Vista - Microsoft's Prescott?

Link to front page topic: http://www.overclockers.com/articles1482
I wanted to share some counter points against the Vista plus side of things.
I work for a local PC retailer, as well as run my own little business from home, I've used and serviced Vista since it became available, and I would never give up my XP for Vista in it's current state.

Vista more stable than XP?
Hardly possible since XP never crashes. I've not rebooted my PC for 14 months since I built it, except for a ram upgrade and Windows auto updates. That said, I was still running Windows 98SE up until I got XP and I never had any crashes wih that either, except when 'I' did somethign stupid.

Vista prettier?
No, I loathe Aero, It's the single most unnecessary piece of software engineering waste of time ever. Windows had a classic clean well known and ultimately user friendly interface where every application has similar layout giving a shallow learning curve and made all software familiar and easy to get into and use. Software skinning started the path of destruction for the very thing that made Windows the top OS in the first place. Vista took it a step further and totally removed every thought of user friendlyness.

Vista better performance?
People keep telling me so, but I have yet to ever see a single reliable verified claim. Every single online review from Vista launch to today indicates the opposite. Drivers might have come a long way, but XP is still faster than Vista. On the otehr hand, of all the PC's I've come across through work I've seen gaming performance drops of anyhing from very little to more than half.

Superfetch/UAC
Features that were already available for years in 9x/2K/XP through third party software. And You virtually have to turn UAC off to use Vista so that point is completely moot.

No, Vista isn't Prescott, Prescott was still a usable CPU. You just needed a big cooler.

From my first hand experience, I agree with the stability, 'prettier' and UAC arguements, as for performance I never noticed a massive difference although Vista was obviously slower.

I've never managed to crash XP, and until there is a significant app/game that forces me to - I will not be upgrading to Vista.

Edit your post and please put the link in! C'mon guys....this should be a given.

Clockwork_Apple said:

From my first hand experience, I agree with the stability, 'prettier' and UAC arguements, as for performance I never noticed a massive difference although Vista was obviously slower.

I've never managed to crash XP, and until there is a significant app/game that forces me to - I will not be upgrading to Vista.

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Same.

I tried vista for a while. I went from being able to play 64/64 BF2 games on maxed out settings with a solid 50fps to never getting above 25fps even at minimum settings on a 16 person server.

Yeah I love my Xp, I will not go to Vista until I have to. Bill gates will have to drag my computer out of my house and reformat and install vista on it for that to happen.

Tried vista beta final and wasn't at all impressed with it, slow annoying, won't use it as long as possible and hope they come out with something else instead of it.

I hope AMD opensourcing drivers leads to advancements in native DX on linux... One can always dream.

Bad Maniac said:

Vista more stable than XP?
Hardly possible since XP never crashes.

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Hahahaha. Yeah, okay

I've not rebooted my PC for 14 months since I built it

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Enjoying those memory leaks? What do you even use your pc for? I could leave my pc on for 14months using XP if it was crunching SETI 24/7 or just plain idle, but you try gaming everyday and see how **** slow your OS is after 14 days, let alone 14months.

Vista prettier?
No, I loathe Aero, It's the single most unnecessary piece of software engineering waste of time ever.

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Opinionated. I personally love Aero. If you dont like it, turn it off. It doesnt make anything easier/harder. It just looks pretty.

Windows had a classic clean well known and ultimately user friendly interface where every application has similar layout giving a shallow learning curve and made all software familiar and easy to get into and use.

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Do you use "windows classic" skin on XP by any chance? Cause seriously.. XP brought fantastic UI changes. The "classic" win 95/98/whatever skin looked terrible. Im also extremely glad they put a fade effect on the menus. Times change man, at one stage Im sure people thought DOS was the be all and end all of user interfaces. No clutter, just pure CLI. Yummy.

Software skinning started the path of destruction for the very thing that made Windows the top OS in the first place. Vista took it a step further and totally removed every thought of user friendlyness.

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Totally disagree. People look for customizability (hence Linux's popularity) in just about anything. If they dont like the way something is, they want to change it. If they dont like the layout of XP, they change it. If they dont want Aero or the vista layout, they change it. Simple stuff.

Vista better performance?
People keep telling me so, but I have yet to ever see a single reliable verified claim. Every single online review from Vista launch to today indicates the opposite. Drivers might have come a long way, but XP is still faster than Vista. On the otehr hand, of all the PC's I've come across through work I've seen gaming performance drops of anyhing from very little to more than half.

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I agree with you on most parts here. Vista certainly doesnt strike me as a gaming OS.

Superfetch/UAC
Features that were already available for years in 9x/2K/XP through third party software. And You virtually have to turn UAC off to use Vista so that point is completely moot.

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You said it yourself. Available via 3rd party programs. They have now incorporated it into the OS. Your problem is...? I agree with you on UAC though. That thing is a pain in the arse.

No, Vista isn't Prescott, Prescott was still a usable CPU. You just needed a big cooler.

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No, Vista isnt a Prescott, Vista is still a usable OS. You just need to get used to it.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record.. I use XP Pro SP2 on my desktop rig, and Vista Home Premium on my laptop, as thats what it came with. So Im not a vista or xp fanboy. I think both have their merits and their demerits. Just trying to have a nice debate here

Careface said:

Enjoying those memory leaks? What do you even use your pc for? I could leave my pc on for 14months using XP if it was crunching SETI 24/7 or just plain idle, but you try gaming everyday and see how **** slow your OS is after 14 days, let alone 14months.

