[brainout]

This is my Vista Business machine, the one I might downgrade to Win8, eventually. First, I wanted to compare Vista with Win7, both 32-bit, so this will be an ongoing set of comparison posts. If you have any you care to add, please do!

First, a lot of the problem with Vista is that it was issued too fast (past is prologue, Win8 was issued too fast as well); so, it had a lot of bugs. Many of these were ironed out after Service Pack 2.

What's been most annoying about Vista is its overprotectiveness. Every time you do anything, you have two extra clicks and dialogue boxes to 'permit' the action. You can turn these off, but it's all or nothing. In truth, you can change the settings in Local Security Policy, but that's mostly in jargon and you really don't know what all you're permitting, since the 'Explain' tab doesn't tell you much, or talks to you as if you were an IT person.

However, if you wanted to preserve the interface and settings of XP, and thus get update protection until 2017 (for I bet Vista's updates will end up lasting as long as version 7's) -- then Vista might be a good idea. But it would be better to buy a separate used machine with Vista on it -- you can get them cheap, now ($300 and under, at least at dellauction) -- better to do that, than upgrade atop what you have. Windows upgrades on top of existing stuff almost always cause severe problems. So you can migrate slowly, after you learn the system, reinstalling whatever as you choose, at your pace.

Vista's native interface is Aero, which is eliminated in Windows 8 but kept in Windows 7. It eats up a lot of memory, but is attractive. You can easily change back to your XP or Classic (Win95-style) settings, simply by copying the 'Plus!' folder from your Win95 machine's directory; or, by copying your XP themes to the machine, and selecting one of them in Personalize Theme of Vista (which you access as you did in XP, right-clicking on the Desktop, select 'Personalize'). So you can switch back and forth between Aero and some old XP theme you created. However, if you want to CHANGE that XP style theme, you cannot really do it well in Vista. You'd have to change it in XP, then copy the theme to Vista. Another reason for not superimposing Vista on your XP, but instead getting a separate Vista machine.

In Vista, your options for tweaking a theme are limited; background, ONE font for everything, ONE size for everything. This same restriction applies in Win7, but there, you have to go through extra steps to get your theme recognized, which maybe you can't do. In Win7, you'd have to have the 'Plus!' folder from Win95, to actually make the change, and you'd have to execute its own Theme.exe in that folder, to effect the true 'classic' change. A limited form of that is available without the 'Plus!' folder, as described here. However, while in Vista there is a convoluted way to have toolbars at both top and bottom of the screen, in Win7 you can only have one toolbar (always part of Quick Launch, though you can size that to several lines).

Finally, themes you set up in XP used background pictures in certain folders. Usually, these were subfolders of Documents and Settings; VISTA REMOVES that option, instead renaming the folder to c:\users as a prefix. So you'll have to redo your backgrounds, or else move those pictures to a different folder in XP which you can alike name in Vista, in essence redoing each of your themes. If you have over 50 themes like I do, this latter is not an option. I just re-select the backgrounds.

In both Vista and Win7, if you want to move back to an Aero style native to each OS, you can. So you can switch between them.

So much for the theme difference. The other posts will cover specific subtopics, one per post.

[brainout]

MAIL -- you can't use Outlook Express in Vista nor in Win7. Instead, you have Windows Mail or Windows LIVE Mail, confusing names. The latter you have to set up online. Plain 'Windows Mail' is the succesor to Outlook Express, and will import your old Address book (.wab), and your email. I don't yet know if it will import your 'Identities', the painstakingly crafted email account settings so you can GET your mail. I've not tested all this, yet, only going by the instructions.

This is a major pain, because if you set a lot of message rules to auto-sort your mail as it came in, you can't port those settings over, in Vista. If you avidly used Outlook Express to keep track of your work like I did (for you can always email notes to yourself, knowing they will always sort by date), then this might be one reason to upgrade atop XP. For I'm reasonably sure those settings will all port to Windows Mail, upon upgrade.

