is vista THAT bad?

[brzilian]

everything about the operating system is better, except that it uses more resources which is expected ... use common sense. more ram is needed to do more and better things ... hence my windows 3.0 to xp comparison . soon everyone will have AT LEAST 2 gb of ram on their home computers and no one will even care that it uses slightly more resources

What exactly does Vista do better than XP other than waste precious CPU cycles with useless, gimicky UI eye candy? Whatever it is, it sure isn't enough to charge $200 for the upgrade.

OS X Tiger and Leopard run smoother with only 1 Gb of RAM and have better designed UIs, hence my decision to dump PCs this summer after using them for 13+ years...

 

[cpc]

Did you research this? What are these 'better' things that use up the RAM? Apart from looking pretty of course.

If I have 2gig of RAM on my PC, I'd rather as little as possible of it was being used on the OS. If I had 20gigs of RAM I would still feel the same.

so according to your logic windows xp sucks right? windows 3.0 is much better because it doesn't waste as many cpu resources ... good logic



yes vista looks better, it's smoother, better security, better indexing, the search features, direct x 10 , better stability, the list goes on and on .

 

[legionserial]

so according to your logic windows xp sucks right? windows 3.0 is much better because it doesn't waste as many cpu resources ... good logic

XP has a whole bunch of stuff that made it more user friendly than other operating systems, especially from the perspective of networking. In terms of what most people are using their OS for, Vista is nothing but a resource hog by comparison. Yeah it may have some extra functionality, but at present, for most people's needs, it's pretty pointless. Maybe in time, but right now, the only extra benefit is the prettiness.

yes vista looks better,

Who cares?

it's smoother

No it's not. It's about the same. More sluggish if you are putting it in the same hardware you had XP on.

better security

yeah, it doesn't trust even the user anymore

better indexing

What was wrong with the way it was before, and is the resource hit worth it?

the search features

again, they were fine as they were in XP

direct x 10

This is to me the only upside. But it doesn't matter in terms of audio production. As a gamer, it's no use to me if it's sucking up the processing power that a game could be using to run smoother

better stability

That's debatable being that it's technically been in an unfinished 'open beta' state

The only thing that has impressed me about vista when I've been using it was how much it reminded me of OSX. The most notable thing about it for me was the amount of obscenity it compelled me to spout.

In time it will be worthwhile. But right now, it's an uneccessary waste of resources IMHO.

 

[cpc]

XP has a whole bunch of stuff that made it more user friendly than other operating systems, especially from the perspective of networking. In terms of what most people are using their OS for, Vista is nothing but a resource hog by comparison. Yeah it may have some extra functionality, but at present, for most people's needs, it's pretty pointless. Maybe in time, but right now, the only extra benefit is the prettiness.


Who cares?
i do, xp looked horrible

No it's not. It's about the same. More sluggish if you are putting it in the same hardware you had XP on.
wrong

yeah, it doesn't trust even the user anymore
you can turn that feature off

What was wrong with the way it was before, and is the resource hit worth it?
yes

again, they were fine as they were in XP
disagree

This is to me the only upside. But it doesn't matter in terms of audio production. As a gamer, it's no use to me if it's sucking up the processing power that a game could be using to run smoother


That's debatable being that it's technically been in an unfinished 'open beta' state
no, it's been in a finished public release state

The only thing that has impressed me about vista when I've been using it was how much it reminded me of OSX. The most notable thing about it for me was the amount of obscenity it compelled me to spout.

In time it will be worthwhile. But right now, it's an uneccessary waste of resources IMHO.

and yes i'm talking about in time , havent you read any of my posts? people talked the same shit about xp when it first came out, how quick your memories forget. is it WORTH spending the extra 200 bucks to upgrade if you're happy with xp ?? no , but if you're buying a new computer and it comes with vista and your computer/drivers can handle it , then why not? you're going to be making the switch within a year or so probably anyways if you're a windows user , and vista IS better .. only if your computer is fast enough and your drivers work with it.

 

[Sloan]

I love Vista, it does take more power to run, but that shouldn't be a big deal.

 

[rayc]

1. Vista is, as yet, unstable;
2. Vista & M/soft aren't keen on old drivers etc for old apps being upgraded & licenced/certified - the buy new buy often push;
3. Vista is HUNGRY;
4. XP was/is a pain but not as much as Vista;
5. I wish I could go back to 2000 but there's no protection for it online anymore
&
6. Do what you want to do, you know you will anyway!

 

[cpc]

how is vista unstable? unless you use drivers that aren't compatible , which is the users fault

 

[Codmate]

how is vista unstable? unless you use drivers that aren't compatible , which is the users fault

Many issues with Vista are still being ironed out.

There was the WGA fiasco this month for instance. People were being locked out of their own
O/S becuase the system thought it was a pirate copy, when it was legit.

It's good that you're willing to beta test for MS - the rest of us will benefit from your hard work when we upgrade in 18 months time and the bugs have been ironed out

 

[legionserial]

and yes i'm talking about in time , havent you read any of my posts?

Yeah, but the question was "Is Vista that bad". Not "Will Vista be that bad in the future".

 

[jpmorris]

soon the standard for how much ram a computer has will be so high that the resources problem won't even be noticeable

I'm not so sure about that. Unless they've pulled some major wizardry, it's going to hit the 3gb limit very soon. Barring some kind of segmentation scheme or paging to the 64-bit address space, there is a 4gb address space, of which Windows splits into 3gb for the user and reserves the remaining 1gb for its own purposes. Even if they've somehow rejigged it to 3.5/0.5 split the 4gb total limit requires a 64-bit OS to overcome.
AFAIK the support for 64-bit software and device drivers remains abysmal, with most systems still running in 32-bit mode.

