Windows Vista Myth Busting

I have Vista running on:

Mrs. Garrett’s Dell Notebook (lower end Inspiron) – it came installed
My new desktop (Intel E6600, 2GB RAM, 512MB video, 2 500GB SATA 3.0 drives)

I also have XP running on:

An older Dell Precision Workstation 530 (1.5GB RAM, 18GB 15K SCSI drive, 2x1.7GHz Xeon Processors)
My work PC (Dell Dimension 9150 Dual Core w/4GB RAM)

I also have a MacBook Pro 17" – brand new. 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD.


The Mrs. has no issues with her notebook. She opens it up and it finds the Internet within a couple seconds. It runs Word. She’s happy.

I have some weirdness with my new desktop running Vista.
[ul]
[li]Office Visio 2007 is constantly updating.[/li][li]After a while, things started running SLOW and the hard drive is churning away constantly. A reboot usually fixes this.[/li][li]Can’t do more than two things that read or write to a disk and expect them to be quick. E.g., I can only unRAR 1 archive at a time and expect it to be reasonable.[/li][li]Certain programs prevent me from using Windows Aero – anything produced by Apple.[/li][/ul]

I run the entire Adobe CS2 suite, MS Office 2007, several diagnostic programs (Everest, MBM), Firefox, and others. No compatibility problems to report here.

But Vista is a dog, and for functionality’s sake, I don’t see it being a marked improvement over XP – especially for a technical type. The thing requires like 20GB of disk space just to install.

Other negatives: The new Resource Monitor (found under Task Manager) doesn’t show me anything particularly useful beyond the normal task manager. The easily-accessible MS firewall dummy interface is useless as well – to find the more advanced one was a chore (under Administrative Tools).

Positives: It’s pretty.

(The Mac on the other hand kicks ass. It’s my first Mac and I’m digging its simplicity and intuitiveness.)

The two XP machines I have fly – no problems whatsoever.

I wonder if many of the people here know what their talking about.

I’ve NEVER, EVER being asked by vista more than twice whether I want to do something or not. Certainly not the five times one of the posters above mentions! And I’ma gamer, half my drivers are beta!

Bottom line is vista is here to stay. You’ll have to upgrade eventually, unless you are willing to pay MORE for mac hardware/software which will offer you very little to nothing more - or even less (depending on your intended use).

The security features can be turned off, and for the most part, they are transparent to the end user, specially after you’re done installing your drivers and programs and setting up your network/users. Seldom do I see an “are you sure” box pop up, and then it’s usually only when running old install apps.

Performance drop is minimal to none compared to an XP machine, specially now: most drivers are in a much better place today than at Vista launch.

I see nothing to complain about. Only very old software will have trouble running on Vista, or software that requires special permissions and has not been updated (I’m looking at you PALM Desktop!) CAD 2000 should run fine, and I KNOW Adobe Acrobat will work fine, since I use it myself.

This claim has been discussed in detail several times before. Basic Mac hardware isn’t “MORE” than comperable PC hardware; the difference is that it’s generally at the premium level. (Caveat: Apple’s prices on memory and some peripherals, like monitors, are out of the ballpark; however, there’s no reason you can’t buy compatable non-Apple-branded stuff.) Using OS X is going to limit you in terms of commercial applications, and in particular current gaming apps are almost nonexistent. FWIW, I’ve read that Vista is an excellent gaming platform. However, not being a gamer myself, I could care less. Working with *nix-based systems and scripting Perl and Python frequently, on the other hand, makes it desirable (though not absolutely necessary) to run a Unix-like operating system.

This has not been my (admittedly limited) experience, nor does it reflect that of those whom I work with. OS X isn’t the end-all, be-all of operating systems by far (and when you get into it beyond the level of casual user you can see its sometimes hacked-together, open-source FreeBSD roots), but it is, IMHO, vastly superior to any Microsoft OS past or present.

