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My cousin came over earlier today. He thought it would be nice to put the Vista upgrade on my pc as a gift. From what I've heard, it sucks ass.

He said he created a restore point, so when it finishes can I put XP back the way it was? Do I just do this normally (accessing the program)?

Uh....have you considered trying vista before going back?

Ace Pace wrote:Uh....have you considered trying vista before going back?

Yes, this is in case I don't like it. My PC isn't ancient, but it has some hardware that isn't the newest...

Superman wrote:My cousin came over earlier today. He thought it would be nice to put the Vista upgrade on my pc as a gift. From what I've heard, it sucks ass.

He said he created a restore point, so when it finishes can I put XP back the way it was? Do I just do this normally (accessing the program)?

Once you get all the updates, Vista is quite usable as long as you don't have a hideously ancient machine and lots of hardware older than 6 months. Now that they've finally fixed their annoying thumbnail glitch I'm finding it a rather decent operating system. (Aero is a bitch of a memory hog, however).

Trying Vista? What are you, nuts, Ace? WOO for a buggy, incompatible ramhog! But it's got Shadowcopy and it's shiny, that makes it aaall better.

White Haven wrote:Trying Vista? What are you, nuts, Ace? WOO for a buggy, incompatible ramhog! But it's got Shadowcopy and it's shiny, that makes it aaall better.

Bugs such as what? The only things I've really noticed is hardware incompatibility and some pieces of software not working quite right (fixed by driver and software updates). The only real built in OS glitch I've seen and had issues with is having problems displaying video file thumbnails correctly, which is now fixed.

White Haven wrote:Trying Vista? What are you, nuts, Ace? WOO for a buggy, incompatible ramhog! But it's got Shadowcopy and it's shiny, that makes it aaall better.

....so you're against trying something for yourself even though it's pretty much risk-free, just because of what others tell you?

Not so much what others tell me, but what I've seen in my own experience with the few customers silly enough to load Vista at work. And I'm not necessarily saying don't try it, I'm just thumping Ace for actively encouraging it.

White Haven wrote:Not so much what others tell me, but what I've seen in my own experience with the few customers silly enough to load Vista at work. And I'm not necessarily saying don't try it, I'm just thumping Ace for actively encouraging it.

He can try it out, play around, if he doesn't like it, he can go back to XP. I'm just against throwing something out of hand just due to reputation.

Sidenote, the bloated crap? Thats what people have said for every Windows OS since Windows NT 3.1.

Try watching what happens to Vista's RAM use before and after disabling Aero.

White Haven wrote:Try watching what happens to Vista's RAM use before and after disabling Aero.

So a completely optional feature that you don't even have to turn on somehow makes an operating system a memory hog?

General Zod wrote:

White Haven wrote:Try watching what happens to Vista's RAM use before and after disabling Aero.

So a completely optional feature that you don't even have to turn on somehow makes an operating system a memory hog?

Nevermind that large parts of the 'memory hog' comments come from misunderstanding what Super-fetch is. I mean, what the hell is the point of free RAM? Filling it up takes the same amount if it's free or if it's full(prefetched data is not paged to disk) and it can speed up loading commonly used apps.

Now maybe having two gigs of ram negates the problem, but I never noticed Aero eating up any significant amount of memory when I had it on, plus it automatically disabled itself whenever games started.

Personally, I find vista to be just fine. I did have an issue with skype which was, I admit, really not fun (machine would reboot while using it), but otherwise I've had no major problems with it.

Of course I'm sure someone on a weaker computer might feel different.

InnocentBystander wrote:Now maybe having two gigs of ram negates the problem, but I never noticed Aero eating up any significant amount of memory when I had it on, plus it automatically disabled itself whenever games started.

Personally, I find vista to be just fine. I did have an issue with skype which was, I admit, really not fun (machine would reboot while using it), but otherwise I've had no major problems with it.

Of course I'm sure someone on a weaker computer might feel different.

I turned off Aero because it made my machine lag, despite having 2gb of ram. I suspect it's more related to graphic card performance. (Without Aero it runs smoothly).

Hmmm...

Okay, I've been updating Vista and I like what I see so far. Ah, what the hell. Vista it is!

What's Aero?

Superman wrote:Hmmm...

Okay, I've been updating Vista and I like what I see so far. Ah, what the hell. Vista it is!

What's Aero?

It's that semi-transparent glassy effect on all the windows. It's just a colour scheme but a RAM intensive one.

Superman wrote:Hmmm...

Okay, I've been updating Vista and I like what I see so far. Ah, what the hell. Vista it is!

What's Aero?

Aero is Microsofts name for the new user interface, the window shinies, the transperent stuff.

Ah ok... I like it. It's not slowing my system down at all... at least not yet.

Switching OSes is never a risk free proposition.

Among the dangers of OS migration (whether XP to Vista, XP to OS X or XP to Linux):

-Application compatibility problems (it would be bad if an app you depended on didn't work correctly, or at all).
-Driver compatibility problems (even more of a danger with Vista).
-Potential loss of data from a failed install corrupting your filesystem.
-Potential lost productivity due to having to deal with any of the above.
-Lost time in relearning the UI.
-Potential problems with an OS not running well on your hardware, or, worse, damaging your hardware (unlikely but in the case of cheap monitors, a risk).

Destructionator XIII wrote:

Masami von Weizegger wrote:It's just a colour scheme but a RAM intensive one.

It is a lot more than just a colour scheme, but the details of what else it is is geek talk that you might find boring. If you are interested though, there is plenty of information on the internet.

Got a specific link handy? It's always good to wipe away my own misconceptions and inaccuracies.

I recently upgraded to Vista and found it a relatively painless process. It found drivers for all of my hardware including my printer which is a year or two old and my wireless card. I've had a couple of minor issues namely that my screen wouldn't exit power-saving mode after bringing the system out of sleep mode and that the latest Ati drivers (Catalyst 7.5) decided to change the graphics card output to something other than my DVI port which necessitated a trip to safe mode to fix.

Otherwise I've found a very enjoyable experience and Vista seems to start and shutdown much faster than XP does. It does hover around the 500 meg mark in terms of RAM use while idling but I don't run any video editing or other RAM heavy stuff so it has no real impact on my system performance. I actually really like Vista's interface and functionality.

I think for someone inexperienced with the arcane ways of a PC they would be more likely to solve their problem with Vista because its system messages are much more helpful and do actually give the user suggestions on how to remedy their problem ie when your internet connection isn't working "try turning the modem off and on". Obvious to most but I'm sure there's some people out there aware of what their modem is but who wouldn't think to turn it off to fix a problem. It's not the best example but it's a bit late and I can't think of any others.

Masami von Weizegger wrote:Got a specific link handy? It's always good to wipe away my own misconceptions and inaccuracies.

ArsTechnica has an overview of the GUI improvements.