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Windows Vista


Murph

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What's the latest on Vista? I'm thinking of buying a new machine and have the option the get Vista or XP, but the XP machine is less configurable.

 

Rumors have Vista SP1 coming out soon. I'd suggest going with XP unless you have 1st person hands-on experience with the particular machine in question running Vista. It would really suck to shell out for a new computer and have the GUI be molasses-ware.

 

Also rumors floating around about the follow-on to Vista, currently codenamed "7" in Gatesburg. Notional release date for 7 has been mentioned as 2010, which if true would have Vista the Windows Me of the 21st century.

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When I was away May/June I spent some time with another Canuck who sold M/S an application he had developed, and had to spend a year down there with them; he said that whole operation was the scariest thing he's ever seen, the geek equivalent of George Orwell's "Animal Farm"... and he emphasized DON'T get Winders Vista for a long while yet! Apparently it's the equivalent, if not worse than the very first iteration of Winders 95. A veritable bug farm... :blink:

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What's the latest on Vista? I'm thinking of buying a new machine and have the option the get Vista or XP, but the XP machine is less configurable.

 

I had Vista come with a new computer. None of my old software, AntiVirus, firewall, pdf converter, CD burner, DVD player, etc would work with Vista so do a check of the software that you use the most. While Vista will do some of the tasks of the previous software, it doesn't do it WELL. I wasn't willing to shell out a ton more money for replacement software as most of the software vendors wanted money for upgrades and were not providing patches. I ended up dumping Vista and loading XP on the machine. Vista did have some cool features, but I won't put it back on the new computer for awhile.

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I just bought a computer with this cpu

 

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz 8MB 1066FSB Quad Core

 

Was told that XP will not run it properly and I was doomed to use vista, so pray for me......

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I just bought a computer with this cpu

 

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz 8MB 1066FSB Quad Core

 

Was told that XP will not run it properly and I was doomed to use vista, so pray for me......

 

That does not sound right. At the moment, XP should work just as well as Vista on any x86-based computer. It is easier to get XP drivers for gear as Vista drivers remain a hit or miss at this time.

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I have Vista on my PC and it truly sucks. I have been amazed how unstable it makes applications like IE and Firefox, after 12 hours or so you have a good chance of the internet browser locking up, first by right click not working and then having the mouse control fail.

 

It's a cool looking program full of features that I don't need that sucks my computer dry. I'm really tempted to just wipe and restart with XP, which I thought was wonderful.

 

Matt

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That does not sound right. At the moment, XP should work just as well as Vista on any x86-based computer. It is easier to get XP drivers for gear as Vista drivers remain a hit or miss at this time.

 

He has a quad core processor. IIRC, XP doesn't take advantage of the quad core features. That being said, I assume you could run XP, you just wouldn't get the full advantage of your quad core processor.

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Finally I am back on the net.

 

First the new computer would not "see" the wireless video card, search for it, update hardware etc. uninstall, again and again, take card in,out,in,out all will installing software (gee you think MS would have drivers for D-link wireless cards eh?)

 

Tried networking the computers over, after 3 hrs, and a router, they "see" each other but won't let me transfer files, arrgh!!

 

Luckily I have a 2g flash drive.

 

I think I need more beer!

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It would seem that the newest version of Google Earth is not very stable in Vista, it keeps freezing up on me, with 4gigs of RAM I don't think that is the problem.

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My verdict at this point - strictly from a tech support perspective - is that moving to Vista is rarely justified. I've learned to love the benefits of being a later adopter. Quad core support - well, OK, but why would you want a quad core if most software isn't even handling dual cores well (to the extent that they were never designed and compiled for multithreadedness, which frankly is a pain to code anyway). XP Pro handles dual core CPUs and dual processor machines quite well. Heck, get an XP Server version and you can even handle four cores or processors.

 

The worst possible move, unless you are operating a datacenter (and then you wouldn't solicit TankNet for advice), is to get a 64 bit version of Vista. If Vista is wonky, 64 bit Vista is wonky with even worse driver support.

