Ive heard a lot of bad things about Vista. Im pretty vehemently anti-DRM and I absolutely loathe the very idea of Windows Genuine Advantage (grossly doublespeak term that it is.) On the other hand, Im not in the market for a new laptop and I do not have many options. I currently live in Japan and if I wanted an English OS I have 2 options: get one with an English version of XP or get Vista Ultimate, which can change languages. If I stick with XP, I am much more restricted in my choices (I have decided to buy from Dell and they only offer their Latitude models with English XP.) I would prefer to go with an Inspiron model--they are both cheaper and come with more of the features that I want, even considering an upgrade to Vista ultimate and 2 gigs of memory (since Ive heard Vista`s performance is awful with anything less than 2 gigs–and sometimes even with that…) I do not game much anymore–for me, speed, stability, and compatability with the programs that I do use (Firefox, OpenOffice, Picasa, etc.) are most important. Just to head off any suggestions, I am not quite ready to make the leap to Apple or Linux. One is too expensive and one is too obscure. (But please, no arguments about that… it is just my opinion.)
If you have had experiences with Vista, what did you think? Is it still a hassle, even on brand new machines? what is your opinion on the DRM features? Is it sluggish? I`ve heard lots of bad things about how slow file copying is, as well as terrible driver incompatability issues and such things. (I read the older thread back a few months ago, but I wanted to see if anyone has any new thoughts.) Thanks!
I have a Dell laptop with Vista. It works ok. I’ve had a few problems just with it not always responding. Sometimes a program will stop responding and I have to restart the computer but that’s been a problem with every windows computer I’ve used. So I’m not concerned about it.
Drivers are still a problem, and from what I’ve read always will be. But aside from not gaming, you don’t say much about what you will be using it for … if it’s really just the web and OpenOffice XP would be the way to go, the language issue aside.
As for Apple being too expensive … here you are toying with buy an extra gb of Ram to accommodate a crappy bloated OS, just so you can switch to Japanese. You get that out of the box with the Mac OS and 1gb will run everything just fine.
I like Vista. I didn’t want it, but it was cheaper to get my new box with V rather than XP.
However, it’s wonky with drivers. It completely lost my CD/DVD ROM drive after an issue with a game install + another program on my computer. That resulted in the computer itself detecting my drive when booting up (and trying to boot from my windows CD) but refusing to detect the drive at all in windows. It took a regedit to fix, and apparently is not an unknown issue with Vista.
However apart from that it’s been very stable, it runs well and responds quickly and looks rather nice.
Should you get it? If it’s got more features you want (language etc) then I’d say yes. If you’re happy with XP and it won’t affect the price of your purchase, then I’d say no.
Thanks for the replies everyone! Just to clear a few things up, I am ordering from Dell Japan, which means the default is Japanese language OSs; however, my Japanese is subpar and I would prefer some English around. This makes things a little more complicated because of Dells sometimes seemingly arbitrary choices of what to offer you as customization options*. Basically what it comes down to is I can get an Inspiron with everything I want for about $1,100 (and Vista Ultimate) or I can get a Latitude with Windows XP English edition for about $150** bucks more OR a somewhat slower processor (2meg L2 cache vs 4meg). From what I understand, the L2 cache size makes quite a difference and I do want to get the best bang for my buck… Plus it wouldnt have the Inspiron`s graphics card, which I do kind of want despite my lack of gaming nowadays. I might want to take it up again in the long lonely nights of living in a frozen Japanese hick town. :eek:
Anyways, thanks for all the advice again! I do want this laptop to last for a while, and when I think about it it seems kind of counterproductive to fight against the future–I mean, Windows has quite a lot of inertia behind it and eventually Vista is probably going to conquer all, just like XP did. Does it really make sense for me to buy an outdated OS? Sigh. I have to make my decision in the next few hours since today is the last day of a big sale on Dell Japans website... :o But yall are definitely helping!
*For some reason only the Latitude lineup has XP in English, and the screen sizes offered seem to be decided practically at random. And some models only have AMD processors, and some only have Intel processors… ugh!
**This is all really in yen, of course.
There’s a long time to go yet before Vista will be completely ubiquitous. And MS is at least good about giving a very long “overlap” time before ceasing support and updates for older versions of Windows. Game manufacturers will be supporting XP for a long time to come yet, because even if the number of new uptakes of XP are slowing down, the number of users still on XP will be going strong for a very long time.
To be honest, if Vista is cheaper and it’s got more of the bits you want then personally I’d got with the Vista box. That’s why I got Vista when I did and as I said, even though I did end up with a pretty annoying bug, it was one that was relatively easy to fix and for the rest of the time my system’s been running pretty well.
There were problems on my laptop with Vista. Games didn’t work because of issues with the graphics driver. My wireless would refuse to connect to a network every day or so, requiring a restart. I suspect a driver issue there also. Hardware compatibility with laptops is always a bit of a crap shoot. If I had a do-over I would wait until Vista SP1 came out. Actually, I’d scrap Vista entirely. Even with 1.5 gb of RAM it would use swap space on my HD. The visual effects are just eye candy, and I’d rather have better performance out of my programs. I was really disappointed when I went from a Pentium M 1.1 GHZ processor to a 2.0 GHZ Core 2 Duo without an increase in performance.
IMHO it’s absolutely ridiculous to have to pay for better hardware in order to run the friggen OS. Having to pay more because you want XP instead of Vista is even more ridiculous. Dell still sells XP on some of it’s models. If you push them I’d wager that they would give you XP without any increase in price.
I have several machines running vista, the laptop isn’t a dell and not a gaming machine and it works fine. Definitely get more ram, you’ll spend less if you the extra ram somewhere other than dell but it may be more hassle the the savings are worth to you. I bought a bare bones and did the upgrade myself requiring partial disassembly of the laptop. Latitudes are fairly decent machines.
If you find you don’t have enough frustration in your daily life, definitely get it. Otherwise wait until the first (or second) service pack comes out.
I would seriously advise against Vista (and I have been running it for almost a year now).
It is much, much slower then XP starting up, with copying files, etc.
I haven’t had any driver issues which you shouldn’t have if you buy a new system with Vista preinstalled.
There are a lot of compatibility issues with a lot of applications but I haven’t encountered any.
You might want to phone Dell directly.
By phone you usually have a lot more options.
Thanks for all the good advice, guys! Unfortunately, I was running out of time on the sale and I had to make a decision fast… so I went with the Vista machine. The specs were just too good to pass up.
Again, I can’t really change the specs cuz this is all happening in Japanese, a language in which I am not exactly proficient. With the help of Babelfish and rikachan, I can navigate a website in Japanese, but that’s about it. I just hope that SP1 helps things out when it finally comes out… otherwise I might just have to buy an English version of XP anyways! Anyways, thanks for all the great advice–and sorry I ignored it!
A layman here. Vista sucks! Why did MS have to go mess with what works? I guess Lord Billy-Bob Gates needed more cash. Heck, you cannot even find the shutdown button anymore! And, the look of Vista plus the graphics, like that big clock…just makes it look so cheesy and unprofessional! And, more and more desktop features (like the sticky pad and the puzzle) are stolen from prototype Macintosh stuff! (My good ole 128K Mac had a smoother look than this crap!) At least, for Mac, the stuff had more eye-appeal. Now, it - plus the rest of Vista - just looks…DUMB!
Maybe they should have called it Windows Unprofessional! - Jinx :mad:
