Author Topic: To Vista or not to Vista that is the ? (Read 42720 times)

Grorgy · « **Reply #25 on:** May 03, 2007, 07:26 AM »

thanks for the replies, nlite seems the way to go, vlite appears to be for vista and i havent got around to buying it to break yet lol. thanks again much appreciated

Hirudin · « **Reply #26 on:** May 03, 2007, 07:45 AM »

If you have the system up and running right now, it's possible the updates are somewhere on your HDD. If you can find them and burn them or something it would save a lot of time. Might be worth a lil' research to not have to DL them again.

f0dder · « **Reply #27 on:** May 03, 2007, 08:05 AM »

There's always vLite, but I have never touched it.
-justice (May 03, 2007, 07:15 AM)

...Which is NuHi's, the author of nLite, new program to tweak vista

Ampa · « **Reply #28 on:** May 05, 2007, 08:52 AM »

Had my first experience of Vista this last week (my girlfriend's laptop came with it installed).

Pros...

it is very pretty.

Cons...

On a brand new dual core laptop it felt slow.

Just deleting things to the recycle bin took an age, while the pretty animation ran, and the glowing windows faded in and out, and the clever algorithm told me in a friendly manner that it was going to take less than 1 second to delete my text file.

Incompatible software

Out of four alternative media players that I tried (MPlayer UI, Media Player Clasic, VLC and GOM) none were properly compatible, all crashed with one media file or another.
Comodo Firewall didn't work, nor did SketchUp.

Unstable - I blue screened the system twice
Couldn't find ways to disable elements of the UI that we didn't like (eg favourites, within Explorer)

nLite is great, give it a try - I am using it as I type to create a WinXP cinfigured to my requirements.[/list]

Hirudin · « **Reply #29 on:** May 05, 2007, 03:31 PM »

Hmmm... doesn't sound too good. Personally, I wouldn't read into the problems you experienced too much.

Odd that deleting a txt file would take so long. It would be pretty hard to believe that they screwed up deleting... I mean, MS would have to be pretty stupid to have it work perfectly since DOS, but somehow muck it up in Vista. I'd say it's more likely that the computer you were on was jacked up somehow. Maybe some stupid crap software the manufacturer forced on you?

I personally don't see the fascination with Media Player Classic or VLC (unless you're running some kind of media server or something). MPlayer didn't work too good for me in XP IIRC (besides not being very good anyway as far as I could tell). I'm a little surprised about GOM though, since it's so similar to The KMPlayer, which is the media player that I'm using (right this very moment in fact) on my x64 Vista machine.

Also, I don't know anything about Comodo Firewall, except that after looking a little at their website I decided not to even try their firewall a couple months ago for my XP comp. But it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a firewall that so far as I can tell doesn't advertise being Vista compatible, in fact is NOT Vista compatible.

I don't know what to say about SketchUp... seems like Google would be more on the ball.

2 BSODs? That's more than I've seen... I've only seen one, on my not-powerful-enough laptop. I attributed it to the batteries being dead. Were they both while trying to use Comodo Firewall?

Yeah, those Favorites are causing other people problems too...
Is there a way to disable the Favourite Links Bar?
Although not the solution that you might be looking for, it probably works... (I just deleted all the links in the favorites and moved on. Now I use Directory Opus...)

Sorry Ampa, not just trying to shoot you down or anything. But Vista isn't an XP service pack (as much as the internet nerds want to treat it as such), it's a different OS with lots of changes and therefor incompatibilities.

If you can swing it, I'd suggest reinstalling Vista using another disc using your GF's key. With beyond compare I've personally verified the 32 bit Business retail and 32 bit Premium retail discs are exactly identical, and exactly identical to the 32 bit Premium OEM disc up until the last KB or so at the very end of the disc (1KB out of 2.5GB ain't too bad).

