when using windows, I would suggest you remove quicktime from booting item and using MPC(Media player classic) as media playerinstead(of course, u can use VLC if u want to). quicktime is a resource hog on window, slow down your system, vista, or XP.
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Vista UI. Oy... Just Oy.
- Thread starter yoavcs
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when using windows, I would suggest you remove quicktime from booting item and using MPC(Media player classic) as media playerinstead(of course, u can use VLC if u want to). quicktime is a resource hog on window, slow down your system, vista, or XP.
How does it compare to XP? I was thinking about putting it on a Macbook, because I need to use Windows every now and then. XP is really ugly. I can never decide if I like the XP look or the Classic look. Both are pretty bad.
as long as your softwares support Vista, go for it, otherwise, u are limited to XP.
I've just switched my Bootcamp back to XP from Vista. I had the added incentive that I can also access Bootcamp XP through Parallels which is handy, but I would have done it even without Parallels. Vista is a piece of junk. I can't see any advantages (other than Spotlig... Live Search) over XP. It's slow, breaks programs, and is in my opinion even harder to use than XP. They've re-defined "Re-Inventing the Wheel".
Not Impressed.
Not Impressed.
The thing with Vista is that it takes a little getting used to. For the copy-file problem in the first page I would really blame the flash drive not Windows Vista... I've copied hundreds of GBs through flash drives, external HDDs and network through Win Vista and it has never given a problem.
As for UI inconsistencies, do I have to remind you Apple has them as well? And it was even more problematic when OSX 10.0 was first released? Have you guys even used OSX 10.0, do you remember how crappy that was? Give Vista a break, its the first time Microsoft is doing a snazzy UI, it took Apple time to get there as well.
As a 6 month Vista user I have really made the transition and I honestly believe Vista is a lot better than XP. Is it better than OSX? In some aspects, all I know is that when I have to edit a movie or create a graphic or presentation or work on something I go to my Mac Pro in OSX and when I want to play a game I go to my Mac Pro in Windows or my PC.
To be honest, if I feel like doing general tasks like IM, Firefox, iTunes, etc, I'll just do it on whatever computer I am on at the moment, using OSX and Windows for me has pretty much become the same thing, only I can use certain apps and stuff (like expose) in OSX and certain apps and stuff in Vista. Sure OSX is easier to learn but I've been using Windows for 6 years (since Win2k) and Mac OS all my life (including starting with the public beta of OSX) and after all these years... I'll just use whatever computer I feel like using at the moment, neither is better because I'm just as productive with both.
All I'm saying is don't be so hard on Vista, the Mac man doesn't remember when he was a Mac baby and OSX sucked and was slow as molasses.
As for UI inconsistencies, do I have to remind you Apple has them as well? And it was even more problematic when OSX 10.0 was first released? Have you guys even used OSX 10.0, do you remember how crappy that was? Give Vista a break, its the first time Microsoft is doing a snazzy UI, it took Apple time to get there as well.
As a 6 month Vista user I have really made the transition and I honestly believe Vista is a lot better than XP. Is it better than OSX? In some aspects, all I know is that when I have to edit a movie or create a graphic or presentation or work on something I go to my Mac Pro in OSX and when I want to play a game I go to my Mac Pro in Windows or my PC.
To be honest, if I feel like doing general tasks like IM, Firefox, iTunes, etc, I'll just do it on whatever computer I am on at the moment, using OSX and Windows for me has pretty much become the same thing, only I can use certain apps and stuff (like expose) in OSX and certain apps and stuff in Vista. Sure OSX is easier to learn but I've been using Windows for 6 years (since Win2k) and Mac OS all my life (including starting with the public beta of OSX) and after all these years... I'll just use whatever computer I feel like using at the moment, neither is better because I'm just as productive with both.
All I'm saying is don't be so hard on Vista, the Mac man doesn't remember when he was a Mac baby and OSX sucked and was slow as molasses.
double standard & avoiding short comes are classic weapons of a successful PR, apple is the master of it,
double standard & avoiding short comes are classic weapons of a successful PR, apple is the master of it,
So to be fair to MS we should compare Vista to OSX 10.0? Even back then OSX was a extremely promising OS, can we say that of Vista as well !?
So to be fair to MS we should compare Vista to OSX 10.0? Even back then OSX was a extremely promising OS, can we say that of Vista as well !?
Actually we can, Vista looks very promising, if you took your mac glasses for a moment you could see that.
I'm just saying that when many changes are done its fair to give a break to whoever is making the change, Apple had it very rough with OSX at first because it was a big departure from OS9 (and lets face it OSX sucked at first, I used it and I couldn't stop myself from booting back to OS9 constantly), that is all I am saying, this is the first time MS is doing a flashy UI (Apple OSX 10.0 UI was really all over the place and crummy looking) so its fair to give MS some time to polish the UI.
