Vista bug free?

Joe Average said:
Thanks for making my point for me. I'll stop feeding you now, as I fully expect this thread to get locked like almost all the others that degrade into this state. Oh, silly me, that would mean I'm making an assumption based on past history with Vista topics at this forum. Go figure...
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QFT on every single line ;)

Stick a fork in it- this thread is DONE.
 
I advised the OP to stick with XP. Somehow that's considered flame?

You can't just close a thread just because you don't agree with me. You've done nothing but try to draw me out as to call me a troll, but I stand by the assertion that people should think twice before switching to Vista and what actual benefits there may be in it.
 
Joe Average hit on the head. Those of us who run Vista and run it well have studied it, heard all of the nightmares about how buggy Vista is, how slow, how big of a pig, how evil it its because of DRM, etc. etc. etc. and for those of use who use all the time without major incident, to be honest, I personally have given up on this crowd. Vista will never please them. There will always be this thing or that that doesn't work and so I just have given up.

So I wasn't trying to gang up on you infornographer, its just that I was the first person to respond to the OP and I believe what I said is the honest truth about migrating to XP. But these threads tend to degenerate into a holy war as to why Vista is so bad rather than being realistic about what Vista is about and how to do a successful migration.
 
infornographer said:
I advised the OP to stick with XP. Somehow that's considered flame?

You can't just close a thread just because you don't agree with me. You've done nothing but try to draw me out as to call me a troll, but I stand by the assertion that people should think twice before switching to Vista and what actual benefits there may be in it.
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To quote myself and this was the first thing I said about the subject:

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.
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So with that in mind maybe XP would be the better choice for a particular individual. But as other have said what tends to happen when this subject comes up is "Vista is crap" and then that's when I get frustrated because now we begin to loose sight the technical issues involved and it becomes emotional.
 
Let's start a quick informal poll:

If you think the worst possible thing someone could do to mount a stance or a position that Vista has too many issues to be useful is to either provide a link or point the discussion towards a Slashdot thread - the most illegitimate and Vista bashing source known to mankind - vote "yay." If you feel otherwise, say "nay."

"yay"

And again, if you don't like it, don't use it. To answer the basic question set forth in the topic itself:

"No, because there is no such thing as a bug free OS, there never has been a bug free OS, and there never will be a bug free OS, it's a technical impossibility unless we're talking about the simplest computer in existence: a light switch. That's a bug free OS, since it's either on, or it's off. There's no middle ground, no way to fuck things up aside from not having electricity to actually make it functional."

'Nuff typed.
 
infornographer said:
If you think my simple relatively neutral statements in the grand scheme of things (from a likely future Vista user) about Vista were bad, just start reading the comments here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/18/186208
Debate them, and good luck closing that thread.
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Slashdot!:p There's absolutely nothing there that's not biased against Microsoft. And that's fine, that's how they roll.

Its a free country, and obviously there's a lot you don't like about Vista. No one said not to speak your mind. I'll say it again, in these types of threads certain people begin to do nothing but bash Vista and you seemed to be on that path. Why would you consider using Vista? You don't seem to think it has any redeeming qualities.

And that's what tends to trigger a response from me. The person goes on and on about how horrible Vista without saying anything they like about it. That to me is negative bias and probably not a person that's going to intellectually honest about the matter.

If that's not you then I aplogize!:)
 
I used it for 6 months. The issue I had was most of the core improvements and changes leave 3rd parties scrambling to catch up. I already said I'd switch to vista maybe in a year or two. As it stands, the cons outweigh the pros, and there is no software out there that I use that runs exclusively on Vista. In a year or two that will change. In the meantime, bravo to those of you who bite the bullet for late adopters like me. I don't want to deal with those issues. I've done enough beta testing on software that's supposed to be final. It may not be Microsoft's fault per se, but that's just how it works.
 
Comparing the two I'd say that Vista was better than XP was at launch. After a year of being on the market I'd say that Vista had fewer problems than XP did after one year.

