Vista bug free?

D

dennisjai

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 20, 2005
Messages
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Hey guys, I've been out of the computer loop for a while. I've only used Vista about 2-3 times but I heard it has a lot of bugs/glitches..

Has MS been releasing enough updates to fix problems? I want to upgrade to vista.
 
You'll hear people say that Vista is a complete piece of junk. I think Vista is a FANTASTIC OS. However you have to keep a few things in mind.

1. If you have an XP machine running just the way you want, its NOT going to probably work the same Vista. There are a lot of architectural changes and you need to understand how they will effect how you work.

2. Check for hardware and software compatibility. You hear people upgrade to Vista and THEN find out they have this problem. Do a little research first to make sure that this isn't going to be a problem.

3. Don't put Vista Ultimate on an older machine with less than 1GB of RAM and then complain about performance. A Core or Core 2 machine with 2GB RAM will work fine however. In fact, you can run Vista Basic on some pretty low end hardware, but if you really don't want to see any performance issues, just make the sure its a decent machine.

I've been running Vista for a year and a half, I personally have three desktops and a tablet PC running Vista Ultimate and they are working fine.
 
Heatlesssun is right on here. It's just a new OS and it's fashionable to bash it, Same thing happened with XP when it came out.
 
The only thing I don't like about Vista is that I had to basically buy a new PC to get it to run, properly. Big deal. With other new software out there, it was time for it, anyway. Things such as IE7, Office 2007, and newer games require newer parts, so a machine purchased in 2002 wasn't cutting it, anymore. Usually when I get a new machine, I have one built for me, and I carefully select the parts. I don't buy the best thing out there, but something almost as good. My processor is a dual core 2 E6750, I have 2 GB of ram and I'm running a 32-bit machine, even though I'm sure with what I've got, it can handle 64. I just don't think the market is ready for 64-bit, yet. Seems to be getting very close, though.

Really scope out what you need your computer for. Then, pick which version of Vista, to get.
 
JOSHSKORN said:
The only thing I don't like about Vista is that I had to basically buy a new PC to get it to run, properly. Big deal. With other new software out there, it was time for it, anyway.
Click to expand...

That is exactly right.
People can moan about Vista needing more RAM all it wants, but the fact of the matter is the applications people use on daily basis are needing more RAM as well.



There were never an aweful lot of "bugs" with Vista to start with.
The only wide-spread one was slow network transfers.

After that- just driver issues, manufacturers that were sleeping during the RTM period, didn't write new drivers fast enough.
 
So I guess Vista is good then, too bad my school doesn't give us Vista for free only XP :(

I'll wait for it i guess.
 
People need to die complaining about RAM. $66 for 4GB on NewEgg DDR2-800.

On topic, I have liked Vista so far. Vista Business x64. I only have Business because it is provided for free to EE students through MSDN at my school.
 
So? The endless September keeps cranking out noobs, increasing the signal to noise ratio.

Also, as good as XP was, it really wasn't all that different from Win2K. Vista is a lot more different from XP than XP was from Win2K. The more you change, the more likelihood there is someone's going to bash it because it's not XP. Win2K users could just switch the visual style and XP and 2K were suddenly virtually identical.
 
MrWizard6600 said:
per capita its getting less bashing then XP did believe it or not.
Click to expand...

That I must admit I do not believe. People are bitching left and right about how bad Vista is. At the same time, you've got all the fucking Mac ads where I'd love to shoot the Mac and the PC guys dead telling millions of idiots how bad Vista is and they believe it because the Mac was in a Die Hard movie!:p
 
I like Vista. I like Vista a lot. However, only problems I've ever had are with drivers. Installed an 8600 GT and now my sleep no longer works. Never had the problem running the built in graphics (Intel G33?).
 
heatlesssun said:
That I must admit I do not believe. People are bitching left and right about how bad Vista is. At the same time, you've got all the fucking Mac ads where I'd love to shoot the Mac and the PC guys dead telling millions of idiots how bad Vista is and they believe it because the Mac was in a Die Hard movie!:p
Click to expand...

Hmm, better double check my numbers but from launch sales were 110 million (in the first something...) and in the same timeframe from launch XP sold 23 million. I have some other numbers but most are from paul thurott... percentage wise in terms of market penetration vista's looking better than xp did at the same time.

