The Pros/Cons of Windows Vista

[Setra]

So yeah... I have an essay I need to write on the Pros and Cons of Windows Vista for a Computer Software class.

Anyone know any Pros?

Also anyone know any Cons aside from Compatibility issues?

[Player_Zero]

I use Vista.

All the pro you need.

[xPANCAKEx]

a few basics off the top of my head

pro - pretty
- user friendly

con - different to old windows (alienate a percentage of existing client base)
- uses more system resources

[B-Man]

I used to use Vista for a while, 'til it decided to not like me leaving the computer on for more than 2 hours. There are a few pros that I think of but I only have personally verified cons to list. Please bear in mind that I'm happier with XP, so the list may be a little subjective.

Pros for Vista:
- looks nice
- easy to use (for users with little to no computer experience)

Cons for Vista:
- very taxing on the CPU and RAM
- audio bugs out after a while
- (personal experience) having a 64-bit processor running the 32-bit Vista OSes offers a few problems. Mine include two of my processing cores turning off and general lagginess if I left the machine on for more than 2 hours
- too many different versions

I kinda wished that I was able to see what Vista 64-bit felt like before I trashed my Vista OS. I still haven't tried to recover my Vista from the C drive.

[Dihan]

Pros
-Most compatibility problems can be fixed by running things in compatibility mode.

Con
-Some things still refuse to work.

[Setra]

Thus far I have

Pro:
Easy to use
Looks pretty

Cons:
Taxing on your computer
Compatibility Issues
Audio Bugs Out
Different enough that it alienates XP fans

I asked my teacher what the Pros for Vista were when he gave the assignment and he said "I don't know of any, I hate it".

There is a Vista fan in the class, but he's a bigger fan of Leopard and Macs in general. He didn't mention why he liked it though.

[Lord Herman]

In my experience, Vista is more stable than earlier versions of Windows.

For me, the downside of using Vista is that some settings and stuff that an experienced computer user wants to access are hidden in the most illogical places.

[Catch]

Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista)'s a decent rundown of what's new. Most of what's listed could be listed as Pro.

[Mr. Mud]

Eh Vista can be okay at times. I like being able to access 90% of the computer fro the start menu :smallbiggrin:. Also the theme is pretty damn cool... But it gets annoying when you try to paly old games that the graphics doesn't actually like... If anyone needs help getting into a game that wouldn't work multiplayer, PM me. I've got it done to a science :smallbiggrin:.

Overall, I think vista has more pros than cons though.

[togapika]

Cons: Takes about a gig of ram just to run vista smoothly without other stuff running, so a minimum of 2 to run it with other programs.

[B-Man]

I have a few mini-rants for my dislike of Vista, now complete with experience using the OS.

Here (http://bman777.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8FA53FC58574C2E2!140.entry?&_c02_vws=1) are some opening notes and here is my liberation (http://bman777.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8FA53FC58574C2E2!168.entry?&_c02_vws=1) from Vista.

Now, I dare you to point out the irony of my rants being hosted on a Microsoft blog site.

[CrazedGoblin]

Pros
-Most compatibility problems can be fixed by running things in compatibility mode.

Con
-Some things still refuse to work.

id have to go with those ones aswell

[Dihan]

Oh, and I've personally never had any audio problems with Vista.

[Zarrexaij]

When I was using Vista on the computer I had in my CIS class, I hardly had any problems with it. It was incredibly user friendly, but like many have said it is a resource hog. I mean, you need at least a gig to run Vista Basic smoothly, and around 2 for Premium.

Plus, when you're an experienced PC users, everything you want to access on Vista is either hidden or in obscenely odd places.

Personally I love Vista. If you have a computer good enough to run it very well, it's an awesome OS. You just have to be aware some of your games might not want to work on it.

[B-Man]

Oh, and I've personally never had any audio problems with Vista.

Could be my own problem, but I had all the latest drivers for my sound card and Vista still chomped up my audio after an hour and a half to two hours in. It could just very well be that my 64-bit processor didn't like the 32-bit Vista.

[JaxGaret]

Cons: by the time the average computer is fast/new/compatible enough to actually run Vista properly, they will be releasing the all-new 64-bit OS, which will probably blow Vista out of the water.

