XP vs. Vista

I'm new so sorry if this has been covered. With all the posting that goes on here, it probably was

So what did you get XP or Vista?

I heard all the issues about Vista so I wanted XP. I also like it better. I'm so glad it was offered but was kinda bummed I couldn't get it with an XPS. I thought about getting a "business class" notebook but I couldn't tear myself away from the Inspiron's pretty colours!

 

I love Vista......and I'll admit it's probably because of the eye candy, but overall I think it was a step in the right direction. Probably not as big of a step as many were hoping, but it's a step none the less.

I was frustrated at first with software incompatibilities, but a year later, I think most (if not all) of the popular titles are now Vista compatible.

Performance wise, I can't really say that I remember XP being faster, but I don't seem to get as many lock ups with Vista as I did in XP.

 

Wow this hasnt been covered before. Have you tried the search functions.

 

People need to evolve...how about if I said I love MS-DOS more than XP? Com'on, Vista is not THAT bad...

 

Vista is okay for free, (definitely not worth a dollar right now) but they definitely need upgrade and all the bugs fixed. I mean, some of my friends who has vista on the laptop said they installed an XP or lower compatible program, think they could run in XP compatible mode in Vista, and soon as they install the program, vista's little searching for drivers comes on all random suddenly, and computer shuts down. And when you boot again, it boots successfully, but soon as it boots, it shuts down, you boot it in safe mode, it shuts down..... uh... yah...... now he has no choice but to lose all his file by putting live CD again and re install an operating system. Not Vista this time though =)...

 

And I installed vista on my laptop, Pentium M 1.73, 1gig ram, 80gb hard drive, And battery life dropped by 1 hr. ****, **** that stupid Aero glass and vista power management system that can't do **** doing anything. And guess what? all the games get 10 FPS less now and it lags like as if you put it in a P3 machine....

(oops... sorry I forgot no cussing rule)

 

What do YOU want for ONLY 1GB of ram? :0)

 

Lemme guess.. you were getting 13 FPS before your upgrade?

 

Wow, your comment was sure helpful. Have you tried to STFU?

 

There is little reason to upgrade to it. The benefits dont really appeal to the kind of people who post here(those who value performance over eye candy and clougy new features) and its not even ironed out, driver wise.

In fact, with SP3 coming out for XP soon(which promises an avg. of 10% better performance) i wouldnt be surprised if more people switch back. Most advanced users want a lightweight, streamlined OS... So while Vista gets more and more superfluous add-ons that continue to slow down the thing, XP keeps getting slimmed down.

When i get my M1530, i plan on switching over to XP as soon as SP3 is released. I'll lose DX10 and a few other less important things(sidebar, media centre, etc.) but the gains far outweigh them.

 

I would pick Vista anyways, XP is easier to pirate

 

Vista is ok on a newer machine with the newer 8xx series nvidia GPU or the newer intel x3100 integrated graphics with at least 2 gigs of ram. But its not great. Definitely a major let down ofter MS took 5 years to develop this.. Most of the features that MS had been working on years back were chucked out and Vista was basically a redo.. rush job. The sorry thing is Vista takes double the hardware requirements and still runs slower then XP. Many of the features in Vista like User account Control are so annoying that you have to turn them off. Superfetch accesses the HD for several minutes once you boot up.. and it takes much longer to boot and shutdown Vista. The new SP coming out practically does ZERO for improving performance. SP3 coming out for XP is speeding it up another 10 percent.. even further separating itself from the Vista beast.

The bottom line is Vista is ok on a newer machine.. Everything will evolve around vista in time.. we have no choice unless you decide to leave windows all together. Vista networking performance for businesses is pathetic. 30 percent of all businesses are already saying the will NEVER use vista on their network. I know the company I work at is currently buying a bunch of XP licenses to replace all the Win 2000 production boxes.

For consumers, Vista should fair ok. But for larger companies that only care about compatibility and performance.. Vista is a dog. MS said a year ago that service patches would not be needed for Vista since it was good out of the shoot.. Here we are today with a SP about to go live on windows update.

