Some ramblings about Vista after moving from XP

[pae77]

Well, I ordered my recently acquired T61p with Vista Business x64 figuring I'd probably be downgrading to XP as I was very comfortable with XP and had heard so many bad things about Vista floating around these and other forums. But I wanted to give it a try and figured it made economic sense to get a license for Vista since I already have a retail copy of XP I could use if I didn't like Vista.

Initially when I booted up into Vista for the first time, I was pretty horrified at what I saw. My hard drive was thrashing constantly, there were seemingly endless annoying nag screens even though I was running as administrator and my initial impression was not positive. I didn't think I'd last with Vista very long.

However . . ., after taking some time to tweak Vista by, among other things: Turning off UAC, letting the search function indexing get finished indexing my hard drive and adjusting how aggressively it indexes, adjusting some power manager settings which solved various issues, changing some default settings that were causing the system to wake from sleep at unexpected times, shutting off R&R's automatic backups, adjusting (lowering) the amount of disk space that system restore can use, adjusting the settings on Windows Defender so it doesn't scan my hard drive every day, adjusting when Windows Update checks and installs updates, and probably a few other things I can't recall at the moment, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I actually like Vista and how few issues I've encountered (aside from those already mentioned, which are now solved). And most of the time, when I do encounter an issue, a little research enables me to solve it. I haven't encountered any driver issues so far.

So now my hard drive is under control again and is no longer being constantly thrashed by Vista's indexing and by W. Defender running scans everyday. Also, almost everything I have tried to run works fine with Vista x64, including games. I did have to change firewalls from ZoneAlarm to Comodo Pro which makes a free version designed for Vista x64. If ZoneAlarm ever gets a version working well on x64, I may or may not go back as Comodo seems pretty good. I am using Vista's Aero interface which I like and I like the sidebar. The file structure (Computer, Users, User, and then Documents, Pictures, Music, Downloads, etc., all being at the same level), seems a bit more logical and convenient.

I'm looking forward to SP1 which I hear will make a few things better and speed Vista up a bit, although it already runs pretty quick on my setup.

But now, after about a month using Vista, I really wouldn't want to have to go back to XP and there really is nothing I really miss, (except the "move" function in XP, which seems to be lacking in Vista, although there are other ways to move things).

So for those who have the horsepower and ram to run Vista well who have been discouraged by all the negative comments floating around from even giving it a try or for those who gave it a try but gave up on it before taking the time and trouble to get it properly tweaked, I think you are missing out on a pretty good thing. Also most of you will eventually probably have to move to Vista anyway so my thinking is one might as well get started and embrace the new technology and embrace change. It really isn't so bad. In fact, it's quite good.

[Marin85]

I couldn´t agree more...
I don´t know what issues you have encountered but from what you´re saying it seems to me to be only a matter of settings, right, which is anyway not a real issue, maybe rather an initial inconvinience with Vista
I would never go back to XP. I think it´s a sort of prejudice cruising around that Vista is that bad. In fact, Vista runs much smoother than XP on my machine, I have never experienced any BSODs with Vista or driver issues by now, it just runs like a charm!

Cheers

Marin

[mgo]

Initially when I booted up into Vista for the first time, I was pretty horrified at what I saw. My hard drive was thrashing constantly
<snip snip>
However . . ., after taking some time to tweak Vista It really isn't so bad. In fact, it's quite good.

Well, nice going for having an open mind and taking time to make some adjustments to Vista to give it a chance.

Sadly, Microsoft pushed Vista out the door with what I consider a crummy set of options pre-set, and this does indeed, create a poor first impression of Vista.

I have my Vista machines set to run in "Classic" mode, and that includes Windows Explorer. This means no silly visual effects like Aero, but it also means greater speed, and that is crucial on an older ThinkPad.

The copy/paste function was horribly slow at first but the SP1 fix has improved that. Using Robocopy (built in to Vista-finally-) is super-fast and fairly easy to set up for routine copy and move jobs. Syncback is also terrifically fast in Vista.

Vista's native backup program sucks, even worse than the XP version. Search and Indexing is decent, unless you want to find something that hasn't been indexed, and then heaven help you find it in the horribly confused search menu. (what drugs did they take when the wrote -that one- eh?)

Vista's biggest asset in my view is how much more easy on the eyes it it to look at. Somehow Vista handles the video in a much improved way, even on an older machine.

Many of us spent a long time learning how to tweak XP for maximum useability, and it will take some time to get Vista humming along to our liking, too.