Thus why many companies are reluctant to switch from XP to Vista.

[B-Man]

Thus why many companies are reluctant to switch from XP to Vista.

Not quite. The company that I work for is still running a vast majority of their terminals with Windows Server 2000. Only the higher ups have Windows Server 2003. It's mostly an issue of "we don't want to upgrade 'cause it'll cost more money than it would to renew the licence".

[valadil]

Thus why many companies are reluctant to switch from XP to Vista.

That and Vista doesn't offer much for corporate users. You don't need a shiny GUI to do office work. One of my pro Vista friends said that the biggest advantage of Vista in an office setting is that the path to a user's directory is much simpler. So you'd go to c:\users\username instead of C:\Documents and Settings\username (the spaces throw off some older programs).

[Hoplite]

When a piece of software crashes on Vista you almost never have to shut down the entire pc, you usually can just shut down the program and restart it without much difficulty. XP used to lag and bug a lot when doing this.

[Eldpollard]

Vista is shiny. Very shiny. On the other hand it is very resource heavy. Which is why I'm going to switch to xp for games and such.

[onasuma]

All of you seems to have missed directx10. Only reason i use the damn thing...

[Emperor Ing]

Windows Vista

Cons:
Eats a LOT of memory and RAM space
Incredibly difficult to use
Basically, its Windows XP but eats up more RAM and hard drive space.

Pros:
The only entity that can defeat Sauron, Batman, and The Imperium of Man.

[Rawhide]

Review: Is it worth upgrading Windows Vista to XP? (http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx)

[Pwenet]

When I bought my new laptop a few months ago it came with Vista. My original plan was to nuke Vista and install XP.

However I have played around with it and it has grown on me to the point that it still exists on my laptop. Do I prefer XP, yes however I'm content to continue playing with Vista.

Pro's
User Interface is Pretty :smallyuk:

Con's
No I don't trust you, you stupid user (security prompts for changing system settings to installing applications.
Resource Hog - As many have said you want to have a decent system running Vista.
Backwards Compatibility - My Canon Powershot A40 (old camera but still works) does not work in Vista (granted this is cause the company has not released drivers nor will they ever cause of the camera age :smallfurious:)
Old Games - I have gotten Fallout 2 and Diablo 2 working on the laptop, with Fallout 2 giving me strange color issues at times.

My honest opinion, if you have XP save the money. If you are getting a new system with Vista give it a try and come to your own conclusions.

[Greenpepa]

I've been using Vista 64-bit for about 6 months now, and haven't had any big problems.

Pros
User Friendly
DX 10
Precaching (Fetches a piece of common programs so they boot faster)
Search Indexing (Makes many searches faster)

Cons
Compatability issues with older software
More RAM use (Note: much of the RAM used by Vista features will free up if a large program is running ie: I get 25% o y RAM back when I run Crysis)
Search Indexing (seriously this takes a lot of RAM, I just turn it off)

[Winter_Wolf]

Vista pros:
I can uninstall the damn thing. At least I'd better be able to.

Cons:
Resource hog
compatibility issues with programs I actually want to use
It's crammed down your throat unless you're going to get a higher end computer. Trust me, there was no real choice, I couldn't even downgrade for an extra 60 bucks with the model comp I bought.
I got a Black Screen o' Death. Yes, black. I was running a program, it crashed to desktop, got a message saying that "Windows Explorer has failed" or something, it was Windows Explorer, not the application. Then things went black and I had to do a hard shutdown of the comp. I know that's bad news on computer that LESS than a WEEK old.

May those who subjected the world to Vista burn.:smallannoyed:

[B-Man]

All of you seems to have missed directx10. Only reason i use the damn thing...

I've not found DirectX 10 useful. No game that I have fully supports it. Before anyone says Crysis I have to say that you're able to hack the Very High graphics for XP by switching a 0 to a 1. And on the grounds of gaming, Vista didn't render a lot of my older games from id Software. The only id Software game I didn't have a lot of trouble with was Enemy Territories: Quake Wars. I still like playing Doom 3 so I'm pretty much cemented in XP until I patch up my games. Also I have no reason to return to Vista as I got Halo 2 running on XP now. Nyer.

[Don Julio Anejo]

If there are any pros of Vista, I'd be very interested to know.

