Vista...

[Bazza454]

Bruce commented recently on a  thread that he wasn't entirely happy with Windows Vista, (although he didn't elaborate).

I've recently changed to a laptop running Vista and I have to say that the improvements compared to XP appear to be impressive.

Windows Defender is excellent, Windows Firewall is much improved, the graphics and the screen layouts are easier to navigate. The only downside so far is the hard drive defrag. I usually run this at least once a week and on XP it takes about 3 minutes and you can see progress on the chart. On Vista it takes about an hour and the progress chart has disappeared.

My PC runs on XP and apart from the Microsoft prompt "Windows has experienced a Problem" etc, etc, whenever you open Explorer, everything seems fine. (I know there's a fix available on the the internet, but it's not Microsoft and at the moment i'm reluctant to try it.

So, I would be interested to hear the views of members running Vista compared to XP, and particulary, what should I look out for? Also, has anyone got any ideas on defrag? I'm currently trying Auslogics, but i'm not entirely convinced.

  

[davenewellhome]

Hi Bazza, when I bought my laptop last year it came with Vista pre installed so I gave it a try. Initially my biggest concern was that it took half the available Gigabyte of memory just to run Vista which seemed rather excessive to me. Then I really started to experience problems with it. One of the uses for my lappy is to act as a TV with a USB TV tuner gismo and despite having no problems with it on my previous lappy with XP I just couldn't get it to work, no dirvers available yet etc. In the end I bought a legit copy of XP home and replaced Vista with XP. Result, everything works as it should including the TV tuner and its faster because XP imposes a lower system overhead (less memory required just to run the OS).

 

Frankly, as XP does everything I want of it and has been rock solid stable for over a year now I wouldn't even consider "upgrading to a slower OS :-) .

 

D.

[michele]

Bazza,

why are you not using the defrag on windows we have never used any other programme, with no probs.

[Bazza454]

Hi Dave,

My experience with Vista and XP seems to be the opposite to yours.

Vista at the moment is running really well and I do like the many improvements that they have made. Agree with the comment about memory, you do need at least 2GB of RAM and the hard drive with the usual software, but excluding any music/photo/video files takes about 40GB.

With XP I get the "Windows has experienced a problem and needs to close" more often than not when I open Explorer. The PC doesn't shut down, it just returns to the start menu. Googling "XP problems" it appears to be an issue with a large number of users. Hopefully, one day Mr Gates will instruct one of his minions to sort out the problem and offer a fix.

Hi M,

I use the Windows defrag on XP and it takes around 5 minutes, you can also see the progress chart. On Vista, the chart has been removed and it can take well over an hour, even though I defrag at least once a week. That's the reason i'm currently using Auslogics, it takes about 5 minutes.

As an aside, I came across this site recently which lists all the dodgy anti-spyware sites.

 http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm#top 

[twooks]

remember guys -

an apple a day .....

 

B-)

[colin]

Windows 7, the replacement for Vista is due next year, so I think I'll proboly skip Vista, as XP is rock solid for me.

[Guest peter]

I've never seen a propper de-frag done in 5 min's in my life.

[Bazza454]

peter - 2008-04-12 10:33 PM I've never seen a propper de-frag done in 5 min's in my life.

Well, if you do a "propper" defrag at least once a week, you will "propperly" find that it will "propperly" do it in five minutes or less.....