Windows Vista experience

Flyingcursor · Post by **Flyingcursor** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:38 am

After six years I finally bit the bullet and got a new computer. I didn't build one as I usually do. I just bought one.

It came with the much maligned Vista!

Overall it's not so bad. It's mainly a matter of getting used to the different ways of doing things.

One of the real annoying things isn't necessarily a Vista problem. That's the insistence of these companies thinking the end user wants the "company" to upload usage information to help "better your experience". What a load of crap! HP wants to take up my bandwidth and memory to record usage info for both the PC and the printer. Microsoft wants to "enhance my Vista experience" by recording usage data. AAAAAGH.

The other real annoyance is their constant attempt to "automatically check for updates" on every little thing. If you let all these companies automatically check for updates you'd never get anything else done.

I've turned all of that off. I suppose I should at least allow it to check for updates on a weekly basis because I'll certainly forget.

Anyone else here use Vista? How long have you used it? Any hidden features I should know about?
Has anyone compared the efficacy of the Windows anti-spyware software vs. Ad-Aware?

I found one unadvertised feature. PowerBoost. (I think). If you plug a USB flash drive into one of the USB ports, Vista can turn it into extra RAM. That's kind of cool. I have 3GB in this PC but if I use a 4 or 8 Gb USB drive I should be able to get it up substantially.

Another interesting feature is the User Access Control. A lot of people really hate it but I see it as a nice feature.

djm · Post by **djm** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:47 am

I was just reading about a week or so ago that Microsoft is seriously slashing their prices on Vista. You might want to check to see that you didn't overpay.

Has Service Pack 1 come out on Vista yet? I wouldn't even consider buying it till then.

djm

Flyingcursor · Post by **Flyingcursor** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:50 am

The system came with Vista Home Premium. I do believe there is a SP 1 but I don't know if I have it.

If they cut the prices then I'll probably upgrade to Ultimate.

peeplj · Post by **peeplj** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 am

SP1 exists but Microsoft pulled it because the upgrade process was leaving some systems in an unbootable state.

They will probably rerelease it soon.

--James

Flyingcursor · Post by **Flyingcursor** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:56 am

peeplj wrote:SP1 exists but Microsoft pulled it because the upgrade process was leaving some systems in an unbootable state.

They will probably rerelease it soon.

--James

How typical.

fearfaoin · Post by **fearfaoin** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:00 am

Flyingcursor wrote:I found one unadvertised feature. PowerBoost. (I think). If you plug a USB flash drive into one of the USB ports, Vista can turn it into extra RAM. That's kind of cool. I have 3GB in this PC but if I use a 4 or 8 Gb USB drive I should be able to get it up substantially.

It's called ReadyBoost (I had to look it up). It was widely circulated when
Vista was about to launch (kind of a viral marketing campaign, I guess) as
the cool feature that would make it worth upgrading. I had my doubts about
the speed of USB vs. normal memory (or even HD) channels, but I never got
to try it. I was using a thumb drive to restore data after installing Vista, so I
said "no" to using it for ReadyBoost the first time I plugged it in, and Vista
never asked me again.

djm wrote:I was just reading about a week or so ago that Microsoft is seriously slashing their prices on Vista. You might want to check to see that you didn't overpay.

I assume it came with the new PC, in which case, how would you know
how much you actually paid for it? It's rolled into the PC price...

djm wrote:Has Service Pack 1 come out on Vista yet? I wouldn't even consider buying it till then.

Due this month, supposedly, but you have to manually look for it on Update.
In April it will be automatically downloaded, if you have Automatic Updates
turned on.

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windo ... a-sp1.aspx

chrisoff · Post by **chrisoff** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:24 am

SP1 is only on Beta at the moment, so for nerds who like to fiddle with things only just now as it's an at your own risk level.

I've used Vista for ages and it's not so bad. The only really infuriating bug I've experienced is that it takes forever to do stuff with zip files or directories that contain large numbers of objects. So I use 7zip for handling compressed folders instead.

It also takes an age to start up and shut down so for quick net browsing sessions and basic usage I now use Ubuntu on a dual boot. But for gaming, music and everything else I use Vista.

avanutria · Post by **avanutria** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:27 am

I'll be getting Vista Home with my new laptop in the next few months. I can let people know what it's like after June if the question is still being raised.

I'm a bit nervous because the computer guys at work don't like it, but there's no way to get a decent new HP laptop without it - I checked.

fearfaoin · Post by **fearfaoin** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:32 am

chrisoff wrote:The only really infuriating bug I've experienced is that it takes forever to do stuff with zip files or directories that contain large numbers of objects. So I use 7zip for handling compressed folders instead.

Yeah, that drove me insane. On my machine, it also took an inordinately long
time to copy or move even a small file. Move was very quick in XP before I
upgraded... I started to think it took forever just because they wanted to show
me a fancy graphic.

One feature I did like was the volume control. You could adjust and mute the
volume in each application from one volume control window. That was nice if
I got sick of the sounds in a game and wanted to listen to MP3s instead.

avanutria wrote:I'm a bit nervous because the computer guys at work don't like it, but there's no way to get a decent new HP laptop without it - I checked.

We hate everything from Microsoft at first. It took me years to get around
to loading XP. I'm sure after a few service packs, it'll settle down. Vista's
perfectly useable if you have enough memory.

avanutria · Post by **avanutria** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:43 am

fearfaoin wrote:We hate everything from Microsoft at first.

LOL, that's true. I'll have 3GB of memory and I am advised that'll be enough; and I don't really want to pay an extra $200 for one more GB when I am told that the 32bit version of Vista won't be able to recognise a full 4 GB anyway.

