Vista Opinions

Does anyone have RC1? How is it?

I don't have it, but according to Paul Thurrott it is great, really great:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_rc1.asp

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_rc1_02.asp

And get this: Games work now. Actually, they don't just work; they now work just as fast as they do in Windows XP. This actually shocked me somewhat, but I'm running Half-Life 2 at 1920 x 1200 and getting great frame rates for my hardware. You couldn't even run Half-Life 2 on previous builds. It was just a disaster.
 
Meh.

Surely you understand why they hide the system files? Just imagine how much that dropped support costs around the world. The vast majority of people do not need to see those files or be able to manipulate them. Hell most people don't even want to be able to see extensions.

My boss at work, for example, has to rename bunches of JPGs daily. If extensions were shown she's screw up every 30th file and wouldn't notice. And I'd be asked why it wasn't working. Yay. Extensions are usually unnecessary and add complexity to tasks.

there's quite a number of free programs whose sole purpose is to rename files more efficiently, maybe your boss should use that.
 
I just went through the MS Vista features page. All I can say is: :devilish:

Damn me if I ever put this shite on my machine. Linux, Apple, here I come!
 
MS have pricing on their vista page now:

Vista Home Basic $199 Upgrade $99
Vista Home Premium $239 Upgrade $159
Vista Business $299 Upgrade $199
Vista Ultimate $399 Upgrade $259
 
there's quite a number of free programs whose sole purpose is to rename files more efficiently, maybe your boss should use that.

We're not talking a batch rename here. Just renaming individual JPEGs from a digital camera's format to the names of what's in the photos. We take hundreds of photos per day, keep maybe 50/day, of maybe a dozen new pieces of furniture per day. Why show extensions for that? That would be stupid. She never ever needs to see extensions.
 
Does anyone have RC1? How is it?

I'm using it right now (posting from Vista :p). It's working great, had a little trouble setting up my Raid0 array which I use for scratch disk and temp files, but finally got it working.

Almost everything else works fine and is really really fast (read:snappy), it uses lots of RAM (400mb at boot time), but never hang up so far although I did lots of things with the PC (install/uninstall software, re partition drives, etc). It looks really REALLY nice, which is a nice add-on. And the instant search feature (deployed everywhere on the system) is great, it reduces a lot the time it takes to go find stuff (even if you know where it was, I indexed most of my folders which I use regularly and getting somewhere just means WinKey+tag).

I can say that it's faster than XP (and it's not because it's a fresh install, the whole system is snappier, even WMP11 with 15000+ songs, IE7, Outlook 2007, etc).

I have installed it and didn't even install XP.
 
As anyone tried the 64bit version of RC1, Paul in that review says it's incompatability hell but also says its better than XP x64, yet I find XP x64 near perfect when it comes to compatibility. Its only the rare game and my tv card that doesnt work :???:
 
So who here is going to get RC1. Can you download it somewhere? Whats so bad about Vista I read buncha articles and heard only few bad thing just bugs and some Apps dont work with Vista and some do. Does anyone know when the final Vista will be out? Is it worth getting it or not???
 
So who here is going to get RC1. Can you download it somewhere? Whats so bad about Vista I read buncha articles and heard only few bad thing just bugs and some Apps dont work with Vista and some do. Does anyone know when the final Vista will be out? Is it worth getting it or not???

You can download it from here:

http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm

Even if you don't have a key, you can skip that step and still run it for 14 days.
 
It will be out in January, if it doesn't get delayed again.

I don't think it's worth using at all unless you can get it free, but that's just me.
 
I can say that it's faster than XP (and it's not because it's a fresh install, the whole system is snappier, even WMP11 with 15000+ songs, IE7, Outlook 2007, etc).

I have installed it and didn't even install XP.

faster than XP? Than freshly installed XP? No it isn't. Fast enough true.
Though i can't find drivers for on-board ADI1986 chip ;(, those coming ith the board (ASUS p5pl2) worked fine with beta1/2 but now RC tells me that i can't use unsigned drivers... maybe i was too tired in friday to find a workaround...

Oh, and I installed Rc1 x64 on D: , expecting to use dual boot with XP x32 (on C:, which primary active)...
on boot when i choosed XP, it failed, cursing ntldr ... recovery console + fixboot returned me to XP...
 
From what I had read with the Beta's the x64 version of Vista was slower then the 32-bit version....
 
Though i can't find drivers for on-board ADI1986 chip ;(, those coming ith the board (ASUS p5pl2) worked fine with beta1/2 but now RC tells me that i can't use unsigned drivers... maybe i was too tired in friday to find a workaround...

The 64 bit version of Vista will not accept unsigned drivers, this was pureposefully done on the request of big media so they can lock down their hardware and software DRM better. They basically seem to have given up on the 32 bit version, apparently future media won't support it.

Just use standard Vista.
 
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Running RC1 and having a nice time with it. Runs very nice apart from the fact that I can't run any games unless I use the default drivers with it (which runs really slow). Seems theres an issue with the X1600 and the RC1 drivers from ATI. Any game will have almost half the screen filled with garbage. A bunch of people reporting it over on Rage3D as well.

A screenshot showing the effect.

Anyone else experiencing this?
 
I had the fabulous IE7 crash on me within 1 minute of first trying it, trying to download Firefox :)
 
I have played a little Oblivion on a X1900GT, It seems a little slower on Vista, but can't say for sure that it really is. IE is pretty fast, running 32bit RC1.
 
I've just installed Vista x64, its pretty fast but keeps drilling out my hard drive and looking at the performance monitor it looks like its the serch index which is doing it but cant seem to disable it. (Pretty much like everything else, does the user have any control what so ever?)

Also tried to install creative dirvers until thousands of popups saying vista cant install these drivers because they dont have driver signatures, so I went about searching for a way to disable it, seems you have to press F8 at boot up to get rid of that stupid enforced driver signature. (What a load of CRAP!) I certainly hope that is permanent solution, dont want to be going through all that fuss just to install something on MY PC!

Still havnt got creative drivers to work yet, gonna have to uninstall it and install it again, not quite in the mood yet.

Hope they sort this user control stuff out, because if not, me actually buying vista is getting awfully close to a fairytale.
 
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In the Hard Drive properties, you can turn off indexing.

Its not that feature. Found the one what was annoying me in services, called windowsearch, I was looking for something along the lines of search indexer before so didnt see it.

Also tried a reinstall of the creative drivers with the enforced driver signature turned off but still doesnt work, and the F8 solution only works once, so you have to press it everytime you boot up otherwise the device with unreconginised driver signature will not work. Thats still the most annoying feature up to now.

And my hard drive still gets drilled, only for around thr first 10 mins after boot, so gonna leave that and say its due to being beta, with the indexer on it just kept going so I got some improvement by turning it off.

As for gaming performance, it around 4 - 6 fps difference in some of the benchmarks and games i've played, so not to bad, thats with the the catalyst drivers on ati's site.

Overall I still prefer XP, theres to many sub menus and favorite menus and quick search menus and menus there just because they could sqeeze them in on vista. I just dont like all these menus :mad: They make everything look very cluttered imo
 
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