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XP Service Pack 3

Bill Gates should not EVER be in a commercial. He just does not have a good on air personality.
 
I really cannot understand all the Windows Vista and Microsoft hate. I have had only very minor problems with Vista, and that was because I was an early adopter of Vista and the 8800 'next-gen' graphics cards.

People just need to understand that to get the benefit from Vista, you need a beast of a system, which costs money, of course. I understand not everyone can afford a computer to run Vista well, but then the answer is simple - stick with XP until you can. 'Dissing' Vista because of this is a bit like 'dissing' (I am down with the kids) Ferrari for producing cars you can't afford to insure and buy petrol for.

In terms of how Vista actually RUNS: I have seen Vista shrug off crashes which would have reduced XP to the BSOD. In fact, this was one of the first things that impressed me about Vista - the laid back manner in which it deals with problems: On occasions when a game has crashed, the dialog boxes almost literally said:

"Your game has stopped working because it is having a problem with your Graphics Card. Yep it's crashed in a serious way. Hang on while we see if we can fix it. <searches> Well, we couldn't fix it and we're not sure why it crashed but we've recovered you back to the desktop and you can try again! Cheers."

Things like this have happened to me in XP and have resulted in my whole computer being locked - not even responding to the ON/OFF switch. In fact, I have never had a BSOD with Vista.

It has become somewhat of a meme among 'armchair' computer geeks that Vista is rubbish; I have had many conversations with people like this which usually run along the lines of:

"Yeah, don't buy Vista - it's rubbish!"
"Why did you not like it?"
"Oh, I've never used it, but it's meant to be rubbish isn't it?"
"Actually, it's pretty good."
"Well, my mate's mate told him...etc"
"I've been using it for well over a year now, and it's brilliant."
"Oh."

It seems like whenever Microsoft release a new operating system, armchair experts are falling over themselves to rubbish it in an attempt to appear "cool" and "edgy" (I'm still down!) and knowledgeable. I was exactly the same about making the jump from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, but I was young and foolish.

If people genuinely don't like Vista, having tried it (and not just for 'fear of change/the new' reasons), then that's fine; but people shouldn't jump on the 'hate bandwagon' just because everyone else is, and because Microsoft are EVIL! :rolleyes:
 
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The problem is an OS shouldn't need a beast of a system. You want an OS to use as little resources as possible, so you can use your resources for your programs you're running on the OS.

I also (think) a lot of the issues with Vista were to do with the initial release which did have some major issues that were later solved by updates.
 
gumboot said:
The problem is an OS shouldn't need a beast of a system. You want an OS to use as little resources as possible, so you can use your resources for your programs you're running on the OS.

I also (think) a lot of the issues with Vista were to do with the initial release which did have some major issues that were later solved by updates.
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OK, I think I phrased that poorly; I need to emphasise - you need a beast of a system to get the best of Vista, if you wish to experience all the shinybells and whistles. There are plenty of options to run it scaled down on older machines (turn off drive indexing, 'Aero' etc). I actually got it running (dual booted with XP) with no problems on my wife's laptop (an AMD single core processor, 1GB RAM and a mobile Radeon X700) without any scaling down. IIRC, I had it running in 'Aero' mode, and it still worked faster and loaded quicker than XP.

There were issues when it was released - like any new OS - but these were mainly due to compatability problems with older hardware, ie; manufacturers not releasing Vista drivers for their products quickly enough, but that can hardly be blamed on Microsoft.
 
My understanding was that in the initial release some of the functions couldn't be disabled either, or at least were stupidly difficult to disable. I remember that being a major reason why I didn't switch to it, and I remember my friend who works in IT commenting on one of the newer updates making some functions optional when before they were not.

I could be mistaken, however.
 
gumboot said:
My understanding was that in the initial release some of the functions couldn't be disabled either, or at least were stupidly difficult to disable. I remember that being a major reason why I didn't switch to it, and I remember my friend who works in IT commenting on one of the newer updates making some functions optional when before they were not.