Let MS release a few service packs and Vista should be a lot cleaner looking. Like I said I've been using Vista for 6 months now and the UI is actually really pretty to me and usable and its a lot faster than XP and more secure as well, I've been running no avast or windows defender because it speeds things up and guess what? It is still malware free but then again I don't look at porn all day and download torrent 24/7.
My whole point is that Vista is definitely a better OS than XP and has tons of potential. Yes I still think OSX is the better system but at this point where I'm so familiar with both I don't really care, I use both and I'm happy, I can run every app out there and I don't go on forums complaining how crappy one is because I think both are good. I'll admit though OSX is a lot more forgiving to a newbie than Windows.
Windows is not nearly the monster macphiles try to make it look and trust me, I was once like that, until I actually started using Windows for real and took that nasty preconception off my head. Vista is just an evolution of XP and thats a good thing.
I'll admit right away that I'm mainly a PC/Windows guy, with a pretty long experience of using Windows (since version 3.1). I thought I'd give you guys my view on Vista, after having used it as my main OS for a couple of months. First, let's get the good stuff out of the way:
The OS is indeed stable. No crashes or BSODs so far. I've gamed, rendered, ripped music, run stability tests, etc. without any OS crashes. Applications have stopped working or refused to start, but that's been apps designed for XP. Those can't be guaranteeed to work on Vista (many because of bad design), so you can't blame the OS there.
It's fast. The caching of data in RAM (Superfetch) really does work and it fills up my 4GB of RAM completely. What's more, it immediately frees up the RAM for apps when needed, so no complaint there.
It's not nearly as resource heavy as some people think. It does use more RAM than XP, but that's nothing to moan about. XP is, after all, more than 5 years old and Vista doesn't use that much more anyway. Other than that, neither a very fast CPU nor a fast graphics card are needed to run Vista with the "Aero" interface enabled. I've run it on an old Athlon64 3500+ with a very slow GeForce 6200 Turbo Cache graphics card and the only thing that ran a little slow was Flip3D. I find it amusing that so many seem to think that they need to upgrade their computer just to run Vista.
I can't say much about security yet. Vista supposedly has had a lot of work done "under the hood" and should be much less likely to get infected by malicious code. That doesn't mean I trust it, though. For what it's worth, after two months of use, my installation is still free of spyware and viruses and that's without running any antivirus software in the background as protection. Then again, my XP install has also been running unprotected since September of last year and is also uninfected, so I'm not sure if this tells us much.
The search function on the start menu is fast and works well. Can't really complain there.
Windows Update is finally integrated into the OS, which I consider a nice step forward.
Most other things that I like about Vista are little things here and there that are improved over XP. Nothing earth-shattering, but nice nontheless.
Okay, onto the bad:
As said before in this thread, the user interface is a complete mess. Windows XP might not have been visually stunning, but the UI worked very well and was consistent and fast to work with. Vista is the complete opposite. The control panel is particularly hard to use. Using Vista's default control panel view or classic view doesn't matter much, both are confusing in their own way. There simply is no consistency between the different setting windows. There seem to be a handful of different layouts used and many are cluttered with "useful" shortcuts that simply make the screen confusing.
Using folders and the file explorer is also confusing. Folders aren't handled as in XP, but instead double clicking a folder on the desktop seems to start up a file explorer view pointing at the chosen folder (complete with a file tree on the left). Disabling the file tree to get a more clean looking folder view is possible. The downside to this is that if you then enter the file explorer and click on a folder in the tree on the left, the tree view will get disabled... So, it seems folders and the file explorer are one and the same now. In my opinion not a good decision.
Another bad decision is that regular menus (File, View, Help, etc.) aren't enabled by default. Microsoft chose to use newbie friendly icon based bars at the top of the window instead. It's limiting the choices that can be made and makes more advanced settings harder to reach when needed.
UAC sucks so much. It destroys the computer experience and can't be left enabled.
That's pretty much it. The problems I have with Vista are almost exclusively UI related, but that is a pretty major thing about an OS. Because of these UI problems, I'd have to consider Vista a failure (atleast for the time being). It makes so many mistakes compared to XP and that's simply unacceptable.
Finally, I have to address kind of a pseudo problem that other people have written about and that is the apparent instability of Vista. Vista isn't unstable. The problems people have are caused by bad drivers and incompatible applications. These are issues that can't really be blamed on Vista. It's like all the people complaining about XP BSODing, when it's almost exclusively caused by bad hardware or drivers. Microsoft is an easy target to attack, but they're not responsible for every little thing that goes wrong on your computer. Believe it or not.
