Hasta la Vista, Vista

[slaveofconvention]

The last machine in my house running Windows Vista, my main PC, has now been put through the 7 upgrade... Well I say upgrade, we all know an actual upgrade is a GREAT way to start off your Windows 7 experience with a PC already running at about 80% capacity. Full wipe and fresh install is the only way to go if you want every last bit of performance from your new OS.

Over the last 8 months, my notebook, netbook, my wife's touchscreen pc, my son's desktop and laptop, they've all gone under the influence of Microsofts latest OS.... My desktop was the last one to be done (well my wife's netbook is still running XP but that's her decision heh)

Why was the PC I use most the last one to get the new OS - well the answer is really in the question - I use it too damned much lol

So, a fond farewell to Windows Vista - and yes, I genuinely mean fond - despite all the moaning and groaning I've heard about Vista's shortcomings since its release, it has served me well and without any real issues so *repeats fond waving*

Now that I finally have all of my machines (except the aforementioned XP based netbook owned by my wife) it must be time for MS to officially announce the formal release date for Windows 8..... :D

Now I just have to decide what (if anything) to do with the half-dozen Vista OEM licences I have lying spare - one x64 Ultimate and the rest x86 Home Premium....

[TheMainMan]

Welcome to the club! I've been running 7 exclusively on my four machines since it was in beta and with the exception of a slow driver release for a webcam (shakes fist at Logitech) it's been a truly wonderful experience. Hope yours is as painless!

[jdbnsn]

Hahaha!!! I didn't read the title carefully and thought you were quitting, damn near gave me a heart attack! Quick, someone let the air out of his tires in case he gets any ideas....

[slaveofconvention]

Heh - tis nice to be appreciated for my lack of absense....

Besides, I'm not going anywhere - no-one else will put up with me :P

[Technochicken]

I'm still running Vista Home Premium 32 bit on my desktop. I figure it's not really worth upgrading and losing 100 gigs of software until I get a new computer and have to do a fresh installation anyways. I put W7 on the HTPC I built though, and it runs great, even with only 2 gigs of ram. The same could not really be said for Vista.

[AmEv]

Sell the licenses and disks here?

[TheGreatSatan]

I love Vista and still have it on 3 desktops. There's W7 on two laptops and it's going on my new Commodore too. I still have one machine with XP even, but it only plays music.

I hate XP.

[Blibbax]

I must agree that Vista's reputation is undeserved. One of my machines, which I use intensivley, has had the same Vista x64 ult installation for 3 years now, and still works as well as the day it was reformatted. Hasn't given me so much as a hint of trouble.

[AmEv]

Well, we must be lucky with Vista.
It's on my brother's computer.


The only times it has Bluescreened is with (partially) defective WLAN cards.
(the soldering jobs on the pins were horrible and quick-done.)

[TheGreatSatan]

I always tell the swarms of people who claim to hate Vista, that if you know how to tweak Vista it's actually a great OS. Microsoft burned itself when it first released Vista on systems with 512MB of RAM. It would literally take 5 or more minutes just to boot.

People would sit in front of their NEW slow laptop and watch Apple commercials. No wonder why they've had such a resurgence.

[xr4man]

i never had any problems with vista running. never had any blue screens or anything, but it is a resource hog and does run slower than 7 or xp on any given machine. of course i never got enough into it to learn how to tweak it other than using msconfig to shut down some stuff that wanted to start automagically.

[SXRguyinMA]

I went from XP to 7, so I can't give any opinion :D

[AmEv]

You're right. My other brother's Vista lappy came with only .5GB RAM


Great move, genii.

Ah well. My one brother's computer came with 2GB RAM.

[xr4man]

my new"er" laptop came with 4g of ram and vista. with 7 loaded it outstrips vista easily.

hell i was surprised when i loaded 7 up on my old desktop with only 1g of ram that it ran faster than the xp install it previously had on it.