Windows Live mail stinks. You're STUCK WITH IT, beginning in Win7. So it might be better to ignore Windows Mail altogether, and just shift to Thunderbird. Problem there, is that Thunderbird, while an Outlook Express clone, can only import your MAIL, unless you already have Outlook Express installed. Or, unless you convert your Outlook Express files to Outlook -- all on your XP machine. So if you do use Outlook, take the latter step and convert to Outlook. Because, at least you can use Outlook in both Vista and Windows 7. The latter will not accept Outlook 2000 (of course, that's the last truly flexible version of Outlook); frankly, Windows 7 wants version 2003 of MS stuff. But some users here in the forum report being able to use earlier versions of MS, despite the universal 'no it won't work' answer you get in MS Answers forum.

Windows 8 junks the previous email also, and its POP3 function is reported as not working by many article writers (here in PC World, ZDNet, PC Magazine, elsewhere). I saw one commenter who claimed he got his gmail POP3 to work, versus many who said it didn't. So maybe the best thing again, is to use MS Outlook rather than either Live Mail or Outlook.com (which is quite different and annoying).

The latter two keep your email in the cloud. You're just asking for trouble there. AOL, Yahoo, hotmail and other online email services have all been hacked. Just last year two of my colleagues, one of my clients and several friends had their email accounts hacked, so I got fake emails from them, claiming that they were in trouble and needed money. Better to keep NO email on the server, and NO address books.

Win7 also replaces your address book with a folder named 'Contacts', which allows limited importing. Again, best to use MS Outlook if you'll transition away from XP for email; or, use Thunderbird (which is compatible with Linux, too).

[brainout]

MOVIEMAKER 6.0 - One of the easiest videomaking editors you'll ever find, was Moviemaker in XP. But it was way behind the times in what kind of resolution it could offer. Moviemaker 6.0 is a significant upgrade, and is native to Vista. If you look at my Pixelan thread, you'll find a way to download 6.0 into Win7; it's not native to Win7. Instead, Win7 gives you a garbage version called 'Live Moviemaker', which can't take advantage of the many add-in packages which were long developed for XP's moviemaker. Vista, though, uses Moviemaker 6.

Here's what that one does: it still can't read avi files, but can render to AVI, HD, and has a lot of extra special effects. Sadly, it's too-white interface makes it hard to see where you can size the preview window (which was clearly visible in XP's Moviemaker), and unfortunately the timeline is also that same stupid white -- yeah, it's all the rage now to use almost no contrast between borders, and use thin gray Arial text so the screen is unreadable. So there is too much glare. Else, the interface looks the same. Same menu items, same predictable places for them, etc. Whew.

It functions the same, too, except you get extras. Best of all, you can right-click in the Preview Window, and go full-screen. That's a real help. By contrast, some dufus decided to take away the stop and play buttons, in exchange for a dysfunctional blue play button which takes up more screen real estate and has no real REWIND. If you hit what seems to be a 'back' or 'rewind' button on the left, the slider moves only a little bit left. WHAT IDIOT THOUGHT OF THAT? Oh, the same ones who design those dysfunctional 'skins', Youtube and other websites which now make you GUESS all the time, how to navigate them. So now you have to manually move the slider to go all the way back to the beginning.

That being said, Moviemaker 6.0 is alone worth the price of going to Vista (or Win7, for that matter), if you make a lot of videos. Will save you a ton of time. So of course you don't get it, in Win8. Just like MS to shoot itself in the foot.