I've had very few problems with Vista in any of its' forms at this point. It is also my understanding that the problems most often seen with Vista in regard to application compatibility are the result of crappy programing on the part of the developers and are not a result of a mistake on Microsoft's part.
 
infornographer said:
I used it for 6 months. The issue I had was most of the core improvements and changes leave 3rd parties scrambling to catch up. I already said I'd switch to vista maybe in a year or two. As it stands, the cons outweigh the pros, and there is no software out there that I use that runs exclusively on Vista. In a year or two that will change. In the meantime, bravo to those of you who bite the bullet for late adopters like me. I don't want to deal with those issues. I've done enough beta testing on software that's supposed to be final. It may not be Microsoft's fault per se, but that's just how it works.
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This is reasonable, but unless you have certain legacy hardware or software, there just aren't that many issues at this point. Certainly if you're getting a new system with new devices and new software, there just aren't really any issues. The 3rd party scrambling at this point is done for vast majority of hardware and software. However, as I stated before, do a little research to see if you have anything critical software or hardware that will be problematic BEFORE migrating.

I doubt you have much in your arsenal that can't work well in Vista. On consumer machines the biggie still are certain games, I've got a few of those myself but they are pretty old games that I don't anymore any way. On the hardware side wifi cards, web cams, and printers. I had a wifi card that wasn't supported in Vista and never was going to be. But I have an even older Brother ink jet printer that has great drivers for Vista x86 & x64.
 
The selling point to a seasoned XP user isn't there yet. Once XP becomes legacy and it's actually worse to run XP than Vista, I'll switch. Until then, it's just more complexity for no added benefit. Of course, this isn't the case for all XP users. I wouldn't call my XP standard by any stretch of the imagination.
 
infornographer said:
The selling point to a seasoned XP user isn't there yet. Once XP becomes legacy and it's actually worse to run XP than Vista, I'll switch. Until then, it's just more complexity for no added benefit. Of course, this isn't the case for all XP users. I wouldn't call my XP standard by any stretch of the imagination.
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There's TONS of added benefit. Just read through this thread, or do some google searches for reviews from users who have actually used Vista and XP side-by-side.

Again -
Vista: Your apps load from RAM (Gbps xfer rates / ns access times)
XP: Your apps load from disk (Mbps xfer rates / ms access times)

It's not rocket science here... this is why a Vista system with 2GB RAM is much more responsive and applications load faster than on the same system running XP.

My first Vista system was a legacy Dell P4D (but it did have more than 1GB RAM - I would suggest upgrading to 2GB of RAM and then give Vista another try... or if you're happy with XP, by all means stay with XP!)
 
There are tweaks and 3rd party apps that allow XP to do the same thing.

Vista has to load it from the disk at a certain point, no matter how much usage statistics it has on hand.

again, for the standard XP user, Vista may be faster. For my customizations, it's just extra Microsoft stuff to disable.
 
No, there's not a lot of difference for most people. However, for gamers you might want to watch out if you're still on XP and start going with new GPU. Driver support is probably going to start turning in Vista's favor, if it hasn't already.

It's the new PC effect. People running rigs like mine are running Vista. What's the point of putting together a $3000 PC and putting a legacy OS on it for the latest and greatest in gaming? Not a lot at this point. When AMD and nVidia release their new gen parts next month, the bulk of the buyers are going to be Vista users.

I've not bothered to test a rig like my sig rig to see how it would run under XP because there's not point. The thing's so freekin fast that XP isn't going to make anything really any faster, save maybe certain drive copy operations. I know that at 100% CPU load, Vista kicks XP in the teeth. But then once again, new hardware just makes most of the reasons for sticking with XP go away and sticking with XP with the latest and greatest will become more and more problematic.
 
OK. You got me.
INTEL Core 2 Duo Quad QX9650 @ 3.83 GHz (11.5 x 333) | ASUS Striker II Extreme | XFX Geforce 9800 GX2 @ 675 core/1687shader/2100 memory | Enermax EGX1000EWL Galaxy 1000W | 4GB OCZ OCZ3P16004GK PC3-12800+
If I were running your specs, I might not care about OS efficiency anymore, and given that this is a hardware enthusiast forum, I could see how speaking against Vista would be seen as trolling.
 
