is vista worth using now?

[jediphx]

my dell laptop came with a free vista upgrade i tried it when it first came out but didnt enjoy the bugs and slow response I was wondering if there have been enough patches and fixes for vista that it is up to par with XP pro sp2

 

[ShawnD1]

If you're completely satisfied with XP SP2, why bother switching? Just wait until XP support is dropped then install the upgrade. By that time Vista will have several sevice packs and patches as well as better driver support and native software.

 

[randym431]

Service packs for what? Patches for what? I find vista the best most stable and useful os, way beyond xp. I look at xp the way I look at win98 now. I'd never regress backwards. The more one uses vista the more you can appreciate it. And I've had no problems. Much less than with xp, even with sp2 xp. The only problems I see people having is outdated hardware or frustration getting use to the advance features. Features that blow xp away.
The os itself has had few, if any problems that require a patch or service pack. What is lagging is 3rd party support in getting "their" act together, not vista's fault.

All I know is if you build a system with vista happy hardware, it runs like a fine tuned clock. More and more venders are getting with it and offering vista compatible hardware or drivers. I've built several systems using the asrock alive series mb, 2 gb mem, amd am2 64 x2 cpu for friends and family that soak up vista like a sponge. Using the right hardware makes all the diff. And asrock alive motherboards and vista go together like fish and water. Not one problem! Smooth install and flawless performance. Vista really shines on this system. The 64 bit vista runs even better, except and again, 3rd party support lacking. Not vista's fault. Give vista what it needs and it truly blows xp away.
I build these systems because they cost little and run so smoothly, problem free. And its all because of vista features and advances.

And... they make a great media center pc. media center alone is well worth the cost of vista. But... if you don?t have the hardware, it can be a nightmare. And thats NOT vista's problem.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
If you're completely satisfied with XP SP2, why bother switching? Just wait until XP support is dropped then install the upgrade. By that time Vista will have several sevice packs and patches as well as better driver support and native software.

I disagree on some things,Vista has had nearly a year of updates and driver improvements,how long you think before it will be stable 1 day,1 year,1 century,SP1,SP2,SP3,SP4?..I found it stable from day one,as it stands Vista is a solid OS,infact it became stable a lot quicker then XP ever did and this is the problem,people remember how long it took XP to mature with SP packs etc..so compare the two which they should not.


Bottomline its not if Vista is stable because as an OS its solid,the question is do I need to upgrade at this time and do I have a real reason to go for a Vista upgrade(most honest answer I can give).


Personal note I'm impressed with my Vista x64 for gaming/general use and have all the 64 bit drivers too.


Side note : People love meantioning Service Packs,lets not forget in some cases they can break an OS too,I remember recommending to a friend to install SP2 on her XP ,guess what she could not boot up her PC after,she had to do a reformat(I did feel guilty) and she is a web designer so knows her way round a PC too.

Personally if you want to install a new OS,I would never wait for a service pack ,you never know how long you have to wait for SP to arrive or what improvements you will notice if any,remember Windows Updates is your friend(gives you faster updates then any Sevice Pack)..

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: randym431
Service packs for what? Patches for what? I find vista the best most stable and useful os, way beyond xp. I look at xp the way I look at win98 now. I'd never regress backwards. The more one uses vista the more you can appreciate it. And I've had no problems. Much less than with xp, even with sp2 xp. The only problems I see people having is outdated hardware or frustration getting use to the advance features. Features that blow xp away.
The os itself has had few, if any problems that require a patch or service pack. What is lagging is 3rd party support in getting "their" act together, not vista's fault.

When I left the computer running for too long, it would lose the ability to mount USB hard drives. It would give an error saying the computer had run out of resources, and that I should restart. After restarting the computer, everything would work again. This happened every 2 days or so.

Networking is not fully compatible with XP. My Vista Home laptop could view the network drive on the Vista Business computer without issue, but any XP computer in the house would give an error saying it did not have permission. Vista computers can view the shared folders of XP computers, but XP computers cannot view the shared folders on Vista computers.

Vista Business deactivated itself when I installed new sound card drivers, then it refused to activate because it had already been activated too many times (once). Do I need to call MS every time Creative or Nvidia release new drivers? Get serious. They'll eventually patch this.

