Didn't Like Vista

[RUSH2112]

I installed Vista RTM the other day, and uninstalled it the next afternoon.
Despite tweaking (Including setting to Windows Classic Theme), it still felt bloated. I can't really pinpoint the source, but I just felt it had too much unnecessary baggage.
One thing that really got me on the default theme is how, when you maximize a window, the whole window border changes - and not just when Aero is enabled.
I didn't like how I couldn't make the sidebar transparent on Classic, either.
Really, it had quite a few things that I liked, but the overall experience wasn't really that great IMHO.
In case you're wondering, the X60s ran Vista with Aero just fine, no lagging or any thing. I didn't test battery performance, though.
Normally, I'd just use a flavor of GNU/Linux, but I have yet to find one that works well on the X60s, so I was forced to restore to XP.

It looks like I'll be sticking with XP for a little while.
Thoughts? Opinions?

[dfumento]

The official Linux for Thinkpads (T60p officially but worked on my X60s just fine) is SLED 10 (or Open SUSE presumably as well).
It worked very well on my X60s.

See:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=31975

[RUSH2112]

The official Linux for Thinkpads (T60p officially but worked on my X60s just fine) is SLED 10 (or Open SUSE presumably as well).
It worked very well on my X60s.

See:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=31975

I also tried SLED10, but it also seemed bloated. I'm no fan of the Fedora/Suse distros, and for no small part because of their lack of an emerge/apt type system.

[pianowizard]

I tried Vista RC1 on my X60s and Beta 2 on the X40 that I used to have, and found the changes very hard to get used to. It also took up too much hard drive space, and was more sluggish than XP. I plan to stick to WinXP Pro for at least one more year.

It might be fun to do a "Will you upgrade to Vista next year?" poll for this thread.

[johnp126]

I am running on T60p 200793U. When Microsoft says 1gb is the min, you know that means run 2gb. It is a huge OS, but it does have some nice features and given the power (core duo, 2gb ram, 7200rpm 100gb drive) it does run faster than xp. If you skimp on horsepower you won't like the results. There are some odd features in the explorer I hate. for one I have found it hard to paste in a file or folder into the correct place unless i am viewing in list mode, if you are in detail mode it seems impossible to me to drop it into that level, i always seem to put it into a sub dir i don't want to.

as far as our company goes we'll proceed with caution, however myself and the network admin are running it with a xp saved on another drive (ah the wonder of removable drives).

[dfumento]

I don't find SLED 10 bloated and the SUSE 10.x version is the cutting edge version of it.

Here are just the security reasons, let alone others for adopting Vista:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=35049

[arni]

It's about the same experience that i had. Vista is a ressource hog. I installed vista rtm with xp dual boot cause i need to test my web applications agains iis7 as well as some other apps i need for business.

First impressions where high. Aero was a good experience on my T60 (2007-63G) as was the overall OS. But putting on my apps for daily work slowed down the system to a crawl. But what' s more important is the fact that many of my needed apps aren't currently support on vista nor the vendors can't give any dates when vista compatible versions will be published. Best example: vmware, on which i'm dependant. And especially for business, if only 1 app is not compatible with vista, that's 1 app to many, even if 1.000 other apps are running fine on that os.

Further more i had crashes of vista here and there. After all, i'm back to xp. Vista was the worst experience for me and i will be on xp as long as there isn't any app out in the wild that's dependant on vista. You should really compare all features if you're thinking of upgrading if it's worth. Just like i said. Even if you have 1 app that would not run on vista, hold on. It's one app to many.

And you can have nearly all features bundled with vista on xp. IE7, Desktop search, RSS integration, Windows Defender, .net Framework 3.0 with WWF, WPF and WCF and so on. And even for the security parts there's nothing better or worse than on xp. It's up to the user to care about security... not the os.

[jdhurst]

I suspect that people are trying to get to Vista too early. None of the experiences documented here to date surprise me. However, that doesn't mean Vista is bad in the long haul.

I have negative experience with XP in 2001 because software designed for Windows 2000 had to be upgraded. That happened and by the end of 2002, I was into XP and all was well. I have had three XP laptops (T23, T30 and now T41). They all were certified for XP and all ran very well for me.

