# What's so bad about Windows Vista?



## Oddler (May 29, 2008)

Personally, I use Windows XP because my crappy PC can't upgrade to Vista I think....It's 512 RAM which I think is a No-No for Vista. My mothers computer is a 1Gig of Ram computer and it has Vista on it. I was playing around with Vista and I got so annoyed with it blocking all the programs and confirming a hundred times weather I really wanted to open the program I just Double clicked on. Is that the major beef everyone has with Vista? I'm thinking of upgrading computers....and I'm not sure if XP may support the pwnage specs my new one will have (I'm computer illiterate kinda and don't really know much if that's true). I plan on getting a really bad ass computer and I heard Vista runs good on really good ones? I just want to know what is so bad about Vista that I see everyone saying go back to Windows XP in the exact ways that Vista doesn't par up!


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## bubbagumper6 (Nov 11, 2008)

i dunno what everyone hates about vista...those security prompts are extremely annoying but what most people don't know is that it takes like 2 minutes to disable them...other than that, the only thing I don't like is that everything is moved around...takes longer to find stuff.  But i'm getting used to it so it's getting easier.

At first I didn't really like it...now I love it


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## laznz1 (Nov 11, 2008)

RAM handelage and on a diff computer had a few probs with it and plainly hate the look


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## bubbagumper6 (Nov 11, 2008)

well my comp has 8gb of ram so it doesn't slow down too often


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## laznz1 (Nov 11, 2008)

well thats just cheating lol


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## Cleric7x9 (Nov 11, 2008)

nothing is wrong with vista. unless you need to use your parallel printer from 1997


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## laznz1 (Nov 11, 2008)

Cleric7x9 said:


> nothing is wrong with vista. unless you need to use your parallel printer from 1997



just to annoy everybody they should bring them back


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## speedyink (Nov 11, 2008)

bubbagumper6 said:


> what most people don't know is that it takes like 2 minutes to disable them



Less than that.  It's literally like 4 clicks, lol.

I have no beefs with vista, I don't miss XP at all


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## mep916 (Nov 11, 2008)

Take a look at some of the threads in this tag search... 

http://www.computerforum.com/tags/vista.html


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## Twist86 (Nov 11, 2008)

Vista requires tweaking and since 80% of PC owners are to stupid to google the thousands of tweaking guides for it they brand it as horrible.

I guess reading "disable this and this is how you do it" makes the normal user confused so Vista sucks.


Know what really sucks about XP? 
I can't fully utilize my quad core...nor can I enable 4 core boot ups so drastically increase my boot times.
I can't have DX10 for gaming because the hacked version of XP DX10 sucks nor can I have full driver support for X64 since XP Pro 64 bit has LOUSY support.


Its user preference but if your running dual core + your wasting your time staying XP imo.


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## Vizy (Nov 11, 2008)

pre 2000 printers = da bomb


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## laznz1 (Nov 11, 2008)

Yea go old printers


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## diduknowthat (Nov 11, 2008)

Nothings wrong with vista, at least I haven't ran into any problems. The interface looks better, it basically never BSODs on me and it supports DX10 and dx10 games. As for higher ram usage, has anyone even noticed how cheap ram is? You can buy 2 gigs of DDR2 800 for for like $25 online.


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## bubbagumper6 (Nov 11, 2008)

diduknowthat said:


> As for higher ram usage, has anyone even noticed how cheap ram is? You can buy 2 gigs of DDR2 800 for for like $25 online.



while that may be true, most of the people who don't have a lot of ram, are probably running really old ram which still isn't all that cheap.  But yeah if your putting together a new build, it doesn't cost much to throw in 8gb of ram...lol i should know


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

This is what's so bad with it:

http://www.computerforum.com/1110653-post87.html


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## bubblescivic (Nov 12, 2008)

ROFL you were wondering if XP would support the pwnage specs of your new computer?


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## voyagerfan99 (Nov 12, 2008)

I find absolutely nothing wrong with Vista.


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## Droogie (Nov 12, 2008)

Nothing is really wrong with it.  There was kind of a  "I hate Vista" bandwagon formed awhile back.  That's what it seems like to me anyway.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

@ above poster

I hated Vista for a while before I used it after reading about it. Then after giving it a damn fair shot for 8 months with nothing but roadblocks, I gave up on it. And I'm not just some average user who is barely computer literate, it's just not for me. The only thing worth missing about it is DX10 since I'm a gamer. But it's sheer aesthetics and frustration otherwise.


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## laznz1 (Nov 12, 2008)

meg said:


> this is what's so bad with it:
> 
> http://www.computerforum.com/1110653-post87.html



nice rant lmao


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

laznz1 said:


> nice rant lmao



Thanks.. I had just gotten over the Post-Vista fever, I really needed to put it down.


