Windows Vista Sucks? A Real Geek's Rant.

[the_jimmy_james]

I'm so absurdly tired of hearing the words that I'm ready to tear my ears off. I'm so tired of reading them I'm ready to pour acid in my eyes.

Windows Vista Sucks.

Sick. Sick sick sick sick sick. People who've never even used the damn thing badmouth it. People who've never even seen it badmouth it. Tech pundits slammed it from day one because they wanted to do one thing...

Drive blog readership.

That's it. That's the secret, folks. Somebody wants to fan the flames so that they can get readers to visit their blog and look at their ads. It's 100% commercial.

Let me explain what real world experience is like...

February 2007 - I purchase a brand new, dirt cheap computer. $500. Dual-core Pentium 4 at 3GHz. I immediately upgraded it to 1.5GB of RAM. It had Vista Home Basic installed. Just as quickly as the RAM was upgraded, I installed the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate. I ran audio production, Internet utilities, World of Warcraft, some older games like TIE Fighter in DOSBox, and other junk.

There has never once been a compatibility issue with anything I use.

March 2007 - Sammi gets her new computer. Identical model to mine. She upgrades to 1.5GB of RAM as well, and moves up to Vista Home Premium to gain the advantages of Aero. She has found only one piece of software doesn't function, that is OpenCanvas. She runs WoW, Halos 1 and 2, Internet stuff, more games, and watching some vids.

Be mindful, that both of us were required to remove gigabytes worth of crapware that the OEM felt obligated to foist on us. Norton 360 of Suck AND McAfail were installed. They were instantly removed in favor of AVG Free for Sam and Avast! AV for me.

Some annoyance called BigFix was installed, chomping up 30% of system resources. We nuked it in favor of the superior error-fixing features BUILT IN to Vista.

Oh yeah... You'll never hear that in any of the whine articles. Windows Vista WILL FIX ITSELF.

Read it again.

FIX ITSELF.

Let it sink in.

FIX ITSELF.

Let's see XP, or Mac OS X (which I also like) do that. So, real world experience isn't enough... hmmmmmmm. Knowing that it can fix itself... Convinced yet? No? Read on.

Poor performance is a whine I hear quite often. Our housemate owns a 1.8 or something GHz box. She ran Vista Home Premium on it for months. World of Warcraft ran excellently.

Next, I own a 1.2GHz Dell Latitude D600. 768MB of RAM. Not great at all. Vista Home Premium runs like a dream. A damn sight better than XP which is hang-crazy. No matter how many times I've installed XP, it hangs too much. It sucks. WoW runs smooth as glass on this notebook. Only issue is sound. The makers of the audio chipset, the SigmaTel C-Major, are too damn lazy to update their driver.

That's another problem. Lazy developers. That's always a Windows problem. 3rd party developers suck and are always too lazy to update their products. Cheap and shitty if you ask me.

Okay... now, finally. This thread is for people who agree with me. I ask this because I'm simply tired of hearing people whine. Call me crazy, I'd like to discuss this rather nice piece of technology with other persons who can appreciate quality software.

Thanks.

 

[Violetta]

For the record, OpenCanvas ran fine. I just couldn't connect with anyone when I tried.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

For the record, OpenCanvas ran fine. I just couldn't connect with anyone when I tried.

I suppose that "operate without error" is the target. 😀

 

[Journia]

Everybody needs a Jimmy.

 

[general zod1]

What is a good internet security for say a Toshiba with Windows Vista? I have a Gateway,with XP,and Norton on it Never had any problems with it I have had this Gateway for maybe 3 weeks shy of 5 years

I am wanting to get a new laptop

 

[the_jimmy_james]

What is a good internet security for say a Toshiba with Windows Vista? I have a Gateway,with XP,and Norton on it Never had any problems with it I have had this Gateway for maybe 3 weeks shy of 5 years

I am wanting to get a new laptop

Vista already has anti-spyware, with Windows Defender built-in. Make sure that it's actually active in the Security Center. Those awful suites like to disable the built-in features. As for AV, which is the biggest worry, use AVG Free ( http://free.avg.com/ww.download?prd=afe ) or Avast! ( http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html )

They're both free. And no, not "free" like Norton and McAfail that come with a computer are "free". AVG and Avast! do NOT charge a subscription for updates.

As for having Norton, you might not have had problems, but you certainly don't know what you're MISSING by ditching shitty ass Norton. Namely a ton of system resources, stability, and speed.

Trust me, these "trusted and respected" pieces of software are actually among the worst on the planet.

These are the only things you need...

AVG or Avast! for Antivirus
Windows Defender AND Spybot for Spyware
Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 as your browser
Leave User Account Control turned on in Vista (It's one of those oh-so-terrible things that helps keep your computer safe)
Use your brain when operating a computer.

Don't visit random links that people send you. Don't download every damn thing you see. Don't do all the things you hear about peoples' mom doing that ends up trashing their box.

Good luck in your hunt for a new computah. Make sure that you get one that has a 64-bit version of Windows installed.

 

[melanie2]

Everybody needs a Jimmy.

hehe...

and awww Jimmy the James Man...i still have this four year old computer..windows xp...i wonder how long it will last?

