Vista?

I don't like it.

There are some that are in love with the thing but..... i can't stand how much resources it uses.
^^^^^
after reading that comment most people tell me to stop using a pentium 3, but i have a pretty good gaming rig, i can run crysis at high settings...but vista still seems slow to me sometimes.

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SP3 of XP beats Vista in most performance tests so.....why would you personally want to upgrade to Vista Rhelamos? thats what you have to think about next.

Most people are willing to take the hit in performance in order to use DirectX 10, which is the only thing i think Vista has over Xp in my opinion, but truth be told the games ive run under DirectX 10 are terribly slow. Company of Heroes on max settings in windows XP runs for me smoothly. The same in Vista is true. But enable DX10 while using Vista and the game is unplayable for me, which is somewhat strange?

In the end its up to you, but i honestly dont see any benefits to upgrading to it.

I've been using vista since 2006, all in all without issue. First I used 32 bit but the last 6+ months I upgraded too Vista 64 bit.

I guess it depends on your system, there perks of using vista and some cons as Deinumite mentioned. It is resource hungry but if you have a good system you can make up for that with having 4 gig of ram for example that you couldn't do with XP in turn increased performances & visual clarity for gaming etc.

Crysis on 64bit was also a step in the right direction and I've had very few problems with running 64bit, 2 errors spring to mind with a 3rd party program that over layed Teamspeak information on games and also a driver error with my wireless. 2 errors since I've had it I would say was good. I had more problems with Xp.



why do you find that strange? forgive me if I'm wrong but wont enabling dx10 enable new effects and graphical advancements dx9 don't have which are more resource hungry, like D3D10 Shaders, increased litter objects on the map, increased terrain detail, soft effects blending and short grass that covers the levels. Remember enabled dx10 is like putting your settings to ultra high and that can make a big difference.

Seems strange people would think otherwise DX10 after all is a advancement that will be more resource hungry. Almost every bit of software that comes out needs improved hardware to run it.

I just found that the amount of resources i thought it would use to be a little off.

The game is fully playable at high settings for Company of Heroes, but putting on directX10 makes it so i cant even play at all pretty much, and to be honest the increase in graphics doesnt seem like it would be worth it.

If you are happy with what you get out of XP - and the Vista upgrade comes on a separate CD with licence - take the CD, then tuck it away in case its needed later, or use for upgrade to the eventual Windows 7.

For Joe Soap at home in the standard run of the mill use, there's no real advantage to switching at the moment. In an office or corporate environment its a whole new ball game. If your the bells & whistles type, upgrade, lots of that stuff in it, nothing of a "killer" nature though.

So it depends why they are being carefree with the upgrade - if you remote work, it may make your life/their life easier, ask your admin guys. For general run of the mill home use there's no killer reason that offsets the increased memory use and performance loss - at this instant in time - so dont worry about it.

Regards
Zy

I agree that if you use your home machine for work (more than you do for other stuff), you should confirm that a change to Vista (I can't quite call it an upgrade) would help you and/or your office IT folks.

I also agree that there are no "killer" aspects of Vista that make it a must-have for anyone other than OS fans or someone who just has to have DirectX 10. If you're an XP power user, you'll have plenty of stuff to re-learn (or forget about). If you do lots of different things with lots of different software, some of it older, you also might find Vista frustrating, at least during your possibly-lengthy settling in period.

I've never had a worse new computer experience than with my Vista box, and I've been using PCs since we used to boot from big, fat floppies that were really floppy. But I confess that I'm utterly disgusted with change for change's sake, which seems to be the MS dev mantra. I'd hardly call my opinion objective, but it is heartfelt.

I've been using Vista 64 for about half a year now, so some thoughts on things I've noticed:

The 64-bit version has quite bad driver support in some cases, the normal version has thankfully outgrown this problem. The manufacturers of my wifi dongle, bluetooth dongle and my TV card don't provide 64-bit drivers, and I had to find drivers from alternative vendors which used the same chipset.

It has better security than XP. Crashes are pretty rare and tend to only bring down the one program rather than the kernal, which is nice.

The audio has been redone. Its higher quality and has some nice effects if you don't have a dedicated sound card. The downside is that Creative's various Soundblaster/Audigy/whatever cards don't play nicely with it at all. The killer feature for Vista for me was per application volume controle: no more stupidly loud background noises if you turn the volume up for a film.

Networking has been given a facelift. Underneath its more or less exactly the same as XP, but it looks a little more sensible and is easier to use now. Permissions are still very fiddly though.

There's now a progress bar whenever you do a search, including whenever you're mapping other devices on the network, which is a very useful addition.