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## voyagerfan99 (Nov 12, 2008)

tknick90 said:


> Nothing is really wrong with it.  There was kind of a  "I hate Vista" bandwagon formed awhile back.  That's what it seems like to me anyway.



I have a lot of Vista haters come into work. I had one guy come in and just go "Vista sucks."

I'm not a vista hater. I find it a perfectly fine OS, so when I hear that I grind my teeth.

I feel like doing a "Mojave Experiment" for a day or two at work.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

voyagerfan99 said:


> I have a lot of Vista haters come into work. I had one guy come in and just go "Vista sucks."
> 
> I'm not a vista hater. I find it a perfectly fine OS, so when I hear that I grind my teeth.
> 
> I feel like doing a "Mojave Experiment" for a day or two at work.



There's a reason there is a bandwagon. Generally, with every trend, though it might be trendy (lol) there is a damn good reason. Because of lots of complaints. So if people don't have to experience it to hate it and save money not upgrading, so what? 

And I don't know where the hell you work, man, but basically every techie (including myself) thinks Vista is just a disaster - maybe not in itself, but in its complexity for the average user. It's not bad necessarily but it takes a lot of pampering if you do more than send e-mail, download viruses (err I mean Limewire) and talk on AIM.


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## Droogie (Nov 12, 2008)

meg said:


> There's a reason there is a bandwagon. Generally, with every trend, though it might be trendy (lol) there is a damn good reason. Because of lots of complaints. So if people don't have to experience it to hate it and save money not upgrading, so what?
> 
> And I don't know where the hell you work, man, but basically every techie (including myself) thinks Vista is just a disaster - maybe not in itself, but in its complexity for the average user. It's not bad necessarily but it takes a lot of pampering if you do more than send e-mail, download viruses (err I mean Limewire) and talk on AIM.



Can you name some specific issues that you have with it, that don't also occur with XP?


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

tknick90 said:


> Can you name some specific issues that you have with it, that don't also occur with XP?



I posted an entire rant if you check back a page it's linked. And up until all those problems (which were actually always there but easily ignored until I really, genuinely needed them to stop) I was a Vista user for ~8 months. Now I'm guessing you don't want to take the time to read that since it's a few paragraphs. But don't ask me that question when I've backed up my opinion with a lot of professional and fair information.


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

It is simply a resource hog.  My new rig does not run Vista as fast as I would thought it would and my specs are pretty high.  I got a 5.9 Vista rating, and it still is sluggish at times, and I experience memory leaks from crappy programs, and sometimes my RAM will spike up to 1.5 gigs idle.

I use it for DX 10, not sure if it is totally worth the trade off just yet.  I would say when SP 2 comes out hopefully it will be less bloated and sluggish.


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## Droogie (Nov 12, 2008)

meg said:


> I posted an entire rant if you check back a page it's linked. And up until all those problems (which were actually always there but easily ignored until I really, genuinely needed them to stop) I was a Vista user for ~8 months. Now I'm guessing you don't want to take the time to read that since it's a few paragraphs. But don't ask me that question when I've backed up my opinion with a lot of professional and fair information.



Ok I read it, and just because YOU have had problems with it, doesn't mean that everybody is going to have similar problems or any problems at all.  You had a bad experience with it, but you saying that the entire OS was a disaster doesn't hold any weight.  Right now I can say I have had far more problems with XP than I have had with Vista.  It's not going to be the same case for everybody.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

tknick90 said:


> Ok I read it, and just because YOU have had problems with it, doesn't mean that everybody is going to have similar problems or any problems at all.  You had a bad experience with it, but you saying that the entire OS was a disaster doesn't hold any weight.  Right now I can say I have had far more problems with XP than I have had with Vista.  It's not going to be the same case for everybody.



I didn't say my problems were anything but unique to me, alTHOUGH most of those problems are known ones. Honestly. Not to pull the 'job' card but I work at Geek Squad and sooooooooo many people come in with the same usb and hibernation issues I had and end up dishing out so much cash to fix it. Most of the Vista customers are repeats... in and out every other week or two with some Vista specific issue. Everyone with XP mostly comes in for a hardware upgrade, not at all due to XP being a problem, just because they want something faster.


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## voyagerfan99 (Nov 12, 2008)

meg said:


> There's a reason there is a bandwagon. Generally, with every trend, though it might be trendy (lol) there is a damn good reason. Because of lots of complaints. So if people don't have to experience it to hate it and save money not upgrading, so what?
> 
> And I don't know where the hell you work, man, but basically every techie (including myself) thinks Vista is just a disaster - maybe not in itself, but in its complexity for the average user. It's not bad necessarily but it takes a lot of pampering if you do more than send e-mail, download viruses (err I mean Limewire) and talk on AIM.



The thing is though, EVERYBODY that doesn't want it has "Heard" how bad it is and have never even tried it.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

voyagerfan99 said:


> The thing is though, EVERYBODY that doesn't want it has "Heard" how bad it is and have never even tried it.



