Windows Vista and Windows 7

Lee H

Hi


There are still a lot of people out there still using Vista so I would just like to ask everyone on here what they think of it now

Me personally think Vista was a big mistake which MS the redeemed themselves by releasing Windows 7

Does anyone on this forum still use Vista and does anyone still rate it as a worthy OS


Thanks

SteveLord

Pretty much on the money. Vista was pretty much either the beta for Windows 7.....or Windows 7 was the great service pack for Vista. You paid either way.

tiersten

Lee H wrote: »

Me personally think Vista was a big mistake which MS the redeemed themselves by releasing Windows 7

Does anyone on this forum still use Vista and does anyone still rate it as a worthy OS

Vista worked fine for me and I never had any issues with it on any of the computers I've used it on. Have you actually used a clean install of Vista with decent drivers? Most people don't seem to have and just bash Vista because its the in thing to do.

N2IT

7 is clearly better than Vista, but I think Vista smashes XP.

After being on 7 almost a year now, I have a hard time working on a XP based machine. It is just awful.

gunbunnysoulja

tiersten wrote: »

Vista worked fine for me and I never had any issues with it on any of the computers I've used it on. Have you actually used a clean install of Vista with decent drivers? Most people don't seem to have and just bash Vista because its the in thing to do.

Vista had several issues upon launch, most if not all which have been corrected with SP1/SP2. It gets bashed because of it's negative initial launch and couldn't seem to make people like it after fixing the issues.

My work (DoD) uses Vista and we don't have many issues, minus the fact that using older laptops don't perform the best with it.

TheShadow

I have two systems, actually three side by side on a KVM one is Vista and one is Win 7. The third is Centos. Vista is the one that I use the most. The Win7 one has more memory and is used for VM's. The Vista one for programming.

I never seemed to have any of the problems that people complained about other than the Vista ultimate ripoff. However I use my systems for work and not eye candy with wierd backgrounds, icon changes, sidebar apps etc. Shrug.

Daniel333

Never held a negative view of Vista. Everywhere we deployed it, things went great. Still several of our clients on Vista only networks.

Consumer grade Vista experiences were pretty negative though. Buddy of my bought a Gateway PC. It had no less thatn 40 startup items in msconfig and two tool bar out of the box. 10 minutes boot times? If other manufacturers were doing this it's no wonder people hated Vista.

Interestingly enough I just bought a Win7 laptop for the wife, 6 startup items and no toolbars.

undomiel

A lot of the problem was the initial release had problems that were patched up in SP1 & 2 but even more importantly was the manufacturers were releasing Vista on underpowered systems with crappy drivers. Lots of the budget release systems were 512mb or 1gb of ram. I personally liked Vista as long as the system it was on wasn't underpowered.

SteveLord

Sorry, but UAC was the dumbest idea ever. And helped contributed to Vista's downfall.

tiersten

SteveLord wrote: »

Sorry, but UAC was the dumbest idea ever. And helped contributed to Vista's downfall.

Better security is the dumbest idea ever? I never found UAC to be that difficult to use. Something pops up. You click okay if its something that you want to happen. You click cancel if its something unexpected. Done.

You like running permanently as an administrator or do you swap between accounts? Even OSX has a UAC like mechanism which will prompt you when it is doing something which requires administrator privileges. The only possibly bad part about UAC on Vista was that it prompted you a lot. It got toned down a bit in 7.

Disabling UAC is a bad idea on Vista and 7. You don't just lose the prompts. You end up disabling other features which let applications work better in a multiuser system and without administrator privileges. Disabling UAC after you've used the system for a bit is an even worse idea.

Hypntick

SteveLord wrote: »

Sorry, but UAC was the dumbest idea ever. And helped contributed to Vista's downfall.

I'll second that. We had a lot of issues with people running it on underpowered hardware as well. It was amusing to see how fast people jumped ship from Vista to 7, at least with the people we dealt with. Although the majority were still on XP by a huge margin.

uhtrinity

Never ran or adopted Vista for personal or business use. However I have worked on a lot of of Vista machines that have been brought in by clients. My number one complaint has been driver support. Issues like DVD drives or Webcams that mysteriously disappear and the only fix is to edit the registry. Or situations where printer drivers would bug a particular USB port. When you had bugged all ports you had to uninstall all the printer drivers and start over. That particualr issue was finally fixed after migrating to Win 7.

