Please note that if you have a network at home, with other computers on XP, you do not really want to use Vista; network copies from XP to Vista and vice versa is incredibly slow due to a noted bug that will be fixed in SP1 which is NOT due for release until 2nd half 2008 IIRC.
Copying a 600Mb file from my file "server" which is an XP box to my Vista Business machine took something like 30 minutes. That's just unacceptable. It'd be faster for me to copy it to a USB drive and transfer it that way. I've tried most of the fixes including the related hotfix, but nothing's really worked except for the beta SP1 which makes me a bit pissed off honestly.
I've tried:
- Turning off Remote Differential Compression
- Applying the related hotfix
- Doublechecking everything else on the network
Also, before anybody goes "Oh you must have crappy computers/network, that's why", the two machines in question are a Q6600 with 2Gb RAM (Vista) and an old XP 3000+ with 1.5Gb RAM (XP) connected through a WRT54G router.
So yeah Your mileage may vary
I know there is a method, but all I see is the madness.
It really does vary: I frequently move large video files from a Mac to my Vista box, and it's fine (Handbrake UI ftw). I have definitely encountered the 'slow-ass network copy' thing occasionally, though. Vista's inconsistency is certainly a pain: I've had problems with older games other Vista users haven't had, and I've had clear sailing where others have had problems.
But I remember XP when it came out, so I don't complain. I guess I'm just not enough of a luddite. I changed to Vista to give it a go and my house didn't burn down, so 80% of what you read about Vista on the internet is instantly false.
Only thing that really pisses me off about Vista is that I need to buy the ultimate edition to be able to upgrade my installation of XP Pro and get the features that will benefit the way I use my system. So It's either spend the $250, or get the cheaper version and do a fresh install. And damnit, I'm lazy.
That and I wish I could use my current badass videocards for DX10 and not have to upgrade. But that's not something MS really has control over.
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.
-George Bernard Shaw
Netko wrote:It should be noted that your laptop incompatibilities are legion. While that sucks, I on the other hand have it running on three different laptops, only one of which is "designed" for Vista without any issues (and one is so old it doesn't have built-in wireless). Yay, anecdotal evidence, I know (yours is the same, of course). Still, considering that pretty much all laptops shipping today are running Vista, we'd probably hear a lot more complaining if, as you say, "laptop incompatibilities are legion".
Sheesh, that's a lot of text to complain about my little dramatization. *tosses away the poetic license*
I already listed many of my issues, many of which aren't regularly used or considered by consumers: VPN, hibernation, piss poor virtual memory management. I have no doubt that readers of this thread are intelligent enough to understand that these are my personal gripes with Vista and decide accordingly.
But I guess I should thank you for reminding everyone that my posts present mere anecdotal evidence, and are only relevant to my Dell Latitude D820.
Don't be a cockface. I don't have any problems with VPNs with regard to Vista, nobody I know with a Vista laptop has a problem with the hibernation (any more so than usual) and if by 'piss poor memory management' you mean 'never notice any memory problems outside of leaky open-souce software', then I agree with you.
If only someone had mentioned that Vista appears inconsistent between systems ... oh wait, they did! You should totally get your epeen in a twizzle because somebody called you on your hyperbole!
Stark wrote:Oh yeah, the pricing is nuts. Ultimate is like $650 here, which is enough for 15 Leopard licences.
Yeah, it's overpriced as hell. But I wouldn't mind so damned much if I could use any of the cheaper Vista packages to upgrade XP Pro and get the features I want.
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.
-George Bernard Shaw
Flagg wrote:Only thing that really pisses me off about Vista is that I need to buy the ultimate edition to be able to upgrade my installation of XP Pro and get the features that will benefit the way I use my system. So It's either spend the $250, or get the cheaper version and do a fresh install. And damnit, I'm lazy.
That and I wish I could use my current badass videocards for DX10 and not have to upgrade. But that's not something MS really has control over.
You could use Business to upgrade - whether or not that satisfies you feature-wise is, of course, up to you.
Elessar wrote:I already listed many of my issues, many of which aren't regularly used or considered by consumers: VPN, hibernation, piss poor virtual memory management. I have no doubt that readers of this thread are intelligent enough to understand that these are my personal gripes with Vista and decide accordingly.
But I guess I should thank you for reminding everyone that my posts present mere anecdotal evidence, and are only relevant to my Dell Latitude D820.