I now have Vista upgrades for DU Meter, Tweakmaster, CommView, Smart Whois and Perfect Disk (partway). When I get to Vista, I will probably use Office 2007 and that will work. I used to use MailCall to screen my email but it won't work in Vista. PopTray does the job and works in Vista.

On the other hand, SafeNet has no clue when they will have a Vista client (knockout for me).

So you see, the journey will be long and I would not attempt to run Vista on an uncertified machine as there are too many issues in the early sledding.
... JD Hurst

[ashleys]

I'm perfectly happy with W2K (and Office 97) on both my Desktop and TPad

[arni]

I have negative experience with XP in 2001 because software designed for Windows 2000 had to be upgraded. That happened and by the end of 2002, I was into XP and all was well. I have had three XP laptops (T23, T30 and now T41). They all were certified for XP and all ran very well for me.

I agree with you. But one fact i couldn't understand. Vistas beta program was huge and it was the first os beta from MS where nearly everybody could participate in that early stages of development.

So software vendors could get their hands dirty and start developing applications for vista. What's even worse is the fact, that MS was not able to lign up hardware vendors in publishing vista drivers. And they had plenty of time for comming out with their drivers and software.

MS statet that vista will be the best experience with windows ever. But look what's going on. Even when the pulic availability is still due on january 2007, businesses could get vista since 1. of november. And if you read all the complaints and about the problems many people are having running vista, that's a really bad story.

Don't get me wrong. But i find that it's still to eary for vista. Maybe it will look different when sp1 is due in mid 2007 when longhorn server arrives and many computer suppliers will have vista compatible hardware.

[pianowizard]

Does anyone remember what was the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 like? Weren't most people happy about the new OS? This time around, most people don't seem to like going from XP to Vista.

[BadAndy]

I'm backing up stuff from my laptop that has Vista Business on it right now to go back to XP. I feel Vista has GREAT potential but no matter what I've tried, the EVDO Wireless card won't work, the computer freaks out when coming out of sleep mode (meaning the network connection is fubar among other things), can't install Exchange Admin tools, had to use a modified Server2k3 adminpak.msi, had to use a hacked version of Cisco VPN client, etc, etc, etc...

Too much crap to try and make work to use in an admin role right now.

[GomJabbar]

Does anyone remember what was the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 like?

I remember. I really did not want to upgrade (being an OS/2 fan), but eventually my kids wanted to run some software that would only run on Windows 95.

OK, so I went out and bought Win 95 and installed it. Found out that I had no sound. My Diamond soundcard was not supported and there were no Win 95 drivers available for it. I went out and bought a Creative Soundblaster AWE 64. Went to install the drivers for the Soundblaster and the installation program gave me an error message that the Soundblaster card required a Pentium 90 minimum and refused to install the drivers for it (I know, I should have read the specs first). So now I had to go out and upgrade my Pentium 75 to something faster. The slowest and cheapest I could find available locally was a Pentium 133. So in the end, my $100 upgrade cost me about $350. Furthermore, I was upset because I could not buy Win 95 SR2 even though it was already shipping on new computers. Microsoft never released SR2 to the retail channel as an upgrade.

[arni]

Does anyone remember what was the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 like? Weren't most people happy about the new OS? This time around, most people don't seem to like going from XP to Vista.

You really have to weight the benefits of vista over xp and how much it will cost you. When you considering every aspect of vista, there's not much you get compared to xp. Even MS Steven Developer, Developer, Develper Ballmer stated that xp is the greatest competitor to vista http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35344.

Right now most people, especially in business, are still happy with xp. Nearly every single pice of hardware is supported on xp as is with applications. So what... if you want to run vista cause of some benefits and all the bells and whistles of aero you have to:

1. invest in greater hardware
2. if your apps are not compatible invest in new versions of apps

And imho that's the biggest problem right now.

For me as a developer i'm currently working on both platforms dual booting xp and vista. The only reason for me working under vista is the new iis7 for web development. If i could get that on xp i would stay on that. For the future i will carefully look how the things will go on and for the long run will be looking for other alternatives to MS like MacOS or Linux, especially Ubuntu which really looks promising.

