Should I upgrade to Vista?

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I recently got the opportunity to upgrade to Vista at no cost so I'm seeking some advice.

Is there any performance reason to upgrade?

Will it run what I currently play (WoW, ET:QW, TF2)?

Most of what I've read in the past hasn't led me to think upgrading is a good idea. Is there any reason to upgrade now?

I bet one of the 10,000 other Vista threads might help answer your question

No reason at all to upgrade now.

Lackluster DX10 VideoCards = No real reason to upgrade to Vista.

I think Shiho put up some nice threads if your looking to tweak XP UI to look more like Vista.

Is there any reason to upgrade now?

No.

If you have the GPU hardware, maybe for DX10, but even then, I'm hearing rumors that the hacker community will have it running on XP.

My own Vista experience has been a nightmare of dropped network connections, performance problems and non-existant drivers. Over the weekend, I wiped my OEM copy of Vista for XP and the overall difference is incredible.

I'm hearing rumors that the hacker community will have it running on XP.

Yeah thats not going to happen.. at least not without a ridiculously huge overhead of a wrapper that will kill your performance.

Given how marginal the differences (so far) between DX10 titles and DX9 titles I cant see that many people going out of their way to achieve this..

That being said once DX10 cards are running well.. Vista should be at SP1 which improves so much about Vista its not even funny.

As others have said:

In a word, "no".

In more words, "Hell no! Well, not until at least SP1."

Bear wrote:

the opportunity to upgrade to Vista at no cost

This is where the fallacy lies. There is most certainly a cost, just not in the usual currency.

Thanks gang! Your comments are pretty much on par with what I was thinking but I wanted some independent confirmation.

Given the option of free Vista, what do y'all think of dual booting? My resident expert suggests that I run it on a VM just to kick the tires, since I won't be getting a dx10 card any time soon.

Given the option of free Vista, what do y'all think of dual booting?

If you're going to dual boot a 2nd OS with XP, then I'd take a look at Ubuntu's latest.

LockAndLoad wrote:
Given the option of free Vista, what do y'all think of dual booting?

If you're going to dual boot a 2nd OS with XP, then I'd take a look at Ubuntu's latest.

Heh, the plan is to tri-boot w/ Kubuntu, XP 64bit, and Vista Business. I mostly use the system for gaming, but I want to get familiar w/ Ununtu so I can eventually replace my htpc running xp mce with a myth box. Through work I can get a bunch of MS OS flavors free, so I though I'd check out Vista for giggles.

I run a Vista I got on the cheap from work in a dual-boot, mostly to see how updates improve it. I played Shadowrun for a bit but that kind of dried up. If you are interested in playing with it, it's worth dual-booting.

Vista Transformation pack makes XP look just like Vista. It is VERY VERY thorough in the way it changes things. And you can disable all the fancy executables and just enjoy the new fancy changed skins, fonts and animations.

Just sayin'.

P.S. I heard rumors that version 7 may be somehow spyware or shareware, but version 6 can still be found somewhere for download.

Oso wrote:

Given the option of free Vista, what do y'all think of dual booting? My resident expert suggests that I run it on a VM just to kick the tires, since I won't be getting a dx10 card any time soon.

If you've got some time and hard drive space burning holes in your pocket, it wouldn't hurt to dual boot it. Admittedly, I haven't tried running it in VMWare or anything, but then I don't have a non OEM license.

I just wouldn't upgrade to it, as that creates some dependencies, which lead to tear stained pillows.

I upgraded my laptop just as Vista was coming out and got Vista on it. I've only had one problem or two if you want to count the London Hellgate beta. My copy of Avid doesn't work on Vista but everything else was just fine. Still it's beefier than my XP desktop so it was still a step up in performance for me.

I was always an early adopter for the MS OS's... I think I remember tinkering with even the earliest versions of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0/3.1, as well as when it went exploded into the mainstream with 95, 98, Millenium(haha, you can laugh now), 2000 through work and XP. I even had a Japanese copy of Win95 when it was launched while I was living there.

