Worth upgrading to Vista yet?

[Coldkilla]

I got Windows Vista Bisiness Edition from Microsoft, back when the Hot Deal was active. However, when I upgraded, I noticed 10% decrease in preformance in games and couldn't use any of my software. But now, is it time to finally upgrade?

 

[Drakkon]

So far no updates that have made my impression of Vista any better. Still slow as molases and takes an incredible ammount of RAM to run decently. HOWEVER i got a tablet PC rencetly and the text recognition between it an an old tablet xp 2005 is amazing they did an incredible job improving that code.

 

[UF Matt]

Doesn't seem like it, especially if gaming is your thing.

 

[Aikouka]

:thumbsup:

You'd be a loony mother fo' not to!

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
So far no updates that have made my impression of Vista any better. Still slow as molases and takes an incredible ammount of RAM to run decently. HOWEVER i got a tablet PC rencetly and the text recognition between it an an old tablet xp 2005 is amazing they did an incredible job improving that code.

Empty ram is wasted ram. My vista x64 is using 1.4 GB's right now. If i load up a game its not gonna continue to hog all 1.4 GB's of memory, its superfetch doing its thing.

For the record all my games have run fine, any problems have been easily fixed by compatibilty mode (makes a change ) or clicking the "run as administrator" tickbox in the game in questions properties box.

 

[BFG10K]

I probably wouldn't bother just yet

 

[grrl]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
:thumbsup:

You'd be a loony mother fo' not to!

Care to elaborate?

 

[mechBgon]

Vist has major improvements in security. In that regard, considering what malware writers are doing nowdays, I think Vista is just in time, if not overdue.

 

[Jaxidian]

In my opinion, if you have a license and don't have a good reason not to, then go for it! If you don't have a license, then I would have to say you need to find a good reason to upgrade before dishing out the $$ on it. I'm a software consultant and I need to know all about the latest technology so Vista was pretty much a requirement for me. And it plays WoW nicely on my laptop (x1400 vid card and only 1gb ram until my other 1gb stick gets RMA'd).

Like most other people said, most (I'd say 75%) software compatability problems can be resolved with either compatability mode or "Run as Administrator" (though I urge caution before running as administrator - be damned sure you trust the software!).

-Jax

 

[Trevante]

For the most part Vista runs ok for me. When I first installed it, something really wierd happened and it could keep asking me for drivers for all kinds of things, like my harddrives and my Cd drives :-

However, after re-installing, it's been running pretty good for me. I play Halo and F.E.A.R. just fine (even with my 1GB of RAM) and most of my programs don't give me problems. I haven't needed to run XP in a while, so right now Vista is ok for me.

 

[Sunner]

I upgraded to Vista recently, I can't really say my experience has been neither negative nor positive.
I mostly upgraded because I've had a disc laying around for a while, and got bored while I was home from work due to being sick.

It's still Windows, applications seem to work as I expect them to.
My hardware works fine, Asus P5W DH Dlx, C2D, X-Fi, 8800GTX, nothing exotic, so I guess that's to be expected(aside from the X-Fi, I never expect Creative stuff to work, new OS or not).

Stuff has moved around a lot, that confused me at first, but I'm getting familiar with it as I go.
Performance is about the same I'd say, slightly slower to boot, slightly faster to open applications, pre caching at work I'd guess.
UAC is incredibly annoying, so I turned it off, Security Center as well, no biggie, they didn't hide the options for that in some obscure place, so I file that under regular fresh-install-tweaking.

The one thing that...bothers(?) me is the memory usage.
It uses absolutely absurd amounts of memory on a fresh boot, problem being, I'm not in any way qualified to profile memory usage under Windows, so I don't really know how much is disk cache, RSS, etc etc.
Haven't run into memory issues so far though, so for now I just don't care.

In the end, Vista gets a score of "whatever" from me, nothing new for me, but no major complaints either.
It works, so did XP, if I bought a new computer, I'd take Vista, but I won't be upgrading any of my other computers until I really need to.

It needs to be said though, I'm one of those people that thinks everything was better "back then".
I don't like changes, and I generally leave new features of stuff unused for a long time unless it was something I was actually waiting for.
Depending on what type of user you are, I'm sure you could benefit a lot more than me from Vista, or it could be complete crap.

 

[Mem]

No problems to report with my 26 games tested so far in Vista x64(except Stalker in Pripyat area ,but that is really the game itself rather then Vista with save loading problems,check Stalker forums for more info with this problem on both XP and Vista).

I did have to reactivate my Vista again for some unknown reason (no hardware changes),but again if you have a legal copy its only a phonecall so not a real problem.

Key thing to remember is some games need to be run "as admin" and may also have to be run in WinXP SP2 compatibility mode ,both from properties of the game concerned.

UAC is incredibly annoying, so I turned it off, Security Center as well, no biggie, they didn't hide the options for that in some obscure place, so I file that under regular fresh-install-tweaking.

Took me about 2 weeks to get use to that as I have stated many times,I actually like UAC now,only one more click so no big deal IMHO.

