Oh mother of God, when I try to play games on Vista (nVidia 6600GT) the graphics card will randomly crash. This is followed by Vista eventually going "Vista has recovered from a graphics driver crash!" as though I should congratulate Vista from recovering when this shit shouldn't be happening in the first place.
...the graphics driver crashed. Why are you blaming Vista? It recovered instead of giving you a BSOD like XP would.
XP, for me, never had such a graphics driver problem. Ever.
Is nVidia to blame? Is Vista just impossible for them to work with? I don't know. I'm not happy with my Vista experience.
I don't know if that last thing is sarcasm or not, but installing ubuntu was the first linux related thing I've ever done.
Also, it keeps asking if you allow yourself to run something as admin when logged in on a admin account... This has probably been mentioned though.
You still don't need that shortcut -- right click on the start menu and customise it to have the run button. You can also remove extraneous things and add other useful things.
And the UAC is pretty damn useful on computers where you don't trust the user at all. Adding another "are you sure" step where the default option is "no way, jose" is another thing that someone has to see and click through before they install "MEGA TOOLBAR 4."
SporkAndrew on
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
I don't know if that last thing is sarcasm or not, but installing ubuntu was the first linux related thing I've ever done.
Also, it keeps asking if you allow yourself to run something as admin when logged in on a admin account... This has probably been mentioned though.
You still don't need that shortcut -- right click on the start menu and customise it to have the run button. You can also remove extraneous things and add other useful things.
And the UAC is pretty damn useful on computers where you don't trust the user at all. Adding another "are you sure" step where the default option is "no way, jose" is another thing that someone has to see and click through before they install "MEGA TOOLBAR 4."
Hahaha, sure... *wipes tear away*
All it does is to condition the user to automatically press yes without a thought. Seen it before.
GrimReaper on
PSN | Steam
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Yes, you definitely could. You just had to know what you're doing. XP is from a time where MS still thought that individual user accounts would be mostly confusing to home users, so it's still buried in the policy control system. You can do some pretty amazing thing using policy settings once you learn your way around them.
You could very effectively limit account access under XP, just not in any user-friendly way.
Do not do this. Based on my experience with the beta, it's pretty important for the proper functioning of the OS, not to mention security.
Edit: To the guy who keeps being asked for a password on his MacBook: What on Earth are you doing? I seeit almsot never. Maybe once a day at worst.
Yeah, I don't get that very often at all. Major system settings, software installs, that's about it. It's more reasonable than Vista's by far, since it tends to make the difference between running a program as user and admin more readily apparent, doesn't lock you out of the rest of the computer while it's prompting you, and doesn't prompt more than once within a certain interval of time. Vista just takes over your screen, sometimes seemingly at random, and pops up something cryptic if you're an admin user, that can be easily clicked past out of habit without paying any attention. (It's a lot better from a normal user account though, since it says a lot more about what's going on, and clearly asks for an admin password.)
Also, Vista is fine, and free is a sweet deal. Dual-booting is easy enough to set up from the Vista installer if you do everything the "custom" or "advanced" way and make sure it doesn't just wipe your XP install. My main complaint with it was the terrible performance of games under the beta drivers for my Radeon 9800 (we're talking 1/4 of what it was under XP).
Do not do this. Based on my experience with the beta, it's pretty important for the proper functioning of the OS, not to mention security.
And based on all of our experiences using the actual retail version of Vista, it's a giant pain in the tits that offers zero added security and the OS works fine with it off.
Vista is pretty and has some nice features. I really like the way Explorer works for example and the new start menu is pretty slick. That being said, if your machine is moderately old you will want to stick with XP. I have a pretty hoss workstation at work (3.4GHz, 3GB Ram, etc) and it kicks my machine's ass for some reason.
I recently turned off indexing and noticed a boost in response time, but I'm still not all that happy. I am really just holding out until my boss gets me a new C2D workstation which I'm sure will run much better.
That said, if you can get Vista Ultimate for free, do it. You can always install it later when your machine can handle it.
