What makes Windows Vista better than Windows XP?

Those were the days..... I remember them fondly, I ran a BBS for a few years and had a lot of fun. Also did tons of programming back then, but when Win95 hit the streets, that's when I said goodbye to that. I guess DOS would scream on hardware like this....

 

the fact that i have a pc with a quad core and 2gb of ramI should be able to run a virtual machine with one core and 256mb as well as running messenger,webbrowser and music player without a major slowdown correct?

btw i have the sidebar gadget showing cpu and memory usage. strangely the slowdowns happern with the cpu usage is less than 50percent and the ram usage is around 86percent. just doesnt make sence.

everytime a new linux distro comes out it is faster and improved so it runs better on all hardware. such as faster boot speed etc. OSX isnt bloated but snow leopard is about optimizing the core to work even better on all hardware.

yet microsoft always produce more bloated os's each time.
no one else does so why does microsoft?

in day to day usage what can you do on vista that you cant do on xp?
nothing. so why are we wasting our money on it?

it took me awhile for me to decide to get vista. in the end i thought it cant be as bad as people are reporting. seems i was wrong it is horrible.

btw im not a windows basher.
my first computer ran windows 95 and it worked perfectly. only one issue was that it thought my printer was a fax machine but that was sorted out quite easily. only two reboots in 4 years and that was only because of a damaged cd.


then i used windows ME for 4 years=( geez worst OS ever.

then i went to xp sp2 and the only problems have been third party programs leaving stuff behind (acronis...., webroot etc)

 

Oh well, lodore, we will just have to agree to disagree (like that time about Norton Yellow )

I have not delved into the world of VM as I haven't had a need to do so. As such I cannot comment on this part of your post. All I can say however is that Vista on my Quad4 is as fast as when I first put XP on a P4 (and it is no slouch on my lowly Pentium Dual Core in my laptop either).

You put up with WinMe far longer than I had, lol. It came in a Dell Dim. 4100 I bought in Sept. 2000. It stayed on the computer approximately 4 months until I was approved for beta testing Whistler (XP) in which I gladly switched to. It is funny that Whistler Beta was more stable than the released WinMe, lol.

Anyway back to the main topic, I just ran across this article at the PCAdvisor UK website. The author relays my sentiments exactly when he states:

'Nuff said.

 

What other say about a software or OS is totally irrelevant at the end of the day. It is your own experience that counts - for you.
I dont think that people who uses Vista uses it just to annoy the people who had problems (may it be ideological or real computer related )
Obviously Vista works just fine, faster and better than XP for many people.

Yeah, I am amazed that sometimes the debate looks like a MAC vs Windows type debate. I wonder why it fertilizes such high emotions.

 

I was not talking about being "techy". A "techy" can personalize any OS to his needs. But he cannot regain the performance when the the problem is related at the core/kernel of the system and furthermore I simple cannot understand why microsoft does not allow the sysadmin to disable the task manager or to make it run at demand throught the admin tools. Why should I be forced to do it through regedit?

No need to forgive, misunderstandings happen all the time. I wanted only to make clear that I did not mean that microsoft is spying the users.
Well I have to disagree on the above. The default should not be "opt-out" but should be "opt-in". If your browser or your email handler crashes during a transaction how can you be sure that your sensitive data will not fall in the hands of a bad microsoft employee?
RACAgent is related with consolidator optinnotification. It gathers the data and the other 2 trasmit it to microsoft.

Exactly! A quad with vista performs like a P4 with XP. This means that they have not optimised the kernel for the highend machines.
If you put xp on your quad and especially on your laptop you will be surprised with their true potential. (The bug of copying/transfering impacts a lot the 5400 2,5 hard drives)...

This is simple stupid (no offense).
I am lover of no OS. I have licences of windows 98,Me,2000,XP, Vistax86 and Vistax64...
Vista is great for a novice. It explains far better the various things than every previous MS OS. But after 2 years, a lot of fixes and a service pack it still seems like a beta to me.
Do I also use Vista? Off course I do. Hell, I bought it.
Does it performes better than xp? Absollutly not. The guide and the log in are faster. Everything else is 20% slower.(same results on 5 different systems without tweaking anything in both xp and vista).
Is this bashing? I do not thing so. It's telling the truth!
What I really do not understand is why Vista lovers try to convince everyone that is the best OS outhere...

Panagiotis

 

i completely agree a quad core should fly in any OS. if it doesent then the OS is at fault. i didnt pay £800 for a new pc with decent hardware to run it at the speed of my old 4year old desktop...
i felt my old pc was slow so i wanted an upgrade not a downgrade.

imo vista shouldnt of been released yet.
yet windows 7 is having loads of new features. before even working on windows 7 they should make vista work properly.

an OS is a base which someone uses to work. if its slower than the older version why would you waste money on it?
so say i was an owner of a company would i want to spend thousands of £'s on something that slows down productivity of all my employee's? HELL NO

also have you noticed that in windows 7 documents,pictures etc are called libarys?
who used that first? oh yeah of course apple. unless apple stole it form someone else but i dont know.
plus look at the screenshots of the new explorer in windows 7 and doesnt that look like another mac copy? with the items with arrows on the side? just like in finder on mac and in itunes?

windows 7 will also support multiple virtual desktops. how many years have unix based operating systems had multiple virtual desktops for?

