I am actually getting used to Windows Vista, and I have to tell you, other than when I install programs, this thing is just blazing fast and really quite simple to use. I am not sure how much of my appreciation of this is due to the fact that for the past six months to a year I have been dealing with near constant BSOD’s on my old desktop, so anything is a step in the right direction, but so far it seems fast, easy to use, and programs for work which took a lot of time to load and were jerky on the old computer are running really well. I guess the real test will be SPSS and Photoshop.
I also went out and bought a new sound card and some Harman Kardon Soundsticks, and music sounds great (Have I pimped Pandora lately?).
At any rate, here is an open thread for you all, and we have not had this up for a while so look at how much we have raised this year:
I will be back later.
harlana pepper
Dammit, not sayin a thing. All my rants got EPU’d!
harlana pepper
I don’t unnerstand all the compooter talk, but I’m hoping it means the Pajamas Media ad comes down.
:)
I know, I busted myself.
Krista
I’m also one of those weirdos who doesn’t mind Vista. I have it on my office computer, and it took some getting used to, as did Office ’07, but I’m able to work quite happily with both.
I do want to get a new video card for my home computer though and an extra Gb of memory. Second Life is just running way too slow and choppy for me and it’s pissing me off.
Geeno
I haven’t had any problems with Vista. It runs just fine for me, too. People keep telling me how bad it is, but I’m just not seeing it.
Jon H
Last X-mas I picked up a closeout $99 Panasonic 5.1 speaker system made to work with the XBox 360. It works fine with my MacBook Pro via the optical out. The system’s amp has two optical digital inputs, a coax digital input, and analog audio inputs, along with a radio tuner. It also has an automatic surround-tuning microphone dealie.
I’m pretty happy with it, especially for the price.
Kevin
I like my Vista as well. Once I found the “add/remove” programs that is. It is just so much faster then my old XP. Starting up and shutting down my computer takes less then a minute now. My shutdown used to take ridiculously long.
But Excel in office 07 is complete garbage. As someone who uses Excel on a daily basis at work, I can’t understand why they got rid of the easy to use menu bar and replaced it with that annoying ribbon that never seems to have what you need. I hate it and I don’t see businesses ever switching over.
Mary
Vista seems to work fairly smoothly on new computers (as long as you don’t have any orphan programs that can’t deal with it, as my sister found out last year), but it’s the people upgrading from XP who usually have the heartache.
Deborah Testa
SPSS? Are you a statistician? I’m a SAS person myself.
redwards95
Vista works fine for running applications like Firefox, Office, or games. If you are an experienced, tech savvy user like me, it can be a pain to do anything in it that involves adjusting a setting in Windows or working with files and folders since Microsoft changed the ui for doing all of that and added new layers to prevent casual users from getting at advanced features.
The Moar You Know
Win. One of the best sounding consumer audio items out there.
If you ever want to step up to what us musicians use in our recording studios, these are like listening to the voices of the angels. At $650 each, they aren’t cheap, but my oh my do they sound good.
NoahC
I bought a Vista box about 9 months ago because I wanted a new computer. I fully intended to wipe the hard drive and install XP and Linux.
Of course, laziness prevailed and after wiping the hard drive I didn’t want to go searching for the XP/Ubuntu discs. I reinstalled Vista without the AOL free trials and whatnot.
Yada yada, nine months later the machine has crashed only 2 times. Not bad for the first iteration of the OS. Certainly less than the Mac with Leopard that I use for work.
The Other Steve
What a terrific coincidence! The Mojave Experiment website was released today.
Microsoft disguised Vista as Mojave, the next version of Windows, and then asked people who claimed to hate Vista what they thought. The results… they were impressed with this Mojave.
Preconceived notions are bad.