Grorgy · « **Reply #30 on:** May 05, 2007, 04:14 PM »

Was checking the tech alert newsletter, seems all the free firewalls arent vista compatible yet, but they are working on it so hopefully it wont be long.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #31 on:** May 05, 2007, 05:35 PM »

Odd that deleting a txt file would take so long. It would be pretty hard to believe that they screwed up deleting... I mean, MS would have to be pretty stupid to have it work perfectly since DOS, but somehow muck it up in Vista. I'd say it's more likely that the computer you were on was jacked up somehow. Maybe some stupid crap software the manufacturer forced on you?
-Hirudin (May 05, 2007, 03:31 PM)

There were some very odd things in the beta about deleting files - I seem to remember one complaint was it took about nine mouse clicks to achieve a simple delete. I presume it is fixed in the final version but nothing would surprise me any more!

Curt · « **Reply #32 on:** May 05, 2007, 05:48 PM »

Sleep mode is broken, it kills your session

-zridling (May 02, 2007, 08:43 AM)

Are you sure about this? I will find it most alarming!

f0dder · « **Reply #33 on:** May 06, 2007, 03:43 AM »

Deleting files was broken even on XP

- when I use shift+del to get rid of files instead of moving to recycle bin, every once in a while I would get 3-5 of the "are you sure?" messageboxes. Of course clicking *one* of them would delete the file, so saying yes to any of the others gives weird errors about the file not being there.

Fortunately just an explorer.exe bug, the underlying OS code is just fine, so no problems with xplorer^2. I assume the long-time-to-delete problem in vizzzduh is similar.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #34 on:** May 06, 2007, 04:03 AM »

Sleep mode is broken, it kills your session

-zridling (May 02, 2007, 08:43 AM)

Are you sure about this? I will find it most alarming!
-Curt (May 05, 2007, 05:48 PM)

Yes it was in the first public beta - to delete things you had to go through various dialogues that tried to persuade you not too. It was ludicrous (and not a bug) but I am sure it is sorted out in the final version (though I don't have it to try).

Hirudin · « **Reply #35 on:** May 06, 2007, 04:05 AM »

...various dialogues that tried to persuade you not too...
-Carol Haynes (May 06, 2007, 04:03 AM)

HAHAHA!

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #36 on:** May 06, 2007, 07:12 AM »

Here is one article about it http://www.neowin.ne...ct=view&id=33449

(see I wasn't mad!)

f0dder · « **Reply #37 on:** May 06, 2007, 07:15 AM »

Heh, that's insane

JeffK · « **Reply #38 on:** May 06, 2007, 07:20 AM »

I now have Vista on my laptop and I don't think I have that problem. I shall test it more thoroughly tomorrow, Aussie time.

Jeff

Mandork · « **Reply #39 on:** May 08, 2007, 02:52 PM »

In general, I like XP, but I think that's mostly because I've had it for so long and messed around with it so much that I'm pretty familiar with it. Despite my fiancé muttering about bit rot and installing every darn piece of crappy freeware (DC excluded, of course) and wierd Firefox extension that takes my fancy, I'm only recently starting to wonder about reformatting and reinstalling (for the first time!).

That being said, all the previews of Vista that I've seen make it look like it would irritate the heck out of me, and I think I'm going with Linux for the next computer I buy. No idea what flavor yet, but it's going to be at least a year or two barring major catastrophe. There's also the political and personal distaste for big closed corporate overlords, plus the fact that I can run just as many bells and whistles on a totally free distribution of Linux as I can on Vista, and the advantages start to fade.

The only thing is Word 2003--I have a serious love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand, it makes me angry almost every day. It has so many irritating problems! On the other, I have figured out how to customize it to within an inch of its life, and I find it really awkward to use other programs or default settings on other machines.

Has anyone tried the new Office? I really don't like the way the toolbars looked in screenshots, so I haven't even given it a second look.

Darwin · « **Reply #40 on:** May 08, 2007, 04:07 PM »

Another PhD procrastinator! Woo hoo - the ranks are swelling... Welcome to the boards, Mandork. You've come to the right place to set aside all things PhD (I'm ~~not~~ doing one on the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition - ie the Neanderthal "problem", but from a bio-anth perspective).

legion1978 · « **Reply #41 on:** May 09, 2007, 12:31 PM »

Well.. i remember i didnt want to switch to XP.. though finally i did, mostly because of the app support, which will happen eventually with vista. i really hope that by the time im suppossed to do the switch, id be a happy linux user

btw i did lay my hands on vista, it toook its time and reboots, although it was supposed to be installed from factory.. in the end,, i got pretty much what i already have: XP with nicer icons and "better" UI (vista bloatware)..
i really dont mind the technicall thing underneath,.. all i need to know its that it needs at least 1gb ram.. thats enough for me t stay away from it.. now with all that activation stuff.. c`mon..