The new interface is pretty and the search orientated start menu is a nice, efficient way to launch your applications. Which is good, because it's now ridiculously hard to organize your Start->Programs list.

It uses a bit more memory than XP by itself, and it also fills up the rest of your memory with things it predicts you might be about to use. The Aero desktop uses your graphics card, which means less slowdown if your graphics card is half-decent, but lots of people with integrated graphics have found they had to disable it and go back to an XP-like desktop.

DX10 support. You can enable or disable this in most games. Worth it if you have a decent modern graphics card. Also means you can play Halo 2 *yawn* and Shadowrun, which Microsoft have oh so thoughtfully had released as DX10 only, just to prove they're not an evil corporate empire with monopolistic tendencies.

Conclusion? Vista is not really worth the full price tag, nor the effort, as an upgrade to XP. If you're building a new system or formatting then Vista is the better choice.

As a non-Vista user, I was wondering... Does anyone think that the hardware will catch up with Vista to make it "zippier," or is it just another Windows ME?

Ghost255 i have vista 64 every time i load it it locks up

it sims to to weth the Logitect Mouse A'll resit the system and resit the Logitech Restore the Defaults it well work for a sort time

I'm have the Logitech MX 5000

AFAIK, the main "hardware" problems with Vista are driver-related, not horsepower stuff, at least for new rigs. There's a fresh batch of Windows updates this week, including one targeted towards us folks suffering with Nvidia combo graphics-network chipsets. Hopefully, they're the good kind of updates and not the bad ones.

If it is fair to reword your question as "Will an off-the-shelf Vista box get better over the next year or two" then I'm pretty sure it's safe to say "yes." But for some of us, that might just mean "less annoying."

I agree with Nights Edge that crashing apps instead of the whole system is a real improvement, but for me the new Start menu is awful, Windows Explorer is painfully downgraded, and tasks like disabling and enabling a network adapter are much harder than they need to be b/c the OS is trying to "help."

Personally, I just picked up a cheap laptop last week, and even after clearing off all the preinstalled stuff, Vista was still hogging up half the memory all on its own (why they put premium on 1GB machines, who knows). Combining that with the annoyances I already dealt with in simply looking at Vista via dual-boot on my desktop, it got the nuke and the laptop is now merrily living with XP on it.

At 1 gig of Ram, you might as well get XP. More than that, and I recommend Vista.

Especially if it's free. Even if you don't want it, keep the free stuff for later, or sell it if you're allowed to.

I donr have vista but i trouble shoot my friends comp and he upgraded to vista a few months ago and i have to say its shit. Its nice cus it doesnt sux cpu but the ram issue is terible, hes got a 2.4GHz quade and 3.5G ram and at times its still slugish.

But thats not to bad since vista was made to use a full 4gig. But what ticks me off is the randome file movement, and the constant "Alow this app" popups. The start menue is worthless and is very unorganized and difficult to use.

You may not knowe this but vista was simple made to compete with apples leapord OS and it uterly failed. aside from not having games leapord is way better then vista.

Can these features be turned off, or switched to "classic," or is the user stuck with them?

BTW - Thanks for the insight everyone. It sounds like I should be in no hurry to get a Vista machine...

If you have a new machine, IE built within the past year and a half, go for it. Although I recommend only doing a clean install, don't "upgrade" your XP to Vista, there are still a few bugs with it, plus its always nice to have a clean install.

Vista is an excellent OS and it is only a "resource hog" when idle, meaning it puts your idle resources to use. Once you launch an application that needs more system resources, Vista will allocate all resources so it runs smooth. 2GB of RAM or more is a must, especially if you game on the machine. The UI, Network Management and DX10 are great reasons to move to it, but on a modern machine.

@Deinumite:
Our definitions and vocab may be a bit different, however running a system with a P3 is hardly what I call a "gaming machine". Also that link you posted, did you even bother checking when it was published? 2007, hardly recent. Vista has been proven performance wise equal/1-5 FPS higher than XP, due to the way it manages background tasks and resources.

I've no idea what the random file movement thing is about, never encountered it.

Popups sound like User Account Control, which can be turned off from the security center.

Start Menu, I don't know how to get around that.

Vista runs like a charm for me.

2 cents,
I was running Vista 32, I had a slew of older combat flight sims, the xp emulation led to lots of crashed programs, I switched back to XP until I Intalled Vista 64 to take advantage of the Ram Upgrades I run 6 gig now.
The XP 32 emulation in Vista 64 is way stablier then the 32 bit version,
I haven't had any issues with drivers except for when I let Vista go to sleep, I can't use my mouse (LX7000) or keyboard (Zboard Merc) after it wakes. I just turned off sleep mode.

