Without a sweaty Ballmer in this picture, I don't think I can believe it.

If there's one thing Vista products will never be it's "Full Throttle"

What has two thumbs, Vista SP1 and has had NO problems with it WHATSOEVER?

This guy!

@N@tedog: +1 People have been ripping on Vista for awhile now, and no matter how many times I bring up how bad the XP launch was in comparison, they never listen. Just take your time and read up on your problems kiddies, because for most things theres a fix.

The other problem is so many people trying to run vista on hardware designed for Windows 2000.

@N@tedog:

High Five my Vista SP1 runnin' no problemo brotha man!

Mine's been better since the install - less of a hog and doesn't crash when Civ IV is loaded now.

@N@tedog:
Installed SP1 2 weeks ago... 2 reboots and done... took 90 minutes to complete in my little dynoasaur, but zero defects.

PASS.
I'll hold out for XP-SP3, thank you very much.

I am about to purchase another computer for my girlfriend later this week but was trying to hold out for another OS for her. She can't wait. My older HP has XP. Glad to know that SP1 for Vista is finally getting the bugs out. I have used Vista at only one workplace before, and let me tell ya', it SUCKS! I was seriously considering dumping the whole OS for XP. But if this SP1 is legit, then we'll at least give it a shot. WTF.

@N@tedog:
Me either! Running along just fine.

@DaOtter: I join you in the wait.

Buy a mac

I'm glad they addressed the perpetual reboot bug. That was driving me bonkers after I upgraded. Other than that, SP1 has fixed a lot of issues. It still doesn't feel as 'light' as XP but it's gotten a lot better. Plus I've noticed better battery life on my laptop.

@duckballs: Then instead of waiting 7 years for a re-hashed OS, you can pay for a new OS every year! ;)

@DaOtter: Also known as Perpetual-OS technology. Or simply, POS. :P

@riqgeez: If you want to keep your girlfriend happy - good news - most PC manufacturers sell XP or if they make you get Vista it comes with an XP upgrade/downgrade CD so you can put XP on the new computer and not have to suffer the slow nature of Vista. While Vista SP1 is a little faster it still is SLOW compared to XP even on a Core 2 PC 3GHz, 2 GIGs of ram and a good video card, XP blows the doors off Vista.

Don't take my word for it or those who claim they run Vista on their commodore 64 - just do a google search on Vista XP benchmarks - look for recent ones that include Vista SP1 - it is STILL SLOW compared to XP. Why do you think everyone is talking about Windows 7- Vista is Windows ME2 - can't be fixed - best thrown out with the bath water.

Vista is stable - just SLOW. I have run the bechmarks myself on systems with 1 GIG, 2 GIGs, and 4 GIGS, P4-to quad core - XP still is MUCH FASTER than Vista SP1.

I spent the past weekend successfully exorcising Vista from a Dell laptop. (They were NO help at all... )

It's all XP Pro now, and it rocks. (Dell insisted that XP pro would not run on this machine. HAH!) With Vista, it was slow as all hell, and worthless for even browsing the web.

Far as I'm concerned, I'll NEVER own Vista. This laptop will last me many happy years past even the rollout of Windows 7.

@DaOtter: The price you pay for not having Windows.

@duckballs: Touche...

Running Vista SP1 on a brand spankin' new build for a few weeks now - not a hiccup. Games fine, burns DVDs fine, can't understand all the hype & hate actually.

@FubarGuy: Check out those resource monitor charts. You'll figure out the hate pretty quick when you realize that it's taking over half your system specs just to run the damned OS.

SP1 installed without any problems for me. I'm now squarely in the camp of "no way I'd go back to XP". On my machine, Vista works perfectly and I've grown quite used to the added features it offers over XP.

@Kaiser-Machead: I agree. I expected the "Vista SP1! Come and get it!" line.

@DaOtter: I believe that is the SuperFetch feature at work; it's suppose to look like that.

@ripfire4:

Not to mention that Vista drops that extra RAM the moment another program needs it.

Still, there's no denying it, Vista still uses more RAM than the older OS's, but some of it is actually being used to help productivity.

Vista is bloated, slow in most cases, but there's some good features there.

im not going to go into how vista is getting the same bad PR as xp did on release from people spreading FUD and misinformation.

I also will not go into how different vista is from xp, stay ignorant or educate yourself, but it an entirely different kernel.

for gamers with current hardware, vista for dx10

for gamers with only dx9 and lower cards, xp is the smart choice for the extra fps

for anything else, short of serious rendering/encoding(for which you should be using gpu assist), vista gets teh job done jsut as well as xp

before you yell memory hog, go read up on mem management in vista.

lol i lose faith in humanity daily by how much people buy into this crap....people hate ms, but love apple for overcharging for hardware. hate to break it to ya mac users, its all the same parts at this point in the game, you got ripped off.

@Kyang: I agree with that, but for my money, it still doesn't buy any credit for making everyone wait 7 years for an OS that's essentially the exact same as XP, AND launched in a less-than-functional state.

