Windows Vista: The Best Case for Windows XP Ever

[Andrew Baxter]

One thing in defense of Vista is the fact that drivers still aren't up to snuff and for stuff like gaming the situation will improve as time goes by. There are some things in Vista I like that aren't covered here, the search feature is much better and being able to type in a word to bring up an application you want to open is nice for those that don't like to take hands off the keyboard.

But, I do agree with many points here. I'm still on XP myself, but I will be making a "permanent" jump to Vista in a few months.

Oh, and with that UAC stuff, I think just about everyone is turning that off. Which is a pain in and of itself because it's just another thing you have to remember to do. Sort of like whenever I get an XP machine and switch from Category View to Classic View.

[link1313]

100% agreed, they are going to need one hell of a service pack to get me to switch over.

Oh and just to note and i'm glad you pointed it out. Creative's drivers were what pushed me back to XP. My Audigy 2 ZS Notebook Vista drivers were absolute CRAP! Here was the problem:

1) None of the settings stayed the same after you closed out of their 'beta' customization panel
2) None of the programs that came with it worked in vista (no more speaker control, eax control, diagnosing, advanced options, sound mixer, effect mixer, etc)
3) Sound Quality decreased by so much it wasn't funny... It sounded worse then my crappy notebook speakers. And not to mention 5.1 and 7.1 sound doesn't work in Vista with SoundBlaster...

You get the picture... basically there were no official drivers, no programs worked, sound quality sucks, and surround sound stopped working...

[lappyhappy]

Check out this site. I haven't tried it but it is supposed to give you the look of Vista on XP. Find it here:

http://www.windowsxlive.net/?p=361

[doniel]

wow, looks like that funny Mac ad "cancel or allow" didn't exaggerate anything about Vista. I think I'm gonna stay put with Bootcamp & XP for my daily windows needs for now.

[Paul]

wow, looks like that funny Mac ad "cancel or allow" didn't exaggerate anything about Vista. I think I'm gonna stay put with Bootcamp & XP for my daily windows needs for now.

Well, it was a little exaggerated. But not by much. People really will just start clicking away without looking at the warning, just as in IE and Firefox. Heck, I did it when I was running Vista.

[hollownail]

Lets all wait till SP1 comes out.
remember how bad both 2k and XP were before SP1!
And how about security holes in Vista? I've heard as of RC2, they still had a ton of major holes brought back from 98. Never heard if they were fixed for retail... but knowing MS and how poor RC2 was...

I'll keep on using OS X and XP until Vista is ready to be released...

[John Ratsey]

A very useful feature.

I'm glad I recently bought a computer which still had XP Pro, but is eligible for a cheap Vista upgrade (which I have ordered but shows no sign of coming soon). My plan is to be able to do a first hand evaluation of Vista, figure out what is good and bad from my point of view and then go back to XP for a while.

Apart from the remaining bugs, what worries me is backwards compatibility (I have a few ancient programs which I occasionally run - such gems as Supercalc so I can load an old spreadsheet and save it as a Lotus file, which Excel can then read). I'm not worried about the eye candy (my XP is set to best performance and looks like W2K) so that I have more speed and less heat.

Indeed, the one feature about Vista which might tempt me is the display scaling. I had read a year ago that 10 point print will look like 10 point print irrespective of display resolution and size. In XP, changing the global DPI setting does have some unwanted side-effects, particularly for dialogue boxes.

It seems that the price of notebooks with Vista preloaded tends to be lower than the equivalent hardware with XP. I wonder why? Or is it just the downward trend of prices?

John

[grumpy3b]

Great review...from my reading I can only agree. My conclusion is putting Vista (32 or 64-bit) on a shiny new C2D system is like putting lipstick on a pig.

A can add that had I not been locked into Windows development with Visual Studio for the past 6 years I would be running either Solaris or some flavor of Linux and doing just Java stuff (btw I HATE Java but that just shows how much more I hate MS.) But contracts dictated I could not follow that path. But two years from now I can, and likely will, dump Windows. I have already started by learning Sun's developer tools and getting up to speed on Java. So I'll hit the gound running in the not too distant future and likely never look back.

I find the comparison of the current release of Vista to ME is really accurate. Also the dumping of the old OS core because "it did not work" is likely why we are now stuck with this POS-OS. I really doubt that SP1 or whatever can fill in the gaps and/or stabalize things to the point where it's useful. Last given the poor performance of the OS think of it this way, what if the thing did not have C2D & CD CPU's to run on? How bad woult it be then?

OK, one more last comment. A source of frustration for me is how XP PRO still runs in short-bus mode even though it's their PRO OS. I mean if someone needs to run the top of their line OS and still needs to handheld for the most basic of tasks perhaps that person should not be allowed to run around w/o a helmet. It's just frustrating to face a constant barage of confirmations or "warnings"...I know how this crap works just leave me alone so i can work...now it reads that Vista is WORSE...good gawd I never thought that would have been possible! Oh, well, Solaris here I come...they will give me the OS for FREE as well as their best in breed Java development tools...OpenOffice, all FREE...no more MSDN Subs @$1000+/yr just to keep updated with MS and their crap. Though I will miss Visio and Foxpro just because they are old friends and I have used them since before they were assimulated.

Yup...MS is working in full helmet-wearing short bus mode anymore, just like their OS.

Great Review!!

[Dustin Sklavos]

Ouch! Steve Ballmer, you've just been JACKED UP!

*ducks flying chair*

But yeah, I stand by my experience. I'm sure after SP1 it'll be a lot better, since that'll have given the manufacturers time to get their drivers in order, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a warmed over XP and the worst release since Windows ME, probably even worse than that, given the state of the shipping operating system and the driver support.

XP's launch wasn't even this messed up.

[Cogitatus]

This article raised some salient points about Vista, and I share many (if not all) of the author's frustrations. But then there was this:

Now, Microsoft's developers feel that the menus at the top of the screen - you know, File, Edit, and their kin - are past their prime and not the way things should be. They could be right.

The problem is that we've been using those for ten years now. We use them in EVERY OPERATING SYSTEM ON THE MARKET. Even the primary innovators in user interfaces, Apple, haven't disposed of it. Why? BECAUSE WE'RE USED TO IT. Whether or not it's the best way to handle it is irrelevant at this point.

I'm sorry, but every blog I've seen railing against Vista's autohiding menu bar comes across like Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man from SNL: "Why do they have to go and CHANGE everything? Back in MY day, we had a MENU BAR and we LIKED it!"

They only thing you seem to dislike about Vista's hidden menu bar is the fact that it's different -- and yet elsewhere in this article you complain that Vista isn't different enough to justify the changeover from XP! What's the message you're trying to send to Microsoft, exactly? It seems to be: "we want something that's new, different, revolutionary -- but not too new, different, or revolutionary because we're set in our ways!" Do you even want a new OS, or would you rather just use XP for another five years?

I applaud MS for hiding the menu bar -- I think it was the only really bold step they made in all of Vista (and technically they made it already in IE7). I just wish they'd had the cajones to do more; if we're ever going to move towards any truly revolutionary UI improvements, the change is going to have to come from the top down just like this. We had to adapt to the menu bar in the first place, so I'm sure we'll be able to adapt to something else quickly. After all, isn't adaptability what keeps us humans on top of the food chain?