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 01:11 AM

[brainout]

WINDOWS EXPLORER is a nightmare in Vista and Windows 7. In Vista, the problem is the old XP folder names are preserved in the listing, but you can't access them: because, those folder names are really HIDDEN, no matter what permissions you have. Because, they instead redirect to a new directory, c:\Users. The dingdong who thought of that, just rendered many old programs which installed to Documents and Settings (for example), obsolete. To work around that problem,

a. Never allow automated installation, but do CUSTOM install, which lets you CHANGE the default installation folder onto either another disk drive (recommended, so you won't have to reinstall programs when you have to restore Windows) --

b. or, at least to some other directory than Application Data, Programs, or 'My Documents' (the cover name for Documents and Settings).

So you can't EDIT or even VIEW what's in these special folders. Same, for Application Data -- its new name is AppData. Worse, the old names and the new ones show up side by side, so you're always confusing them. Unless, of course, your Folder Options hide those folders (along with their newly-named compadres), so now you can't see much of anything.

Windows 7 fixed some of this problem. It preserved the double naming, but you can get into the folders if you have Administrator privileges. In Windows 7, navigation is still annoying, but much less so.

The interface is familiar enough, but now at top, an extra three lines of screen real estate are taken up with BIG BLANK SPOTS. You can no longer move the Menu and address bar to the same line, for example, to make a tight one-line top. You can't get rid of text and have only icons. There's now the equivalent of the ribbon tab, a drop down containing extra menu items, called 'Organize'.

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 01:56 AM

[brainout]

THEME UPDATE: you don't have to change the Theme by going back to XP first. Vista moved the change thusly:

1. Right click on start menu and select 'classic'. (BTW, even if you elect Aero desktop, the 'classic' setting will give you the familiar organization of the Win95+ start menu. You can just uncheck 'classic' to get the boxy Aero/XP menu style, at any time.)
2. Right click on desktop, select Personalize.
3. Then select Theme, and browse to the theme you copied over to Vista.
4. THEN (after selecting the theme), at the top of the Personalize Window, you'll see Window Color and Appearance (how unintuitive) -- THIS will bring back the familiar 'Appearance' settings dialogue box you had in XP, replete with Effects (yes, you want to use it, always elect CLEAR TYPE, else you'll go blind) and 'Advanced' tab, which gets you into all those individually-selectable fonts and colors. Whew. So in Vista, they split up the various tabs you had all nicely organized in one place, under XP. Oh well: at least you can still do it.

This is a very flexible way to handle the interface. You can switch back and forth between new and old style, at will. Of course, since this is a great idea, the full 'classic' start menu interface described above is REMOVED in Win7 -- only the box-ugly XP menu style remains -- and is wholly absent in Win8. But at least in Win7, after you do the steps described here, you can select the Theme, THEN select Windows COLOR, and fine tune using the same dialogue box you've had since Windows 95. Whew, what a time-saver.

OH, and HERE's a TRICK which changes the icon label colors you can't otherwise change. You know: the background and icon label colors are almost the same, so you can't read them well. Here's the trick: if you want the icon labels to be black, change the DESKTOP color in Windows COLOR, to white or light shades. If you want the labels to be white, change the DESKTOP color, to dark shades. This same trick should work in prior versions of Windows.

Do you notice? Every single element of Windows has 100 different settings or more which need tweaking, so it's time consuming to set up. But it keeps familiarity, which saves you time in operation -- the biggest expense anyone spends. Pity there's no good way to really preserve or transfer your settings, without the installation of a Windows upgrade, crashing. (The horror stories of upgrade installations are many, just Google. That's how I got my first Windows computer, a guy who tried to upgrade from Win95 to Win98SE got so frustrated at failing, he threw his Micron in the trash. I had used Win3.1 a few times and then stopped, so I had it on my 486s, but it lay idle.)

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 02:25 AM

[brainout]

ADD OR REMOVE PROGRAMS in Vista, is changed to Programs and Features, in its classic Control Panel. This is enhanced. One of the options is to turn Windows Features on or off. Smart thing. You want to turn on Active X installer, and all the Internet Information Services, if you upload to the web. Maybe also all the subentries under Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0, if you're experiencing problems. The other defaults which are off, maybe should be 'on', depending on your network configuration.

