Simply Windows XP is better than Vista

[Borimol]

Review: Windows XP

Look & Feel

Windows XP has quite a cartoony look and feel compared to the slick look of Aero Glass; this is mostly offset by the lack of strange screen artifacts caused by malfunctioning graphics code. You know, almost like static on the screen. This was a once or twice monthly occurrence on my laptop, and happened on my desktop whenever I logged in, and also whenever I played a 3D game after leaving Vista running for a couple of hours. I also miss the "orphaned windows" I got on Vista, dialog boxes that would not go away, in a sense they became part of the desktop, since you could drag a selection from within them, despite the fact that the Glass would render the selection below them. Such crazy graphics bugs appear to be a thing of the past.

Performance

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some "I'm still starting up the OS" queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.

A doomed attempt to cancel a file copy, I had to hard reset the computer after this.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec's pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you're surfing, a nice touch.

Device Support

XP comes with some impressive device support. In fact, every peripheral I've collected over the years works perfectly with it. Many have the device drivers preinstalled on XP, making their installation a snap, but for the rest it was easy to find device drivers on the Web. In addition I found the drivers quick and reliable, a far cry from the buggy, slow and sparse driver support in Vista. I'm glad to see that with their new flagship OS, Windows XP, Microsoft have finally learnt from the mistakes they made with the Vista launch. In addition, support for mobile devices seems to be significantly improved.

I've also found that XP seems much lighter on the hardware than Vista, when it's inactive the hard drive very rarely spins up, a major advantage for me, since I often sleep near my laptop. No longer do I have to try and ignore the continual hard drive drone, but can now sleep soundly just like my computer. I never did figure out exactly what Vista was doing with my hard drive the whole time, but I'm sure it degraded its lifespan with all that spinning.

Reliability

All I can say is "wow!" You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

The Lack-of-Solutions tool

Internet Explorer 7 is much more reliable on XP as well, and has so far not crashed once whilst viewing GMail, when it used to do this several times a day. In addition, I can now actually close the thing down normally every time, instead of sometimes having to kill the process. Error collection seems to be far better as well. Instead of a dialog taking a minute or two to collect the information it needs, the dialog comes up and is ready to send error data almost immediately. I am sad to see the back of the Solutions tool though, it may have hardly ever delivered any valid solutions, especially for the standard random crashes, but at least you knew that something under your control was tracking that information. Please, Microsoft bring it back.

The much-missed reliability report

Speaking of which, I notice that the Reliability Report is also gone, again a sore loss, I really enjoyed charting the downward spiral of my Vista reliability, there were those occasional humps that got you all excited, and then the graph would continue its steady sojourn downwards. Of course, the fact that it only appeared to pay attention to a tiny fraction of the actual problems was a bit of an issue, but I'm sure they could have resolved that for the XP release. Ah well.

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowadays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes. So I'm going to have to hard-reset my laptop. This process, by the way, is also something that amazingly seems to almost never be required in the clean and sparkling new XP.

Right, I'm back, thanks for being patient. I mentioned how much quicker you could start using programs from a boot in XP; I must admit that, appealing though that feature is, you won't actually find it that useful. XP almost never appears to require a reboot, so you hardly ever take advantage of a wonderful improvement like that, which otherwise would save you at least 15-20 minutes a day.

Gaming

This is another area where Microsoft has really excelled in Windows XP. Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you're a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory. Whilst there are a few games that won't work as well in XP than in Vista, you'll find that on the whole XP supports almost all the games you'd want to play. In addition, it's vastly increased reliability means you'll spend much more time killing things than restarting, a welcome change I can assure you. You'll also find that non-X-Fi soundcards with EAX are much improved by their support in XP, which can really add a bit of excitement to your gaming experience.

Multimedia

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers' needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model. It's nice to see a corporation like Microsoft stand up to the cyber bullies at the MPAA and refuse to assume that its loyal customers are criminals. In any case, the DRM built into Vista was broken shortly after its release anyway.

