Windows Vista is bad. What do you think?

Well, I'm not defending the high prices, but I do remember seeing XP Pro in stores a few years back for $299.00 US. That's no bargain either.. If you want low prices, use Linux. MS is obviously in business to make money, so that's pretty much what they're doing, and prices usually keep going up in general, so Vista is really no great surprise is it?

 

I was really talking about the disastrous tiered pricing structure. People buying Basic and realizing it has nothing which they've heard about that makes Vista so "different." A marketing debacle.

 

Actually, as I just noticed Kerodo just pointed out, the prices are about the same when first released. Someone pointed this out in another forum and I do not remember the figures but the poster based it on analogies:

XP Home--------------------Vista Home Basic
Media Center Edition---------Vista Home Premium
XP Pro----------------------Vista Business
(no analogy)-----------------Vista Ultimate

I wasn't about to fork out $399 for Ultimate however. So I bought an OEM version which was less than the full Home Basic's price, $199 (I paid $189). I had been using XP Home for years and missed out on some of the things you could do in Pro (like grepedit.msc) so since the OEM Ultimate version wasn't that much over OEM Business I decided to get it.

 

While most of the changes are "under the hood" I agree on what you said. People expect to see some visual changes as well. Some manufacturers put Basic on very low end computers where you couldn't even upgrade to Premium even if you wanted to. EDIT: Well, not without doing some serious hardware upgrades.

 

I don't understand why some people are having such a hangup on Vista being slower than XP. I have installed Vista on fourteen computers here in town and none of them are slower than XP. Maybe it is just the security forum mentality, install way to many security apps then blame it on vista?? I just have not seen any slowdown with Vista. I know there is some compatability issues with some software. but I am fortunate that I have not personally seen this. Fortunatly the majority of Vista users are not having the problems that get hashed around on this forum.

 

It's certainly not just a hang-up here at Wilders. Just Google the benchmarks. Every PC magazine, every overclocker's forum, every controlled benchmark test shows that XP is a faster OS. I didn't even realize that was still in dispute.

 

It is not in dispute here, Vista is running faster than XP pro did. What can I say. I am sure not everyone will have the same results but everyone that I know that is running Vista say it is faster than XP. Enough said. Oh and bye the way, they said the same thing about XP when it was released also.

 

Really couldn't have said it better myself.

If Microsoft was looking to press ahead with innovation and more creative ideas, they certainly are yet to be realized, and it for sure isn't in Vista.

Almost every POSITIVE & ATTRACTIVE aspect thats found in Vista is already been developed and released (90% FreeWare!) for XP users with much lower overhead with none of the taxing demands a Vista Install offers.

It's not only at the PC retailer levels but have a look around at every single major program developer, more pronounced in the security fiield as evident right here in these forums, where so much additional effort is been put into compatibility with Vista causing for marked delays in improvements/updates for XP customers as well as a whole host of conflict issues just so these software programs can run reliably on BOTH vista & xp.

I'd say $M shot themselves in the foot big time this go 'round by once again clinging to their "run away" policy, this time from XP, last time 98/Me. A real rude awakening for such a collossal giant.

But then, theres always Vienna right?

 

It seems to me that you're talking about the "smoothness" caused by SuperFetch (disk caching algorithm) if you have enough RAM (2 GB).
"Hard" benchmarks show that Vista is slower than XP in 3D and I/O performance.

 

Well I won't be going back to XP so all of you guys can have my share of it.

 

No I am talking about boot time and the time it takes to open folders and open and present images. and the general operation of the computer is faster on my comp with Vista. And it wasn't slow with XP. But I am not going to sit here extolling the performance of Vista. You all have your own thoughts on it and I have what I see every day I use Vista. So have a good life and enjoy XP.

 

Now that most all the glowing vista reviews are in let the chips fall where they will.
AFAIK, the XP Pro units i have are everything Vista, in appearance plus features anyway, including ALL the GUI candy

In XP software you have all the best possible top security programs, (AS/AV scanners, virtualizers, sandboxes, HIPS, firewalls etc.) Why go thru all that wasted expense and trouble all over again for vesta?

So it begs to question why invest in an inferior product when you can have all that and more in XP but without the annoying extras and especially without forking over for yet another $M O/S that really isn't all it was cracked up to be in the first place?

 

Well at this rate I will be using my old PC's until the museums come and get them.... to much of a risk... my first internet experience was on a WinME...yea it was not all that good.

I added more memory and bought retail box XP Home. It was much better.

