Finally made the switch to Vista

D

Deimos

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
1,167
A few months ago I asked if I should switch to Vista, I tried but I had an old Audigy that wouldn't play well with Vista, couple of days ago I got an X-Fi titanium, so far I am absolutely loving Vista, There is still things I don't like about the start menu companred to XP (no cascading menus) but overall the massive amount of improvements far outwiegh the minor anoyances.

I'm just now discovering the awesomeness of 24/96 5.1 music, dark side of the moon is just amazing.

The worst thing about Vista so far is that I am hooked on Chess and Hold em' poker...
 
If you love Vista, you're gonna cream your shorts for Windows 7...

"EVERYBODY STAND BACK... SHE'S GONNA BLOW!!!" ;)
 
I think the cascading Start Menu is a complete mess. It is so difficult to find anything and on smaller displays it is way to easy to "blow it up". It's so much easier to hit the Windows key and type something or to simply scroll through stuff.

You're not the first person I've heard say they like the cascading menus and to me its completely baffling as to why anyone likes that mess. But people like what they like and to each his own.

On a setup like my sig rig Vista is very cool. I'll be the first to admit that Vista on older hardware and be less than responsive. Windows 7 completely changes all of that and my guess is that 7 can run at least as well as XP overall on older hardware.

Enjoy!
 
At first I missed the cascading menus, but now I like the clean looking Vista start menu. So maybe, give it a while and you'll feel the same.

Vista looks nice, but the greatest things about Vista are all the under-the-hood changes (that Win 7 inherents); Stability from moving driver code to user land, glitch free media playback through I/O prioritization, ASLR/DEP (DEP is in XP but it needs ASLR to actually be useful) and integrity levels for sandboxed applications like IE, file and registry virtualization so many admin-only programs can run as standard user, DX10, low-latency audio stuff, etc etc.

You're just realizing what 350 million slashdot rejecters have realized, so you have good reason to feel good about your choice. :)
 
If you love Vista and have a new, fast PC, you'll notice Windows 7 is not an improvement in performance.
 
Joe Average said:
Why is it so very many of us [H]ard Windows 7 users disagree with this statement, eh?
Click to expand...
I believe you that 7 is faster on older systems with 1-2GB of ram and slower CPU's. I benchmarked absolutely zero performance increase in boot time or gaming benchmarks on my system with 7 over Vista. Absolutely none. There are only a handful less services running and maybe a few hundred less MB of memory being used, if that. Otherwise the task manager readout was very similar. The only difference I noticed is that Superfetch is less aggressive which will help people with slower hard drives (I have a WD6400AAKS which is blazing fast).
 
Joe Average said:
Why is it so very many of us [H]ard Windows 7 users disagree with this statement, eh?
Click to expand...

I actually agree with it. I have a fast system and Windows 7 for me is no faster than Vista. I'm not saying it's not fast. Oh no. Vista is very fast on my computer so I have no complaints and I love all the tweaks in 7. But build 7000 is no faster than Vista right now on my computer.
I suspect that would change with RC1.
 
Joe Average said:
Why is it so very many of us [H]ard Windows 7 users disagree with this statement, eh?
Click to expand...

Because they're Windows 7 users, so they clearly already like Windows 7 more than Vista, otherwise they wouldn't be using it.:p


I myself have to agree with his statement. Windows 7 isn't any faster than Windows Vista for me. I was rather disappointed actually. Lots of people said the Windows 7 beta is way faster than Vista, and from what I've seen with the beta on my PC, it's not faster at all.
 
Joe Average said:
Why is it so very many of us [H]ard Windows 7 users disagree with this statement, eh?
Click to expand...

I also agree. I've been running tests for a while with 2, 4 and 8gb of ram. Windows7 is clearly faster with 2gb. But once you go past 4gb the difference is gone.

Also tried windows7 on a lap with 512mb and it runs surprisingly well.
 
AbJ32 said:
Windows 7 isn't any faster than Windows Vista for me.
Click to expand...
I'm in that boat as well, to be honest, and that's not a complaint. Vista x64 runs so well for me, that Windows 7 doesn't show any improvements overall. I haven't done testing in games, but for my usual apps, basic moving around the OS, and some video editing apps, I see no difference between the two. Call me crazy, but I'm also not sold on the new taskbar buttons. I'm sure in time I will, but I liked Vista's layout enough that I didn't see any thing to want changed.
 