Stranger

This has not been my experience with my older (2001) home laptop, and I’m one of those “only uses Word and the Internet” Idiot users. Vista is much slower booting up my maching and much slower logging on the Web.

Also, it would not allow me to hook up my HP printer without technical assistance from my BIL (and a downloaded patch), which pissed me off severely.

I should have added a “depending on your hardware configuration” clause to that statement.

On modern hardware performance difference is negligible or non existant. This is after building some 7 vista based gaming systems and about three home theater PC’s. Heck Vista’s cache system, once it’s a had a few days to learn your typicla usage, loads apps a lot faster than an XP machine.

As to the superiority of Mac OS to Vista… like most of these types of debates, it comes down to personal opinion. Vista does everything I need it to do, and does it well. Mac OS would no doubt do most of what I would want it to do and do it well… -Except for gaming and commercial apps :slight_smile:

Athlon X2 64-bit 4800, dual core, with nVidia 7900 GTX video card and 4GB of RAM. Modern enough for you? Latest released nVidia reference drivers on both platforms. Vista 64-bit Ultimate and XP dual-boot system.

Booted into XP, frame rates in World of Warcraft: 60 (maximum)
Booted into Vista, same hardware, same settings: 13 – and it can only run for 10-15 minutes before corrupted graphics make it unplayable and you have to restart the game.

Booted into XP, frame rates in Oblivion: 50
Booted into Vista, same hardware, same settings: 5, unplayable until you turn the options down. Sound doesn’t work right; there’s always a hum that’s not present in XP.

Simple disk bechmarking test (higher numbers are better):
Large files XP: 590 (this doesn’t correspond to a real world unit, but it’s basically read/write averaged throughput)
Large files Vista: 530 (not bad, but still obviously worse)

Small files XP: 540
Small files Vista: 120 (ouch!)

Now admittedly, having the 64 bit version of Vista installed increases my problems, but if you have a 64-bit CPU and only run a 32-bit OS, you’re wasting some of the capabilities of your system? no? And the OS ITSELF should be faster, since it’s a 64-bit app.

I’m not seeing that kind of drop off in performance on any of the rigs I’ve built including my own. I have heard of problems on WoW, but I don’t play that game. Either way it will likely be fixed soon.

Oblivion runs at -2 frames per second on average the last time I played which was not with the latest drivers available now. I have a Geforce 8800 GTX for reference.

All my other games run as they did in XP, with the exception of FIFA 07 which runs faster, don’t know why.

So great, Vista works fine for high end machines running gaming and home media applications. That doesn’t translate into a good general operating system for commodity-level PCs used for office productivity tasks.

There are, by the way, plenty of commerical applications for Mac OS X, including high end science/technical, professional video production, and publication apps. It’s just not a gaming platform and makes no pretense at being such. You’ll have to pardon me if I grow weary from people who assume that the first, primary, and most important use of personal computers is to play games.

Stranger

In vista, open a Dos prompt. Type ‘cd \ <enter>’ then type ‘dir /w/s *.txt<enter>’

You get an error. In EVERY previous Microsoft OS it would have traversed the C drive, listing all your txt files. Why did they change it? The Conspiracy theorist in me thinks it was to drive you to Monad, their replacement for the Dos prompt.

You want to join a domain…how do you do it? Not the way you did in XP, it’s somewhere else.

How do you run solitaire with a low end graphics card? (In this case, Parallels under OS X) you get a warning that your card may not be up to snuff and it plays abismally slowly.

You want to have graphics acceleration that Unix and OS X will do on four year old hardware? You need a 256 Mb graphics card and you need more than a Gig of RAM.

It’s not that Vista isn’t an improvement. I’m sure it is in innumerable ways. It that so much stuff has been changed with no logical explanation as to why…unless it’s to sell you more stuff.

I learned Windows NT when Microsoft released it, I learned Win 95, 98, ME, and XP. I learned all the new web based technologies as they brought them out, then abandoned them for The Next Great Thing.