The Other Steve
I honestly haven’t used Excel 07, but Word 07 is ten times better than Word 2003. Mainly because I think they hired some graphic artists to come up with the default templates. The ribbon, in my view, as someone who doesn’t use these products a lot, I find it easier. I could see if you used it daily, change would be bad.
broca
Just a heads up, when you install SPSS you will also need to install an update from their website- otherwise you will get a message that you do not have the appropriate license when using SPSS.
EnderWiggin
I spent a day watching furniture be delivered, and got a good way through my current non-fiction read. I HIGHLY recommend everyone go forth an read The Big Sort. Unlike the idiotic ‘answers’ that pundits on TV give, this is possibly the best explanation for the level of crazy we now deal with.
Svensker
Vista works fine, so long as you’re not trying to use your favorite old program with it. Then, bad words ensue. Hilarity not so much.
The Moar You Know
Mr. Tech Savvy User, the easiest way to deal with this heartburn is simply to disable UAC:
Disable UAC
and here’s a bunch of Vista tuning tweaks for y’all: Black Viper’s Tuning Tweaks
The Other Steve
I have a Rotel integrated amp and a pair of PSB Century 500 speakers on my main development rig, all about 11 years old. It’s my old stereo which I replaced a few years ago with a surround sound system.
I’m spoiled.
rumpole
Funny. This is the first time that I’ve ever seen a casual user write anything nice about Vista. (I switched to a mac 2 years ago for work, and have no plans to come back. Then again, I’m still on the old version of office, so I don’t have a lot of the new headaches.). My colleagues that have upgraded to Vista spent a lot of time exploring the syntax of the f bomb. That does, however, seem to have subsided.
The Other Steve
Tech savvy users don’t know how to use google. It’s a known fact. :-)
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Photoshop should work perfectly on Vista. I have Photoshop CS installed on a 64-bit machine and it is teh awesome.
Jon H
“Microsoft disguised Vista as Mojave, the next version of Windows, and then asked people who claimed to hate Vista what they thought. The results… they were impressed with this Mojave.”
So, basically, Microsoft let people use Vista on an optimally-configured, optimally chosen bit of hardware, with an optimally chosen selection of compatible software, and it worked fine?
Hell, if they’re going to have the user starting from scratch, they might as well put them in front of a Mac.
The bad rep Vista has is largely because of the problems people have had when trying to use it with hardware or software they already own. And possibly due to conflicts with shitty crapware installed by vendors when they got Vista on a new machine.
Andrew
Vista is quantifiably slower than XP on identical hardware, and is unusable without a fairly substantial machine.
The sound driver model is completely screwed up.
The drivers are not particularly comprehensive.
Backwards compatibility is not guaranteed. Ahem.
UAC. Disaster.
All this and more with a mere 6 years of development! One would hope that folks have slightly higher expectations for a new OS than, “It has pretty buttons and runs about the same as the old one.”
cleek
i’ve had Vista machines for two years and have never been unable to find a driver.
4tehlulz
“You know, I think Me has had a bad rap; let’s try something similar with XP…”
M.Z. Forrest
I use Vista at home. I built a box for it. Intel Core2 Quad Precessor. 2.4Ghz. 1 GB RAM. It runs fine for me. I’m not impressed with Office 2007 as an administrator. The users do find it ‘pretty’ though. From where I sit, it seems a lot of the issues are people just undersizing their machines. Microsoft could have helped that issue by upping the min spec, but then they were getting complaints about it being too big already. Whether it works for Msft or not, they aren’t going to compete in the Linux space or against free. Hence, they aren’t going to get into a competition to see if they can have the smallest footprint or the simplest box.
The Other Steve
I’m running Vista Ultimate as a media center on a machine that has a Asus P5E-VM Intel G35 motherboard, and a Pentium E2200 CPU, with 2 Gigs of RAM. The G35 has built in Intel graphics. Vista runs great, even with Aero features on. The CPU is like the lowest end Intel cpu you can buy at around $85. Total cost for the hardware, with a 500 Gig drive was around $400.
