Microsoft Vista Users Only Please: How do you like it so far?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

I’ll start. I do not like it at all. I find it dumbed down to the point of utter stupidity. I am being asked if I want to allow the HTML tool from the dope to work every time I use it. I have no way to shut this off. I cannot even figure out why my google cookie won’t save.

As I do things, I get constant nags to verify I want to do it. Yes, I want to do it!

I find the changes annoying so far. Thankfully, I am only using it on a work laptop, specifically purchased for me to beat up on Vista. At this point, I have zero plans to upgrade any of my PCs to it and I plan to recommend we stay on XP for as long as possible at work.

I hold out hope that either someone will call me an idiot and point me to how to turn off the Vista security prompts or that Microsoft issues a Service pack to turn off the Vista prompts.

So, how about other users, what do you all think?

Jim

#2

I don’t use Vista, but many of my customers do. I find that it’s less stable than XP, has more overhead (i.e. a game will run better under XP than Vista on equivalent systems), naggy, and it assumes all users are dumbasses.

Pass.

#3

Well, if you’re using Vista, that’s probably true :wink:

#4

You are pointing out Vista’s flaws, Cancel or Allow?

sorry, couldn’t resist :wink:

#5

I can’t call you an idiot in this forum (go ask in the Pit if you really want it), but the vista security prompts are called UAC (User Access Control), and can be turned off in the Control Panel. Exactly where it is depends in the mode you’re in, but most of the UAC “Are you sure you want to press the ‘s’ key at this time? That letter is used in the word ‘virus’?” prompts have a “what is this?” help thingy that will take you to the place to turn it off.

Perhaps fittingly, you’ll have to confirm several times that you want to turn it off.

#6

Thanks, I will look for that later and report back.

#7

I like it. One of the first things I did was go here: http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm and follow the directions. I haven’t had any of those things you describe.

#8

I’ve been using it for a few months now. I have found it no worse but no better than XP. I haven’t had many problems with stability, but then again, I mostly use my Windows machines just for email, IM, and the web. Most of the changes seem to me to be cosmetic. I have the same opinion of Office 2007, even though the interface changes in that are more significant.

I haven’t had the “allow HTML tool” problem; that sounds like a browser issue.

#9

I bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago after a catastrophic hard drive drive crash. So far:

Vista is a pig. It uses 1/2 a Gig just idling.

I had to download a Vista driver for a brand new HP all-in-one that I bought at the same time.

I also bought an external hard drive (lesson learned from the crash). Vista has a built-in backup utility. It bites. Instead of telling it which directories you want to backup, it asks for the “types” of files you want to back up, for example, music, TV recordings, documents.

The worst yet, my (now obsolete) Canon Powershot G2 camera will not interface with Vista at all. Canon, on the web site, says “tough luck”. They recommend buying an external card reader.

The other differences I’ve noticed compared to XP are purely cosmetic, which are the ones that annoy me the most. Change just for change’s sake is software wankery.

#10

Vista is a hardware hog - the specs for reasonable performance are simply ridiculous - and there are still no non-beta drivers from many vendors such as video cards. It is the living embodiment of the adage “software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”. I suspect it’ll seem OK after a SP or two and as faster hardware with multi CPUs gets more common, but I wouldn’t touch it til at least 2008.

#11

I’ve had it since the day it released (my new computer came with it installed) and I pretty much hate it. It’s crashed on me 3x as many times already than XP did the entire 2.5 years I had it. It doesn’t play nice with a lot of software that’s less than 2 years old; it doesn’t even play nice with some older microsoft programs! This computer, with 2gb of ram and a 4600+ AMD dual-core processor, runs slower than my old one did with 1gb ram and a 2ghz processor. None of the changes it lauds are actually improvements, and most of them - like the search features - are less efficent than… well jesus, windows 95, even. Vista is the suxxors.

#12

We have buildings full of Vista users. Once we settled on our lockdowns & turned off UAC, it’s fine. The lockdowns we had on XP to prevent users from hurting themselves or our installation were more troublesome than Vista ever thought about being. Our IT staff was pretty frustrated at the amount of relearning they had to do though.

From a user productivity standpoint I think “gadgets” were designed to ensure clerical users have a distraction every 30 seconds so as to prevent any actual work getting done. This will require the US to double the number of clerical workers & hence MSFT will sell twice as many OS licenses. We’re busy killing user’s ability to employ them without business justification even now.

#13

I’ve only used it for two days so all I have to say is that it’s really pretty. I only have Vista Basic, though. Also for some reason windows didn’t load this morning. That better be a random event, I just got this computer two days ago! If I had a choice, I would’ve gone with XP. I don’t like how Vista takes up so much RAM. I did figure out that if I chose Windows Classic appearance it frees up 200 MB of RAM. That’s almost as much as my old laptop had in total.

