To Vista or not to Vista?

[brokencrow]

I've been running Vista Enterprise for several months now on a dual boot
single-core proc (2.8 ghz, 1 gb ram, and a ti4200 vid card) and must admit
it's not my first choice for an OS. I got it to run halfway-decently by bagging
the sidebar and disabling UAC (don't even get me going on UAC). It's still
using more ram than XP though. And there's problems with my video card,
which Vista says is a bottleneck (it's only 128 mb). Vista really needs a
dual-core proc and at least a 256mb video card in addition to the 2 gb ram
to run comparably with XP.

Anybody found a decent PE disc for it yet?

[Cider]

I would definately do Vista if I had the monies to build a decent rig.

At work they made me run Vista ent on a box with 1 GB Ram so I made them upgrade me too 2GB Ram until I used it

Works alright now.

Although IE 7 is ridiculous on Vista. FF is smooth even though it takes quite abit of Res.

IE just hangs all the time

[brokencrow]

Microsoft definitely wrote one fat OS when they did Vista. I run XP
on everything from a 500mhz, 512mb ram Compaq laptop (it's ancient)
to this P4 I described and it runs well. I can't see scaling Vista for
older hardware, but maybe that was MS's whole idea.

It's ironic because I've also been working with SUSE, which we were
using at a mfg'ing company to retrofit old machine tools and I found
it also to be fat & slow. I'm opting more and more for stripped down
desktops like XFCE and fluxbox on my Linux boxes. Wish I could do
that more readily with Windows, so it may be time to try Vlite.

I haven't experienced any IE7 issues with Vista, but I've stayed away
from that POS for quite some time now. Opera has run fine for me on
Vista. I recently installed FF and have had no problems with it either.
What drives me nuts with Vista is the pop-ups JPnyc describes, which
is of course, UAC. I use a ton of 3rd-party apps, many simply single
.exe's like vncviewer, and UAC was always there with a warning. One
can disable the warnings without disabling UAC, but I was pleasantly
surprised how much faster Vista ran with UAC disabled altogether.

UAC is a setting you want to be familiar with if you support Vista, and
may be quite useful for many consumers out there who need all the help
they can get (that arguement can go either way though). Too bad it's
so balky. Something simpler like sudo might've sufficed, but then Windows
is so much more prone to vulnerabilities due to their monoploy on desktop
OS's, so maybe they needed all that extra engineering.

Alas, I have sacrificed UAC to the gods and chosen to live free.

[LateNightLurker]

Vista uses 800 megs of ram at start-up for me. No additional services running except a vista media center extender. There is quite a bit of bloat, but in defense of MS, it's rather easy to remove features via the add/remove program function.

[kingkong]

well with the updates on this

i use vista home premium with 1 GB ram

and with this OS there are services like
1. Norton AntiVirus
2. Sidebar and 4 additional gadgets
3. Dap Downloader (nothing is getting downloaded but its functioning in mini tool bar)

are also running but after i closed all this services i checked the ram usage it was coming uptoo 700 to 750 MB

this is still i high number of ram to be used by vista

with a 1.6 ghz dual core processor

[Cider]

All in all - Stick with XP (SP3 when it comes out) till Sp1 for Vista is out. Even then only upgrade if you can buy a decent machine. A dual core Proc is a viable option.

[Ouroboros]

I would tend to agree with the sentiments voiced here.

Personally, my machine is a Celeron-D processor (3.06MHz nominal, but I have it overclocked to 3.22MHz), 2Gb RAM (DDR SDRAM...184 pin) and a GeForce 7300GT GPU.

Vista still gets crabby about it. The overreach on M$'s part is the 'Aero' interface and the 'Sidebar'. It's extremely taxing on the GPU and the HDD cache, hence the high percentages on RAM usage.

All in all, it works well as an OS and GUI, but one has to be mindful of what features to use, and what features to disable.

It really comes down to the user maintaining control vs. the user being blinded by pretty lights and useless features.

Just my $0.02.


O

[foxyloxley]

It really comes down to the user maintaining control vs. the user being blinded by pretty lights and useless features.

Just my $0.02.


O

and until we DO actually GET a user who can differentiate between the two .......................

our, well MY job at least is [VERY] safe

[brokencrow]

and until we DO actually GET a user who can differentiate between the two .......................

our, well MY job at least is [VERY] safe

That one makes me laugh. The gig I was in last year was supporting dozens of engineers in a mfg'ering plant, some of whom were certainly a match for me. In dealing with users who could differentiate between the two, my job was still safe, just very very different. Kinda like going from babysitting gradeschoolers to watching teenagers.

[nihil]

Hey Foxy,

and until we DO actually GET a user who can differentiate between the two

I am sure that mine could.............. they wouldn't see the screen for the lights............. reminds me............. maybe I should upgrade them to DoS 5.0, then they can play that game with the two gorillas throwing nuclear bananas at each other?

Well I got it, and built the machine............ yeah I had problems.......... well I was building a "new" machine but from old bits. Mostly it kept telling me that it couldn't find a disk to install onto.
After a while and a or two, I figured that it was expecting to find a SATA RAID 1 array............... as if, as if.............

So, I loaded Windows 2000 and formatted the two HDDs.......... that made it happier............ but it shouldn't really, as it now gives me the nastiest, cheapest, tackiest bootloader choice screen I have ever seen......... and this box has a 256Mb DDR2 graphics chip! Hell, I have (legitimate) instances of NT 4.0 that look better............ with a 16Mb graphics card.

OK, I also wondered why it was running so hellishly slow..........until I remembered that the MoBo supported Duron processors............OMG! there is this blue box with a white switch somewhere near the centre of the board. It is shipped set to run at 100MHz clockspeed............ I flip that and hola! she is recognised as an Athlon XP3000+. Running at around 2.2GHz.

Now, I haven't really noticed a particular problem between processors and the operating systems of there day since back to the 8086 days, so my guess is that the issues will be:

1. RAM, and its availability (particularly after use)
2. Video capability (not shared)
3. General data transfer rates (bottlenecking)
4. Quality?

Well, once I got it to load, it did it pretty quickly for a 2.5~7 Gig DVD.

I have been messing around for about a day and a half now, and have a few preliminary thoughts:

It isn't that efficient at housekeeping:

1. Disk clean up offered me 3.0Mb................ I ran CC immediately and it got rid of 13.1Mb.

2. Registry manoeuvres? I have a number of "Registry Optimisers" (yeah I like to live dangerously). Now, with Win 2000 and XP, I would run these (report mode only ) month in and month out and they would find nothing to do.

With Vista I run one, and it tells me that it can reduce the size of the Registry hives by 11% and that will speed up Registry access speed by 16%. I run it later in the day, having done very little............and it found another 2%..................... that is going retro in my opinion guys?

Same story with file fragmentation............. lots of work there.

My immediate suspicion is that this thing leaks memory, it leaks RAM and it has a scruffy Registry manager.

But it does have some rather cute wallpapers?

2. I must say that I liked the quality of graphics under "safe mode"........... really clear and sharp, and you can alter the size of icons back to regular, and even sharper. Nice one! (yeah, I am that old; and I need all the help I can get)................ now where did I put that magnifying glass?

3. It doesn't do defrag well.............. hell, I would say it doesn't do defrag at all............ Auslogics have a couple of tools that handle the defragmation............... still pi$$ing around withdrivers and such, but I will hope to post some useful tools by this Monday?

4. And then there are .zip files.................. ever tried to do that in natural Vista?

I shall report back