What do you think of Vista so far???

[jonrem]

I'm just kind of curious what the concensus is out there among those who have upgraded. I just added a Vistax 86 to an unused partition on my RAID 0 array and have been pretty pleased. ( Dual booting XP Pro and Home Premium) I think it's definitely evolutionary as opposed to being revolutionary, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes that isn't readily obvious. It seems to be really stable, looks great, loads my most used programs quickly, and has no trouble with my hardware. The only downside I've found is game performance is a bit behind XP.
What are your first impressions?

 

[exzrael]

Pros:

* A lot of applications which responded slowly with Windows XP now works like a charm. For example Outlook 2007.

* Even 32-bit version of Vista supports 4Gb memory.

* Vista introduce a few very nice updates and new applications which I find useful. Windows Mail is way better then Outlook Express (know, its an update FROM Express), Windows Calendar is nice to and Photo Gallery does the job pretty well to.

Cons:

* IE works noticably slow when scrolling. I use the latest Nvidia drivers (100.59 beta atm) Firefox works perfectly but I stick with IE for now I think.

* Never found the Windowswitching-function (the one which shows all windows tilted) useful. Use Alt-Tab, that works ten times better.

 

[darious00777]

Some things don't work right, most programs do run though. Some weird issues, some nice improvements.

Overall I like it, just wish I could fix this one little thing, then I could get back to making this machine cost effective.

 

[jonrem]

What is that one little thing?

 

[darious00777]

What is that one little thing?

Any video file I play on VideoLAN plays like any AVI file on Windows Media Player. The sound is fine, but the video is a solid white the whole way through. Kind of odd that when I take a snapshot the video can be seen for a little bit though. Should probably mention this on their forums.

 

[jonrem]

Yeah, I think it'll take a while to work all the bugs out. I'm looking forward to actual non-beta drivers for everything, especially 64 bit ones.

 

[jonrem]

First Blue screen It happened about 15 minutes into the Supcom Demo. I had TAT running in the background to monitor temps, so I'm not sure if that played a role. I'm guessing that Beta NVIDIA drivers were to blame.

 

[mpjesse]

Never found the Windowswitching-function (the one which shows all windows tilted) useful. Use Alt-Tab, that works ten times better.

Agreed... thus far I haven't used that feature much either. I was thinking it would be useful if there were a button on your mouse that you could map to it. It's too much of a hassle to hit WinKey + Tab. And moving my mouse down to the icon is a hassle too.

If I could just map a mouse button i'd probably use it.

 

[uber_g]

its kool, i like the look

 

[mpjesse]

Yeah... Aero is awesome. It's one step ahead of OSX. But that'll change soon.

 

[briank]

I'd consider XP the most evolutionary OS as it was just the excellent 2000 with some upgrades.

Vista is a much more major overhaul. The entire driver API has been rearranged, not to mention the dozens of major interface changes. Explorer, control panels... all very different.

2000 was ground breaking too as it took the stable Win NT platform and allowed win98 programs to run on it along with better memory management (but not perfect).

Vista is the biggest interface change since win95 I feel.


Overall I like it. Slower boot, but better application load times. Good looking and of course the included multimedia apps always get better. The new resource monitor is awesome for those who like to tweak their systems.

 

[mpjesse]

Vista is the biggest interface change since win95 I feel.

Absolutely.

 

[KingLoftusXII]

Slower boot, but better application load times.

Odd, boot time is noticably quicker for me than XP Pro.

 

[briank]

Slower boot, but better application load times.

Odd, boot time is noticably quicker for me than XP Pro.

I was surprised it was slower too. Perhaps I should try another clean install or perhaps XP took better advantage my fast OS hard drive (Maxtor Atlas 15K II)

 

[jonrem]

It's definitely strange. In my case I'm booting from 2 320 gig seagate 7200.10 in RAID 0. After the raid is initialized it still takes about 30 seconds for everything to load. Maybe it's the Beta state of the drivers??? Once everything is loaded it's lightening fast, but I was expecting faster boot times myself. (I've heard 8 seconds on a single drive!) I'm sure it'll be fixed in the future.

 

[KingLoftusXII]

I timed it. 19 seconds from the time the M$ loading screen appears until
I can actually click on things in Vista and it responds...with no delay. That's
including clicking on my profile. (I've got one for my daughter)

Vista Premium installed on a 2yr old Samsung 120gb 7200 SATA drive.

 

[desolationw]

The sound is fine, but the video is a solid white the whole way through

I recently found a way to get past this. I downloaded Portable Apps and got the Portable VLC player and 'installed' it. Open Portable VLC and open your file and problem solved!

Not the best fix ever but works and will do for now.

 

[Yrusoad]

10 sec boot on my 7200.9 Segate 300gb
much better from 1min on xp

 

[davidinsarasota]

I like it. I think the search and file organization are going to be important features as I get used to them being there, and remember to use them. Its like that with most of the features--I will appreciate what Vista has to offer more as I use it and get used to it.

 

[KingLoftusXII]

10 sec boot on my 7200.9 Segate 300gb
much better from 1min on xp

From the boot screen? I measures from the time I hit the power button. But I digress. It's faster,
that's all that matters.

Samsung 2yr old 7200.. At least it's SATA. XP would never see this drive on my Abit board
when installing, no matter what bios settings I used or "3rd party drivers" were installed.
Vista saw it immediatly without doing a thing.

 

[topdog2007]

I wish you could see a progress bar when defragmenting your hard drive, instead of just saying "this could take a few minutes to a few hours."