Trust me, anyone who started using Vista early had problems. But that seemed to have gotten straighted out in the spring of last year. I had to ditch a wifi card, upgrade Nero and not use other legacy software like Visual Studio 2003, though it can work. If I need certain older stuff, that's what the XP machines are for or a VM.

Vista is heavier than XP, not doubt, but were XP runs better on older hardware, I think Vista can stretch its legs with new hardware. That's the thing, when people start talking about turning of Superfetch or disabling paging that's when I start thinking, why did you upgrade?

And yes good point about this being a hardware enthusiasts site. XP just doesn't give are shiny overclock rigs enough to do!:D
 
I would NEVER disable paging. :confused: In fact I increase that to 4096mb min and max on both of my physical drives in both XP and Vista. Both OSes automatically prioritize which swap file to use based upon fastest disk access at that particular time, and the second physical drive makes an amazing difference. I'm surprised they weren't pushing that instead of flash drives that can only cache tiny files. What you really need is another set of spinning platters and heads.

I tried readyboost and eBoostr (equivalent tech for XP), and neither really benefited performance enough to justify throwing a flash drive and USB bandwidth at it. Having a max set page file on two physical drives seemed to up the access performance about as high as I could imagine getting it without using a solid state drive and faster ram.

That said, I will probably be using Vista when I land more cash than I know what to do with (giant upgrades, and likely in a year or two). I will also be hacking it until no one recognizes it as Vista anymore. Sorry guys. : )
 
infornographer said:
There are tweaks and 3rd party apps that allow XP to do the same thing.

Vista has to load it from the disk at a certain point, no matter how much usage statistics it has on hand.
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Rest of this is opinion more or less, but I've just gotta comment on this Superfetch stuff...

Show me an application that does the same thing on XP, in just as an efficient manner. It doesn't exist. But please, feel free to prove me wrong by providing a link (Not an opinion piece, either).

Vista loads it from the disk if you have some idle time. Again- this is idle time put to use... Makes use of it- rather than not using it at all.
XP- idle time does nothing. When you request an app, it has to load from disk.
While your machine was idle, Vista already loaded it.

I fail to see why you think this is such a BAD thing. On low-RAM systems, it essentially reverts back to XP's memory management- as there isn't enough RAM for Superfetch to work.


Edit- and, FWIW, one of the biggest pluses for me... Multitasking in Vista is FAR superior to anything XP can touch. Even on a high-end XP system (or dual-booting), the OS itself in XP has some drawing issues, lagging or whatnot. Vista is simply seamless, fluid, and polished.
Again- GIVEN YOU HAVE THE HARDWARE to run it comfortably. You just need more RAM is all you need. I have a machine with a P4 in it just like yours, but with 3GB of RAM, and it runs very well.... CPU isn't a huge factor- but giving it enough RAM for SuperFetch to work... is.
 
The main reason in my opinion to go to Vista is for SuperFetch. To say it has no affect is retarded (unless you only have 1 gig of RAM). I have (all legal from MSDN) 3 copies of XP and 2 copies of Vista Business. I have switched back between the two a couple of times and I finally ended up using Vista.

Vista uses ~1 gig of my RAM at any given moment. Then I have 3 gigs of cached data. After the first few days when indexing is done I hardly ever have hard drive accesses or thrashing. Using SmartPlacement from the free trial of PerfectDisk also made this even better. Load times for all my usual apps are at zero and no hard drive access.

Please upgrade your RAM (4 gigs cheap after $20 rebate...they honor their rebates too...personal experience): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220227
 
Telling someone using DDR1 ram to upgrade to 4gigs using DDR2 is also retarded.

I already have near instantaneous application load times without superfetch. There are other ways of attaining similar performance gains.

eBoostr for XP does the same thing but better, because it supports multiple flash drives. I don't use that either.

If you honestly believe the real redeeming factor of Vista is Superfetch and Readyboost, enjoy it. There are good features in Vista that I consider useful, but that's not one of them.
 