The rest of it is intuitive. Hooray. Helpful tool tips explain each option. Wow, whoever designed this baby deserves a raise. Win7 has the same thing.

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 04:12 AM

[brainout]

BACKUP AND RESTORE CENTER -- that's the name of the new combined function which used to be in XP's System Tools, 'Backup' and 'Restore'. If Win7 is supposed to be better, well.. it's still unreliable and convoluted as ever. Win7's more automated, whereas you have to do a lot of tweaking to set up restore points in Vista. In both, however, you must read and think over carefully, what they will and won't do. For example, in Win7, you only have the option to restore 'system settings' and/or 'previous versions of files'. So, does 'system settings' include the programs, does it undo installations, or is it what it says, only the 'settings'? In which case, this whole restore point thingy is useless.

For XP, you had some powerful third-party products like GoBack, which Symantec bought out and used in Norton System Works from 2000-2006. Today, you have MagiCure, which is the same as Go-Back, a true time-lookup-and-dialback for your entire computer, all in one simple step. GoBack has saved my XP machines at least once a month since the year 2000. Windows never had anything comparable, and still doesn't.

Acronis claims to have something comparable, but since its technicians were so dumb, I question its efficacy, though some users here like it. The thing wouldn't even REGISTER on my machine, and I had to use GoBack to get rid of it, since its uninstaller (looking at the registry) said the program didn't exist -- never mind the uninstaller was in the same folder as the program which yes did copy onto the machine but didn't tell WINDOWS it was there. So my trust level in it working, is nil. The technicians, informed repeatedly that I REMOVED the program from the computer, kept on asking me to allow them to connect REMOTELY to my computer! To what? View a program which wasn't there? So maybe Acronis was fine in older versions. But now one doubts...

Same for Rebit and EASEUS, but for different reasons. The only competent backup and restore and cloning program I've seen is Macrium Reflect 5 Pro (which is compatible, through Win7 and with Linux partitions, though can't be run via Linux). Macrium won't conflict with GoBack, and it won't do what GoBack does -- literally, turn back the clock on the whole machine (for the last 24 hours), or on any given file you pick. (Again, MagicCure claims to do the same thing, but it's only compatible with XP, as last I checked.) Repeated XP MS updates since May, conflict with GoBack. So maybe try MagicCure, or if you've not updated your XP, go to Amazon and look for GoBack.

Alas, Vista and Win7 can't do that turn-back-the-clock function. MS has always been notorious for bad backup/restore software. But you should leave them on, in case an individual file's 'previous versions' can be restored. Macrium's backup can be automated, so I run incremental backups daily, and full backups weekly. If you're not paying close attention to backing up, if you don't automate it, you're just asking for trouble.

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 04:48 AM

[brainout]

Support timeline for Vista: click here.

Support timeline for Win7 (provided by smax013): click here.

This post has been edited by brainout: 23 November 2012 - 11:18 PM

[brainout]

MOUSE pointers in Vista are as simple to tweak as they are in XP. Just copy your cursors and ani files to C:\Windows\Cursors, in Vista. Do NOT copy the folder from XP, but select all the files INSIDE the folder, then copy over to the same folder in Vista. In other words, you can copy the folder to a flash drive or CD, then insert the drive into Vista. But then WITHIN the folder, Edit Select All then Edit Copy. Most of the cursors in XP are already in Vista, so you'll often be prompted to choose whether to replace, skip, or copy with 2nd name. It's less easy in Vista, to copy; but you also get more options when you encounter a duplicate file. Be sure to look in the lower left hand corner, so you can tell Vista to handle the same type of file the same way, during the session.

Same, for Windows 7. Then use Control Panel Mouse in either OS, to access and select your mouse pointers.

