Problems with Vista

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3672_7-6539798-3.html?tag=nav
The thing that trouble me the most is 2. Vista's Aero graphics gobble up laptop battery power, since I was planning on upgrading my laptop.

 

The article is only partially on the mark. It was clearly written hastily.

All you need to run the Aero UI is Vista drivers for your graphics card. Obviously integrated graphics may not cut it, but there is a huge list of cards (old and new) that do.

You don't need a graphics powerhouse to run this thing. You just have to MAKE SURE to get Vista drivers. Otherwise, as the article states, things go haywire.

By release I assume Vista will be better on battery. The OS is supposed to be more intelligent at managing mobile battery life than XP. We'll have to see. Clearly that's not the case (or intention) with the Beta.

 

The battery drain is reported to be a bug in the beta. I had it pretty bad, even when my computer was in sleep mode it ate through the battery where as in xp in sleep mode it doesnt use any battery. I have been running the beta for about a week now and just took it off today and put xp back on. It was just a little to buggy for me for my every day computer. It will be a great operating system and I will pay the price to buy it as soon as it comes out. It is pretty good just some little things that were buggy.

 

I use Vista on a separate partition, and that seems to work very well. You could try that.

It wouldn't fix the battery drain, I guess I hadn't heard that (until the article, that is). But you could choose, like I do, to use Vista only at home/plugged-in. It's fun to play around with and test.

The main thing I'm noticing is the non-responsiveness on occasion. It's usually only on Media Center because I have a HUGE media library.