Darwin · « **Reply #42 on:** May 09, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Well.. i remember i didnt want to switch to XP.. though finally i did, mostly because of the app support, which will happen eventually with vista.

I'm in the same boat. Funny (but completely understandable) how initially app support is dreadful and keeps people from upgrading, yet within 12-18 months everyone s clamouring to make the upgrade because 3rd party developers start dropping support for older Win flavours. No doubt this is a long way off for XP... one hopes!

EDIT: spelling correction

Subsailor · « **Reply #43 on:** May 09, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Vista

This is my personal experience.
I've been a PC user/gamer for about 25 years counting my C64 days.

World of Warcraft + Ventrilo = Vista's audio layer pegging CPU at 100%
Oblivion = Performance decrease unless Aero is turned off (one of the big selling points for vista)
EAX (creative audio standard that's been used for years) is not supported in Vista. That super fantabulous X-Fi card with 5.1 and EAX effects? Forget it. You get stereo.
The really handy "Windows has blocked some startup programs, click here to view them" window ALWAYS appears when you boot up. Can't select the programs/icons as "I know stop telling me".
UAC windows pops up when running a utility program. Requests permission to run. I like that. But why do I have to do it every single time I run my disk defragmenter? What, there's no option to flag this as a "permission granted always" program?

For an OS that's been in development for 5 years I was underwhelmed. 3 of the biggest suppliers of hardware addons to PC's didn't/don't have satisfactory drivers for Vista. Creative, ATI, Nvidia. The performance is laggy. Aero is pretty but a resource hog. Irritating popups. Absolutely no reason to upgrade from Windows XP in the foreseeable future. It's unfortunate that I did last month to try it out.

For the record my system has the following: 2gigs ram, 3.4G P4, ATI X1900XTX, X-FI, dual 10k rpm Raptors, etc.

That's my 2 cents

nite_monkey · « **Reply #44 on:** May 09, 2007, 12:57 PM »

wow, I have vista duel booted on my computer, and I have a fairly crapy computer, and vista runs perfect on it, and for deleting files, I can delete then fast, just like with xp, though I kind of like vista better, because firefox is messed up on my xp right now, dunno why, but it works perfectly on vista. I haven't ran into many problems yet.

lhammer · « **Reply #45 on:** May 10, 2007, 02:20 AM »

I liked XP, I like Vista. Is there something wrong with me $:-\$

Grorgy · « **Reply #46 on:** May 10, 2007, 03:35 AM »

nothing at all leigh, i think it all depends on what you are doing with your computer and if the programs you use have been modified for vista if they need it, i would have got it except i got my newest computer just a month or so b4 vista was available, too expensive for me to buy it, and xp does all i want anyway

Mandork · « **Reply #47 on:** May 10, 2007, 03:47 PM »

Darwin--Yay for archaeologists faffin away! But you get to use cool words like "morphometric". I'm stuck with "landscape".

Anyway, back on topic. The other thing that I am finding is that the more serious work I do, the more I find comparable (or sometimes better) apps that are open source or free, which I would image (naively?) means that the people who are interested in them will continue to make them work in XP flavor. A lot of them are originally Linux/Unix things, anyway, so when the time comes I will probably actually find it easier to run, say, GRASS GIS on a Linux box than my current XP one. Hopefully by that time, I will have passed through the serious procrastination stage and gone on to genuine research.... :

Jan-S · « **Reply #48 on:** May 10, 2007, 05:31 PM »

Having read an article about the consequences of Vista's DRM / Content Protection mechanisms several months ago (A Cost Analysis of Windows Content Protection), I've decided not to seriously try Vista. I will probably have to install it for testing purposes sooner or later, but when I drop XP somewhen it will be replaced by Linux, not Vista.

Hirudin · « **Reply #49 on:** May 10, 2007, 08:03 PM »

AnyDVD HD ($80, $30 upgrade from AnyDVD) supposedly removes HDCP. Content Protection problem solved it seems.