[brainout]

BATCH FILES you created in XP have to be copied over to Vista; but they won't always copy. I was able to copy and run a 123 batch file, but not another batch file. Really weird. I can RUN the batch file from the flash drive to which I'd copied it from XP, so long as I 'run as administrator'. But why then, since I AM the Adminstrator with full privileges, can't I copy the batch file, since I was able to copy the other batch file? LOL.

Now hear this: the executable you would use for batch files, is usually 16-bit, if a DOS file. So you'd think that, since you can run DOS programs in DOS windows, you should be able to just configure the executable with a right click (specifying font, memory, etc. just as you did in XP). Well, you'd be WRONG, because when you just click on such a modified-parameter executable, it won't RUN on 64-bit hardware, even if your VISTA OS is 32-bit! Aha!

I did this test using Multimate Advantage II, a DOS word processing program once the dreamchild of Fortune 500 companies, which allows extensive internal programming for merge databases -- still the best little wp on the market (well, only in vintage software houses). Maybe SmartSuite will beat it, but SS is backwards-compatible with it, at least through SS9.7.

MMII works fine in Win7 and of course XP. Problem is to get the right printer emulation (PCL 5-6, which is available on Brother 8480DN and similar machines).

See, this is why people don't upgrade MS products. They have something they know works, and fear that the 'upgrade' will wreck, what they have. Rightly so, they worry!

You cannot create new batch files in Vista. You get this STUPID error that such files cannot be used 'for this client', even though you are not a network, and ARE the administrator.

But you can trick the machine. It won't let you save the batch file to the root directory. But it will let you save it to your documents. So then you save it to C:\users\yourusername\Desktop, where it will show up for easy access. You know, this is like childproof caps: only children, can open them.

It's quirks like this which make Vista so annoying to use. STOP PROTECTING US FROM OUR MACHINES. Happily, the outcry must have been big, because you don't have this problem, in Win7; it lets you create, copy, use batch files. And it doesn't attack you with the permissions thingy, as much. Whew.

So now it looks like Win7 wins over Vista. Its protectiveness isn't as anal as Vista's. You NEED to be able to make batch files. Win7, allows them just as easily as XP did (32-bit, not sure that 64-bit will work).

But the tradeoff is, that you MIGHT lose the nice 'classic' start menu you can still get in Vista. (I thought I was able to get it in Win7; so will try again. Win7 crashed just after I did, and it wouldn't restore except through Clonezilla to copy back the pre-change, clone.)

So I'll probably upgrade this Vista Business machine to Win7, and not use Win8 at all, except on some used laptop of the right hardware configuration, I get in dellauction or elsewhere.

This post has been edited by brainout: 24 November 2012 - 06:43 AM

[brainout]

FONT NAZIS are Vista and Win7. They bloat you up with many fonts -- these all hang in memory, eating it up -- AND YOU CANNOT DELETE THEM. They call these 'system protected fonts', dozens of them you'd never use. Some of the others you can delete, but it's hit or miss, you don't know which one, and since there are hundreds of the dang things in the Fonts folder, you have to hunt and peck through ALL of them, individually. So what I had to do was select all, then endure the myriads of prompts telling me this or that unknown and never used font, was part of the system and could not be deleted. Many of them were Cambodian, Vietnamese, or like font names. I don't need those, in the US. Why can't I decide what I need?

THIS IS INSANE OS. Win8 is even worse. Just read the user reviews on Win8 in Amazon, 163 1-star reviews, mostly saying that they either couldn't get Win8 installed, or when it installed it wrecked their machines, that they kept on having to sign in online to get Internet Explorer, or other browser or their mail to work; and that their POP3 email didn't work. Over and Over and Over again, same complaints in different mouths, some eloquent, some barely literate. In short, they couldn't do it with their sign on local account, couldn't compose mail offline, couldn't even launch the browser without having to signin online with MS or Chrome.

