Gents

A quick question to you Vista users if I may?

I'm looking to buy a Sony Vaio which is only supplied with Vista - never used it and am quite happy with XP.

The ability of running Vista and XP side-by-side on the same machine (avoiding uninstalling Vista) - if you boot the machine up using XP - will it perform completely as if Vista wasn't on the computer, or is the system still slowed down by Vistas presence? (excluding the extra HD space an extra OS would use).

Duffer question I know, but I'm easily confused.

having more data on a hard drive generally slows down any PC. However, if you dual boot XP and Vista it shouldn't make a difference to the speed of XP.


And to do with the earlier posts.. I got rid of my vista home premium after about a month, it was just wasting my laptops battery and idled still using half a gig of RAM.
such crap for a bit of eye candy

Ah now be fair, there's lots of new features besides the Aero interface that are slowing it down and rendering it user unfriendly. ;)

SD

I have no problem with it... Performs nice for me, looks good and does everything I need.

mmm... i liked the Windows Calendar! that was useful.

In which case it will probably be removed by SP1.

probably. :)

apparently file transfers are a crapload faster in SP1, i wonder where M$ went wrong?

One can turn off all sorts of unnecessary services in Vista to speed it up exponentialy, such as the pointless never ending indexing search thingy, however, one agrees that obe shouldn't have to do so - it should chug along out of the box - and it doesn't. It's a tweakers delight instead.:rolleyes:

Vista did in fact win the equivalent of the 'Turkey of the Year Award' in PC World's end of year horrors list.

Quelle surprise!

Beware Sony/vista
 

Tradewind. Just a precautionary word regarding Vaio's and Vista. I put vista on my sony t1xp which was supplied by sony with xp as an os. Immediately I had problems ranging from wireless utility, bluetooth, hotkeys non functioning and more. Sony refused to assist so I took a look at the club viao forum and discovered that my plight was nothing compared to many others who were supplied units with vista pre-installed. They had similar problems and sony have washed their hands of them stating that it was microsofts problem....... Despite having a liking for all things sony this has made me very wary of them.

I'm sure there are others who are delighted with sony but for the money I would have expected a little better service.

I've had an Acer Aspire 5610Z for around 6 months now. Dual core (T2060), with 2Gb DDR RAM. Works fine except for when it decides to lock up, which is on a daily basis. Anyone found a fix for this?

Not as bad as people say.
 

Started with Vista on a new Laptop. Took a bit of working through the cr@p I don't need and turning it all off but so far it looks like HP did a good job on the packaged OS build and I think that this is the reason why I had a good experience. Most of the bloatware was from M$, HP only included a couple of programs in the build.

Only real issue I have is that Outlook 2003 on Vista cannot connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server as it did when running on Win2k - so after having migrated all my office settings (worked fine) I have to sort out that issue, there are still a few possible solutions so although annoying it is not a show stopper.

Cleaning up in general took a bit of effort (don't want M$ applications in my face at the top of the list of the Start Menu and Side Bar junk or UAC) but to be honest getting the OS to look like I wanted it (and configure the services I wanted or did not want) took no longer than resetting the application configurations to my norms after I had installed all my apps and tools I use. I know Mac does this config migration for you automatically when you install on a new machine and connect your old one but I have a wide range of apps and with that choice and diversity comes the effort of setting all the preferred options, there is no free lunch in this world. For some apps I just copied config files over.

I'm now on a machine that is now tidier and more refined than XP (that I use on another machine) or Win2K and doing what I did before. Having said that, I would eat my dog before I performed an OS upgrade to Vista, I think it's a fresh install type of change that is the right time to choose to leave XP (such as I did when a change of hardware occurred). I'd love to see this happen on Windows as smoothly as a Mac "can" do it (if all goes well) but as I have stated elsewhere the relatively poor range choice of Mac software makes the effort I just described above wothwhile, for the moment, in order to preserve my massive range of application choice. Anyway, I've got VMWare Workstation installed.

Hardware I used was an HP dv9670ed: 4Gb RAM (Vista only uses 3.1 of this) and 2GHz Dual Core Intel Processor.

My summary, "Acceptable, M$ could do better".

Needed a laptop and I was going to buy one without an OS and install XP on it. However, came across an HP one in the sales at a very reasonable price, the only probelm being it was loaded with Vista premium.
Decided to buy it and I have to say that so far, and much to my surprise, I am getting on very well with it. A few things to turn off etc as previously mentioned but at the moment I like it :8
Regards
SHL

"Vista's first year leaves little to celebrate"
 

My favourite line in the "Vista's first year leaves little to celebrate" article:

:D :)

SD

Vista Service Pack 1
 

Does anyone have any idea when the Service Pack 1 for Vista may become available as I understand it includes a lot of fixes for many of the bugs etc ?

If you are considering abandoning Microsoft due to Vista issues and buying a Mac. DONT!!!

Long term Mac users will tell you that excessive sales of Macs will encourage virus and spyware writers to focus their attention on our beloved machines and sooner or later one of them may succeed in writing something nasty.

Please stick to your highly advanced machines based on NT technology. Whatever the flaws, you have stuck with them so far. Don't abandon Microsoft!

I thank you.

It's already available as a "release candidate" download from microsoft, but reading the report on it in this months PC Pro it doesn't appear to do a lot.
Their tests showed very little improvement after the installation of SP1.


"It improves the file copying speed significantly, it now shuts down 7 secs faster than before and it took 35mins to install the service pack as opposed to
10mins for SP3 for XP. XP with SP3 installed it still faster than Vista"

No 1 Son tells me that his work "Let's try Vista for a laugh" machine warned him that a particular file copy would take "122 days".

I'll let you know in May how it went.