Guess what? You don't specify in your previous posts that you're only recounting your experiences (especially the second post) and not some widely known information. Hence my little clarification for you. Remember the OP? He's questioning which to install to what is, I believe, a laptop so its a very relevant qualification to know that the issues you unfortunately experienced aren't common on Vista laptops in general (and for yet another counter-anecdote - sleep/hibernation never worked right with XP on that old laptop I mentioned earlier, with Vista its rock solid - as Stark notes, the unreliability of Vista buggines is annoying). And I agree with what Stark said on your specific complaints.
Flagg wrote:Only thing that really pisses me off about Vista is that I need to buy the ultimate edition to be able to upgrade my installation of XP Pro and get the features that will benefit the way I use my system. So It's either spend the $250, or get the cheaper version and do a fresh install. And damnit, I'm lazy.
That and I wish I could use my current badass videocards for DX10 and not have to upgrade. But that's not something MS really has control over.
You could use Business to upgrade - whether or not that satisfies you feature-wise is, of course, up to you.
Yeah, it doesn't at all.
Chances are I'd just get Home Premium and backup all my shit, reformat my HD and then do a clean install. I'm going to have to do that eventually, anyway. It's just such a pain in the ass.
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.
-George Bernard Shaw
One thing that did concern me that I just recalled was something to do with soundcards. I vaguely remember an article in PCGamer about there being some kind of issue there. Do you have a high end soundcard, and if so, any issues?
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.
-George Bernard Shaw
By "high end" you mean Creative trash? Creative drivers have always been utterly horrible and the crapware buddled with them is even worse.
"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
"One Drive, One Partition, the One True Path" ~ ars technica forums - warrens - on hhd partitioning schemes.
I remember the AWE32 drivers being card-revision specific. THAT was fun.
I have heard however that initially there were plenty of problems with proper soundcards, and they're largely gone now. However the audio system is a bit flakey - for instance, if I have 'auto-sense' turned on for my front panel and plug something in, the sound drivers crash and break my network, requiring a reboot.
RThurmont
Although Vista's interface is nice and pretty and all, firstly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and secondly, it isn't nearly as customizable as something like Emerald for linux. If I really wanted to, I could make my Ubuntu desktop look exactly like Vista. I don't because it still doesn't hold a candle to Mac OS X. In any case, all I really need are the UI features from both that I really enjoy, and I already have that anyway.
As for the question at hand, personally, I'm not all that eager to switch to Vista (notice how I didn't say upgrade) for a number of reasons.
A) I don't have it already, and I don't want to pay for it. This is besides the point that I've already spent far too much money in the past 4 months.
B) For me, Windows is for games, Linux is for casual games and everything else (with the odd exception of senior project programming, but that's out of my hands). In this respect, XP serves me very well. Over the past 4 months, I may have had windows booted for a total of 300 hours. Maybe. Considering that my computer averages a total uptime of about 150 hours a week (ie downtime of 18 hours a week), the time I spend in windows world becomes tiny. This has resulted in little to no Windows Rot over the past 8 months since I reinstalled last, meaning I might not have to reinstall for another 8 months, almost 3 times as long as my typical reinstall cycle for windows.
C) To me, this is probably the most important. I've learned how to do things in XP. I've learned how to do things in Ubuntu. And while learning how to do things is great, and while I understand that there will inevitablely be differences in the way things are done in XP and Ubuntu, the same shouldn't be true for XP and Vista. This is especially the case if the new way of doing something isn't demonstratablely better than the old way, which many power users are saying to be the case (that isn't just the Mac ads talking either). While Vista users totally new to Windows are indifferent, part time Vista users who are familiar with older versions of Windows are left out in the cold. They become frustrated when they encounter changes that were made for no apparent reason.
So I guess that's my rant about not switching to Vista. XP serves my perposes, and Vista is just a bit too much for me.
My brother and sister-in-law: "Do you know where milk comes from?"
My niece: "Yeah, from the fridge!"
Braedly, I generally agree with 100% of what you're saying. I myself haven't been able to get Emerald to look *exactly* like Vista (not one of my computers has a graphics card that can do the blur effects in Emerald), but I'm confident that will change.
For the time being, IMO, Vista is, by a narrow margin, the best looking OS, but I'd say the second, third and fourth best looking OSes are Fedora, OS X Leopard, and OpenSUSE 10.3, respetively, and all of the above are quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing than Windows XP.
I agree with your overall assertion that there is no really compelling reason to upgrade to Vista from XP. IMO, the average user would be best served by something similiar to what you're doing, using Linux for casual use, and if they need gaming or certain Windows applications, using XP for that purpose.