I hope you know, that the second you sign in with Chrome, it automatically DOWNLOADS your last settings, rather than giving you the option PRIOR to refuse that. So you automatically get the OLDER links, and your new ones are wiped out. This just happened to me. I wasn't given a warning, and wasn't given the option to CHANGE how sync worked, and the instructions claiming I would be, were flat wrong. I lost YEARS of settings because I hadn't signed into Chrome in years. But I had to sign in, to get the update. Not knowing, the sync was one-way. (It doesn't work that way, in Firefox.)

More: that they had to remember the first password they gave when installing the system, using it over and over and over during operation; that the 'permissions' problem in Vista, is much worse in Win8; that they lost their DVD, their WiFi, half or all of their Win7 drivers, programs and settings, that they got blank screens or black screens, or claims that their valid Win8 downloads or DVDs were deemed not genuine MS OS; that it installed after 24 hours or 16 hours or 8 hours of waiting and failing and trying again and waiting and failing and no information WHY it kept failing; of HUNDREDS OF HOURS ON THE PHONE (collectively) with 'tech help' at MS in India being clueless about the interface or remotely connecting to their laptop/desktop and THEN wrecking their machine during installation.

Anyone praising Win 8 is a liar or quite dishonest, having ignored all the complaints on the internet even since October 26th. Like the Muslims who claim Islam is a religion of 'peace', despite its bloody 1400-year old history, culminating in 9/11, which the Muslims blame on the Jews. Just as Islam is peace, so is Win8 a good OS.

Same taqqiya.

This post has been edited by brainout: 24 November 2012 - 11:54 PM

[Szczecinianin]

brainout, on 23 November 2012 - 12:53 AM, said:

MAIL -- you can't use Outlook Express in Vista nor in Win7.  Instead, you have Windows Mail or Windows LIVE Mail, confusing names.  The latter you have to set up online.  Plain 'Windows Mail' is the succesor to Outlook Express, and will import your old Address book (.wab), and your email.  I don't yet know if it will import your 'Identities', the painstakingly crafted email account settings so you can GET your mail.  I've not tested all this, yet, only going by the instructions.

This is a major pain, because if you set a lot of message rules to auto-sort your mail as it came in, you can't port those settings over, in Vista.  If you avidly used Outlook Express to keep track of your work like I did  (for you can always email notes to yourself, knowing they will always sort by date), then this might be one reason to upgrade atop XP.  For I'm reasonably sure those settings will all port to Windows Mail, upon upgrade.

Windows Live mail stinks.  You're STUCK WITH IT, beginning in Win7.  So it might be better to ignore Windows Mail altogether, and just shift to Thunderbird.  Problem there, is that Thunderbird, while an Outlook Express clone, can only import your MAIL, unless you already have Outlook Express installed.  Or, unless you convert your Outlook Express files to Outlook -- all on your XP machine. So if you do use Outlook, take the latter step and convert to Outlook.  Because, at least you can use Outlook in both Vista and Windows 7.  The latter will not accept Outlook 2000 (of course, that's the last truly flexible version of Outlook);  frankly, Windows 7 wants version 2003 of MS stuff.  But some users here in the forum report being able to use earlier versions of MS, despite the universal 'no it won't work' answer you get in MS Answers forum.

Windows 8 junks the previous email also, and its POP3 function is reported as not working by many article writers (here in PC World, ZDNet, PC Magazine, elsewhere).  I saw one commenter who claimed he got his gmail POP3 to work, versus many who said it didn't.  So maybe the best thing again, is to use MS Outlook rather than either Live Mail or Outlook.com (which is quite different and annoying).

The latter two keep your email in the cloud.  You're just asking for trouble there.  AOL, Yahoo, hotmail and other online email services have all been hacked.  Just last year two of my colleagues, one of my clients and several friends had their email accounts hacked, so I got fake emails from them, claiming that they were in trouble and needed money.  Better to keep NO email on the server, and NO address books.

