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Vista

peteweaver said:
If so is it worth the cost ?
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I got it for free, so the answer to that one is 'yes', in my case.

Would I pay money for it? Not on my current PC. Vista turned out to be a bit slower than XP, and I kinda regret the upgrade. But I'm to lazy to roll back.

So my advice would be:
Upgrade from XP? No.
Buying a new PC and need to buy a Windows OS? Get Vista.
 
bought my wife a new HP laptop with Vista and i would have to agree with MetalPig. Buy a new PC get Vista, I would not bother upgrading.

I must admit that I like Vista. the Live search and MS Aero, Flip 3d are pretty cool features. I also like the full preview, on the task bar. But the knock is limited Applications for Vista. Trillian still is not fully supported which is annoying, so she has to use the crappy AIM client for IM's for now. I see no reason to upgrade as XP is actually a pretty solid OS and Vista doesn't really offer enough to upgrade.

Jon
 
Windows Vista might not necessarily be worth the upgrade for existing machines running XP. Drivers are still problematic for some hardware (I got a story to tell below), and some software applications as well.

There are some good, new features and improvements, of course. But, none of them scream "must have!", except in the case of Tablet PCs.

If you have a Tablet PC, you'll find vast improvements to how the pen and handwriting recognition are handled in Vista.

If you have an OS earlier than Windows XP, you might find much more benefit to upgrading, as well. (if your machine can handle it!)

If you are getting a new PC machine, of course, Vista is the way to go. (Unless you are a Linux person.)

I just got a new Tablet PC that shipped with Vista Business, and it all worked quite well. Then, I upgraded it to Vista Ultimate, using the "Upgrade Anytime" system. And, believe it or not, many of the hardware drivers failed to work, right after that! Took a few hours to set them up again, (and I still think there is something, somewhere left to do).
But, if I am having this sort of difficulty from one Vista to another, imagine the potential issues moving from XP to Vista!

If you feel compelled to upgrade, I would recommend a clean install. (Back up all your data, first, of course!)
You can also try dual-booting between XP and Vista for a while, if you feel up to it, and have two or more partitions and/or hard drives. (but, it pays to back up your data, before doing this, as well! You never know.)

You can also try using Vista in a Virtual Machine (except for the Vista Home Basic edition, apparently), if all you want to do is examine its pretty features.

Hope this helps.
 
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Wowbagger said:
You can also try using Vista in a Virtual Machine (except for the Vista Home Basic edition, apparently), if all you want to do is examine its pretty features.
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I tried that with MS Virtual PC, but I couldn't get the Aero stuff working. Apparently Virtual PC emulates a crappy non-3D graphics card.

Then I did the dual boot, decided that pretty = good, undid the dual boot and upgraded, found out too much stuff didn't work right, and did the clean install.
 
Hammer_of_Thor said:
Plus it is a RAM hog.
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And a CPU hog.
And a hard drive hog.

Basically, it is a resource hog. Everything is slower in Vista.

But damn there are some cool features. The best is that the start menu is text searchable! Very cool feature, and it works extremely well. It makes navigating an ugly Start Menu a breeze.
 
Okay so the very best feature of an ENTIRE OS is that you can text search a menu? Um, that's a quirk, not an OS defining aspect. That's mere usability. I don't rank that very high compaired to ACTUAL OS features. I mean, usability is important, but as far as I'm concerned all I need to be able to do is double click on things to open other things. If an OS can do that, things like some sort of streamlined search or cute little "gadget bars" sitting around on the side of the screen are just diversions. I need an OS to act fast and be compatible with lots of hardware, and support the majority of stuff OSes are doing, like basically abstract away stuff so that programmers don't need to worry about what hardware is in a machine that much.

Anyway, there is only one feature of this new OS that gets me interested in it at all. It's not the 3D prettied up menues, or faster searching, or this or that little toy they tossed in here and there. It's not the support for really cool stuff they have systematically removed since announcing this OS, it's the only one they actually kept. DirectX 10. Any particular reason that feature can't be ported over to XP? If there's something amazing deep in the code of Vista that makes it support DX10 and XP completely incapable of ever supporting it, then that's something I care about.

Other than that, I have no motivation to get it. XP was an actual upgrade. Vista seems like makeup. Makeup that isn't fully compatible with all my old games and hardware. Makeup that is very needy of resources, and makeup that doesn't like me doing whatever I want with my own computer (I refer to far too controlling "digital rights management", for while I consider piracy a form of theft, I certainly don't condone an OS being so controlling as to prevent independant developers from basically having their way with an OS).

No Vista for me, is what I'm saying. Maybe I'll change my mind, but it'll take a lot.
 
