Should I upgrade to Vista?

No, they aren't meritless. I setup dozens of PCs a week with Vista and particularly on laptops, it is bloated, slow and buggy. The built-in indexing (which still delivers slower search results than Google Desktop), the Aero interface and a number of the other additions are inefficient and create a substantial amount of unnecessary overhead. Programs almost always take longer to install and run, it regularly hangs up on certain operations (sometimes for minutes) with no explanation but other times performs them without a problem and even with the latest patches, it will still often get stuck infinitely on the Shutting Down... screen, continuously accessing the hard disk for no reason. I've seen machines where it sits like that for 10 minutes or more with no sign of stopping and where I have to force the machine off to shut it down. I've seen it every day for a year on dozens of models by every major system manufacturer and no one will convince me it's isolated. Vista isn't nearly as bad as its hardcore detractors say but it's not nearly as good as its hardcore fans say either. Not even close. If you have the option to pre-install XP, do it.

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

Well, sir, I say YOUR post is meritless how about THAT

Seriously, I didn't blame Sony for bundling Norton, every new PC I buy has crapware bundled.
I blamed Vista for taking all of 12 minutes to uninstall a 50mb program. =/

The RAM usage doesn't seem to be for the better, Vista seems to like "hanging" randomly for 5 minutes, accessing the HD like crazy for no discernible reason. Copying files or making backups of the disc...

And UAC is plain stupid. After a few hours with UAC, I imagined its creation went like this:
Some engineers at Microsoft got fed up with everyone saying "Man, Windows is so insecure! *giggle*", and in their nerd rage they went "Windows is insecure? No, YOU ARE INSECURE", and came up with UAC to place the blame on the user.

I really like the interface and the super detailed icons, however, I really have no problems with that. They look cool =)

Again, these are all personal opinions and may change at any given moment without prior notification from Mex LLC.

edit: Also, I guess in theory, UAC is ok for a normal, websurfing, wordprocessing user who doesn't install anything.

Sorry, didn't mean to sound like I was attacking you Mex (Remember the Alamo!). I just was commenting that I keep seeing the same complaints about Vista that are generally just lack of knowledge about it. Vista consuming sh*t-tons of memory freaked me out on my first Vista box until I bothered to read more on the changes that Vista brings.

But yeah, UAC was one of the first things I disabled.

I've seen many complaints about Vista that are due to lack of knowledge and fear-mongering (the DRM for example and this is coming from someone who thinks DRM should be illegal) but the complaints I've mentioned are not due to lack of knowledge. They happened and they're commonplace. I installed the release candidate of RC1 today on my dual-boot testbed and I'm hoping that will show some improvement to some of the more common issues. Vista is chalk-full of potential. It just isn't done baking yet.

Windows used your idle ram for disk caching since Windows 95. It's nothing new. And its certainly not an excuse for Vista's monstrous memory consumption compared to XP.

shihonage wrote:

Windows used your idle ram for disk caching since Windows 95. It's nothing new. And its certainly not an excuse for Vista's monstrous memory consumption compared to XP.

Yea, I was gonna say, both Windows and Linux (and probably Mac) have done this for some time pretty efficiently.

I got the chance to use Vista this week on my brother's brand new laptop and was sorely disappointed. Pretty, but very sluggish for the specs.

I expect the next Windows released will be "Windows Classic", and will consist of repackaging XP with a 100 million dollar ad campaign featuring polar bears and Santa Claus.

Caching without memory usage is quite the trick. My 4GB XP machine is doing such a good job with MagicCache that it has 2.7GB free, even with lossy 4GB 32bit memory usage.

So I wonder why all these articles on Vista's SuperFetch are so confused. Damned propaganda white papers.

Well, on Linux, memory used for caching shows as 'buffers', so it's pretty clear what it's being used for. If Vista is more lightweight than claimed, then Microsoft should just break out the memory usage clearly so that people understand why they're 98% full.

I suspect it's just high overhead, and when we're limited to about 3GB on a 32-bit system, 500+M just to run the OS is excessive. On a 64-bit system with 8+ gigs, no biggie, but on 3, that hurts. And 64-bit Vista has a whole new set of problems.

Vista does at least hint at the usage breakdown. With Superfetch enabled on my 1GB laptop (until UPS delivers my 4GB upgrade on Monday) the Task Manager shows 494MB used for cache and 3MB free as of this moment. My 2GB Vista workstation shows 1300MB cached and 52 MB free. With Superfetch disabled my laptop drops and shows about 400MB free.

I agree though, it's not very obvious and the Task Manager should at least give you the option to separate memory usage, much like you can display kernel times on the CPU utilization graph.

