All I get for info is the net and forums.
Vista gets a bad rap if anyone hasn't noticed. A DX10 vid card purchased last year had me contemplating an upgrade from xp home for some time.

I read up on some last minute stuf before buying, to help make me feel better about it. ya know what?

This is the greatest leap forward since xp. they aren't even the same.

some quick nerd notes: it is noce to see the kernel up to 100mb ram in use, it is a nice gui, and the actual ram in use is actually written for us to see. My xp home was a nightmare, the second I upgraded to a 3400 prescott and 3 gb of ram.

If you are still wondering about vista and xp: ignore the dumbass bloggers and get the premium. Even the dvds play like I have never seen...my number one complaint, and it started 10 years ago. Just satisfied in 2009...

8 years for one os is a long time. My teenage dog died (I am now 36) since then. I have had 3 cars, 4 addresses, 7 computers...all on one os. It was more than a time for change, xp has a problem with my stuff, and is in the bin collecting dust possibly forever. Come to think of it. XP was a masterpiece on my athlon 900, it does have a small heart.

People tend to fall into one of three categories when it comes to Vista:
1. It does what they want
2. It does most of what they want it to do, but they have complaints
3. It doesn't do what they want, and therefore use another operating system

I'm sincerely glad that you fall into the first category - it isn't every day that things work out as we want them to.

People tend to get a little polarized about the topic, as you have seen in the thread you started last Sunday. People have had all kinds of experiences with Vista, and unfortunately I fell into the third category. It was what motivated me to try out a linux based OS for the first time. Now, I run all kinds of things on my computers, like Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris to name a few.

My problems and a lot of other peoples problems with Vista are not entirely Microsoft's fault.

First big problem I had with Vista was no Creative X-Fi driver and then when Creative release a driver for Vista it is only a very basic driver that doesn't enable even half the functions that are on my X-Fi card. Then some guy starts releasing drivers that enable these functions and Creative threaten him with legal action. There is still no Official Driver that restores all functions that some random dude made, let alone make all the functions a paid for work in Vista.

My second problem with Vista was Nvidia crashes, Nvidia's unstable early drivers caused 28.8% of all reported Vista crashes.

Canon Scanner, Canon Printer and Logitech Joystick no longer had working drivers.

I also found Vista to be slower in some areas and faster in others, but with early problems with file transfer being dog slow I just couldn't take it.

You just purchased Vista, go back reinstall it without SP1 then you can come tell us how great it is. SP1 solve so many problem that were MS problems but there is still a lot of Third Party Drivers and Software that need to catch up.

After reading about Windows 7, the new Windows OS currently in development, I highly doubt I'll ever try Vista after all the problems I've heard about it.

And it's been said that Windows 7 will be what Vista SHOULD have been.

I'm currently running XP and it does exactly what I want it to do, so other than DX10, I have no reason to switch OS's.

I must've missed this earlier thread, but I am happy with Vista Home Premium as well. In my case I *only* use it as a dedicated media centre interface in the bedroom. Never even see the desktop, it autoloads VMC and I have a Linksys MCX in the living room now.

It also has a high WAF.

Considering another copy for a new build at this time.

Granted in this household I have 4 different Linux distributions, XP Pro, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X all running. Plus the Vista Home Premium. So I will use whatever works for my purposes.

A major part of what's wrong with Vista is Microsoft's fault.
They chose to implement end-to-end video encryption. Ostensibly this is to make piracy by "recording the analog stream" impossible. IMO they did this for a business reason - put MS is a better negotiating place with the various mafIAAs "support our platform instead of Apple - we're piracy proof".
The thing is, this takes a lot of processing power - so your PCs a lot slower - and this isn't for you - even though you own the box - it's for MS's business advantage.
They've done something similar with audio. Google for "tilt bits".

So... using up my cycles for their own purposes. No, thank you.
They seem to be doing the same thing with Win7.

If you're looking for "what Vista should have been", check out Windows Server 2008. It's easy to convert to a workstation (BTW Win X64 is basically server 2003 converted to a workstation). The problem is, it's priced like a MS server OS - and it's stuck with "tilt bits", but so is everything else, including Linux, given the way that MS can drag the hardware market around.