I understand many people like Vista and the eye candy etc.. But really, after 5 years in development, this OS is a major letdown. Businesses are staying away from it, MS is extending XP life cycle, Dell is expanding XP to more models.. This is not the trend that MS wants. I mean logic should be simple to understand here... if a vista box has double the memory of a XP box.. it should not run slower. But it does.. this is absolute proof that Vista is a more bloated, less efficient OS. And it generally falls short on most benchmarks in comparison to XP. I doubt vista will ever perform as well as XP.. Rather, look to MS next OS in a few years. Vistas code is too screwed up at this point.. The upcoming SP is proof of that.. it does nothing for performance.

My advice to the OP is buy a laptop with 1 gig of memory with XP and it will generally blow the doors off a vista lappie with double the memory.. it will game better as well. XP support will be with us for many years and will support any laptop life cycle that is purchased today. With the SP3 coming out for XP it will be better then ever. Vista will probably never see raw performance like that. My suggestion is configure a system with XP if you can and just hope MS gets it right on the next OS. I am fully convinced that overall, vista will never be as good an OS as XP is. Its simply does not offer enough to give up that much HD space, boot times and poor networking performance. Its poor coding.. bloated coding. MS used to know how to write lean code that performed.

 

The only thing that really grates my nerves with Vista is the superfetch feature. On my old HP dv8000t, my harddrive churned for a good 5-8 minutes after starting up, however, on my new Vostro, it doesn't go long at all. May very well be due to the fact that I had two 100gb hard drives nearly full with data on the HP and my Vostro has a 120gb drive less than 15% full right now.

Aesthetically, I think Vista is great. Very modern and sleek looking. Operationally, Vista has some features that I really like, and others that are rather annoying. I personally have not had a really noticeable slowdown in any of the games I play (Medieval 2 & HL2 to name a couple), if they are slower, it's negligible.

All in all, I prefer Vista since I haven't run into any major problems or incompatibilities. I agree with the majority that it isn't the major upgrade that they marketed..but it's whats new and most people will switch over in time. It's already vastly better than it was at release due in large part to more mature drivers.

 

Had Vista business for 2 weeks, then went back to XP pro cuz I couldn't stand it.. it was very slow compared to XP (of course) and so I decided to choose performance over looks

 

I actually prefer the look of XP. I'm just more of a minimalist. I agree with the thinking that Vista will eventually just be scrapped in favour of a whole new OS. I mean, I couldn't even install Norton's on my nieces laptop due to the incompatable drivers. My sister has a bunch of high-end software for video editing that also wont install. My work also stayed on XP and we are a web design firm. All in all, I think Microsoft failed with Vista.

 

I've got Vista on my m1330, and absolutely love it. Haven't had any problems, and while I know hardware plays a role, Vista is WAY faster than my XP laptop (40 secs to full boot from "Off," with no services or start-up programs disabled!)

 

I agree. I think Vista was a way to help sell new hardware to people while at the same time confuse the average public with all the versions of Vista.

 

If I had a choice that would be my reason...

 

Well here's my take. I realize that Im in a room of experts and alike. We all probably used all the versions of windows over the years. XP is pretty dang cool. But when given the choice of a new computer, I got to go with Vista. I think Vista probably is most notably bad for people upgrading. For me, I got 2 new computers, well 3 if you count my girlfriends laptop too. But I got a new Dell workstation at work with Vista Business. It only has 1 gig of ram. But it boots up super fast. About as fast as any XP computer I ever had. And although one or 2 of my friends might have had problems installing some of our apps that we use, I seemed to have gotten all mines working just fine on Vista.
So after that, I got my girlfriend a 1521 and later a 1520 for me. Both with Vista Home Premium (for me my first version of windows with media center capabilities), and we both love it. She runs all her apps, including sims. I put my video stuff on my laptop etc. I havent tried games yet but I have a PS3 for that.
Ive reinstalled my factory vista setup from dell many times but I think on the last time I only disabled some of the stuff that bugged me, such as that super fetch. But everyday computing on my laptop is perfectly fine with vista. I cant go back to that old OS on new machines. My other laptop and my main PC run XP and those are fine. But the new stuff gets vista. Even if I was a hard core gamer Id probably tweak vista down instead of downgrading to XP. We only got used to XP, its not like Vista has changed everything.

 

If you don't have a choice, which is usually the case, then "choose" Vista. If you do have choice between XP and Vista, and you treasure gaming performance, and you want to be able to use all the software and hardware you have, and you're not about pretty UI and icons, then definitely get XP.

 

is superfetch turn-offable?

 

1min 45secs to full boot from off with no programs installed, right after I formatted it.. mmmh with XP it takes 50 secs