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Vista Boycott?

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My dad has been running Vista for months now and it's gone without a hitch. Actually, the only problems we've encountered are because of user error. Once you get used to how Vista works, it's a very nice OS.
 
Microsoft made a basic blunder with Vista that made them look like politicians. They said, or at least suggested, that Vista would provide much more than it really does. I'm sure the majority of you remember what a pain XP was when it first came out, and my dissatisfaction from Vista comes from Microsoft not being able to improve on the situation.

Vista's 64bit file system structure is convoluted at best.

I don't think it's an awful operating system, but for the vast sums of money, time, and top-notch programmers they threw at the project, I expect more. The problem with Vista is that it failed to meet the expectations of its users.

Having to debate whether it performs better than a 6 year old operating system (Windows XP) is an exercise in futility. Vista should be far superior to XP, and it's leaving a great deal to be desired.
 
I personally hate the new defragmenter... I WANT TO SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

Then I screwed it up trying out Diskeeper 9 because there is no more MMC. Now I cannot defrag my storage/program drives because they're no longer linked back with the default defragmenter, been lazy to find a fix on that until my frustration with the defrag system fades.

Then I hate some of the round-about ways I need to take to get to such things as "Network Connections." I made a shortcut for myself so I didn't have to make the 5-menu-hop to get there..
 
I personally hate the new defragmenter... I WANT TO SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

Then I screwed it up trying out Diskeeper 9 because there is no more MMC. Now I cannot defrag my storage/program drives because they're no longer linked back with the default defragmenter, been lazy to find a fix on that until my frustration with the defrag system fades.

Then I hate some of the round-about ways I need to take to get to such things as "Network Connections." I made a shortcut for myself so I didn't have to make the 5-menu-hop to get there..

Vista is supposed to be easier to use lol. Can't you just right click on the network icon in your taskbar?

In any case, that is true - Vista does not seem to like 3rd party apps doing its job :D
 
i work at a computer help desk at my college, where our computer that's connected to the server is XP and will stay XP, and we have a Vista that we basically use to be familiar with Vista.

I will agree with people that if you're a little more than an average PC user, Vista will run stable and will probably not give you too many errors that aren't user related. It has some fun features I guess, but nothing very original. It's an OS, it drains way more RAM than it should, seeing as 2GB of data will only keep most Vista computers going at a fast walk kinda pace as compared to the running pace it keeps on XP, but that's also to be expected with a new operating system.

But I do have an EXTREME grievance with Vista that stems from their SP1. One of my main duties as a computer desk worker is to get people hooked into our WPA-Enterprise secured wireless network for the school. SP1 has a glitch or something that has made it to where it will not even pick up the network anymore, and the only way to get a student body of almost 10,000 online with their laptops is by uninstalling SP1. What further disapoints me is that since this pack came out a few weeks ago, there has been no fix. This should be a no-brainer for an OS that has auto-update tattooed all over itself. This is what I call a prime example of 'really though, this is our fault, and we're not going to fix it'.
 
I personally hate the new defragmenter... I WANT TO SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

Remember the DOS defragmenters and those from Windows 95 days?

Vista should have brought those back.

When I loaded XP onto my gran's computer (she used to have 98 and knows very very little about computers) her first remark was: "Where did the nice little blocks go? I liked to watch it working..."
 
SP1 is BETA software and as such should not be implemented in a production environment. If there's a bug, report it; that's what BETA testers do...

We have sent microsoft information on the problem, but have recieved no information back from them, as far as i understand.

i think i must correct myself though, and apologize for the misunderstanding, it was one of the regular auto-updates in the system that caused the error with the wpa network. i falsely made the assumption it was SP1 after glancing at it when i was system restoring someone's computer the other day. i've been trying to find out exactly which update it is so i can just manually uninstall it instead of using system restore, which i consider to be about as useful as voodoo magic anyways.
 
I was one of those that blindly "boycotted" Vista as well. I had no need for it (still don't, probably). But then a copy of Ultimate fell in my lap. I couldn't resist installing it and I have to say I am pretty impressed.

I haven't had a single issue yet. Aside from the ridiculous strongarm tactics to get people to upgrade (rather than offering a superior product, that is), Vista does seem to be an improvement over XP.

The only thing that kills me is the memory footpring. In XP, after a fresh restart I would only be using ~175mb of RAM. In Vista it is somewhere between 500 and 550MB. If I didn't have 2gb I would be ****ed...
 
I just want to say:

A few years back, my marriage was failing. That's when our couseler said to 'install Linux Ubuntu'. Within weeks, we saw a complete turnaround in our communication and love life.

That;s when I realized that Linux is the answer to everything. Dodgy OS's...Linux. World Hunger...Linux to the rescue. AIDS...linux can fix that too.

Linux is the 'little black dress' of thread hijacking...you can do it anytime anywhere, and no techie will blink twice. Roll on linux fanboys, roll on...and give yourselves a pat on the back for using linux...oh wait, you already did.

That made me LOL at work.

