Fixing Vista`s Troubles
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In part one of this two-part series, I discussed the major user issues that have emerged in Windows Vista, eighteen months into its life cycle. Part two will consider what steps are available to users to improve the Vista experience, and will discuss Microsoft's strategy for addressing the widespread unpopularity and perceived failings of the operating system.
One of the main problems with Vista is that it doesn't work as well as it could out of the box. This was demonstrated - almost certainly unintentionally - by Microsoft itself in the widely publicized and notorious Mojave experiment, in which they demonstrated Vista disguised as the "new" Microsoft OS, codenamed Mojave, to 140 participants and then documented their opinions.
The demonstration took place on a standard notebook PC fitted with just 2GB of RAM, the point being to show that Vista could run well on regulation hardware. On the face of it, Microsoft achieved its aim of revealing that users' issues with the OS are primarily perceptual, as the feedback was uniformly positive.
What this flawed experiment really revealed, other than that peoples' responses can't always be trusted due to the placebo effect, was that Vista can run effectively in an unrealistic environment when tweaked and manipulated to do so. In the experiment, Microsoft engineers set up the hardware and testing environment, chose the software they would run, and controlled the "tasks" that were performed.
This is a far cry from the real-world circumstances in which users have to run the OS and deal with its problems on a daily basis. However, knowing that Vista can be set up to run well, what steps can ordinary users take to improve their everyday experience of it?
Some aspects of Vista's behavior are difficult if not impossible to improve. These include its apparently random refusal to run certain applications, for example, or the complexity inherent in accessing certain features and functions. But in other areas it is possible to make significant improvements to how Vista behaves, and with a bit of gentle persuasion it can often be made to work the way you want it to. So here we present our seven-step plan to make Vista work better.
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