Hardly what I would call a substantial machine.
I always get a kick out of people who claim hardware requirements are steep. I started out computing on a VIC-20 with 5K of RAM. Times change. I bought 8 Gigs of RAM recently for what it cost me to buy 1 Gig only a few years ago.
jeffreyw
I’m running Vista on a Dell e1705 and have had some printer issues, a Lexmark I was using on an XP desktop refused to install because of driver issues, the Lexmark driver download site offered a driver said to be for Vista but it didn’t work, a Dell tech walked me through over an hour of tweaks and outright yanks but finally gave up. I went with an HP network enabled model and it works fine.
Another problem that I was attributing to Vista turned out to be a bad hard drive, replaced for free under Dell’s warranty. The security center nags were swiftly taken care of, as described in comments above.
I don’t use this machine for anything other than web browsing. I would install Vista again without a qualm.
The Moar You Know
ME was written on the 95/98 codebase; XP was written on the Win2K code. ME was doomed to fail for this reason alone; it was not a bad OS, with some nice features…when it ran.
Agreed. I think I’ve had one fairly inconsequential piece of software not run on it (an older version of Macromedia’s RoboHelp). No other compatibility issues. I even successfully installed Office 2k on it, which is not supposed to work, but it does.
An above complaint about sound drivers is a valid point; right now, I’m still using an older machine for my music work. But in the grand scheme of things, very few folks are fundamentally affected by this – their sound cards still work. That they don’t work properly is of concern only to people doing audio production.
jj
I bought a new machine with Vista about two months ago and have been bracing myself for dealing with a horrible, inefficient OS.
Instead I’ve had zero problems and have been enjoying rather snappy performance from my Vista box.
Sure, the UAC is annoying and the OS interface is a bit flash for my tastes but otherwise, this machine does everything my tweaked XP box could do, Office, Photoshop and of course WOW, only with better crash recovery (I have bad power in my house right now) and better multitasking.
So far Vista is a winner in my book.
When my wife gets her new Mac, I will be able to do a side-by-side comparison with Leopard.
Darkness
Bwa hah hah, the clever plan has succeeded . . . your expectations were lowered to frat-house toilet level and now you are happy with the new product.
What amazes me, is MS manages to do this EVERY round of OS, for decades. Stunning. And Jobs is one considered to have the power to warp reality.
jj
No. I needed a new computer. I was told the preinstalled OS would suck, so I was prepared to do complete wipe and install an older, more established OS.
As it turned out, the preinstalled OS didn’t suck, so that’s half a day I don’t have to spend rebuilding my box.
Yay for me.
Boo for Mac/Linux trolls.
cleek
did i mention that i also use my Vista desktop to do audio mastering ?
Andrew
Almost everyone with hardware audio, particularly multi-channel, got screwed by Vista.
John Cole
Been a little under 24 hours, but I am just as impressed with this machine as I was my new mac last year. It just
My sound card seems to work well. Shrug.
chopper
pfft. newbie.
Dreggas
Like I said I love my vista machine. I want to get the 64 bit version of the OS though to really take advantage of my 64 bit proc and to handle more memory but there’s the issue of games working on 64 bit so I haven’t yet. I know newer games work on both so might have to ditch my old games.
Also play with Windows Media Center. Lots of goodies like Music Videos and such there. If you have an nVidia card, nVidia has a widget for the widget bar to keep you up to date on drivers as well.
The Moar You Know
So do I. And it works just fine.
Errr, no, not “almost everyone”. A few people did. And frankly, if you are one of them, you should not buy that brand of hardware in the future – Vista didn’t screw you, Microsoft didn’t screw you, the company that made your hardware, took your money, and then decided to not support future iterations of the OS platform it runs on screwed you. Badly.
Those makers thought they would be able to skate by using the same drivers that they’d been using since the Win98 or 2K days – a gamble that paid off nicely with XP. But they can’t ask that technology not improve! When it did, and they were called on to actually do some work to justify their income, they instead shrugged their shoulders, blamed the OS maker, and left their customers holding a bag full of shit.
