Not knocking Vista, but...

It really is unstable. I don't get any BSOD's or anything I just get a lot of the "The installer has failed", "The app has not started properly" etc. errors popping up.

IE7 can't seem to complete a download without an error popping up. The Sidebar keeps crashing when playing windowed games and this version of vista seems to be svhost crazy. I have 13 svhost processes running and whenever I try to shut one down it just pops back up again.

When booting up windows starts within a minute. There's aproblem though. Once on the desktop it appears it has fully loaded but after about a minute the HD starts going on one of it's missions. What I mean by that is that the HD starts working really hard and goes militant for about 5 minutes.

File tranfers are slower but windows tries to trick you in to thinking the transfer is fast. What happens is this. When I try to transfer a file of about 400-600mb a window pops up stateing that it's calculating the time needed to transfer the file. 4 minutes later it states that it will take 20 seconds to transfer the file and then it transferts it.

The glass feature of the windows is nice if only it worked properly when you start other applications. I've noticed that when I have a lot of apps open the glass feature turns itself off. I think it does this to give back some resources to apps that are running.

Vista Overall is a nice (meh!), kind of nice OS. I would ask that Microsoft recall it though and re-release when it's more stable, faster and doesn't drain your HD of it's lifespan.

:/

Why not go back to XP? I can't see any benefits in moving to Vista.

I'm thinking about it. I may go back to XP in the end but I might wait to see if any service packs for Vista get released.

In most versions of Windows...

When SP1 it got working

When SP2 it got stable

I'm waiting Vista SP1 by the end of year..

Well, the end of the year is a long way off. If it's going to take Microsoft that long to release a service pack to fix these issues then I'll go back to XP.

MS announced SP1 for Vista for the second half of the year.

In the meantime, wait for the Vista updates for your applications.

And if you want to see a BSOD every four or five minutes on Vista, just install avast Anti-Virus for Vista - it reliably crashes Vista, especially when you try to launch the setup of Microsoft Visual C#.NET 2005 Express Edition; that always blew my Vista Ultimate Edition to pieces until I uninstalled the damn thing.

It's a new version of Windows, and migrating to it is almost as painful as moving your entire software environment to a completely different platform like Linux. By the way, this actually is what the "multi-platform" promise of .NET is all about: Bringing compatibility to the different flavours of Windows that are out there... Funny thing, though, is that Microsoft themselves is not selling one single .NET application. They still don't eat their own dogfood. But that is another story. (Don't get me wrong, I think that C#.NET is the -ONE- thing Microsoft did right and I really like it. It's just, hm, "curios" and "funny" to see that the prophet is not living by his own word.)

I am a hardware & network specialist for a local ISP and let me tell you...Vista sucks a big one. The fact that every computer vendor decided to package vista with their new pc's the day of release and not allow xp is horrible. I can't tell you how many times a day I have to work on a vista machine because
A) its unstable with everything
B) pc manufactures don't understand what system requirements mean.
c) Users cannot understand the whole run as administrator concept.

Overall it's a huge memory hog pretty much any game i've run on it was slowed down by the side bar and every time I install a patch for a game or software I have to run it in windows xp compatibility mode....not cool

Hmmm... I must be doing something really wrong. I have yet to see BSOD in Vista and I've been using it for months now. Same thing with applications and games. Only a few did not want to work straight away but it was easily remedied by changing their execution properties. What are you guys doing to have so many problems?

Barney

We bought a Micorsoft Operating System. :)

I haven't had a BSOD either but get a lot of the popup windows telling me that a process has failed or an app has failed to respond; installer has stopped responding and Sidebart crashes etc.

It's not a very good start for Vista imo.

Also, how come we have to pay more for Vista than anyone else in other parts of the world?

Personally, I find Vista is rock solid. I had a few problems after installing Tortoise SVN, but it's been fine since I uninstalled it.

I do find that IE 7 complains almost every time I close it down, but I can't blame that on Vista.

You haven't been to my part of the world where Vista Ultimate RRP is almost $550 and average salary is just about $770. Probably most expensive Vista in the world...

Barney

$770 - i do hope that's not per annum

Per month.

Barney

When I had Vista installed it seemed *more* stable than XP, but then as most people here know, I have a tendancy to break my PC.

I never really wanted to buy Vista, since XP does all I want. However, Im going to buy nVidia 8800 GTX tomorrow, and feel like Im going to miss out since they say drivers aren't optimized for windows xp, just Vista.
Ultimate version would cost me around 1900kr (~$270).