However, given the choice between obtaining a new copy of Vista, or a new copy of XP, when both copies are provided gratis by an educational institution, I would go with Vista. In that scenario, Vista's high price tag becomes irrelevant, and either way, you're using a DRM-ridden OS, so you might as well pick the one that has better security, a better looking desktop, and more modern features.
Also, yes, I know, XP is not anywhere near as ridden as Vista, and the thought of what Microsoft could to do Vista users if Ballmer had a bad day unnerves me to some extent, but I think the iPhone experience also shows that what a vendor seeks to prevent in a consumer product, a third party community will ensure (in the form of unlocked iPhones and third party applications).
From my standpoint as an open source advocate, furthermore, both OSes are equally bad: they're proprietary, DRM-ridden, expensive, and in many repsects, inferior to their open source counterparts, marketed by a notoriously consumer-hostile company. So as I see it, there really isn't any difference between them on that front.
For people who already have XP, however, I suggest retaining it, and not upgrading...and instead, contemplating a move to Linux in the next year or so.
Flagg wrote:One thing that did concern me that I just recalled was something to do with soundcards. I vaguely remember an article in PCGamer about there being some kind of issue there. Do you have a high end soundcard, and if so, any issues?
Creative has been throwing a fit about MS's choice of moving the DirectSound (and DS3d) engine over into the software realm (meaning that even the crappiest AC '97 chip will be able to use those effects - considering the power of today's processors they have more then enough to spare to do that processing), thereby nullifying most of their reasons to exist. Unfortunately, as part of that transition, the old games expecting hardware DS got screwed over and have been forced into standard sound (without effects). Creative did fix that for most of their cards, but again they did the assholish thing and instead of supporting all their customers with affected hardware they cut Live cards out of the fix, and charge for the fix for Audigy users (only X-fi gets it free).
Considering Creative's outright vileness, and in recent years its status as pretty much the sole provider of better-then-baseline-integrated gaming sound cards, I'll be overjoyed if this move by MS (which really should benefit consumers in the long run) will manage to kill them off.
My point wasn't that Vista was irredeemable. And I know UAC can be disabled, but as someone selling an OS to end-users, I'm sure as hell not going to say, 'Well, it's really goddamn obnoxious, but if you tinker a bit and disable all those bits, then it's not too bad.'
The point is that its benefits are minimal, and they're packaged with minor to moderate failings, and as such it's overall a failed product.
Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.
Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Darth Nostril.
-'If you really want to fuck with these idiots tell them that there is a vaccine for chemtrails.'
Xon wrote:By "high end" you mean Creative trash? Creative drivers have always been utterly horrible and the crapware buddled with them is even worse.
What's wrong, baby can't afford quality sound?
yeah cause only Creative makes quality sound cards am i rite
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles."
White Haven, you're totally wrong about UAC, IMO. UAC is the best approach to elevation I've seen from a convenience standpoint, in that it prompts you in a discreet manner, without substantially disrupting your work.
Compare this with the Linux and OS X approach of continually prompting the user for passwords, or the Windows XP approach of letting "Administrator" users do whatever they wish without prompting, and the benefits of UAC become clear.
The problem with user prompting a la UAC and other solutions is that if you're prompted for authorization every time you try to do ANYTHING, after a while clicking 'allow' becomes automatic to the average user, and then the UAC becomes nothing but a false sense of security.
Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.
Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Darth Nostril.
-'If you really want to fuck with these idiots tell them that there is a vaccine for chemtrails.'
Dendrobius wrote:Please note that if you have a network at home, with other computers on XP, you do not really want to use Vista; network copies from XP to Vista and vice versa is incredibly slow due to a noted bug that will be fixed in SP1 which is NOT due for release until 2nd half 2008 IIRC.
Copying a 600Mb file from my file "server" which is an XP box to my Vista Business machine took something like 30 minutes. That's just unacceptable. It'd be faster for me to copy it to a USB drive and transfer it that way. I've tried most of the fixes including the related hotfix, but nothing's really worked except for the beta SP1 which makes me a bit pissed off honestly.
I've tried:
- Turning off Remote Differential Compression
- Applying the related hotfix
- Doublechecking everything else on the network
Also, before anybody goes "Oh you must have crappy computers/network, that's why", the two machines in question are a Q6600 with 2Gb RAM (Vista) and an old XP 3000+ with 1.5Gb RAM (XP) connected through a WRT54G router.
So yeah Your mileage may vary
Just as a random aside- I have seen cases where making yourself a couple of hotmail accounts and then dropping the file across MSN was about 2x as fast as using the network file transfer. Maybe give that a try if the standard stuff is being buggy?
Your mileage may vary
