Your Windows Vista Experience

[Aiello]

With Microsoft's new OS being bashed so much, I was just curious as to how it is working for other people. PLEASE, only post if you use Vista on at least a semi-regular basis.

My Experience:
Running preloaded on a out of the box HP a6200n. The speed of Vista is okay and it looks very nice. I personally dislike the file hierarchy and I disabled UAC (user account control, its the thing that asks you "are you sure you want to do this?") so I wouldn't hit the computer with a baseball bat. I had some problems installing programs with UAC off. So, I had to turn it back on for a bit, and it asked my (no joke) six times if I wanted to install a program. And, oh yeah, it blue screen twice. By the second day. Seriously.

My conclusion: I dislike Vista, but I think I can live with it. I think.

[mellowd]

Slow. copying was a nightmare and just far too slugish. Explorer would also crash often.

My pc could easily handle it, but I'm back to XP on my main box

[bufsabre666]

quick for me i didnt really notice sluggishness

it had some imporvements over xp that i like, like drivers in the windows update

but other things, like the windows update not working


i guess im the odd ball, ive never had a crash with vista

[darksong]

It works fine for me. I have a laptop with it pre-loaded on and a pc which i built and loaded it on and both are very quick. I use xp on one hard drive on my pc and vista on another. XP is about 5 fps faster with games but loading applications and general usage feels nippier on vista than XP.

The preformance and driver support in vista is improving and coming along pretty nicely. I can now run guildwars pratically at the same rate as in xp now in vista (60 fps all the time) which suggest nvidia's drivers are coming along quite nicely.

I also like the look an feel of vista - everything feels intergrated and fits well together. Personally i have had an good experience with vista - i am yet to have a crash on my desktop or laptop.

Some people have had very bad experiences with vista - look around these board - but remeber this is a linux board - expect people to say baad things about it when 9/10 times they havn't used the os.

Hope this helps :)

[Antman]

I have it on my secondary laptop. I think it is fine so far; however I notice that my battery life isn't that good with it. Also it runs HOT on my laptop, so I will not run it for too long since i don't trust the heat levels. Once I get World of Warcraft to run on my Sidux box, I will dump Vista i think.

They need to restructure the price. I DON"T think it is worth buying in the store.

[fedex1993]

um i got vista with my laptop about umm a couple of months ago used it for one trip. and i detleted vista and installed ubuntu and it works fine. I am still using vista on my main box because of gaming but other than that i havnt had many problems at all i have actually never seen the blue screen of death before :lolflag: :)

[screaminj3sus]

Just built a new PC with Vista Home Premium 64 bit. No driver or software problems at all, running fast as hell with 4 gb ram, all programs open isntantly. Rock solid, All my games run flawlessly and with great fps. specs in sig. No file copying issues like other seem to be having, copies my 17 gigs of music over my network as fast as xp.

[kamaboko]

Let's see....I've used Vista Home Basic, Vista Professional, and Vista Ultimate 32bit/64bit versions. All said and done I like it. At this particular moment I love it because Call of Duty refuses to install on my Linux box. I had one BSOD with Vista Pro but that was due to bad memory. Other than that it has been solid.

[zipperback]

With Microsoft's new OS being bashed so much, I was just curious as to how it is working for other people. PLEASE, only post if you use Vista on at least a semi-regular basis.

My Experience:
Running preloaded on a out of the box HP a6200n. The speed of Vista is okay and it looks very nice. I personally dislike the file hierarchy and I disabled UAC (user account control, its the thing that asks you "are you sure you want to do this?") so I wouldn't hit the computer with a baseball bat. I had some problems installing programs with UAC off. So, I had to turn it back on for a bit, and it asked my (no joke) six times if I wanted to install a program. And, oh yeah, it blue screen twice. By the second day. Seriously.

My conclusion: I dislike Vista, but I think I can live with it. I think.

Vista came installed on my Acer laptop.
The laptop is a 2.2GHZ laptop.
With Vista the laptop would run very hot, and the battery would get used up really quickly if not plugged into the wall for AC power.
In addition the laptop would have heavy memory usage even when I wasn't running anything, in addition to it running like a machine that was considerably slower.

I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, and it now runs considerably cooler, is far more responsive, allows me to use it on the battery for a far longer time, and the memory usage is very low.