[ArtShapiro]

I'm glad you folks are working smoothly in Vista - certainly the visuals are a Good Thing.

I continue to have sporadic problems on the dual boot T42. In the last week:

a). It told me I was unauthorized to access my own Documents folder. (I went back to the XP partition to do what I had to do.)

b). It wouldn't let me delete an old directory; it turned out the permissions for my account only involved some sort of "inherit from parent", whereas every other account had "full control". So logging onto the Administrator account let me get by that one.

c). The sidebar, containing only the analog clock, often faults and terminates.

I want to like Vista, but it seems to fight me tooth and nail!

Art

[tylerwylie]

I gave Vista business a week on my laptop, and as an avid Linux user I had heard many many horrible things about it. I will say I was impressed with some of the functionality it provided, and the way Office 07 integrated into the OS. It's harder to do my job in Windows than Linux however so I eventually moved on to Fedora 8, and am running Windows XP inside VMware Workstation for my Office 07 and Internet Explorer needs.

[mrBrown]

Hello my fellow Thinkpad owners. This is my first post...let me share my 2c on Vista.

I recently got a x61s with Vista Business pre-installed. It worked fine for the most part and I liked the new gui after looking at xp for 5 years. But, there were several annoyances:
1) I normally have the OS on C and data on D partition. Vista's shrink only gave me 2 partitions equal of size. Only after reading http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... -problems/
and using the trial version of perfect disk I was able to size them as I would like to: 40gb - 80gb.
2) creating files and dirs, copying files at some moment got terribly sloooooow. I used every patch, even installed SP1 but still it was terrible. Was thinking about going back to xp but decided to just try a fresh install of Vista. 3 hours and several patches later the speed was back to normal. Dont know why it turned slow at some moment, crossing my fingers it wont happen again because having to install Vista again to solve it is quite a hassle.
3) Startup was very slow at login. After installing a fresh Vista I removed most of the thinkpad tools. Im quite happy with the speed now.

greetings.

[Mobil1]

I'll share my experience with installing Vista Business on a T42p. For the most part it was a suprisingly smooth transition from XP. Almost everything was recognized and good to go under Device Manager. The only nagging issue was my Intel 2100B wireless card which for whatever reason cannot be controlled via Fn-F5 (bluetooth works fine though!), it can only be powered off through Properties under Device Manager but fortunately it has no network connectivity issues. But other than that, with the latest updates installed, aero, power management, sleep, sidebar, all seems to be running well so far under Vista.

[rbena]

Corporate uptake has been slow, and is good to read some positive experiences with Vista here.

Pae77's comment is particularly interesting:
"after about a month using Vista, I really wouldn't want to have to go back to XP and there really is nothing I really miss"

Many users are still debating whether there is enough reason to move from XP to Vista, given the cost of new hardware, and availability of software written for Vista.

The speed of uptake of Vista will no doubt be one of the main stories in the computing industry in 2008. Is also possible focus may start shifting to Vienna, the new OS due in late 2009. Regardless, is good to read of successes here with Vista.

[ejr]

It is normal that corporate buying would be slow. Training all the people is expensive and impacts a current quarter's earnings. Few managers will do that. There are not a few companies still running nt 4!

-er

[SHoTTa35]

I'll share my experience with installing Vista Business on a T42p. For the most part it was a suprisingly smooth transition from XP. Almost everything was recognized and good to go under Device Manager. The only nagging issue was my Intel 2100B wireless card which for whatever reason cannot be controlled via Fn-F5 (bluetooth works fine though!), it can only be powered off through Properties under Device Manager but fortunately it has no network connectivity issues. But other than that, with the latest updates installed, aero, power management, sleep, sidebar, all seems to be running well so far under Vista.

Well did you install the latest drivers in Windows Update for the system? You should have Windows Mobile Center option to turn off wifi at the click of a button. FN +F5 only work with the software installed so you would have to install all of that to get it working. Then again, a T42P with a 802.11B card? I thought those all came with Atheros ones or atleast Intel 2200GB/2915ABG cards? I would swap that puppy pronto!

[Phil_L]

Hi

Vista is based on XP with a lot of stuff added on. Think Windows 98 compared with Windows ME.

I tried to use Vista on the 3000 series laptop, and was staggered to see over 800MBytes of memory used just to boot to the desktop, leaving 200 free my applications.

