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I own a number of PCs and I work for an organization that has about 500 PCs in use. Not one of my computers, and only a half dozen of my employers is able to use Vista. It is just too big, too bloated and too slow to be of use to me or to my employer. Although the cost of hardware has dropped significantly, replacing all those systems with ones capable of reasonable Vista performance is way outside of the budget. Sometimes, I half believe that Microsoft is in collusion with the hardware manufactures and system builders to raise money by forcing hardware replacement just to be able to run a more secure operating system.
Personally, some of the hardware I am running cannot run any version of Windows newer that Windows 98. They work, they do their job (off of the Internet, of course). Upgrading is just a waste of money.
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So don't upgrade.
Microsoft designed Vista with new technologies in mind so that they could improve performance. Naturally this actually requires the new technologies to work properly. If your machines are that old, then don't expect Ms to keep supporting them. If Ms held back on the resource consumption, they would lose to their competitors due to the lack of new features. Let's face it, aero, indexing, and readyboost are all designed to provide a better experience by consuming more resources. I agree that some programs are bloated (e.g. IE7 - especially in comparison to Chrome), but overall Vista is better than XP on the computers it was designed for. The only major mistake Ms made with Vista was reducing the minimum requirements - 800 MHz and 512 MB RAM are laughable. I wouldn't consider running Vista with anything less than 1 GB, and would recommend 2 GB, since performance with Vista really seems to scale with RAM. 800 MHz is a joke as well - once again, doubling the recommended 1 GHz provides a decent performance (especially with a dual core). And for the record, don't bother considering an OS without all of the latest SPs - its just incomplete without them. Vista is pretty good on a decent system with SP1.
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Firm bought me HP Compaq 8710p, with Vista Ultimate.
I spent 3 days installing VS 2005, SQL Server 2005 & other dominantly MS
products.
System crashed twice during instalations, returning me to the start (recovery).
I have installed XP SP2, and I am happy 
I DO have job to do other than installing, reinstalling anf fixing OS,
there are enough problems with our own code  , I don't want
to spend time google-ing about fixes, bugs etc...
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I run vista business on a HP Compaq 6710b with 4Gb of RAM and I can't complain. I has not crashed on me once.
I run SQL Server 2005, VS2008 Team systems, Office 2007 and a whole bunch of other apps and it performs way better then XP.
Especially when you start running the apps simultaneously.
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I'm not using Vista myself right now (XP/SP3 is fine on all my boxes). However my daughter's ThinkPad died so I bought her a new laptop. (A Gateway). Got it for < $500 at Best Buy. Geez - the box was configured stock with 4GB of main. Still ... it was pre-loaded with Vista SP1 (64-bit) and seems to work fine. Connected up with my home LAN right away, runs all the stuff we already have (Office 2003, etc) - she's happy as a clam. Nice little box that Gateway; if I needed a laptop I'd buy one for myself, plenty of power.
I would *not* upgrade an existing XP/SP3 installation to Vista at this point - but on a box designed to run it I see no problem with it now - works very well.
-CB
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Both me and my wife do software development; both (large) companies mandate Windows XP; and don't allow Vista for the corporate desktops. That certainly suggests something to me...
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simply suggests that the large corporations don't want to train thier employees to use (and support) current technologies.
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I would like to suggest a correction:
"simply suggests that the large corporations don't want to" spend the money to "train thier employees to use (and support) current technologies." 
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Yeah, this argument makes sense...
"Vista is crap because our hardware is too far outdated to run it"
Believe me, Microsoft doesn't want you running vista on your outdated machines either. You won't be happy with it. If your business runs fine on old machines then great, keep using it. When you are ready to upgrade, buy the hardware to run it.
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Keeping the old is okay until you by that new software package and find it is only for Vista. We have one machine that can not run XP!
Current technology is great but when the developers have to use machines (XP) that take five minutes to boot??
MS has started to look at other ways of doing things as their Core Server shows.
I have not worked with Vista but would like to, however, no money to upgrade my system at home. 
djj
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peterchen wrote: with lipstick?
I have voted a '5' for the tag to the running subject.
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar
Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep!
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Overall I'm very happy with Vista. Enough so that when I go to use my old XP machine at home, I'm underwhelmed.
Yes vista has higher system requirements than XP. It has a lot more stuff happening in the background. You can disable that stuff if you wish your OS to behave more like XP.
One thing I have definitely found is the performance of vista scales with CPU and/or memory pressure MUCH more nicely than XP. With nothing open, everything in xp is instant. In vista things seem a little more leisurely, which no doubt causes some of the vista bashing.
But open a few instances of visual studio, outlook, word, excel and the rest and vista will hardly break out a sweat while XP will struggle.
Pre-SP1 vista was indeed fairly flaky though. I nearly went back to XP before sp1 came out.
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SP1 is definitely a necessary upgrade. Agreed with you on all accounts.
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Plebs wrote: I'm not an idiot, so OSX annoys me.
Yeah, stuff just working out of the box without people having to meddle with it but still allowing for geeks to customize the tar out of it must really be badgering. Sorry you have to endure such harshness should you choose to use an advanced OS that Microsoft copies off of left and right.
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I need to ask a stupid question here. What the hell does IMHO stand for?
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In My Humble Opinion.
Dates back to IRC
Now I'm showing my age
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Thanks, learn something new every day.
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Just dont ask what FFS means .. surprised I've not seen it in this thread yet <grin>
The only thing unpredictable about me is just how predictable I'm going to be.
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It's a phrase that bugs me, must people don't know the meaning of humility.
It's just a way of saying this is what I think - like it or lump it. IMHO 
Try not to take life to seriously.
When all is done no one gets out alive anyway.
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Nah... dates back to Usenet News (using UUCP, using modems - early eighties). And yes, my hair is gray...
Peter the small turnip
(1) It Has To Work. --RFC 1925[^]
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Just for future reference ("teach a man to fish"), you can usually google an acronymn like IMHO and find out pretty quickly what it stands for.
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One thing I have definitely found is the performance of vista scales with CPU and/or memory pressure MUCH more nicely than XP
Hands-down agree there. I was diagnosing random BSODs on my mom's laptop this weekend; turns out it was a bad stick of memory. When I pulled one stick out and rebooted (going from two gigs down to one), Vista didn't even flinch, apart from the unavoidable slight slowdown from cutting your available memory in half.
I'm still waiting for 7 to come out, though. Has anyone heard a definite date that they're going to start the public beta testing?
“Acer, Gateway, and eMachines are the same company now. Great! Now we just need a really big toilet, and we can get rid of all three at once.”
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Yeah SP1 was loads better; I was getting random windows disappearing pre-SP1.
But the biggest problem with Vista IMO is the DWM. It is a memory HOG. Even with three gigabytes I was getting low memory warnings every 20 minutes when running two instances of VS, Photoshop, and a few Chrome windows. dwm.exe was right up there at the top or close to it for memory usage in Task Manager.
I finally got fed up and researched what to do about the DWM and discovered it's just an Aero thing (which I guess I knew but it didn't click until that point). Which means if I switch my theme to Vista Basic, the dwm goes away. So I asked myself: are semitransparent title bars, drop shadows and live taskbar previews really worth low memory warnings every 20 minutes?
You can probably guess my decision.
“It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic, is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
{o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! )
|)””’) http://pihole.org/
-”-”-
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...and i will defend it vigorously, until the day i have a machine that can run it.
---- You're right.
These facts that you've laid out totally contradict the wild ramblings that I pulled off the back of cornflakes packets .
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