Anybody Upgrade to Vista (Ultimate)?

MIT has a sitewide license - I downloaded Vista the other day and installed it on a spare machine.

I was rather underwhelmed. The new UI is just cheap, gaudy eye-candy - not useful at all. It's an improvement over the Fisher-Price theme of XP, but not by much - and I always turn that off anyway. In the general, the interface was badly organized and confusing (and I'm a CS major!) It seemed like a poorly polished beta release.

Have you tried IE 7? Have you noticed how haphazard and slapped-together the interface looks? That's pretty much how all of Vista is.

If you're buying a new computer, most people would be better served with a Mac - technical users and newbies alike. And we don't even know what the next version of Mac OS X, due in a month or two, will bring.

If you just want to upgrade, I say don't bother.

 

I have a copy of Vista Ultimate sitting on my desk. Don't know whether to install it or not...

 

Put Vista Business on my laptop.

3 hrs to install on a 6 month old laptop that passed the preflight test with flying colors. I'm not a pro at this stuff, but I'd say I'm an advance amateur.

If you thought XP was a memory pig, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

I'm about to stick another couple gigs in my machine so that I'm not running with 60% committed memory all the time, before I open any graphics application. Open photoshop, I'm at 90%.

Doesn't seem to suck a lot of processor up.

Does have some graphics issues that I'm still working to fully resolve. It appears that they're not kidding when they say 256mb is minimum video memory to run well.

And, followed up with an install of office 2007. It took the Windows techie about an hour to get that to go, after I could not get it to install at all. If you've been running the betal of office 2007, GFL uninstalling all the old office applications prior to your fresh office install.

Getting past the wireless networking was a nightmare, but that could have been my fault. And the freaking windows defender asks you EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING if it's ok to run the application. Doesn't seem to have a variable setting, it's either on or off.

Would I do it again on my machine? Probably. Will I implement it across my network at work, not very likely.

Lots of show, not a lot of go. Looks like a Mac OS knockoff, again, just as Apple is about to completely revise their interface.

DM

 

I had about the same experience as DM_N_STUFF, except I didn't have an issue with Office 2007. I did run into a obscure networking issue though. Evidently Vista doesn't play well with some routers that use SPI (stateful packet inspection). Mine is a Linksys and until I figured the SPI issue out I was having all sorts of problems downloading emails and using Firefox as my browser. Oddly enough IE7 worked just fine (if you like the look/feel of it). Thankfully I was able to get to the root cause and turned off SPI on the router (not the best security move but I'm willing to compromise security a bit to be able to run the applications I want to run). Overall, Vista doesn't bring a whole lot to the table except a new paint job (some would say it's not even a good paint job). And it does have some other annoying factors such as User Account Controls. I finally had to turn that off too as it wasn't allowing me to run Firefox without saying it was okay and I couldn't copy files to locations that I had set up myself. I finally had enough and switched it off. And, like DM said, there are some definite performance issues with it. If I run Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 at the same time, I will almost always end up getting an out of memory error...which never happened under XP.

All in all, I'd say Vista isn't really worth the hassle and I would have gone back to XP if it would have been easy to do...now that I've solved most of my performance and usability issues I can at least get done what I need to, but it was a few weeks of figuring things out to get to this point.

 

Here's an interesting Vista tidbit.

Firefox renders images better than IE7 in vista. Not much better, but better.

go figure.
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Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I also have a full copy of Office 2007 that I did install on this computer (which is now running XP Pro). It's got a totally new layout that I assume is supposed to be Vista-ey. It's weird to get used to, but I haven't explored much in Word to see if it's worth it.

I would say that after using Excel 2007 to do some chemistry labs, Excel is certainly worth the upgrade if you use that intensively. I also don't use Outlook, but I hear the newest version is supposed to be a MAJOR upgrade over the old one. I can't vouch for this as I've never used the old or new version.

My last question about Vista is that I've heard (and apparently it is true) that Vista is harder to run than XP. Right now I'm running dual monitors at 1440x900 and 1280x1024, and it runs just like it did with one monitor unless I play a different video on each of the screens. Would it run alright in Vista?