I also hear tell that Vista-64 does not support unsigned drivers. This means no more home-brew drivers, which is not so relevant in audio circles unless you're trying to design some wonderful new audio controller (in which case you're probably stuffed), but when Roland/Edirol include 'ignore the screen complaining that the drivers aren't signed' as part of the installation instructions for their hardware, I think things are not going to go down very well.

Since we're really discussing audio here, it might be interesting to point out how Vista was designed to aggressively prevent audio processing (e.g. the loss of EAX and even Direct3D)
This is an interesting, although lengthy read:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

you're going to have to make the switch to vista eventually , if your computer is good enough now might as well.

No. XP's activation system kept malfunctioning which drove me up the wall, so much so that for things which do still require Windows, I've now switched to W2K, which I should have done in the first place, IMHO.
Now Vista has all that shit and worse, it seems to require that it touch base with Microsoft every six months or it will self-destruct. That is not acceptable to me, as I simply don't let Windows touch the 'net directly at all, ever. If that means migrating away from Windows as a platform, then that['s the way it has to be.

how is vista unstable? unless you use drivers that aren't compatible , which is the users fault

Would you like to tell that to my customers?
I work in mobile data software development for a living. Vista, out of the box, does not support any Microsoft PDAs. After an aggressive process of upgrading it we managed to get WM5, WM6 and some PocketPC 2003 devices to connect, but many of our clients are using industrial devices such as the DAPtech, Casio IT500, Gotive, MaxID iDL etc. These are rugged, industrial mobile computers which in some cases are $4000 a pop (with dozens or hundreds deployed) and AFAIK there are no Vista drivers for them.
I don't think any of them have migrated to Vista yet, but they're going to have one hell of a shock when they do.

 

[Kevin Deschwazi]

To what extent can all the pretty crap and unnecesary processes/functions be switched off in Vista?

(answer as if you were responding to a Luddite please, cus you are ).

 

[legionserial]

I also hear tell that Vista-64 does not support unsigned drivers.

That sucks. I didn't know that. I conclude that Vista is useless to me

Since we're really discussing audio here, it might be interesting to point out how Vista was designed to aggressively prevent audio processing (e.g. the loss of EAX and even Direct3D)

Sucks even more. I like EAX. XP supports EAX, therefore, again, Vista is useless.

it seems to require that it touch base with Microsoft every six months or it will self-destruct.

This is something I hate. A lot of developers these days seem to refuse to accept that not everyone has the internet and even those that do, have computers that they don't want anywhere near the net.

 

[kubeek]

What about vista without GUI? That would be GREAT, no fancy icons, just command line and some key combination to switch between programs.... Just a dream I guess

 

[cpc]

To what extent can all the pretty crap and unnecesary processes/functions be switched off in Vista?

(answer as if you were responding to a Luddite please, cus you are ).

yes , the only 2 things that are really annoying are the sidebar , and the user control warning messages , which can be easily turned off . also the indexing and just about all the resource using features can be turned off as well, and the visual style/aero can be turned to windows classic theme just like xp to save resources .

 

[Hard2Hear]

But even with optimizations, it performs much poorer than the same setup on XP.

I have audio two test machines here that are identical, one with XP, one with Vista (Business64). XP performs much better. And MS has made it very hard for manufacturers to develop drivers for it. They're much more concerned with the vast majority who do not do content creation. The only Vista machine I tested that actually performed similar to XP in the same setup was a dual quad Xeon machine with 8GB of RAM. Anything below that is going to get bogged down by the OS.

 

[DAS19]

yes, it is.

 

[timthetortoise]

My experience with Vista:
Day 1: set it up, everything went surprisingly smooth. 5 minutes later, my network connection goes down for no reason. I notice it because I can't FTP to the server I was on anymore, and can't navigate to the web. Turned out the port on the switch I was on went bad and Vista didn't bother to tell me that the connection had been lost (no active light on the ethernet, so it should have noticed something was up). XP would have told me this the second that the connection dropped out. Strike 1, not so bad
Day 4: a few days of getting familiar with the stock setup. I decided to bring it back to the classic theme to try and free some resources. Changed it over, went smoothly
Day 5: themes service fails. I don't use it anyway, so I disable it. 2 minutes later, it fails again. And again. And again. I thought I told you not to run, themes service! This was the first service that took a crap
Day 7: getting pissed off with the themes error messages, I ended up just dragging it to the corner of my screen. Problem solved. I go in in the morning and attempt to log in to the domain. Nope, a necessary service for domain logins fails immediately and doesn't let me log in (even though my credentials are cached). Oh well, I'll just have to log in as the local admin. Woo! It works! Loading... loading... loading... loading... service failed, service failed, service failed. I'd say in all, about 20 services started failing on random intervals. This basically rendered the machine unusable. And that's how Vista made me quit my job!

Do not touch the pile of shit, avoid all eye contact.

 

[cpc]

my experience with vista-

day 1- set it up , everything installed perfect, all programs, all drivers. looks better than xp , runs smoother, indexing and search features are nice


been happy since

 

[timthetortoise]

Good for you. But there are a lot more people who have had bad experiences with Vista.

 

[Chris Shaeffer]

My experience with Vista.