Windows XP vs Windows Vista

Windows XP or Windows Vista?

  • Windows XP FTW

    Votes: 18 46.2%

  • Windows Vista FTW

    Votes: 9 23.1%

  • Windows 7 RC1 FTW

    Votes: 12 30.8%
  • Total voters
    39
arch5

arch5

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Title says it all.

Provide reasons, not just "ZOMGZOMGZOMGZOMG WINDOWS XP IZ T3H H4X0R 0$!!!1111"

I currently have Windows Vista, and I like it.
A lot.
But then again, I do have a powerful PC....
 
XP because it does all I want it to, which wont last for too much longer. I want to try 7 soon, but first I'll get a new hard drive so I can dump my files there before clearing this drive.
 
I have Vista on my main machine. But TBH I haven't noticed any difference good or bad over XP. Granted it's way past when Nvidia had driver issues and other things were not quite up to par on Vista.
EXCEPT...I don't like that some menus and options are organized are differently without doing so for improvement! Just something more to get used to. :\
 
Asus said:
Win7 RC1?
Click to expand...

This.

Although I personally wouldn't pay for Windows, seeing as I currently only use it to play games or run an application or two. I'll probably use the Windows 7 Release Candidate until it expires next year, and then either switch to Windows Server 2008 (tis a freebie) or go back to Windows XP x64.
 
Win 98 FTW! best OS M$ ever released and I would have loved it if all they did was slightly upgrade that OS from time to time
 
XP, because it does everything I want and then some.

Nothing against Vista, but I'd never had any need to make the switch over or dual-boot. I'm not an OS fanboy, I really don't give a damn about the OS as long as it works properly.

I'll probably just get Vista on my next brand new build, which won't be for a long time (2 to 3 years?) by which then, Win7 and it's first Service Pack will be out, making Vista pointless.
 
Vista. Vista rocks my cock. But yes, it will become obsolete after win7.
 
ok, so i voted for what i have (vista).


but i honestly dont know the difference.
 
i got a shitty laptop which allowed for vista on the bare minimum so i really didnt get a good experience with it. now i use xp media center with the royale theme and it looks the same but runs better.
 
for the moment. XP will continue to be the most used in the professional and business world, however, when win 7 is actually released for resale, there will be a large conversion to it. unlike with vista.
win 7 shows much promise, but its not there just quite yet
 
I use XP atm, but I need to make a decision what I'll use on a laptop that I'll be receiving hopefully next week. It comes with Vista, but I'm thinking of getting rid of it to install XP, since I've heard stories of crap performance (in games especially).

For one, my friend, who bought his laptop about 1,5 year ago, said that he had bad performance in games on Vista and the issue went away after he switched to XP. And the specs were nice - Core 2 Duo T5550 (1,83Ghz), 8800GTS, 4GB RAM.

How has the situation changed during this 1,5 year? Were there any performance fixes? Or could that performance be caused by bad Nvidia drivers which Asus mentioned?

BTW is Windows 7 an open beta? Maybe I'll go with that if it's possible to get my hands on it.
 
Unfocused said:
I use XP atm, but I need to make a decision what I'll use on a laptop that I'll be receiving hopefully next week. It comes with Vista, but I'm thinking of getting rid of it to install XP, since I've heard stories of crap performance (in games especially).

For one, my friend, who bought his laptop about 1,5 year ago, said that he had bad performance in games on Vista and the issue went away after he switched to XP. And the specs were nice - Core 2 Duo T5550 (1,83Ghz), 8800GTS, 4GB RAM.

How has the situation changed during this 1,5 year? Were there any performance fixes? Or could that performance be caused by bad Nvidia drivers which Asus mentioned?

BTW is Windows 7 an open beta? Maybe I'll go with that if it's possible to get my hands on it.
Click to expand...

Apparently Microsoft's voucher upgrade program is going to start soon, July I think it was, but don't quote me on that. It's where you buy a laptop now with Vista on it and get a voucher for an upgrade to Windows 7 when it gets released. So if you can, hold out for a few more weeks on a new laptop just to be sure.

Also, the "bad" performance in games could be a number of things, preinstalled crap on the computer vs. a fresh XP install, etc...

Another thing, did he mention exactly how "bad" the performance was? In my experience, performance has either remained relatively similar to XP or in some cases there is a very small drop in performance, but nothing at all that will make a game unplayable.

