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

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?