Poll: 2 Years after release, do you prefer XP or Vista?

A year ago, one year after the release of Vista, 57% of 119 respondents said they preferred Vista to XP. At that time, Vista was only up to Beta Service Pack 1. Now there's been the Service Pack 1 release that many wait for - and also another service pack for XP. There seem to still be a good number of XP users on this forum, so I'm curious how the percentages compare to last year. Which version of Windows do you prefer?

For the sake of comparison I've left out Windows 7. I also would go out on a limb to say it's a bit too early for most people to really say whether they prefer it to XP or Vista - it's only been in public beta two weeks. Once it's a full release, then it'll be a candidate!

As last year, no Mac OS/Linux/etc. - the point at hand is to see how popular XP and Vista are relative to each other, and it's easier to decipher that without other options causing XP and Vista to add up to 73.49% total or some odd number like that.

Poll open for 10 days, until 11 PM GMT on February 5th.

 

I like and use both actually. When Win7 comes out I will upgrade my XP machine to Win7. And my laptop will stay with Vista likely through its life with me.

 

Depends what I'm using the laptop for. So I have both Vista and XP.

 

I prefer Vista over XP, and 7 over both.

Using XP now seems really dated.

Greg

 

I still prefer XP to Vista beause everything in my house works 100% with it. I must admit, Vista has grown on me, especially the 64 bit version and I use it on my laptop.

 

XP. Vista Home Premium on my new lappy led me to use Ubuntu full time since I couldnt even install XP due to a SATA driver issue. Until Ubuntu I didnt realise how much speed Vista was robbing me of as well.

 

Vista for me, XP seems so dated in comparison. I actively seek out the computers running Vista when I have to go to the computer lab

 

I prefer Vista, it looks cleaner in my opinion and is now well optimized

 

I prefer Vista hands down, when I use XP, it feels dated and old although it is a very reliable OS. I guess it's down to personal preference.

When Windows 7 comes out I will be getting this as it feels and handles a lot better than Vista.

 

I still use both OSes, but I prefer Vista.

with Vista I still get the occasional compatibility problem and UAC for all its benefits can make life difficult, partly because i like to use multiple accounts. And of course there's a lot of bloat in Vista.

But after a while I learned Vista's limitations and when you start to understand how Vista is different, the problems fade and you only see the advantages.

I wonder if at least some of the negative opinions of Vista are due to people being 'scared' of something new and different.

M$ could have avoided all this bad publicity if they'd bothered to make it a better product in the first place!

 

For work, I'm forced to stick with XP but would love to switch to Vista in a heartbeat. Fortunately at home I was able to switch to Vista and haven't looked back.

While XP still has some advantages in the gaming department, I'm not a hardcore gamer looking to extract the most frames per second. So in that light, Vista works very nicely for me.

Here's hoping Microsoft offers a free upgrade for us Vista Ultimate owners to Windows 7. Probably won't happen, but one can dream.

 

I think the Service Pack is not the key adcancement for Vista nowadays.

Its the fact that laptops have become much more powerful and driver support exists and works.

My SZ71VN/X was running fine without the Service Pack - I installed it immediately - yes, I know people have seen performance increases from SP1.

But: The key point is hardware - even the cheapest laptops (not netbooks) will run Vista decently as a "typewriter" - at the beginning the most expensive machines would run it just about fine....

 

It's hard to say for me still but I ended up voting Vista. After using Vista for about 6 months now, I still have very mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, XP has NEVER given me any kind of issues and it was always fast and responsive even on my ancient Dell Inspiron 600M with only 1 GB of RAM and a Pentium M processor.

On the other hand, Vista seems much more streamlined and fluid like, if that makes any sense. It's not faster by any means, even with my brand new Sager NP2096 with all the latest hardware, but it feels like a somewhat more optimized OS. It definitely needs a lot more optimization, which is where Windows 7 comes in. I still get random lockups and weird things happening to my system all the time.

By the way, it just occurred to me that Vista is like Crysis - somewhat revolutionary advancement but poorly optimized

 

Keep in mind that the basic level in technology has risen, most cheaper laptops even have 2GB Ram now, like Vista was intended to be.
Disregarding technology, Vista is a lot more stable than XP. Cant be an argument against that.

EDIT: Just to save my arse from a flame war quick:
I didnt say Vista was a lot faster, etc, just more stable.
The gaming performance for XP vs Vista is (IMO) neglible. That is however open to argument

 

i love how i'm able to do crazy stuff with vista and still trust in it's stability. with xp, i knew when i do strange things, the system may crash. so i tried not to do strange things.

one thing i really hated in xp, was to develop on the edge of gaming technology (all the shader stuff while it was still new). i did a lot of work on the gpu those days, and a crashing app always ment a full bluescreen-reboot, and if i forgot to save before, i lost the latest changes.

on vista, only really strange drivers where able to bluescreen on me, and all before sp1. after sp1, i was not able to crash my system except in a hardware fault (overheating, hdd fault, etc). if the gpu driver dies, so does my program dies. the rest doesn't care, and i can continue to try to debug the problem while programming.

same for music. i love vista for djing. it's memory management let me run and dj for hours and hours (and traktor can be a with your ram and resources, so can ableton live), and you have no glitch.

it depends all a lot on hardware, of course. if you have cheap hardware, than can be faulty by itself, you're out of luck on any system.

the slowness of vista in some cases could get completely solved by finding out which hw components where the reason, and switching to ssds. thanks to ssd's i have no need for new hw at all in the future years (theoretically, i'll still buy new stuff).

 

I like both..but I prefer Vista on my lappy! I'm so used to it now

I had XP on my desktop! Now, I have XP once again, on my Netbook!

It's all good ~ they both work just fine for me!


Cin

 

I've preferred Vista since July 2007. The search in the start menu is basically my lifeline. I have an XP computer at work and I only use it for instant messaging.

 

I dont have an issue with XP, but I do prefer vista now. Visual and feature wise vista has xp beat, and ever since SP1 I have had no issues with vista. Still doesnt change the fact that I have a dual boot xp vista business on my dell (not for much longer though). I still prefer to support xp/server 2003 environment though.

 

Vista is safer, more stable, and easier to use than XP - my standard line.

It is also a next-generation intelligent OS that can handle large resources - unlike XP.

I changed from 98 to XP because 98 wouldn't know what to do with the amount of RAM I was going to use. Now Vista is a much better OS.

A lot of people like XP for the wrong reasons... what's the point of using an over-10-year-old interface when you can use something fluid.

Vista and Office 2007 makes the PC enviroment very freindly for non-tech-savvy people who are beginning to learn.

 

I bought Vista and didn't even use it. Total waste of money. On XP and W7.

 

its kinda like getting fed up and getting used to Vista now..

for performance ..i wud still go for XP..
otherwise Vista can get the work done now.

 

I've only been using Vista since Saturday and I got the hang of it within a day with some help from Google. I still use XP on my home desktop and at work. I can't say that I actually prefer one over the other yet, but it was not difficult to get Vista customized and modded to my liking. That said, I have not installed much software yet, so it remains to be seen how smoothly some of my familiar software packages run on Vista.

I can't tell which Windows is faster because I've never benchmarked both back-to-back on the same machine. Driver or application incompatibilities notwithstanding, Vista really isn't the POS that people still think it is, but some people can't be bothered to RTFM (or G, usually) and parrot the worst of the complaints that other people have had in the past. Still, I primarily went with Vista on my laptop in hopes that Microsoft will make the upgrade path to 7 from Vista free.

 

XP, by a hair.
That said, I won't complain one bit if you force to me to use only Vista. I like Vista quite a lot...just that I like XP a little more.