Windows Vista forum: Poll: Whats your personal experience with Vista?

This is the sort of response that really sets me off! If MS's programmers can't write an efficient OS, blame the users who aren't willing to throw money at hardware which can run it? I don't think so!

Back in the 80's, I was writing real-time FFT applications which ran on an embedded Apple II motherboard - 1MHz 6502 (8-bit) CPU, 64K RAM, and a single 143KB floppy drive.

These days I make my living designing and programming embedded systems. As such, I work on low-end to medium capability microcontrollers with limited amounts of memory and very restrictive power consumption requirements. I hate waste! I also hate sloppy programming and since I <u>know</u> systems don't have to be as inefficient as Vista it offends me. Also, many of the systems I work on have to be compliant with a variety of standards. If they're not, people can die. So when I see software which is poorly tested or with bugs left in to fix later, I'm offended.

Finally, when I hear people defending marketing strategies which try to force people to buy hardware which they shouldn't need to do the job, I'm really offended!

Well a think there are technology levels, and acording to that level, it cost more or less, but when it becomes to slow level or less speed specs in a pc, is because there are a lot of people who needs or want a pc but doesnt have a lot of money to buy the most excentrically speeds in a processor or RAM. By now i think buying a pc that costs above 1500, its buying a really fast pc, but, think about this, you will buy it just to run vista more smothly? to watch movies more comfortable? ot listen your mp3's and make your homeworks more efficiently? mmmmmhh maybe yeah.

But i gotta say i'd buy a pc costing above 1500 or even 2000 or more, because i'd really need the power for special aplications, like music or video or digital imaging and design productions, but i'm realizing that Apple's MAC is the best in those areas.

i have 7 computers all most running xp pro and 1 running win2000, and 1 with vista, even after turning off all the useless visual bells and whistles the performance is seriously lacking considering the hardware. I tried installing xp on it but since this computer only came with vista from the manufacture was unable to get any xp drivers, so i'm between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In its current state it just a very pretty and expensive internet browser since its not much good for anything else.

Hi ( my first posting)
I have used desktops for 12 years and had good times and bad times with W95, 98se, XP. Now I am switching to Vista. Unless I go to Mac, Vista seems to be the future. To be honest, I have only heard neg feedback. I heard lots of neg about windows ME and 2000.( Do you feel Vista will be pulled like windows ME) I will be using a DLink network. Anyone have problems using this wireless network ( with Vista) , I will still be using two desktops on my network, both of them running XP. I am concerned about sharing info with XP and Vista, files, pics, the printer etc...
Why are a lot of laptop suppliers provided extended XP installs if Vista is running smoothly. I am 95% sure I will be buying an ACER for 2 reasons, First budget and second I think they are now making good desktops and good monitors. They seam to cost about 25% less than the other popular laptops
Thanks
Dave

Lets face it, the parallels between Windows Millenium Edition and Vista are too great to ignore. Lets hope that Vista meets the same end.

I purchased a new system that came with Vista Premium installed. This is a fast, dual-core machine with tons of memory. Vista could just barely get out of its own way. The problem was all of the extra c**p that M$oft tacked in to try an improve security and an enhanced user experience at the same time. Since this was layered on to of all of the other whiz-bang M$oft ideas, like DCOM, of course it ran slowly.

The ultimate insult was when I decided to install XP. The hardware vendor refused to supply the applicable drivers due to an agreemnt with guess who. But I perserved and the new machine is happily running XP in a very acceptable way.

I am convinced that the situation will not improve until (1) M$oft abandons some of the flawed OS features that contributed to the security issues and (2) provides a more open, standards-based platform. If you don't believe that's possible, have look at the Apple systems that are currently out there. The user interface is slick and polished. The systems are simpler to understand and use and, since they are UNIX-based, have a much lower incidence of security issues.

I find the present results of your poll ("50% - little or no problems") hard to believe and I don't think it is truly indicative of the general feeling of people who have experienced vista.
I have not met one person so far, who has not experienced considerable problems with this bloated, over priced collection of totally unnecessary Eye-Candy. The people to whom I refer, are experienced computer users and most have reverted to XP.
Personally, I will NEVER install vista on any of my PCs - XP works fine for me and along with some third party security software, is stable and does everything I need. So why should I continue to line microshaft's pockets, just to be Up-to-Date.