So who knows about Vista

By the way I do not believe the XP Home equals Vista Basic and I do think the pricing with all the different types of Vista is just plain bad idea. To complex especially someone older or someone new to PCs. It is just dum.

 

Yes this may be true at least partially.

These are very strong arguments for vista, but don´t forget purple pill and blue pill and this guy who subverted Vista 64 by modifying ATI drivers. I am very keen of testing vista 64 bit but this is only cool with new computer and 4 gb + ram

I hope I will be able to test this asap, to report about.

This is understandable and speaks for vista.

I only tested the beta but looked not bad.

This is comprehensible.

Vista is eye candy for sure, the performance loss is not very high, approx. 1-3% I guess according tests in magazines.

That´s a very broad range of arguments, so I assume that the raw performance between both may only differ about 1-3%. Probably it is not possible to say with 100% guarantee Vista or XP is faster because it depends on how you use it.

 

Very interesting exchange of ideas and thoughts. I enjoyed it. But I believe a statement in SystemJunkies post pretty much sums it up. [in the blue text] keep up the good work guys and keeping digging into the software

( Probably it is not possible to say with 100% guarantee Vista or XP is faster because it depends on how you use it.)



bigc

 

To be fair, XP also came in many flavors though it was stretched over time. Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, Tablet PC Edition, Professional x64 Edition, Starter Edition, and the "N" Edition.

 

Ok, here it is, all in USD prices on full versions as of at release:

XP Home--------------$199
Vista Basic------------$199

Media Center Edition---approx. $220-$235 (I could not find the original price on MS's site. It looks like it was sold mainly on systems. I am going by OEM pricing)
Vista Home Premium---$239

XP Pro----------------$299
Vista Business---------$299

And then you have Ultimate at $399 which has no XP analog. This info was gathered at Thurrott's website (the analogies) and on Microsoft's website.

I am not saying Vista is faster than XP on my machine but given the overhead I was expecting something a lot worse (especially since my computer was getting up there in age). The last time I tried Vista was Beta 1 and it ran slow as molasses. I skipped Beta 2 and then later I was reading how much RTM had improved over the betas so I decided to roll the dice (hence another reason for getting OEM, if it fell on it's face I wouldn't have been out of too much money). Doing little things such as turning the "UAC blackening" and windows animation off did wonders and it feels the same as XP.

I know there had to be some tweaking going on out there when XP came out. I know I had to on my old P2, lol.

 

Yes, you're talking about SuperFetch
Windows Vista I/O technologies

 

All I can say: Did you open Word/Excel 2007 with XP? And then with Vista? You will do "Wow!". Believe me.

 

Sure, but those are POC only. Anyway I use only Vista32 without any security aplications and I am good, but I dream about Vista64 as about being in heaven.

 

FYI transactional NTFS can be very slow, it does not offer a single performance benfit, usually a 1% - 2% performance loss.

I remember when XP came out, some peoples machines ran better, others ran worse... IMHO its a combination of the new OS (which probably has minor performance improvements), but also how well the drivers perform and how well the software runs upon the new OS.
I bet if you take XP now compared to XP when it came out you will see as much variation in performance between XP (as of now) and Vista on a random selection of currently in use desktops.

Nick.

 

Currently Vista offers no benifits over XP for what I use the OS for. I have no need to change.

I have performance and stability issues with Vista running the software I require, but non of these are specific features and XP was in the same position when it came out.
At work we need IE6 still as some of our intranet apps are IE6 only. IE7 does not function correctly with them. I could blame the intranet apps for being IE6 specific (as they do not function in Firefox either) as much as Vistas IE7 for not being compatible.

It took me 2 years to move to XP, possibly the same for Vista. I will only move to it when I can make practicle use of its extra features over XP (in XP's case it was the SP2 wireless networking that I had waited so long for...)

 

a lot of people are talking as if vista has just come out, and it's still fairly new vista is one year old, that's middle aged for an OS. the things that aren't working now have nothing to do with teething problems and everything to do with incompetence. i bought a new computer to try out vista because i liked XP and hoped vista would be better, but i still haven't finished setting it up because it's total junk!!

 

POC which works. So let´s go on with dreaming about a perfect 64 bit OS somewhere in the future.

Lol, I wonder what you did with it? So you seem to be that kind of person that doesn´t like nice designs. I assume both OS have their right and the user can choose. Personally I first want to experiment and to test Vista in all variations, but I doubt that it is a good idea to buy 32 and 64 bit version only for this reason.