I had my first hand experiences today with Vista
getting it wireless and installing software.
Boy to look into the hardware section asks me
to grand access through the firewall???
Vista seems to be a serious bad clone of OS X
visually and concept wise more confusing than
XP.
It seems also not to be so snappy as XP.
How is your experience?
It’s really not so bad if you have a nice enough system, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for serious Blender users.
It eats up a lot of RAM, you see…
Also, everything is “update this”, “wizard that”, and “are you sure you want to run this program?”
Good enough for people who have a nice computer and also do nothing more complicated than sending an email. Of course you could argue just about the same about XP. I’m sure that if you spend enough time (4-6 hours?), you can get Vista to be at a usable state (assuming that it works fine hardware-wise).
I like XP better because it is faster. I dislike Vista because it looks ugly (I know, trivial), acts very annoyingly, and it makes me feel wasteful. I used it on my grandfathers brand new computer which has 4 GB RAM, and I was using 1 GB with no programs running. My system only has 1 GB and works like a breeze; I can only imagine how nice it would be to have 4 GB!
when blender is busy doing something (like baking clothes), vista thinks it crashed and you lose your work if you didn’t save…
there have been a few crashes in Speed Modeling Contests, here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=134073
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=128525
the visual effect are very inefficient, anyone who plays games or does intensive graphics work (2D, 3D… etc) should turn it off before opening an app. I know 3dsmax shuts the visual effects down by default to conserve resources for itself.
as for the operating system in general, i think it’s just like any other windows… can’t live with it, can’t live without it (if you’re a long-time windows user)…
And with service pack 3, XP now asks you whether every time you run a program! :no:
ohh please dont talk about os x… woo! do i hate it. no offense to any mac lovers but i much prefer windows. Yeah vista tends to be slower and a resource hogger but once u tweak a little of the settings it should run fine. and yeah you might want to turn off UAC, unless you like the constant nagging.
And the new look is a bit tacky as well, the only thing i like is the start bar…but i hated that at first … a big blob as the start button. Anyways all that aside i still use vista on the good ol’ classic theme.
hopefully they patch things up in vista and “hopefully” they change that odd blue window outline color they have in the standard vista theme.
And i reckon they should only have like 2 editions… they’ve made four havent they?, home. home premium,business, ultimate.
lmao
I use VIsta and its allright and all its just to dam anoying, i dunno why they would hide the simplest menu items within other submenu items withing wizards llocated within other wizards… to much crap that is unneeded, windows xp was simpler and yes it wasnt a frikin RAM hog
but thats just me talking… i use vista couze i need it for certain other things other then blender
i use vista and imo it’s quicker than xp to boot and run some programmes. UAC is turned off and I haven’t had a virus or spyware alert since i installed it,…of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean i’m safe!
disk partitioning in vista is 10x easier than in xp, and wonder of wonders i can actually burn > 800 mb of data to a dvd without using a third party program. vista drivers seem to be working well and my wireless network was also quick to set up. all in all, as happy as you can be with an OS.
I use Vista on my TV box, and XP on my work box.
There are some very silly things about Vista… its 15+ Gb install size for one. But I must admit it is pretty nice, and does have some good features. I love how they have done some things like the search/start menu, and the disk size/ space available.
I’ve not used it as a work-horse machine yet, so don’t know how it fairs.
Due to its install size it won’t fit on a 4Gb flash drive (which is what I want to use in order to have a 100% silent PC) I am still very tempted to install Linux and battle the poor driver support for TV cards with MythTV.
I dislike Apple claiming to be the first on everything, but at the same time i hate to say that Microsoft is innovative. I would hardly say its an OSX clone, but it certainly does miss the mark on a lot of things (i.e. protecting users from themselves using a method that makes them confused and feel like an idiot is a very stupid idea.)
