DescentBB

It's deteriorating. Features and programs that used to work properly no longer function. It's slow and clunky. The backwards compatibility sucks all over the place. The GUI itself takes most of my computer's power. It randomly blue-screens and crashes. OpenGL functionality is limited. Lots of my programs don't function properly in the first place. AND I CAN'T PLAY DESCENT 3 ONLINE!

Red_5 wrote:It's deteriorating. Features and programs that used to work properly no longer function. It's slow and clunky. The backwards compatibility sucks all over the place. The GUI itself takes most of my computer's power. It randomly blue-screens and crashes. OpenGL functionality is limited. Lots of my programs don't function properly in the first place. AND I CAN'T PLAY DESCENT 3 ONLINE!

I'm with you brother
It's the cause, why I deleted it from my hd and put xp on my new machine, even if HP means this notebook is made for vista only

With XP this machine is running 2-3 times faster and all programms are working fine.

But it was a little tricky to find all the needed drivers ...

I tried Vista for several months then got rid of it. Good thing I didn't actually pay for it because its a definite waste of money, except MS Chalked me up as a buyer and thus amongst the elect they perceive as happy customers.

Lets see, the straw that broke the camel's back was a completely futzed up Update which Microsoft themselves dont know how to fix. Its been documented in their forums, albiet by a small minority, that a certain November update breaks Windows Update if it hasn't been installed in the correct order. After several cryptic command lines and paging through various troubleshooting pages I gave up, as my school wont let me log in to their ISP if my Windows isnt up to date.

Besides that, it makes a new machine feel like a 5 year old machine, and the resources allocated for the given feature set (CPU, Ram, HD Footprint) is unreasonable. Much of this points to a lack of optimization, which is a dirty word for Microsoft. Nevermind the details, its all been well documented and mentioned several times in this forum: bloat, DRM, and general poor decisions that could be traced to a lousy and bloated management structure. I understand the certain level of antagonism that exists every time an MS OS gets released like XP, but this time its significantly different.

Most of the problems you'll have with Vista can be determined in advance. There's no need for nasty surprises.

I still use my XP... And from what I've see here, it looks like I'm gonna stick to it... (Cannot play D3??? You've lost one client by now!)

Last I heard, D3 works fine in Vista...

I have D3 running perfectly fine on my laptop running Vista, and every program I have installed on vista works perfectly fine on Vista, so I have no issues at all with Vista.

Out of 6 PC's I run Linux on 5 and XP on one, you know, for old times sake.

D3 works fine in Vista. (In fact, it runs smoother than it ever did in XP for me.)

D3 dedicated servers works fine in Vista. (I have two running on my main Vista box right now.)

D3Edit works fine in Vista.

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Seriously, I don't understand what people are complaining about. I've had it for about six months now, with zero problems (edit: one problem, StarCraft sound cuts out on me sometimes, but that's not a big deal), running all the same software I did on XP.

Games? Vista runs everything XP did, plus some.

Stability? Vista has never crashed on me, XP crashed about once a month.

Turn off some of the flashy graphical and file-indexing stuff if you have to, but it runs perfectly.

I fail to see the point of Vista.

When years of work have made XP into a fairly stable, smooth OS, why in the world would I pay to go backwards five years to another buggy train wreck that does the exact same things, but requires more horsepower to eke out the same performance?

3.1 to 95, that was a meaningful leap. 98 to XP, that was the best leap of all. XP to Vista... that's a small hop on par with going from Word 2000 to Word 2002. The base program is still as clunky as ever, but you have five new animated helpers.

Okay, as of yesterday, my computer learned a new trick. Every time I brought up one of those \"Open file...\" or \"Save As...\" boxes, it, and the program it was associated with, crashed without so much as an error notice. It seems fine now, but now my Samsung PC Studio is broken.

>Imagines Microsoft burning at the stake<

Foil, I think its a situation where some people have experienced no problems, and some have experienced every problem. Luck of the draw I suppose...

The only explanation I have for Vista being the result of a five or six-year delay is that Microsoft ran out of ideas.

How about the fact that Vista was initially supposed to have full support for
``trusted computing'' (as well as some other features like WinFS)?

I'm guessing that, given the magnitude of TC, at some point they realized
they had no chance of ever completing it in under (say) 10 years, or even
at all, while still keeping such a system usable and not eating up too much
resources (and note that there have been many complaints about Vista's
performance even without this TC support); and so they had to redesign
the whole thing.

So, actually, they did have some major ideas, they just couldn't work them out.

By the way, it has been suspiciously quiet on the TC front altogether...
what could this mean?

You should have added another choice…

Neutral…

Which I will put forth here as my write in vote.

For a few months you could here me yelling “This crap really sucks”…but I have gotten used to the system. As far as performance…it is slower that my XP box…but so is the processor, so I can’t really make a true comparison. The system is very stable, but I have seen a bug or 2...never had a system crash…but I have had a few app crashes.

One bug I had was when I deleted (shift + delete) a file and the entire folder went.

I converted over to linux to avoid Vista. My wife's comp has it, and it seems to work ok, I just don't know how to accomplish things so I don't like it.

Also, there's a MS program the repeatedly crashes- Media store, or something like that. It seems wrong to me that a microsoft product should crash on windows.

The good news is, everything I want to do with my own computer is fully set up and awesomely functional on Linux. Woot.

I never had so much luck. VNC sucked on Linux... there were alternatives, but they didn't sound that good.

