Since I have access to legit versions of all sorts of stuff for testing purposes, I have installed Vista and have to say that I was not impressed.

I get fancier graphics on the desktop from Mepis or Ubuntu.
I get better applications at lower cost as well, for the most part.

The whole DRM thing is not really much of an issue to me as far as usage is concerned. Philosophically I do have some problems with the current plans and practices.
I also don't think its right to freely copy/swap/view content without the creators/producers getting something for THEIR efforts though....
But that is another rant and topic. ;)

My problems with Vista are many however, and start with the simple installation process and speed.
I could install linux, update it and install MythTV on half a dozen computers during the time it takes to install Vista on one 3Ghz P4 system.
And be watching tv when Vista finishes updating.
And I would have better desktop graphics and far more applications installed.

I ran Vista for just a few days, but in that time it crashed once and had numerous errors on my proven, stable hardware.
It also had and caused issues on my network (a problem I have also seen with WinXP.)

With about 10 running computers in my home network, I have one with the last decent, stable version of Windows- 2000 Pro- and one that dual boots WinXP simply for gps nav software.

I tested Vista and can see not one compelling reason to use it.
Not a one.

>> "The whole DRM thing is not really much of an issue to me as far as usage is concerned. Philosophically I do have some problems with the current plans and practices."

have to agree with this one ... infact i cant "feel" the hype of drm things when using vista ... i also think the hype was a bit over-stated ... done nothing good to linux actually ...

i only use vista "continueously" for a while and i'm quite impress by it(probably all the while i'm a "classic" interface user ^_^) ... i dont see other windows version can be better than vista ... windows users should upgrade to vista for their home desktop ...

one thing i dont like about vista which is obvious to me is that i find it very hard to navigate around in vista ...



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Why bother, a friend of mine already has it (well..actually it's not installed at the moment, because it trashed 2 other operating systems and err is kind of 'banned' for now) and I get to see the trouble even without paying for it myself :D

So..no go. Of course it'll one day be in front of me at work or something, but I'll try not to pay for it myself. And those of you who now think "alright, how about piracy then?", let's just say it's pretty stupid to pay for getting shot at.. :)

pft yah right
 

Vista is a memory horder. Although it can be hard to escape consitering most PCs that you buy start out with the most recent windows os.

I have only heard bad things about it, crashes, boot-up problems, viruses, trojans, ect., ect., ect.

>> "Although it can be hard to escape consitering most PCs that you buy start out with the most recent windows os"

agree with that ... but i'm dont quite understand the polling result(so far) ... that second item ...

infact , vista is a very very good cahallange i think ...

>> "I have only heard bad things about it, crashes, boot-up problems, viruses, trojans, ect., ect., ect."

i dont believe that actually ...



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a small question ...

i saw a compaq(i think its a pressario) laptop with xp on it but theres a label stating "vista capable" ...

how does it works ?? ... can i get vista installation discs and install vista in it ... ??

i have heard about the vista testing(for downloading ??) and i also thought that i can only get vista if i buy a new pc/laptop as it is pre-installed ...


//just curious ...


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nope you can buy various flavors of vista install disks (too many flavors) off the shelf but you will be forking out a lot of $$$s for them, much more than the OEMS get them for as thay buy in bulk.

people actually BUY vista?

I've been lucky enough in the lasy year to escape into Linux, for the most part. At my office, I've had a number of people approach me asking how to get XP on their brand new machines, because they hate Vista.

I don't plan to purchase Vista in the near future. However, I know it's a matter of time before I'll need to upgrade my Windows game machine. Doh!

>> "nope you can buy various flavors of vista install disks (too many flavors) off the shelf but you will be forking out a lot of $$$s for them, much more than the OEMS get them for as thay buy in bulk."

frankly speaking i didnt know that ... are you serious about that ... ??

