Happy with Vista yet?

[Mr. Chris]

I finally am. I was having stupid issues with XP Pro, even after SP3 (maybe MS fubar'd XP by issuing SP3? ) and I had Vista Home Premium on a second drive. Instead of going thru the hassle of reinstalling XP once again, I decided to update Vista and run with it, good or bad.

Well, it seemed slow and I still had some crashes with a few games and Internet wasn't quite right and a few drivers were wonky. But, after SP1 was installed, wow. What a big difference over all. Everything has improved. Most of my drivers updated automatically, including the Realtek HD audio which was seriously messed up before.

So no more XP on my main rig (I'll still have XP Pro on my Folding PC's) and it's running just fine! Chris.

[boyblue]

I think Vista is great and IE8 beta is fine as well.

[cas]

Have always been happy and pleased with vista, though my vista doesn't comes with sp1 but it still detect whatver stuff i plug in, is definitely better than xp as the latter need drivers

But the disadvantage is it seem slower as compare to xp

[Mr. Chris]

Service Pack 1 has fixed any slowness that I noticed compared to XP. In fact, downloads are faster, bootup is faster, even in games the frame rates are better. You can get Service Pack 1 from Windows Update. Actually, Windows Update installed the SP1 for me. Chris.

[tcsenter]

Just don't ever go from XP to Vista or vice versa on the same hardware. I performed my first Vista install a couple months ago using some spare parts:

- ECS 755-A2 Socket 754 (SIS 755/964L)
- Athlon 64 3200+ 512K (single core)
- 1.0GB PC2700 DDR
- ATI Radeon 9600 256MB DDR AGP
- Seagate 200GB SATA 150 HDD
- 8x DVD-RW ATAPI
- Onboard Audio and LAN
- Vista Home Premium SP1 + all updates

I built this just to play around with Vista Home Premium 32 and 64, since I've never actually used Vista on my own computers. My only exposure to Vista before this was on other computers (that I was usually fixing). After playing around with it for a few days, I honestly didn't think performance was half-bad, considering the hardware is four years old. That is, until the 30-day grace period expired, so I wiped Vista and installed Windows XP on the same setup.

HOLY CRAP! I didn't know what I was missing, partly because my own computer that I use every day is even older Athlon XP 2500+, KT600/VT8237, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600 AGP, and because I had no prior experience with performance of this setup running either OS. It wasn't so much that Vista was intolerably or unacceptably slow, its that Windows XP was soooo much more responsive in everything by comparison. You wouldn't notice it until you directly compared each OS for a few days on the same hardware.

I gained new sympathy for all those persons who upgraded their computers from XP to Vista without significant hardware upgrades. The big take-away from my experience was:

- Don't upgrade a computer from XP to Vista! If you want Vista, buy or build a new computer so that you will have no prior knowledge of performance on that system running XP. If you want to upgrade an existing system, spring for some significant hardware upgrades as well.

The situation is more pronounced on lower-performing or older hardware. Notebooks are especially problematic because the average notebook has significantly less capable hardware than average desktops due to the need for much greater power efficiency, thermal control, footprint, and weight. I have worked on at least two dozen notebooks that shipped with Vista Premium SKU and many were intolerably slow. I installed Windows XP on several of them at the owner's request and the difference was fairly huge. Several of these laptops had decent hardware specs; dual core processors, 1GB ~ 2GB RAM, newer IGP products from ATI, NVIDIA, or Intel (not VIA or SIS).

Its one thing to say "you need more capable hardware" as the answer to complaints about performance on desktop computers, but notebooks represent a far more difficult set of trade-offs. Capability is far cheaper on the desktop, power efficiency and thermal control is not nearly as much of a consideration. Microsoft was completely inconsiderate and insensitive to the entire sub-$800 notebook segment, which represents a huge percentage of the notebook market. Microsoft should extend Windows XP sales for another year to address the very real performance issues that Vista poses for affordable mainstream notebooks. Not everyone can afford, nor do they want, a massive DTR notebook with discrete graphics card, more than 2GB RAM, and higher-end DTR mobile processors. A lot of people actually want a light efficient notebook that doesn't require an upgraded 12-cell battery to achieve run-time longer than two hours, and doesn't require the cooling fan to run full-blast 80% of the time.

[cas]

I've download vista sp1 and right now i'm installing it, so far so good.

The only issue which i face just now which nearly scared the hell of me is when i switch my usb mouse and keyboard back to PS2, it doesn't seem to recognised it while i reinstall vista ultimate

So i swap a couple of keyboard and is still the same, it make me wonder whether the PS2 port is spoilt, then i would have to waste a trip bringing down to the distro for rma, next i thought to myself could i have accidentally disable PS2 and i clear cmos till when i restart my pc, this time is able to detect and allow me to go into bios, wow what a closed shave, guess i must have disable something that causes the PS2 keyboard and mouse not working, lol

[boyblue]

Cas you can't hotplug PS2 so only connect with the power off and then boot up.

[cas]

Originally Posted by boyblue

Cas you can't hotplug PS2 so only connect with the power off and then boot up.

lol of cos i knew, i did shut it down and power on again but it still wouldn't detect the PS2 keyboard and mouse, only saw the leds blink once and there's it, once i clear cmos, everything goes back to normal.

Must have disable it previously as i change a couple of setting in bios setup recently while OC

[Jim-Rainor]

Not ready for vista yet, XP has so much i havent even looked at. I h8 vista bugs, it has too many...

[boyblue]

Vista SP1 sorted alot of bugs.