All I know is if you build a system with vista happy hardware, it run like a fine tuned clock. More and more venders are getting with it and offering vista compatible hardware or drivers. I've built several systems using the asrock alive series mb, 2 gb mem, amd am2 64 x2 cpu for friends and family that soak up vista like a sponge. Using the right hardware makes all the diff. And asrock alive motherboards and vista go together like fish and water. Not one problem! Smooth install and flawless performance. Vista really shines on this system. The 64 bit vista runs even better, except and again, 3rd party support lacking. Not vista's fault. Give vista what it needs and it truly blows xp away.
I build these systems because they cost little and run so smoothly, problem free. And its all because of vista features and advances.

I wouldn't exactly describe it as a fine tuned clock. Much like XP in 2001, Vista's ram requirements are too much for today's hardware. Vista Business consumes 900mb of ram from the second it turns on. Since most people have 2gb of ram, that means close to half of the physical ram is set aside for the operating system.
This complaint is made with all Windows versions, and it's generally true.

General processing seems to be down as well. Tom's Hardware concluded that Vista was roughly 10% slower for most applications. This is because programs are not yet optimized for Vista.

Games are particularly bad right now. Nvidia's Vista drivers are terrible. My frame rate in TF2 literally doubled when I formatted and put XP back (had to format because of all the above problems; mostly the network drive issue). Nvidia has been working on these drivers for over a year and the best they can do is 50%? Interesting. The card is a 7950GT.

Sound performance is way down. I use my Celeron M 540 laptop as a movie player, and it's having some trouble with the way Vista handles things. The integrated video is a factor, and the 40% CPU load from bsplayer reflects this, but then there's the audio task taking 10% as well, and thats at the lowest possible settings (CD quality). It jumps to 20% if I set it to studio. Why does it take so much CPU power to play a damn avi file? I ripped the sound as 128k MP3, which is the same quality as was used way back in 1999 when we were all using Napster to share sound files. Is it really acceptable that Vista requires 10% of a CPU that's about the same speed as an Athlon 3200+ (according to Sandra) just to play sound at 1999 quality standards?
Btw I did not install Vista on that laptop. It came preloaded, so it's clearly "a system with vista happy hardware" (your words). I think what you really mean is "Vista runs pretty good when you have the 64-bit version with at least 2gb of ram and at least 2 processor cores", which is basically true. Vista runs ok, but XP runs faster for the time being.

Wait until Vista has more native software support.

 

[Mem]

I wouldn't exactly describe it as a fine tuned clock. Much like XP in 2001, Vista's ram requirements are too much for today's hardware. Vista Business consumes 900mb of ram from the second it turns on. Since most people have 2gb of ram, that means close to half of the physical ram is set aside for the operating system.
This complaint is made with all Windows versions, and it's generally true.

General processing seems to be down as well. Tom's Hardware concluded that Vista was roughly 10% slower for most applications. This is because programs are not yet optimized for Vista.

Games are particularly bad right now. Nvidia's Vista drivers are terrible. My frame rate in TF2 literally doubled when I formatted and put XP back (had to format because of all the above problems; mostly the network drive issue). Nvidia has been working on these drivers for over a year and the best they can do is 50%? Interesting. The card is a 7950GT.

You do know how Vista uses ram etc?....Read up Superprefetch etc....(funny how when games require more ram and faster video cards nobody moans,but when Vista has a thing called SuperPrefetch which is designed to use your ram more efficiently people moan).
Please stop spreading FUD about gaming in Vista,I have over 40 games installed and use Nvidia drivers(sound set to 24 bit Studio quality too), I only had one game give me a headache and that was The Witcher(Which I sort of fixed by running in Windowed mode(not crashed at all in that mode),check their forums common problem.

As to network,I never had to reboot my router or had a disconnect in online gaming and remember I'm using Vista x64,speed has always been fine.

Games are particularly bad right now. Nvidia's Vista drivers are terrible.

Funny how benchmarks from various sites say different now,ie equal within a few FPS now.


Don't believe everything Tom's types,he comes out with a lot of crap too.

Don't get me started on how bad XP was in its early days for gaming,remember the famous BSOD crashes Nvidia users had due to drivers I do,at least I never had those with Vista.

 

[bucwylde23]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Networking is not fully compatible with XP. My Vista Home laptop could view the network drive on the Vista Business computer without issue, but any XP computer in the house would give an error saying it did not have permission. Vista computers can view the shared folders of XP computers, but XP computers cannot view the shared folders on Vista computers.

