Vista vs XP: Stability

hmmmm... We'll i'll look into this further, maybe this thread will finally make me switch to vista .. (I can see d4nz0r jumping for joy in his house right now)

 

To Itomix

I don't know what is your skill or what is your education. I don't know if you are the genius from Harvard or MIT. What I wrote is just a few features that Vista can offer more than XP. There are a lot more in Vista, but I guess you haven't discovered them yet.

It is more than corporate OS. I can tell you that. I work with a lot of programmers and DBA. I am here to stay because I am in the real situation and environment. I know the advantage and disavantage between Vista and XP.

If you have something to prove, I would love to hear the fact.

 

Hey, that is a good one. I feel like you were my dad.

 

Looks like I may have figured out why my Vostro 1500 was sooooo unstable running Vista. It appears one of the two 2GB PC5300 Corsair sticks was bad. I swapped out the sticks this morning and this time I used only 1 (slot 1) to try and narrow things down.

I did a fresh install and when I went to do the first batch of updates the laptop blue screened on reboot and put me into Safe Mode.

So I swapped the sticks again, only using 2GB and reinstalled the OS again and so far so good. I was noticing in the past several unrecoverable memory errors popping up every now and then in the event log. It just started getting progressively worse where crash apps and servces were the norm as well as blue screens.

I have a Mushkin 1GB PC5300 stick that I have laying around. Is it advisable to mix and match two vendor's memory modules?

 

Lol that did make me chuckle I admit. I'm actually 23 You mentioned 6 years later, hence 8+ years experience. I really don't have much programming experience - I meant I work in engineering as a product designer. But anyway, my point was just that there really hasn't been any valuable 'proof' posted in this thread that one is faster than the other. I'll just leave it at that.

 

Good read this thread.

I am glad I just tinker and tweak, I’d hate to be a geek for a living, reminds me of high school duals and stinks of D&D b/o. Good they pay you well in the US, because in Canada, at least at my company the computer department is full of kids earning tons less than I did 15 years ago (I’m 35). But maybe that’s a sign that deployment and maintenance can be administrated with the ease of a child these days.

I personally can’t stand vista and do not require proof for or against an OS, it’s just what I feel comfortable in. It’s rare when I compute in a windows environment anyway, I just watch videos on the road on my XP laptop.

 

Well, it is depend what do you mean by kids. You can connect all the computers, switches, and routers together, and they are just work! Working and working properly are different concept.

For me, I have to understand routing protocol, floating static route, Voice over IP, VLAN, DNS, DHCP, IDS, SQL, IP multicasting/unicasting, and etc. I don't think normal kid can do that expecially you have to manage and implement 254 VLANs and each VLANs can have 254 host. You do the math.

Vista is user friendly, but it is more robust than XP at the cost of complexity when you compare to XP.

 

From what I gather we contract out complex stuff out, Cisco / MS and IBM teams (and at my department I have never seen them), we retain none on staff. The daily admin duties appear to be delegated to teens and tweens with the various certificates, I even had a MCSE winNT, no longer renewed, I did that at a company elective one weekend. That’s a major crude refiner. Those kids totally admin our linux net and employee net, tinker with the website and fire off various memos.

In fact many I come into contact with have goals set in career paths within the company, not careers in “IT”, the market is extremely saturated I keep hearing. Maybe we just have too many experts and not enough positions.

I mean no disrespect when I say kids, I just interpret their responsibility hehe.

 

Yeah here in the US it depends on whether or not you are good in IT. I have job security and with a college degree I make a pretty penny(more then the figure imonix said starting engineers make) as a network engineer and Im still on my fresh college graduate pay rate. But then again if you are only good at answering phone calls and reading a script there are lower level IT jobs that pay pretty low.

But as for vista its all personal preference, and what software and hardware you use. Personally I prefer XP/2003 for my work environment and me using vista on my rig to a full vista/2008 environment. For personal use and work vista offers me some nice features and visuals, all while retaining 100% seamless integration into a 2003/xp pro environment.

