Some time ago I decided I'd had enough of Vista and would go back to XP. After 2 BSODS and explorer crashing when I tried to rename a file, I decided now was the time.
Sounds easy... I disconected 3 of my four drives, partitioned and formatted my O/S drive, and started the XP install procedure. Hmmm, evertime I got to the part where I expected it to say 'Press any key to boot from disk...' it just went straight into setup again. Nothing I did to the drive with either formatting or partitioning would get past this. Clearly, Vista still had it's grubby little paws on this disk.
So, back to basics. Thankfully when I built this pc I kept a floppy drive... Out came my Windows98 boot disk and straight into DOS. From there I used my equally ancient Killdisk. It took an hour and a half for Killdisk to finish, but it took Vista and erased its ass. Vista is no more, it has ceased to be - it is an ex O/S.
XP installed as smooth as ever. So here I am, in an O/S which so far has no drivers or programs installed. I'll get to that later. Meanwhile I can stick two fingers up (in the form of a 'V') to Vista. Hasta la Vista Vista, as they say
I forgot all about the bsod. The only time I had it in XP was with the bklaster worm and I've never had it in Vista. Might as well go back to win9x if you really want to impress.
I prefer XP over Vista for the simple reason of less "safety features" if you get my meaning. XP I tell it to do something, it does it, or at least tells me why it can't do it and then I make it do what I want anyway.
Vista it's constantly "Are you sure you want to install this program?" Are you sure you want to startup this program? This program may not be installed properly. Are you sure you want to shutdown the computer?
At least XP let's me save money on aspirin.
You can do the same in Vista by disabling UAC... it's no biggie and you can do what you like, with no need for aspirin, tantrums or strait jackets.
I hear you all, agree with some disagree with others...
But, point here isn't in going from one dead horse to another or from one pig to another...
I also used to run Vista and XP and 2000 and 98 and 95...
But then, after plenty of "aspirins" and various forms of frustration and utter pain I made rather balled move and switched to OS X
13 months later:
- not a single crash
- not a single virus
- not a single trojan or other bs file
- plus perfectly clean XP installation via Bootcamp for all my gaming needs
= the ultimate computing experience
In short - whenever I see thread like this I remember old days and feel with you all
I built a new quad core PC earlier this year (my brother in law is an Intel Rep - free motherboard and top line CPU!). The word from my computer geek friends is that Vista was a memory hog, prone to driver-related crashes, would not work with some peripherals, and had some performance problems. XP worked fine with me, so my new rig got XP. I've had no problems whatsoever.
What is telling for me is that my company (engineering) has not migrated and has no intention of migrating to Vista. When 98 was replaced by XP (ME and 2000 weren't considered except for specialty business computers) it took only a year before the rollout. Of course, 98 DID have stability problems. Why aren't they jumping onto the (small) Vista bandwagon? Our IT guys have told me that VISTA doesn't play nice with other XP PCs (a problem during the middle of a rollout that takes 2 years before all PCs cycle off lease), and that changing over ten thousand PCs at my company, upgrading the servers, and dealing with hordes User Issues is not something they want to deal with. XP is well understood and works just fine. Plus, Vista is such a memory hog that PCs that have lots of company security and specialty software become brain dead doorstops unless they massively upgrade the memory. And why go to the extra expense when XP works?
So, I'm happy with XP. Once I have a reason to switch I will.
Hydro
I haven't had a BSOD for quite some time; I'd guess a driver is to blame. I've had my share of BSODs in XP anyways, so I'm not sure XP is all that different in that regard.
But I guess that doesn't matter now that you've made the switch. I plan on sticking with Vista myself. It has worked well for me.
As if going above your monitor's refresh rate is going to make any difference. Your monitor can't draw fast enough to keep up with 300 fps.
Dunno why it would slow down so much, though - is this with the latest drivers?
This one I count as very helpful because I've had many a program try to shutdown my computer without my permission .
Once all of the software you want is installed, those prompts pretty much go away anyways.
Never used the Start menu much in either Vista or XP, so changes to it really don't bother me that much. Someday they'll make it useful. I personally don't see how it's any sort of improvement over Windows 3, and to this day I have a set of folders on my desktop instead of using the Start menu.
In short, if you'd like to buy me OS-X, I'll happily use it (with Bootcamp for XP), and in a few years we can reminisce about the good old days and feel for them all together
Sound like a plan?
Oh, yeah. I have never had a problem with XP, but ME... man. I heard that Bill Gates himself said that that was the worst OS that Microsoft had ever made.
My parents had Vista for awhile, but went back to XP because the Vista media center program was considerably less user-friendly (you couldn't play movies off your hard drive, I believe was one of the issues they had).
Ok here's the problem I see in this discussion:
Most people are comparing their set-in, heavely optimized, completely personalized, correctly installed XP rigs with their out-of-the-box Vista machines.
Unless you got your XP rig in the bast 18 months or so, you had to do about as much (or actually more most of the times), to get it working well as you do with Vista.
