KwadGuy says:

I’ve dealt with Vista on multiple platforms. It runs OK provided A) you have a computer with sufficient ram (at least 1GB, 2GB preferred) and a fast enough processor (realistically, a P4 or better). If all you want to run is the standard Office suite, and all you’ll be connecting is new (< 1 year old) hardware, you’ll probably be OK.

That said, if you want to run older software (and by older it could be as new as something issued in 2005-6), or if you want to attach older peripherals (again, 2005-6 constitutes old), you may encounter problems. And by “may” I really mean “will” if you do much at all with your PC. The latest Vista service pack has fixed a few things, but this is still a serious problem.

Now, all that would fall under the “in order to improve we must leave the old behind” catch-all IF there compelling reasons to run Vista. The problem is, there aren’t. The improvements in Vista relative to XP simply aren’t important enough. Apps launch a bit faster, search functions are somewhat better, the GUI is slicker…yeah, OK, whatever. The OS is somewhat more secure under the hood, but that advantage is going to be reduced with the next XP service pack.

Previous successful, compelling OS launches have been powered by the fact that the OS offered noticable, important improvements.

Bottom line: XP is a good OS. Vista is barely better, and breaks too much in its wake.

tcc3 says:

Kwad, what sort of revolutionary advance did XP offer over 2k? Pleople made the same claim back then even though it was more stable, had built in CD burning, remote desktop, and a slew of other nice if not extraordinary features.

Vista’s the same way. People call the new gui eye candy, but pushing the gui load off on the gpu frees up the cpu for other things. It handles memory management better. The search indexing promised in XP actually works in Vista. DVD burning support. Media Center. Its more stable, but when it does crash it does so more gracefully.

Its not a quantum leap. Neither was XP. Neither was Leopard. There are improvements; people claiming there aren’t doesn’t make it so.

Jeff says:

Some interesting Wikipedia articles on Vista:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista

It might be of interest to look at the article which list features that are new to Windows Vista. I know this is Wikipedia, not really an authority, but some of the new features are pretty interesting.

KwadGuy says:

tcc3: said:
————————————————
Kwad, what sort of revolutionary advance did XP offer over 2k? Pleople made the same claim back then even though it was more stable, had built in CD burning, remote desktop, and a slew of other nice if not extraordinary features.
————————————————

You are correct in that the upgrade to XP over Win2K was NOT compelling. I didn’t migrate for over two years, and the IS departments in most companies took at least as long.

But the lineage there was : NT->NT4->Win2K-> XP

That was the corporate track. These were the more stable operating systems. They were also more costly, harder to use (NT/NT4), and were less widely supported with respect to commercial software and peripherals. VERY few home users used NT/NT4 and while Win2K made greater inroads in the home market, it was still not heavily marketed to that segment.

Most customers of Windows weren’t on that corporate track. They were on the 95->98->98SE->ME(ugh)->XP track. XP was a wonderful improvement over any predecessors on that track.

To be honest, the transition from Win2K to XP was not compelling on the basis of features and functionality. The transition was ultimately mandated by the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting Win2K with updates and that software and hardware vendors started to drop Win2K support. (This isn’t a surprise, since with XP, they could easily support both the ‘business’ (XP-Pro) and ‘home’ platforms (XP-home) with one set of drivers–something that was not true of earlier parallel releases.

Bottom line: Someday, the Win2K -> XP scenario will likely repeat itself, and an OS upgrade will be mandated by the realities of the market. But for now, there is no compelling reason to upgrade XP.

tcc3 says:

Seems to me the types of folks who had to go from 98 to XP (due to lack of availability or support) are the same sorts who aren’t going to upgrade from XP any way. They’ll get it the same way they got XP: in the coming years when it comes bundled on a new PC.

98 to XP was a sea change – but it also was a huge jump in sys reqs, just like vista is. Can you imagine running XP on some of the old slow PII or older hardware? It would be a dog, just like people complaining Vista is now. It also broke compatibility for programs and drivers.

My point is that there is nothing new under the sun. People don’t like change. Period.

tcc3 says:

Qsabe – If nothing broke for you between 98 and XP you got very very lucky. XP had many of the same compatibility problems that Vista does now.

Every release is going to break compatibility some. The only way that isn’t going to happen is if they don’t make any changes or improvements to the underlying code. If that were the case people really would be claiming theres no reason to upgrade. Given some of the security/ stability issues of the older OSs, changes needed to be made.

The ony way ’round this is some sort of sandboxed compatibility mode, much like Classic was for OS X.

This is an oversight on their part and should definitely be a feature of Win7. With virtualization they could offer “probable” compatibility all the way back to DOS if they wanted.

It would solve two problems: It would quiet the critics who’s software breaks with every new release and their OS would no longer be shackled to old crappy code and methods for compatibility. We could really see some improvements in both security and stability.

EDTM says:

” Video – Do You Hate Windows Vista As Much As These Guys? ”

Yes, I do…

MrBloedumpSpladderschitt says:

#33 – That was that way back to VS2003 when I was taking some classes. Guess I’ll have to take another class…

On a related note – Anything that kills off Apache is a good thing. I just got away from a place using a HR system based on Apache. The piece of crap system had a lot of “issues” but one major one was provably it’s Apache foundation. Everyone I’ve every worked with that has any experience with Apache would agree it needs to go away.

Jeff says:

No, as a student you get a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 Pro, MSSQL, Expression Studio, Windows 2003 Server standard edition and XNA Game Studio 2.0… it looks like a pretty good deal if you are still a student (probably valid for graduate students as well).

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

robertson says:

I actually really like Vista. Sure it had a few teething issues that are slowly being fixed with SP1 fixing the most serious problem of slow file copy.

I would no longer consider going back to Windows Xp as I have become reliant on too many of the new features in windows vista. The enhancements to the windows explorer with its better searching, sorting, and view customizations are one example. Another is the better memory management with the ability to handle multitasking much better and more smoothly than XP.

The Networking stack is also much better once the early poorly written device drivers were updated. The ability to automatically configure the firewall based on what network you are connected to makes moving from trusted wireless netowrks to wireless hotspots much more convienient. No more having to remember to lock up the firewall manually when using a untrusted hotspot as this is done automatically. The addition of the built in two way capable firewall make having to use a third party firewall unnessecary although the user interface is a little confusing at first.