Ok so I skipped Vista & 7....should I download Win 8?

[nublikescake]

Blasphemy! Where's a pitchfork when you need one!

 

[BoomerD]

My laptop has XP Pro as does my secondary hard drive.

Vista is miles better...even with UAC.

I agree that in the beginning, Vista was a buggy POS with piss-poor driver support...but most of that has changed.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Sorry.. XP was better than the bloated crap known as Vista, but Win 7 is definitely better than XP.

That. The smart people skipped Vista and went from XP directly to 7. XP was a decent O/S, but there's no reason to be stuck with it forever. Windows 7 is nothing to be afraid of.

 

[Vic Vega]

My employer provides me with a wonderful Pentium 4 3.4GHz PC running XP SP2. It would be really great if this were 2005. Sadly, I'm stuck using it today and can't stand how slow and dated it is.

On my personal PCs I switched to Vista in July of 2006 when the stable betas hit. I have no problems with Vista and enjoyed it thoroughly over XP. I jumped to Win 7 when the betas came out and have been using it ever since.

XP was good for what it was and frankly, the PC really grew up with XP and it was during this time that more homes had PCs than those that didn't. The user base went nuts during XPs reign and for many users it was their first OS. It's no surprise it has stuck around 10 years.

I have no nastolgic connections to XP though so I moved on to Vista, a much superior operating system, as soon as it was available.

 

[Vic Vega]

That. The smart people skipped Vista and went from XP directly to 7. XP was a decent O/S, but there's no reason to be stuck with it forever. Windows 7 is nothing to be afraid of.

From my experience the dumb people skipped Vista and complain about it to this day, mostly because of their ignorance.

 

[reallyscrued]

XP > 7 > Vista.

I use 7 on both machines now for compatibility purposes, every once in a while you'll run across a driver or program that absolutely does not want to work nicely with XP x64. I've got a list of grievances with 7 though, many more than XP.

I have a feeling 8 is going to be riddles with "ease of use" and is going to sacrifice a lot of customization and power user options in the process. Apple's influence is too strong.

 

[Aikouka]

This. The only bad part about Vista really was manafacturer drivers. Drivers are no longer and issue and Vista became good after SP1. 7 is a ton better than XP ever was. I use XP every day at work and 7 at home and how much has changed.

It's actually kind of sad, because most people that spew the Vista vitriol have never even tried it. They simply think that because they heard there were driver issues when it came out (over 4 years ago), that it most definitely still must be bad! Even though Vista and 7 use the same drivers (they both use WDDM and UAA).

Although, Windows 7 is the first skinned OS where I use the "pretty theme."

 

[FelixDeCat]

I held on to XP for many years when everyone else was moving to Vista. I read the articles about Vista and the many problems with compatibility. All the while me and my XP were running strong without problems. I had my XP tweaked to run fast with no more blue screens of death. When Windows 7 came out, I felt it was just another Vista fad. I was getting my work done, I had no need for change. Month by month went by and I'm hearing about the faster Operating System from Windows 7. I still have no real reason to change, as why mess with something that has no problems. I know XP inside and out. Now I hear about a new Windows 8. Why would they change if Windows 7 is so great? What is wrong with windows 7 to cause a change? I can still buy Windows 7 in the store. My XP has not failed me, it continues to get my work done. I have literally no wait time in my computer work that a faster computer or operating system would better me. Why should I change from XP? Because some geekhead said so? I should risk my profitable business by changing all my computers over to some other operating system because some gamer believes XP is inferior to Vista, Window 7 and perhaps Window 8? I learned an old lesson a long time ago: If its not broke and working good, leave it alone.

Finally. The only one with brains around here. :thumbsup:

 

[Arkaign]

If only the benevolent AT gods would create an 'Operating Systems' subforum.