 

Vista firewall isn't so power and granular as a lot of real sw firewalls are ( two names for all: Outpost and Comodo ). The UAC is primarily a great annoyance, and it is NOT an HIPS, neither it can do what an HIPS does. So, if I used Vista, at the same I had an HIPS.
I use Opera, but I can have IE 7 in XP, so Windows Media Player 11; sure, in Vista the Windows Search function is better, but I never needed really it. And for the GUI, since 2004 I use Vista Inspirat pack on XP. Not like Vista GUI, sure, but I don't spend my money for it.

 

Difficult not to agree with pandlouk and lodore.

It's also possible to gather midway40 means it will be perfectly ok and in line with the inevitable Microsoft progress that in 2050 one computer would burn the
equivalent energy of a nuclear plant of today in just one day,
and there'll be people who would consider this a necessary and good thing.
Unfortunately,resources are going to disappear and this line of thinking will not take prisoners.

Is it an improvement that Vista takes twice as much time to start up than XP?
(Only,of course,if you chop some twenty unnecessary services,otherwise
it's double that figure)

More security? What, the fact you've got IPV6 which is unusable for who knows how long yet?
Or its inability to disable the Task scheduler,so that its corresponding Port is always open? To mention a few.

I cannot believe the great programmers employed at Microsoft cant do better.

Millennium was worse than Windows98 and naturally died as an OS because back then it was not found exclusively installed on all machines all over the world,contrary to Vista.

 

Definitely seems to be a mixed bag of reviews. For me vista is better overall on my laptop. With my current dual boot setup vista boots up a couple of seconds quicker than xp and i find its performance is just as good if not slightly better than xp. Running a virtual machine, browser, im, music/video player at the same time is a breeze with no major slowdowns.

 

I haven't experienced more issues with Vista then I have experienced with XP, and because I run Vista HP 32 bits on a high end PC, my user experience is pretty good.
But I think XP is way better in terms of productivity.

 

I prefer XP over Vista as all the games that run on vista require about double RAM to play than that in XP

 

Karad this should not happen. In case it does it means that you have disabled more services than you should and have deactivated the scheduler.
I suspect that MS deactivated the access of the taskmanager service from the services panel because of this...
There are too many poorly implemented tweak guides and programs outthere and they do not take in account that on Vista the taskscheduler is used to compensate the various services so that they will take less resourses. The not necessary services will run when the pc is idle or once a day/week/month. Also some of the tasks are directly related with the optimization of the OS and the way is being used...
And the advises of disabling the task manager in vista is at least a moron approach...
If you disable the task manager Vista will never get optimized and will run slower over time. In case anyone decides to disable the task manager should remember to run it on demand at least a once a week all day long!

Actually it should boot a 30%-40% faster than xp. And the programs you use all the time should load faster. (This if you have not disabled the scheduler)
But when the programs are loaded they do not perform with the same speed as they do in xp. (videoediting/convertion in vista takes 15%-20% longer than it takes with xp; same programs, same video file, same convertion settings and the temp file resides on the same partition which gets formatted after the task is completed).

Panagiotis

 

I don't have that result here, in fact Vista x64 boots about the same here as XP x64, or most Linux distros for that matter. So I don't have your experience there.

For me, on a newly bought PC (AMD Triple Core, 4 gigs ram, ATI graphics, etc), Vista is fine. I have zero issues. I don't know what everyone else is bitching about really, but I will acknowledge that everyone has different experiences. But I will not complain about it, as it works for me.

I will say on the same machine, XP x64 is visibly faster and snappier all around. IE7 x32 on XP x64 is faster than any browser on Vista x64. Why? I have no idea. But that's how it is here. So I would grant that XP x64 is indeed faster than Vista x64.

But for me it's not just about speed. It's the entire overall experience, and for that, I like Vista best.

Linux does well here, but in all honesty, I find it pretty buggy in general. I have tried a dozen distros in the new PC, and only 2 are issue free so far. The rest bite it in varying degrees. More often than not, due to problems with ATI drivers.

Anyway, it's interesting to see all the opinions and arguments on this. But at the end of the day, Vista will win, or Windows 7, or whatever is in store for the future. It's just progress (for better or worse), and there really is no stopping it. Perhaps many folks will get sick of the MS bloat factor and move to Macs or Linux. But MS will do what MS wants to do.... that's just how it goes...

I personally wouldn't mind seeing a fresh new Google OS for the desktop, built from the ground up, to be the best...

 

Yes pandlouk,what you say about having disabled a service too many could even be, although I always followed BlackViper's advice and never did anything wrong before.

This time is different, I could have made a mistake, trying to make the machine -a bloated HP notebook- boot faster, which I succeeded in obtaining. I went to the limit confiding in Acronis11 boot disk as a safety net.

As regards the scheduler, having disabled Windows Defender for another program and Scheduled Defrags, preferring to make them manually, I wonder for what the Task Scheduler is really needed.