Conclusion

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

Review: Windows XP

[Guest basicomputers]

At the moment I am not risking Vista in case of compatibility issues with the large range of programs I rely on.

[mattmatik]

:laugh:

Pretty good.

[7Dash8]

Oh so Hilarious! An article making fun of Vista..... this hasn't been done before, it's so fresh and innovative! Two thumbs up, whoever wrote this must be a ****ing genius, seriously I love it! This is definitely worth having in the Back Side News forum. ZOMG LOL ROFL HAHAHAHAHA !!!111!!1!!!

[+dave164 Subscriber¹]

This is just poor... you just don't know how to use your computer or you've got a load of crap installed if your getting system locks and crashes.

NO problems with Vista..

David.

[?AK]

This is just poor... you just don't know how to use your computer or you've got a load of crap installed if your getting system locks and crashes.

NO problems with Vista..

David.

+1

[randomnut]

Very nice, and I completely agree.

You have forgotten however, that from an admin point of view, they have upgraded your server management experience in XP. Now, instead of having to remote desktop to the servers to manage DNS, DHCP, Exchange, Group policy, Active Directory as in vista, you can add them as MMC snap ins on your local machine, and they actually work!

[stevember]

This is just poor... you just don't know how to use your computer or you've got a load of crap installed if your getting system locks and crashes.

NO problems with Vista..

David.

+2

[DreadBoat89]

only losers have vista crash on them and publish a dumb article like that

[Leddy]

Well, Windows 3.1 probably runs really fast too. In fact, it will probably never crash, because you've got no new, unstable programs to crash it for you.

Edit- A bit of an interesting fact: I seriously cannot remember the last time Windows 3.1 crashed on me while I was using it. I don't think it ever crashed at all, now or in 1993...

[coth]

It isn't. Vista is much more advanced and much more stable. You might getting higher FPS for low demanded games. But DX9 simply is not able to perform very good on high demanded games. DX9 is naturally too slow. Vista has DX10, which is aimed to able to perform on high demanded games. While XP's core and driver subsystem does not support it. An only reason why DX9 is slower on Vista is that Vista does not support it natively, as it's useless and outdated. If your explorer hangs oftenly it doesn't mean that it is Vista's fault. Tones of people has hanging explorer with 100% CPU usage on XP. Just check you buggy third party programs or upgrade your computer. With poor CPU this problem is very often even on XP or Linux. Vista has much more advanced interface and more enabled useful services, so, of course, it eats more resources. Device database is larger than in XP. And unlike in XP it has support of many latest and modern devices. MPAA? DRM? Never heard of such. Vista is not changed since XP in anything related to antipirating.

Well It has some bugs of course, like hanging explorer when copying from network after connection is getting broken which you noticed. But in overall Vista is more stable, reliable, more optimized and more advanced.

[raskren]

He conveniently forgot to walk through common end user scenarios like connecting to a wireless network, searching for a file or folder, or launching applications via the Start menu. You know, the areas where Vista really shines.

Also highly disappointed in the "DRM" paragraph. Did the poster of the article run into any issues with content protection runing his experience? It didn't seem like it. If not, there's no point in bringing it up. Oh, and XP has a level of DRM as well...noob.

[stezo2k]

I must admit i totally agree with the article, i'll be using XP for a good while

long live XP

[webeagle12]

I bet $100 this thread will get out of control :laugh:

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

Pathetic attempt!

[zhangm Supervisor]

In other joe-blogger news, I farted today.

[xpgeek]

This is just poor... you just don't know how to use your computer or you've got a load of crap installed if your getting system locks and crashes.

NO problems with Vista..

David.

While my big games do run a bit faster in XP, other then that,

+3

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

A somewhat harsh view on Vista, but there are some good points there. It's been proven through benchmarks that XP performs faster than Vista. Aside from that, I think Windows Vista is a wonderful OS. My two pet peeves for Vista are OpenAL and emulated DirectX 9. Slower gaming performance, and no support for hardware EAX. I've moved back to XP for the time being simply because games don't perform and sound as well in Vista.

