Is Vista really that bad?
 

So, I was having a play with Vista on my sisters new laptop and I have to say I quite liked it. Then I see all the negative press it gets, like this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10...s_xp_recovery/

Is Vista really that bad? What problems have people on this forum had with it? Or is this just mostly press induced hysteria? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't upgrade any of my existing systems to run Vista but I'm don't think I'd be crying into my beer if a new laptop came with it pre-installed....

I'm not convinced as a user myself, having looked at it on a few machines.

For us as a software house, our product runs very well on XP Pro. To move to Visa we'll have to:

- Change from MSDE 2000 to (min) SQL Server Express 2005, maybe later
- Fully test on three or four versions of Visa (Business, Ultimate...)
- Maybe change our compiler to something based on Phoenix

and whatever else it takes to make our stuff run on Vista. And in the end, our product will require more memory and run slower.

In short, yes it is.

i did not like vista when i first got stuck with it.

it is more difficult to get rid of the "free" crap.

it is more difficult to get to places without 2 or 3 requests of do you want to do this? do your really want to do this? do you really really want to do this?

getting permissions squared away is difficult.

i use eudora. real eudora has problems in vista. one cannot access attachments directly.

this is because vista does not want to store any data in the programs folder.

i cannot keep my screen resolution each time i reboot

a lot of tools have been revised, renamed, and placed elsewhere. some are very hard to find.

wireless networking with a couple 3 routers is not as easy as xp
vista is much more stable than xp.

i let it run for weeks at a time

it is much faster than xp. either because of the new processor, or the fact that it addresses 3g of memory better than xp did.

i think it overall a better system than xp, and would recommend to anyone with a stand alone

Ahhh.... Now I see where I've gone wrong
 

I think Vista looks great for a home laptop or PC. It would never have occurred to me to look on it as an enterprise OS. It looks like consumer software so that is all I expected of it. Does any major enterprise use it?

Adoption has been slow. MS will brag about their sales numbers, but they conveniently ignore that their licensing agreement basically requires a purchase of the most current version of any software they sell but allows installation of older versions.

I do not think that it is as bad as it gets credit for, but more importantly it is not a compelling upgrade for either the home or enterprise environment. XP SP2 is ridiculously stable and people are comfortable with it. Vista changes too many things without providing sufficient tangible benefits to justify the changes. And the hardware requirements to get from XP to Vista for comparable performance are pretty steep. Way too many XP systems that run OK will choke on Vista.

I can think of a number of major enterprise customers who are upgrading their workstation/laptop fleet to it. That said as another poster pointed out, it's not generally a compelling upgrade story.

There's a whole lot of negative bandwagon jumping going on with Vista.

I think too many people say that they "played with" or "looked at" Vista and then make a quick judgment followed by negative statements.

UAC (User Account Control) gets a TON of negative publicity for being too intrusive (UAC is what gives you the "do you really want to do this?" prompts).

It takes 4 clicks to turn UAC off. Takes about 10 seconds.

Don't like it? Turn it off and get on with your life. The sheer amount of negative publicity that one single security option gets - an option that is completely controllable by the end user - is evidence of the irrational piling on that the media does to Vista. Look, if you don't like UAC just turn it off. Don't whine about something that you can turn off anytime you want to.

Personally I love Vista. I have been using it since early betas and I switched all of my computers over to it before it even shipped. A few weeks ago I had to spend an entire 8 hour work day on an XP laptop and I wanted to gouge my eyes out with spoons by the end of the day. I couldn't get away from that damn XP box fast enough.

I currently have 3 laptops and awhile back I used one of them to do extensive XP Vs. Vista performance testing. I built the laptop with XP and then ran an entire battery of tests over the course of a week. Then I rebuilt the laptop with Vista, installed the exact same software as the XP build, and ran the same tests. What I noticed was that XP has a smaller memory footprint when first booted, and seemed to consume less memory with fewer applications open (under 5) than Vista did. However, Vista outperforms XP when you really start to stress it. With a lot of applications open Vista manages memory better and does a better job of seeming "snappy" even when its under heavy load. The XP laptop "felt" slow before the Vista laptop.