The OS is indeed stable. No crashes or BSODs so far. I've gamed, rendered, ripped music, run stability tests, etc. without any OS crashes. Applications have stopped working or refused to start, but that's been apps designed for XP. Those can't be guaranteeed to work on Vista (many because of bad design), so you can't blame the OS there.
It's fast. The caching of data in RAM (Superfetch) really does work and it fills up my 4GB of RAM completely. What's more, it immediately frees up the RAM for apps when needed, so no complaint there.
It's not nearly as resource heavy as some people think. It does use more RAM than XP, but that's nothing to moan about. XP is, after all, more than 5 years old and Vista doesn't use that much more anyway. Other than that, neither a very fast CPU nor a fast graphics card are needed to run Vista with the "Aero" interface enabled. I've run it on an old Athlon64 3500+ with a very slow GeForce 6200 Turbo Cache graphics card and the only thing that ran a little slow was Flip3D. I find it amusing that so many seem to think that they need to upgrade their computer just to run Vista.
I can't say much about security yet. Vista supposedly has had a lot of work done "under the hood" and should be much less likely to get infected by malicious code. That doesn't mean I trust it, though. For what it's worth, after two months of use, my installation is still free of spyware and viruses and that's without running any antivirus software in the background as protection. Then again, my XP install has also been running unprotected since September of last year and is also uninfected, so I'm not sure if this tells us much.
The search function on the start menu is fast and works well. Can't really complain there.
Windows Update is finally integrated into the OS, which I consider a nice step forward.
Most other things that I like about Vista are little things here and there that are improved over XP. Nothing earth-shattering, but nice nontheless.
Okay, onto the bad:
As said before in this thread, the user interface is a complete mess. Windows XP might not have been visually stunning, but the UI worked very well and was consistent and fast to work with. Vista is the complete opposite. The control panel is particularly hard to use. Using Vista's default control panel view or classic view doesn't matter much, both are confusing in their own way. There simply is no consistency between the different setting windows. There seem to be a handful of different layouts used and many are cluttered with "useful" shortcuts that simply make the screen confusing.
Using folders and the file explorer is also confusing. Folders aren't handled as in XP, but instead double clicking a folder on the desktop seems to start up a file explorer view pointing at the chosen folder (complete with a file tree on the left). Disabling the file tree to get a more clean looking folder view is possible. The downside to this is that if you then enter the file explorer and click on a folder in the tree on the left, the tree view will get disabled... So, it seems folders and the file explorer are one and the same now. In my opinion not a good decision.
Another bad decision is that regular menus (File, View, Help, etc.) aren't enabled by default. Microsoft chose to use newbie friendly icon based bars at the top of the window instead. It's limiting the choices that can be made and makes more advanced settings harder to reach when needed.
UAC sucks so much. It destroys the computer experience and can't be left enabled.
That's pretty much it. The problems I have with Vista are almost exclusively UI related, but that is a pretty major thing about an OS. Because of these UI problems, I'd have to consider Vista a failure (atleast for the time being). It makes so many mistakes compared to XP and that's simply unacceptable.
Finally, I have to address kind of a pseudo problem that other people have written about and that is the apparent instability of Vista. Vista isn't unstable. The problems people have are caused by bad drivers and incompatible applications. These are issues that can't really be blamed on Vista. It's like all the people complaining about XP BSODing, when it's almost exclusively caused by bad hardware or drivers. Microsoft is an easy target to attack, but they're not responsible for every little thing that goes wrong on your computer. Believe it or not.
I agree with Chone. To be fair, 10.0 was a pretty terrible release, it wasn't fit for market, and was really a beta. I would say Apple didn't really nail it until Panther.
However, Apple were breaking new ground with OS X in the interface department. If you look at the world it came from (OS 9 and Win 2K), it was pretty revolutionary.
With Vista, Microsoft has failed to learn from Apple's early mistakes (too much transparency anyone?) and is making some very poor decisions. Apple had nothing to really go on, and I'm sure they will admit that some of the early OS X interface ideas were flawed. They worked these out on their own and have now got a very attractive (if not perfect) OS.
It's fair enough to point out that OS X wasn't perfect at first and so neither should Vista be, but Microsoft had a huge amount to learn from Apple, and for once appeared to have completely ignored them and have gone on to make the same mistakes.
However, Apple were breaking new ground with OS X in the interface department. If you look at the world it came from (OS 9 and Win 2K), it was pretty revolutionary.
With Vista, Microsoft has failed to learn from Apple's early mistakes (too much transparency anyone?) and is making some very poor decisions. Apple had nothing to really go on, and I'm sure they will admit that some of the early OS X interface ideas were flawed. They worked these out on their own and have now got a very attractive (if not perfect) OS.
It's fair enough to point out that OS X wasn't perfect at first and so neither should Vista be, but Microsoft had a huge amount to learn from Apple, and for once appeared to have completely ignored them and have gone on to make the same mistakes.