Whats so bad about Vista?

Just as the title says, been talkin' to a few people (and some forums), and everyone is like 'Win 7 is the way to go' 'Vistas buggy' 'XP was better' and so on ...
I used xp for nearly 6 years and when Vista was released I've never looked back since. I find it VERY user friendly.

So what do you guys and ladies think, and what are your experiences with Vista?

Also I have not tried Win 7 yet, but with Vista fulfilling my daily needs why should I?

Cheers,
Perrin

 

Home wise Vista is fine, it's driver support should be a lot better now.

Office wise, almost all places I know inc mne avoid Vista like the plague.

 

Short answer: Nothing.

Well, Win7 does have some neat improvements in its new interface, and it is overall a refined version of Vista. But if you are happy with the way Vista works for you now, then there's no reason to invest the time and money to upgrade your OS.

 

Win 7 may be spruced-up Vista, but why do people dislike it so much?
It aint that bad is it?

My work still uses XP sp2.

 

Nope, Vista is and was perfectly fine. This is just an instance of ignorant masses blabbering nonsense, and parroting other ignorant people. The fairytale of Vista being so terrible has taken on a life of its own, no matter how little it has to do with reality. Shrug...

 

if people like win7, they can't dislike vista except for being cool to dislike it. win7 is based on vista, heavily, and most of the "wows of win7" are founded in vista.

 

The main issue stems from the problem that Vista requires at least 1GB of RAM to run in a usable capacity.
2GB if you want optimal daily use of the OS.
512MB is the minimum required... but it will run SLOW.

It was initially installed on machines that had 512MB of RAM, or even 1GB, and was accompanied by A LOT of bloat-ware (which was slowing things down even more).

XP SP3 runs fine on systems with 512MB RAM (without bloat)... Vista is more demanding.

It was a problem of the manufacturers who were idiotic enough to put Vista and their bloat on laptops with 512MB RAM.

One thing to keep in mind is that manufacturers can put their garbage on computers without allowing background processes or startup items at the same time, but they don't do this.

 

It is cool to dislike Vista just like it is cool to own Apple Products.
"Coolaids" spread by sheeps.

 

If you were a early adopter of Vista (Beta) like me, the growing pains where horrible, that's why people like me have issues with Vista. Sure now Vista is a good OS, but in it's early stages, ouch. I guess Vista to me was a growing experience that left a lot of baggage. I think this is the main reason people have a bad perception of Vista. I love Windows 7, it maybe Vista spuced up, but at lest it works out of the box

 

But essentially, are Vista and Win 7 similar in terms of installed size?

 

What's so bad about Vista? In a word everything. It was slow, annoying and buggy. It was promised as a gamers platform and failed. It looked nice but that was about it. Yeah Windows 7 is basically Vista, and if they had introduced Vista in it's current form i'd have no problems with it and most reviewers and PC sites. Vista's criticisms are well earned and deserved.

 

Personally, I think most criticisms are quite exaggerated. My only criticism of Vista is that Windows Explorer and some other parts of the shell have a greater tendency to "lock up" and pop up with the message "___ is not responding" than in Windows 7. This tendency, however, is present to the same degree in XP.

 

Vista is slow and some of the UI refinements that Microsoft tried to make didn't fully make sense until you saw the layout in 7 and realized what Vista was trying to do. As a late adopter, that's about all I can say negatively about Vista. Vista SP1 was stable and I never had any issues with it other than a bootup that felt like three minutes before the CPU hit idle on the desktop. I have 7 now and it's far quicker and better polished. The people who had the biggest problems with Vista were those who had to deal with outdated hardware and incompatible drivers early in Vista's lifecycle.

 

I had Vista on a few systems. It's slow, everything you actually want to run has to be right clicked and then run as an administrator or it may not work, user account control bothers you about it being off, and you have to disable even more notifications. Wireless was less reliable as compared to XP.

It was just awful. Alpha software, retail prices.

 

Notebook came with Vista RTM and still happily running it now(with SP1). Sure it use much more resource(mainly RAM) than XP but unused RAM is wasted RAM so I have no problem with that.

Aero Glass is nice, UAC is slightly annoying but better than hitting by virus or the XP solution of not running as Administrator(even more annoying than UAC under Windows).

 

I also don't understand much of the hate. The only bluescreen I ever had with Vista was my own stupid fault.

To date, I've had worse problems with Windows 7 than Vista, but that's more Toshiba's fault than 7's.

My only big problem with it is the fact that it runs absolutely dog slow for about a minute or so after logging in.

