Headlines - Microsoft explains a misunderstood Vista

[HEXUS]

Microsoft is standing by its flagship operating system and has offered a nine-page document outlining "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista".

Read more.

[pow1983]

Microsoft have now officially lost it.
They have some barmy bloke in charge of something way out of control.

There is nothing mis-understood about UAC.
If there is a fly buzzing around your head and flying into your face do you:

A) Kill it
OR
B) Write a 9 page document convincing others that it isnt annoying.

Either of these 2 could be Ballmer --->

[Ferral]

I really like Vista, moreso since SP1.

First thing I do on a clean install is disable UAC as that can be a bit of a pain, then it is removing things like the sidebar on the desktop and other things that run on the system tray. After that once the drivers are installed it works great for me with my setup.

We can't just keep holding back with XP, hardware moves forward and so does software. Since the release of SP1 a lot more people should consider it. I now prefer it over XP and when I do a new build for my wife she has stated that she wants Vista on her new machine as she like things like the sidebar and feels comfortable using it.

[Saracen]

Much of what that document says is probably true, and there undoubtedly are structural benefits to Vista, and some of them evidently do cause some issues with backwards compatibility, and that obviously does cause some issues in moving forward. Legacy hardware and apps always have caused that problem, and probably always will.

But none of that changes my assessment - the benefits to be gained from Vista do not, for me, justify either the cost (of Vista) or the changes required or hassle involved in bringing systems up to date.

It's this simple. I use, currently, about nine PCs at home. They all have legit OSs installed. To bring them up to Vista requirements will cost me a lot of money in licence fees, and I can't see ANY of the improvements in Vista that justify that expense. Then there's the hardware - a good proportion of it is getting on. Hell, some of those machines are Pentiums, some are Athlon XPs and a couple are 486's. And they're doing the job I require of them. They're stable, they're long written down and they just carry on working. So to upgrade, not only would I have to spend a lot of money on Vista licences (unless, of course, MS would suggest I use pirate software? No, thought not) but I'd have to spend a bucket-load more on upgrading PC hardware.

Then there's the question of legacy hardware and software. I regard both as tools for a job. If they're doing the job, why replace them? For instance, I still have some old tape streamers, several old SCSI-based scanners (including two film scanners and an A3 flatbed), dye-sub printers, A2 inkjets, and a host of other items. To upgrade to Vista either implies replacing those, or an extensive investigation to determine if drivers are available for them. And for gear that's 10 years old or more?

It comes down to this. Does Vista offer me anything I want, or need, badly enough to be prepared to spend either the time or money involved in upgrading? Right now, no, it doesn't.

And nor do I or other users at home want to spend the time learning how to do things in Vista that we already know how to do on the existing machines.

There's a time-honoured adage. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And Microsoft, as far as I'm concerned, my IT infrastructure ain't broke.

If you want to convince me to spend the time, money and effort required to upgrade, you're going to have to come up with a FAR better product than Vista. Sure, it's better than XP in many regards (at a price, in time and money terms), but not by anything remotely resembling enough to win the pro v. con argument with me.

As teachers are fond of putting on school reports ..... must try harder in future.

[Wiczy]

Vista x64 is just great

Give it plenty of memory and a powerful cpu, turn off any extraneous features and watch it fly

However UAC is so annoying it is the very first thing that everybody disables, everybody I know anyway.

Edit: Trying to run Vista on lesser hardware is like wading through treacle though, so I can understand why a lot of people don't like it.

[badass]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Vista+old PC=NO
Vista+PC with 2GB RAM minimum and bits released after Vista was officially released=yes if you got it with the PC.

Why are people bothering trying to shoehorn Vista on to the computer equivalent of an old banger?
If you had a rusty old Austin Maestro, would you give it a full leather retrim?

[this_is_gav]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Vista+old PC=NO

I've said the opposite. Vista Business (x86 and without Aero) on oldish hardware works just as good, if not faster than XP SP2. It was fine on a Sempron laptop with 512mb and a rather crap 4,200rpm drive. I was testing for any software incompatibilities it had at work.

Just let it settle down once it's done the indexing and superfetch detection and you might be surprised.

Agree entirely with most of what's been said though - very little point in splashing out the cash unless you've got new hardware or have a specific need, such as having projects that would benefit from x64 or something (as the XP license isn't transferable to new media, as XP64 is a separate OS to XP, unlike most of the Vista licenses).

[Mblaster]

I'm currently running Vista Business x64, and I wouldn't go back to XP. The only problem I have with it is that when browsing folders there is no 'up' button! A little annoying but I'm getting used to using the buttons in the address bar.