Anyways, as a Vista X64 user, I'm impressed. It is much more stable. It is much more secure. just before I was doing a reformat I went to a couple of sites I knew would force a virus onto my system. all were unsucessful. The furthest one got was I saw setup.exe in my download manager and and it appeard in my downloads. A fake AVG window came up and told me I had a virus and gave me the only option of ignoring it. My real AVG came up and gave me the option to delete it right before Windows UAC came up and asked me if I wished to continue. i said nay, move to virus vault, rebooted, and everything was honkie dorie. Reformatted anyways of course.

I also have yet to have a soft lock on this machine, and all my hardlocks have been the fault of my overclock. Every time somethings gone south when I hit Control+alt+delete I get the windows splash screen.

I like vista.
 
I'm not going to switch permanently to Vista until new hardware support for XP fades. I know how to make both XP and Vista run fast and efficiently, but there is a limit for Vista. Many strange behaviors are simply hard coded into Vista's interface for no good reason at all, and no matter how hardcore my computer is, an OS shouldn't force bloat onto the system.

Microsoft changed the interface considerably.. however, they left little windowing bugs in that have been around since Windows 95 and added a whole lot more... but who are they to care if, in seemingly random circumstances, clicking on any program's taskbar entry refuses to minimize it until explorer.exe restarts? and that sometimes windows go from a maximized state to a restore state, only to have the dimensions equal the maximized dimensions, for no reason? just off the top of my head.

Vista Basic up to Vista Ultimate is a marketing scheme to hide what features they're bloating into the OS. On install, I should be able to choose what goes in without having to resort to service management and registry editing just to make the OS behave. A considerably strong portion of the features added in Vista already existed in third party offerings in XP.

If they want to sell packages, let it be like third party software and sell them separately. I don't want all their extra software. I want a good OS. I want WinFS; I want the new command prompt built in; I want a pony! I don't want Windows Server 2003 kludged into something called Vista, a package full of distractions and glitter to distract you from the fact that they didn't actually deliver on their promises.
 
infornographer said:
Many strange behaviors are simply hard coded into Vista's interface for no good reason at all, and no matter how hardcore my computer is, an OS shouldn't force bloat onto the system.
Click to expand...
Can you give some specifics?
What strage behaviors? What bloat?

Vista does have some differences in UI vs. XP did, but if you ask any NEW computer user- it really is easier. Most people forget or don't know that Microsoft took advise from over 100,000 people when they built Vista- so the UI is essentially what the users wanted. And naturally, no UI will satisfy 100% of everyone.

IMO Vista isn't anymore bloated than XP. It has more FEATURES, like the sidebar, Windows Defender, etc that run by default- but those can all be shut off... What specifically are you talking about?

infornographer said:
windows go from a maximized state to a restore state, only to have the dimensions equal the maximized dimensions, for no reason?
Click to expand...
I know exactly what you're talking about, but in my findings this is due to two reasons:
1) You manually set the restored state to about as big as the maximized state... Vista just remembered it.
2) The app has those dimensions set already.


infornographer said:
A considerably strong portion of the features added in Vista already existed in third party offerings in XP.
Click to expand...
I fail to see how this is a negative about Vista...
Packing them in by default means you spend less time downloading, installing, configuring all those third-party apps.



MrWizard6600 said:
I went to a couple of sites I knew would force a virus onto my system. all were unsucessful.
Click to expand...
Actually, with UAC enabled- there are no known attacks that have gotten in. All of them (And to my knowledge- only know of even ONE of these (that Adobe flaw)) were through third-party flaws.
Most people just screw around on the Internet. Therefore, by sandboxing the browser like that, you eliminate the vast majority of issues.
 
TechieSooner said:
Vista does have some differences in UI vs. XP did, but if you ask any NEW computer user- it really is easier. Most people forget or don't know that Microsoft took advise from over 100,000 people when they built Vista- so the UI is essentially what the users wanted. And naturally, no UI will satisfy 100% of everyone.
Click to expand...

It's only easier to new users because the defaults are more acceptable to users who don't know how to administrate a computer.


TechieSooner said:
Can you give some specifics?
What strage behaviors? What bloat? ...
IMO Vista isn't anymore bloated than XP. It has more FEATURES, like the sidebar, Windows Defender, etc that run by default- but those can all be shut off... What specifically are you talking about? ...
I fail to see how this is a negative about Vista...
Click to expand...

