[brucewduvelow]

Im Tired of the Vista Bashing.If you are SCARED to use Vista..Then don't buy it.Problem solved.Then again maybe one should consider that it may be their own mistakes that cause the Vista OS to not work correctly.I bought my computer new in march 2007 with ultimate installed.To this day i have not had 1(ONE) problem with it.Then again,Im not running the minimum specs on the machine either.1 gig of memory to run it?? Come on.Im running 4 gigs and it works as good as Xp ever did for me.Some people refuse to accept change.Well you can have your Xp Os.I will trust Microsoft that this is just the beginning to an exciting and wonderful OS!!!

[GMan]

@brucewduvelow,

Amen!! I share your experience and am really tired of the cult of Vista-bashing!!

G-Man

[ChuckEtheridge]

I agree with brucew-duvelow. I got a new Gateway FX530XV with 4Gb RAM also in March 2007 and also with Vista Ultimate, now SP1. With me too, no problems at all. The Experience Index is 5.1, and this is due to an Intel 6420 that runs at a leisurely 2.13GHz/sec. Everything else is rated at between 5.4 and 5.9. I am completely happy with it and I also really like the IE8 Beta 2 that was just released. I even have HD DVD and Blu-Ray drives with Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-Ray and a Pinnacle 800i digital TV Tuner card, all of which work beautifully. It really makes me wonder about all those whiners who disparage Vista. I think they must be a lot more lacking than they imagine Vista to be.

Just one word of advice. I tried two different Cyberlink packages for several months and never got anything but a dark monitor and no audio other than with conventional DVDs. Avoid that at all costs. The Corel product works perfectly.

[Pepps]

I have been using vista, now, for 6 months. I almost dumped it for ubuntu or to go back to XP but stuck it out. I can see why businesses would hold off implementing Vista. It took a lot of tweaking to get it where I like it, now. This tweaking, though, has caused me a lot of headaches and sleepless nights. I have done three total system reboots following a botched tweak or two. Some was my fault and I am convinced that Microsoft botched an update or two along the way. Proper backup would have saved my butt more than once. My Vista is running good. I cannot see going back to XP. I see virtual box with Kubuntu as my next step. XP seems like a dinosaur after running with Vista for 6 months.

[crazypj]

I was a bit late getting 'into' computers but I used win 95, upgraded to win 98, skipped 2000/ME and finally got to XP.

Bought a new laptop with Vista installed and.......

I DON'T LIKE IT.

I like the fact it can use flash drive for extra memory, but, so far, everything else about it sucks.

Some 'features' I find particularly irritating but I'm sure I'll figure out how to turn them off eventually

[GMan]

h4. @crazypj
It is a bad carpenter who quarrels with his tools.

h4. G-Man

[techie4fun]

Pepps said:

I have been using vista, now, for 6 months. I almost dumped it for ubuntu or to go back to XP but stuck it out.

Ubuntu wouldn't even install for me.

[piyushsingh]

LOL

How is Mandriva going ? :)

[techie4fun]

I haven't used Mandriva in months! LOL . I'm back to XP .

[mcconnell]

Good article. That's exactly what is happening with Win Vista. Glad that the article said it how it is! Good job.

[mcconnell]

I have all my systems running Vista now and everything has been fine for almost a year. My laptop got messed up once and I had to wipe the drive and reinstall XP before upgrading to Vista. It was slower, less reliable and a network head- ache compared to Vista.

[ChuckEtheridge]

Just get the equipment that Microsoft recommends and I'll bet that your troubles will vanish. One thing I forgot to mention before is that I do use a DVI-D cable from the video card to the monitor and a Logitech Z5300e 5.1 Speaker system connected with the 1/8" pin plugs that Logitech provided straight out of the sound card and have more high quality sound than I can deal with. By the way, even with 4GB Ram which is all that the computer is designed for along with a 4GB thumb drive, but it is hard to tell if it makes much difference. As I said, though, IE8 Beta 2 is excellent.

[rgreen4]

Mcconnell - if you have need to do that again, skip the XP step altogether. You can use the Vista upgrade disc to do a "clean install" of Vista. You do have to install it twice, but since Vista installs faster than XP you will save time. You simply do not enter the COA on the first pass, and uncheck the automatic activation. This is basically a 30day test environment, but then you install it a second time, this time entering the COA and either automatically activating or not at your choice. If you do not activate at this point you will be prompted to activate later. However, as long as you are re-installing on the same machine with the same MB and CPU, you should have no problem.

Here is a link to a full discussion on Paul Thurott's website.

[crazypj]

calling names wont make me like Vista any better.