System
MotherBoard Gigabyte N4SLI-A9
CPU Athalon 64 3200 2.0g (note. was running A Newer asus A580i till I got carried away clocking a phenome , waiting for the new Phenome x4 2.5 black edition now)
Memory 6 gig DDR2
Video 8600gt 1gig, going to 3x 9600 sli on the new board.
HD 1x 1tb sata drive
2x 500g pata raid array

I think that might just be defrag and/or SuperFetch at work together. If you're just talking about the seemingly endless I/O, the search indexer is often busy when you're not doing anything.

You can get some idea of what's going on from the Resource Monitor. Open Task Manager, switch to the Performance tab, click Resource Monitor, and then expand the Disk group. Lots of things are labeled "system" in the first column and you have to look at the file name column to get the real picture.

I would not recommend disabling User Account Control. Newer apps should be able to run with properly reduced privileges and you can use Virtual PC to isolate older stuff if it just won't play nicely with UAC.

UAC can be annoying, but so can more initimate forms of protection; doesn't mean you should skimp on either form.

Vista is Amazing , just give it lots of RAM.

My main rig is a C2D e8400 @ 3.6ghz with 8gig of ram, and Vista 64bit uses about 25% of it when idle.

My laptop is a C2D T5550 @ 1.8ghz with 3gig of ram and Vista 32bit uses about 30% of it when idle.

It just wants RAM , lots of it.

Both systems are super fast.

** I have XP Pro on the main rig also, as some older games just don't like vista.

Same went for XP when it was new... It seemed to crawl with 128 MB on a Pentium III. Now a lot of people love how XP screams with 2 GB of RAM on a Dual Core (or a single core for that matter). So maybe there is hope for Vista after all...

XP was designed for ease of use in an era when security wasn't as big an issue as it is today and Microsoft has taken a lot of flak for that choice over the years. Vista represents a 5 year, multi billion dollar effort to create an inherently secure platform for Windows. I find it interesting that people hate Vista but love Server 2008 - which is essentially the same codebase. Seems the corporate and consumer markets are looking for different things. While I believe Vista could (and should) have been a much better product given the time and resources Microsoft invested in it, I've been running it for a year and a half problem free. Give it decent hardware, turn off UAC and the problems people complain about go away. You also have the option of switching to Linux or buying a Mac but both choices were available when Windows started to gain popularity in the early 1990's and neither has managed to make much of a dent in Microsoft's market share - there's an old saying in business: you don't have to be good, you just have to be better than the competition!

My first impression of windows Vista came in the form of a big pile of game disks sitting on my desk, and every few minutes another game disk would make a 'clinking' noise as it landed on the top of the pile of games that won't install on Vista.

I have to wonder if the developers of Vista even realise computers have already been around for a number of years before Vista was released?

perhaps Microsoft execute all the developers of each operating system on completion and start over with a fresh batch of clones who nothing of what came before??

Oh and that compatability option,,, is that actually plugged in to anything??? Hello, is anyone home in there?

I've been using Vista x64 since I assembled my new computer (E8400, 8800GTS G92 and 4GB DDR2 RAM) and have only had 1 hardlock.

Love the transparent windows that comes up fast (but not immedietly though).

Another great thing about Vista is the automatic networking, driverupdating and problems & solutions.

It made internet work immedietly (A halfretarded friend called me and told me that XP doesn't make internet work immedietly like Vista does....)
It automatically finds drivers for stuff so you don't have to find a thing yourself! That's great!
Finally, Vista identifies compatibility problems with programs (but don't know of any solutions what I've seen so far....)
But i did set Diablo 2: LoD in XP SP2 compatibility mode and now the scrollwheel works for switching skills

Vista x64 works like a dream. Thanks to Microsoft's Certified for Vista program, 64-bit is going mainstream. So long as you have internet, Windows will find just about any driver.

Example, Linksys states that they do not have 64-bit Drivers for their PCI wireless-G adapater. I plugged in the ethernet cord, and Windows gave me generic Broadcom wireless drivers, after activating the card Windows did an update and found...Linksys Wireless-G PCI drivers. Pretty impressive I have to say.

Performance wise, I say it's kind of like commanding an army, the bigger the army the more generals/captains you need. Vista can manage resources much better, (and manage a lot more), and more efficently, but it needs more to be able to do so.

