Windows XP "upgrade from Vista" review

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx

I was happy with vista until it corrupted its own boot manager last night. I have some pretty important things to email off of that machine (Sorry Jake!) and of all the times it decides to cock up it did so last night.

The problem I have is this: In XP I am forced to use OEM drivers (I have a Tosh laptop- Tosh by name, Tosh by nature.) so I cannot use the Nvidia drivers. If I do, the fans do not kick in.

In Vista, it seems the whole graphics-driver-in-charge-of-cooling thing has been handled differently and vista cools my graphics adapter no matter which driver I use. so... Yay Crysis!

As it is now I have Ubuntu installed, and I don't know wheather to install Vista again, or install XP. The *only* reason I am installing windows again is because of our project, Flow.

Ubuntu works wonderfully and actually runs my audio software FLStudio *better* than Windows. Consider that FLStudio is a Windows-only application... 'Nuff said.


I am SO pissed off with it right now it just isn't funny.

I will say this about Vista: it is the new ME. Make of it what you will, but if it's anything positive then you've clearly gotten the wrong idea.

Would you hurry up and release that already? -_-

Really enjoyable thx. I'm getting a new PC next year and I was going to put Vista on it but over the last few weeks I've decided to use XP instead because the whole reason I want a new PC is for better everyday performance.

Cyg: Bummer. well I hope you can sort it, not least so I can receive that email...

LMAO

Vista is utter shit, I've been telling everyone for years. Why doesn't anyone listen? :)

Well I suppose once they start putting all that Vista crap into XP from new XP updates then eventually Vista will SEEM good.

I foolishly put a few hours into getting my Vista install to work, so replacing it with XP, while theoretically a good idea, would feel very wasteful.

In fairness, though, any OS where I have to follow a convoluted guide to slipstream a SATA driver with its installer, in this day and age, deserves death.

I so badly want to go back to XP but I have so much installed in Vista.

People will probably not belive this but Vista deliberately sets out to screw up your HD. Everytime my screensaver comes on my HD goes on a marathon of a disk access that lasts for 1 hour. As soon as I switch off the SS the militant HD acess stops. It saves my screen but kills my hard drive. :/

Copying files from one folder to another seems to fail 40% of the time. Downloading files larger than 10 meg always results in IE 7 crashing.

My system feels slow and unresponsive and it feels bloated to the extreme.

Vista cannot possibly be the new OS that everyone will use. I refuse to believe that.

I'm looking forward to this one: http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

I fear they may be going a bit too far by duplicating some of Windows' bloat, but I'll reserve judgement until I have actually used a "finished" version.

It's so funny when you read the comments that people make about Vista, like "It's perfect for office apps", or "quit using 3 or 4 year old equipment and upgrade you ret**d!!!"... I bet Direct X 10 is for Office use, and I of course am positive that the hardware is at fault ;) ... NOT!

Yeah, i'm sticking with XP till the newer OS comes out. Not heard a good thing about vista.

I bought my wife a new computer 3 weeks ago. First thing I did when I got it home was reformat the hard drive effectively obliterating Vista, and installed XP. Ahhhh!! :)

Amon, I feel scared for you.


Except it more or less works, whereas ME more or less doesn't.

ME works, provided you sacrifice babies to it.

Where do you put them? I can't find the baby port.

I shove them in the fans, minces 'em up real nice.

Say that again -- FLStudio is probably the only application that is tying me to Windows at the moment. What manner of witchery is this?

I got a laptop running vista, about... a few months ago? :/
IDK, havent kept track..

Anyway, i have seen barely any of the problems people keep talking about. There is only a few big problems. It somewhat seems unresponsive on mostly all programs, and whenever i start it up, it does this annoying thing where the screen blinks on and off, and it cycles through the different screen settings. Such as widescreen, tiled, ect.

Other than that it works fine. So far.. :)

What I want is vista but without the piles of crap. I can accept advancement but after prolonged use I can say no-one really has taken to it.

