Vista not only wastes resources but also energy.

I got Vista Home Premium 32 with my notebook which I use mainly as a typewriter and for watching anime. While it was announced as fully Vista compatible I noticed with Aero it has temperature issues and the battery doesn't last even nearly as long as announced. Watching the usual animes the battery lasts about 1h30', typewriting while Aero is active is just about 1h. Typewriting without Aero about 2 hours.

I disabled all the crap and now it's performance seems to be ok - but I never really challenged it.

 

I believe SP1 includes some hotfixes on that but I cant remember. That said for battery use I believe Linux would probably be better depending on the distro and how they have the kernel compiled etc.

 

You just sound too much like a MS fan boy for me not to respond.

Not just slightly, the difference between the minimum and recommended system requirements are highly inaccurate. Some of the machines which are "Vista Certified" are only just within the minimum requirements, no false advertising at all? right. Then customers wonder why Vista runs like a piece of shit compared to XP on the same machine. The fact is, you shouldn't NEED high system requirements JUST for the OS. It is there to solely allow the application of other programs etc. You use it operate your computer, it shouldn't be your computer.

The fact remains that MS had a very long time and a beta period for which Vista was developed. As Midknight previously stated, they made extremely little changes or improvements between RC1 and the release version. Hot fixes etc shouldn't be needed for performance optimising, they are solely in existence to remove security vulnerabilities and to fix bugs. Such trivial things such as file transfer speeds should not be hampered by the OS in any way and if they need to send out a patch for that sort of thing, they should've kept the OS in development for a few more months, iron out the insanely obvious deficiencies and focussed on making it a solid OS before worrying about the shiny effects crap which do nothing at all to improve operating efficiency or usability, only to show off graphics, make things seem new and shiny to sell and make money. Having essential programs installed such as Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Firewalls should not have such a drastic effect that they have to fight with the OS for resource just to be able to operate. Don't go and blame the end user for the 'obvious' culprits when it is quite clearly the OS which impacts on performance as seen by a direct comparison to XP running the same things.

Businesses are NOT upgrading to Vista. At all. I doubt they would even upgrade with SP1. They NEED stability and reliability. I work in applying business IT solutions and supporting them. They hate having downtime and having to train staff for a new standard which isn't even seen as a industry standard whilst the existing software is more than capable of meeting their needs.

Vista's version of making use of memory is a little eschew. It caches your most used programs so they ready to run at a moments notice. The thing is, when using memory intensive programs a lot like video editing software, it will cache memory which could be better used by the program itself, not by allowing the program to start up quicker. Allowing streamlining is more important than being ready for future uses. Vista plainly sucks at memory management. They had a nice approach, but it has a few serious flaws to it's system. The amount of memory used to cache commonly used programs is way too much and in low end systems this WILL cause serious performance issues.

As the original topic of this thread suggests, the only reason numerous people have Vista installed is due to Vista only games and DX10. The same thing applies to 360 and PS3 only titles. Trying to force people to buy something new just to be able to use something else. But when they offer supposed improvements for DX10 over DX9 when all they did was lock out being able to select such features under DX 9, that's just shit. When the previous DX9 is capable of offering something pretty damn close to what they offer in DX10, but then lock it out to try and force people to use DX 10.

People will be forced to upgrade to Vista eventually. Money talks and major programs will be made Vista only and above and XP will eventually lose support from MS. Even though people are happy and capable of doing bigger and better things on the current platform, MS forces them to adapt to new things which may not be better in any way, making more problems in the process.

When Linux reaches the stage of being able to act as a base for every day computer uses, then it will gain even more widespread use. Games are a major selling point of people sticking to MS and support and compatibility for applications which they rely on in circumstances which depend on it. That IS something the open source community has working against them.

With the same hardware, the performance on XP is still higher than that of Vista. Plain and simple.

The performance gain from the cache implementation is minimal and widely seen as not in direct comparison for the resources used in the process.

 

I find performance and my experience with my computer to be better on both Linux and Vista than XP but then I have all hotfixes and stuff applied. Ubuntu is a pretty solid OS too, though some aspects as I have said from my experience still need a few things to go.

The problem with "Vista certification" is that they go by the minimum requirements, plenty of things which say the minimum requirements really are the minimum requirements but not recommended for good reason.

I'm not a "Microsoft Fanboy", I just don't enjoy watching stuff being posted that is incorrect all the time. Most of the people I know who have switched from XP to Vista are very happy. That said, most of them are gamers and not casual pc users.

That said my PC is not anywhere near the minimum requirements and if it was i'd go with Ubuntu rather than XP for out of the box SATA support (without making my own image) and the ease of management over either XP or a cut down Vista. Infact before upgrading my PC I was running Ubuntu for over 6 months purely because I had tried Vista and liked it during the BETA/RC process and couldn't go back to XP so decided to go back to Linux again although I was using OpenSUSE/Fedora previously.