I like the cascading menus because I can actually categorise my programs, it seems a lot more difficult to do this in Vista.

Don't get me wrong, I love the vista start menu, the search feature, the games menu, its all great, just thing it would be better if I could have a cascading menu as well.

Also, I have found that Superfetch is WAY too agressive, for example, playing Crysis: Warhead, windows for some reason refuses to release enough RAM for the game to run, I mean WTF is up with that? so what happens is every now and then, a map won't load because there is no free ram, and I have 8GB for crying out loud!

I'm just playing with it now, I changed the superfetch from 3 to 2, rebooted, and have watched my free memory gradualy decrease, I think I'm going to turn it off if it is going to cause problems with my games.

The unfortunate thing is, I really like the idea of superfetch, I mean if I have 8GB of ram, and windows can use it all if my PC will go faster, and I am really reluctant to turn it off, but FFS I just want to play warhead without having to reboot!

I just wish you could say, hey superfetch, I want 2GB of ram free at all times so I can play my damn games without problems!
 
Oh for God's sake..... *HEAD EXPLOSION*

FREE RAM IS WASTED PERFORMANCE. If your programs need the memory that SuperFetch is filling, it will be INSTANTLY released with NO performance hit. LEAVE IT ON.

How can we still be getting people with the same mistaken assumptions 3 years later?
 
Arainach said:
How can we still be getting people with the same mistaken assumptions 3 years later?
Click to expand...

Because people for some reason or another seem to think that they know more about designing operating systems than Microsoft's career software engineers do, and that they can tweak an operating system and make it better than Microsoft can.
 
AbJ32 said:
Because people for some reason or another seem to think that they know more about designing operating systems than Microsoft's career software engineers do, and that they can tweak an operating system and make it better than Microsoft can.
Click to expand...
Just quoting this for emphasis.
 
Deimos, Superfetch is not causing issues with your games. If anything it helps the games load faster because it caches game files. I've monitored disk activity while I was in the middle of my 100 hour Fallout 3 gaming months. The system already had the game files loaded into ram for me before I already started the game. The levels loaded virtually instantaneously.
 
AbJ32 said:
Because people for some reason or another seem to think that they know more about designing operating systems than Microsoft's career software engineers do, and that they can tweak an operating system and make it better than Microsoft can.
Click to expand...
qft

Check out the newest page file thread which I get flamed for telling the truth.

Microsoft knows more about Windows than you will ever know.
 
Microsoft knows more about Windows than you will ever know.

So, they're not ignorant. :) Still leaves lots of adjectives :p
 
bigdogchris said:
Deimos, Superfetch is not causing issues with your games.
Click to expand...

Well Warhead must have some wierd ass bug in it cause every now and then with superfetch enabled levels get to 82% and stop loading, I ran the game in dev mode, it hits a certain amount of memory and stops, and in task manager the available RAM is like 4MB.

I finished Warhead last night anyway so I have re-enabled superfetch.
 
I did have some issues with the original Crysis not loading all the way on my Vista machine (not saying it was Vista's fault). It would get to a certain point and stop but it eventually went away. I don't remember what was causing it. Warhead was trouble free though thankfully.
 
Joe Average said:
If you love Vista, you're gonna cream your shorts for Windows 7...

"EVERYBODY STAND BACK... SHE'S GONNA BLOW!!!" ;)
Click to expand...

why? whats so much better in windows 7? im just amazed at the ignorance that has been around both vista and 7.... vista is horrible and 7 is amazing, yet both os's are 90% the same.
 
Another vote for W7. I have both Vista and W7 installed on separate HDs, Windows 7 runs better, faster and in beta almost seems more stable than Vista even at SP2 already. Btw 7057 is sweet ;)
 
Windows 7 runs better on my laptop (1.73GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 5.4k 60GB SATA) than Vista did. On my desktop, Windows 7 x64 feels smoother, but whether it is actually "faster" is up for debate.
 
dnottis said:
Another vote for W7. I have both Vista and W7 installed on separate HDs, Windows 7 runs better, faster and in beta almost seems more stable than Vista even at SP2 already. Btw 7057 is sweet ;)
Click to expand...

These days I would have to say that any stability issues people encounter would not be an OS problem.

