Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

4 questions:

1. What SKU have they given you?
2. What are your system specs?
3. How important is higest-performance gaming to you?
4. Do you have any seriously abnormal or REALLY cheap hardware or peripherals?

Well, apparently MS is going to stop supporting XP in a play to push people to Vista. Personally, I'd stick to XP for as long as possible, Vista just seems so buggy right now.

I get a free copy of Vista business through uni, and while I now have it with me, I won't be installing it before Service Pack 1 comes out. Right now it just seems like there are too many issues surrounding it, especially for gamers like me.

I don't think anyone should touch Vista unless they really need it, at least for the time being. But that's just me - some people are desperate for all those pretty effects.

What bugs does Vista (itself) have? I've had only a handful of explorer crashes (fully recoverable) and 1 blue screen (because I was mucking around with a buffer overflow demonstration I was working on that pissed DEP off (in other words, completely my fault). SP1 won't fix much.

99% of people's problems are drivers. Who's fault is that? Well who's fault is it that Linux doesn't have decent ATI drivers? Linux's? So is it Window's fault? No. Hardware mofos need to pull their fists out and start working on providing the support we pay for.

As for performance... The drop in performance is directly comparable to that from 98/2000 to XP. Sure things work slightly differently but this is just progression... Computers do more so they run slightly slower.

Expect this to be the last version of Windows that I endorse because Linux will be king of the hill before they manage to release the next version... It's not perfect. It's not a million miles away from XP but it works and it looks pretty at the same time.

Just the other day I was trying to copy a single .doc file from my sister's Vista laptop to my XP machine. Hers locked up, and so did mine while waiting for her computer to respond. While I could easily recover in XP, her Vista machine was so far gone I had to just do a hard reset. She's had plenty of other issue with it resetting and blue screening, and while drivers are probably one of the causes, you'd expect such an integrated solution like a laptop to fare better in that regard.

When I said "issues surrounding" I do indeed mean drivers, and also other applications which still aren't quite Vista ready. I know some of my uni's student software isn't yet Vista compatible. It's hardly Microsoft's fault but by the time Service Pack 1 is out, I would imagine that most things will be well in order by then. That's about how long it took for everyone to settle down with WinXP as well.

I love the excuse game people play defending Vista.

Avoid it as long as you can. It's true that it's not MS's job to supply drivers for everyone else's hardware. And how could they be expected to with so many different bits of hardware?

The problem is, the customer doesn't know, or care why his system is unstable, buggy, or nigh unusuable, and it will always reflect back on MS. They can't control the experience of their software, and it's true it's not their fault. They could spend a lot of time and money trying to facilitate that (and they often have,) but you're still left with so many loose ends.

Avoid Vista until it matures and hardware manufacturers start supporting it, until then you're playing russian roulette.

been using (a lot) for about a month with no problems. i never play games though. my computer does run faster than it did with XP.

I love Vista. And I don't care who knows it. It looks great, it works great, and that's really all I have to say about it. Haven't had a single problem with it. Haven't had a single crash in the 3 months I've been using it.

Oh man... all I want to say is, "I love my iMac..." [insert cheesy grin here!]

no

I have been using Vista for development for the last month or so and had 0 problems with it.

I have a laptop with Vista on it. I reckon it's ready to replace XP as long as you're not doing anything intensive - for the reasons Oli has already mentioned.

***Sneaks out the backdoor marked "Mac Users only..."

Actually, Vista seems to run really well on a macbook pro, there may be some driver issues somewhere but I played with one the other day and it seemed quite snappy and nice.

I got a free copy of Vista through school too, and it seems to work fine. I certainly wouldn't pay for it though.

Stick with Windows XP for the time being, if you are curious then you can try a test installation, i have installed it and everything works fine in it, i haven't got a high end graphics card through which I cud have enjoyed the aero desktop interface and all the other cool bits Microsoft has provided with it.

Its running very smoothly on my Dell Dimension 5000 PIV 1GB Ram and a 160GB SATA HDD with realtek ac97 sound and intel gma900 graphics card.

Just back up your stuff and don't forget to visit dell's website (if you have a dell machine) to download the drivers from.

Also, if you are unable to find drivers for Vista specifically, try the windows xp drivers for that device and hopefully it will work, as it did in my case for my sound card.

Hope it helps
Mutahir

I say that you should stay with XP for a while. Just wait and see. That is my opinion, due to feedback I received from family members.

I find there are often benefits to not upgrading to the latest technology. That goes for computers, software, handheld electronics, etc. The first release is almost always riddled with bugs and I find that it's best to avoid the frustration.

The more important question is whether you actually have a need to upgrade or are considering it just because the option exists.

And yes, that goes for my Apple stuff as well.

Depends entirely on taste and what one is doing.

Vista is intensive and needs horsepower. Yes, it's pretty, yes there are some nice bells and whistles. And yes, it can be very slow doing some of the most basic tasks.

Vendor support for Vista is poor and will remain so for some time, as there is quite a jump between the two driver model wise and vendors are struggling to find stability.

One of the few reasons to run windows is the great device support - that's rendered a bit hit and miss with Vista.

Personally, after using Vista, then rolling back to a mixture of Ubuntu and XP I can honestly say Vista isn't actually ready for general use. It's still very rough around the edges and has a way to go yet.

It's still buggy, it still has performance issues, over time the boot process turns to molasses (and you thought XP gets slow) and in general the polish is missing in a lot of places.

This is supposed to be Microsoft's best desktop OS ever - and it's just not.

Stay put until Vista matures.. you may feel a bit envious when friends upgrade but you'll have less consternation when you find out they are regressing and you don't have to. ;)

Avoid it like the plague until Microsoft does it right. Look at everything else that Microsoft puts out there, Xbox 360 for example? All the security issues with XP?