What do you think of Vista?

condra

Hey just wondering what you lads think of Vista.

I just bootcamped it a couple of days ago and I must say I rather like using it a damn sight more than using XP.

Narcissus

How well does it run on bootcamp? Any problems?

I've never used bootcamp, must give it a shot.

condra

Dude the whole process (apart from having to repair my hard drive with the install disk, disk-utility, as opposed to the normal disk-utility) was pretty handy. Its all explained pretty well in the bootcamp PDF thing that comes with bootcamp.

CoreDuo 1.8 and a gig of ram here, and Vista runs sweet as.
Photoshop, Ableton Live, Opera Browser, all run at similar speeds to on OSX.

IM quite impressed with Vista to be honest, but perhaps thats because I never used a Windows machine with a gig of ram.

Narcissus

thats cool.

Have you tried playing any games on bootcamp vista?

you use opera on mac? i just got a mac yesterday and am using opera. is it the best browser?

BostonB

womoma wrote:

....CoreDuo 1.8 and a gig of ram here, and Vista runs sweet as.
Photoshop, Ableton Live, Opera Browser, all run at similar speeds to on OSX.....

Ummm, I'm using Vista (not on a Mac) and its an absolute dog compared to XP. Yeah everything runs, and I've had no big issues. But even after turning off all the crud its still a dog, and stalls far more often than XP ever did. Can't wait for the SP1 tbh.

condra

Hey congrats on getting your mac! What type did you get?

I havent tried playing any games yet. Ive only devoted a couple of gigs to Vista, for doing a couple of windowsy things. The graphics are s**te on a macbook so I wouldnt be too hopefull for more advanced 3d games.
If youre using a MBP or imac I imagine you could get some pretty good results, as with bootcamp, you basically turn your computer into a windows PC when you boot up windows.

By the way, if youre installing Vista with bootcamp, when partitioning, be aware how much space it can take up. The version I installed took about 7 gigs!

Perhaps rather pathetically, people can get very passionate about browsers, and any mention of whats is "the best" can cause huge flame wars, so I'll just say this...

OPERA BROWSER IS THE BEST FRACKING BROWSER GOING, AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH THAT IS STUPID!

.... but seriously, I love Firefox, and I kinda think of Opera as Firefox with a big bag of extra stuff on its back. If I didnt like or use the extra features, I would use firefox, but I do use them, so its Opera all the way for me.
Like firefox, you have a nice (easily skinnable) gui, intuitive tabbed browsing,
mouse gestures, rss feeds etc...
BUT, with Opera you also get built in IRC chat, which is way kool if youre a geek like me. Not only that but BUILT IN BIT TORRENT! So its a browser, an IRC chat client, and a bit torrent client, built into one superkool ap.

It was the first thing I installed on Vista. Love it.

babypink

womoma wrote:

OPERA BROWSER IS THE BEST FRACKING BROWSER GOING, AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH THAT IS STUPID!

:rolleyes:

Narcissus

womoma wrote:

Hey congrats on getting your mac! What type did you get?

thanks!
i got a white macbook 2.16 ghz. I'm loving it!

OPERA BROWSER IS THE BEST FRACKING BROWSER GOING, AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH THAT IS STUPID!

.... but seriously, I love Firefox, and I kinda think of Opera as Firefox with a big bag of extra stuff on its back. If I didnt like or use the extra features, I would use firefox, but I do use them, so its Opera all the way for me.
Like firefox, you have a nice (easily skinnable) gui, intuitive tabbed browsing,
mouse gestures, rss feeds etc...
BUT, with Opera you also get built in IRC chat, which is way kool if youre a geek like me. Not only that but BUILT IN BIT TORRENT! So its a browser, an IRC chat client, and a bit torrent client, built into one superkool ap.

It was the first thing I installed on Vista. Love it.

It's got speed dial too!
I started up safari when I first started using it but it wouldn't go full screen. I looked up how to do it on google but I don't really like the appearance of it. So i got opera instead.

Are there any cool mac programs I should get? (I'm completely new to mac having mostly used windows for the past few years)

Oriel

I hate it with a passion.
Give me XP any day.
I'd nearly even prefer Windows '98.

Average Vista: "You've clicked a mouse button - are you sure you want to do that?"

[Y] Yes [N] No [R] Remember my choice [A] Run AntiVirus Scan

BostonB

Oriel wrote:

I hate it with a passion.
Give me XP any day.
I'd nearly even prefer Windows '98.

Average Vista: "You've clicked a mouse button - are you sure you want to do that?"

[Y] Yes [N] No [R] Remember my choice [A] Run AntiVirus Scan

Calculating...
Calculating...
Calculating...
Calculating...
Calculating...

This program is not responding...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770

condra

Apapaia its personal preference really, but for what its worth, I use VLC for watching AVIs, Toast for burning disks, amsn for msn, and for ftp either Yummy, or cyberduck.


Hmm Boston what kinda hardware spec you on? I havent tweaked Vista yet, must look into that.

