Vista Users (rate it)

[MRGTB]

I've been reading mixed reviews about Vista, some people seem to love it and say it's miles faster than the other MS operating systems like XP Pro x64. While others hate it and say it will put and end to Microsoft's O/S domination over the other operating systems like Linux and Mac.

So if your using Vista now, please rate it from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. And post your views about it. What are the pro's and cons in your view?

[filburt1]

Based off RC2: 7. It's generally nice overall, but they rearranged some UI elements for seemingly no reason, and dumbed down the user interface even more in other areas. Case in point: I tried to connect to my home VPN yesterday, and it gave a simple failure error. It wouldn't even tell me why it failed. At least XP told me bad username/password.

[Yur1y]

Windows Vista - the easy way to kill your computer.

[Kier]

I installed a test version of RC1 last week and have been fiddling with it for a while, and although I haven't done anything serious or in-depth with it, I do have the following observations.

Aero Glass
Very nice eye candy but the lack of a distinct, differently-coloured title bar to windows tends to make the interface seem somewhat cluttered. The fact that you can see through the title bar to what is behind doesn't help this situation. I'm sure with time this will become less of a problem as your brain becomes adjusted to the visual cues Aero gives you, rather than those of XP or 2000.

Explorer Address Bar
The new address bar that allows you to click on each component of the address in Explorer windows is awesome... finally Windows has something that's as good as the vBulletin navbar breadcrumb! Of course they've taken it one step further with the pop-up menu of a location's children, which I also really like...

Zoomable Icons/Thumbnails
Hold down Control and use your mousewheel in an explorer window to change the size of icons and thumbnails. Lovely.

Flip3D
Seems like a bit of a gimmick at first but provided you have a sufficiently fast graphics card to run it without a slow-down, it's a fantastic replacement for alt-tab.

Multi-Monitor Support
As you may know, I run a triple-monitor setup both at home and at work. This consists of a dual-DVI GeForce 7800GTX in the PCI Express x16 slot and a single-DVI GeForce 5200 in a regular PCI slot in order to provide three DVI ports in total. Under XP this was fine.

However, under Vista, the speed difference between the 7800 and the 5200 is painfully apparent - windows dragged from the center monitor (7800) to the left monitor (5200) suddenly stall and move as though through molasses. This is also demonstrated with some of the new screensavers. Aurora for example runs beautifully if I enable only the two monitors powered by the 7800 but slows to an absolute crawl when running on all three, having to employ the 5200 card.

The final problem is the incessant security prompts Vista pops up. I don't object to these at all, but for the fact that they take the best part of five seconds to appear, because they have to black-out all the monitors before appearing, and Vista seems to do a very bad job of doing this with a multi-monitor configuration.

On the whole...
it looks like it will be a worthy successor to XP and I'm sure I'll upgrade. Perhaps the problems I've encountered have been fixed in the RTM version and affected only the beta and RC versions. Until January I won't be able to find out unfortunately.

[Greps]

I love it how all mac fanboys rate Vista 1 :D

[MRGTB]

Just installed Vista Ultimate RTM and tried it on a 30 trail with no serial number entered during the install.

First impressions are it looks good, much better than XP on the eye candy front by far. But I think there is too much messing around to get stuff done compared to XP. But then I felt the same way around with XP compared to Windows 2000 when that came out.

In saying that, it's very impressive and a worthy sucessor to XP. I was lucky enough to have recently built a powerful x64 bit based computer with 4GIG ram and two top of the range SLi cards installed, using an Athlon X2 x64 processor. So Vista Extreme runs fine here in Aero mode. But I did not really find it any faster than XP Home 32bit to be honest, about the same.

The down side is, I've had some driver issues with the mothboard. I was hoping with it being a new Asus board it would have been auto configred with MS drivers. But that was not the case! So compatibilty wise right now. It just not having it with my PC at all on the driver front.

All in all though, it's good. But I won't be rushing out to buy it for neally £400 in the UK. I think I'll stick with XP Home for now until I at least know for sure that there are Vista drivers for all my hardware to work 100% with it. If that doesn't happen I'll be sticking with XP Home.

[Cromulent]

I love it how all mac fanboys rate Vista 1 :D

Do they?

[WorkAnimal]

I atually like it a little bit, looks all sleak and shiny. :)

[Zonex]

I'm rating it a 1 just because it's bloated. I can't stand bloat...even if the os turns out to be faster. I would have been twice as fast without the bloat.
Case in point - it comes on a DVD!
Another thing I despise is losing control over files and folders.

[BBF]

Well I rate it 3 Since my computer sucks and it can barely run vista with all of their features.
Its a really nice designed system but it requries alot of RAM and CPU to run normally.

[MRGTB]

Windows Vista - the easy way to kill your computer.