My desktop is Vista Home Premium and my laptop is XP pro. I have no problems at all in accessing shared folders from either PC. There were a few settings in Vista I had to turn on in order to share files, but I can't remember at the moment what they were. Might have been to enable file sharing, and turn network discovery on. They were in the Network & sharing center (whatever it's called)

 

[PrinceofWands]

Nope. But in my own opinion it never will be, so you're dealing with some heavy bias here.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands
Nope. But in my own opinion it never will be, so you're dealing with some heavy bias here.

When I see comments like above,I think those sort of people should stick to console systems and never touch a PC or any OS.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Mem
You do know how Vista uses ram etc?....Read up Superprefetch

Go to task manager. Click the performance tab. Where it says "Cached", that is superfetch. At the bottom where it says "Commit Charge", that's how much ram it's using for things that are actually running (it includes swap file as well). The commit charge is also the same number as the bar on the left; in XP its title is "PF". A fresh install of Vista Business boots with a 900mb commit charge.

As to network,I never had to reboot my router or had a disconnect in online gaming and remember I'm using Vista x64,speed has always been fine.

"My car is a Honda, that's how I know my house won't start on fire".
Having a good router and having a good operating system are not related.

Funny how benchmarks from various sites say different now,ie equal within a few FPS now.

Prey
"At a lower resolution, the GeForce 7 series card doesn't slow down too much under Vista, but the GeForce 8800 GTS runs almost 20% slower, and ATI's promise of "stability now, performance later" for their brand new OpenGL driver is proven by the dismal showing?close to 30% slower"
"The GeForce 7950GT is within spitting distance at 5.5% slower,"
"The GeForce 8800 GTS doesn't do any better here than it did without AA/AF applied: It still runs nearly 15% slower in Vista. The GeForce 7 series card, on the other hand, is doing a great job, with a performance drop under 4%. As resolution climbs and features like AA and AF are applied, performance starts to depend on hardware limitations like memory bandwidth rather than software limitations like OS-level driver efficiency, so we see the expected pattern out of the ATI card: big performance loss at the low resolution, with the gap narrowing as we climb up to 1920x1200 with AA and AF turned on. We still don't like that it's 10% slower, but it's a lot better than the 30% performance drop at 1280x1024"

Half-Life 2
"Now what the heck happened here? For some reason, the GeForce 8800 GTS, which was doing so great at the other resolutions, takes a huge nosedive, losing over 40% of its frame rate compared to XP. The GeForce 7 series card takes a huge hit as well, almost 25%. Judging by the other resolutions, you would think Nvidia's Vista driver is pretty much "done" when it comes to Source engine performance, but maybe they still have some work to do. The ATI card's performance drop under Vista is less than 5% at this resolution. "

Oh, so as soon as things get more intense on the video card (higher resolution), performance absolutely tanks. This really helps, especially when I run games at the native resolution of ~1600x1000 (resolution rounded because I can't remember the exact dimensions)

Call of Duty 2
"Nvidia runs into big trouble here. There is no score for the GeForce 8 series card because it shows nothing but a totally brown screen with the compass and crosshair visible when you enable AA. That kind of game-killing bug is worse than any performance drop, but the GeForce 7950 GT isn't exactly redeeming the company with that big 23% performance hit. The Radeon does ATI proud, with performance very close to Windows XP. If only it ran well at 1280x1024"

Don't believe everything Tom's types,he comes out with a lot of crap too.

Althought I thought most of his crap was tied to fanboyism, saying one company is better than the other, I'll have to cave on this one. I can't prove his credibility.

Don't get me started on how bad XP was in its early days for gaming,remember the famous BSOD crashes Nvidia users had due to drivers I do,at least I never had those with Vista.

You're absolutely correct. XP did have bugs, XP did have driver issues, XP did have compatibility issue, XP was a ram hog, and XP was a lot slower than 98. That started changing when software was designed for it, drivers got better, and the idea of having 512mb of ram wasn't so far fetched. When I got a computer in 2001 with 512mb ram, that seemed like a hell of a lot, and XP used about half of it. The same thing is happening again with Vista, and that's why a lot of people are waiting before buying it.

 

[Nothinman]

Nope. But in my own opinion it never will be, so you're dealing with some heavy bias here.

In other words "Change is bad! Run away!".