All that said, I think the expectation of Vista and DX10 has been greatly overdone by certain parties including to some extent at the start Microsoft and thus the product delivered especially with the issues with transferring small files and the Vista related graphics performance issues which have mainly been hot fixed.

You must also remember with Vista, that a lot of the features that should have been in Vista didn't quite work out properly for them and so they will apparently be in the next version of Windows (Vienna) or whatever it's called now We shall see though.

 

One thing is that MS fucked up their development cycle when they scrapped Vista based on the XP code base and redid it based on Server 2003. Basically, over 2 years of dev time was lost, and as a result they had to rush to implement some half-baked features that were pretty good but not great.

I'm sure they've learned their mistake and are going to do a much better job in the next version of Windows; as it is, Vista isn't stellar but it isn't horrible either. You have to remember that XP was pretty bad as well up until SP2 was released. If you're paying the full price for Vista, though, it probably isn't worth it until it's been subjected to some more patches (this doesn't apply to me; yay for free university provided OS!).

While Linux is awesome and everything (Ubuntu 7.10 is great except for some annoying GNOME bugs that I have), I can't see true games becoming a reality for it for a long time. Catch-22: A lot of developers don't want to develop for a platform with a limited audience, while at the same time a lot of gamers see no games as an incentive to switch (TuxRacer doesn't count).

 

Screenshots or gtfo. Mine can be found in several threads in the computer threads we have here.

Yes Vista does use more memory, where as XP does keep alot of it unused at desktop. The problem is, Vista keep using that memory, or does not release it properly, as it is supposed to, when you switch from desktop/surfing to gaming. Their whole system of caching heavily used files is smart, but not handled properly, and needs to be redone.

Vista for gaming is pure retarded unless you have a system like the one you spec'd, and even then, you're still running 20-30% less then what you could with XP.

As for Vista Certified, they can obtain that backing if they can even run Vista barely, completley barebones down, with everything turned off. That certification is a total waste. It's like nVidia calling their 8400 series cards a good buy for a gamer. The living room PC is running a 6800 GT, and it blows away the brand new 8400 by like 30 fps in Battlefield 2142. Runs Vista better then the "Certified" piece of crap as well.

The sales show what folks think of Vista. I'd even go so far as to say Vista would be even more of a failure, if not for the OEM companies selling it preloaded. And on top of that, every single manufacturer, well as of Late Oct when I ordered my mother's pos (she wanted one from the store w/ a warranty so she wouldn't have to hassle me with problems) had gone back to offering XP SP2 Pro as the preferred installed OS in place of Vista.

Vista is this series Windows ME.


I find it hard to believe that your friends are gamers and are happy with Vista, when most of the folks at my job either have systems specs like mine, or way higher, and they absolutley detest Vista. We play every game under the sun together when we're at work, and sometimes have cooks outs and LAN together, and you will.not. find a single Vista in over 30 PCs. With over 3/4s of them liquid cooled, and hell our old director had a custom built with a refridgeration/reverse phase change system inside it, we're not your average idiots who'd pass on a good thing. If Vista was worth running, and wasn't just smoke and mirror jerking around from greedy MS, we'd be running it.


Edit splitting this out or renaming the thread

 

...This thread demonstrates how little I know/understand of computers.
Anyway, I don't game all that much and my pc can't handle Crysis, but if that article is true... that's just low, really low.

This might be considered a stupid question (and if it's perceived as such, sorry), but how do you guys know so much about computers?

 

I guess it all stems from building your own computer. That's how I know what I do at least.

In order to build your own computer, you have to order the parts, in in order to order the parts you have to research as to what parts are the best and what all the numbers that come with them mean and so forth. I don't know much about software though.

 

Screenshot what?

 

Of your set-up. Like, a picture of the insides of your machine.

 

Oh, I don't have one and really cant be bothered to lug it out from under my desk at the moment to take one. I'll try to remember to take one when I get around to replacing my noisy fan. By screenshot, I had thought he meant a screenshot of some sort of application that shows my specs and drivers etc.

 

The thing is, XP is an end to one evolutionary branch of OS's, that has started back with Win95, and even earlier (Win 3.11). It has had nearly 10 years of constant feedback-spurred updates behind it. As far as I'm concerned, it's probably the best OS Microsoft has ever published.

Vista, on the other hand, has been programmed basically from the scratch. It ends the old branch of Microsoft's OS's and starting a brand new one, with little previous experience to fall back on.

I still have Win98 on one of my PCs. Working on that piece of crap, after doing stuff on XP, is excruciating. Literally every click I make feels like a gamble, with the blue screen waiting behind every corner. If my memory serves me right, Win95 was even worse in that regard.

Now, I never really tested Vista beyond admiring its flashy interface, but I bet the experience is similar to working on the first Win95, 10 years ago. Bugs, performance issues, memory leaks, security holes, compatibility problems... it takes a lot of time to fix all that up, years in case of something as complex as an OS.