Features aren't exempt from being classified as bloat if they quietly default to ON. The sidebar shouldn't default to ON. If anything, it should ask you if you want it on when you install just like windows security center asks you if you want trojan Windows Update to run all the time in the background.

Net code is slower. Explorer is slower. Everything just has more overhead, for no benefit whatsoever. Tell me what Vista is capable of currently that XP can't do? A fully tweaked Vista vs a fully tweaked XP reveals that Vista's changes were rushed and full of bugs. Just look at the change list on Vista SP1, and even after that, XP still performs easily 20% faster on basic functions like opening office, copying files, and interacting on the net. I don't care if I have 16 gigs of ram and a quadcore, I wouldn't want to waste cycles just to have a marketing team slap me with a Vista sticker.

Maybe in 2 years this will change as development is focused on Vista and SP2 comes around, but until then, there is no incentive for anyone to use Vista. They manufactured incentive by releasing DirectX 10 as a Vista exclusive, when 3rd parties have already demonstrated that with a little hacking it works on XP. That's marketing. Marketing shouldn't design operating systems!


TechieSooner said:
Packing them in by default means you spend less time downloading, installing, configuring all those third-party apps.
Click to expand...

No, packing them in by default increases Microsoft's monolithic antitrust behavior. Most of those third party apps are actually better, much better. I'd take the NOD32 security suite over Vista's firewall, defender, and UAC any day... but wait, I'm forced to install them with windows! No option to exclude. I have to use the services manager to disable and msconfig to remove UAC. This is anticompetitive behavior, and it should bother you too when the software itself isn't even the best.


TechieSooner said:
I know exactly what you're talking about, but in my findings this is due to two reasons:
1) You manually set the restored state to about as big as the maximized state... Vista just remembered it.
2) The app has those dimensions set already.
Click to expand...

No, and no. It's a bug. It isn't because of the above reasons. If it were only because of that, I wouldn't have mentioned it, and there a ton of other windowing bugs... but I'm not going to write up a huge report that people are already aware of. There's no excuse for these behaviors to exist for the lifespan of the product series.


TechieSooner said:
Actually, with UAC enabled- there are no known attacks that have gotten in. All of them (And to my knowledge- only know of even ONE of these (that Adobe flaw)) were through third-party flaws.
Most people just screw around on the Internet. Therefore, by sandboxing the browser like that, you eliminate the vast majority of issues.
Click to expand...

Microsoft exec admitted UAC designed to annoy users

UAC is just another computer condom. Combine that with running antivirus and windows defender, you might as well proffer your computer to the 0-day virus gods, because when it gets hit you won't even be aware. The system will already run like it has a virus installed. The first thing any real system administrator does to their own Vista install is diabled UAC.

With UAC, viruses can still get in. Virus writers will just write with UAC in mind. It's very easy to produce behavior that lulls a user into a false sense of security in order to gain full access, and with UAC engineered specifically to annoy users, this is even easier.
 
rossd said:
I like Vista. I like Vista a lot. However, only problems I've ever had are with drivers. Installed an 8600 GT and now my sleep no longer works. Never had the problem running the built in graphics (Intel G33?).
Click to expand...

you can blame nvidia for their shatty vista drivers.
 
infornographer said:
With UAC, viruses can still get in. Virus writers will just write with UAC in mind. It's very easy to produce behavior that lulls a user into a false sense of security in order to gain full access, and with UAC engineered specifically to annoy users, this is even easier.
Click to expand...

Not true.

Once a computer is setup and apps are installed, UAC prompts are few and far between. Users think twice about clicking - i.e., if a bunch of porn popups start appearing and then a UAC prompt comes up in the middle, I guarantee the user will click "deny."

Automating a click of the UAC prompt is very difficult since the prompt is not accessible by Windows API calls.

Nothing is foolproof, but props to MS for adding this feature to Vista.

This, combined with the many performance features (Superfetch, low priority I/O) makes Vista a very enjoyable OS to use - even on my legacy Dell P4D 3GHz w/3GB RAM. It's much more responsive and apps load faster than an XP machine on the same system due to Superfetch. (i.e., ns access times instead of ms access times and Gbps transfer rates instead of Mbps transfer rates (RAM vs HDD))
 
infornographer said:
*snip*
Click to expand...