However, doing research on the matter, it just doesn't seem like its worth it. Maybe microsoft will back down and ultimately release dx10 for xp? I can only hope :D

I told you Vista is pants, many times. You've only got yourself to blame.

Amon, I thought you said in the other post: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=67146#750487



Lol Not having second thoughts ru? :P

chaotic: Those drivers for Vista are notoriously *not* so good. nVidia have been accused of deleting each and every negative post regarding the stability of their drivers under Vista (for any of their hardware products).

They *will* sort it out, of course, but things really are at an early stage right now.

I would like to install Vista on my PC, but until networking works (ie., Vista will pick up settings via DHCP, which currently it refuses to do) and graphics drivers are truly optimised *and* Creative work out the new way of things and completely rewrite their sound drivers... I will wait. Oh, and I will actually buy Vista, as I've never paid for any other Microsoft OS because I didn't consider them at all well written.

A likely cause: poor hardware drivers, in particular your motherboard or IDE/SATA controller drivers.

The only time Win2000 was horribly unstable for me (blue-screen galore) with with data integrity issues was when I had reinstalled the OS, but hadn't quite gotten around to putting on the IDE busmastering drivers (VIA 4-in-1). Up until that point they'd always seemed more or less "optional", things had always just worked under Win95 and Win98... But it sure made all the difference - after adding those drivers, all problems and BSOD's disappeared, and things were rock-solid.

Given how abyssmal the Vista driver support is for older hardware, I have a sneaky suspision that this is what you're running into here.

If you haven't already, check your motherboard manufacturer's website and look for the latest drivers. Depending on how old and actively supported your hardware is, you may just be flat out of luck.

That's pretty funny. Just a couple of days ago I saw you praising it relentlessly =]


Remember IE7 is NOT the same as on XP - it was originally going to be named IE7+, but people thought it was confusing so it was dropped. I use FlashGet and two out of four plugins which worked fine in XP, crash IE7 in Vista with DEP issues immediately every open. Turning them off in Network and Internet --> Internet Options --> Manage Add-Ons sorts that out.

Also make sure you didn't get Flash player installed by a website - some websites install dodgy old versions which crash IE7 in Vista as well. Get the latest version from filehippo.com. Or the Adobe webpage I suppose =]

If you have any other plugins installed you will have to fiddle around with disabling them and seeing if it helps things.


Every version of Vista. =] You must be doing something special though - I only get 11 ;]


If your system is still responsive to user action, it's indexing. If your system has slowed down, it's because in Vista services can now be started on a delay basis (automatic, manual, disabled and automatic (delay)) - I guess some of those are starting up, but I've never noticed to tell the truth. I suspect you're talking about the indexing.


I have no idea why. I noticed that back in the betas.


No, it depends on the apps. One of them must be using OpenGL or DX or an old version of Java or maybe SDL or something else that Glass doesn't like (there's plenty). If Vista notices your system has come to a crawl because of Glass (and your system really has to not do much for 5 minutes except be completely busy) it will bring up a dialog asking if you want to turn it off first.


You should have beta tested. Then you would have known what you were in for before buying it. Releasing Vista in it's current state was a terrible decision, but MS had contracts to fulfill with Dell etc.


Vista SP1 is planned for 2008.


There you go then. =] I'll tell you, you WILL miss how a couple of things worked in Vista (and possibly Ribbons, I'm addicted to that thing), but at least XP works.


Never had a problem with Avast!, though I don't use C#.NET 2005, but I have used a lot of crazy stuff <shrugs>


It's a lie. Vista drivers are not officially beta, but should still be considered so.


It's not. There's probably nobody here that should get Ultimate. Home Premium does all that most people will need. Unless you have a server setup using Active Directory.


Nope.


ENAY's just a troll.


Works fine for me and my router... see! I'm posting here =]


They say their drivers are beta but I think they are more functional than nVidia's atm. EAX is dead and there's nothing Creative can do except create an OpenAL workaround.


XP is definately a better candidate for being bought on those grounds. Vista is a better candidate for being bought on the grounds that you don't /want/ to pirate it.

That's a "feature" that many people ran into -- supposedly it works OK on all microsoft networks, but not very well if you have a hardware router doing DHCP for you.

Luckily, there is a fix for it.

A quick google returned the following (among many similar pages)

http://thedaneshproject.com/techblog/archive/vista-not-working-with-dhcp/

I think one word sums it up ... "bargepole"

I'm going to play the optimistic route (for once), I feel that Microsoft may be able to pull it off once the retail "beta" stage is done with (post-SP1 times, etc)...