>> "I know it's a matter of time before I'll need to upgrade my Windows game machine. Doh!"

infact , as i dont think vista is that different from linux , as least by appearence ... i'm kind of thinking making that the earlier the better ... ^_^


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I just bought a new laptop and, of course, it came pre-loaded with the Vista abomination. It's running Ubuntu now! ;)

Here's something for those who are considering buying Vista:

http://images.wikia.com/uncyclopedia...istaohlord.png

Interesting thread.

We needed to buy a new laptop for my wife, but I was pretty adamant that it would not be Vista and she is sick to death of XP; bad drivers, USB ports randomly quitting etc etc.

She isn't allowed to use Linux at work because the admin is an @rsehole so we bought her a MacBook. So far she loves and it is working perfectly.

hmm , better get her a vista ... can have the best of both worlds when searching for freely downloadable applications ... ^_^



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It is what is...
 

Today I was talking to a fellow who is running a small but very successful computer sales and repair business. He is into Linux but also loves to do the Window's Gaming thing! If it wasn't for games, I wouldn't give Windows a 2nd glance.

Found out today however that you can get your hands on something called TinyXP. Apparently it's a very stripped down version of XP that requires only 45 Meg of disk space and about a gig of operating space. Perfect for runnings games.

If only we can streamline the installation of packages like VMware so that we can run virtual machines inside Linux, we could have the best of both worlds!

- Perry

I am suprised at how many people I see with macs lately. And almost everyone likes them. Looks like they're really coming back to the home user market. Certainly a positive trend.

To answer the OP: I would refuse to buy a pc that is bundled with Vista. Which isn't so much of a problem since I have never purchased a computer in one piece... and I don't need a laptop... If I did need a laptop I'd be seriously pissed off.

i'm kind of disagree with you ...

having seen and using vista personaly may have "force" a person to ask himself "what in the world that linux cant do ... ??"

ok , probably the only "discomforts"(i can only see this as a good thing) are people have to follow strictly what are inside that drop-down hardwares listing whenever they see one ... and ... and learning/enjoying(they are not(or dont have to be) necessarily hard) mounting and unmounting of stuffs like unrestricted heavens ...


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It depends on ,maybe one day I will try that.

i can assure you that its weird ... and its very "unclear" to me ...

initially i use to do the "automatic" windows updates ... but now i cant be bother about it ...


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Ok, herz my 2cents.
I'm not a gamer so I don't need all the problems associated with Micky $oft. I used to spend $70.00 a year for the full house package from C A to protect me from all the stuff that ex pee was vulnerable to. And still, going on the internet was like going to sea in a fish basket...
One day I was going to start using another company for my so-called security and when I removed C A from my system a box popped up telling me that all the crap it had gathered up would now be released into my system. Thats when I zero filled my drives and installed a better Dual Boot system, Suse / Debian. That was about a year and a half ago. My boxes are home made so I don't get Micro Garbage shoved down my throat in some package. I'm getting ready to buy an HP laptop and the first thing I'll do to it is hose Vista and install Linux.
Theres a lot of people that have to use it for Quicken, or games. ect. But I don't.
I feel like they should provide the virusware and spyware protection for free. After all, the security holes are there screw-ups, not mine.
Anytime I buy anything, I expect the manufacture to fix defects free.

You can get free anti-spyware and anti-virus

Yes, and free spyware and viruses too. Those MS commies... : D

lol, ive used vista for a week or so while trying to get my housemates new laptop running.

the laptop had a core (1) duo and 1G of ram, 120G HDD
and it responded slower than VNC over dial up internet!

the eye candy was ok... but juts having it turned on eats up 700M of RAM.
could not install firefox easily,
the defender thing basicly sais "this is not a microsoft approved product therfore I cant let you install it"
after hitting 101 allow boxes it installed but still wouldent run (not windows logo tested)
the same when trying to get AVG installed,

the only thing in vista better than XP was the wirless networking which accepted our 4096 bit WPA key without a hitch

within a month my housemate (who is allmost totally computer illeterate) had hosed vista and put XP pro on

as i suggested ... try to encourage people usaing vista ... that probably means cutting down or narrowing down the differences between systems "by default" ...

probably can helps linux into the mainstream without much surprises from the users ...