Overall the results from my personal experience from using Vista is one that speaks for itself.

My conslusion: :KS Vista is an inferior product to Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu and I know that I can stay with it by choice. And it's open source.:KS


- zipperback

[Giradman]

Bought a new Dell Latitude about 3 months ago (HD on older IBM TP X40 died - now running Ubuntu on it after replacing the drive & upping the RAM to 512 MB) w/ VISTA business installed - new laptop has 2 GB RAM - so far, I've not had any major problems w/ this new OS - using Windows Defender & AVG anti-virus; does 'wireless' networking w/ my Linksys rounter w/o a problem; using UAC (a pain but there for security issues, thus a 'trade off'). I had a few problems w/ some USB drives & an external 'older' HD that I used for backup. I have XP on my desktop (fairly new Dell) but don't plan to upgrade it to VISTA - at the moment, probably best to get VISTA on a new computer pre-installed in which compatibility is pretty much assurred. :)

[BreathEasy]

My experience has been with the 32-bit Ultimate version. It's been fairly solid I suppose - nothing like the disaster you tend to keep reading about. I just feel Ubunu is better on a technical level, and works better with my 2.5 year old hardware than Vista does.

I've had two BSODs, but they were actually due to crappy software. One was entirely my fault - I was trying to install an older version of Alcohol 120% that was KNOWN to not work in Vista, and despite being fully aware of this fact, I still tried it. Had to reformat. The second BSOD (and a couple others) was due to the fact that MacDrive, a program I use to fiddle around with my Leopard hackintosh, has a buggy driver that can occasionally take down the system when you do things like repair disk permission to the Mac partition. Note that in both cases the BSODs weren't Vista's fault directly, but other software. Upgrading to a newer version of Alcohol 120% and uninstalling MacDrive after doing what I needed to do, solved the problem.

Doesn't mean I don't like Ubuntu however, I much prefer it to Vista, but I can certainly work and do work just fine in Vista.

[digital_exhaust]

Two quick tips...

When installing software, leave UAC enabled, right click on the file your going to install and select "Run as Administrator".. that right there will save you a ton of headaches in the future. And for software installed without doing so, right click, Proprieties, Compatibility and check the box next to "Run as Administrator.

Second, Vista SP1 RC (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9de6260e-4275-482d-9524-de850c4dd91c&displaylang=en) is publicly available, and so far, it seems to speed things up noticeably, in particular file transfers... big time.

[BreathEasy]

it seems to speed things up noticeably, in particular file transfers... big time.
In other words, it got a basic operating system function back to XP standards. Gotcha! :)

[LinuxIsInnovation]

Had vista home premium genuine OEM on my laptop and have cracked Vista Ultimate x64 on my desktop. Regular BSoD, "Windows Explorer has stopped working", "COM Surrogate has stopped working" and blah blah.. I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop (ofcourse, I have the recovery disks handy :D)
With my bro's and my full salary dedicated ;) my monster desktop is running Vista as smooth as ice :D
Surprisingly with no BSoD, Vista still lies in my desktop's HDDs, but is ofcourse, under the intense threat of removal, as soon as KDE4 gets launched :D

[Aiello]

Well, thought I may as well update my Vista situation. Five blue screens in four days. Now, I knew that Vista couldn't be THAT bad. So, I called tech support and it turned out to be a faulty install!:) After reformatting the hard drive and recovering, everything seems to be running okay. Fingers crossed!

[BradwJensen]

The OS runs fine, but is very annoying with all the 'popups' it gives you when you try to install just one program..

Also, i have an older motherboard with on-board audio, and i have yet to get a working audio driver that doesn't stop working til i reboot or log out and lock back in again.

I also don't understand why you need to have such a new video card in order to get the Nice theme for it to work.. On linux, all the themes, even with transparency work on my computer..

I'd say its more annoying than anything else. It's not really unstable at all, it runs just fine with 512MB's of ram.

[marx2k]

My experience has been with the 32-bit Ultimate version. It's been fairly solid I suppose - nothing like the disaster you tend to keep reading about. I just feel Ubunu is better on a technical level, and works better with my 2.5 year old hardware than Vista does.