The only thing that worries me is that Microsoft is already planning the next Windows (codenamed Vienna) to come out in a couple years time.............there's no way Vista will be up to XP-standards in that time with regards to adoption rate.

If it took them this long to get Vista out the door, do you think there's a snowballs chance in hell they'll get a radically new OS out in a couple years?

They could always leave Vista half-broken and sell the actual SP2 and up packs as individual OSs. >.>

I mean, isn't that what Apple is essentially doing with it's OSX?

What makes you think Vienna is going to be radically different? I'd wager that "Vienna" is effectively going to be "Vista that works", much like XP was "Windows 2000/NT that works".

Not necessarily because it's bigger or cleverer, but because in the interim, companies that aren't Microsoft, will have figured out how to write software that complies to Vistas quirkiness.

> ENAY's just a troll.

Come on, if you're gonna quote 10 times in one post, at least quote text from the right people.

@(Wii) Genexi2 - Actually, no, that's not what Apple does. OS X 10.0.x is vastly different from 10.4.x (the current version). Look at it this way...

If you look at the version numbers of Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista, you'll see that NT is 4.0, XP is 5.0, XP is 5.1, and Vista is 6.0, but they are all based on the NT core. Apple designates their version numbers as follows:

The part before the decimal point is basically the core. So where Vista is technically "NT version 6.0", Apple says "10" for the name of its core instead of "NT". The next digit is the version, which in the current case is 4. So this is the fourth major version of their operating system "10". The last digit is the service pack, which is currently 8. So basically, if you had the most up to date version, you would be running operating system 10, version 4, service pack 8 - hence version 10.4.8.

When Leopard comes out, that will be version 10.5.0. It will be a new version of the OS (like going from XP to Vista), not a service pack, and users of the current version will get a lot more out of it than what they do with service packs.

Technically, I guess they could call it OS 15, since it is their 15th major version of their operating system, which would reduce the confusion caused by the current versioning method with a few non-Apple users, but that doesn't have the same ring or brand recognition as "OS X".

I hope this helps!

I am running an XP/Vista dual boot at home and I like Vista. I also have beta'd some since about a year ago. As I write this, I am putting Vista as a single boot on my laptop and see if I can run it without any problems.

I'm quite keen on vista, it has run great on my system, which is quite old in the scheme of things. Socket 754 A64 3000+ AGP 6600GT.

It seems to me that the determining factor for running vista well is your system ram, even a basic shader 3 card handles the GUI well, and the vista OS seems a lot snappier than XP on my machine. I don't really have enough ram to run the more demanding games but for apps Vista seems a nice improvement.

Pure dumb luck.

I will wait till XP is defunct and Vista SP 5 is out :)

Vista was supposed to be the radically new OS out in a couple of years. They scrapped it because it was hideously unstable (read:MS don't know how to make an OS from 'scratch'). The same thing will happen in another 'couple of years' time and in another 5 years we'll have an OS that's only slightly better than Vista.


I did. Cut n paste, quote, reply, newline, wash rince and repeat...


Except 10.4 was not much different to 10.3, 10.0 was not much different to 10.1 and the same goes for everything in between.


Or a multiple core CPU/multiple CPUs. I tested Vista on a dual P3 1gig machine with 512MB RAM and it performed magnificently better than on my home Athlon 64 3gig with 512MB. An extra gig on my home machine and it was back up to speed...

@The ho hum nick - Actually, 10.4 was very different from 10.3. Among about 200 other smaller things, the additions of spotlight, expose, and dashboard were huge. Kind of like how Vista adds the spotlight clone, expose clone, and dashboard clone... But anyway, here's Apple's list of the 200ish new features that were added in the upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4 - http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html Admittedly, some of the features listed are more significant than others, but they can't all be winners.

As for the differences between the other versions, I didn't own a Mac at the time, so I'm not entirely sure, but I'd suspect that there were similar levels of improvement between them. I know for a fact that there was a GUI change between 10.2 and 10.3, not as drastic as the change between XP and Vista (more like between XP and 2003 server), and the bundled apps (like Mail.app) have been constantly improving.

Expose was the only addition I'd call relatively big. Searchig features have always been there, spotlight itself is just an advancement of what is already there (and arguably should have been in since 10.0) and dashboard might be huge to a gadget freak, but to anyone else there's been things to do the same job(s) for years. Not huge.


Actually, MS envisioned/described what would have become WinFS before Spotlight even existed (and WinFS still hasn't made it into Vista), there is no expose equivalent period and yeh... gadgets. I turn them off personally.

Vista is a mark above XP for the new gfx driver system and the new audio subsystem. Nobody's pretending it's a major step up from XP, apart from MS and everyone who can't see behind Glass.


