I bought an HP laptop a year or a year and half or so ago. I had a lot of fun playing around with Vista, but after a couple of weeks, the HD went bad. At the time I was too busy to deal with warranty and fixing it so I shelved the system. A few weeks ago I put an spanking new 500 GB into it and restored Vista from the install disk HP sent me. After clearing out the bloatware, it runs pretty damn sweet!
It is a Pavillion with a 1.8 centrino duo and 2 GB of ram. Runs very smoothly. I put Ubuntu on another partition, and it is OK, but seems to have issues with virtual memory, but Vista seems to run very well. Ubuntu, even when it is aping it in Jaunty Jackalope, seems downright primitive.
I think the Vista interface is elegant as hell. Makes XP look like a fisher/price toy,. Having no trouble administrating it as a desktop OS.
And, I have tried OSX and own a recent iMac, that I use for Final Cut, and still prefer Windows. It is a MUCH more sophisticated interface.
The (inaccurate) meme that Vista is the devil’s spawn is alive and well, even on these boards. As long as your hardware is fairly modern the OS is nothing but an improvement over XP.
That being said, Windows 7 is a considerable improvement over Vista, you may want to give that a shot as it’s currently free until this time next year
If you could just have the graphics, and not the rest, I would haved liked Vista.
I had Vista on my last Laptop. I had to relearn next to everything on it, and essentially ended up doing things that a computer novice would do, just for the convenience. [I ended up putting next to everything into one Direct… I mean folder just so I could tell where it was on my PC.]
Long story short, my Hard Drive crashed, and I scraped (gambled [and won], actually) enough money to get a Netbook. This netbook. It came with XP.
I totally forgot how closer to 3.1 XP was, than to Vista.
But then, I am 26, I nearly grew up with computers. I can hold my own in DOS. Getting XP back was like an old friend for me. Like riding a bicycle. I didn’t have to relearn everything again.
Personally, I understand what Vista is trying to do. In my opinion they Microsoft went for too much at once. In my opinion, Vista is more Fisher-price than XP. People who had 3.1 - XP were forced to learn a NEW way of doing things, and frankly, they had to play with Vista to get it right. I doubt most of them ever did.
I am done with Vista. Hopefully 7 will get it right. If not, I am sure this computer can last a while.
That is unusual for someone of your age. I am a year or two from being 50, and it has been a while since I met anyone who even knew what DOS was. But DOS is done. What we have are command line references but not a complete OS like DOS was. I started with 3.2, but had used CPM and TRS-DOS and obscure machine language before that. Flipped switches for lines of code… Punchcards… :eek:
I used Win 95 for ten years, from '97 to ‘07. Then I got a computer with Vista. It works great. There are a few problems with it, like how explorer can’t seem to remember my columns or icon placement, but overall it’s very stable on my computer. Quick and responsive. Setting up network connections and security settings are a snap. Overall it’s been the best OS I’ve ever used.
I worked with XP at school, at work and on my friends’ computers. I hated it. It was completely different from Win 95 and not in a good way. Ugly, unstable (at least before SP 2 on the machines I worked on) and overall it left a very bad impression on me.
I have Ubuntu installed on one of my partitions. First, my wireless card didn’t work. I tried for hours to install drivers for it. I gave up after half a day and bought an ethernet cable to plug into my router. 5 minutes later and Ubuntu had downloaded and installed the wireless drivers. Why the hell I couldn’t I install them without being wired in first, I have no fucking clue.
The default Ubuntu fonts are ugly, I had to adjust them to make them readable. They look like shit on the default settings. Gave me a headache trying to read them. Even after installing extra fonts, the fonts in Opera and Firefox still look like shit. The OS itself seems slow and sluggish. Dragging windows around seems laggy, maybe it’s my video card, but I don’t know. And I don’t care because I hardly ever work in Ubuntu now, I only use it when I want to keep up on my Unix skills.
