Anyone find Vista RTM too buggy for use?

[imported_Com80787]

I downloaded Vista from Technet yesterday and after about a day of use I am already having flashbacks of Windows ME.

Here are my experiences thus far:

First problem occured right after a clean install. I was looking around the control panels after install. After going through a few of them the control panel window was completely unresponsive. I tried to click on other control panels and nothing occured. The icons could not even be clicked. The window was frozen. Restarted the system several times and went to the control panel. As soon as the window opened BAM control panel window was frozen. Had to do a clean install AGAIN to resolve it. Have *no idea* what caused this. First occured literally within 10 mins after install was finished.

Next issue. After clean install for the second time inserted my flash drive so I could put my faves on Vista. Opened computer, clicked on the jump drive, and what do you know explorer crashes. This could be duplicated a couple times. I have to say though the explorer crash didn't bring down the system. It started back up again, but it would have been nice not to crash at all.

Third issue. Not Vista's fault probably, but the Nvidia video drivers wreak havoc on the system. After installing them random restarts occured. Had to roll back to vista provided drivers.

Also - sleep/hibernation is a disaster. Fails 9 times out of 10.

That's it for the major stability problems so far. Minor issues include no startup splash screen, system being unresponsive briefly at times and very sluggish doing certain tasks compared to XP (running on a Core 2 duo system with 3 gigs RAM - completely unacceptable).

Most of the OS has a "rushed out the door" feel to it. You just notice a ton of a things after just a couple hours of use that make you think constantly that "they obviously didn't tweak X thing". Too many features were pulled as well. Many of the features I had read about the past two years are no where to be found.

Has anyone else had a better experience? I have to say personally I am very disapointed thus far. I was excited about a new OS, but right now it looks like Windows ME all over again.

 

[pcgeek11]

First I am not a Microsoft " FanBoy " or anything. I run Suse Linux most of the time.

You said:
Third issue. Not Vista's fault probably, but the Nvidia video drivers wreak havoc on the system. After installing them random restarts occured. Had to roll back to vista provided drivers.

Me: This is an Nvidia driver problem as proven when you rolled back to the Vista driver you had no issue. Nvidia will get their drivers up to speed I am sure, It has been less than a week in RTM...

You said:
Also - sleep/hibernation is a disaster. Fails 9 times out of 10.

Me: This may be an isolated incident as on my Dell I5100 laptop it works perfectly ( sleep and Hibernate ). I never shut down just hibernate 99% of the time and they have never failed for me anyway.

You said:
Minor issues include no startup splash screen.

Me: There is a start-up splash screen. Run " msconfig " On the " Boot " tab put a check in the " No GUI Boot " and then shutdown and restart. See the pretty boot splash. Note: it will slow the boot process a little.

You said:
System being unresponsive briefly at times and very sluggish doing certain tasks compared to XP (running on a Core 2 duo system with 3 gigs RAM - completely unacceptable).

Me: I'm running a single core P4 2.66, 768 MB Ram, Ati video Mobile M7 with 32 MB Ram ( of course no Glass effects and such ) and it is very snappy and responsive. What video do you have? That may be the issue.

You said:
Has anyone else had a better experience? I have to say personally I am very disapointed thus far. I was excited about a new OS, but right now it looks like Windows ME all over again.

Me: My experience has been great over all. Of course there is a learning curve just like everything else. And you are correct Windows Me Sucked Gopher BallZ.

pcgeek11

 

[spyordie007]

Definetly not Win ME; but:

On my laptop the experience has been exactly as I expected (Thinkpad T43 w/ X300). On my desktop on the other hand I had the video drivers crash out on me 3 times within the first 24 hours.

I'm pretty sure this is NVIDIA's problem, however the drivers that MSFT distributes out of the box need to be stable or it looks bad on their part. BTW if you look at the driver version currently the out of the box drivers from MSFT are a later version than the ones on the NVIDIA site (NVIDIA still has the RC2 drivers posted), which means by you "updating drivers" you're actually installing an older version.

Usually after you install an OS it's a good idea to go out and look for updated drivers. But the truth is that right now there just arent that many good drivers out there, you're better off using the out of the box drivers with a lot of vendors until they have had a chance to iron out their own issues.

It would not surprise me if we see MSFT put updated drivers on WU in the very near future...

General system "snappyness" is going to very, but again it's heavily dependant on hardware and drivers. Now that Vista is RTM I think we'll see a lot of vendors working on updated drivers (many have been holding off, mostly because they are cheap).

I have not had any problems with sleep/hibernation. I rarely ever shutdown, usually just put my laptop in sleep and it's worked for me every single time. Have you tried updating the BIOS on your laptop?

 

[Smilin]

It's running perfect for me with the exception of nVidia drivers. I expect nVidia to have their crap together before release (end of Jan). It's kind of a bummer until then.