I have been through so many builds of XP I wouldn't even care to count, and now about 3 of Vista and every time I have had any stability problems it has been either hardware fault or driver fault.

Example, my last build was XP x64, I would frequently have video related crashes or issues, hard locks in games, major hassles upgrading drivers, but as soon as I switched to Vista x64 all problems were gone, people often complained about XP x64 ATI drivers, and I have found that the Vista drivers are actually more mature, XP x64 support is pretty lacklustre at best.

I have not had a single crash in Vista so far and my rig is fairly well overclocked.

In this day and age, Windows is rock solid, lets face it, Windows has come a very long way since Windows 98/ME.

In my opinion, when building a PC you should buy quality where you can't test, Power supply, my #1 recommendation when anyone asks is spend big bucks on the PSU cause you can buy cheap ram, middle of the road motherboard, and all of those things can be tested or burned in to find potential problems, but no end user has the ability to accurately test a power supply.

Anyway, getting OT a bit.
 
spacetrader said:
why? whats so much better in windows 7? im just amazed at the ignorance that has been around both vista and 7.... vista is horrible and 7 is amazing, yet both os's are 90% the same.
Click to expand...

It's a little more complicated than that. Sure, the OS'es are very similar, maybe they are 90% the same technically, that said Microsoft has made a big difference in that 10%.

Overall performance is much better on lower end hardware. As a tablet pc nut, I can tell you that a LOT has been upgraded in the pen and touch touch technology (though I am still waiting for solid touch drivers for my HP tx2z). Windows Search is better and the federated search feature is very slick. Windows Explorer is much improved I believe, faster, less quirky and Libraries are awesome.

There's a lot more there and it adds up to a lot of little to medium changes with a large cumulative net change for the better I believe. It's actually been a while since Microsoft has done a fit and finish release, Windows 98 was probably the last, though in many ways on could say that Windows XP SP2 was a fit and finish release tough just a service pack.


I think that Microsoft claimed that Vista's core would last about ten years so while Vista has some bad PR, the Vista core is probably going to be in the next major release of Windows as well.

This isn't really a first in software history. There are many times that a major release gets off to a rocky start, especially something that had some many architectural changes in it as Vista relative to its predecessor and then the next fit and finish release was much better received.
 
Deimos said:
These days I would have to say that any stability issues people encounter would not be an OS problem.

I have been through so many builds of XP I wouldn't even care to count, and now about 3 of Vista and every time I have had any stability problems it has been either hardware fault or driver fault.

Example, my last build was XP x64, I would frequently have video related crashes or issues, hard locks in games, major hassles upgrading drivers, but as soon as I switched to Vista x64 all problems were gone, people often complained about XP x64 ATI drivers, and I have found that the Vista drivers are actually more mature, XP x64 support is pretty lacklustre at best.

I have not had a single crash in Vista so far and my rig is fairly well overclocked.

In this day and age, Windows is rock solid, lets face it, Windows has come a very long way since Windows 98/ME.

In my opinion, when building a PC you should buy quality where you can't test, Power supply, my #1 recommendation when anyone asks is spend big bucks on the PSU cause you can buy cheap ram, middle of the road motherboard, and all of those things can be tested or burned in to find potential problems, but no end user has the ability to accurately test a power supply.

Anyway, getting OT a bit.
Click to expand...


I agree 100% about the PSU. But the same goes for using all high quality parts. Motherboard, ram, etc. Some people will drop $550 for a GTX 295 and then use crap memory.

I, however, have all name brand parts and had issues with Vista early on. Network file transfers over gigabyte network were awful. Vista had application compatibility issues and driver issues. I had to buy a new printer just to use Vista. Vista SP2 is much better than RTM but it still has resource issues where it just seems to bog down where Windows 7 seems much snappier due to the smaller resource footprint. While I can agree about using higher quality parts including a power supply Vista had its own issues that were responsible for it's demise. Windows 7, while not a brand new operating system is what Windows Vista should've been. Either way from the betas I've used I'm very happy with development and excited to see it hit the market in the near future.
 
Let me put it this way: Chimpanzee DNA is 97% identical to human DNA. But there's a hella difference between you and me and the chimpanzee in the zoo :)

That's Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista in a nutshell. Not much changed, but the changes made counted in very big ways.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top