 

A lot of that is due to the GDI redesign in Win7. One application never blocks another the way that they could in Vista, so the whole system feels a lot "snappier", even on the exact same hardware with the same drivers.

Vista was just rushed to release without a lot of the tweaks necessary to really polish it up.

To put it in SAT terms:
Win Vista:Win 98 :: Win 7:Win 98SE

Wikipedia also helps: Windows 7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

they are similar in size, in distribution form, in the way they install, etc.. not to say identical except for the actual files

vista never was a problem even in beta. it was, when you used nvidia hardware, which i happily dismissed long before vista.

coolaids are hell fighing them daily, supporting facts instead.

 

Vista is no longer on my own computers, but my son still has Vista 32 bit. I have a copy of Windows 7 for his computer, but says he is fine and will not let me load it. He is not really computer savvy and I have always had to fix my kid's computers as they always picked up viruses and malware somewhere with XP which required major reinstallation. Ever since I installed the service pack on my son's Vista PC, I never have to touch it except to renew the Vipre anti-virus license every year. This computer got him through 4 years of college without a meltdown. XP is great, but Vista has come a long way. On the business side, we have a lot of software companies that have software and hardware that interface with computers on farm and construction equipment. Vista will not work with their hardware and software and no plans to make it compatible. Windows Seven has issues, but they are willing to adapt to it as it is the future. Some are using XP mode as a work around in Windows 7. What really burns me up when using Vista was the awkwardness of working with MS's file manager program. Windows 7 is much more user friendly.

 

I too did not have a problem with Vista. However, when I bought a new machine, I opted for Win 7 Pro and I've had an excellent time with it. But Vista does reside on another machine I have and I see no reason to replace it...yet!

 

i had to use vista for some special installations (with microsoft steady state, not supported on win7) lately. oh the nostalgia but yeah, works perfectly.

 

I am in the same boat Davepermen. I do feel nostalgia towards Vista sometimes but I have come to love Windows 7 as well. There is basically nothing wrong with either of them. The last Vista service pack really improved the performance of it.

 

My main issue with Vista is it's resource hoggyness. It's the greediest OS ever built. Off of a clean install one can expect to see around ~60 processes running easily. Compared to it's predecessor XP that's a huge number. Also, XP could function quite fine on 512MB RAM. 1GB would be the good life...Vista? you better have a minimum of 3GB if you want to have a smooth experience.

 

not that process count ever mattered. but yes, it needed quite some ram to perform well. which wasn't expensive back then, but the greedy manufacturers where happy they didn't have to, and thus could sell installations with less than optimal amounts of ram, calling them vista ready.

 

None of that is, or was, true. There is absolutely no meaningful difference in speed between Win7 and Vista, there is nothing particularly annoying in Vista, and there were and are no more bugs in Vista than in any other OS at that level of complexity.

Same thing. I really wonder where that strange notion of Vista being "slow" is coming from, except for the fact that Microsoft re-arranged the timing of certain housekeeping tasks the system runs at boot-up, which makes the system more immediately usable in the case of Win7. So, yes, that is a useful bonus in Win7, but if you gave Vista the time to finish its chores, it was every bit as "snappy" as Win7.

That's nonsense. No properly coded usermode application will ever bother you with a UAC prompt. If all you ever do is system maintenance, as the above would imply, then log in as an admin. In that case you could also turn off admin-approval mode, which would disable UAC prompts when logged in as an admin, but still leave it in place for standard users. If you run sh!tty applications that require admin privileges because they act as we were still in the 1980s, writing configuration files and settings all over the filesystem and registry, then get rid of the crap.

Yes, see above; the way they were running superfetch after boot-up was a mistake. On a loaded system, you'd have to wait several minutes for the system to become reasonably available.

So what? I am running 90+ processes right after booting, in Win7, with more than 2 gigs of memory used. Doesn't bother me in the least. RAM is there to be used, not to sit around empty. Besides, there is no difference whatsoever in that respect between Vista and Win7. They both spawn the exact same number of processes, and use the same amount of memory, unless you are on marginal hardware. If you force the system to make do with less than 4 gigs of RAM, then Win7 manages to accommodate itself a little better. But at a time were 8gigs of RAM are quickly becoming standard even for laptops, that is entirely irrelevant.

 

We'll agree to disagree but Vista was crap and a HUGE letdown for me.

 

As some others have mentioned, the main issue was OEM's put Vista on very low-end systems. Like 1.6GHz Singles core processor, 512MB, and a 4200rpm HDD. Vista runs perfectly fine on 1-2GB's of memory(no crapware) and a low end dual core, with a 5400rpm HDD.