I've got a pretty high end box (see sig) and right now Vista runs faster than XP did. Very snappy. Seems to be getting faster as I go (indexing has completed etc). My work box runs about the same as XP so seeing my home gaming rig run so well was a pleasant surprise.

I have heard others with the sleep hibernation issue back in the beta days but I haven't seen any problems myself on RTM. What hardware are you on?

Now that I'm "moved in" UAC isn't bothersome at all and actually refreshing to see when some program pulls some shenanigans I wasn't expecting. UAC was a bit of a click-fest when first getting setup.

The startup splash screen is there. It's just very minimal. What tasks are you seeing run slower than XP?

 

[wht1986]

Running great for me. E6400, 2 GB RAM, and ATI x800XT. Running just as smooth as XP ever did. No crashes. I did have 1 hibernate issue once where it hung on going to standby but it has never repeated. ATI drivers have been great. Only downside to Vista so far is that EAX support has been removed. Creative has added OpenAL support but all my favorite games now need to release patches to use it. Until then Im stuck with software dolby stereo.

 

[drag]

Check your RAM. A good way is to make a memtest86 boot cdrom or floppy.

Cronic seemingly-unrelated problems usually stem from overheating cpus/power suppliers, etc and/or damaged RAM.

I'd do that before I start levelling claims against a operating system's stability. That way you know for a fact were the problem is coming from.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: drag
Check your RAM. A good way is to make a memtest86 boot cdrom or floppy.

Cronic seemingly-unrelated problems usually stem from overheating cpus/power suppliers, etc and/or damaged RAM.

I'd do that before I start levelling claims against a operating system's stability. That way you know for a fact were the problem is coming from.

Actually you can now memtest from Vista itself.

Hit start and type "memory diagnostics" in the search field.

 

[drag]

Just as long as it reboots into the memtest stuff it may be usefull.

Otherwise it's not going to be very usefull as it will only test memory that is not actually being used. Which is nice if your doing remote adminstration since you don't have to reboot into it, but it's easily possible that it's going to miss big hunks of the aviable ram, and it may miss it consistantly since everytime you reboot the system will generally read the same drivers and kernel and such into the same parts of physical ram.

For instance if your having driver issues you want to make sure that it tests memory that parts of the kernel tend to occupy and unless MS has done some special allowance for that memtest program the operating system is not going to allow that section of the RAM to be abritrarially written over by random programs.

Linux has had memtest program for a long time now also, but realy it's not reliable for the same reason. It's nice though if it comes back with lots of errors as that will usually indicate a memory misconfiguration and that's a easy fix usually were as only having a few bits bad invariably means your going to have to replace the ram.

 

[Smilin]

It's legit memory diagnostics. They aren't trying to pull it off while the OS is running. It requires a reboot and runs in some form of realmode.

It's some variant of the Microsoft memory diagnostics that's been available for download to bootable CD for a long time now: Same basic idea behind memtest but in a more user-friendly interface.

 

[drag]

I don't know how you get more user friendly then popping in a floppy in and rebooting (either you get errors or you don't after that), but I'll take your word for it.

But it reboots so it'll probably be ok. I wonder how memtest86 vs this thing adds up when detecting memory errors. It should be a interesting comparision.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: drag
I don't know how you get more user friendly then popping in a floppy in and rebooting (either you get errors or you don't after that), but I'll take your word for it.

I haven't actually run it, but my guess would be less verbose output.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: drag
I don't know how you get more user friendly then popping in a floppy in and rebooting (either you get errors or you don't after that), but I'll take your word for it.

But it reboots so it'll probably be ok. I wonder how memtest86 vs this thing adds up when detecting memory errors. It should be a interesting comparision.

If I remember right both memtest86 and the windows diagnostics had the same tests. Windows had one more pattern available though that was somehow "windows centric". No idea what the nature of the pattern is but it found problems first pass that other patterns missed...memtest still would have caught it with a later portion of the test so I wouldn't call it a selling point for the windows version.

The user friendly part is just the menus...but there is obviously only so much you can do. Both are easy enough my grandma could use. Having it actually built into Vista is pretty nifty though!

As for how they stack up in detection? Dunno. Identical would be my guess. The whole memory testing thing is pretty basic. You gotta run it in realmode and you gotta use some specific read/write patterns designed for the way the transistors are laid out in the chips.

 

[drag]

Well, like everything the devils in the details. If you go to memtest86's page there are the things they have to go through.

For example there are odd things that different chipsets may do that need to be taken into account. For instance they will reserve parts of RAM for different things like ACPI support. Sometimes it can be difficult to find out how exactly much memory and it's layout. So the stuff has be tested with different chipsets and be updated time to time with new information on how to deal with their pecularities.

