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Vista RC1 - Post your thoughts...


br0adband
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Heck, I've found RC1 to be very well rounded, WoW plays great, It's really taking shape basically.... *OffTopic: I found a PDC Longhorn ISO on my hard drive xD!!!!* They have come a long way... UAC is finally not *so* annoying, WMP11 + URGE (Which has a 14 day free trial - truly no CC required) is really an improvement. When RC2, rolls out, I may consider that as a primary OS.

 

BTW... nVidia has an RC1 video driver that runs better than the LDDM in my opinion.

 

-Neospy

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I just tried it on my AMD 3000+ system with 1gb DDR and 6600GT. I see the potential, but IMO it's still beta. The GUI felt nice and fast at times, but it didn't feel "smooth". The Nvidia drivers need alot of work IMO, especially on OpenGL games. All of the forums I visited echoed my thoughts that those drivers are in serious need of performance tweeks in that regard. Overall, the system didn't feel any easier to use either. It didn't take long to find out where stuff was, but I was kina hoping they would take the opportunity to really simplify settings and configurations. It was very XP to me in that reguard.

 

Maybe when they get things ironed out, I would call it XP SP3 like someone else mentioned. Maybe my expectations were too high, or perhaps I'm trying to compare it too much to the OSX experiance. I DID like I.E. 7 though. Very nice job on that.

 

Just my .02 - Thanks

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How about this "Media Center" feature???

 

Does it work better than XP "Media Center Edition"??

 

I think it works better/faster than XP¨s

 

 

ONE Thing I missed is the ability to backup to TAPE DRIVE - the backup/restore option seems to handle ONLY DISK and DVD/CD...

 

DUAL Display works fine here....

 

As for UAC, people have to get used to this as this feature is new in Windows world. It is a shame that in previous versions of Windows people are allowed to installed/changed things without these protections. No wonder Windows is Number ONE HACKED OS....

 

Now when they trying to switch to more Linux/Unix style of OS People complain..

 

My 0.02c

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I gave it a last try. ASUS users don't really have good luck. thats all I can say with VISTA

My internet wouldn't reach any site, I was able to ping though. Nothing else .

 

After that much of use. I installed OSX after a few days of non-use. And my OSX is faster than both of my windows. OK maybe the same speed as my Tiny XP Vista Edition and XP Gamer v2.01 that I had installed too . will reinstall XP Gamer v2.01 and dual-boot with osx until vista comes out

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I think it's quite nice, runs just like XP (hic-ups, some crashes). It really is just a reskined XP I think. The new visuals are very nice though. Their answer to OSX's Expose is pretty whack in my opinion though. I might keep using Vista as my day to day for a bit and do XP for gaming performance.

 

Like VN Man wonders...I am curious about the Media Center stuff, will play w/ it soon. Wonder how my capture card will be treated by it.

 

I have no beef moving to it from XP when it's ready, especially w/ the DX10 support that I'm waiting for.

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Vast improvement over beta 2; I am so comfortable with it that I've been using it as my primary operating system for now. It even boots faster than my copy of XP (though that's probably because one of my storage hard drive is doing the click of death, and XP seems to want to wait for it to try to find some data it doesn't need in order to resume booting while Vista doesn't do this). Vista wants to use my hard drive more, but that's probably because of the file indexing and prefetching. It usually doesn't affect performance but sometimes it does. Also, on my copy of XP, I had disabled virtual memory while I left it enabled on Vista.

 

Most everything works that I want to, including games and such. Stability has not been a problem, although there was an explorer crash that I was not able to recover from. The whole Ctrl-Alt-Delete not going directly to the task manager but instead blanking the screen is a little annoying, but it has never failed to respond.

 

UAC pops up, but I don't really see what the big deal is. One extra mouse click per program installation. Big whoop. I am worried that it may not be ENOUGH. I mean, what if you accidentally allow an installation that bundled spyware unbeknownst to you, to proceed? What's UAC different from just putting a "are you sure you want to run this program?" dialogue? Because that would be completely lame and unnecessary.

 

Most everything is compatible, except for dumbly coded programs that think Vista is a version of Windows older than XP, 98, etc. Also latest version of Daemon Tools does not work, but that's not surprising since a driver is involved. Daemon Tools 3.41 works perfectly and will do mostly everything you want to.

 

So, basically, it's not BAD, but it's not very exciting. The sidebar is not very useful, though I don't see how it's less useful than the OS X dashboard. All it is is a dashboard that takes up less room. You can easily access it with Windows-Space whenever you want and eventually more gadgets will appear for it. But I'm just not a huge Konfabulator/Dashboard/Sidebar fan in general. All those little widgets taking up ridiculous resources and doing nothing most of the time seems kind of useless to me.

 

The new Windows-Tab feature is marginally more useful than the old Alt-Tab and the new Alt-Tab is also better. Both features are very responsive. (In general, despite Aero, the whole operating system is as responsive for me as XP, so I don't feel bad about it using the extra resources). However, Expose's different views remains more useful.

