Windows Vista -- is it THAT bad?

Okay, I’m in the market for a new laptop, and it’s dawning on me that I’ve put things off so long that getting another Windows XP system isn’t going to be as easy as it would have a year ago. So I’m wondering now if it’s worth the trouble of staying with XP, or if I should go ahead and switch to Vista.

Oh, I’m certain someone is going to think it’s clever to tell me to switch to Mac instead, but I don’t want to hear it. This thread is for opinions about Windows Vista, and Mac vs. PC arguments belong elsewhere.

I heard a lot of awful things about Vista when it was first released, but a fair amount of it seemed to be because of computers that weren’t up to running Vista rather than the operating system in and of itself. If I got a new computer that could handle Vista, would I as a longtime XP user be likely to have many problems with it? I really dislike having to get used to a new operating system even under the best of circumstances, but if it’s running properly is Vista actually inferior to XP or just different?

Or to put it another way, should I avoid Vista at all cost or suck it up and learn to deal with it? I don’t even know anyone who’s using Vista now, so anything anyone here can tell me would be appreciated. I’ve been reading reviews online but I haven’t found this very helpful.


A little more about my specific situation:

My current laptop is a circa 2002 HP Pavilion. I am not a power user by any means. I’m not concerned about being able to play the latest computer games. I use my home computer primarily for Web surfing (browser of choice is Firefox), word processing, financial spreadsheets, and photo editing. The main things I want that I don’t have now are a wireless card, the ability to run whatever the latest version of Adobe Photoshop is, and the ability to have both Photoshop and iTunes running at the same time without my system freezing up. I also figure I might as well get as much hard drive space as I can, because I’ve been around long enough to know that what seems like a lot of space when the computer is new will seem barely adequate after a few years.

I work at a university that has a contract with Dell, and offers better-than-basic Latitude 6500 laptops to faculty for about $400 off the retail price. If I purchase through the university I’d also be able to participate in a no-interest payment plan, which would be nice. The only drawback is that they tell me they probably can’t get me a Latitude with an XP downgrade, it would have to be Vista Business.

My other option is to get an Inspiron 1525 with XP directly from Dell. I wouldn’t be able to get a special discount on this, but they are on sale now. I could get an Inspiron for less than even the discounted Latitude at work, but to get more memory and a bigger hard drive like I want then the price would be about the same. I also wouldn’t be able to get the no-interest payment plan, but I can afford to pay for the whole thing up-front so this isn’t a dealbreaker.

It is my preference to get a Dell, because if I needed to have it serviced I could do so on campus. I live in a small town, so taking my computer elsewhere for service would be a hassle.

No, it isn’t. For a single home user on a machine made for Vista, it works just fine.

The issues came from trying to install it on computers that weren’t designe for it, from the fact that some manufacturers were slow to develop drivers for it, from people who didn’t like the extra security features (which are inconvenient, but make it harder to infect with viruses/spyware), and from power users who needed particularly esoteric software.

Most Vista users find it’s perfectly fine for their use. If you want to wait a bit for Windows 7, that may be even better, but Vista’s problems are vastly exaggerated.

I think you’ll find it slightly different at first, but after a small time getting used to it (and maybe help from a savy friend or a quick google search to change some settings to make things more XP-ish, if that’s your preference), it’ll be like second nature.

The only reason for a home user to get XP, IMHO, is if he or she has specific peripherals that still don’t play well with Vista. For example, some audio interfaces for recording via firewire are still problematic on some Vista machines.

Yuck. I particularly hate the space-gobbling features like the fade-in animations, and loathe with a special loathing the many non-intuitive menu paths.

Buy a little HP with XP (Mini 1000 series, for example). Load your Office suite from your old disks.

Obligatory XKCD link.

Yes it is that bad… Well at least until you get rid of all the messages asking if you really want to do what you used to do on XP without thinking much about it. After that, it runs stable with few problems. Until then, God, I hate it!
Get Firefox and ignore IE7, btw.

