More Vista drivel

Rainmaker

Rainmaker

Rainmaker

Soldato
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<drivel>

Yeah, another post on Vista. A post with a difference, though, maybe. A couple of years ago I got sick of Windows, or more to the point I don't entirely agree with the way MS operates. Long story short I embraced FOSS and switched to Linux. Fedora, CentOS/RHEL, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, you name it. Great OSs, good times. I learnt a lot and I spent two years running Linux only :D

Eventually for a couple of reasons I went back to XP, and had to admit it's a great system. I basically realised it wasn't so much the OS I had an issue with (it's rock solid after all), I just liked tinkering and being free to do what I wanted. You can have way more grinnage breaking stuff in Linux and fixing it via the shell and config files.

I'd tried Vista on trial (pre-SP1) and yeah, hands up, I jumped on the Vista sucks bandwagon. It was slow, buggy, and compared to something like Arch it was a positive bloat. I binned it off, despite owning an OEM licence. After a RAM upgrade, and a power outage last week which managed to wipe my MBR :mad: I was having some issues with XP SP3 and Windows Live Messenger. Nothing serious but I thought what the heck, I'll stick Vista SP1 on and spend a few days reminding myself how crud it is etc etc.

The result? I'm still using it and can't bear to switch back LOL :D I got stuck with the 32 bit version because of driver issues with my onboard sound (Realtek AC'97 :o). The Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio I bought from OcUK this week was even worse, and plays horribly. Waste of £30 tbh, but that's Creative's fault.

See what I did there? I blamed the hardware OEMs for lack of quality drivers instead of slating Vista. I have to admit that while XP is nice and light, runs great etc, Vista is a breath of fresh air. It's silky smooth, everything runs nicely and even multitasking is much smoother than under XP.

I'm downloading a 12GB file as I type this, at 2.3 MB/sec, as well as streaming from YouTube and browsing. No slow-downs, no "loading" messages, it's like ice. The damn start menu took a few days to get used to, but once you do? Handy as heck. Explorer is 10x better, and I've not had a single crash or freeze - not for lack of abuse/trying either!

So yeah, you're probably bored by now and I dare say I'll get some nice condescending replies. But what the heck. Consider this my public apology. Vista's a great OS and I'm already recommending it to anyone with fairly recent hardware. I couldn't imagine being stuck on XP or *shock* even Linux as my main desktop OS now.

My hardware's nothing special either. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 (socket 939), 3GB Corsair DDR RAM PC3200, Nvidia GeForce 8600GT, 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm 32MB cache hdd and 500w Antec PSU.

I'll shut up now - I just had to admit it. Confession is good for the soul :p
</drivel>
 
For me I really rate XP as an OS for any hardware, but new machines I would personally recommend Vista Home Premium to most users.

As with all things there are teething problems, issues and things that get fixed either by the Windows Update (which can be a problem in itself) or by the Service Packs that are released. The thing is, without us finding these problems Microsoft cannot develop patches for them.

I do have to admit, I spent three hours with Vista Home Premium on a friends laptop and loved it, it felt smooth. I tried it slightly lower grade hardware (a friends machine) and was running really really slow, however, XP on the same machine runs just fine.

Needless to say, I am planning my upgrade to Vista Home Premium sometime in the very near future.
 
Well I'm glad there is some good views on Vista. I also really like it but wish to get comfortable with using Fedora myself. Still have a couple of niggling problems with it...

(Reboots back into Fedora from Vista...)

/user who liked Vista from Beta 2.
 
I'm glad you're enjoying it. It's pretty much my experience of Vista. I admit the first week of using Vista is a massive learning curve (but then I cheated and went back to a standard menu!)

I haven't yet bothered to update my Sound Card yet after having a nightmare with Creative in the past. So looking at alternatives as we speak!
 
ive loved it ever since my all in the screen PC from Elonex was begging for an upgraded OS and since ive tried to format the bugger before only to be stumped by drivers (has a built in TV card and sub woofer and all sort of other awesome gumpf) so was without a woofer or Tv card among other things for ages, fired Vista on it and it had the bloody lot found everything straight away, fully working PC again. at that moment I hugged my PC and vowed never to slate Vista. :D

oh and also just bought a creative x-fi 7.1 card (my first soundcard!!!) and i had no issue with the drivers that came with it.
 
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Vista really is awesome. most people jump on the hate bandwagon as they have no idea how it uses resources and just assume it's resource hungry, have hardware with rubbish drivers, or they can't be bother to solve a few issues.

I can't see how anyone can say xp is better than vista.

Vista is rock solid stable, faster, looks better, feels smother and has loads of nice small features you don't notice till you try going back to xp. Then there's media centre as well.
 
I'm much the same. Tried 32-bit Vista on 1GB RAM a couple of months after release, and lasted about a week - slow, laggy, buggy, driver issues. A year later and I installed Vista x64 SP1 on 4GB RAM - it's like using a different OS. Fast, smooth, pleasant to use and never, ever crashes. I think quite a lot of the Vista-bashers are coming round to it now the early issues have been worked out.
 
Iv got it on my laptop and really am impressed (its taken me about 8 months to admit it though). I mean pre sp1 it was only ok (and i only had a gig of ram which made me wince a bit), but now i have a 2gig stick in it and sp1 got updated to it a few weeks ago and i actually enjoy using it more than my desktop (for net browsing and basic stuff). This does also take into account i hate my laptop screen and touchpad (acer travelmate 5510, just poor in these areas) as vista is just really plesant to use on it, this is after trying xp and linux on it and deciding acer did actually know best (shocking).

Anyway conclusion of this is im buying the 64bit vesion for my desktop in a few weeks and that people will accept change (and that vista secretly is pretty nice)
 
vista all the way as far as i'm concerned... a lot of thought has gone in to this product. Especially for the enterprise, all the problems I had with xp have been addressed pretty much out the box.

i don't play games on the pc any more so i'm not bothered about that extra fps
 
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