What has Vista done for you?

Soldato
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It's been 8 months now since the first release of Vista, yet i still too this day preach to my customers when they ask if it's time to upgrade not too move away from the reliability, the stability and usability of XP.

I have explored the usual avenues of testing and evaluation but am unable to find a suitable reason why Vista would be a viable upgrade path for not only businesses but home users also.

Id like to here peoples opinions on what they have gained from a day to day working perspective of the operating system as a whole over what is still available and in my opinion a very stable platform being XP.
 
IMHO Vista has a lot of potential to be a great OS with its new features in the area of security and so on. BUT - not very many programs interact well with those features and most power users end up turning them off.

Couple that with poor driver support from a lot of the big brands and things are pretty bleak.

I'm still running a copy of Vista X64 on my home machine but day and daily I'm tempted to reimage to an old XP build I have waiting.
 
It does everything XP used to and more. Looks nicer, better GUI, good x64 support for drivers. Its good if you have newish hardware. I and a few others I know have had loads of problems using older Mobos and Vista. Some stuff is not compatible, but I dont personally have any issues right now, its running great.
 
^well i think the hardware thing is just random. my mobo is 4 years old and runs just fine in vista. and plenty of people with new hardware have issues so i don't think it's the age that's the problem.... :)

i'm very happy with vista but as much as i like it, even i'd have a hard time trying to convince the average user to upgrade.
 
For most people currently, there aren't many hugely compelling reasons to actually upgrade. I personally find Vista easier to use and I enjoy using it more, but then that's because I know about its features and how to best use them. Most people don't even make use of what XP can offer so shifting to Vista doesn't give them much benefit.

That said, if someone were buying a new PC I'd definitely suggest Vista. Less likely to have compatibility and performance issues on newer hardware, and if it's a new system it's going to be expected to last a fair few years so it makes sense to just get the newer OS.

I've been using Vista for a little while now and I'm very happy with it. No stability issues, no problems finding drivers, and no issues with programs or games not working.
 
Ive been running Vista for a couple of months now and I have to say im close to reinstalling XP pretty much everyday.

The only thing that comes to mind that I like is aero glass lol. Everything just seems tucked away by another click (although I did feel the same way about XP going from 2K) or moved somewhere else.

Add it just feeling more sluggish in general and there doesnt seem much to keep me :(
 
sidethink said:
IMHO Vista has a lot of potential to be a great OS with its new features in the area of security and so on. BUT - not very many programs interact well with those features and most power users end up turning them off.

Couple that with poor driver support from a lot of the big brands and things are pretty bleak.

I'm still running a copy of Vista X64 on my home machine but day and daily I'm tempted to reimage to an old XP build I have waiting.


I'm very happy with Vista x64 no problems at all ,in fact I tried to copy MP3s from XP to my new LG mobile phone today (seen as removable storage device usb type) got i/o error when it tried to copy even one ,anyway thought I would try it it on my Vista x64 PC and it worked first time copied all my MP3s to my LG phone,so much for XP could not even move one MP3 file lol...

Bye bye XP,new improved king on the block called Vista :),all my games work great too :).
 
TBH Vista doesnt do anything for me which XP couldnt do, I could perfectly be happy running XP but considering I've got Vista i thought I might aswell have it installed and well it just looks nice and cleaner to me.
 
refresh said:
Vista has taught me the need to be patient with Linux or suffer at the hands of MS.

:D

What has Vista done for me?

It let me install it on an old rig yesterday, after running one big update it then installed all the graphics card, sound card etc drivers which are usually a curse to track down.

Sound worked, graphics card worked (fully) and it was fully ready to use after its one request to restart.

That was a huge surprise to me. The fact that it runs pretty smoothly on a P4 2.8Ghz, 1Gig, 5200fx system was very nice.

It also has cleaned up the whole installation process both visually and practically as well.

It looks good, very clean and tidy once you get to know it, much more user friendly. And when the programs and drivers are fully sorted out like they should have been nearer launch (Not really Microsoft's fault, they can't be responsible for everything....well....) then it'll be a top drawer operating system for all.

Bettering XP in terms of stability and security was damn near impossible - it's an excellent operating system. But cleaning up the GUI and making it better is definitely something that has been achieved.

That will only be realized after some more use and perhaps a service pack or two.
 
I installed Vista home prem 64 2 days ago

I love it!

I didn't even have to install any drivers :eek: apart from my 8800GTX driver so that saved me a lot of time.

Speed wise, Tbh its about the same as XP IMO

Running this on
6300 @ 3.25Ghz
4GB ram
8800GTX
 
What has Vista done for you?

Overall, not much. The only thing I like about it is I use Media Center for watching TV/Sky, listening to radio and my music libraries etc. Turned the PC into a MCE unit so to speak.
I will remain keeping XP on the other drive for other stuff and gaming, should I ever do any.
 
I love the fact that vista can give me lots more information about my computers performance and reliability than XP ever could. The GUI makes using vosta more pleasant, some of the sidebar widgets are really usefal and i use them everyday (weather, news, cpu and ram usage). Its also a lot more responsive than XP. Plus Flip 3D is cool to show of to your mates who are still using XP :cool:
 
When i first starting working i remeber everyone saying Windows 2000 was only NT4 with plug and play and wasn't worth upgrading :rolleyes:

In a few years time this argument will be forgotten and we will be asking should we upgrade vista, although you all said you never would run it in the first place
 
Hi

How do I tell which OS I have Running?..................just kidding ;)

I have Vista on one laptop and XP SP2 on the other, and apart from the look and everything being in a different place I reckon they're much the same, probably more behind the scenes.

I think all MS did was move everything around and gave it a fresh coat of paint - if you know what I mean.

Just my 2 pennys worth.

Rich
 
I have Vista home prem 32 & 64. Both are sitting in the box still.Had the 32 bit installed once never registered it though. After a week or two it totaly messed up my computer so bad that I couldn't even get into it. Had to reinstall from CD. Not tried it since.
 
My experience so far is its exactly the same.
I was impressed that I didn't need to load drivers for anything such as two printers and a scanner.
There are a couple of problems but I can live with them.
 
I've had XP + Vista 32bit dual booting on my system since Vista launched. I was not very impressed with Vista to begin with, a combination of really poor drivers and various other problems meant that I still booted into XP probably 99% of the time. The only time I would boot into Vista was if some new drivers were release and even then, this was only to see if it solved any of my problems. My main issues were terrible sound (X-Fi) and I found games ran a lot worse.

I have found that in the last week Vista is finally ready for me to use as my main OS, with the latest sound, graphics, motherboard drivers and patches installed it seems to be running just as well as XP, including for games (I solved my crackling sound problems by moving my X-Fi to a different PCI slot!).

Anway, I've completly changed my opinion of Vista, I've gone from detesting it so much that I even tried running Ubuntu to see if it was a viable alternative (for me it wasn't), to the point where I actually like Vista and have been using it almost 100% for a week now. As for what it does for me, well it still doesn't offer that much over XP really, it does look nice though, and it means I'm all set for DX10 games when they do start releasing them :)
 
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