Win7 also replaces your address book with a folder named 'Contacts', which allows limited importing.  Again, best to use MS Outlook if you'll transition away from XP for email;  or, use Thunderbird (which is compatible with Linux, too).

Never mind that as I never used Outlook Express and people use Thunderbird, Pegasus, The Bat and other clients or webmails, like Gmail.

[brainout]

Szczecinianin, on 25 November 2012 - 01:47 AM, said:

Never mind that as I never used Outlook Express and people use Thunderbird, Pegasus, The Bat and other clients or webmails, like Gmail.

Well, maybe it's different running in Poland. I'm just reporting my experience here. Thunderbird is okay, but to transfer OE files to it, you have to either put Thunderbird on the same machine as OE, and THEN import and THEN find out what file names Thunderbird uses (or maybe you can sync it on the other machine, I didn't try that yet) -- or, you put your wab and dbx files onto a pen drive and then you can ONLY import the dbx files into Thunderbird. That's what I did with my Win7 machine. I can't get the wab to import, have to convert it to csv and then import. Haven't done that yet either.

Alternatively, you can import both address book and mail into MS Outlook, and then export the psts or simply import them into the other machine. That's what I'll probably do as well, but right now it's not a priority. Point is, you're right about Thunderbird,which runs happily in Linux as well. Since that means two different Thunderbirds, at least short-term (until only using Linux for internet), that can be a boon, because then you can split the kinds of emails you want to use, for each one.

NOTE: 'wab' is the address book file in Outlook Express. 'dbx' is each MAIL folder in Outlook Express.

[brainout]

Okay, I'm about done testing both the Vista Business and the Win7. Last topic of note, concerns internetting. Both do well on that score. I don't use Internet Explorer except for Dell downloads and MS updates, because in both cases, I must use that browser. IE stinks ever since IE7.

Chrome is worse, except for its cookie handling. But I've already explained that. Point is, all three browsers work well on Vista and Win7.

Overall, Win7 is better, but it won't let you use the 'classic' menu style. Meaning, you can get a classic theme, but the menu still uses the boxy Aero construction with the classic colors. Good news is, you can revert back and forth to true Aero theme simply by choosing an Aero theme. Choose a classic theme you set up prior, to revert to classic.

Libraries and the Windows (file) Explorer are still somewhat worse, too much white space, but tolerable. Neither is good enough to abandon XP, but both have their charms and frustrations. I've listed the frustrations I've had.

[AdamJack]

In terms of performance Vista took the longest time to get started, XP come in second place and Windows 7 is the fastest.

This post has been edited by coastie65: 13 December 2012 - 04:06 PM
Reason for edit: Removed Spam link

[Naman_dhingra]

throwing my personal experience, I would say Windows 7 is the best one, though there is very little difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP.
I had just used Windows vista once and can say I don't like working on it..

[orlbuckeye]

brainout, on 23 November 2012 - 12:24 AM, said:

This is my Vista Business machine, the one I might downgrade to Win8, eventually. First, I wanted to compare Vista with Win7, both 32-bit, so this will be an ongoing set of comparison posts. If you have any you care to add, please do!

First, a lot of the problem with Vista is that it was issued too fast (past is prologue, Win8 was issued too fast as well); so, it had a lot of bugs. Many of these were ironed out after Service Pack 2.

What's been most annoying about Vista is its overprotectiveness. Every time you do anything, you have two extra clicks and dialogue boxes to 'permit' the action. You can turn these off, but it's all or nothing. In truth, you can change the settings in Local Security Policy, but that's mostly in jargon and you really don't know what all you're permitting, since the 'Explain' tab doesn't tell you much, or talks to you as if you were an IT person.

However, if you wanted to preserve the interface and settings of XP, and thus get update protection until 2017 (for I bet Vista's updates will end up lasting as long as version 7's) -- then Vista might be a good idea. But it would be better to buy a separate used machine with Vista on it -- you can get them cheap, now ($300 and under, at least at dellauction) -- better to do that, than upgrade atop what you have. Windows upgrades on top of existing stuff almost always cause severe problems. So you can migrate slowly, after you learn the system, reinstalling whatever as you choose, at your pace.

