Vista not as bad as people say

[Easy Rhino]

i run vista and it works great! the only reason i use it tho is for dx10 gaming. if dx10 gaming were available in XP i would not have switched OS.

 

[rangerone766]

every time i hear people talk trash about vista, about how bloated it is. how much it slows down there pc. it reminds me of when xp first came out. they said the same thing then, how 512mb of ram wasnt enough to run xp, but it worked in win2k or 98.

i've got a copy of vista, i tried it and i liked it. but my copy is not so legit, so i didnt want to run it as a main os, just havent gotten around to buying a legit copy.

 

[ShadowXP]

Reading why people hate Vista is exactly like reading why people hated XP when it was first released. It's the exact same story all over again Plus the fact that people seem to love to blame Microsoft for hardware-vendors severe lack of driversupport, even though the vendors full well knew that there would be changes to the driver-model. Go figure.

Been running Vista since Beta 1, and I've become more and more pleased with it. Go back to XP? Yeah, sure, the day after the Dovre Mountains here in Norway fall, pigs fly, and there's a lasting peace in the middle east. In that order, please. For my own case, Vista runs smoother than XP did on this box (installed XP after hitting a bad batch of pre-RC patches for Vista and ran on XP between Beta 2 refresh and RC1), I find the interface more intuitive, easier to work with and a whole lot nicer-looking that XP's bubblegum-GUI ever was (or will be). System tasks have been simplified in operation without loosing any of it's options, and I'd daresay that there's more advanced options than you'd find at first glance (the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security in Administrative Tools, for example) if you know where to look (or just bother to look). And, of course, if you need those options. Never had a BSOD that I didn't provoke myself except when a memory-stick kicked the bucket, have had very little, if any, issues with incompatibility except early drivers for the Creative X-Fi-card I have (had to use XP's drivers until the proper ones for Vista was released).

SP1, while it didn't hold any hugely visible improvements (minor bump in framerates in certain games etc), made the system feel that much more smooth. Currently running Vista on two comps. My gamebox, and a Dell Latitude D630 laptop. The laptop has a gig of ram, and runs what it's supposed to quite nicely (websurfing, email, Skype/IM's, admin'ing stuff at work from home etc). SP1 actually improved the performance on the laptop to a greater extent than what I saw on the gamebox, too.

Calling Vista a disaster is like calling pogosticking in a minefield a safe and child-friendly pastime activity. Besides, Lil'Squishy doesn't command you to switch. If you don't want to, then simply don't.

 

[thoughtdisorder]

MinWin kernel

Sorry, dont have any. Its something i read and heard Maybe im wrong, but i know the minwin kernel is in windows 7

Edit: Just found this on wiki "A minimalistic variation of the Windows kernel, known as MinWin, is being developed for use in Windows 7."

Appears there's some validity to this... See here..

 

[Black Panther]

I installed vista 4 days ago , and applied the latest updates with SP 1 . Also applied some tweaks . It has been a pleasant experience till now . running pretty smoothly .

Somethings which run better than XP SP2 are :

Photoshop loads faster .

Winamp Bento Skin window doesn't stutter now when clicked on to show from minimized . It stuttered a lot in xp with the same system.

And above all , vista looks sweet .

Hard Drive Read Speed increased by 6Mb/s ( without the HDD speed tweak in vista, checked with HD Tune ) . Avg speed much more than it was in xp .

Still have to get somethings ironed out. After that i think i'm going to keep this OS .

I took a glance at your system specs and sure you're running Vista on your second rig. Vista performs nicely on nice rigs (and yours is awesome and Vista will run nicely).

I think the main problem with Vista has been that many low-end rigs were marketed as 'Vista compatible' just to have them sell. At least that was what was done in my country, and many people got very disappointed. More the gaming people than the guys who bought a new 'Vista compatible' system for office work and net browsing.