My wife is a prime example of the average user. She has an old Dell Latitude D600, its probably 3-4 years old. It has 1.5gb of RAM. About a year ago we put Vista on it. She said that she has seen no noticable difference in performance (and remember - this is a fairly old laptop), said all of her games play fine, says that she has an easier time connecting to public wireless access points (she would sporadically drop her connection in XP), and said simply that "likes Vista better". She's just your average Jane Doe non-techie user.

Yes, SBM is correct that it can be difficult to make a compelling case for enterprises to upgrade. Any enterprise software purchase is all about enabling your users to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently. A PC is just a tool that helps them do their job. In order to go out and buy the latest greatest tool you first need to understand what the problems with your existing tool are and how the new tools improves upon that. But just because many enterprises consider XP "good enough" certainly doesn't make Vista bad.

SP1 fixed much of what was wrong with Vista and I support numerous folks who use it, including a handful who run 64-bit Vista on $10000+ workstations. It's a perfectly fine operating system that's not giving us any problems with stability or performance.

I never did see it as a big enough improvement over XP to recommend spending extra for it, but if someone orders a computer with Vista, I no longer automatically wipe it and install XP.

I gave up Vista long before SP1 was available. Next time I get a computer with Vista I will give it another shot.

Just thought I would post some quotes that I found interesting:

"It hides everything I want to find, and forces me to use Wizards to do everything. I have no idea what the Wizards are doing to my settings"

"It looks like PlaySkool's My First Operating System. It grates on my nerves."

"It is not pretty! It looks like a giant, disgusting piece of candy!"

"The system hides so much from me, and I don't trust anyone or any thing to maniputlate my system on my behalf without it's giving me a detailed explanation of what it has done."

"I am so frustrated by its many, many steps that are required to override its many, many ways of making it difficult or impossible for me to search for things."

"GRRR!!!!
Internet Explorer froze. No matter how many times I hit "end now" and "don't send" error report. I can't get rid of the IE window."

"I have been using it for a few days now, and I really do not see a need to upgrade from [the previous version]"

"If you're a gamer and are satisfied with [the previous version], by all means, don't upgrade and risk losing the ability to play some of your favorite games."

"If you think that Windows ... is going to revolutionize the way you use a computer and surf the web, wake up and save your money."

Guess what? Every single quote above was written by either the media or consumers about WINDOWS XP when it was realeased, not Vista!. You see the 2 places above where I inserted "the previous version"? Those were references to WINDOWS 98.

So when you see negative publicity on Vista comparing it to the supposedly superior Windows XP, just remember that this is the same media that was saying that WINDOWS 98 was better and more reliable than XP. True story. Think about that.

The general acceptance of Windows XP went something like this:

Years 0 - 3: "Windows XP is awful, it won't play my games, won't play on older systems, is slower than previous versions, uses too many wizards, hides all my settings, makes it too hard to find stuff and consumes too much system resources. Windows 98 rulez!!!"

Years 3 - 6: "Eh, Windows XP ain't all that bad"

Years 7 and on: "Oh my god Windows XP is the greatest thing since sliced bread!!! Windows Vista is awful, it won't play my games, won't play on older systems, is slower than previous versions, uses too many wizards, hides all my settings, makes it too hard to find stuff and consumes too much system resources. Windows XP rulez!!!"

See a pattern here? :)

Here's a pretty accurate, unbias look at Windows Vista, and even a comparison of how its early adoption compares to XP's early adoption:

http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

XP had a lot of problems before SP1.

True, but it was more than just SP1. By the time SP1 shipped many hardware and software vendors finally had stable products for XP. SP1, combined with updated hardware and software, was the tipping point for XP.

I agree and I've turned off UAC on my production system. I also operated with it on for about 3 months and found that it really wasn't all that intrusive for my dady-to-day operation of the computer. I don't really need to be in control panels or event viewer or regedit all that often. The main UAC annoyance was with downloading things from the Internet, and it was a bit annoying on that front. BUT, one of the main selling points of Vista is that it is supposed to be more secure, and a big part of that is UAC. So if the solution is to just disable UAC then you aren't really getting the major benefit of better security on the system.