Also, being able to hit the Windows button and type 2-3 letters + Enter to open programs/files is extremely useful. I am quite spoiled, and when I work on Client's XP machines, I find I am no where near as quick to perform. And note, I was extremely used to XP.

The only thing I don't like in Vista as much is the networking setup, but I know that once I start to master them they are much more comfortable.

Oh, and Vista is almost uncrashable. I have never seen the system not be able to recover from even heavy errors. It is very good about being able to do everything seperately. If you want to hear why there is such bad press for Vista, go here:

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com

Gotta love that Mojave experiment!

As a computer technician I can vouch for Vista's stability and performance.
I bought the full version (not OEM because I like to change mobo's about twice a year) of Vista Ultimate the month it was released, before that i had dualbooted XP and Vista Beta2 /RC1/RC2 as they became availible.

Vista improved at every one of these steps, and let me tell you that the late beta versions of XP were far less complete then the last two beta's of Vista.
Windows Vista has come a far way since release, and especially when SP1 was released it has been faster then before.

A Vista installation on modern hardware will be faster then XP, especially if you get the x64 version.
Games perform slightly better in Vista then XP on modern hardware (By modern I'm talking about a core 2 duo or Athlon X2 CPU) and generally backwards compatability with older games is not an issue.

I am to say the least confused about what mystikmind is talking about, and I would like to know what titles he tried to install instead of saying it was a heap of games and nothing more.
The ONLY game I have that does not play nice with Vista is Homeworld 2 after patch 1.1 (Homeworld 1 works like a charm).
After some research about the issue i found out that the 1.1 patch pisses off DEP in Vista and can only be fixed by disabling DEP when playing the game.

Anyone who says Vista is complete bullshit is either using it on outdated hardware, had a issue early on and never used it since or just plain don't speak from experience.

I have built a total of 4 computers for family members since Vista's release and every single one of them runs wonderfully with Vista Home Premium x64.
Every single problem encountered I could track back to "pilot errors" that would have been the same on an XP system.

During my time as a technician I have talked to a lot of people who blame Vista rather than facing their own technological inadequesies.
It truly facinates me how many people just assume that something is an error if something pops up on the screen.
Even though most of these are either a response to something the user did or a warning to something the user is about to do.

The simple fact is that Vista is the best Windows OS released and if you think otherwise it is for the wrong reasons.
Most of the changes made since XP was under the hood, so what on earth Nights Edge is blabering on about is beyond me!

All this crap about Vista being a memory hog is also a load of lies!
As Naoza tried to point out Vista pre-fetches a lot of stuff based on what applications and files you tend to work with during the day.
Vista immediately relinquishes this memory space for applications that need it when they need it.
They simply thought that maybe it would be a good idea to use all that RAM you were not using anyway to make stuff launch faster when you decide to start it up.

In fact Vista has a superior ability to manage computer resources in comparison to XP.

I noticed someone saying earlier in this thread that Vista SP1 allows you to utilize 4GB RAM at x86.
That is not true!
The change was that Vista will show installed memory, not availible memory.

So if you could only utilize 3.3GB RAM before, you can stil only utilize 3.3GB.
Vista will however tell you how much RAM is installed on the machine.
This is however not a flaw in Windows Vista, it's a user flaw for not getting the x64 version of Vista.

Simply put, a 32 bit operation environment can only address 4096MB of RAM, regardless of host operating system!

As a rule of thumb you want ANY dual/quad core CPU, a cheap $50 graphics card and 2+ gigs of RAM and you have a machine that runs Vista great!

There a few games that do not work in Vista like a charm...
Empires at War: FoC punishes you for having more than 3 gigs of RAM in vista

Fortunately the fan base has addressed these issues although developers still seem to be slow about supporting vista. Some have even refused to do so, stating that why should they work on problems for only a small part of their fan base. Disgraceful but makes business sense I suppose.

If you do not have a minimum of a dual core, 4 gigs of RAM, and a 256 mb video card, I can't recommend you getting vista. Laptops especially suffer under these requirements since most of them can only support 2 gigs of ram. My wife's laptop has all these requirements but is limited to only 2 gig's of ram and it makes the vista experience dull and lackluster compared to mine. She loves it though and won't let me put XP back on it. Vista Needs the 2 gigs to run on its own and you don;t want to try gaming if you are only at the bare minimum.

Also if you have a dual core system and only a 32bit op system you just either wasted your money for the op sys or the dual core. You do not really get any benefit from it or the RAM in a 32 bit system. Almost everyone who has complained about vista to me had the 32 bit system. Microsoft is too much of an idiot to realize they shot themselves in the foot by even releasing a 32bit version of Vista.