Dark Jaguar said:
XP was an actual upgrade. Vista seems like makeup. Makeup that isn't fully compatible with all my old games and hardware. Makeup that is very needy of resources, and makeup that doesn't like me doing whatever I want with my own computer
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Funny how many people said that exact same thing about Windows XP when it was released. And Windows 98. And Windows 95. And Windows 1.00.

Then they realized how stable the system is, and how much those "little" improvements matter, in everyday usage of the OS, etc.

The road of human judgement is paved with shifting standards.
 
I bought it, after trying it for a month in a dual-boot system with XP.
I don't notice anything particularly slower about it. It has a lot of little features that make everyday use a little nicer, particularly with Windows Explorer. The only driver issue I've had is that a printer I had that was 5 years old didn't work with it, but it wasn't a big deal.
I like it a lot, and so far have no regrets.
 
Wowbagger said:
Funny how many people said that exact same thing about Windows XP when it was released. And Windows 98. And Windows 95. And Windows 1.00.

Then they realized how stable the system is, and how much those "little" improvements matter, in everyday usage of the OS, etc.

The road of human judgement is paved with shifting standards.
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In truth, I suspect many people upgraded these systems because they bought new computers which had the new system preinstalled.
I expect the same will happen with Vista.

I first used Win 98 in 2000. I first used XP in late 2004. This delayed takeup seems pretty common. I get the impression from computer magazines , that Vista uptake has not met expectations.
 
Wowbagger said:
Funny how many people said that exact same thing about Windows XP when it was released. And Windows 98. And Windows 95. And Windows 1.00.

Then they realized how stable the system is, and how much those "little" improvements matter, in everyday usage of the OS, etc.

The road of human judgement is paved with shifting standards.
Click to expand...

Except that those previous systems really did have important upgrades. 95 was an actual OS (based on DOS) as opposed to the previous Windows which were more like GUI frontloaders for DOS. This meant it could do certain things, like for example have certain driver support. That said, it was still based on an old system purely for backwards compatibility and so it was pretty unstable. 98 was a lot more stable, on top of having certain important support for things like USB. ME did not really add anything at all, and in general is frowned upon because of that. In fact it was LESS stable and lost a lot of compatibility. XP was a complete rebuild of the entire code, well really it was replacing the home version of Windows with an NT based OS. It added a LOT, and being based on NT while adding as much support as it could for 9x stuff (though I still need DosBox). Usability? Really, it's still pretty similar in a lot of ways to Windows 95.

So no, it's not just the changing times. ME was rejected because it didn't add enough and it actually made things worse. Vista could share that fate.
 
As I've implied in another thread on Vista, I think the previous bashing of MS will sound like accolads once people realize just what it is Vista is going to force us all to do, myself included probably; like many, I'm professionally locked in to MS and the upgrade pressure is already upon me.
 
Wowbagger said:
Ah, good point, but mostly applies to the older versions of Virtual PC.
Try using the 2007 edition. Or the latest VMWare.
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Experimental support only in VMware workstation 5.5 which is the current release and only as a guest OS, not a host


WS 6 (now in Beta) will probably support Vista in a host and guest

Jon

disclaimer: I work for VMware
 
Dark Jaguar said:
Except that those previous systems really did have important upgrades.

(snip)

So no, it's not just the changing times. ME was rejected because it didn't add enough and it actually made things worse. Vista could share that fate.
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You'll notice Windows Me is conspicuously absent from my list.

You are right about Me making things worse. But, I don't think Vista will quite share that fate. These driver and incompatability problems will, with time, smooth out, like they did with XP.

Vista does offer important security improvements; support for interesting ways to use hardware devices (such as ReadyBoost, SideShow, and better Tablet support); and nice, new APIs for software developers to work with; and the OS interface is, generally, easier to use. (Though, some Windows veterens might be slow to find certain stuff, at first.)

Windows Me had none of that.

ob986s said:
Experimental support only in VMware workstation 5.5 which is the current release and only as a guest OS, not a host


WS 6 (now in Beta) will probably support Vista in a host and guest

Jon

disclaimer: I work for VMware
Click to expand...
Ah, this does appear to be correct. It has been a while since I've worked with VMWare. I had forgotten that the "latest" edition is still in Beta.
 
Well, whether people will get Vista depends on the software that will become available exclusively for it. How many games with raving critiques will be Vista-only ? Will Microsoft succeed in luring developers to write just for Vista (perhaps with a Vista-only version of Direct-X) ? And so on.

Personally I'll be getting it for free along with a free new PC in 1.5 year, so I'll probably accept it. :D Unless it's the home edition.
 
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