I have Win 7 installed on yet another partition. So far it’s been incredible. It’s just as stable as Vista, and even speedier. It’s also the best looking Windows release yet, but aesthetics are a minor point here. It’s user friendly. The new taskbar is a nice improvement.
Like Vista, there are a small number of quirks in explorer. It still doesn’t seem to remember my column settings. And they stupidly disabled the option to turn off sorting and auto-arrange, and you can’t pin folders to the taskbar, but it is still in beta. Overall I look forward to its release and will be upgrading when it comes out.
When I had Vista on a laptop before I “upgraded” to XP, it was a constant fight. I want to install something, it took several responses before it did it. I wanted to install my editor, which is so old it came on a disketter–no way can you put an exe file any place under Program Files (okay it installed under root well enough). The program I use daily (TeX) came on a CD with instructions to run the install.exe file. Load Explorer and it does not admit that install.exe exists. Fortunately, the Command prompt was not so instrasigeant. The Find command was totally useless. It would do nothing and say “finished”. What a mess.
I started with DOS (no version number) moved on to v. 1.05, then 1.1, then 2.11, 3.something,… 6.1, Win 3.1 (awful), Win 95 (first useful one), Win 98, NT 3, then NT4 (not bad), missed Me entirely, used Win 2000 (really NT5) and XP and made all those transitions without difficulty, but just could not adapt to Vista.
I think much of the hate for Vista (aside from Microsoft understating the hardware requirements) is not so much that it’s a bad operating system, but that it doesn’t offer enough benefits for the average user to make it worthwhile to go through the effort of learning to use a new operating system.
XP, once the major patches were released, worked well enough for most people, it’s not really clear what they have to gain about upgrading (or now, upgrading twice if the are going from vista to 7). After all, the mark of a good OS for the average user is that they don’t have to spend too much time thinking about the OS.
I agree, but that’s partly because they made a lot of changes to the interface and as a result, there’s a lot of effort required to learn to do the same things.
Also, there are some software that worked perfectly on XP that no longer work in Vista. Mostly older software, I admit, but some people don’t like to upgrade if the older version was perfectly adequate.
Vista is perfectly good once you turn off all the annoying ‘features’, worst of these being UAC.
“Are you sure you want to move that icon slightly to the left?”
“Are you sure you want to perform a right click?”
“Are you sure you want to do nothing for ten seconds?”
All the people I’ve known who’ve had problems with Vista, stem from memory. Vista’s minimum requirements are too low in reality. Once you get enough memory it’s quite nice.
My only problem with Vista is that it does everything it can to keep me from running unsigned drivers. Of course that’s a problem that your average user would probably never run into nowadays. Anyone know if Windows7 is going to do the same thing?
Other then that though it’s pretty much the same thing as XP once you turn off all the nagware and setup your account as an admin. But with built in DVD writing and much worse support for managing multiple sound devices.
True, but that was true of 98se -> XP as well. And in both cases you can, with a few clicks, change the layout to the old system. In fact i’m running vista with the windows 98 theme. I’m pretty sure you can run it like XP as well. Though since i always ran XP in windows 98 theme i wouldn’t be able to recognize it if i found it.
Not in my case, 4GB still wasn’t enough for it to get bogged down. After a forced acquisition of a new laptop (after the previous one died), two months with Vista and its infuriating random second-long freezes without rhyme or reason was enough to make me finally make the long-anticipated jump to Linux, which had previously been delayed by the cons outweighing the pros.
So I’m now running enough programs to make Vista vomit, plus my previous legit copy of XP on a virtual machine, and also can access two printers which I could previously only get working by tricking it into installing XP drivers. (And I can’t for the life of me remember how I did it, so can’t replicate it, either! Maybe sacrificing a few animals would do the trick.)
Hell I know DOS and I’m 23. Unusual case here though, since my dad is an electrical engineer who was always getting the most cutting edge computer gear, and I literally did grow up on computers.
Also my grandparents had one of these babies which I was also tinkering with from age 7 or so. The original Apple Macintosh. I played the text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on it. Ah, the memories.
