Your Vista Experience

What is your Vista experience? Did you like it so much that your machine was upgraded from XP, or at the other extreme, did you switch from factory installed Vista to XP?

In that range are those who started with Vista and like it and those who hate it but were unable to switch to XP for any reason.

I am presently running Vista SP1. I find it better than XP in many ways. The only drawbacks are usage of much more memory and somewhat less snap when opening windows, deleting files or copying files. Heidi Eraser actually runs faster. The much maligned UAC is an improvement over trying to run LUA in XP. Due to some bugs in Sony power management I get better battery life with Vista than with XP in a LUA, although XP in an administrative account is the same for battery life as Vista. The only application that will not run and I wish it would is Netstumbler.

What is your experience?

 

My experience is that Vista > XP.
8]

 

XP >>> Vista32
XP >>>>> Vista64

 

I actually really like Vista. It's grown on me.

 

I moved to vista from my xp, 1.8ghz sempron, 1gb ram, 80gb 4200rpm hard drive, ati x200m.....and I liked it, even though in xp I only had 28 processes, but in vista it jumped to 49. For the first few days I really liked Aero, but now its boring lol.

 

Vista > Xp > OSX

Once u get used to its changes you realize its has a dramatically faster housekeeping and software Maintained system and faster general navigation in both simple and complex tasks... and Dx10 is faster at SM4 than Dx9... Assassins creed for instance runs at a higher FPS in Dx10 than 9...

Upgrade now... vista is here to stay.. massive apple advertising and Grumpy people switching to OSX rather than vista is the main issue. that is powering the vista bad reputation.

people had 7 years to get used to XP... and now they are 2 stupid/lazzy to learn a new Windows OS so they are switching to OSX.. which in reality is a OS designed for people over 40.... its NOT for smart minds its for absent ones.

 

i think more of the gamers prefer xp to vista because of how better the little older games can be played on vista.. but personally i really vista.. with the proper tweaking it runs amazingly smooth..

 

Another plus for Vista. Using x64 and it's been flawless for me.

That said, XP is still a serious OS. I use it heavily at work with all sorts of specialty and consumer programs and it never quits - just the way an OS should be.

My last XP OS install lasted 4 years. Just reinstalled last month and this thing is probably good for another 4, should I choose to keep it.

Regards,
Paolo

 

vista 32 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> xp
vista 64 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> xp

 

I used to have XP and fear Vista because people told me it was bad and i would hate it. Eventually, i decided to take the plunge and i love it so much more than XP. I'll tell you what you can do about your problems so you can love Vista more too. The memory usage in Vista isn't a bad thing. It uses your RAM to make things faster. Things in vista load a lot faster because of a RAM hogger named Prefetch. Firefox takes 1/4 of the time it did to start in XP when using Vista because of that nice little feature. The window/close open speed is because Aero has to close/open the windows in a 3D fashion. Here is how to turn it off:

I'd also try and run NetStumbler in compatibility mode for XP SP2.

 

You can't really compare vista and XP as Vista is more advanced.

 

My opinion is that others shouldn't make opinions for the masses. IE "People who play games like XP more" I play games and I like Vista better.

Vista is good it came with my laptop hence my first real experience with it and it's fine. I have had absolutely zero problems with Vista, not one BSOD or anything. (touch wood).

 

IMO, Vista and XP are the same.
I don't care which of the two I use.

First thing I did was to disable Vista HD indexing (I could use and much prefer google Desktop for that), Aero (which is nothing to write home about), gadgets (I could use a Mac if I wanted those, but I don't!) and was left, in essence, with good old XP.

Too bad I had to buy Vista, but it's a fact that to stay compatible with the world you have to use the most recent OS.

 

Actually, in my experience it's the other way around...to stay compatible I have to use XP. Vista just isn't compatible enough.

For me, XP >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Vista. Major complaints about Vista:

*It locked me out after I set a password. This is entirely unacceptable and should never happen. Eventually I found a security hole that allowed me to salvage my data, but the fact that it happened is incredible. Thank goodness the BIOS makers figured out how to make passwords work correctly.

*Incessant resetting of the video card driver. Out of the blue my screen would go blank, and 2-3 seconds later it would reappear on the desktop with an icon in the lower-right corner:



This obviously caused problems with any GPU-using programs that were running.

*Graphical glitches. Most problematic with Microsoft Halo. Happened regardless of drivers. Does not occur at all in Windows XP.

*Incompatibilities with programs. Had problems with Civilization III, The Guild, and Visual Basic 4. All run fine in XP.

Minor Complaints:

*Aero not being compatible with all programs. Hence I ran Vista Basic 92% of the time because it was too much trouble to switch it back all the time.

*Disk defragmentation changes. I'm still not sure I like the "whenever Vista feels like it" defragmentation, as that sometimes results in hard drive noise when I want quiet. And I still like the visual elements of XP and Windows 95 better than the lack of them in Vista.

*More Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) than XP. I finally got my first XP Blue Screen of Death in five years this week. Meanwhile I got four in Vista in four weeks, and several others thereafter.