#14

We were discussing Vista yesterday and came to the following conclusion:

It’s not safer. Vista’s idea of safety is asking you if you want to do something so often that you get desensitized to the questions. When you DO get infected, Vista says “Not my fault, I asked you if you wanted to do it.” Security by deflecting blame is not security.

While Vista IS a resource hog, I’ll say that most modern operating systems will use up as much RAM as available as soon as possible. Accessing code from RAM is about 1000 times faster than trying to call it up from disk.

While I had it turned on, the 3d blurring and acceleration gave me vertigo. I have blurry vision enough with my glasses, I don’t need the OS to go all glass block on me. Win-Tab is a pale approximation to what Exposé does in OS X, and the 3D stuff is, uh, transparent.

#15

Which would be a good thing if Vista were actually doing that. But bring up task manager, switch a large foreground app to the background, and watch it page out – even when there’s plenty of physical memory left. All 2000+ versions of Windows seem to make keeping physical memory free a priority; but in most circumstances you’d be better off using it and paging only on necessity. This seems to be mostly why switching programs seems to take forever to paint the newly-front application’s windows, ticking away on the disk drive the whole time.

I’ve posted elsewhere about my experiences with Vista. It’s getting better, but not very fast. We’re six months after ship, and neither of the two leading vendors of video cards has a halfway decent driver; apparently they didn’t know Vista was coming. Microsoft’s own development system has irritating interactions with Vista. Applications that were stable in XP on the same machine crash constantly; I’ve seen more “Send Info to Microsoft” messages since I installed Vista than I have in my previous experience. Games play now (they didn’t for the first four months), but at frame rates about a third less than XP.

#16

I’m going to do this when I get home. Any other ways to free up more RAM? I got a new laptop with Vista on it, and it takes about 5-10 minutes to come back from “sleep mode” every time. :eek: It doesn’t have a whole lot of RAM, so I’m pretty sure that’s the problem.

#17

I’m surprised by the reports in this thread. I thought that Vista would at least give the same performance as XP. I may end up installing Windows as a secondary OS on my Mac, and I think maybe I’d better get a copy of XP Pro while I still can.

#18

Windows Vista is more secure than XP with the UAC on*, and is less secure with UAC turned off than it is with it turned on*, but how does Vista’s security with UAC turned off compare with Windows XP? Is it at least as good as XP with all its updates was?

*I base these statments on my impressions from the Apple commercial. if you can’t trust Microsoft’s competitor’s marketing department, who can you trust?

#19

Problems were numerous for me specially at Vista Launch. Drivers for the motherboard and video card, and most other peripherals was non-existent or buggy.

Vista itself crashed at least once per day.

Now it’s a different deal. Drivers for my two motherboards are stable, if not fully optimized. The same goes for my two Geforce cards (A 8600 GTS and an 8800GTX), and all my peripherals, including the two TV tuners in my media center PC.

The only problems I’m dealing with now:

  1. Performance. The gap has closed significantly from launch, but I’m still about 5 to 15 fps off in games from where I’d be in XP. Differences in performance elsewhere is not noticeable/negligible.

  2. Sleep mode is unrealible, specially in my media center PC, with the PC waking up at odd times, and failing to go back to sleep on occassion.

  3. Vista Media Center needs improvement. Right now it crashes if there is a video file it doesn’t like in one of the video folders (just by navigating into the folder!). Unless I copy a new video file, check to make sure it doesn’t crash, then add another file, etc, I risk the scenario I suffer from now. Yesterday I copied several old german TV shows to various folders. Apparently one or two are not liked by the media center App and now I can’t go into the “my videos” folder without having it crash on me. I’m dreading having to check each file one at a time to find the culprit.

Other than this (and I’m eagerly awaiting the vista media center update sometime later this year) I’m happy with Vista. It looks good, I feel more productive, and the prompts don’t bother me. I hardly see them anymore after installing all of my software anyway.

#20

For all of UAC’s faults, it’s better than the alternatives, and no worse than Linux or MacOS (using sudo). It is really convenient to try to install an application from a pure user account, and be asked to elevate the process to an admin account, without using runas or logging in as another user.

That said - wireless behaviour is appalling, sleep is slow, and the whole interface is clunky.

I hate it, and will take it off my wifes laptop when I find a MahJongg game for her to play. I may even go to Kubuntu (but Fedora 7 KDE sounds even nicer), but the family may vote for XP.

Si