Do you recomend Win Vista?yes,no. Why?

[Pangloss]

One example: it uses up substantially more space on your video card for the sake of graphics and aesthetics.

 

Wouldn't that be an example of doing more with more resources? We've been screaming at this industry to move past 2d desktops for years, with millions of people buying 3d-accelerated video cards that couldn't accelerate a single blasted thing in Windows. And it seems to me that I've seen plenty of demonstrations of 3d Linux desktops over the last couple years.

 

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree that there remain numerous (even predominent) computing situations where moving in this direction is not only useless, but actually a negative. The ridiculous Microsoft "Windows everywhere" campaign is one of the dumbest ideas since the default password.

 

But human-computer interaction is a perfectly valid area of research and endeavor, and personal computers are SUPPOSED to be inefficient at specific tasks (compared with embedded systems). The computer's plenty fast as it is. What's pathetically slow is our ability to work with it.

 

So I ask again, how does Vista "do less for more resources"?

[Mr Skeptic]

It all depends on what you count as "doing". The job of an OS is not to show you pretty graphics. That would be (part of) the job of the GUI.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Example 2: I have a friend who has vista on his laptop, and from the looks of it, Vista also eats up battery power rather quickly (my laptop can last on batteries more than twice as long as his can, while at the same time my laptop is much older and his battery can store more power).

That's not exactly a fair comparison. Newer processors with more gigahurtz likely suck power more than an older processor regardless of what you run on them.

[insane_alien]

actually, the new processors should be more efficient as they have smaller transistors and run a bit cooler. they also have more power saving features like stepping where the clock frequency is variable also, older laptop processors were basicallyjust desktop processors squashed down a bit. modern ones are designed to have low poer consumptions and so on.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

You still don't know what else is in the guts of the laptop. You can't make a fair comparison without knowing the age and usage of the laptops, the guts of it, and all sorts of other stuff.

[Reaper]

You still don't know what else is in the guts of the laptop. You can't make a fair comparison without knowing the age and usage of the laptops, the guts of it, and all sorts of other stuff.

 

You only need to look at the hardware. It has, as they say, the latest and the greatest stuff. And his battery is about 56W/hrs.

 

Of course, it is a little difficult to monitor their computer habits, but even when you set the screen lighting to its lowest setting you can still only get about 2 hrs on it, depending on the laptop.

 

I know of some people who bought their laptops and replaced Vista with XP and their laptop lasts quite a bit longer. But, they still can't beat mine though:cool:, mine can last more than 4 hours.

 

 

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And besides, Vista is just slower in general because it requires so much memory to operate, and about 40 different processes going on at any one time. And I hear that its security features can be quite annoying.

 

An example of what? lol? You don't think Vista uses unnecessary system resources?

 

He doesn't know because he doesn't own Vista.

 

Anyways, this is Vista in a nutshell:

 

It's slower, has lots of bugs, uses up a lot of memory, a lot of RAM (about 1 GB for optimal performance, but some of my friends tell me that you really need 2), a lot of video card space, battery power, and system processes. It's harder to use than XP because the UI isn't nearly as intuitive (aside from being buggy and annoying at times since it asks you "are you sure" EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to do something useful with it). Its security system is rather annoying. And anything else that can go wrong with it actually does. Basically, it does a bunch of things that are either detrimental, wasteful, or just otherwise unnecessary to do basic functions. It looks nice, but I'd rather have one that works properly than one that has sacrifices some of its functionality for gimmicks.

 

And, for all the memory it uses up, its features and graphics just aren't really that impressive. My custom UI does a lot more (including making it look really cool) for far less resources and memory. In short, its total crap. I, and a bunch of people here, don't recommend Vista. Just use XP until they come out with (hopefully) a better OS in 2010.

 

Just having it sit idly consumes more resources than playing a FPS game.

[Pangloss]

An example of what? lol? You don't think Vista uses unnecessary system resources?

 

I'm asking you how Vista "does less for more resources". That was the statement you made.

 

If you were just stating your opinion about Vista, then fine, I'll just chalk it up to your usual Microsoft bashing. But if you actually had a substantive point then I'd like to hear what it was. Some of us here are actually interested in a realistic assessment of the current situation in the field of personal computing, rather than the latest dopey "lol"-isms from Slashdot.