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You must play some poorly written games... Any memory leaks are the fault of the application, not the OS.

Elluzion said:

Yeah I love my Xp, I will not go to Vista until I have to. Bill gates will have to drag my computer out of my house and reformat and install vista on it for that to happen.

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I can just imagine Bill Gates sitting at his super computer reading 1,000 threads at once and comes across this and is like, "That can be arranged... MAUAHAHAHAA!" (This of course being said in a decidedly evil and nasal manner).

Bad Maniac said:

I hope AMD opensourcing drivers leads to advancements in native DX on linux... One can always dream.

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AWWWW Yea.


As for vista it is currently staring me right in the face.... on my desktop.... no not that one the other one (physical). Will I be installing it soon? Don't count on it. Will I have to install it? Yes to get used to it so I can actually navigate and fix things for customers. Will I be angry about it? Yea, most likely. Do I feel that my xp64 does fine for me right now? Yep.

Careface said:

Enjoying those memory leaks? What do you even use your pc for? I could leave my pc on for 14months using XP if it was crunching SETI 24/7 or just plain idle, but you try gaming everyday and see how **** slow your OS is after 14 days, let alone 14months.

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I game almost daily. My PC is a media and gaming rig more than anything. I've currently got UT2004, Oblivion and the UT3 Demo installed, along with Dungeons & Dragons Online, and I recently played through HalfLife 2 Ep2 as well. Never have any problems with memory. Like the previous poster, memory leaks come from software not the OS, if a game has memory leak problems in XP, it will have the exact same problems in Vista, only in Vista there'd be no memory left to leak...

As for Aero, yes it may be my opinion, but not even you can deny the step away from a uniorm interface in all applications, which, like I said, is why Windows became so popular in the first place.

Anyways, I'm glad Vista is working well for you, not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's the complete opposite of my experience.

Eh I like vista.. it isnt too bad.. And... all OS's need time to be worked on.. I mean go back when XP didnt have any service packs or anything and expec it to be as good as it is now.. Give vista 6 more months and the SP1 for it and it should be a lot better.

I've used Vista business 64bit for 4 months now, and I'm quite satisfied with it. It's very stable. Boots up from cold boot to desktop in under a minute (my XP machine takes 3min). Very stable and I can still play all my games with it.

Bad Maniac said:

I game almost daily. My PC is a media and gaming rig more than anything. I've currently got UT2004, Oblivion and the UT3 Demo installed, along with Dungeons & Dragons Online, and I recently played through HalfLife 2 Ep2 as well. Never have any problems with memory. Like the previous poster, memory leaks come from software not the OS, if a game has memory leak problems in XP, it will have the exact same problems in Vista, only in Vista there'd be no memory left to leak...

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Then clearly Im playing the games "wrong" then, because my pc becomes as unresponsive as a dog **** after a week or so of heavy use.

As for Aero, yes it may be my opinion, but not even you can deny the step away from a uniorm interface in all applications, which, like I said, is why Windows became so popular in the first place.

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What do you mean? I hardly use my laptop (Its supposed to be for uni, but I use it as a 24/7 SETI cruncher).. In my using it, Ive not seen anything "ununiform" about different applications.. each has the same layout, same buttons/menus, and the title bar has the cool glass look (except when maximized)..

Anyways, I'm glad Vista is working well for you, not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's the complete opposite of my experience.

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Meh, as I said, I hardly use my laptop.. I wont be upgrading to vista on my desktop, as the only reason Id do that would be because I like the look of it.. but thats what Vista Transformation Pack is for I guess I just didnt agree with how strongly you felt about Vista. Sure, it probably is a POS OS, but to make claims like its the "worst piece of software engineering" is way too extreme lol

petteyg359 said:

You must play some poorly written games... Any memory leaks are the fault of the application, not the OS.

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Tut. If a process dies, then all the resources associated with that process should be released. That's what an operating system is _for_!

Captain Newbie said:

Tut. If a process dies, then all the resources associated with that process should be released. That's what an operating system is _for_!

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I had a feeling this was the case, but as I know jack about programming, I thought Id leave it alone xP

The inevitable...
"But Vista has DX10!"

Captain Newbie said:

Tut. If a process dies, then all the resources associated with that process should be released. That's what an operating system is _for_!

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No, what the OS does is called memory management. The leaks are the application. And I have yet to see my XP ever not release resources from a terminated process. The only thing that does that for me is Java, but that isn't XP's fault, it's Sun's idiot JVM not realizing that the app has exited.

petteyg359 said:

No, what the OS does is called memory management. The leaks are the application. And I have yet to see my XP ever not release resources from a terminated process. The only thing that does that for me is Java, but that isn't XP's fault, it's Sun's idiot JVM not realizing that the app has exited.

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Amen to that about Java.

Also, XP salvaged all (as far as I could tell) memory when my C programs crashed.


Vista is not such a bad system. I am running it on any of my computers, although I have it. I tried it, it was slow, I uninstaled it. Now I know that when I get a new CPU, it's Gentoo time.