Vista: Get it now or wait?

[Truth Seeker]

In three years...I will upgrade. Not now.

 

[doktorziplok]

Nah, not Linux. OS X Leopard. From what I've heard it will be released for all Intel Processor PC's, not just Apple's own.

doubtful, and by doubtful i mean "it won't happen." apple is a hardware company, the software is just an "extra."

...Apple is about 2 generations ahead of Windows Vista and 5 ahead of Linux.

please elaborate, especially about being so far ahead of linux.

 

[Agamon]

Wow. Informative, folks, thanks. I am, at this very moment, setting up my PC to dual-boot Ubuntu with XP. I'm really happy that my new PC isn't Vista and I have a few years to decide what to do when I get a new one.

 

[borc killer]

Vista's Fine Print Raises Red Flags

I personally find most of the concerns that these people blog about laughable.

I have no problem with Microsoft making sure I have a legitimate copy of Windows. I know they have big big issues with piracy and short of coming to everyone’s door this is the only way to make sure it is legitimate… unless you have a more elegant solution? If you do I am sure they would love to buy it from you… and, no linux does not count… at least not yet… not till it passes the ‘mom’ test.

Also I don’t plan on using my PC to play HD movies. I think I will use my nice HD tv for that when and if I decide to buy a player (which would not be for years). Who the hell is going to buy the $1000 player for that anyway? LOL

Compatibility issues? Sure! Check to make sure every piece of hardware you depend on has drivers for it before you buy it and read up to see if your software will work. Welcome to getting a new OS, same thing happens every time Apple releases a new OS or a new distribution of linux comes out. *shrug*

Game issues? Sure! Check to make sure your games will work.

Buy it right away? If you have money to burn… sure! But dual boot it till you know everything you depend on works. As I said before I have had no issues with any software or hardware I have both at work and home but you might have crap loads.

 

[Thanee]

#5 I can't get a decent explorer/treeview of my files (it always maintains a few 'favourites' listed at the top)

Get Total Commander.

Now I quite like the sidebar, I do like the search built in to the start button a lot... but I'm getting a whole lot more annoyances and most of the new apps in it are pretty 'meh' IMO.

Many of the features are available for XP as well, AFAIK.

Bye
Thanee

 

[trancejeremy]

4. Performance on modern hardware actually isn't that bad. I run it on the same PC as XP and the only real difference I notice is a lot of disk-thrashing at odd times and I'm not sure why. Even games are only slightly slower, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that the drivers for the video board are leaked beta drivers. (For reference, the specs are C2D 6600, 2GB RAM, WD Raptor drives, and GeForce 8800GTS.)

Modern? I think your rig is pretty much top of the line for modern PCs (well, your ram isn't super high, but the rest...). If Vista is noticeably slower on it (even if only slightly), that doesn't seem like a good thing.

 

[Mercule]

#2 Can't reliably connect to my wireless network after waking up from hibernation. It seems that if you hibernate, then unhibernate away from your wireless network that isn't broadcasting its ssid, then hibernate and unhibernate in your own wireless network again it can't find the network unless you either (a) tell the wireless router to start broadcasting its SSID(!) or restart vista.

Interesting. This is one of the most noticeable improvements I see in Vista over XP. XP was slower than poop to reconnect, but Vista is pretty much instantly reconnected and quite reliable.

#5 I can't get a decent explorer/treeview of my files (it always maintains a few 'favourites' listed at the top)

This is one of the bits I like, especially the new downloads folder. It's probably a matter of how you function, though.

#6 I can't run visual studio 2005 properly on it

No problems, yet, but I haven't done as much home dev lately, either.

It's probably worth noting that, when Win 95 came out, I was a bit of an early adopter, too. I used a two-year-old Gateway (pretty much the same boat I'm in now) and had no problems -- ever -- with Win 95. Meanwhile, the high-end Dell I had at work that was supposedly built with 95 in mind spent more time crashing than working. I don't know what that means, but I don't seem to have the same issues with MS OSes that others do, at least for personal use.

 

[gleicher27]

I've also got an MSDN subscription and have been running Vista on my two-year-old tablet since Thanksgiving.

Overall, I like it. Some of the changes to Windows Explorer/My Computer actually are easier to use (at least for me). The handwriting recognition does seem a bit improved, too. Really, most of the little things add up to a pretty nice whole.

The Sidebar, which I thought I was going to hate, has actually had some uses -- mainly in checking weather, but there are some other toys. It comes turned off, by default, too. There is definitely no gun to the head.

The permissions nanny is nowhere near as annoying as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I barely notice it even though I do programming, which is one of the touchier things. Something to keep in mind, though, is that new directories are set to "read only" for everyone, by default. I had to change the directory settings for PCGen to get it to work. But, that was a pretty quick, minor change.

The down sides, so far:

Drivers -- Yup, some of them are tough to get. My special tablet PC buttons (like the one to quickly rotate the screen) don't work. I should check for an update now that the public release is upon us, though. Otherwise, my drivers have all worked fine, except....

Pocket PC -- The old ActiveSync software isn't compatible. Vista won't even let you install it. There is a new tool that I absolutely cannot get to work right, though. Technically, it's still in Beta, so I'm not that concerned by a glitch. Still, having that sort of product in Beta at this point seems like pretty poor planning on the part of MS.

Power consumption. My battery life is a bit shorter (maybe 15-20% less) under Vista. But, I also have it set to max performance. Speaking of which, my mid-aged, low-horsepower, computer is moving at a fine speed with Vista.

I've been looking at desktops lately. I've actually been holding off until Vista is available, though. Since my kids will be making quite a bit of use of the new machine, I definitely want the extra security on their accounts.

Oh, and I've been using Office 2007, too. Very nice. There are a few tweaks to existing tools (color picker, autoformatting) that are really nice. The new ribbon control took some getting used to, but I think I actually prefer it, now. At the very least, I find myself wishing for a couple of the improvements at work (where we run 2003) quite often.

I thought about upgrading my PC with it, but not my tablet. What kind of tablet do you have ?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070128-8717.html

a link to the new idea that you cannot do a clean install with a "upgrade" copy of Vista, you must have the old OS on the same disk. That kind of blows since upgrading over an old OS install is a recipe for problems IME. Anyone run a Vista upgrade yet?

And I too would enjoy hearing how OSX, a Unix variant, is 5 generations ahead of a current Linux distro, another Unix variant. You an even run Beryl and get all your eye candy on Linux too.

 

[Michael Morris]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070128-8717.html

a link to the new idea that you cannot do a clean install with a "upgrade" copy of Vista, you must have the old OS on the same disk. That kind of blows since upgrading over an old OS install is a recipe for problems IME. Anyone run a Vista upgrade yet?

And I too would enjoy hearing how OSX, a Unix variant, is 5 generations ahead of a current Linux distro, another Unix variant. You an even run Beryl and get all your eye candy on Linux too.

All my install experiences with Linux have been nightmarish, to put it mildly. In OS X you install a piece of software by dragging it into the applications folder, and that's it. In Linux you have to compile it, decipher cryptic warnings about dependency files, find the dependency files, try to compile them, find THEIR dependencies, install the thing, find out something else is broken.

There's a reason ENWorld's server runs MySQL 4.0 instead of 5.1 -- installing ANYTHING on Linux is outside the base package is a pain in the neck even for an experienced computer user. It's worse that getting something to work on Windows 3.1. It took me some 6 hours to update Apache on the box and it's not an experience I'm keen on going through on my home computer.

Yum has alleviated this somewhat - but it's still a headache compared to Windows or Apple. Linux is great for servers - but I've yet to see a good, friendly and easy to use desktop solution.