Vista has been different though. Maybe part of it is that I'm getting older, less disposable income for an OS upgrade... whatever, but I think most of all it boils down to I'm just comfortable with my XP install and what it gives me. I'm sure Microsoft will end up tearing it from my grip when they 'someday' end support for it.

Irongut wrote:

Vista has been different though. Maybe part of it is that I'm getting older, less disposable income for an OS upgrade... whatever, but I think most of all it boils down to I'm just comfortable with my XP install and what it gives me. I'm sure Microsoft will end up tearing it from my grip when they 'someday' end support for it.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact the XP is both stable, and usable for gaming. Prior to XP, no matter what MS OS I was running, it was never good enough. the options prior to XP were;

- Win 98 for gaming; but it was only stable for a little while after a clean install. You just couldn't keep installing more and more apps on it without reaching a point where any modicum of stability just disappeared.

-Win 2000 for work; it was stable, but in general kinda sucked for gaming. Sure some games ran fine on it, but usually with a performance hit. Then there were games that just refused to run on it altogether.

XP was truely the first MS OS that is generally stable and usable for gaming. I think that's why I'm satisfied with it and don't have that urge to upgrade as soon as something new comes along; I don't feel like I'm going to get anything from upgrading that I don't already have.

XP was truely the first MS OS that is generally stable and usable for gaming.

Stable and it can run lean & mean too.

I can't remember if someone said it here or another thread but I completely agree with the thought that an OS should have as minimal an impact on the system as possible so that it doesn't interfere with the actual applications you are using on it. Tossing a lot of eye candy and throwaway features just gets in the way of what the OS is supposed to be doing.

LilCodger wrote:

I just wouldn't upgrade to it, as that creates some dependencies, which lead to tear stained pillows.

gotcha, I've always been a clean-install kind of guy. Call it the lazy-man's approach, but keeping it simple works best.

Oso wrote:
LilCodger wrote:

I just wouldn't upgrade to it, as that creates some dependencies, which lead to tear stained pillows.

gotcha, I've always been a clean-install kind of guy. Call it the lazy-man's approach, but keeping it simple works best.

I actually meant one more level beyond that. It was more of a "don't burn your bridges" sort of statement. If I put Vista on my machine at home, I'd want a second drive or VM for XP, just in case. There are still things that don't work on Vista.

Even when SP1 comes out (which will probably be when the bullet is bitten), I will likely take the dual boot approach for a while.

But yeah, rule of thumb: clean install, don't upgrade. Even Linux distros recommend that.

Gotcha. The only bridge burning I'm contimplating is replacing XP with XP 64 bit version, but after looking at current driver support and talking w/ someone who uses XP 64 as his main gaming rig, it sounds like a decent path. Luckily, my free OS choices include a variety of XP flavors, as well as Vista Business.

Irongut wrote:

earliest versions of Windows 1.0, 2.0

F*ck Solitaire, give me back Reversi/Othello!

Oso wrote:

Gotcha. The only bridge burning I'm contimplating is replacing XP with XP 64 bit version, but after looking at current driver support and talking w/ someone who uses XP 64 as his main gaming rig, it sounds like a decent path. Luckily, my free OS choices include a variety of XP flavors, as well as Vista Business.

Having messed around with XP 64 bit my suggestion would be STAY WAY. It is a barely noticeably performance boost, even though it recognizes all of my 4 gb of ram instead of the 3.25 the 32bit OS's recognize. The driver issues are numerous and varied. I have had products claim x64 compatibility and then not deliver. After 3 hours of explaining how drivers work to tech support I got that changed on a few of the manufacturer websites before giving up and switching back to 32bit.
In short, the performance difference is there, but it is my opinion that it is simply not worth the trouble (editing drivers etc) to deal with it.

No issues with XP64 for me... no driver issues or software issues.

Serengeti wrote:

-Win 2000 for work; it was stable, but in general kinda sucked for gaming. Sure some games ran fine on it, but usually with a performance hit. Then there were games that just refused to run on it altogether.

XP was truely the first MS OS that is generally stable and usable for gaming. I think that's why I'm satisfied with it and don't have that urge to upgrade as soon as something new comes along; I don't feel like I'm going to get anything from upgrading that I don't already have.