No matter what I turned off disc thrashing would go on for 20 minutes or so on each start up or at random. I removed all the bloat installed by Lenovo and took away start up programs and got it down to using 650 to boot to the desktop. I upgraded to 2Gbyte of memory and saw little improvement with the constant spells of disc accesses.

Now I know Vista is able to prioritise disc access and constant thrashing shouldn't affect performance when I want to do something, but thrashing away the disc is a major problem on a laptop. Not only does it drain power much faster and prevents the hard-drive from ever having chance to enter lower power states, it also creates noise. I find my laptop use is in area's that are generally quiet, for example in a meeting or at home, and that constant rattle of the heads becomes very irritating after 20 minutes and it doesn't appear to improve any of my experience with using Vista.

I've not bored everyone with the freezes or restarts in the OS that simply are not part of the XP experience.

I tried the SP1 RC1, and after another 30 or 40 minutes of constant disc thrashing nothing had changed in use with RC1.

Vista is simply trying to be all things to all people, it has too much bloat for businesses, yet offers nothing really new to encourage home user's to upgrade. The negatives regarding Vista are justified in my opinion. Yes it is possible to turn off most of the bloat and the what soon becomes irritating Aero effects to get something more like XP, but then why not just stick with XP?

I've now put XP on the Lenovo and XP feels like the newer OS and not Vista. It absolutely flies, all my applications are back on without a single issue, the interface is clean and tidy, the laptop hard-disc remains quiet and calm, and battery life is almost double to what it was on Vista. Even the fan has fallen silent with XP, a sure sign of lower power consumption. It's rock solid and the only reboots will be due to updates.

Regards

Phil

[jdhurst]

Then, Phil, to add to your post - Vista cannot find 90 percent of what XP can find in terms of data on your hard drive. Much as I would like to move ahead, Vista was born brain-dead, retarded and crippled. It is, at this point in time, a worse mess than Windows ME. I apologize if I appear to be overly harsh, but when you load an OS and the clock turns back nearly a decade, it's a problem. Just my own opinion. ... JDH

[mattbiernat]

gave Vista a try for 2 months, could never get used to it and im never going back (unless there is a major SP overhaul). and as JD implied, vista feels much more of a downgrade than an upgrade.

[Harryc]

I've been using Vista Business for a couple of months now, and it's not too bad. I had to do some major tweaking to make it acceptable though. The only thing that I haven't addressed is slow boot up time, but I really don't care about it too much. I can see where folks who don't like to mess about with an OS might be frustrated with it. I am running the SP1 public RC.

[bhurley]

I used Vista Business for a couple of months before switching back to XP. It felt like an improvement and modernization over XP in terms of design and organization (plus it finally did away with XP's Fisher-Price-like "My Documents," "My Pictures," "My Computer," etc. so I felt less like a three-year-old), and while I noticed the constant "disk thrashing" it seemed responsive enough. The only deal-killer for me was the lack of compatibility with tools and programs that I use every day, such as my company's Cisco VPN software, IBM/Lotus QuickPlace, and some older programs that I really don't want to have to pay to upgrade for compatibility.

When I switched back to XP, my first impressions were, 1) "ugh, XP looks really old-fashioned now," and 2) "oh my god, XP is FAST!" Vista booted up about as quickly on my dual-core desktop as XP does on my ThinkPad T42, so I didn't realize what a sloth Vista was until I switched over to XP on the desktop. It's up and ready (including Norton's launch scan) less than 30 seconds after login.

[mattbiernat]

It felt like an improvement and modernization over XP in terms of design and organization

i felt the opposite, for me it was a downgrade in modernization, design and organization.
just to mention few things:
- vista classic looks nothing like classical windows theme. seems like they used poorer graphics.
- menus are completely disorganized
- complete lack of windows explorer
- slow (but everyone knows that)

[tinue]

I tried to use Vista on the 3000 series laptop, and was staggered to see over 800MBytes of memory used just to boot to the desktop, leaving 200 free my applications.

Small kids tend to come over to one bed in the early morning. Knowing this, would you sleep all packed up at the side of your bed all night? I guess not, you would use all of the bed and move over when necessary.
Its the same with RAM: Vista would be badly designed if it wouldn't use up all of the available RAM to speed up things, as long as nothing more important uses it. As soon as an application shows up and claims the RAM, Vista makes room and frees it. I have 4GB in my Laptop, of which 3 are usable (I'll move th Vista 64 once the Service Pack is out). Of those 3GB, Vista reports 17MB as free.

