Houndog777

Sick of reading moans about Windows Vista, I thought I'd start this here thread......Anyone else feel like me?
My Vista Experience
I've used every MS OS since Windows 95 and for me, Vista not only looks better than anything that's gone before, but undoubtedly has much more under the hood.
And it also seems to work better, too. Yes, it's resource hungry, but it should be,.......it's doing a lot more.

With all my peripherals now installed, I've experienced none of the much rumoured compatibility problems. The most important, my Lexmark 3350 AIO scanner printer, installed easily and it's bundled software works just fine.
Amazingly, my old and favourite camera, an AGFA ePhoto CL18 installed & is working perfectly with it's XP drivers. My fave games; Doom3 & Quake4 work perfectly and fast enough for my liking. (A directX 10 card is on my Christmas wish-list, though).

As for security, I believe Microsoft when they say Vista is secure. Why? Because it's a very successful business that bothers about it's reputation. There are no winners, having their products anything other than as secure as possible. Plus the reports I've read elsewhere have been positive.
Sadly, ordinary home users like myself are simply not qualified to judge how secure any OS really is. We need IT Pro's to advise and inform us; which they do every day through the media.
I will say, that common sense surely plays a massive part in protecting yourself and your details online. Since Windows 98, I've only ever been infected with trojans and the like, three times. Twice after visiting adult web sites, and once after stupidly installing pirated software. You reap what you sow!

With it's eye-candy, Media Centre, rapid Search Indexer and super-easy Back-up & Restore, I believe Vista is a winner. It's just a shame it's human nature to hang on to the past for as long as possible. And like it or not, XP, just like the excellent Windows 98se, will soon be obsolete.


Need big-bucks for a Vista PC? No, you don't!
My latest Home Computer was built for less than £500 (under 1000 US dollars), including the Vista OS.

Asus P5B-VM Quad-Core,1066mhz 965G motherboard, with integrated 256mb Intel graphics and HD sound
Pentium D915 Dual Core 2.8ghz/4mb/800mhz Processor, with Arctic 7 Pro Cooler
2gb Samsung DDRII 533mhz memory; max 4gb
Inno3D 7600 GS, 256mb PCI-E Graphics Card
Western Digital Caviar SE SATA2 80gb HDD (I save my stuff to DVD, so no need for anything bigger)
Western Digital Ultra ATA IDE 40gb HDD ( For system back-up)
LG GSA-H22N DVD-RAM DL
Arctic Power 450w PSU
All internal cables etc by Akasa.
Two Coolermaster LED case fans; 12cm front and 8cm rear.
Youngyear Sys-Guardian System Monitor in a CD bay.
Antec all black & silver mid-tower case
No floppy! At last.
Windows Vista Ultimate OEM

Benchmarked, tested & working well.

All of this, purchased on the much maligned eBay, with a few mistakes along the way but no real problems.
(I believe bad sellers are usually easy to detect in any market place if you're careful and wary. I've also found over the years that the majority of people on planet-earth are both honest and decent.)
Houndog777

Girderman

I built an Opteron 165 system on a DFI board and never saw the potential of this hardware until Vista.

I really like it, and like it more every day.

Unfortunately I get chronic HD error problems on a 290 Gbyte SATA that never had a problem before Vista, and the errors are all on the Vista partition.

But I think it is my chipset drivers need to be updated. Too lazy lately to try them.

I don't really like IE7 too much, either. Where's the back button ? And the Home Page button is too small and obscure looking. And the search in the browser is goofy and suspicious looking. I thought Microsoft lost an anti-trust suit for software bundling, and now Vista wants to be my search engine. I like Google just fine, maybe Gates should pays some more millions.

And I don't like Vista's Explorer either. Where are the directory navigation arrows, like "Up" ? Roaming around in the directory structure is no longer intuitive, it's unnecessarily complex with WAY too many features jammed into my mug that I will NEVER use. Too much eye candy, too many glittering, shimmering, winking, dancing and glowing lights; like a Las Vegas showgirl only she's fat and has a mustache.

But (/rant) the boot-up and shut-down times are MUCH faster and smooter too. I can actually do something once the Desktop appears, instead of waiting for XP to finish loading the drivers and connecting the internet. It's more stable, and better looking in most respects. The sound got better too. Smaller, lighter & faster sound prompts rather than grandiose XP noises that sort of sounded like the groans of a sinking Cargo ship that got torpedoed in WWII.

jen56

Houndog I have to disagree with you... Give me XP Pro anytime.. When my other half had Vista on his computer (he was a vista tester) .Internet connection was interfered with something chronic, and it would not please me if I was doing something online and all off a sudden my connection disappeared. I wasn't happy, especially when it happened several times a day.
I am happy with XP and there will not be any change for this member.
There is a saying: It goes...Better the devil you know than the one you don't know.
That's why I am staying with XP Pro....