I could be mistaken, however.
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I can't really say one way or the other as I did not (and still haven't, really) attempt to switch anything OFF. The only thing that bothered me (and it was only a minor annoyance) is the amount of dialog boxes and prompts that Vista throws up when you attempt to change system settings. However, as mildly annoying as it is, it's also quite reassuring from a security point of view, so I have not turned that off. I know you can though.

Speaking of security as well - the security on Vista is fantastic: I have only ever had one virus on Vista (and I run no anti-Virus software), and this was as a result of me willfully downloading a file from a dodgy site (despite all Vista's protestations - I thought I knew better!) and unpacking it.
 
My sister's machine melted after she installed SP3, so I haven't bothered. Unless there's a major security benefit I'm missing?
 
SP3 is great. It makes my system run faster and smoother, if anything. Certainly not worse. This CT is ridiculous.

ETA: It's also great for full system reinstalls. I already have a SP2 DVD, and then with SP3, I have the vast majority
of updates all in place in a fairly short amount of time. I remember reinstalling sometime between SP2 and SP3 and
downloading dozens and dozens of updates for an hour plus.
 
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I have just installed SP3 on my older computer, this morning. Haven't tested how it runs, yet. My new computer runs Vista, and apart for a bit slow boot (for what was a science fiction computer not too long ago), it runs like a breeze.

My old computer is a Medion 2.66G P4.
The New one is a Dell XPS420.

We also have a Compaq labtop running XP, so I'll wait and see how the Medion runs before upgrading that one.

Hans
 
Mongrel said:
When was this?

There was an earlier release of SP3 which was available briefly, it was pulled when it did nasty things to machines. The updated version was released this week I believe.
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Hmm, more than a week ago but not more than two weeks ago, I'd say.
 
My problem with Vista isn't how well it performs. It's just an annoying OS to me. It treats you like you have an IQ of 2. Now I understand many users do have an IQ of 2. But I want a transparent OS that helps me get thigns done. Not one that wants to baby me through every little procedure and pound me with 100 questions about everything I do. Not one that pops up messages every 5 seconds to ask me about this or that.

Annoying. That's all I can say. They should just have a question at first launch that asks if you're an idiot or not. If you say yes, than include all that annoying stuff, if you say no, then get rid of it and don't require a person to take a whole day just to find where to turn all that crap off.

Vista by default to me is like one big clippy (that annoying paper clip character in Word that doesn't let you get anything done because he always wants your attention and 2nd guesses everything you do).
 
Nogbad said:
My computer is pretty new and has a quad do dah and I have stuck with XP SP3. Only been running three weeks but so far seems sweet. I was advised by No 1 son (an IT geek) to avoid Vista as it is going to be as Windows ME to XP and a replacement to Vista is on the way that will do the clever stuff but not consume half your PC's resources just to boot up (I think that was the gist of what he said)
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Number One Son very wise, wil enhance Nogbat empire greatly
 
The most telling sign about how Vista has more or less flopped is that It has been out for nearly two years, and except for Microsoft, I have not seen a game that requires Vista. Whereas with XP, within 2 years you saw a lot of XP required games out there.
 
*pouts*

Gee, you guys are no fun, you turned my CT parody thread into a Computer Geek Thread. :p
 
Jonnyclueless said:
Annoying. That's all I can say. They should just have a question at first launch that asks if you're an idiot or not. If you say yes, than include all that annoying stuff, if you say no, then get rid of it and don't require a person to take a whole day just to find where to turn all that crap off.
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That is the test though. If you just asked a simple question, all the idiots would claim they were experts.
 
dudalb said:
The most telling sign about how Vista has more or less flopped is that It has been out for nearly two years, and except for Microsoft, I have not seen a game that requires Vista. Whereas with XP, within 2 years you saw a lot of XP required games out there.
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They might not require Vista, but DirectX 10 does, and some of the newer games have settings that are only enabled for DirectX 10. Whether your computer can handle the additional features (volumetric smoke, for example, can eat your graphics card(s) for lunch) is another story.
 
No problems at all so far on an older machine with SP3. I still run IE6, though, because I had huge crashy problems with IE7.
 
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