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View Full Version : Dell still less than enthusiastic about Vista


frostbite
5th Jul 2007, 17:22
Is anyone?


http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287855,00.htm

planecrazy.eu
5th Jul 2007, 18:30
Well i am the odd one out here, as Vista just hasn't caused any problems for me, infact, its less troublesome that XP Pro.

The only bad thing i have noticed, or the only performance problems are, i loose a few frames per second from FSX, and the 3DMark score is a little lower.

Graphics are great though, getting well over 30Fps with sliders on tops and a few checks here and there. Video encoding is quicker and all that.

Oh, bad point, VMWare doesnt run as smooth as Vista hogs 256mb more RAM than XP on average, even then i am left with a good 450mb on average free, i used to like VMWare to have 512 but i can make do with 256.

I think issues are with under spec machines.

Minimum spec is what vista will run on, anything under that and vista prob wont run, so thats nothing to go on.

The recommended specs are more realistic, but i recon you need to double the ram and double the GFX Memory. So 1GB RAM and 128 Dedicated Memory would run it nice.

Dell are only moaning as they are getting more calls due to the fact vista just aint designed to be put on a machine with 256RAM, No dedicated graphics and Celeron.

Keef
8th Jul 2007, 20:23
A friend of mine just treated himself to a shiny new laptop. It's a top of the range model, and came with Vista. He's very impressed with Vista's features and content, and extremely unimpressed with the speed of his new machine. We also can't get it to connect to the other machine on his local network. It seems Vista goes out of its way to make that difficult.

The blow came when we did a quick comparison: my old 1100MHz IBM ThinkPad (4 years old if it's a day) running XP is faster doing any serious application than his whizzbang running Vista. That proved what we'd suspected.

Oh - and with Vista, came MS Works preinstalled! I thought Works had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Now he's debating whether to buy MS Office 2007 (pesky expensive), or install Linux instead. He's not quite confident enough in his geek-skills for the Linux-only step.

That (especially a fruitless afternoon spent trying to get his new toy to work on his network) has convinced me that Vista won't be coming in this direction.

Isn't Slackware 12 good! Knoppix 5.2 is downloading as I type this...

seacue
8th Jul 2007, 22:17
I act as computer mechanic at a volunteer organization. We've been using Office 97 with XP, but Microsoft has changed the "doc" format in recent MS Office versions so 97 won't do. <longer story skipped here> So I went to the store to buy Office 2007. I read the small print on the box and find that one can use the cheaper "Upgrade" version of Office 2007 if one has MS Works 6 or more recent. That saved us about US$170. Not cheap even after that.

This might explain why Works came with VISTA, No, MS wouldn't go out of their way to save customers some money.

IO540
12th Jul 2007, 07:36
Vista looks pretty but is a pile of junk.

Anybody using a computer seriously will delay the change until the last possible moment - certainly until we are on at least the 2nd or 3rd service pack, 1-2 years from now.

Dell sell a lot of stuff into the corporate market (their D800 series laptops are really nice) and if you put Vista on these laptops you will just screw yourself.

mutt
14th Jul 2007, 03:59
Seacue,

Have you considered using OPEN OFFICE.... Try google and you will find it.

Mutt

Basil
14th Jul 2007, 10:05
seacue,
I guess, although there's a compatibility pack for Office 2003, there isn't one for Office 1997?
Family members in commerce say, so far, few people have installed Office 2007. It can be set to default to .doc instead of .docx but, of course, some new features will be lost ( and no, don't ask me what they are :rolleyes:)

Can't help feeling there's something immoral about locking out people whose expensive apps may be only 7 years old.

seacue
14th Jul 2007, 10:13
mutt,

I use Open Office myself, but if the (one) paid employee at the volunteer organization were unable to open even one attachment she would be yelled-at by "management". And she was in the case at hand. I'll spend a bit of the organization's money to spare her that.

I did, in fact, try Open Office's Writer on the offending file and it didn't recover the formatting correctly. Grrr!

It's the old IBM / Microsoft situation. If you buy IBM / Microsoft, management won't crucify you. Even if it's not the best product.

Saab Dastard
15th Jul 2007, 00:22
For the many private and business users who have all their apps and hardware working (pretty much) as they want under Win Xp, there really is very little (if any) advantage to migrating to Vista. Quite the contrary, if the application(s) and hardware is not supported with Vista.

For any individual or organisation to take on the cost and pain of migrating, there needs to be a perceived advantage to doing so. The organisation I work for (large, global) has yet to find it, and I as an individual am in a similar position.

I wouldn't describe Vista as a pile of junk, but I simply don't see the need for it - other than to use up spare CPU cycles!

SD

VH-Cheer Up
15th Jul 2007, 01:13
Mike Jenvey: That Vista speech recognition clip nearly caused me a hernia.
Office 2007 can be acquired legally and reasonably cheaply using http://www.shoparhive.com/catalog/Office_2007-3-1.html

It's 88 quid or US$175.95 for Office 2007 Professional, full version, not the upgrade. Only two snags:

It's a digital download which might take a while if you don't have a really fast connection. It's about 700Mb which took me about ten minutes over a nominally (supposedly) 17.5Mb/sec link.

