Vista users, how ya like it?

Strong Bad

I just purchased a new laptop and ordered it with Vista Ultimate. Gotta say, after playing with it, I really like Vista. I have a Core 2 Duo 1.5ghz processor with 2gb of DDR2 667mhz RAM. Runs like a champ!

I give Vista 2 thumbs up!


John

Fireman32

I played with Visa for a bit when my dad bought his new laptop and i hated it. I could not get his printer and scanner to work at all with it even after downloading the new drivers. I know they have worked out some of the glitches since then but I can wait for a while before i upgrade from xp pro

Serendipity

Not very happy with it because it's too resource intensive on older systems.

OTOH, if you have 3GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, then yes, Vista is great!

AsSiMiLaTeD

I'm running Vista Ultimate, and I actually like it alot. It's a bit hard on slower systems, but runs great if you've got the power to run it.

PhantomOG

I'm ok with it on my pre-installed laptop. I wouldn't dare try to upgrade an older system with it though.

dual core laptop with 3GB of ram running Vista Home Premium 64bit.

VSchneider

Played with Vista on 2 new PCs out of the box, so no user misconfiguration issues here.

1. Vista Basic on Gateway Intel Celeron and 512 MB of RAM - what a joke. And not a good one either. Like a very old and stupid and tasteless one you have heard so many times before, but told very poorly yet again. You didn't recognize it in the beginning, and listened, but at the end regretted the 2 minutes stolen from your life... You get the picture. The OS barely loaded. Cleaning the auto-start gadgets Gateway put on the PC didn't help much either

2. Vista Premium on an ASUS built Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM - a different experience all together. Very smooth and reasonably quick. My father loves it. So far I am pretty impressed, too, especially by its driver database, although it's funny that with hardware over a year or so old, it will "find" a newer driver after a bit after originally installing something that would just make the thing run.

shadowofnight

Its just OK for now.....hopefully service packs will come soon enough. Just look back at XP...it wasnt the greatest in the beginning either...then by the time SP2 was released it became the stable user friendly OS it is today.

I have one PC loaded with Vista ( Ultimate...Had to learn the OS well to fix PC's loaded with it ) ....It is up to the minute updated....still it has issues that the average pc user shouldnt be seeing this far into the game.

The most common complaint I have heard from people is that when an application does hang...the 3 finger salute ( Control-Alt-Delete ) takes FOREVER to appear ( On vista it actually opens a full screen with choices to pick from ...there you pick task manager). Also if your a gamer it is a bit slower running with identical pc's no matter how kick **** they are.

One good thing though....in mass marketed systems ( Like Dell ) that have their own bloatware added to the OS when you get it...Vista seems to handle the bloatware much better then XP did...so leaving the preinstalled vista on whatever you ordered isnt as much a penalty today...its usable. Of course loading your own clean OS is worlds better...the last few laptops I recieved from dell with vista were much better .

Demiurge

Vista is great. I find that the bulk of the bashing comes from people who don't own it/never used it. Not one issue on this PC.

McLoki

2 gig of ram with a dual core processor and it seems fine. It seems like if you purchase a new system with it (with at least a couple gig of ram) you will be fine and like it. The older and less powerful your system is - the more it will suck.

If I were building a system, I would still use XP, but it is not worth worth the effort of formatting vista to go back to XP.

shack

I'm probably going to pick up a new laptop and desk top in the next few weeks. I going with XP pro for both. I'm still hearing of too many "issues" with vista. I'll wait untill the bugs are gone before I upgrade.

engtaz

lots of driver issues. Otherwise fine.

engtaz

ben62670

4 cores 2 gigs DDR1066, and an 8800GTX runs pretty good, but it doesn't do anything better than XP except DX10 if you have a DX10 card. Still many driver issues. Some program incompatibilities, and it is a ram hog. 32bit only handles 3 gigs well supposedly, and 2 gigs gets used up quick in ultimate. I turned off all the eye candy fade in fade out crap. All that does is slow your system down. I'm thinking another gig of ram, and I will be running fine. I wouldn't be running it except I own a computer repair business, and I should know Vista. Also DX10

bobman1235

I haven't used it, so really should not say anything, but I will just say - it seems ridiculous that an OS should take as beefed up as a system as Vista takes. There's just no reason for you to need 3GB of memory just to run your OS. To run a heavily graphics based game? Sure. To run video editing software? Fine. To compile a large program? Yup. To just have your basic OS up and running? Ludicrous. This is not saying anything about how well it DOES WORK, just the general principle of it.