I wouldn't buy Vista to replace a copy of XP on another machine, because the benefits from it are really not worth it, but if I had to buy a new OS anyway, it'd be Vista.

I also turned off UAC, maybe they had a competition to see who could create the most annoying feature... if they did, UAC won.

[badass]

I've said the opposite. Vista Business (x86 and without Aero) on oldish hardware works just as good, if not faster than XP SP2. It was fine on a Sempron laptop with 512mb and a rather crap 4,200rpm drive.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. 512MB RAM with everything turned off is still not enough to run Vista In my experience - even after leaving it for everything to settle down for a few days.

[Tidus]

Vista isn't as bad as most people make it out to be but if you list the recommended requirements as 1GHz CPU and 512MB Ram your asking for trouble with an OS like Vista. I'm Running Vista on a 2500+ CPU with 1.5GB's or Ram and it runs fine with no bloatware installed on my system, but if I leave the pc on for a long time it starts to get slower.

If Vista was marketed as an OS for new PC's with 2GB's Ram it wouldn't be getting so much hate. People buying PCs from stores like Comet are bound to hate Vista as the computer usually has little ram and is bundled with a load of crapware taking up most of that ram, try browsing the internet with 5 or 6 tabs open in Internet Explorer for an hour with some music playing on wmp and see how well 512MB - 1GB of ram will do you with all the bloadware you get installed with a new PC (Internet Explorer even hurts my PC with 1.5GB's of ram).

I do like the look of Vista though and its nice to use (after turning off UAC), I'm about to build a new system and I will use Vista 64 but XP is still a better choice for people with older PCs or new PCs with little ram (if your not willing to buy more).

[this_is_gav]

The recommended spec of 1gb RAM that's listed for Vista is fine (Home Basic is 512mb, but the others 1gb). It's a hell of a step forward from XP, where the recommended specs were for a 300MHz CPU and 128mb RAM... have any of you tried XP on 128mb RAM? Even with only the standard stuff installed (pretty much limited to Office XP and PSP7) it takes about 5 minutes to get from the initial boot (after the POST and BIOS screens) until all the services have been loaded. 64mb RAM is listed as the minimum. I believe in the vast majority of cases that would cause mental issues.

In comparison, the 1gb RAM that is recommended by Vista is much better. If all you did was stick the equivalents (Office 2007 and PSP9 (which I think is the last before Corel took over and went all Nero on it) or Photoshop CS3) on top of it, it would still be fine for most. Certainly perfectly usable, without having to wait hours while the OS swapped RAM back and forth. Obviously for the number of programs that enthusiasts tend to have installed, 1gb RAM isn't a good idea...

Sorry badass, but I simply don't agree. A plain Vista install (with just turning off Aero if the driver supports it, as it takes quite a bit of RAM) is completely usable with 512mb with just the essentials installed. I'd never, ever recommend it, and for most systems it would be stupid given the current prices of DDR2, but it just works, almost as well as XP. Then the more you throw at the 2 of them, side-by-side if necessary, the better Vista gets. XP just keeps getting slower and slower, on an almost constant line, while Vista adapts and prioritises. Running the same stuff on both OSes is quite an eye-opener. I'm not suggesting it's fine - it isn't, but it's usable. As it is, only Home Basic has 512mb listed as the minimum spec.

Vista's just so much better at memory management. As a result, it works much better, even without tweaking, with comparatively low-end systems than XP ever did.

[=assassin=]

I have Vista on a laptop with 2GB RAM, a Core 2 Duo 1.66Ghz and 8600M GS graphics (with 512Mb) and Vista runs pretty slow compared to XP, with programs and general startup taking an age to load in comparison - it's basically awful for what it is, as it should load stuff alot faster than it does. There wasn't anything really put on the laptop by default apart from some trial firewall software, so it's not like there is loads of bloatware pre-installed. My dads old A64 3200+ with 1GB Ram runs miles faster on XP, and as I would expect it to. If I had the choice, I'd have stuck with XP when getting the laptop.

[greenalien]

Another area where Vista has XP licked is networking. Vista just works, no arguments, instantly recognises and configures wireless networking, no connection issues. XP is much more hit-and-miss.

[[GSV]Trig]

I'm less impressed with Vista since I managed to break it the otherday doing something really simple, at which it failed really badly, I laughed.

[directhex]

gaming benchmarks now show vista sp1 as at least as fast as xpsp3 - both of which are faster than previous xp or vistas