Doug
I don’t think that Vista is something that Microsoft allows you to “ignore,” from a practical standpoint, but I do believe that “never has an operating system ever been built that was more effed-up by the marketing department.” (Or maybe by DRM-goons.) It was obviously devilishly-hard to build in the first place, which is why it was so late, and it seems to be built upon the principle that the owner of a personal computer can only be allowed to reside in a rubber room. I don’t think that they were listening to professional customers when they built it.
MS hires some of the best software engineers in the business, but (as they said in the book, Hackers): “it’s like designing a particularly nice archway for the doorway of a supermarket. You don’t really want to admit to having had any part of it…” 
After gettting use to it and disabling 8 tons of security features and replacing them with my stuff i like it
i would use ubuntu for blender if it wasn`t for the inability to set custom screen resolutions in ubuntu
My little bro has vista on his laptop. He’s had no problems with it (none serious). I used it a couple of times.
Personally I don’t see the point of Vista. It’s like XP but it hogs even more resources and is filled with the most annoying sounds. Also, now that people mention it, it does feel like you are in a cage when using it. I neither like it nor hate it. I just don’t see the point of it.
On another note…
I saw that microsoft commercial where they fooled people into believing the computer they were using was mohave. I think thats kinda shady of them. That was a controlled environment. They had plenty of opportunity to test everything so that it all went smoothly. And they expect people to fork out a crap to of money to upgrade to systemt that isn’t really much different from their previous. I wonder how many people actually brought up concerns and thus weren’t featured in the commercial.
What are you talking about? I can set custom screen resolutions in Ubuntu just fine.
What I’ve seen of Vista is hardly impressive, but luckily I don’t have to use it. However, it was while talking to someone to try to fix their Vista problems that I successfully converted them to Ubuntu, and they haven’t looked back yet.
Besides, if you want Vista’s visuals, Linux can do the same thing now. I once customized my computer to act so much like Vista that I fooled my IT professional of a father that I had downloaded a cracked version of it!
The only thing I don’t like about Ubuntu is that the install system and the update system is almost crippled if you don’t have Internet.
On the point of commercials…
I saw a commercial where they say something like, “A world without walls”. Well, isn’t that the OPPOSITE of Windows? If you don’t have walls, you can’t have windows. And with Windows Vista especially, they RESTRICT what you’re allowed to do with the computer.
Isn’t that kind of like, lying?
…and the thing that makes me laugh (and cry) is that it keeps popping up a bubble in the tray warning that this is off and that I need to fix it right away! Like something’s broken when its off. Dumbasses. (How do I turn off those warning bubbles, BTW?)
I actually wouldn’t mind having it on if I could just turn off the constant warning dialogs portion. I’d actually like to have the different user areas isolated from each other to some degree. I’m just not going to put up with “are you sure you want to run ProgramX.exe?” every dang time. Couldn’t they at least filter these execution warnings by whether or not they’re accessed thru the GUI by the current user using the mouse or not? Geez, already.
Under the hood & from the user’s perspective, Vista’s not that much different from XP, ‘cept that they decided to move everything around again (re-organize? yeah, whatever) which happens with every new version of Windows. (What else have they got to do with themselves up in Redmond? Besides spend all of that cash we keep feedin’ 'em.) Just turn off all the pretties and the UAC and you’re good to go.
EDIT: Oh, and one more rant: Those recent commercials about how they’re “testing the latest new version of Windows” with some “random” sampling of the public and then telling them its “really Vista” (the bait-n-switch) are just haneous. The marketting dingbat who came up with that one should be taken out and shot (or at least delivered over bound and gagged to a screaming mob of current Vista users to have their way with.)
