Vista. Using it or hating it.

[Fred_G]

Well, this weekend I bought me an Acer Laptop from the BestBuy. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9052945&type=product&id=1218012528210

Not a bad deal, especially considering my old laptop was a 1.49GHz!

Well, it has the Vista on it. So far, I am loving it! It works. Can be a bit annoying with the nag screens when you install something, but that is called security.

Now I am not going to go out and buy Vista for my other computers, I got this one mainly to play around with Vista.

Things I don't like: Stuff is moved around, and not exactly the same as my old XP

Thigs I like: Wireless network detection. Very good. Can detect a network not broadcasting the SSID. Asks you for the SSID, and then asks for the WPA/WEP password. XP does not do that . i have to broadcast the SSID, get the computer up on the network, then hide the SSID. Or am I doing something wrong there.

Files are set up better. I am big on the Folding At Home thing. I use a program called FAHMON to monitor my computers. With XP, I have to hunt and look for the correct folder. Vista has it listed form me.

Overall, I like it. Boots fast, and well, it works.

So what do you folks think about it?

And if you need a cheap, nice laptop, look into the one in the link.

 

[abe]

Thanks for the link Fred g I have two customers waiting for such a deal how would you review the laptop.

 

[Fred_G]

I love it. Full keybord, 10 key and all. It is the 32bit Vista. The screen is a bit short, but very wide. I will have to buy a new case for it.

A couple of benchmarks for you: (stock of course, it is a laptop..)
SuperPi 1M 31.013 Secs

3DMark06 767 (not a big gamming computer)

I like it.

Some bad things: No OS disk. I am guessing I have a restore partition on the hard drive?

It is a bit odd in size, 10"x15", but if you have a case for it, no problem. And it has that beautiful 'clear' display. WCG?

It is quiet, no issues with it so far. I am running both CPU's at 100% with the FAH, no problems browsing the net. For a $400 laptop, I think it would be hard to beat.

And it has a € key.

 

[iptech]

I bought an Acer mini laptop for onsite use earlier this year and I'm very pleased with it. They sell good quality, well-specced machines for a competitive price and their after sales support is very good. I can't share your enthusiasm for Vista though, I junked it on my machine in favour of XP Pro as much of the software I need to run (such as data recovery and disk repair/partitioning tools) does not run under the restrictive policies of Vista.

 

[pcgeek]

I took a look at your link and I must say:It looks very good from the picture.However I do have my doubts due to the factor that it is dirt cheap and in this world "you get what you pay for",those are my sentiments which do make me wonder a bit.....also the factor that the LCD connector seems to be quite bad dosen't do it for me and makes me question this entire deal!

I read some dodgy customer reviews here: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...oduct&id=1218012528210#tabbed-customerreviews

 

[Fred_G]

I did not see any 'dodgy' reviews. But it is always good to be cautious when you buy computers. I build my own desktops. I still think it is a good deal for an inexpensive laptop with Vista.

And it does have a 1 year warranty... So I have not cracked it open and replaced the TIM. Yet.

 

[Alana]

I have been using Vista since April and I find no problem with it.

 

[gunslinger]

"Vista. Using it or hating it."

Using it and hating it. Have been sense Jan 07.

 

[Fred_G]

Well, I have had Vists Explore (used to be Windows Exlore) lock up on me repeatedly when transfering files using a USB card reader. Had a couple of issues with Opera (my prefered Browser), and HAD to kill the UAC! UAC is a good tool, poorly impleminted in my opinion. But stll loving the laptop, and no major issues with the Vista.

 

[gunslinger]

Sense SP1 I have had no "major" issues with Vista. Just a lot of little things that add up to a bad user experience. If I was coming from say, XP pre SP1, I might think Vista SP1 is pretty good. But, after getting used to very fast XP machines and using OS X for a little while, well.....Vista just does not cut it.

