pp
My experiences with Vista
- installing it was a breeze. Barely any user input was needed and it was quite fast too
- loved the sidebar at first, but later removed it. It's handy for some people but just like the Mac version of it, it's just a gimmick with little actual use since you can't look at it while working in most programs.
- the speed is fantastic. Vista responds much better than XP, feels way smoother, and while in XP I felt all the time that my PC stopped responding (white screen), Vista gives the illusion that everything is working just fine even if your CPU is pushed to the max.
- compatibility was very good except for the standard software. One thing I never got is the amount of people complaining at Microsoft when they release a new OS. If you look at Apple which has horrible backward compatibility, Microsoft still does it a fair bit better. It's only logical that software that intensively uses Windows resources may not work well in Vista if it was made for XP.
Nero's new version (7.X) works fine on Vista, as do the new versions of nearly all other software. The only program I didn't find to function well despite the "Vista compatible) label was PowerDVD. Also to my surprise, I managed to get Windows 98 games working very well. Ultima IX, which is a notoriously buggy game which won't even run well on Windows XP, runs more than fine on Vista (I actually completed it on Vista, which says a great deal). I tested over 50 games and of all those two failed to work:
- Gothic 3 (which barely worked on XP because of the many bugs- now works after a patch
- Fahrenheit, which won't install because the setup does a specific check for DirectX9 and of course that's not Vista's fault.
So when it comes to games, Vista is more than up to scratch. Dosbox works perfectly too so old DOS games and Windows 3.1 games are at your grasp too. So for gaming, it's no worse than Windows XP and obviously, for future DX10 games it will be essential.
The only downsides I found to Vista was a few minor bugs (I made a topic today concerning one, where Vista seems to guess what kind of folder you want, and it doesn't do it too well) and of course, it uses more resources. About 500Mb with drivers and stuff running idle (although I got a lot of drivers for this and that) so 2Gb of memory is really needed for gaming.
Of course, this is Vista 32 bit we're talking about. For now, I don't see any merit in the 64 bit version. Support for it is much worse, far more compatibility problems, etc. but this is because of the nature of a 64 bit OS. I think most people who say negative things about Vista either do so because either their PC is not very recent or they went for the 64 bit version at a time where there's very few programs written especially for it.
