Ah, sweet proof

[NYJimbo]

I have to agree that SP1 Vista is a major improvement. Put it on new hardware with 2 gigs of ram, turn off User Account Control (UAC), make some tweaks and it's running like XP.

What I think is that MS should never have released an Vista upgrade, only Vista for fresh installs. Likewise there are alot of computers with "Vista Ready" or "Vista Compatible" stickers that should not be.

Multi-core processors with multi gigs of ram are cheap. As I type this, I am doing it on an AMD 64 X2 5200 with 2 gigs of ram on some older GeForce video card and 320 gig WD SATA 1.5 drive. Lightning fast. Honestly. Price a custom box like this and anybody can afford it. Get Vista SP1 OEM 64 bit from NewEgg for about $110. That's the way to do Vista.

 

[seedubya]

I fail to see how any competent technician, with their customer's best interests in mind, would not strongly recommend against Vista. If the customer already has it, then I must deal with it but if the customer is about to buy then it's my job to ensure that they DON'T buy Vista. In simple terms it's shite. In more complex terms it's a resource hog, has poor memory management, poor TP driver and software support, suffers from inexplicable slowdowns in the file system when copying files and even more inexplicable BSOD's et cetera, ad nauseum.

I'm running Vista Ultimate with SP1 installed on a Dell XPS 720, Quad Core 6600 and 4 Gigs of RAM and dual GeForce 8800 GTX 768Mb. I force myself to log into it at least once a week to stay familiar with it. But that's it. I triple boot this machine with XP and Ubuntu 8.04, neither of which have any difficulties, crashes etc.

@ JDTechnet, I don't see why you feel such a need to defend this OS. OK, you're having a good time with it. Unfortunately, you're in the minority. Most people are not having such a walk in the park. Don't forget too, that you are technical, end-users are not. They neither know NOR WANT TO know how to tweak Vista to make it stable, nor should they have to tweak anything.

 

[gunslinger]

Don't forget too, that you are technical, end-users are not. They neither know NOR WANT TO know how to tweak Vista to make it stable, nor should they have to tweak anything.

Thats one reason I have been recommending the Mac a lot lately. Everything just seems to work as it should, right out of the box without tweaking, downloading updated drivers, turning off un needed services ect.

Like I said before, With SP1 and lots of tweaking, Vista can be made to work on a fast system. But whats the point when there are better choices?


Also you have to understand that about 95% of people who own computers have no clue what they are doing. Its easy to take for granted being a computer tech. On a brand new system I have some set things I do to make it "ready". First thing if its an OEM I spend about an hour or so removing all the crapware and trialware that came bundled with the OS. Next is the garbage and reg files removing said programs left behind. Next, if its Vista I turn off UAC , and disable Windows Defender. Next, its time to install a good antivirus program and firefox plus windows updates. There are many more things but you get the point. The average person does none of this. They get the system home and start using it.
They don't know about start up programs slowing boot times. They don't understand that the OS came with 10-30 programs they will never use or that the OS itself is using 700mb of RAM and by the time you factor in the Norton, Windows defender and other crap running in the background a system with 2 gigs can be left with 250-300mb for other things. They take software at its word, if it says Vista compatible on the box, for some reason they think it should work. ( go figure )
This is the "average" computer user. If Vista gives us techies a tough time sometimes, how can we expect these people to make it work?

 

[NWPhotog]

I have to agree that SP1 Vista is a major improvement. Put it on new hardware with 2 gigs of ram, turn off User Account Control (UAC), make some tweaks and it's running like XP.

What I think is that MS should never have released an Vista upgrade, only Vista for fresh installs. Likewise there are alot of computers with "Vista Ready" or "Vista Compatible" stickers that should not be.

Multi-core processors with multi gigs of ram are cheap. As I type this, I am doing it on an AMD 64 X2 5200 with 2 gigs of ram on some older GeForce video card and 320 gig WD SATA 1.5 drive. Lightning fast. Honestly. Price a custom box like this and anybody can afford it. Get Vista SP1 OEM 64 bit from NewEgg for about $110. That's the way to do Vista.

Well said Jim.

 

[gunslinger]

I fail to see how any competent technician, with their customer's best interests in mind, would not strongly recommend against Vista. If the customer already has it, then I must deal with it but if the customer is about to buy then it's my job to ensure that they DON'T buy Vista. In simple terms it's shite. In more complex terms it's a resource hog, has poor memory management, poor TP driver and software support, suffers from inexplicable slowdowns in the file system when copying files and even more inexplicable BSOD's et cetera, ad nauseum.

I'm running Vista Ultimate with SP1 installed on a Dell XPS 720, Quad Core 6600 and 4 Gigs of RAM and dual GeForce 8800 GTX 768Mb. I force myself to log into it at least once a week to stay familiar with it. But that's it. I triple boot this machine with XP and Ubuntu 8.04, neither of which have any difficulties, crashes etc.

@ JDTechnet, I don't see why you feel such a need to defend this OS. OK, you're having a good time with it. Unfortunately, you're in the minority. Most people are not having such a walk in the park. Don't forget too, that you are technical, end-users are not. They neither know NOR WANT TO know how to tweak Vista to make it stable, nor should they have to tweak anything.