 

Took me a bout 20 minuted of fiddling to get the dual monitors to work right for me.

I had to do a lot of screwing with the second monitor settings to get Vista to recognize that there were two monitors in play, and that I wanted to extend my desktop.

It was a much simpler operation in XP

 

I would say that once you get used to the changed interface, Office 2007 is a significant improvement over Office XP.

that one does seem to be worth the upgrade, and yes, EXCEL is much improved, although Word seems a little less intuitive in its operation, and is a wholesale change over the last version.

 

quick install

http://comedy.videosift.com/video/Opie-installs-Windows-Vista-in-2-minutes

 

been using Vista Ultimate since most of the beta builds and now im running the RTM version [havent spent money on it yet, and probably won't]

i don't like it, but i'm sure ill have to get used to it. it's paranoid, it's ugly, it's slow [64 bit version runs programs slower than the 32 bit version, unless you have a good amount of RAM]...

im not sure what to make of it yet.

as for office 07, after getting used to the new UI, it's better than any of the previous Office suites.

windows is the opposite.

 

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

 

Tonight I bought an HP laptop with Vista installed. It's going back tomorrow. ACT! 2006 does not work with it and that's enough for me to take it back. I got it from Staples (2Gb ram, Core 2 Duo, 160gb HD) tonight because my day-to-day laptop is about to take a crap. Needed something but this isn't it. I'd like to try and install XP on this but don't want to REALLY screw it up. All the stores seem to have Vista machines only which sucks.

Do you think I can install XP on this? Wouldn't I have a hell of a time finding drivers for everything if I did (touchpad, smart card reader, wireless, graphics accelerator)?

It's going through a factory restore now before I box it back up. I did install some things on it and got stuck on ACT! which prompted me to read their website which said "no way".

Looks like a nice machine otherwise. Smaller and thinner than the one I've been using. A real shame.

RMX

 

Thank you. It really amazes me from the people talked to that just bought a new machine & cannot use Vista with even some of the newest software.

GO APPLE!

 

I love Office 2007.
I use MacOSX.
I think Vista's only good thing is that it's got a 3D gui now, welcome to 2001 Microsoft.

I really wish Microsoft would get on the ball, but I think this will be a repeat of IBM. They are going to go so big, and then fall, and reorganize and become a badass company.

 

Anyone here installed Office 2007 on WinXP machine?


I've very hesitant about Vista so I probably will not install it until at least the SP 1 upgrade comes out sometime in the future.

 

Amazingly we have a copy here in Iraq that the computer guru tested the other day.

Today we got a msg from them that anyone who wanted Vista on their machine would be shot at dawn.


Wow.

 

Yeah, I have it installed both at work and at home on XP. Office '07 rocks, I love it.

 

+1
I run Office 2007 on WinXP it it's very nice to use. The only problem is that it saves everything in .dox or docx, one of those, and it's a pain to open with NeoOffice on my Mac.

 

Of course, you can Save As in Word 2003 format to get the standard binary *.doc file format from Office 2003 and before.

 

Oh I can, but I was talking by default.
I haven't looked that indepth to it, I just dig the new layout.

 

I don't plan on getting vista for awhile, gonna wait for everything to get worked out. Besides XP is great and will be supported for a few more years. I'm a big gamer and at the moment Vista isn't working with the latest cards anyway (DX10 8800 series from nvidia) when I do get vista though I'll probably get ultimate or at least premium.

 

My new laptop came with Vista and, aside from having to get used to it, I really like it. It requires adjusting from XP, but it's pretty cool. The only thing I can't fathom the use for beyond its aesthetically pleasing appearance is the way you can look at all the programs current open. Yeah, it's cool and you can arrow through each one and hit enter to select the one you want - but it's still easier to just ALT+TAB through the active applications. But this is my first day with it, so who knows - I'm sure I'll figure out more things as I continue to use it.

 

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=213468
Give that a shot, see if you like it