I've had two BSODs, but they were actually due to crappy software. One was entirely my fault - I was trying to install an older version of Alcohol 120% that was KNOWN to not work in Vista, and despite being fully aware of this fact, I still tried it. Had to reformat. The second BSOD (and a couple others) was due to the fact that MacDrive, a program I use to fiddle around with my Leopard hackintosh, has a buggy driver that can occasionally take down the system when you do things like repair disk permission to the Mac partition. Note that in both cases the BSODs weren't Vista's fault directly, but other software. Upgrading to a newer version of Alcohol 120% and uninstalling MacDrive after doing what I needed to do, solved the problem.

Doesn't mean I don't like Ubuntu however, I much prefer it to Vista, but I can certainly work and do work just fine in Vista.

I wouldn't blame it on the software. A strength of an OS is to not get BSOD (or equivalent) from a user running software. If that DOES happen, that shows a weakness of the actual OS. (In my opinion, anyway)

[BreathEasy]

I wouldn't blame it on the software. A strength of an OS is to not get BSOD (or equivalent) from a user running software. If that DOES happen, that shows a weakness of the actual OS. (In my opinion, anyway)
Well, in this case, the two programs which caused BSODs had installed special drivers during their installation - Alcohol 120% uses a driver to provide virtual drives for mounting disc images, while MacDrive uses a driver to provide native support for the Mac filesystem. Drivers are a rather low-level component of any operating system - if they are badly programed/flawed, they can easily take it down.

I've had issues with the NVIDIA drivers in Linux locking up the system. Not quite a BSOD, but the keyboard/mouse wouldn't respond so the result was still the same - a hard reset. I'm not so good at understanding the particular levels of a kernel, but if drivers are running that close to it, any system can be affected really.

[LinuxIsInnovation]

The OS runs fine, but is very annoying with all the 'popups' it gives you when you try to install just one program..

Also, i have an older motherboard with on-board audio, and i have yet to get a working audio driver that doesn't stop working til i reboot or log out and lock back in again.

I also don't understand why you need to have such a new video card in order to get the Nice theme for it to work.. On linux, all the themes, even with transparency work on my computer..

I'd say its more annoying than anything else. It's not really unstable at all, it runs just fine with 512MB's of ram.

First point: You can disable the 'popups' by disabling UAC=> Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Manage other user accounts -> Turn UAC on off

Secondly: Requirement for graphics: You cannot claim linux to provide vista effects. It provides transparency, not blur and reflection on weak graphics cards.
Your motherboard and sound card is old isnt vista's fault :D

And you are running Vista on 512MB and recommended is 1GB. So ofcourse, you have to forget the performance factor, or upgrade your RAM :)

No offense bro... peace. :D

[SidewinderPro2]

I have Vista on my primary hard drive. I've had over 10 blue screens so far with it, which is way more than I have had in my years of 98, 98SE, and XP combined. I have no problems in the performance area. I use it for gaming for the most part. The only thing thats going for Vista in my eyes is DirectX10. Other than that, I would much rather be running XP Pro x64 if only Gateway would put out some drivers for other operating systems.

I made a screenshot comparison thread in the main Other OSs forum. Check out the RAM usage compared to my Ubuntu hard drive. Vista is using up way too many resources for my liking. I've disabled a ton of processes already, disabled the UAC (What a retarded feature..."Yes I want to run this program, that's why I clicked on the freakin' icon), and ran the heck out of msconfig.

Necrosoft is saying that Service Pack 3 is going to make XP 10% faster while Service Pack 1 is going to do almost nothing in the speed category for Vista.


PS: Could someone PM me and tell me how to get Flash working in Firefox on Linux here? I went through Firefox's plugin installation and it did squat. I tried finding a Vista video but I couldn't see anything.

[Slingshot]

I always ran Linux as secondary OS to windows until Vista. Mine came preloaded on a Dell M1210. After one month I had enough. Constant buzzing noise coming from the computer, explorer crashing just trying to browse a network drive, I had problems with programs/games using OpenGL under vista as well.

I'm glad I researched into computer that could run Linux suitable to my needs, but as it stands only the hibernate fails to work properly on this notebook now and Virtualbox takes care of my windows only applications needs.

