Windows Vista: Poll: If you use Vista, how satisfied are you with it?

Vista: Not ready for prime time.

In reply to: Poll: If you use Vista, how satisfied are you with it? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

I've evaluated the Vista Home Premium, and Vista Business versions of this OS. Like everyone else, I drooled over the pretty interface and a couple new features. But thats pretty much were it stops. As a analytical technician, I had to really look at what makes it run, as well as what can actually run on it.

First off, you are pretty much forced to buy a whole new PC to start off with just to run it, or make major upgrades on a existing system (if its new enough).

Then the amount of overhead processing running in the background makes my shiney new HP run slower than my AMD 64 3500+ CPU system.

Loading and shutdown times were over 3-4 times longer than my XP system.

Practically every application I had needed to be upgraded, or I had to buy new versions so it would run on Vista. Thats another hidden cost that most of us don't consider.

I then manually went through, using suggestions from forums, on turning off or manually tweaking settings and registry settings to thinning out the fluff and process hungry internals, and managed to finally get the OS to boot up, run and shutdown "almost" as quickly as XP.

At first, I got Home premium with the HP I bought, but I quickly scraped that because I have a small home network and it was missing all the components needed to join a domain, group policy editing, etc. So I installed Vista Business. Personally, I think the Business or Ultimate version is the way to go if you really want Vista to do anything beyond playing some games and surfing the internet with.

What puzzles me, is even on a Dual Core CPU, it is not really all that fast as you would think. And you really have to laugh at MS's performance evaluator they have in it. It scans your OS and hardware and thenm tells you on a scale of 1-5 how pathetic your PC is for running Vista. It won't even give you the average. It just goes by the lowest number which psychologically induces you to go out and buy upgrades.

Not that its bad enough that you relly have no choice but to get Home premium on any PC or laptop for consumer models that you go look at.

Plus what is with the administrator permissions on Vista? I want "full" admin rights. Not some predetermined hidden level that Microsoft thinks I should have.

So like a few out there, I decided to "upgrade to XP Pro". I hunted down the drivers I needed for my model HP and installed XP Pro. Not only is the system running faster now, but I'm saving unmeasurable amounts of time and $$$$$ not having to tweak, upgrade or find endless workarounds to get my existing external hardware and software to work.

I'm not totally giving up on it just yet, and will be waiting for SP1, since this will be the first major bug fix package and have a few modifications applied.