 

[JRDtechnet]

Using it and loving it. Actually had my first glitch the other day, I BSOD'd with with ndis.sys after installing Tuesday's patches. Booted into safe mode and used system restore to go back before I installed the patched...still BSOD on normal startup. Took me awhile by I was enabling disabling drivers I was concentrating on my NIC drivers, actually disabled all my NICs but still BSODs finally found the culprit the Catalyst 8.9 drivers...odd but I went to ATI's site and 8.10 was already out so I installed that and re-installed Tuesday's patches and everything is A-Ok!

 

[nonchalant]

Been using Vista 64-bit for about 12 months now. LOVE it.

 

[zchehi]

love it

I also have been using vista home premium 64 bit, runs great but vista is a resource pig so just have between 2-4 gigs of ram and decent video.

 

[gunslinger]

I think I'll hold out for Windows mojave, um, I mean Vista SP2....er....Windows 7, thats it.

Steve Ballmer
“Windows Vista is good, Windows 7 is Windows Vista with clean-up in user interface [and] improvements in performance. Look, I’m not encouraging anybody to wait, I’d go ahead and deploy it right away. We didn’t have to go in an incompatible direction to make big strides forward,”

Vista cleaned up? No thanks Steve. I'll stick with XP Pro SP3, Ubuntu , and OS X. All three of these work better than Vista and do it with fewer system resources. Ubuntu is free and OS X costs only $139.

 

[geekhelp4u]

I have no issues with Vista! i have however seen better performance on my machine with server 2008 as a work station.

 

[Fred_G]

I have not found Vista to be a big rescource hog. On this lower end speced laptop, I have had very few issues. What do you mean Gunslinger by rescource hog?

Now don't get me wrong, not a Vista fanboy here or anything, I have XP on my other computers, and am looking at putting a couple on Ubuntu. I am, just playing with Vista because it came on the computer. I see no real need to upgrade to Vista at this point. Just curious what others have experienced with it.

 

[gunslinger]

What do you mean Gunslinger by rescource hog?

By resource hog I mean It offers no useful features over XP and yet It uses up over twice as much RAM, and HDD space as XP.

 

[geekhelp4u]

By resource hog I mean It offers no useful features over XP and yet It uses up over twice as much RAM, and HDD space as XP.

It looks pretty = an additional 512mb of ram and 800MB of HDD space

Looks pretty and runs nice = an additional 2GB of ram

 

[nonchalant]

By resource hog I mean It offers no useful features over XP and yet It uses up over twice as much RAM, and HDD space as XP.

Vista has quite an number of useful features missing from XP. Better PnP for devices, better setup/install options (eg no requirement for manual RAID driver install), better troubleshooting features & better recovery options. It also has better performance & reliability monitoring, an inbuilt RAM tester, & networking is a cinche (often it will network itself lol) , and besides all that it looks much nicer.

Memory management under Vista is also completely different to XP. What Vista is doing is caching virtually ALL free memory. Its meant to do that - its by design. At the moment I have 4GB system RAM installed in my PC & almost nothing running yet task manager shows I only have 5mb free. Why? Read on.. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

 

[gunslinger]

Notice I said useful features. I have seen no features that Vista offers that makes up for its lack of stability, and over all slowness.

It looks nice, I'll give you that. Its also nothing that can't be done on XP with third party software if you just have to have glass.

I know all about Vista's memory management. It still uses far more RAM to function than XP, period.

The simple fact is I can install XP on a system running 512 RAM and it will fly. Vista will boot up and thats about it. You know what that means? It means the system requirements are higher for Vista than XP.

Other than DX10, XP will do anything Vista can do, and do it faster. The only reason some people still defend it is because of DX10 and glass, or because they paid for it and feel they have to to. Honestly, if Vista looked like XP and did not have DX10 would you still buy it?

I guess if you are willing to give up speed and reliability for new and shiny, Vista is what you want. Or, you could have speed reliability and pretty, with OS X.