Upgrading from Vista to XP

[Whoha]

Vista is being dumped all around it seems.

[Omni Rex Draconis]

Originally posted by Asher
Am I the only person in the entire world who remembers going through the exact same **** when XP was released compared to Windows 2000?

Nope. I have to remind a lot of people of that fact when they say that Vista is an unstable piece of crap. Truth is, Vista has been the most stable OS release since Windows 3.1 (from Microsoft, anyways).

Originally posted by Geronimo
It seems very strange that experiences with the two operating systems can be so completely at odds with each other.

Vista is extremely susceptible to a number of issues that make it look bad. The computers my company sells often come with 512 MB and no video cards. Even without Aero, that is not enough. With the proper hardware, Vista seems to outperform XP on the benchmarks:

http://www.viperlair.com/articles/editorials/vista/versus/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128305-page,1-c,vistalonghorn/article.html

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3118_7-6695272-1.html

A lot of drivers and software are not up to Vista, and this causes a lot of headaches. I have to fight a daily litany of problems with Vista that go away when I uninstall some third party product. Microsoft may be closed source and write ****ty code (I'll let Asher handle that one), but to be fair these problems are not theirs to fix.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Geronimo
What rig did you compare on? How did you compare?

It seems very strange that experiences with the two operating systems can be so completely at odds with each other.

Sometimes XP is the much faster OS and other times vista is the much faster OS?

Does anybody have a good link to some reliable benchmarking?

Benchmarks are kind of useless in a lot of ways. For gaming, drivers for Vista are very very different from XP's which are obviously more mature. Vista's performance delta from XP is rather negligible now and will be faster than XP once the drivers get as optimized as XP's are today. The reason for that is quite simple: DirectX has far lower CPU overhead in Vista than XP, by design.

And Vista is faster, where it matters in responsiveness. XP, even on dual or quad core systems, is still largely single-threaded. Vista is a fully multi-threaded OS, from input/output to the kernel to directx runtimes, etc. If you had a dual or quad core system, you'll notice a marked improvement in boot times, application responsiveness, etc.

The main problem is most applications were designed for XP right now, and drivers for XP are far more mature and optimized than Vista's. People who don't know any better will claim there's things fundamentally flawed with Vista because their FPS game is 5% slower in Vista with today's drivers, but those who understand how Vista works and where it's going don't pay any attention to those idiots.

[-Jrabbit]

Huh. I thought it was a humor piece.

People seem to be reacting very seriously to it...

[Asher]

Where's the humour if it's just reiterating something stupid people have said for a year with a straight face?

Maybe some people just have lower standards in humour than others.

[Geronimo]

How can a user best judge when to change from one OS to the next?

[Bkeela]

I remember being stuck with Windows 98, feeling envy for those with XP. Now with XP, I pity those with Vista.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Bkeela
I remember being stuck with Windows 98, feeling envy for those with XP. Now with XP, I pity those with Vista.

I think that pity is a bit misplaced. I still have XP on one of my work machines, and I loathe it compared to my Vista machines.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Asher

I think that pity is a bit misplaced. I still have XP on one of my work machines, and I loathe it compared to my Vista machines.

loathe it? It must have some appallingly glaring flaws that are impossible to overlook. I doubt I would even loathe having to use windows 3.1 again. What exactly incites your passion against xp on that rig?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Geronimo
loathe it? It must have some appallingly glaring flaws that are impossible to overlook. I doubt I would even loathe having to use windows 3.1 again. What exactly incites your passion against xp on that rig?

The fact that it uses GDI+ is enough. I'm a huge WPF whore, as a developer. So is my company.

The start menu in Vista is a huge improvement for me.

The single-threaded I/O slows down my whole system a lot when doing development work.

The lack of the breadcrumb navigation bar in the explorer window is annoying.

The new performance/reliability tracking features are amazing.

The interface is less responsive compared to Vista's as well. When you multitask as much as I do, it makes a noticable difference.

[Dis]

Can you get pirated versions of this? Or do I have to (shudder) pay for it?

[SlowwHand]

You can get pirated versions of anything. Vista would be real low on my priority list.

[CrONoS]

For someone who is not a power user;

WinXP with SP3 is a must-have.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Vista FTW

I'll also have to join the folks who prefer Vista and remember when XP was getting slammed in all corners when it came out.

[Blake]

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowadays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes.

QFMT