Serendipity

Demiurge wrote: »

Vista is great. I find that the bulk of the bashing comes from people who don't own it/never used it. Not one issue on this PC.

No, I actually own a copy and use it. Works fine on a dual-core machine with 2GB, but anything less (like my 2 year old laptop) with 1GB of RAM, it doesn't run well.

avguytx

I would have rather bought a laptop with XP as now I can't network it in with my desktop...unless there's some sort of easy thing I don't know. Other than that, it's slow as s**t with 1 gig of ram. I just order 2 gigs which should be here tomorrow. I definitely wouldn't buy it to put on another machine, that's for sure. It takes forever to boot, forever to shut down, it gives me the blue screen sometimes that the system is crashing or something if I try to turn it off too soon after I've shut all the programs down. It makes me think it's going to crash soon. Beautiful...just beautiful.

Bill Ayotte

This is why I went Apple....As for Vista;

hypertone

I bought a laptop with Vista because I need to learn it for work. I work in IT and felt like an idiot dealing with any Vista problems because I had never even used the OS and I was suppose to fix them!! The main problems we have experienced in the field is print problems and VPN problems. It seems Vista doesn't support the older VPN protocols, so you need to use a 3rd party client. No big deal.

Now even though I work with "Windoze" everyday, I absolutely hate it. I've been using Linux at home for a couple of years now and it slays Windows XP in terms of performance, stability and security. However, Vista is going in the right direction. It requires your permission before installing software, unlike previous M$ which let malicious code run without your knowledge. Vista *should* be far less virus prone and more secure.

I can print to my Linux print server from my Vista laptop. I was very suprised to see this work so well. I've had no problems accessing my Samba shares on my PC as well. Windows was too stupid to remember my password for the shares, so I changed it to match the login password on my laptop. Now they mount without typing in the password every time I reboot.

Overall I think it's far better than XP. The interface is less ugly than XP, but still way behind OSX, Gnome and KDE in terms of looks. It's basically XP with a little nicer theme, no innovations here.

If you buy a new machine with Vista, don't even consider less than 2 gigs of RAM though, it is truly bloated, but with 2 gigs on my Core2 Duo it's very fast. It's not as bad as some people make it out to be, imo. I've had no crashes, and have been able to do everything I've wanted to. Except telnet! There is no telnet in the command prompt!

Demiurge

appadv wrote: »

No, I actually own a copy and use it. Works fine on a dual-core machine with 2GB, but anything less (like my 2 year old laptop) with 1GB of RAM, it doesn't run well.

Does XP run on a 486? No, get with the times and upgrade your stuff if you want to use the newer software. That's the way of things -- just like video cards. Most can't run the new games such as Crysis. In due time, another OS won't run on PCs that can run Vista.

Serendipity

Demiurge wrote: »

Does XP run on a 486? No, get with the times and upgrade your stuff if you want to use the newer software. That's the way of things -- just like video cards. Most can't run the new games such as Crysis. In due time, another OS won't run on PCs that can run Vista.

I have a Pentium M 760, 2.00 GHz, with 1024 RAM. Not necessarily old.

Approx. 19 months old.

XP runs fine on my Pentium 233Mhz though.

thejck

it suxs

ben62670

One thing to think about is what are you doing with your machine?
Anytime you open a program you do not even see the OS. Right? Like now I am running IE. I don't even know vista is running or XP except for the task bar. If you have the hardware, and want to dual boot its fine, but until they release more/better drivers I would stick with XP. In the office XP, at home XP, on the go XP, for gaming with a real nice machine Vista. Even then expect a slower frame rate with DX10 by about 10-20%. Its eye candy. Even if you read whats new for Vista it is embarrassing that there isn't hardly anything that Vista does that XP doesn't. Currently running IE with one page open I am using 635 megs of ram...
Total 2045
Cached 1631
Free 20
CPU all four cores flatlined

ledhed

I love Vista. I am running Vista Business 64 and besides software incompatibilities; iTunes doesn't work right (Nor does it work right on 64 bit XP) and Macdrive doesn't work on Vista yet. I run full Aero with all the fading in out, etc. with no discernible slowdown. All my drivers work and my 5 year old HP Printer/scanner works better than before with XP. I'm happy with it.

