good read

[Cujo]

boiler, i've thought like you for the past year. i always would get upset at people for bashing vista without trying it. i use it as my every day os on my powerful system and it's still slower then xp by quite a bit. i do a lot of gigabit file transfers and a lot of file transfers to usb drives. just things like incorrectly displaying the time left AND taking much longer to copy are starting to drive me nuts. i had sp1 pre-release on here and i removed it and transfers got even slower then before i installed it and they were no faster with it installed.

 

then let's talk about all the new systems i sell to clients with vista on them. it took me two hours to set up a computer with about 30 vista updates that needed to be done plus installing the printer. the same install on xp with about 90 updates to download would take about an hour and a half only. i'm talking about hardware that is brand new. in this 2 hour case it was a laptop with a c2d something and 2gb ram. it had nvidia integrated graphics not even intel and it was still laggy as hell. have you used a vista system with intel g33?? it's awful. we're talking brand new hardware not 4 year old hardware and it's still bloody slow.

 

yes, i fully agree windows xp had similar growing pains but at least it had w2k out a year before it came out so many of the bugs were known and in the process of being fixed. for me vista is broken. i get more crashes compared to xp and previously simple things like updating drivers are no longer simple. i'm always worried that my windows won't boot. also, i've seen BRAND NEW COMPUTERS blue screen when doing simple things like updating windows. i started a file transfer the other day and then after about 20 seconds i cancelled it. the system took a futher 5 minutes to cancel the transfer. when i checked it never actually cancelled. all the files finished copying! how can you say that's not broken?? brand new system with having just installed the updates.

 

anyway, i'm going way too long here. suffice to say i've stopped recommending vista to clients. perhaps when ssd hard drives become standard vista will be doable but as of right now even with my high end system i'm finding it lacking. if i wasn't too lazy to find a floppy drive, raid drivers and had a legit copy of xp handy then i'd be back to it in a heartbeat. probably once i buy my hardware raid card i'll switch back.

[soul .gc]

I have been using Vista Ultimate 64 a little of 4 months now and love the stupid thing. I had zero install problems and everything worked as soon as I installed it on my new PC build.

 

The main issues I have come from using 64-bit and the lack of support for some software...namely codecs. It took me several hours of reading and downloading to get AVIs and DiivX videos to play correctly. Overall though it has been a great OS and I love the changes and was never happy with XP over the years.

 

I would still prefer to go OSx but the limited software apps and game titles make it a poor choice at this time. I hope Jobs releases a version without the hardware locks and then we will see more developers making more programs for it.

 

As to the original article - it was a nice rant, but very heavy on the hate. MS is not going away, no matter how bad some folks dislike Vista. They have a choke-hold on the business community which leads to a choke-hold on the public since people do not want one thing at work and another at home in most cases.

[soul .gc]

I have been using Vista Ultimate 64 a little of 4 months now and love the stupid thing. I had zero install problems and everything worked as soon as I installed it on my new PC build.

 

The main issues I have come from using 64-bit and the lack of support for some software...namely codecs. It took me several hours of reading and downloading to get AVIs and DiivX videos to play correctly. Overall though it has been a great OS and I love the changes and was never happy with XP over the years.

 

I would still prefer to go OSx but the limited software apps and game titles make it a poor choice at this time. I hope Jobs releases a version without the hardware locks and then we will see more developers making more programs for it.

 

As to the original article - it was a nice rant, but very heavy on the hate. MS is not going away, no matter how bad some folks dislike Vista. They have a choke-hold on the business community which leads to a choke-hold on the public since people do not want one thing at work and another at home in most cases.

[Preacher]

Unlike Soul, I hate to repeat myself but LOL

Edited March 8, 2008 by Preacher

[Cujo]

LOL. yes, theinq doesn't like ms but if you read their articles regularly their point of view is easier to understand. by this i mean all their hate is backed by experiences they've had.

 

i too am using vista 64. i had no problems with video playback, especially divx, as there really isn't anything divx anymore. xvid or x264 ftw. the only 64bit related problem i had was with my screen shot program on the sidebar. when i had 32bit it worked fine and it was one of the things keeping me from going back to xp. without it working in 64 i've got yet another reason to switch back to xp.

