Reply to: MS Vista on new laptop

[xoggoth]

I have mentioned this before but worth repeating.

Keep one user account just to do all your instals on. Half the time they will screw something else up, BUT, if you actually use another account you will probably find it works ok. On my screwup account, I cannot see png files in IE, the scanner won't work and Excel takes a minute to open and crashes on close. On this account I have none of these problems. Doesn't seem to lock up as much either.

[Svalbaard]

I recently bought a Toshiba P200-156 for work pre loaded with Vista home premium as a replacement for my ageing Vaio. It came with 2Gb memory as standard and a 200Gb SATA HDD and I have had no problems with it, or Vista whatsoever. Whilst I hate the way that Vista tries to be too helpful, and that you can't smash Windows defender with a hammer, and that compared to XP - even with 2Ghz under the bonnet... Vista runs like a dog; from a purely technical POV - setting up my home network, transferring all of my files and settings from my other computer and connecting to other perhiperals has been a breeze and I don't see what all the fuss is about?

The only downside with it, although I think it to be a problem with most laptops running Vista is that if you want to upgrade the RAM to 4Gb (which seems advisable) Vista can only actually use about 3.4Gb max, an architectural limitation of the 32bit O/S or something like that and the Toshiba only upgrades in matched pairs, so you'd be wasting 0.5Gb of RAM.

I also took the opportunity to free myself from the Microsoft Office "grasp" and have gone for all open apps. such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Zone Labs F/W and PC Tools AV and am happy with the results.

Anyway, hope this helps.

[Diver]

Strange though!
I am using XP on another system, and I miss the layout on Vista.
Maybe I need a Reboot or a reformat

[chef]

well, vista update...

got it working all spangly and nice.. even got the tuner card and Media Center working and oooohhd and aaaaahhhhd at its lovely new features.. for 2 whole days

then i changed channel from BBC1 to Channel 4 and it told me i didnt have a fecking tv card installed.. reboot, reboot again, it detected tv card, scanned for channels, none found... motherf###ing pile of tulipe

uninstalled tv card, reboot, reinstalled, nope nothing..

even after the hardware upgrades and the huge ball ache of getting this far (i.e no tv unless I start rewiring the room) im now considering abandoning the whole thing and going back to a fresh XP MCE install... what a complete and utter stupid idea and waste of time vista has been..

<chef goes and looks for a tree branch to give vista a damn good thrashing>

[Diver]

update!
sunday morning Vista crashed, then crashed again, and again.
reboot to the blue screen of death.
Full harware dags, with 4 different diag progs, all passes.
OS reload no joy
Reformat drive, won't let me,
nothing in Dells little book of tricks, including their techies on the phone trying to sort it out (by trying almost everything I have already tried)
I even tried force feeding it from an external HD.
Is it Dell or is it Vista?
Who cares. Dell can sort the damned thing out, that's why there's a warant'eek

[xoggoth]

It worked for me to start with Diver. That is the thing with Vista, something new stops working every week for no discernable reason and because there is no working system restore the only eventual solution is a complete reinstall. I can see that being about every 3 months. PNG was last week's problem. Excel has always crashed on shutdown but this week the files have started taking ages to open. Next week? Who knows? Of course you can always avoid the problems by not installing any other software.

And regardless of what beans says .net is a pile of overbloated crap too. Visual Studio takes an entire morning to install. My software used to take half a minute to install with DLLs, now users have to fanny about clicking more boxes and waiting ages for it to instal the .net framework.

[wxman]

What is more of a concern (for M$) is that NONE of my corporate clients are going to roll out Vista period!

After review thay just can not see the advantage of vista? not least with the hardware spec required and all this IP6 thing?

IMO Vista is like Windows ME - and look what happend to that OS

[Diver]

It gives you trivial extra gimics in return for extra flakiness and slowness. The machine locks up two or three times a day. Some problems appear to have no solutions, I cannot view any png files in IE7 at the moment and hours spent on net have given me no clues. As system restore does not even work I cannot just rollback as I would have done on XP. I have to use it as developing s/w for sale, if you do not have to use it, avoid.

Curiosity just made me check this out.
I can view png in all its glory. Strange!
Something actually works right

[Diver]

Sorry to hear this Chef.

I think, from your experience, and some others I have heard of, Vista is OK if purchased on a new unit - another way for the hardware vendors to fleece you.

Boolianlocks!

I have a 12 week old Dell Dimension,

Version 6.0.6000 Build 6000
System Manufacturer Dell Inc.
System Model Dell DXP061
System Type X86-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz, 1861 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Dell Inc. 2.3.1, 23/03/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Total Physical Memory 2,045.32 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.07 GB
Total Virtual Memory 4.22 GB
Available Virtual Memory 3.24 GB

And it hates Vista more than I did.
The only Antivirus/Anti spyware that doesnt cause problems with hang time and file transfer is Microsoft One care.
You have to disable most of the auto update functions on everything.
If you run windows defender in conjunction with one care you get freezing.

I use my laptop running XP most of the time.

Maybe one day bill gates will sell us something to make it work as it's supposed to.

[xoggoth]

It gives you trivial extra gimics in return for extra flakiness and slowness. The machine locks up two or three times a day. Some problems appear to have no solutions, I cannot view any png files in IE7 at the moment and hours spent on net have given me no clues. As system restore does not even work I cannot just rollback as I would have done on XP. I have to use it as developing s/w for sale, if you do not have to use it, avoid.

[DimPrawn]

Do not go down the Vista path until SP1 or even SP2 is well bedded in.

So at least 1 to 2 yrs.

XP is good enough, unless you have a laptop with quad cores and 64GB RAM

[Dark Black]

W2K is slow as old dogs...takes forever to boot up.

You'd be surprised how quick you can it to boot if you remove all the unecessary services that are activated by default

XP is quicker yes, but not by much.

[Let-Me-In]

Wouldn't install on my worst enemy's PC nver mind my own...

My OSs of choice are currently Win2k (main PC and Laptop) and various flavours of Linux (other old laptop and PCs).

Works for me, solid as houses

Win2k is the newest MS offering I will ever use. XP is rubbish

W2K is slow as old dogs...takes forever to boot up. XP is pretty stable but I prefer Mac OS X...

[Dark Black]

Wouldn't install on my worst enemy's PC nver mind my own...

My OSs of choice are currently Win2k (main PC and Laptop) and various flavours of Linux (other old laptop and PCs).

Works for me, solid as houses

Win2k is the newest MS offering I will ever use. XP is rubbish

[cykophysh39]

Well so far, My new Toshie with Vista installed is working like a charm.

The only 2 complaints I have is, Occassionally the Screen in Visual Studio 2005 doesn't repaint properly. And when I change windows in VS and Click the Cursor to a space and start typing is iit normally start displaying letters in previous 2 spaces from where I originally placed the cursor.

But I think these might actually be Visual Studio bugs rather than Visat bugs. Although I have only experienced them on the vista platform thus far.