Poll: Rate Vista

[Popcorrin]

I'm just curious what the census is on Vista so far.  Not just for gaming, but also for everyday use.  I personally haven't had the greatest experience with it.  My main gripe is that it's slow.  You need a ton of ram and a very fast processor just to get it to run at acceptable speeds.  And while it looks nice, I don't see a whole lot of advantages to it when compared to xp.

I'd really like to hear what others have to say about it though.

[drventure]

Vista isn't too bad. I've had a few run ins with drivers from older equipment that I can't use, but fortunately, I use VMWare desktop anyway, so I just created an XP virtual machine and install those things on it. That works pretty good.

That said, there's not really much on Vista that would make me really WANT to upgrade to it, but as a professional software developer, I basically have to run the latest stuff (and all the old stuff, hence the VMWare!)

[MajorLag]

The problems with it are generally exaggerated from what I can tell (XP@Home, Vista@Work). The install is pretty bloated, it hogs a lot more ram than XP for no readily apparent reason (even with Superfetch disabled), and it takes between 2 and 5 extra mouse clicks to get to any given settings dialog (not including UAC).

I've never found UAC to be unnecessarily obstructive, you can turn off most of the useless graphical fluff, and it has some actually useful new features like per-application volume control.

My biggest complaint is that it doesn't feature a built-in sandbox (every operating system should and very few actually do) and it isn't compatible with Sandboxie for various reasons.

[Cakemeister]

So long as you install it on a brand new computer with all brand new parts, Vista is fine.

[Space Fractal]

I use vista on all machines, but all have also 4gb ram (ram is really cheap now today and is not really a big issue, otherwice ReadyBoost could been used with machines with less ram).

Like XP, which did also have high ram requirement when it was released that time, its also not new a new OS of course use more ram.

For new machines I would choice Vista and XP on older machines.....

[Derrick Renaud]

Well first off, Vista is unusable with UAC on.  It will drive you crazy within 2 minutes.

Next you have to turn of the search indexing of the drives.  Might as well disable the search through msconfig, because it is useless compared to XP.  Of course you can wreck XP and download the search update too.

Unfortunately, there is no hope for the useless pile-o-crud that Windows Explorer has become.  They had it almost perfect in XP.  Vista makes me want to throw out the computer after 3 minutes of use.  It will not remember the windows settings even though I told it to.  I set it to list.  I'm not an idiot, I don't need big icons.  But Vista keeps wanting to go back to the big pretty icons for some folders.  Plus the whole look of it is just wrong.  Bring back the little Up folder.

Don't even get me started on the whole driver signing issue.  That is only a way for MS to make more money and stop innovation by the little guy.  As a user there is no reason for them to force this.  It should have been an option for large companies to turn on.  Or turn off driver signing when you turn off UAC.

When you download a file, the window sits at 99% forever, until MS has thought about it enough to finally beep done after a few minutes.  Even though the file is accessable when the window hangs at 99%.

It's a load of rubbish.  But so was XP until SP2.  So maybe they will get Vista workable by SP2.  I don't see it.  I think it will take at least SP4, which MS will never get around to.

[MajorLag]

Well first off, Vista is unusable with UAC on.  It will drive you crazy within 2 minutes.

As someone who is using Vista at work, right this very second, I have to disagree. The UAC prompts only come up when changing system settings and installing (and sometimes starting) apps that require admin privileges. In a typical work day I see 0 UAC prompts.

Indexing is a wasteful resource hog, but just like in XP you can turn it off easy enough. Explorer does seem to ignore applying view settings to all folders, but I much prefer the bread crumb stile navigation to the "up" button. Why they can't have both though...

How many little guys do you know who actually write drivers? And from what I understand getting a signed driver is pretty straight forward. Microsoft's logic is that if a user could simply bypass it, thats what they'd do and companies would never get their drivers signed and so the user wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a legitimate driver and a valid one anyway. I can understand their point, but I also the point that forcing drivers to be signed takes control away from the user.

From what I can tell, Windows 7 is basically supposed to be Vista SP2. Which is a bad plan if you ask me.

[Popcorrin]

I remember back when XP came out and I made the switch to XP, I wanted to keep using XP.

The one thing I notice is that when I am using Vista I am always finding myself wanting to use XP instead.

