An actual dialog in my house

[Lum]

Me: (stares at my screen while Vista SP1 slowly installs itself)  God, I hate Vista.

My wife: Why are you using it?

Me: I don't know.

My wife: You're just a glutton for punishment.

(cat walks in insouciantly)

Me: Cat, why am I using Vista?

Cat: Meow.

Me: Guess I've been told.

My wife: I think she said the same thing I did.

Me: But she used fewer words.

[rk47]

did it do this?

[Lum]

No, just gave a "silly human" Meow.

[Ironwood]

I often wonder why anyone is using Vista.  Please to come up with a reason.

[rk47]

yep, wondering about that too, even my office insist the Dell computers be XP installed, avoid a lot of headaches and confusion with the staff that way.
So unless you really must use Vista or someone will kill your cat; then you shouldn't. I probably wait a year till nobody makes games for XP anymore.

[Oban]

People use Vista because it comes pre-installed on new systems.

Trying to track down drivers and such to downgrade and install XP is such a pain in the arse too.

Vista, Windows Me for a new generation!

[Signe]

Why do people listen to country music?  Why?

[Tebonas]

Because its the music of pain!

[Engels]

Originally because I was one of the hapless few who thought that maybe, just maybe, DX10 was going to be widespread and improve the shiny on games. Now I still use it in part because I can't be bothered to revert back to XP and partly because I do end user support for a bunch of folks who end up using Vista, so I might as well get used to it.

[Miasma]

I only bought it for dx10.  The reward of imperceptibly better fog in a tiny number of games really hasn't been worth all of the headaches and configuration problems though...  I could not imagine using this pig at work where I actually have to get stuff done.  I even went out and bought an external hard drive and imaging software and made a snapshot of my system so that I never have to configure all that bullshit again.

YOU WILL ALL EVENTUALLY JOIN US IN VISTA HELL YOU POOR SUCKERS.  Either that or grow a neckbeard and install linux.

[Daeven]

I often wonder why anyone is using Vista.  Please to come up with a reason.

Because Vista 64 has significantly higher faster disk i/o and memory access times than xp or Vista 32.

What I don't get is why in all that is holy anyone on the planet would even consider getting vista 32. And that wacky, resource hog of a UI they like to use. If you have to get Vista, get 64. Otherwise do not bother. Seriously.


And if all that fails, there is always room for an Unbutu partition.

[Samwise]

Because Vista 64 has significantly higher disk i/o and memory access times than xp or Vista 32.

I very much hope you meant to say "lower" or "better" or "faster"...

[Selby]

My brand new Dell XPS 420 came with Vista only because I couldn't delete an operating system from the option list (the tech support was no help in this either).  I didn't even bother booting it up, I blew away the partition as soon as I could.  I hit the forums and made several different slipstream packages and *bam* had an XP installed Dell computer.  So now I have a brand new computer that isn't running *as heavy* a resource hog as Vista, and the only thing that doesn't work on it is the little MiniView icon browser that is on the top of the case (no loss).

I seriously would have installed Windows 2000 if MS was still supporting it.  I ran NT4.0 for years once I found out about the unstable buggy mess that '95 was and upgraded to 2k as soon as it came out.  I only run XP because computers are now fast enough to support it without too many issues which wasn't the case when it was brand new.  And it has a pictures screen saver built in, which I am a sucker for.

[Viin]

I have Vista 32bit, though I think I might reinstall with Vista 64bit. I was worried about compatibility with 32bit apps but I haven't heard of any issues. Why Vista? Why not? It's really not any worse than XP. Just looks funnier.

[Samwise]

Why Vista? Why not? It's really not any worse than XP. Just looks funnier.

The last time I looked at XP vs Vista gaming benchmarks, they disagreed with you.

[Viin]

The last time I looked at XP vs Vista gaming benchmarks, they disagreed with you.

I've heard that Vista SP1 brought gaming performance on par with XP SP3 - but I haven't found any solid benchmarks yet.

I also haven't found any that compares Vista 64bit to XP 32bit, do you know of some?

PS - most of the xp vs vista (all 32bit) benchmarks I've seen were with the very initial release of vista (and not even the burned copy, but the copy they release to devs) so I'm sure it's gotten better through patching.

[Samwise]

PS - most of the xp vs vista (all 32bit) benchmarks I've seen were with the very initial release of vista (and not even the burned copy, but the copy they release to devs) so I'm sure it's gotten better through patching.