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Free anti spyware can't be trusted. Even the stuff you pay for can monitor you after it's installed. With no root password to overcome, your data and your system is completely exposed to whoever wrote the software.. I think it's best to just use Micro $oft for off line stuff and Linux for everything else.

Post #127, more like reason #127 to not buy vista. My work has a MSDN subscription so I have been using (evaluating I should say) Vista since beta RC1.

I have Vista Business edition on my HP business class desktop at work, I also dual boot SuSe Linux on it as well.

I will not even mention any of my problems with the beta, these are all release issues.

First thing I noticed when installing is, that the installer sucked, and it lacked so many basic features not to mention it had no advanced features. If you hare going to put Vista on a machine and dual boot it, you pretty much have to install Vista first. This ticked me off because it wiped out my XP partition when I first installed it. My guess is because MS changed the boot loader for windows and there is no longer a boot.ini file. So, to stop any kind of compatibility issue the Vista installer just wipes it out. I had to set up a virtual machine of windows xp instead.

It pretty much broke over half of our existing technologies in our infrastructure. We are a novell shop, and well at least the novell client worked. I didn't have high hopes for that to work when it was released. SMB2 is a joke. It breaks all functionality to my OS X boxes and my Linux boxes. Of course I am sure all of you know this, and the whole NTLMv2 problem and how you have to hack the registry to make it work. Even then my Macbook Pro still has tons of intermittent, but constant, networking issues with my vista box. No IE6, you are stuck with IE7. IE7 broke lots of things, including my several labs of computers running Autodesk softwares. Autodesk Design Academy uses IE to authenticate the unlimited seat license we have with them online when you first run the application after being installed. IE puts this html file into the c:\documents and settings\local settings\temp directory for the authenticated license. IE7 breaks this functionality completely, so if you use Vista and want you use your Autodesk Viz software, well too bad. IE7 has also broken some online banking software that our accounting department uses, we had to roll back the image to IE6, because uninstalling IE7 doesn't fix it. We run strictly XP on all windows boxes at work, thank the gods! DX10 is vista only, this is ridiculous and forces developers to code software for vista and it also forces the consumer to upgrade the OS. That royally pissed me off that they did that. WMP11 still can't play a DVD out of the box, you have to download a codec. Seriously, what the heck? Oh, well VLC still FTW every time!

The security center alone makes me want to commit seppuku. It is not that easy to turn off and it literally asks you if you want to do every action you perform on the OS. I hate the UI, the control panels are completely unintuitive, and I also hate how it automatically shares media over the network. First thing I noticed is that I could grab my bosses MP3 play list over the network, and he never shared them. Vista automatically does this.

I have had issues getting vista to lease an IP via DHCP over wireless. For some reason if I assign a static IP to the vista laptop it works with our WiFi, if I try to use DHCP no dice. Didn't look that far into it, didn't care that much.

Almost all new features do not even benefit the end user, they are geared towards figuring out what to do when windows crashes. So, I suppose Microsoft openly admits that their OS sucks now.

Drivers, hahahahahahahahaahah - good luck.

I did some serious testing with vista because our IT director wanted to know if it was worth upgrading. So, I put vista through the grinders at work, and in my professional opinion vista is probably one of the worst enterprise level OSes you could run at your business. If you are going to use Windows, use Windows XP. At least XP is solid and doesn't have issues and in my experience out performs vista.

I am actually glad I am moving and administering the Mac sides of things these days. Less headaches.

>> "Free anti spyware can't be trusted."

people dont actually need anti-spyware softwares for any systems ... to me , they are kind of like "after-sales" oppunities just to make more money with more appearantly vaild reasons ...

and for the above post ...

and yup , vista shouldnt try to be in by the feels and looks of trend setting linux(sort of) ... just keeps the new polishing ...

btw ... when we say vista is hard to navigate , doesnt it implying that we are actually using a "new" windows system for the first time ... ^_^

what if the vista way of working and navigating througout the system and desktop was firmly ingrained into the minds of the all of computer users ... as these "complaints" typically takes time to be resolved clearly ...


