Why do people hate Vista?

[Scooby Doo]

Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

Heh...tell me about it. Just installed Home Premium x64 for the first time.

I've already had 5 hard-locks in less than an hour. I blame Creative's drivers :|

 

[Noema]

Turns out that (apparently) Vista didn't like my overclock very much...

 

[Scooby Doo]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

Heh...tell me about it. Just installed Home Premium x64 for the first time.

I've already had 5 hard-locks in less than an hour. I blame Creative's drivers :|

Ouch! Thank goodness I don't have a creative sound card too. I'm having enough troubles with the ide drivers. Mine usually stalls out during a save. Might as well go get a cup of coffe for something that usually takes a few seconds.

 

[Noema]

After about two hours of goofing around, going back to stock speeds, patching the OS up to date, installing newest drivers, updating the BIOS and then bumping the overclock back, Vista x64 finally feels stable.

And I have to say...I like it thus far. Seems really fast.

 

[VladMM]

It is fast! And a hell of a lot nicer to look at.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: Sunner
Kinda like me and my car come to think of it.
I drive a Saab 900, it's not that old(-95), but it's got quite a few kilometres on it, and it's starting to show.
The A/C can't cool, the gearbox requires some..."special skill", it's starting to rust, the hand brake isn't very good(have to have it tuned up now and then, cheap enough that I don't care that much though), transmission probably won't last much longer, etc.
I've been thinking about buying myself a nice BWM, it's quite tempting, but I just can't motivate myself enough to go forth with it as long as the ole Saab gets me to work every day.

You can't compare an OS to a car. The fundamental function of a car is to get you from point A to point B. No more, no less. Normally, you start at point A, 10 minutes later you arrive at point B, then you're completely done with the car. That's why I drive a 1990 Corolla. It's crap, but it does what needs to be done.

Operating systems are a lot more complicated. Sure, you can argue that XP does what you need it to do, and it "just works." I can't argue with that, but Vista does everything XP can do, and it does it more efficiently. Why do people who like Vista, like Vista? What is their reason? From a logical perspective, if it offers no improvements over XP, then why do they prefer Vista? If it's just XP with Vista Transform Pack slapped on, then why even bother going for the real thing? It doesn't make sense. There has to be some improvements that put it ahead of XP. Whether you want to discover these improvements for yourself or not is another issue altogether. You can choose to avoid Vista simply for the sake of avoiding it, or you can invest some time in adapting to a more modern OS.

Well, aside from what I stated in a previous post, about my desktops being reasonably uniform across Windows, Linux, and even Solaris, as was stated, it's also a matter of differing opinions.
Chances are you don't particularly like vi.
I do, I love vi, it's by far the best general purpose editor out there.
It takes a while to get used to, after all it's nothing like notepad, gedit, or whatever else floats your boat.
I'm not going to go around telling others to learn it, if they like notepad then that's fine, they're probably used to it, and it does what they need.
Also, there's only so much a UI can do, say a specific task takes me 10 seconds with UI X, then someone comes out with UI Y, where this task would take 8 seconds.
Would it be worthwhile for me to get used to UI Y? Probably not.

An OS is there to let me get going, start applications, arbitrate hardware resources, etc.
The time I spend actually doing stuff with the OS itself is so insignificant that even if it could be reduced by 90%, this wouldn't be significant to me in actual time saved.
Heck, throw the Windows 3.1 window manager on top of Vista's kernel and I could get along reasonably well anyways, though I'd still prefer the 2K/XP Classic window manager

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Noema
After about two hours of goofing around, going back to stock speeds, patching the OS up to date, installing newest drivers, updating the BIOS and then bumping the overclock back, Vista x64 finally feels stable.

And I have to say...I like it thus far. Seems really fast.

I wouldn't be surprised if Vista is less forgiving of an overclock. Because of some added security features Vista is much more likely to choke on a bitflip than XP was. Overclocking does some pretty awful stuff even on a system that *appears* stable.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: Noema
After about two hours of goofing around, going back to stock speeds, patching the OS up to date, installing newest drivers, updating the BIOS and then bumping the overclock back, Vista x64 finally feels stable.

And I have to say...I like it thus far. Seems really fast.

I wouldn't be surprised if Vista is less forgiving of an overclock. Because of some added security features Vista is much more likely to choke on a bitflip than XP was. Overclocking does some pretty awful stuff even on a system that *appears* stable.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking. I think I'm going to try the OC for a few days and at the first signs of instability I'll go back to stock. It's a very mild OC, mind you: an E6400 @ 2.66GHz, nothing extreme.

So far Vista is considerably faster than XP, not only in multitasking and general usage (WMP 11 opens in a heartbeat, and the library is smooth to browse instantly, as opposed to XP where it has to read the index off disk every time and it makes it extremely choppy until the whole thing is cached into RAM...well, that's with 400+ albums ) but also games show little difference in performance compared to XP.