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Prey
"At a lower resolution, the GeForce 7 series card doesn't slow down too much under Vista, but the GeForce 8800 GTS runs almost 20% slower, and ATI's promise of "stability now, performance later" for their brand new OpenGL driver is proven by the dismal showing?close to 30% slower"
"The GeForce 7950GT is within spitting distance at 5.5% slower,"
"The GeForce 8800 GTS doesn't do any better here than it did without AA/AF applied: It still runs nearly 15% slower in Vista. The GeForce 7 series card, on the other hand, is doing a great job, with a performance drop under 4%. As resolution climbs and features like AA and AF are applied, performance starts to depend on hardware limitations like memory bandwidth rather than software limitations like OS-level driver efficiency, so we see the expected pattern out of the ATI card: big performance loss at the low resolution, with the gap narrowing as we climb up to 1920x1200 with AA and AF turned on. We still don't like that it's 10% slower, but it's a lot better than the 30% performance drop at 1280x1024"

Half-Life 2
"Now what the heck happened here? For some reason, the GeForce 8800 GTS, which was doing so great at the other resolutions, takes a huge nosedive, losing over 40% of its frame rate compared to XP. The GeForce 7 series card takes a huge hit as well, almost 25%. Judging by the other resolutions, you would think Nvidia's Vista driver is pretty much "done" when it comes to Source engine performance, but maybe they still have some work to do. The ATI card's performance drop under Vista is less than 5% at this resolution. "

Oh, so as soon as things get more intense on the video card (higher resolution), performance absolutely tanks. This really helps, especially when I run games at the native resolution of ~1600x1000 (resolution rounded because I can't remember the exact dimensions)

Call of Duty 2
"Nvidia runs into big trouble here. There is no score for the GeForce 8 series card because it shows nothing but a totally brown screen with the compass and crosshair visible when you enable AA. That kind of game-killing bug is worse than any performance drop, but the GeForce 7950 GT isn't exactly redeeming the company with that big 23% performance hit. The Radeon does ATI proud, with performance very close to Windows XP. If only it ran well at 1280x1024"

Those benchmarks are from February. I can't believe you even posted those, which leads me to believe you are merely trolling. If so, please stop.

Drivers have improved dramatically since, to the point in which games perform almost identically in Vista than they do in XP.

It's pretty unfair to link 8 month old benchmarks to prove a point.

 

[Mem]

You're absolutely correct. XP did have bugs, XP did have driver issues, XP did have compatibility issue, XP was a ram hog, and XP was a lot slower than 98. That started changing when software was designed for it, drivers got better, and the idea of having 512mb of ram wasn't so far fetched. When I got a computer in 2001 with 512mb ram, that seemed like a hell of a lot, and XP used about half of it. The same thing is happening again with Vista, and that's why a lot of people are waiting before buying it.

I remember XP with 256mb of ram ,do we see people complaining now that most XP users are on 1GB?(some are even on 2GB)...
More up to date benchmarks link ,not bad for an OS less then a year old ,oh but wait XP had 7 years head start ,still not bad by any means when you look at the benchmarks,as to Vista you forgetting one important thing it was released in a better state the XP ever was,also XP NEEDED a SP or two just to get the security sorted,it had holes so big you could get the QE2 through and still have room from the starship Enterprise.

Go to task manager. Click the performance tab. Where it says "Cached", that is superfetch. At the bottom where it says "Commit Charge", that's how much ram it's using for things that are actually running (it includes swap file as well). The commit charge is also the same number as the bar on the left; in XP its title is "PF". A fresh install of Vista Business boots with a 900mb commit charge.

As I stated Vista will use ram more efficiently unlike XP,price of ram is also cheap,do we expect(especially gamers) for games to need more ram (and faster video cards) down the road ,yes we do its called progress,gone are the DOS days of 4mb of ram for your 386/486 PC.
So its using 900mb (big deal) you know how cheap ram is and not to meantion ReadyBoost device,operating systems have always needed more ram(even XP if you remember when it had 256mb ,I do),look at history remember DOS,Win95,98, etc....the point I'm talking about is how efficient Vista puts the ram to use.

General processing seems to be down as well. Tom's Hardware concluded that Vista was roughly 10% slower for most applications. This is because programs are not yet optimized for Vista.

Hmm I have concluded 10% is about the rating I would give any of his reviews,let alone believe in what he says.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Noema
Those benchmarks are from February. I can't believe you even posted those, which leads me to believe you are merely trolling. If so, please stop.

Drivers have improved dramatically since, to the point in which games perform almost identically in Vista than they do in XP.