And for XP I've done about 20 reinstalls(forced, not counting optional ones where I was tinkering and stuff) in its lifetime, resulting form BSODs, taskbar hangs, >>>>MALWARE<<<< (the unprovoked kind, mind you) etc, etc, etc... most in the first 2 years of release
WIth Vista?Since getting it a year ago: NO reinstalls so far, NO taskbar hangs, NO BSOD(aside from the one time I did something stupid istalling gfx driver... and yes the whole GFX issue was a pain) , NO malware, great file management and backup capabilites, great background service prioratization, and so on.
...
Actually both my machines are Out of the Box installs.
My desktop is a refurbished Compaq Presario AMD 3400+ that has had XP Home preinstalled
My laptop is a refurbished HP Pavillion AMD Turion 64x2 that has Vista Home Premium
Both machines have 2gb of RAM. Desktop has a better graphics card.
My XP machine is a far better experience ( my laptop is 'good enough' and I'm having issues with kubuntu on it so for now Vista stays )
Oh and the virus issue is moot. I had *one* malware incident on XP and that was me installing a .exe for a Trillian skin off of Customize.org. Self inflicted. And I don't go to that site anymore. Lesson learned.
BTW , OSX isn't worth becoming the 'I'm a Mac ' from those assinine Apple ads .
not on 4gig & quad core 9800GT G-Card no pup here start menu is better on Vista come on
Fuzzy will soon grow fatigued with XP and downgrade to Win2000
Anthony R lol
Good for you, not a fan of vista myself, but anyone else wanting to go back, use the xp disk and run fix mbr. Vista has an entirely different boot loader and it needs to be changed before you can load xp. Just a note to save others from the hassle Fuzzy encountered.
I guess I've been at this too long. I remember the battles between MSDOS and DRDOS. I was there at the birth of OS2 and fought hard to keep it going. In short I've seen and worked with EVERY OS Microsoft has put out. Vista is no worse or buggier(new word) than the others. Its new driver model is problematic with some hardware and software due to lack of developer support, but I've seen that every time. These new OS's always seem to require time to mature (read catch on). Hopefully Win 7 will be a more developed(read supported by drivers) Vista and thus be more compatible with the real world. Personally, I can't use it because it isn't supported by my VPN vendor. This is the VPNs' fault, not Microsofts'. The UAC is however a moronic idea and better disappear in Win 7 or that won't interest me either. Security is one thing. Treating ALL USERS like idiots is another. Just a thought...
Fuzzy,
I also remain more of a fan of XP then Vista. Really, the only reason I even tried Vista was for the "bells and whistles" of a newer OS. I have found XP to be the most stable of MS operating systems for my use. We'll see what they offer next and how it compares, but until then I will keep my XP.
I got a vista based PC here. For me it depends on the hardware I run it on. At work I run it on a dual core Pentium D, 4Gb ram single 500Gb HDD and a geforce 7 based card with 512Mb VRAM. so far its performance has been reasonable but has had less issues than XP.
My home PC I run vista as well this is on a quadcore, 8Gb ram, 6 different size HDDs each in sets of 2 on raid0 (I do have backups in place on a nas box using raid5), XFI Fata1ty and a Geforce 9600T 512Mb.
Ever since the Performance patches vista has improved as well as constant driver updates. I have had vista over a year now and not had a single issue and is running vista once.
I have incountered one blue screen on vista but this was due a driver included in a product we were trying out at work and nothing to do with vista at all. Most issues I seen with vista have always been hardware releated or third party and not the OS it's self.
Sounds just like my experience with Vista.
100% hassle free and no problems.
Heck I haven't had a crash since Win98.
I'll be hanging on to Vista untill I can get my hands on W7.
lol same...you have to wonder what some people get up to on their computers...
I'm running both atm and quite frankly barely notice the difference, except that the Vista machine seems not to care when I stack too many browsers. If it wasn't for that though, I would likely forget that they're different at all (they seemed different at first, but I have since decided this was mostly superficial). Maybe learning new stuff just rattles the ol' biosecurity circuit.
Congratulations on your switch though, I hope it all goes well.
I have had a great experience Vista. The start menu is vastly superior to the bloated ever expanding crap that we have lived with for so long. Of course, with the Impulse dock I hardly have to use the start menu anymore.
I can't understand why everyone is so angry with the security prompts. What is so damn important that you can't take the extra 5 seconds to glance at the prompt and hit yes or no? I am willing to give up a few seconds to ensure that I'm not getting screwed over by malware.
I have encountered a weird glitch with IE7 in which sometimes when I middle-click on one of my homepage tabs, it starts openning that page over and over again in multiple windows, stopable only by killing the process.
Only if you don't know how to organise your menu items into folders
I will not change! I have had XP for a long time and I will not change! I have used Vista. I hate Vista. My fathers computer has 100 more gegabytes of hard drive space on his computer than I have on mine. He has Vista I have XP. My computer is faster. I have only gotten the Blue Screen of Death on XP once and that was because I fried my hard drive. Long live the XP!
Samurye.
I have been using Vista Ultimate now for almost a year.I haven't had any troubles with it.I built this system about a year ago and put Vista on it.If you have the right components then you should be able to run Vista without any trouble.
XP Was a great OS.But it was time to move on.I'm glad i did.
I'm happy I moved from XP to Vista. The ability to use over 3gigs of ram is enough to use Vista 64bit.
I was running XP (64bit) and had good luck with it but made the move to Vista 64bit because of the lack of software and driver developement for XP 64bit.
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