And yes, Windows 7 is currently available to all: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
 
Asus said:
I have Vista on my main machine. But TBH I haven't noticed any difference good or bad over XP.
Click to expand...
Pretty much the same except for the occasional gripe. I went with Vista 64 when I got this laptop because I wanted all my 4Gb of RAM to be counted and tbh I don't find any earth shattering difference between Vista and XP. There are a couple of niggles, the most severe being enforced driver signing, so that some stuff with old or hacked drivers won't install, or will require me to change a setting during bootup before I can install it. Some peripherals still have very poor Vista driver support, such as my Hawking Hi-Gain Wireless Adapter, and while that's not Vista's fault it certainly counts as a disadvantage of it. Another problem is the amount of services enabled by default and the amount of paging that Vista does as a result of auto-indexing and prefetch (which are two of Vista's big advantages, apparently) - I don't like the idea that my too-hot laptop HD is being worn out by constant unnecessary read/writes, so I turned off those things.

Otherwise, I like the look and feel of Aero, I like how Ctrl+alt+del will now get me out of practically any crash bar a BSOD and I like that it rarely seems to become unresponsive. Oh and that old chestnut UAC only annoyed me for the 2 minutes that it took to disable it.
 
Dumb Dude said:
Apparently Microsoft's voucher upgrade program is going to start soon, July I think it was, but don't quote me on that. It's where you buy a laptop now with Vista on it and get a voucher for an upgrade to Windows 7 when it gets released. So if you can, hold out for a few more weeks on a new laptop just to be sure.

Also, the "bad" performance in games could be a number of things, preinstalled crap on the computer vs. a fresh XP install, etc...

Another thing, did he mention exactly how "bad" the performance was? In my experience, performance has either remained relatively similar to XP or in some cases there is a very small drop in performance, but nothing at all that will make a game unplayable.

And yes, Windows 7 is currently available to all: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
Click to expand...

Oh well, I already ordered the laptop.

As for the performance - it was on a clean Vista installation, on a new laptop. I don't know how bad was it, but it must've been noticeable, since my friend previously had a rather old system, so he must've been used to mediocre framerates.

Hm, I'll consider the beta then if it's available to all.
 
Laivasse said:
Pretty much the same except for the occasional gripe. I went with Vista 64 when I got this laptop because I wanted all my 4Gb of RAM to be counted and tbh I don't find any earth shattering difference between Vista and XP. There are a couple of niggles, the most severe being enforced driver signing, so that some stuff with old or hacked drivers won't install, or will require me to change a setting during bootup before I can install it. Some peripherals still have very poor Vista driver support, such as my Hawking Hi-Gain Wireless Adapter, and while that's not Vista's fault it certainly counts as a disadvantage of it. Another problem is the amount of services enabled by default and the amount of paging that Vista does as a result of auto-indexing and prefetch (which are two of Vista's big advantages, apparently) - I don't like the idea that my too-hot laptop HD is being worn out by constant unnecessary read/writes, so I turned off those things.

Otherwise, I like the look and feel of Aero, I like how Ctrl+alt+del will now get me out of practically any crash bar a BSOD and I like that it rarely seems to become unresponsive. Oh and that old chestnut UAC only annoyed me for the 2 minutes that it took to disable it.
Click to expand...

The auto-indexer is only "bad" for the first while that it has to index your entire HDD. Once it does its initial indexing, it does the rest as you add/remove stuff. It will hardly, if at all, impact performance after that. The page file can also be manually adjusted if it is too big for your liking.

There is no way you can call prefetch a negative either. That feature uses your free (thats unused by the system) RAM to preload commonly used apps for faster loading when you want it. When apps require more RAM, prefetch data gets pushed off, that simple. People think that just because they see a high amount of RAM usage in the taskmanager, that Vista is doing stuff ineffeciently when in fact it is doing the exact opposite.
 
I use XP on both my PC and laptop. It's just a very stable and complete OS for me and is pretty fast.
Also tried Vista on my PC(2.25GHz, 1.5GB RAM), but it ran horribly slow compared to XP.

I've seen it running at very good speeds on faster PC's, but I don't see any advantages compared to XP. Can anyone tell me one?

Some games are exclusive to Vista or have DX10-only features, but with some tweaks you can enable them on XP.
 