Couple of tests I just ran, (with Opera running here and nothing else)

Photoshop CS 1 - Load time 11 seconds
Another photoshop test.
300dpi A4 document with white to black gradient across the page. Radial Blur at 100% amount, and all other settings normal. - 10 seconds..
(I tested it in osx with CS3 and it took about 8 seconds)

Ableton Live 6 - Load time 11 seconds (thats actually faster than in OSX, but I do have more plugins to scan in OSX)

Windows media player - Load time 1.7 seconds

Firefox - 2 seconds

The one thing I have a problem with is booting up Vista, which takes quite a bit longer than booting up osx.


Babypink - :rolleyes: :eek:

triple h

When i bought my imac just before xmas i had to boot windows xp.
I only use windows when i have to and i hate using it. I have no intentions of upgrading to vista. xp does what i want it to do and i want no more from it. I just go into xp and do what must be done and leave as quick as i can.
I was never one for games on computers, i reckon ( and i am told i am wrong on this) one should buy a xbox or playstation for games.

Tar.Aldarion

Oriel wrote:

I hate it with a passion.
Give me XP any day.
I'd nearly even prefer Windows '98.

Average Vista: "You've clicked a mouse button - are you sure you want to do that?"

[Y] Yes [N] No [R] Remember my choice [A] Run AntiVirus Scan

I test on Vista all day every day, you can just just UAC off.
It's fine, but it uses too much RAM/Harddrive space for my liking.

condra

Maybe I shouldnt be surprised that Vista doesnt seem to enthuse many OSX users.

Personally, Im relatively happy with it. It runs a lot smoother than I imagined it would, and the look and feel is an improvement on xp.

Are there any viruses on Vista yet?

rymus

I'd nearly take Windows ME over Vista at the moment.. Pain in the ass that it is. Booted into it once after installing it on bootcamp. I'll have to delete the partition, the 10GB is far more use to me in os x

heggie

agree with the majority, just downgraded back to xp on my pc. That crap isn't going near my mac!

440Hz

rymus wrote:

10GB is far more use to me in os x

Why not just throw the Leopard preview on that partition? More fun than Windoze anyway

BostonB

womoma wrote:

Apapaia its personal preference really, but for what its worth, I use VLC for watching AVIs, Toast for burning disks, amsn for msn, and for ftp either Yummy, or cyberduck.


Hmm Boston what kinda hardware spec you on? I havent tweaked Vista yet, must look into that.

Couple of tests I just ran, (with Opera running here and nothing else)

Photoshop CS 1 - Load time 11 seconds
Another photoshop test.
300dpi A4 document with white to black gradient across the page. Radial Blur at 100% amount, and all other settings normal. - 10 seconds..
(I tested it in osx with CS3 and it took about 8 seconds)

Ableton Live 6 - Load time 11 seconds (thats actually faster than in OSX, but I do have more plugins to scan in OSX)

Windows media player - Load time 1.7 seconds

Firefox - 2 seconds

The one thing I have a problem with is booting up Vista, which takes quite a bit longer than booting up osx.


Babypink - :rolleyes: :eek:

Laptop, 2GB RAM, 2Ghz Dual Core, 7900GS. When Vista works its fast enough in apps. Slower in games which is a drag. Thats not the problem. Its just seems to go off doing stuff no apparent reason, no indication of that its doing, it just pauses, lots of disk activity and huge memory use. Might be just opening a tiny txt file. Theres things I like about XP over OSX and OSX over XP. But theres nothing I can find of value in Vista.

condra

That sounds odd as hell. I'll keep an eye out for it. Luckily I only need Windows for light stuff, running Outsim SynthMaker and Soundforge.

BostonB

Lots of bad report about vista on the web, and the weird stuff it does. I'm hoping it will improve a lot in SP1.

ZENER

I had my first Vista experience yesterday. It was an Acer laptop with 512MB RAM so I was expecting it to be pooh ! I was wrong . . . It was absolute SH1TE ! Low RAM aside the OS did everything possible to stop me using the laptop, as someone said above, You have clicked the mouse . . .

To begin with despite being told by MS it would work Office 2000 Pro (without Outlook) refused to work. AVG Anti Virus couldn't get it's updates until - after 20 mins looking for it - I disabled the firewall. I couldn't get it to accept an SSID for a hidden Wi-Fi AP - kept saying it didn't exist. If I as much as sneezed it wanted confirmation of the action before proceeding. All of this after it took one hour and fifteen minutes seting itself up after power up.

Come back Windows ME all is forgiven !!!

Now I know why I like Macs !

ZEN

BostonB

Nothing is as bad as WindowsME.

fbradyirl

I used Vista for the first time yesterday. I was configuring 2 Dell latops (1 Gig RAM, AMD cpu) for friends. I.e. putting on VLC, avast anti-virus, Open Office, chat clients, Firefox, etc. I have to say it runs a lot slower than Mac OS X on my Powerbook which has a lower hardware spec.

Anyway, after first boot it spent about 10 minutes running a performance test on the Dell hardware (part of which gave me no feedback as to what was going on-very bad). When this was done, I went in to configure the proxy settings. So I tried to launch IE and it crashed before it even opened. So had to re-open IE. Configured proxy settings in IE options. However I still couldn't connect to the web. So I had to do a reboot before Vista would connect to the web & the Gadgets or widgets started loading RSS etc.