Vista likes RAM no doubt about it and it kind of makes sense from a design point of view given the price of RAM these days. But in general on modern hardware and good drivers, there just aren't any real issues with Vista. I think a lot of people think Vista has problems because of those Mac ads, which at one point were funny, now they are just getting bad. The newest one with the bloodhound is just an awful commercial.

Vista isn't perfect. Maybe you still need XP for legacy stuff, but for new a system with no legacy requirements, going with XP is just dumb. There's no performance benefit, no security benefit (in fact Vista is probably more secure), no real cost benefit, no benefit at all. XP as good as it is, is done. It's market share is going to diminish, Vista's is on the rise. The latest and greatest stuff is beginning to not be supported in XP like hybrid SLI, and drivers for new hardware are going to get Vista priority support because of the new PC effect.

To me anyone who would recommend a person chose XP over Vista for a new machine with legacy requirements is doing that person a disservice in the long run.
 
heatlesssun said:
To me anyone who would recommend a person chose XP over Vista for a new machine with legacy requirements is doing that person a disservice in the long run.
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Some people prefer the simplicity of XP's file explorer. Many of the behaviors of Vista would be perfectly fine in my book if they were simply -defaults-, but you can't even hack the registry to change it via options. I want options. Nothing wrong with that.

XP is still in active support. It isn't a legacy operating system until 2014. That's straight from Microsoft.

There's still a ton of software in the wild that would require a whole ton of programming hours to bring out of XP dependence. Sometimes it is a service to recommend the OS that will work to the user's needs.
 
infornographer said:
I already have near instantaneous application load times without superfetch. There are other ways of attaining similar performance gains.
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Sorry, I must've gotten lost after reading these comments:
infornographer said:
Net code is slower. Explorer is slower. Everything just has more overhead, for no benefit whatsoever.

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
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infornographer said:
I wanted new iterations of the OS to run faster, not slower.

I don't care if you're running a dual quad core system with 16gigs of ram. You still shouldn't run Vista.
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eBoostr for XP does the same thing but better, because it supports multiple flash drives. I don't use that either..
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While I won't make any comments on that app in particular, I will say I wouldn't want ANYONE making any conclusions without running some serious benchmarks on Superfetch vs. eboostr.

That said, you end up patching the hell out of XP. Buying all these third party apps, flash drives (Which has been shown- unless you are buying some significantly fast and expensive flash drives (costing more than RAM)- offers no improvement over good old fashioned RAM), you could have bought a copy of Vista- which probably runs it more efficiently. Again- I don't know for sure without solid facts and benchmarks.
And I sure hope you don't try to make claims without them, either.
 
Net code and explorer file operations WERE slower. SP1 directly addresses some of the problems, but not all of them. Read the change log. I don't need to run benchmarks when Microsoft itself is publicly admitting it with SP1.

Did I recommend eBoostr? No. It's just as useless as Readyboost to me. Most of my software is free and better than the apps bundled with XP/Vista.

Edit:
FYI, the following was referring to my performance in XP, not Vista: "I already have near instantaneous application load times without superfetch. There are other ways of attaining similar performance gains." Not that it matters. Vista still ran as fast as I wanted it to. Even XP needs to be hacked to bits to get it to be a fast OS, just like Vista. The only difference with Vista is that some of it can't be fixed without more development from Microsoft. and TechieSooner, stop asking for "proof." I'm not a Anandtech. I'm not going to reinstall stuff and run extra programs just to prove to some rabid fanboy that his beloved OS still needs some tweaking by Microsoft.
 
infornographer said:
Did I recommend eBoostr? No. It's just as useless as Readyboost to me. Most of my software is free and better than the apps bundled with XP/Vista.
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infornographer said:
eBoostr for XP does the same thing but better, because it supports multiple flash drives. I don't use that either.