Well said seedubya, I could not have said it better.

 

[NWPhotog]

.........................

 

[NWPhotog]

Thats one reason I have been recommending the Mac a lot lately. Everything just seems to work as it should, right out of the box without tweaking, downloading updated drivers, turning off un needed services ect.

Yep. And the main reason for that is Mac is a closed system. It is much easier to work right out of the box when you manufacture 90% of the HW.

 

[gunslinger]

No arguments here. Like I said before, With SP1 and lots of tweaking, Vista can be made to work on a fast system. But whats the point when there are better choices?

I will be the first to admit it has come up a lot. I don't even have a problem saying that maybe with another SP and a few tweaks it might even be good one day.

But I still think for most people there are far better choices.

Yep. And the main reason for that is Mac is a closed system. It is much easier to work right out of the box when you manufacture 90% of the HW.

Its a good thing.

 

[NWPhotog]

No arguments here. Like I said before, With SP1 and lots of tweaking, Vista can be made to work on a fast system. But whats the point when there are better choices?

I will be the first to admit it has come up a lot. I don't even have a problem saying that maybe with another SP and a few tweaks it might even be good one day.

But I still think for most people there are far better choices.




Its a good thing.

Seems reasonable. Options are always good. OTH I am running into more and more people that have bought a computer 6 months ago (with Vista) and want help with an issue. They don't want to discuss OSes. You have to admit there is more $ supporting MS!

 

[gunslinger]

You have to admit there is more $ supporting MS!

This is true, by far. Hopefully people will start to get over their fear of Macs and Linux and things will change a little. This would also be good for the comsumer who likes MS because the compitition will make them take more time with their next OS to make sure its solid.

 

[JRDtechnet]

I fail to see how any competent technician, with their customer's best interests in mind, would not strongly recommend against Vista. If the customer already has it, then I must deal with it but if the customer is about to buy then it's my job to ensure that they DON'T buy Vista. In simple terms it's shite. In more complex terms it's a resource hog, has poor memory management, poor TP driver and software support, suffers from inexplicable slowdowns in the file system when copying files and even more inexplicable BSOD's et cetera, ad nauseum.

I'm running Vista Ultimate with SP1 installed on a Dell XPS 720, Quad Core 6600 and 4 Gigs of RAM and dual GeForce 8800 GTX 768Mb. I force myself to log into it at least once a week to stay familiar with it. But that's it. I triple boot this machine with XP and Ubuntu 8.04, neither of which have any difficulties, crashes etc.

@ JDTechnet, I don't see why you feel such a need to defend this OS. OK, you're having a good time with it. Unfortunately, you're in the minority. Most people are not having such a walk in the park. Don't forget too, that you are technical, end-users are not. They neither know NOR WANT TO know how to tweak Vista to make it stable, nor should they have to tweak anything.

All I can say is every customer I've helped that runs Vista once I got all the drivers squared away (especially graphics,chipset drivers, Hard drive controller driver) then everything ran great! I haven't crashed my Vista OS yet and it handles application crashes much better than XP. As for tweaking, I haven't tweaked it at all, haven't disabled any services or did any registry hacks. Unless you want to call updating drivers tweaking?

 

[purple_minion]

Rant mode on.

I have to just say a few things here since we're dealing with microslough. My opinion of Vista, or for that matter XP or anything Microsoft is that they are all very poor. Look at microsoft's track record, anyone here own an xbox 360? I'm sure someone does, and it's a piece of crap, I wish I knew about all the problems before I spent $450 for it. They didn't have a clue about how to design hardware and did a craptacular job misdesigning the cooling for this thing among other things if you google it. They have I believe a 33% failure rate just because they wanted to rush things out to market and didn't test things thoroughly. Sound familiar? The zune from what I've heard was a flop, though the ipod is overpriced at least they got it down. I have been using linux more and more because every time I start to feel "hey, windows isn't so bad" something else comes up, or slows down, or just doesn't work and I have to reevaluate things again. If they would stop trying to be everything under the sun like google, os's, office apps, servers, virtualization, antivirus, antispyware, console games, music players, etc they might actually do something right. Every hear of a jack of all trades, master of none? That's them, just pick something and do the best damn job you can do. If they took Bryce's theme like on this site and just went out, did the best they could, do it right, etc. they would be fine. It takes more money to get new customer's then to keep them right? So take a little longer, iron out the bugs and you will keep your customer's you already have, and will probably gain more (though with windows shoved down your throat on every computer you buy they should have no trouble).

End rant.

 

[gunslinger]

I agree with pretty much everything stated above. That is the main problem with Microsoft , they try to have their hands in everything they think is capable of making money. Microsoft looks around and sees what companies are making the most money and then they say oh, let's do what they are doing. I completely agree that if Microsoft would just take a few steps back and concentrate on their operating system, I think Windows seven could be great.

You can like Windows vista or not like Windows vista, but the numbers do not lie. When one third of the people who choose to vista are going back to XP and 60% of admins have no plans to switch to Windows vista something is wrong.