I don't see why you care so much about removing everything possible. You do not need to remove UAC. You go into the control panel and disable it. Done. It shouldn't bug you anymore. Windows Media Player? Internet Explorer? Don't like them? Don't use them. I run Firefox and Media Player Classic with a bunch of filter packs, and it works a lot better. Never have I had those WMP and IE bug me before. Don't like the Windows Firewall? Turn it off. Don't like the anti-virus? Install another one. I have NOD32 running on Vista x64 with no issues at all.

So... what exactly is the problem? Are you using a 20 GB hard drive and are afraid of Vista taking up too much space?
 
I have 2 500gb hds and 1 250gb hd, fyi. It isn't about hard drive space.

I wasn't talking about Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. I was talking about the bundling marketing philosophy that Microsoft employs. It only gets worse with Vista.

"So... what exactly is the problem?"
It's anticompetitive.
 
infornographer said:
I have 2 500gb hds and 1 250gb hd, fyi. It isn't about hard drive space.

I wasn't talking about Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. I was talking about the bundling marketing philosophy that Microsoft employs. It only gets worse with Vista.

"So... what exactly is the problem?"
It's anticompetitive.
Click to expand...

It'd be anti-competitive if you couldn't use anything else, but for everything I mentioned, there were alternatives. Bundling also has its advantages by making a product that's easier to use for the end user because everything is properly set up right out of the box. If you're going to use the argument that Microsoft is being anti-competitive, you should name some of the products / software which have no alternatives because Microsoft locks out everyone else.
 
Vendor lockout is just one type of anticompetitive practice, which they do all the time.

edit:
I wanted new iterations of the OS to be -easier- to customize, not harder. I wanted new iterations of the OS to run faster, not slower. File copying should -never- take longer. Network performance should never be slower, but it is in Vista (including SP1). There's no excuse. I don't care if you're running a dual quad core system with 16gigs of ram. You still shouldn't run Vista.

I'm not going to go even further into all the technical details as to why Vista has no merit over XP for a power user. Suffice it to say, by the time Vista just might be worthy, Windows 7 is going to hit.
 
infornographer said:
Net code is slower. Explorer is slower. Everything just has more overhead, for no benefit whatsoever. Tell me what Vista is capable of currently that XP can't do? A fully tweaked Vista vs a fully tweaked XP reveals that Vista's changes were rushed and full of bugs. Just look at the change list on Vista SP1, and even after that, XP still performs easily 20% faster on basic functions like opening office, copying files, and interacting on the net. I don't care if I have 16 gigs of ram and a quadcore, I wouldn't want to waste cycles just to have a marketing team slap me with a Vista sticker.
Click to expand...
Since you are a noobie with no signature- what are your hardware specs?
Everyone that has tried Vista on modern hardware would agree that with Superfetch, it runs quite a bit faster than XP... It's really just common knowledge at this point, and people will find it hard to take you seriously if you say EVERYTHING about it is slower. If that is the case- the conclusion is you have older hardware- or something seriously wrong with your install.

No, packing them in by default increases Microsoft's monolithic antitrust behavior. Most of those third party apps are actually better, much better. I'd take the NOD32 security suite over Vista's firewall, defender, and UAC any day... but wait, I'm forced to install them with windows! No option to exclude. I have to use the services manager to disable and msconfig to remove UAC. This is anticompetitive behavior, and it should bother you too when the software itself isn't even the best.
Click to expand...
Like someone else said: anti-competitive is when it blocks other applications, not when including it by default.
Hell, if that were the case, everything else under the sun is anti-competitive. Linux, OS X, whatever- they all bundle applications.

The fact of the matter is that most stupid users don't think about installing AV. Therefore, it is beneficial to most users to have the Firewall, Defender, and UAC available.
Windows Firewall is very well designed. About as good as it gets, ESS' firewall isn't going to do any better.
NOD32 kicks ass in the AV side of things though.
And UAC is there for everything- and it isn't even meant as a replacement for AV. Anyone that knows anything about Vista would know this.

It seems to me you are complaining for the sake of complaining. Like others said- it'll take you one minute to disable UAC- there is no reason to go to the lengths you went to shut it off.