It didn't last more than 1 month on my laptop. I killed it and installed XP, going through all that crap with finding the right drivers.

[bluewind95]

Forced to use Vista on my new laptop... here's my experience:

Pros:
- The start menu search system is very, very useful. You just type the name of whatever you want to open and it mostly finds it. Which is neat.
- Things may stop working, yeah, but at least the system recovers fast enough. Yes, faster than XP, and with less of a buggy feeling.
- It actually locks the computer if you suspend it, instead of happily returning to whatever you were doing. That was one safety bug that, well, bugged me from XP.
- It has very nice tablet PC functions, and I can type and do everything with a tablet, as opposed to XP, where I would have to constantly let go of the tablet if I needed to type anything. Which... is not a problem in a desk, but if I was anywhere else, trying to not have the tablet fall was annoying. The letter recognition is actually very decent.
- Yeah, the interface is pretty, but... more about this in the cons.
- It's actually performed better speed-wise than my old XP laptop. However, I'm using Vista on a 2GHz double core CPU(64 bit though), and 3 GB of RAM, compared to 1.6 GHz CPU with only 512 RAM on my XP laptop. So... I guess it's kind of a pro that it DOES run smoothly... you just need ridiculous amounts of resources for it.
- Pretty secure. You won't have anything trying to mess with your settings because Vista is just THAT whiny.

Cons

- It's been fast. It's been good at recovering.... but gods, I have NEVER seen so many crashes in an OS. Not even when I had Windows 98 on a Pentium 1 (bad idea, that). EVERYTHING crashes. I even crashed explorer yesterday. By scrolling fast through a folder. It did not mess the whole OS, and it recovered fast, but seriously... it crashes EVERYTHING. And if it can't crash it, it will eventually find a way to do so.
- It's WHINY. Like someone said above, Vista has SERIOUS trust issues.
- Vista's Windows Defender (or whatever it's called) system clashes with anything and everything. And if it can clash with more than that, it will. NEVER run Norton Antivirus on a Vista. So... safety at the cost of functionality and compatibility.
- Yeah, sure. The graphics are pretty, yeah... I have never seen such a slow, inefficient thing. I said Vista runs fast earlier. THat only happened after I got frustrated enough (in the first day of using the OS) and switched to Windows Classic view. Magic! Fast Vista! But yeah, if you like those pretty graphics... yo're stuck with slow Vista.
- You have to find work-arounds for many compatibility issues. For example, I had issues installing a game from its own installer... which I had to fix by manually running setup.exe from the disk, as opposed to having it called by the pretty menu the game came with.
- It's a HUGE system hog, unless you disable many of its features.... and then it becomes a moderate system hog.

- It apparently found a good way to stop users from moving things... it HIDES them. To even half find things in the control panel, I had to use the classic view. And they still moved things around there.
- Of course, the compatibility issues themselves. Compatibility mode won't always work.
- The items in the start menu are very tiny. It's easier and faster for me to just type the program name rather than look for it manually from there.
- In trying to keep things simple, it feels like the user is being treated a bit as an idiot with the advanced things well-hidden and not exactly intuitive to access.

That's more or less as far as I've seen.

[Sneak]

Cons
-It's Windows

Pros
-...I'll get back to you on this one. :smalltongue:

[Jibar]

Sneak is in ur windows threads, subtley biggin up Mac.

:smalltongue:

Also:

Pros: That clock gadget is neat for guys like me.
Cons: GOD! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! YOU'VE MURDERED MY PC! Screw you Vista, I'm keeping XP.

[cody.burton]

Pros: It looks and feels like a Mac more than any other version of Windows.

Cons: See above.

[Lorn]

Been using it for 8 months now, here's what I can come up with:

Pros:

Looks nice.
It IS possible to turn a LOT of unwanted features off (eg, user account control)
Fairly nice for advanced users when you work out how it works
Shipped with a completely seperate admin account that can do ANYTHING.
Harder for a not-so-computer-savvy user to mess with inner workings of almost ANYTHING outside of C:\Users
Compatability mode.

