Windows Vista through my eyes

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

So my sister got a laptop and against our wishes, Windows Vista was installed at the shop. Our family is now mainly using this laptop and I can tell some words about Vista.

I get my daily stuff done, however I do not recommend this operating system to other(it still likes to crash + Windows Movie Maker 6 crashes when publishing a video). All I want to say in this thread is - there is no way I would voluntarily get Vista. If we ever upgrade the old desktop computer(plus hardware), then I will say one thing: Windows XP or Linux!(Probably from Knoppix Live CD).

However, if one has computer powerful enough to run WRF model(this laptop is), wants to use it just for reading e-mails, then go ahead. Otherwise, sticking with XP is better. Note: I have turned the Windows Aero off and using the good old look... I don't need any translucent windows.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

I got stuck with Vista on my new laptop, and I'd probably go the other direction. I'd say Microsoft got a lot more right with Vista than they got wrong -- especially over the crashy/less stable XP. On the whole, Vista has been much more stable than XP, and the new security implementations make it much more secure than Microsoft software has ever been.

There are some legacy hardware issues, though; my Nikon scanner, for instance, still doesn't work, as Nikon hasn't gotten around to writing Vista drivers. You can't really blame Microsoft for this, though.

Vista does take more juice to get going well -- but even with a mid-range laptop, it will perform well. The real key is to have lots of RAM (at least 1GB) and to either have a dedicated 3D graphics card or the Intel graphics chipset designed specifically for Vista. Aero speeds things up quite a bit, as it takes all the graphical processing and tasks it somewhere other than on the main CPU.

In conclusion, me likey.

 

[Robert Dewey]

My brother received a laptop with Vista, and all I can say is... well, if I said it, my post would be blocked out by censors.

Vista sucks, to put it bluntly. Perhaps on higher-end machines it runs just fine, but it has no place being on low to medium-end machines. I had to go into 'msconfig' and disable a ton of crap that didn't need to run.

The opinions of my family and close friends all point to the same conclusion; we don't like Vista. In fact, my friend did a complete re-install and put XP back on.

My theory is "don't fix what isn't broken." I can honestly say that XP was one of the best things to happen to Microsoft; not only is it stable, but it's quick. Why did Microsoft have to "fix" it?

 

[Jeff Snyder]

My new laptop has run just fine with Vista. The only BSODs I've had with Vista have been caused by an old, incompatible program (the virtual serial port from DeLorme). Otherwise, everything has been running just fine. I agree that it seems much more secure than XP, and I welcome some aesthetic changes (Mac OS has, for quite some time, been aesthetically-pleasing, so it was time for Windows to catch up).

We seem to go through this each time a new OS comes out. When XP came out, there were a myriad of folks who said "XP is only about the visual changes, and it requies a whopping 256MB of RAM! Why upgrade when Windows 98 works just fine?". I can guarantee that folks will say the same thing when the next Windows OS comes out, regards of the changes made. Of course ,there's an occassional bug, but that's to be expected with an OS that's forced to work with hundreds and thousands of different hardware pieces and thousands of potentially-faulty drivers by lazy manufacturers. I'm sure it'd be more stable if Microsoft had nearly complete control over the hardware that can be used (such as Apple does). Alas, that's one of the beauties and selling points of PCs, IMO.

If you have an older desktop (2-3 years old), you can get a decent graphics card and another 1GB stick of RAM for a couple of hundred bucks, which I don't think is too bad. Most new comps will run Vista just fine. Just my 2 cents

 

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

My theory is "don't fix what isn't broken." I can honestly say that XP was one of the best things to happen to Microsoft; not only is it stable, but it's quick. Why did Microsoft have to "fix" it?

Exactly: Why throw away a machine that still works fine.

P.S. My desktop computer is 8.7 years old.

P.P.S. Vista doesn't seem to get pictures from Shenzhen Demelai digital mini camera I had since 26 Dec 2005(Windows 98 was already too old for it). Fortunately I use have Pentax Optio E30 camera now for taking pictures. However, the mini camera still works as a webcam.

 

[Aaron Kennedy]

My brother received a laptop with Vista, and all I can say is... well, if I said it, my post would be blocked out by censors.

Vista sucks, to put it bluntly. Perhaps on higher-end machines it runs just fine, but it has no place being on low to medium-end machines. I had to go into 'msconfig' and disable a ton of crap that didn't need to run.