Do not do this. Based on my experience with the beta, it's pretty important for the proper functioning of the OS, not to mention security.
And based on all of our experiences using the actual retail version of Vista, it's a giant pain in the tits that offers zero added security and the OS works fine with it off.
Turning off UAC is a bad thing IMO. I've been running Vista Business' final release since October of last year, so just shy of a year. I HATE the UAC popups so after about 2 months I decided to turn UAC off. Big mistake. UAC does more than just handle the popups. It must handle redirecting paths/locations for user profile data as trillian and a handful of programs no longer had any user data. After freaking out for a bit and being unable to find the files, I turned on UAC again and everything was working again.
UAC is there for a good reason, just learn to live with security in place and you'll get used to it.
I've been using Vista in a lab for the past few weeks, and only time I saw UAC was in a control panel and when I installed Acrobat Reader.
When software is designed to not play around in the system registry or protected folders, those should be the only instances you see it.
If any software needs a UAC window during a normal bootup (not counting things like patches), then it is not written tot he spec Microsoft made very clear to folks for a couple years prior to Vista's release.
Good software runs from the Program Files and only writes in your User folder. Software that does anything else is written in violation of how Vista works.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
No, I plan on keeping UAC, mostly because I have everything set up a very certain way (that and the other members of my house show absolutely zero discretion when browsing the internet so when it comes to my two thousand dollar tower I'd like to err on the side of caution) so it's actually a pretty nice feature, for me.
No, I plan on keeping UAC, mostly because I have everything set up a very certain way (that and the other members of my house show absolutely zero discretion when browsing the internet so when it comes to my two thousand dollar tower I'd like to err on the side of caution) so it's actually a pretty nice feature, for me.
Me as well. Anyone else accessing my PC is gonna have to do it through a guest account. I've had enough of cleaning up other peoples messes, and UAC will at least prevent them from installing anything I don't want them to when they're on the guest account.
Do not do this. Based on my experience with the beta, it's pretty important for the proper functioning of the OS, not to mention security.
And based on all of our experiences using the actual retail version of Vista, it's a giant pain in the tits that offers zero added security and the OS works fine with it off.
Turning off UAC is a bad thing IMO. I've been running Vista Business' final release since October of last year, so just shy of a year. I HATE the UAC popups so after about 2 months I decided to turn UAC off. Big mistake. UAC does more than just handle the popups. It must handle redirecting paths/locations for user profile data as trillian and a handful of programs no longer had any user data. After freaking out for a bit and being unable to find the files, I turned on UAC again and everything was working again.
UAC is there for a good reason, just learn to live with security in place and you'll get used to it.
The reason that happened is probably because Trillian tries to write your personal info to the C:\program files\ directory. Part of UAC stops programs writing to certain protected directories and offers them a virtualised space to play with instead. Now, when you turned UAC off, the program must have stopped using the virtualised folders and gone back to the default location of writing profiles to.
Essentially for any user that could safely navigate Windows XP without fucking up there own computer by downloading and running FreePorn.exe can safely deal without UAC.
1. Windows Vista fully supports hardware accelerated OpenGL;
2. OpenGL applications can benefit from Window Vista's improved graphics resource management; 3. OpenGL performance on Windows Vista is extremely competitive with the performance on Windows XP.
Do not do this. Based on my experience with the beta, it's pretty important for the proper functioning of the OS, not to mention security.
And based on all of our experiences using the actual retail version of Vista, it's a giant pain in the tits that offers zero added security and the OS works fine with it off.
Turning off UAC is a bad thing IMO. I've been running Vista Business' final release since October of last year, so just shy of a year. I HATE the UAC popups so after about 2 months I decided to turn UAC off. Big mistake. UAC does more than just handle the popups. It must handle redirecting paths/locations for user profile data as trillian and a handful of programs no longer had any user data. After freaking out for a bit and being unable to find the files, I turned on UAC again and everything was working again.
UAC is there for a good reason, just learn to live with security in place and you'll get used to it.