To itomix:

Try being a fire protection engineer, they make more then other engineering disciplines and since they are in super high demand they get HUGE signing bonuses on top of their awesome pay. But be prepared to study ALOT of fluid, fire and other dynamics classes on top of heavy math(calc 1-3, diff equations, analytical algebra, vector math and such on top of much higher math as a requirement for an undergrad). The engineers at work that I support are fire protection engineers and they are very smart and extremely technical.

Sorry didn't mean to hijack, but it seems this thread has gone a totally different direction.

 

Interesting, I"ll look into it. I've already taken calc 1-2, and taking 3 this semester. Taking diff equations this semester, and i've done lin algebra my first semester. So not that much left on the math front. Haven't had any fluid/fire other than a few chem classes, but its def worth looking into. Thanks.

OK, now back on topic!

 

So in other words, they account for and fix the problems that ConE's make? Btw, the figure I quoted for engineers is a national average, with AeroE, ChemE, EE and ME's making the most. Obviously it varies widely if you're living in California compared to Iowa & Nebraska

 

I'd just like to chime in and say that as a 'non-power user,' the ~5% performance hit I take for using Vista just doesn't make much of a difference to me. I guess if I was trying to play Crysis or do some heavy graphics/engineering work it might though.

Oh yeah, a few page back someone mentioned OS requirements for XP...something about XP needing only 64mb? Anyone around here actually manage to get their XP SP3 RAM usage down to that number without massive tweaking/slicing up of the OS? Just curious...never did get that low myself heh.

I guess RAM usage is kind of a moot point to argue in XP vs Vista IMO, mostly because system RAM has gone up so much these days--compare 512mb in an old XP computer vs. 4gb in a newer Vista machine. Yeah a tweaked Vista install may still use 500mb (mine's down to ~400 pre all my programs loaded, 500 with), but relative to the massive amount of RAM available it doesn't seem so bad.

Then of course there's the whole 'Vista caches everything to hell and back stealing all the RAM' vs XP leaving it all free debate, but I'll readily admit I don't understand the whole thing as well as I'd like...

 

With pro audio applications, XP is the only candidate when it comes to stability and compatibility. Vista Ultimate is nice and relatively fast when it is heavily tweaked. I don't rely on Vista at all.

 

When I first bought my computer, ofcourse it came with Windows Vista, and this got me a little worried because I had heard thing about Vista that where not always good, but on the other hand, I heard thing that suggested that Vista was not as bad as it seems.

From my experience, it comes from just going out and handling it. That's hard to do because sometimes if you choose the wrong path, to go back and choose the other one can sometimes not be an option, or quite expensive.

I have had a few problems with Vista, none I couldn't fix with a little research and know-how, but my main problem was my Graphics Card. Took me atleast 5 drivers to find a driver that wouldn't crash my game. 8700M GT NVIDIA Geforce Graphics card, 174.16 Drivers Ftw! (Thank you Laptopvideo2go.com)

As for XP, I had no real problem with it, no crashes, some freeze ups, nothing to serious.

The choice is basically all up to you, if your comfortable with XP, go for it....if you want to explore, and try something new, and don't mind running into a few hiccups along the way (not saying you wont run into them with XP), go for Vista.

 

I have Vista business and no blue screen yet, with XP I would have 10/month as a minimum.

 

I think its reasonable to say that each OS has its good and bad and each person's experiences may differ.

 

I would think XP is more stable since it has been here longer and got more problems and bugs fixed....but if you compare early XP and the early VISTA which is now....you might find them to be equal in terms of stability

 

I would expect that entropy would have taken it's toll on XP by now, rendering it incoherent and unstable; it's very atoms dispersing into the void.

 

I find Vista to be completely awesome to be honest. Granted I got it after Service Pack 1 so I have no idea what it was like before then but my experience with Vista has been a certifiable success.

I think it's hilarious all the loops and holes people are willing to jump thru or over just to get their system to run an outdated and in my opinion seriously backward OS.

XP was alright but it definitely is not the holy grail of Windows that some people are making it out to be.

 

LOL, me too.

As far as stability is concerned, either one is stable if you feed it stable drivers (and use reliable hardware). XP drivers tend to be more mature, having been around longer in most cases... but Vista SP1 is 100% stable if you use stable drivers.

 

LOL! Just wait.