I Hate Windows Vista

[sjaak327]

Quite the opposite, Vista runs way faster then XP on at least 6 pc's I have it installed on. Even a 4 year old Dell Optiplex is more happy running Vista then XP. Of course the amount of ram inside your system is important.

UAC (user account control) can be switched off, even by using the control panel. Not recommended though, and once you have finished installing all programs, you won't see the prompt that often anymore anyway.

I just have to laugh at the last comment regarding the Apple, Mac OSX isn't bad, but to state that it can do what vista is doing for ages is just plain bullshit.

Huh? OS X is besides the point - the question is what Vista can do that Windows XP can't. And there, I have yet to see anything that's compelling. Smoother graphics. The shiny. That's about it.

My main gripe with Vista is that it's not just slower on the hardware I run it on, it's also way, and I mean WAY, WAY slower, cumbersome if you will - to use.

First you have to turn off UAC. Why? I don't know - it's a feature so obviously broken that no-one in their right mind would let it pass QA let alone the biggest software company in the world.

But UAC sets a tone that's followed throughout the entire Vista experience - pop up dialogs, annoy and ask the user everywhere and for anything. It violates everything a OS should do which can be summarized by: Stay out of my way and let me do my work. Vista fails miserably in this most important aspect of what a OS should do. XP is far ahead in this regard, it basically mostly just works - as it should. And it manages to do so without popping up dialogs left and right.

OS X, in this regard, also does the right thing - it mostly stays in the background where it belongs.

Vista is crap. It will probably be OK by SP2.

I agree OSX is besides the point, but I couln't resist commenting on that remark made by the previous poster.

Regarding Vista running way slower has everything to do with hardware and possibly with drivers or other software, Your experience is that it is way slower, my experience on most of the pc's is that it is indeed way faster. If you have enough memory and a capable processor, Vista is quicker, if you run inadequate hardware (like the laptop in my previous post) then it will indeed run way slower and becomes unusable. The only thing I can say is that on most of the pc's I have installed it on Vista indeed runs faster. That said, most of these pc's were less then 2 years old, one was older and needed additional ram.

Getting back to OSX, you state that the UAC equivalent of OSX stays in the background, now that's exactly what UAC does as well. In normal day usage I hardly see UAC. The only annoying thing about it, is that UAC seems to think that re-arranging the start menu, is an admin taks, hence it will prompt, that is IMO ridiculous. For the rest it prompts when it is indeed needed and surely about the same frequency as under OSX.

Finally regarding added features xp versus vista, the main reason to upgrade is added security, in another post you ask me to elaborate on that. For starters Vista is more secure by design. One of the reasons why it was delayed and also why some features, that were promised, never made it into the final release. Microsoft changed their programming procedures to be security centric. UAC is of course the most prominent new security feature, for the first time it makes vista usable as non admin user, something that was more difficult to achieve on XP. But also when run as admin, you won't have access to the file system in the same way as under XP. Other features includes a more advanced firewall, bitlocker, windows defender, IE7 protected mode which is NOT available when run under XP. If you run the 64 bit version, there are some other security features, most notably Kernel Patch protection and the inability to use unsigned drivers.

Finally there are some added features that make it worthwile to upgrade to Vista. Some new programs are an improved media centre, windows sidebar, defender, instant search (maybe the best new feature), photo gallery and DVD maker. I admit that some can also be added on to XP, infact you can even get the aero effect to some degree using add on software on XP, but not out of the box.

[Wolfie]

Sorry to tell you but I'm not joking. I did install a lot of programs actually. The biggest disappointment was probably the continuous blue-screen's I got after installing the driver for my SoundBlaster which is so-called "Vista Ready". Both the latest drivers from the developers' website and and Windows Update got me a bluescreen. And I can't remember having a blue-screen on my last at least 3 years on XP. Photoshop installed fine, but it was a lot more sluggish than on XP. For most programs, I had to start the installer 2 or 3 times in order to even get it running or stop it from crashing. Program compatibility, as others have mentioned, is just terrible. Another thing that bugged me is the "over-done" interface. What was wrong with keeping it fast and easy like it was with XP? We don't need a pretty interface if it takes 5x as much memory as the previous one.

If Vista works for you, then good for you. It just didn't work for me.

Sounds to me like there was something wrong with the base install of Vista.

I've never had a blue screen with Vista, the SB drivers worked first time for me, as did my GFX drivers.

