Buzz Out Loud Lounge: Vista and Molly
Vista and Molly
by George Gray - 7/30/07 6:50 PMMolly, love ya! Don't be a 'switcher', stick to your guns...there's nothing wrong with Windows.
I really don't get the whole anti-Vista thing. I have four machines running it just fine. Two of them were purchased with Vista pre-installed: an eMachines running Vista Home Basic, which my wife finds is just as usable or moreso than the Windows 2000 machine she had before. The eMachine, btw, cost a total of two hundred bucks, which she loved, after CompUSA rebates. It has 512mb ram and and PCI-E ATI x1600 video card for output to the big tv. The machine has been running 24/7 with the exception of about four hours due to power failure. It has not crashed once. The next machine, an HP Entertainment laptop (dv6253) has Vista Home Premium installed along with 2gb ram. The one time it crashed was when the HP Software update ran and tried to install a 'new' nVidia video driver. Funny thing, the installed driver was newer than the one the updater tried to install. After gutting the machine of the HP crapware, it runs happily. The other two machines that are running Vista are upgrades. My primary desktop, another HP Entertainment pc was upgraded from XPMCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate and my kids' machine was upgraded from XP Home to Vista Home Premium. I can't say the upgrades were 'smooth', but the machines are pretty stable. The HP machine, from time to time, has an issue with the ATI x1650 driver and kills explorer, the whole machine does not go down in flames. Explorer restarts on it's own. My kid's machine, after a memory upgrade, needs a new video card in order to get Aero, is also pretty stable. One game, Seaworld Tycoon 3d, does not like Vista and, after each play, pretty much sucks the life from the pc. I suspect the weak video card and it's xddm driver.
The parental controls that Vista offers works GREAT. I can limit the time he spends on the computer, I can limit what games he plays and the sites he visits. It produces really detailed reports and IE 7 has prevented not only entire sites, but some ads as well. It was well worth the upgrade issues to get this kind of control over the PC. I feel much better about my kid being on the internet and having the level control over the machine as I have. Microsoft did Vista right. I makes the XP laptop I use in my job seem really old and slow now.
I guess Microsoft's expected launch...
by shawnlin - 7/30/07 8:07 PM In reply to: Vista and Molly by George GrayI guess Microsoft didn't expect such inconsistent performance. ...that seems to be the running theme of the Vista launch - inconsistent performance.
--Shalin
My Prob w/ Vista...
by navsimpson - 7/30/07 8:51 PM In reply to: Vista and Molly by George GrayIs that both of my new machines have dual core processors and 2gb of RAM and Vista is slow. It's just disappointing to have my PC run at what feels like the same speed as my old one, which I'd had since 2002.
Different result for me
by MedicineHead - 7/31/07 10:14 AM In reply to: My Prob w/ Vista... by navsimpsonI had a computer that was from around that era, and I found my computer to be much faster "despite" Vista. It's not to say that your perception is therefore false, but rather my perception of Vista is different.
i had a different exprience
by camobrien22 - 8/1/07 2:21 PM In reply to: Vista and Molly by George Grayive had two bad experiences with vista, the first was when i clean installed Vista Home Premium on my desktop computer that runs XP great but when i tryed vista, even a right click took about 20seconds to pop up a menu and my system crashed about 15times a day, the second was when my grandmother bought a new laptop with vista on it she told me it was so slow that she couldnt do anything on it and that her extremely old Windows 98 machine runs better then vista
Inconsistency is the key ...
by mollywood
- 8/1/07 4:31 PM
In reply to: Vista and Molly by George Gray
My comments about my experience with Vista are totally personal. It does sound like some people are having great experiences and others aren't. I've found that Vista, which came preinstalled on a new Dell XPS M1210 notebook, is both buggy and slow. I had to disable the AeroGlass features (which I actually like!) to get decent performance, and when I enabled the preference to expand certain menus in the new Start menu, it dragged the entire performance of the Start menu to a halt. Like, I'll hover over the Control Panel option for a full 5 or 10 seconds before the menu expands -- and that's with Aero turned OFF! So, I feel forced to use the Classic Start menu, which kind of defeats the purpose of the cool new search feature. I've also had some strange crashes (including an actual blue screen), and my wireless card driver disabled itself or became corrupted and a little Googling showed that there had been a lot of problems with that driver and the Vista beta. So, that's been a bummer. There are also just some odd usability choices in Vista -- like, why rename the Add/Remove Programs menu "Programs and Features"? We all know what Add/Remove programs means, you know?
