windows vista

[Sinitron]

i have never actually tried linux but if they have a distro called "yellow dog" then they must be badass

even though its home-made, shitty, and you cant run anything on it

here yellur yellur yrllur hrurr hrufughfu huv tht good dog yellur

[Nadroj0711]

so are you guys saying just to stick with XP, or get vista and wait it out until it's better

[Nadroj0711]

also, ssaf, can you customize laptops with newegg
this is probably a stupid question but I haven't really checked and I just want to make sure I can

[Irishman]

So, I haven't been here in quite some time, but I'll weigh in with my opinion.

1. Is Windows Vista an acceptable operating software?
2. If so, tell what you like about it. If not, leave this question blank.
3. If not, tell what you dislike about it/think is wrong with it. If you like it, leave THIS question blank.

It functions yes. Does it function well? Depends on the definition of well. Stable? Mostly. Quickly? Absolutely not. Vista is a huge resource hog. On a brand new computer, with a fresh install of vista, on the first boot up approximately 700 megabytes of memory will be taken up (1/3 of total memory for most decent laptops). And this is with nothing installed or running!

I worked tech support for a few weeks at the beginning of this year to help freshmen connect to the university network. I had to work on a brand new Vista machine running on the most recent Intel Core Duo model with 2 GB of memory. It took over a minute for it to start up (this time can be expected to more than double as programs are added to the computer). For contrast, my PC running XP with less memory on a slower processor starts up in 40 seconds or so (and shuts down in about a fourth of that). Regular usage of the computer (opening and closing programs, changing settings) was painfully slow (several second pause to do even basic things).

Vista also has the side affect of making a computer more expensive. Since it is so resource intensive, to get an experience commensurate with that of XP the hardware needs to be beefed up which greatly increases the cost of a new computer. And, Microsoft has it set so that as of January 2008 (next month) retailers are no longer allowed to sell computers with XP loaded on them. So then the bare-minimum, cheapest computer one can buy just became several hundred dollars more expensive.

Vista contains a lot of "features" that don't really do a lot to 'enhance' the user experience other than look pretty. Things are tarted up without adding much genuine additional functionality. Since I worked tech support on these machines I had the "opportunity" to navigate around in control panel. In my opinion, the control panel has been obfuscated. It is more difficult to find the proper settings. There are two different "views" for Control Panel, and for whatever reason when I was in one I could get to menus and programs that were not accessible from the other, and vise versa (and believe me, I looked for them exhaustively). I had to constantly switch views to find what I was looking for.

There is also the issue where it is harder to do a recovery in Vista. In XP, if core system files become corrupted (such as the SAM file, ntoskrnl.sys, the registry hive, etc.) such that the computer won't even start, one can boot from a live CD and simply copy the files from the system restore to the proper place and get things moving again. While in Vista a restore point is a single giant file and it is not possible to select particular files that you want to replace. So if there is some problem with the restore point, it may be completely impossible to do a restore (this happened to me while working on a Vista machine).

There is the additional issue of a lot of untested code, specifically the reimplemented TCP/IP stack (logical "layers" that manage communications between computers on a network [e.g. Internet]). The TCP/IP stack in XP has been beaten up, broken, and fixed for 6 years now. The code has become reliable and secure. But for Vista, Microsoft completely rewrote the stack and now there is all of this new code that hasn't been subjected to the same rigours that the stack in XP has. Though, admittedly, with the new software development cycle Microsoft is using, the stack they turned out is of higher quality than XP's originally was.

I won't even get into the ridiculous amounts of "Digital Rights Management" code they have built into the deepest levels of the kernel (main program that manages the hardware). Not to mention the absurd provisions in the license agreement [It says, in obscure legalese, that Microsoft reserves the right to see what you have on your computer and delete anything it thinks shouldn't be there. No joke.] I'll just point the curious to this (rather lengthy) article written by Peter Gutmann, a security researcher from Auckland, New Zealand.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html



4. If you said "no" to question 1, can you also let me know if/how it's possible to load a copy of XP onto a Vista laptop? If not, leave THIS question blank.

Of course it is. You can load any operating system you want. Any computer you can buy is "universal" in that it can run any program you can possibly conceive. And since an operating system is a giant program, any computer you can buy can run any operating system. In the strictest sense, this isn't true since one needs to make sure the operating system supports the hardware. Unless you're buying specialized hardware from Sun, IBM, or HP, most any computer you buy at a commercial retailer will be based on the x86 architecture and EVERY operating system supports that hardware. [As an aside, the x86 architecture was originally created by Intel but AMD has a functionally equivalent hardware architecture (to the best of my knowledge).] Since Apple made the switch from Motorolla chips to Intel chips you can lost XP (or even Vista!) on a Mac. So, given a laptop purchased in the usual sense (i.e. from a store) you can load Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, OS X (Jaguar or Leopard), any distrobution of Linux, any version of BSD Unix, and a few more.

To install an operating system to a computer you simply need an install disk. If you don't care about losing the data currently on the laptop, it is simplest to just wipe the disk when you install the operating system (this will be on of the steps) and install the operating system by itself (i.e. not dual boot).



5. Final question; Is it possible to take an old recovery disk for Windows XP and put it on a reformatted vista laptop and load on Windows XP as the OS? If not/you don't know, leave this question blank.

No. The recovery disk loads drivers specific to computer it originally came with. If you use it in a new computer the disk may even refuse to run after running some cursory checks to see if the current computer is "the same" as the one it is supposed to be linked with. If it does load the OS, then it is quite possible that a lot of things won't work, in which case you'd have to begin the arduous task of locating the malfunctioning drivers and replacing them with the proper ones (assuming it even boots!).


Over all, my recommendation would be to stick with XP over Vista. Everything runs on it (compatibility is almost never an issue) and it runs much quicker than Vista does. If possible, I would recommend switching to a Mac (though, those are developing their own issues security-wise) or Linux. The initial switch to Linux can be quite difficult, but using things typincally more foreign than difficult. Navigating around isn't too difficult. But getting some things to work properly (even when following the instructions!) can be a royal pain. As far as Linux has come, it still has a ways to go before being quite easy to use.

[anigen]

i kinda bought it a week ago lmao

sorry to make ya type all that dude

[Irishman]

Nah, I don't mind typing all that out. Gives me a chance to sort out things in my head ('til now my anti-vista facts were mostly ad-hoc and disorganized). And now you have a whole slew of reasons as to why a person shouldn't use Vista. Which can be quite useful in dealing with the Vista-fanboys (they are ever so irritating).