Yeah so I was pretty wrong about Vista

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And this below is a huge mistake

http://apcmag.com/5835/vendors_in_no...

Vista right now is simply to slow on mid level hardware.. and forget running it on a reasonable laptop. Sure the huge 17" and 19" "laptops" do a better job with 7200rpm Hard Drives.. but for the most part the $1500-$2000 laptops are a mess with Vista Preloaded.

Even on the desktop side Vista requires serious horsepower to run well.. I've tried it on several mid ranged systems and its a mess.. even simple tasks will bring up the spinning circle and the user is forced to wait for the system to respond.

We got 2 new Sony TX laptops and they were 100% unusable with Vista. We're talking minute after minute of waiting for the system just to boot and become responsive. Even with 1.5GB of ram the Hard drive constantly churned. In the end Sony had to give us a full refund because they no longer have XP drivers for the latest TX laptops.

I'm going to do some digging around and see if I can get some feedback from some people we have at various manufacturers.

I'm sure in time as the hardware gets faster Vista will be fine but it really looks like Microsoft released a product that is designed for hardware we'll see in 2 years or so.

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

You may have more patience that most of my circle heh.. but case in point especially with Dells.. I got some new Core Duo 2's with 2gb of ram with Vista Business and they frankly suck... just awful.

TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

You may have more patience that most of my circle heh.. but case in point especially with Dells.. I got some new Core Duo 2's with 2gb of ram with Vista Business and they frankly suck... just awful.

Hmm. I am using Vista Home Premium or whatever..maybe it makes a difference.

I also go through and shut down all kinds of useless services and stuff, so maybe that accounts for it.

Can I say I told you (by you I don't mean you, I mean anyone who reads this) so? I lasted less than about a week and change before switching to Ubuntu. Ubuntu lasted two months, and I'm back to XP happily.

Yea I've had Vista since the developer launch in November and I just cant stand it. I still cannot get all my hardware working. I mean, I have all the latest well-known items (i.e. X-Fi) and the silly drivers dont work.

I think Ill be on XP for quite a bit longer for my Windowz box.

PAR

Edwin wrote:

Can I say I told you (by you I don't mean you, I mean anyone who reads this) so? I lasted less than about a week and change before switching to Ubuntu. Ubuntu lasted two months, and I'm back to XP happily.

What does Ubuntu Linux have to do with Windows Vista, just out of curiosity?

With regards to Vista itself, I haven't been impressed by it at all. Lots of no good going around. Here's a [H]ardOCP review of it:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...

I tested all of them recently on the same machine just to see how long I would last with each of them. I was just curious.

Edwin wrote:

I tested all of them recently on the same machine just to see how long I would last with each of them. I was just curious.

Ah, I see. Personally, I run Ubuntu on a little Dell laptop. It handles email, browsing, note-taking and WoW, although WoW has a funny cursor graphic bug.

Dr.Ghastly wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

You may have more patience that most of my circle heh.. but case in point especially with Dells.. I got some new Core Duo 2's with 2gb of ram with Vista Business and they frankly suck... just awful.

Hmm. I am using Vista Home Premium or whatever..maybe it makes a difference.

I also go through and shut down all kinds of useless services and stuff, so maybe that accounts for it.

I imagine that kind of tweaking would go a long way in helping.. its just that thats beyond the realm for most normal users.

TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

You may have more patience that most of my circle heh.. but case in point especially with Dells.. I got some new Core Duo 2's with 2gb of ram with Vista Business and they frankly suck... just awful.

Hmm. I am using Vista Home Premium or whatever..maybe it makes a difference.

I also go through and shut down all kinds of useless services and stuff, so maybe that accounts for it.

I imagine that kind of tweaking would go a long way in helping.. its just that thats beyond the realm for most normal users.

Oh I agree completely there.

Dr.Ghastly wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:

Odd, I'm not having any of those issues on the Dell I bought some months ago.

Granted, I tweaked the hell out o fit, but still..

