So has anyone received their Vista Upgrade yet?

GJW

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jan 25, 2002
Messages
2,030
Location
Bay Area, CA
When did you receive it?
Which brand computer?
Which model?
Are you brave enough to use it?
:naughty:
 

Radio

Modulated Moderator
Joined
Oct 28, 2005
Messages
2,220
Location
The Land of Baked Beans and Red Sox
Got mine yesterday afternoon, Vista Home Premium for Compaq, I need to upgrade the RAM 1st, only 512 on board now, need 2gig. The good news is you can get 2gig for $100 shipped virtually anywhere! Looking for RAM deals as I type this :)
 

PhotonBoy

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
3,304
Location
Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Canada http://tinyu
I think Microsoft has issued another Win ME type OS this time, crippled by DRM and other issues. I'll either wait for a SP 2 or skip Vista altogether. I'll look at son-of-Vista and decide between it or a version of Linux. When in front of my PC, I live in my browser and listen to internet radio. OS eye candy is not a big attraction for me.
 

geepondy

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Apr 15, 2001
Messages
4,896
Location
Massachusetts
Is Vista the same as XP in that it is a lot better to install on a freshly formatted disk whether then over an existing OS? I'm wondering if people who bought their pcs around Christmas with XP and a free Vista upgrade are making out with their upgrades as I recall upgrading XP over win98 usually didn't go real well.
 

gorn

Enlightened
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
859
Location
The Big Valley, Calif. USA
I bought a toshiba notebook about a month ago. It came with Vista home premium. Vista basic is a ripoff as it takes away some of the functions you had in XP. I'm not sure I like Vista. It seems that they changed things just for the sake of change, not to make it work better. So far it seems to be stable. I would think that doing an upgrade on a clean drive would be better than upgrading over an XP install. There were changes made to the file structure (that didn't need to be done) so that means the registry file will be different between the 2 OS's. When ever you screw with a windows registry you are asking for disaster.
 

greenLED

Flashaholic
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
13,263
Location
La Tiquicia
Everyone in my wife's office who got Vista computers are switching back to XP.

Our IT guys won't even touch in until at least the end of this year, at the earliest.

:green:
 

Casual Flashlight User

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 26, 2006
Messages
1,263
Location
England
Um, is it really that bad?
thinking.gif


I just got my new laptop with it pre installed (vista premium).

I really wish I hadn't spotted this thread now...I'll start worrying.
frown.gif



CFU
 

gorn

Enlightened
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
859
Location
The Big Valley, Calif. USA
Casual Flashlight User said:
Um, is it really that bad?
thinking.gif


I just got my new laptop with it pre installed (vista premium).

I really wish I hadn't spotted this thread now...I'll start worrying.
frown.gif



CFU

It isn't like the windows 98 to windows ME (melt down) edition. It has worked fine for me. It takes more memory, and there are a bunch of interface changes that were put in for God only knows why. There was no need for them. A word of caution. When you go to empty the recycle bin don't make the mistake I did and hit the delete option. That deletes the recycle bin from your desktop. Then you get to search all over hell's half acre to find out how to restore it.
 

3rd_shift

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 9, 2004
Messages
3,337
Location
DFW. TX. U.S.A. Earth
knot said:
I won't buy vista, even if I had the money. I believe it's a money maker during the interim of Vienna's release.

I'm kinda leaning that way too.
I finally got a chance to play with a pc at work that had Vista on it and was immediately unimpressed.
Much of the learning curve of Vista seems to come with no real benefits this time around. :candle:

This is another reason to just build your own pc with
Windows XP service pack 2b, or later.
Or, if the latest version of Microsoft's other software won't work on Xp, it may finally be time to just go over to Mac, or Linux and just blow off Microsoft for once and for all imho.
 

Pellidon

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 19, 2002
Messages
1,375
Location
39.42N 86.42 W
I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10. Never been happier.

At work my project is moving to Linux as well. I can't keep spending time on each new computer fixing the API bugs the incremental "upgrades" MS keeps forcing on the PC vendors. We bought two PC's made two weeks apart and my program works on one but not the other. They have the same hardware specs but different day's implementations of XP. 28 machines with the same program running on 98 SE, five different versions of the same code tweaked to run on each box of XP. I don't even want to attempt the headache of Vista. No thanks.

Windows XP (maybe Vista) may be fine for the casual user that only web surfs at home. But when you need consistent performance it just doesn't cut it IMO. I'd go back to 98SE in a heartbeat if I could for my specific task. It works.
 

3rd_shift

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 9, 2004
Messages
3,337
Location
DFW. TX. U.S.A. Earth
I just remembered something.
When I got my free Windows95 upgrade cd from Packard bell in 10-1995 after I bought the pc on 8-31-1995, it stunk too.
The win95 upgrade cd ended up in pieces and in the trash.
I stayed with windows 3.11 for workgroups that the computer originally came with and ran good with until i got a newer and faster computer later on.