The reason that happened is probably because Trillian tries to write your personal info to the C:\program files\ directory. Part of UAC stops programs writing to certain protected directories and offers them a virtualised space to play with instead. Now, when you turned UAC off, the program must have stopped using the virtualised folders and gone back to the default location of writing profiles to.
Yeah, I knew what it was doing, but I'll be damned if I could find that data after UAC was off. It was essentially gone. At any rate, UAC isn't as big of a deal as everyone makes it sound.
UAC isnt really all that bad at all. I run everything from a regular user account and if something needs to be update I run the .exe windows prompts me for the admin password and thats it.
I am on a laptop dell E1705...1.78 dual core with 2GB ram and a GeForce Go 7900.
I have had no issues playing WoW, Company of Heroes Vanilla and Beta, City of Heroes, Half Life 2 and mods, City of Heroes/Villians, Lord of the Rings Online, Command and Conquer 3, Civ 4, Tabula Rasa beta, Quake ET beta...I'm sure you get the hint now.
Add to the fact that the first SP will drop soon, vista will be steadily catching up on XPs performance.
Yeah when I first upgraded to Vista I turned UAC off. But when I reformatted a few months back I decided to leave it on and see if I could live with it. It's really not that bad, plus now I know that software I write is UAC-friendly.
RandomEngy on
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
The only thing I don't like about UAC is when it claims you need admin access to delete or move a file when it's really just in use by another program. Seems like a bug
I remember an interesting article on Slashdot awhile back laying out some of the shadow voodoo Microsoft had to work under to make the HD content managing system work in Vista. Ultimately that's enough reason for me to stay the hell away from it, but eventually my hand will be forced by hardware upgrades. Personally I see no reason to spend money on Vista when XP does everything you need, Vista just adds some cosmetic things, which admittedly are nice, just not hundreds of dollars nice for me. Also the DX10 stuff has been up to now, pretty nominal. CoH and Bioshock added some effects, but they were pretty minimal. Supposedly Crysis will be the first true DX10 game, but I'm still of the opinion that we'll see DX10 in XP at some point.
But a free OS is a free OS, and it will be hard to stick with XP into the foreseeable future, so go with it and dual boot.
Vista (Business) crashes just about once per day for me. It keeps telling me that it thinks the problem is with my RAM, but running the Windows memory test shows no errors, so who knows. The error report telling me that it recovered from a blue screen is less than helpful. I also get graphic card crashes, even though my GeForce 8600 GT has up-to-date drivers. It also has some strange hard drive management - my available storage fluctuates daily.
When Vista is working, it's fine. But I find these issues to be annoying. Hopefully SP1 will fix some of them.
Vista just adds some cosmetic things, which admittedly are nice, just not hundreds of dollars nice for me.
Why do people keep saying this? The cosmetic things are the least of the improvements.
All that said, you're mostly right if you're a gamer. If you're developing or running tons of parallel Office, Adobe, or parallel programs (as in, using the OS on a regular basis), there are quite a few non-cosmetic benefits.
I remember an interesting article on Slashdot awhile back laying out some of the shadow voodoo Microsoft had to work under to make the HD content managing system work in Vista. Ultimately that's enough reason for me to stay the hell away from it, but eventually my hand will be forced by hardware upgrades. Personally I see no reason to spend money on Vista when XP does everything you need, Vista just adds some cosmetic things, which admittedly are nice, just not hundreds of dollars nice for me. Also the DX10 stuff has been up to now, pretty nominal. CoH and Bioshock added some effects, but they were pretty minimal. Supposedly Crysis will be the first true DX10 game, but I'm still of the opinion that we'll see DX10 in XP at some point.
But a free OS is a free OS, and it will be hard to stick with XP into the foreseeable future, so go with it and dual boot.
I'm requesting that whoever helps you turn on your computer to stop doing so so I don't have to read paranoid lies on PA.
Yes, it's worth it, and no, it's not expensive.. unless you're a little slow and fail to realise there are versions other than Ultimate and fail to see what discounts are available.
