Vista Stuff

[Chris Blount]

Just wanted to chime in here with my experiences with Vista.

Back in April, I purchased Vista Ultimate full version. Just for fun instead of doing a clean install, I decided to try upgrading my current XP desktop. The upgrade went fine but took quite a long time. Over 3 hours.

After the upgrade, most of the applications worked but there were some bugs.

1. Some videos would play without sound.
2. Some applications would not load.
3. Machine would crash when compiling video.

Over this past weekend I decided to go ahead and do a clean install. What a difference! The install only took about 35 mintues. After it was done I had no sound and a few of the drivers were not working.

I then loaded the 25 updates it wanted me to do. After the updates, basically everything worked and all drivers were loaded - Sound, video, webcam etc. Very easy! Vista also created a subdirectory with the files that were on my previous installation in case I need them.

All of the recommendations to do a clean install are correct. Don't even bother with the upgrade. The install was fast, easy and the system runs much better and faster.

BTW, I found an excellent program that will transfer settings when moving from one installation to another. It backs up and restores the entire my documents directory, desktop and outlook stuff. Very easy and much better than trying to manually move everything.

The program is free for 15 days and fully functional: http://ajsystems.com/obp.html

The whole process was painless and took much less time than I thought.

No matter what people are saying, there are a lot of improvements in Vista. I don't regret the move and can't wait for more updates.

[Michael D'Angelo]

Agree Chris. I went from XP Pro to Vista Home Premium and had a lot of problems at first and a lot of programs would not work. But over the last 3 months with all the updates just about everything started working and I don't have any problems any more.

I think Vista is a much faster OS and a lot of things are a lot easier to use on it.

[naijai]

I installes Vista back in Feb and havent had a single regret works fine almost all my machines only one left with XP but all my hardware worked easily an installed by themselves and all my installs were clean installs

[Stuart Sweet]

I'm holding off until I get a new PC with it Preloaded. I'm still suffering from installing Win95 on my 33MHz 486 the day it came out.

[MikeW]

I have always had good luck with Dell machines. The trick is, the second you get the computer, reformat it with the OS CD that comes packaged with the computer. They typically add too much junk that slows the PCs down. Also, when purchasing from Dell, do a google search for Dell coupons. You'll typically find a coupon offering $350 off a computer of $1000 or more. You can get a decent computer with monitor for less than $800 and finance it interest free for 6 months.

I'm new to the Vista game. Just got my first PC with Vista last week. No complaints so far. I'm using Qwest DSL and they offer Microsoft 1 care as part of the package. Seems like a great addition to Vista.

[Kevin Dupuy]

I played with Vista (Home Premium) on my new laptop a couple of weeks ago, it's interesting, I have to say. I didn;t see many of the issues some people talked about, so... I did end up going back to SUSE, but...

[Capmeister]

I like Vista, but when I recently upgraded my PC, I left Vista behind and reinstalled XP Pro. Why? Because nVidia and Vista aren't working the way I'd like in my games. I expect they will at some point, but for now I want my games to be flawless.

[Mark Holtz]

My Vista 64-bit drive is collecting dust at the moment. I'm still using mostly XP Pro.

[Steve Mehs]

Yep, my Vista Ultimate hard drive is collecting dust as well. I've become very happy with Vista, after some customizations, but my main issue is with sound. The drivers I'm using from Creative from back in 2003 sound a hell of a lot better then the latest drivers for either XP or Vista. In the winter I'll be getting a new computer, preloaded with Vista Ultimate, I'll give this PC to my mother and go back to Vista since she doesn't care about audio. But for now I'm back to using XP Pro.

[Brandon428]

I wish they would focus on developing windows to be less demanding of more,newer ,and faster components. It seems no matter how much ram I add its never enough. :D

[AlbertZeroK]

I have a 4U Vista PC in my rack right now. Just reloaded it again (I needed the pair of 320G drives for something else). I plan on dual booting it and Win2k as a test machine.

There are many tweaks in Vista you can make that will make a HUGE increase in performance. Heck, I have a Prescott P4 3.0GHz Processor w/2G Ram & the fastest AGP Video card (512M onboard) I could get last January - the darn thing was like $250! And I still can't score above a 3.0 on video performance.

But yeah, upgrades BLOW! There is an exception to this, there is a HowTo out there on how to install Vista Upgrade onto a blank drive - you basically install vista twice. It works like a champ and makes good use of all those vista upgrade cd's I got for free.