It's pretty unfair to link 8 month old benchmarks to prove a point.

It's also trolling if you use the "lol old benchmarks" argument without posting any of your own links. Mem posted a link, and it supports his argument quite well. Your agreeing with Mem doesn't make you any less of a troll.

Mem, they may have fixed the problems with most games, but TF2 performance is still brutal in Vista. It uses the same engine as Episode 2, in case you feel like searching for benchmarks (don't bother, it's not a big deal). As a minor aside, I should include that nTune does not work in Vista, and RivaTuner is unable to change memory clock speeds. The overclocking itself is not a big deal, but the inability to even change these things shows that the drivers are not yet mature, but they're getting better with each release. You, and many others, could conclude that they are "good enough", but I would rather wait a bit longer.

My concern about the memory isn't really about the cost of ram, but the amount of ram you can use in a motherboard. Just as an example, most laptops do not support more than 2gb. In Vista terms, 2gb is really not that much when it comes to future proofing since the OS takes almost half of that, but it depends on what you use the computer for. A lot of middle-age computers such as ~3Ghz P4 era only support 2gb. My current motherboard is a P5LD2 for the current generation of Core 2 processors (the base model, not deluxe), and it only supports 3200mb (and yes I have the latest bios version as of 2 weeks ago). If you have the 32-bit Vista (like I do, because I'm retarded), you're also stuck at 3200 for the same 32-bit reason.
Yes ram is cheap, but it doesn't do a lot of good if you can't use it for one reason (motherboard) or another (32-bit).

To put that in terms relative to XP's release, getting 32-bit Vista, or getting Vista for my P5LD2 (or any other motherboard that is stuck at 3200) is like putting XP on a computer that can only use ~750mb ram. That's not acceptable. The OS itself is fine, but only new hardware is up to spec for it.

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
You're absolutely correct. XP did have bugs, XP did have driver issues, XP did have compatibility issue, XP was a ram hog, and XP was a lot slower than 98. That started changing when software was designed for it, drivers got better, and the idea of having 512mb of ram wasn't so far fetched.

Don't forget when Intel caught up with Microsoft.

 

[imported_spike99]

Not to step on anyone's shoes... But if anyone is considering between XP & VISTA.... Then stay away from VISTA !!!

I'm not talking about how long it took XP to fix hardware/software or how long it's gonna take VISTA to get up to speed with drivers... People should be considering what is rock solid right now... not tomorrow but right now... and that would be XP hands down.

I'm a gamer with VISTA 64BIT (I also experienced VISTA 32BIT) and I previously had XP, and let me tell you... I never had a BSOD or games crashing due to video driver issues with XP.... with VISTA, It's a different story... I've been pulling my hair out with all the video driver issues.... I'm currently considering going back to XP, but I wanna try to give VISTA more time...

Although some people may not have any issues with VISTA, I really believe most people are having problems... especially if you are a gamer...

I would suggest waiting a year before considering VISTA... That's my take anyway...

 

[imported_spike99]

Not to step on anyone's shoes... But if anyone is considering between XP & VISTA.... Then stay away from VISTA !!!

I'm not talking about how long it took XP to fix hardware/software or how long it's gonna take VISTA to get up to speed with drivers... People should be considering what is rock solid right now... not tomorrow but right now... and that would be XP hands down.

I'm a gamer with VISTA 64BIT (I also experienced VISTA 32BIT) and I previously had XP, and let me tell you... I never had a BSOD or games crashing due to video driver issues with XP.... with VISTA, It's a different story... I've been pulling my hair out with all the video driver issues.... I'm currently considering going back to XP, but I wanna try to give VISTA more time...

Although some people may not have any issues with VISTA, I really believe most people are having problems... especially if you are a gamer...

I would suggest waiting a year before considering VISTA... That's my take anyway...

 

[imported_spike99]

Not to step on anyone's shoes... But if anyone is considering between XP & VISTA.... Then stay away from VISTA !!!

I'm not talking about how long it took XP to fix hardware/software or how long it's gonna take VISTA to get up to speed with drivers... People should be considering what is rock solid right now... not tomorrow but right now... and that would be XP hands down.

I'm a gamer with VISTA 64BIT (I also experienced VISTA 32BIT) and I previously had XP, and let me tell you... I never had a BSOD or games crashing due to video driver issues with XP.... with VISTA, It's a different story... I've been pulling my hair out with all the video driver issues.... I'm currently considering going back to XP, but I wanna try to give VISTA more time...