Wanderer · Post by **Wanderer** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:28 am

I've been using Vista since christmas. I got it with a dual-core Athlon 64 3.0 ghz machine, with 3 gig of ram (from the HP Home Media Center pc line)

Vista does some things differently, but isn't the beast that I've read about--probably because I have a new top-of-the-line machine. It works with all the games I like to play, it has much faster boot times...30 seconds from button on to desktop. Applications load WAY faster--firefox took 13 seconds on my old 1.7ghz machine, Excel took 18 seconds, and Adobe CS3 took almost a minute. On this machine, almost all my applications open in less than second, though Adobe CS3 does take a full 3 seconds to open.

This is due to some new feature called SuperFetch that really does what it says it does.

I haven't used ReadyBoost yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it. It acts as an additional cache for SuperFetch, making application load times even faster. And since 4 gig flash drives are pretty common these days, I may just get me one, and give 1 gig of it to Vista to keep things peppy.

BTW, there are lots of pretty little additions to Vista. For instance, if you normally hit alt-tab to switch between programs, try hitting windows-tab instead, and you'll get a cooler-looking representation of that functionality. If you hover your mouse over the taskbar, you'll get a little real-time icon of what's going on in that window. Nothing earth shattering, but cool nonetheless.

Flyingcursor · Post by **Flyingcursor** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 10:02 am

The 3d flip is pretty cool. Not better, just cooler. In addition to hovering over the task bar the thumbnails of documents displays a faint view of the contents. Before only pictures had thumbnails that reflected their contents.

Also I noticed if you are overwriting a file you get a thumbnail of the contents to help you remember which one you wanted to keep.

In addition, if you apply a "image" folder icon to a folder containing images, the icon actually shows parts of the images within.

They really went wild with the whole thumbnail concept.

I've tried using Media Center for the first time. It's interesting but for most things I'll probably stick to Media Player, Photo Gallery, etc.

I haven't had any problems with file copies. Yesterday I copied 1.3 gb of image data from my flash drive to my E drive in about 70 seconds.

The only trouble I've had is my DVD drive seems to have trouble reading some of my older data CDS. So far no problem with music CDS.

It seems to be a little clumsier to navigate around the files system than XP. However with their new "Search Folders" and metadata tags, it's not really as necessary any more. For example, I have various music related files in a multitude of folders. Everything from Tabedit files to PDFs, MIDIs, wavs etc. It's always been a pain to keep track of them.

Now I simply tag each file as "music" and I can use explorer to display all "music" files. It doesn't matter where they are located. They all show up. I haven't tried nested tags yet. That would be even better.

Tyler · Post by **Tyler** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:19 pm

chrisoff wrote:SP1 is only on Beta at the moment, so for nerds who like to fiddle with things only just now as it's an at your own risk level.

I've used Vista for ages and it's not so bad. The only really infuriating bug I've experienced is that it takes forever to do stuff with zip files or directories that contain large numbers of objects. So I use 7zip for handling compressed folders instead.

It also takes an age to start up and shut down so for quick net browsing sessions and basic usage I now use Ubuntu on a dual boot. But for gaming, music and everything else I use Vista.

I've had the beta for SP1 for a little while now, and truth be told, my VIsta system has been considerably less buggy since I downloaded it. I was kind of worried when I heard some peoples units were left a complete mess by it, but I've not had any problems at all to speak of since getting SP1b...
Before SP1b my system was pretty buggy; that and having to learn the new system was really aggrivating, but after almost a year using Vista and getting to know it's quirks and things to avoid etc, I like using Vista, for what it's worth.
I LOOOVE the ReadyBoost. Up to 4g of aditional memory. yoawza! with the 2g i have in my notebook plus my 4g thumb drive, the thing is lightning fast for most things.
There's still a good deal of rough edges that M$ needs to work out of Vista to get it to where XP left off. The thing that bugs the bahjayseus outta me about M$ is that they throw out this OS that's really little more than a beta at the time of release and charge us out the yin-yang for their buggy product.
Being a PC/Mac/Linux user, I see a lot of areas for improvement when I compare my VIsta machine to, say my machine running Gentoo. Same with OSX; I look at how much these OSs can do, what they look like, what they include, and what not compared to what M$ is trying to do with Vista, and Vista ends up coming off like that poser kid you knew from high school who tries to do all the things the popular kids do, overcompensates in every regard, and ends up being a shallow copy in the long run with no real personal identity.
That's where Vista still gets to me; it has no realy personal identity and no great deal of imagination was put into the actual development of this OS (there certainly was a great deal of imagination and effort applied to how they could make a passible copy of other OS's features, though

). Truth be told...every single doodad, extraineous feature, eye candy and whotnot is turned off...which is probably why I can get Vista to run so damn fast...It's not bad at all when you turn off all the crap they included with it, but therein still lies the problem.
Anyways...
Long story short (sorry for the rant), I think in the long haul, the Vista chapter in the OS history books will be somewhat reminiscent of other mediocre entries by M$.

Denny · Post by **Denny** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:31 pm

Tyler wrote:Vista ends up coming off like that poser kid you knew from high school who tries to do all the things the popular kids do, overcompensates in every regard, and ends up being a shallow copy in the long run with no real personal identity.

Yeah, they are consistent...

pastorkeith · Post by **pastorkeith** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 9:35 pm

I have had it a week or two on a new machine.
Some things are kinda cool - but even with the 47 updates it installed upon first boot up, I still get a hard freeze every few days and have to manually reboot. Ctrl - Shift - ESC (the new CTRL-Alt-Del) dosn't work in these cases. My drivers are, as far as I can tell, up to date. Turning off the power saver stuff seemed to cut down on this.

pastorkeith