(Possibly a good subject for the news dep | This is different than 'General Thoughts on Vista' thread)
6 months and 1 day since the OS was released.. And I'm curious, (in numbers & facts not opinions) what’s the damage?
I had heard Microsoft sold more copies of Vista than there are apple users.. but I had also heard there was an enormous number of consumers who crawled back to WindowsXP.. I can't find any consistent facts, so I was hopin you guys could fill in some blanks
I can tell you that many large corporations (including the one I work for) have plans to upgrade to Vista, but have not done so at this time.
We are still testing the compatibility of some of our core applications and recoding those that don't work properly.
We are looking at 2nd or 3rd quarter next year before we start any pilot roll outs.
As for end users, I think those that bought PC's with Vista Home Basic are the ones who are disenchanted with it.
Let's face it.. Vista Home Basic is ugly and it sucks.
I used it for about 2 months... then returned to XP... XP sucks, but Vista sucks more. Not just by itself. Microsoft did a crappy job getting things from the rest of the companies. Plus, there is no backwards compatibility. Parts of my hardware were deemed "end of service life" ie. no drivers (wireless, soundblaster), parts were on beta drivers for too long (geforce) that just did not work... Not to mention DRM crap eating at my processor cycles, and "vista phone home" shit eating my bandwidth...
Even Office 2007 was not performing as expected on Vista... The whole experience convinced me on the need to switch to a mac. AT LEAST, their DRM shit is less intrusive...
PS. Halo2 is for Vista only (at least legally)... how am I supposed to play it when Nvidia has yet to release a consistent Vista driver that doesn't suck? And it's not just nvidia to blame. Microsoft changed all the core hooks and APIs... I know. A friend of mine has to code a couple of scientific programs all over again because lots of little "security" things make the code buggy...
PS. Halo2 is for Vista only (at least legally)... how am I supposed to play it when Nvidia has yet to release a consistent Vista driver that doesn't suck? And it's not just nvidia to blame. Microsoft changed all the core hooks and APIs... I know. A friend of mine has to code a couple of scientific programs all over again because lots of little "security" things make the code buggy...
I'm sorry but I fail to see your arguement there. If it was also Microsoft's fault why does ATi have such great drivers? It has nothing to do with Microsoft, just pure laziness on nVidia's behalf.
Vista (according to Microsoft) has sold more copies in the first 6 months than XP did on it's initial release.
On a side note, I agree with what was said above. It's the users that bought Vista Basic that hate it, it has absolutely nothing in it.. I'd be pissed off too. Maybe next time those people will take into consideration the old saying You get what you pay for.
Vista Basic has at least the new kernel and UAC... But yeah, it lacks Aero, Aero Glass and all the hardware-accelerated graphics and technology.
Im very fond of Vista. It has so much more to offer than XP had. I love instant search, which if u use more advanced commands is actually the best improvemnt over XP. It is also great that thanks to the Preview Pane u can forget about programs like ACDSee. However at this point Vista lacks sth very curcial: driver support. I had to wait till last week to have drivers released for my bloody HP LaserJet. I can only imagine how bad an experience it has to be, if ure on a PC with half of ur hardware either not recognized or running on beta drivers (I have a notebook which came with Vista-compatible everything). Some of my friends said no to Vista, mostly becasue of drivers and UAC, which at times drives me crazy as well. Some other regret the switch to Vista becasue their machines with lets say 1GB RAM from snappy turned to tardy.
Do people feel more trepidation upgrading to Vista from XP than they did upgrading to XP from '98?
I was able to use Vista for a bit when I stopped by a Sony store, and it wasn't too bad. I could understand it being overwhelming, but I don't recall my reaction to XP, so I was wondering what your answers were to the above question.
-NC
I upgraded from XP to Vista with no problems. It was fairly self-explanatory and easy. I'm running Vista Business, which has some of the visual goodies, no games, and a very handy file recovery/restore feature. I've been testing virtually every feature I find out about.
I did, however, turn off the sidebar. It was a bit of a ram hog (which doesn't matter on my system, but mostly it just takes up space. I prefer a clean desktop. I also turned off a few features I'll never use.
One of my favorite new features is the ability to use usb memory sticks as extra RAM. If I want to run a smooth 3-D app, I'll just add a few gigs of (RAM) that way. Works like a charm.
Once you get used to Vista, it's a breeze. Opening files or apps is a breeze. Hit the windows key and start typing what you want and hit enter. That easy. Also, If you abuse smart indexing, it's even nicer.
As far as customization, I haven't gone to extremes with it. It's mainly a work laptop. Customizing the icons, from what I've read, can be a little trickier but doable. I kind of like the Vista theme (with some color tweaks) for the most part. The taskbar is the only semi-ugly thing about it to me. No matter what your color scheme, it stays a bit black
You can customize the start menu a bit.
Overall, it was an easy install, has yet to crash, has had a few compatibility bugs that it fixed itself or was fixed with an updated driver/program update. So far I really like it.
One of my favorite new features is the ability to use usb memory sticks as extra RAM. If I want to run a smooth 3-D app, I'll just add a few gigs of (RAM) that way. Works like a charm.
Wait, wouldn't USB transfer speeds be below even HARD DRIVE read/write speeds? In that case, why not just increase your pagefile?
From Lifehacker Article
"Using Vista's new ReadyBoost feature, a spare USB 2.0 key with enough space can speed up the OS performance.
Plug in your drive and choose "Speed up my system" from the AutoPlay menu to enable ReadyBoost, which uses some fancy-pants disk-caching to make Windows a bit snappier."
@virtulte 2.0usbport + (readyboost capable) usb sticks, owns. It wouldn't be incorperated in windows if it was slower than writting to disk..
@nc I was thinking that myself.. XP's been the standard for computers for so long, (I'm assuming..) people just arnt conforatable with change..
...
I'm still lookin for some facts and numbers.. Anyone?
Nothing in Vista has blown me out of the water so far... It was good to buy it with a brand new custom computer though because everything just worked.
It crashes alot less than XP did but thats probably also due to the age of my old system. The UAC feature is just utter rubbish, M$ didn't bother thinking that users don't want to be interupted by an annoying box every 20 seconds.
All my old software works fine with Vista but a major quip was with creating custom icons, which has now been resolved. Another problem I had was that it recognized my mates 1GB USB as only 250MB...
The main problem I have had is with networked printing, the actual networking was as easy as plugging in the ethernet cord then changing the workgroup. I can't seem to be able to print over the network, something I could do on XP. M$ say I have to plug the printer into this computer so it gets the correct drivers and can recognize it over the network, I just can't be bothered doing that.
This article says that there was a huge boost in Vista sales and helped boost computer sales in egneral because people were upgrading for Vista: http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/8/6970
July 1 Vista hit 60 million copies sold:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=598
Vista sales compared to Mac:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...ticleId=9027558
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