@boe:
Thanks, I will take your advice.

I have to question, have any of you gone in and turned off the services and features you aren't using. Yes Vista out of the box is a memory hog, but I've got it tuned to the point of running the exact same memory usage as my XP system was. There are a lot of things like system restore, UAC, Windows defender, etc etc etc that you can easily turn off, and *POOF* your system is running just as "light" as XP was.

Again, take the time to tweak your system, do a little reading and research and remember that when these articles are written they are talking about non"geeked" vista. So make the modifications and run Vista. Unless you specifically need XP for some program or run environment, or you can't get a driver for your ancient graphics card, theres really not a reason to switch back.

Running Vista x64 with SP1, and I love it. Using XP nowadays feels so old.

You could always just run a hackintosh if you don't like vista, xp or any of the flavors of linux available. For the money, you could get so much more if you bought a PC instead of apple branded hardware. Including the cost of OSX and an apple sticker (to make your PC 'apple branded')

Its all 'Intel Inside' anyways...

@riqgeez:

My pleasure.

Vista good side - stable (but then again so is XP, OSX and linux)
Vista bad side - SLOW (might help people who enjoy eating at Friendlies, go grocery shopping every day, wait in line for days at movie premiers, generally trying to kill time).

A lot of people think all of us who bash Vista are making stuff up - I'm not sure why the refuse to just take 1 whole whopping minute to actually google some Vista XP benchmarks. I'm not sure if they don't want to admit they wasted money on a new OS or are hoping if they can convice others to use Vista MS might continue support enough to get a SP2 for Vista.

While I feel sorry for them that they wasted money on Vista I'm not sure what the advantage is in leading others to making the same mistake. I'm not a MAC fanboy, Linux fanboy or MS hater. I run MS products on over 90% of the workstations and servers I support. It probably runs on 50% of the phones as well. It runs on all three of my personal machines as well (which all have 2 GIGS or more of memory, fast 512mb video cards, fast hard drives with 8-32MBs of cache, core 2 or quad processors all in excess of 2 GHz)

I have actually run the benchmarks myself and had volunteers who tested Vista at the office (with brand new machies)- all asked me to switch them back to XP even though they insisted they wanted Vista they regretted the time they wasted with it. All were a lot more impressed with XP's performance after they tested Vista.

@boe: The problem with these kinds of tests is that you are asking people to compare an OS they ahve used for a long time witha brand new one with new features and different "button" placements.

A lot of people hate Office 2007, but after you get used to it, it is much better than the previous version. It's just that people are so used to the old office, that they rate 2007 down.

Did you control for this "familiarity" factor?

@boe:

"Vista bad side - SLOW (might help people who enjoy eating at Friendlies, go grocery shopping every day, wait in line for days at movie premiers, generally trying to kill time)."
Hmm. Interesting enough, Vista opens and runs my everyday programs FASTER than the XP I have on another partition.

"I'm not sure why the refuse to just take 1 whole whopping minute to actually google some Vista XP benchmarks."

Yea. Because you know synthetic benchmarks mean everything. On another note, I actually started out as a Vista hater and HAVE looked at the benchmarks and you know what I found? A few seconds shaved off benchmark apps/A few more FPS on gaming. None of which, in everyday use, mean jack. The biggest issue was the deletion of OpenGL, which I do find a bit strange, but so be it. Vista IS, in fact slower on CERTAIN TASKS. But considering my system is more responsive and more stable than XP, im willing to take the extra 2 seconds it takes to encode an mp3.

"...I'm not sure if they don't want to admit they wasted money on a new OS"

Actually, I run Vista for free, so I have no bias.

"It runs on all three of my personal machines as well (which all have 2 GIGS or more of memory, fast 512mb video cards, fast hard drives with 8-32MBs of cache, core 2 or quad processors all in excess of 2 GHz)"

Well considering I am running Vista SP1 perfectly on my low-end laptop(as are many others), I'd say you must either be hexed by the devil, or are just really not open to giving something a chance.

"I have actually run the benchmarks myself and had volunteers who tested Vista at the office (with brand new machies)- all asked me to switch them back to XP even though they insisted they wanted Vista they regretted the time they wasted with it. All were a lot more impressed with XP's performance after they tested Vista.'

People hate change. Plain and simple. This was one of the main reasons I hated Vista at first. We are creatures of habit. We all want the latest and greatest, but when we get it and it takes more than 5 minutes to figure out, we are all but ready to call the latest and greatest "shit" and go back to what we know.

Truth is, Im not a Vista fanboy, nor am I an XP fanboy. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I,however, find Vistas strengths to be far more than its weaknesses. If half the bashers would actually TRY Vista and/or give it a chance, I'm fairly certain they would feel similar.

