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I haven't seen any other threds about this, my bad if there are. I don't get much in the way of functionality with Lynx at work.

So Vista is now out. Anyone got it? Pleased? Displeased?

I don't have Vista. I plan on waiting until I buy a new PC. Frankly I'm unimpressed so far - it seems like some big graphical update to XP with a few security tweaks (personally, I've never ran into problems so I don't care much about security upgrades unless they're ticking time bombs that can happily happen as you're typing away in notepad.) Having to buy a new graphic card to see through my taskbar and to have a 3D desktop and whatnot isn't my thing. When I alt-tab, the window's just a blur visible long enough to press two buttons and release them: 1/10th of a second, if that. And my desktop? Well, I suppose I see it when I boot up the PC... More often than not I've got a text-editor of some sort (dev IDEs and hex editors included) in front of me and don't need nor want flashy graphical effects that are unecessary bloat.

Despite what those snotty Linux fanboys harp on about and how the anti-MS sheep are quick to pick on problems they and millions of other users have never run into, I'd say MS did a lot of good moves in the past. But I'm not so sure making Vista so graphically-buoyant (yes, that's right, buoyant - I spent millions on that adjective, start liking it or start packing. ) was a wise move. Focus on new and innovative features would've been far more welcomed than 3D windows that flip out of the way or whatnot.

Does anyone have a genuine non-beta Vista? It might be a bit early for this, but I'd love to hear about people's experiences.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I'm interested, too.

Currently running IE7 on XP. We are *supposed* to be going to Vista in the next two years.

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Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them.

~Pacifist Badge, 1978

To be fair, the graphical stuff can be turned off to revert to a less flashy version of the Vista look or good old Windows Classic. The difference in the flashy version is supposed to be that it finally makes some use of your video card rather than being completely CPU-bound like XP's interface.

But I'm not keen. To get the complete set of features I DO need and use now in XP Pro, it seems like I'd have to buy Vista Ultimate, which costs a stupid £360 in the UK. Um... no. No individual part of my PC even cost that much, and this is a fast machine.

Furthermore, Vista x64 won't allow you to use unsigned drivers except by booting a special way which, last I read, couldn't be set so it'd happen automatically. Blah, blah, I'm sure it's all for "security" reasons, and not just because the movie industry don't want you to be able to play back HD content without an HDMI connector and all that...

At least the retail licence of Vista is now valid for both x86 and x64, and both are on the DVD, although you're only allowed to use one at once - no dual boot.

At the moment I doubt I'll upgrade until I'm forced to, which is a major contrast to my attitude to previous Windows upgrades.

That's more or less how I see it. Vista seems too lacking in feature and too money-hungry to be worth upgrading to. At least, that's how I feel - there might be some extra in all this that makes it worthwhile.

I don't quite get why everyone is so keen to upgrade. Maybe top of the line cutting edge developpers, sure, but say... a company that does documental management? Or that maintains databases? What are they going to get from all of this? There's no new Vista-exclusive software that doesn't have an XP equivalent, as far as I know, so...

I dunno. I'm just feeling a little let down by this version of Windows. XP was an h-bomb. Vista seems like a loud flasy explosion with little actual impact. I don't actually feel like XP will go the way of 98 for quite some time, personally, and don't expect to have to upgrade for a few years at least.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I have read a lot about Vista, and I can't find anyone who really wants to upgrade. I agree with Tiddles for the most part, since he and I have had discussions about this in the past, but my bottom line is simple: Vista offers me nothing that I need now or in the immediate future. I just finished building a brand new box not a week ago, and I didn't even consider waiting for Vista. I don't game enough to need DX10, and I don't even use the flashier bits of XP - aside from wallpaper, my XP machines all look like Win98.

This is a Mac UI as far as I'm concerned. Flashy and pretty but holds no utility for the computing I do.

Edit

Silverlance, there is a new version of Office that IIRC is completely XML-based in terms of document storage, making it a more open format to work with. Some places may find that quite useful, I think. I am reasonably sure that my workplace is not one of them.

This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 1st February 2007 20:45

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

But you can still get Office 2007 for XP. Using it on Vista doesn't add a great deal, although I assume this time they haven't embarassingly gone in a different direction with UI in Office vs. the OS, as Office XP did.

Windows is obviously just trying to make more money. They hype their product up until we think it's equivalent to God, stick it out there for $300, and laugh all the way to the bank.They tell us we need all this new technology and we need to upgrade every few years but I think it's still just for the money.

BTW, I am not getting the Vista unless it drops significantly in price or I am brainwashed.

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Why, hello guys! Haven't been around here in a loooong time!
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Well to be fair, what do you expect them to do? Make a product to lose money? They can't be faulted for trying to make money - they're a company, not a charity.

What I'm more concerned about is the later point you brought up: we don't need shiny see-through windows that spin around and such. Especially not when we have to buy new hardware and deal with huge increases in HD/RAM usage. Yet we're told it's a huge thing, and upgrading is important, and so and so. What about ease of use, faster ways to get work done, and more powerful data management/mining utilities?

I'm not the "average" computer user. I'm a programmer and get a lot of exposure to some of the more advanced features of an OS. I like to work fast, use keyboard shortcuts, and am comfortable enough with my OS and environment to navigate through the OS without having to reach for the mouse and read prompts every two seconds. How are these aspects of the OS any improved? What about some means of sorting out my notes, or maybe creating a "shadow" copy of a ROM so I can tweak it, test, and make new changes without restoring from the original each time? I can see this being useful for many other things. How about some means of managing my multimedia collection where I have control, not the OS, over what's what and don't have to dig through 50 .rm files to find that one Simpsons episode I feel like watching? Or what about automatic backups à-la Word of my files so I can roll back in case of a mishap quickly and painlessly just by right-clicking and picking the version I want to go back to?

There are tools to do this stuff. But why would I want to run 5 seperate programs when these features could be integrated in the OS directly and accessible in a painless, quick, easy way?

Well at least we get cell-shaded bump-mapped textured 3D windows with alpha transluscency and vertex-shader driven distortion effects while dragging them.

Oddly enough, my mother's old Macintosh Centris 610 from 15 years ago can do just as much as my P4 3.0 can. Just a bit slower and more bare-bones, but it gets it done.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 2nd February 2007 18:23

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Yeah. I think Tycho explains my position on the matter better than I ever could. That said, it is kind of a "Hummer" OS in my eyes. I'll never buy it, but I sure would like to test drive it just once for the sheer fun of it.

Edit

On a pointless side note: Kara's sig FTW.

This post has been edited by Narratorway on 2nd February 2007 21:26

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Arts

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Paying for a new OS just seems bizarre to me. I've always either had it included with a new computer purchase, or been able to get a free install CD from somewhere (legally). So unless my husband can get a free Vista install from the university where he works, I'll be sticking with XP for at least the next three or four years.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.