Be Excellent To Each Other

So, Windows 7 is on the horizon and reviews of the beta have been excellent, stating it's everything that Vista should have been. It got me thinking about Vista and how it will be viewed by history.

I remember being quite keen on Vista back in 2006 when I first installed the release candidate version. It seemed more modern and quite speedy on my decent work machine. It wasn't until I tried to use it as a main OS that I stumbled across the irritating elements such as UAC, crappy drivers and VERY slow file management across networks (certainly between XP and Vista machines).

I have 3 machines at home. A laptop for general browsing, a gaming machine/media server in the loft and a HTPC under the TV. Only the HTPC is running Vista, mainly because I like to keep up to date with Media Center (sic) releases. Although both the gaming machine and laptop are capable of running vista, I've never bothered to switch them over. In fact the laptop came with Vista and I 'backgraded' it to XP.

As we use Novell at work and Microsoft and Novell don't play nicely together, there has never been so much as a suggestion to move to Vista in the 2 years since it's been available, but there's been a regime change in the last few months and it looks like we're moving over to a Microsoft network in the next 12 months or so (and fingers crossed, Windows 7).

So, what do you guys think? Stepping stone to greater good? Or turd in need of polishing?

It is ME, only prettier.

Meh - Vista's fine. I've used nothing else for the last year at least. It had a number of early bugs that have been mostly fixed, and UAC is occasionally a nuisance, but not that bad.

"it's"

Mmm. No.

I think the flop of Vista is more a testament to XP than to anything else. I remember the first time I tried XP after using Windows 95 and 98: it just felt far more solid than the earlier versions. My machine at home runs Vista but I would be just as happy with XP (if I downloaded the sniping tool).

I like it. I like it a lot.

It doesn't do more than XP, but it just feels slicker doing it. Admittedly I jumped in post-SP1, but IIRC, OS X raced through two or three updates pretty quickly. (And Microsoft don't charge for going from 10.4 to 10.5.) The machine is absolutely rock solid. The (very) few problems I have had are down to crap software.

I firmly believe that those that bleat the loudest about it being unstable are the ones loading cracked warez onto dodgy cracked copies and blaming Microsoft when it goes tits up.

I think that Windows 7 will be to Vista what XP is to 2000. The same under the skin, but with all the annoying bits sorted.

What are you talking about, you mad fool?

Err, what? ME was an unusable mess that need reinstalling every six months. Vista is far better than that pile of arse.

I'm still on my first install of Vista, after two years (I think). It's still running quite beautifully.

Same here, Mal.

I've used vista now for a fair while. No problems with it. Wouldn't want to go back to XP.

ME was the greatest abomination of a fetid cow foetus stuffed into a sack and called an operating system ever inflicted on the public. It was almost literally unusable.

Vista's legacy will be as the only Microsoft OS I never installed from 3.1 onwards. In my house, anyway.

Thinking back to when I installed it last summer, my two main gripes were having alter the button that looks like an 'off switch' so it actually turns the system off, and having to faff about to get MSN Live Messenger to work through the fire wall.

It hibernates by default, doesn't it? I remember having to do that, as my wireless network connection would completely fuck up when the computer returned from hibernation.

My only other real complaint was with the horrific time it would take to extract compressed files. But I just installed 7zip instead.

Transferring files across a wireless connection from the XP machine in the loft to the laptop was ridiculously slow. Like a quoted 120mins to transfer a 5 meg file. I swapped to wired and it was still snail paced. Hence my back grading to XP.

Wrong.

It should be 'its legacy'.

That's been fixed though. And it was more an error with the calculated time than actually with the transfer speed - although the transfer speed was (and still is to some degree) slow. Still, that's why robocopy exists.

UPnP is actually good for stuff like that. It even copes with having two logged-in users on one machine having Messenger running. uTorrent gets its forwarding automatically and my 360 and PS3 never fail (at that stage). It requires a reasonably functional router, but I was very surprised.

Unless you mean the Windows Firewall, which would be odd because it Just Worked when I installed it.

Cool. I have a license of Vista x64 Business through uni. I may stick that on the Media Box.

Edit: Stick it *back on* the media server. Is what I meant.

Vista Media Center is much much better than XP Media Center.

I know, that's why Vista has been under the TV for 2 years. What I meant was, try Vista on the upstairs machine again. I have enough RAM to justify x64 and I don't use it for games anymore *sob*