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Name 5 game released this year that run on 98.

^^

The biggest contributor to the rise of Linux is Microsoft, whether they know it or not.

How are you supposed to click that ;)

Actually, I've seen Vista and it's a good spoof, but it is a spoof.

I bought a new laptop with Vista preinstalled. I just booted it up, checked that all the hardware works properly on vista and once I was sure that the laptop is not faulty, I wiped out the hard drive and installed debian. that was my 1-hour adventure with vista.

I've used all the betas & rcs. I have Vista ultimate on 1 rig. After you get used to it & turn off uac it's almost as good as xp. It is a resource hog. I'm not good enough with linux to rely on it 100% . I also have to use windows at work, so I will be buying other copies I'm sure. The 3d stuff is pretty good & the search feature works well also.

windows systems with their accompanying hardwares and their pc/laptop are
replacable one-on-one almost immediately by phone calls ... by anyone ...

guess that i have to wait some more time ... a totally unrecoverable windows systems , hardwares and machines ...



//too bad ...


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From what I have seen of the flip 3d, its just pictures of the windows turn sideways, it looks pretty stupid to me

In memory of WindowsNT
 

They did. The familiar and actually reliable NTLDR has been replaced. I don't know the boot files for Vista, but I do know one of the files is called 'winload.exe' which is the name of some really old virusses :D

I don't even know how people dual boot vista and Linux, particularly the home versions since I heard that dual boot option has been crippled in that version (anyone can confirm that?).

It is kind of funny and sad to see Microsoft bastardize their once decent OS. I say decent, because Vista, and XP are NT derivatives and I have had actually relatively good experience working with an NT system, particularly NT 4.0 and Win2000Pro (NT 5.0). I have always been beating the drum about WindowsNT4.0 and Windows2000 and will always refer to those two versions as the by far Microsoft's only BEST versions of Windows that ever was.

However, with Vista being NT6.0, I can't hardly consider much of it as an NT system anymore, though NTFS, and most elements of the NT kernel are still there, but how Vista is setup to me seems like a completely different system, and does not offer the familiar reliability and usefulness of NT. It has been so overloaded with 'media features' and a GUI that takes so much memory, that it just doesn't add to serve any useful purpose.

A friend gave me his copy and told me it was crap.

I gave it to someone else, as i dont run windows that often and XP plays all the games i enjoy playing.

Maybe someone somewhere will enjoy that copy of vista, who knows.

sometime its good to not try finding "wheres the catch" of any product or system whenever you come across them for the first time ...

just treat them as how you would treat anything that you come across as like before ... no sweat ...

but the thing is that by doing things like this , there is a tendancy of you not treating them "seriously" , unlike polygamy ...



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I wouldn't buy it, but trying it out...yes I would. And I have. Because I will bump into it one day I know, and when I do, I need to know how to use it. It's mostly the same as the previous Windows versions (with a cherry on top of the cream mountains), just requires more machine power to run smoothly, but still it's a good thing to know.

I don't get who really pays for it, to get trouble, a desktop that looks about the same as KDE4 or OSX and a resource hog..but some people do, and to be able to help them I need to know the beast too. But I'll never put any money into that ;) I'd rather happily donate the licence money to some open source project that really needs it, not feed the sum to the fat pockets at Redmond.

I am not gaming (much) on computers anymore (I am going back to consoles... ah the simplicity, no tweaks, no headaches) and I have Vista in one machine. However, I don't have a DX10 compatible card on that machine. A friend of mine is an avid computer-gamer. He invests an insane amount of money on his computers every few years. He is no computer geek though, just a gamer. He dual-boots (Vista and XP). I asked him once:

"If you buy a game that can run on both XP and Vista, which OS do you prefer to play the game on?"