[Monsuco]

I recently obtained a new laptop with Vista Home Premium. I don't mind it, but then again I have 2 GB (bios may have an issue, it only seems to see about 1.6 GB) of ram and an AMD Turon 64 X2 processor. It does use up a rather large amount of HDD space and I think requiring 700 mb of that ram is a tad excessive. I like it I guess, but if I could get all my driver issues worked out, I would prefer Ubuntu be running most of the time.

[chips24]

my best windows experience, no complaints

[cmat]

It's a mixed experience for me. Sometimes I'm like wow this is pretty cool and other times I'm reminded the reason I use linux/ubuntu exclusively.

[colecampbell666]

The only thing thats going for Vista in my eyes is DirectX10.
Ever heard of The Alky Project (http://www.fallingleafsystems.com/)?

[Lucifiel]

Likes:

- the sound theme and kinda "cool" graphics.

- the speed: it's at least faster than XP which is a good thing. Also, Vista takes faster to react to various minor things instead of stalling and making you go "uhhh... soo what now?"

Dislikes:

- the ACPI seemed to have some problems on the laptop(even wtih the battery removed): Windows starts and shuts down... oh joy. Or how it conks out halfway... yeah, no messages, nothing!

- the annoying user control thing. Thankfully you can disable it.

- the way it tried to implement security by confining and restricting your movement within Windows in a really annoying and anal manner. It drove me nuts: oh wait, you can't do this and that... no warning beforehand, instead, you get walled up.

- how it tended to crash or destabilise a variety of programs without always telling you why. I understand programs don't always work in different environments but at least give me a couple of hints instead of no response most of the time. At least, Linux has an error log and lets you restart the program/process.

Sometimes, Windows crashes the program and that's it: you can never start it without a reinstall after which the problem could be different.

[Zyphrexi]

new comp came with vista pre-installed. played with it a bit, no internet, horrible performance on games.

On ubuntu everything works fine. Overall the only reason I have vista... is well... hmm... games i can't play on linux I guess. Oh that and the voice recognition is nice. But I use linux 99 percent of the time.

[MONODA]

I got vista home premium on an hp laptop. On my first boot I got a blue screen. It would blescreen everytime I would turn it on and I would have to format the hard drive so that it would work again. This happened for about a week. Then I installed pidgin, miro, FF, and thunderbird, and norton 360. MAJOR SLOWDOWN!

[MONODA]

I got vista home premium on an hp laptop. On my first boot I got a blue screen. It would blescreen everytime I would turn it on and I would have to format the hard drive so that it would work again. This happened for about a week. Then I installed pidgin, miro, FF, and thunderbird, and norton 360. MAJOR SLOWDOWN! Explorer would crash every five minutes (no joke), windows update was horrible, either that or microsoft wasnt releasing updates for 3months...(Whenever I checked for update, there were not any I had to download.) System restore always fails after 100 hours... UAC was the biggest pain ever!!! if I wanted to delete a shortcut I had to confirm it TWICE!!! and with uac there were several apps that would not install. Many xp apps wouldnt work. IT TAKES 800 MB OF RAM JUST LOOKING AT THE DESKTOP WITHOUT THE SIDEBAR!!!! very slow. only thing I liked about it was windows media player (but its really bad at searching for music files on the pc)

[kaar3l]

I tested it for two weeks. I used Ulitmate, at first it seemed ok, boot pretty good and normal speed, but after about one week it was slower and slower, it used my cpu too much, therefore my laptop was very hot and fan spinned all the time. I removed it, put xp for some programs(10GB partition), and installed ubuntu (70GB /home separetly).

One of the best videos about vista:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80sWifG40B0
and Vista Speech Recognition](*,)

[insane_alien]

using it at work, sluggish, requires regular maintenance(defragging, disk cleaning, registry cleaning(that seems to get messier than XP's)) and it runs the computer hot.

CPU temperatures jumped from a nice 50*C to 68*C idling.

[bufsabre666]

i love vista, its more resource heavy but welcome to the wave of future computing, it cant be about working on old computers forever

[the8thstar]

I encountered a lot of the same frustrations written by other users in this thread. I decided to react and tweak vista as much as I could to get the best performance/stability ratio.

Well I must say i's worth the effort. Most of the issues listed in the threads can be resolved in matter of minutes if you just take the time to work on the registry and alter some settings. There are countless HOWTOs' out there, so keep looking!