Glancing very quickly at the list, it appears to be on par with an XP service pack to me.

The only big OS improvements that aren't actually some bundled software are Core Image/Audio and Aqua's 3D accelerations, which again, should have been solid since 10.0. Those features alone actually make Mac OS X -usable-.


I read in depth articles written by <insert memory loss here> of each release and the differences between that and the previous one. Each article was between 5-20 pages and reading them during work, it took me some days to finish. Suffice to say, I was well versed in OS X evolution about 1.5 years ago, but having not spent any time with them since I have plum forgotten everything. I did however come away with the knowledge that in fact no, they were not big deals. The first few versions simply made the OS almost usable, 10.4 is what the OS should have been from the start (arguably fully usable).


There were GUI changes between every version I believe, although 10.0 to 10.1 may not have been significant (from metal to some other shinier metal to jet black basically)


XP and 2003 have the same GUI. You may have meant 2000 to XP, although it's actually more comparable to changing from one XP Theme to another. It's still all the same stuff, it just looks different. Eye candy alone does not a good OS upgrade make.


One should hope so. They were a disgrace in the beginning.

So, vista is the recent edition of 'Millenium Edition', better of waiting for vienna....

Ho hum, just thought I'd mention that your sig link "Remember Legend of the Red Dragon" doesn't work as is thanks to a stray back slash.

@ho hum... & your FF Character link results in a 'ff. server is taking too long to respond...' page.

@The ho hum nick

The Expose clone I refer to in Vista is Flip 3d. It's not a perfect comparison, since they took different approaches in the presentation, but they both serve the same function - display smaller versions of the open windows so that users can easily pick the one they are trying to get to.

As for comparing 10.3 to 10.4 feature additions to an XP service pack, here's Microsoft's page on what was added in SP2 - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/features.mspx There's nothing wrong with what MS added, and in fact I think it was an excellent service pack, but it was just that - a service pack. It fixed IE problems, improved the firewall and its associated default settings, added in some new drivers, and rolled up some patches. It did exactly what a good service pack is supposed to do - fix things that were broken. The 10.4 upgrade added new features like Expose, Spotlight, Dashboard, smart folders, video chat, grid capabilities, Core Image/Video, and Automator, plus it fixed things - much like what Vista is doing above XP now. It did exactly what a new version of the OS is supposed to do - fix things and add new things.

Everything else in our back and forth is just opinions about what "should have been" in old versions (there's plenty that could be said about both platforms), the relative merits of certain features (again, applies to both camps), and whether going from some old version to another was "worth it" (ditto). Since my goal here was to inform someone about the Apple versioning scheme, not get sucked into a debate which OS is "better" (an exercise in futility), I'm going to get back to coding now!

Vista could not possibly be as bad as ME. Even if every real or imagined rumour you have ever heard about Vista was true, it would not be the atrocity that is Windows ME.

@Flame, fair point, it'd be going some to equal the wobble factor that ME had. Although MSoft do seem to have (needlessly ?) pushed the hardware envelope somewhat for Vista.

@Ho-hum - your FF link works now - nice website.

Uh, no, Vista actually works. It's more of a '2003 update', but then 2003 was a mere 'XP update', XP was a mere '2000 update' - only 2000 was actually a pretty big NT4 update. In any case, 2003 has the most solid and stable kernel of any Windows OS ever, so they would really have to have worked miracles to cock it up as much as ME.

On the other hand, if they released what Vista was GOING to be before they scrapped it and started just bolstering stuff onto 2003, then you might have been quite close.


That's odd, it works for me. I knew that backslash looked strange. I guess IE7 is less strict (wow, shocker) on that than whatever you're using.


I'm pretty sure you're the only person that gets that =]


Flip 3D is not even close. Flip 3D is simply a graphical version of Alt-Tab, which has always been there. Expose is much, much more.


So was 10.4. So Apple have the gift of the gab better than MS do - they need to, because they're selling it. It's like MS with Vista. It's not as great as they make it out to be. What is listed on that Apple page are hundreds of 'improvements' that are more or less completely insignificant. And they list seperate updates for each app bundled with the OS as well - which obviously is a bonus, but not an OS upgrade. MS with their completely free service pack have obviously chosen to cut down on man hours and simplify a lot of what has gone into it. But I'd say the changes especially to the security system in XP SP2 are on par with the changes to Core Image/Audio and Aqua 3D in 10.4.


The thing is, I don't consider the changes in Vista to be much more significant than an XP service pack either.

I do agree with your last paragraph though =]

*Shudder*