I like me some Vista. It looks prettier than XP and it runs great on my laptop. If you’re getting a new computer, Vista comes on the damned thing anyways, so just get the damned thing.
I’m familiar with some of the problems with JDBC and vista. But really this is something whoever is providing the bridge to work on.
Again, I’m not saying people will not have issues with Vista, I’m only saying that the reasons I listed are by far, the most common problems. As long as the OP doesn’t fall into those categories for one reason or another, vista should be just fine.
Once I turned off the “feature” that asked “are you sure you want to do that?” after every click, I’ve been very happy with Vista. I am on very new hardware, though.
I have a Vista based laptop with 2 gig of RAM. Never had any problems once I turned off user account control. Since SP1 was released you should have no problems with connectivity or drivers, I haven’t in the year since I got my laptop.
I built a new desktop with 4 GB RAM about 6 months ago and got Vista, much to the chagrin of some of the geeks in my life. The user account control was a pain, but once I figured out how to turn it off, it’s been fine. The only thing I like better about Vista is that I can set it to cycle through a folder of pictures for my desktop background through the windows sidebar. The only downside is that the colors on one of my favorite old games are all messed up.
All in all, it’s nothing special.
You might be able to fix the color problem by right clicking the game executable, going to compatibility, and disabling visual themes.
Thanks, I’ll give that a try when I get home. 
I’m running Vista Home Premium 32bit on a four year old machine that I’ve swapped the hardware a few times. It currently looks like this: AMD Athlon 3000+ (2.0GHz), nVidia 6800gt, 2gb RAM, Creative Audigy 4 vanilla. It was originally from Falcon NW and ran XP Home.
I switched to Vista just for fun (and because I got a price deal on it from my school) and I’ve liked it from the start. The Athlon’s a 64 bit processor but I went with the 32 bit Vista because reading up on the subject showed that the consensus was that driver support from different manufacturers for the 64 bit Vista lagged well behind the support for the 32bit version.
The only bit of trouble I’ve had is the monitor (Benq FP931) which is, I forget. I think maybe 6 year old? Anyway it works ok but if I put the system into hibernate the monitor is full of ugly green artifacts when I wake it up again and it won’t refresh correctly. But that’s not Vista’s fault - that’s the monitor that’s the problem. Oh and Bioshock didn’t like either my Creative sound card or the motherboard’s onboard sound. So I picked up a Turtle Beach usb card for about 30 bucks and that works for Bioshock. No surprise there - Creative drivers are notoriously crap. But all my other games work great.
I especially like the breadcrumbs in Vista as opposed to the old file path. I love the new search function and the way it integrates with the start menu. But from a UI standpoint it’s mostly just XP but prettier.
Lamia, buying a preconfigured laptop should be painless. Just be patient and spend an hour or so looking around and you’ll find yourself wondering what all the scary stories are on about. I would recommend David Pogue’s “Windows Vista: The Missing Manual” for anyone looking for an introductory text.
It’s not all that bad, but overall I choose to run XP instead, fewer headaches. It’s more secure than XP, but slower in many ways.
I bought a new Dell box last year when my old box died and I went with Vista Home Premium 64bit with 4GB Ram. My only complaint was that there was no ActiveSync (used for iPods, Palm PDA’s etc) version for 64bit Vista and they were not planning on building one. Fortunately, I upgraded to a smartphone which syncs up fine via Vista’s Sync Center so i was able to retire my PDA (was about time anyway).
I was hesitant when I made the purchase for the same reasons the OP has expressed but honestly, I have had almost no problems with any software or hardware and am actually quite please with Vista.
Thanks everyone for your comments. One of the campus computer shop guys contacted me today and said they may be able to get me a Latitude with the XP downgrade after all, which if true would solve my dilemma nicely. The computer would come with XP already loaded, plus a copy of Vista so I could upgrade when/if I felt like it.
Otherwise it sounds like Vista wouldn’t be TOO horrible for me. I wouldn’t be installing a lot of programs after the initial set-up, and I don’t have any peripherals other than a digital camera to worry about now. But I would really prefer to stick with XP as long as I can.
Cool. If and/or when you decide to install Vista, don’t go with the Upgrade option which just installs Vista on top of your XP install. Back up all your stuff first, then let Vista reformat and install itself fresh. It doesn’t take long (faster than reinstalling XP) and it will run smoother.
We bought two new computers this past fall: a desktop for me and a laptop for my wife. The laptop came with Vista, while I specifically requested XP for the desktop.
So far neither of us have had any complaints. She’s never been a heavy-duty user, so there was no adjustment phase for her with Vista. I’ve been in front of an XP OS for over 12 hours a day for the last five years, OTOH, so I really wasn’t in the mood to switch, especially when XP has been performing without a hitch the whole time.