*Poor drivers. This accounted for some of the BSODs. Note that it was not just the NVIDIA graphics card that had poor drivers - the webcam, for example, had a horrible driver to start with. As far as I can tell, the XP drivers are better - at least, none of them has caused a BSOD.

Inm the end I upgraded to XP.

 

I don't really understand what you mean on this one. Did you forget your password? Or you set the password and it didn't work?

Visual Basic 4 ??! LOL, I'm not surprised it's incompatible.

I really like the auto-defrag, but it's trivially easy to turn off if you don't like it.

I get a lot more BSODs on Vista too. I still don't know the reason... I suspect either hardware or drivers though. I haven't run XP on the same hardware though, so I don't really know.

XP drivers tend to be more mature, no doubt.

 

I moved to Vista 32 at the end of November 2006 when the RTM was released to volume licensing customers. Tried the x64 version and had to go back to x32 as I had a few incompatibilities with several pieces of software that I use to test PCB's with. A shame as I had just gotten use to Vista x64 and it was working very well with my system.

 

I like both Vista and Xp, never really had aproblem.

Though if a problem do comes it is very easy to do a reformat then it feels like you have a brand new OS.

 

using both vista and XP, but on my newer machines vista

 

Vista Ultimate 32 Bit FTW!!!!!
no... but seriously... ive tried both XP Pro and Vista Ultimate on the same hardware (see sig) and Ultimate is just as fast as XP, and it has more features
The only reason im even keeping XP is because of the driver issues and compatibility with my hacked MOTORAZR V3m

 

I set my password, set my system to standby to test it, and when I resumed from standby it would not accept the password I had set less than a minute before. It was my most commonly used password so there was no risk that I would forget it.

I've since upgraded to a more recent version, though I'm not sure it's Vista-compatible either. More importantly than VB not working, though, was that programs I created with it weren't working, either. Though I've been told they occasionally work on other Vista rigs.

That was common with Civilization, too. Some people could run it on Vista but some had major problems with it. It's 2001 (2003 most recent expansion, which I was running).

Then it's just an aesthetic problem. I admit the XP graphical implementation didn't really add much to it but it still made defragging seem like more than just taxing your hard drive for no reason (I've only ever noticed a speed improvement after defragging once).

I think it's mostly drivers. It's not as bad as Windows 98 (with its old remove-the-floppy-while-its-in-use-causes-a-bluescreen), but it is a step back from XP.

Which makes sense. They've had years to learn the intricacies of how to make them.

My Vista experience was, hopefully, far worse than the average one. But Microsoft has certainly lost one Vista user from it, possibly more (I always suggest XP over Vista to anyone who inquires), and I'm not sure I'll buy any other post-XP operating systems from Microsoft, either.

 

Err... maybe... ah.. user error?

 

I just really tried Vista for the first time the last couple of days and I can say I am truly impressed. All the hype about it being bad was blown way out of proportion. I'm an XP user through and through but Vista is a nice change of pace, especially the interface...so many configurations.

 

Welcome to Vista, enjoy your stay.

 

Started out with Vista 64 Home Premium on my new laptop, but had occasional BSoDs. Hoped SP1 would cure the problem, but it didn't so I switched to a dual boot of XP and Vista 32 Business. Barely use XP though and have had no issues with my new Vista installation.

As for the BSoDs when I ran Home Premium, I have this theory that it had to do with the ethernet driver provided through windows update which I have not installed this time around. Don't want to test it either for the time being.

 

so far so good, havent got any problem yet. no froze, not blue screen nothing
SP1, also it boot up / shutdown fast

 

It's acceptable, but I wouldn't hesitate to install XP if I was starting over with my computer.

 

I'm one of those that likes the looks of Vista but prefers XP. I'm currently running Vista Ultimate 32 on my T60 only because i'm too lazy to dig thru all the necessary drivers for XP.

Vista for me has been stable minus an incompatible Mushkin memory stick which was causing BSOD's. Since I swapped it out for another brand the OS has been rock solid.

Here's what I don't like. It's a bloated pig even with SP1. The part about it utilizing Ram more intelligently is garbage. It may be true but Office 2007, Streets and Trips and other apps that opened almost instantaneously in XP takes usually longer to open in Vista and that's with a Core 2 Duo and 3GB's of RAM.

On the gaming side Vista is crap, plain and simple even with recent games and updated drivers. Seventy percent of my games have lower performance compared to XP, fifteen percent are about the same, five percent have an increase performance and ten percent just don't work.

My system has a current Core 2 Duo, 4GB's of ram, 1TB of disk space and a top end video card.

I like the glassy look but that's about it. I just won a free copy of Vista Ultimate 32 and 64 from Microsoft and when I get it i'm selling it. Windows XP is more than solid and has the performance I need so as not to miss Vista.

 

I love it since Beta 2. Even then I saw no reason for me to keep XP.

I don't give a damn about how muc memory it uses, as long as I have enough to play my games

 

. currently triple boot (xp/vista/linux)
. linux = work and tinkering
. vista > xp (currently ony using it for testing "beta" toys)

cheers ...

 

(& enough for other apps) ... well put

cheers ...