If you get vista, when will you get it?

[Perris Calderon]

when longhorn was first announced I said I didn't think it would be a success, my thoughts were most people would remain on nt until there is some kind of blend between electronic storage and mechanical

we read somewhere they plan to eventually making vista dual hardrive, part flash part mechanical..when that happens, if xp isn't capable, people will switch and tons of games and programs will be written as soon as possilbe

therefore, if vista can take advantage of that scenario and xp cannot I believe everyone will switch

until then, or until xp isn't supported anymore, just a few people will switch, though vista is going to get all the newbes for sure

also, if you're switching to vista, you pretty much should be going to the 64 bit so you can start accessing more then 4 gigs of memory...that's gonna be important

 

[ming]

Already made plans to replace my "almost retiring" PIII laptop - not sure when exactly, but waiting for Core 2 Duo laptops to drop below £500.

 

[NetRyder]

General business app's for now.

Gaming if available. NOT anything from "3dmark" family for gaming! I no longer consider them reliable due to the way they weight CPU vs FPS. Mostly the business app benchmarks for I think it unfair to test Vista for gaming at this early stage of driver and hardware development. (And I haven't been keeping up with who's gaming benchmark is trustworthy these days.

Alright, I'll try to get some numbers from a PCMark05 benchmark soon.

I agree that a gaming benchmark is not the best idea at this point, given the quality of the drivers we have. Let's wait until ATI and NVIDIA have released a couple of Vista-compatible versions before we do that comparison.

 

[Perris Calderon]

Already made plans to replace my "almost retiring" PIII laptop - not sure when exactly, but waiting for Core 2 Duo laptops to drop below £500.

don't know what that translates to in american, but I just bought an hp amd dual core 64 with 2 gigs memory for 700 bucks and that was without shopping, I'm pretty sure my friend got it for close to 500

hard to understand these prices, maybe they aren't selling new computers because people are waiting for vista so they have to make them dirt cheap

this thing comes with media center and remote controll too, I'm bringing it back though, it doesn't support pc cards believe it or not, I can usb my pc cards but I don't want to do that

 

[ming]

GBP>USD is currently approximately $1.9 : £1.

 

[Perris Calderon]

GBP>USD is currently approximately $1.9 : £1.

almost double
teh google gave me this site

xe.com Universal Currency Converter ® Results
Live mid-market rates as of 2006.12.23 23:36:17 UTC.
700.00 GBP
United Kingdom Pounds = 1,370.32 USD
United States Dollars
1 GBP = 1.95760 USD 1 USD = 0.510830 GBP

cool site

 

[NetRyder]

LeeJend, I installed PCMark05 on my Tablet PC (see sig for specs) while it was running XP, ran the System Test suite, then installed Vista and ran it again.


The test suite in the free version consisted of:

HDD - XP Startup
Physics and 3D
Transparent Windows
3D - Pixel Shader
Web Page Rendering
File Decryption
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines
HDD - General Usage
Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression
Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding
Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encryption
Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan
Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random 16 MB
​

Results:

XP SP2 x86: 3248 PCMarks
Vista x86: 3613 PCMarks

As you can see, it's not a big difference, but it was nice to see that Vista didn't fall behind. It seemed to do well on the multithreaded tests, presumably due to kernel code updates. If you'd like to know specific numbers from any of those individual tests, let me know.

AnandTech ran some similar tests back when RC 1 was released, and their results were pretty interesting:

Under general performance, Vista is a mixed bag with one interesting result. Encoding under AutoGK with XviD is a little over a minute longer, or about 13% slower. Photoshop CS2 shows a much smaller gap at only 11 seconds, which comes out to only 5% slower. Neither of these results is really poor, but anything over 10% is a pretty stiff hit for just switching operating systems.

Moving on to Cinebench, the tables turn. Although barely enough to consider it outside of the expected experimental error range, the performance boost of just under 3% is the first sign we've seen out of these release candidates that Vista can be faster than XP. By far the most interesting result however is PCMark05 with a 23% performance improvement in favor of Vista, but we're not entirely sure what's going on. Since it's a multitasking heavy benchmark, one possibility is the changes made under the hood for Vista benefit multitasking the most, which may also explain why Cinebench did so well since it too can split its rendering jobs so well. PCMark05 also has some HDD benchmarking activities, so another possible explanation is that Vista has more optimized I/O performance.