Specs:
2.4 GHz Quad core
4GB Ram
8800 GTS GFX card

Strong Bad

I bought this laptop primarily to take to photoshoots. I downloaded 2 apps from Nikon. 1 app, Camera Control Pro, allows me to connect my D200 to the laptop via USB and view photos as I take them. Snap and it appears on the screen. It also allows me to adjust the camera settings from the laptop (shutter speed, aperture, exposure comp, white balance, yes, everything)Works flawless! Vista saw and loaded my D200 camera with no problem. Yes, it had the driver for it! The other is Nikon ViewNX which allows me to view all of the photos taken, whether they are RAW, TIFF or JPG. It's a nice photo browsing tool.

You do need 2gb or more for things to run smooth, but hasn't each successive MS OS needed more RAM? I remember bitching about Win2K at work years back and realistically needing 512mb of RAM for that while running an app.

I also need to learn the latest and greatest OS for work.

I'm loving Vista Ultimate!

John

avguytx

Update on my Vista loaded Gateway laptop. UPS literally just ran so I shut my laptop down, let it cool a little and installed the 2 new 1gb memory cards. Wow. On booting it up, it had to be at least 5 times as fast! This is going to be much better....I can tell already.

Oh, and the place that was recommended to me by a place down the road is called www.newegg.com. They had THE best prices on the 1gb memory sticks for my laptop at about $24 each and by the time they got to me shipped, it was under $54. I ordered it on November 11th and it got here today from California. Helluva deal if you ask me. I wish I would have done this sooner. YMMV.

bigaudiofanatic

I Love Vista

shadowofnight

avguytx wrote: »

Oh, and the place that was recommended to me by a place down the road is called www.newegg.com.

Newegg is awesome...they know me on a first name basis Even though I am in Ca as well as newegg ( Get hit with taxes ) they are still the most reliable...fastest shipping and best price out there for me.

Pauly

Its better than Windows ME. LOL

It slowly coming along as far as compatibility.Tons of fun tweaks.

SKsolutions

I did Vista Premium upgrade from MCE on 11 month HP dv2200 laptop 2 gig, Dual Core, and was surprised to find some file structures intact. My **** was still there. . . how convenient! Less to Limewire.

Vista did look more appealing, and the search function was nice, but I know where I stick my files, and it's not that needed. The major complaint I had is that it's not laptop friendly. Even with the gizmos and candy disabled, it will start backing up it's search function or some such silliness when I'm looking to max the battery. My time unplugged dropped by 30%. XP is back in, and Linux will be next. Vista had that "H.A.L. from 2001" feeling. Vista knew what was best, and it did what it wanted. If my HD is writing and I can't see it in task manager, or the I/O writes, I don't want it.

Systems

I’ve now done extensive testing on Vista at work and we are ready to start rolling in out on PC's but not laptops. My recent test PC with Vista Ultimate is a Dell Precision 690. It has 4 gigs of ram (633 ECC), 2 Intel Quad Core Xeon 1.8ghz procs (that’s 8 cores), Nvidia FX3550 (dx10) video and just a normal old 250 gig sata drive (could buy Sata drives for it later). This box defeats Vista and all of my previous issues related to performance disappear. As I knew hardware had to ramp up to Vista.

Laptops are not ready. Even my new Dell latitude D830's with the core2duo 2.0 gigs just cannot take Vista yet. I will wait for laptop hardware to catch up (maybe quad core chips).


As to "problems" with Vista, I haven’t had any real problems with Vista at all that couldn’t be fixed with basic computer knowledge. ITs been ready for users since it came out.

Unfortunately there was a active media blitz by Vistas competitors (like Mac) to make it sound lik this OS is a problem and that’s all just goofy fanboy talk by those companies and their users.


But hold on to your pants! I will be buying an Imac in the next few weeks and put it to a “real” network test. Aka putting it in a production business environment with complex and fundamentally flawless Microsoft products backing it (aka heavily utilized Active directories (2003 server enterprise), Exchange 2007 servers (enterprise), storage server (enterprise) type typologies backed by Cisco and such.

We’ll see how Leppard does real soon <wink>

SKsolutions

So, if you run 8 cores and want to upgrade all your hardware, it's fine. In return, you get a new theme, some gizmos, and better file search. No thanks. Bloated monster out of control Windows strikes again. I'd run Win98 if it was hardware compatible. Can't wait to ditch it and switch the office to Linux.

Serendipity

Just got a new PC with Vista. Wow my impressions of Vista have changed greatly. At first on my old laptop I thought it was extremely slow, but with this new PC with 2gb of RAM, it runs fine.

With Vista don't even think about running it with less than 2GB of RAM, trust me, I say this from experience.