A year later, Vista SP1 or XP SP3

[anonymous_user]

But I've found nothing to eliminate the HD bloat. Vista is just HUGE!

You havent heard of vLite? Their forums are right here.

[Phoneywar]

My package is a little bit old for vista

My package is just a little old

[suryad]

Drivers causing slowness overall? Well if I got the manufacturers drivers so if that is the root cause of the problem well then I would blame it on the drivers but that is not the case. Its still sluggish no matter what way you slice it. I am sure it will get better. SP1 was prob a step in the right direction and I am thinking by the time Windows 7 comes out a lot of fixes and stuff going into that next OS will be put into Vista as well. I am not saying it wont get better it will but its not worth the hassle for me to be beta testing an OS. I have better things to do than hack registries and vlite and hunt for the 'right' drivers.

[CoffeeFiend]

Not surprised to see xp is getting more votes.

The split is about 50/50. A year ago, it was like 99/1 in favor of XP. Give it 6 months to a year, and it'll be like 75/25 in favor of Vista. Nothing surprising here.

Even after vista sp1, vista is still slow and bloated and resource hungry. My system is op notch, 4gb ram with intel core duo, but still vista is sluggish when it come to speed, responsive, and reliability

Exactly my setup (actually not even, my CPU isn't exactly top notch, it's just a lowly E2160), except it's not slow at all (it wasn't sluggish either back when it only had 2GB either). Very responsive, and way more reliable than XP.

If it's still sluggish something is wrong. Could be one of those "right drivers."

Totally. Good drivers makes all the difference.

From your personal experience, please list off some games that you know for certain do not work in Vista. Specific titles please.

Also, criticizing gaming performance (how many FPS they get in games, as seen in benchmarks) isn't really a valid point anymore. Drivers have gotten better, and the problem is solved for the most part. As for software not working, I have to call FUD on that one. Just see how very little software ended up being added to this thread (no titles named here either)...

Edited July 18, 2008 by crahak

[Stoic Joker]

The quickest thing I know of to get to network connections (not start > control panel > network and sharing center > manage network connections, nor right clicking on the systray icon > network and sharing center > manage network connections), is win+r, ncpa.cpl (but yes, you have to remember the name now)

As much as I use the command line I never thought to try that.

Thanks!

[suryad]

I do not deny that drivers for Vista have gotten better. Its still slower compared to XP. Until that gets fixed I for sure and I am sure many others will just refuse to upgrade.

And for those who say good drives make the difference give me some examples of good drivers that are NOT from the manufacturers since thats where I got all my drivers from!

[shahed26]

The split is about 50/50. A year ago, it was like 99/1 in favor of XP. Give it 6 months to a year, and it'll be like 75/25 in favor of Vista. Nothing surprising here.

Vista is not that bad at all, and definitely it will be much better OS than xp in just few months, with MS releasing lots of hot fixes to fix vista every month

Exactly my setup (actually not even, my CPU isn't exactly top notch, it's just a lowly E2160), except it's not slow at all (it wasn't sluggish either back when it only had 2GB either). Very responsive, and way more reliable than XP.

Its not that sluggish compare to xp, but multitasking makes it too sluggish, because of vista's many bloated services running in the background (kills my 4gb ram)

Just a bit tweaking and configuring makes it run better than xp, but as always i prefer speed, reliability, and responsive out of the box, and am pretty sure MS will have it this way when SP2 comes out

btw if you installed and used server 2008 and run it as wrokstation, you will see the difference. Vista and server use the same kernel, but server performs and runs smoother and faster, that is because MS tuned server for speed and reliability, and that just shows that vista can be the same in terms of speed and reliability, ONLY if MS took their time a bit more and tuned vista a little more to be better out of box

Edited July 18, 2008 by shahed26

[suryad]

So based on your annecdode shahed if it IS sluggish why would one want to use it?

[shahed26]

So based on your annecdode shahed if it IS sluggish why would one want to use it?

I use server 2008 x64, much better than vista and xp, i can have all the vista look and feel enabled on server, and run my apps and do multitasking without any sluggish performance. I used vista for about 3 weeks, and then switched back to xp. Now am running dual boot server x64 and xp. Server rocks!

[suryad]

Yes I have heard really good things with server. I think in general server OSes make a better OS because of all the xtra tuning and effort the companies will put in for the enterprises where performance is paramount. That is why I am using XP x64 which is based on WS2003. IMHO it is the best balance in performance and lightweightness.

[S.SubZero]

So based on your annecdode shahed if it IS sluggish why would one want to use it?