XP was pretty poor so Ubuntu / OSX became my favourites but Vista now has the crown, for the most part, there are a hell of a lot of things I still like on Linux/OSX but overall Vista gets the most action.. and some of you guys are spewing pathetic amounts of lies or are just plain being clueless.
Sounds like there's something pretty heavily the matter with your system, dude.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was something horribly wrong with my machine. It's been crashing since day 1. It was built by my idiot co-workers, so I wouldn't doubt it if they used some shitty RAM.
Is there any way for me to see what brand they used? The device manager reveals nothing. Also, has there been any reports of AMD/Vista conflicts? I'm currently running an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+.
Vista seems really nice, but unless your machine is up to it then don't try and game on it. A buddy of mine had it for awhile on his machine (3200+ AMD processor, 1 gig of RAM, and I forget what video card he has, it was the top-of-the-line AGP card if that helps) and while it was really nice and he liked it, his performance in games just wasn't as good as it had been on XP. Admittedly it wasn't bad, it just wasn't as good and it bugged him so he switched back to XP. He may use Vista in the future when he buys a new computer but for now he's staying with XP. Also, my roommate's girlfriend bought a laptop with Vista installed on it, and it runs like absolute shit. I mean, I won't even touch the fucking thing because it's so awful. I don't know what processor it has, but the fucking thing only has 512 megs of RAM and integrated graphics. I told her she should have asked me before she bought anything because she's stupid, but this is her payback I guess.
Posts
XP, for me, never had such a graphics driver problem. Ever.
Is nVidia to blame? Is Vista just impossible for them to work with? I don't know. I'm not happy with my Vista experience.
I never had the need to know that shortcut before
I don't know if that last thing is sarcasm or not, but installing ubuntu was the first linux related thing I've ever done.
Also, it keeps asking if you allow yourself to run something as admin when logged in on a admin account... This has probably been mentioned though.
You still don't need that shortcut -- right click on the start menu and customise it to have the run button. You can also remove extraneous things and add other useful things.
And the UAC is pretty damn useful on computers where you don't trust the user at all. Adding another "are you sure" step where the default option is "no way, jose" is another thing that someone has to see and click through before they install "MEGA TOOLBAR 4."
I have an upgrade CD for Vista Business edition.
Will this include Remote Desktop? Because I tend to use that a lot.
Hahaha, sure... *wipes tear away*
All it does is to condition the user to automatically press yes without a thought. Seen it before.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Yes, you definitely could. You just had to know what you're doing. XP is from a time where MS still thought that individual user accounts would be mostly confusing to home users, so it's still buried in the policy control system. You can do some pretty amazing thing using policy settings once you learn your way around them.
You could very effectively limit account access under XP, just not in any user-friendly way.
1. Randomly wakes up from sleep, even after disabling all peripheral wake up ability.
2. When i exit LOTRO, media player always starts. Odd.
Other than that, runs great!
Yeah, I don't get that very often at all. Major system settings, software installs, that's about it. It's more reasonable than Vista's by far, since it tends to make the difference between running a program as user and admin more readily apparent, doesn't lock you out of the rest of the computer while it's prompting you, and doesn't prompt more than once within a certain interval of time. Vista just takes over your screen, sometimes seemingly at random, and pops up something cryptic if you're an admin user, that can be easily clicked past out of habit without paying any attention. (It's a lot better from a normal user account though, since it says a lot more about what's going on, and clearly asks for an admin password.)
Also, Vista is fine, and free is a sweet deal. Dual-booting is easy enough to set up from the Vista installer if you do everything the "custom" or "advanced" way and make sure it doesn't just wipe your XP install. My main complaint with it was the terrible performance of games under the beta drivers for my Radeon 9800 (we're talking 1/4 of what it was under XP).
And based on all of our experiences using the actual retail version of Vista, it's a giant pain in the tits that offers zero added security and the OS works fine with it off.
I recently turned off indexing and noticed a boost in response time, but I'm still not all that happy. I am really just holding out until my boss gets me a new C2D workstation which I'm sure will run much better.