Having said this, Vista does require more RAM than XP. In my experience, an XP system with 256MB RAM runs about as slow as a Vista system with 1GB. So I wouldn't put Vista on a system with less than 1.5GB.

But once Vista is installed, tuned, and has the necessary hardware to run on, I prefer it anytime over XP. Its the sum of many small improvements that count:

• When I click to rename a file, the extension remains unselected. With XP one always has to un-select the file extension.
  I no longer care about organizing the dozends of start menu entries. I type the first 1-2 characters of the app I need and press enter.
  I feel safer, because no application can write into a protected area (e.g. c:\Windows) without me noticing and acknowledging it.
  I get full disk encryption transparently (Bitlocker). Great for a Laptop which can be lost or stolen.

And probably many more things. I am annoyed about XP every day in the office. There the missing security features are added to XP (e.g. disk encryption, and paranoid Anti Virus Settings), so the machine (with 1.5GB of RAM) is actually much slower than my Vista machine.

Regards, Martin

[K0LO]

In reading some of these posts I am wondering if we are talking about the same operating system because my experience has been the polar opposite.

I've been running Vista Business on my work desktop for a year now, and there's no way in hell that I would even consider going back to Windows XP. Of all of the operating systems that I've used over the years, (DOS, Windows, MAC, Linux, etc) Vista is the best so far. Martin has hit on a few of the reasons in his post. For me, Vista just does not get in the way of doing useful work, making me much more productive, and is quite noticeably faster than XP. My other twin desktop machine (identical hardware and almost-identical software) at home still runs XP and is not nearly as enjoyable to work on, but I'll be fixing that soon.

Believe what you want but the other side of the story needs to be told.

[jdhurst]

True that both sides should be told. I agree with you that Vista runs (I have run it), but the file manager and the search tools are gone. One of the PRIME business purposes for a computer is to create, manage and find documents, and the tools for doing that (readily available in XP and in Windows 2000) have vanished in Vista. True that if I want to find mindless tidbits in My Documents, Vista can do it, but the heavy lifting tools have gone.

I have opened cases with Microsoft that they have responded to, only to tell me that the cases would be closed unsolved (their words), because they intend to leave Vista brain-dead (my words).
... JDH

[K0LO]

I have found Vista's search to be a huge improvement over XP. One of my work tasks is to occasionally write letters of recommendation for former students. They often don't tell me when they took my course, leaving it up to me to remember or to search past gradebooks for their name. It used to be rather painful to search for them in XP.

With Vista, since the search function indexes inside of Outlook mail, Word and Excel documents, I simply start typing the student's name and instantly the search results pop up with the gradebooks, emails, and other documents containing the name. This feature alone has saved me hours of time.

As for the file manager issue, I've seen you write about that previously but I don't understand. Windows Explorer for XP has been improved, IMHO, in Windows Explorer for Vista.

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

[jdhurst]

<snip>
With Vista, since the search function indexes inside of Outlook mail, Word and Excel documents, .....
We'll just have to agree to disagree.

You just hit the nail on the head. It quickly finds the stuff you mention, but it CANNOT find any OCR text of which I have *mountains*. Paperless offices do not exists, except that they scan paper documents when no electronic source exists or is readily available. Try it.
-------------------------------------
As for the file manager issue, Vista got rid of explorer.scf which does not open up in My Documents. I have no information of any kind in My Documents - it is all elswhere. Business people keep documents on a server and My Documents is discouraged because businesses don't (usually) back it up. They back up the server.

I know that Vista works, and I know it can do really simple things - it just cannot (as of today) do the heavy lifting I need and have already had for nearly the past decade.

I only hope they improve Vista so I can move to it.
... JDH

[K0LO]

I don't keep anything in "My Documents" either. I use another partition for documents and some network shares. Vista's explorer works perfectly with these. One of the added features over XP's Explorer is that you can create one-click "Favorites" in the explorer tree to link to frequently-used locations in your folder structure. These are very handy. If you want even more powerful ways of navigating, Vista now has simlinks and directory junctions, (borrowed, copied, or stolen) from Linux, which greatly simplify doing things from the command line.

Typing "explorer.scf" in XP just opens up a Windows Explorer window with the XP-style view. On my XP machine, it opens to the C: drive with the tree structure shown in the left pane. I can get the exact same view on Vista. In my case I prefer it to open to the documents partition D: so I just set it up to my liking and then create a shortcut and put the shortcut on the Quick Launch toolbar for instant one-click access.

