The FINAL Definitive Poll

I hope you're right.

 

Personally I think most of Windows 7 is just hype. It is just really Vista 2.0 . Vista works fine for me, although those performance optimisations in windows 7 would not go amiss.

 

First: I'm not a vista fanboy per se. I just see it as the better os. Everyone who disagrees I'm fine with. And I know it can perform bad on some systems.

I'm fine with you being happy with xp.

There's just one thing. Win7 IS Vista with some updates. That's why win7 works so good on new systems. because there isn't really much new, and win7 drivers where essentially in public beta now since over 2 years.

And the perception of win7 is a bit the mojave experiment. I had tons of people around here bashing vista, using xp all day. They then ran around "oh win7 is awesome". guess what, after some days of win7 beta, they now all use vista, finally noticing it's about the same (and the new taskbar was, while nice, hindering productivity).

So if you don't like vista, how can you like win7? That's what i ask.


Second: vista, by default, has less places where it can go instable than xp. if this wouldn't be the case, i would never use vista. xp crashed to bluescreen about once all half year to me (and mostly my faults). vista crashed once on me at all. the main difference (that doesn't matter anymore to me) is, gpu's can't bluescreen vista as easily as xp does. i've developped small 3d applications back on xp. it's no fun to try out pixelshaders knowing, when they crash, i get a full reboot, last saves of the project will be lost, and possibly the os ****ed up. this is just not possible in vista.

it IS more stable. it may not be more stable in your case. but it is, globally looked at, on most systems more stable than xp.

third: performance is a big thing. and i've seen vista performing badly often times. it looks like you're one of those expiriencing the same. as far as i can see, it largely depends on the performance of the harddrive (and of course, 2+gb ram minimum). but we see it outperforming here on systems from quadcores with dual-ssds down to atoms / p4 systems.

still, it doesn't work great on all systems sadly. one thing i pinpointed is, certain hw (like card readers) can make your os boot up up to 1, 2 min slower if they somewhere "hang" at initialisation. another thing i pinpointed is, superfetch can mess up from time to time making the os so slow, as if it runs on your cellphone (on the 10 year old cellphone with an x86 emulator written in java).

it looks like you didn't just sheeped around, means "uh there's vista on it, kill it i want xp back" but tried it really out and it didn't work well on your system. i'd like to look at it to see why, it's always a learning experience. till now, i pinpointed down three things: drivers, hdd, superfetch to be at fault.
oh, and a 4th of course: crappy default installations. clean install is a must.

i hope win7 works better for you. it made 0 performance and stability gain for all the systems i tested around here (assuming you feed them with enough ram ). instead, but that's because of beta, it wasn't able to repair itself when i killed it's boot files somehow (thanks to ie8 beta, grrr ).

hope this should point out that it wasn't ment as an attack per se. i just try to point out, that win7 and vista are the same. still, that doesn't mean win7 can't be better (and in most cases, it is. except that ******** taskbar, and as it's the main os gui feature one uses, i can't stand win7). else i would love win7.


and last: vista fanbase? we're just small compared to apples fanbase, xp fanbase, linux fanbase.. (and much less annoying, too )

 

Win7 > Vista

I'm on build 7077 ATM, and it's flying!! Even at pre-RTM state it's more stable and faster than Vista

 

I have vista on my laptop works very good,i dont see any need for xp anymore.Allthough i still have it on my desktop which i use only for gaming.

 

I never intended this to be a XP vs Vista vs Win7 thread.

If it isn't stopped the thread will be closed. Let's clean it up a little, guys.

 

One little tjhing about Vista:
Vista after an instal is slow, it needs time.
Run it for 2 weeks, maybe a month, then let it run overnight (idle) - that's when Vista optimizes itslf and becomes a good OS

 

what do you expect from a "Yay or Nay" poll exactly?

 

Intelligent discussion about the topic, not belligerent bashing of opposing views.

 

Or maybe the sheep are the ones who say:

"I just bought a notebook today with something called 'Visa Extreme' preinstalled. I don't bother to research any of that IT stuff - it hurts my brain too much. But the associate at RadioShack said that the 'Visa' thing was the latest and greatest product. 'Visa' looks cool, so why should I listen to people who want to put some old operating whatsit on it".

Guys like that are not sheep, right? Only people who don't like 15GB of wasted HDD, 3-5% slower gaming, and patchy backward compatibility are sheep. I give up...

 

I always try to, but I'm not very good at it.. Espencially in the moments where you feel that you're a real lone rider and the wall of all-the-others is too massive. And at this very moment, I'm very tempted to comment on Varadero's post..

 

There is a very well made point about the "wasted space" in Vista.
You can plug in your device, and Vista has a driver for it.