Is Vista the way of the future? Sure, no denying it. But is it worth installing it NOW? Maybe if you're a multimedia guzzler who gets off on admiring his ultrakwool animated desktop. As for me, I'll wait as long as possible before saying goodbye to the good old XP. It'll be many years before we get a mainstream OS as good as that.

 

Hey that'll work too. Grab CPU-Z, or Everest Ultimate, open up the valid info windows, open up Firefox with DLP in the background. I just have a VERY hard time believing someone who obviously seems to know about PC's liking Vista. Unless you didn't build your PC yourself anyhow. As I said every single person I know that games, builds their rigs themselves, and loathes the ground Vista exists on. DX 10 itself is actually nice, but Vista's coding totally screws up the whole OS and makes games run stupid slower unless you do indeed have a beast of a machine to compensate for it, which in my opinion, is a fucked way to handle things.



IP has an excellent point, Vista, or whatever their next OS is they're already working on, the name escapes me atm, might be pretty damned nice. Aero is beautiful. No denying that. It's just not worth the hit performance wise to run Vista. Aero itself isn't so bad of a bit, it's the rest of the OS, even in min. setting mode, that still is a hog and needs to be fixed. SP 1 doesn't fix it.

If they fix the hogging of resources and various bugs, great, but I still feel like they're raping you if you're a gamer and want to play the new crop of DX10 games, you have got to get Vista, and you've GOT to have a strong enough PC to make up for their horrid coding.

I build my rig a year ago, and I already want to update it, but I can't due to buying a house right now. I have NO issue whatsoever dumping cash into my rig when it's time, but I refuse to upgrade to make up for bs coding.

It's pretty brainless as to how to build your own PC, I dunno why more folks don't do it. Check the review sites, check Tom's Hardware's comparision charts, go to newegg.com and buy away. Just for the love of God, do NOT go into a Tigerdirect outlet and have them tell you what parts to buy. Last year this guy had a top of the line AMD Dual Core, a 680i (the i stands for INTEL) motherboard, DD>1<R Ram, a budget soundcard, some bullshit overpriced ATI card that cost as much as the nvidia 8800GTX, and to top it all off like 300$ Creative speakers. I shook my head, the dude spent 3 times as much as me, and he wouldn't listen that the mobo and the proc wouldn't work together.

The rest is just plugging the right stuff in the right spot and installing drivers. Cooling, go Zalman, the 9700 rocks, hard drives, sata-2s, screw RAID it's overrated, hrm, what else, just don't go big on all the parts and then buy a budget power supply, get a quality one. I've seen a lot of folks tear up good parts by faulty PSU's, or return perfectly working cards that they thought were bad b/c the shitty psu wasn't giving them anough juice.

 

Okay, attached cpu-z and gpu-z output:

 

Nice, forgive my doubting, but as I said I just can't see how someone can stand Vista.

Build it yourself or prebought? And did you have that rig running XP before?

 

Actually, the best release of Windows so far is Windows Server 2003 when turned into Workstation mode.

My favorite version is by far Micro2003 and Tiny2003, stripped versions of Server 2003 that make my older computers run like champs. My newer desktop practically responds before I click. I got a full 17 frames per second increase in performance out of one of my games. Did I mention they usually boot in under 20 seconds?

You can find them on a collection of releases made by the developer eXPerience called:

Windows 50-in-1 Ultra DVD by eXPerience

Ram usage idles at about 31 mb for the Micro edition, and 45 for Tiny. Compare that to about 110 and 220 for XP and Vista respectively

Here's more info if you want it: http://pastebin.ca/817669

And remember: I expect that you own licenses to those original versions. It'd be illegal otherwise

 

But how pretty are they?

 

Windows Classic by default. I just use Windowblinds to make it sexiful again. The ram used by Windowblinds is less than that of the default theming engine.

~ 3 or 4 MB less in ram usage, usually far less.

 

That sounds sweet, Amerision. I'll definitely check it out.

I know that Win 2002/3 is more stable than XP, and that there are many user releases that work better than the official versions, but I singled out XP because it's the most universal OS from that whole family.

Besides, Windows NT (or 2000, whatever you want to call it) has been known to have compatibility issues, particularly with games and multimedia. I always thought that sacrificing a few percents of speed is worth not having to hassle with unresponsive software, incompatible driver and such. Although, Win2000 and newer are much better in that regard than the old NT family.

 

My previous rig I build myself and for the majority of the 2 years or so I had it running XP Pro as was the one before that.

This rig has only had Vista on it and was built by a PC store (parts + small fee for building) because I had ordered and built a rig with the same hardware but the motherboard and graphics card were faulty - so instead of risking having further issues I simply RMA'd it and got someone else to build it and have it stress tested. I was in quite a pickle because my computer I was replacing was having lots of issues at the time and all I had for backup was my laptop and I work at home as a System Admin / Support tech! Much fun was had troubleshooting what was wrong and filling out RMA's forms. :banana: :banana: The razer blade and some down the road not across the street action was looking mighty good at the time!