By the way...Windows Update is suggesting I download the nVidia SATA drivers (I have a nforce 650 mobo)...I usually don't install nVidia's SATA drivers in XP and rather use the stock Windows ones....do you recommend installing nVidia's SATA drivers in Vista, Smilin?

 

[StopSign]

Install nVidia's drivers if you want the fancy SATA features like hotplugging. Otherwise, just use the Microsoft ones.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: Noema
After about two hours of goofing around, going back to stock speeds, patching the OS up to date, installing newest drivers, updating the BIOS and then bumping the overclock back, Vista x64 finally feels stable.

And I have to say...I like it thus far. Seems really fast.

I wouldn't be surprised if Vista is less forgiving of an overclock. Because of some added security features Vista is much more likely to choke on a bitflip than XP was. Overclocking does some pretty awful stuff even on a system that *appears* stable.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking. I think I'm going to try the OC for a few days and at the first signs of instability I'll go back to stock. It's a very mild OC, mind you: an E6400 @ 2.66GHz, nothing extreme.

So far Vista is considerably faster than XP, not only in multitasking and general usage (WMP 11 opens in a heartbeat, and the library is smooth to browse instantly, as opposed to XP where it has to read the index off disk every time and it makes it extremely choppy until the whole thing is cached into RAM...well, that's with 400+ albums ) but also games show little difference in performance compared to XP.

By the way...Windows Update is suggesting I download the nVidia SATA drivers (I have a nforce 650 mobo)...I usually don't install nVidia's SATA drivers in XP and rather use the stock Windows ones....do you recommend installing nVidia's SATA drivers in Vista, Smilin?

Use the newest that have been through the WHQL labs. Be that from nVidia or windows udpate. I don't believe signed drivers kick of an automatic system restore point like unsigned do so make one of those first.

 

[toadeater]

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: toadeater

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

Nope, but Vista is much more different from XP than Xp was from 2k.

You are right about XP supporting much more hardware at the time than Vista supports now, and I'd say that the major underlying changes are the cause of that.

Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: toadeater

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

In my case my hardlocks were not due to bad drivers but a bad overlock.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: toadeater
You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

XP was actually worse when it was first released. Most of the applications and drivers were based on 9x technology. Since XP was the first consumer operating system based on NT technology, compatibility was broken for many applications and a lot of hardware. (Win 2000 Pro was a business operating system and was not intended for home use.)

Many games would not work with XP at all and performance was shoddy on a lot of games due to immature drivers. Most enthusiast I knew would not touch XP for a couple of years after it's release for precisely the same reasons they avoid Vista.

I don't believe you have a faulty memory. It is just that XP has been around over 5 years. It has been well supported and stable for 4 of those 5 years. I even have a hard time remembering all the problem XP caused when it was first released.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Nope, but Vista is much more different from XP than Xp was from 2k.

You are right about XP supporting much more hardware at the time than Vista supports now, and I'd say that the major underlying changes are the cause of that.

The problem with this statement is that win2k was not marketed and sold to the home consumer. Win2k certainly helped hardware and software companies get compatible products out the door faster for XP. But most home consumer products on the market at xp's release did not come with XP support out of the box. Downloading XP drivers was a no go for most people due to the slow speeds of dial-up.

Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

People said the exact same thing about XP upon it's release.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: soonerproud

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Nope, but Vista is much more different from XP than Xp was from 2k.

You are right about XP supporting much more hardware at the time than Vista supports now, and I'd say that the major underlying changes are the cause of that.

The problem with this statement is that win2k was not marketed and sold to the home consumer. Win2k certainly helped hardware and software companies get compatible products out the door faster for XP. But most home consumer products on the market at xp's release did not come with XP support out of the box. Downloading XP drivers was a no go for most people due to the slow speeds of dial-up.

Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

People said the exact same thing about XP upon it's release.

People said that because it was true then, and true now. A midrange used system when XP was released had 64 or 128mb of memory, 10-20gb hard drive, 500-800mhz cpu, etc. That kind of hardware just ran better on 2k/98se.

Today, low/midrange used systems have 256-512mb of memory, 80-160gb hard drives, and 1.6-2.4ghz processors, give or take. This kind of hardware just runs better with XP.

Of course, new systems back then, and new systems now, so long as the OEM doesn't gimp you on the ram, will run great with the new OS.

And as far as hardware support for legacy hardware at XP's release, I'm sorry, but you're a bit off the mark. Hardware support on XP was incredibly good for the guts n glory hardware (Video/Sound/Modem/Chipset/Network). I can take my original XP Pro CD (no SP1/SP2), and install it on virtually ANY pc released '99-'01, and it will already have working drivers for it. There were very few drivers that 98se/me had that weren't in XP. Hell, XP even has generic drivers for 300 baud modems. Ditto for all the de facto chipsets of the era, Via/Sis/Intel/ALi/etc.

