[Adama]

As you know, many people are choosing to stay with XP and yet others whose new computers came with Vista !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1! (thanks, PCW) are choosing to go back to XP. Many people hate Vista. What has Vista ever done to merit such vile hatred? There are many of you who will argue back and forth about Vista's weaknessess and I'm sure you have a foot-long list of why you love to hate Vista.
On the other hand, what if somebody really likes the way Vista looks and works?

Here's my experience. My laptop came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. I like that it is able to conduct any type of search from anywhere in my computer. I can just press the Windows key on my keyboard and I am immediately in the Start menu. All I have to do is enter a couple of words and it takes me where I want to go in my computer, the Internet or to any Website I want.

Vista has also put together many of the features and tools I need into a task-oriented center. For example: Welcome Center helps me to learn about my computer and shows me how to set up and even customize some things. There's Security Center, where I can make sure that my computer is protected from all the bad guys lurking out there in Cyberspace. I know, you probably have something to say about that.

I am glad that Vista has many security features that are running in the background, whether I'm aware of it or not, because I don't have to worry about it.

Everybody hates to be asked for a password and permission, to "allow" or "not allow." But you know what? after using my computer for the past 7 months, I've become used to it. What can I say, it just doesn't bother me anymore.

After having it for about a month, I started running Defender every 3 days or so and I did that for about 3 weeks. During that time, every week when my SpySweeper did the scheduled sweep, I got a Congratulations, No cookies, No traces found message! Defender was doing its job and I thought that was pretty awesome. Then I got tired of doing it so often, and since then, SpySweeper finds cookies and traces every time it does the sweep.

Did I tell you about Help & Support? I love H & S, it has saved my behind many a time.

A few months ago I was having a problem when my Protected Mode Icon was OFF. I couldn't figure out why and I started getting all kinds of unwanted emails, spam, etc. Yahoo! couldn't give me a straight answer. Then I talked to an IT (friend of a friend) whose answer didn't help.

I started searching through H & S and reading the Vista book I had just purchased. That's when I realized that somehow I had managed to turn my User Account Control to off and that was the reason my Protected Mode Icon was off. Needless to say, I turned UAC back on, my Icon was back to ON and it's going to stay On for as long as I own this laptop! I know, UAC nags you to enter a password or click OK every time you make certain changes or perform certain actions, but I feel it's worth the effort to have more protection.

Another thing I enjoy is my Windows Media Player; I have ripped and burned CDs, something I never thought I could do. I even learned to copy photos into my Windows Photo Gallery. And emoticons, can't forget my little emos! !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

I know all these things are probably small potatoes for you who are so knowledgeable about computers and have had a great experience with XP. Well, this is my first computer, ever. I'm just getting to know my laptop and finding out all the awesome things it can do.

I find that Vista is fast and convenient, the Speedy Gonzalez of Cyberspace.

So the question still remains: Is it V or Not V for you? For me, it is V, definitely.

In a recent PCW post, someone suggested that XP was the old ME and others agreed that ME had become the new XP. I think the same thing has happened here. In my humble opinion, XP has now successfully morphed into Vista.

Vista is the wave of the Future. And the Future is Now.
-----
Proud user of Vista Home Premium. And still loving it.
Message was edited by: Adama

[lilxkid24]

I used Vista for 3months or so and there were goods at bads about it. First off the bads about Vista, it uses too much memory, just not doing anything its already using up 700 memory which is a lot compared to xp. It also has too many confirmation stuff which i know can be disabled from UAC control panel. Also vista boots way too slow nearly 40 seconds. Also in the games i play counter strike source half life source etc there is a major frame rate compared to xp.

Ok the good stuff i like about Vista, its dx10 support for games like crysis makes the graphics look awesome, it has a new sexier look, but i am able to get an xp to look exactly like xp if i really wanted too. Sniping tools is really convient at times

So I switched to xp now and i really like it better than vista, booting time is only 10 seconds now, folders load very quick way faster than vista, no more of these icons telling me to enable this security and that for xp. Memory usage is only at around 300-400. So i would say i like xp for now. Everything just seems to run faster and smoother on xp for me.