I have used Vista only on friends' computers, so no real-life, day-to-day experience with it, but I have been using Windows since 2.5, up until Vista was released, so I believe myself to know a few things about the Windows series of OS.

I ran the initial start-up and installation of my grandfather's Vista-preloaded computer. I have done quite a few of these during the years, and the comparison with other Windows versions was not promising. It took forever. With XP I have done quite a few clean installs and initial start-ups, and it usually takes an hour (clean install) or about 20 minutes (initial start-up). Vista took two hours with an initial start-up.

Later, he needed help, because despite the UAC, he had managed to do some minor damage to his system. Minor because he had only disabled one application. All the rest were running (slowly, but) happily along. In XP I know the ways to correct this problem, and it wasn't TOO different in Vista, but as the layout has changed completely, and settings have changed categories, it took me an hour locating the tools to perform the operations. XP would have let me at them after five minutes or less.
Having found the tools, I set out to correct the problem. In XP, I know the procedure well enough to know that it will take maximum an hour to run the tools. In Vista it took the better part of five hours.

He wouldn't even have been able to make this problem in Ubuntu. He would have been able to do it in EVERY Windows version out there, from as far back as 2.5

I have used a friend's ultra-lightweight laptop with Vista connected to a large widescreen TV as a music player. During the party, a few other friends with computer knowledge dropped in, and we wanted to check out some features of the machine, not the OS. We had to get to the Control Panel while playing music in iTunes. We hit the flag-button (Start-button) and waited. And waited. It took nearly two minutes to pop up. We had given up already.

An ultra-lightweight laptop provided by a school in a poor district isn't exactly what's recommended for running Vista, but come on. You play music and then it takes two minutes for the menu to appear? XP might have been sluggish on that computer too, but I doubt it would have used two minutes to open the menu.

From a side-experience, I had a very old laptop. Comparative in size, but not specs. It was a Pentium 366MHz, 192MB RAM, 6.2GB HDD, no graphics-card, integrated sound, no network adapters of any kind, 1xCD-R (my father almost chose floppy for this computer more than eight years ago), and 1 USB 1.1 port. It had XP on it, and did a fairly good job. (Compared to Vista on the laptop above, it only took five seconds to open the menu). I decided. after getting a DSL-cable modem with USB connectivity to try going online. I had to search for almost six hours on another computer to find a driver allowing me to do that.

Having another computer working perfectly with XP, and only curiosity to see what the laptop could do, I tried Ubuntu 6.06. I installed in less than an hour, was online (found the USB-port and ticked a checkbox to tell the OS that it was supposed to be used for networking) and finding that the only thing my desktop with XP could do better and faster than the out-dated laptop was viewing YouTube videos. And that's not a very crucial part of my online-experience. I stuck with Ubuntu. Since then, I have upgraded to 6.10 and sold the laptop, gotten a modern laptop, installed 6.10, upgraded all the way through 7.04, 7.10 and now 8.04. Only trouble so far has been with widescreen in 6.10 (solved in 7.04) and wireless in all versions (ndiswrapper needed to use native Windows-drivers in 6.10 and 7.04), but in later versions (7.10 and 8.04) it's just three mouse-clicks to get it working perfectly. (Broadcom doesn't support Linux, and therefore the three mouse-clicks)

A lengthy post, and one filled with off-topic references at that. But these experiences are linked together with my experience of Vista in particular and Windows in general.

A final off-topic experience: I had to do four clean installs of XP on my modern laptop in less than 8 months. It took me nearly a week getting everything back to the way it was, every time. I have tried a few distros on my laptop, and the clean install of Ubuntu and getting everything back to the way it was, has never taken more than six hours.

You said;
"Vista is a modern OS and as such requires modern hardware and modern software."

That begs the question, what do you know about modern OS's?
Vista is modern because it is Microsoft's latest OS? Even on the most up to date hardware and software, it is slow compared to XP Pro SP-3 and Linux. Slowness comes from Microsoft's fixation of being and maintaining a monopoly position. Kind of like my way or the hy-way.

There up and coming OS, now that is modern, in concept let's see if they can pull it off. Mac OS is modern, as is Linux.

You say; "Some people complain that it runs slowly or that such and such application doesn't work. I have yet to hear of a complaint that wasn't solvable by updating to the current version. It's OK that Acrobat 7 doesn't work, cos Acrobat 8 does. Yes, you need lots of RAM and HDD space, but memory is amazingly cheap now."