My laptop PC (1.8GHz, 1Gb RAM, 60Gb partition for Vista and 20Gb for Ubuntu) works great with Home Premium. It's actually just as fast as Windows XP MCE 2005! The only significant thing I got rid of was Aero, all the rest was done in fine-tuning some internal settings.

[kanati]

My vista experience: from the perspective of a Vista user and a salesman/technician at Staples.

Personally I have no major complaints about it. I installed Vista on my desktop the month it came out. And I got a Vista based laptop in september. These two systems have combined for 0 system crashes, 0 security breaches (malware etc.) and 0 major bugs. That's more then I can say for any of my previous XP systems. It runs plenty fast enough (granted both my systems have 2gb of ram). And I can stretch my laptop 7-8 hours on battery, and it stays nice and cool the whole way through (its a Dell 1420 with the 9 cell battery).

As for what I've noticed selling and fixing these things:
-Most of the customer complaints (the vast majority) surrounding Vista have to do with compatability issues. And most of these customers never checked the internet for the updated drivers/patches to fix the problem. A lot of people just stuck in their driver disk from that 6 year old HP laserjet and assumed that the drivers would install... and the returned THE COMPUTER when it wouldn't. The remainder tended to be people who needed to use specific business software or some form of AutoCAD.

-Every vista machine (without exception) that we had brought in for 'repair' because of crashing problems was running off of an Nvidia motherboard chipset. I have never seen, or seen evidence for, a Vista crash on a system with an Intel or AMD/ATI motherboard chipset. I saw the exact same pattern in our 20 some odd display models (heck, even our Macs crashed once each).

Considering that our return and defect rate on Vista computers is no higher then it was on our XP computers (and the sales are actually stronger), I'd have to say that all this anti Vista stuff is as much perception as it is reality.

[wildgene789]

I have a Lenovo r60 laptop with dual core 1.66ghz and 1 gb ram and vista i think runs like ****. but i need a version of windows on my computer because i have an ipod and i only know how to use Itunes and only windows/mac will run that program

[Lysander10]

My vista experience: from the perspective of a Vista user and a salesman/technician at Staples.

Personally I have no major complaints about it. I installed Vista on my desktop the month it came out. And I got a Vista based laptop in september. These two systems have combined for 0 system crashes, 0 security breaches (malware etc.) and 0 major bugs. That's more then I can say for any of my previous XP systems. It runs plenty fast enough (granted both my systems have 2gb of ram). And I can stretch my laptop 7-8 hours on battery, and it stays nice and cool the whole way through (its a Dell 1420 with the 9 cell battery).

As for what I've noticed selling and fixing these things:
-Most of the customer complaints (the vast majority) surrounding Vista have to do with compatability issues. And most of these customers never checked the internet for the updated drivers/patches to fix the problem. A lot of people just stuck in their driver disk from that 6 year old HP laserjet and assumed that the drivers would install... and the returned THE COMPUTER when it wouldn't. The remainder tended to be people who needed to use specific business software or some form of AutoCAD.

-Every vista machine (without exception) that we had brought in for 'repair' because of crashing problems was running off of an Nvidia motherboard chipset. I have never seen, or seen evidence for, a Vista crash on a system with an Intel or AMD/ATI motherboard chipset. I saw the exact same pattern in our 20 some odd display models (heck, even our Macs crashed once each).

Considering that our return and defect rate on Vista computers is no higher then it was on our XP computers (and the sales are actually stronger), I'd have to say that all this anti Vista stuff is as much perception as it is reality.

I have to disagree with this. Vista is in some ways an improvement over XP, but overall, Windows has taken a turn for the worse. The Vista security model is definitely an improvement. Its use of tokens is quite similar to permissions in Ubuntu, and from what I understand, it's very close to being a true multi-user system now(about as close as a hacked single-user OS can get). Although, keep in mind that Vista is still a monolithic system, and therefore still vastly insecure by default in comparison to Unix-like OSes. In addition, Windows is, of course, closed-source, which brings about inherent security issues. Only Microsoft(with few exceptions) can view and edit Windows source code. Only Microsoft can correct errors, and only Microsoft knows exactly what's running on your Windows computer. Also, just because you haven't been able to detect any malware, viruses, or other security breaches, doesn't mean there haven't been any. Indeed, if you could detect all of them, they wouldn't really be a problem, would they? And every OS has major bugs. Most people who aren't developers don't know this, but every piece of complex software has bugs, they just may not be apparent to the end-user... until they really create a problem.