Although some people may not have any issues with VISTA, I really believe most people are having problems... especially if you are a gamer...

I would suggest waiting a year before considering VISTA... That's my take anyway...

 

[imported_spike99]

Not to step on anyone's shoes... But if anyone is considering between XP & VISTA.... Then stay away from VISTA !!!

I'm not talking about how long it took XP to fix hardware/software or how long it's gonna take VISTA to get up to speed with drivers... People should be considering what is rock solid right now... not tomorrow but right now... and that would be XP hands down.

I'm a gamer with VISTA 64BIT (I also experienced VISTA 32BIT) and I previously had XP, and let me tell you... I never had a BSOD or games crashing due to video driver issues with XP.... with VISTA, It's a different story... I've been pulling my hair out with all the video driver issues.... I'm currently considering going back to XP, but I wanna try to give VISTA more time...

Although some people may not have any issues with VISTA, I really believe most people are having problems... especially if you are a gamer...

I would suggest waiting a year before considering VISTA... That's my take anyway...

 

[imported_spike99]

Apologies for repeated posts... Replying to topic did not seem to work so I tried couple of times repling to topic and instead of only sending 1 reply, it sent multiple.... Not sure how to delete duplicate posts....

 

[Maximilian]

Vista has its problems, for me theres:

1. Nvidia driver error, theres an actual name for it, TBB error or something i dont know, theres a massive thread on the nvidia forums about it, basically the screen goes black for a certain amount of time (less time with newer drivers) and you may or may not get a message about the display driver crashing but recovering (you always see it in the icon tray at the bottom right when you exit a game) Seems to be limited to geforce 8xxx series cards. Maybe its nvidias fault? Maybe its vista? I really dont give a rats ass whos fault it is all i know is its exclusive to windows vista and not XP.

2. Itunes dosent really work well, i keep getting this message about it being unable to burn cd's unless its reinstalled, reinstalling does nothing to make this go away.

3. It buggers about with the view and order of icon a lot, xp did this too but i would expect some consistency by now. It just seems to randomize the view and appaearence of folders and icons, is it trying to make browsing more interesting and random?

4. Various UI annoyances, multiple icon selection is made difficult by having a massive box around every frickin icon, try and drag a selection box from the TOP of the screen ABOVE an already existing icon, oh wait you cant do that, it just moves the icon instead of making a lasso because of that box thing around every icon. Whats the deal with the drop down navigation menu at the top of every folder, it used to show you the directory you were in in XP, now it shows some random recently visited places, its pretty useless like that.

5. Sleep is the default shutdown option, but it dosent work. I just get a blank screen when it wakes up. I have the latest drivers, it worked before actually with older drivers, then broke again with one of the 16x.xx releases.

6. You get bluescreens with certain creative pieces of hardware and certain drivers. Funnily enough the drivers i downloaded from creative cause a bluescreen with my audigy 2 NX, but the windows update ones seem to work fine. Means i have to forego the creative software but no big loss there.

7. My lexmark X1270 behaves randomly and rarely works correctly.

8. Vista is only worth it if it comes with your new computer, its an absolute rip off if you must buy it alone.

So theres my various problems with vista that i cant solve. Like i said about the nvidia driver i dont care if its microsofts fault or a 3rd party, it makes no difference to me, these things still bug me about vista.

 

[imported_spike99]

screen goes black for a certain amount of time (less time with newer drivers) and you may or may not get a message about the display driver crashing but recovering (you always see it in the icon tray at the bottom right when you exit a game) Seems to be limited to geforce 8xxx series cards. Maybe its nvidias fault? Maybe its vista? I really dont give a rats ass whos fault it is all i know is its exclusive to windows vista and not XP.

Same thing happens to me with the video drivers...

8. Vista is only worth it if it comes with your new computer, its an absolute rip off if you must buy it alone.

I got my 3 weeks old PC with VISTA... and it's not worth getting VISTA.


Like I said before, XP is much more reliable than VISTA.... Get XP now and talk to me next year about getting VISTA. It'll be a miracle if I stay with VISTA but if I stick with VISTA I'll give you my thoughts...

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: spike99
Not to step on anyone's shoes... But if anyone is considering between XP & VISTA.... Then stay away from VISTA !!!

I'm not talking about how long it took XP to fix hardware/software or how long it's gonna take VISTA to get up to speed with drivers... People should be considering what is rock solid right now... not tomorrow but right now... and that would be XP hands down.

