Whats wrong with Vista?

[tedebear]

I am about to buy a laptop - but the specific model I want only comes with Vista - is it really that bad? if I'm using the laptop without need for anything other than music, photos, web design and general web page surfing - are there any grand issues I should worry about?

 

[Shizuoka Dolphin]

I doubt it's that bad, but people just love whinging. Especially techie people.

 

[rool]

I'm not a techie by any means of the word but I have had PC's for nearly all the versions of windows and never had many major problems when upgrading to a new machine.

I bought a laptop from dell with vista in June and find that it's a real pain in the arse to get stuff to work that has just been a case of plug and play on my old XP machine. It's stuff like my digital camera, my mp3, my digital turntable, my 3g mobile broadband. For someone like me with little knowledge it has become too much effort, so much so that we still mostly use our XP desktop.

 

[Cian]

Speed - unless you make it look like Windows 2000 or have a monsterously powerful system its very, very slow. Games are usually a bit slower than Windows XP on the same PC.
User Access Control - nearly every action pops up a "Cancel or Allow" dialogue. Some actions are very hard to perform because of UAC.
DRM - restrictions on what you can do with audio/video are far more entrenched.

It should be fine for what you're intending to do as long as any design apps you're going to use are compatible, though.

 

[tedebear]

Speed - unless you make it look like Windows 2000 or have a monsterously powerful system its very, very slow. Games are usually a bit slower than Windows XP on the same PC.
User Access Control - nearly every action pops up a "Cancel or Allow" dialogue. Some actions are very hard to perform because of UAC.
DRM - restrictions on what you can do with audio/video are far more entrenched.

It should be fine for what you're intending to do as long as any design apps you're going to use are compatible, though.

Macromedia Dreamweaver - I'll need to check it'll work to be honest...

Don't like the sound of the plug and play being difficult though....

 

[Gritt23]

I just seem to have had quite a few problems getting things to run properly on it.

At home, I have a couple of games that won't load up, whereas, at work anything I try to load up seems to be more tricky to get working, or it just doesn't work at all.

If I had my time back again, I would have tried to get a laptop with Window XP instead.

 

[saltash seagull]

I'm not a techie by any means of the word but I have had PC's for nearly all the versions of windows and never had many major problems when upgrading to a new machine.

I bought a laptop from dell with vista in June and find that it's a real pain in the arse to get stuff to work that has just been a case of plug and play on my old XP machine. It's stuff like my digital camera, my mp3, my digital turntable, my 3g mobile broadband. For someone like me with little knowledge it has become too much effort, so much so that we still mostly use our XP desktop.

im not techie either but have problem getting things to work on my vista laptop as well

never had much trouble with previous versions of windows

thought it was just me

 

[El Presidente]

Get a Macbook Tedebear!

 

[Starry]

We have a Vista laptop and all our plug and play things have worked just fine with it, the camera, digicam etc. I am a complete techy dummy (cannot get the tumble dryer to work right now ) and I can work Vista just fine.

We have Dreamweaver (8?) and it works fine with Vista.

 

[beorhthelm]

I doubt it's that bad, but people just love whinging. Especially techie people.

The problem can be best summed up by looking at the system requirements for any upcoming game. They will list 25% more CPU and 50% more or even double the memory to run on Vista verses XP. Its like buying the lastest model car and finding it has lower 0-60 than last years despite a bigger engine and less MPG.

 

[Napper]

vista is the bollocks

 

[Nemesis]

I've been using Vista for a few months-came pre-installed on my Toshiba laptop. No real problems-most apps seem to work fine. PnP stuff all functions-iPod, camera, older stuff too.

Only problem I have is that I installed it on my desktop machine and the graphics are all over the place with a message "VIA CPU to AGP Controller". Only real problem and that's on a 3 year old pc.

You should have no problems.

BTW-if anybody can tell me what the hell that message means and how I cure it, I'd be very happy. Ta.

 

[Curious Orange]

The trouble with Vista is that by default it runs applications using the lowest level permissions, which is a right pain if you have higher level permissions and the application you want to run also needs to use those permissions. If you are having trouble running something try running it as an Administrator (right click and select "Run as Administrator").

 

[TonyW]

To be fair, VISTA is excellent!

To be (possibly) unfair, VISTA can be a complete pain in the arse.

It all depends on the system you are running (as has been mentioned already).
I've got 3 machines running; 2 with XP, 1 with VISTA.
The VISTA box is a very powerful Quad Core monster built just a few weeks ago - and it ROCKS with VISTA.

I haven't even considered installing the new Windows on either of my other machines (the first is 2 years old, the other 3) because they would probably have issues both with hardware compatibility and neither would do it justice - they just aren't powerful enough.

VISTA is new technology and its only to be expected that some old equipment and software just won't work with it.

That's progress.

 

[TonyW]

You can always turn off User Access Control (UAC) by going to control panel/user accounts and changing the default setting for UAC.

 

[NMH]

Progress maybe, but the smooth transition from the XP into the Vista new world has been heavily criticized for reason(s). And what does it mean, 'new technology' if the old equipment just becomes defunct? It means that someone stands to make more money by outmoding everything you relied on before so they can sell you new shit.

People should vote with their wallets and tell them to stuff it if they can't make it compatible - otherwise they'll just keep doing it, and keep everyone on a hamster-wheel to keep up, and keep spending.

 

[TonyW]

If you have a piece of software or hardware that simply refuses to work with VISTA (are you listening EPSON) you could install a copy of XP in addition to VISTA.
The PC when it boots will give you the option of starting in either version of Windows - problem solved.

 

[Marshy]

considering they havent released a new OS for such a long time its a bit of a f*** up in my eyes.

 

[Cian]

To be fair, VISTA is excellent!

To be (possibly) unfair, VISTA can be a complete pain in the arse.

It all depends on the system you are running (as has been mentioned already).
I've got 3 machines running; 2 with XP, 1 with VISTA.
The VISTA box is a very powerful Quad Core monster built just a few weeks ago - and it ROCKS with VISTA.

I haven't even considered installing the new Windows on either of my other machines (the first is 2 years old, the other 3) because they would probably have issues both with hardware compatibility and neither would do it justice - they just aren't powerful enough.

VISTA is new technology and its only to be expected that some old equipment and software just won't work with it.

That's progress.

Its Vista, not "VISTA".

Its not reasonable to expect that new equipment won't work with a new operating system; and Vista isn't particularly new - its been in testing for nearly 3 years.

And dual-booting is the biggest pain in the arse ever - if a vital piece of hardware doesn't work in Vista, don't use Vista - setting up a dual boot requires partitioning, configuring the boot loader, and most importantly a multiple minute reboot procedure to get in to the "other" system.

 

[Badger]

I've got Vista and XP running on my machine at home. I installed Fifa 08 on Vista and it was really jerky where as when I installed it on XP I had no problems at all.

Vista looks very nice and has a lot of decent functions but it eats resources for breakfast. My problem is that a tiny 1Gb of RAM obviously isn't enough, I may have to invest in a supercomputer.