BleepingComputer.com: Is Vista Worth It?

I posted earlier about vista. What I should of asked was what are your experiences with Vista.
I have heard there are a lot of problems. I am looking to buy my daughter a laptop for going to college.

If you can find a place to buy a computer that is capable of running both/either Vista or XP, choose that instead of one that is limited to just Vista. I have a pc that runs Vista and another older pc that runs XP. XP is more user friendly and not so fussy to configure. The trouble is that the market is shifting towards Vista, so you don't want to be stuck with just XP either. Ideally would be a new modern computer that is capable of running both or either one and has both upgrade and downgrade support from the vendor or manufacturer or whatever.

Troubles with Vista: For gaming or video or audio, it is less than acceptable. There are way too many things configured automatically on Vista that interrupt gaming and audio or video applications. A lot of it has to do with the harddrive suddenly doing stuff that the user didnt request be done. Other stuff is the CPU being occupied with tasks that the user didnt request be done. Combine those two and it's a recipe for frustration because it's difficult to find out what's going on, learn what it means, and stop it for good safely. Vista is still somewhat mysterious, even for people who optimize and hack systems for performance. So there's not as much support for getting stuff working better, compared to XP.

Your daughter might have an interest in video recording or editing or music recording or whatever. Vista would be bad for her in either case. And video gamers don't tend to like Vista either. I've also noticed a lot of digital cameras aren't compatible with Vista yet, amongst other types of hardware that connect to a computer.

XP is where compatibility lies for the time being. It's not as flashy looking as Vista, but that flashyness comes at a serious price to Vista.

Stuff I've had to disable on Vista is not limited to:

* All visual effects
* All gadgets
* disk indexing
* file/folder indexing
* readyboot
* readyboost
* prefetch
* superfetch
* about 30 services
* lots of scheduled precedures
* automatic defrag

This is more than many people will disable, but for recording and mixing high quality mulititrack music, this is necessary for me.
I imagine that people into video recording would have similar issues.

I also performed a lot of registry modifications and disabled restore points since I use Acronis True Image Home instead.

Now to put things into perspective, if your daughter is just going to be using the computer for word processing and surfing the internet, then maybe vista is ok. Vista support will probably get better over the next few years. But anyways, you'll want to get a variety of opinions on this besides just mine.

I have found nothing wrong with Vista. As long as you have 2GB of RAM and a decent dual core processor it will run like the wind with a few modifications.

I just recently changed from XP Home And Pro to Vista Ultimate and IMHO, I will not go back to XP.
I have an older ASUS 478 board, 2 gigs mem, 3.2 P4 800FSB a few mod's and Vista just tears up XP

hi,,, i have 3 vista and 2 xp machines in my house,, i know like vista more than xp,,, as long as you have 2gb of ram its fine,,, also vista takes more advantage of multi core processors,,,, a friend of mine has just upgraded his pc which has vista from 1gb to 2gb of ram and also installed a core2 duo E4000 series for his old celeron,, and he is amazed at the diferance,,, if your getting a laptop try and get as much bang for your buck,, also get one with service pack 1 already loaded,,,,,,
good luck.

Stick with XP if you have older software or hardware that's not compatible with Vista (and you don't want to upgrade to newer stuff).
If there's none of those problems, then Vista will work well for you.

Now that Vista's been out for a while, the growing pains associated with a new OS are minimal. Still, when purchasing hardware or software, make sure that it says it's Vista compatible. FWIW - some printers will have a "Works with Windows Vista" sticker on them. What this means is that the printer will work with Vista, but the company didn't include the Vista drivers in the package - so you'll have to download them from the manufacturer's website in order to install it. Don't try and force the incompatible drivers to install - removing them is a real pain!

Axephilic, on Aug 9 2008, 02:42 AM, said:

Like this person, I've had no problems at all with Vista. In fact, I actually -gasp- LIKE IT.

dick button, on Aug 9 2008, 02:59 AM, said:

Does she like to mess with and configure computers or does she just want to run applications on it?
If the latter I'd try to find a suitable laptop with XP installed.

Vista out of the box tends to run the HD indexing files, putting all your media files in Media Player library, and just a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to do on a laptop.

I have Vista on a desktop machine with 2 GB ram. I like the exploding windows. But I didn't like endlessly messing with it to quiet the HD.

Vista is the future but since a laptop prolly lasts until dropped once I wouldn't worry about getting one with "old" XP on it.

I've been using Vista since its release. I actually like Vista, I have two PC's with x64 version on it. Most newer hardware and software has good support. I found Vista easier to configure and use than XP in many cases. Before buying into the doom and gloom some people see with Vista, you should try it out on a PC at the store or at a friends house. I've seen many people write off Vista without even using it. Or, they come in with very high expectations only to become angry when something doesn't work without a patch or update.

Over last Christmas I read somewhere that the #1 question that circuit city, best buy, and comp USA got about Vista was whether it was upgradeable to XP... Sorry I know it is no help but I thought it might get a smile outa someone.

Well I'm another one in the camp for liking Vista, I've just bought a new machine with Vista Home Premium and I love it especially the 17" LCD wide screen monitor that came with it. It has 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB Hard drive on an Intel E4600 Core2 Duo 2.40 GHz.

So far all my stuff that worked on my XP Home machine works on this one, my router is 4 years old and I just plugged the cable into the back of the machine and the router and away I went, I passed my XP over to my husband as his had bit the dust and he's happy plus I have a WinME machine on the network that keeps chugging along without problems.

Another happy Vista convert here

The new desktops in the $1000 range(meaning just Tower/Keyboard/Mouse in a box) are coming standard with 6 GB Ram and Vista Home Premium 64 bit installed. So it looks like it's what it is for a while. Maybe user feedback can get them to configure the defaults a bit better. I've heard from some people running 64 bit Vista with SP 1 that they don't get hard drive run-on and other side effects that I mentioned with Home Premium 32 bit. Here's hoping.

I got a new Dell with Vista Ultimate on it and love it! I was warned by many not to get Vista, but there is no other commercial choice. I think they've worked most of the bugs out of it by now, and most hardware and software has been updated to run with Vista. By the way, I have 4G memory. Runs great!!

patop, on Aug 22 2008, 07:03 PM, said:

Unfortunately I found out the hard way that if you have an HP Media Center PC with Vista, it runs a whole
bunch of services, tasks, and other crap that constantly catalog, index, and publish your files.. esp.
multimedia files. So it tends to run the HD on incessantly. I've been shutting off unnecessary services and tasks since April 2007 and the drive activity is still way higher than the same machine with XP(I have it
multiboot.)

It would be much more convenient if they had a central configuration gizmo that would shut all this related stuff off with one go! Then the Vista hostility might be drastically reduced. Other than that I like using it fine.

I just don't like it when my computer makes me wait because it's busy doing something it thinks is important but I don't!!