I have been trying to use Vista more so I can become more familiar with it because eventually I'll have to make the switch, but whenever I use it, it always feels like a frustrating experience.


 

[Blanka]

The problem turns out to be not Vista itself, but Vistafied software!
Take for example Office 2007 and Adobe CS4. The menu-structure in Vista sauce sucks beyond all software that has sucked before. Hail Apple's "immer" at the same spot not-wasting-space minimalistic menu-bar! 

[youki]

Where is my good old MS-DOS 2.11... 

anyway GEOS on C64 is the best OS out here !!!     Like Vista but in 16k bytes.

More seriously, as said cakemeister  if you have a brand new machine  with Vista compliant device  , Vista is not so bad.  But that's sure , there is a clearly waste of resource...  but it is the problem of all today's software. ...   Just have a look to GEOS , when you think it uses only 16 K byte (kilo not Mega!!) .  ...

But anyway , i keep my XP!   

[daywane]

I bought Vista basic.
tried it.
gave it away

[Goatz18]

I dual boot my iMac with XP and use it as my mule to work out whatever I need for my cab machines and idle she runs at 350MB ram used with no services turned off and quite a build up of background stuff over the years. My brand new Dell that runs Vista, with as many services as possible disabled and in classic windows theme, runs at 460MB idle. Don't ask me what it's doing, but I sure as hell wish it ran XP x64 instead of the garbage that compiles Vista.

[Endaar]

Vista at home is OK. Vista at work (I run a 1000 node network) drives me nuts, as we had to make a lot of changes to keep things working (properly) as they were. The driver situation is horrible; try setting up Vista to allow a limited user to install a printer from a managed print server without any prompts...

The thing is, the changes in Vista are designed to appeal to less advanced users. Those of us here are not your average PC users, and so the extra clicks and the abstraction of some features are a step backwards. But for someone ordering a preconfigured machine from Dell or whomever, the truth is Vista works very well out of the box. I'm amazed at the things my parents (in their late 50s) are doing that they struggled with or couldn't figure out at all on XP.

As for Office 2007...give it a little bit. It is the first real change to the Office UI in ages, but once you're used to it, the ribbon works extremely well.

[MPS]

Vista at home is OK. Vista at work (I run a 1000 node network) drives me nuts, as we had to make a lot of changes to keep things working (properly) as they were. The driver situation is horrible; try setting up Vista to allow a limited user to install a printer from a managed print server without any prompts...

The thing is, the changes in Vista are designed to appeal to less advanced users. Those of us here are not your average PC users, and so the extra clicks and the abstraction of some features are a step backwards. But for someone ordering a preconfigured machine from Dell or whomever, the truth is Vista works very well out of the box. I'm amazed at the things my parents (in their late 50s) are doing that they struggled with or couldn't figure out at all on XP.

As for Office 2007...give it a little bit. It is the first real change to the Office UI in ages, but once you're used to it, the ribbon works extremely well.

I'd have to agree 100% with this post.  Vista in a corporate environment is a nightmare.  Too much crap needs to be changed with various UAC settings, reg hacks, etc. to make it usable in a corporate network.  The IP stack changes wreak havok in corporate environemts.  I hate having to do all of those "remote differential compression" changes just to make network performance stable.  Thankfully, XP Pro OEM is still plentiful, and I am keeping the bulk of my client base off of Vista completely.  The Windows 7 Beta appears to improve on some of my complaints, but not nearly enough to make me suggest a rollout when it gets released.

I deal with some software vendors (mainly in custom accounting software) that have said they will not certify their software for Vista at all.  These same vendors have recently stated they won't certify for Windows 7 until at least 6-8 months after its release.

Office 2007 takes some getting used to, but now that I have used it for a year, I would not go back to the old menu structure used for Office 95 thru Office 2003.

[VicBond007]

MPS and Endaar summed it up pretty well.  Vista at home or at work is a joke, and I type this from a Vista laptop. 

With XPSP3, I'm ready to work 10 minutes after installing it.  Vista took me a week of configuring just to get it to reasonably behave. 

Folders still don't remember view settings and any time a folder suddenly has more media files than documents, Vista assumes it's a media folder and blows up the icons to superfrigginhuge and sorts them by name.  Folder sorting by date is a hidden option by default, and I have to set it for every new folder that I create. 