Oh - I'm an ex driver developer. FWIW that developer community is really pissed off about this set of marketing decisions.
IMHO if they hadn't had a monopoly, they wouldn't have dared to make those marketing choices. There are other ways to protect "encrypted material" other than making your hardware slow and more fragile.

Sigh...

Thank goodness for the "blogosphere". The collapse of PC magazines means MS didn't have an easily influence-able-with-ad-dollars way to counter real complaints with sugar-coated "reviews" - and there's a limit to what they can force the world to accept, monopoly or not.

Finally, and just to be clear. All the developers I've met at MS have been really bright, really good at what they do. Their work is being screwed over by decisions made (probably) by marketing. It's the marketeers, and not the developers, who should be taking the heat (and maybe the firing) rather than the developers.

MS has done what it can from a business point, you cannot blame MS entirely for DRM. If you want to watch DRM protected content on your PC then you have to comply with DRM to do view it. If MS allowed DRM content to play on their OS without DRM protection then the likes of RIAA etc would take them to court.

In the end you can only really blame one group for all this DRM and that is the pirates. I support MS in every attempt to stop piracy, this does not mean I think tilt bits are a good idea.

If you don't like the conditions of sale, exercise your consumer choice by not buying. At the end of the day its MS product and they will develop as they see fit. There are alternatives but none as good and I'm sure most will just get over it cause they don't really care.

I hated the look and feel and sluggishness of Vista but persisted.

The straw that broke the camels back was that Office 2000, which I require for maximum compatibility with my corporate clients, would update automatically using Office Update on XP, but Vista required manual updating.

It seems that Vista is a "love it or hate it" relationship.

Those that hate generally have good reason.

In my case, I spent a month troubleshooting a wireless problem on a brand new Dell XPS m1330 laptop with Vista Home Premium that the Mrs. purchased in May. Shortly after that I installed SP1 and the problem still persisted.

Several trips back to the local big-box retail (even trying to run Ubuntu through Wubi to troubleshoot the problem) and the tech advised the the two choices were: A) Send it back to Dell to determine if it is a hardware problem or B) Try installing XP myself

I chose be and she has been very happy with it since then. I hope W7 is the next good MS OS makes. No more Vista for me... thank you very much.

Dear OP,
Happy to hear you are pleased with your new purchase!

Can I have your 8 yo old XP license, please?

-xan


Reduce
Reuse
(give to me)
Recycle

And this is exactly what the internet does terribly. Dispite the guffaws and chuckles that people have over it, have you seen The Mojave Experiment. You simply cannot make a decision about an operating system until you actually use it. It's the same reason why for those of my friends who are thinking about getting Macbooks instead of PC laptops, I tell them "Go to the Apple store and use the computer for half an hour." It's the only way you'll get to figure out how an OS works.

And no, DX10 is not the only reason to move to Vista (it was never a deciding factor for me anyways). Instant search, improved multi-threading performance, improved security, integrated software, just to name a few. The one thing that's definitely won me over is how all of the built-in applications have the same look and feel. If you know how to use WMP or IE, you already know how Windows Photo Gallery works, so you just use it.

A lot slower? My old laptop (P-M 1.86GHz, 2GB DDR2-533, ATI X300) was never sluggish or bogged down because of this added DRM. Read these two articles before going on about Microsoft's DRM practices - Busting the FUD about Vista's DRM and Everything you've read about Vista's DRM is wrong.

As for tilt bits... re-read the definition. It clearly states a restart of the graphics subsystem (which was removed from the kernel level... remember?), not the whole computer. Take another second to think about why they put this in, instead of jumping to conclusions like the poster on zdnet.


Slow and more fragile? Slow is definitely not true. Now that companies know how to write drivers properly under user mode (which means not kernel mode, which means fewer BSODs is the driver goes off the deep end, which is a good thing), there's virtually no performance falloff when comparing an XP system to a Vista system. As for fragile... I'm not sure where you're going with that one. Hardware is hardware, and regardless of the operating system you run on it, it'll break because of physical wear and tear.