If you honestly believe the real redeeming factor of Vista is Superfetch and Readyboost, enjoy it. There are good features in Vista that I consider useful, but that's not one of them.
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infornographer said:
I tried readyboost and eBoostr (equivalent tech for XP), and neither really benefited performance enough to justify throwing a flash drive and USB bandwidth at it. Having a max set page file on two physical drives seemed to up the access performance about as high as I could imagine getting it without using a solid state drive and faster ram.
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I think you're confused :) Nobody is cheering about ReadyBoost - they are cheering about SuperFetch. ReadyBoost is a tool that (among other things), helps repopulate your Superfetch cache after playing a game or using another memory intensive application that required Vista to release any RAM reserved by SuperFetch.

Everything I've read about eBoostr (from people who have tried it) is that it is buggy, crashes and didn't seem to actually improve load times.

So... you say ALL your apps load instantly? Even, say... Photoshop? Visual Studio? Acrobat Reader? iTunes?

Now, we're not saying go blow a fortune on RAM - but at least add 1 more GB of DDR1 memory. The difference between 1 and 2GB of RAM with Vista is significant.

Or, as I have said in every post, if you're happy with XP, by all means stay with it! Nobody is forcing you to switch. But neither will we stand by while you say that Vista is slower or SuperFetch doesn't make a difference in day-to-day use of your computer :)


infornographer said:
Edit:
FYI, the following was referring to my performance in XP, not Vista: "I already have near instantaneous application load times without superfetch. There are other ways of attaining similar performance gains." Not that it matters. Vista still ran as fast as I wanted it to. Even XP needs to be hacked to bits to get it to be a fast OS, just like Vista. The only difference with Vista is that some of it can't be fixed without more development from Microsoft. and TechieSooner, stop asking for "proof." I'm not a Anandtech. I'm not going to reinstall stuff and run extra programs just to prove to some rabid fanboy that his beloved OS still needs some tweaking by Microsoft.
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Vista, out-of-the-box, and with a week or so to learn your usage habits will load the majority of your applications nearly instantly if you have 2 or so GB of RAM to take advantage of SuperFetch.

No hacking to bits necessary :)
 
No point in dumping money into DDR1, and I've used Vista with 8 gigs before.

Photoshop takes about 5 seconds, which might as well be instantaneous.

I know what Superfetch does. It is useful for the average user. eBoostr is crap (though most of that crashing went away with 2.0+), but so is ReadyBoost.

Vista is slower than SP1. They "fixed" XP copy behaviors, but in the process the procedures take much longer than they should. That's part of what they sped up a little bit in SP1. You seem to be bunching together everything I've said into one resounding "Vista sucks," which isn't what I'm saying at all.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070928/vista-file-copy-sp1-comparison/
 
And no offense here, but if you think any of us reading this thread or participating in it think you've got "near instantaneous application load times" on a P4 with 1GB of DDR (not even DDR2) RAM, wow... that's a pretty long limb you're walking out on. I can tweak XP with the best of them and even a little more than the majority, but even I couldn't take such old hardware and give myself "near instantaneous application load times" with just 1GB of DDR RAM soooo...

This whole thread has turned into a Vista bashfest, as they always do. You can say it's not, but it is, it was going to happen, and it did, as they always do.

Let's all just end it and move on lest a Mod decide to drop a hammer on some if not all of us, shall we? There are no winners here, there are no losers, just let it go before all of us pay a price none of us wants to pay.
 
infornographer said:
Some people prefer the simplicity of XP's file explorer. Many of the behaviors of Vista would be perfectly fine in my book if they were simply -defaults-, but you can't even hack the registry to change it via options. I want options. Nothing wrong with that.

XP is still in active support. It isn't a legacy operating system until 2014. That's straight from Microsoft.

There's still a ton of software in the wild that would require a whole ton of programming hours to bring out of XP dependence. Sometimes it is a service to recommend the OS that will work to the user's needs.
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First off, the simplicity of XP file explorer is in Vista, Vista just has more options like search, better viewing. You can ignore those if you want, but there's no real difference in the two. If you can use file explorer in XP, you can use file explorer in Vista.

Sorry, XP is a legacy OS. That simply means that it’s not the latest version and as such isn't guaranteed new features. Sure it will be supported for a long time still but if you're looking for latest and greatest, it may or may not be there.