Just make the analogy between previous OS's, take as an example Windows 95 and Windows XP. An employee of mine has a computer which I didn't know the specs of, and she 'upgraded' from 95 to XP because she thought things would get faster and better. Wasn't she disappointed! When she shared her problem with me, she told me that she doesn't game but uses her pc for internet browsing and the people who sold her the OS told her that XP is more secure than Win 95 and would be better. What they didn't tell her were the obvious limitations encountered by running XP on a Pentium III with........ (take a deep breath!)......... 64MB RAM! I'm surprised she managed at all. On my suggestion she got 256MB of RAM (considering the pc is just used for internet and isn't stuffed with superfluous stuff and one of my work pc's works just fast and fine on 256MB RAM on XP Home) made the difference between her pc taking 15 minutes to load to just taking 1 or 2 minutes. By my standards 2 minutes to load the OS and 1 minute to load IE is awful... but she's ecstatic

 

[ntdouglas]

I think they should make an "enthusiast" version of vista e.g no windows aero and optimised to consume less resources although, vista caches that ram and a smaller installation size, you know just general improvements for gamers.

In a way they do. You just have to do it yourself like I did. You buy windows home basic off of ebay for $40-$50 and then order from ms the 64 bit sp1. There you go, the most stripped down version of vista thats 64 bit.

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

I switched to the Vista. I switched back. The incompatibility with TF2 did me in. I just about broke the disc. Now I have a nice key I can save.... and then Windows 7 will come out.

 

[strick94u]

I have vista on my laptop

 

[erocker]

i could have sworn otherwise. source?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ws-7-taking-shape-meet-the-minwin-kernel.html

... and I wouldn't say it's going to be compatable with "most" programs. It will most likely be like the jump from '98 to XP if not worse. If you want to use "worse" as a bad thing it's up to you. Starting from scratch will be good for all of us in the long run. Plus, I hope there's no 32-bit at all!

 

[trog100]

As sucky as this sounds it would probably be great if nothing was compatible. I think everything needs to start fresh, microsoft has too much legacy now.

words well spoken from a dude who probably chucks his hardware away every few months and has practically spent nothing on software..

any estimates on what it would cost the world to throw it all away and start again.. ???

trog

 

[erocker]

I agree with magibeg. I don't like throwing out my hardware too early, but in order for advancement things need to change. It's mainly software that won't be compatable. If anything this is good for hardware because a new O/S not blown up with bloatware, will help with performance and the advancement of modern software applications.

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

If you take the time to make Vista good, it works. I tweaked it well... but still could not get Steam games to run, and why switch when I have no DX10 video card.

 

[Error 404]

Vista works fine for me, as it came pre-installed on the Family PC. If I get Internet, a bigger hard drive and a better graphics card for my P4 PC, I'm considering putting Vista on that as well, just because I don't like XP as much.
Sure, I'll work on XP, I'll game on it, but Its easier and a more pleasurable experiance on Vista, partly because it is layed out pretty sensibly, and partly because it looks good.
For those people who have had a bad experiance with Vista, I feel sorry for you. It works fine, as long as you have the correct drivers.
To those who don't like XP's Bubblegum/cartoonish theme, Google "XP Royale theme". It is a "glassed" version of XP's skin, which is more pleasing on the eye.

If we need legacy, then just keep an old computer, and run your legacy stuff on that: I've got a PIII laptop which can run DOS (Yes, I've tried), but I don't becuase command line sucks. Either keep an old machine, or get some VM software to run XP on Windows 7 or Vista.

 

[DrPepper]

In a way they do. You just have to do it yourself like I did. You buy windows home basic off of ebay for $40-$50 and then order from ms the 64 bit sp1. There you go, the most stripped down version of vista thats 64 bit.

you sir have made my day

 

[DrPepper]

words well spoken from a dude who probably chucks his hardware away every few months and has practically spent nothing on software..

any estimates on what it would cost the world to throw it all away and start again.. ???

trog

I would be annoyed at my huge collection of games not working and if nothing was compatible I would stay on vista until it was time to upgrade. tbh the only games i play are supcom and battlefield 2 so until they became rather empty player wise I would gladly stay with vista til the rig expired and I got a new one.

 

[Error 404]

I think there's a program called vLite for those people who want to slim down Vista.
I used nLite to slim down my XP installation and add in SP2 to the CD, and it ran about twice as fast on my laptop as the standard XP installation. I got it down to a 1 gig install, which is quite good with a 128 MB Pagefile!
Someone used vLite to get Vista to fit on the EEE PC, and run responsively as well!