The initial release was the one that MS was counting on to win people over, so you have to figure they weren't exactly sandbagging its performance.

It's entirely possible that it's gotten better since then, of course, but that's not something that I'd take for granted.

[Tebonas]

After extensive patching it might be just as fast as the old OS, thats a rather weak endorsement. Usually you get something new because its better.

[Sir T]

"Hey guys. If you spend 300 on a new OS and $1000 on hardware upgrades, you can have a computer that runs as fasr as your old machine and be closer to heaven by having less money!!!"

I'm deadly serious. Those benchmarking tests were done on different computerts. The vista one was much higher spec...

XP is the last Microsoft OS I will ever own. The linux emulations are getting so close now its not worth the agony of Vista.

[Lantyssa]

Vista SP1 had around a 10% performance boost.  As it was lagging behind XP, that's not a ringing endorsement.

[Ironwood]

Why do people listen to country music?  Why?

"We have both types of music;  Country AND Western !"

[rattran]

If you have 8gig of ram, vista64 is a much better choice than xp64.
Just turn off UAC and aero and all the other stupid shit.

[Fabricated]

I've been using Vista for some months now and it's alright. I haven't really noticed any problems gaming. Interface I can take or leave. There's some stuff I like and some stuff I don't.

Edit: Also, the reason why I'm using Vista is because I got a free copy of Vista Ultimate from my university and figured what the hell. The extras are retarded. Looping video backgrounds, EFS/Bitlocker, and A Texas Hold'em Game! Also, 2 new sound sets. Wooo!

[CmdrSlack]

I have Vista on my laptop. I purposely got the laptop without a proper 3D card so I could use it solely for working on stuff. As far as being an OS which can load MS Office apps, CD and DVD burning utilities, Firefox, and the random SP games that I have on there, it's fine with me. Some older games must be run in a compatibility mode, but that's fine too.

I wouldn't want to really have to fool with Vista for a gaming rig, but mine is pretty much obsolete at this point. I might be able to upgrade it a bit to make it less prehistoric, but I'll probably get to find out how "fun" Vista is on a gaming rig sooner or later.

[Murgos]

I've been running Vista since the new year.  I really haven't had a problem with it.

Supposedly, Aero turns off automatically if you run a game that needs the resources.  Though I don't know if that includes in windowed mode.  Regardless I was running Eve with the new client and bells and whistles and all in a window while doing umpty other things without seeing a problem with an older single core Athlon processor and an AGP video card.

[HaemishM]

I'm on Vista now at work. It's shiny. I haven't really had too many problems with it, once I turned off the fucking search indexing. The persons who wrote Vista's search indexing features should be anally raped by rabid voles. There is no reason to thrash my hard drive that hard when I'm doing fuckall with the computer. The biggest problems I've had with Vista are from Adobe Design Premium CS3, which is a bitch to install and apparently on Vista will just randomly shit itself for no good reason (a bug Adobe knows of but hasn't been able to fix reliably yet). I put that one on fucking Adobe.

I've figured out something about Vista. If you are upgrading from an XP machine, DON'T. Windows upgrades have always been shitty shit shit shit and Vista is the worst of the lot. If you are buying a brand spanking new computer with hardware built for Vista, you are safe(r) going with Vista than you would be upgrading. Also, have shittons of RAM.

[Morat20]

I've figured out something about Vista. If you are upgrading from an XP machine, DON'T. Windows upgrades have always been shitty shit shit shit and Vista is the worst of the lot. If you are buying a brand spanking new computer with hardware built for Vista, you are safe(r) going with Vista than you would be upgrading. Also, have shittons of RAM.

Got my wife a laptop that came with Vista. A coworker assured me I wanted to upgrade to 2G of RAM, minimum. REALLY glad I took his advice. It's a low-end laptop and once we had her running in user mood, the UAC shit wasn't a problem.

I plan a full-up desktop replacement next year or so, and will probably go extra-heavy on the RAM. Really can't have too much of that stuff with Windows systems.

[kaid]

I would never install vista on something that had 1 gb of ram or less. Vista itself will eat up a good chunk of a gig all by itself let alone trying to run any programs.

[Kitsune]

I use Vista specifically for UAC; this thing's virus-proof like a cast-iron bitch as long as you don't go and disable its security.  As for its performance, I installed Vista at the same time as a big hardware upgrade, so I'm still getting better performance than my old XP machine.  As long as you have a multi-core processor and at least two gigs of RAM, Vista runs great.