My parents got a new computer for Christmas and they’re having all sorts of problems. They can’t download Adobe Flash, for one thing, because Adobe hasn’t released a 64 bit version yet. They can’t do basic things such as download pictures, etc. and have been calling me every day with a new problem.

The flip side is that there’s absolutely no reason for a user who already has XP to migrate to Vista…well, at all, unless there’s hardware that doesn’t have XP drivers (unlikely).

Vista is a perfect example of Microsoft trying to give us the carrot instead of the stick with their planned obsolescence scheme for operating systems.

They want to sell more OSes, so they’re trying to make Vista look cool and flashy to sell more, when in fact, XP does all that an OS needs to do, and does it well, relative to Vista, with less overhead and less problems.

The stick of the planned obsolescence scheme will be the EOLing of XP in the next few years, forcing everyone to Vista or Windows 7, when again, there’s nothing particularly obsolete about XP.

my biggest problem when I first upgraded to Vista on my PC (my old PC could handle the OS itself just fine, mind you, though I should note I’m mostly an OS X user) was that it simply couldn’t access my Linksys WiFi router if there was any sort of password on the thing. I searched for hours online regarding this problem and the only fix anyone seemed to have was to simply disable any WEP or WPA key you had and go with an unsecure network… great. (They HAVE to have fixed this by now, though. I’d check by my PC lives in another country…)

Also the fact that it took MS 5 years to create an operating system that attempts to look like OS X but still has all the silly pitfalls of XP was kinda grating (seriously? A registry? still?!) And all the little “are you sure you want to do this?” messages that made me want to destroy all life (though OS X now has a couple of these, too. Look, I know I just downloaded this program from the internet, I’m pretty damn sure I want to open it, hence me attempting to open it. Damn people programming for the lowest-common denominator…) I will say the install process of Vista is one of the most pain free (and fastest) OS installs I’ve done, though.

ETA: so yea, maybe not “avoid at all costs” but it does add a lot of annoying things for simply being a prettied-up version of XP

I’ve not had a problem with Vista for about 9 months now.

It was annoying at first, but not a dealbreaker. As someone upthread said, most of my problems were software versions that didn’t support Vista yet. So far I haven’t found much that it actually does better than XP.

I’m a similar user to you. Word processing, Exel, some games, and the internet and I’m golden. It looks different but better IMO. Rumor has it that v.7 will be a more stable product for business networking issues but that’s purely conjecture at this moment.

I have 64-bit Vista and flash, just download the normal client, it doesn’t matter.

Direct X 10, if you’re a graphics whore at least.

I got a computer that shipped with Vista. In other words, it was supposedly made with Vista in mind.

But there are some programs that I could use on XP that won’t work on Vista. The error messages, as usual, are completely useless.

I say stay with XP as long as you can. The bells and whistles of Vista aren’t really worth the trouble of not being able to use some programs you’ve paid good money for.

It’s not as bad as it was when it first came out, but it’s a step down from XP in many little ways like search still not working properly without crashing constantly. I made sure I ordered my laptop with XP on it before Dell discontinued offering it in July.

On an adequate hardware platform Vista works fine. Any OS is going to leave some older hardware behind re drivers etc (XP sure did) , so I don’t really blame Vista for that.

The big problem (to me) with Vista is that interactionally it’s simply a pain in the ass to use with the mass of annoying gatekeeper messages cropping up for everyday surfing and file tending. It like a series of speed bumps and after the first 100 times or so of requesting authorization for some incredibly mundane workaday task it gets pretty fucking annoying.

You know you have a serious reputation problem when the OS manufacturer has to spend Gods knows how many millions for TV ads showing people running a “mystery” OS that they really like and then reveal it’s MS Vista! And the reactions are “Wow it doesn’t suck as bad as my friends said it would!”