With my use the only thing I ran into for Vista was when I was copying over media files with metadata. After I copied a few files then it would tell me I was out of RAM and icons for the folders would disappear (virtual memory anyway). But it was just how Vista mishandled those type of files when copying or something. There was a hotfix but you had to request it and get an email before you could download it. And I had just upgraded to the newest service pack and so when I tried installing the hotfix it told me I couldn't...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=829
And it happened to me when I was only copying media off of a CD (not 16k files worth and not a DVD either).
 
Just out of general curiosity, why do people use an anti-virus on a Vista machine? Certainly anything that can pose a threat will get stopped by UAC first, and it'd take quite the dumbo to press the YES ALLOW THIS VIRUS TO DO WHATEVER button (or to disable UAC for that matter).

I read an article a while ago (pre-SP1 I'd say) where some PC magazine or website was doing reviews for various AV programs on various OS setups and they could not do their tests properly on Vista with UAC enabled because it caught everything before the anti-virus program could. That kind of out of the box security is pretty awesome in my book.
 
Dumb Dude said:
it'd take quite the dumbo to to disable UAC.
Click to expand...

I guess I'm a Dumbo. (I don't use AV software either, the hardware firewall on my router + not being a dumbass has always served me well.)

UAC is annoying as hell, the first thing I do on my Vista machines is turn it off.
 
BHC said:
UAC is annoying as hell, the first thing I do on my Vista machines is turn it off.
Click to expand...

Certainly not using the computer like a noob is always the best thing, I'm quite against AVs in general, even in XP because I think it's a waste of system resources on something so easily preventable.

UAC really isn't all that annoying to be honest, or perhaps I've been using Windows 7 for a while that I forgot how intrusive Vista UAC is, but either way, to disable something that adds a tiny bit of annoyance but all the difference in security, I don't get it.

You can also adjust it's level of "annoyance", so you shouldn't disable it completely, that's just a dumbo move. :p

Also, I'd just like to mention that up until a little while ago, I had NO idea you were babyheadcrab. It all makes sense now.
 
Dumb Dude said:
The auto-indexer is only "bad" for the first while that it has to index your entire HDD. Once it does its initial indexing, it does the rest as you add/remove stuff. It will hardly, if at all, impact performance after that. The page file can also be manually adjusted if it is too big for your liking.

There is no way you can call prefetch a negative either. That feature uses your free (thats unused by the system) RAM to preload commonly used apps for faster loading when you want it. When apps require more RAM, prefetch data gets pushed off, that simple. People think that just because they see a high amount of RAM usage in the taskmanager, that Vista is doing stuff ineffeciently when in fact it is doing the exact opposite.
Click to expand...
I guess you didn't read my post. I didn't mention high RAM usage once - I object to having my hard drive fiddled with constantly while my machine is idling, especially on a laptop which runs very hot, since that's going to shorten the life of my HD in the long term. Never mind for the 'first while', 6 months after I got my machine it was still experiencing lots of HD activity during idle periods and I got fed up of it. I used the Performance tab in Task Manager to see what was being so busy, and with the aid of discussions online I confirmed that it was superfetch and the auto-indexer doing it. These services were thrashing away at the HD while offering a speed increase that tbh I don't need (and haven't noticed the absence of since) so I turned off those features and now the LED signifying HD activity hardly blinks at all most of the time.
Dumb Dude said:
You can also adjust it's level of "annoyance", so you shouldn't disable it completely, that's just a dumbo move. :p
Click to expand...
Why adjust it when I don't even remotely need it? I didn't need it when I had XP - I ran a clean machine for years with no AV - and a year without UAC on Vista has taught me I don't need it now either. I and most other people find it slightly more than a 'tiny' annoyance.
 
Laivasse said:
I guess you didn't read my post. I didn't mention high RAM usage once - I object to having my hard drive fiddled with constantly while my machine is idling, especially on a laptop which runs very hot, since that's going to shorten the life of my HD in the long term. Never mind for the 'first while', 6 months after I got my machine it was still experiencing lots of HD activity during idle periods and I got fed up of it. I used the Performance tab in Task Manager to see what was being so busy, and with the aid of discussions online I confirmed that it was superfetch and the auto-indexer doing it. These services were thrashing away at the HD while offering a speed increase that tbh I don't need (and haven't noticed the absence of since) so I turned off those features and now the LED signifying HD activity hardly blinks at all most of the time. Why adjust it when I don't even remotely need it? I didn't need it when I had XP - I ran a clean machine for years with no AV - and a year without UAC on Vista has taught me I don't need it now either. I and most other people find it slightly more than a 'tiny' annoyance.
Click to expand...


