Windows Vista. To buy or not to buy?

[cab124]

My old Windows XP box recently died.

I am considering building a new Windows Vista PC as my new primary home computer. Yet almost everything I read on the web and hear from friends makes is sound like Windows Vista is horrific and should be avoided at all costs.

Is it really that bad?????

Also, can I expect problems in syncing it with my Axim x50v?

Thanks for any input!!

[jasondearyou]

as with everything it takes time and patience to adjust.

[doughboy]

Vista is bad. I warned a colleague of mine who is a techie who works for a Fortune 100 company and he tried to build his machine with Vista, anyway. After two months of trying, he gave up and reverted back to XP.

Best Wishes,

[dstrauss]

It's a crapshoot. My trusty Thinkpad X40 cratered about four months ago, so I moved on to the latest and greatest HP (2ghz core 2 duo; 2gb ram; 160 gb hd; dual layer DVD RW; led lcd; you name it) with Vista Ultimate. A total POS; wouldn't support our networked printers; VPN a miserable failure; wireless a mixed bag; annoying "do you really want to do that" security system.

Went through three different Vista based notebooks and finally settled on a Sony Vaio with same specs but Vista Business, which had teh same driver issues (and no VPN which is critical for my work), but t least no major shutdowns (although it didn't like Office 2003). Got so bad, I bought another Thinkpad x40 off of ebay so I could at least get VPN again. In the meantime, I tried to manually downgrade the Sony to XP, but it kept failing there too.

Finally, after months of Googling, I found the VPN problem was a combination of two things - a missing DLL on the Vista side, that could only be restored by a complete system restore, AND changing authentication protocols on our Exchange 2003 SP2 server to MSCHap 2. Finally, Visat Business can do VPN (but it still doesn't work on the Ultimate box - go figure).

AND THEN, I get an email from Sony support (almost three months after my first inquiry) telling me there is now a complete XP Pro DOWNGRADE support package of drivers online for users wishing to downgrade.

What does that tell you?

[jadesse]

There were a lot of problems with driver updates. Meaning that Vista didn't support a lot of devices such as printers.

You will be better off buying a PC with Vista preloaded then upgrades an existing machine though.

I used the beta version of Vista for a period of time. I really didn't see any benefit from running it. Microsft really needs to start over with a new code.

[cab124]

Wow, doesn't sound good. I appreciate the feedback.

I am beginning to get the impression that the issue is not that Vista is a bad OS, but rather than it is just not mature enough from a driver perspective to actually be used in the real world.

It sounds very similar to the situation that occurred with the other major versions of Windows when they first came out (NT, 2000, XP).

Once Windows Vista finally has good driver/hardware support, I wonder if it will provide a user experience as good as OS X.

[Cybrid]

Vista isn't all bad. It also isn't all good.

Re: drivers...
Many vendors didn't provide upgrades to XP either. Vista has very limited backward compatibility. It is an attempt at a "clean break" from older legacy issues.

Re: Many things broken. Yes.
WMDC is an absolute failure.
Syncing to Vista is either impossible or fraught with data loss.

Re: UAC. MS is finally adopting a linux like security model. Safer...but annoying.


Overall unless you absolutely must have Vista...wait for the issues to be ironed out.

[mv]

Not to buy. Period. Vista promised 3 key innovations when it was a project, and delivered only one, aero. And aero is just a bad copy of Beryl, and does not compare to the new Compiz/Fusion that can be found in ubuntu or mandriva. It promised a new file system, to replace the old NTFS, and it failed at that. It also failed in the new search system, that was intended to be a copy of mac os (see the new toys in leopard and see what i mean)

So, there is no future for windows IMHO. Get linux or get a mac if you want the easy way. :twisted: :devilboy:

[tregnier]

I thought I would replace my XP machine. I ordered an HP m9000t. A quad core machine w 4gb RAM, 700gb SATA hd, dvd/cd, tv tuner, etc. A kick-ass machine for sure.

When I got it, the transfer software did not work. I tried to transfer 40gb from the XP machine to the new machine. I would get to the end of the 3 hr process and it would fail. Did this twice.

About half of my software would not install, including one program that would have cost me $915 to upgrade. A lot of my PDA software wouldn't work (eWallet being one). I got messages saying my battery was low (on my desktop machine). Finally, it wouldn't boot.

I did a system restore, using the built in software that puts the computer back into the same condition as when you bought it. I started over with my installation hassles.

After 2 1/2 days of screwing around with this, I called HP and said I'm sending it back. They wanted to send me a new one. They said, "This is one of the best machines that HP makes." I said, "You're not listening to me. I am sending it back!" Finally got a return number and shipped it back the next day. You can't imagine the relief that the acceptance of this brought me.

So, where am I now? I have beefed up my RAM to 4gb on the old machine. I've added a 250 gb USB external drive; and I've bought a wireless keyboard and mouse. I have a 24" widescreen monitor.

Vista, shmista. I'm keeping XP until I retire. When am I going to learn, if it ain't broke, don't fix it....especially when it comes to technology.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

[Sven Johannsen]

OK how about a little rebuttal to the doom and gloom. Got three machines runnig Vista, two towers, one laptop. All doing essentially fine. Only the laptop came with Vista on it. One tower is being used as mostly a media machine in my Den. It was the machine that was used beta'ing Vista over the last two years. Finally got the released version on it, no problems. Has a Hauppage tuner in it, and does fine. Records TV when I ask it to, plays the radio and ripped CDs when I want.

The second tower is my main machine. It was an XP Dell when I got it. I learned long ago that it is more trouble than it is worth to upgrade. My Documents is always redirected to a second drive. I wiped the machine, installed Vista from scratch, and all my software. Yea it takes time, but it is worth it to clean out all the cobwebs. Normally I would just re-direct My Documents back to the second drive, but in this case just created a shortcut to all the old stuff.

That machine works just fine. I do have some issues with drivers for peripherals, but I blame HP for not upgrading the printer and scanner drivers, not MS. My PPCs work OK, though WMDC leaves much to be desired in functionality, if not in flash. E-Wallet incidentally works just fine. It is important to ensure you have the latest versions of things.

The laptop works fine...it should..Vista came on it. There are lot of nice things about Vista, though many you could emulate with third party products in XP.

So there is another view. Whle I don't see any overwhelming reason to upgrade if things are working OK, I also wouldn't hesitate to adopt Vista on a new machine/build. YMMV...apparently mine did.