 

IE 7 and Firefox basically have the same functionality. I'm trying to force myself to get used to its different set of shortcut keys and it's a very useable browser (after I get rid of the annoying browsing clicking sound effect... just like after I got rid of Firefox's annoying cannot find text sound effect). One feature it has that Firefox doesn't (and is useful to me) is Alt-Q which gives you thumbnails of all open tabs. I typically have many, so that's nice. One feature it does not have that Firefox has is a search bar at the bottom that doesn't obstruct your view of the website, highlighting, etc.

 

One major useability improvement: I'm a big fan of the new Start menu. It's sort of like the Google desktop bar, but easier to use (for me). The Google Desktop bar requires you to click on it to move the focus to it, and THEN you can type. I hate that. I like using the computer with only the keyboard --- it's just a lot faster. With the new start menu, I can hit the Windows key and type out what I want to look for. For example, to start Guild Wars, one of the games, I play, I can just really quickly hit Windows key, type Guild Wars, and hit enter and the program will start. No messing around with the stupid hierarchical menus or anything like that.

 

I also like that they made the Programs list scrolling and that it enforces a neat arrangement, just in case you do need to browse. My start menu on XP is all over place now, and hard to use. This is truly better. And better than what OS X has got, too.

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Its smooth, its fast. but a lot of things dont work. being an asus mobo user. asus users stay away from vista for now.

 

Hogwash. I'm running with Asus and you just have to install your driver support at the install screen. In my case I'm installing the Silicon Image SiI 3114 SATARaid Controller driver. Also if your partitianing from a 3rd party software such as Acronis you might have some reboot problems. My advice is to partitian from the install DVD. If you could explain in more detail what your error your experiencing instead of assuming all Asus user shouldn't install Vista. I've had every available build installed since LH 4051 PDC.

 

Also if your Asus board uses the Yukon Marvell Ethernet Controller you might want to consider updating your driver if you haven't done that. The latest driver yk51x86 I installed was released 25-Aug-2006. I was connected right after install to desktop.

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Bah. I decided against my better judgement to install this bloated piece of trash.

 

RC1 (5600)

 

Here's my thoughts.

 

First of all it's hideous. Seriously I find the UI to be god awful.

 

Nothing about it is intuitive. There will be a learning curve to home users on this version of Windows much steeper then was 9x->XP. Even getting to simple things such as network settings has become slightly more complicated then it used to be.

 

It's going to be a good while before Corporate Clients even consider putting this onto workstation machines.

 

People are going to have to wait for third party software companies to push out updates for some software to even work.... and certain software that is no longer updated at all that worked fine going from 9x/2k-XP does not work even in compatibility mode.

 

Hell one of the first things I did was fire up Silk Road Online. Without compatibility the app simply did not work. In XP compatibility mode, the game crashed. It took me a good while to finally force Madden 07 to install and playing it was not pretty. Nor was playing The Sims 2.

 

Hell TivoToGo ran, but would no longer speak with my Tivo box.

 

So there is going to be a waiting game there.

 

But again... back to the UI. It felt sluggish even with Aero turned off. Hell even reverting it into Classic mode it still felt sluggish compared to XP.

 

I'm not sayin the MS is {censored}. I'm saying this is not up to par with what I would expect after years of development.

 

The sidebar is quite possibly the most useless thing ever created in the Windows environment and I expect that 85% of users will turn it off and leave it off. I fully expect most OEM's to have it off by default.

 

It's bloated. The whole thing. I'm still in shock with how much Hard Drive space it takes on a clean install.

 

However I will give it some good points as well. Security wise out of the box it is much better then the previous Redmond drudge. The new taskbar actually looks nice. MUCH better then XP's default Fisher Price look. The included wallpapers (I'm grasping at straws to find positives if you can't tell) are very nice. The icon sets aren't bad. BUT these are things that XP can have. So not much to be said.

 

The Vista Media Center... another area I was highly disappointed in... and this coming from a Windows Media Center Edition 2005 advocate. It feels less responsive then the old one and much harder to navigate. The old interface was just about perfect. This new one... not so much.

 

DX10 is a nightmare. It has managed to break DX9 backwards compatibility with a lot of games. You know DX9 didn't break DX8 games.. etc. DX10 is going to need some more retooling on MS's side. Some of the *older* games can't be fixed as there is no financial need to do so... so I put the responsibility on MS to make DX10 more backwards compatible.

 

OK I've ranted enough...

 

These are just my feelings... and you know... So far my rants about OS 10.5 aren't much better... or KDE4's Plasma... or XGL...

 

seriously... I don't like where the GUI side of things are headed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I like Operating Systems as pieces of Art

In 30 years with comps I have seen a few

UniX flavours

CPM, That bootsector Virus DOS

Something really elegant, the only real new idea after Mac: Os/2 in bad IBM hands (had Microsoft marketed it! history'd been different)

NeXt: the best of all still alive in os/X

NT: a very good and fast runner and so on......

I have never never seen such an ugly thing as Vista Rc1

a kid's inteface with the power of a 80 years old man

it's a ridicolous mess, of course, beeing Microsoft it will go, but what a piece af Sh...!

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