 

[reallyscrued]

I held on to XP for many years when everyone else was moving to Vista. I read the articles about Vista and the many problems with compatibility. All the while me and my XP were running strong without problems. I had my XP tweaked to run fast with no more blue screens of death. When Windows 7 came out, I felt it was just another Vista fad. I was getting my work done, I had no need for change. Month by month went by and I'm hearing about the faster Operating System from Windows 7. I still have no real reason to change, as why mess with something that has no problems. I know XP inside and out. Now I hear about a new Windows 8. Why would they change if Windows 7 is so great? What is wrong with windows 7 to cause a change? I can still buy Windows 7 in the store. My XP has not failed me, it continues to get my work done. I have literally no wait time in my computer work that a faster computer or operating system would better me. Why should I change from XP? Because some geekhead said so? I should risk my profitable business by changing all my computers over to some other operating system because some gamer believes XP is inferior to Vista, Window 7 and perhaps Window 8? I learned an old lesson a long time ago: If its not broke and working good, leave it alone.

For business purposes, I can definitely see where you're coming from, but for personal use, you are really going to be held back to only running office-type apps if you're still running such an archaic OS. In my experience, in order for everything to play nice, XP 32 bit Pro is the sweet spot, but that will limit you to 3.5 +/- .25 GB of RAM.

Honestly, I guess if I never played PC games I still wouldn't have made the switch.

If only the benevolent AT gods would create an 'Operating Systems' subforum.

That forum is useless. No one but a few people venture in there. The partitions of AT Forums are logical but they don't work well in practice in many cases.

 

[FelixDeCat]

XP > 7 > Vista.

I use 7 on both machines now for compatibility purposes, every once in a while you'll run across a driver or program that absolutely does not want to work nicely with XP x64. I've got a list of grievances with 7 though, many more than XP.

I have a feeling 8 is going to be riddles with "ease of use" and is going to sacrifice a lot of customization and power user options in the process. Apple's influence is too strong.

Apple is ruining life as we know it:

-First they ruined mp3 players by forcing us to use ID3 tag information as opposed to plain old filenames.

-Then they ruined smartphones by unseating Win Moblie (another fave of mine) by replacing it with idiot buttons and calling programs "apps" so they can set up an "app store", which pisses me off.

- Now they are about to ruin MS OSes with more flucking idiot buttons and less power user options so MS can also have an "app store". The fluck is that?

Why does Apple hate America?

 

[Arkaign]

It's actually kind of sad, because most people that spew the Vista vitriol have never even tried it. They simply think that because they heard there were driver issues when it came out (over 4 years ago), that it most definitely still must be bad! Even though Vista and 7 use the same drivers (they both use WDDM and UAA).

Although, Windows 7 is the first skinned OS where I use the "pretty theme."

You guys must have never tried to use Vista in a business environment. It was impossible for a time to get certain apps to work at all, and most of the major ones never got patched, you ended up having to spend thousands of dollars in software upgrades to applications that worked perfectly fine in XP, and there were TONS of these. Further, tons of hardware had issues with Vista, not so much on the consumer end, but it sucked @$$ when a plotter or drum scanner, or other expensive and perfectly working hardware had zero support for Vista.

It's arguable how much of this was Microsoft's fault, but the result was the same, the thing was ludicrously difficult to roll out for businesses for years. And when a small/medium business has already bought expensive software from around the same timeframe that won't work with Vista, that's a significant problem.

Vista also worked poorly on lower end hardware. It shipped on a lot of systems that had 512mb ram and shared video, which was a uniformly horrible experience. This is the fault of the OEMs that were that cheap.

Windows 7 didn't have the same initial problems because in general, the apps that wouldn't work on Vista had several years of new versions rolled out by the time Win7 hit, and the frustration of not being able to use an application loses a lot of the justification if you're trying to run a 5-year-old program, and further, you can use improved compatibility mode support or even XP mode to get past that. It's also more efficient than Vista, try running a Vista x64 Home Premium SP2 install on the same netbook that you try to run Win7 x64 Home Premium SP1 on, it's night and day.

 

[gaidensensei]

Microsoft can't make money if everyone clings onto XP. Soon they won't have any more customers if everyone in the world had XP. Periodic OS rehauls are mandatory to keep the business going.