Not sure about that, but it sure does mess your computer up if your not careful. I had XP Home installed and use another hard drive to store my "Drive Image 2000" back-up image of XP Home on for restoring with floppy boot disks.

Well, I deleted the C: drive partition to install Vista on that had XP Home on previously with the intentions of deleting that partition again later after testing Vista to restore XP Home back again using the image located on my D: Drive.

Guess what, after I installed Vista to my C: Drive (or so I thought). I found it had removed all my files from my D: Drive instead (meaning I loosed my image of XP Home and other important files located on it and had to do a clean install from scratch today and install everything again from fresh. This would have took me 10 minutes with the image I loosed because of Vista. It installed loads of Vista files there instead on my D: drive and made it duel boot. In fact I even loosed another HD drive being displayed in Windows because of Vista under both XP Home and Vista. Seeing as I have 4 HD's and yet Vista only displayed 3 HD's for some strange reason and so did XP Home afterwards. Man, thats the last time I do that. Just got everything back as I want it again after spending all day re-installing and formating everything to get all my drives to show up again under XP Home.

Not sure why it did, or what the hell I did wrong by mistake. But I know all about creating and deleting partitions using the Windows disk. And using the Vista disk I deleted "Disk 0 - Partitiion 1". (which should have been my C: Drive). But something went wrong and it sure screwed things up for me big time.

Anyway everything OK now. And I still think Vista looks pretty cool when installed :)

[Quillz]

I'll rate it an 8.

I find it must faster than XP on the same hardware, and straight out the box, everything worked just fine on Vista. The only driver that needed updating was the touch pad driver, which took about a minute to find online. Everything else, including my wireless card, just works the way it should. Now that I've used Vista, I don't think I could go back to XP. I'm also running Office 2007 with it, and I've noticed that Outlook starts up quicker than on XP.

[MRGTB]

Vista looks great, a lot better looking than Windows XP. But it's very expensive though.

[whitetigergrowl]

I dont get it. I see people that use computers and OS's that are damn near obsolete. Some say its all they can afford and others say that it suits their needs. Yet they get upset because fewer and fewer things are compatible with their PC or its OS. The natural progression of technology and the abandoning of old, outdated technology that drags down current technology for the sake of making everyone happy. Ain't it a bitch.

I've beta tested Vista and I love it. It felt a bit awkward at first but once you tooled around with it for a few minutes things seemed more natural in placement. A great product so far. Cant wait to see how things continue to turn out with it.

[feldon23]

The irony is it is Vista's backwards compatibility that must hold part of the blame for it requiring ridiculous amounts of RAM, disk space, and CPU. I would rather have had a clean break and say "Ok, we're supporting all software written from 2000 forward."

I still don't know, features-wise, what XP does that 2000 doesn't except Remote Desktop (a conscious choice by Microsoft not to support it) and zero config Wi-Fi. Oh, and require twice as much RAM and 3 times the hard disk space.

[filburt1]

It doesn't really matter to me in any case. I inevidibly swear off most OS upgrades (except for Mac OS X) and then months later, or earlier, cave in and upgrade. Plus I'm getting a free copy of Vista, and my existing copy of XP is from the wonderful days of when my campus bookstore sold it for $15.

I find many of the people who slam Vista think their ancient system will magically cope with it, and when it doesn't, it's Vista's fault, not that they have 2 MB of RAM and onboard video. Upgrade or get out.

Essentially I'm echoing whitetigergrowl's comments. If your computer is at fault for not running Vista to its full feature set, then shut up because of course it won't be a good experience for you.

My lowly, 3-year-old-once-set-on-fire computer (2.6 GHz P4, 1 GB of RAM that should be 2 GB but I'm poor, 10k RPM RAID 0 hard drives, and a Geforce 6800) will only run Vista with average performance, I'm guessing. My laptop (Core Duo, 1 GB, 7200 RPM, Geforce 7400) will probably run it better in some respects, or at least for purely CPU-oriented tasks.

[Zonex]

I still don't know, features-wise, what XP does that 2000 doesn't except Remote Desktop...Actually, you can run remote desktop on 2000. Look in the support folder of the CD. You can use it to fix an XP machine. Not the other way around though.
VNC is better anyways.

[Kier]

VNC is better anyways.Apart from the multi-platform capabilities of VNC, I really couldn't agree less - Remote Desktop is superior in just about every other conceivable way.

[Zonex]

Apart from the multi-platform capabilities of VNC, I really couldn't agree less - Remote Desktop is superior in just about every other conceivable way.

I really couldn't agree less - VNC is superior in just about every conceivable way.

Matter of opinion and needs I guess. ;)

[feldon23]

I use Remote Desktop all the time. I have not tried VNC.