[piyushsingh]

adama: u said it right -"Vista is the wave of the Future. And the Future is Now."

i have been using vista ultimate for about 3 months now and i have no problems with it.most of the ppl will disagree, it doesnt matter .
the only problem is that the ppl who cant run it tell that its bad. vista is so good to work and so many features to be explored.

uac is such a good thing to have - just turn it off on admin account and customize it ur way on limited accounts, an easy access to so many powers for the administrator. the inbuilt parental control is so strong - u can tell what all has been done on limited accounts, u can set time limits , web limits, program limits so easly , the admin is the real power - this is what i like the most about vista.

aero is just too good to admire, its a totally different experience to work on a glassy UI than just sit on a XP,all other graphical advancements- the flip 3D, dreamscene, are cool.

The sidebar is another thing that needs to be explored - add what u like, tons of gadgets available, customize it ur way.

WM11 is so good than that on Xp. the explorer is so lively, all things come alive with nice thumbs.The search got so much faster , it finishes searching for the file by the time u actually finish typing the tags, a different search for programs installed - i never have to browse any folder to get to anything , just type in the start menu and u r there , its hardly take any time to reach any program.

network management has got so many easly accessable features, DEP and other security features incorporated make it so secure.

i m not saying that dump ur xp and go vista, i am using xp on my older PC , but a new build demands vista. Use it and feel its power, just dont get carried away by what other say and see yourself.

program compatibility is always a problem initially whenever an OS get upgrade but this is inevitable, its similar to that when xp was launched - same critics were blaming xp at that time and its vista , but now its OK , i dont have any problems now, only a few initially.

some ppl havent even used vista, they just say its bad, how can u say its bad without even trying and by just seeing others initial problems that are with any new OS, say that its bad.

my 3 months experience of vista has been very nice and i love using vista on my new built, every time it booots up it makes me feel happy and a new feeling of joy comes , it has never been this type on xp. U cant explain it , its just VISTA.

:-)
Piyush

[avanish11]

Vista came with my laptop. it looked cool and the sidebar was useful. That was about the only good thing about it. I used Vista for about 2-3 months and It was really slow. I could only get on average 10-15 fps in Empire Earth 2 on medium and in XP I get around 50-60 fps on high. It took over a minute to boot, and the uac was really REALLY annoying. I disabled it and then I got the red shield in the taskbar. Another thing I hated about vista was the big shortcut arrows on the icons. I downloaded a program and got rid of them, but it would've been nice if microsoft put an option directly in windows. I got XP on the lappy and its nice and fast now :D

so Not To V for me

[TechyGuy]

The main two quibbles I have with Windoze Vista are as follows:
-Backwards compatibility on WInVista is a nightmare. Most of my games will not run on Vista(and practically no expansions either.). I also have some software that I am very fond of that will also not run on Vista, as well.
-Resource Hog. Vista is probably the hog of all OSs. It takes up a massive amount of hard-disk-drive space, and requires an unreal amount of Ram to run well, starting at 1GB to run well for Home Basic. Home Premium - 2GB to run smoothly, and over 2GB for Ultimate. This is a problem if you cannot afford sticks upon sticks of oh-so-expensive RAM. And did I mention that Vista is incredibly graphics-demanding? Integrated graphics - common on low-end systems - simply do not cut it, especially on Aero-effects.(ugh)
So for me, You can count as Not V. Instead, count me XP or U(ubuntu-Linux)

[Adama]

Hi, piyush. Thank you for the excellent points you made. I know that feeling of joy you're talking about. I have it every time I log on! My Son just got a brand new Toshiba laptop with Vista Home Premium and he called me last night asking for my !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1! My advice....?! We had so much fun talking about it and laughing and I was sharing some of the things I learned from the fine people here at PCW. We had a lot of fun and I think that's what it's all about. Having fun and learning together.
There's so much to learn about Vista... I think that once people give it a chance they'll begin to like it too.



ps: Sorry about the mispelling of your name.
Message was edited by: Adama

[lilxkid24]

vista is good for people that like to learn about new stuff, and xp is good for people who don't care about anything besides what they do like me lol and just go for the speed.:^0

[TechyGuy]

lilxkid24 said:

vista is good for people that like to learn about new stuff, and xp is good for people who don't care about anything besides what they do like me lol and just go for the speed.:^0

I'll have to second that, Xkid. Though I would like to add :
> vista is good for people that like to learn about new stuff, and xp is good for people who don't care about anything besides what they , and Linux is good for people who want the compromise.:^0 - added by techyguy

[piyushsingh]

2GB is more than sufficient for even vista ultimate. i have playing all high end games like pro street and call of duty with maximum graphics settings without turning off aero and other things and its running well.