Oh, and it takes a reboot, too, doesn't it? So maybe a minute and 10 seconds. ;)

A laptop with 1.5GB of RAM is not typical, particularly not for a 3-4 year old device. My old company was upgrading RAM on our older laptops to support Vista and 2GB was the target, though some maxed out at 1.5GB. The D600s we had in inventory were about the same age and they were purchased with 512MB or 1GB, and that was a "lot" of RAM 3-4 years ago when they were purchased. The HW requirements are much higher for Vista, so as people try upgrading to it they are seeing the results of not having sufficient HW as much as anything else.

Microsoft (and the media) really wanted everyone to upgrade immediately and Microsoft's HW partners hoped that Vista would drive a huge hardware upgrade cycle that otherwise is unnecessary. In reality, however, most folks realized that there was no compelling demand and will just take it in stride, just like every other major OS upgrade cycle. In the meantime, however, the media and Apple will have fun poking at Microsoft and Vista and watching them squirm.

And don't forget the Windows 7 release scheduled for January 2010, with the first set of public bits coming our at the PDC at the end of the month.

In my university department, we still strongly recommend people not get Vista and get XP instead, to the point that we'll even reformat a machine that comes with Vista to XP unless the person has a compelling reason to want Vista.

Vista and HP printers has been an absolute disaster. Now, part of that is that the lower end HP printers (and I'm not talking the absolute bottom end, but a more 'normal' desktop laser printer) have really gone downhill in quality over time, and a lot of it is probably that HP just plain dropped the ball on printer drivers.

For all that JClishe has done tests on the same machine to show that Vista does no worse, and in some cases better than XP, that's definitely not been my experience. We've had a few Dell XPS M1330 laptops come through recently, a couple of which have been reformatted to XP, and then I was just working on one that was new but still had Vista on it, and I couldn't believe the difference in the speed of the computers (and all were configured similarly). It was bad enough that I was checking the amount of memory in the system wondering if it had been ordered with too little, and checking to make sure there weren't bad sectors on the hard drive (and no, neither of those were the case).

I do think a lot of the performance drag on Vista can be attributed to the Aero user interface. Disable that back to basic, and things improve. Even with decent graphics in a system, Aero is just a dog.

But what it really comes down to is I'm not overly convinced there's any compelling advantage to "upgrade" to Vista. Prerelease it kept having features stripped from it that were originally supposed to be in it, and ultimately it just turned into XP with an (arguably) "pretty" interface on it, with an attempt to improve security (which I'm also not overly convinced has improved). I definitely don't think there's any real good reason to actually pay to upgrade an existing system to Vista. If the system comes with it, it's not going to kill you to keep it, and it's certainly not unusable, but I do feel you're losing a noticeable amount of the performance of the system (but arguably, a lot of people won't necessarily even notice that, especially if the new machine is much more modern than their old one anyways).

Personally, I've used all the windows versions, generally trying out prerelease versions of all of them also before they came out, and I'll certainly be taking a look at the prerelease versions of 7 when I can get ahold of that. With the exception of Me (which should never have been released), I've generally felt that each step was a noticeable improvement over the previous up until Vista. Vista's just the first one that's completely turned me off.

My experience with Windows goes back to the earliest versions, and includes 95, 98, 200, Me, XP and now Vista, sitting in front of a new low end Dell with Vista while at my right hand is an older more expensive Dell with XP, and across the room an old Laptop with 2000. Mine is low tech work, consulting involving developing complex forms and refining data (actually, Roman augur style, killing chickens and examining their entrails for portents and passing them along to clients), managing a professional association, etc., and my first computer was 1985 or so, I already middle aged and not into change.

Reading the previous posts, leaving out the techies, it's the classic "Old dogs don't want to learn new tricks." syndrome. Hell, I still use WordPerfect, a dramatic improvement over the WordStar I recall with horror. As good as Word. No, but I know how to make it do tricks.

The bottom line....Use Vista and learn by doing so, because just as GM doesn't stock a lot of parts for '57 Chevies, MS has a way of pulling the support plug on Windows versions. Today, Corel damn near gives WordPerfect away, and even WP11 makes a clumsy transfer to Vista (leaving Help behind). As for cheap WP printers and old Lexmarks, driverless in Vista, there are plenty of alternatives.