I haven't seen any similar RTM benchmarks from them, but the RTM build is undoubtedly far better than RC 1 in terms of perceivable performance, so I would expect that the results would be pretty similar.

 

[kcnychief]

It was the processor, which is plenty fast enough at 2.5GHz to run Linux and all of the Beryl eye candy stuff, and XP, but vista just feels slow. Opening programs, booting and just overall it feels sluggish. Transferring relatively small [200MB] files also takes about 5 times as long as it does with XP or linux. Everything else rated between 4.1 & 4.2, disk space a 5.

See, I know the 800mhz or whatever is the bare minimum, but I like how it was worded before - a "modern" Intel/AMD processor. In my mind, I don't quite think that a P4 2.5Ghz is quite modern enough to run Vista - that CPU is roughly 2 to 3 years old I would wreckon. Heck, the score right there shows that it's not too great, a 3.6 for a CPU - you should expect sluggish performance.

I know, I said that wasn't their fault and I know it will get better. As far as ASUS releasing updates for my P4PE, I'm not holding my breath, no updates for 2 years from them.

Your motherboard manufacturer not releasing driver updates is no fault of Microsoft. ASUS won't release driver upgrades because, if you want to run Vista with their mobo - they are hoping you buy a motherboard that is supported and will receive updates.

There are two apps that really bug with it, AVG & Spyware blaster both prompt you like three times to let it continue. Its just annoying. You still don't really know whats going on, just some generic prompt asking permission, then some other prompt asking you permission. Time will tell if the malware authors can get around this and my money would go with YES.

Oh, but of course you realize that is because of how the applications access the Operating system, right? Vista doesn't prompt you for certain programs, it prompts you when programs try to access the OS a different way. I'd be surprised if one of the updates from AVG down the road doesn't slightly change a little, since customers may start to whine who run AVG on Vista, and don't want to turn off UAC.

Thats just it, I don't really see anything positive about it at all. There is not much new, the GUI is a little more polished at best. There are supposedly a bunch more GPO to make administration easier, but I think an IT department would be insane to roll Vista out any time soon. Besides AFAIK the new SMB sharing breaks some Linux compatibility so if you are in a mixed network this could be a big nightmare.

I'm confused as to why you keep bringing up Linux and other Operating Systems, last I checked this was a benefit of upgrade from XP thread?

Just checking.

also, if you're switching to vista, you pretty much should be going to the 64 bit so you can start accessing more then 4 gigs of memory...that's gonna be important

64-bit usage of Vista will be a pretty small piece of the pie IMO. The only real cut and dry difference right now is the 4GB of RAM as you mentioned, and I would assume those machines will be few and far between.

 

[j79zlr]

See, I know the 800mhz or whatever is the bare minimum, but I like how it was worded before - a "modern" Intel/AMD processor. In my mind, I don't quite think that a P4 2.5Ghz is quite modern enough to run Vista - that CPU is roughly 2 to 3 years old I would wreckon. Heck, the score right there shows that it's not too great, a 3.6 for a CPU - you should expect sluggish performance.

That processor is plenty fast enough to run any application written properly. It runs AutoCAD 2006 without any problems and that thing is a beast.There is absolutely no reason that it should not be fast enough. If you need a 3.5GHz processor to run an OS I would say that is good enough reason not to upgrade. What the hell is it doing that is needs so much processing power. I'm not talking about it being sluggish with 10 apps open, it is sluggish just browsing around with explorer.

Your motherboard manufacturer not releasing driver updates is no fault of Microsoft. ASUS won't release driver upgrades because, if you want to run Vista with their mobo - they are hoping you buy a motherboard that is supported and will receive updates.

Another good reason not to upgrade. I am continually saying this isn't Vista's fault, but one of my main reasons not to upgrade to Vista is that most software and apparently hardware manufacturers are trying to get you to purchase all new hardware, this shouldn't be necessary.

Oh, but of course you realize that is because of how the applications access the Operating system, right? Vista doesn't prompt you for certain programs, it prompts you when programs try to access the OS a different way. I'd be surprised if one of the updates from AVG down the road doesn't slightly change a little, since customers may start to whine who run AVG on Vista, and don't want to turn off UAC.

I know, but again until everyone gets their kinks with this OS worked out, I see absolutely no reason to upgrade.