[pianowizard]

You really have to weight the benefits of vista over xp and how much it will cost you. When you considering every aspect of vista, there's not much you get compared to xp.

And that's exactly why I compared the XP-to-Vista transition to the Win3.1-to-Win95 transition. Both involved major software and hardware changes, but because Win95 was far superior to Win3.1, most people upgraded quickly and were happy about the move. For me, Win95's new Start menu alone was worth it. But for Vista, the small benefits don't justify shelling out thousands of dollars on the latest technologies.

[johnvndnbrk]

You really have to weight the benefits of vista over xp and how much it will cost you. When you considering every aspect of vista, there's not much you get compared to xp.

And that's exactly why I compared the XP-to-Vista transition to the Win3.1-to-Win95 transition. Both involved major software and hardware changes, but because Win95 was far superior to Win3.1, most people upgraded quickly and were happy about the move. For me, Win95's new Start menu alone was worth it. But for Vista, the small benefits don't justify shelling out thousands of dollars on the latest technologies.

I recall this upgrade, from Win3.x to Win95, as well and found that I did not care for the graphical interface, shelling out to DOS to manage files (I supported notebook configurations at that time). The "feel" of Vista is similar to skins on themexp.org using StyleXP. The only theme I cared for was called ChaNinja.

As a software developer I am more interested in what is under the hood, though. The concern that MS Visual Studio 2003 would not be supported I believe is warranted. Microsoft chose to go forward with Visual Basic 6 and Visual Studio 2005. Even so, service packs are required for this software and the SQL Server 2K5 database. I have a hunch that given some time most of these issues will clear up, that Windows Vista will be choice of OS (from Microsoft, anyway), and the choice to use WinXP vs. Windows Vista will be similar to WinXP and Win2K. The outcry of WinXP SPWhatever not being secure was real and Vista has many upgrades here. In fact I think that the User Access Control is a bit annoying and frustrating, even though this can be turned off. BitLocker has some contentious aspects as well - take a look at Wikepedia's comments on this and what it could mean for us.

I am not sure what really has changed at the code level, i.e. is Vista mainly a set of managed code assemblies which will be the beginning of the end to COM API's, etc., and if so what does this mean. I cannot seem to find too much written here just yet as most books on Vista explain how to update/upgrade, what's new, how to change settings, but not much to dig into. Hopefully I will be able to reply with what it is about Vista beyond the eye candy that may compel or disuad one from making the switch.

[tomh009]

Don't get me wrong. But i find that it's still to eary for vista. Maybe it will look different when sp1 is due in mid 2007 when longhorn server arrives and many computer suppliers will have vista compatible hardware.

Mid-2007? I think not. There is no way Windows Server 2007 (2008?) will be shipping next summer. Most projections indicate a late-2007 or early-2008 release.

[makaveli559m]

I liked all the other betas except the RTM because I couldnt use my Dynex usb 2.0 card or use Windows Media Player 11 for movies or use moviemaker. how is that for a [censored].

[RUSH2112]

Update:
Well, I did reinstall XP, but it got all screwy on me. I did a virus scan, no viruses, but the thing became very very slow. The fingerprint scanner would work on and off. It took forever to boot up. The ThinkVantage software would crash at random. Not to mention the thing was running around 80 processes

Basically, I needed to reinstall. I decided to give Vista another shot. I installed it again last night. We'll see how it works out this time around.

[warder]

Now I've had Vista running for a few weeks I'm more happy with it than I was to start with.

As a developer, I need all my tools on here and while some run if you tweak them (VS2005, Delphi7), some really didn't want to work (WinAVR, VS2003) which was a pain, but I persisted as I needed to verify our in-house applications on the new platform.

Fortunately VMWare Player comes to the rescue for things that really don't work... I was amused the other day to find I was running XP and W2k at the same time on Vista.

The graphics are sweet and it has many built in tools like the backup system that are very good. The search bar is better than say MSN desktop search. The usability is actually greatly enhanced, even if some things take a while to get used to. For instance Favorites in the explorer and the ability to search anywhere. Ironically I now search my start menu rather than drilling down 5 layers of menus... it's quicker to type the first few letters

It has so many things going against it... less battery life, slower to boot, eats memory (get 2GB) etc. But the good things... robust wireless, improved networking, better security and a general feeling of responsiveness once running count in its favor.