Andrew
Well, I should hope that NEW machines do work. Like someone said earlier, most of the problems were with upgrades (though lots of Vista machines were very under-equipped).
Again, the point is that you’re paying for a Microsoft product that gives you basically no useful new functionality over their 5 year old OS. Everything you are happy with seems to be a function of the new hardware.
NoahC
“Everything you are happy with seems to be a function of the new hardware.”
Right, except for the part where the machine *never* crashes.
nightjar
My first computer came with ME, which came with enough bugs to feed an army of Bats. When I bought the computer I have now, with XP, it was deliverance of profound magnitude. Happy as a clam with XP.
The Other Steve
They said the same thing about XP. But the more I used XP, the more I realized was missing from 2000. Same has been true with Vista compared to XP.
If there were no useful new functionality, then why do I miss stuff when I go back to XP?
electroglodyte
John,
Pardon me if I missed something here, but are you still using the iMac? Are you running Windows Vista on the Mac or did you get rid of it?
Beej
Doesn’t it all depend to some extent on which version of Vista you have? I’ve heard lots of cussing from Vista Home Basic users, but I have no complaints at all about my Vista Home Premium. Don’t know about Office
John S.
Vista can kiss my ass.
After over a decade of hating Apple, I’m making the switch. Never mind that as a graphic design professional I should have already been on Mac, but I was a holdout.
I have an Intel Core2 Quad with 4gb of RAM and Vista Business, and all my Adobe CS3 applications run like dog shit.
Andrew
An up-to-date XP on a new or recent machine doesn’t crash very often either. I have good uptime on dozens of XP machines. Stability is primarily a function of good drivers and lack of crapware.
Like what? Besides aero, I see almost no interesting or useful feature differences between XP and Vista. XP actually had some substantial, fundamental improvements over 2000, primarily aimed at the end-user.
tBone
My setup’s very similar and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time cursing Vista. I put most of CS3’s problems squarely on Adobe, though. If there were any credible competitors to Photoshop, I’d drop their customer-fucking bloatware in a heartbeat.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Noah
Did you hear? John McCain set a timetable for defeat last night!
http://novemberblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/john-mccain-sets-timetable-for-defeat.html
John Cole
Adobe is just a kick in the dick. Every time I open photoshop on my mac, I have to download a damned update. By far, it is the slowest loading program on my computer.
John S.
Absolutely.
Not that CS2 was without it’s bugs, but CS3 is just so utterly fucked up. Illustrator crashes on me at random ALL the time. Photoshop locks up regularly. InDesign crashes unexpectedly. And don’t even get me started on that fucking Adobe Bridge.
Sadly, those cockholes have a monopoly.
Ed Marshall
John, for shits and giggles pull a stick of memory out and see what happens.
Synuclein
OK — You can tell I’m a Mac person when I had to do “the google” on BSOD….
Wow, it must suck to run a PC regularly (I still have to for work…but they’re currently beta’ing Leopard and I’m crossing my fingers…)
MikeL
Richard Cohen from the Washington Post has a question
“”Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire,” I asked a prominent Democrat.”
Does beating Hillary count?
rachel
Vista is quantifiably slower than Linux, too.
The Other Steve
Better hibernation support, better power management, improved dialog prompts, I like the sidebar… The start menu is faster and more intelligent. automated disk defragmentation, improved security, IIS7 versus 6. The list just goes on and on.
Just the fact that you can do user switching while connected to a domain is enough for me.
Dayv
I picked up iphones for my wife and myself this week, and I have to say — Pandora is *the* killer app for it in both our minds. There’s a lot to like about it, but the Pandora app is amazing.
On the other hand, I’d be *so* much happier with it if it supported copy/paste.
dougie smooth
last.fm is far superior to Pandora.