Am I Not Geek Enough if I’m Happy with Vista?

As everyone is obviously aware of by now, last week the world finally witnessed the public debut of the latest operating system from Microsoft, the glorious Windows 7. The newest OS has received tons of positive reviews and everyone seems to love it and people keep comparing it to Vista that is now considered to be one of the hugest failures in the world.

What’s more, even Microsoft now seems to be ashamed of Vista – ashamed enough to lose some part of its revenue by providing free upgrades to Windows 7 to many of those who have recently purchased a laptop with an OEM version of Vista, kind of to compensate for the fact that you have to buy the worst operating system that ever existed only because you need to buy a new laptop for some reason.

My current laptop was only purchased a week before I was supposed to purchase it for my operating system to be eligible for such an upgrade – and this single week makes it impossible for me to upgrade free of charge now that this option is available to many of those laptop users that purchased their machines a week (and more) later than I did.

But you know what? I definitely have no desire to upgrade anyway – free of charge or not – for a number of important reasons. One of them is my own laziness and unwillingness to deal with all the hassle involved in making all the backups and installing everything from scratch and importing everything back. Last time I did it I spent two whole days only copying and exporting/importing everything and I certainly don’t want to go through the entire process again only a few months later.

But no matter how lazy I may be, if I have a goal that is worth fighting against the laziness, I will certainly fight and in most cases will win – depending on how badly I need to achieve that goal. And in this particular case I will have to admit it: I am quite fine with Vista and I will not upgrade until I buy my next laptop that will probably come with an OEM version of Windows 7.

I know that it is a definite nonsense for a tech blogger to use Windows at all as geeks are certainly Mac people but I have never managed to persuade myself into such a radical change after using Microsoft operating systems since it was Windows NT that my mother’s friend installed on my very first Pentium machine (it was 386) using a pack of floppy drives many years ago. I developed my computer knowledge simultaneously with Microsoft developing and releasing new versions of its operating systems and I have learned to feel myself an integral part of Microsoft environment whenever I was buying and using a new Windows-based machine.

But now that I have admitted that I am quite comfortable with Microsoft operating systems, I’ll have to make one final confession: I am rather happy with Vista. Honestly, this is my second Vista-based computer and while the previous one was on Home Premium edition, this one is packed with Vista Business and I have never felt uncomfortable with the operating system for any single reason.

As a long-time Windows user I have never had problems configuring the elements I needed to configure or removing the gadgets that I did not want to have on my desktop. But the good part is that Vista actually works pretty well where everyone else failed for me.

The recent example is some huge hassle with my multifunction device in my home office. The device comes from HP and used to work pretty well after I downloaded and installed a ton of drivers and some software that was supposed to facilitate my work with the device. It worked pretty well for a while but then at some point for no apparent reason I faced a problem with printer glitches when printing letters of Cyrillic alphabet and with scanner unwilling to save scanned documents at all. No uninstall and reinstall of the drivers and software helped at all so while thinking of the alternatives I decided to go with a built-in Vista alternative – the Windows Fax and Scan component. I definitely did not expect it would really help but it did and the process was actually more user-friendly than the HP software provided me with so I have simply decided to forget I had some special software installed for the device – and I now use the tools that I have anyway which are pretty good and do the job well.

Of course this is only one single example but the general idea is that if you have been a Microsoft user for a while, I strongly doubt you will have some grave problems with navigation or usability of Vista and all of its components. I know that Vista is blamed for many things but since I have not felt any bad affects myself, I will only have to repeat it: I see nothing wrong about using Vista and I really am not sorry about the fact I won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 7 free of charge even if Windows 7 is better – it will simply come to my computer life at some later point.

So of course Windows 7 may be better but it does not necessarily mean that Vista is ugly and entirely unusable. And finally, if not for an occasional Vista glitch that would prevent me from working normally for a couple of hours (I’m quite sure you have not seen a Microsoft products that is totally glitch-free), where would I get the adrenalin in my overall streamlined techy work?