Vista is more than a pretty face

[Neuromancer]

Okay, since many people bash on Vista I thought I would start a thread to highlight the good points. I have a few things that I comes across very often, and now just will not install XP anymore because I find these features SO useful. But I am sure there are a ton more that I am missing and I just want to know what I am missing

So please, no derogatory remarks, you can save that for the other 99% of Vista threads. I am only interested in what features you have noticed that are new, and what ones you can no longer live without.




For me its the little things.

Video screensaver

I like to put on a couple of videos to fall asleep too (love my Xfiles/SG-1, I know the series very well and do not feel compeelled to watch so Ican listen to it and fall asleep. On XP, I wake up and my moniotr is showing the WMP Full screen image. (albeit mostly black, but the tool bar and stuff is up) In Vista, (I have been awake to witness this) the screensaver/power saving feature timer starts when you stop touching anything. As long as a video is playing... the monitor says on. As soon as it stops. Bam the monitor turnsa off. Very cool and very good for me, since I watch my videos EVERY night.


Ability to burn DVDs natively.

Have not explored this too much, wish it was widerspread.. of course it comes out just like XP did with CD burning about 1 year shy of the next medium. so this isn't reall a perk I suppose, but I like in a pinch to just drag n drop.

Networking.

the new networking setup is great. Its a little confusing at first since you cant just go right to network connections for setting static IP and such. But the new work/home/public settings make masking your presence REALLY easy, and although this gets some complaints because for instance enabling comaptability with XP networks is 2 more mouse clicks, they are not apparent ones, but still once you know, you know and its just a a great new feature.


1/2 credit for UAC..

okay, this is going to get poopooed i am sure. But I think its a great idea. Disable it, get your system all set up installed how you like, then reenable it. I think you will be surprised how often it does not come up. At least for me it doesnt. You can tweak it in secpol.msc anyway to reduce some of the stuff. and older games that need access to certain files... you can set to "run as" fair trade off IMHO. But I will not call this a straight benefit because many do not like any warnings. For serious enthusiasts.. this is a straight negative because we reinstall so much we only see the negstive side. (you want to see real security though? Try installing tiny firewall... uber secure and makes a PC ultra unuseable)

Disk Checking

WOW. Added a busted *** old laptop HDD to Vista on an external tip (before SP1) Vista told me the HDD had problems and needed to be fixed. Not incorrectly like XP does "this disk is unformatted ETC" but ran chkdsk on it fixed the files and bam, it was done fast. Gotta say that impressed me a bit, XP does that now, but not correctly. If there is a problem it wants to format the thing. Yikes!

I know I have more but I accidently posted cause I was switching from IMs Will post more tomorrow.. .please feel free to add your own positive experiences

 

[Automata]

To add:

Vista loads often used programs into RAM. With 8gb sitting here, it is a waste to not use it

What does it do for me? It loads WoW into RAM

 

[johnz]

Snipping Tool

Task Manager

Graceful gfx driver crashes(not since I first installed though)

Sidebar with useful gadgets. I used to use Google Desktop, but it wasn't as polished or useful.

 

[johnz]

To add:

Vista loads often used programs into RAM. With 8gb sitting here, it is a waste to not use it

What does it do for me? It loads WoW into RAM

Crap, that's a huge plus. I forgot about Superfetch :^/

 

[TempliNocturnus]

For starters, I like vistas disk management snapin. There's a shrink volume option, that can resize partitions. Haven't used it yet, but I can see it being useful if I'm too lazy to install Partition Magic or boot up GPartEd.

I don't believe this was available in XP (too lazy to boot up into XP right now and check), but you're able to set Vista's Task Scheduler actions to be triggered by events from the event logs. This feature, I can see being extremely useful.

I completely agree with you with UAC. I personally can't stand it, due to how often I install/uninstall apps, and tinker around, but I can see it being extremely useful for users who are not technically inclined.