Guess which OS he said? Vista. I immediately asked why, because you may need a more powerful computer to run the same game on Vista, that you would on XP. He told me:

"The game looks far better in Vista. It is cleaner, it is faster and the graphics with DX10 support are sharper".

And you know, I think he is right in this one. I am actually very happy with my Vista box, can't deny it. But if you don't have the hardware to run it, nor software (games or otherwise) that you wish to run on it, it is not really an upgrade from XP.

The amount of games using DX10 is still small, but the number might increase soon. I don't think most developers will drop DX9.0 completely though, not until Vista has the same market share that XP does (if it will ever happen actually).

The problem I have with Vista is that it uses SO much hard-disk space and so much RAM.

I thought everybody had a Quad Core with 4 gigs of ram and a terabyte harddrive /sarcasm. The stupid thing is if you complain about it everybody says everybody has enough disk space anyways so whats the problem.

I don't get that either... It's an OS made for PC's that are being sold now and in the next 5 years. When XP came out people complained about the same thing. If your pc can't handle it - don't install it.
Hom much disk space does it need? Even if it's 10Gig - that's 2$ of disk space... what the hell.

i think they are very exited with vista , still suffering from the hang over ...

seriously , if only microsofts distribute vista like how they distribute xp ... i think vista will replace xp(and the rest) very much sooner ... and probably there will also be more major upgrading of linux distribution and linux machines coming very shortly ...



//puzzling to me ...



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its actually 16 gb of disk space, and I think that the reason that they make it use so much resources is for the hardware manufactures to make more money because then people have to upgrade their pcs

Interesting theory... but if you look at it in another direction, the price of RAM went massively down around Vista's release date. 1GB was pretty common back then, but the demanding for upgrade was quite high because of Vista. So that is actually a good thing. I upgraded my PC's RAM and it was insanely cheap. Just a few months back and I would spend 2-4 times more money for the same amount of RAM. So that is a good thing about Vista, don't you think?

So be glad Vista was made, but don't use it. That RAM is for apps, not the OS. :)

Exactly, for example I was reading an article on /. about test versions of windows 7(the next release of windows) uses *only* 480 mb for itself according to ms, 480 mb is a hell of a lot of memory for just an operating system.

480MB in another two years, that's not so bad. There are other things that I find annoying. For example, that tendency to sacrifice performance and security in the name of "user-friendliness". With a system that is as prone to fragmentation as WinD'oh!s, the wise things to do is install the OS in one partition, virtual memory and temporary files in another and applications in yet another one. But that's nearly impossible to do in a failsafe way. One would have to download a script from an obscure location on their site to do this at install time. How many people know that? And what good is it if you later change your mind and you 'd like to switch a few things around?
Or again, stuff like index.dat files, which are still hidden and difficult to clear - and as such serious security threats. People have been complaining about this since 2000. Has anyone stepped up with a good explanation of why these things should exist at all? With an easy way to delete them or clean them out? No. All you can do is never use Internet Explorer, which is less than intuitive considering how deeply it is rooted into the system.
Since I don't use Vista, I don't know whether these issues have been addressed at all. But well, I don't really care. Vista is very likely to get skipped here. I've always felt that it was the new MS ME, a botched upgrade that was only a basis for the real thing (XP). So I am more interested in Windows 7. I wonder whether it will be released within the next 18 months as scheduled. I hear that MS has already released an early beta so it's quite possible. I guess this is another area where Ms can learn from Linux. Releasing an operating system every so many years is so 1995. It would be far better for anyone if they simply gave out annual subscriptions and introduced innovations more gradually.

All I can say about that is, 'meh.' I'm not impressed by the whole vista ui, nor the projects to for some reason beyond me to mimic the look and feel of vista. There are so many better user-friendly UI already that are already similar to the 9x UI that the vista/vixta ui has no real advantages. I prefer the classic 9x anyways, which is readily available.