You're still pointing the finger at the wrong people here. Most of Vista's faults are not the fault of Microsoft. Examples:

• People complain about poor security. Microsoft implements an improved security structure (UAC). People bitch (at Microsoft) because software developers have become lazy and UAC pops up everytime they open a program.
• Microsoft changes the driver model in Vista (and dispite what you might say or think, it's a necessary change in this day and age). Hardware companies don't put in the time, effort, and money to update their drivers before Vista's release (I remember running the Vista Beta 1 in 2005, a good year and a half before Vista's RTM). Vista crashes. People blame Microsoft.
• Windows XP is released when most people in the world are still on dial-up. The internet boom happens. People start pirating. Microsoft has to implement anti-piracy measures to protect their software. People complain that they have to call Microsoft when it says that activation has failed. Who started the cycle?

Nick, it's very charitable of you to take it upon yourself to be Microsoft's appointed vanquisher of all users who have anything uncomplimentary to say about Vista, however I fear the mountain of negative feeling towards Vista cannot be dissipated by one person alone. Very little will be achieved by jumping on every thread where people even mention Vista, and touting its benefits to anyone who will listen. It's just pointless. With Windows 7 soon to be released, you will be singing the praises of an obsolete operating system. I'm not one to be drawn into an argument of the merits or demerits of Vista, all I'm saying is most people will not change their opinion of Vista even when you have links to back up what you are saying.

Yep. If this discussion took place a year ago I'd like to question some of Nick's points, but I feel that now it's not needed. Let's wait for W7.

For the record, I have used vista on and off for a year- setting up and fixing two laptops and one media PC for a far away friend....(latest problem is the new video drivers are making all media players only display a tiny image.-So much fun to troubleshoot video problems remotely)

I shudder every time I have to use Vistojave.
Its nearly as bad as ME, only now PCs are almost powerful enough to actually handle it.

To each his/her own.

I understand what you're saying, but at the same time, if nobody points out the realities of a topic (let's face it, there's a lot of FUD when it comes to Vista), what's going to change things? It's one of the reasons that the lastest set of Mac vs PC ads simply annoy me, since they're essentially spreading misinformation in order to win consumers over (i.e. they're playing on the stupid people). My feeling is that the "bad rap" that Vista has got over the past year (for whatever reasons) is now self-perpetuating. The OP gave Vista a try, and found that it's not as terrible as the "intarwebs" claim. I was talking with classmates today who were making the general claim that Vista "sucked", but it turns out... they'd never used it.

For what it's worth, the underlying architecture of Win7 is Vista. From my understanding, the driver model and various subsystems are mostly the same (although the graphics side of things have apparently got some internal tweaking). If Vista hadn't happened (and forced some of the changes that it did), Win7 would never be as good as it seems to be. The wait is still at least a year to come though.

Or another take is, Vistojave is essentially an early BETA for Win7. One that you have to pay for the privilege to be a tester.

Now thats one hell of a sweet business model!

All problems in this thread are either driver problems or legal stuff Vista needs to add to avoid potential lawsuits ( DRM ).

Driver problems are not Microsoft's problem. If you have a driver problem you can blame only one company and that is whoever made your piece of hardware. In the case above with the dell laptops wireless not working that is Dells problem to trouble shoot. Now it there were 100s of wireless laptop not working with Vista then it would be Microsoft's problem.

My point is people are so easy top start blaming Microsoft. They get in the mindset of "Oh it used to work under XP but now that I have installed Vista it doesn't work. Boo Vista sucks"

Nick is right, If your hardware or software doesn't work under Vista it is not going to suddenly work with Windows 7 unless the company that makes the product creates a update for Vista/Win7

If that's the case, it's the best damned beta product I've seen in a long time (we'll see how Win7 runs on my EEE later this weekend).

Microsoft isn't to blame when drivers of third party hardware don't work, but if people know there will be a problem with some of their drivers when they upgrade to Vista, I can't blame them for staying put.

