» Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 Upgrade

Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 Upgrade Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Congratulations Microsoft, I now want a Mac...
Comment: This is the most bloated OS I have ever used.. it was slow when I got it on my brand new laptop and with every update (which seem to come numerous times a week) it seems to get slower.

If you have XP save your money.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A few improvements, many drawbacks
Comment: Vista is essentially the operating system your grandma would love... anything you try to do, the screen goes black and a pop-up warns you of dire consequences. If you try to install a program or customize anything, it wants to stop you. If, on the other hand, you have no idea what you're doing but just want to upload pictures of the grandkids and send an email to your bingo group, it's easy as cake.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not really great or awful...but I will get a Mac next
Comment: The Good:
-It is relatively stable - I've had a couple issues with stability with regard to getting my laptop to respond after going to sleep, but that was early on (pre SP1) and I haven't had any real issues in this way for quite awhile.
-Has a decent degree of support built-in. Usually it does bring up menus to help you along when a networking problem or something like that comes up.
-Security better than previous Windows. While the prompting for changes that you request is annoying at times, it also makes it presumably harder to hijack the computer.

The indifferent:
-Graphics are better looking than most OS, but this is not really a huge plus in functionality; I use Vista the same general way I use XP.
-The Sidebar gadgets went away after awhile and haven't come back...so-so features that seemed to slow down the computer.

The Bad:
-Updates... Lots of updates, and I swear it can take hours-days with multiple restarts before the updating is completed.
-Speed... Or lack thereof.
-Start-up... The worst of the speed issues occur at start-up. The Vista startup takes several minutes.
-The hidden preferences... When Vista makes a preference easy to get to, it does it better than XP. The problem comes with the myriad of hard-to-get to preferences that can affect all kinds of different issues. By default it will set a huge chunk of hard-drive aside for backup purposes...so much that my hard-drive was quickly disappearing. To change this was not a simple process. This has happened more than a few times with Vista - something that should be easily done, isn't
-Driver support, or lack thereof... Worse driver support than XP, leading to the usage of questionable drivers or subpar 'supported' drivers.
-Backwards compatibility not all there... Does allow for "compatibility mode" in which it runs a program as if it is running an older version of Windows, which is good because several programs (mostly games) won't work until put in XP mode.

While post SP1 Vista is an improvement, the slowness of startup and other issues have pushed me to Ubuntu and Mac...

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Vista software
Comment: I bought the windows vista home premium with SP1 upgrade from Amazon. I am very happy with it. Just remember to save everything you want before installing the software.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Parental controls are only good for very young children
Comment: The Vista parental controls have a lot to be desired. Here are the parts that do work. You can set the time that the child can use the computer. The high level settings works. Accept for websites that most people agree are for children, the rest of the internet is blocked. And overriding a website to be allowed does work. The only problem is that you can't set it to allow a website for a single logon sesson. The only options are "always allow" or "always disallow". Adding new websites to the Allow list is controlled through an interface or an XML file.

For any child above the age of 9 (needs to start doing research on the computer for school), don't count on the medium setting. The rating star image on Amazon, and the ability to see this product's page is blocked, but I could very easily see a picture of Male private parts -- a picture that would that be allowed to be sold to a child under 18 if it was in a magazine. I would type in a word in simple.[...] and it would block the page, but when I typed in the same word in en.[...] or common[...] , the images were displayed. If a page on simple.[...] had "Sexual reproduction" the page was blocked, but when that category was removed and it only had "Male reproduction" and "Female reproduction" the page was not blocked. I did these tests both using both the medium setting (standard) and the custom with "Sex education" set to blocked.

Something is working the way it is supposed to be working, because I have been able to block sex education pages on simple.[...] , but still be able to see pages like elephant. The main problem is that there is no way to see the filters, and there is no way to add words to the filter. [...] websites can be imported and exported, but not the filter. Nor is there any interface to the filter list.

Overall, don't count on the Parental controls. Consider either buying a third part filtering program and subscribing to an online encyclopedia program.

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