That said, if you can get Vista Ultimate for free, do it. You can always install it later when your machine can handle it.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
Turning off UAC is a bad thing IMO. I've been running Vista Business' final release since October of last year, so just shy of a year. I HATE the UAC popups so after about 2 months I decided to turn UAC off. Big mistake. UAC does more than just handle the popups. It must handle redirecting paths/locations for user profile data as trillian and a handful of programs no longer had any user data. After freaking out for a bit and being unable to find the files, I turned on UAC again and everything was working again.
UAC is there for a good reason, just learn to live with security in place and you'll get used to it.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
Trust me, use it in production as your main OS and you'll see it plenty.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
If any software needs a UAC window during a normal bootup (not counting things like patches), then it is not written tot he spec Microsoft made very clear to folks for a couple years prior to Vista's release.
Good software runs from the Program Files and only writes in your User folder. Software that does anything else is written in violation of how Vista works.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Me as well. Anyone else accessing my PC is gonna have to do it through a guest account. I've had enough of cleaning up other peoples messes, and UAC will at least prevent them from installing anything I don't want them to when they're on the guest account.
Yes it will.
Main problem i have with Vista is the shitty openGL performance.
The reason that happened is probably because Trillian tries to write your personal info to the C:\program files\ directory. Part of UAC stops programs writing to certain protected directories and offers them a virtualised space to play with instead. Now, when you turned UAC off, the program must have stopped using the virtualised folders and gone back to the default location of writing profiles to.
Essentially for any user that could safely navigate Windows XP without fucking up there own computer by downloading and running FreePorn.exe can safely deal without UAC.
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/
20th April
1. Windows Vista fully supports hardware accelerated OpenGL;
2. OpenGL applications can benefit from Window Vista's improved graphics resource management;
3. OpenGL performance on Windows Vista is extremely competitive with the performance on Windows XP.
Yeah, I knew what it was doing, but I'll be damned if I could find that data after UAC was off. It was essentially gone. At any rate, UAC isn't as big of a deal as everyone makes it sound.
Podcast 0207: Sinking to new depths
Preview: Is Uncharted: Golden Abyss the Vita’s killer launch title?
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3: Macro-wreckonomics
I use it on three machines on a daily basis; two at work, one at home.
I only see it when I install a new program or start Xfire on one machine. That is *it*. This adds up to, possibly, once every other day.
Mark of Chaos did this too. Though, in that case, it was just a sign that the game sucked ass and shouldn't be played.
I am on a laptop dell E1705...1.78 dual core with 2GB ram and a GeForce Go 7900.
I have had no issues playing WoW, Company of Heroes Vanilla and Beta, City of Heroes, Half Life 2 and mods, City of Heroes/Villians, Lord of the Rings Online, Command and Conquer 3, Civ 4, Tabula Rasa beta, Quake ET beta...I'm sure you get the hint now.
Add to the fact that the first SP will drop soon, vista will be steadily catching up on XPs performance.
I say go for it.
But a free OS is a free OS, and it will be hard to stick with XP into the foreseeable future, so go with it and dual boot.
When Vista is working, it's fine. But I find these issues to be annoying. Hopefully SP1 will fix some of them.
Why do people keep saying this? The cosmetic things are the least of the improvements.
All that said, you're mostly right if you're a gamer. If you're developing or running tons of parallel Office, Adobe, or parallel programs (as in, using the OS on a regular basis), there are quite a few non-cosmetic benefits.
Yes, it's worth it, and no, it's not expensive.. unless you're a little slow and fail to realise there are versions other than Ultimate and fail to see what discounts are available.
XP was pretty poor so Ubuntu / OSX became my favourites but Vista now has the crown, for the most part, there are a hell of a lot of things I still like on Linux/OSX but overall Vista gets the most action.. and some of you guys are spewing pathetic amounts of lies or are just plain being clueless.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was something horribly wrong with my machine. It's been crashing since day 1. It was built by my idiot co-workers, so I wouldn't doubt it if they used some shitty RAM.
Is there any way for me to see what brand they used? The device manager reveals nothing. Also, has there been any reports of AMD/Vista conflicts? I'm currently running an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+.