Vista today = XP 6 years ago. Stop complaining!

[deck]

I'm really not sure which forum to post in regard this oft lamented, probably dead topic. But it's late, I'm tired, but I'm not going to bed any time soon.

I'm one of those people who are saying that Vista today is just like XP was 6 years ago. People are whining and moaning and saying that Vista is the worst thing since minced bread. They say XP is the ideal and does almost everything perfectly.

Common complaints are; drivers, interface, system requirements, and additional features. Also included is the much maligned, inevitable service pack that is spoken of even before anyone tries the software.

Problem is, and I guess 6 years is a really long time, XP was received in just the same way. The same response, the same questions, the same demands. Few people can get it through their heads that Vista will, like XP did over time, become the OS of choice and we will not know the difference or care. As ubiquitous as XP is today, in 2 years Vista will be (or less, given that Vista is being adopted more quickly than XP was at the same time). As loved and touted as XP is today, Vista will be in 4 years.

As proof, and since it's late I only did a quick search, I offer you these two reviews.

One for XP 6 months in the wild, and one for Vista. You'll find some interesting parallels. They are from Cnet, and I hope to find several more to prove my point.

XP

Vista

[ozgeek]

We did experience the same when XP was released. People would say XP was eXPensive, eXPansive (in terms of system resources). But where are we today? XP is not expensive and it's system requirements is nothing by today's standards. Even a P3 can run XP (at least I did with my old (500mhz celeron).

This recycles again when Vista was released and still is happening. I guess most people takes things very slowing when adapting to new things. About a year ahead, we should see a drop in complaints about Vista since new computers will have the power and resources needed to run Vista anyway.

[bunker]

I know this is true but some people aren't ready to switch to vista. For me, the only thing holding me back, is that I can't afford to build a new machine.

[+virtorio MVC]

I've been saying much the same. XP was a s**t of a thing when it came out.

[-Hiroshi-]

MAN that horse sure is being flogged, atleast you warned us..

[Digitalx]

Well XP wasn't this bad 6 years ago so isn't really much point to this...

[Vice]

I want to run Vista. I have one of the fastest rigs money can buy and XP doesn't take advantage of all the cores, ram and graphics.

Vista does. And thus I want to run Vista. But its so darn buggy! It's been a year since Vista made Gold Master, Microsoft has so much money and employees.. I wish they would have fixed many of the problems 6 months ago. I know you can't rush development but maybe if they broke the development down in to blocks and brought more people in to work on each of those blocks we could get some of the major bugs fixed. At the moment I'm suffering with ICS, UI lockups, random kernel panics and general application instability (Especially with IE7).

I'm not writing Vista off by any means. I remember when XP was first released and it had a lot of problems that everyone complained about, and Microsoft slowly fixed those. But at the same time the longer we go without fixes or SP1 the more I lose patience waiting and eye a already functional Dual-Quad 8GB RAM MacPro with Leopard + XBOX360 to replace my fast depreciating PC with a difficult to suffer operating system..

In closing, Come on Microsoft make me proud to be a PC owner.

[CloudEngineer]

vista runs better for me than xp did when i first installed the rtm release.

i love it when ever i see the people who arnt even running vista putting any problem a user might be having down to "its vista's fault" when it isn't.

vista runs stable, fast, and i have not had any major issue other than a hardware issue which was my own fault.

I have no driver complaints, i love the interface & my system easily exceeds all vista's requirements.

the same people complaining about vista now, will be the same one's praising it later down the road.

[Lee G. Veteran]

I agree - it'll get as good as XP's become over the years, and will replace it as the main OS. I really want to be on Vista, especially as I have a new PC, but I'm holding back until SP1 is released. Then I'll buy a copy of Ultimate Edition.

[stezo2k]

I dont see the point myself, xp has a lot of life left it in it and its pretty much a perfect os for me, its very stable, fast and cheap (well cheaper than vista)

Vista doesnt offer me anything more than XP does, infact its more bloated, requires more (even on some dual cores its sluggish) once SP1s out though i'll try it on my setup

As for 6 years ago there were people slagging off xp but not as much as they are with vista now, and driver support when vista was released was poor (especially with printers)

[BlakByte]

When XP got out, i didn't even know what Windows was.. Win2k ftw

[Panacik]

Wow, this thread is SO open to trolling...

[nXqd]

I agree, Vista is not that bad. People just like XP, they may be blinded. Let's wait, but Vista is not in the same situation like XP before. We have uBuntu, OSX . Big problem :p

[Pikey]

Very true! ... I would go further and say that Vista works good for me straight out the box!

I've not done any tweaking as such ( logging in as *real* admin is all) ... unlike XP when it first came out ...

Remember the BSOD ... ?

[Brody McKee]

I want to run Vista. But its so darn buggy!

Hahaha. You don't even know if it's buggy because, as you said, you're running XP! Having used Vista since Beta 1, I believe I'm much more qualified to judge Vusta and I say that Vista is bug free and does EVERYTHING I want - I reguarly use Adobe CS3, 3DS Max 9, Office, Nero, Visual Studio, Expression Suite, Nokia PC Suite, heaps of games (including Bioshock, Company of Heroes and Crysis (demo) in DirectX 10!), and etc WITH NO PROBLEMS EVER!