[crenn]

Vista was only 'widely' accepted after SP1, and you can understand why to a degree. A stock RTM install of Vista was fairly slow, SP1 did change that, and made it a lot better. However, The main problem I had with Vista at the time, wasn't the speed, it was the poor driver support of a USB WLAN stick I had, however, since moving to a gigabit network I don't ever have those issues! But all my computers run Windows 7. It wasn't really that much an improvement over Vista, but there are features which I can't live without now! I hate using the desktops at uni that are still using XP.

[AmEv]

I'm with you, Crenn. Vista's biggest fallback was USB WiFi drivers and support.

Especially with cruddy hardware.

[slaveofconvention]

I don't think there's anyone who thinks 7 is a step back from Vista, but what I do think is that, almost uniquely in the tech community, the TBCS crowd aren't all utterly anti-vista which is surprising. It's nice to see people who make up their own minds based on experience instead of being sheep and just blasting vista because, well, um, yeah - someone else said it was bad.... :D

[x88x]

I'm another who never really had a problem with Vista. And I was using it since a month before release (friend with MSDN Premium got the disc, then slapped an MSDN AA key on it)! And I was running it on an Athlon FX-55 with 2GB of DDR-400, and didn't do much in the way of tweaks besides disabling superfetch. I actually never even had problems finding drivers, tbh. I do prefer 7 though; it does run a lot lighter.

[DynamoNED]

TBH, I'm still running my laptop on Vista for two reasons: 1)laziness and 2)because I haven't had that many problems out of it. The only problems I ever had out of Vista was a driver for an old Dell printer I had that would never install and some minor network issues when at LAN parties (yes, I used to game on a laptop because it was all I had at the time...don't judge me!). However, as soon as I do my next backup of my games, data & documents, it is getting a fresh install of 7, because, as mentioned by others, Vista is a resource hog.

As for all the Vista hate, I think it was a combination of overhyping by MS (make huge promises on fantastic features, then cut them out last minute) and Vista being under so much scrutiny because of it. After all, it had been 6 years since XP, so something revolutionary was expected. When Vista turned out to be a good but imperfect OS, there was a lot of inevitable backlash that has since festered into outright resentment. IMO, Vista was not nearly the debacle Windows ME was; ME should still be the poster boy of a horribly designed & implemented Windows OS.

[x88x]

IMO, Vista was not nearly the debacle Windows ME was; ME should still be the poster boy of a horribly designed & implemented Windows OS.

Actually, Vista made me wonder...was ME really that bad? I wasn't really into computers yet when it came out and I never used it, so I have no personal experience with it, but for those of you who were...was it really as bad as we like to think it was? Or was it just like Vista...overhyped and underdelivered?

[LiTHiUM0XiD3]

i agree to an extent... ME was a joke....
vista ran... if you had the dough for a minimum of 2Gbs of ram (any less and u would cry)
7 is what vista shoulda been :)
and for all who truly love vista...
i want w/e ur on

[DynamoNED]

Actually, Vista made me wonder...was ME really that bad? Or was it just like Vista...overhyped and underdelivered?

Yes, yes it was. My parents made the mistake of buying a Windows ME machine back in 2001 before XP came out. It was nothing but headaches for us the whole time we used it as our primary PC. USB support in ME was flaky at best; our printer would randomly disappear when called upon unless connected through the LPT port. Connecting a USB device had about a 50/50 chance of causing a BSOD. (Admittedly, this was in the USB 1.1 days, but that standard was well established by then.)

ME was also a resource hog to rival Vista. My parents' computer had 128MB of RAM, which was fairly typical for computers then. It was not uncommon for ME to take up over 60% of that while idling! And heaven forbid you try to run more than one program at once, because if you did, ME entertained you with its impression of a tortoise.

I honestly believe the original hard drive in that machine corrupted itself to put itself out of its misery, and the lightning strike was just the last straw. Its replacement had XP installed, and it was like night and day performance-wise.

And these are but a few of my not-so-fond memories of Windows ME...

[AmEv]

My biggest problem with ME was trying to install drivers, and it bluescreened with "Could not write to drive D:"
What the freak?!?

[xr4man]

we completely fixed the bsod in win me.......we made it the black and red screen of death :)

[AmEv]

O.o