My dads laptop(Inspiron 1525) still has Vista 32 Bit on it, and it runs great. It has a Dual Core 2GHz, 3GB's memory, and 5400rpm HDD.

 

depends on the system, not on vista. lots of systems where not vista ready but sold as that. the result: crap experience.

 

Vista was just not fully ready when it was released, that is why many people feel the way they do. Vista was a completly diffrent animale when it came out. Most busnesses never switched to Vista becuase of this also. I work for a World Wide company we still use XP.

 

important driver developers where not ready over half a year AFTER vista was released (without any reasons that made sense). nvidia was one of them. they led to a much more instable system than it should have been. why they couldn't deliver in time, while others like ati could, well, that was/still is a topic for the court.

 

It matters to me. There is no reason a fresh install should take up that much processes and services off the bat. Not every consumer are IT Geeks who knows how to tune and tweak their systems; and not every IT Geek wants to go through the trouble of having to tweak a clean install of an OS. Nor should they have too.

You seem proud of this. That's a server you got running there?

I got ~ 76 processes running on my Server '08 box running an Active Directory Domain, Exchange 2007 w/ SP3, Hyper V ( running a BES virtual machine), IIS services etc. and the list goes on.

I agree. But why throw so much startup services etc. at RAM just because it's there to be used. Other 'user installed' programs have to use it too....

That's a flat out lie.

 

I believe 1/5 viruses that run on Vista will not run on 7. Right there that's a big deal, a full 20% of attacks simply won't run at all.... that's ignoring antivirus and everything else.

Superfetch was improved, indexing was improved. I mean, really everything has just been improved. Especially the RAM usage =p

 

As for "not minding" that your RAM is being used. I 100% agree, I WANT my RAM used... but I want it used efficiently. I don't like when my RAM is basically being thrown out right from startup.

 

Nonsense. All that the quote above reveals is a complete lack of understanding of how modern operating systems work. Let me emphasize, without knowing exactly how these processes and services operate, their number is meaningless. I could have a system that runs well, and is designed to do so, when having hundreds of background processes in the background, or I can have one that bogs down when there is more than a few. It just so happens that nowadays modern operating systems are designed to have many small processes and services running in the background, exactly in order to maximize functionality and responsiveness at the same time.

Again, you clearly do not understand what you are talking about. There is no reason whatsoever to "tweak" anything on a plain vanilla windows system, just because you get scared seeing a certain number of processes. It turns out that the kind of "tweaking" you are referring to has no noticeable effect on the performance of the system. To put this more succinctly, other than being disagreeable with somebody's obsessive-compulsive disorder, there is no rational reason to "tweak" Windows services.

I'll ad in parentheses that, what certain third-party applications may do to your system is a different matter...

No, of course not, that's my M6400 laptop, my main work machine. Very comfortable and fast. And I am neither proud of it, nor am I scared of it. I simply don't care, because there is no reason to care.

So? What is the aggregated CPU and/or I/O load from these services? Do you know how to determine this? What is the aggregated CPU load of services you're not using? Here, I'll give you a hint: It's a very small number...

Yep, and it's the operating system's job to take care of it, and it does so very well. It's called memory management. Besides, most people these days rarely ever manage to fill up their RAM, unless they try really, really hard.

Oh please. Why don't you give us some objective numbers rather than throwing around gratuitous insults? I repeat, given sufficient memory, the number of processes and memory used by Win7 versus Vista is pretty much identical.

 

I learn from the best. Seasons greetings BTW!

 

Happy Holdiays to you, too!

 

From my point of view, I think of Windows 7 as a Service Pack or highly-tweaked version of Windows Vista with a new UI and extra features. Windows 7 is based off of Windows Vista and that is why they are almost identical, but you have to admit that Windows 7 is tweaked much better to support slower systems than Windows Vista or Windows XP. This fact has already been written/tested all over the internet.

Nevertheless, I do find Windows Vista with SP1 as snappy as Windows 7 on the same desktop computer.

In short, I see nothing bad about Windows Vista as long as it is stable and works like it is supposed to.

 

My reference to Vista being slow is exactly in reference to boot speed and I stated so in my post. In the mornings, it used to be a competition as to whether my toaster or my laptop would be ready last. Waiting 2-3 minutes before Vista finished its "chores" was unacceptable, especially since my 7 installation hits idle on the desktop just 45 seconds after pressing the power button.