No, and no. It's a bug. It isn't because of the above reasons. If it were only because of that, I wouldn't have mentioned it, and there a ton of other windowing bugs... but I'm not going to write up a huge report that people are already aware of. There's no excuse for these behaviors to exist for the lifespan of the product series.
Click to expand...
Just not buying it, honestly...
Doing some searching around I don't see anyone else with these issues... Might start a thread (unless you'd rather just complain) and see if someone can help with it.



Combine that with running antivirus and windows defender, you might as well proffer your computer to the 0-day virus gods, because when it gets hit you won't even be aware.
Click to expand...
How so?
Assuming you have a NAT firewall, decent AV, and UAC- what else are you going to do?
I mean, you stick that stuff on- it's as good as it is going to get... I don't know what else you are going to do that will prevent you from getting slammed by the "zero day virus gods" :rolleyes:

The system will already run like it has a virus installed. The first thing any real system administrator does to their own Vista install is diabled UAC.
Click to expand...
Speak for yourself.

With UAC, viruses can still get in. Virus writers will just write with UAC in mind.
Click to expand...
Prove it. No known cases- in the over TWO YEARS Vista has been out.

It's very easy to produce behavior that lulls a user into a false sense of security in order to gain full access, and with UAC engineered specifically to annoy users, this is even easier.
Click to expand...
Social Engineering and writing a virus are two different things.

Social Engineering (as in this case) relies upon the users' stupidity. This will ALWAYS be a weakness, in ANY system... Because the fact of the matter is, if a user tells the system to do something: it MUST do it. This rings true for Linux, OS X, Windows- everybody.

calebb said:
Automating a click of the UAC prompt is very difficult since the prompt is not accessible by Windows API calls.
Click to expand...
Bingo!
This is called the Secure Desktop, BTW... Do some research on it, very, very, very hard to get around (again- over two years running- and nobody has done it).

infornographer said:
I was talking about the bundling marketing philosophy that Microsoft employs. It only gets worse with Vista.
Click to expand...
You're moving into the troll category here...
Instead of coming up with some examples, you keep making blanket statements.
Or, could it be, you have no examples?

infornographer said:
Vendor lockout is just one type of anticompetitive practice, which they do all the time.
Click to expand...
Example?

File copying should -never- take longer. Network performance should never be slower, but it is in Vista (including SP1).
Click to expand...
Fixed in SP1. Again- post your specs... I guarantee you folks here could help. Given you have some decent hardware, and haven't f**** up your system, it shouldn't behave like that.

I'm not going to go even further into all the technical details as to why Vista has no merit over XP for a power user.
Click to expand...
Did I miss something? I see NO technical details at all here... No examples, no backup to any of this FUD.


I'd say (And so would a good chunk of folks), if you are running XP, there isn't a HUGE reason to UPGRADE to Vista... However if you are building/buying new machine, there isn't any reason to NOT upgrade to Vista... Especially x64.
 
You've clearly grown acclimated to the bloat of Vista. More power to you.

"It's really just common knowledge at this point." = argumentum ad populum

Rather than address all of your giant slew of point for point gainsay responses, troll accusations, and implications that my system is lacking or that I don't know how to use Vista when you've somehow missed all the ongoing news about Vista issues, I will instead offer this amusing video of no actual merit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExeyrNZwzwQ
 
Superfetch is completely worthless. Any appreciable gains are on a level bordering on placebo.
http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=1048

Edit:
Of course, with all the extra crap that Vista does in the background, caching like mad based on analysis of your behavior may just be necessary!

The secure desktop you mentioned is ultimately a BAD thing, unless you love DRM.
drm problems

"Social Engineering and writing a virus are two different things."

Yes, and a trojan and a virus are also two different things (UAC is about stopping trojans and viruses by implementing serious user privilege enforcement; I know all about it). Secure desktop doesn't make the user smarter. It just makes the user have to mess with confirm dialogs more often. System exploits will continue to appear in various forms, no matter how annoying you make your system to use.

This thread is about whether Vista has bugs and whether someone should opt for XP instead. It isn't trolling just because you don't agree, and I hardly think my # of days registered on HardForum have anything to do with this, unless you're one of those forum elitists. Just because you're a Vista fanboy doesn't make me a troll.
 
dennisjai said:
Hey guys, I've been out of the computer loop for a while. I've only used Vista about 2-3 times but I heard it has a lot of bugs/glitches..