Everybody?

and

if your best friend told you not to eat at a restaurant because the waiters were slow, and the food wasn't as good as he'd hoped, and that he wished he'd just gone to his favorite restaurant instead of wasting time and money there... would you go to that restaurant?

When people hear things about computers from trusted sources (friends, or a magazine) they can't really help it. And like I said, more often than not it's based off of truly bad experiences.  Now with 9/10 customers coming to my counter with a legitimate Vista complaint (not just OH I HATE VISTA! but something tangible, something they can show me)... wouldn't it be blind of me to not come to the conclusion about the OS being pushed out a bit too early? About it being a bit sloppy?

Anyway I'm not so much defending Vista as I am people and how we communicate.


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## ikermalli (Nov 12, 2008)

Yeah well when I told my friend (he's a gamer) that I was going to put Vista on my machine, he wouldn't leave me alone about how bad it was, and for the next week he kept nagging me, then when I got it on my machine and told him I liked it and he came over he thought it was pretty nice too. I haven't had problems with it, I am personally on Windows XP Pro SP2 because I don't game (yet) and I like the look of AlienGUIse themes on my computer, plus I am getting 4GBs of RAM soon


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

If I play a game over 2 hours it is prone to crash.  That is a good thing though, so I never spend more than 2 hours playing games.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

tlarkin said:


> If I play a game over 2 hours it is prone to crash.  That is a good thing though, so I never spend more than 2 hours playing games.



Now that's just silly.


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

Key word being prone, not always.  I think it has to do with the shoddy 64bit library files.  I don't see why MS just didn't include both 32bit and 64 native, but I guess it is another way to make money.

I literally do nothing with this rig except surf, maybe office production work, a dash of web development and gaming.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

tlarkin said:


> Key word being prone, not always.  I think it has to do with the shoddy 64bit library files.  I don't see why MS just didn't include both 32bit and 64 native, but I guess it is _*another way to make money.*_
> 
> I literally do nothing with this rig except surf, maybe office production work, a dash of web development and gaming.



I'm not knocking your method of parental control. It's kind of interesting. No need to get defensive... and your answer is right there! : )


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

I don't have any kids and live alone, hahaha so it isn't a form of parental control.  I just feel guilty if I play games all day and don't stop to like read a few pages out of book or something, or clean my apartment.

To be fair, it is not 100% MS's fault why Vista sucks in my opinion, it is partly due to the developers who are lazy that develop this stuff.  However, I think that MS enables them to be lazy, so it kind of all goes full circle, several times over.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

tlarkin said:


> I don't have any kids and live alone, hahaha so it isn't a form of parental control.  I just feel guilty if I play games all day and don't stop to like read a few pages out of book or something, or clean my apartment.
> 
> To be fair, it is not 100% MS's fault why Vista sucks in my opinion, it is partly due to the developers who are lazy that develop this stuff.  However, I think that MS enables them to be lazy, so it kind of all goes full circle, several times over.



The parental control thing was kind of a joke, not literal. Because you use the eventual game crash as a form of control... ah, nevermind.

It's not MS' fault that Vista sucks, followed by it is the lazy developers' faults? Well they're a part of MS, if you hadn't noticed, lol. They're not lazy, quite the opposite really (people hellbent on profit are stupid maybe but not lazy). It was a marketing drive - frankly Microsoft had to do something because other OS' like linux-based ones and OSX get constant updates, so they rushed it. Several places Microsoft spokesmen are found admitting that Vista had/has some serious issues that needed attention. It just wasn't really polished off as well as XP was at release.


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

meg said:


> The parental control thing was kind of a joke, not literal. Because you use the eventual game crash as a form of control... ah, nevermind.
> 
> It's not MS' fault that Vista sucks, followed by it is the lazy developers' faults? Well they're a part of MS, if you hadn't noticed, lol. They're not lazy, quite the opposite really (people hellbent on profit are stupid maybe but not lazy). It was a marketing drive - frankly Microsoft had to do something because other OS' like linux-based ones and OSX get constant updates, so they rushed it. Several places Microsoft spokesmen are found admitting that Vista had/has some serious issues that needed attention. It just wasn't really polished off as well as XP was at release.



I'm just going to stop you right there.  I used to manage thousands of Windows machines in an AD/ED environment for a few years, now I manage mostly thousands of Macs in a OD environment.  Apple is not bullet proof nor are they immune to making mistakes.  OS X 10.5.4 was a pile of dog excrement and I had so many problems with it the beginning of this school year (as I am a sys admin for a school district).  I know you didn't mean that they were better, but I just wanted to point that out.