Then I started un-installing McAfee and few other pieces of unwanted trial junk that come pre-installed. Took me a good while to figure out how to actually un-install (eventually saw it in Control Panel). Now I wanted to install Gtalk, Skype, etc. I realise now why Apple's get a Mac ad's take the piss out of Vista as any time I tried to do anything it would ask for confirmation. Very annoying if you want to click 'install' and walk away from your PC for 10 minutes. You can't do this as you might need to press return for confirmation. Very stupid.

But other than this, I think Vista looks much better than XP. However, the performance hog on your machine isn't really worth it yet. I'd say when a service pack comes out it might fix some of these issues. Maybe

440Hz

BostonB wrote:

Nothing is as bad as WindowsME.

I used to think that... until I used Vista!

God I'm so glad I get to work in Mac-land!

BostonB

fbradyirl wrote:

I...Now I wanted to install Gtalk, Skype, etc. I realise now why Apple's get a Mac ad's take the piss out of Vista as any time I tried to do anything it would ask for confirmation. Very annoying if you want to click 'install' and walk away from your PC for 10 minutes. You can't do this as you might need to press return for confirmation. Very stupid.....

You can just turn it off....;)

fbradyirl

BostonB wrote:

You can just turn it off....;)

It should be off by default.

Oriel

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

I test on Vista all day every day, you can just just UAC off.

Unfortunately, I do too - but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

BostonB

fbradyirl wrote:

It should be off by default.

Thats called XP.

babypink

I've only used vista a couple of times, and each one was a painful experience. You have clicked maximise, would you like me to allow me to maximise the window.....

I just couldn't get my nut around it - i'm pretty pliant when it comes to interfaces - hell i was once an OS/2 fan, but Vista....no more chances for the time being.

BostonB

babypink wrote:

I've only used vista a couple of times, and each one was a painful experience. You have clicked maximise, would you like me to allow me to maximise the window..... ..

Never seen that.

babypink

BostonB wrote:

Never seen that.

i was ripping the piss...hence the ...perhaps a might have been better

BostonB

babypink wrote:

i was ripping the piss...hence the ...perhaps a might have been better

Fair enuff.

condra

Hmm. Im getting on really well with it.

One thing which annoys me, and its more an irk about Windows in general than Vista.

Finding free software. Theres no point googling something like "free unrar" because there is SO MUCH shareware that only allows limited use without paying. Its so annoying.

With mac software, when something claims its free, it usually is.

PS.. does anyone know any good free unrar software for Windows? :P

Tar.Aldarion

Winrar is free, you can keep using it after teh trial period ends. You can get anything free.

fbradyirl

BostonB wrote:

Thats called XP.

I think I'll stick to OS X & Ubuntu thanks.

h8red

fbradyirl wrote:

I think I'll stick to OS X & Ubuntu thanks.

I have only started using Ubuntu recently myself. It's savage.

I have used Vista a couple of times and I think it is horrible. I have had a few people get me to remove Vista and stick XP back on their machines. The only advantage Vista has over XP is DirectX 10. But I don't have a DX10 graphics card yet so there's absolutely no point in using Vista.

ZENER

h8red wrote:

I have only started using Ubuntu recently myself. It's savage.

Prefer Mandriva/KDE myself, never liked Gnome.

ZEN

ZENER

h8red wrote:

. . . . I have had a few people get me to remove Vista and stick XP back on their machines. . . . .

Actually there's an interesting quandary, if you don't want Vista can you claim back the cost of it from the computer vendor ?

ZEN

Tar.Aldarion

I believe people have doen it already and some have failed. They don't have to give it to you, as it is part of the package you are buying off them. Also, tehy would get it much cheaper than it retails for.

h8red

I think Dell might be putting XP back on some computers free of charge. One guy contacted me because his girlfriend had bought him a Dell laptop for his birthday. She didn't stipulate that she wanted XP and got Vista. The machine was a Sempron 1800+ with 512MB RAM. It couldn't run Vista! It would take 5 full minutes to start up and was as slow as a wet week. Dell should never have supplied that spec with Vista on it as far as I'm concerned. He said he contacted Dell and they would have put XP on it at no charge but he got me to do it cos he didn't want to go to the hassle of sending it back to them.

spidermonkey

ya parents got a new pc from dell, vista capable, nice specs, im using it now, but jaysus!! firefox crashes, quicktime fúcks up, sidebar crashes, crash crash crash, if it wasn't for the restore session in firefox i'd be really pissed.

and my amazing g5 imac, never a problem, and its littered with rubbish, only about 10gb free, running 4 or 5 intensive programs at a time and not even a peep!. and only half the ram of the pc.
i love my mac...

teckoda

Ah Vista is a nice bit of eye candy all the same. Im guessing they spent more time designing it..

I still recommend Win XP Pro, which i have on all my dell machines. even the new ones and even on my imac which is great.. boot camp for the win