I say using the good old XP with Acrobat 8 is much faster in the same hardware.

You state; "In a similar vein, XP is out of date. I recently loaded XP Pro over Vista onto a brand new laptop for a friend - after slipstreaming SATA drivers onto a new install disk just to load it onto the harddrive more than half of the hardware was not supported by XP. Some hardware didn't even have XP drivers available from the vendor."

I do the same on a weekly basis and you have to acquire some expertise to find the drivers. Laptop Vendors use similar hardware and I have yet to be stumped by drivers. However, Linux has the drivers in the Kernel of the OS for modern Intel hardware.

You said; "Did I point out that I needed my Vista PC to create the disk to install XP?"

If you used "nLite" you could have slipstreamed the SATA driver and the other hardware drivers in XP.

You need to make an nlite XP installer with service pack 2, that comes with the SATA drivers for all HD vendors, probably you are installing XP with SP 1, and it will never run on a pc with sata HD's. And even if your HD is not SATA but it has more than 127 GB of capacity, it'll never install on your pc, cuz XP SP 1 doesnt support HD's with more than 127 GB of capacity.

When I run Computer Performance I get the following:
Processor - 4.6
Ram - 4.6
Primary Hard Drive - 5.0
Graphics - 2.9
Gaming Graphics - 2.5
I don't care about Gaming graphics as I don't play games.
How do you improve the graphics? Is it neccessary to improve the rating for graphics?
Anybody?

As a former computer systems engineer I am at least as knowledgeable as the average user. I've had VISTA on my new machine for about 6 months. I upgraded my memory to 3 GIG within a month, I run AOL and Norton and Vista just wouldn't run, it would crash to blue screen 20 times a day. Now that I made the upgrade it only crashes 3 to 4 times a day. My HP printer with all the new drivers still prints only one page every 4 to 5 minutes with xp it printed over 10 a minute and I have over 1000 of the looking for solution problems in my history. Vista has brought me closer to my family because our computer is in the kitchen and now I have to spend five to six times the time to complete the things that I used to complete. Truly, I cannot say anything good about it, I've made it a quest to tell at least 3 people a day, whatever they do don't try to go to Vista it is a waste of time.

Well it is like this. I bought this HP as a bundle on sale and it always gives me problems. The startup is slow and the blank explorer page drives me nuts. The D drive is full and I can't back up and it fails putting on a disk as it holds in a space on the drive. No sense to me. Too much in the hard drive to start. Now my Yahoo don't respond right away. They keep fixing and we keep repairing.I bought my sons HP and he don't have a problem. I must have gotten an old one.

MAC is a little expensive option, but i think it well worth. I don't own a MAC, but im seriously considering in crossgrade to a MAC. If just all the software i bought were compatible with MAC .

I have built 15 PCs with Vista so far, and none have had any problems. The components were all selected for maximum performance, so I have not experienced any "slowness" that many others have complained about. I have used nVidia video cards exclusively, and with exception of lack of non-beta drivers for SLI in early 2007, they have performed flawlessly -- and NO bluescreens.

One PC had a minor (although, unfixable) issue when updating to SP1. It was a Vista Ultimate PC, so fortunately, I had a recent image (made using the built-in MS imaging utility). I reimaged the drive, and SP1 loaded without further problems.

I previously had a Dell Latitude D600 (Intel M Processor 1.5Ghz 512Mb RAM). It came preloaded with XP Home and I hated it. After 3 weeks I got rid of XP and went back to 2K Pro and laughed at family and friends who kept having problems with XP, (my step-father 3 clean installs (XP Home), a mate with 5 (XP Pro) and my brother in law 1 (XP Home). I did not need 1 in that 2 1\2 year period. When it came time to upgrade I brought a Compaq Presario V6000 (Intel Centrino Duo 1.86Ghz 1 MB RAM Shared with graphics) preloaded with Vista Business almost a year ago and i've had no problems with it. I regularly download and try a lot of Freeware Programs and have had only about 3 that haven't worked, and i've only had one driver failure, my audio driver from MS Update, (bundled with about 15 other updates on patch tuesday), so I downloaded the driver from the HP website and it installed properly. I now have SP 1 installed and it's just getting better. I ain't going back to 2K or XP.