[TechyGuy]

Are you sure that you don't have some kind of supercharged Corsair Dominator DDR3 1033MHz RAM?
I have tried to game on a friend's PC that had 2GB of Crucial DDR2 667MHz RAM, Vista Home Premium, just to try out Vista with games(Aero turned Off) and see how DX10 was, and the games played a lot slower than an XP system.
Message was edited by: TechyGuy for Grammar

[Adama]

Hi, kid. My son and I had been talking about Vista for about a year, ever since I told him I wanted a laptop. Since then, he had been saying that if he ever got a new laptop, he was going to have XP installed in it. He has extensive experience with XP, which he had in another laptop he owned for about 6 years. He hated, hated, hated Vista.



Well, the one he just got a couple of days ago came with Vista. And what happened? He. Just. Loves. It. :^0
Message was edited by: Adama

[piyushsingh]

mine is kingston 2X1GB DDR2 @ 800MHz , its a normal one

[lilxkid24]

my fps goes down lower when i was running vista while playing games

[avanish11]

Me too. Vista is horrible when it comes to memory requirements.

[DoctorDoom]

First of all, my hat is off to Adama for starting this thread. You would think that the captain of the Galactica would have better things do do but... ;-)



But seriously, I guess I'm fairly well known around here as one of the local Vista lovers, and as such I am the frequent target of many flamethrowing Vista haters. I swear that every time I try and tout Vista as a good OS, at least one guy signs up to post in the forums with the sole purpose of bashing me and Vista mercilessly, which usually gets me riled up, much to the chagrin of the moderators.



My story with Vista is this:

I've basically owned every Microsoft OS since MS-DOS 6.0. I've owned other OS's as well, OS-X (IBM Version), OS-X (Apple Version), Plain old vanilla Linux, as well as various free GUI-based linux versions including Ubuntu, but I've always had a special place in my heart for Windows. Not necessarily a special place for Microsoft, but definitely for Windows. There are some things I don't like about Microsoft and their business practices, but that's also true about Sony, Apple, IBM, and the United States Government, but I manage to tolerate them all regardless.



So anyways, prior to Vista I was (of course) a heavy Windows XP user, and truth-be-told, I was a bit of a holdout for XP, I didn't buy into it until well after a year after it's launch because I was - and still am - opposed to Microsoft's Software Activation policy. So I used Windows 2000 for a year after XP was out, and I was happy to hear all the XP-bashing at the time, and may have even participated in XP-bashing from time to time.



Then I bought XP and guess what? I really liked it! So from 2002 to 2007 every computer I owned (geez it must have been like a dozen in that time period) and worked on (half a dozen?) was an XP machine. XP had scads of problems at launch, and until SP1 was pretty flakey when it wanted to be. The main complaints I remember from the early days of XP were about hardware requirements, hardware drivers, and software compatibility.



So, fast-forward to January 31, 2007, Vista release day. As someone who normally spends 8-16 hours on the computer each and every day, both for work and for play, I was well aware of XP's limitations, although by that time, it was a very stable and robustly patched OS. Regardless, I was itching for an improved OS, and endured all the hoopla and beta-versions of Vista, biding my time. On release day I went directly to my local retailer and purchased Windows Vista Ultimate for the full retail price - without complaining. I installed the OS in a dual-boot configuration along with my Windows XP installation, you know - just in case.



Well, I have never looked back. Since installing Vista I have logged into my XP partition maybe 4 times, each time just to get the Windows Update patches installed and update the graphics driver. Vista has been great, and I have had no show-stopping issues with it at all. Sure, at first it was a little difficult to get used to, and all of those "Are you sure?" and "Allow" prompts were annoying, but I quickly got used to them. I had scads of older hardware attached to the computer, but didn't have any trouble at all finding drivers, or just using the old WinXP drivers. We're talking scanners, printers, fax machines, mice, external drives, gamepads, keyboards, yada yada yada...NOT ONE ISSUE!



Non-game software was a tad more difficult - I had 2 programs (yes ONLY 2) that didn't work right with Vista - PartitionMagic 8 and Nero 7. PartitionMagic I could live without - Vista does most of what I used it for, and within a month Ahead put out a patch for Nero 7 that fixed it's compatibility issues.



