Is Vista Worth?

[afroxav]

Let me hear what you have to say about vista, and if it's worth to upgrade if we have a Windows Vista Capable computer.

I think that we should wait 'till the SP1 which, I hear, is in closed beta-testing.

 

[Smith6612]

Vista SP1 I believe is already out. Otherwise, it's going to take the OEMs about a month or so unless you upgrade Vista onto your current computer or build your own machine and get a DVD with SP1 pre-installed. Otherwise, Vista is worth it, as it's done so many things for me that I would've had to go open source hunting for (which can take days of hunting and gigabytes of downloading, which isn't a problem). Just as long as you have a decent processor, a good amount of RAM and for Aero, a video card that tankes Pixel Shading, then you're good to go.

If you want to see if your current system is Vista compatible, there is an Upgrade Assistant available for download at the Microsoft Website.

 

[Zangetsu]

vista is worth it if you have a quad core, 4-8gigs of ram, and a high end video card but if you have a computer thats designed for xp then its not worth it trust me i've tried

 

[Spartan Erik]

All because a computer says it's Vista Capable doesn't mean it will run well. Some Vista computers are more capable than others (this is why Microsoft is currently being sued).

Vista is a terrible OS. Stick with XP, you won't regret it.

PS the Vista service pack is already out I believe, but XP should be getting its third service pack sometime this or next week

 

[Starshine]

vista is worth it if you have a quad core, 4-8gigs of ram, and a high end video card but if you have a computer thats designed for xp then its not worth it trust me i've tried

I don't have a quad-core or 4-8 gigs of ram and run Vista just fine. Its not sluggish or slow, hasn't had errors. I was skeptical about getting it when I got a new computer, but since I did - things have been good.

 

[dWhite]

Vista is absolutely terrible in every aspect of a good operating system. The only thing Vista is good for is the looks, which is a resource hog along with a space hog.

Unlike alot of people that like the looks of Vista, I prefer performance over visuals. I am going to stick with Windows XP Professional, as XP Pro is by far the best OS Microsoft released as far as performance goes.

I have my XP Pro so tweaked out performance wise, that it only takes ~200mb of my RAM, leaving me with a extremely high RAM availability percentage.

I also have it so tweaked out I can do a cold boot in less than 20 seconds, which is basically like a fresh install boot of Windows XP.

 

[swirly]

I saw an offer where you could get Vista for free if you gave up your privacy to microsoft for like 3 months.

 

[Smith6612]

I can boot Vista completely here in about 30 seconds and be viewing my desktop with all of my apps open by themselves within 45 seconds. How long does it take you to get Vista even started?

Also, my Vista score is a perfect 5.9/5.9 . This is my gaming machine btw. Also, What does the poster below my last post mean about Microsoft getting sued over systems less capable for Vista? Is there a news article around there I can see?

As for getting Vista for free, there is a Windows Live Club, that if you have the time to play some puzzle games, can get a hold of a free copy of Vista.

 

[HomerJ]

I have my XP Pro so tweaked out performance wise, that it only takes ~200mb of my RAM, leaving me with a extremely high RAM availability percentage.

200MB!?!? I always thought XP was nice and lightweight. For comparison, here is the software on my desktop:

Gentoo linux (kernel 2.6.22-gentoo-r10)
X11 (a graphical windowing environment)
Xfce 4.4 (a desktop environment)
Compiz (a 3D window manager, all sorts of fancy effects like Vista's Aero)
A few services: vmware-server, XDM (for remote X11 logins), others

All of this uses 166MB of RAM. If I get rid of Compiz and replace it with xfwm4 (Xfce's window manager) the RAM usage drops to 152MB.

On my very old laptop:
Arch Linux (A 2.6.22 kernel, I think)
X11
fluxbox (a lightweight Window manager)

All of this uses only 19MB of RAM.

Of course, XP's 200MB is nothing compared to Vista. My friend's computer boots up with Vista already taking up 500MB of RAM. It was also pre-installed and occupying 20GB of hard disk space.

Overall, Vista totally sucks. It's a resource-hogging waste of money. I can have way more eye candy on linux wasting far less resources without having to spend a bunch of money on Windows Vista.

 

[tscout3]

I dont have vista yet but i can tell you it is worth it because alot of games are starting to use directx 10 which is only compatible with Vista OS's.

 

[jamesg112]

vista sucks you should wait till they fixed most of the bugs.

 

[mattura]

From what I've seen - no.
But I haven't been able to get to know vista intimately and I'm not going to bandwagon majority views. I have seen many cosmetic improvements (these are easy to find), but few performance improvements (but these may be hard to find) and some 'differences' from XP which may be slow/inefficient to those used to XP.
The winner in these comparisons is always the most customisable. I'm sure that if vista is discovered to be more customisable than XP, it will win. It will not, however, win just because of market monopolies or being 'the new version' - people have enough choice nowadays and are well informed regarding operating systems.

