Very brief, not comprehensive rundown of the myriad problems I’ve encountered with Microsoft Vista Home Basic on my cheap-o Dell Outlet Pentium Dual Core/2gb RAM/integrated graphics/160 HD box:

  • numerous lockups that eventually require a hard restart
  • difficulty installing an external USB hard drive (required creating a Environmental Variable to show non-working USB devices, finding it in DevMgr and deleting it, then rebooting and trying again. Good luck talking Grandma through that over the phone!)
  • UAC is an even worse nuisance than the Apple ads imply
  • mysterious “unable to load Security [blah blah]” locking up random logins
  • Can’t run Maplestory (for my 10 year old)
  • mysteriously inaccessible Disk Management mmc
  • boots 2-3 times slower than a Macbook

This box is nothing special, but it should be able to run the OS at a basic level. I shouldn’t need to max out RAM just to get it to run. I cannot imagine people running this on a Celeron box. I have set everything to run for BEST PERFORMANCE, no eye candy stuff active.

I’ll get it going. It is disappointing, but not surprising. There are a few things I do like about it, too. I’d give it a D+ so far, though. A charitable D+. The Apple OS is so much better it is sickening.