PanamaGal

Business version working like a champ for us.

nickster_uk

Vista gets my vote too...it's an excellent OS.

It does have a couple of minor downsides like being bloated (but with huge storage hdd's at competative prices, this shouldn't really be an issue) and resource hungry but as Houndog777 says, it does far more than XP and all other MS OS's. Also, again echoing Houndog777's sentiments on cost...it doesn't need the most expensive system in the world to run Vista (though that would help), i'm currently in the middle of upgrading CPU, RAM, MoBo & GPU for about £300 which isn't so bad considering the quality of the hardware.

I expect people who used the beta versions will be sceptical but you should expect problems with testing software. IE7 was notoriously bad buring beta testing but I now rate is as highly as Firefox. It never causes me any problems and my system is always clean.

FreoHeaveho

I agree, I am hearing much negative comments from users of Vista. My opinion is that most of the problems relate to using Vista on a machine that it was never intended to be used on.

Testers get problems, well thats a first lol

dai

i tested and ran as my sole operating system for over a year before release
i only had 1 bsod when trying to get the xp creative driver to work
there was only one release that had internet connection problems
i had 32x on one drive and 64x on another
i only updated to the next release on one at a time in case there was a problem with the release,so that i had a working system to fall back on
when i test i run the new operating system full time so if there are bugs they are going to show up
i found it better than xp even from the very early versions
as far as i am concerned the finished product is streets ahead
it takes a bit of getting used to finding everything,some are just renamed from xp
others are new
but if you dig in deep you find a lot more controls over everything
but i learnt from testing 2000 and xp if you don't want problems make sure your h/ware is up to scratch to run the new release
so i built this computer specifically for running vista
i cannot wait to get my hands on the next release

FreoHeaveho

next release being Vienna or SP1 Vista?... agreed in full too

dai

vienna is supposed to come first

FreoHeaveho

really??? wow, I thought sp1 is due in second half of 2007?

dai

their aim is to have the next release out in under 2yrs they were well under way with inhouse testing long before vista was released
bill was not impressed with the delays in vista and stated a max of 2yrs between new releases

FreoHeaveho

it will likely be a 64bit OS i would imagine, where does that leave a system like mine?

dai

yours must already be capable of 64bit

Real_Bullet

Vista is good but the problem is you need to set so much up after installing it.

This includes the own manufacture drivers if the windows update drivers screw things up, alot of the addons like microphone, speakers, all that needs to be setup manually.

Alot of stuff needed to be setup manually when I installed Vista, its hard to use and get use to for a while, once your past that problem, your ok. I noticed Vista is pretty good OS, its fast and everything.

Scriabin

I've actually experianced quite a bit of Vista bashing at my school, but I always do my best to defend the OS. Even with the problems I'm having, I just love Vista. It seems to run more smoothly than XP did and you can't ignore how nice it is to look at. I suspect many of the mild problems I've had came from the fact that I'm running it on a a 2004 Compaq Presario that is probably not the best machine for it.

Nevertheless, despite internet connection problems (which I believe are my internet service provider's fault) this has been the best Windows I've seen in a while and I've really enjoyed using it.

nickster_uk

That's a very good point about the post-installation setup Real_Bullet. I haven't had any significant issues finding drivers but it took me a couple of days (at least) to tweak it so I was happy with everything which included finding out about all the new services and which could be disable etc and which features I could disable/should enable etc. The following is a great site which I found very helpful if anyone's interested:
http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html

Houndog777

A good tip for customizing an OS is to read the help & support documentation that comes with it.
How many of us actually do that?
We expect Vista to be better than XP, but not too different as it's a pain learning new stuff. Once you do learn, though, you find it's quicker and smarter than xp and you won't be going back.
Much the same happened with XP when it was first released.

Girderman

I don't. I'd rather complain here and make someone else RT*M.

FreoHeaveho

lol girderman!

60307a

I have to defend Vista too. The issues that my customers are having a majority of the time is that they just don't understand how to use it. They go on the internet with no protection and see an add theat says"click the bunny and win a car" as the bunny runs across the screen, so ofcourse duh...CLICK!
Guess what? No car AND no internet!

Who do they blame Vista!

It is a new OS but is NOT problematic as you will hear everywhere. People are just doing dumb things and installing software from 1998...ah duh.