Most PC users never built a PC, if they change one thing (either software or hardware) and they run into problems, "it must be because" of the last single variable they changed...
If I buy a new video card and "it doesn't work" I will RMA it.
It's not for a generic PC user to think of third party drivers if a new OS doesn't work.

In short, it's not Microsoft's fault but it is a problem for them.

The user experience of people who might not even know how to pirate was impaired. Including the DRM issue [Khrono Devil], the "innocent" have to pay for something a small group (back then...) did.
Surely the majority of PC users didn't start the cycle, a small group did. However, the countermeasure (while fully understandable) affects all people, ofcourse they will complain about having to call.

I think "the media/blogs" in general are to blame for the bad name of Vista. After it's release, soon the first problems were put to paper. This has a serious impact on people in regards to how they perceive a product. The Mojave experiment proved a first perception might be wrong, but the damage is done. First impressions (first and second hand) linger, and from that point on people would think twice before bying Vista, and when asked even say it sucks when they never used it [the bad rap is self-perpetuating, as you said].

Even when a manufacturer tried their very best to do everything right, not all products will be a success.

I have Vista on all of my machines now, and it's by far the best OS I've ever used. I'm not a M$ fanboy by any stretch, but I do find it funny that the people most critical of Vista have either never used it or blame the drivers, or like my boss, "don't like the way it looks." (Note: I turned off Aero and put the Windows Classic theme on and he's fine now)

I've had fewer stability problems with Vista than I ever had with XP on my main machine, and at first I attributed it to the hardware, but that old hardware is now my WHS and is much more stable than it was as workstation.

I used to be a BeOS champion back in the day and kept waiting for it to take off and become more compatible with games, but it didn't and it folded. I've used Macs and understand the appeal, but find that in the end the majority of people that use them do so more for the image of the device than for the usability aspect.

Linux and other alternative OSs are nice in some forms but until they can appeal to the majority by being "more like windows" to the general populace, they will always be niche products.

I completely agree. I've never been one to be a first adopter of new software or hardware, for exactly the reason you mentioned. I only made the switch to Vista last summer, after SP1 was released (I only got an XP system after XP SP1 was released as well). Now that the rest of the world has had a proper amount of time to catch up, however, there are few reasons why Vista can't be someone's mainstream OS (the requirement for Office 2000 is one of them, however much it confuses me that a company still hasn't updated from Office 2000 - but that's another matter altogether).

Just like how it's hard to tell whether an OS is good/bad without using it, it's hard to tell why companies don't upgrade from Office 2000 without getting involved in IT decisions.

I worked as a temp in a bank last year. Their back office workstations were running Win98 and Office 97. No connection to the internet. As far as I can tell, the workstation did everything I needed it to do. Why upgrade? A corporate environment is never the same as the enthusiast market. Rarely do companies upgrade just to "stay ahead of the curve" or "keep up with the times", common insults hurled by enthusiast Vista users to others who're still using Win XP/2000/98.

oh I just installed Vista x64 on the desktop. Was a bit confused between 32/64bit media players and codecs, didn't realised that they had to match. Anyway, the Vista OS feels the same as my XP Home laptop, meaning both does whatever I need them to. I could buy another Vista disc and spend a few hrs re-installing all prorgams on the laptop for the "I-am-totally-on-vista" bragging rights. However, it might be better to spend those hrs getting out to earn some income. I've come to realise apart from online IT/geek forums, most people out there don't care what hardware or OS I have.

[quote="Nick Geraedts....(the requirement for Office 2000 is one of them, however much it confuses me that a company still hasn't updated from Office 2000 - but that's another matter altogether).[/quote]

Me too

At least I have been able to put my copy of Lotus Smartsuite away.

Running a fast core 2 duo with lots of memory? Have you done an A/B on the same hardware? Yes, less of an issue as "typical" hardware gets faster. BTW, are you saying that Vista does not have end-to-end video encryption? That doesn't slow things down? There are other ways to accomplish anti-video-piracy.