 

[Neuromancer]

To add:

Vista loads often used programs into RAM. With 8gb sitting here, it is a waste to not use it

What does it do for me? It loads WoW into RAM

Oh man how did I miss that

I am only running 4GB, and still run a Pagefile though cuz, I am a multitasking bastage

Graceful crashes? Dunno about that. Once I ditched nVidia I had no crashes at all. Before that.. straight up BSODs... this is not Vistas fault though. (cant blame driver issues on the OS)

It does bring up another great point though.

Drivers.

Wow.. it is amazing how much more stuff is comaptible. No loading raid drivers modem or ethernet or sound.. .none of it. Just chipset and "special" devices.

 

[johnz]

I never got a BSOD from gfx drivers. There were a couple of games back in February 06, that would crash by resetting the drivers. The display would go to desktop, then go right back to the game where I left off. Annoying, but at least my machine didn't restart.

 

[Automata]

Oh, forgot another one.

When overclocking and doing stress testing for the video card, the system does not hard lock when the overclock fails, it simply resets the video driver. This saves so much time restarting and testing again.

 

[Neuromancer]

Yah this is what johnz was reffering to i think. I get that with my ATI card (even in XP)

johnz; you were a beta tester too? I dont know if 06 was typo or if you were referring to to longhorn (it was after that (02/06) it became vista i thinik...). But yah actuall ythe whole "crashing" thing has supposedly been improved in Vista. Striaght up OCers wont see it, but gerneral imcompatbabilty issues that normally BSOD a machine should now prompt a a response and even bring up the issue panel (event viewer sort of has more functionality then event viewer though). Nother good advance.


templi; didnt know about resizing. Awesome. Going to be using that soon i think

 

[johnz]

johnz; you were a beta tester too? I dont know if 06 was typo or if you were referring to to longhorn (it was after that (02/06) it became vista i thinik...).

Whoops, it's hard to keep track of years when you get old :^P I started using Vista at RC1, I meant Feb 07 in my post(a bit after official release)

 

[Albuquerque]

Power management on my little Dell Inspiron E1505 is far better than it ever was on XP -- and it's easier to manipulate because it's now all in one spot. Wireless power used to be wedged into device management, allowing USB devices to suspend was also buried in there. Some power options didn't even exist without 3rd party utilities like minimum / maximum CPU states, and even more didn't exist period like PCI-E power management.

Boot times are also far faster on Vista than XP for all my boxes.

I like that defrag is already a scheduled task, but it will only run if the system has been idle, continues to be idle, and you're not on batteries. Works fantastically.

There's a lot more command line options available in Vista, quite a few have been "extended" so that they can work against remote machines. Tools like WMIC, SC, and NETSH have considerably more functionality under Vista. This makes it great for scripting and automating things

 

[freeagent]

i like vista better then xp as well. i find the defrag is better in vista too it also doesnt seem like vista suffers from the same windows rot as xp. at first i was torn between the two, but the longer i used vista, the less i was attracted to xp. other things off the top of my head that i like, is native raid0 support, and that cool ribbons screensaver, because it spans accross both of my monitors, its groovey.

 

[gottcha]

It Looks Cooler!!!!! and runs smoother!

 

[oakstave]

I'll second what Thideras said, not only for OCing VC's but in general when Vista crashes, it doesn't lock the system. XP tends to either lock up, causing a hard reboot, or even worse, there is general instability in the system after a crash, such as having Windows Explorer hang or other application issues so you have to reboot after the crash anyway.

Seriously, Vista 'crashes' better than XP.

 

[hajalie24]

I love vista way more than xp, that when the dual boot didn't work, i didn't even care . I just uninstalled xp. And one thing I like about vista is the search button in the start menu, if i ever need a file i'll find it in a second. Im sure xp had it too, but vista's is easier to find

 

[Ben333]

I started in 2005 (i think) when a copy of Longhorn came with MSDN. I liked what I saw mostly and figured the bugs would be worked out soon enough and then I tried RC1 in 2006 (or 2007?) and was disappointed. Soon after I received a full copy of vista and was still disappointed. Guess I'll have to try SP1?