 

If I were not forced to get at least one Vista license for beta testing and providing adequate customer support I would cling to XP as long as I possibly could. If the vendor won't sell the new computer without Vista, go away or spend extra bucks for an additional XP license. At the very least, set up a dual boot option so you can play around with Vista, and work with XP.

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I'm without emotional stakes in the whole thing. There are a few things that are actually a good idea - the virtualization of system critical files so that the user is operating from a virtual admin account when in fact he's got limited privileges; kernel memory randomization - well, these ideas have merit. It's just that a lot of stuff is actually broken by design, especially the graphics driver issue. First and foremost it is of course the fault of hardware vendors like NVidia and ATI to market features of their cards that the drivers simply don't deliver, and that their drivers are all flaky at varying degrees. And the hard-to-believe embarrassment that they didn't manage to develop drivers for an operating system that was available in beta stage for more than a year before it got released.

 

But at the same time it's Microsoft who is at fault too. Making signed drivers mandatory and then not providing adequate resources to certify drivers at the necessary speed; requiring certification for each and every stepping of a GPU and thereby atomizing the unified driver systems that, finally, made driver handling easy enough even for a layman - that's all the evil incarnate from Redmond. Or, shall we say, a strategic decision leading to severe disadvantages for customers, at least during a transition period of unknown duration.

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  • 6 months later...

Wonder how MS gets such bad publicity?:

 

Microsoft has stopped automatically distributing a prerequisite piece of software for Vista Service Pack 1, following some customer complaints that it had caused system problems.

 

Servicing stack update KB937287, released last week, contained updates to Windows Vista installation software, and was billed as being "necessary to successfully install and to remove Windows Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) on all versions of Windows Vista."

 

Microsoft stopped distributing the update on Wednesday, according to a blog post by Microsoft product manager Nick White.

 

"We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287," wrote White. "Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes."

 

Vista SP1 is already available to subscribers to the Microsoft Developer Network but won't receive a formal public release until mid-March.

 

One irate Windows Vista Ultimate user replied to White's blog post, saying the prerequisite had corrupted a PC and resulted in the need to reformat the hard drive, with the resulting loss of all of the files and programs. When advised by an anonymous contributor of the System Restore option on the Vista installation disc, the Vista Ultimate user replied that the copy of Vista had been purchased and downloaded from the Internet, so there was no disc.

 

Two users complained that Windows Update prompted them to install the prerequisite, even after they had installed it.

 

Another user, S Marusic, wrote: "New Dell Inspiron PC stuck on the update loop as well. Any ETA from Microsoft on when/how to fix it? My client has valuable data that I need to consider stripping off the (hard drive) unless a patch/fix comes out soon...Help!"

 

According to Microsoft's White: "This problem only affects a small number of customers in unique circumstances."

 

 

 

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About 10 months ago I bought an HP laptop that came with Vista.

 

I was patient with it, remembering that I had a negative opinion of XP after using W2K for a while. However, after two months of it, I finally gave up, downloaded, burned, tried and installed Ubuntu 7.10. I've never looked back since.

 

I still keep my old desktop with XP on it to run my games and the wife's software (GIS stuff that runs only on Windows), but both my laptop and the laptop I use for work are now Ubuntu machines.

 

Of course there was a learning curve to go through and some configuration issues to resolve on both laptops, but I managed to fix almost all of them fairly quickly and easily.

 

I still would not recommend a Linux distro for the complete computer newbie, but IMO the Linux community made a big step towards mainstream acceptance with Ubuntu.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

I hear M$ is taking a beating over Vista, but decided to end the XP license in June because no one really wanted Vista, and people were demanding to go back to XP. I don't use Vista, but is it that bad? Is this why Apple is experiencing a 51% jump in sales and profits? I'd go Mac in a heartbeat if they were not so insanely expensive. For $2,500 I can get built a totally pimped out Winbox, but for the same amount I can only get a crippled iMac....