Sounds familiar. Sis's new laptop came with Vista. Yikes. Within an hour I made it crash several times doing nothing out of the ordinary. Even got a blue screen of death (some things in Windows never change )

 

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

Sounds familiar. Sis's new laptop came with Vista. Yikes. Within an hour I made it crash several times doing nothing out of the ordinary. Even got a blue screen of death (some things in Windows never change )

All I can say is wow(actually not, I am not surprised at all). I think my sister has to consider herself lucky... However, I have found inconveniences on this machine as well, as written in my first post.

 

[Robert Dewey]

Jeff,

Windows XP broke away from MS-DOS, which carried tons of limitations. Windows 98 was well known for the BSOD that would always popup. All of this was fixed with the release of XP. If people aren't having a problem with XP, what does Vista solve? Is there some sort of unkown issue with XP? It's not that it runs slow, because Vista runs even slower.

What is Vista trying to solve that XP couldn't?

Check out Tom's hardware for benchmarks: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page4.html

If those are believed, then I find no use for Vista at this time. When benchmarks come up, and software developers fully embrace Vista, I'll switch. But until then, everything is stable on my end.

 

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

Jeff,

Windows XP broke away from MS-DOS, which carried tons of limitations. Windows 98 was well known for the BSOD that would always popup. All of this was fixed with the release of XP. If people aren't having a problem with XP, what does Vista solve? Is there some sort of unkown issue with XP? It's not that it runs slow, because Vista runs even slower.

You can tell that again. Before I went Linux on the desktop computer, I was using Windows 98 and I knew the text of BSOD's almost by heart. There wasn't even a single month without a BSOD. In fact, Windows 98 crashed even during its presentation to the public.

 

[Rob Herman]

My theory is "don't fix what isn't broken." I can honestly say that XP was one of the best things to happen to Microsoft; not only is it stable, but it's quick. Why did Microsoft have to "fix" it?

To make more $$$$$$.

 

[Robert Dewey]

To make more $$$$$$.

Of course; I just didn't want to be the first to state the obvious... I had it typed, but hit backspace

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

My theory is "don't fix what isn't broken." I can honestly say that XP was one of the best things to happen to Microsoft; not only is it stable, but it's quick. Why did Microsoft have to "fix" it?

To make more $$$$$$.

XP was great from a functional GUI perspective, which is why it's been carried over to Vista (and copied to a great extent by the opensource GNOME environment). However, XP was a great big mess in terms of security, at least for the typical retarded computer user. Everyone always ran as admin, and simply opening a webpage could infest your computer will all sorts of silliness. Vista makes this much more difficult; even those who run as admin require a SU type prompt to do anything interesting to core system files. Additonally, using GDI calls to paint the screen is pretty stone-age. Much better to let the 3D card do that heavy lifting, and let the processor do what it's designed to do -- run processes.

I liked XP. It wasn't perfect. I was prepared to hate Vista, and didn't want it installed on my new laptop. It was, and Vista is better. If you try to run it on an old laptop with 512mb of RAM and no 3D card, yes, it will suck. If you try to run XP on a Pentium 90 with 128mb of RAM, that'll suck, too.

Linux is interesting, too, but you can't run Photoshop on it, and GIMP is missing half of what makes Photoshop worth using.

 

[Robert Dewey]

...that's the problem though, most low or medium-end laptops come standard with 512MB of RAM (some still carry 256MB); all come pre-installed with Vista. Instead, why not give the consumer a choice?

 

[Mark Blue]

I've had mixed results since I bought my new laptop in April, which is running Vista Ultimate. On four or five occasions the laptop inexplicably restarted and I've experienced a couple of BSODs. But what the heck, the same thing has happened in XP over the years more times than I care to remember.

Right now I'd have to say I like Vista and don't have a whole lot of nitpicks with the O/S. If I had a choice I'd probably still run XP on my laptop, but at some point in the near future I estimate more stable drivers will become widely available which should make a big dent in Vista's stability, not to mention when SP1 becomes available. Memory is dirt cheap these day, so if your rig is lacking RAM and slogging through its' chores, head on over to newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com and pick yourself up a 2 GB dual channel kit!

 

[Mike Gibson]

... Additonally, using GDI calls to paint the screen is pretty stone-age. Much better to let the 3D card do that heavy lifting, and let the processor do what it's designed to do -- run processes ...

Quick correction: GDI has been fully hardware accelerated for over 15 years. I haven't tested it but I imagine that painting a typical 2d window (plenty of textouts, bitblts, patblts, etc) is *faster* in GDI than doing the equivalent operations in the 3d hardware. All those random state changes are expensive on 3d hardware and relatively cheap on 2d hardware. Of course, things could have changed since I last worked on GDI and drivers.

Mike