You may have more patience that most of my circle heh.. but case in point especially with Dells.. I got some new Core Duo 2's with 2gb of ram with Vista Business and they frankly suck... just awful.

Hmm. I am using Vista Home Premium or whatever..maybe it makes a difference.

I also go through and shut down all kinds of useless services and stuff, so maybe that accounts for it.

I imagine that kind of tweaking would go a long way in helping.. its just that thats beyond the realm for most normal users.

Oh I agree completely there.

Mind listing your tweaks there DrG? Or at least a link that shows what can and will help.

PAR

http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/s...

http://vistaforums.com/Forum/Topic56...

and the big one:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Use at your own risk, and make sure you really do know what you are doing

Dr.Ghastly wrote:

http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/s...

http://vistaforums.com/Forum/Topic56...

and the big one:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Use at your own risk, and make sure you really do know what you are doing ;)

cool I'll give them a shot.

Dr.Ghastly wrote:

http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/s...

http://vistaforums.com/Forum/Topic56...

and the big one:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Use at your own risk, and make sure you really do know what you are doing ;)

Thanks DrG. And let us know your results there GG. I'll do the same.

PAR

I've been working with Vista for a while now doing system setups for computers that come with it pre-loaded. What a joke is all I can say. I've setup E6600 Core 2 Duo, 2GB HP systems that are sluggish with Home Premium. And this is after the initial setup procedure takes 45 minutes. Their laptops are even worse as most have only 1GB and still come with the same 5,400RPM hard disks that the same models did when they ran XP. The worst thing is when I get a customer who was sold a Compaq Presario with 512MB RAM (equivalent to running XP with 128MB) and also Norton AntiVirus 2007 and Spy Sweeper. I've so far had three customers return those computers after I set them up because it takes 30+ seconds just to load Internet Explorer. Hardware simply isn't ready for Vista to be loaded on value-line systems yet. Unfortunately, Best Buy was Microsoft's biggest Vista pusher so you can't buy XP on any system from them anymore.

I'm so glad our new PC came with XP. Apparently the guy that built it applauded our decision.

I'm so glad our new PC came with XP. Apparently the guy that built it applauded our decision.

The problem is it is starting to get more difficult to get XP licenses and the next Service Pack isn't due till next year. Probably most independent computer shops are trying to stockpile XP stuff but the big stores where less techy buyers are using are probably throwing Vista out there like crazy.

Didn't Dell (and other manufactures) announce this week that they were re-introducing XP as an OS option on some of their lines due to high customer demand, and Microsoft said "okay, but only for the rest of this year?" Either way MS sells an OS, but it's a shame that games (from a gamer's perspective) will start requiring Vista to work.

EDIT: Nevermind -- just read GG's link. I thought it was linking to a review of Vista, not a story about XP sticking around through the end of the year.

The people I really feel bad for are the normal people being caught by this garbage. We're all either techie or know techie people, so we can work around many of the problems or know just to avoid it altogether, but what about Grandma Boone in the Ozarks? She just dropped 350 bones on a product that's much inferior to the $150 product she could have had.

I have Vista Enterprise at work on my Dell Lattitude D820 (1 gig of ram) and have no problems. I've been using it since November, I believe. The system is responsive and all of the hardware is supported. My only issues that come up are relative to our network design, and the only thing I can think of that's an issue is some of our printing abilities. Otherwise, I have no issues. However, I will state I don't do anything high end on my work laptop. Email, internet access, burning, some audio editing, etc.

At home I have a Vista Ultimate 64-bit (my boss bought it for me to get used to all of vista's features before we ever consider rolling it out across campus). With the windows search enabled, I find my HDs will churn quite often and it indexes 640gigs worth of stuff which can cause slowdown for a lot of multitasking when its in session. A little more than 1 gig of ram would certainly make the performance better, and I wish my AMD 3500+ was a dual-core. I've only been using it at home for a little over a week so I haven't had much chance to do any game performance testing. I will say that general desktop use (with a lot of simultanous applications active) is just fine. Vista is much better now than it was during the public beta, that's for sure. I normally do video, audio and photo editing on top of a lot of gaming on my home PC, but again I've barely had time to do the testing so all I can talk about is just general use in terms of performance and features.

