[cubbage]

I also do not see the corallation between Vista and ME. For me I never had a problem with ME personally or for any installs I did for family and friends though I will admit that I never upgrade an OS but do a clean install. Now Vista for me was a real pain in the rear at the beginning in usage not installation but once I turned off all of the fancy crap and used classic windows settings I like it, rofl. I only use 64 bit Vista, why spend money on the 32 bit when I have already gotten a got 32 bit in XP. At my work we have 1 Vista (64) PC but all the rest are XP, even have several 64 bit XP's which have not given us any problems. I am willing to support and use any OS depending on the tasks needed and software availablility, that even includes MAC's which I do hate because of its patronizing ways.

[rgreen4]

Well, actually they technically are not dual boots, IMO, because each OS is on it's own individual drive. Each OS was installed on that drive when no other drive was active to avoid corrupting the boot record when a particular drive was removed. Right now it has only a single Vista drive, the others have the cables removed.

You demo was interesting, but I have never worked with virtual machines before. Maybe sometime in the spring I might have enough time to play around with it. Would you consider doing a detailed document on the process and pitfalls for the community? Many have talked about it, but there aren't too many members who have any real experience with it that I am aware of.

[VHMP01]

@rgreen4. It is quite simple, I?ll give you the 1, 2, 3 on it because I?m taking a vacation for the next couple of weeks.

1.- Dowdload and Install Virtual PC (free from MS or any other site).

2.- Setup any Virtual PC with the Wizard (or manually) setting the ROM, RAM, Virtual Drive Space, etc. that you?ll be assigning to it.

3.- Run it and it?ll ask you for the OS CD?s (This is the tricky part, you can have CDs, DVDs, ISO Images, Disquettes, or all Installation Files in a Directory).

Once it end the Formating (Don?t worry, it is a Virtual Drive C) you?re done!

There is a `Technical Overview.xps? file on Virtual PC which explains it very clear.

Greetings.

[rgreen4]

Have a good trip. I'll give it a try next week when things are quiet. I appreciate it, drop by the community when you get back.

[Tariff08]

I must agree. PCWorld seems to be very biased in terms of Windows & Mac. I saw one of their magazines today and it had something about fixes to Vista's bugs or something like that (can't remember, and I don't have the magazine).

To me, it seems like people at PCWorld are a bunch of Mac fans, which me as a non-user of Mac, gives me little reason to check the site. On to ZDNet, I suppose!

[rtfire1]

yes they are sometimes very pro mac and pro xp. Thats why I dumped getting the mag at home and when back to inport tuners the have save me lots of money when it comes to car tuning and cheap mods that save money.

[piyushsingh]

rtfire1 said:

yes they are sometimes very pro mac and pro xp. Thats why I dumped getting the mag at home and when back to inport tuners the have save me lots of money when it comes to car tuning and cheap mods that save money.

very true in my opinion also. they have been anti-vista from the beginning. pcworld had rated it as #1 in 2007's tech disappointments and then later rated it as #2 in 2008's most under-rated product. Maybe this is just trying to feed people what they would digest more.

Did vista change from 2007 to 2008 ? NO , but some opinions changed. :)

[rtfire1]

great point Piyushsingh,

Now that every one is starting to see how great the os is there jumping on the band wagon.

[piyushsingh]

lol :D

[rtfire1]

and to add to the fun my vista dvr is faster at download/moving files over my home network by a few min (20 pluss gib file size) i cant wait to see what this baby can do with 2gb of ram instead of 1 gb of ram. An the pc was made by dell in late 02 early 03
Message was edited by: rtfire1

[piyushsingh]

it would be flying after that i guess.

When i had a dual boot with xp and vista , vista used to boot much faster than xp . I removed xp from it after that when i noticed I hadnt booted in xp for many days.

[rtfire1]

I would like to get all the kids on vista pcs but thats to much right now. and they only do school work mostly on them any ways if they want to play again the use my laptop.

[dragon69]

well personelly i would wait for windoze 7 as they might have fixed all the bugs in vista ( well hope fully anyways )

they say windoze 7 can run on a machine with only 512 mb of ram lol try that with vista home premium

yes big file transfer are not to slow but small file transfers seem to take a lot more time then on my back up machine with P3 @ 700 and only 256 sdram and win xp pro but that might be the os as i got 64 bit and i think you ar running 32 bit vista

windoze 7 is the what vista should have been from the start (in my humble opinion vista was just a beta with a big price tag on it)

good luck and take care

[rtfire1]

I run vista 32 and 64 on my laptop I do have 4gb of ram. my dell xps was upgraded to to a fresh copy of vista at the time I upgrade it i was only running 512 mb ram. It ran fine and then I dropped 1gb of ram from my old dvr pc into it it did run better. I just picked up a 1gb of ram to add to it on tuesday just have not gotten around to it yet. My wifes acer has only 1 gb of ram an runs vista great I do plan to upgrade it to 2gb ram so it will run better and yes i know vista can only us 3gb of ram but the rest can go to the on board video card.

