My Mini Review on Vista

Phate

Phate

Phate

Caporegime
Joined
1 Nov 2003
Posts
35,700
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Hey Guys...

Probably Nobody is going to read this, and there are millions of others of reviews over the net but here is mine anyway.

I have been using XP for the past 5 years, and have always had problems with it...and frankly I'm sick of it :p

I've been working in IT support for 3 years and get problems day in and day out at work.

But...After using the same soddin OS for 5 years and from work was offered a copy of Vista Ultimate I jumped to the opportunity...plus I'm the lucky git that has been nominated and been put in charge of rolling it out to 1000+ users...great.

So Friday night I came home with my Vista disk and key with the intention of giving it a test over the weekend as I had nothing better to do :)

Ok I run

5 x Sata Hard drives. 3 of them on one onboard RAID controller and 2 on another.

So I spend ages backing everything up, reboot my pc and insert the disk looking forward to kissing XP goodbye.

Boot from CD and it loads the GUI. Lovely.

Get through and select Language blah blah.

Load my Sata drivers for the RAID controllers and it picks up the Raptor I want to install it on...

Click on the drive... delete partition and format it. again all smoothly.

Click on Next

"Windows cannot locate a suitable volume to install Vista on"

Eh? :eek:

So 2 hours later of trying various BIOS configurations I'm sitting here with a mate not getting annoyed...but more impatient than anything as I want to see Vista in all it's glory.

So in the end I disabled one RAID controller (the one without the HDD I wanted to install to)

Went through the setup again and it installed on it no problems.

Install time once it got going was VERY quick. but that may be due to the drive being a 10k rpm disk or the 2gb of RAM, but either way it's a damn sight faster than XP setup.

Ok...so the PC reboots for the final time and 10 minutes later I'm in Vista and it is sitting there waiting to be used and abused...

So the first thing I do is Open IE7 and install Firefox...no problems here...No 60 different updates to install, nice flashy status bars. all looking and feeling Modern and upto date.

Unlike XP which is really feeling it's 5 years now.

So I proceed to installing all my usual programs like photoshop, msn, dreamweaver etc etc, all going along fine. doesn't slow down or crash once.

Despite my card being quite old now (9800Pro) everything is still running very smoothly.

No slow down no matter how many jobs I load onto it...unlike XP if you load to much it all crashes and becomes sluggish etc.

Now One Major improvement is the GUI...the last beta I briefly used the GUI was using up to nearly 70k in resources in the task manager...currently it's sitting at 17k and I've got several different windows open doing different things.

Vista also comes with a lot more now.

We have

Calender
Meeting Places (haven't tried this out yet)
DVD Maker
Defender
Just being some of them...

But everything just seems to....dare I say it...work.

The mouse and hand have been redone to add to that extra modern look.

When viewing Explorer the windows can be customized to your hearts content to view it in whatever way you choose.

All the buttons have been remodeled, the explorer windows have been done.


All adding to the Uptodate Modern but yet Professional feel of the whole thing.

NOD32 2.7 installed without problems, and runs smoothly.

So to conclude the OS seems to be Very stable and worthwhile upgrading depending on prices when it's released :)

I'll probably stay with Vista now and not go back to XP unless i'm at work.

It's new it's fresh

AND IT WORKS!

Thanks for reading :)

Phate
 
Nice one. I might try out the 30 day trial thing as i have ultimate image on pc. I am a bit tired of xp, having to reformat so often although its due to upgrades but heh. I think this time i will make a arcinos image of my fresh xp install and then if it mucks up no need to plug in the floppy drive ect to reinstall raid drivers if i reformat ;).
 
That's lovely but it seems that your main positive with Vista is that it doesn't slow down like XP did or crash when you try to do a lot.

However, I never had that problem with XP either. What would you say is the biggest reason to upgrade after the stability?
 
Do you find your hard disks chug away a lot? Mine seem to do it too much for my liking. Whether it's never finished indexing yet, I don't know.
 
Caged said:
That's lovely but it seems that your main positive with Vista is that it doesn't slow down like XP did or crash when you try to do a lot.

However, I never had that problem with XP either. What would you say is the biggest reason to upgrade after the stability?
Click to expand...

Apart from that software is going be developed for Vista?

Also the fact, compared to XP you get incredible amounts of software, all built in and ready to use.
 
ic1male said:
Do you find your hard disks chug away a lot? Mine seem to do it too much for my liking. Whether it's never finished indexing yet, I don't know.
Click to expand...


At first they did, but seem to be ok now.

Although when I left it on last night and the screensaver came on, the 5 internal drives went mental. but after about an hour or so. They stopped.

The thing I don't like is when it puts the hard drives to sleep.

Probably the first thing I turned off...

I mean it's not reassuring if you don't know about the feature and your browsing the net and suddenly you hear 3 of your drives stop spinning :p
 
indexing service does my nut in, uses a ridiculous amount of cpu time, seems to run the cpu flat out nearly constantly which slows everything down.
 
Clarkey said:
indexing service does my nut in, uses a ridiculous amount of cpu time, seems to run the cpu flat out nearly constantly which slows everything down.
Click to expand...