It should be interesting to see how many Windows Vista disks end up with the same destructive fate when they finally arrive.
:popcorn:
 

knot

Banned
Joined
Apr 5, 2007
Messages
731
Location
SW Washington
Talk about proprietary design, Mac is even worse. I like to build my own computer and install whatever operating system I desire. I don't want to buy an operating system that includes a computer.
 

WNG

Enlightened
Joined
Nov 3, 2004
Messages
714
Location
Arrid Zone-Ah, USA
Pellidon said:
I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10. Never been happier.

Windows XP (maybe Vista) may be fine for the casual user that only web surfs at home. But when you need consistent performance it just doesn't cut it IMO. I'd go back to 98SE in a heartbeat if I could for my specific task. It works.

I migrated one of my PCs to Ubuntu, I like it so far. Will try 6.10, currently using 6.06 LTS.

Your opinion of XP is so true. It's these subtle stupidities that keep me using Win2000 sp4 on some systems and not install XP on all of them. Tweaks have allowed XP to run almost as stable and fast as Win2k. But I noticed oddities between what are identically built systems too.

Vista won't be used by me. Other than getting some exposure to it, it will be relegated to the "so what?" box.
 
Last edited:

tiktok 22

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 8, 2002
Messages
1,273
Location
Illinois
knot said:
Talk about proprietary design, Mac is even worse. I like to build my own computer and install whatever operating system I desire. I don't want to buy an operating system that includes a computer.

Linux,Windows and OSX can all run on a mac:)
 

greenstuffs

Banned
Joined
Dec 4, 2006
Messages
1,198
Location
Norman, OK
I got a free copy of vista biz when ms had some deal, well the thing is that the vista is not much better than the xp with more graphics, i don't like it besides games don't run well on it. There are lots of functions aka annoyances like pop ups and things just to make your system more secure which i don't think it'll help once vista gets more adopted.

It is very pretty nonetheless but after having 3 tries yes none of them worked well. 1st one crashed, 2nd corrupted, 3rd corrupted due to having multiple fonts i use chinese, english and some other western european language the machine would just not boot. My flashdrive is not "Vista" compatible :barf:and everytime i put it in it makes the system go into shock until i take it out.

just by running windows my laptop was taking 1 gig of ram totally worthless i am happy with XP and will not upgrade until ms stops giving updates for XP. I still remember the great windows 2k it served me well until 2k5 :)

I'll keep the copy and install it after 18 months once the OS gets more mature and may be a new system along with more powerful graphic card, 4 Gb of ram quad core just to run Vista without stutter.
 
Last edited:

binky

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Dec 1, 2002
Messages
1,036
Location
Taxachusetts, USA
Disney's Toontown doesn't work with Vista. I have an 8-year-old who's seriously ticked off at his dad for upgrading to Vista.

On a more serious note, I loaded Vista Ultimate onto my now old Dell D800 laptop and it seems to work fine. It sleeps fine. The apps work fine. I like the cool graphics, mostly the cool chronometer watch/clock thingy that I can have stay up in the bar at the right. If you know what I mean by "classic mode" then you probably know what I mean when I say that I found XP's non-classic mode totally unusable. I couldn't find anything or get anything done in it. With Vista things are more informative so I don't have the immediate reaction to crank everything back to classic mode (the Start Menu, the Control Panels, the folder views, etc.)

For anti-virus I'm using MS Live OneCare. It took forever to start up in XP and it seems to take forever and a day to start up in Vista, many times reporting that there are problems, deficiencies, or errors when it's apparently only erroneously checking something about itself before giving that service a chance to start up, or that an update failed but it's only because I need to restart before it'll be installed. Because OneCare was beta through most of XP I was hoping that it was actually designed for Vista and would work much better. Annoyingly, there are some times that it still forces me to manually go to MS Update in IE and walk through that huge long procedure myself.

I do get really tired of the annoying allow/deny dialog boxes. It's so annoying that in no time at all I was trained to just approve of whatever without paying much attention to it, which, of course, totally defeats the purpose. But it just comes up way too often.

I can get my Office work done on it, but ever since I needed to ship back the original drive to Dell and format a new one myself I've never been able to get a DVD to play on this darned laptop. (I know XP didn't ship with DVD decoders natively) I was hoping with Vista I'd be able to play DVD's but all I get is sound. It's not like it's an off-brand laptop. I don't know whether to blame Dell or MS, but when I'm on a trip it sure would be nice if the ultra-premium ultra-ultimate OS did what it advertises.
 
Last edited:
Top