Since its release, I see people complaining about Windows Vista over and over (much like people did about XP when it was released). This made me quite reluctant to try it myself. However, I installed it about a week ago (thanks, you know who you are!), and I can't say anything else than that I'm pleasantly surprised about Windows Vista.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I quite like it?
Sure it eats quite a bit of RAM, but you get some nice stuff in return for most of it (compositing desktop and superfetch for starters). As RAM is dirt-cheap anyway these days, I picked up 4GB before I made the switch.
As for UAC, I don't see the problem: ever tried running XP with users properly configured as 'user'? UAC makes that scenario workable instead of a hell to setup (as in XP).
What I really like about Windows Vista so far:
- users with reduced permissions + UAC
- superfetch
- hybrid sleep that resumes even faster than XP
- compositing desktop (Aero Glass)
- it doesn't write all minimized programs to the pagefile (with 4GB RAM in the machine none the less!!!), preventing the very annoying disk trashing that happened in XP (other alternative was to disable the pagefile in XP which many people adviced against for various reasons, or setting it to a small size which resulted in annoying popups telling me I'm running out of virtual memory)
My gripes with Windows Vista so far:
- where's the TweakUI? I need to change some stuff that TweakUI could easily do for me. I need an equivalent for Vista.
- support for more than 4GB RAM using PAE. Although I can't say it's better than XP in that regard, as they removed that feature from XP Professional after SP1. Fortunately I can use about 3580MB out of 4096MB installed. As my motherboard chipset and CPU don't support x64, PAE would be the only way to address and use all 4GB physical ram for Vista and programs, rather than 4GB minus space used up by BIOS and hw.
The main reason I see that people prefer XP is that Windows Vista eats quite a bit of RAM and you need a reasonable graphics card to get compositing. So for a lot of people XP is 'good enough' (Microsoft is falling for its own succes here?). Another thing might be slow driver support from hw manufacturers.
Did I miss something crucial here?
Maybe I'm just weird, but I quite like it?
Sure it eats quite a bit of RAM, but you get some nice stuff in return for most of it (compositing desktop and superfetch for starters). As RAM is dirt-cheap anyway these days, I picked up 4GB before I made the switch.
As for UAC, I don't see the problem: ever tried running XP with users properly configured as 'user'? UAC makes that scenario workable instead of a hell to setup (as in XP).
What I really like about Windows Vista so far:
- users with reduced permissions + UAC
- superfetch
- hybrid sleep that resumes even faster than XP
- compositing desktop (Aero Glass)
- it doesn't write all minimized programs to the pagefile (with 4GB RAM in the machine none the less!!!), preventing the very annoying disk trashing that happened in XP (other alternative was to disable the pagefile in XP which many people adviced against for various reasons, or setting it to a small size which resulted in annoying popups telling me I'm running out of virtual memory)
My gripes with Windows Vista so far:
- where's the TweakUI? I need to change some stuff that TweakUI could easily do for me. I need an equivalent for Vista.
- support for more than 4GB RAM using PAE. Although I can't say it's better than XP in that regard, as they removed that feature from XP Professional after SP1. Fortunately I can use about 3580MB out of 4096MB installed. As my motherboard chipset and CPU don't support x64, PAE would be the only way to address and use all 4GB physical ram for Vista and programs, rather than 4GB minus space used up by BIOS and hw.
The main reason I see that people prefer XP is that Windows Vista eats quite a bit of RAM and you need a reasonable graphics card to get compositing. So for a lot of people XP is 'good enough' (Microsoft is falling for its own succes here?). Another thing might be slow driver support from hw manufacturers.
Did I miss something crucial here?
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