Did you get any errors or strange behavior when installing vista? I've installed my version twice, once as an 'upgrade' to XP and once as a standard base installation (fresh disk) - both times it worked fine.

The interface, i believe, can be turned to 'Windows Classic' which should give you a much more XP look and feel, i haven't tried this myself but i do remember seeing it, i have disabled some of the gloss on the interface.

Sorry it didn't work out for you

[meadish_sweetball]

I'll bide my time and let you and MS sort out the kinks. Thank you all for being pioneers so I won't have to.

[chuchok]

Does Skype still run with Vista? I was told that there are some compatibility issues??

[cdnvic]

Does Skype still run with Vista? I was told that there are some compatibility issues??

Runs fine

[ThaiPauly]

Does Skype still run with Vista? I was told that there are some compatibility issues??

Runs fine

Mine does'nt.

Myself and a computer expert spent half a day trying to get it to work with Vista and we just cannot do it.

Have you any tips ?

Cheers

TP

[pumper]

in my experience windows features are second rate versions of available software.

media center, file management, security, speech ... bundled window features .. are second rate versions of free standing software.

the purpose of the OS is to allow us to get to our work apps .. my time spent in windows is wasted time.

for me: the os is there ONLY to allow access to applications ..

windows has been progressively dumbed down .. the os 'pop ups' / rules are for for the dummies

i want the os out of my way

i want icons to my apps on my desktop .. & nada mas.

[solo siam]

Media Centre is a second rate version of something? care to share the details.

What else can stream my HD and movie collection to inexpensive box's (xbox360) all around my home so that we can watch our entire DVD, HD DVD and Blu-Ray movie collection anywhere in the house (including a nice gallery interface), that never crashes and needs NO fooling about with hardware, apart from 10 minutes once to set up each x-box. Also it will have to stream my photos, my collection of music and be able to turn my lights on and off, did I mention it can't crash. Oh and it should also allow each client to watch (and record) TV independently of each other, all over a single ethernet conection.

I'd love to see the hodge-podge of PC's, Linux boxes, switches and other hardware you'd have to cobble together to get anywhere near 1/2 the functionality of my Vista and extender system.

[cdnvic]

Does Skype still run with Vista? I was told that there are some compatibility issues??

Runs fine

Mine does'nt.

Myself and a computer expert spent half a day trying to get it to work with Vista and we just cannot do it.

Have you any tips ?

Cheers

TP

I just downloaded and installed it.

[pumper]

whats an xbox? I've NEVER played a computer game.

are you saying that you have xboxs spread all about your home? amazing!

my satellite's digital video / audio signal is distributed via wires.. to bedroom TV & audio system .. lub Sirrius radio tu mutt.

& 18,000 MP3s are sent via digital wireless signal from main computer to main system (in another room) via a "$29. transmitter / receiver w/ remote"

& my computer is not the center of my video system .. I've NEVER viewed a computer based .mpg or divx file equal to a dvd / satellite signal.

i have found ALL computer based video to be pixilated .. entertaining but certainly not dvd quality video.

xbox is dolby digital 5.1?

I do have 2 dvd players .. but with TIVO rarely use the dvd players anymore.

I guess you and the owners of 5 or 6 microsoft gaming consoles need vista.

finally, THE customer who needs vista.

score:

computer users 1000000000000 microsoft sucks

xbox users 1 microsoft wonderful

:D :bah:

[solo siam]

Pumper

Xbox is 5.1 DD, 1280x720 resolution (720p) and even my DVD rips will blow away satellite TV, my High Definition films are high def - probably 90% quality of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. We're obviously talking different leagues here, BTW the xbox 360 runs a 3 core 3.2Ghz PowerPC processor, the graphics card has 48 parralel pipelines.

I'm sure you're happy with your system, I would not be - nor would my family be, we love the ability to sit at any TV and watch any of our films or view any of our photos.

Just because YOU don't know, don't understand or don't use a part of the OS, doesn't make it second-rate or useless.

[JackA]

Been using Vista Ultimate ever since it became available in november to MSDN members - and never looked back, but must admit that I did dualboot with XP as an option. Of course there's some programs that I use. which I find essential to make the experience better.