Also modern CPUs have it's cache, which can't be turned off, that may interfer with some types of memory tests.

But I am sure that Microsoft is at least smart enough to check out memtest86 when designing their own stuff (not that they can't figure this out on their own) so I expect they know about all that sort of stuff and have accounted for it in that program.

(edit: then there are a few other features, like being able to have output which will work with Linux's badram patches for having the kernel isolate bad ram from being used, or being able to test different memory timings. But that sort of thing is mostly irrelevent.)

 

[Shawn]

I personally think Vista RTM is a HORRIBLE PILE OF CRAP! This is coming from someone who loved the RC1 beta releases. Build 5728 was so much better than the steaming pile that is Vista RTM. I don't know what happened after 5728 but it has been down hill since then.

In build 5728 everything ran great. It was completely stable and very responsive. Almost everything worked and some tasks were even more responsive than WinXP. The only problem I had was that audio would stutter whenever there was a lot of hard drive activity.

I tried out RC2 build 5744 hoping that they had fixed the sound issue (which they did) but is when all of my problems began. They seemed to have introduced a ton of new bugs! I couldn't even get it to install properly because it would not shut down or restart on its own. I had to keep hitting the reset button to get it to finish the install. Same issue after installing as well. Someone finally figured out that the Via SATA drivers were messed up and forcing WinXP drivers to install would fix the problem. Even though I got that fixed there were problems with the display drivers. For some reason the screen would never go into sleep mode no matter what the setting. It would just turn black and the back light would stay on. I also noticed that this new build was EXTREMELY SLUGISH compared to build 5728. For some reason the OS was always doing something that took up 20% of my cpu cycles. I couldn't even playback videos I recorded in media center because CPU utilization would stay at 100% and the videos kept skipping. At this point I was so pissed off that I formatted and went back to XP MCE.

Now that Vista RTM has been released I had hoped that Microsoft had fixed all of these issues and that Vista would perform like build 5728 had. Boy was I wrong! I did a clean install and as soon as it restarts there is image corruption while loading. Once it made it to the desktop everything appeared fine but every time it would boot there would be the same garbled image. I figured I could live with it if everything was ok once windows had loaded. Well it wasn't. Any Vista application with 3d graphics (short of Aero) showed image corruption. I couldn't play the new 3d accelerated games because of the image corruption and media center would occasionally develop artifacts as well. Desktop performance was horrible with the included ATI drivers. I installed the RTM drivers from ATI and it helped greatly with the poor desktop performance but the image corruption remained. Also compared to build 5728, vista RTM is much more sluggish. I tried disabling Aero completely but I noticed that even 2D performance was really bad. A simple effect like minimizing or maximizing a window was sluggish!!! Completely unacceptable.

All of that aside, the new sounds and icons included with RTM suck! Everything was fine before, I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to change stuff around. The windows media player icon is a nasty light blue and pink that reminded me of the CGA color days. Another problem I had which was introduced since build 5744 was that my digital camera would not work. When I hooked it up it would find new hardware but hang at "Searching for preconfigured driver folders". Worked fine in build 5728.

I don't know WTF Microsoft did but they screwed up big time with this release. I was so excited about Vista, especially the improved Media Center, but now I just have a sour taste in my mouth. I definitely won't be switching any time soon, at least not until all of these issues are fixed. If anyone is thinking about upgrading to Vista I suggest you wait for at least SP1. For now I am very happy with XP MCE.

 

[aelfwyne]

First problem occured right after a clean install. I was looking around the control panels after install. After going through a few of them the control panel window was completely unresponsive.

Haven't had a problem on the control panels... There was ONE that came up empty, it was an advanced/other category, I guesstimate that it may be filled at a later date?

Also - sleep/hibernation is a disaster. Fails 9 times out of 10.

Sleep mode is very stable on my vista. I know this because I keep accidentally putting it into sleep when I intended to reboot/shut down, thanks to the wonky button positions.

Minor issues include no startup splash screen

Microsoft's response to this is that the splash screen isn't "missing", but rather, it was taken out on purpose. Supposedly, putting an image there increases the average boot time by SIX SECONDS.... Sounds like a load to me... Their other reason is that they wanted to convince third party vendors not to use the splash screen for their own logos, and therefore refrained from putting one of their own. That is a bit more believable. Nevertheless, the blank screen was intentional.

system being unresponsive briefly at times and very sluggish doing certain tasks compared to XP (running on a Core 2 duo system with 3 gigs RAM - completely unacceptable).

Honestly, now that I've switched to dual core (AMD Opteron 170), Vista is actually more responsive than XP for me.. this may be due to some issues with my copy of XP (it has never been right since the last reinstall), but Vista certainly is usable.

Windows ME all over again.