If you're available I can let you know exactly what I did,so that you might spot an error.

This Vista notebook is now more human,anyway,and ,Task Manager apart, works fine after the one month long 'cure'.

 

the problem with ati drivers is a fault of ati and not a fault of linux.
would be nice if big companies took linux more seriously and supported more of there software on it as well as creating better drivers.

im not sure google would create an OS they may do but im sure it would be based on a current linux distro im guessing redhat.

 

Yes, the ATI drivers seem to be a bit problematic on various distros. In Ubuntu and Kubuntu, it offers to install them and they work great, zero issues there. Also in my current setup, OzOS, I installed manually from the linux drivers on the ATI site, and no problems. But other ones like SUSE seem to have various degrees of problems, ranging from just 2D, no 3D, and Fedora for example after install, just went into space with some funky video mode that it got God knows where.....

I love Linux, and I love to try the distros out and have fun with it, but I do find it generally more buggy than not. But that's just the nature of things.. I have been distro hopping for almost 2 years now, and have seen most of them. Win and apps are not without bugs as well, so nothing is perfect... But in general, I usually return to Win and XP or Vista for relief from various Linux issues and bugs...

Right now I'm a satisfied customer with Vista x64 & OzOS x64. Haven't seen much better....

 

Everything is better in Vista compared to XP. I have both in different laptops, and I can't wait to get back to Vista whenever I need to use XP(I have some programs only with XP).

I'm a visually oriented person, Vista has adopted the same approach in design as Apple computers. Programmers and tech oriented people might have some reservations, I can understand, but they are a minority. Linux might be better suited for their taste.

 

Me too, Searchlight if I recall. Some friends did lan parties, we still all play online. I think I originally got online in DOS with Prodigy. Weird compared to today.

 

what i like about vista is that now p4 running xp intel 3gig cost me $150

 

Why would anyone bother to use the built-in Windows Firewall, when there are other leakproof firewall available in the market? Others are even FREE.

Parental controls? You mean Vista's built-in LUA and UAC?
You can install LUA and HIPS programs in Windows XP, which performs better than Vista's LUA and UAC. (ie. Comodo FW's Defense+, Online Armor HIPS, SuRun, ProcessGuard, ShadowDefender, etc )

 

As it was already mentioned, Vista is more than a pretty new face, .. and persons would know this if they spent little time researching. And again, like already mentioned .. good place to start is on wikipedia.

What I've personally observed is Vista simplifies things for it's users, and includes awesome built-in hardware diagnostics and monitoring tools .. which already boldly alerted me of a hardware problem with graphics. And it's nice that starting with Vista it monitors the life of the hard drive and gives warning and time for one to backup sensitive information.

.. Before Service Pack 1 there was some big problems, like Networking performance really, really poor, copying / deleting files and folders on the local drives was incredibly SLOW .. but all addressed with SP1 - thank god!

There's alot of big things to be impressed about with Vista, but there's also lot of small things too .. and I'm still finding out more and more through-out the usage. And it is very speedy assuming you installing it on a modern PC and not one dating back years (or using it on Celeron PCs or alike). And completely configurable, for instances a person could disable or customize (preferably) the UAC feature and be done with frequent annoyances.

I do love XP, and continue to use on the old machine, but I really love Vista (probably because I have the juice to run it, otherwise I would probably be like the many on here and post negatively on here about it)!

 

Yep, totally agree, and well said, could not have said it better myself. There is much to like about it if people could just get past their stubborn (and perhaps outdated and inaccurate) views... I too have and use XP x64, and it is faster on the same hardware, but that isn't the entire measure of a good OS, or even a desirable OS.

Anyway, I had to comment as your post said a lot that I would say also.

Thanks....

 

On a side note of factuality that no one has mentioned, here is a wise statement to behold for which is better:

Depending on the margins of victory, and even more importantly depending on how individual users plan to use their systems, which component is "better" is a matter of perspective.

Honestly as a tech I've never bothered to use, or learn Vista. Like they say if it's not broke, don't fix it does hold true for many facets of the computer/business world that still run on XP, and doing so just fine...

Also another great truth to behold here. If Vista was so great and better, why then is Windows 7 coming out so soon? Because Vista isn't so good after all. If it was, a new OS wouldn't be chugging out the door as quick as it is, and that's a FACT no one can argue, that's just plain simple truth.

Vista simply isn't worth using, or wasting time with, unless you absolutely need something it offers over XP, like, ahhhh, DX10 for gaming maybe?

If you're a business looking to make a change, then it is definitely a waste and could end up in more problems then it's worth, and it's certainly better for a business to wait on Windows 7 to arrive before leaping off of XP.

 

The fact (perhaps) that Windows 7 is coming out soon has absolutely nothing to do with how good or bad Vista is. It's all marketing and hype, and how well their products are selling or not selling. Vista didn't do well. The reason makes no difference. Bad image, bad initial reception to first release, bad OS all around, bottom line is, Vista was a marketing failure, so they're moving on sooner than expected, to recover. Vista could be the best OS yet technically, but if it fails to generate the revenues that they have targeted, then it's a marketing failure and they will move on to the next offering.

Those, sir, are the "facts"...