I use server 2008 x64, much better than vista

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2245

In my own testing Server 2008 has not shown to have any kind of workstation level advantage over Vista SP1. The way it is tweaked to be a server may allude to some magical performance gain, but that would only be recognized if you're doing activities that are more server-ish anyway like heavy file I/O or network activity. For typical workstation tasks the two are identical.

[CoffeeFiend]

(kills my 4gb ram)

I don't know what you're doing then, because I have it booting in 365MB of RAM, so that should leave you with like 3700MB for your apps. Unless you're referring SuperFetch preloading (caching) things in RAM as killing it? I don't know... It runs just fine even on 2GB. It might be worse if you're using media center or such, but overall it's quite good.

because MS tuned server for speed and reliability

And Vista would be tuned for slowness and unreliability?

What makes the server versions more reliable is things like video acceleration disabled i.e. at the expense of speed, things like audio being disabled, and the lack of user apps running (and the user behind the keyboard doing strange things). Similarly, if you'd leave a XP or Vista box alone, just to serve files on your network or such, you'd see record uptimes too.

In my own testing Server 2008 has not shown to have any kind of workstation level advantage over Vista SP1.

Ditto. It's basically Vista + extra server components (e.g. active directory) and some limits removed (e.g. IIS 7's conn limits). The extra server components sure don't make the system any faster. And it's definitely not worth the price tag. Plus, I remember back then trying to use Win 2003 as a desktop (needed IIS 6 to test stuff and XP comes with crippled 5.1) and it wasn't exactly a great experience. I had to edit msi's for installers to even run, I had to use compatibility mode on a lot of apps and all that -- not counting those that couldn't possibly work (using things that were incompatible with 2003), apps that refused to install (you need to buy the expensive server version of it), and those I've given up onto (didn't want to start using apps like TweakNT for them to run). And there was basically zero performance benefits. That's also not counting all the extra work to make win 2003 even usable as a desktop in the first place (enable sound, video acceleration, disable shutdown tracker, etc) -- that was certainly more work to configure than it is to get Vista "tuned" in the first place.

Edited July 19, 2008 by crahak

[shahed26]

(kills my 4gb ram)

I don't know what you're doing then, because I have it booting in 365MB of RAM, so that should leave you with like 3700MB for your apps. Unless you're referring SuperFetch preloading (caching) things in RAM as killing it? I don't know... It runs just fine even on 2GB. It might be worse if you're using media center or such, but overall it's quite good.

I do lots of multitasking, eg photoshop (takes huge amount of ram) and few video encoding as well. Without running these apps, vista runs just fine, but on server i can run these apps, and still use my system without any sluggish performance. Not only that, my games load faster and gives me slitghly more FPS (did not benchmark, but it runs much smoother compare to vista)

If MS did give us the freedom to choose which components to install during vista setup, then vista would have been much better, and less resource hungry, unless you decide to install all the bloat stuffs.

Edited July 19, 2008 by shahed26

[CoffeeFiend]

I do lots of multitasking, eg photoshop (takes huge amount of ram) and few video encoding as well.

Same here. I've had firefox 2 + vmware + photoshop cs3 + visual studio 2008 + many more open at once (sometimes using them while encoding xvid's with VirtualDubMod), even on 2GB, and it worked just fine... 4GB should be a complete non-issue. Photoshop isn't really incredibly memory intensive anymore. It's not quite like it was back when we only had 3-digit RAM sizes (most of which being used by the kernel) where every MB counted... PS CS3 opens in 90MB of RAM and even with a decently sized pic loaded, it only shoots up to 110MB or so. Add a couple layers, and you still don't even hit 150MB. It's not a big concern by today's standards (especially not if you have 4GB+). Games wise I dunno, I don't play any, but then again you could basically buy a PS3 (40GB) + a Xbox360 Pro + a Wii for the price of a Win 2008 license. That should have most of your gaming needs met...

If MS did give us the freedom to choose which components to install during vista setup, then vista would have been much better, and less resource hungry, unless you decide to install all the bloat stuffs.

Perhaps, but then people would have a bunch more questions to answer during the install... And components installed shouldn't make much of a difference except for disk space. Services running by default perhaps would (then again, the same thing applies to XP). And realistically, it's not much more work to disable stuff post-install, just like we've been doing with XP anyways (like disabling system restore and such things). Personally I don't really disable much anyways (system restore, the defender stuff, and that's about it). Either ways, for those who want to do that, there's apps like vlite I guess.

[dennis123123]

then again you could basically buy a PS3 (40GB) + a Xbox360 Pro + a Wii for the price of a Win 2008 license.

Nah, Windows Server 2008 is (legally!) free for over half a year (240 days), and its not much hassle to format that often.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948472 for the 240 day thing,

and see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

or http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008...l-software.aspx

for the ISOs, all geniune direct from Microsoft themselves