I've heard mixed reviews about the stability of Vista. Some say it's better, some say it's worse than XP. I only ran Vista for a few days on my laptop before I switched completely to Ubuntu, so I can't say from personal experience. What I can comment on is how inefficient Vista is. It's a resource hog. Vista consumes more resources than most games. That is beyond ridiculous. I'm running a computer with a 1.67 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of RAM, and Vista was lagging badly the very first time I powered on my computer. I had installed Ubuntu 7.10 on another computer that had half the RAM of mine and about four to five times less processing power, and it was more responsive than my Vista computer, hands down. That is sad.

Another problem with Vista is its backward compatibility. It might actually be a good thing that Vista isn't as backward compatible as previous versions of Windows, from a stability and security standpoint, but one of Windows' main (and only) strong points is compatibility. Take that away, and what do you have left?

i love vista, its more resource heavy but welcome to the wave of future computing, it cant be about working on old computers forever

Why can't it? Most distributions of Linux certainly don't seem to have a problem with that. Why Windows? The simple fact is, the more resources your OS takes up, the less you have for other programs that actually need them. This is a big problem for people like me, who do things like 3D modeling and animation, and for many other people.

[EnergySamus]

Windows Vista is pretty good. I am running a dual-boot system and I like Ubuntu a bit better than windows. Windows is the best for gaming! But Ubuntu seems Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

EnergySamus

P.S. I like the Elite Avatar Aiello.... Halo is the best game ever:lolflag:

[rubenvb]

My laptop (Dell XPS m1330 with 2 GB of RAM and a decent graphics card) shipped with Vista Home Premium and I can't say I don't like it. (notice the double negation).
It runs smooth, and despite what most people say, every program works on it (except some VERY old games). Running Vista with only 1 GB of RAM is not done, but with 2 GB it runs very very smooth. The desktop interface is also crisper than Ubuntu's .I've tested KDE 3.something and GNOME extensively, and the cube is the coolest thing ever... I was really pleased with my Ubuntu 7.10 which worked pretty much flawlessly, untill I plugged in my MP3-player (Zen Touch Playforsure). There was no way I could make this thing work decently. That last one combined with Office 2007 and my gaming addiction made me switch back to Vista-Only.
Linux has come a long way (The first distro I downloaded was Zenwalk, which for a total newcomer is hell on earth) and Ubuntu is doing a great job... still there is an amazing amount of features missing...

[rat3idea]

Its come a long way.

I loaded the ultimate 64bit version on my 3.6ghz core2 machine probably 8 months ago and the driver support was horrible (8800gts 640) and crashed atleast twice a day. I had to revert back to XP. I have a vista laptop and work and it runs just fine with vista buisness.

The laptop worked well enough that i reinstalled the 64bit ultimate edition two weeks ago and it seems to be kicking pretty well. Guess the driver issues got fixed up. I'm only running the 64bit version due to 8gb ddr2.

Though of the two work laptops I have, the one with ubuntu gets taken to clients much more often =)

[Lysander10]

It runs smooth, and despite what most people say, every program works on it (except some VERY old games).

Tell that to the people who use Autocad.

[Redrazor39]

With Microsoft's new OS being bashed so much, I was just curious as to how it is working for other people. PLEASE, only post if you use Vista on at least a semi-regular basis.

My Experience:
Running preloaded on a out of the box HP a6200n. The speed of Vista is okay and it looks very nice. I personally dislike the file hierarchy and I disabled UAC (user account control, its the thing that asks you "are you sure you want to do this?") so I wouldn't hit the computer with a baseball bat. I had some problems installing programs with UAC off. So, I had to turn it back on for a bit, and it asked my (no joke) six times if I wanted to install a program. And, oh yeah, it blue screen twice. By the second day. Seriously.

My conclusion: I dislike Vista, but I think I can live with it. I think.