Has MS been releasing enough updates to fix problems? I want to upgrade to vista.
Click to expand...

If you have the hardware to run it, why not give it a shot? Buy it, install it, and make your own conclusions. Vista runs fine for many many users. You just happen to start a thread where some people are going to come in and bash and troll no matter what is being said.

I run 5 machines now with Vista Ultimate 64 and one last XP machine. I don't have any of the problems that "infornographer" keeps referring to on 5 differnet machines. And the power user argument? I have been doing this for over 25 years now, and honestly, there will always be haters of every new OS that is released...
 
Suffice it to say, by the time Vista just might be worthy, Windows 7 is going to hit.
Click to expand...

If no one uses Vista, Windows 7 will just be another XP. Why wait 10 years for another XP? Why not just scrap future OSes now and use XP for the rest of our lives? Inferno, I may be reading every other line, but all I see is you complaining that vista uses more RAM, is slower, and UAC is preventing you from using anything. You might have only used Vista for just a week. After a fresh install of Vista I expect to see UAC pop ups every other minute. Why? Cause I am installing new programs. I want Microsoft to bundle my Vista with Internet Explorer. Why? Because I don't have CD back ups of Firefox. I wouldn't pull info from a Vista bashing page, unless the bashers were using XP. The people who made that page might as well have been the same people who wrote the Mac vs PC commercials. The process that watches your PC for pirated versions of Microsoft's programs? A Hoax. Open up google and you can find Office 2007 for free. Vista's "DRM" is being hyperbole'd just to bash it. Microsoft has always had 100 page legal terms, because its the most pirated OS on the market. It boils down to people want to make money for their work. If I "owned" my own copy of Vista I would share it with my entire family to save money. And software that doesn't make money fuels lazy programmers we are already seeing that with many devs skipping out on PC versions. I want to be able to reinstall Vista after I install a new mobo, but I shouldn't be able to install the same copy on 10 different computers.

I can't say UAC has prevented me from a virus, but I haven't seen it once on my Vista build, and I use that one the most.

Vista may have bugs, but thats why they have patches. And as I alluded to before, every software has bugs, even XP. SP1 may not have sealed the deal on Vista, but neither was XPSP1.
 
I've used Vista for easily 6 months on a variety of systems for many different applications. I've read a ton about it as well. I wasn't linking to that site in regards to the proprietary nature (note the source is the free software foundation, so obviously they're going to talk about that). It was the part about the DRM and the other "features" that they're adding. I also wasn't complaining about IE being bundled in.. that's sort of a fact of life for Windows because it has been integrated into the foundation of windows.

Vista may be useful when the patches and updates continue onward.. but SP1 nowhere near makes Vista the logical option over XP, not by a long shot. If I were building a new PC, I'd use XP sp3 x64 in a heart beat and would recommend the same.

This isn't trolling.
 
infornographer said:
If I were building a new PC, I'd use XP sp3 x64 in a heart beat and would recommend the same.
Click to expand...

There is no XP SP3 x64.

Windows XP Professional 64 Bit Edition is not Windows XP Professional 32 bit edition in a 64 bit form.

They are not the same OS, not even related in most respects. XP x64 is actually Windows Server 2003 x64 with an "XP" theme enabled on it. They don't share service packs with each other; XP x64 is Server 2003 at its core, so it shares service packs with that OS, not XP Pro 32 bit (which just released Service Pack 3).

XP x64 and Windows Server 2003 are only at Service Pack 2 stage because that's all they need. They were both developed years after XP first came out, so their development cycles are not the same, they don't synchronize anywhere on the line.

So, if you want to put XP x64 SP2 on your machine, that's fantastic. But XP x64 SP3? That's at least 1.5 years off, sometime in late 2009 if they even do an SP3 which I'm sure they will because Server 2003 is still a seriously viable OS for businesses even in spite of Server 2008 now being available.
 
If XP x64 is actually using the 5.2 kernal from Windows Server 2003, they shouldn't have called it XP at all.

EDIT: The windows marketing department has more power than the people from the software development department, apparently.
 