They DRASTICALLY changed IIS from versions 2 - 6

They DRASTICALLY changed Site Server from 2 to 3, to Portal Server 2 to Portal Server (2005?) I dunno, they keep changing their versioning schemes.

With Microsoft’s ‘Next Great Thing’ in Vista, I decided I didn’t need to learn what they told me I needed to know.

I’m much happier for that. I sit in front of OS X, I have debian serving up bits, and the knowledge I picked up over the last 20 years working with Unices is STILL VALID.

Philosophically, I see the environments as follows:

Un*x: Lets see what you’ve got…okay, we’ll make do with what you have (but you get to be your own tech support)

Mac: You’ll pay a slight tax on the front end, but we’ll make it up to you in productivity and stability for a very VERY long time ( I have a 1999 vintage iMac the kids pound on…it runs OS X 10.2 acceptably well )

WinTel: How can we get you to buy now, buy later, then get you to buy some more after that? Then what can we cripple in the next version to get to to buy it again? Oh, do you have a Virus Scanner? It’s only $40 a year! Spyware protection? You’ll need two of those. Firewall? Well we have a SE version, but you’ll really want to upgrade that…

I haven’t even mentioned OEM crapware or the non-existence of an iLife equivalent.

To Stranger

I’m not sure I ever said gaming needed to be the primary function of anyone’s PC. I was using it mostly as a measure of performance and compatibility, and stating the fact that gaming on Macs is extremely limited. I’m not sure where you got the rest from.

When it comes to Macs and PC’s (vista, xp or otherwise), like I said before, things get very subjective. Can I do web design, video editing, programming, music, pictures, etc on my PC AND on a Mac, Sure! Can I do all of these things to the same extent of technical quality and complexity on both platforms, Sure! Is one better than the other, I don’t think so, but many Mac users will tell you yes, and many PC users will tell you the same, only about their respective platforms.

I think both can achieve similar results by sometimes going about things in a different manner, and it comes down to personal taste. I certainly don’t think one OS is “superior” to another in any way whatever, except to the particular end-user and his particular needs.

Adobe Acrobat will cheerfully let you download version 8.0, which I’m guessing is Vista-friendly. The download gives you some kind of Photoshop update, but I don’t understand what that’s about.

I’m still on XP. My wife is office manager/alpha geek at her company, and, going by things she had heard on various grapevines, we decided to wait until Vista was better housebroken before switching. She says several computer makers and dealers now offer a choice between XP and Vista on new computers.

Microsoft is a towering chimerous beastie, and they’ll probably get all this stuff sorted out. In the meantime, I’m keeping an eye on threads like this.

Maybe by modern you mean high end. I got a Vista loaner, right out of the box, which should be modern enough. With 500 MB of memory (not something I’d buy for myself) performance was not just slow but absurd - including not responding messages for Windows Explorer when opening up directories - not exactly a high performance activity.

I know VPN software which is vital to me won’t run on Vista, so I’m right out of the market. When I went from Win98 to XP, the only thing that didn’t work was a video intensive piece of one not very well written 3d puzzle game - the bonus stuff at the end.

I must say that Plug and Play did work - it recognized my printer and installed the drivers with no intervention on my part.

I’m sure other annoyances would have gone away with more effort at reconfiguration, but I’ll stick with XP until at least the first SP comes out, thanks.

I shouldn’t have to buy expensive new hardware to run new software. It’s not like I’m asking it to do anything I didn’t ask it to do before. An “improvement” that renders your entire system obsolete is not an improvement.

Why are you looking to install a new OS on an old machine? Vista brings about a lot of improvements, but all those improvements come at a cost. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. The Op is looking to buy NEW hardware, not retrofitting his old hardware with a new OS.

I can’t run XP on my old Emachines computer (256MB RAM, 800 Mhz Processor) either.

512 MB RAM is the lowest rung now a days, the bare minimum. Invest on another 512 MB (NOT an expensive upgrade) and vista should be more responsive. Another option would be turn off some background services you could live without.

