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Well, we've began testing Windows Vista Business at work because our director wants it University wide in 08... Which will be interesting because many a secretarial PC is an aged Compaq that will not run it. That's about 40% of our systems not Vista ready...

Anyways, I put it on my work issued IBM T60 laptop to begin to familiarize myself with it. So far I still prefer XP. I like Vista's snazzy new look, the gadget bar is neat, window effects rock, but too much stuff broke when I upgraded. It also added 3-4 minutes to my boot time...

But hey all in the name of progress... and science... and because our boss wants us too... What can ya do?

Has anyone else been messing with Vista? What's your opinion?

/em goes back to his WindowsXP MCE 2005 laptop...

If I was seriously planning on 'upgrading' to vista here, I would first upgrade my system memory from the current 2 GB, to 4 GB. If you do that and let Vista figure out your work patterns for a few days, it should speed up a good bit till most of the applications you use often load faster then they did on XP...if they load that is, compatibility is still a problem.

But for now, XP works extremely well for me, I have zero motivation to test Vista any of my systems. I'll wait till at least SP1 before I will think about it.

I used Vista last year when it was available to those who have MSDN accounts. It worked OK except for a few Web development issues (IIS etc). I'm going to wait several years (like any other Windows OS) for the dust to settle and then use vista.

im not touching it until absolutely have to

You ought to read this:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... _cost.html

You'd rip out that hard drive and drill a hole in it to get rid of Vista. I will never use it as a primary OS. Not until this DRM fetish goes away, or is cracked..whichever comes first.

But anyway, the interface is half-cool, half-★■◆●. Not the ratio I was hoping for.

Ive been running it since Beta2 went public, Pre-RC1, RC1, RC2 and Finally Home Premium, I love it, my desktop PCs are both more then capable to run it, one an Opteron 170 @ 2.7ghz, the other an XP 3200+/ my laptop runs it just fine as well with a mere 768MB of ram, Ive never seen ram usage as much of a problem.

as to the DRM stuff, there have been so many mountains built out of ant hills on this one its rediculous, its so passive and so non-invasive theres nothing to worry about, heck, about 70-80% of my music was aquired in non-conventional means, and it doesnt give a rats ass, ive got some DVD ISOs that ive ripped from other PCs, they play fine here.

Vista responds well, is faster then XP, a better flow pattern as well. RAM management imo is much much better then XP and boot times are down to a half sweep of the bars. XP takes about 6-7sweeps on the same PC.

If I had the money, id upgrade all my PCs to vista, but I dont have the money

When it comes to writing emails and documentation... I could care less about DRM.

I still use XP on all my personal machines for that reason.

Looks fugly to me.

Here's what the DOT thinks about Vista.

Based on our initial analysis (from internal recommendations and analysis performed by the Gartner Group), there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade including:

- The cost of performing the upgrade (hardware/software upgrades, application upgrades, labor for planning and implementation, etc.)
- Previous version compatibility concerns regarding Office 2007 suite components (primarily Word)
...

This affects about 15000 PCs. The FAA has a similar stand (45000 PCs.)

I agree, if given the choice it would not be getting installed, but alas we have no choice.

Just spent 2 hours dropping it on one of our lab PCs (IBM ThinkCentre 8171, P4 3.22GHz, 1GB RAM) Vista gave the machine a score of 1.0... it knocked it down to the non-glass interface and McAfee 8.5 broke. Slow as all hell...

Needless to say loaded up ghost and dropping the XP Pro image back on it.

I just purchased a full copy of Vista the Ultimate edition, not the upgrade, and have yet to install in on anything. Since I'm going to end up having to support other people that do install it or get it pre-installed on their new computer I figured that I'm going to need to get familiar with it. From what I've seen on other peoples computers that already have it installed it feels slower on a machine that should just be rock'n.

I'll give you my reasons why I like Vista, but of course I work at Microsoft (though not on Vista), so take it with a grain of salt:

- Search in the start menu vastly improves my productivity.
- Ability to use the mouse and see previews when Alt+Tab-ing is another productivity gain.
- Windows media player and the address bar behave much better together on the task bar.
- RDPCLIP bug has been fixed, although only when logging into a Vista machine.
- Font smoothing over RDP
- I <3 gadgets on my desktop, though I really dislike the sidebar and I have it turned off.
- IE7 runs in protected mode. People shouldn't underestimate how good this is.
- UAC. I think this will pay off in the long run, but we'll see.
- PatchGuard (on x64), ASLR

My pain points:
- At home I have x64 and my printer still won't install.
- My home machine only sees 3.2 gigs of RAM when it has 4 gigs.
- Older application incompatibilities. Probably a mix of Vista and x64.
- Some legacy bugs like \"right click on task bar doesn't work when the application is frozen\" or \"all icons/gadgets get moved to the center when logging in through Remote Desktop at a smaller resolution\".

My home machine only sees 3.2 gigs of RAM when it has 4 gigs.

This is normal. Your BIOS will eat up about 600-800 megs for addressing. MY wife bought 4 Gigs of HyperX Dual Channel and returned it because she only had 3.2 gigs left after and it wasn't enough of a speed improvement over the 2 gigs she had before.

Its not lost to \"addressing\" you actually don't have all 32-bits to use, as some of it is reserved for I/O devices.

you can get by that on with processors that support larger addressing modes.

There might be some option in your bios to change how it deals with more than 2gb of ram, depending on what you are using.

Beyond that, what does vista do better than OS X?