XP now feels clunky when I go back. Kind of like W2K does if you use it after running XP for a while. No doubt PC performance will improve, application compatibility will get better and in 6 months or so people will start to love it. In the meantime, I suspect it won't be the biggest OS upgrade release, but most people will love it on a new PC.

[tomh009]

It has so many things going against it... less battery life, slower to boot, eats memory (get 2GB) etc. But the good things... robust wireless, improved networking, better security and a general feeling of responsiveness once running count in its favor.

If you have your Z60m set up for dual boot to XP or Vista, would love to get power consumption figures (idle w/wireless, idle wo/wireless, and full CPU usage) in both XP and Vista. We need to collect more data on this ...

[Ken Fox]

And that's exactly why I compared the XP-to-Vista transition to the Win3.1-to-Win95 transition. Both involved major software and hardware changes, but because Win95 was far superior to Win3.1, most people upgraded quickly and were happy about the move. For me, Win95's new Start menu alone was worth it. But for Vista, the small benefits don't justify shelling out thousands of dollars on the latest technologies.

People forget how unstable and awful were those early attempts at a GUI-OS from Microsoft. I myself had relatively little experience with the Win9x family because I found it so unstable that I almost immediately went over to NT4, which evolved to Win2K, and now to XP.

The difference in going from all things pre-NT4 to NT code was literally night and day. It was the realization, the reality, that you COULD crash a program and still have a running OS that wouldn't necessarily need to be rebooted.

The moves from NT4 to Win2K, and from Win2K to XP, were relatively minor. Granted, there was much better usability, more device drivers, plug and play -- that sort of thing -- the further you went up this line but the changes were still incremental.

What we have now in XP is a mature, relatively stable OS. Granted, it is not perfect and it has many irritating aspects, but still, it is a mature and stable OS that does most things that most people want without too-frequent system crashes.

This puts a huge burden on Vista, because it has to best this in order to be felt worth the effort.

To this point I've heard little of the sorts of changes that would cause major user classes -- businesses and cost conscious home users -- to chuck what they are using now in favor of Vista.

There are tech nerds like us who will drool all over what they think are perceived benefits of this new OS, but for the great mass of users out there, I'm not hearing of things that would cause them to jump feetfirst into a major upgrade cycle, at least not yet.

[GomJabbar]

There are tech nerds like us who will drool all over what they think are perceived benefits of this new OS, but for the great mass of users out there, I'm not hearing of things that would cause them to jump feetfirst into a major upgrade cycle, at least not yet.

It will probably be what made me upgrade to Windows 95 a couple of years after it came out. There was some new software that the kids wanted (read games) that would only run on Win 95. Nuff said.

[tomh009]

People forget how unstable and awful were those early attempts at a GUI-OS from Microsoft. I myself had relatively little experience with the Win9x family because I found it so unstable that I almost immediately went over to NT4, which evolved to Win2K, and now to XP.

Early attempts? Win95? Not quite! I dabbled with Windows 1.04, then actually used Windows 2.11 (not as a primary environment yet, but to run Excel and a pre-release Word for Windows). Windows/386 was a bit of a disappointment as it was able to use more than 640 KB, but there was actually less memory available per app.

Then used Windows 3.0 and 3.1, both as the environment and for software development. Used Windows NT 3.1, but there were enough compatibility issues that could not do that full-time. Used Windows NT 3.5 while in parallel dabbling with "Chicago" (later called Windows 95). By the time that was on the streets, though, I was happily running Windows NT 3.51 with 20 MB of memory, and there was no looking back!

To this point I've heard little of the sorts of changes that would cause major user classes -- businesses and cost conscious home users -- to chuck what they are using now in favor of Vista.

For business, it's one word: security. That will drive the adoption, but most larger businesses do controlled rollouts, and I think mass upgrades in business will take 12-18 month, almost as long as they did with the introduction of Windows XP.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 05073.aspx

Home users? Especially cost conscious ones? They may not upgrade until they buy a new PC that ships with Vista ...