Vista help required

[whiz]

Hi All

I have just taken delivery of a bright new shiny lappy, nothing fancy just a basic Dell Inspiron. Being a new beastie it is loaded with the dreaded Vista. I am a Vista virgin so I'd appreciate some pointers on what I can live without bloatware wise. The lappy will be used almost solely for email/surfing, playing music and watching DVDs. Are there any sites out there which can guide me to a relatively pain free experience ? I realise there are stacks of sites available to google but as with everything I find it's best to get some recommendations from folks who have a bit of experience. Over to you guys/gals.
Thanks in advance. :ok:

[HuntandFish]

You might actually like Vista ! It will run with 1GB RAM but 2 is better .
I use a pc with Vista for the purposes you give + digatal photos .
I was planninng to convert to XP but I got used to Vista

[jetfour]

Totally agree. A bit querky to begin with but seems to work well. Drivers were lacking for 'old' bits of kit, but these are now available from the usual driver sites.

Here are a couple of links to get you going.

http://www.howtogeek.com/tag/windows-vista/

http://www.tweakvista.com/VistaUsabilityTips.aspx

[BRL]

Hey Whiz, long time no see, hope all is well mate.

I too recently went out and got a new laptop, 17" screen, 160Gig hard drive 2GB Ram, bought it mainly for my photography and to surf, the usual stuff but it has got Vista on it. It is a pain in the arse.

I have a broken lappy here with XP on it and another one a few months old with Vista on it. I much prefer the XP one.

With Vista you have to update almost everything you put on it. Photoshop CS3ex, Lightroom, iTunes, nothing is straightforward to install, one product I have will not even install full-stop.

One thing that is really peeing me off is the Canon software 'Zoom-browser' will not pick up my 400D, I will have to call Canon support in the morning to get it sorted out, waste of time buying it otherwise as I say I want it for my photography stuff.

Vista is nice to look at but at the end of the day bloody annoying with all the drivers that have to be updated, if you can get past that and get the laptop settled and running ok then you should be alright with it in the long run.

[hellsbrink]

Whiz

I have Vista on my "new" PC, and have had no real issues regarding speed, etc, but a quad core processor could have something to do with that. I would turn of Aero (if it is on your version) for starters, and do the usual things like check on the size of the pagefile, graphics settings, ya know the deal.

As far as updating things goes, well, the first thing you should be doing after installing anything from scratch is actually updating it anyway! You should always be going to the manufacturer websites to update drivers (don't use windows update for drivers, it can have "issues"), and always check for updates from every software producer. That applies to any operating system, you would hardly run your firewall/antivirus software without ever updating it and you should do the same for other software. TBH, the only software I had issues with and couldn't replace with something free was a few games, everything else was easily updated for nothing, so you shouldn't have any real issues. If Vista is an issue then you can wipe it out and install XP, and in fact I think Dell could even do the changeover for you as they are still selling computers with XP installed.


BRL:- Have you updated the software? If not, go here http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0027540.asp?model= and download this update. If you have only installed the software from the CD it won't have the Vista drivers there. Go here http://software.canon-europe.com/products/0010371.asp for all the rest of the stuff you'll need. If you have updated, then the issue could be as simple as the cable you connect with but without seeing it I wouldn't be able to tell.

[BRL]

hellsbrink Hi there. I managed to suss it out after a few hours of head scratching and gentle chin pulling...

I realised it was the EOS utility, not the ZoomBrowser that needed updating....! :O

[jetfour]

Hi Brl,

My original Zoombrowser software installed straightaway on Vista Home Premium and immediately asked for permission to update which, when allowed, happened with no problem.

I had previously updated the camera (10D) firmware to EOS standard.

I think there are the necessary updates on the Canon site but it can be a navigation nightmare.

Regards,

Jetfour

[empacher48]

For all of you with Vista, I've just installed the latest release candidate for Vista Service Pack 1 onto my Dell XPS M1330.

So far there hasn't been too much of a change,but performance wise, it is using less Memory (about 1451Mb of my 4Gb - used to be up around 1600Mb). So far I haven't found anything in the new Service Pack that is going to screw anything up. Just general work within Vista does seem to run a bit quicker, there used to be brief pauses when opening up the control panel and my documents, but that has disappeared. When something crashes the CTRL+ALT+DEL happens almost instantaneously rather than waiting for up to a minute for something to happen.

Both Creative MP3 players work, my Garmin iQue M4 works, Canon EOS350D works and so does the Epson C87 works fine.

I will be interested to see whether there are any other new things they've changed with the Final Release when it comes out in a couple of weeks.

[Shunter]

You might wish to try vLite - http://www.vlite.net/

It will strip Vista down and remove a lot of the fat to turn it into something approaching a useable system. No matter what the Vista apologists will tell you, it's a poor product. There's little it will do that XP won't (twice as fast), and there is almost no business case for upgrading to it. Even MS themselves have reluctantly conceded that it's a fat bastard of an OS and will be stripping down the next version of Windows to be less of a rancid compost heap.