I'm a gamer with VISTA 64BIT (I also experienced VISTA 32BIT) and I previously had XP, and let me tell you... I never had a BSOD or games crashing due to video driver issues with XP.... with VISTA, It's a different story... I've been pulling my hair out with all the video driver issues.... I'm currently considering going back to XP, but I wanna try to give VISTA more time...

Although some people may not have any issues with VISTA, I really believe most people are having problems... especially if you are a gamer...

I would suggest waiting a year before considering VISTA... That's my take anyway...

Send me your PC I have it up and running in 30 minutes ,no seriously when I went from XP to Vista and I was one of those early XP adopters with 256mb of ram and famous Nvidia BSOD drivers problems etc...so have been using XP since day 1 more or less(still have it on backup PC but no need to use it apart from updates),anyway installing Vista x64 took me 20 odd minutes and everything went fine(this was back in Jan) I did have two drivers missing but had them within 5 weeks,I know some people like spike99 are experiencing problems but I know more Vista users that don't have problems,hell I still have to go over and fix a friends XP PC now and then so what does that say or mean about XP?....Does not mean its XPs fault.
Speaking of drivers issues,if you do get a driver issue?....Is it Vista's fault or video card manufaturer,think I'll point the blame at the video manufacturer,Vista can do a lot of things but it can't fix buggy drivers,even XP can't fix buggy drivers and I have one XP buggy driver on a family's PC which I keep meaning to pull out(wireless NIC card) and repalce with something decent.


Btw Spike99 I fixed my "The Witcher" problem so now have all my 40+ games running fine with excellent stability,it was not Vista's fault (I knew that anyway,thankyou Atari for another buggy but great game).

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Soviet
1. Nvidia driver error, theres an actual name for it, TBB error or something i dont know, theres a massive thread on the nvidia forums about it, basically the screen goes black for a certain amount of time (less time with newer drivers) and you may or may not get a message about the display driver crashing but recovering (you always see it in the icon tray at the bottom right when you exit a game) Seems to be limited to geforce 8xxx series cards. Maybe its nvidias fault? Maybe its vista? I really dont give a rats ass whos fault it is all i know is its exclusive to windows vista and not XP.

Mine does this, but it's due to overheating. The stock GPU is 550, and it starts doing the black screen freezup at 650. I turned it down to 630 and the problem went away completely. Try getting one of those fans that goes under the video card.

2. Itunes dosent really work well, i keep getting this message about it being unable to burn cd's unless its reinstalled, reinstalling does nothing to make this go away.

iTunes was screwing my system as well. It caused svchost.exe to consume 100% CPU power all the time. It seemed itunes was constantly searching for an ipod,and it wasn't finding it, so it kept trying forever. I uninstalled iTunes and the problem stopped immediately.

6. You get bluescreens with certain creative pieces of hardware and certain drivers. Funnily enough the drivers i downloaded from creative cause a bluescreen with my audigy 2 NX, but the windows update ones seem to work fine. Means i have to forego the creative software but no big loss there.

I had this too. I turned off EAX in games and the problem stopped. Somewhat unrelated, but I agree that the MS plug and play drivers are better than creative's drivers. When I use creative's drivers for my sound blaster 24-bit, the microphone doesn't even work. It works fine with P&P drivers.

7. My lexmark X1270 behaves randomly and rarely works correctly.

Is this with P&P drivers or with drivers from the website?

8. Vista is only worth it if it comes with your new computer, its an absolute rip off if you must buy it alone.

Quality is arguable, but the price is literally the same. Not sure if that's what you meant, but I remember a lot of people ranting about $300 Windows Vista when XP (retail) was the exact same price. Check amazon if you don't believe me.

 

[Mem]

Like I said before, XP is much more reliable than VISTA.... Get XP now and talk to me next year about getting VISTA. It'll be a miracle if I stay with VISTA but if I stick with VISTA I'll give you my thoughts.

That depends on the person you ask to be honest and we all know that different users will give different opinions,infact everybody's hardware /usage and experience is slightly different so you can never really get a true answer unless you try it for yourself and even then hope you don't make any typical noob user mistakes and blame it on the OS.


I would hate to go back to XP ,my Vista x64 is purring like a kitten and eats any game I throw at it for rock solid stability.

Btw I hope people are uninstalling their drivers when they try new ones and not installing over the top.