 

 

 

Lockheed, I missed this in my last pass, pardon me:

 

Example 2: I have a friend who has vista on his laptop, and from the looks of it, Vista also eats up battery power rather quickly (my laptop can last on batteries more than twice as long as his can, while at the same time my laptop is much older and his battery can store more power).

 

It does run shorter if you have all the new GUI features turned on. In other words, if you're asking it to do more.

 

If you turn those features off, it lasts about the same amount of time as it did under XP. This is consistent with the various PC mag articles that were flying around during Vista beta testing.

 

Video cards were barely utilized by XP, and if you ran a 3d game under XP your battery life would suddenly (and unsurprisingly) evaporate.

 

 

 

It's also quite heavy.. the requirements of 1GB memory is something I find bizzar and quite worrying from an OS..

 

Why?

 

 

Vista comes pre-loaded with all sorts of anti-piracy software' date=' which stops you playing DVD's that have been copied.[/quote']

 

No it doesn't. I've run DVD-copying software on my Vista box just fine, and the backups play back on Vista just fine. I use it to back up every DVD I own.

 

Although I must admit I haven't used it since the last few Vista patches, so if they put something in there recently I wouldn't know. I recently stopped buying DVDs and I only buy HD DVDs now, but the HD DVD burners were still pretty pricey last I looked, and I don't know what the software situation is yet. I also can't say that there's no anti-piracy software in there to prevent HD DVD copying, since I haven't tried it yet.

 

(I'm already shuddering at the idea of re-buying almost a thousand movies in HD format.) (sigh)

 

 

Oh, and for the record:

 

He doesn't know because he doesn't own Vista.

 

I've been running Vista continuously on this computer for about a year.

[Reaper]

 

 

 

Lockheed, I missed this in my last pass, pardon me:

 

 

 

It does run shorter if you have all the new GUI features turned on. In other words, if you're asking it to do more.

 

If you turn those features off, it lasts about the same amount of time as it did under XP. This is consistent with the various PC mag articles that were flying around during Vista beta testing.

 

Video cards were barely utilized by XP, and if you ran a 3d game under XP your battery life would suddenly (and unsurprisingly) evaporate.

 

I understand that, that's why I don't play video games unless it is docked. What I mean by "doing less for more" is that it consumes more resources without adding to functionality, sorry if it wasn't clear. I guess, technically, yes, adding better graphics makes it do more, but it doesn't add to functionality.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

and about 40 different processes going on at any one time.

I regularly see XP boxes with 55 processes running.

[Pangloss]

I understand that, that's why I don't play video games unless it is docked. What I mean by "doing less for more" is that it consumes more resources without adding to functionality, sorry if it wasn't clear. I guess, technically, yes, adding better graphics makes it do more, but it doesn't add to functionality.

 

Ok, you don't think the "additions" are worth the additional drain on resources. Fair enough -- I respect your opinion on it.

[Reaper]

I've been running Vista continuously on this computer for about a year.

 

 

I had assumed otherwise.

 

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Vista is functional if you only use it for basic stuff such as Microsoft office or just playing CD's, I'm just speaking from a different perspective. For what I have to do with my computer for both work and play (and no, not just games), Vista is not optimal.

 

I regularly see XP boxes with 55 processes running.

 

 

Which boxes were you looking at, mine uses less than 32.

[Pangloss]

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That post about processes reminded me of something that very much acts in Vista's favor -- it's MUCH more efficient about utilizing multi-core processors than XP was. The division of labor and memory utilization is MUCH improved under Vista.

 

How that compares with other operating systems, however, I cannot say. It would not surprise me if Linux or MacOS were superior in this regard.

[Reaper]

Ok, you don't think the "additions" are worth the additional drain on resources. Fair enough -- I respect your opinion on it.

 

Well, no, I don't think so. My custom GUI I made with Object Desktop does much more than Vista. I just don't find Vista impressive, thats all. Not only that, I can disable features anytime I want if it starts to become a drain on resources.

 

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Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Most of the complaints usually come from people who regularly download crap and/or play lots of video games, so there you go. They don't seem to value the use of, or know how to properly use, an external hard-drive either.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

That post about processes reminded me of something that very much acts in Vista's favor -- it's MUCH more efficient about utilizing multi-core processors than XP was. The division of labor and memory utilization is MUCH improved under Vista.