 

[kylew]

I think they should make an "enthusiast" version of vista e.g no windows aero and optimised to consume less resources although, vista caches that ram and a smaller installation size, you know just general improvements for gamers.

If you're bothered about vista's RAM use, turn off superfetch, though I don't see the point in having a large amount of RAM if it's no used, otherwise, it'd just be a waste of money wouldn't it? Also, aero is disabled when running a game, so it's not eating into the performance. I don't really know myself why people complain so much about vista, and say things like "well, I'll most probably give vista a miss and jump to windows 7". Most of the people who complain about vista will complain about windows 7, they don't know or don't want to deal with change. I know some one who used to play unreal tournament at 640x480 16bit because he didn't know what graphics settings were, I shown him how to change them, changed it to a higher res and 32 bit colour. He complained about it, it looked "worse". In reality, we all know 16 bit colour looks worse than 32bit colour, so why did he complain? He wasn't "used" to it, so automatically disliked it. I think that's what most people who complain about vista are doing, the same thing pretty much happened with XP when it was new on the scene. Local PC shops refusing to sell PCs with XP installed because it's "bloated" "slow" "over priced" and "unstable" (among other complaints). They were adamant that win 2000 was the best ever, and it'll never be bested. My nan bought me one of their computers (way before I could build my own and I was about 12-13), guess what? win 2000, from my experience was terrible(though I'm not saying it actually is bad), I had to teach myself how to format, reinstall windows, and then the reinstall drivers, and I did this about 10 times over the course of about 2 days because I constantly got problems with this PC. Everything they complained about in XP, was happening to my PC with win 2000. Anyway, I returned the PC for a refund, though they didn't acknowledge any problems until I had complained for weeks to them. In the end I got a refund and went else where, those people obviously didn't know what they were on about. That was pretty much my first experience of PC "enthusiasts" and I've had very similar ones since.

 

[kylew]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ws-7-taking-shape-meet-the-minwin-kernel.html

... and I wouldn't say it's going to be compatable with "most" programs. It will most likely be like the jump from '98 to XP if not worse. If you want to use "worse" as a bad thing it's up to you. Starting from scratch will be good for all of us in the long run. Plus, I hope there's no 32-bit at all!

There's no need for 32 bit anymore. I wish they hadn't made a 32Bit vista!

 

[EastCoasthandle]

I installed vista 4 days ago , and applied the latest updates with SP 1 . Also applied some tweaks . It has been a pleasant experience till now . running pretty smoothly .

Somethings which run better than XP SP2 are :

Photoshop loads faster .

Winamp Bento Skin window doesn't stutter now when clicked on to show from minimized . It stuttered a lot in xp with the same system.

And above all , vista looks sweet .

Hard Drive Read Speed increased by 6Mb/s ( without the HDD speed tweak in vista, checked with HD Tune ) . Avg speed much more than it was in xp .

Still have to get somethings ironed out. After that i think i'm going to keep this OS .

In all fairness you went through a substantial upgrade:

Processor: AMD AthlonXP 2800+ Barton --------------- Intel Q9450
Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X ---------------------------- GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4
Cooling: Stock AMD -------------------------------- Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm
Memory: 1 GB DDR333 ---------------------------- ------ 2x2GB GEIL Kit (4Gigs)
Video Card: XFX 7600GTAGP -------------------------- Palit 9600GT w/HDMI
Harddisk: 20 GB ------------------------------------- 250GB WD IDE + 250 GB External
CRT/LCD Model: Arnos Instruments S-19 ----------------- Sony SDM-81 (19")
Case: Some Cheap case - ---------------------- - - - -- Thermaltake Bach VX
Sound Card: Onboard --------------------------------- Creative X-FI Xtreme Music
PSU: Okia 420W 18A on 12 V -------------------------- Corsair TX650
Software: Windows 2000 ---------------------------- Windows Vista
Benchmarks: 3D Mark06 Score 2933 w/7600 GT on xp sp2 - 3d Mark 06 Score 10897 w/9600GT on Vista

It's great you are experiencing no problems but do you think it's possible that your positive experiences is more likely do to the hardware you had vs what you have now more so then just Vista? If you ever have the time try your new setup with XP and run a few games, benchmarks etc. That would allow you to gauge the differences IMO.