/spam

I am "boycotting" vista until I need DX10 then Vista here I come baby. I am more waiting on SP1 to get out and create a whole bunch of new issues, I mean ahem... fix the existing problems with Vista.

Nah seriously it isn't that bad...
 
I'd be happier if all the XP fanboys stopped telling people they have to have dualcore and 2Gb of RAM.

If you dummy down alot of the stuff (like aero) that users don't need, you can run it on a single core (no HT) with 1Gb of RAM and it runs suprisingly well.

Until you've done the testing, best to reserve judgment.

A boycott is a stupid idea. Tell you what. We'll boycott Vista, and we'll boycott toilet paper. If we good alternatives, that'd be one thing. But we don't. And we won't

This is about the average end user, which none of us truly are.
 
I'd be happier if all the XP fanboys stopped telling people they have to have dualcore and 2Gb of RAM.

If you dummy down alot of the stuff (like aero) that users don't need, you can run it on a single core (no HT) with 1Gb of RAM and it runs suprisingly well.

Until you've done the testing, best to reserve judgment.

A boycott is a stupid idea. Tell you what. We'll boycott Vista, and we'll boycott toilet paper. If we good alternatives, that'd be one thing. But we don't. And we won't

This is about the average end user, which none of us truly are.

I can certainly agree that a boycott is a stupid idea; that was the original intention of this post, to shed light on the fact that bad Vista experiences are not the fault of the OS in a majority of cases.

We were beta testing Vista at the first release over DEVNET back in early 2006 and have built 75 Vista boxes in 2007. I'd say that we've done the testing and then some. That said, I can state unequivocally that I'm certainly not an XP fanboy, but rather a Vista Evangelist.

I will say, however, that if you have a single core with 1GB of RAM, it's likely an older machine for which there's really no compelling reason to upgrade. Better to save your money for the next machine you're going to build/buy and put Vista on that. Why settle for half measures in search of immediate gratification? This goes for both geeks and grandmas.

Likewise, if you're buying a new machine, why not get enough ram and a dual core to run all of Vista's features, including Aero? Both are ridiculously cheap right now.
 
The only thing that kills me is the memory footpring. In XP, after a fresh restart I would only be using ~175mb of RAM. In Vista it is somewhere between 500 and 550MB. If I didn't have 2gb I would be ****ed...

You have to remember that Vista tries to anticipate how you will use your computer, so it loads the most frequently used programs into memory and therefore uses as much memory as it possibly can in an attempt to improve your experience. IMHO, this is a good thing. RAM is the most underused performance enhancing piece of hardware. Sure it gets used in games and other apps, but why not make use of it when you're not using a game? Why not load frequently used programs? You've spent however much money on your RAM, you might as well get some use of it. Lastly, it's not like if you throw a curve ball at it (some App you've never used), it can't just page out the required space, just like XP/OS X/every other OS.
 
We have sent microsoft information on the problem, but have recieved no information back from them, as far as i understand.

i think i must correct myself though, and apologize for the misunderstanding, it was one of the regular auto-updates in the system that caused the error with the wpa network. i falsely made the assumption it was SP1 after glancing at it when i was system restoring someone's computer the other day. i've been trying to find out exactly which update it is so i can just manually uninstall it instead of using system restore, which i consider to be about as useful as voodoo magic anyways.

If you actually looked on MS"s knowledge base for the problem, you would see that they released a fix for that about 6 months ago :p.
 
i beg to differ, as the problem only arose from the update released around the 10th of october.

i by no means am boycotting vista, just waiting another year for more programs that will run smoothly on vista 64-bit.

it's relatively stable, but it's slower than what people using xp are used to. that would be a generalization i get from the all the customers i get who have vista, most of them seem rather unhappy with it. and these are those main users that were mentioned in the reply a few messages up.
 
I'd be happier if all the XP fanboys stopped telling people they have to have dualcore and 2Gb of RAM.

If you dummy down alot of the stuff (like aero) that users don't need, you can run it on a single core (no HT) with 1Gb of RAM and it runs suprisingly well.

Until you've done the testing, best to reserve judgment.

A boycott is a stupid idea. Tell you what. We'll boycott Vista, and we'll boycott toilet paper. If we good alternatives, that'd be one thing. But we don't. And we won't

This is about the average end user, which none of us truly are.


I'm definitely not an XP fanboy, very happy with Vista on my main rig... but if eye candy is the main advantage... and you need dual core and 2gigs of RAM to get the eye candy... why bother with a dumbed down version of the OS? Stick with XP until you get a rig that can handle the only real reason to get it.
 
But again, you don't need 2GB of ram, nor a dual core processor to use Vista -- even with the eye-candy. Example: Pentium-M 1.4ghz, ATI x9600 128mb, 1GB DDR-333 = works fine. Hell, it works better than fine, it boots faster on this old laptop than XP Pro did. Outlook certainly opens faster, so does IE.

People who insist that it needs all this horsepower to run "optimally" have also never tried running it on sub-optimal hardware.
 
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