I have been working with computers for a while, before the world had windows and brick walls for the windows to have a reason for its existence.
almost every time microsoft changes the place of things in its OS du jour, people will go through a period of “who moved my cheese” syndrome. happened on win98 to 2000, 2000 to xp, xp to vista and my guess is that it will happen from vista to windows 7.
vista has all the functionality of xp plus a few security enhancements that may be annoy you (or not), plus a few graphical enhancements that may bog your system down (or not).
on the other hand, if you are a command-line nut like me, vista does have the powershell… but the best thing in vista (for me) is the lack of IE6. part of my job is being a web designer and i can tell you that the world would be a happier place if ie6 no longer existed. vista has ie7 by default and that alone would be reason to use vista over xp.
i guess if you are a pc gamer, then vista offers you directx 10 - just like xp offered directx 9c.
but your initial question was which one we liked most. that is a highly subjective question mostly based on personal experience and preferences. i am not a believer on the “one solution fits all” philosophy, so each person’s needs will be met differently by the different choices of operating systems that are out there.
i use both vista and xp as virtual environments (under virtualbox) running on my kubuntu desktops. i have used windows, linux and mac before and - to me - the best desktop experience is offered by kde running with compiz. my “windows-only” apps i use through wine, though a virtual box or though a terminal services server. you can publish a desktop with terminal services server or publish just the application using citrix or a cheaper solution like 2x (www dot 2x dot com).
XP is OK for most stuff, ugly and not very customizable.
Vista is OK if you only want web/email, it wastes too much resources for anything else. still ugly, still not very customisable.
windows is crippled by the lack of a proper multi-user permissions system, and its history as a single user OS.
I will use windows if it ABSOLUTELY NESSOSERRY, however I much prefer a Linux/UNIX oparatring system.
OK, everyone. Here’s my view. Anyone who says Vista is worse than XP either installed Vista on their system that’s made for XP, doesn’t have enough RAM, or is too lazy to learn their way around a new computer.
I have Vista Home Premium with 3 gig of RAM, and it’s over 10x faster than my XP with 1 gig. And, yeah, I’m a computer geek who knows all about how to enhance speed and all that good stuff. Vista looks way better than XP does. Vista is way easier to use than XP is, once you get used to it. The wizards for Vista are not a bad thing, they make everything way easier. And if the wizard can’t do something, you can do almost everything manually with the Vista that you can with XP. Vista can recognize almost anything with a USB cord, and automatically install drivers for it in seconds. XP does this to a certain extent, but doesn’t have nearly as big a database.
The only, and I mean ONLY downside to Vista that I can think of is it asks with pretty much everything whether you want to run it or not. At least for the first time you run that program. Oh, yeah, and I haven’t found any compatibility wizard on Vista either. Pretty annoying when trying to use some old Win 98 stuff.
I prefer to use the XP rather than Vista. Vista just have a few too many little issues popping up all over the place.
and since I had the restore partition on my laptop for restoring it back to vista, I had decided to try and see how well XP would run after setting up all of the drivers. A number of peoples seems to not believe me but in general Blender3D renders about TWICE AS FAST on XP than Vista for me personally.
So I had deleted the Vista backup partition since I wouldn’t be using it again because Window 7 is coming out next year. Despite some evidence that Window7 will use a few components similar to Vista, it is supposed to be much more easier resource-wise and compatibility-wise. I just hope that the dev of win7 aren’t idiots and still makes the Win7 too bloated with junks and security issues (I absolutely hated UAC!)
@nitros2: u r crazy.
@everyoneelse: I love Ubuntu. I am a Open Source enthusiast myself. Ubuntu is Spyware free. All crazy people that think windows is better than UNIX based operating systems just don’t know how much better UNIX is than stinky ol’ DOS. UNIX OS’es are the best! Mac, Linux…
Linux+XP for me, because Flash and Photoshop put bread on the table, and I don’t feel like giving up on gaming just yet.
But Vista? Heck no. Aside from lacking any substantial advantage while still sucking up your memory, I’m not crazy about their built-in DRM stuff. Bad Vista!
By the way, Mojave is biased and manipulated, and MS’s Vista sales numbers are leeching on those of XP systems. Don’t believe the man and all that.