On the other hand, I really like some things about it, particularly the handling of media files. I love the way it handles photos -- you can offload them from the camera, rotate them, fix redeye, and email them directly from Windows Explorer, without having to open a separate app. It's exactly how I wanted iPhoto to handle photos, actually. And the Aero stuff, if it wasn't such a performance drag, is actually really cool. I've yet to use the Media Center features, although I'm pretty sure that a Media Center problem caused my blue screen and a weird screen-freeze problem I was having (I downloaded an updated driver and it hasn't acted up since). All in all, I want to like it, I just think it's not ready for prime-time if it has this many problems for this many people. That doesn't mean some people won't have a great experience, and more power to 'em!
P.S. Yes, I visit. 
I just lurk a lot.
Thanks MS, but no thanks.
by Drezen - 8/3/07 6:13 AM In reply to: Inconsistency is the key ... by mollywood
I'm sticking with XP for the time being, after getting quite badly burned by my first Vista install. It actaully went on very well and I didn't notice any significant change in performance in desktop and browser activities, and it was all very slick and impressive.
The reason I say "desktop and browser activities" there is that Vista took offense at my Radeon 9800 XT video card and wouldn't run any drivers for it whatsoever. It would install the generic VDA driver, but it wouldn't run it and it insisted on telling me so every couple of seconds with an annoying popup. After downloading and installing three updated drivers from ATI and reinstalling Vista once, I gave up and installed Mepis while I waited for a new copy of XP (thanks to my sister for losing the original one!). All in all, a very expensive experiment for me.
I think of Vista as a driver Nazi, steadfastly refusing to run anything that isn't certified, whereas XP was a driver Hippy, cautious but ultimately happy to absolve itself of all responsibility and let you decide. The frustrating thing is that my computer, an oldish but well upgraded gamning rig, is powerful enough to run Vista at a decent pace. If I had a computer that was under a year old, then I'd happily switch but as things stand I'm happy with my computer and I'm not going to buy a new one just for Vista.
It's fine
by Ron-Mexico - 8/3/07 2:55 PM In reply to: Vista and Molly by George GrayThere's room for improvement, but a lot of the complaints we're hearing really aren't all that dissimilar from what we heard when XP came out (speed, system requirements, drivers.) There's simply more hardware/software manufacturers out there now you have to deal with so there's bound to be some companies that don't have their stuff upgraded yet. It comes with the territory.
I've got it on two machines. One was preinstalled on a new HP I bought. Another was loaded onto my own frankencomputer that I built. The experience has been painless with both. The only minor issue I've encountered was a mouse driver that prevented one system from sleeping properly, which was quickly patched with an automatic update.
A lot of people complain about the system resources required, but one of the things I actually liked most about it was how fast it seemed to load. In fact I was worried that my old homemade rig with a modest CPU (Sempron 2800), bare minimum video card (Radeon 9600Pro) and 1GB of RAM would run like a dog. But it's fine. In fact one of the things I love about it as that you can immediately start working as soon as you can see the desktop. On XP I had to wait for all my startup and background apps to load before they finally let go of their stranglehold on the CPU.
I also think anytime you make a shift in the UI there's going to be some pushback from previous users who are accustomed to the older interface. You see it all the time. I heard a few co-workers saying similar things about Office 2007 when it first came out. It's a dramatic shift in the UI (probably even moreso than Vista was given how long the toolbar model has been utilized.) But after spending just a little bit of time with it, you realize how vastly superior it is to the old UI (or any of the competing products for that matter.)
I wonder..
by Nicholas Buenk - 8/3/07 8:48 PM In reply to: Vista and Molly by George GrayDoes molly like anything that she's not already familiar with. 
| Forum legend: | |
 |
Locked thread |
 |
Moderator |
|
CNET staff |
 |
Samsung staff |
 |
Norton Authorized Support team |
 |
AVG staff |
 |
Windows Outreach team |
 |
Dell staff |
 |
Intel staff |