It kind of reminds me of the whole biz in retro-computing. I know those of you geeks who still are clinging onto their P3 800mhz in win2000 with 128mb ram, you get kudos for staying in that cave, but if you want to move on with the times... you know what to do.

 

[Oil]

Apple is ruining life as we know it:

-First they ruined mp3 players by forcing us to use ID3 tag information as opposed to plain old filenames.

-Then they ruined smartphones by unseating Win Moblie (another fave of mine) by replacing it with idiot buttons and calling programs "apps" so they can set up an "app store", which pisses me off.

- Now they are about to ruin MS OSes with more flucking idiot buttons and less power user options so MS can also have an "app store". The fluck is that?

Why does Apple hate America?

So let me get this straight:

- Better information and organization of music files is bad.

- A better and easier mobile user experience is bad.

- A better and easier desktop user experience is bad.

BTW, you're not even a power user. You're still on XP lol

 

[FelixDeCat]

Microsoft can't make money if everyone clings onto XP. Soon they won't have any more customers if everyone in the world had XP. Periodic OS rehauls are mandatory to keep the business going.

It kind of reminds me of the whole biz in retro-computing. I know those of you geeks who still are clinging onto their P3 800mhz in win2000 with 128mb ram, you get kudos for staying in that cave, but if you want to move on with the times... you know what to do.

 

[ultimatebob]

Yeah... I can't understand why some people around here look back so fondly at Windows Vista. It was slow, buggy, and had lousy driver support until a year after it's release.

Personally, I think that it was the worst operating system Microsoft ever released. Even Windows ME gave me fewer hassles.

That said, anyone who's still using XP at this point is living in the past. Windows 7 works great... it's time to upgrade.

 

[Ms. DICKINSON]

If XP supports modern quad core, 16gb ram, I'll hop on it in a heartbeat. Not happy with 7.

 

[Mark R]

There were several 'problems' with Vista that made people hate it:

1. Microsoft changed the security model. With XP and prior, the default configuration was to log in as admin. With vista and beyond, the default was to log in as a limited user (even if the user was technically an administrator - i.e. UAC). This broke a lot of incorrectly written software. In particular, a lot of businesses with custom-written tools ran into a lot of difficulty where specialist applications stopped running.

2. Microsoft changed the way that user profiles worked to support the enhanced security model. On XP and previously, anyone could change anything in any directory (including the windows directory and program files directories) by default. In Vista this disappeared - programs that were incorrectly written (Microsoft did provide clear details in their programming toolkits for XP, but many programmers ignored the advice and wrote their 'XP' applications the 'old' way) failed to work.

3. Poor driver support at launch. MS changed the driver model to make it more robust, secure and future-proof. This required peripheral drivers to be rewritten, many low-end OEMs didn't bother and simply didn't issue vista drivers. Some did, but they were buggy and unreliable.

4. It came with IE7. The stricter security policies in IE7, and better adherence to web standards broke a lot of webapps that were developed for IE6 and before. The IE7 in vista can't be downgraded to full IE6 compatibility, which can be a showstopping problem for businesses that run on web-based tools.

5. It was a lot more resource intensive than XP, and the hardware at the time wasn't really up to the task. MS had internally expected hardware to advance faster than it did, and the design hardware was unrealistic at launch time (even with a number of features culled from the final release)

It's debatable how much this was really a problem with Vista, or a problem with the myriad of old software (and the heritage of MS's previous bad practice) that was either of poor quality, or had used features of XP that were considered 'bad practice'.

Remarkably little has changed between vista and 7. But why has 7 had such a different reception? It's probably simply that there has been sufficient time for much of the non-vista compatible software to fall by the wayside, and for drivers to have matured to a stable level.

 

[Anubis]

I'm in the "Vista works great for me" group.

Is it the best OS evar? NO...but it's better than XP.

this

i started using it the day it came out and has 1 issue, and that wasn't a vista issue it was another company too lazy to fix their software issue

also what Mark R wrote is spot on

 

[Fingolfin269]

Lol why use XP when you can use DOS instead?

