Windows Vista, NOT a good experiance for me...

[JohnWPB]

Rant()

Sub (Begin Rant)

Well, I waited this one out, till all the major bugs were worked out of Vista. I just downloaded the release version a few days ago from Microsoft's site (Trial good till July 2007)

I replaced my Main Hard Drive with another, and thats where all went terribly bad.

Let me say, I can't believe they are letting this go to market like this! First off, the install took like 3 hours! (Even the install screen stated this can take several hours to complete)

Secondly after it was FINALLY installed, one error after another.... and another.

I guess I should start by saying my hardware has all been purchased in the past year, and all "standard" stuff. P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 Gig's Memory, GEforce 6600 256 Meg Gfx card, and a Sound Blaster Live. One would think that such standard hardware would be supported.

The first error was this lovely one soon as the desktop appeared for the first time:

I wanted to call Microsoft and ask for the the phone number for the "Unidentified Device Manufacturer"!

The next thing right after that was that it could not use the Vista color scheme, because ONE program on my system (Trillian) was keeping it from doing so!

Those two things aside, Going into Device manager, pops up a dialog asking if that is what I wanted to do, well I clicked on the icon didn't I? I heard about all the security pop-up's, but it is more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined! Just about anything you try to do, causes a pop-up confirmation, with no "Do not show this again" anywhere in sight.

Lastly, nothing on my computer seemed to be supported by Vista, My APC Finger print reader, NeoSpeech Voices, Nero Burning Rom ect... Using sound recorder, I was able to record my speech, and play it back, but when trying to go into the speech recognition settings it said no supported hardware was available. All of my stardock stuff wouldn't work. AVG anti virus wouldn't work. I then went into Text To speech to see what the new voices sounded like, and when I would click "Preview Voice" it would come up with an error that no audio playback device was detected. Thats funny because all the system sounds were working, and even tried an MP3 that worked fine. (This after installing the "Vista Drivers" from Creative)

I have a 26" LCD monitor, and even with the latest "Vista drivers" for this card. dirrectly from Nvidia, I could not get above 1280 x 1024 resolution. (In XP I have it set to 1920 X 1080, and is capable of 2048 X 1536).

Media center does look nice, but it kept crashing, and flickering in and out, acting like an old VGA cable that has gone bad. (I'm using a DVI cable)

Next I tried changing the icons to 64 x 64 through display settings/advanced, and they only changed spacing, and not the actual size of the icons. (Even after a reboot) Then I right clicked and saw "Show large Icons" and tried that. It changed all the system icons to large, but left 3rd party icons the original size! Kinda looks funky with some large icons, and some really small ones all mixed in together!

When I downloaded and installed Firefox, and ran it I got the Typical "This is not your default browser" dialog, and made it such. The next time I ran FireFox, the pop up appeared again, Looks like MS is again insisting on keeping IE the default browser again!!!!

Ok, I think you get that this was a TOTALLY frustrating experience! I had Vista on the computer for less than 4 hours (Only an hour more than it took to install). I powered down, and put my XP drive back in the system.

I had really been looking forward to Vista for quite some time now, as it really does LOOK more polished and clean (Thanks to Apple for the ideas!) and couldn't wait to start using it. So I am by no means a simple nay-sayer here, as I REALLY was looking forward to it!

I am a power user / programmer / IT guy myself. I can't even begin to imagine someone with minimal computer skills trying to work through all this. It makes me feel sorry for the IT guys when their NON IT executives decide to switch to Vista!

This has just been MY personal experience, and could be just my system (HIGHLY unlikely... but REMOTELY possible I guess). If anything, it's a bit of a heads up to switch wisely, and not install on your main system by any means to check it out.

End Sub

 

[Rupp]

Wow! It's amazing how something goes so wrong with some and so right with others. I loaded Vista on 4 machines this week and it was nothing but a positive experience. I'm an IE fan so IE 7 is fine with me and I loaded this on hardware that was a year or 2 old and there wasn't a device that wasn't recognized. The security warning are a bit over kill but all that I've encountered did have the do not show this again check box.