I bought a refurbished HP with Vista Home Premium preinstalled (for $420!!) a few months ago, and haven’t had many problems. Actually, if we describe a problem as “something that prevents me from moving forward,” I haven’t had any problems.
I don’t have an opinion on the eye candy, but one thing that slows me down is that I haven’t figured out how to completely navigate through open/save dialogs using only the keyboard (however, since I operate primarily over a VNC connection, my keyboard is probably mapped in a weird way; when I get motivated enough, I’ll just look on lifehacker to find a relevant article). It also takes me a little time to figure out how to change a system setting; the first place I go is the newer Control Panels; if that doesn’t work, I switch to the “classic” control panels, and then go to the Services window (desktop->My Computer->Manage). But I’ve done that like twice in the last six months.
Web surfing, DVD playing and working with Microsoft Works (because I’m cheap) are no different than on XP. I think the key was that I got a computer with Vista pre-installed, and that was months after the Vista introduction problems. For the curious: 2.2GHz core 2 duo, 2GB RAM.
However, my habits may inherently bring me into fewer problem areas:
I don’t play computer games, I don’t use e-mail or IM and have the “full” McAfee internet protection. UAC doesn’t bother me, and I haven’t turned it off.
My company hasn’t switched over yet, and I want to hit the ground running when it does, so for $420, it was a great deal. Turns out, it’s not much different, at least for my uses, and it runs rings around the other cheap-o HP box I bought five years ago (again, on sale). One thing that puzzles me is that I can’t figure out exactly where startup items are defined (for all users). Anytime I get close, I end up with a message that I don’t have privileges for that. Anyone know a “sudo” command for the Vista command line?
You could post a link to this list of trivial changes…
Whoops. I just checked; it’s an AMD chip, not Intel.
Go to start menu, type “msconfig” right click and run as administrator. Then just go to the startup tab. I’m not sure if it defines the startup items for all users though, it may just be for the current user.
I’ve been using Vista on my computer for over a year now. It’s a Dell Inspiron 531, AMD dual-core 5000+ 2.66 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 128 MB video card, and Vista 32-bit. Runs perfectly smooth.
I actually recently installed XP on my secondary hdd so I could play some older games that didn’t seem to work so good on Vista. I can’t stand it anymore. All of the folders and menus look different and are in different spots than in Vista. The taskbar and quicklaunch are not nearly as nice as in Vista. For instance, I love to use a double sized taskbar on autohide with quick launch on top with large icons. Works out very nice on Vista but looks terrible in XP and seems to be buggy also. I’m also running Ultramon so I can have a second taskbar on my secondary monitor. Works smooth in Vista, not so smooth in XP.
In Vista, I can right click on the pictures, documents, etc. folders in the start menu, and I can change the location of the folders. I can’t seem to do that in XP. I keep my OS and personal data on seperate partitions, so this is a pain in the ass. I could probably go into the registry to change them, but why should that be required? Vista does this, no problems.
It’s little stuff like that which makes Vista a better OS for me. I find it to be more customizable, and that’s what I like.
I’ve troubleshot (troubleshooted?) desktop operating systems since the DOS days, have been through ALL of the Windows permutations to date. The biggest complaint I have (and have had EVERY time Microsoft did it) is that they change where you have to go to find the tool/applet/settings to make whatever changes need to be made. From a support standpoint, I think Windows 2000 was my all-time favorite (would’ve been NT 4.0 if it had supported plug & play). The jump from Windows 3.1/NT 3.x to Windows 95/NT 4.0 was painful because of the change to the GUI & the shift from .INI files to the registry. You had to relearn everything you knew and figure out where they had hidden the basic stuff. Same thing with XP. I’m old now, and it really pisses me off when someone running Vista has a problem and I have to hunt for 10 minutes to find where Microsoft hid THAT setting when I already knew where it SHOULD have been according to their previous logic. I guess I just hate having to relearn everything every few years just because Microsoft thought it would be COOL!!!
Do you mean turn off UAC?
Hit the start button. Type msconfig. Run it and Go to tools. Find the “Disable UAC” line and run that. Restart your PC. Done.
Incidently, this is also the place where you can tweak background services and startup programs.
I’m a bit confused. I thought most of the point of Vista was that it’s supposed to be much more secure than XP. Otherwise, it’s just XP with some fancy graphics tacked on.
Doesn’t turning off the UAC render that point moot? Why does everyone turn that off?
(I must admit, I haven’t used Vista and have no particular plans to do so any time soon, it’s just curiosity here.)
UAC helps in security certainly, specially when sneaky executables try to do things on your system you don’t want them to. But that is not the extent of the security improvements in Vista.