I’ve had a Vista-run computer for a couple of months now… And I adore the OS.
Admittedly I may be free of many of the common problems associated with it - such as driver compatibility - by having up-to-date hardware.
One problem I do have, and it isn’t such a problem for somebody with patience, is the fact that unlike with XP my internet connection takes a minute or so to be operational after the OS has loaded (XP would have internet access immediately)
And I have compatibilitiy issues with some software… but that can be expected with software designed on/for an older OS.
Annoying features like Indexing, and UAC can be turned off… and it only takes a minute on google to find out how.
I can’t say I adore Vista, but I like it well enough.
I’m not about to strip my PC and go back to XP - I’ve had no problems with the OS itself, everything works and runs quite nicely.
I can’t say that I’ve noticed my internet connection being any slower at startup than XP, but then my XP machine always took a moment or two to say hello to our router anyway, so there’s nothing new there for me.
But yes, I think we are in the minority at the moment.
I’ve had a couple of crashes, but they were after I was playing around in the registry and that was my own damned fault. But I haven’t had any crashes apropos of nothing.
Wouldn’t have paid real money to upgrade the old system to Vista, but so far after almost 2 months with the new machine, no reason for bitter hatred nor desire to replace it with XP, either.
(“Windows Mail”, OTOH, is lameness on a stick; it’s actually **missing ** features that were in the last versions of OE… by Og, M$ really can’t do a mail/news client right to save their lives… I guess I’ll be getting T-Bird and the paid version of Forte Agent…)
I think there’s two things that will make a person have a good vista experience:
Enough ram
The right usage patterns
If you happen to not meet those criteria, you would be me.
I say that because I was give a temporary Dell to live out of while I loaned out my Mac…I threw Ubuntu on it as a liveability experiment. That first day (in a work usage mode) mightily sucked. This weekend, mostly using it for google apps has been pretty okay.
I’d imagine Vista would act the same way with slight differences.
No, I think you have a magic computer, Lob. Windows explorer crashes 75% of the time I do searches (this started happening after an automatic, un-uninstallable, update 3 months ago), and when it comes to real, full on crashes, I’ve had that happen about half a dozen times because of drivers issues since I got this computer last winter. That’s already 3 times as often as XP ever crashed on me.
What I can’t figure out is why the crashes are suddenly caused by the same drivers the computer has been using for weeks or months at a time. How do they become uncompatable after working for so long?
You definitely seem to be in the minority, Lobsang.
I haven’t used it much at all myself, but the only good thing I’ve found about it is that it has MahJongg (a game to which I’m addicted). In a year or two more I’ll probably trust it, but I still don’t like it.
(Which is just fine for me; disliking Vista pushed me to replace my busted laptop with a Mac rather than another Windows machine, and now I’m in love.)
I had my first crash on Vista yesterday, but I’ve been running it on my laptop for two or three months. My laptop isn’t my primary machine so it doesn’t get as much use, but when I have used it, it’s been pretty good (touch wood).
I don’t do video editing or LAMP but I do play games. I play a lot of games - WoW, FEAR, Doom 3, CoH, Portal, HL2, TF2.
I’ve not had any of my games crash. The times I’ve had the crashes were just when I was browsing online. Not even watching videos, just browsing the dope using Firefox.
Not wishing to hijack the thread, just a recommendation for using Agent for email as well as Usenet - it’s much better than T-bird, and since you’re buying it anyway, why not?
I’m sorting around for new mail solutions and am likeing Google Mail. Apple’s Mail App had great spam filtering, Thunderbird might eventually learn to be good at it, but I’m getting more and more that the apps aren’t filtering. I’m hoping the wizards at Gmail can do a better job.
The Windows Key-search feature is killer. It’s kind of like having a command prompt back, but better. It’s like just hit a key, type, “excel,” “int,” “word,” or even the more obscure programs that I rarely use and it’s right there. For someone that uses keyboard shortcuts over the mouse, it’s awesome.
It’s been pretty stable for me, although the main reliability problem I’m having is with IE7 and Gmail. They don’t get along well for some reason, but I’ve been very unimpressed and annoyed with the newer versions of Firefox. I used to be a Firefox convert but I’ve since returned to IE.
My biggest beef with Vista were the preset User Controls:
Then I turned those off and it’s been a glorious partnership ever since.
I really do wish that developers would get hopping on updating their software to be compatible with Vista, though… particularly my corporate VPN client. It’s not a big issue, though, because it gives me a convenient excuse as to why I don’t work from home.