I've upgraded a lot of hardware between my Vista and my 7 installations, so I certainly have no true apples-to-apples comparison of the speed between the two operating systems. As I said in my previous post, I didn't have a problem with Vista other than the boot speed, but I like 7 much more than Vista for many reasons. The numerous UI refinements and the taming of UAC in 7 makes it a far more enjoyable computing experience, whereas Vista just felt like an incremental replacement for XP.

 

you, sire, don't have a clue what processes and services mean and do, then. you have a lot to learn.

hint: they're there for you, not a harm. there's no reason to tune and tweak a clean install. a real geek doesn't do it. only those who think they're smarter and have to do something sort of a test of courage to feel proud to their friends do that crap.

a non-running process is a performance GAIN, not a loss. but that's hard to understand.

he has a system with >90 different processes ready to serve him as needed. better than those who have less.

but it doesn't serve you with the functionaly of a home os. none of the media features and none of all others.

well, most of the time, users don't use their ram to their max, esp. not all the time. so it's better to put it to some use than let it be wasted while the user doesn't need it. it's a matter of milliseconds to get it back once a user needs it, so there's no loss in performance or anything.



you need to get over the habits of the 90ies. both hardware and software changed massively since then. since vista, nothing in the core of windows is the way it was (nothing is like in xp days), they completely changed it in there. you have to relearn EVERYTHING. if you don't, you just spread wrong knowledge that will harm you, your systems, your friends, their systems, and others. because, even while not knowing, you're lying to them.

 

vista in 30 seconds to fully usable, and so is win7. your hardware wasn't balanced. but yes, win7 works much more gently on such unbalanced systems.

(and in case, it's a 12" ulv 1.2ghz core2duo 2gb ram with ide ssd on it, so it's by any means of today a slow system, except for parts of the ssd).

even win7 can be slow (up to 10 minutes boot time on a friends system with a 4200rpm hdd), but it's not a fault of the os normally, it's the fault of a system which did not focus on removing bottlenecks. unwise spent money.

 

So in the end Vista is fine after you install all the updates and services packs, basicly fixing the mess it starts out to be

 

it wasn't much of a mess if you had a system with proper drivers and enough juice to serve it well.

and this one line holds true for about any os installation

and updates should always be done of course.

 

Of course, updates should be done, except Vista did not have all of it's updates it has now. Vista was alot harder to to install when it first came out due to lack of driver support, and all the bugs that where not figured out just yet. SP1 was a major fix too. I used Vista from it's beta, it was not that fun, and I had up to date hardware too.

 

You seem to be contradicting yourself there; but I guess we're speaking different languages. Nevertheless, i've already said my piece, and I stand by it. Seasons greetings to you as well.

 

That's fair enough. I'll certainly acknowledge that my hardware wasn't up to the level it is now and anyone could also objectively say there was more stuff loading at startup with my Vista installation than my current 7 installation. Again, it was by no means an apples-to-apples comparison of the two operating systems because I upgraded almost everything when I moved to 7, including my hard drive.

That said, I think your SSD would make most any OS load extremely quickly. I would be thrilled with one if a large capacity SSD was within budget right now.

 

Well, he does have a bit of a point here. On my M90, which I considered, and still consider, a very capable and well-balanced machine, I would have significant hard disk activity for about five minutes after booting. Not to go too much into the details, it turns out that this was SuperFetch working hard on figuring out which one of the thousands of executables and libraries it should load. For this machine, I could log in right after booting, and the machine was usable in the strict sense of the word, but it was noticeably slow until SuperFetch was done. This is something that Win7 has vastly improved on, and it's a clear benefit.

HOWEVER, I am not in the habit of constantly rebooting my machines, so that issue has always been of very limited relevance to me. But, if for whatever reason a user has a scenario where s/he often has to shutdown and restart the laptop, this makes a difference. And, yes, you could always tell people to hibernate rather than perform a shutdown, but, as you know, I am not the one to tell people how to use their computers...

P.S.: And of course, your SSD will solve the disk-thrashing of SuperFetch for good.

 

Win 7 had no problem detecting hardware right out of the box, even dated hardware, I think MS learned a lot from Vista.

 

Nope, he isn't: Like he said, that non-running process can immediately serve me when I need it, and costs me nothing while it is dormant.

 

Bien que je sois damné, j'ai peut-être eu un trop grand nombre de Heinekens ce soir. Encore une fois, Meilleurs vœux à vous deux. Que le mec bourré dégriser. Adieu!

 

Have a beer for me too