I never used your name, I said people. I meant it to be a generalization and not an ovbservation of something you didn't say in your post. That was my fault.

Your concerns about HDD life-span and heat are legitimate arguments though. I, for one, never noticed an increase in idle temperatures while my HDD light blinked madly, which only really happens when the computer is idle. But that can easily differ depending on laptop layout/make/whatever.

The HDD life span is something I don't think is that much of an issue. Let us assume that a standard laptop HDD has a life of about...the hours equivilant to 5-10 years. I highly doubt that you're shaving off more than a year's worth of it's total life by doing what should be regular maintenace anyway (Vista just by default has these enabled and auto-run for you at times where it doesn't affect you during idle times).

Your UAC argument holds as much water as me saying "Well, if you were fine with XP for xx amount of years, you shouldn't need to even upgqrade to Vista", which is to say, it holds none.

Seriously, find ONE legit reason for disabling it that doesn't involve it being annoying. You might not need it, yeah, but what hassle is it really to click yes on a prompt that you probably only see once every couple of days (lowest UAC setting)? Not much at all. And like I said, it offers all the security you'll ever need, regardless of whether you think you need it or not, at such a tiny expense. It's also not some type of service that is always running, so it doesn't affect you AT ALL until a program specifically asks for admin level privlages.

In short: There is no reason to disable it entirely.
 
I have UAC disabled because it's so ****ing annoying.

*Clicks on Half-Life 2 Desktop Shortcut*
*Computer Lags with screen darkened for about 3.5 secs*
"ALLOW OR DENY HL2.EXE?"
*Hits Allow*
*Steam: Now Launching Half-Life 2..."

Ugh..wastes about 5 seconds :angry:
And in gamer time thats 1 minute.
 
No worries@generalisation. As for whether indexing, etc. causes excess heat - I can't tell, most of the heat in my laptop comes from elsewhere and HD temps bottom out at around just under 50C even with them disabled, which is pretty high. I just don't want to take a risk on things that cause undue wear and tear on my parts, and even a year of HD life saved sounds great to me.
Dumb Dude said:
Seriously, find ONE legit reason for disabling it that doesn't involve it being annoying.
Click to expand...
Eh? But that is the legit reason for disabling it: I find it annoying. I like my OS to trust me to know what I'm doing, and experience has taught me that there is no need to subject myself to the annoyance of repeated prompts in order to keep my PC safe, however minor that annoyance (I didn't find it all that minor anyway). Simple as.
 
WINDOWS 7 FTW

The UAC is significantly improved, as it hasn't annoyed me enough for me to turn it off, unlike vista.

1. Windows 7
2. Windows XP
...
3. Windows Vista
 
Vista is objectively a better OS than XP. However, whether or not it's worth upgrading to from XP is debatable, but if you're getting a new PC, there's absolutely zero reason to choose XP.

Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again: if UAC is nothing but an annoyance to you where you just press "Allow", then you're running as administrator which means you're a dumbass. This is Microsoft's biggest mistake with Windows: to have allowed users to run as administrators as much as they did, creating a huge amount of dependency on having admin rights. UAC is a decent step towards fixing this, but I wish they were more aggressive in preventing users from using administrator accounts for daily tasks.

Windows 7 is, of course, better than both. Although build 7100 is not as stable yet as Vista. Especially navigating the libraries feels very unresponsive (half a second delay, if not more) even though they're as fast as normal folders when opened from another PC through a network. Anyone familiar with this problem?
 
Windows 7 definitely. **** YEAH.

This coming from a guy who was XP hardcore.
 
Aren't there any compatibility issues with Windows 7? I mean drivers or applications in general.

If I was using Win7, was about to download a driver and had to choose between an XP and Vista driver would I have to choose the driver for Vista?

EDIT: Ah, I just noticed that there are only a few language versions of the Windows 7 RC and since I'm used to having my OS in Polish with all the additional fonts etc. I'll pass on this.
 
The problem is XP (vista is better) still can't always correctly perform admin rights from a standard account with 'admin privileges'. You can't install SP3 from a standard account, even with admin privileges, and granted while a file that important should be done from an admin account...
 
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