 

[Aikouka]

You guys must have never tried to use Vista in a business environment. It was impossible for a time to get certain apps to work at all, and most of the major ones never got patched, you ended up having to spend thousands of dollars in software upgrades to applications that worked perfectly fine in XP, and there were TONS of these. Further, tons of hardware had issues with Vista, not so much on the consumer end, but it sucked @$$ when a plotter or drum scanner, or other expensive and perfectly working hardware had zero support for Vista.

I'm mostly referring to the typical Windows 7 vs Windows Vista "debate" that goes on. Vista was essentially plagued with (as you add to it with examples in your own post) lazy/cheap developers/manufacturers. Maybe you could say that Microsoft is also at fault for introducing so many under-the-hood changes into Vista, but (if memory serves me correctly) it's not like they sprung the changes onto developers a few months before release.

EDIT:

Here's an interesting driver story... well, probably not that interesting. A friend of mine had been complaining about blue screens on his Vista machine. I believe they were the usual and fun IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL one, and after checking RAM and HDD, nothing showed signs of having a problem. Out of curiosity, he upgraded to Windows 7, and he didn't have as many blue screens, but they still occurred. One day, he started talking a bit more about his PC and he said three dreaded words Creative Sound Card. Apparently, his PC had one and he forgot to mention this earlier. I just told him to try removing the card and relying on on-board sound, and he's never had a blue screen since.

If I remember correctly, Creative didn't even want to support Vista, and a user ended up writing drivers instead?

 

[JulesMaximus]

If you arent booting off of a SSD and using 64 bit Win7, you probably have no idea what you are talking about.


Also: Total troll


BTW, new PC games are going to stop including XP support.

Add in 4GB RAM and a quad core processor and you just described my rig.

 

[Merad]

Lol why use XP when you can use DOS instead?

DOS is for losers. When I do anything on my PC I want to write out every instruction manually. In machine code. :awe:

 

[Mark R]

If I remember correctly, Creative didn't even want to support Vista, and a user ended up writing drivers instead?

Creative released extremely limited drivers for Vista, as a result, card owners who upgraded to vista lost many of the 'premium features' that were unique to their card.

A Brazilian hobbiest programmer analysed the drivers, and found that the drivers were deliberately deactivated the features on vista. He hacked the drivers to remove the OS check, and found that the drivers worked just as well as on XP. While he was digging inside the drivers, he also fixed a couple of bugs that creative had refused to do so.

He eventually got into trouble, and Creative tried to sue him, because he discovered that all the different 'advanced premium' features that differentiated the whole family of soundblaster variants was simply switches in the driver software. When he published his 'fixed' drivers he simply deactivated all the 'feature' switches, so that a base-model soundblaster card, would be detected as, and work as a top-of-the-range model.

 

[Bateluer]

I went from XP to Vista 64 to 7 64, but purchased Vista and Win7 under educational licenses. Both Vista and 7 were far superior to XP in every way imaginable. The glitches with Vista were related to manufacturer drives, most prominently Nvidia, who were basically lazy and didn't bother to write drivers for months after the OS was released. Despite having the Betas and RCs before end users did. I had ATI hardware at the time, and Vista ran great.

The second knock against Vista was the hardware at the time. Despite Microsoft being very clear and upfront about what hardware Vista needed with their Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready ads, manufacturers sold machines with the bare minimum Vista Capable specs. Slow CPUs, and 512MB of RAM, systems that even XP would struggle with once you tried any multitasking. The lawsuit against MS for this amounted to 'We were too stupid to understand what you were telling us, so we're suing you'. Ironically, 7 had higher system requirements than Vista. It was just that over the 3 years since Vista was released, hardware vendors had finally gotten their crap together and wrote some polished drivers and 2GB+ of RAM became standard for OEM PCs.

Will I buy Win8? Probably, but certainly not around launch day. I don't have the luxury of getting educational pricing any more, so it'd be full price. And with PC gaming getting so heavily consolized, I have little motivation to move from Win7. Heck, if I didn't enjoy the few remaining good games that come out these days, I'd be on Mint entirely.