There were also issues with some games. I would say that about 10% of the older titles wouldn't run right out of the box, however I learned that if you set the compatibility mode correctly in the game EXE's properties tab, it would fix the problem a lot of times. I would say that half of the games I was having trouble with were fixed in this manner. No game I have purchased since I installed Vista has failed to run. As far as framerates in games on XP versus Vista, yes, there is indeed a performance difference. Vista seems to run most games about 10% slower than XP. I suppose this is to be expected with a "heavier" OS, but it's a downside nonetheless. You have to put things in perspective though, if you're running, say, Half-Life 2 at 200fps in Windows XP and 180fps in Vista, how does that affect your gaming experience? It doesn't. You can't perceive anything in that framerate range. Even if you were barely eking out 30fps on a game in XP, the 10% framerate difference would only drop you down to 27fps. So I guess the question is whether the framerate issue is something worth griping about? I tell ya, I am a hardcore gamer, and I'm not sweating it.



I really like the new media center, the picture viewer/editor/album, and the movie editor, all are head and shoulders above XP's offerings. User accounts are finally usable - no more making everyone an Administrator, like in XP. I also LOVE the search function, as Adama mentioned in his post. Windows WiFi manager is actually usable now (try setting up a WiFi connection in XP and you'll see what I mean), and I absolutely LOVE the performance and reliability tools in Vista. The sidebar rocks, even if MS just lifted the idea from Google or Apple, depending on who you have yelling at you.



One thing I don't particularly like is taht Vista takes about twice as long to boot as XP. But I can live with that, since I usually leave my computer on 24-7, and to be honest, an extra minute to boot is not worth complaining about. It is true that Vista uses more memory than XP, but that's to be expected, every subsequent OS is going to require more resources than the last. With memory prices what they are today ($49 for 2GB of OCZ 800Mhz DDR2 RAM???), this shouldn't even been a issue.



So all in all I am very happy with Windows Vista, and have never looked back from Day 1 installation. It's a great OS, and is the best Windows yet.



So I am definitely "To V"!

[Adama]

Hi, DoctorD! I was wondering when (and if) someone would notice that my name is the same as Battlestar Galactica's Captain. LOL In the new show, there's an interesting twist because Starbuck is now played by a woman. Same thing here, for I am a woman as well. Several years ago I met Richard Hack, the guy who used to play Starbuck in the original BG and when he found out my name, he flashed me his famous smile and gave me a hug. That made my day, better yet, it made my whole year. :^0

I appreciate your post. It looks like you feel passionate about your computers and all the things they do for you.

Vista has had its ups and down and I do acknowledge that it takes up a lot of room, but I think that in the end, people will recognize that it is an excellent OS. And all this fighting and hullabaloo will fade away, until the next OS comes out... you know how that goes.

[SusanC]

I would LOVE to go back to XP or even buy an Apple at this point. This HP TouchSmart PC is really getting on my nerves. A bug just flew to the screen and bumped me off of PC World!! I have had so many problems with this PC (since buying on 4-21-07) and even got a new hard drive, but the same problem has found it way back with that - HP Media Center pops up randomly and this PC will not shut down at night because of that program. I have fired off a very irate email to HP and we'll see what happens with that. Glad that you are one person who is happy with Vista!

[Adama]

Hi, SusanC, I saw your post on another thread, and I know you are very unhappy with your HP TouchSmart PC. Have you thought about returning it?

[smax013]

DoctorDoom said:

I've basically owned every Microsoft OS since MS-DOS 6.0. I've owned other OS's as well, OS-X (IBM Version), OS-X (Apple Version), Plain old vanilla Linux, as well as various free GUI-based linux versions including Ubuntu, but I've always had a special place in my heart for Windows. Not necessarily a special place for Microsoft, but definitely for Windows. There are some things I don't like about Microsoft and their business practices, but that's also true about Sony, Apple, IBM, and the United States Government, but I manage to tolerate

I am curious...did you perchance mean OS/2 for IBMs? I am not aware of an "IBM version" of OS-X...the only OS X that I am aware of is Mac OS X by Apple.

[DoctorDoom]

Yes, I did mean OS/2 from IBM, thanks for the correction. My memory tends to fade after 10 years or so, and I don't have THAT box anymore lol.



BTW, OS/2 would have been a decent OS if anyone had bothered to write some software for it.