How many of you think Windows Vista is terrible?

Probably half of the friends & family that have vista have said that it performs worse than XP, the other half haven’t noticed any difference. From most 3rd party magazine articles I’ve read, you need more RAM to run Windows Vista at the same speed as XP with a smaller amount of RAM.

When my father-in-law purchased a new laptop he had the option of XP or Vista. I had no first-hand experience with Vista beyond a Microsoft dog and pony show I went to. I figured if he went with Vista he wouldn’t need to upgrade later. I helped him configure it with a nice CPU and plenty of RAM. It would have been a pretty smokin’ computer for XP. With Vista it is slow even with it tuned more for performance.

I think for most users XP is still the better choice.

I have had a bit of experience with Windows Vista, especially on laptops. If you have a laptop that is any less than 3.4GHz single core/1.7GHz dual core, or less than 1 Gb of Ram, its going to run as slow as a snail. A lot of laptops are trying to run Vista with 512Mb of Ram - it really isn’t enough, but with 1 Gb of Ram you really notice the difference in speed, and it becomes much more useable. Vista requires more grunt, so if your computer just meets recommended requirements, you’re going to have problems. Another problem with Vista is the many different versions - Home Basic was basically an attempt to get Vista to work with lesser-spec hardware, which gives it other issues. Also because it needs that grunt, it makes laptop batteries run out quicker than if the laptop was running XP. Desktops are generally gruntier, so they have less trouble trying to run Vista.

XP’s advantage is that it is 6 years old, and was designed to run on the computers of the time, so on todays computers it is lightning quick, and very stable since the bugs have pretty much been all ironed out. But its problem is that it is 6 years old - and its only going to get older, and more out of date. Microsoft are going to stop XP sales in the near future, so people won’t have a choice - Vista or nothing (unless you know what you’re doing and put Linux on. Or even better still, just buy a Mac!).

Vista isn’t all bad - running on a decent-spec computer, its quite nice and relatively stable (it certainly isn’t another Windows ME), but it will take time to settle down and become fully stable, and during that time hardware will have caught up and run Vista with ease, and all the compatibility issues will be ironed out. For now though, XP does seem to be the best way to go.

My daughter just bought a new Compaq laptop with Vista and she hates it. I have used it and I like it, but I prefer XP, probably just because that’s what I’ve gotten used to. Eventually we’ll probably all have to upgrade to Vista, but I’m not going to until I absolutely have to.