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I hear M$ is taking a beating over Vista, but decided to end the XP license in June because no one really wanted Vista, and people were demanding to go back to XP. I don't use Vista, but is it that bad? Is this why Apple is experiencing a 51% jump in sales and profits? I'd go Mac in a heartbeat if they were not so insanely expensive. For $2,500 I can get built a totally pimped out Winbox, but for the same amount I can only get a crippled iMac....

I had lunch last week with a bunch of IT guys, the running joke about Vista is that they call it "Fista". As in bend over and take the "Fista". :o

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I would describe Vista as XP pimped out by a high school computer club. New look, a few things nicely improved (seems to handle removeable drives much more gracefully than XP), system applets renamed for no good reason, dramatic increase in memory and CPU demands. Probably handles Wi-Fi better than XP, as well as situations where the system uses one of several network connections. On a mid- to high-end workstation, the average user might think it is a somewhat better OS than XP. On a low-end desktop or middlin' laptop, its bad news. I wouldn't upgrade a running system to it.

 

Microsoft really is taking it in the shorts with Vista, as there are more people trying to downgrade back to XP than upgrading from XP to Vista, and from what I hear the intra-Vista upgrades aren't selling whatsoever (dumphucs in Redmond created an upgrade map that precludes most of us from being able to upgrade to a higher version of Vista). Microsoft has finally clued in that Vista has become nothing more than a gap-filler between XP and Seven. Hell, they went back and cobbled together an SP3 for XP after Vista's rollout.

 

In terms of total revenue, Apple is going big with stuff like the iPod and iPhone, and to a lesser extent the MacBooks. Along with price reductions, the Apple storefronts are apparently having a substantial impact on sales. Plus you gotta figure that Apple is doing better than Wintel in reaching the last 25% of the population.

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I don't use Vista, but is it that bad?

The question rather is, what does it so much better that justifies the numerous changes of the user interface that require quite a bit of re-learning how to configure your computer and where to find what. I find myself still using the classic view of the System Settings under XP, habits like these are hard to break. And Vista changes many of those "minor details" which, however, will waste your time once that you start to wonder how on earth you could change X or where to find dialog Y, and why does Z look so strange?

 

To me there is no obvious benefit in Vista, but all the pain of an OS transition phase. Knowing the ins and outs of an operating system is a significant know-how investment value which is hardly ever accounted for. Still, you realize how much of a pain all the re-learning is once that you have that new OS and you feel stupid again, but then it's too late already. I guess that's the prime reason why people want to downgrade. Then, of course, there are broken things. Maybe the SP1 will fix the most annoying stuff, and I'm not saying that Vista is without merits, but the good stuff is by and large not very obvious to the average user aside from functionally useless gimmicks like the Aero UI style.

 

In short, I try not to be hostile towards Vista but I cannot say honestly and with a straight face that I like it and that I would recommend it. Maybe it's Vista, maybe I'm just a conservative old fart. I didn't want XP first, but then again I came from Windows 2000 so there was little functional difference for me while for the majority who still stuck with 98 or ME the transition to XP brought countless noticeable improvements.

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I hear M$ is taking a beating over Vista, but decided to end the XP license in June because no one really wanted Vista, and people were demanding to go back to XP. I don't use Vista, but is it that bad? Is this why Apple is experiencing a 51% jump in sales and profits? I'd go Mac in a heartbeat if they were not so insanely expensive. For $2,500 I can get built a totally pimped out Winbox, but for the same amount I can only get a crippled iMac....

 

End the XP license in June? Wat dat mean?

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I run XP on three desktops and, ugh, Vista on two laptops. I've found no redeeming features of Vista save one, if you put your mouse pointer over an open app on the tool bar you can see a minature version of that app. A pretty good feature if you're running mulitple sessions of a program. Still, Vista is a memory hog. Oh, and Office 2007, refuse to use it unless absolutely necessry.

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After a great deal of trouble, I managed to get my laptop back to XP. Vista is cute, but would not run well with 2 GB of RAM.

 

DKT, I use Office 2007, but only because I needed another copy of Office and AAFES had Office Standard (non-upgrade) for $80.

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