Honestly, it is enjoyable not to need a driver installation disc for every device you buy or want to use once - also, these disc generally come with 5% drivers and 95% bloat for free... take our old printer. Yes, you could instal just the printer driver, btu you get this application, and this...
You use them once and the you don't...
On Vista I just plugged in the printer and it works

If you want to, search NBR, there are guides on slimming Vista, amongst other things getting rid of drivers.

Patchy backwards compatebility - could you elaborate?
I haven't yet encountered software problems, and from what I hear and read they exist but are rare.

Gaming.... Some tests show Vista beating XP but then it depends on the game etc.
In fact, Empire Eart 1 ran worse on my old Medion than World In Conflict did on my SZ.
Compared, my SZ was closer to the minimum specs thanmy old Medion...

And games are a bad benchmark anyway. If it weren't for games, consumer PCs would be much less powerful. On the consumer level its games that demand the latest hardware.

 

Windows XP = Best Windows creation to date... still < Linux=

 

Hey Dave... THANKS for the comprehensive and understanding response. I apologize for my nasty one from last night.

Regarding the Windows 7 thing, I have no first hand experience with the OS. I did download it from MS a few months ago, but never used it. I base my opinions on what I've read from others. So, I'm certainly no expert, by any means. Regardless, I am eager to try it once a final release surfaces. I was the same way with Vista. Very eager to try it. When I tried Vista the first time, it was really a horrible experience. It was a clean install. I forget system specs, as it was years ago. I tried it for maybe a month or so, and it was unstable and quirky. I liked the GUI, but really disliked the kernel. When I recently got my new laptop (Gateway P-7811fx), the first thing I did was fully reformat, and clean install Vista x64. I figured Vista now had SP1 and I had hoped all my bad experiences were gone. I eagerly tried it again. While this time around it was more stable, it was slow. Again, I tried for maybe a month to speed it up, traying various tweaks. To me, Vista on that new laptop was slower than XP Pro SP3 on my old Gateway laptop (M680). Was I doing something wrong? I dunno. All installs were fully clean (Vista and XP), and I always tried the Vista OS bone stock before I tweak anything. I'm comfortable enough with XP to dive right in and start tweaking, but I always held off with Vista.

I used Superfetch, the HD on my old system was a healthy 80gb 5400 drive (forget who made it), and on my current the os was on a dedicated Seagate Momentus 7200 200gb drive. Drivers were always as up to date as I could find. With video drivers, I always tried multiple ones (Nvidia, Xfastest, laptopvideo2go, etc.)

I promise I was never an XP sheep. I eagerly awaited Vista's release years ago, and despite my bad experience, looked forward to Vista on my new laptop. My experiences were just really bad.

Despite all my bad experiences with Vista, I'm looking forward to 7. I have hope, dammit! That being said, if I try it and have miserable experiences, I'll probably go back to XP.

And lastly, there's no fanboi base like Apples!!! lol

 

Depends. Show me a good audio editor for my use for linux, AND make it do better with batteries (i.e. power management), and I'll reconsider

 

Depens on the user.
If you are willing to learn command lines then Linux is much more powerful than any other OS.

But as a "out of the box" "clicky OS" Windows still beats Linux.

I was running Suse 10 on my old Medion for a little while.
I like the doubble click in Windows to instal - Linux, I'd need some command lines.

Still, Linux is free, so even if it has its "problems" - comparing it to MS it is value for money.
And if you know what you are doing, yes it is more powerful.

But I think we are looking at Vista here.

 

Oh what a difference first impressions make.... My first deep experience with Vista (besides playing around with it on demo units at Best Buy, Circuit City, when I was first looking for a laptop) was when I got it on my D630 with 2 GB of RAM. It ran smooth as butter, and performed very responsively....)

Fast forward to a few days ago, where I had to resort to yanking 1 GB of RAM out of my computer to shore up a memory problem temporarily. What a difference 1 GB of RAM made. On 1 GB of RAM, Vista is dog slow....period. I literally had to walk away from my computer for a few minutes just so I could let it finish logging me into Windows. Actually using the machine was doable, but was very laggy performance wise esp. compared to Windows 7 on that same 1 GB.

So I'd say that yes, Vista is a decent OS, if you have a decent (2 GB or higher) amount of RAM. Remember that when Vista was first released, you would look in the circulars on Sunday and almost every machine there only had 1 GB of RAM, it was a rarity to find one with 2 GB, let alone the systems you can pick up from a store now with 3 even 4 GB of RAM. It's no wonder that many people's first experiences with Vista were disappointing, esp. since many of those same systems had integrated graphics that steal a chunk of that 1 GB and also came with Home Premium which activated the resource intensive Aero UI. In Vista, as we know now, RAM means everything. The more you have, the better.