My experience with Vista has been good enough that I'm finally about to upgrade my personal workstation to Vista. I just need to verify availability of good Vista drivers for my various audio hardware.

Vista, from questions over on AskMe, appears to shut you out from being able to record your own audio. You might be a pirate, you dirty thief.

Be warned.

Malor wrote:

Vista, from questions over on AskMe, appears to shut you out from being able to record your own audio. You might be a pirate, you dirty thief.

Be warned.

Have a link to that?

Malor wrote:

Vista, from questions over on AskMe, appears to shut you out from being able to record your own audio.

Thanks for the heads up. So far I haven't seen any mention of issues in the Reaper DAW, KVRAudio, or Presonus forums.

Vista, from questions over on AskMe, appears to shut you out from being able to record your own audio. You might be a pirate, you dirty thief.

Not sure how true that statement is... I use Audacity on one of my work laptops running Vista all the time without any problems at all using Mic In and Line In feeds. There's some headaches within the Windows Device Manager where it will automatically (and usually improperly) assigns the wrong audio devices to playback, recording and voice recording.

What appears to be the case is that you can't put a monitor on your 'out'. That is, if you're using an application to play something back, you're not allowed to copy that datastream anywhere else to work with it, because you might be a thief.

If you run a physical wire from your out to your in, that will probably work, but then you have all the error of the dual conversion, instead of clean access to your own computer's original output.

Malor wrote:

What appears to be the case is that you can't put a monitor on your 'out'. That is, if you're using an application to play something back, you're not allowed to copy that datastream anywhere else to work with it, because you might be a thief.

If you run a physical wire from your out to your in, that will probably work, but then you have all the error of the dual conversion, instead of clean access to your own computer's original output.

this has nothing to do with Vista.

well, it might in this particular case, but this is more down to the manufacturer than the operating system.

I've owned two DELL laptops (running XP) in the last few years, and both of them come with the STEREO MIX option disabled. Using registry hacks and drivers from a non DELL source, I've managed to restore my STEREO MIX and record my podcast. Depending on your system and audio card, you might not be as lucky and will need to purchase a mixer to accomplish this feat.

I've been using Vista now exclusively on all my machines once SP1 hit beta.. I've got zero issues these days.. Creatives drivers are still god awful.. so I basically just gave up on all Creative sound products and went to onboard.

Its hardware spec's are way higher than XP and you need a fairly beefy system for Vista to run well.. but I for one appreciate all the new things Vista brings.. I've gotten used to the changes so little things no longer annoy me.

I was watching a divx video which caused my nvidia display driver to crash on my laptop.. but instead of taking the whole system out.. Vista blanked my screen for a second.. rebooted the display driver independent of my system and recovered properly with no freeze or reboot. I then launched a 3D game with no issues whatsoever.

TheGameguru wrote:

I was watching a divx video which caused my nvidia display driver to crash on my laptop.. but instead of taking the whole system out.. Vista blanked my screen for a second.. rebooted the display driver independent of my system and recovered properly with no freeze or reboot. I then launched a 3D game with no issues whatsoever.

ATI drivers do that under XP and have been doing it for years. It's called "VPU Recover" and it's enabled by default.

Of course that happens very rarely in the first place... because XP is just, well, stable.

Yeah but video drivers even with ATI cards can and will still take out your whole system..

see Crossfire and a few recent games.

TheGameguru wrote:

I've been using Vista now exclusively on all my machines once SP1 hit beta.. I've got zero issues these days.. Creatives drivers are still god awful.. so I basically just gave up on all Creative sound products and went to onboard.

I haven't tried the SP yet but fully agree on Creative and their drivers. I'm about to yank my audigy out and just go onboard. Creatives support for their products on Vista has been abysmal.

I got my girlfriend a laptop for Christmas that came with Vista. She's not a much of a gamer, and uses it for work, movies, and the internet. After an initial, "It's different and I don't know any tricks for it" period where she wanted XP put on it, she seems to be happy with it after learning how to use it. I'm tempted to put it on my desktop, but it'll have to wait for a bit.

Ok it gets cooler.. I had another display driver crash with the same DIVX file.. but while playing WoW in a window.. no only did just the screen blank for a brief second while Media Player shut down the offending file.. but WoW never stopped working and I was able to continue playing 100% normally.

Take that XP!

TheGameguru wrote:

Ok it gets cooler.. I had another display driver crash with the same DIVX file.. but while playing WoW in a window.. no only did just the screen blank for a brief second while Media Player shut down the offending file.. but WoW never stopped working and I was able to continue playing 100% normally.

Take that XP!

