As I’ve mentioned several times before, there is no reason whatsoever to have Vista right now, especially if you value the performance of your PC. And now, with beta version of SP3 for XP and SP1 for Vista, XP is still kicking Vista’s butt.
No matter what you do, fight for XP when you buy a new system. Microsoft has committed to sell Windows XP until at least June so the systems are still available.
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I read somewhere that you could get 10% better performance from SP3 for XP. I don’t know anyone who has it yet, nor how to get it, tho.
Or better yet, insist on Mac OSX.
Mac OSX, XP, Linux — ANYTHING is an upgrade over Vista.
I upgraded to Vista, a ‘dirty’ over-XP upgrade because … well, because I’m a nut;-)
And it seems to be just fine, performance-wise. Do I have error messages? Yup, a few- dumb ones, too. Do things lock up occasionally? Yup (but less than XP.)
I’m no gamer, I just need fast Net access and a machine that can keep up to edit videos for the Website, etc. Does just fine for me, after some expected starting hiccups after the upgrade.
Anybody know when MS might come out with the next version of Vista with (some of) the bugs worked out? I’d like to buy a new notebook but the horror stories about Vista have scared me away from it.
It pisses me off that so much technological “innovation” is driven by the profit imperative rather than by genuine improvement. Windows XP is a perfectly good OS. (Okay, not PERFECTLY good, but pretty damn good.) Vista was developed and introduced for marketing reasons, not for anything else.
@Barney: Obviously, gamers want to avoid Vista, as DirectX10 just doesn’t offer anything really exciting when game developers aren’t using it nor is there a ton of hardware out there that supports it. However, it’s just an important to avoid Vista if regular applications are your game. While it’s only a bit of slow down here and there in most applications, it’s a lot of time lost when you add it all up, and this is all thanks to the OS’s overhead. If you’re doing something even more intense like video processing, the slow down is even worse in most pieces of software (Adobe Premiere is on example).
Unless Microsoft fixes Vista and fixes it soon, it’s just going to be another over-hyped, over-marketed Windows ME.
MS is supposed to release a service pack for Vista in the spring. Maybe that will resolve some of the problems.
“Frankly, the world wasn’t 100 percent ready for Windows Vista,” corporate vice president Mike Sievert said
How typical of MS to blame the customer rather than their crappy software.
No, Mikey — the problem was that Vista wasn’t ready for the world.
“Obviously, gamers want to avoid Vista,”
I disagree. I am a gamer, as much as anyone can be a gamer, and I use Vista for most everything. I dual-boot XP and Vista, but I quit going into XP because I don’t get any performance gain in a single game I play. As a matter of fact, I really don’t notice any difference in any application I run.
Vista has been running perfectly well for me, no matter what software I use with it.
Thanks for that, Rick. I’m not a big time gamer, I was just basing that on reviews I’ve read around the web that show performance drops in many major DirectX 9 games in Vista compared to XP.