[bhurley]

Since we're talking about search in Vista, I have a question: when I was using it, it instantly found files that contained words I was searching for, but I didn't see any way to "preview" those files to see which one(s) I wanted. Instead I had to open them one by one. Did I miss something? I've found that feature invaluable in X1 Search, which I've been using on Windows XP (I used Google desktop before that but prefer X1). A typical search string will pull up dozens or hundreds of documents and emails, and if I can see a preview (either in the search results or at least by single-clicking), it saves a lot of time.

[mgo]

Since we're talking about search in Vista, I have a question: when I was using it, it instantly found files that contained words I was searching for, but I didn't see any way to "preview" those files to see which one(s) I wanted. Instead I had to open them one by one. Did I miss something? I've found that feature invaluable in X1 Search, which I've been using on Windows XP (I used Google desktop before that but prefer X1). A typical search string will pull up dozens or hundreds of documents and emails, and if I can see a preview (either in the search results or at least by single-clicking), it saves a lot of time.

Go to:
http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archiv ... -Pane.aspx

for a blog/tutorial about Search. It's more understandable than the usual Microsoft writing style.

[Andy]

I feel safer, because no application can write into a protected area (e.g. c:\Windows) without me noticing and acknowledging it.

I agree 100% and I'm disturbed to see that so many people are not only turning off UAC but advising others to do so. Granted, UAC is necessary only because of all the security lapses that Vista inherits from past Windows versions. But it seems to be the only way to fix the massive security shortcomings of those past versions while providing a pretty high level of backward compatibility.

Unfortunately UAC will ultimately fail. First, it's extremely annoying in the first few weeks one uses Vista, which coincide with the installation of lots of programs; hence all the recommendations to turn it off. Next, users quickly learn which button to click to make a dialog go away without regard to what it says -- and the first problem guarantees that new users get lots of training. The result is that it quickly becomes a reflex to click "Continue" when the UAC dialog pops up, even if it's asking whether you really want that virus to install itself in Windows\System32.

My $0.02,

[Marin85]

Well, along with all other security features of Vista Microsoft should have implemented the very essential anti-fool enhanced firewall protection to protect the user from himself...

[byunnbi]

But now, after about a month using Vista, I really wouldn't want to have to go back to XP and there really is nothing I really miss

I couldn't agree with you more here - but I do have one major gripe against Vista that I doubt will be solved anytime soon. BATTERY LIFE.

I actually had Vista Ult. and XP Pro dual booting on both my older T41p as well as my new, current T61. Under both systems, I noticed about a 13-20% difference in battery life, in favor of XP Pro.

Without going into details, suffice to say that my results were consistent through all kinds of settings - from turning the brightness down to the lowest with wireless radios off, underclocking via RMCLock, etc., to having the brightness at a comfortable (not necessarily max) level with radios on. No matter what I tried (even turning off Aero, indexing, etc. in Vista), it could never come anywhere close to XP Pro in battery life. I am willing to be (and hopefully am) wrong about there being no solution to this, as battery life is very important to me. My current T61 actually does manage to squeeze enough life on battery for my uses, but that's only because I turn the brightness down to around 40%.

[Trekk69]

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35641/118/
Maybe the plan should be to stick with XP until the next one....

[mattbiernat]

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35641/118/
Maybe the plan should be to stick with XP until the next one....

look at my signature. this is exactly what im doing. im not switching out of XP unless I get good reasons to do so...
as the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[SHoTTa35]

well my T60 with a 6 cell battery (52.xx Whrs capacity) (full specs in my sig) runs pretty good with vista. While i dunno how much better it would run with XP (formatted on day 1) here is what i got:

09:00AM - 93% Start test
11:41am - 25% Yellow battery icon.
12:14pm - 10% Red Battery Icon
12:24pm - 5% Automatically went to sleep

WIFI = On
Brightness = Lowest
Bluetooth = OFF
Vista Profile = Balanced

So wit that i basically got 3hrs 24mins ... probably would have been 3:30mins if it started from 100%. Before you ask, yes i was using the machine.. this was on thursday morning at work. If you check my history you can see i was on here browsing and posting

So while XP might have gotten a bit more (i can too by putting the machine in power saver which turns off transparency - NOT AERO tho and gives an extra 10mins or something) i'm not sure XP would have given me 20% more battery life which would be another 45mins, highly unlikely. The 6 cells only give about 4hrs MAX anyways and my system isn't a baby one at that. 2Ghz and the X1400 definitely aren't slow components.