If there a level of self abasement deeper than that for an OS that it has to fake users out to get positive comments I’m not sure what that would be.

It’s never been nearly as bad as the reputation it’s received, nor was it ever as good as Microsoft would have liked us to believe.

For the average home user, it’s just fine. Don’t order Vista 64-bit. It’s not necessary unless you have more than 4 GB of memory, and there are issues with application compatibility (as has been mentioned upthread). If you are going to surf the Internet, use general office-type applications, and play the odd game or two, you won’t notice the difference after a couple weeks.

My company uses Dell PCs, so I am able to take advantage of their employee pricing, as well. In the past couple years, I’ve gotten new machines for myself, my wife, and my sister, all running Vista, and nobody has had any problems.

Same here. Have had it for about 6 months or so now, on a brand new (and good performance) HP, and no issues whatsoever. I can imagine that with older PC’s or ones that have limited memory resources, it can be a pain. On the other handm I also do not really see advantages versus my previous XP.

Looks like a LOT of people in this thread have run afoul of the UAC, which is a huge pain in the ass. Fortunately, it’s easily remedied. Go to Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > User Accounts and the last option in the list is “Turn User Account Control on or off.” Select “off.” Presto change-o, no more nag screens.

They’re doing something wrong–I’m running Vista Ultimate 64 and Flash runs just fine.

If you have the resources for it, Vista isn’t a bad OS. Post SP1 it’s quite stable and having native DVD drag/drop burning alone is worth leaving XP for. I don’t have a problem with its weird file structure since I think all OS’s have stupid file structures and I impose my own. The missing “up” button was disconcerting at first but I’ve gotten to rather rely on the nav pane view and find it a faster way to get around than the old way.

Don’t get anywhere near Vista if you have less than a GB of RAM. Just don’t… I like a 64 bit OS because I’m notorious for using huge amounts of native resources concurrently and I tend to send 32 bit machines into brain freezes. Software compatibility isn’t an issue for me–it’s mostly games that have the problem. Finding 64 bit drivers for Vista is way easier than finding them for X-64 by a long shot!

On a new machine, with 4 gigs of RAM, you should be fine. The problem with Vista is that MS softened the standards for what could be called “Vista capable” (or compliant or ready or whatever one of the billion or terms they were throwing around) and was allowing machines which could not run all of Vista’s features to use the “Vista capable” logo, so people bought the things and discovered that it didn’t look like they were shown on TV or that they had problems with things that they were told would work just fine with Vista. Another problem was that there were six different versions of Vista, making it confusing as to what version someone needed. (Really, “home” and “professional” are all that’s needed, and even that’s a bit much, IMHO.)

And while its true that XP does pretty much all that one needs of an OS, it is not nearly as secure as Vista, and if your current printer, scanner, whatever goes out, you might have a tough time finding a new one that will work with XP. Windows 7 may come out this year, and it might not. MS is sending mixed signals about it, but any machine you buy today will be Win 7 compatible, it seems. Apparently, MS is doing a lot to make sure that exsisting hardware will work with 7.

There is certainly no reason to upgrade from XP, but I’m not having any problems with SP 1. Well, once my desktop disappeared and I had to restore from a save point, but other than that it has been fine. I found out before I got it that the VPN I use for work doesn’t work on 64 bit Vista, so I got a machine with 32 bit and 3 Gig, and it runs just dandy much faster than my old XP machine. Not surprising this this is a dual core machine that is a lot faster. I’m using Office 2003, no problems, and even Star Office 5.2 kind of works. I think SP 1 fixed a lot of issues. I don’t play games or do a lot of fancy things, though.

I only have XP machines. At Xmas time I spent a couple of weeks at my parents and fooled with their Vista desktop beasty. It’s a budget Dell, and performed well, no problems with browsing or Office apps.

The main thing for me was how every menu was renamed and in a different place. I ask why? Hasn’t every version since 95 basically had the same names and order?