This complaint round always happen with new technology, specially when it’s supposed to replace existing technology.

I have a feeling this thread will reemerge whenever the next windows version comes out full of witty comments like:

“When I want vista to do something it just does it. Why did they have to change it?!”

“Why do I have to upgrade my (insert obselete system specs) just to run a new OS?”

“Sure it looks pretty, but Vista just works!”

This isn’t to say that Vista is without problems. Drivers still need work, the OS is still a bit green around the edges, but so is every new technology.

I’d normally agree with you, but the growing feeling I have about Microsoft is one of a company with a problem: How do you continue to create cash flow, when your current product works well enough for the vast majority of your users.

It was one thing when your new spreadsheet application could now incorporate four smaller spreadsheets from the previous version into the current one…or it could do your yearend books in 10 minutes vs. 4 hours from the previous version, but that’s really no longer the case.

There is nothing that Vista provides that wasn’t available, adequately, in XP. The security ‘improvements’ in Vista are attempts to patch security while maintaining TWO_DECADES of backward compatibility. It provides an entirely new sub-structure that programmers, again, have to adapt to. It attempts to speed applications up by predicting what you’ll do, and using flash ram to speed things up, rather than making tighter code.

I’ve seriously evaluated if I’ve become that ‘crotechety old IT fart’ that didn’t want to move from Workgroups for Windows to Windows 95, but I sincerely don’t think fear of change is what’s forming my opinions. In a nutshell, I don’t see the added complexity and bloat providing me any value. I DO see it making a HUGE machine run slower than the three year old box it replaced.

What Vista SHOULD have been was a platform to run Virtual machines. 64 Meg worth of code that kicked off an XP emulator, or VistaEnvironment™ for each application and brokers communications between VM’s and the hardware. Then an app can do nothing but crap all over it’s memory space, an App cannot get permission to load nasty bits where it shouldn’t, your 6 running VMs can be swapped to disk so your WoW session can have AS MUCH of the machine as you want to give it. Vista should NOT have had ANY backwards compatibility code.

I can’t disagree with this. Maybe in Windows 10.1?

Except for the fact that I was force-fed the cake. Once Vista rolled out, I was prompted repeatedly to install it, with assurances of how super-duper it was going to be. Once you sign up for Windows updates (which I did after one of their famed security holes effed up my computer, requiring a visit to the 'puter doctor and a patch), you are repeatedly prompted to switch to Vista if you haven’t, with dire warnings of potential security problems if you stay with XP.

I don’t WANT to invest in anything further. I shouldn’t HAVE to invest in anything further. To me, it’s like getting an engine component that literally slows down your car, and being told that you should buy a newer car to support it. The component should support the machine; not the other way around.

I would, if I knew how, keeping in mind that having never added any “background services,” they would only be in place because Microsoft includes in their OS a bunch of crap I neither requested nor need.

You can certainly inform me six way til Sunday how I can improve my situation – buying a whole new computer would be an excellent start. That in no way negates my experience with Vista, which has been mediocre to bad, nor does it negate my opinion as to why.

Anyone considering loading Vista on an older machine needs to be aware that their older machine may not support it. It is NOT an automatically improving update for everyone, even though it certainly is marketed as such.

Not necessarily. The US Government is the biggest buyer of IT on the planet and its influence is rather strong. The FAA, DOT and NIST have banned any installation/use of Vista within their agencies. If the IT folks at NIST are not happy with Vista, that should be a red flag for everyone.

You probably also saw how quick Dell backed off of Vista only and suddenly offered XP again and Ubutu (or whatever this linux is called).

I checked, HP Business desktops list:
• Genuine Windows XP Professional SP2
• Genuine Windows XP Home SP2
• or Mandrake Linux
• Windows Vista Capable†

Vista is not winning many people over with its faulty release and many nuisances.

Disclaimer: HP for Home is defaulting to Vista.

Jim