The problem is with Windows is many many things.  Mainly running every user as root and not abiding by any standard POSIX set of permissions allows for the developer to use "sloppy" as in not secure code.  Which is prone for memory leaks and crashes.  When you build an OS off a strong foundation of permissions and ownerships you gain a lot of control and more stability.  A process goes crazy and wants to eat up resources but it can't because it isn't running as root (unless it is actually a root level process).  The down side to this is that it sets the learning curve higher than Windows.  People can't simply point, double click, and let a wizard magically do everything for them.  

Then you have developers like AutoDesk and Symantec which are so huge they just buy out any competition, and they have such a large market share and companies are already so much invested into them a new product will likely never actually make it.  There are many reasons for this, one being that a lot of products don't use or follow any open source standards.  That is slowly changing though.  I would say the first largely used open source standard in most enterprise networks has to be LDAP.  LDAP is LDAP, plain and simple.  I can export LDAP from AD and suck it right into OD.  Things like passwords may not transfers but groups and users will for sure.

Now imagine you have some large back end SQL based SAP system like Crystal Reports.  Now, you want to change to a better product, but the current product you use doesn't follow any open source standards.  Nor does it support them.  So, you have no ability to migrate your data bases and other data into a new product.  It would cost you millions of dollars to migrate when you take into account the labor it would take to migrate the actual technology.  The time it would take your company to train every person on the new technology, and the loss of productivity while they are switching over to a new system.  The actual benefit never out weighs the cost of changing platforms or migrating.  

Unless you migrate it in to integrate it keeping your current technologies in place.  Which is why Exchange supports open source calendar standards now.  MS wants you to keep your exchange servers and email/calendar system if you decide to toss some Linux or Unix boxes in.  Smart move on their part.

This was not meant to dis the developers, the people who develop for MS and those giant companies are smart, but there are so many problems and they have to develop for a plethora of hardware configurations that it is nearly impossible to make a solid OS with Windows.  There will always be a higher rate of failure with Windows boxes because of that.

I guess the upside is that you get a lot more choices with PC hardware, but it does come at a cost.


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## meg (Nov 12, 2008)

You genuinely went off on a tangent that ought to be another topic. I didn't say OSX, or linux were better, or worse, but they are competitors for Microsoft, lets face that at least. Maybe entirely different, reaching (mostly) a different target audience. I wasn't asking for the breakdown of what's wrong with whose code. Simply stating that XP did better than Vista in the benchmarking for a very long time, in every process. It still does better overall, despite Microsoft's attempts at fixing their bloated operating system with a SP.

Now I honestly don't know the reason for all the... stuff... that you said, other than to maybe try to back up the fact that you're knowledgeable, but you really lost the relevancy to my previous statement, which you quoted. So I'm kind of lost as to where this went. The only reason *I* mentioned OSX and Linux was because, regardless of how *good *their recent releases were (which I was not at all discussing... *at all*) they were making Microsoft sweat because they had been doing nothing since 2001, at least as far as the public could tell, since that's when XP was released. And aesthetically, it's outdated.


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## tlarkin (Nov 12, 2008)

I forgot to add the last part.....it's late

MS is trying to migrate their product into a more POSIX-esque product, and in Vista you see the first fundamental steps.  Running apps as admin, the home folders of each user are now just under \Users (no more documents and settings), amongst other things.  Windows 7 should be an entirely new OS under the hood.  

So, to transition the change they left all the backwards compatible code for XP which causes issues and creates bloat.

That is why Vista is maybe marginally better than XP as far as benchmarking goes, and in some cases not as good.  That is also just my opinion


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## SIMP (Dec 8, 2008)

I recently went back to XP Pro myself.  I am so wishy-washy though.  I may go back to Vista before too long.

You'd think I would dual-boot!


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## Hugh9191 (Dec 8, 2008)

There's really no point in dual booting with 2 Windows O/Ss.

With the right tweaking Vista can be quite good.


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## johnny (Dec 10, 2008)

Personally, I think the flaw with Vista is that it is like a step backwards for us.  The system requirements are so high, and unless you spend an arm and a leg on a computer then its like using you computer from back in the day.


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## DMGrier (Dec 10, 2008)

It's a band wagon effect, vista is a fine operating system. And as for the person who said " not trying to pull the job card" that you work at geek squad. Well not trying to pull the job card but in the navy I have people in my department that work on computers and equipment that you wouldn't even know what to do with, and they actually like vista. Your problems with vista could be traced to your error.


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## mac550 (Dec 10, 2008)

laznz1 said:


> RAM handelage and on a diff computer had a few probs with it and plainly hate the look



wait till windows 7 comes out, i doubt you'd like the look of it.
you can get themes and stuff if you dont like vistas look.


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## Jozeorules (Dec 10, 2008)

Vista is fine with 2+ gigs of ram and a decent processor, with UAC disabled.
(Google UAC to learn how to disable )


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## DMGrier (Dec 11, 2008)

What do you mean you can get different themes for vista?


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