Vista has driver issues with a lot of recent 'in-the-box' hardware, notably the creative sound cards and Nforce2 chipsets.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

What constitutes high-end? My laptop with a 1 GHz T5600 and 1 GB of memory runs Vista like butter. Don't tell me the average dual-core desktop can't handle it while my laptop in power saving mode can.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

What constitutes high-end? My laptop with a 1 GHz T5600 and 1 GB of memory runs Vista like butter. Don't tell me the average dual-core desktop can't handle it while my laptop in power saving mode can.

That's surprising. Several new out-of-the-box 1gb dual-core Compaq/HP notebooks I've set up recently for clients have run very sluggishly with Vista.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Vista is very good, but Vista is really only suitable for new/high-end systems. The rest should stick with XP until they can afford new hardware.

What constitutes high-end? My laptop with a 1 GHz T5600 and 1 GB of memory runs Vista like butter. Don't tell me the average dual-core desktop can't handle it while my laptop in power saving mode can.

That's surprising. Several new out-of-the-box 1gb dual-core Compaq/HP notebooks I've set up recently for clients have run very sluggishly with Vista.

I guess it also depends on what type of HDD they have. Many laptops come with 5400RPM models which really kill performance.

 

[Noema]

I must also add that I'm impressed with Vista's dual monitor support. So far, leaps and bounds better than XP.

EDIT: I also like how image files on the desktop show a preview of the image instead of just a generic icon for the file type. Gnome (and others I'm sure) have been doing this for a while now but it's nice to finally see it in Windows too.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Originally posted by: StopSign
What constitutes high-end? My laptop with a 1 GHz T5600 and 1 GB of memory runs Vista like butter. Don't tell me the average dual-core desktop can't handle it while my laptop in power saving mode can.

That's surprising. Several new out-of-the-box 1gb dual-core Compaq/HP notebooks I've set up recently for clients have run very sluggishly with Vista.

Not surprising at all. Vista simply isn't that demanding of hardware. My laptop is also running Aero with transparency using a GMA950. It's barely any more sluggish than no transparency.

The store bought laptops will most likely be MUCH faster after a clean format and install.

Originally posted by: Noema
I guess it also depends on what type of HDD they have. Many laptops come with 5400RPM models which really kill performance.

That's not really a big issue. My laptop has a 5400rpm drive and it's fine. It's definitely slower than 7200rpm drives but it's not the difference maker between "smooth" and "sluggish."

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: toadeater

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

Either your memory is short or your experiences atypical. XP had far worse compatibility problems when it was released than Vista. It also supported far fewer devices. Also Win9x was a lot faster on games than 2000 (or later XP) when running identical hardware. Many stuck with 9X when it came out simply because of the gaming. XP didn't start becoming faster at games until the hardware became fast enough that 9x couldn't take proper advantage of it.

Frankly if you are crashing or having stability problems it is far more likely to be your hardware or drivers than Vista. If you run Vista with signed drivers and don't cram it full of 3rd party kernel-level apps it is very stable. The big problem with Vista's stability is merely the perception of it. Few people troubleshoot a crash down to the real root cause. They just throw up their hands and say, "the os crashed!".

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: toadeater

Originally posted by: Scooby Doo
Well my reset button is getting a nice workout with Vista... rarely had to use it with XP. Stupid drivers. isgust;

You can't blame everything on the drivers. XP was never this bad when it was released. I don't remember so many crash and instability problems when I first upgraded to XP.

Maybe I have a faulty memory, but I honestly don't remember XP being this bad. There were minor things, mostly security issues, but not so many problems with hardware. Games ran significantly better than in 9x (maybe because I bought more RAM for XP?), and overall XP was actually more stable. Can you say the same thing about Vista?

Either your memory is short or your experiences atypical. XP had far worse compatibility problems when it was released than Vista. It also supported far fewer devices. Also Win9x was a lot faster on games than 2000 (or later XP) when running identical hardware. Many stuck with 9X when it came out simply because of the gaming. XP didn't start becoming faster at games until the hardware became fast enough that 9x couldn't take proper advantage of it.

Frankly if you are crashing or having stability problems it is far more likely to be your hardware or drivers than Vista. If you run Vista with signed drivers and don't cram it full of 3rd party kernel-level apps it is very stable. The big problem with Vista's stability is merely the perception of it. Few people troubleshoot a crash down to the real root cause. They just throw up their hands and say, "the os crashed!".

Could you clarify that statement somewhat for me? I agree that Vista overall can run almost any hardware outside of some troublesome items (mfg at fault), but can't remember any common internal PC hardware that I couldn't run on XP. I worked at a PC shop back then as well, and installed XP on countless systems. Most of the time, the XP drivers worked right out of the box, and other times, I'd have to download updates. But only a half-dozen or less times was I simply unable to make a device function under XP. One of them was a really rare Diamond 3d card that my brother had bought a few years earlier, I think it was Edge3d or something. It was far before 3dfx Voodoo1.

 

[wwswimming]

i will be using XP for another year or 2. i don't hate Vista, i just don't feel a
need for it.

the only people that i hear that have strong feelings like that, are people
who tried Vista, and in some way shape or form, "it screwed" them.
they lost data or a whole bunch of time.