Even my 100% technophobe girlfriend hates vista and has repeatedly asked me to put xp back on.

I agree 100% about vista being a new winme in terms of it not really doing it for anyone nor working how they want.

Fact is, XP is pretty much human friendly and simple.

People need limits and hard edges, they dont want the confusion that is vista.

Sounds like wine to me. ( http://www.winehq.org ) it works for a fair few things, theres an app search on this page. I find it works quite well, but you sometimes have to pinch a few native dlls. It tells you whats missing or why something fails when you run an app from the command line for example: $wine notepad

Bingo.

It pops up several errors on install due to codecs *but* I never use the codecs that failed to install. I find thet Fruity then works and uses less CPU than it does on windows. Odd! I can also have lower latency (even odder!).

I reinstalled vista last night, went to log in, it restarted, and then refused to boot again. Daft stupid software.

So, now I need to install enough software to enable me to burn the final of my three XP disks so I can re-install XP mediacenter, which works, after about 6 hours of downloading+installing software. Then, I can fix the vista boot issue, and boot back to vista. hate to say it, but as buggy as vista is, it fixed the only major issue I had on my laptop in XP, so i'm pretty much forced to use it.

Cool. My music PC is still running WinME (because the hardware is old and limited, works pretty much flawlessly and is super-easy to backup and restore) but when I end up having to replace the hardware I'll want to take advantage of the inevitably larger HD sizes that were introduced in the last century.

My vista laptop is up and healthy. Better than the other XP laptop, which has kinda had some "medical" treatment

Heh, Cygnus got XP installed again, last I heard Vista was surprisingly faster!

With enough memory, it's more responsive for desktop tasks, especially immediately after booting up. Everything else is wrong though.

I don't know why everybody disliked Windows Me. Back in its time, I used it on a Toshiba Satellite 2710 and it actually ran much better on it than Windows 98SE that came with the notebook. Then I upgraded to XP Home Edition on that machine when it came out. The entire 16bit-based Windows family sucked, but Me wasn't worse than the others.

Vista: I now have Vista Ultimate 32 Bit on my iMac at home (again) and next to it is a freshly bought Xbox 360. The only thing that sucks is that Microsoft asks you for money if you want to use XNA Studio to write stuff for the Xbox; they don't want money for XNA, but you can only upload crap to the Xbox 360 when you paid for the XNA creator's club membership. --THAT-- sucks. The only other complain that I have is that the Xbox 360 is LOUD.

Other than that, I can live with both Vista and the Xbox. And unlike Leopard, Vista actually runs very stable on my iMac... Now what does that tell me about the "it just works hype" that I once bought in...?

Windows ME was an abomination.

Gamertags on Vista sounded like an OK reason to upgrade but since latest dx/xna supports xbox live on XP (although 360 controller may be a prereq?) I think XP has got some good years ahead.

i dont know if it has to be a true 360/windows rebranded usb controller
but its better to get used to the look and feel of how it works if you do port stuff over ;)

wsad / keyboard is still supported though ... just not on xbox :))

speaking of which ... not all 360 buttons register in blitz ... atleast not for me.

I managed to install XP again on my lappy yesterday, and I seem to remember XP being faster than it is. Vista was surprisingly more responsive.

Random strange interesting fact: Install XP on a partition created by Vista and all the wierd file placement features of Vista appear in XP too.

IE Documents and Settings is now Users. putting any files in Docs and Settings gets them moved to Users.

Looks like the "Junction" feature of the new NTFS version is working in XP hehe.

but yeah, XP feels slugish compared to vista on my machine. I was surprised because just 2 days ago I was having a right whinge about how crap I thought Vista was, and that I was going to put XP back on.

BOY was i wrong.

Maybe you just explained your own problem. Do a complete reformat.

Definitely. if all that stuff appears you installed it on a Vista NTFS, not on a XP one which means that the whole overhead trash that is part of Vistas performance problem now is carrying over as well to XP

well, exactly. It would be nice if we could get vista to install on ye olde-NTFS version.