I'm confused as to why you keep bringing up Linux and other Operating Systems, last I checked this was a benefit of upgrade from XP thread?

Just checking.

Because we were talking about a corporate environment, and MS's purposeful disregard for anything not MS makes this a pain where they aren't the only game in town. If you are running a few linux servers in with your Windows desktops and you upgrade from XP to Vista and this breaks your network, that would be a reason not to upgrade, don't you think?

 

[Tuffgong4]

I bought a copy of windows mce 2005 with free upgrade to vista for around 109. I wanted to be a beta tester and try running it but I couldn't find a way to become one. So I had to buy it. but I'm getting a great deal and can't wait to get it.

I just don't know when I'm getting it. Just know that it's after the Jan 30th release date.

 

[Mainframeguy]

I have an upgrade coupon from my recent laptop purchase - yet to check the site it tells me to d/l from and see what the cost is, but tempting to use the coupon and have a look see - esp. since my laptop seems to be my fastest damn machine ATM and is not critical for me to use - chances are drivers are my main concern and on a laptop that should (I hope!) be less of an issue than the new PCI-X machine I am planning ATM.

 

[Khayman]

64-bit usage of Vista will be a pretty small piece of the pie IMO. The only real cut and dry difference right now is the 4GB of RAM as you mentioned, and I would assume those machines will be few and far between.

Also Kernel patch protection and enforced digital signatures on drivers. more stable ans secure

 

[Johnny]

I have the msdn version, but I will probably wait until they come out with drivers for my printer before I install it again, or wait until I get a new machine .. Which ever comes first ...

 

[Perris Calderon]

64-bit usage of Vista will be a pretty small piece of the pie IMO. The only real cut and dry difference right now is the 4GB of RAM as you mentioned, and I would assume those machines will be few and far between.

vista boxes are gonna start with two gigs on the lowest end of the market most will be shipped with 4 gigs after just a few months on the shelves

everyone thinking about vista should be getting 4 gigs right from the start for the few extra bucks it's gonn cost

I just bought the cheapest laptop I could find and it's got dual 64 bit and 2 gigs memory, it doesn't support 4 gigs otherwise that would be in there right now

the same as xp started with 256, my first xp laptop couldn't hold 512 and right now I don't know anyone with less then a gig of memory unless their on a very old box that won't take more

vista is a work in progress even though it's being released it's pretty underdeveloped

if you want to use all the interface that's going to make it a unique os, the new file system when it's available, if you want to be part of the evolution process you're gonna be getting way over 4 gigs before your done with your vista box and this is a fact

motherboards right now aren't gonna support too much memory, but that's gonna change fast

if you're installing vista you're cutting edge, you'll have 6 to ten gigs memory in no time

unless you're stuck with the 32 bit version of the os, then it won't matter how much memory you have it will only see 4 gigs per processor

do yourself a favor, if your getting a new box, get a 64 bit dual core , if you can find one with a motherboard that supports more then 4 gigs, get that one.

memory is going to be a big issue as this os evolves and I don't think anyone should be stickling with a 32 bit processor or the 32 bit os when considering vista

 

[madmatt]

I upgraded to 4GB of RAM for Vista. The RAM in my production system is valued at more than an entire computer over at Dell, HP, Gateway, etc ($550.00 after rebate).

 

[pluto]

Im going to wait for the OS after Vista. I have WinXPPro and it seems dandy just now on my current machine.

I tried Vista throughout the betas, even the early Longhorn releases. I found the interface is really appealing and the layout more organised but not worth me spending so much on software which wont offer much more to me since alot of new features were dropped.

 

[LeeJend]

NetRyder - Thanks. That was what I was looking for, 12.5% for an OS upgrade is a nice bonus.

So VISTA has real potential for multicore systems once the drivers are optimized and all the fetaures finalized.

 

[ming]

Can someone PM me with directions on how to get beta version of vista please. I can't seem to find the email MS sent me ages ago, but have the product key... not sure if it'll still work.

 

[madmatt]

NR or anyone else: How do you disble the welcome screen for Vista? I want to use the basic CTRL+ALT+DEL and user/password login screen like 2000 and XP.

I've seen screenshots (I'm certain anyway) but cannot find this tweak when I search for it.

 

[ElementalDragon]

i plan on getting Vista..... whenever my free version from that one thing that was posted a while back arrives. supposedly sometime mid-late January i believe it's been said.....