I don't get it. Why are so many people having bad experiences with Vista? I dual boot Vista and Ubuntu (I wanted to try out Ubuntu and I've never dual booted before. I love the new Explorer, Vista loads everything super fast for me, the fingerprint scanner I have is so much fun, and Vista just seems to work well. I've seen a vista blue screen, but it's never happened to me and I've installed and messed with loads of stuff (even in the registry and all that). I did system restore one time because I lost something- it took me 2 minutes and everything was back! Yay! Vista is super awesome. The eye candy is great and 3D flip is underrated. It's a great way to see all open windows when you have a lot, so you don't really need much else.

Vista is great, Ubuntu is great, Mac OS X is alright, but not that great.

[jrusso2]

If you have a dual core and two gigs of ram and a nice 256 mb video card and you don't have old printers and scanners and so forth, or a lot of old sofware you want to run then vista is ok.

But its huge and bloated resource hog and the UAC is just a pain in the ***.

[afljafa]

If you have a dual core and two gigs of ram and a nice 256 mb video card and you don't have old printers and scanners and so forth, or a lot of old sofware you want to run then vista is ok.

But its huge and bloated resource hog and the UAC is just a pain in the ***.

It`s hardly bloated - try installing slackware or sabayon sometime - thats bloated.

UAC - just turn it off. It takes 2 seconds and a reboot.

[kaufmannn]

I bought my laptop, a Toshiba A100-TA7 (Core2Duo t5500 1.66 ghz, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD, crappy integrated video) before Vista came out and recieved an upgrade package for Vista once it was released. Upgrading was no problem, however, if you like to keep your computer on for long periods of time to download large files or render movies like I do... be wary. I had problems with XP crashing on me during these day long stints, hoped that Vista would be better. NOPE. By the way, most crashes weren't too bad, but I had a handful where system config files became corrupt - all because I had my computer on all night. WTF?? right?

Since I had only an upgrade version of Vista, I had to reinstall XP first (couldn't try to repair because I had an OEM version which is castrated and only does fresh installs) and then I could upgrade to Vista. I had about three fatal XP crashes and one Vista crash... I stopped leaving my computer on after the single Vista crash - too much work to repair.

Aside from that, I didn't really have any problems with Vista and in fact liked it more than XP. I had a trojan at one point, though I had zone alarm and AVG, but that was my fault and since then I installed some more software to protect Vista.

Then I heard of Wubi, a way to install Ubuntu without ruining a windows install. This was music to my ears as my windows copy is quite restricted and normally I wouldn't be able to dual boot. I am now in love with Ubuntu 7.10 and barely use Vista, only when I need to use a windows only program. In Ubuntu I am also able to access the files from my Vista partition and thus can easily work on the same file on either OS.

I have no hate towards Vista, though it could have been better, but I do enjoy Ubuntu much more and that's going to be my OS of preference from now on.

[mcimo88]

I think this is my first post on this site. :guitar:

Vista first, then Ubuntu.

Vista:
I got a Dell Dimension for Christmas in 2006. It came preloaded with XP, but it came with the free upgrade to Vista for when it came out. Did some research to make sure I could run Aero. All I needed was a new video card, so I went out and bought an Nvidia 7600 GS (no biggie because I wanted one anyways.)
Fast forward: Vista came out... I got Vista... I installed Vista... I fell in love with Vista. :) I had to reinstall it once (ironically enough, it was because I tried to dual boot Ubuntu with it. :) .) I personally have had no problems with it other than that (plus the fresh install made it run even better! For all those who ditched Vista after a month, TRY IT AGAIN. There have been many updates since its initial release, and it is MUCH better.

Ubuntu:
I also have an Inspiron E1705. It currently has both XP and Ubuntu 7.10 dual booted. I've had to reinstall XP once, because I thought I would try to avoid messing up my laptop like I did with my desktop. So, I went with Wubi. BIG MISTAKE! I turned on my laptop and all I got was the Dell logo, then a black screen, wash, rinse, repeat. Luckily I was able to save it, because I'm awesome like that. Plus it was with 7.04, and that already didn't work to well with my laptop's hardware. Anyways, I've since installed Ubuntu correctly (with partitions and everything :lolflag: ) and I really like it! 7.10 seems to work much better for me than 7.04.

WOOOOOHOOOOOOOO you read all that?

Basically:
Vista=Awesome
Ubuntu=Awesome
XP=Pretty Good
OS X= ...let's not

God Bless