Cons:

Takes up a LOT of resources
It's possible for a not so advanced user to turn off features and mess up the computer. Eg, user account control.
Takes a LOT of time to work out how it works differently to previous editions of Windows, folder layouts very different etc
No account can truly be called an admin aside from the one shipped with it which requires some CMD-geekery to unlock.
Want to write to Program Files? Blocked. Same with C:\Windows, probably. And more. An advanced user could fix this; they shouldn't have to, though. Admin account built in can get past this.
Sometimes compatability mode does not seem to work. See also: Sony Handycam driver issues. COMPLETELY unusable with Vista, after you spend about £250 on a camera a few months beforehand, and Vista does NOT say it won't work until after installation.

Pros without clearly defined advantages a sleep deprived brain can think of:

Windows Explorer revamped - ALWAYS view in Explorer mode, meaning a file tree. Pictures can be made MUCH larger than before, enabling easier searching.
Files can have tags added to them. Easier searching.
It's new...

[Inhuman Bot]

Bleh. I reaally dislike Vista. Good thing I kept my old computer or no more SC for me. It seems to refuse Vista :smallfrown:
Oh and apperntly service pack (I belive 2) *Causes* some problems.:smallyuk:

[koutalied]

pro it looks pretty some times (when it isnt clogged up with shyty wigets like mosaic tiles puzzles)
cons - it too slow for modern compuuters to run sucessfully
- it constanlty asks if you want to do somethign even after you say yes it then comes up with you need to be a administrater (if you r it still ahppens and you need to go thrhough some convoluted routee 'run as administrateor'
- it steals ram like a burglar on speed
- it is MICROSOFT hence **** and corporate

LONG LIVE LINUX
ALL HAIL THE PENGIUN

[sktarq]

Pros: If you are clueless about computers it is rather hard to break.


some more cons.

The symbol that has ment "power off" for years now means sleep as default
I'd DISAGREE with the "easy to use" comments. Not just as part of getting used to a new program but in the fact the damn thing keeps on trying to predict what I want (I had to whipe the memory and reinstall with lots of new settings-after which it works fine but still unessesarily complex) and while that may work for most people, if you think differently then your computer seems rather possessed. Even with most of the programs aditional bits turned off it eats prossessing power like a fluid dynamics simulation. I feel like I shouldn't need that much customization work to make me okay with my OS.
It wants to be a Mac, visually and organizationally. If I wanted a mac they are located on the other side of the aisle thankyou. Windows Classic is a help but I'm still in a snit from switching to Windows 3.1 from DOS 8. Also I
I still play games from the dos era. Sim City 1, SimLife, a very old chessmaster, Utopia, FirstQuest (taken directly from the board game-with dice and your barbarian, dwarf, elf, and magic user)....I had trouble getting vista even SEEing these programs let alone running them. Thus I play them on my laptop-with is still running 98.
In the end I just dropped the thing and switched over to XP


note to self; Don't rant and work with customers at the same time-spelling really does suffer....sorry folks...I'm busy with annother now

[burninnapalm]

Pros: Granny can use it...


Cons: Granny can use it... I have my laptop and Vista set to the highest resolution possible, and the icons are still as big as my thumb... the "power button" just puts it in to stand by mode, which suck when i am going to bed, hit that button out of shear exhaustion, and then wake the next morning to find my computer was still on when that storm knocked out my power and erased everything on my hard drive AND thumb drive... and that was WITH a surge protector... it eats memory like a starving person eats bread, not only that, but it has 8 count them 8 programs that run in the background to keep the memory to a minimum... the only problem with that logic is that they eat more memory then if they had left well enough alone on my computer ( i dont run background programs unless it is necessarily for the system to run) the owei goei-ness of the sounds and the visuals make me want to puke sometimes because they put me to sleep when i have a paper to type that is due for my professor the next day, Solitaire sucks because it is hard to tell the hearts from the diamonds when the diamonds look like they are overweight squares, office is so watered down that you need to take 4 steps to format a paper so that it is in the college letter format with right aligin and headers on the top ghosted to show page number. Office 2000 has this in one section, Office 2007 has this in 4.... must i continue?

</rant>

bottom line XP, though it still has flaws, was infinitival times better then vista will ever be. the only problem is that Microsoft is making computers so Grandma friendly that is makes it impossible for computer nerds like me to get anything done. bring back the option where is was a black screen and you needed to <d:/ run> to get anything tho work or to make games run.