My first (real) Vista experience
I finally decided to give Vista a try on my box at home. I *thought* it was a decent machine. It's an AMD Athlon x2 4400+, 4GB of RAM, and a nice fast Ultra 160 SCSI subsystem. I have a 7600 GS in there as well. It rocks under WinXP. Needless to say, it has been, um, less than impressive. The installer took forever to startup the first time, and then crashed trying to measure my hardware performance level. Ok, I have an old AGP card - maybe that was it. So I restart the installer. That works, except that now I have to create ANOTHER account, because the installer started over from the beginning! Fortunately, ESC works to abort the perf measurement and I finally got a login screen. Note, all this time the machine has been waiting for minutes between "pages", so I'm a little irritated already. So, I finally get a desktop only to be greeted with 1) no sound (I have an old Audigy) 2) No network. Apparently Vista doesn't like my DHCP server, and 3) crap video. I'm working on 1 now - downloading the DanielK modified driver installer. 2 I still don't get - so I just statically assigned the address. 3 appears to just be an initial setup thing - I was able to fix it fairly quickly. Windows just got a bit ahead of itself pushing my old SGI 20" monitor. Time for SP1. No go - I hit WindowsUpdate only to get a strange error code when I try to install the la-*test*-('") WGA tool. I thought it might be because I hadn't activated yet, but no - it's apparently a problem with BITS. Nice. I downloaded the full SP1 installer, and it's *still* running. Strangely, some things work just fine. The basic GUI is fairly snappy, and the few apps I've run aren't too bad. The sidebar runs fairly nicely, and the system seems responsive. Other things, however; are beginning to piss me off. The UAC especially, since both screens go black for 5 seconds before the dialog box appears. I'm going to give it a go, but so far things do not look good. I admit, I'm a bit biased from the hell I went through with my dad's brand new Dell laptop, so I'm trying to work through that. Still, I'm sensing some serious suckage ahead...

i would say irritating but not totally unusable. Vista is definitely not my first choice for an OS, but my brother uses it every day at college (he's not what you would call a _power user_ ) and doesnt seem to have any problems. I even asked him if he wanted me to install XP and he asked why would he want to "downgrade" :roll: So, all in all, its simply not THAT bad, its bad, but better than your experiences show (probably due to the fact that it didn't come reinstalled on your PC)

deleted dupe. and i always feel more braindamaged when i use it...but one of the things that i'd like to compare this experience to is...--drumroll--- a linux install. people poo-poo on how difficult linux is to install, and it should just be a snap of the fingers like windows is. you have to do a bit of massaging to get xp installed correctly, driver updating, and then the dreaded after-install upgrade. i'm not trying to hijack this topic, but i'm merely pointing out that this is the same on both sides. some people get everything to line up for bingo first try, some people wind up beating their hard drive with a rubber mallet.

just playing the devils advocate here though. The majority of windows users get it preinstalled, so the installation and driver nightmares are gone, making vista at least usable if nothing else

Well, I finally got SP1 installed. It took about 2 hours as near as I can tell. However, it made a substantial difference. The system is much more responsive, and I actually have sound now. (I guess Creative must have taken DanielK's work and shipped it) I also (appear) to have the rest of my RAM back. I'm not sure on that one, I've read that it just reports the amount installed, but not necessarily in use. There are still some irritations - like the fact that the start button occasionally hangs (That could be due to the defragmenter running, but that's still pretty bad) I also turned off the UAC. It was annoying the hell out of me. Still, I could see how a Vista system with SP1 would be usable. It certainly isn't as bad as I thought it would be on this hardware. I suspect that had Microsoft waited until it was to SP1 levels BEFORE shipping, we probably wouldn't have seen such an outcry.

I have been running Vista Ultimate since December. I was a fresh install, but on new hardware. Since it's use, I have only had one major problem and it was recent. I pretains to Nvidia driver's and SP1. I mistakenly upgraded my drivers to my dual SLI 8800 512mb GTS's. Upon doing so I got numerous BSOD's and frequent lockups and Nvidia driver crashes. So thinking it was SP1, I uninstalled it and still got the same errors, only less frequent. So my next step was to remove all Nvidia software, drivers, ntune and anything else I could find. I downloaded all new Nividia software and installed it. Since doing this, I have no issues since it was done and that was about 3 weeks ago. I am going to attempt to re-install SP1 and see if my problems are gone. As for the UAC crap you spoke of, turn it off. It is annoying and fairly easy to turn off. Here are several ways of turning it off, so just pick your method and be done with it. http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm Regarding your ram, 32bit versions can only use a max of 3.5GB's of ram. The 32bit version can only see 4GB in total, but can't use it all. I also run 32bit version, but I only have 2GB's installed which is more than enough for me. Well that or I'm just use to it.

I found the DHCP problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233 Apparently Vista does something different with the discovery packets that causes problems with non Microsoft DHCP servers. Nice. At least there is a fix.

My friend installed Vista on his newish latop and now his crotch has fleas... Coincidence... I think not.

Ever since I installed Mint Linux, my faucet quit dripping. :lol:

strange...i have debian on everything, including my server, but i get the same amount of sex. well, i don't get interrupted about server downtime...so i guess that's a plus? and my "faucet" never dripped, so i can't attribute that to a cure. might want to contact one of those drug companies?

since i installed gentoo, i became marginally more geeky, and my processor has to work overtime compiling :P

Well, here we come to the ultimate irony. I have Vista SP1 all up and running (well, mostly - aside from the irritating network startup issue) - everything is, more or less working. I am within the 30 day grace period for activation, which I had planned to use to evaluate whether or not to plunk down $169 (NewEgg) for my own copy. (I borrowed an OEM DVD and installed without any key, so if I did buy a license, I could just fill it in and activate with no hassle) However, after deciding that Vista was not where I wanted to go just right now, I decided to try the activation hacks. I now have a fully functioning, fully activated, copy of Vista SP1. Even the la-*test*-('") "critical update" didn't perturb anything. The Texas Hold'em game is kind of neat, but the dreamscene stuff was fairly useless. Nonetheless, I am about to unplug the Vista disk, and replace my primary XP disk - probably permanently. This Vista disk will most likely end up as part of an LVM RAID. So, the irony is that I could easily (and technically I already have) "pirate" Vista Ultimate SP1 - but I'd rather go back to my legal copy of XP! I just polished off my SP3 slipstream installer, with a prepatched uxtheme.dll and my favorite (unsigned) theme. I literally have to change two settings to have my preferred install, and both are in the same control panel! My la-*test*-('") XP install CD rocks :) For the curious, no - I'm not going to go into details about how I solved the activation issue. Just suffice it to say that it is possible.