My Software has no problems to report,Nero 7,O&O defrag (64 bit version)CCleaner,Spybot,Printmaster 16,SpywareBlaster,Firefox with extensions,Thunderbird(64 bit version),Kaspersky 6,Java,flash etc all running smooth.

Guess that leaves drivers,again I have all the drivers(64 bit in my case) and all working well so 10/10 is my rating.

I'll be upgrading my old backup XP PC to Vista x64 once I get around to hardware upgrades to it.


Vista I find more stable then what XP ever was in its first year,I guess you can say I'm one very happy Vista gamer/user.


.

 

[Jules]

whenever i get 4gb. But i do love vista 64bit. on my 2gb ram all my games work fine and had ZERO Software problems.

 

[Sunner]

Oh and one thing I forgot to mention, actually my biggest annoyance that I haven't found an easy fix to.
Vista's Explorer sucks, ALOT.
At least for me, being used to the old one.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Oh and one thing I forgot to mention, actually my biggest annoyance that I haven't found an easy fix to.
Vista's Explorer sucks, ALOT.
At least for me, being used to the old one.

What about it don't you like? I like the new changes to Windows Explorer in Vista .

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: Sunner
Oh and one thing I forgot to mention, actually my biggest annoyance that I haven't found an easy fix to.
Vista's Explorer sucks, ALOT.
At least for me, being used to the old one.

What about it don't you like? I like the new changes to Windows Explorer in Vista .

Well, by far the most annoying thing is that it simply won't apply the settings I make to all folders, despite using the "Apply to Folders" button, it insist on bringing up the retarded icon listing instead.
I hate the new search, which I consider part of explorer
Favourite Links is a minor thing, but I'd really like to get rid of it.
I don't like how it changes icon in the task bar depending on what folder you're in.
And a bunch of other minor things.

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: Sunner
Oh and one thing I forgot to mention, actually my biggest annoyance that I haven't found an easy fix to.
Vista's Explorer sucks, ALOT.
At least for me, being used to the old one.

What about it don't you like? I like the new changes to Windows Explorer in Vista .

Well, by far the most annoying thing is that it simply won't apply the settings I make to all folders, despite using the "Apply to Folders" button, it insist on bringing up the retarded icon listing instead.
I hate the new search, which I consider part of explorer
Favourite Links is a minor thing, but I'd really like to get rid of it.
I don't like how it changes icon in the task bar depending on what folder you're in.
And a bunch of other minor things.

Mine too! It will also forget the settings i put on folders like list by date created and they will be back to alpabetical listing the next time i look, its a PITA.

 

[Ryland]

Well Vista has defeated me the last X times I have tried installing it. First I made the major mistake of actually having the gall of wanting to Upgrade my XP box to Vista which resulted in a BSOD that took me awhile to recover from (I never got Vista installed that time). On Friday I tried doing a clean install on my RAID array. At first it wouldn't' see my 2 drives so I had to track down that the Nvidia SATA_IDE driver needed to be installed first THEN it would see my drives. So I pointed at C and formatted it then tried hitting next and received a "Vista can't find a valid partition to install to" error. I finally found out that for some stupid reason Vista wants the whole disk to be blank before it gets installed and I didn't have a backup drive to copy my D partition to first. XP is still sitting on my box and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

 

[Acanthus]

I am very happy with vista.

Im not so happy with nvidia + vista. (motherboard and GPU both)

 

[bsobel]

The one thing that...bothers(?) me is the memory usage.
It uses absolutely absurd amounts of memory on a fresh boot, problem being, I'm not in any way qualified to profile memory usage under Windows, so I don't really know how much is disk cache, RSS, etc etc.Haven't run into memory issues so far though, so for now I just don't care.

Just to be clear, on low memory systems Vista will basically use all of your memory leaving only a very small part free. This is part of the caching system, is by design, and will release that memory for more important uses (e.g. your game needs it) as required.

(Btw, I define low memory as 4g or less....)

 

[Smilin]

Been Running Vista RTM for nearly 7 months now. When am I ever going to see the end of these threads?

I should start a "Does XP look crusty like NT 4.0 to you yet?" thread.

 

[KeithTalent]

I think I may upgrade very soon, now that I picked up a couple moe cheap sticks of DDR2.

Looking forward to it!

KT

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: Smilin

I should start a "Does XP look crusty like NT 4.0 to you yet?" thread.

I vote yes

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Been Running Vista RTM for nearly 7 months now. When am I ever going to see the end of these threads? I should start a "Does XP look crusty like NT 4.0 to you yet?" thread.

Smilin, to be fair, until we see Vista adoption numbers (for current XP users) that are north of 25% or so I think it's going to be common for these questions to be asked. I seem to remember a year of this when XP came out, so look you only have 5-7 months (depending on if you consider RTM or FCS) to go

 

[Dethfrumbelo]

When there's a worthwhile DX10 game out (which gives DX10 a notable feature advantage over DX9, read: Crysis) and when 4GB+ of RAM can be had cheaply (we're basically there now with the recent collapse of DDR2 prices).