To Keep or not to Keep

I have been using vista business for about 3.5 months now. I haven't had many problems, except for a few BSODs. Do you think it is worth waiting for SP1 to come out, or downgrade to XP Pro?

 

Its up to you, I personally won't ever use Vista until DirectX 10 becomes a standard that all video game developers use.

When Vista SP1 comes out you will propably want to do a full reformat anyways.

 

Wait a second...do you speak of a full reformat of your hard drive? That's ludicrous!

 

SP1 will come out in Q1 2008

 

Yes, with any Service Pack Microsoft releases its a good idea to do a full reformat with it slipstreamed in.

Ask anyone who tried upgrading from Windows XP SP1 to SP2 when it first came out. Constant crashes, errors etc. A fresh reformat with SP2 and it worked flawlessly.

Edit: No point arguing, but if Vista's SP1 release is as unstable as XP's SP2 its likely that without a reformat you will experience program/stability issues.

 

Don't believe this. Sure, slipstreaming makes installs easier as you don't have to do a bunch of post patching, but I don't know of any large scale SP deployment where companies did wipe and loads. Vista SP1 will be no different. Microsoft would get beat to death by CIOs if this was true.

 

Have you ever tried installing a Service Pack on an OS that contained 80+ programs? 75% chance, usually more that irreversible issues will crop up. (When Windows XP SP2 was released, thousands of people had to reformat due to issues of installing Service Pack 2 on a current install)

Its just a more safe option to backup your data and start fresh with Vista SP1 rather than apply it once you've had the OS running for months.

But as mentioned above I won't move to Vista until DirectX games only use DX10. So if I were you I'd stick to XP, its all a matter of opinion though. If you enjoy Vista use it, I enjoy XP because I can slipstream it and strip it down to only the vital components I know I need for optimum performance.

 

Yep, many times. Works just fine.

I've installed every version and every service pack of Windows/32 since NT 3.1, and have never had a SP install cause a problem. While I have slipstreamed, I've done many installs directly from the CD and had the thrill of watching 70+ windows updates come down over several reboots to bring the machine to current.... and haven't had any stability problems not slipstreaming.

My point wasn't that slipstreaming was a bad idea, in fact it's a great idea if you plan to reinstall again multiple times or on multiple machines. You made a pretty strong statement that a reformat/reinstall of SP1 was necessary to have a stable system, and that's clearly not true. Some folks may have some issues with some programs and a new service pack, but the overall majority will be just fine. Microsoft would be crazy to provide service packs if this wasn't the case.

Of the 5 machines that I have Vista on personally, I don't plan to reformat/reinstall any of them. I've got 96 programs installed on this box (X61t) and it's the lightest loaded of all of them.

I definitely agree with backing up your data, as you mention, before you perform any kind of major system maintenance.