And actually, the security/WinFS thing is a point. For good or bad, they could have made a major difference to computers - but at the very least, I suspect \"trusted computing\", properly implemented, would pretty much stop most viruses dead in their tracks, which is a very major change. (At the very least it'd stop e-mail worms working if the machine just wouldn't run unknown code without express permission; it wouldn't save you from less common attacks like buffer overrun attacks in existing programs, or from trojans in software you decided to run yourself, but it does handily eliminate most of the \"noob\" category of infections.)

The only thing is, from all the scaremongering against it, I seem to recall it was supposed to do other things as well. Some kind of anti-piracy/traceability measures or something...

Not sure what the story was with WinFS, but file systems are one thing that never seems to be finished... every system so far has its disadvantages.

Leaves one to ask though; if the stuff that was actually interesting didn't make Vista, why did they bother releasing it? I haven't really noticed anything important from Vista that couldn't have worked in XP. (Barring DX10, which is entirely artificial.)

I initially installed the 64 bit version of Vista when I built my brand new PC. Had major problems due to 3rd party hardware drivers and software that just didn't run too well in a 64 bit operating system environment. Blue screen city, although the majority of that wasn't Microsoft's fault. The operating system itself did run fine.

But as far as the 32 bit version of the operating system, yea, I have better support from software and hardware 3rd party vendors, but the operating system itself is definitely less stable than the 64 bit. My main issue is that the explorer shell will just go ape crap every now and then when I'm working with photographs and just go non-responsive. This happens faily often.

Other issues are the amount of system resources that the operating system takes up. Out of my 4 gigs of ram, (which by the way isn't all available in a 32 bit environment), windows LOVES to take a whole gig for itself, which is just absolutely astounding.

The only reason why I didn't initially build with XP is that I actually pay for my operating system software, and I wanted to future proof my pc as much as I could (I build a pc every 3-4 years). So I didn't want to install XP, and then have to deal with buying Vista later on in the future.

Hopefully, the service pack will alleviate some of these stability issues with the explorer shell.

I use it at work, it's OK for office work. I've been using SP1 for a few weeks now, it seemed to slow down boot time a bit, but file transfer speeds are not as bad as they were.

At home I run XP. Probably will for a looooooong time.

Wife uses Vista 64bit at home. Runs fine with 8gigs RAM on a quad core. I still run XP Pro. WIll until I get an upgrade. The only problem I've heard is the annoying security feature and that it runs games slower than XP.

Sirius wrote:Leaves one to ask though; if the stuff that was actually interesting didn't make Vista, why did they bother releasing it? I haven't really noticed anything important from Vista that couldn't have worked in XP. (Barring DX10, which is entirely artificial.)

If they didn't release, what would they do, just scrap the entire thing? ....And get $0 on their investment?

By releasing, they have gotten thousands back on their investment, and have lost a (very) minimal portion of their customer base. A few people have gotten fed up with Vista and gone to Linux, as have some who have gone to apple, but the vast majority have gone to XP, which is still Microsoft. Eventually, when they're new favorite game is DX10 only, they'll be convinced and come back to Vista.

I guess they technically don't have a monopoly, but when they can push 90% of the computer users around like that, they might as well.

I was thinking wait a couple years until somewhat more compelling features were available.

Latest update: Sound card won't work properly until the second reboot I do.

I have sooooo switched over to an Apple advocacy. Go Apple!

i hate it on my work laptop but had to kill it becase alot of the stuff i do require me to use a serial port and vista didnt like that to much

at home i use XP64Bit and sticking with that for a long time

Red….it sounds to me like you have a farked up system…why blame Vista for that?

Because every Vista computer I've tried (and they are many) has it's own severe problems.

...And I, on the other hand, have never had anything remotely near a severe issue with Vista. (I have two machines running it at the moment.)

Let's all just hope that in 2010, we can still play Descent on Windows 7...

I blame alot of issues with Vista, not on microsoft, but the other companies, mainly due to incompatibilites, lets take a company like blizzard, and star craft, that came works on, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista with no problems at all, and people blame vista on the issues because of the way the OS is designed, we have proof with alot of games and other programs, that it can be done to make a program that will last through every version of windows.

No, blame Microsoft. trying to blame the rest of the industry doesn't help, MS was making significant changes to Vista right up to RTM.

captain_twinkie wrote:I blame alot of issues with Vista, not on microsoft, but the other companies, mainly due to incompatibilites, lets take a company like blizzard, and star craft, that came works on, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista with no problems at all, and people blame vista on the issues because of the way the OS is designed, we have proof with alot of games and other programs, that it can be done to make a program that will last through every version of windows.

Sounds like how I blame Linux on the third-party developers. Because, curiously, there's nothing wrong with the OS at all... stuff like Ubuntu is really pretty impressive now. It's just that people developing software for Linux don't make it to be usable.

But to at least some extent, what you're saying may be true; it is possible to develop software that isn't so schizophrenic about where it will and will not run. It just needs to use decent, well-supported libraries and not rely on weird stuff (some copy protection measures come to mind).

I blame Microsoft completely. If they hadn't been in such a stupid rush, they could have made it loads better.

When I think of Microsoft nowadays, the words that come to mind are \"Clunky and slow.\"

So if winx7 comes out in 2010, that gave Vista a life of what? Three years? Win 2000 anyone?

Win2000 was supplanted in late 2001 by XP, so it'd be longer than that. More like Win95 -> 98.

You'd be surprised how popular Win2k still is, Woody. It was designed to replace Win98 in the business world, not really for consumers. (That was what ..haha..HAHAHAHA WinME was for.)

I stuck with 98se until I got xp so I never experienced the tweens.

lol! The tweens.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Ah, let's not forget, the Data CD Writing Wizard is busted! And always was!

Funny, I still haven't experienced a single one of the problems people are claiming to have with Vista.