On all my vista pcs I have not had any problems with little or large files being it camra pics or word docs or movies and large autocad files. In all but one case I have found vista faster then my xp pcs in the house.

[dragon69]

yeah when my comp only had 1 gb it ran ok after i disabled the eye candy and turned off the indexer and a few other stuff but the media center still had a little lag when searching for media but the extra 1gb helps a lot now ( when searching for media

once in a while my connection still drops to the internet (but that has mostly gone away now with sp1 since then it has only happened once the other were all before sp1) and it will say it is still connected to the network but sometimes ie8 and firefox will not be able to display a page and then i have to go to the command line and check everything out and fix it up again and again ( about 4 or 5 times since i installed vista last year) but one time it was eset nod smart security suites fault but the others was just a mysterious "unable to load page" error with no appaerent cause other then new windoze updates (yes i even had reinstall the realtek network chips drivers ( once only the 64 bit version of internet explorer could connect but the 32 bit version ( both were ie 8) of IE and firefox could not connect yes only the 64 version not anything else could connect but it was listed in the networks as being connected )

after service pack 1 the average file transfers did pick up speed but not the reported 30% that micro$oft has stated but by a modest 10%and is almost as fast as win xp pro on my old machine

gl and tc

[rgreen4]

Actually the 3+ Gig limit is for all 32 bit versions of Windows. I believe if you have 4 Gig installed, the actual number available for general purpose memory is 4 GB - Video on board memory. Of course it didn't become a problem until recently.

[herewegoinvt]

I'm a bit surprised by people who have posted saying they have had no problems with Vista - unless they started off with SP1. I purchased a laptop with Vista Pre-installed, and surprisingly little crapware. However, when I first started the laptop up, I had problems galore. My Webcam, Wireless Internet, Card reader & Bluetooth simply didn't work. Others included hibernation/sleep issues, nearly endless shutdown loops and more. Thankfully I was able to get many of these things working over the course of a few days, though the system stability was less than desirable. Once I installed SP1 beta everything worked, and pretty well too. I think this is a fair assessment of the beta. It is a beta, I don't think any reviewer expects it to work flawlessly, but they shouldn't pull any punches about it either. I appreciate that it was installed and tested differently on different systems and tested in more of a 'real world' environment. That's where I use mine after all.

[cubbage]

Yes I installed Vista Ultimate 64 after SP1. I did the same with XP, installed after SP1.

Vista 64 if very fast, but I did not like Aero so I changed theme to Classic.

[rtfire1]

i did not have any issues with Vista and i started with vista in dec 07 before sp1 came out. I did find issues with some intel drivers but that was an easy fix

[rgreen4]

I qualified for a free upgrade on a Media Center I purchased in November 2006, and it came with XP MCE. Nothing but trouble, having to do a full reinstall twice, and having so much trouble with Symantec, that they gave me a free copy of Norton's Internet Security 2007, no real improvement. I got my Vista Home Premium upgrade in April 2007 and had intended to leave it on the shelf until after SP1 came out. However, facing a third recovery of XP MCE, I simply formatted the drive and did a clean install of the Vista HP upgrade. I have never looked back.

I also ditched all Symantec products as well. I have updated to SP1 on that machine. I also purchased a new laptop in the fall of 2007 that came with Vista HP factory installed. I did remove all the crapware, but everything worked as it was supposed to including the camera and the hibernation mode. I have also since upgraded it to SP1 as well.

My third machine is a custom build that I assembled and installed Vista HP OEM as well as XP Pro OEM and Windows 2000 Pro OEM. Each OS is on a separate drive and installed when it's drive was the only active drive so the various versions of bootloader do not know about the other. I use the BIOS boot menu to determine the boot drive. Vista is booted most often (and it is the one I am on now), with XP only occasionally. Win2K is almost never used, it was set up only since I had it, it didn't need activation and it is used only to perform experiments to answer PCW community members questions. The XP Pro installation has rapidly fallen into that mode as well. This machine has subsequently been updated to Vista SP1 and XP Pro SP3 when they came out.

I doubt that I will experiment with SP2 as a beta, simply waiting until the RTM version is released. I may take a spare drive and experiment with Windows 7 Beta when I have time.