- Vista Manager (trialware)

- AVG Antivirus (Free)

- AVG AntiSpyware (Free)

- Zonealarm (free)

- VistaBoot Pro (Free)

- CCleaner 1.40 (Free)

- nLite Pro (Free)

Once you play around with Vista Manager and nLite you'll find that most things can either be disabled and / or uninstalled, and VISTA can be slimmed down to near same footprint as XP.

The thing that I like about Vista is the stability and *much* improved multicore support. To me the workflow just seems so much smoother than XP.

Once you disable UAC, get used to "run as administrator", "take ownership" and sometimes run "compatibility mode", most of the problems are gone.

The biggest culprits of bluescreens or lockups have been immature drivers - and as X-Fi user I can tell that had to remove the card initially until recently (Yesterday) as the new alchemy drivers became available and now it works.

The driver model is different - and much more strict and tight than before.

It's also possible to run desktop, explorer and GUI in separate processes, instead of a multithreaded process, so if either crashes, it won't affect the others.

And so far, all programs that I work with works with Vista.

[JaiGuru]

Photoshop installed fine, but it was a lot more sluggish than on XP.

I gotta agree that there must be something wrong with your install or hardware. Vista runs so much faster than I've installed it all of my XP machines (except one, which is a dedicated server). And the increased speed of Photoshop is nothing short of impressive.

Did you buy a copy, or just install the latest RC? Having gone through all the RCs, I can tell you the final release is better than the final RC.

[dog412]

for my own info, has Vista so far been virus free?

[plachon]

I just got a new laptop (plumped for an ASUS) and the shop installed a non-licenced version of Vista. Immediately had some problems with Word blue screening and took it back. They reinstalled Vista and so far (just a couple of hours of testing),the machine hasn't crashed, but is slower than my old laptop. the new one has 512 MB HD, but can't remember other specs off the top of my head (I'm a technophobe when it comes to computers), and the guy in the shop told me it would be slower as it's so much bigger than XP, but the model is not compatible with XP.

This is a pain in the butt, as I don't need all the flash graphics of Vista, I just want a computer OS that supports basic functions and is simple to use. XP was fine in my book, but now i'll have to get used to Vista it seems.

My question is this though - it's a non-licenced version and I'm going back to UK soon. Will this give me problems if I ever need to get it serviced in the old country (which presumably is slave to the Bill Gates empire?). If so, should I bite the bullet and get a kosher version installed before I go back West? Opinions please?

[cdnvic]

Any version of Vista will work for 30 days. You may want to do a big backup on day 29

[Wolfie]

actually you get more than 30days, according to an article i read (cant find the link) - apparently you will get 90 days in total, but will get annoying reminders. Of course, i would back up everything on day 29 just in case the article i read was wrong!

[Rice_King]

...is slower than my old laptop. the new one has 512 MB HD, but can't remember other specs off the top of my head ...the guy in the shop told me it would be slower as it's so much bigger than XP, but the model is not compatible with XP.

Assuming you meant to say that the laptop has 512 MB RAM (not a 512 MB HD) that lack of memory alone is enough to make Vista crawl. I am surprised it even runs at all! Spring for 2 GB of memory and you'll be much happier with the speed of Vista.

If the machine can run Vista, it certainly will run XP. The sales person was feeding you a line of bull or was totally inept. Take your pick.

[sjaak327]

I have been running Vista on computers with that low amount of memory, it runs but that's all it does, don't open too many programs at a time since then it will be so slow that it becomes unusable. The pratical minumum is 1GB in my experience.

If you have an unlicensed version of Vista you will get into problems later. Of course you could use google to good use and find out what you can do about that, or just buy a licensed version. Better yet, on that hardware, either upgrade your memory or just load XP, .

[cooL_guY_corY]

Ben@H3-Digital: MASTER OF TECHNOLOGY

your house sounds like a great place to have a huge vodka party and play wii.

[eek]

It sucks, I installed it on my 1.6 GHz Pentium Mobile 1GB Ram...it sucks, it is slow....

I am happy to be back on XP!

You have a weak machine, what do you expect?

Installing a gig of RAM too difficult?

Let's face it, the biggest news about Vista is the lack of news. It wasn't the catastrophy all the chicken littles thought it would be. Had to add RAM? You poor thing. Did you forget upgrading from 98 to XP and having to add RAM? 3.11 to 95 and adding RAM?

When XP launched and immediately fell victim to numerous security breeches people were justified in reverting until SP2. In comparison the petty whinges about minor things in Vista is just so paltry it's amusing to anyone with a clue.

