problems with vista

[md16185]

Why was microsoft in such a hurry to create vista? It sounds like it has way more bugs than anything.

[fritzi93]

Heh, to please the shareholders maybe?

Personally, I wouldn't touch it until SP1 at least. M$ has a bad habit of using early adopters as beta testers. Plus, many third party apps will require driver updates. This will take a while, and some programs will be orphaned.

I may never get Vista. I build my own boxes and am a video hobbyist, not into gaming at all. My encoding apps run fastest on Win2K Pro. They run almost 10% slower on XP. From the benchmarking tests I've seen, CPU-intensive tasks can run approx 20% slower (than XP!) on Vista. That is not progress from my point of view. When encoding, I'll peg the processor for hours at a time, and I want minimal background services running. Nor do I need a crapload of RAM, encoding uses surprisingly little memory. It's the graphics in Vista, I guess, that needs so much RAM. Then there's the whole "security" can of worms and the DRM (digital rights management) thing.

Bleh. If new killer apps come out that I must have and won't run on XP, I'm sure there will be Linux alternatives I can go to.

[Miz]

It's nothing new.

When 95 came out, everybody said "I'm not installing 95, I'm staying with 3.x."

When 98 came out, everybody said, "I'm not installing it, I'm staying with 95."

When NT came out, everybody said, "I'm not installing it. It doesn't support gaming and it's got all sorts of stupid security junk." (Totally ignoring the fact it was produced for the business world where game playing was not exactly a priority and security was)

When W2K came out, everybody said, "I'm not installing it. I'm staying with NT."

When XP came out, everybody said, "I'm not installing it. I'm keeping 98 (or W2k)."

I've got Vista and although I've only been running it for several days, I haven't encountered any problems other than the learning curve.

Vista is quite a bit different for those of us who poke around in the file structure. For example, there is no access to "Documents and Settings" without some pretty severe registry editing. Turns out it's not actually a "folder" like I'm used to, it's a "junction." Someday, I'll learn what a junction is.

While XP was arranged somewhat similarly to 98, Vista is not. The interface is different enough that it takes some time to use it easily.

Also, a lot of the problems that have been posted all over the net were problems with the beta versions, the "release candidates." Microsoft never claimed any of those were free of bugs and glitches. They were an "install at your own risk" deal.

[md16185]

makes as much sense to me his having to agree to stuff or unlock programs... It's like society these daysis based ion exclusivity, in terms of property rights..

[Miz]

Turning off that nagging about having permission to continue is a matter of eight mouse clicks. Seven if you have Control Panel on the Start Menu as a menu instead of link.

Start>Control Panel>User Accounts>Turn User Account Control on or off, uncheck the box, click OK, tell it to restart now or restart later, close the User Accounts window.

[fritzi93]

Here's one benchmark page:

http://www.passmark.com/ftp/Vista-Benchmark-Results.htm

Vista offers some improvements.

But for users of professional or "prosumer" graphics applications, one should emphatically stay with XP, at least for now:

http://vnboards.ign.com/Vanguard_Sag...3/101205761/?0

Here's one compatibility list:

http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.ph...atibility_List

It's not too bad in the areas I'm most concerned with. Actually, the apps with the most problems are dubious performers anyway. (I'm thinking Pinnacle and Nero stuff particularly.) Nevertheless, Vista performance with CPU-intensive programs is no improvement:

http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=85920

(The above is from the concluding page of Tom's Hardware Benchmarking article.) So I think, for my purposes at least, my reasoning is defensible, to wit: at this time, I have no good reason to switch to Vista. Yeah, there's moaning and groaning every time Microsoft rolls out a new OS.

[Miz]

The only reason I had to switch to Vista is that we needed a new computer. The old workhorse Mr. Miz was using was giving signs of nearing the end of its useful life. Since we needed to buy anyway, I waited until Vista was out and going to arrive preinstalled. That way I could avoid the hassles of trying to upgrade.

It did mean, though, that Mr. Miz had to give up win98 and start using XP (my old machine). He's adjusting...slowly, slowly. Twenty years flying sophisticated Navy jets and he lets himself be completely buffaloed by a home computer. Go figure.