[ZeroDamage]

Time for me to chime in. I use Vista on my primary work machine because there is an expectation that my users will be using it at some point and I want to know as much about it as possible. My system is always on and runs sometimes for 2 months before I need to reboot it. It is pretty solid for every day use like Office and email and what not. It even handles the once in a while "Crack" flash game just fine. It is much slower than XP in most things though and it is a resource hog without a doubt. It is much slower with the games and it crashes my apps a lot more than XP ever did. I had it as my primary gaming OS on my system for several months before the game crashes and occasional reboots and the like drove me back to XP which I kept as a secondary partition. I even watched one of the SANS guy have an issue using it for a bit the other day at the training we had as it would freeze his apps. Do not run virtual machines on it; Microsoft themselves use Windows XP as the host OS for virtual machines because Vista is too much of a resource hog. I had a MS engineer tell me this back in November and the MS training class I went to used XP as their host OS and Vista was used as a guest OS. That's a huge admission if you ask me.

With all of that said, I think Vista will improve in the next year or so as SP1 hits the scene and more updates come out. You also need to tweak it more than XP ever needed tweaking to get it to perform well. I like using the basic tweaked registry deal from http://www.SpeedyVista.com and then using http://www.BlackViper.com and getting everything set right for performance. I also like to disable all the extra "pretty" graphic things that kill performance even more and disable the annoying widget thing. (That could be just me as I've always hated those things).

 

As for Mac OS, I've been using it as a system in my make-shift office in another building and I just do not much like it. It looks pretty but I just cannot get accustomed to it. The weirdness about installing apps and then removing them later. The built in iChat application is awful (but the video conference thing works great). I cannot comment much on it except that I do not much care for it yet and I've been using it for a few months now. The hardware thing also sucks really bad.

 

Everyone knows that I like linux but I think it has the coolness of Mac OS but it is free and works with most all existing hardware on the market including Apple hardware. Do not get me wrong, I like XP too as a basic every day use OS but has so many security issues and right now it takes me 3 hours to install and get it set up the way that I want; this includes windows update which as of this writing has like 94 updates. Every 6 months I get a new version of Ubuntu which costs me nothing. Linux does require some tech saviness with some of the issues that crop up and the IRC chat help is a hit or miss as some of the people in those channels are jack-offs. Linux and Ubuntu specifically is getting better and better all the time and with Dell and HP now making computers with Ubuntu pre-installed, things will only improve. Did I mention that my Ubuntu install runs so much more efficiently than my XP install ever did? Well, I should tell you about that but I think I've written enough.

 

You still need Windows to game though. Yeah, there is WINE but it isn't the most user friendly application out there.

[dwEEziL]

You people complaining about how long it takes to get your Windows OS installed because of all the updates need to take a look at these.

 

nLite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

 

vLite:

http://www.vlite.net/

[dragonfly]

Besides when you install Linux, you're installing communism!

 

This totally made my day! Thanks!

[Cujo]

You people complaining about how long it takes to get your Windows OS installed because of all the updates need to take a look at these.

 

nLite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

 

vLite:

http://www.vlite.net/

 

i've tried nlite but it's not as simple as i'd like. too much trial and error for getting things to work. i still much prefer my sp2 cd plus updates. once sp3 comes out then i'll probably but an oem copy of windows with sp3 and switch back to xp from vista.

 

btw, does anyone else's vista not properly close css? EVERY time i exit i have to close without sending error report or whatever it says. i've submitted numerous reports to microsoft and it's been i think 8 months now at least. it's not a real big problem but it's annoying.

[ZesteR]

cujo, that happens to me every time I exit a steam game. It's rather annoying.

[Preacher]

Same here and SP3 is out http://www.soft32.com/Download/Free/Micros...4-123572-1.html

[dwEEziL]

You people complaining about how long it takes to get your Windows OS installed because of all the updates need to take a look at these.

 

nLite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

 

vLite:

http://www.vlite.net/

 

i've tried nlite but it's not as simple as i'd like. too much trial and error for getting things to work. i still much prefer my sp2 cd plus updates. once sp3 comes out then i'll probably but an oem copy of windows with sp3 and switch back to xp from vista.

 

btw, does anyone else's vista not properly close css? EVERY time i exit i have to close without sending error report or whatever it says. i've submitted numerous reports to microsoft and it's been i think 8 months now at least. it's not a real big problem but it's annoying.

 

I've never had a problem using nLite to slipstream SP's, hotfixes, and drivers. I've never actually tried to modify anything else about the install. Hit me up on PM if you want to give it another go and want some help.