[Vice]

Hahaha. You don't even know if it's buggy because, as you said, you're running XP! Having used Vista since Beta 1, I believe I'm much more qualified to judge Vusta and I say that Vista is bug free and does EVERYTHING I want - I reguarly use Adobe CS3, 3DS Max 9, Office, Nero, Visual Studio, Expression Suite, Nokia PC Suite, heaps of games (including Bioshock, Company of Heroes and Crysis (demo) in DirectX 10!), and etc WITH NO PROBLEMS EVER!

Please think through what your saying :)

I've been running it for 8 months (Final) and I beta tested it all through its life. I've sampled every build released and I currently Dual Boot Vista x64 Ultimate with XP. I think I'm qualified to know what I'm talking about.

[Calculator]

I made the switch to XP about 1 or 2 years after its release, when most of the "bugs" were fixed but it wasn't yet a serious hype as it is nowadays. Thus, it was quite logical that when I got my new PC this year and immediately installed Vista Ultimate 64 on it, I would be experiencing problems. And I did experience trouble. My Logitech camera and microphone were unsupported, but this was already fixed in March. My nVidia card driver is out-dated because of something weird with the latest driver versions, and I hope that it'll be fixed soon. But apart from that, everything works great! I am able to do the same and sometimes even more than I could with XP, and I'm very happy about that.

I guess that within 2 years, Vista will be the standard and XP will become unsupported, just as Windows 98, ME and 2000 are today.

[Panacik]

The bottom line is that Vista is not ready for a company or user to transfer to. Once more applications are built to run on it, improvments are made to its boot time and general speed.

We put a few machines with Vista out on our network after some tests and the users didnt like it, said it was slower and then we found that a new piece of software we are rolling out is not compatiable with Vista until next year.

OK, the software is its own fault, but, any average user will want his current software to work with their machine and until fixes have been made to allow older software to run on Vista and the speed is improved either through software or hardware, it is not an option.

[Brandon]

Ive had no problems with Vista on my Dell laptop. I'm waiting for SP1 to put it on my desktop, but still

[Angel Blue01]

I dont see the point myself, xp has a lot of life left it in it and its pretty much a perfect os for me, its very stable, fast and cheap (well cheaper than vista)

Vista doesnt offer me anything more than XP does, infact its more bloated, requires more (even on some dual cores its sluggish) once SP1s out though i'll try it on my setup

As for 6 years ago there were people slagging off xp but not as much as they are with vista now, and driver support when vista was released was poor (especially with printers)

That's what I said of Win98 6 years ago -its a great OS why bother with this NT-based, incompatible, reource hog?

I've had far few problems with Vista RTM than I did with XP RTM.

[NotChetHanks]

I still don't get it, seriously. What are these people doing to their computers? I have had Vista since RTM and it has run flawlessly for me since then. It recognizes all my hardware and I have NEVER had a lockup, NEVER had any error of any sort. I really, really dont get it. Seriously.

[Dom]

The problem is, that between XP and 2000, it wasnt a WHOLE LOAD of new features, the basics were still there, so most of the users, would get used to XP in a little to no time...

I for one, got a PC just when XP was released, so i had the pleasure to test it, indeed at first boot i found it more interesting and better than Win2000, but it was so heavy on my Machine (which wasnt top notch at that date :p)

I went back to Win2000, then back to XP, and so on, till one day 2000 wouldnt install, and i HAD to stay with XP..., this was after 1 or 2 months were i formatted every 2-3 days to test different things...

This is were i had to learn to optimize every bit of XP to make it fast, i wasnt easy, but since i managed pretty well Windows 2000, it wasnt hard at all..., now i wont go back from XP, i love every bit of it (lies, but it does all i need, flawlessly, and if for some reason it fails, i know why immediatly), but Vista its something different...

I had to say, at the start, i hated Vista, mostly because i couldnt even run it decently, but after using it on some PC's, Laptops, i kinda liked it..., but im not sure its ready to enchant everyone just like XP did...

Starting for the hundred of versions (5 if i recall correctly), the big standards, i mean, XP when it shipped, it was able to run with any PC on budget for the date, it did with mine, kinda slow, but it ran..., Vista, does not run on budget PC's, you need more Ram, and a Graphics card decent enough (6150 runs it kinda slowish), keep in mind im talking about Budget PC's on my country, since USA budgets PC's are quite better :p...

With that said, i really believe you cant compare XP to Vista, XP was a huge step from Win2000, keeping the Basics, fixing a lot of features and adding some useful ones, Vista, its on another league, i cannot say its better, but its different in a lot of forms, last time i used Vista, i had to search for a lot of HowTo for some things, which on XP, i recall only doing this for Services or such..., Vista might be a good OS in the future, but it wont be for everyone...

[LiGhTfast]

I happily used XP as a main os when it was in rc2 form. The rtm was fine too even though i dual booted to play some older games. Vista on the other hand is still no were near a useable state the whole feel of vista is slow and interupted. XP is straight forward and easy thinking, im in control and it all works.

[naap51stang]

I've been running Vista on my laptop (Dell E1505) since March. After I shoved an extra gig of ram (now at 2 gig), it took

off. Haven't had really any problems with it other than wi-fi, which was fixed in a KB article.

That article with the 6 months into XP looks a LOT like the articles you read about Vista now.

I remember a few of my friends when I put XP RC2 on my home box were laughing at me saying XP was a POS, are now

saying the same thing about Vista. I'm sure when whatever comes after Vista is released, they will be saying the same

thing. It's human nature, to an extent.

[CoolerUK]

I dont know why so many people complain about Vista either, not had any problems with it since i bought it around 5 months ago now.