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Poll

Windows 7 due in 2010 — will you hold out and skip Vista?

YES, I'm happy with XP
235 (77.3%)
NO, I'll use Vista
61 (20.1%)
Still using Win98!
1 (0.3%)
I don't use Windows
3 (1%)
Don't know or don't care
4 (1.3%)

Total Members Voted: 287

Last post Author Topic: XP or Vista user — take the poll!  (Read 80393 times)

Ralf Maximus

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #125 on: October 07, 2007, 11:55 AM »
Well, I didn't really use FDISK.  Call it artistic license.  But I did reinstall over the partition with a fresh copy of Windows 2000.  Why Win2000?  Because I often need to perform retrograde testing on the same operating system as my customers use, and about 1/3 are still on Win2000 SP4.

BTW, Win2000 installed perfectly, found the network right away (*sob*) and allowed me to install everything I needed.  It's been years since I reinstalled 2000, and I'd forgotten how simple things used to be.

DRM?  Eek!  I meant UAC.  Which is closely related to WTF but I digress.

And anybody who says VS6 should not be supported by the current operating system has cursed themselves.  Someday you will try to install an older beloved/necessary application and be foiled by the New Hotness (whatever that may be) and on that day I will magically appear, point my finger at you and say, "HA! Sir, and HA! again."

Darwin

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #126 on: October 07, 2007, 12:28 PM »
I bought a Toshiba notebook with Vista Home Premium on it yesterday morning and am just waiting for the store to open so that I can return it... Actually, Vista itself I quite like and the hardware is magnificent but I just keep wishing I had XP Pro on it. I have a first generation centrino notebook (1.4 Ghz, 1 GB 266Mhz RAM with 279 programmes installed) running XP Pro and the performance differences between it and the Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB 667 Mhz RAM that I bought are not great enough to justify having made the purchase. That coupled with the number of times that I had to reboot the new computer and watch either a Toshiba utility or a Windows utility configure my machine has left me with a permanent tick... Seriously, it took about an hour and a half to get to the point where I was looking at the desktop - what happened to the good old days when you bought a notebook and the only thing you had to wait to "do" was run it off the battery? Note that what concerns me about the boot time with the new machine is that this is after using it with only StarOffice, Webroot Spysweeper with Antivirus, and YourUninstaller 2006 installed and surfing the web and noodling around with the StarOffice suite (wanted to get a sense of how it handled multitasking with something other than notepad and the Office 2007 demo). So, it's got fewer than 50 apps installed and runs 28 processes after booting to the desktop. My older Centrino has 279 apps installed and is running 46 processses after booting to desktop and does so in roughly the same amount of time as does Vista.

The new machine is more comfortable multi-tasking but it doesn't boot any more quickly and I might as well get my money back and wait until I *have* to upgrade my hardware before doing so. I backup my harddrive obsessively, so configuring a new machine in an emergency will be only slightly more aggravating than setting up the current one. The attraction of this is that the longer I wait, the sexier the hardware is going to be (and hopefully Vista will be that much better at utilizing the resources on offer).

Incidentally, I still have a PIIIE notebook running Win2k Sp-4 and it's still more than capable - runs Office 2003 just as quickly as the centrino does on half the RAM (512MB 100Mhz).

Sorry for the rambling and incoherent post...
« Last Edit: October 07, 2007, 12:30 PM by Darwin »

Armando

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #127 on: October 07, 2007, 04:25 PM »
Incidentally, I still have a PIIIE notebook running Win2k Sp-4 and it's still more than capable - runs Office 2003 just as quickly as the centrino does on half the RAM (512MB 100Mhz).

Yup. Let's all go back to win2k!  ;) (that's 7 years ago... a long time in computer time... Amazing.)

Josh : apart from the 3 aspects F0dder mentioned earlier (DX10, Hybrid flash/harddrives, and Vista only apps) what would be, in your opinion, the benefits of switching to Vista now ?

Darwin

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #128 on: October 07, 2007, 10:53 PM »
Guess what - fired up the Win2k machine after I posted above and the monitor is shot (looks like something dropped on it...). It works but there's a big, inky black spider web in the upper right hand corner extenging into the middle of the screen  :( I guess I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for a parts machine going cheap. Too bad - I feel like I've lost an old friend.

PhilB66

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Ralf Maximus

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #130 on: October 30, 2007, 02:18 PM »
Guess what - fired up the Win2k machine after I posted above and the monitor is shot (looks like something dropped on it...). It works but there's a big, inky black spider web in the upper right hand corner extenging into the middle of the screen

Eek! 

On the off chance... this is a tube monitor, right?  Does it have a degauss button?

Sometimes a strong magnetic field in close proximity will cause CRTs to display large black purplish bruises on one or another edge.  Degaussing it would be a free fix, if it works.

If you live in the Atlanta area, I have two ancient but still working 21" CRT monitors, just taking up space in my server room.  Yours for the takin'.