You probably have a lot of Mp3 or other files. I agree that on the first boot of Vista the PC does run slow due to the indexing. However, if you give it enough time it will eventually index your files. Once it has indexed you will be able to enjoy the wonderful search and filter systems. Have you tried them yet. Well worth the wait for the indexing. You will never want to go back to folders again.
 
Caged said:
However, I never had that problem with XP either. What would you say is the biggest reason to upgrade after the stability?
Click to expand...

Instant Search. This is an excellent feature. And one that seems to be overlooked. Its a joy to use, once you get to grips with it. Find files, run programs, filter them by date, time, camera size and all other sorts of metadata.
It's a next gen platform using current gen technology. ;)

Native SATA support?? :D
 
Just to add my 2p worth.

First thing I noticed with Vista is how nice it all looks. The installation was a breeze with the SATA RAID card drives being taken of my memory sticks (in an age where floppy drives are far between this was a god send). It detected the drives and partitioned them for me - job done. It now asks for all the information at the start rather than several times through the installation so you enter the information and walk away - it also changes everything to the UK once you've selected it rather than changing it in 4 or 5 different places like XP.

Once installed I checked out what was not installed. An old SCSI card didn't work so I installed the Windows 2000 drivers and that worked fine I then noticed that my Soundblaster 2 card wasn't installed - very strange but again a quick pop over to the website solved this.

I then checked out AV as the company has a subscription to Sophos I have used this - downloaded and installed fine - ran a full system scan again all nice looking and working well.

I then remembered something I really wanted to test - the Aero features. Very nice to say the least - the transparency and everything really looks nice.. it just looks very nice to use with the included Screensavers and backdrops looking very, very nice...

Once I installed Office and activated everything I thought it would be a good time to make a backup - the backup wizard is really nice with a full system backup option - it doesn't actually use a tape backup drive which I found strange so I went to DVD's it warned me it may need three as office and the O/S was around 10.9GB in size by now. Anyway it backed it all up to one DVD - talk about compression.

I then installed a game to test - it installed fine but when ran it wouldn't connect to the server - changed the compatibility mode to XP - SP2 and all was fine.

I'll post some screenies tonight - oh and by the way this is a legitimate Technet subscription copy not a dodgy one! One last thing I want to do is mess around with gadgets the ones I have look great but theres lots more out there.



M.
 
hmm yes, other than terrible gaming performance (with 1GB RAM) under utilisation of my soundcard (audigy 2 ZS), consistent COM SURROGATE crashes Vista isnt bad.

i went back to XP overweekend, and despite my dissapointment that PRE SP XP doesnt see HDD's over 130GB, it is great! looks modern, feels fast and snappy, and plays my games 100%! cracking.
 
Clarkey said:
yes the search is very good, but the indexing process seems to run for at least an hour a day.
Click to expand...
Hmm, it explains why it's necessary to index for instant search but is it possible to disable it if I don't use search?
 
Nickg said:
hmm yes, other than terrible gaming performance (with 1GB RAM) under utilisation of my soundcard (audigy 2 ZS), consistent COM SURROGATE crashes Vista isnt bad.

i went back to XP overweekend, and despite my dissapointment that PRE SP XP doesnt see HDD's over 130GB, it is great! looks modern, feels fast and snappy, and plays my games 100%! cracking.
Click to expand...

Never had that problem. I have 1GB RAM and the couple of games that I've thrown at it have been fine. Not had one crash yet (touch wood!)
 
m4cc45 said:
Never had that problem. I have 1GB RAM and the couple of games that I've thrown at it have been fine. Not had one crash yet (touch wood!)
Click to expand...

to be fair NHl07 was fine.

BF2 was not. it was jerky something terrible for like 15 mins before it would settle down and then still thrash the HDD> it also took over 1 minute to "verify client data" after loading each map, usually getting kicked for "inactive player" or whatever which made it real sucky!
 
georges said:
Is the search much better than google desktop?
Click to expand...

I have not used google desktop since the first beta. (And it was discovered to be phoning home, so I scrapped it). I imagine if Google Desktop has the same filters and is built into explorer (context sensitive searches) then it would come down to personal preference. I imagine google would be quite a formidable competitor if you were designing search routines. For obvious reasons.

However you raise an interesting point. Is MS creating a level playing field with the indexing data? That is, could Google write a program that equals of surpasses the native instant search in Vista using standard API's. I imagine there are people at google who know the answer to this question.
 
Last edited:
Nickg said:
to be fair NHl07 was fine.

BF2 was not. it was jerky something terrible for like 15 mins before it would settle down and then still thrash the HDD> it also took over 1 minute to "verify client data" after loading each map, usually getting kicked for "inactive player" or whatever which made it real sucky!
Click to expand...

Sadly not got BF2 to test it myself. I'll try a few games which I know are HD intensive such as Call Of Duty, etc and report back here...
 
its the sheer size of the game and the ram used which causes the probs. my honed WIN XP install uses like 120MB ram when doing nothing..

VISTa takes like 400MB!

BF2 takes 600-900MB.

when you have 1 GB of RAM, win xo can survive however vista just cant because it is permanently using the HDD:/
 
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