I will admit that downstairs, my bride putters along on a Dell purchased in January, ordered special with XP, 3 times as expensive as mine, but no better.

Now, if you want to fight, what about Google's Chrome browser?

Vista works fine on my home machine. I can't say that it's better than XP - it just operates differently. I'm not resistant to change when it's good (I used DOS from 1.0 to 6.22 and Windows since 3.0 (dabbled with 2.0)) - I'm quite happy with the ribbon model of Office 2007 (though I wish you could customize them), but nothing in Vista stands out as "different but much better", just "different".

My work machine, running Vista Enterprise, is a different story. It's a pig compared to my old machine, which was 2 years behind in hardware. Slow to boot, slow to respond, lots of "hold on 10 seconds while I just sit here and do nothing". We've rolled it out to tens of thousands of users. Our CIO actually published an article on his blog titled "Vista, it's not that bad". I can't say for sure whether it's Vista enterprise itself or our implementation of it.

Hey All, thanks for the perspectives on this. I know we used NT4 in our office for the first year after the launch of Vista and, I suspect there will be a move to Vista two years into Vista's life cycle (maybe sooner - I think we are forced to upgrade Office/Exchange or something else that me precipitate a move to Vista at some point). Either way, like most large corporations, our IS dept tends to be conservative.

I still haven't gotten to the "Windows XP is the greatest thing" part. When will that happen for me? :D

The pattern I see is that Microsoft introduces an OS that is full of bugs, runs slowly on current PCs, and creates a lot of incompatibilities that breaks a lot of existing software and training.

It takes about 3 years for MS to release Service Packs to address the bugs, for PC processor speed to increase enough to make the new OS as fast as the old one, and for companies to upgrade their software to work on the new OS.

Vista isn't there yet, which is why most of us computer types recommend against upgrading to it unless there is no choice. (Not much software requires Vista yet, but you can bet it's coming.) Wait a few more years, and Vista will be just fine. It just isn't the best choice right now.

I tried vista. I am a longtime windowns advocate. I didnt like it. SInce then, I have purchased 3 macs. I like Xp better than the Mac, and the Mac better than vista. I use PCs at work of course exclusively. It is intereseting...

My son had to get Vista recently when the screen size he deemed critical for his laptop wasn't offered with XP. He says the blue screen of death is a regular feature and he is a pretty ordinary user with limited software installed.

Then he either has bad software or a broken laptop. I have NEVER seen a BSOD on my Vista machines.

I haven't, at least not since SP1 and, even before that, it was only in the first few weeks of use when there wasn't a lot of compatible software and hardware.

I did an interesting experiment today, though. On my 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop equipped with Vista Business, I turned off all Vista effects. This laptop has always been reasonably fast -- certainly faster than any other machine in my house, including a 3.0 GHz P4 running XP. However, with the visuals turned off my laptop now screams! I've never seen anything like it -- all the pretty cosmetics really held that machine back.

What exactly did you disable and how?

Advanced System Settings - Advanced tab - under Performance click on Settings - click on the radio button for Adjust for best performance. Then click Apply.

Vista is bad as it is a totally different build as it's predecessor, XP. Many devices / software do not work as drivers are not created, like my dell printer, Dell did not want to make a driver for vista. However, I've read reviews somewhere that vista is able to make use of multi-cores better, ie using a multi-core built game on a quad core, XP was only able to utilize 100% on 1 core and 50% on another, the other 2 are basically idle. Vista was able to get all 4 cores running almost 100%.

The IT guys where I work categorically will not support Vista.

Yeah. The only reason I would remotely consider it is for 64 bits. XP64 is out of the question due to the lack of certain critical drivers.

I still use Wordperfect, also. Most of the time I find it superior to Word. To me it comes down to one feature: Reveal codes. Many times I've straightened out a Word file someone has made a total mess of by loading it into Wordperfect and finding the hidden problem.