 

[kylew]

words well spoken from a dude who probably chucks his hardware away every few months and has practically spent nothing on software..

any estimates on what it would cost the world to throw it all away and start again.. ???

trog

Legacy HAS to be dropped though, sooner rather than later in my opinion. Like AGP, those people who are complaining about no AGP support just need to accept that they're running old tech. If some one complained that AMD don't make socket A CPUs anymore, they'd get laughed at.

 

[kylew]

In all fairness you went through a substantial upgrade:

Processor: AMD AthlonXP 2800+ Barton --------------- Intel Q9450
Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X ---------------------------- GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4
Cooling: Stock AMD -------------------------------- Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm
Memory: 1 GB DDR333 ---------------------------- ------ 2x2GB GEIL Kit
Video Card: XFX 7600GTAGP -------------------------- Palit 9600GT w/HDMI
Harddisk: 20 GB ------------------------------------- 250GB WD IDE + 250 GB External
CRT/LCD Model: Arnos Instruments S-19 ----------------- Sony SDM-81 (19")
Case: Some Cheap case - ---------------------- - - - -- Thermaltake Bach VX
Sound Card: Onboard --------------------------------- Creative X-FI Xtreme Music
PSU: Okia 420W 18A on 12 V -------------------------- Corsair TX650
Software: Windows 2000 ---------------------------- Windows Vista
Benchmarks: 3D Mark06 Score 2933 w/7600 GT on xp sp2 - 3d Mark 06 Score 10897 w/9600GT on Vista

It's great you are experiencing no problems but do you think it's possible that your positive experiences is more likely do to the hardware you had vs what you have now more so then just Vista? If you ever have the time try your new setup with XP and run a few games, benchmarks etc. That would allow you to gauge the differences IMO.

I've ran vista (ultimate) on a fairly low-end PC, a sempron 2800 socket 754, 512MB RAM, 200GB HD and an X800XT. It wasn't lightning fast, but it worked well enough for me, I later added in an extra 512MB of RAM and that made things a lot better for me. After that, I upgraded my CPU to a A64 3400 and that made my vista installation pretty nice to work with. From then on, I knew I wasn't ever going to have XP on any of my home computers. From then on, it's just gotten better and better with my new PC (a year ago now). It's a different PC now of course . Still very happy with vista, I've got rid of my XP licenses as I was never going to use them again.

 

[DrPepper]

I actualy like vista the laptop has basic, I have ultimate 32bit and 64bit on the gaming pc and I find running vista a dream apart from moving files where it asks for your permission and then tells you that YOU don't have admin rights

 

[kylew]

I actualy like vista the laptop has basic, I have ultimate 32bit and 64bit on the gaming pc and I find running vista a dream apart from moving files where it asks for your permission and then tells you that YOU don't have admin rights

Turn UAC off

 

[FatForester]

Whoever said something about battery life on Vista being terrible is talkin' fud. When I first got my laptop I slapped XP on there to accompany Vista. After less than a week I had already reformatted and gotten rid of XP. On my Santa Rosa laptop XP consistently gave me an hour less of battery life when compared with Vista. (4 1/2 compared to 5 1/2)

Even though at first it'd be a real pain in the ass, if MS would pull an Apple OS9 -> OSX transition, it would be for the better. It's great to have all these compatibility modes, but they really just end up slowing down the system. If they want to keep supporting legacy software / hardware, then every Win7 disc should come with an XP disc as well. I'd rather dual boot and have a fresh start with Win7 than keep running down the inevitable path of bloated-ness.

OK, I thought I would stop, but I remembered an article I read a while back. Because of the anti-trust laws the EU handed down to MS, MS was forced to make Vista "compartmentalized", meaning they couldn't allow IE to be completely integrated into the OS. This actually makes sense, I'll see if I can't find the article... it helps explain why Vista is ~10GB on a fresh install and why there are so many services to bog it down.

 

[DrPepper]

Turn UAC off

I did but my pc still undermines me with you do not have adequate privelages or some crap like that its like having a wife