CDN_Merlin wrote:

My home machine only sees 3.2 gigs of RAM when it has 4 gigs.

This is normal. Your BIOS will eat up about 600-800 megs for addressing. MY wife bought 4 Gigs of HyperX Dual Channel and returned it because she only had 3.2 gigs left after and it wasn't enough of a speed improvement over the 2 gigs she had before.

Well that stinks, but it's good to know. Thanks.

I use the memory for raytracing large scenes, so having 64-bit support and near 4 gigs of ram is still worthwhile.

fliptw wrote:Its not lost to "addressing" you actually don't have all 32-bits to use, as some of it is reserved for I/O devices.

you can get by that on with processors that support larger addressing modes.

There might be some option in your bios to change how it deals with more than 2gb of ram, depending on what you are using.

Beyond that, what does vista do better than OS X?

We're talking about 64-bit, so it should have no problem addressing all of 4 gigs.

Vista supports right click.

32bit can only read 3.2GB, even if you have a 64bit CPU, if you want more, install Vista x64

as to what Vista can do over OS-X, it can play games =o

also, I dont understand the people who say vista feels mor sluggish, maybe if you only have 512MB of ram or less, but on all my other systems, vista has consistently felt faster, as well as performed faster when it comes to mathematical functions. its the 3D apps where the drivers still need some serious fixing.

Topher wrote: Vista supports right click.

OSX supports right click too.

I know the Athlon64 current uses 40-bit memory addressing, but Core 2 may seem to support the 36-bit PAE addressing of its P4 cousins, limiting you to 32-bits without extra OS hackery.

Immortal Lobster wrote:32bit can only read 3.2GB, even if you have a 64bit CPU, if you want more, install Vista x64

At home I have x64 and my printer still won't install.

Certain 64-bit processors have issues with 4GB of RAM as well.

ok, i misread. If I had more then 2GB or memory Id test it, but Vista is supposed to support 16GB unless you have ultimate, then its 128GB, i dont quite understand that cap at all

and flip is right, C2Ds are not whats defined as a \"true 64bit\" CPU, they have the 64bit math units, but the method in which the memory is addressed I believe was ported directly from netburst

I have the 'demo' installed on another hard drive, and I honestly dont see myself using this in the future. If I was ever forced too, I would tweak it down alot to make it more 'lean n' mean', disabling themes and other such add-ons. Heck, im using the 'classic' (heh!) theme in XP. The visuals are nice, and the animated backgrounds is absolutely killer, but the novelty of such bells and whistles wear off over time. The biggest turn off for me is the new sound system, I can no longer adjust the volume with my mouse while watching TV in DScaler and nether can I run old games because of this new system. If it aint broke, dont fix it, but alas, here comes Microsoft. Various other unessesary compatabilities erupt with older software despite the fact that at the heart this is still the NT kernel.

I wouldn't use this OS, even if it was for free. Why bother? Why bother anticipating updates and fixes to get the software running again that once worked fine in a previous OS? Who gives a flying ★■◆● about animated backgrounds and a 'glass' interface? I want to run every program that was coded for XP without a hitch god damnit. An OS should not be a toy, it should be a tool between the user and the hardware inside the computer. Everything else is secondary.

Dude, I have to totally disagree with you. Per application volume is awesome. I really, really hate it when I'm listening to music and AIM decides it wants to be deafeningly loud. And now it can't be.

Aye, the sound system is much improved, it hurt creative a lot however, but overall its been a better experience. and as far as old game compaability, I havnt realy found anything thats not compatable yet =I also like how when you play a game, it switches to what Ill call game mode, my ram dumps down to about 200-300MB of usage after launching a game, on a system with 2GB of RAM, thats substantially low, and quite nice!

I had a huge 4-part reply to this written up, but I wound up just deleting it. Basically, I could sum it up thusly:

Vista fixed a lot of things that needed to be fixed. It added a lot of things that either shouldn't have been added, or were already available by third-party apps that are well supported and work better. And the things it added that were neither (like Aero glass) are a couple of years behind where Beryl on Linux already is. Sorry, Vista doesn't get my vote.

Due to Volume Licensing complications (KMS server has to be running on the domain) I have dropped XP Pro back on my lappy. (Won't activate)

I like the effects in Vista but that's about it. And half the time I'm staring at my PC screen I'm playing a game and not looking at the OS at all.

Network Admin is in the process of implementing the KMS server but I'm not putting it on my work computer again until they pry XP from my angry, middle-finger waving hands.

I admit I have only used Vista for a short time so I can only give my first impressions, so my opinion on the audio system may change or not, however the rest of my argument still stands.

On top of that, an image of XP is roughly 570 mb, and image of Vista is roughly 2 GB. Is the size increase attributed for not compressing the system files so that installation could be fast? Or did they add 1.5gb worth of stuff?

Top Wop wrote:I admit I have only used Vista for a short time so I can only give my first impressions, so my opinion on the audio system may change or not, however the rest of my argument still stands.

On top of that, an image of XP is roughly 570 mb, and image of Vista is roughly 2 GB. Is the size increase attributed for not compressing the system files so that installation could be fast? Or did they add 1.5gb worth of stuff?

Vista Business is 4 CDs long and took 2 hours to complete on a Core Duo 1.83GHz/1 GB RAM/SATA 1.5 Hard Drive.

Lame.

Vista Home Premium is on one DVD and took 20minutes to install on a 2.7ghz Opteron 170 =P