I wouldn't use Vista in the office but my new home PC - purchased last Sunday - runs Vista phenomenally. When I do an operation for the first time, the effects and overall layout take me a few extra seconds to figure out (nothing major). I was a hold-out who only gave Vista a chance because my previous desktop had become unusable in practice - let's just say that my laptop is corporate running XP and I hadn't purchased a personal desktop since 2002.

I've been using Vista for a year on a Thinkpad T61 (C2D 2.2) which came with it pre-installed. I also use XP on my corporate T61 (C2D 1.8).

I had been intending to remove Vista and install XP on the personal laptop, but it's "not that bad". That said, it still bugs the heck out of me in certain things (particularly networking, and in particular Wireless management). I experienced a few BSoDs and lockups pre-SP1 but it has been relatively fine since then.

I like XP better though; and I was an early adopter of it and really liked it over NT4 and W2K.

I'm a Unix user by heart (and by profession), my laptops are mostly just web browser/email (although the BB plays the majority role for that these days)/Word/Visio, and dumb clients for SSH and X to the places of real work...

I've tried it both ways many times on my laptop and it doesn't make a huge difference. I don't know why it makes a difference on yours, but not mine. Transparency is the only setting that makes a noticeable difference on my laptop.

I saw my first BSOD in years on my week-old Vista laptop. Coming out of sleep mode: Ta-daaaaaaaaaa. The only software I had installed at that point was Office 2007.

I'm trying to figure out why my laptop is so slow booting up. It takes a good 3-4 minutes until it establishes network connectivity. About 60-90 seconds coming out of sleep or hibernate. My 4 year old XP laptop is about 60 seconds boot up and 15 seconds out of sleep. And coming out of sleep mode, every 6-7th time my Vista won't find the network at all so I have to reboot.

Maybe I have to try PTravel's suggestion and shut off Vista's special effects. But since I purposely got 3Gb Ram to avoid that issue, I'm not thrilled with the OS as of yet.

It all depends on your graphics card. The better your graphics card, the less impact system effects will have on system performance.

So if you have a good graphics card, disabling visual effects won't provide a noticable increase in performance because the visual effects weren't impacting performance to begin with.

But if you don't have a good graphics card, then fiddling with visual effects can improve performance.

See my previous post. Your graphics cards is the critical factor here, not RAM. If you have a poor graphics subsystem and try to use all of Vista's visual effects, then whether you 1, 2, or 3gb of ram won't make a difference. You need a better graphics card.

But if I'm not doing anything graphics intensive - ie. coming out of sleep mode and just waiting for the nic to become active, what would a better graphics card do? My issue is with the boot up/wake up speed.

Check the settings on the NIC to see if the option to "allow windows to shut down this device to save power" is set. That has been a source of much malcontent for me in getting Vista online faster. And it doesn't save that much power.

Coming out of sleep it is also going to be slower since it has to refresh 3GB of RAM rather than whatever the older machine has.

Finally, what is the speed of your HD in RPMs? A 4200 or 5400 RPM drive will noticeably slow things down compared to a 7200 RPM drive.

I've changed the power setting on the NIC. I'll see if that improves things at all. Thanks!

The HD is 5400RPMs. Couldn't see going for the 7200 based on what I do/cost and the simple fact I didn't need the size drives on the laptop that the 7200's come in. Maybe I was wrong.:D

My bad. You said "Maybe I have to try PTravel's suggestion and shut off Vista's special effects. But since I purposely got 3Mg Ram to avoid that issue". It sounded to me like you were saying that you purposely got 3gb of RAM to avoid having issues with special (graphic) effects. Guess I misread your statement.

This has made a HUGE difference. Thank you!:cool:

Sorry, it was probably my frustration causing the misunderstanding. I know Vista shouldn't be 'that bad' and was just grasping at any suggestion to speed this thing up. Having something new is supposed to be fun.:D

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I have it on a new laptop. Like you wasn't sure. But I actualy like it and it works great with a high end lapply anyway

Vista is to hard on hardware resources. The jump from a fast XP PC to a fast Vista PC that can use all the cool graphic gadgets is a big jump right now. Over the next year with dropping prices for hardware it won't be such a problem.

Still I think MacOS X is the best.