Happy with Vista! Am I in the minority?

[cockeyed]

I've used Vista for the past year and am happy with it. I just had to get a few new drivers and program updates, then everything worked great. The many Vista forums and Tip sites have been a help learning about Vista. The UAC was initially a pain, but TweakUAC running in silent mode solved that problem for me. In case someone is not aware of this program get it here. It does not install itself on your machine.

BTW, I'm running Vista HP on a P4-3.0 with a Radeon 850XT and 1.5 gb ram; it runs well.

 

[pcslookout]

I love windows vista but wanted my santa cruz sound card to work in so I had to force myself to go back to vista 32 bit from vista 64. My onboard sound is ok but nothing like my santa cruz sound card. My onboard sound card volume is so low compared to my santa cruz. I don't mind the sound quality of the sound on my motherboard but it is just not loud enough. Sure it works fine in Vista 64 bit but I need it to be louder and that just isn't going to happen. I don't want to have to buy a amp either. Sooner or later I will get a 64 bit driver for my santa cruz so I can run it in vista 64 bit instead of vista 32 bit. Luckily I only have 4 GB of ram so I don't loose much ram in vista 32 bit. I just use the left over ram for a ram drive that the OS can't see.

 

[Griffinhart]

The truth is, Vista is probably doing much better than everyone thinks it is in spite of all of the negative press about it. We always hear about how companies are refusing to go to Vista and such, but they don't mentions that corporations always wait a long time before migrating OSs. Most IT professionals out there have stories of how they only migrated to XP just a year or two ago. Whey should we, especially the IT focused media, suddenly be shocked that businesses aren't jumping on the latest OS considering the costs, effort and software compatibility issues that always come with upgrading to a new OS?

On his latest Windows Weekly Podcast, Paul Thurrott brings up a very interesting point. While people like to point out that Vista was sold on less than half of the PCs sold in 2007, there really aren't any similar figures of the percentage of XP PCs sold in its initial year. We do, however know that XP had an install base of just under 10% of all PCs at the end of its first year. Vista has an install base of just over 10% after its first year. Clearly, the worse we can say about vista adoption rates is that it's no worse than Windows XP given this information.

Originally posted by: pm
I like it well enough - but it seemed expensive for what it is. There's too many versions and the high-end versions are too expensive given what they are. $300 for Vista Ultimate Retail Upgrade? I think Microsoft would have a lot more happy customers if they cut their prices in half.

I do think that MS should have really only had two editions. Business and Home. They should have also had features like Previous Versions on all editions of Vista. But with that said...

Vista isn't as expensive as most think. But the amount of SKUs really do confuse the issue. When XP was released there were only two editions. Home ($99 for the retail upgrade) and Pro($199 for the retail upgrade)

The direct comparisons for Vista are Home Basic ($99 retail upgrade) and Business ($199 retail upgrade)

Later MS released XP Media Center Edition, but there was never a retail version. But, OEM copies were available for roughly $130. Now we have Home Premium who's OEM version is $110 with an option of a retail version of $150. So on a direct comparison Vista is actually cheaper than XP MCE.

Vista Ultimate doesn't have a direct comparison and it's honestly kind of an odd duck.

 

[JustaGeek]

$150 buys the Upgrade verson of Vista Home Premium.

Retail sells for ~$230.

 

[Griffinhart]

The retail upgrade version sells for $150 while the retail full version sells for $230. Neither versions had a similar version of XP since the Media Center Edition of windows never had a retail version at all.

XP Home had OEM, Full retail, Upgrade retail.
XP Pro had the same.
XP MCE only had OEM.

It's an important distinction since prior to Vista there were no versions of Media Center with the same licensing flexability that the retail license affords over OEM versions. that's why there is no valid price comparison of any version of XP to the retail versions of Vista Home Premium.

So based on feature sets of the XP and Vista editions Vista has the same cost of XP. It just happens to throw in a few other options that were never available in XP.