New operating systems require more muscle. That goes for Windows, Macs, Unix, and everything else. Moaning about it is just silly.

Oh, but, i have 2gb of ram on my laptop and yet i still found the programmes i used most (photoshop and maya - often open at same time) were so terribly sluggish it just wasnt viable for me to use vista. I recal at the time, looking for answers on sites on how to rectify or counteract it, and it seemed to be a common issue causing others frustration too.

Also on the simple side i did miss having outlook express as the vista equivalent wasnt compatible with hotmail. Downloaded hotmail live, but just wasnt the same. In some things im a creature of habit. Dont mind change, just not too drastic, and so long as its for the better.

The look of vista was cool, but in my experience, i just found it too frustrating.

[pumper]

i began wondering why an interface to a proprietary gaming system was part of the Operating System.

answer: A Microsoft gamer spends many many times as much as a common OS buyer spends .. not same same

& I am glad that the gaming interface works & is beneficial to multi station gaming. Sounds cool!

But that function / application is obviously not part of the OS function.

& is a game consul marketing decision / application .. multi game consul owners will really enjoy that APPLICATION & have a big reason to buy a microsoft gaming consul.

the OS is the operating system .. & not a "SE Application or Marketing Application" bundle.

& I stand corrected about my generalization that all windows included functions are second class / SE applications.

[solo siam]

Mirosoft see their future as being part of the whole home, in the living room and the bedrooms, rather than stifled to a PC in the study. My guess is you will see a lot more of Microsoft's resources being pushed into that area.

It' not only the xbox360 either, there are TV sets coming with MC Extender functionality being built in.

[Kyosuken]

Vista will run full for 30 days then in a broken (well downgraded) state for the rest of the time, there is a way to get another 30 days full state by doing a well documented, and legal operation, in which you are clearly advised to validate/enter a proper serial key for Vista.

When i used the Beta (up to RC2) UAC was a little annoying (the most part was because of things in control panel that need UAC for unimportant things. Now i am using Ultimate on my Imac and it's a bliss, even with only 1g of ram. It's a treat as a media player PC (even if it does so much more than that ). Regarding UAC still it gets in the way so much on Vista (compared to Mac OS X) mainly because a lot of apps were meant for XP and do not follow any guidelines for safe and intelligent installation procedures ! Do you get UAC to install Office 2007 ? i don't recall, nor with the tools "Vista ready" that i usually carefully chose to install on my box !

This is it, just cut the crap out of old rubbish apps and the experience gets dramatically better, that reminds me of the 95/98 era where people would load unfathomable loads of Win3.1 16 bit craps on their windows (and you could see that mostly with the systray taking up half the task bar ;p) and wondering why it was soooooo slow... so unless you really have to do it, stay away from crappy apps, stick to vista ready ones, and your good to go !

[cathyy]

Bin windows and go for an apple. It has done for ages what "New" vista can do and it does it all better and faster.

I went with a Mac two years ago or so after 20 years of Windows. Haven't looked back since. My husband, daughter, mother-in-law, and niece have all made the switch as well. My son wants to switch, and will when he next buys a computer. They say every computer nerd who switches to the Mac brings 5 people with them, and it sure looks like it's true in my case.

Nidge is right. OS X is far superior to Vista. It is more secure without being intrusively so as Vista is. It is less vulnerable to worms, viruses, trojans, and tracking cookies. Like, there aren't any in the wild. It's based on BSD Unix, and retains the ability to do all things command line if you like that. It comes with the software you need to do all the things most commonly done on a computer, unlike Windows. It comes with a built-in camera for video chat. You can run Windows on it natively if you insist on doing so, and it it price-competitive with a PC for comparable hardware and software.

[Jockstar]

Afetr reading many opinions. I will buy and install Vista when i build my new PC in the next couple of months.

[britmaveric]

I use old apples for door stops!!!

[cdnvic]

It is less vulnerable to worms, viruses, trojans, and tracking cookies.

Tracking cookies are not malware, no matter what overzealous antispyware programs tell you. No OS is less "vulnerable" to them, and all browsers (regardless of platform) use or reject them according to user settings.

It's been years since I've had a Windows infection. All it takes is some common sense mostly.

[Jockstar]

So should i go for Home or Ultimate?

[cdnvic]

So should i go for Home or Ultimate?

Ultimate "extras" have been a bit disappointing. Go for Home Premium and get the media centre.