 

That is 100% accurate, booboo. In a way, I blame the PC manufacturers for skimping on the RAM during Vista's early days. Also, they had a large part to play in the driver problem since they were severely behind in that department, case in point: NVidia. ATI was (and still is in my view) much quicker to create drivers that were more stable.

 

This would be saying Win 98 is Win 95 2.0 or that XP is NT4 2.0. Most OS's are built on top of another adding new stuff. Is the next Win version going to be Vista 3.0. Come on, give this debate up already.

 

Windows Vista has been a "Yay" for me so far. I've been using it since it's release back in 2007 and I haven't had as many problems as people have made it appear to have. Throughout my experience I've used Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit + 64bit, Business 64bit, and Ultimate 64bit all of them have ran without any serious issues. I remember back in the day with Windows XP my computer managed to get infected by a viruse or trojen within 4 to 6 months, but with Vista I have yet to get a single infection. There was an incident which I managed to corrupt a certain system file which ended up screwing up Windows in such a manner that it wouldn't even booth up pass the login screen, but Vista's recovery and repair fixed the problem in a matter of mins and in the process I didn't lose a single file. I don't know how many of you have tried the new Service Pack 2 Release Candidate, but Vista now runs even better than before. Don't want to sound like a fan-boy, but I'm sticking with Windows Vista until Windows 7 is out.

 

...and herein lies one of the problems that I am sure I (and maybe others) will face in a few months as Win 7 is released. Not having experienced (thus far) any problems with Vista (SP1) and with SP2 - which will probably make Vista more stable - probably in the works in May, to switch to Win7 will stretch my powers of convinving myself to do so!!!

 

I will not switch to win7 as long as there is no way to use the vista taskbar again. I can't stand it. It's very bad in usability for me.

Eric618: hm you're experiences with vista are very sad in my case, always a clean install and just the drivers from the manufacturer and windows updates, no tweaks results in the best performance of the os.

but then again, i personally only will use ssd powered systems in the future anyways. and then, vista is fast/faster than xp in general (default installation) due to xp handling an ssd much worse, and vista's slowness never being slower than xp on an ssd anyways

so no matter what you do, instead of trying win7, instead of retrying vista, instead of sticking with xp, instead of buying a new licence, a new pc, a new what ever, the only thing i can really suggest anyone: if you want to invest money, do so into an ssd. then, every os is fast and snappy, none is a system hog. it really makes that much difference..

but i got vista running on bad hw in good ways, too. but this was never different: some hw just doesn't like some os. other does. on my first real pc, i could never install win xp. only win2000. it was terrible unstable and could never be fixed. sadly, as i always wanted xp

but on the current state of os'. i'd prefer vista over anything. the new gui of win7 is a huge backstep in detail and usability imho, the resting ehnancements of win7 are great and i'd love to use them. xp is just old and, for me, dead. but i still use it daily at work and it works. that's the great thing about today: we're messing around with details. all os' work today. all major windowse, all major linuxe, macosx. all perform good, quite stable, and are usable.

i'm happy to live in such os days. i really disliked win98 days

 

I am eagerly watching the prices continue to drop on the SSDs.

Dave, I don't want to burden this thread, but what's the main difference between how Vista interacts with a SSD compared to XP? If you can PM me I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

 

I voted against Vista. I just will never forgive it's bulk. Seriously, it takes days to configure it so it's acceptable.

*looks both ways and runs*

 

run as fast as you can!!! (i already stated afaik, vista works best with no tweakings at all so no it doesn't take days to configure it )

 

Well, you can tweak it a bit - but very little.

Overall Vista optimizes itself over time

 

SSDs are really going to shine on Win7, as they've actually made the OS aware of SSDs and when one is recognized, Win7 will optimize itself for the SSD.

Can't wait to have a Dell XT2 or Lenovo X200t with Win7 and an SSD.

Very nice.

 

Just curious, I read somewhere that running a defrag app on an SSD drive kills it quicker. Is this true?

 

Well, I have used Vista more than any other operating system. And it just takes days before I get all these little things tweaked like I like them. Indexing, services, theme files, security settings, and so on. It's just that, in XP, a lot of these things were so much easier, and weren't so screwed up to begin with. Vista with no tweakings sucks.

 

why tweaking indexing? no use.
services tweaking, what do you gain? nothing.
theme files.. uhm, download and use? okay, first the crack, which you need on xp, too
security settings? i never fiddled with them.

and no, vista with no tweakings doesn't suck at all. some old data needs tweaking to not suck on vista, yes (like external disks formatted on xp always pop up uac, but that's a single right click -> properties where you need to fiddle once).

no need for much tweakings. i changed the indexing a little bit right now, yes. and i change some gui stuff. but i do so on xp, too. all in all, configuring a windows to my needs is about 15min max on xp and vista.