AnandTech Vista Review
AnandTech, one of my favourite hardware review sites, have decided to give Vista a review.
The reason I like AnandTech, is it seems like biased/has less 'sponsered' reviews than TomsHardware, and is more legible than sites like HardOcp.
However, AnandTech have done a horrible review.
They start off with an okay introduction, but then it goes horribly wrong.
"This is the first time that we can say without flinching that Vista is in an acceptable state for general use. Compatibility on the x86 version is remarkably improved over what we saw earlier, and in our testing we only managed to come up with a single program - non-commercial at that - that simply wouldn't function correctly under Vista no matter what. "
If they could only find one application, they've obviously done very little testing.
They go on to say that everything works if you put enough effort into making it work. How does that translate into an acceptable state for general use?
Next, they go on and on about how UAC is going to stop enthusaists.
Start -> Control Panel -> UAC -> Turn off UAC -> Reboot.
Gee, that was hard, good thing you have to be a guru, not enthusiast, to turn that off.
Okay, I admit, they make some good points about UAC (about pre-approval), but they also overly demonise it.
They do other silly things like testing game performance of 5728 (which I believe has some debugging information turned on, slowing the performance. And they don't compare it to RC1 at all) saying its not good at the moment…for ATI. Why not test nVidia? Don't have the hardware? You're a freaking hardware review site!
They finish up with this gem
"At this point most of Vista is perfectly fine. Everything works, all functionality is enabled, and driver support is looking good".
Yeah. Do some finer testing of your soundcard boys. Sure, Intel HDA will be supported, but what about the rest of us?
This is more a 'review of a review' than focusing on the subject of the review.