That's like saying "my new husband beats me, but he is a surgeon and stitches me up in no time. Take that, old husband who never hit me in the first place !".

I just recently played video and windowed WoW in XP with no crashes. Crashes in XP are a rarity, and system-wide crashes are an extreme rarity.

shihonage wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Ok it gets cooler.. I had another display driver crash with the same DIVX file.. but while playing WoW in a window.. no only did just the screen blank for a brief second while Media Player shut down the offending file.. but WoW never stopped working and I was able to continue playing 100% normally.

Take that XP!

That's like saying "my new husband beats me, but he is a surgeon and stitches me up in no time. Take that, old husband who never hit me in the first place !".

I just recently played video and windowed WoW in XP with no crashes. Crashes in XP are a rarity, and system-wide crashes are an extreme rarity.

er...the divx file in question crashes under XP as well.. and brings the entire system down when it does.. sorry.

You can resume your hating though.. carry on.

shihonage wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Ok it gets cooler.. I had another display driver crash with the same DIVX file.. but while playing WoW in a window.. no only did just the screen blank for a brief second while Media Player shut down the offending file.. but WoW never stopped working and I was able to continue playing 100% normally.

Take that XP!

That's like saying "my new husband beats me, but he is a surgeon and stitches me up in no time. Take that, old husband who never hit me in the first place !".

I just recently played video and windowed WoW in XP with no crashes. Crashes in XP are a rarity, and system-wide crashes are an extreme rarity.

Ok, this is getting silly.

Vista works better for Gameguru, doing what he is doing, and XP works better for you.

Vista is actually better at recovering from application crashes than XP, in part because they tried to fix one of the old criticisms about Windows from the *Nix crowd that if an application crashes, it hoses the whole system. Which was true, particularly with pre-2000 versions, but not so much now.

Personally, I use Linux on my desktop, because I don't like the licensing restrictions on Vista, and frankly, I have enough *nix skills so that I have low barriers to switching. And I have a 360, so I don't have to give up gaming for the privilege.

That said, I really liked the changes in Vista, and I think, as the service packs start to arrive, that we are going to see Vista be every bit as stable as XP. It's not ME take 2.

I am having a problem with my Mic in Vista. I am using the front Mic and headset inputs on my computer and they work just fine under XP but for some reason the mic isn't working properly in Vista (64 bit) I haven't tooled around with it too much yet but has anyone else had this problem? One of things I am going to try is seeing what happens when I plug my mic into the port in the back. I am using on board sound (Soundmax) and a head set microphone from plantronics.

Some Soundmax drivers require that you do into their little tray utility (the blue square with the white arrow-looking-thing in it) and switch the input to the front jacks. They don't all do, it depends on the OEM that's using them it seems. I know in XP, you can also sometimes go into the Volume Control utility and switch the mic input there. Vista's made adjusting sound mix a lot more frustrating though so I would recommend doing it through the Soundmax utility if you have it available.

mateo wrote:

Ok, this is getting silly.

Vista works better for Gameguru, doing what he is doing, and XP works better for you.

This is pretty much a way to end any argument on any topic on any message board.

Vista is actually better at recovering from application crashes than XP, in part because they tried to fix one of the old criticisms about Windows from the *Nix crowd that if an application crashes, it hoses the whole system. Which was true, particularly with pre-2000 versions, but not so much now.

Yeah, Windows NT 4 took care of that problem in 1996, followed by Windows 2000 in 2000 or so.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Some Soundmax drivers require that you do into their little tray utility (the blue square with the white arrow-looking-thing in it) and switch the input to the front jacks. They don't all do, it depends on the OEM that's using them it seems. I know in XP, you can also sometimes go into the Volume Control utility and switch the mic input there. Vista's made adjusting sound mix a lot more frustrating though so I would recommend doing it through the Soundmax utility if you have it available.

The vista drivers don't come with the control panel, I found the options you described within Vista but selecting them didn't correct the problem with the mic input up front.

The one thing I hate about Soundmax and SigmaTel on-board chips is that the chip vendors don't provide reference drivers like RealTek does. So if for example you have an HP with a Soundmax chip, the features and options you get could be different than if you had a Dell with the same chip. What brand of mainboard are you running dude?

This is pretty much a way to end any argument on any topic on any message board.

I think after a year or more of similar exchanges that amount to the same end result, it seems necessary to point it out once in a while. Even if it is painfully obvious and applicable to nearly every argument ever made. Not casting judgment on this particular situation, but "agree to disagree" rarely seems to actually happen on message boards in general. This is usually when I have to step in because disagreements tend to gets personal when every other avenue is exhausted.

Speaking of Vista, all of a sudden I am getting a è instead of apostrophes. Weird.