The company takes about 24 hours to e-mail you the license code. Don't know why. That's just the way it is. You can install the software and use it up to 49 times I think before having the license code, so it's OK, but I was stressing whether it would be sent or not. It was sent OK, and in slightly under 24 hours.

Seemed like a pretty good deal - the same product (albeit with a set of discs and a load of cardboard packaging) is 4-6 times the price here in the shops. and I can vouch that their process works, and it's a genuine product.
Cheers
VH-CU

VH-Cheer Up
15th Jul 2007, 01:22
Remember, too, when XP was released they suggested a min of 128Mb memory?

I'm using 1Gb with XP. If they recommend 512Mb as a minimum with Vista, based on past performance, you'd have to guess that it's going to take at least 4Gb to run effectively.

BTW what Office 2007 gets you with the docx format is files that take half the space, plus a whole load more/better graphics formatting capabilities.

And there is an Office 2007 compatibility pack from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en)for Office XP/2003 users, so they can read your docx/xlsx/pptx documents.

It's not my fault I'm ahead of the curve on the new applications.

But I'm still waiting for Vista to settle down - and I'm sure I'll need a whole new laptop,, this one maxes out at 1Gb and video memory lives out of a tiny corner of that, so no funky aero graphics.

Binoculars
15th Jul 2007, 05:47
Cheer up, I know it's Windows but did your download specify how many times you could install the software?

Nothing gets me angrier than having to pay extortionate prices for M$ software then being severely llimited in how I can use it. My copy of M$ Office for Mac came with three product keys, and I have three Macs in the house. Am I correct in assuming that I may as well throw the software away because it's now unuseable and unsaleable, or have I got this all wrong? I'll be upgrading my laptop later in the year and I'll be mightily pissed off if I have to turn around and pay these gouging bastards for another copy.

On a lighter note, that Vista Speech Recognition clip is a classic, but I can't seem to download it. :(

VH-Cheer Up
15th Jul 2007, 08:38
Binos

No, it doesn't stipulate, and I've stored the two download files on the server so I could get at them again if I wanted to. I'm sure it could be burned to a CD Rom if I needed to, or loaded onto a new computer if required.

I think the standard deal with MS software is you're supposed to buy a new licence for each new installation - i.e. extra installation.

If you retire one computer and get a new one, you're only running one installation still, so you should be able to re-install the software onto that.

Once after a disc crash years ago I tried to re-install Windows XP and it told me the licence key had already been used. I rang the helpline and Microsoft reset it for me after I explained. I haven't had that happen with Office software though.

ShopArhive has live online support so if you catch them during business hours (they're in the UK) you could check the specifics. I don't think Office 2007 is available for the Mac, though. I'm an all Windows shop here, about the Mac I know very little. How does anyone survive with only one mouse button?

frostbite
15th Jul 2007, 11:41
"so you should be able to re-install the software onto that."


Should, probably being the operative word.

Binoculars
15th Jul 2007, 16:01
How does anyone survive with only one mouse button?

You don't. You throw the Mac mouse to the ****house and plug in a normal two button optical mouse. I was on my third Mac mouse with the same problem before it ran out of warranty and I threw it away.

IO540
15th Jul 2007, 18:59
SoCal - I don't think there are many PCs with 4GB in them. That's actually quite expensive, even these days.

I don't see the point in upgrading. A PC is a device for running applications, no more (for people with a life I mean :) ).

Also drivers: In my business we sell various bits which need windoze drivers, and vista drivers are very slow to come out. It will be years before there are vista drivers for the more obscure items, by which time the said item will be obsolete so nobody will bother. At this point on the curve, upgrading to vista cuts you off from many add-ons and exposes you to the risk of something you buy being never supported. I sell into the industrial market where customers will hassle you like mad for a driver.

IO540
16th Jul 2007, 07:52
Incidentally, as far as I can tell, JIFP is not a "thin client" - it is basically the whole of Flitestar. The main difference is that while FS gets its data from the CD, JIFP gets it over the internet. I have used both (use FS quite often) and didn't detect any real difference - other than JIFT being much slower due to the remote database accesses.

Jepp are very short on software development resources. If you look into their products in detail (say, Flitestar and Jeppview) you find they are very similar in the internals. This stuff has not really changed for about 10 years. I would guess they are tearing their hair out trying to work out why Vista doesn't like some piece of 1995 code in their program, whose original developer left years ago or, in the case of Flitestar, was never around because that product was bought in.

Mac the Knife
16th Jul 2007, 08:18
4GB of memory on a AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ dual processor platform just to get Vista to run Word 7 at a respectable speed?

The mind boggles!

With *.nix you could probably do real-time dynamic fluid modeling on a rig like that....

;)