I have two Vista machines at home (along with two XP machines that I won't be upgrading anytime soon). First attempt at SP1 (a home-built PC) took 10 days and at least a dozen conversations with MS support. SP1 would hang on installation, requiring a restore using the installation DVD. We tried all sorts of things before I was told I had some corrupt files and should do an in-place upgrade of Vista and the run SP1. The several hour long upgrade failed. It finally took turning off several Windows Features to ge the upgrade to run. Then I was able to redownload 46 updates before running SP1. The system is fine now, except that Windows Security and Norton Internet Security don't seem to be on speaking terms -- Windows Security isn't recognizing that Norton is running a firewall and malware protection, so I had to turn off alert messages. It kept telling me I had no firewall or malware protection.

Second PC SP1 update went smoothly (off-the-shelf Gateway PC), but now Windows Update keeps bringing up an XML update to install, which it already shows as having been successfully installed four times.

I can already hear the snickers from the Apple fanboys. Keep it down, guys. I will never own a Mac (unless Apple opens up the system and let's people build there own machines).

@berribrand: Good question. Yes I set them up in a classic windows environment so it was just like XP. That wasn't the issue at all - these are people who enjoy new environments - all of them are running office 2007 and are relatively happy with it.

The issue I got complaint after complaint on was how slow Vista was even though these were new machines. No one complained about the new way of doing things - e.g. removing programs). When I upgraded them to XP they all commented on how fast the new machines were compared to when they were running Vista. And yes, I applied every patch to their machines, and yes they had plenty of memory, and yes I even tried turning off many of the Vista features, and yes I applied some of the tweaks mentioned in various trade journals - in the end - Vista is just plain SLOW.

Side by side - identical machines running the same software - XP is significantly faster in - file copies, file moves, network throughput, boot time, shut down time- pretty much anything you can think of XP is typically faster.

@Dook_In_The_Urinal: I'd say you must either be hexed by the devil, or are just really not open to giving something a chance.

I ran Exchange Server before SP1 was released, I ran WM 6.1 before it was released, I upgraded clients to XP before SP1 was released - never a complaint. I was genuinely hoping Vista was going to be better than XP - that is why I was even testing it in the Beta stage - sadly it was dreaful then and still very slow now.

I have new clients on a regular basis who bought machines without checking with me. They used Vista for a couple of months and paid me to upgrade them to XP.

I agree that there are people who only want to use what they are familiar with but even if you make Vista appear like XP - it can't run as fast as XP and that is why most people complain.

I don't think it is just me that doesn't like Vista - read any technical journal (are those people afraid of change to?) read any business magazine (don't those people try to get people to change the way they do things?)

For those who say XP had some negative reviews - yes it does - but nothing on the scale of Vista - Windows ME had similarly bad reviews but even that didn't win the coveted class action suit.

For those who think I'm pushing XP, OSX and Linux are nice for some people but not for everyone. If you get a chance, I would try EVERY OS - particularly on whatever hardware you are buying - then you can make your OWN decision based on your OWN experience.

I'm not trying to rule out your choices but it is funny all those people who say - you must be wrong, it runs fine on my machine - never seem to say - google this and you'll see I'm right. I recommend people google - Vista XP - and use other terms like benchmarks or industry acceptance, or percentage, etc.

Sure if you just work in a standalone workstation environment and leave your PC on all the time and either shut off UAC or spend a few weeks getting your PC to accept that yes, you really wanted to open that application, and don't play games, care about file copies or moves - you'll be fine with Vista as long as you can find the drivers for your printer, video card, camera, scanner, keyboard and mouse, sound card (hope it isn't creative they don't have good drivers for the sound blaster - slow down Vista).

@Kaiser-Machead: I was loling like crap. Thanks for the laughs.

an old timer here.
I've been dealing with mocrlsoft since the days of Win 3.2 and all I can say is this reminds me of when Win 95 came out.
delay after delay while IBM's O/S 2 was already running circles around it.
If you don't want to deal with Microsofts reclusant and laxadazical attitude toward its customers then get Lynix.

but, if you're like me and like the idea of software compatibility then you'll just have to remain calm ana wait for Bill Gates to talk his employees into fixing his prw mature O/Saculation.

I've been running vista 64bit for a little over a year now and since several driver updates and now SP1, things are finally running smith.
6 months ago I'd have told Y'all how much I regreted getting Vista and how sucky nVida was as well.
but now that everyone's gettin their act together and catching up with each other Vista is really coming together.

Yes, it's a resorce Hog but with the right RAM and CPU it really does scream.
my advice is if you don't want to spend the cash on high quality support hardware then it would be in your best interest to stick with XP.

@DaOtter: There are many legitimate gripes about Vista. Being too much like XP isn't one of them.

[en.wikipedia.org]
[en.wikipedia.org]
[en.wikipedia.org]
[en.wikipedia.org]
[en.wikipedia.org]

Now, whether that's worth a small frame rate hit in some games, a learning curve, and $230 to you is another question.

As far as browsing performance goes (which is probably nowadays 50% of people's perception of OS speed), anyone complaining about slowness there has probably not figured out to turn off the phishing flter. Which, on the other hand, probably means that you're better off to leave it turned on....