Either way, XP was placed on its own partition shortly after, but it was still strangely slower than i remember.

I would wait until they've released Service Pack1.

Bah, SP1 isn't the magic bullet everyone was hoping for. Maybe SP2. Maybe next year. Or the year after.


I dislike it because, no matter what I do, if I want to install graphics drivers, it's a BSOD every boot without fail.

I guess that it's quite safe to assume that a lot of bugs and performance issues will be fixed in there. Never thought about "Bah", the magic bullet...

According to someone I know who went on a beta testing programme with Microsoft, they have already internally abandoned Vista and are focusing on Windows 7.

Honestly i would do the same...

Windows ME could not do LAN networking at all, a cynic might say it was crippled for... who knows.

VISTA appears to be a hardware resource hugger, even if you have the hardware then no guarantees it would seem. Did vista need to be such a gargantuan hardware resource hugger - or was it designed to NEED more hardware?

Windoze 7 ? (I'm still running XP Home and MSoft did well there - apart from the home LAN set up regard whereby I've since learned that the XP Home networking is crippled to encourage you to creep towards the XP Professional package - bizness afterall I suppose?)

XP is the future, but thats an anachronism, Linux then ?

Prediction:

In 7 years vista will be the worlds most popular OS. After 2 mabe 3 service packs it will be running the way it should have been from the start (just like 'daddy' XP) and still they will be looking to Linux and OSX to find the inspiration to release the next *initially* crippled son-of-a-vista.

In 7 years, Windows 7 will be the worlds most popular OS unless Apple starts to realize that vampire like money sucking while selling ASUStek subpar quality stuff (their systems are produced by asus) isn't an acceptable business model. In that case Windows might actually really lose place 1 after the recent strong raise in market share in the education sector. (the amount of macbooks at our university raised by 1000% - 2000% in the last 14 months depending on if you take institutes into account as well)

If MS is intelligent then they take the most important features from Vista and add them to XP SP3.

Because Vista will need more than only a few months, thats something that SP1 clearly shows which does not adress a single of Vistas massive problems. Its still seriously slower than XP on the same machine while not giving any real adventage in the same go.

In 7 years Vista will be nothing but a bad memory. Like Noel said, much like Windows Me.

XP was actually significantly crippled by SP2. It's also odd that Windows 2000 has received twice the number of service packs in the same time. Why is support for XP so poor?

Hahah, that's got to be the best OS insult ever.

Why does everyone call the next version "Windows 7"? Surely it's only Windows 6 (5.0 being Win2K, 5.1 being XP, and 5.2 being Vista)?

If MS was intelligent they would have ripped off larger parts of FreeBSD, than just winsock2. By the way, retroactively adding more functionality to XP would be a pretty stupid move for Microsoft. It would eliminate their only compelling reason for people to buy Vista.

5.0 is Win2k, 5.1 is XP, 5.2 is 2k3, 5.3 is XP64, not sure about 2k3-64. Vista should have been no more than 5.5 but they jumped it to 6.0. The next version of Windows should probably be 6.1. But will probably actually be 7.0.

Vista, 8 min to unzip a 200k file?!? GJ MS!

My friend has a QUAD Core Intel with 3 gigs of ram with Vista on it, yesterday I asked him to install a World of warcraft addon, it's basically a 200k zip file, I kid you not, It took 8 minutes to unzip the file.. 200 flipping Ks.

I did a file copy test over the network with my girlfriends laptop, first with Vista and next with XP, over 30 min to copy a 1 meg file from vista to my xp machine!
Then I booted her system to XP and it took seconds.

File copy is one of the most basic OS function.

Vista? no thanks!

yep I was gobsmacked at how crap unzipping files was, it was slower than some kind of DOS 6.22 PC! I'm gonna cling onto XP shouting "no, please don't take it away" until Vista is "remixed" via some serious service packs or until something new comes along...