No, actually Win2000 was the first MS OS that was stable and usable for gaming. Windows 2000 is still capable of running all the latest XP games, except many of them decide to use completely unnecessary calls to newer version of Win32 API during installation and such, which are not present in Windows 2000.

XP is Windows 2000 with minor tweaks. Everything that XP is capable of, 2000 is capable of as well, except for some programs, hyperthreading and cleartype.

I had some pretty bad compatibility issues on this machine. I don't think the NVidia drivers are very good for XP64. Went back to XP, and 1 of my 4 gigs just sits there, bored.

Oh and they finally added some stuff to SP2 that makes XP do things that 2000 doesn't.... so you're finally starting to see some programs that won't work on 2K. But overall, I loved that OS to death. Totally focused on the customer.

shihonage wrote:
Serengeti wrote:

-Win 2000 for work; it was stable, but in general kinda sucked for gaming. Sure some games ran fine on it, but usually with a performance hit. Then there were games that just refused to run on it altogether.

XP was truely the first MS OS that is generally stable and usable for gaming. I think that's why I'm satisfied with it and don't have that urge to upgrade as soon as something new comes along; I don't feel like I'm going to get anything from upgrading that I don't already have.

No, actually Win2000 was the first MS OS that was stable and usable for gaming. Windows 2000 is still capable of running all the latest XP games, except many of them decide to use completely unnecessary calls to newer version of Win32 API during installation and such, which are not present in Windows 2000.

XP is Windows 2000 with minor tweaks. Everything that XP is capable of, 2000 is capable of as well, except for some programs, hyperthreading and cleartype.

While I generally agree with you, I remember abandoning W2K because folks quit updating drivers for it. That was also around the time that video card companies were dropping left and right (e.g. 3dfx, Diamond, etc.). I'm guessing they came around eventually, but I had moved on. The hard drive crash probably influenced my decision.

XP is and always has been what W2K was supposed to be before they rushed it out the door. The next desktop OS will likely be what Vista should have been.

Most XP drivers work just fine under 2000 because its the same OS. Some XP/2K drivers may require a minor .inf modification to work under the "other" OS.

XP to me is W2K's bastard child, full of useless junk that still doesn't make it user-friendly, only annoying as all hell before you disable it all. It has some great features but man do I hate the useless network file access warnings, the insane file sorting bugs where it "decided" the folder type for itself, the zip folders, the search feature USING the zip folders, the TWO dialog boxes after every crash...

Via Digg.

Fill out some surveys and install a program that monitors your computer use for 3 months and you can get a free copy of Vista or Office. I'd hate sifting through that data on Microsoft's end (man, this guy in Louisiana sure likes porn), but I think it's a neat idea. And as for the privacy issue, it's not like they're forcing you enter the program when you buy Windows. If you're uncomfortable with the concept, you can just not participate.

It might be good for people on the fence about Vista, who were waiting for SP1, since that's been released now. And someone in the comments points out you could easily just put it on your work computer.

I've been playing for a day with Vista (got a new Vaio laptop with it).

IT f*ckING SUCKS.

I really liked it at first because it looks so pretty, but goddamn it, it's taken like 10 minutes to uninstall Norton internet security and other crappy programs that came with it. Slow is pretty much the only way I'd describe it.

Not doing ANYTHING, it's taking 80% ram (1gig), and I've already began to hate the "Do you reeeallly want to do that?" prompts.

It's becoming an irrational hate really, because at first I was "Oh, cool, welp, I guess you're looking out for me! ñ_ñ" but after the 12th time it popped up (Yes, I began to count) I just wanted to crotch-punch Steve Ballmer and whoever came up with this system.

It's too bad because the interface looks super pretty, I don't mind the new layouts for the new "Control Panel" and all the new options and widgets, they're cool.

It's ultimately a gift for someone who is sort of inexperienced with PCs, so I'll let her see how it goes. Hopefully it won't intrude too much on a non-geeky user.

But at the first sign of a complaint, I'm wiping it and going with XP!

Well, like a lot of Vista complaints, those are mostly meritless. You can't blame Vista for Sony bundling Norton crapware. The RAM is used because Vista actually uses your idle RAM by caching. UAC is easy to disable

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