I'm not praising it outright, there are issues with hardware support. That comes with the territory of being an early adopter of the next version of windows, with a 64-bit editon to boot. I only have two pieces of hardware in my system that don't have any manufacturer support for vista 64-bit. My Creative Live! Video IM Pro webcam and my Phonic Helix 12 firewire mixer. Phonic informed me yesterday they're not long from releasing vista drivers, and my creative webcam has vista support, just not 64-bit yet. I also have a few issues with some applications that are either flaky or don't work at all. Adobe Audition 2.0 works but turns off Aero while it's in use. Winamp crashes if you open the vis window, but otherwise works fine.

I think Vista is a great step ahead and I really enjoy the new features, but as with XP and 98 and 95.. a few patches later and a chance for the manufacturers to catch up and we'll be just fine. In the meantime I'm sure it's frustrating a lot of retail chains, and if you're in the business of buying a new computer/laptop you might want to wait a bit for everyone to catch up. You might also want to avoid it if you're unsure about your current system and if the upgrade is worth it. If you're iffy, chances are it won't run well. Don't bother if you don't have at least a gig of ram.

In case anyone is curious about what I have at home:
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+, MMX, 3DNow, 2.2GHz
Motherboard: Asus M2N-E
Memory: 1022MB RAM
Hard Drive: 640 GB Total
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

Edit: Warning! I forgot to add that GameTap installs and you can use the interface without it. But when you go to launch a game it'll just sit there. Not cool!

Very interesting thread. Thanks, Guru.

You got to have a way higher tolerance to system lag Stauf7 than anyone I know (myself included) even on my systems at home Vista is just to slow to use everyday.. I sure hope things speed up with a service pack or something.

TheGameguru wrote:

You got to have a way higher tolerance to system lag Stauf7 than anyone I know (myself included) even on my systems at home Vista is just to slow to use everyday.. I sure hope things speed up with a service pack or something.

I am a heavy multitasker, so of course system lag is a concern. Like I said in my previous post, I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty with what I like to do with my PC yet on my home system. At work, I am not maximizing resources (I have more powerful computers setup in XP when I need to do so).. and I've also been using it for a few months so I am probably used to the burden that the new OS puts on the system. I'm also not admitting in any way it performs faster than XP, I'm merely saying it's not as bad as I expected and I am comfortable with it for general application use so far.

I'm also used to never owning cutting-edge technology to enjoy maximum performance, and make due with what I have.

Edit: I'm also expecting that everyone is going to get varied results, depending on their hardware. Some manufacturers are really behind and I am very aware of all the horror stories. I hear more problems from name brand equipment as opposed to custom-built machines. I'm sure anyone with integrated video, audio, etc. are feeling the pain.

Edit 2: I know from numerous posts you are very knowledgable when it comes to all of this. I don't mean to step on any toes, I just wanted to give my two cents. Perhaps one of the rare positive remarks about Vista's launch.

Not a plant!

karmajay wrote:
I'm so glad our new PC came with XP. Apparently the guy that built it applauded our decision.

The problem is it is starting to get more difficult to get XP licenses and the next Service Pack isn't due till next year. Probably most independent computer shops are trying to stockpile XP stuff but the big stores where less techy buyers are using are probably throwing Vista out there like crazy.

I bought an OEM copy of XP64 a few weeks ago from Newegg. I ordered it, and had it in hand 2 or 3 days later.

At the risk of sounding (yet again) like an MS apologist, I'm with Stauf on this one. I've been running Vista on both a Thunderbird 2000+ system and a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (Hyperthreading; Socket 478) -we're talking 3-4 year old motherboard and CPU- and while I would never argue that it performs as well as XP right now, I haven't been frustrated with it's level of performance except in particular apps and games. (This is just my experience; I'm not trying to discount what the rest of you who have used it, have experienced.)