No OS is bug free; no software is bug-free, unless it's extremely simple or tested to death because it's controlling the Space Shuttle or medical equipment (and even then you can never be totally sure). But Vista is not significantly buggier than any other OS, especially now it's over a year after release.

XP x64 is indeed using the Windows Server 2003 kernel, but it was aimed at the workstation market, not the server market. XP is the brand they were selling the workstation OS under. (Note that Vista SP1 uses the same kernel as Windows Server 2008; using the same kernel doesn't make it a server OS.)

The SuperFetch article has no data and doesn't support any conclusions, the author just thinks that it's not useful. I doubt that turning SuperFetch off is going to improve the performance of a low-RAM system, because if the RAM isn't available then it won't be using much RAM - it doesn't force other programs to page so it can expand its cache. Nor is it going to stop programs loading at boot, since it uses background priority I/O.
 
It also didn't similarly hurt performance when I disabled the SuperFetch and Readyboost services, either, oddly enough.
 
It might not help, true; if you rarely start programs while the machine's turned on or use a wide variety of different programs unpredictably then it'll probably never get many cache hits, or if there's not much free RAM then it could never cache anything worthwhile.

The Readyboost service also controls Readyboot, which is meant to speed up startup (and doesn't use a USB drive). I don't start up my system very often and I'm not sure how it would be without Readyboot, but its logs certainly claim a number of cache hits. You can turn it off, certainly, but just thought I'd mention it.
 
Mithent said:
using the same kernel doesn't make it a server OS
Click to expand...
Complaining for the sake of complaining when you complain about what they name their products :rolleyes:

Mithent is correct here, just QFT.

infornographer said:
It also didn't similarly hurt performance when I disabled the SuperFetch and Readyboost services, either, oddly enough.
Click to expand...
Did anyone else catch this?

infornographer said:
Superfetch is completely worthless. Any appreciable gains are on a level bordering on placebo.
http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=1048
Click to expand...
Do you even read the stuff you link to?
Quote from article:
If you're a multi-tasker, then SuperFetch does have significant performance advantages
Click to expand...

The article comes to the same conclusion anyone else around here could have told you... Superfetch doesn't help much in low-RAM systems.

infornographer said:
The secure desktop you mentioned is ultimately a BAD thing, unless you love DRM.
drm problems
Click to expand...
This time, I have no clue if you read it or just have no idea what you are talking about.
Not only did I fail to see "Secure Desktop" even mentioned, I am having a hard time understanding how you think DRM is playing into it.

I'm more siding on the side of things you have no the hell clue idea what Secure Desktop is... So stop trying to argue for or against it when you don't know.

infornographer said:
"Social Engineering and writing a virus are two different things."

Yes, and a trojan and a virus are also two different things
Click to expand...
Trojans still rely upon social engineering... Therefore, my point is still a valid one.

infornographer said:
I hardly think my # of days registered on HardForum have anything to do with this, unless you're one of those forum elitists.
Click to expand...
Strawman argument, anyone????
Not only did I not say that, what I was suggesting is since you are new- you've never posted hardware specs.

On that note: Where are the examples I asked for? Or can you not provide any?
 
If I were building a new PC, I'd use XP sp3 x64 in a heart beat and would recommend the same.
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What? Why is that, 64bit drivers are rare to begin with, but for XP? Change is devastating your life, and you have spent far too long with one OS. I really don't see what Vista's major problem is. If readyboost doesn't boost anything, use the USB for something else. Vista wants more RAM? Let it have it. If Microsoft was limited to using the same amount of RAM it used in the previous OS, we would still be using Windows 3.1.
 
TechieSooner said:
This time, I have no clue if you read it or just have no idea what you are talking about.
Not only did I fail to see "Secure Desktop" even mentioned, I am having a hard time understanding how you think DRM is playing into it.

I'm more siding on the side of things you have no the hell clue idea what Secure Desktop is... So stop trying to argue for or against it when you don't know.
Click to expand...

I didn't spot the mention of the Secure Desktop before, but, that's correct - it has nothing to do with DRM, and it makes perfect sense - it would be pointless if programs could automate the UAC prompts. You can get them to appear on the standard desktop if you want, but I don't see much reason to do so. The login and Windows Security (Ctrl+Alt+Del) screens also run under the Secure Desktop.

If what you're worried about is protected processes, they're not related to the Secure Desktop.
 
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