You missed the part where I said if you don't have legacy requirements. If you do not have legacy requirements and are getting new hardware and software, why in the hell would you buy something this long after Vista's release that still doesn’t work in Vista. Hell, even if I were still on XP I might wonder what the hell was wrong a company that STILL didn't support Vista. That could be a sign of other issues. Most of the top tier open source apps like OpenOffice and GIMP have worked fine in Vista since day one.
 
I saw no where in the rules where we couldn't discuss the details of Vista SP1 fixes and the usefulness of ReadyBoost. Stop trying to fan invisible flames, Joe Average.
 
If you optimize XP the way I did, you would be surprised, Joe Average. There are some things that I've done that aren't even mentioned on the net. You do know that most exes and associated dlls aren't 1 gb in size, right?
 
heatlesssun said:
First off, the simplicity of XP file explorer is in Vista, Vista just has more options like search, better viewing. You can ignore those if you want, but there's no real difference in the two. If you can use file explorer in XP, you can use file explorer in Vista.
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You can use it in Vista, but not as comfortably. You should be able to enable a explorer classic view that allows for the file explorer to behave like XP and previous on the surface, because plenty of people don't use it for that reason, myself included. You can still do it with the start menu; I don't think it would have been so much to ask.


heatlesssun said:
You missed the part where I said if you don't have legacy requirements. If you do not have legacy requirements and are getting new hardware and software, why in the hell would you buy something this long after Vista's release that still doesn’t work in Vista. Hell, even if I were still on XP I might wonder what the hell was wrong a company that STILL didn't support Vista. That could be a sign of other issues. Most of the top tier open source apps like OpenOffice and GIMP have worked fine in Vista since day one.
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I never said I -like- apps that don't push forward in modern support, but they do exist. They aren't mainstream programs. Usually giant custom apps for professional offices. Sometimes legacy support is cheaper than the programmer hours to update to a new system. This is a complicated subject in the realm of enterprise software.
 
Before we start, and before I'm accused of not having any experience with either of these OS's, I've been using both Windows XP and Windows Vista since each of their respective beta and release candidate stages of development, so I'm content to argue that I've been using each for a substantial amount of time.

Now, the question here is if XP is still "good enough" these days. Well, it isn't as "good" as Vista if we're going to compare it in terms of technology (e.g., SuperFetch, etc.), but I argue that it doesn't have to be. It only has to be good enough!

Now, Windows XP has been hardened over the past 7 years, and with SP3, we have 7 years worth of refinements and fixes to the OS. In the whole history of OS's, no product really comes close. Obviously, this is largely due to the numerous delays Microsoft encountered with Vista, and consequently, they had to include functionality intended for Vista in XP, which isn't so bad!

Also, I think a lot of people are ignoring the fact that Vista was a rushed product after Microsoft literally started again over half-way through its development. And I think it's clear from the "annoyances" found in Vista that simply do not make sense. For example, I am compelled to believe that the changes in Windows Explorer were rushed. Honestly, why is the Menu Bar underneath the navigation toolbar?? The same thing goes for Internet Explorer 7. It simply doesn't make sense! Heck, in IE7, they took things to a different level by firstly not having a default Menu Bar, and secondly, putting the "Home, Print, etc" toolbar to the right of the screen. They made too drastic of a change instead of refined changes. One interesting thing to note, in Windows Server 2008, the Menu Bar is on-default in Windows Explorer, so hopefully someone at Microsoft is paying attention.

Finally, with the mention of Windows Server 2008, it's the OS that Vista ought to have been in the first place! Instead of turning every possible service on by default, they've turned everything off and let the user turn-on what they want! No SuperFetch, no Search, no Aero! Not surprisingly, even with the same services enabled as compared to Vista's default services, some benchmarks are showing that Windows 2008 "Workstation" is 20% faster than Vista! There's definitely something else that's going on, and I suspect that it has to do with Vista's bloat.

Anyways...
 
infornographer,

You may be God of XP, we don't know, but it’s difficult for me to believe that ANY optimization you could do an OS is going to make all your applications load instantly on a 5 year computer. That just doesn't make much since. Some apps a bigger than others and as you said with Vista, XP has to hit the disk sometime especially with only 1GB of RAM.

