Windows Vista

So, it’s been about 5 years since Microsoft launched Windows XP and now we have its successor, Windows Vista. Has the 5 years spent on developing Vista been worth it? Well, yes and no. There’s no doubt about it, it looks nice. The Aero interface is very cool to look at. The glass effect window borders, the 3D tab application selector and the graphical tooltips on the taskbar are all very nice, but what about compatibility and performance?

There are serious compatibility issues with some applications, games and drivers. Some users I know are experiencing regular crashes. Microsoft has done its usual trick of releasing an unfinished product and getting Joe Public to beta test it, report bugs and other issues so they can then release a service pack to attempt to remedy the problems (well, some of them).

What about performance? I have XP and Vista installed on the same machine, and wrote a little benchmark program to test the speed of them, like for like. On XP the program called the test routine 5000 times and took 523ms. The same test on Vista took 2507ms. Almost 5 times longer. No wonder the minimum spec is a 1Ghz CPU and 512Mb RAM. My system is a 3.6Ghz P4 with 2Gb RAM and it runs acceptably, anything less and it would run like a sloth on Valium.

My personal take on the situation boils down to this... If you purchase a computer with Vista installed you’ll probably be ok with most mainstream apps, but if you’re thinking of upgrading from XP to Vista, I recommend you wait till the first service pack to be released before doing so. That way some of the bugs will be ironed out, and driver developers will have extra time to come up with more stable drivers for your existing hardware.

Utility Bills...

Yesterday we received two utility bills... gas and electric. We get both from the same supplier. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw them. The electric bill was for £561, and they were going to up our direct debit to £160 a month. This was an estimated bill, based on a previous estimate when we first became customers. They had some real readings (someone came to the house and actually read the meter) but they were so much lower than their estimate they decided to disregard the actual readings and send another estimate. Apparently the reading was lower than their first estimate which they based on our usage with our previous suppliers and so they thought the actual reading was an error. No, we don’t live in Buckingham Palace, it’s just a 2 bedroom terrace.

The gas bill was even worse. The bill was for £1021 and they wanted to put our direct debit up to £290 a month! Yes, it was another estimate, presumably based on the supposition that we heated the whole town. As it turns out, the actual bill was for £83. Just a slight discrepancy.

The ridiculous thing is, when the sales rep originally called and convinced us to switch to them, he “personally guaranteed” that our utility bills would be cheaper (yes I know they all say that), then we receive bills totalling over £1500 for a quarter. Not quite the bargain prices I was expecting. At least after contacting them (and being on hold for 20mins) the situation seems to be resolved, but not without a great deal of stress.

It just infuriates me that they employ people to read meters, then ignore the readings, preferring instead to scare people to death with their outrageous estimates. So much for privatised utility companies providing a better service for customers (I intend to blog about this in the future).