Windows Vista - how bad is it?

[KurtNYC]

my boss wants me to use Windows Vista which means I either have to run on 2 different operating systems (home and work) or move my life into the hands of Windows Vista. I haven't heard good things so far. I admit my bias is against upgrading in general -- if something works and you rely on it I say don't mess with it.

Any experiences?

[Maineiac]

1. My best buddy gave it a big thumbs down

There's a lot of hardware out there that passes the "compatibility" test but the drivers suck. I always wait for at least service pack 1 before I lay my money down.

[Shakespeare]

2. It came pre-installed on my new laptop. I wanted to hate it, wanted to rant about it....

....but it's really been completely benign. Kind of a more dressed-up version of XP, with very little that's different in the way it runs. I've had zero problems with it, and I've had it for about a month and a half now.

[SPKrazy]

7. Same story here...

came pre loaded on my new laptop

is just a dressed up version of xp, not much different that i can tell

:shrug:

[Maineiac]

3. If it comes pre loaded, it's probably OK

but I wouldn't trust it on any other computer.

[Kutjara]

4. The OS itself seems about as stable as XP for general use.

The major problem, however, is that a lot of hardware out there doesn't yet have drivers for Vista. You either have to use XP drivers and hope for the best, or try to get generic drivers to work. Also, you need a good amount of RAM (1.5GB recommended if you want all the Aero eyecandy) and a good, late model videocard (128MB recommended).

The good news is that if you have the necessary RAM and video card, Vista seems a bit faster than XP. It certainly boots up a lot quicker on my MacBook Pro. File operations appear speedier and browsing with IE7 is faster than on XP (although I don't use IE much myself).

The upshot is that Vista is fine if you buy it on a machine for which it's been optimized, as long as you don't have a lot of peripherals from smaller vendors that haven't got their drivers written yet. I'd avoid installing it on an existing laptop without doing a lot of research, however, or you might find that half of the features don't work anymore.

[KurtNYC]

8. eww, you mention many of my concerns

this is on a laptop that was upgraded from native XP. Never the best way to go on a new OS.

[Breeze54]

9. A lot of the drivers are now available.

Just go to the HW device manufacturers website and check!

Like any new OS, there are 'kinks'.

It happened with all the OS releases from MS.

I think people confuse their browser with the OS issues.

I don't use IE except when my Firefox browser is rejected by another website.

I don't trust IE but I'd get Vista and probably will, when necessary.

But I just got XP and it's been fine. I haven't had any issues.

I was using ME before that and I tweaked it and didn't have any problems

with that either, after the tweaks. ;)

[Kutjara]

10. I'm sure more and more are available every day, particularly for...

...peripherals. Laptops may be a different story. The drivers for several components of my Vaio TX650 still aren't ready (although they're promised Real Soon Now), even though the machine is barely a year old. Anything older than that and there might be problems. WiFi card vendors also seem to be lagging a bit and I've found some that are supposedly Vista-compliant, aren't.

Gameers should also be careful as well. Unless you buy games with the new "Made for Windows" label on them, there's no guarantee they'll work with Vista. I've had a couple of games that were released as late as last Christmas take one sniff of Vista and fall over dead. Again, most of those are now patched, but a couple aren't.

Vista isn't yet a seamless experience for users, so I'd recommend all but the most tech savvy to hold off until it's bedded-in a bit more.

[Breeze54]

11. I read somewhere

the other day that Sony has been dragging their feet with the Vista drivers.
They did the same thing when ME came out and XP.

I won't be upgrading to Vista anytime soon.
Only because I just bought this computer and it suits my needs.
I'll probably wait until the next OS. ;)

[Orsino]

5. Working well here.

I only upgraded from 2k so as to be able to play some games, and my wife was curious. She had some trouble killing partitions on my hard drive (I had dual-boot with Linux), but I can't really complain--she's the one who spent for hours upgrading me.

One game I play, http://bzflag.org/ , runs so slowly as to be useless. I'm told that an updated video driver will fix this.

[ismnotwasm]

6. I went from Windows 2000 to Vista

(New computer)That cancel or allow commercial cracks me up because it's basically true. I don't find it too hard once I found everything, but I'm not all that savvy with commuputer programs. There are a couple of things I've haven't figured out with downloads.

We'll see is the best I can say