 

How that compares with other operating systems, however, I cannot say. It would not surprise me if Linux or MacOS were superior in this regard.

Actually, I think FreeBSD 7 will be the king in that regard. It has pretty wicked benefits for people running webservers.

 

Which boxes were you looking at, mine uses less than 32.

Mine, friends' computers, various other computers I have seen -- and I try to eliminate as many startup tasks as possible.

[Pangloss]

My custom GUI I made with Object Desktop does much more than Vista. I just don't find Vista impressive, thats all. Not only that, I can disable features anytime I want if it starts to become a drain on resources.

 

That's another valid point, IMO, the selectivity of interface features/functionalities. One of Microsoft biggest problems over the years has been its determination to be "all things to all people", forcing the OS to appeal to the lowest common denominator at the cost of the more granular kind of control that appeals to techies.

 

One of my current complaints about Vista, for example, is a change in the behavior of context-sensitive right-click menus. They don't respond to quite the same location clicks as they did in XP. And sometimes they don't respond at all, because of -- and this is a 20-year-old problem! -- incorrect current window context! I'm just waiting for some enterprising young programmer to put out a rollover window activator, circa 1992! Yeesh!

 

MacOS is even worse, but I've always thought it odd that Linux fans despair over their OS's unpopularity. Popularity would be the WORST thing that could ever happen to Linux.

[encipher]

I've been using Vista since the day it went RTM, and I absolutely love it. Now, before I can express my personal opinion towards the OS, I will make clear what exactly i do on it.

 

I have several computers, one of which is an AMD X2 4800+, with 1 GB of DDR ram. It's my primary development computer. I run Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Office suite, Multiple Adobe products (including premiere, after effects, photoshop, dreamweaver) for video post production purposes. I almost always have 10+ applications running simultaneously. I've also just started using Windows dreamscene. I'm also running full vista aeroglass

 

As you can imagine, I do quite a bit of rendering on the system, a lot of compiling etc.. and It has yet to crash. It has been very solid from the very beginning, I have disabled UAC which is a pain in the butt, but without it everything runs smoothly. Performance is great (again 1 gb of ram). However, there are a few issues I do have with vista:

 

1. I have about 3 TB worth of raw footage and other stuff on the system, especially when capturing off DV media, vista lags a great deal.

2. Search indexer puts a lot of strain my drives. I do a lot of data transferring as is, and with indexing my pc can sometimes come to a screeching halt. I have since disabled indexing and haven't had any problems like that again.

3. Explorer window listing.. For some odd enough reason, it can never remember my preferences (show file type, size, date modified etc..) and its reallly annoying.

 

Asides from those three points, I have had no issue with vista and I recommend it to almost everyone. My belief is that, as usual, people are afraid of change and look for any excuse not to move to the newer and better solution. I haven't had any compatibility issues with software/hardware although I have read about it a lot. I guess I might just be lucky, but who knows...

[Mr Skeptic]

I'm not afraid of change. I just don't want to be Microsoft's beta tester. Let them get their act together, and give me a reason to switch, then I will use Vista. I don't give a damn for prettier graphics.

[Glider]

That's another valid point, IMO, the selectivity of interface features/functionalities. One of Microsoft biggest problems over the years has been its determination to be "all things to all people", forcing the OS to appeal to the lowest common denominator at the cost of the more granular kind of control that appeals to techies.

This I agree with absolutely.

 

I'm not a techie and to me, my computer is a tool, and not an end in itself (i.e. computing is absolutely necessary for my work, but my work is not computing). I've been using windows based systems since 3.1 and each major edition seems to provide less control.

 

It is irritating that in its latest, 'best' iteration, I'm constantly engaged in dialogue that serves no other purpose than to reassure the OS that, yes, I really did mean to start that programme, and yes, I trust its author as much as I did this time yesterday.

 

Vista does what I need it to do (as I said) and for the most part, it does it well. I just wish it wasn't designed with the default position that the user is an idiot. It gets wearing.

[Pangloss]

The OP has been answered and we've had some good discussion here, in spite of some fanboy nonsense that had to be removed. I think we'll close this on a positive note.