XP vs. Vista?

I'm not a Microsoft Fanboy. In fact, I've urged users on this forum to forgo buying MS based laptops in favor of Apple's products. I've touted the advantages of an overpriced bit of hardware that has the best of all worlds going for it; OS/X for the average user and running XP in a VM under VMWare Fusions for when they need to run x86 programs. For the average user, no mobile PC has the innate ability to do it all that OS/X has.

For more advanced users, the line is blurred to the point of pointlessness. XP - OS/X- Vista or any (other than Linux) other OS is just as good as the other in terms of security because the users of such exact their own security policies.

Beyond that, there are a few real reasons why a HOME user should pick Vista over XP. Primarily, task management in Vista is leaps and bounds above XP. Wildly leaps and bounds. My CPU at 100% and disc thrashing to the end of its life and ALT+TAB is much much better in Vista. I can still use my PC under Vista while it squirts out weekly backups to all my devices. Doing the same under XP leaves me without a machine for an hour.

That's not to say that I love Vista. It still blue screens at times when XP just chugged on. Do I blame MS for that or the boneheads that wrote the device drivers for that? Where to put the blame, on MS for letting that driver in or the company that wrote it?

Did MS drop the ball with the launch of Vista? Sure as hell they did. They should have required 2GB as minimum and 3GB as comfort, not the 512MB or 1GB companies were pinching out with full Ultimate installs. Not MS fault Compaq, Dell or HP have cave trolls as system designers. Now even base laptops come with 2GB, and more often than not, 3GB.

And as I have said before, Vista runs OK on old hardware. The P4 single core that I've got runs the piss out of it, and that machine is 4-5 years old.

 

Most of the corporations I deal with still use Win2K. This, in the day of Vista. Most will skip all OS's until Windows 7 when all of their single core machines will be replaced with multi-core machines and an OS that can take advantage of them. Are you in alpha of W7? It's GOOD.

Beyond that, you will find that LAMP rollout is contracting, not expanding. And this isn't isolated amongst small businesses. Server 2003 and 08 are excellent products that more than offset their purchase price with running costs. Easy to admin without huge headaches. There's nothing more reassuring to a CIO or CEO when you tell them that the world's most popular Linux distro's patch servers have been rooted and you have to flush the lot...the entire lot because you aren't sure what's in those "signed" binaries....neat, let's write off all those dollars.

 

PC = typewriter
mac = paintbrush

very hard to compare tools when one is work, the other is graphics based. Like going from a truck and asking what minivan dodge offers is the best, there are a lot of thinks you need to ask about it that directly speak to how you will use it.

My office at Variety and all the sister companies are XP. Just shy of 10k employees. Up until 8 months ago I ran Win2k server as my home machine avoiding a lot of the resource gobblers XP had, then I tried it on my box for 6 months, and got a new HP with Vista on it. I leapfrogged XP to go Vista for home and am stuck XP in the office. Aside from better usage of the hardware since the drivers now must be signed (as opposed to **** 3rd party h/w that is the PC M.O.) it adds some comfort to people seeking a "soft" gui as opposed to the box of melted crayons/acid trip that was the XP gui. It flows better, allows usb and sd/cf chips to aide performance, things are less abrupt, and fewer BSODs, so I am going to go 64-bit. I am not a fan, but happier than anything I previously used.

Don't wait the two years for W7 because this article points out some good things. Remember they will be supporting Vista for a good 3-4 more years.Five Reasons Why Skipping Vista Could Backfire

Mojave project?
Stupid marketing, they showed it to people without Vista experience, and did not let them use it. Yes Vista sucks, but it sucks less than previous Windows home versions like XP/ME/98/95/3

 

The learning curve was in a few areas:

* Document storage locations are not identical to XP, and I had lots of shortcuts which needed to be retrained.

* Services, control panel stuff, etc. is more 'buried' than it used to be, and took more clicks to locate

* More importantly, some of the imaging software which used to be bundled into XP, and is SPECIFICALLY used in the Ferrari factory CD-ROM's, is no longer in Vista. Microsoft let the license go, and a third party app needs to be purchased. Its neither obvious nor well documented (at least to me!), but was solved with a few hundred $$ purchase from some company in England that bought the rights from Microsoft.

* Finally, and maybe most importantly, MULTI-MONITOR SUPPORT in Vista is just horrible. In trying to make it 'dummy-proof', they made a freakin' nightmare out of it. Yes, it does work -- but it's pathetic. Without multi-monitor support, I'm at a significant disadvantage in how I function with my daily software. Yeah, it works now... but I'm thinking that a single 24" monitor might be a cleaner approach. For now, I use dual 19's.


Again, everyone adapts to technology different. Some stuff, I understand right from the word "go". Other crap, I struggle with.

 

Fair enough, I didn't think the control panel of personal settings were hard to deal with but it is more in depth and a lot more buton clicking. As for the last two issues, I doubt most people will enter into them so you can understand why some people will say "there were no major changes for the regular user".

 

I currently run a 4 monitor setup. The only thing that ever bothered me is the way both Vista and XP set up wallpapers and I fixed that with a free version of displayfusion.

 

I prefer XP to vista at the moment.

I had xp professional on my pc for years and loved it, found it user friendly, even though it failed on me numerous times. I found the way of how it places folders, the start menu etc all very handy and easy to remember where i put all my stuff.

My best friend started using vista about 1.5 years ago now, and because we lived in differernt countries we used skype to talk to each other. I often send him files for games and it would take him ages to find where it was saved this time. I thought he was just being stupid...

then i moved countries again and i'm now limited to 56K connection, so i dont game (online) anymore...I played some racing games online until recently my video card fried itself. Havent bothered to replace it yet as i didnt game often any more and i've got a laptop here i can use. However its got vista...

Used it for a good couple of months now and i still find it very frustrating. it just doesnt make much sense (in comparison to XP) how it places folders etc.

I will continue to use vista though, mainly because it will get better over time and i refuse to use mac. lol.