Darwin

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #131 on: October 30, 2007, 08:48 PM »
Thanks for the tip, Ralf, but sadly it's a notebook with an LCD  :(

Great Scott! You're in the Atlanta region? My wife is from Savannah but went to school in Atlanta and still has family there. We live on Vancouver Island in Canada now, so several thousand kilometres away. Thank you very much for the offer, though!

f0dder

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #132 on: October 31, 2007, 06:18 AM »
On the off chance... this is a tube monitor, right?  Does it have a degauss button?

Sometimes a strong magnetic field in close proximity will cause CRTs to display large black purplish bruises on one or another edge.  Degaussing it would be a free fix, if it works.
Tube monitors (the last few I had before going TFT) tended to de-gauss by themselves on power-on, so a de-gauss button probably wouldn't have helped much... there's some stronger de/re-whatever-magnetizing devices that can be used in the severe cases, my mum got our TV fixed back several years ago with one... that was back when I thought it was fun to play with magnets and went all "ooooh, the news reporter is purple :D".
- carpe noctem

Ralf Maximus

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #133 on: October 31, 2007, 07:58 AM »
Thanks for the tip, Ralf, but sadly it's a notebook with an LCD  :(

DANGER!  DO NOT, REPEAT DO NOT, DEGAUSS THE LCD PANEL.

Great Scott! You're in the Atlanta region? My wife is from Savannah but went to school in Atlanta and still has family there. We live on Vancouver Island in Canada now, so several thousand kilometres away. Thank you very much for the offer, though!

Next time you come to visit family, let me know.  We'll go have a pint, I'll take you to Microcenter, and make you buy really expensive toys your wife will *love*.

:-)

Ralf Maximus

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #134 on: October 31, 2007, 08:03 AM »
Tube monitors (the last few I had before going TFT) tended to de-gauss by themselves on power-on...

Ah!  Mystery solved, albeit 5+ years late.

I once had this 20" tube monitor, big as a beach-ball.  Upon power-on it would make this god-awful mmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMM (wait for it) GABUNG!!!  noise.  That was probably its auto-degausser, but at the time I thought it was about to kill me.

Another clue I should have noticed: All my paperclips would fly up out of the desk drawer and attach themselves to the glass.

f0dder

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #135 on: October 31, 2007, 10:49 AM »
Another clue I should have noticed: All my paperclips would fly up out of the desk drawer and attach themselves to the glass.
:D :D :D :-* :Thmbsup:
- carpe noctem

BinderDundat

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #136 on: October 31, 2007, 01:51 PM »
XP for me!!  I bought my first new computer in six years in 2006 just to be sure that I would not have to be saddled with Vista.  I had been happily using Win98 but the threat of built-in DRM and the enormous overhead that it requires spurred me into action.  The video drivers for video cards have become gigantic - one set of drivers for an nVidia board was as large as the NT 4.0 o/s.  It is no wonder that the Vista systems are slow with that kind of overhead.  The Vista components are now written in "modules".  There are 6 (I think) video modules, of which 4 are concerned with security.  The size of the o/s is another problem.  There is no way that the o/s code can be grown by a factor of eight without a performance hit.  As for the security of the o/s, it is a bit different from XP, so it will take a few months for the hackers to catch up.  From my recent reading, all that it means is that rootkits will be written in User mode rather than Kernel mode to circumvent the User Account Management feature.  All this wonderfulness is costing us money.  When there is a huge coding overhead for Vista drivers, hardware manufacturers will add that to the price of new hardware.  In addition, because of the performance hits, we will have to buy better hardware to enjoy the same performance.  Add this to the generally user-unfriendly approach of Microsoft - limited installs of the software you have actually paid good money for - activation on only one machine, ever, meaning that if you upgrade your hardware, your o/s may no longer work - and you can count me as a no for Vista, and a vote for XP only because there is not a better choice without having to learn Linux.  Every time I think about Vista, I come back to Linux.  I may go there yet.

Darwin

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #137 on: October 31, 2007, 04:01 PM »
Ralf - I'm not sure when I'll be in Atlanta next, but we'll definitely have to turn that visit into a mini-DC get together  :Thmbsup:

Curt

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #138 on: June 05, 2008, 05:52 AM »
Number of Voters:  1238
First Vote         :  Tuesday, 29 January 2008 21:48
Last Vote     :  Thursday, 05 June 2008 11:37

2k/XP: 62.8 %
Vista: 29.3 %

poll.gifXP or Vista user — take the poll!

take the poll from the link in the upper right corner at http://www.copyhandl...om/en/home/index.php

BTW: Copy Handler is very promising, but maybe not all finished, yet
- read test at FreewareGenius

Nxqd3051990

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #139 on: June 05, 2008, 10:03 PM »
I'd tried Vista for a week. It made no impression at all, I've switched to XP again :)
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crono

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Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!
« Reply #140 on: June 06, 2008, 09:24 AM »
I run Vista for the last 18 Month, but I'm going to switch back to XP. Vista is nice, but in my opinion XP "feels" better. I haven't had problems with Vista, but it feels weird - like something is not matching... Cant describe what it is :-\