Well, yeah. But its been patched a bit since then. As i remember it was only the live update that caused loads of problems. The CD version was for some reason more stable. XP works kind of ok now though (after what, 7-8 years?)

--a coincidental bad trip down memory lane--
I installed XP the other day on a friends PC. It was basically SP-(none) a first release prehaps?. It was HORRIBLE compared to what SP2 is now (after being updated and patched a million times) It was, as expected (and remembered) as unstable as hell and it took ages to get it up to spec due to a multitude of communication & driver problems. Anyway, my point is that XP sp 0 is a shadow of what XP is now.

So as i said mabe one day (when it is old fashioned and out of date like XP is now) "vista" will have its "finest hour". (or mabe we should just say "better hour" :)

Win2000 had more SPs because it lacked many things back then. The initial Win2k was not even able to use DX6+ as the NT kernel never was meant to be used as a "media OS" ... all things that XP had out of the box.

And I don't think Vista will shine in the near future now that XP SP3 is raising on the horizont

Why do so many people have a problem with this, Vista is not an upgrade to Xp.. Its a completely new OS enviroment.

Improvements mean things are more advanced than before, this comes at a price; in this case cpu/gpu cycles. Name one Windows release that surpassed its later in performence? There isnt one, all previous versions of Windows ran faster than its predesscor. Advancing technologies take advantantage of newer hardware thus newer hardware is generally more-powerful than its later.

Summary:
Vista was not ment to out-preform XP, it was ment to out feature it. New features take adavantage of newer hardware thus speed loss is not noticable as newer hardware is generaly better/faster than it's later.

If your running hardware that you used for your Xp then yah, stay with Xp. Dont expect Vitsa to take advantage of aging hardware, it simplt won't.

Now when all the whinning is done and the average house-hold system is considered 'newer hardware' then Vista will be embraced as the norm and Xp will slowly phase-out.

Every OS advancement leaves behind it a trail of whinning users that 'don't want to change'.. Based on that we'd all still be using 8-bit processors and Dos, or better yet Atari 2600's.

Vista was meant to be a completely new OS
Actually it isn't

It is still the same core but new features. Windows 7 potentially might become what Vista was meant to be, a completely new OS.

Performance wise, Vista is a downgrade not an upgrade.
Feature wise, Vista is en par with XP when it comes to the usefull features beside DX10 which MS just does not want to have outside of Vista. Lets see how much MS likes the fact that CG 2.0 supports geometry shaders as well

And you are actually seriously wrong.
Microsoft ALWAYS advertised Vista as the new Windows that will be faster than XP. Whenever this point was mentioned they clearly stated that Vista will be faster.

And 1.5 to 2 times slower on high end machines means not faster to me but a step towards stone age. (C2D E6600 2x3Ghz, 8800GTS SC, 2GB RAM, Rating 5.8)
Vista SP1, meant to solve some of this problems, didn't even adress them. So Vistas next hope is SP2 due to somewhen in the further future (end 2008 spring 2009, who knows)


MS did a seriously wrong decision when they decided to cut all the featuers that made Vista outstanding just to throw it half baked on the market.
No WinFS, still bound to that trashi stone age API etc. Even the so called new great driver model is not of much use as WHQL still cause straight bluescreens in different cases. So much to the "new better" world lol.

Vista to me is a beta for Windows 7 but I don't consider it a serious OS. Its the 2007 reincarnation of Windows ME. Useless, instable, causing a lot of problems and definitely not worth the money a license would cost.
I do not even have it installed although I've 3 free licenses simply because that piece of shit does not even correctly recognize my broadcom onboard LAN nor my wireless pci card. Thats no OS, thats a collection of smaller and larger problems and new ways to annoy users!

Nobody minds change when it's for the better. What the hell is so great in Vista to change for? It's a scam-of-an-OS designed to blind the cud-chewers with science and nothing more. There's nothing there that's worth scratching your behind for. In fact if I was offered it for free I would have to turn it down in the same way I'd turn down the offer to shoot myself in the foot.