[heslo]

I've not yet posted in one of these threads but after seeing hundreds of them all over the internet, it's time for me to vent...

NO ONE gives a toss if you think XP is better than Vista, if it is, use XP, I DON'T care, neither does the rest of the internet. Vista is fine for me and many others, we will continue to use it. If for some reason it doesn't work on your PC, you are free to stay with XP, no one is forcing you... now I know you are gonna say "Oh but M$ (see how clever I am using a $ instead of an S) is bundling DX10 in Vista only!!11ones!

BIG DEAL

Only few games use DX10 now anyways, by the time games properly take advantage of DX10, you will have upgraded, driver support will have matured even more for Vista and it will be a viable platform for all!

Don't like the GUI? Set it back to basic, skin it, use a shell replacement, whatever, just stop whinging!

[EL1TE]

Let's see what i have to say to that great mind which write that hilarious text.

Look & Feel

So why MOST of people which search for new themes always look 1st for Vista ones? <---------------------

Performance

You are really smart by showing a folder which has 78.653 items (with only 436MB, i'm wondering what you have there), plus, when XP comes out people said Windows 98 and 2000 was better in performance and compatibility (which it's true), so where are the news when people compare XP to Vista? <---------------------

Device Support

You gotta be kiddin' me... so are you saying when XP comes out it supports everything that was available before it's release, i mean, i hope you are not using Service Pack 2 to compare XP to Vista.

Reliability

All I can say is "wow!"

LOL, all i can say is that you need glasses, and the heavy ones.

I was wondering why Explorer in Windows XP crashes much more than vista (well at least in vista i've got only one crash, which happened because of a shell extension), when you open some folders with videos (specially with .AVI ones) when Explorer is generating the video preview (thumbnail) it simply crashes, how nice.

Gaming

Well, i would like to know what will happen when most of games will be released ONLY in DirectX 10, let me guess you're gonna hack DX10 to work on XP or download one already hacked, plus who said the performance in games are poor in Vista because of the OS? Have you just think about the drivers? Didn't think so.

Multimedia

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista.

Wow i must be sleeping for ages, can someone explain me better how is that (a expert one please :rolleyes: ) ? <---------------------

Conclusion

This is a completely joke. :rofl:

Well done Microsoft! <------------ Vista

Oh yes, i almost forget... describe some programs that are NOT compatible with vista.

Thanks for this, i didn't laugh like this since my friend was really drunk (which was yesterday). :laugh:

[Raa]

Perfectly happy running XP here.

Tried Vista, performed badly, tried it on another pc, performed okay, but XP is still the win.

Faster, more reliable, more compatible. All round, far better, imo.

Bring on the service packs!

[bigmehdi]

hi,

I've never seen as much microsoft fans as in this forum.

Vista suffer from the comparison with XP, full point.

I have a "relatively" fast system (4.2 for the performance index in Vista)

and I still prefer XP.

Moreover, nothing in the new Vista system justify the big decrease of performance.

Edited December 17, 2007 by bigmehdi

[Lasker]

I bet $100 this thread will get out of control :laugh:

Yup, same as someone start a thread called: "OS X is better than Windows" :laugh:

In other joe-blogger news, I farted today.

you thought you farted but in reality is poop, check your pants :shiftyninja:

[Victor V.]

Well, Windows 3.1 probably runs really fast too. In fact, it will probably never crash, because you've got no new, unstable programs to crash it for you.

Edit- A bit of an interesting fact: I seriously cannot remember the last time Windows 3.1 crashed on me while I was using it. I don't think it ever crashed at all, now or in 1993...

Wow! Let's upgrade to Windows 3.1, then!

[abcdefg]

This kind of publicity is the best Windows users can get. Don't you see it?

If people refuse to use Vista M$ has to make it better.

What the hell are M$ employees doing all day?

Are they all in marketing/FUD/bull**** department? Or here defending Vista.

nothing in the new Vista system justify the big decrease of performance

They are just keeping hardware vendors happy so they'll continue their unholy alliance with devil.