Vista's native interface is Aero, which is eliminated in Windows 8 but kept in Windows 7. It eats up a lot of memory, but is attractive. You can easily change back to your XP or Classic (Win95-style) settings, simply by copying the 'Plus!' folder from your Win95 machine's directory; or, by copying your XP themes to the machine, and selecting one of them in Personalize Theme of Vista (which you access as you did in XP, right-clicking on the Desktop, select 'Personalize'). So you can switch back and forth between Aero and some old XP theme you created. However, if you want to CHANGE that XP style theme, you cannot really do it well in Vista. You'd have to change it in XP, then copy the theme to Vista. Another reason for not superimposing Vista on your XP, but instead getting a separate Vista machine.

In Vista, your options for tweaking a theme are limited; background, ONE font for everything, ONE size for everything. This same restriction applies in Win7, but there, you have to go through extra steps to get your theme recognized, which maybe you can't do. In Win7, you'd have to have the 'Plus!' folder from Win95, to actually make the change, and you'd have to execute its own Theme.exe in that folder, to effect the true 'classic' change. A limited form of that is available without the 'Plus!' folder, as described here. However, while in Vista there is a convoluted way to have toolbars at both top and bottom of the screen, in Win7 you can only have one toolbar (always part of Quick Launch, though you can size that to several lines).

Finally, themes you set up in XP used background pictures in certain folders. Usually, these were subfolders of Documents and Settings; VISTA REMOVES that option, instead renaming the folder to c:\users as a prefix. So you'll have to redo your backgrounds, or else move those pictures to a different folder in XP which you can alike name in Vista, in essence redoing each of your themes. If you have over 50 themes like I do, this latter is not an option. I just re-select the backgrounds.

In both Vista and Win7, if you want to move back to an Aero style native to each OS, you can. So you can switch between them.

So much for the theme difference. The other posts will cover specific subtopics, one per post.

I tyhink part of the probelmm that happened with Vista was the development had to stop and resources were put back into XP SP2 because of the BIG security issues.

[orlbuckeye]

I don't think the biggest problem with Vista wasn't is was released to fast. I think it had more to do with the team members were retasked to work on security in XP which was part of XP SP2. The devlopment of Vista statrted in 2001 before XP was released. Vista was finally released in 2006. The biggest problem with Vista was older hardware drivers support was non0existant and too many devices wouldn't work with Vista. Since Vista MS has done way better with allowing older computer to run the new OS's.

Even now if you buy a mach from say Acer or Lenova and a new OS comes out they don't update the driver for the new OS. That means they basically only support the computer with the OS it comes with unless you buy the computer a few months before the new OS is released.

[crazy4laptops]

Windows 7 > Vista hands down! There is NO contest, Windows 7 wins!

I just formatted and erased the hard drive on my friend's computer that had Vista. Now I'm just putting the finishing touches to the new Windows 7 installation.

Response time overall is about 2.5 faster than Vista.

The problem with vista is that there's just too much OS for the PC! No standard hardware besides a gaming rig would run well with vista on it.

Vista needs to just go away and become a warning to techs, Vista sucks! Do not use if you don't like getting headaches, frustration, and snail-slow startup times. I login and it takes 10 minutes for the system to load up my profile! Terrible terrible!

Also, vista is so freaking buggy that an HP OEM installation of Vista managed to lose it's license and endlessly prompt for re-activation. The rep at Microsoft was really confused about my call for re-activation for an OEM machine.

[LiveBrianD]

In my experience, it hasn't been that bad - if I'd had a machine with more than a Pentium 4 and a Geforce 6200, I likely would've kept using Vista. (I'd upgraded that machine to Vista, but later reverted back to XP because Vista was slower.)