I agree, Vista was rushed out with too many bugs. I remember there being an article that also stated that Microsoft wasn't as open with vendors on the release. That resulted in lower quality drivers which helps explain a lot of the issues. The same article mentioned that the vendors were part of the Windows 7 cycle from the beginning. Saying that Vista was the Windows 7 beta is a pretty apt analogy or that Win 7 is Vista SP2. Regardless they fixed the most glaring issues. As a result I'm ready to migrate our school to Windows 7 in the upcoming year from Windows xp.

SteveLord

tiersten wrote: »

Better security is the dumbest idea ever? I never found UAC to be that difficult to use. Something pops up. You click okay if its something that you want to happen. You click cancel if its something unexpected. Done.

You like running permanently as an administrator or do you swap between accounts? Even OSX has a UAC like mechanism which will prompt you when it is doing something which requires administrator privileges. The only possibly bad part about UAC on Vista was that it prompted you a lot. It got toned down a bit in 7.

Disabling UAC is a bad idea on Vista and 7. You don't just lose the prompts. You end up disabling other features which let applications work better in a multiuser system and without administrator privileges. Disabling UAC after you've used the system for a bit is an even worse idea.

UAC desensitizes people...since all they did/will do is click YES to just about everything anyway. Having a popup pester you...is not security. Apple's Mac vs PC (Vista) commercials were right on the money back then.

Let the record speak for itself. Vista stunk and was a failure or a variety of reasons. UAC's initial implementation was one of them.

tiersten

SteveLord wrote: »

UAC desensitizes people...since all they did/will do is click YES to just about everything anyway. Having a popup pester you...is not security.

What would you prefer it did? The old way where everybody was admin all the time?

Whilst it may have prompted you a little more often than people would have liked, I still think it was a good idea and a move in the right direction. Its been significantly toned down for 7 as they either just automatically say yes for certain predefined system tasks or they changed that task to not require administrator privs.

I still don't see what exactly it did wrong that made it the "dumbest idea ever". I guess Windows Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage which both annoyed the crap out of nearly everybody whilst not actually stopping anybody pirating Windows at all were better ideas.

Daniel333

UAC is alive and well in Windows 7 and similar interfaces when you elevate in MacOS and Linux. So I am not clear on the problem? With the exception of legacy software UAC wasn't a problem. Do you have a lot of legacy software at work? We did have a client with some 16bit apps and some poorly made 32bit ones that triggered UAC pretty often. We just went and tossed those Apps onto RemoteApp/XenApp. (we didn't know about App-V at the time)

UAC Just makes your life easier at work since users can call you over "hey I need update my flash/quicken/Firefox" you enter creds in, next next done. Prevents people from updating things they shouldn't.

Of course if you are talking consumer grade, then I can see why some users would get desensitized to it. Windows 7 is nice on that, since you can lower how often it bugs you.

tpatt100

So anybody remember the XP launch? I remember gaming systems like Falcon Northwest were still offering Win98 SE for a while because it was faster than XP. Then SP1 came out and I think SP2 is where it really matured. I had no problems with Vista or 7 I think Vista had a public relations problem since XP had been the norm for so long.

jmritenour

I never really had a problem with Vista, but it was a solution looking for a problem. XP, by that point had matured into an awesome OS, and and did everything most people needed it to do, myself included. DirectX 10 would've been a great selling point, but there were no games that really took advantage of it.

So XP did what I wanted, albeit faster than Vista. Vista also had to deal with the lack of reliable driver support most completely new OSes suffer through, and there just weren't enough compelling reasons to switch.

7 still doesn't have any major gotta have features, but it's faster, more secure, and scales a lot better than either Vista or XP. I've installed it on machines with 512MB of ram that struggle with XP, but seem a bit zippier with 7.

Chris:/*

UAC in Windows is implemented similar to how Linux and Unix require admin access to fix a problem. I love this feature no more switching accounts to fix problems that I wish I could have done immediately. It also prevents me leaving my wife running an Admin account when I am away.

RobertKaucher

Chris:/* wrote: »

UAC in Windows is implemented similar to how Linux and Unix require admin access to fix a problem. I love this feature no more switching accounts to fix problems that I wish I could have done immediately. It also prevents me leaving my wife running an Admin account when I am away.

Give me a break. Are people still complaining about UAC? What OS does not have a feature like this now? OSX, Linux, you name it. +1 to Chris and the others here.

Xcluziv

N2IT wrote: »

7 is clearly better than Vista, but I think Vista smashes XP.

After being on 7 almost a year now, I have a hard time working on a XP based machine. It is just awful.

I agree, the changes and enhancements they made in Windows 7 were supreb. Having used both, Vista was okay, but experienced problems with it