 

[Steve]

Sounds like maybe the Romulans have snuck aboard the USS Enterprise and are wreaking havoc!

 

[mkensinger]

WoW!!!

That is terrible! What is really weird is that I have also been running Vista (I'm using it right now) since the final beta became available (pre-release 1) and have only had problems with one application (phone manager from Avaya that said it wouldn't run under Vista).

Granted, I am not using any voice or the media center applications on the system, so I can't comment on those issues. I'm running this on a box that is older than old (Intel 845 series MB with integrated graphics and sound) and I would have suspected t I would have the harder time because the hardware is so "old school"



For my installation I also used a "spare" harddrive and it did take some time to get things running, but everything fired up first try. Overall, Vista has been very positve for me...I even like the way it took the office 2003 apps I use and "spruced up" the look a little bit. I also LOVE the gadgets sidebar. I load up the local weather, calendar and analog clock, plus the news highlights...very handy!

Having said all of that, I will also add that the changes and differences between XP and Vista are not so great that I would ever consider paying for Vista if I had a good, stable XP (Professional) system running. The Vist offers a lot of "glitz" that XP doesn't, but IMHO, it isn't worth upgrading to get.

All My Best

Michael

 

[noshali]

I also installed Vist aon my daughters pc (non critical) and everything was running fine. There are some apps that won't work but I know that going into Vista.

All she needs is office and WMP and of course IE...I love the way it looks and is very user friendly.

regards,

 

[Paul]

My Vista experinece wasn't near as bad as yours was, but like you, I'm not a fan.

My test system was a dell Inspiron 5160 Laptop
3.06 p4
1024 RAM
60 gig 7200 rpm drive
64 meg Geforce FX 5200

My install only took me about 35 minutes start to finish (excluding formatting the drive). It picked up all of my hardware except for the video card in my laptop...Geforce FX series mobile GPUs aren't supported by Microsoft OR nVidia, so that's no surprise. I had no problems with any programs running. I installed my normal docket of software. AVG antivirus, AIM, IRC, Winamp, Ultramon (taskbar for multiple monitors), Steam for games. I like the gadgets a lot. I at one point had about 15 of the rss reader gadgets spread all around the screen, and that was awesome.

What I don't like:

Huge memory requirements
Confirmation dialogs even after you've clicked 'yes, I'm sure I want to'
Ultimate is going to cost 400 fkin dollars

Those 3 things alone are enough to make me stick with XP until I for one reason or another NEED to run something in directx 10.

On the resolution note- if you're using an nVidia card, their drivers allow you to use custom resolutions. Type in the res you want, and it'll display it. My roommate just got a 19 inch widescreen monitor, and his video card didn't display 1440x900 as an option right away, but after a little looking, I found the custom res option and its been working great. If you decide to fiddle with vista again, you may want to consider that. I don't know if AMD's(ATI) video drivers do that, but its worth a shot.

 

[JohnWPB]

WoW! I can't believe it, with all the positives here for the most part, it has to be something with my system or something. Even though, as mentioned it's pretty standard hardware. When my Small Form Factor PC gets here, I intend on putting a bigger hard drive in it, and will test Vista on that and see how it goes.

In the Mean time, I will stick with a Window Blinds Vista Theme & Konfabulator, that Looks very nice, and add's some of the eye candy that Vista offers.


Here is a Screen Capture of my Current Media Center Edition Desktop. Be warned, the image is quite large! When I reduced it ti looked pretty bad.

 

[Mike]

Also remember that there were many changes to XP from when it was first available to a short time after that. Activation and changed hardware was atrocious but was cleaned up. I would guess any driver issues will shortly be resolved.

And remember, many companies wait for the first service pack to use Microsoft OS's for a reason...