[pogopower]

I like vista I was very carefully about getting in to a new Ms operating system .But i had to because i have a lot of friends and family that needs my computer help so when it came out I got a new vista computer. It only has 512 mb of ram and a 3.2 ghz chip but it runs fine. I like the way it looks and the way vista lets you control the software on your system much better then xp.
When xp came out I had a hell of a time with all computers for years with spy ware and viruses .Vista is very save and fast .After that i got myself a new hp laptop with vista premium and wow the stuff you can do on that is just amazing so sorry all the problems that you guys have must be because you try to run vista on old computer that are not set up right. And buy the way does anybody really believe ms is going to bring windows 7 really out in 2010 how stupid can you be there are never on time with a new windows so good luck trying to hang on to xp all the ne software in the works world wide is not going to wait for the xp world they are going vista that is it.PS IF YOU DON'T LIKE MICROSOFT VISTA THEN GO TO THE APPLE STORE AND PAY TWICE THE PRICE FOR THE SAME HARDWARE SO YOU CAN RUN MAC OSX.

[technicalhitman]

Perhaps Apple should pay all its customers for Mobile Me, OS-X with the highest vulnerabilities of any other OS according to the National Vulnerability Database, and for the iPhone 3G which still has troubles to this very day. I think I'll keep my Vista Ultimate system, which has 3 times more of the uptime than my old XP system or Mobile Me.

[technicalhitman]

I've been using Windows Vista since June of 2007. At first I was kind of indifferent to it, because I didn't understand the OS changes nor did I really get that the hardware wasn't there yet. After plunking money for good quality hardware such as a dual core processor, a higher quality graphics card, higher end DDR2 memory, and a better hard drive; Vista started to take shape as an OS. Microsoft worked most of my issues and hang ups with SP1. Since then, I've had more uptime and better computing experiences with Vista, then I ever had with XP.



For those who have forgotten the XP nightmare, perhaps you should go re-read history. It still has too many holes to plug. I saw that someone mentioned that Vista has a lot of XP's vulnerabilities. In a word, Bullcrap!!!!!!! Vista is based upon the Windows Server 2003 codebase and is approximately 85% protected over XP vulnerabilities. The XP codebase couldn't handle what was attempted with original Longhorn code. It was started over to give Vista a clean slate. The biggest problem with Vista is that software developers and driver writers aren't doing a good enough job. It took a whole year just to get good quality drivers from both ATI and nVidia. Software developers need to get off their butts and get some work done. Vista's not perfect, not by far. However, by leaps and bounds, Vista is a much more stable and feature complete Operating System.

If you really have issues with Vista, then you should be writing to Steven Sinofsky on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Sinofsky's team is being very receptive and open with potential Windows 7 users, and it gives users the chance to help mold Windows 7 to be a better product.

blogs.msdn.com/e7/default.aspx

Trust me, I've been letting them know how I feel about what I expect out of Windows 7. It may not all happen, but if we can get a better product out of Microsoft then I think that does the whole industry justice.

[langkp]

Vista is XP on steroids, but it is definetly not ready for primetime. I run Vista Ultimate. Sometimes it won't startup, sometimes it won't shutdown. It doesn't start fast enough. It should allow a start order for programs that automatically load. It should set priorities for starting programs as Vista is Loading. For instance I want my internet security to load immediately but don't want other nice to have utilities, like Norton Ghost, force me to wait to access my email. It takes too long to start other programs when the system is loading and loading, and loading, and loading. When Vista gets into some process (unknown) it can take up to a minute to start another program. Running Office 2007 it sometimes takes five to ten seconds or longer to see a result on the screen.

I can't quite understand why internet icons for a website won't display properly on the desktop, For example the eBay shortcut icon displays on the desktop, but the Microsoft Home icon displays like a generic internet explorer icon. When website shortcuts are displayed in Windows Explorer you get generic icons if you display the shortcuts in any way larger than list view. XP had a problem displaying icons that were too large on the desktop but Vista has taken a step backwards.

When Vista goes to Sleep it doesn't always wake up the external hard-drive when it restarts. It needs a power plan that will recognize scheduled events or have the scheduler remind you when scheduled events are missed. What happened to Hibernate?

Somehow I've developed printing problems. I can't print multiple copies of documents in anything but Microsoft Works. Office 2007 and most other Windows programs that can print to printer won't print more than one copy at a time.

There is a lot to like about Vista, but it needs a lot of work under the hood, needs more user controls over processes. I hope Windows 7 is Vista FIXED!

Ken

Gilbert IA

[cubbage]

You should check you facts, Server 2003 is based on XP code.

Server 2008 is based on Vista code.

Server 2008 makes a great workstation once you turn off all of the server crap.

Google Server 2008 workstation, there is a whole community supporting this as a workstation/desktop. They did the same thing for Server 2003.

Thank You

Zarlon

[ChuckEtheridge]

Hi, Overall I agree with your sentiment, but it would be nice to see a positive user do his initial writing using Word so that little things like word usage and spelling would seem to be from a more literate user. After doing the composition there just copy it and then past it into one of these letters. With all those negativists out there we sure don't need to give them any additional ammunition. My system has only an Intel Duo Core running at 2.13GHz, along with 4GB RAM and ti works just fine.