It's definitely not worth getting for most users right now (like Stauf, I got my copy for free, through work); there's just too many driver and compatibility problems. And there's definitely a fair amount of isolated, but nevertheless, bizarre occurences. For example, my wife's photo manager program -Picture It- suddenly refuses to show thumbnails of new jpeg images imported from our camera. Thumbnails appear just fine in Picture Explorer and Vista Photo Gallery, but not in Picture It. Makes no sense to me. But other than isolated weird sh#@ like that, the only place I really have issues with sluggishness is when switching users and performing a cold boot (those operations are frustratingly long, IMO). Maybe I'm too forgiving - or just used to sluggishness -even in XP- since I'm running on pretty dated hardware.

Anyway, like I said, I wouldn't encourage anyone to move up to Vista right now, but I do think the long run will do for Vista what it did for XP. FYI - Ars Technica had a great piece (it was supposed to be part 1 of many, but, so far, no follow-ups) on how Vista changes the landscape for developers. Under the hood it's a very different beast from XP and I'm sure that's a lot of why current apps just don't run as well in Vista. Sucks for the present, but I think there's plenty of reasons to believe it'll get considerably better in time.
---Todd

Not that it means jack for consumers stuck with crappy drivers, but X-Bit as an article up today in which nvidia ackowledges that their drivers, to this point, have been junk and that the situation will be rectified "very soon". The nvidia rep also notes that, right now, their only priority is stable, working drivers and that they're not focusing at all on performance.

As much as I really do like the OS, if nvidia is having so many problems getting end-user drivers done, all the more reason for most people to avoid Vista in the short term.
---Todd

I been using vista since it was available on MSDN and my biggest complaint has been with drivers not with Vista itself.

My driver complaints are mostly fixed now too.

My X-Fi fatalaty card worked for me on the creative beta drivers then the release drivers seemed even better.

Nvidia finally came out with a decent driver with 101.71 (I think that is the number) and not had any game video issues since latest driver.

My one complaint is that I still can not get a wireless driver for my liksys network card.

Just yesterday I had to go out and get a new all-in-one printer and got a canon PIXMA MP600 installed the software plugged it in and it it worked like a charm.

I am using Vista Ultimate 64 bit, E6600 CPU, 2GB RAM, and it is my every day use PC and it does not seem slow to me.

I just purchased Vista alongside parts for a new PC Im going to build (first time I've built a PC from the motherboard up) I think it's not too hopeful to think that performance will get better over time. XP may be good now but it costs the same as Vista and its not as if MS is going to just trash Vista and go back with XP.

I guess I had better start looking up Vista drivers for my equipment while I wait for the shipment to arrive.

Quick question: What's the difference between 32bit and 64 bit versions of the OS? Performance or security, or both?

For the curious, my new rig:

E4300 chip to be overclocked as much as is safe
Radeon x1950 Pro card
2gb ram
and all the rest

The main differences right now are the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM (if you have a mainboard that supports it, most consumer ones don't yet) and that the 64-bit version is more secure because it requires signed drivers and locks down access to the kernel. The problem with the 64-bit version is many companies don't have drivers for it and many of those that do are still in beta form and not feature-complete. There is almost no 64-bit native software available and reports of how well 32-bit applications run vary wildly from terribly to better than on the 32-bit kernel. Most experts are saying that unless you have a specific reason to run the 64-bit version, it's not worth your trouble right now.

Something that is going to really bite Vista 32 bit is the memory addressing issues that can happy when you have large amounts of video memory which can basically cause a loss in total system memory availble to address.

So going to 64 bit is not a bad option if you also think you are going to say have 2 8800GT cards eatting up 1.5gb of your addressable memory.

There is a lot less support though for 64 bit but hopefully we will get there as it really only makes sense in the long run.

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