Many Lake State students ordered a system from Dell or Hewlett Packard and ended up with Windows Vista on their machine because the OS is now standard. However, many of these students are unhappy with Vista’s performance and the IT department is left with headaches and frustrations.

Vista’s main problem is that it’s a cow. It takes 64 megabytes of RAM just to run. Gaming is nearly impossible on a Vista laptop. It has so many bells and whistles (like the newly added Windows sidebar) that just opening a word document can take minutes rather than seconds. The system also sleeps when it’s not supposed to and it’s very hard to modify all the alerts you receive. For example, it’s nearly impossible to close a window or change a setting without be asked three or four times if that’s what you mean to do.

Before I make it seem like Vista is the apocalypse of the Windows world, there are quite a few benefits to the new OS; after all, a company wouldn’t release something new if it doesn’t have any improvements, right? A favorite feature among students here is the versatility of Microsoft Word for Vista. Because a lot of the school’s PCs are Windows 2003, it can sometimes be tricky to save a document to a flash drive and bring it in class to work on it. The version of Windows for Vista can convert a document file through several generations of Vista. Also, Windows sidebar is nifty, if not buggy. Also, all those annoying boxes that question your intelligence when you close windows and change settings, actually serve a purpose. Those boxes are a way of the system checking whether or not it’s a human or a virus performing the action. In this way, Vista has improved security; a Vista system is less likely to have a life-altering (the users life, that is) crash if it does have a virus because it does have such extensive double-checking processes.

With that being said, Microsoft realizes that Vista is quite buggy. On February 4, Windows released its first Vista service pack into production and made it available to several beta testers. By Microsoft’s own count, the service pack fixes 551 bugs in Vista (with a central focus on Internet Explorer). The beta testers have given mixed reviews. Most say that, if nothing else, the speed of everyday actions is greatly improved. Mike Nash, part of the Windows Product Management group, claims a few things about Vista’s first service pack: Copying or moving files may be up to 50% faster, resuming a PC from sleep may be faster and several other added benefits as determined from Windows Error Reports and Customer Experience Improvement Program.

So why can’t you get the service pack now? Mike Nash reports that several problems (specifically with drivers) with the service pack can be rectified by uninstalling and reinstalling it.

“…when beta testers encountered this issue, the problem was typically corrected by simply uninstalling and reinstalling the driver.  This type of issue can be addressed by our more technical customers since they are comfortable reinstalling driver,” said Mike Nash.

So basically, Windows is waiting to release the service pack to the average consumer in hopes of making the transition easier and giving you less problems to deal with.

So when can you get a hold of the new Vista service pack? In mid-April Windows will release the Service Pack to Windows Live Updates so that your computer will automatically let you download the service pack.

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