VISTA: Worth It?

[Frost]

Well, the deal is I just bought another two computers and about to get an Alienware

One an HP Pavilion AMD Turion 64x2 2GB Ram Laptop

And one HP Pavilion Desktop (Haven't even turned it on yet)

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Now both of these new PC's say they include an upgrade to Windows Vista. After doing some research it turns out that I would have to get in contact with HP and they will ship me copies of the Vista with a possibility of S&H charges.

I have spent about two hours reading every blog, forum, release announcement, opinionated buyer, etc and I have to say that the results are not looking good. About 90% of people say DO NOT upgrade because of complexity, current program compatibility issues, and even the default installed software compatibility issues.

Has anyone here upgraded?
Is it worth it?

[Imajica]

Frost:

I'm an IT Director for a small catholic non-profit and before that I was an IT manager at fairly large university

I know I am not letting vista in my shop and my former co-workers are saying the same thing.

Upgrade or full version. IMHO it's not ready for primetime

Imajica

[a_lunatic]

Yeah I have tried it & it's too much of a head ache with most 3rd party software some will say vista compatible or ready but there are still issue's with them so I am ditching it for now.

[Whisky]

I received my own copy of Vista @ work early in january, before the EU release.
I tested it at work and was really amazed by the new features and overall look. I had no big software issues with it at work.

However at home it was quiet different...
since it gave me a great impression I took it back home and installed it. I've got a quiet powerful machine, Dual core and 2go RAM

Everyting was running fine except World of Warcraft. My FPS was about 20-30 under XP (not enough because I've got a very wide screen) and it get down to less then 10 under vista!!!!!
I spent 1 month trying to find a solution, upgrated my CG and SC and trying a lot of workaround proposed on a lot of different boards where I saw a lot of Vista players experiencing the same problems... no one ever worked and one day I was so furious to lag constantly in game that I finally scrached all the DD and reinstalled XP :#:

This is my experience with Windows Vista <img>

[tekguru]

Well I love Vista here, fast, flexible, and no drivers issues. Running it on my main PC, the lads PC and shortly on the new PC I'm about to get hold of.

Mind you my machines run Ultimate and work as work / media machines - got a game around anywhere.

[Frost]

Thanks for the replies guys!

As I thought all bad reviews except one, 3/4 lol
I imagine another 6 people and we would have hit the alleged "90%" mark <img>

I too believe that it was simply slapped together and packaged up too fast. Maybe M$ thought they gave us too much flexibility and options with windows XP and realized they didn't have much control over us anymore. It looks like a downgrade to me.

As an avid 98 fan for the longest time I was really impressed when XP hit sp2 and got stable for the most part. I love XP now and I think I'll be sticking with it.

I have a feeling that Vista won't be ready for a couple more years, and even when it is, I still think there's an evil eye in there somewhere. M$ is watching you, and your programs. [/conspiracy theory]

[ZacFields]

Vista is not a bad OS. I have used it and I think it is perfectly fine.

But that being said, I would wait at least another year before using vista. My parents have vista on their laptop and everything works fine, but as been said before, hope you don't want to use any software on it that you were using on your old XP computers because I've found a lot of software is not compatible, and a lot of the companies will give you the runaround and tell you they won't support Vista and you'll have to buy newer versions of software. My parents' printer doesn't work with their vista laptop and it's only 3 years old. HP won't make the drivers for vista for that printer.

I'll personally hold off until all the software I currently own is vista compatible <img>

Zac

[Whisky]

Yeah I precise that I am overall happy with Vista but since I am playing WoW a lot I could not live with this problem

As an avid 98 fan for the longest time

Are you serious?
98/millenium were the most famous OS jokes since Stoneage <img>

[Frost]

Millennium was a fluke, and never should have been made, but as for Windows 98, it was my choice of ALL OS's until XP came out. You cannot sit there and tell me you skipped 98 and stayed with 95 or jumped over it to XP.

Windows 98 was the most customizable OS I've ever seen, I went through 6 PC's with 98 over the course of upgrading, or because I lost my restore discs. But in the process I had the most highly tweaked PC of all time. Voice recognition, extremely overclocked, and customized basically to my own OS.

Yes, looking back now, or any relatively new PC user will probably say what you said, but 98 will always be my favorite old OS

(I even still have two 98 pc's, a sony vaio, and compaq, both still working perfectly)

Edit: Yea, and this was before all the new pc users got handed everything to them, now all you have to do is click a button and your pc does everything for you, man truely has gotten lazy

[tekguru]

Wel I run (quick count) 70 apps under Vista and have no problesm with any of them. Mind you I was one of the beta testers and did give some suppliers stick in the early days about support!

[BoneHead]

In my opinion, nope not worth it. I've used it since right before RC1 and enjoyed it. I purchased Ulitmate edition when it came out. I tried both the 32bit & 64bit and was just left feeling a bit let down.

The UAC of course was more annoying than helpful. The memory usage was awful (I only have 1GB in my machine) as Vista was constantly creating and accessing a HUGE page file that slowed my computer down more and more. Games were hit and miss as was most software. Since I had used it during beta and RC phases (same with 2k & XP) I was not surprised or worried.

But eventually I got tired of the slow machine when I didn't think it should be. I'm now using Ubuntu full time and haven't had any issues. Most of my games play as well or better using wine on Linux than they did on Vista Ultimate. Not to mention almost no swap file at all, and very low memory usage (usually around 10% total, compared to the constant 50% Vista had).

So if your going to try it, I suggest to save your money and wait until SP1 comes out for it to fix a lot of the issues.

[Helter]

about the only thing good about living so close to Redmond is that my Ultimate cost $40. Honestly though, at this time, it is not worth the $40. In my opinion, the best windows os ever was dos/win3.1.1 Ever os since has taken more and more control away from you. Win98, NEVER should have been an os, because it was basicly a bug fix for win95 MS=Greed

[Frost]

Ah, Dos...

I remember as a little kid, sitting in front of my 1982 Tandy Co. one piece pc. My first ever true PC, If I recall it had dos 1.25, one year away from the 2.0 version.

I had no idea what the hell it was or what it did, I had no floppies for it, and all I could do was self-learn the first of my dos experience of command lines. The line "Bad command or file name" will be forever burned into my skull.

As I never owned windows 3.1 and Win98 was (besides for the apples I learned in kindergarten, later in school i acquired some of them after the school upgraded, they were good for the huge floppy games, but nothing more) the first pc I owned while old enough to use, it will still be my favorite. Sort of a sentimental thing I guess.

Useless Fact: In 1980 IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. The pair buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template. IBM allows the two to keep the marketing rights to the operating system, called DOS.

PC History suggested movie: Pirates of Silicon Vally - Watch for free [url=http]HERE[/url]

See Bill Gates as he was. How he is.

[computerz]

My copy of Vista was free <img>

All in all, I would say don't install it in production yet, or if you have tons of software on your computer. This is not because Vista is the problem, the code behind vista is actually very well architected, flawless "in comparison" to previous versions. The problem is that software manufacturers haven't kept up. They are the ones to blame for incompatibility issues, not Vista. But if you're like me and all you're using is Office and the Internet, and not a host of other 3rd party software, then you will love Vista.

The only thing I don't like about it are the constant User Account Control prompts. But with enough patience, I live.