I'm not sure yet if the ME comparison is valid. ME didn't really do anything that 98 didn't do - except crash more frequently. Time will tell.... But overall, I'm impressed with the final product. I won't be using it as a primary OS for a while since many games are not supported, but I will definitely switch within time.

 

[ktwebb]

4 or 5 days use. I have had one blue screen after I played with bus speed to O/C. Since taking it back to stock, which I did right after the BSOD, no problems at all. Completely stable, including with Vista drivers and the latest NVdia build drivers as well. Might be more sensitive to memory issues now or something but at least for me, it's very stable.

 

[imported_Com80787]

My view on this is just so much different. Vista has done this for me thus far over Win XP:

1. Nicer GUI
2. More instability, less performance
3. Tons of "under the hood improvements"

That's all Vista seems to be thus far, and number 3 is probably the biggest. I am strongly suspecting at this point that Vista is cover for Microsoft to fix tons of security and other issues that XP & 2000 had that *never* should have been in those products at all. Vista does next to nothing for functionality. It's a giant collection of bug & security fixes.

IMO Vista should have been released as service pack 3, not a new OS. I can only hope the next MS OS actually brings about lots of new innovations and functionality rather than a $500 service pack disguised as a new OS.

 

[ktwebb]

New GUI, new explorer, new DVD burning software, including authoring on some versions, and so on and so forth. Whether you like it or not, that can be reasonably debated. It's a major OS upgrade, albeit with features they promised left out. If you haven't come to that conclusion based on use I'd recommend doing some online reading. This is no more a service pack 3 for XP than XP was SP5 for win2000. In fact this is a MUCH bigger step forward than XP was in relation to 2000.

 

[Arkaign]

Yes

 

[Fishy007]

It's weird. I'm seeing people say that their interface is 'snappy' and 'responsive' whereas my experience is 'slightly sluggish' and 'bloated'. The system specs are in my sig with the exception of the video card. I'm running an ATI X800XL since the Nvidia Drivers are crap. My system is nowhere as responsive as XP. Even if you disregard boot time differences (XP was about 40 seconds whereas Vista is a full 2 minutes), I'm still feeling like Vista is holding me back. Even just browsing files through My Computer is a little slower than XP. Running exe's is slower, copying to and from disk is MUCH slower.

Maybe I've misconfigured something, but I doubt it.

 

[aelfwyne]

Originally posted by: Fishy007
I'm running an ATI X800XL since the Nvidia Drivers are crap. My system is nowhere as responsive as XP.

Are you using RC2 or RTM? I'm using RTM, and it is very nice, with my x800 GTO... My x800 is flashed to 16 pipes, so it is the functional equivalent of an x800xl.... I've got to say that right now it is nicer than XP since XP is having mysterious slowdowns ever since I installed my new CPU.

I wonder if there are any common threads we can find on those who are having slowdowns -vs- those who are having smooth rides?

Myself... I don't even have a native command queuing drive, just a first-generation SATA. I do, however, have 2gb of Ram... Maybe RAM is just that important with Vista? Obviously my CPU is no better than yours, I have an Opteron 170 @ 2.7ghz.

 

[daniel1113]

Works fine on all three of my computers. What else can I say?

 

[Fishy007]

Most of the complainers here don't post their system specs, but what I'm noticing is that it seems that AMD users have positive things to say and Intel users (Core 2?) have negative things to say. Could there be a performance difference with the CPU brand?

 

[Smilin]

We're running a lot of Core 2 duo's here at work with no problems.


My observations on Vista performance.
1. It's harder on your system than XP - across the board. Video especially.
2. If your hardware is just adequate you'll notice #1.
3. If you are running powerful hardware Vista will leverage it well and your system will run much faster than XP.
4. Performance improves over several days as drive indexing, defrag, prefetch complete.
5. Vista will work in the background sometimes even you doing something. It somehow pulls this off while remaining completely responsive. This part impressed me immensely.
6. All performance issues I've seen *so far* on various systems can be traced back to drivers or people doing something dumb. We'll see how things firm up before the end of January.



Shawn: Image corruption is typically indicative of video drivers or hardware failing. Report issues you see to ATI via their beta program. You should find them to be very receptive as they want things ironed out before January. Also note: Turning off Aero altogether may be very detrimental to performance. You have configured Vista to use your CPU to generate bitmaps for your high end graphics card to render.

 

[Fishy007]

Smilin, is there a way to check the drive transfer mode in Vista? Things for me have stabilized a bit, but my major problem is still with moving files across drives or from memory keys to and from Hard drives. Apart from that, I've gone from 'bloated' to 'slightly sluggish'. I probably just needed to give Vista some time to index everything.

I've already installed the latest Intel chipset drivers, so unless they're faulty (which is possible) I'm wondering if Vista has somehow bumped down my drive speeds. I know XP did this if you received x number of errors.