While I can agree that going back to the old file explorer would be a nice option you are making way too much of the difference between Vista and XP in this area. If you can you XP’s file explorer, you can use Vista’s right off the bat. There are some differences that one should get up to speed on but Vista explorer is more capable. To me this is nit picking. Sure there are some that might have a hard time with it at first, but most would figure it out pretty quickly.

I never said that you said that you didn’t like apps with modern support. All I was saying is that if you don’t have legacy issues and are getting a new system that you should want stuff with the latest and greatest support. That’s all I was trying to say.

I work in corporate IT and I’m fully aware of the challenges of migrating to Vista as I’m on a team that’s working to migrate our department’s applications. Some work flawlessly, some work with minor modifications and some need serious work or replacement. But that’s a corporate environment. A consumer buying a new system with new hardware and software shouldn’t have these issues and that’s why I say that if you are coming in fresh, XP has no benefit. Please explain to me how a new system with no legacy requirements gets any benefit from XP? There are none IMHO.
 
Fulgore,

Much of what you say makes sense. I never said XP wasn't good enough and depending on your requirements XP may be a better option.

My point has been that Vista on modern hardware works just fine. If you a individual consumer looking to get a new system and you have no legacy requirements, Vista will serve that person just fine. Nit picking over the default menu bar and those types of things are trivial. Those kinds of changes are common in different versions of Windows and get over played IMO. Most people sort through those things pretty quickly I've found.

As far as services being disabled like Aero, indexing and Superfetch, I believe that's irrelevant on good hardware. One good hardware, these things just don’t degrade performance. Even indexing. The indexer is smart enough to not work while you’re using the computer. On my sig rig, it’ll index tens of thousands of files in only an hour. I can’t tell that its running, it’s invisible. Aero likewise works only with DX9 hardware and doesn’t degrade performance on such systems. Superfetch, 2GB of RAM is the answer there.

While people have clamored about the resource requirements of Vista, by today’s standards they are not specially. 2GB is cheaper than a tank of gas for some. DX9 hardware is SIX years old. Dual core processors can be had again for less than a tank of gas they will run Vista like on dog on fire.

As for Windows Server 2008 being faster, well it’s a year newer than Vista, duh! So that it has some enhancements over Vista is only natural. That’s like comparing the best CPU’s of today to those of a year ago. Guess what, they’re faster!
 
The problem isn't the cost of hardware. It's the cost of a tank of gas. : D

and that's a good point. Vista is cruelty to animals! for shame!

Edit:
If I were sitting on a $400 motherboard, I might be arguing in favor of Vista too.
 
infornographer said:
There are plenty of benefits, but you would classify them as "nitpicking." ; P
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That's a cop out. You might have some point that I've missed. The problem with the file explorer point that you made is that its VERY subjective. Sure some people like it the old way, but I know people who like it the new way. The thing is that really, how long is it going to take someone to deal with it unless they just can't handle ANY type of change.

I was trying to make objective points about why Vista is a better choice for a new system with no legacy requirements:

1. Vista will recieve better support than XP as time moves along. This is always the case in a legacy product versus a new one.

2. Vista has better built in security. I saw earlier that you didn't think much of those features, none the less they exist in Vista and not in XP out of the box.

Now I didn't say Vista rules the universe. There's not a huge difference for the average user. But at the same time, why invest in a dying product unless you have a SPECIFIC reason? I made this point at the very begining of this thread. Find out how Vista works, and if it doesn't work for you then don't use it. But do not dismiss it out of hand, it works, its solid.
 
"as time moves along" It still doesn't have better support than XP. If you want to know the ultimate reason why users like me stay with XP.. it's because XP has received considerably longer widespread support and development by virtue of a longer existence.

The changes to the XP interface to my understanding of the GUI are a giant leap backwards. Unfortunately you won't get better than subjective on this. However, if they wanted to have more users adopt Vista, they should have allowed more options, but they didn't. Options for customization are key.

That's why I'm waiting. Vista hasn't hit RTM as far as I'm concerned until SP2.
 
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