Vista treats zip files like folders (just like xp) however when you install 3rd party zip software, it doesn't STOP treating them like folders.  Open your rom directory in Vista's shoddy explorer and the tree will expand for miles as it treats every rom as a directory.  You can stop it with a registry patch.  Heck, you can stop anything with a registry patch, but it's extra work to do the same thing XP does out of the box, sensibly, the first time.  I don't even get the option to click up one directory, i have to use the crappy breadcrumbs bar which uses relative paths instead of absolute paths, meaning it considers places like your user directory as a root path, instead of being located in /users/roaming/yournamehere.

UAC is a joke. 

File writing and copying, even in SP1 is still terribad compared to XP.  Terracopy helps this somewhat, but when I need an app to handle a basic GUI operation like moving a file, it's time to reinvest.

Managing networks is a disaster, and tweaking it to get a stable connection is even worse. 

Half of the services you don't even need, and quite a bit of the new technology designed to speed things up, really just slows you down (I doubled my file writing performance just by removing my turbo memory chip!) 

Interacting with open windows is less responsive that Windows 3.1.  With Aero on, Vista forces the desktop to render with vsync on, meaning there are times when a dragged window has gotten as far as 2 inches BEHIND MY MOUSE CURSOR.  Scrolling performance also suffers dramatically for the same reason.  This poor performance gets passed on to any application you are running unless it's rendered full screen.

Vista drivers are still a mess.  All of the copyright protection garbage that MS was forced into implementing makes it a pain to develop working drivers.  Vista makes it so that applications have to be able to control your hardware, regardless of manufacturer so that you can't make copies of things that you already paid for.  I'm using Asus sound card drivers on my Lenovo laptop right now because even after a year, lenovo still hasn't figured out how to write a sound driver for Vista that didn't stutter every 20-30 seconds.  Put the blame where you want to, but at the end of the day it's XP with the hardware that works.

Vista eats a ton of resources for no good reason.  Anyone arguing that every OS uses more resources than the OS before it, hasn't tried Windows 7 yet.  It uses less than Vista, even before tweaking.  XP used more than 2000 because it did more.  Vista uses more than XP because...it's fat.  yes, RAM is cheap, but just because you have more resources available, doesn't mean you need to waste it on a bloated OS.  if you have $20,000, you can buy a sensible car that will last you years.  If you suddenly get more resources, say, $50,000, sure you could buy a more expensive car, but you could also use those resources to buy the sensible car AND some sweet living room furniture AND even a new TV!  With XP, you have more resources available to "spend" on other stuff.  I want my 4GB of RAM to work for me, not just support my OS.

However!  Vista with MAME is great.  Why?  because you're not interacting with Vista!  Once you've set up MAME, you're interacting with your frontend, which communicates to MAME, and that's it!  Vista64 is supported way better than XP64, and MAME64 offers significant performance advantages across all types of games.

[loadman]

I got a free copy of Windows Vista Premium and I installed it two months ago.\

Even  though initially I found it frustrating I have tried to give it a fair evaluation but.............  it looks like I will drop back to XP soon.

IMHO Apart from some nice eye candy Vista is "A drain and a Pain"


FYI: MaLa works fine under Vista (if you must use it)  if you change the Apperance settings to something other than Aero  

[richms]

I cant stand going back to XP now, the clickable alt-tab screen is awesome, as is seeing (most) of the applications as you left them.

Navigating in explorer works great, the random explorer crashes are gone, video seems to play nicer in it then it did in XP - graphics card acceleration finally works for h264 stuff.

Going back to xp is like going back to a 1980s car - sure, it gets you there but all the things you are used to are gone and whats there is less refined. IMO windows 7 is getting even better then vista, just waiting on the RC to roll it out on all the machines at home since i dont like reinstalling for the sake of it.

[Haterot]

There's never been (to me at least) a compelling reason to upgrade to VISTA. it may do a few things better or what not but it's not like 'Install this OS and life is all unicorns and rainbows'. Maybe Win7 will be, but until then why upgrade (from XP) and for what great benefit?

[TeutonicDarkness]

 Regardless of if you have a Good performance PC or a slow one.
Single core, dual core quad, 1 GIG or 8 GIG of memory.


Vista is slow period.


Speed is #1


If you Want 64 bit then go XP 64.