 

[MasterMax1313]

People may complain like mad, but the fact is it is a stable, good operating system. It recovers from errors far more effectively than XP does (if explorer happens to crash, i get everything back in my various trays and in mere moments, versus XP were things may not appear again until the next reboot). What people constantly complain about is more the fault of driver makers. Vista tries to force software makers to reduce, if not eliminate, their need for elevated permissions as a measure of increasing security. I run Vista Home Prem. on a HP laptop, core 2 duo (originally 1 gig ram, now 2), with a medium sized hdd (160 gb) and integrated intel graphics, without issue. i use office xp without much issue (occasional graphic artifacts). I love it. Granted xp was great, but Vista is wonderful. it can run on a lower end pc, just lower what it's trying to do. disable aero, decrease some of the effects, etc.

In the end, I personally consider it to be the best MS OS out. Friends of mine agree. One of whom only switched back to XP because there was a driver he needed for work that didn't exist in x64 form. I've been told by friends that run it in x64 that x86 emulation, when needed, works seamlessly.

SP1 just makes it better. File transfers/copying has been greatly improved. I'm sure there were some other fixes incorporated with it, but none as outstanding as the file transfers. People may complain about SP1 crashing their system, forcing a reinstall, but remember that XP SP2 did the same thing when it first came out.

 

[alexandgruntz]

Vista is great, it takes up most of your RAM due to a technology called Superfetch - this is an improvement over XP's prefetch feature.

 

[tscout3]

I forgot to add before also that Microsoft will stop supporting XP i believe after this year. So GO VISTA!

 

[theafterthought]

Vista is absolutely terrible in every aspect of a good operating system. The only thing Vista is good for is the looks, which is a resource hog along with a space hog.

Unlike alot of people that like the looks of Vista, I prefer performance over visuals. I am going to stick with Windows XP Professional, as XP Pro is by far the best OS Microsoft released as far as performance goes.

I have my XP Pro so tweaked out performance wise, that it only takes ~200mb of my RAM, leaving me with a extremely high RAM availability percentage.

I also have it so tweaked out I can do a cold boot in less than 20 seconds, which is basically like a fresh install boot of Windows XP.

+1

Please listen to this guy! And as for lack of XP support soon, the next version of Windows will be out before XP starts to become depricated, it's really not worth 'upgrading' with the lack of driver support that Vista has for older hardware/software. I would stick with XP if you have it.

 

[componentwarehouse]

No, Vista is far better then XP, especially with SP1 for Vista. XP was slow and sluggish, crashed often and didnt recover well. OK, Vista might use more RAM, CPU and gfx, but RAM is cheap, I mean I got 4GB for about £70 here in the UK (And not the value rubbish), thats probably abput $100 in the US, cos everythings cheaper there, so whats the problem.OK, not everyone has that money to spend on RAM, but 2GB will get you along well with Vista. And who doesnt, on a fairly new computer, have less then a 100GB HDD. Even my 4 year old laptop has 60GB, which is fine for Vista, depending on what your going to store on it as well as vista obviously.

Alex

 

[alexandgruntz]

... it's really not worth 'upgrading' with the lack of driver support that Vista has for older hardware/software.

Vista doesn't have to have drivers installed for hardware, it will ignore it if need be. Saying this, you can dual-boot Vista and XP and use XP for hardware/software that Vista doesn't support.

On newer computers, drivers aren't an issue since Vista is more than likely to have drivers for the hardware.

 

[shaunak]

* Driver support for vista and xp is similar
* Most softwares work on both
* You can do all that with Xp that you can do with vista
* You can make xp look pretty too by adding ms shells

SO, One simple question:
Why spend more system resources doing all that Xp does for 1/2 the resources?

 

[theafterthought]

Vista doesn't have to have drivers installed for hardware, it will ignore it if need be. Saying this, you can dual-boot Vista and XP and use XP for hardware/software that Vista doesn't support.

On newer computers, drivers aren't an issue since Vista is more than likely to have drivers for the hardware.

I mainly use my PC for Audio production software, and on transferring my software from my XP computer to my Vista computer I found that none of it would work - there were issues with running the ASIO driver, which Microsoft strangely decided to completely replace with a driver that is far less able than the previous one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Stream_Input/Output). This rendered Vista useless for my needs! There was no benefit to me running XP and Vista side by side and so I went straight back to XP. It seems to me Vista forces the XP generation of software to conform to it, rather than being backwards compatible in the first place, which is ridiculous. But I guess it depends on what you're using your computer for, for other purposes there are probably some advantages...