Call gates will never be as fast as no call gates - but that was all hashed out when things got moved the other way in NT 2 or 3 (I forget which one). I'll certainly grant that user-space drivers were the original design; hardware just wasn't fast enough at the time.

The issue is the tilt bits that MS is forcing on hardware manufacturers. Something add'l to go wrong. This appears to be the end of "universal" drivers (the major thing the driver devs are up in arms about). And because MS is driving the hardware market, Linux users get to use (or at least work around) tilt bits as well.

Ah well, none of this matters with Win7b available.
Workstation-ized Server 2008 IMHO is great. I'm still hoping that they offer this as some sort of option for those folks who don't just already have the server OS (MSDN).
And yes, I realize that that's not what Win7 is.

I don't think that processing power is used up for non-encrypted content is it?

The end-to-end decoding is a bit annoying as it confuses the video drivers into sometimes having wrong black levels: they should have got that right. It seems to go against normal computer architecture.

But in general there were quite a lot of visual advances in vista (interface, dpi-aware, colour management, new APIs, to name a few) so overall it was a significant step forwards.

Off the top of my head, some advantages I get from Vista:
-It has much better security. I can now give my family limited accounts.
-The audio is much better. I now am happy to use standard vista audio rather than asio for listening to music. Adjusting settings of different outputs and programs is much better.
-It looks much better. If you don't like the interface, just customize it. It supports changing dpi much better than xp. (I would hate to go back to 90dpi.) Color management is better. A lot of information is displayed better.
-There are a lot of little things missing on xp that are included in Vista. Want to check memory on XP: make a boot disk, install necessary files, boot to the boot disk, fiddle around in a text interface. In Vista: make a few clicks in the control panel.

Huh? I've been watching DVDs from my local video rental place using a free non-microsoft operating system with no trouble for years. There must have been something seriously wrong with your old system.

I upgraded my desktop from XP x64 to Vista x64 back in August, and my day to day tasks are definitely faster in Vista. Take any system today with 4GB of RAM (which should not a major financial concern these days) and Vista will load programs faster and let you the user do your work more quickly. This is because of the vastly improved prefetching that was implemented in Vista (XP's prefetch simply orders the files to be loaded for a particular program launch) and the increased memory caching. Before you make a complaint that Vista is a "resource hog", think back to every other major OS release and name one that didn't require some sort of hardware upgrade. The world cried bloody murder when XP was released and performed terribly on anything but the top of the line PIII's of the day.

Furthermore, the WOW64 libraries in Vista and Server 2008 have been improved, increasing 32-bit performance over that found in XP x64 and Server 2003 x64.

I never said anything about Vista not having improved content protection methods. However, this doesn't apply to the general discussion, and most certainly does not affect you when you're browsing the web, chatting on WLM, or reading your emails.

There's a reason why all the high-end overclockers use Vista as their main operating system these days. Kernel-level drivers are often just a bad idea, especially when you don't have direct control over the source of those drivers.


Read this page again. Tilt bits are something that Paul Gutmann started raving about, and the internet community spun into a massive tornado of misunderstanding. The rest of your hardware is polled far more often than this (USB is polled at 125Hz by default) and we haven't seen any significant performance drops from using USB mice and keyboards, have we?

What codebase do you think Win7 was built on? At the heart of it all, Win7 has tilt bits, user-mode drivers, and all the other wonderful features that people complain about in Vista.

Congratulations, you just found a feature that's there since NT1.
I don't want to elaborate, but better security is questionable.


Indeed there is a reason. It's called Vantage.

http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=801002
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=800387
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=805505
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=615025
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=778453
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=811382
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=811428
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=806571
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=770569

Vista/2k8 is number one in 3D mark with SLI, CPU-Z, PC-Mark 05 (which has transparency test, guess why Vista wins here).
XP/2k/2k3 in 9 categories.
Some don't have screenshots.

You're also comparing apples to oranges here. You can't make an equal comparison when the systems you linked to have different hardware profiles, different overclocks, etc etc etc. The OC forums that I've looked through seem to show that Vista is more picky when it comes to determining if a system is unstable. Just because it doesn't crash in XP doesn't mean that it's fully stable.