 

[general zod1]

Vista already has anti-spyware, with Windows Defender built-in. Make sure that it's actually active in the Security Center. Those awful suites like to disable the built-in features. As for AV, which is the biggest worry, use AVG Free ( http://free.avg.com/ww.download?prd=afe ) or Avast! ( http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html )

They're both free. And no, not "free" like Norton and McAfail that come with a computer are "free". AVG and Avast! do NOT charge a subscription for updates.

As for having Norton, you might not have had problems, but you certainly don't know what you're MISSING by ditching shitty ass Norton. Namely a ton of system resources, stability, and speed.

Trust me, these "trusted and respected" pieces of software are actually among the worst on the planet.

These are the only things you need...

AVG or Avast! for Antivirus
Windows Defender AND Spybot for Spyware
Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 as your browser
Leave User Account Control turned on in Vista (It's one of those oh-so-terrible things that helps keep your computer safe)
Use your brain when operating a computer.

Don't visit random links that people send you. Don't download every damn thing you see. Don't do all the things you hear about peoples' mom doing that ends up trashing their box.

Good luck in your hunt for a new computah. Make sure that you get one that has a 64-bit version of Windows installed.

Thanks for the help friend 😉

 

[the_jimmy_james]

hehe...

and awww Jimmy the James Man...i still have this four year old computer..windows xp...i wonder how long it will last?

As long as you take care of it. You could run most of the bleeding edge software on it. People got it in their minds that a computer is useless after some random amount of time, when that's 185% untrue.

A computer, like any other tool, is useless when you don't have a use for it. As long as it lets you do what you want, then it's perfectly fine.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Thanks for the help friend 😉

Hey, you're welcome! That's actually a question that I get asked quite a bit. I always, ALWAYS do my best to steer people away from those expensive, poorly coded nightmares. In my experience, they waste too much of your box's resources, drill a hole in your wallet with their subscriptions, and in the end... just don't do a good job at all.

In short, Norton and McAfail, unlike Vista... suck 🙂

 

[general zod1]

As long as you take care of it. You could run most of the bleeding edge software on it. People got it in their minds that a computer is useless after some random amount of time, when that's 185% untrue.

A computer, like any other tool, is useless when you don't have a use for it. As long as it lets you do what you want, then it's perfectly fine.

That is very true I feel I have taken great care of my laptop These things ain't cheap The main reason I want to get a new one,is my current one does not have a DVD burner

I want to put all my clips onto DVD,so I can watch them on TV

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Get an external burner, man. If you're happy with your notebook, just get a nice burner and plug it in. It'll cost a shit ton less than a whole new book! Then, you can add an external hard drive... all the goods! Hell, even a HDTV tuner!

 

[SilverleafLycan1]

I completely agree, I've loved vista since I installed it. Granted my system is a budget gaming build (E8400(oc'd to 3.6), radeon 4850, 4 gigs g.skill, antec 900 case with an extra case fan i just put in). It's been a wonderful operating system which has moved very far ahead of where xp left off.

 

[Budweiserbob!]

Totally agree, Jimmy, totally agree.

The only true issue I have with Vista is the memory usage. It does really need more than 1Gb to run well. Thankfully though, cheap computers usually supply 2Gb or more so that's not an issue no more. =]

 

[MistressValerie1]

Thank you for this thread, Jimmy! I've been looking at new laptops but was put off by the terrible press I have read about Vista. I wonder how many "Vista problems" were actually Norton problems. My XP used to crash all the time until I uninstalled Norton AV and switched to a better product.

hehe...

and awww Jimmy the James Man...i still have this four year old computer..windows xp...i wonder how long it will last?

My laptop is over six years old and runs better than when it was new. The only problem is that laptops can't be upgraded much; I am still using only 256 MB of RAM.

 

[Tiefling]

I think some of the problem is that back during the vista release candidates and betas it had much more apparent problems, the vast majority of which were fixed either by launch or service pack 1. People who tried vista then were much less satisfied with it. That and the syndrome that seems to come over computer people every time a new version of the operating system is released. Every time a new version of windows comes out, there will almost certainly be backwards compatibility issues (to some extent), so people start shouting about how the new version sucks and how they will never switch. The exact same thing happened when XP launched. It happened when 2000 was released. It happened when NT4 was released. It happened when ME was released (yes, there are people that got ME running better than 98SE... though granted not very many as there was a lot of user tweaking involved).

 

[ILove2Tickle1]

I've heard both sides about Vista. To sum up what was said: I've heard some people swear by it & others swear at it.

I think some of the problem is that back during the vista release candidates and betas it had much more apparent problems, the vast majority of which were fixed either by launch or service pack 1. People who tried vista then were much less satisfied with it. That and the syndrome that seems to come over computer people every time a new version of the operating system is released. Every time a new version of windows comes out, there will almost certainly be backwards compatibility issues (to some extent), so people start shouting about how the new version sucks and how they will never switch. The exact same thing happened when XP launched. It happened when 2000 was released. It happened when NT4 was released. It happened when ME was released (yes, there are people that got ME running better than 98SE... though granted not very many as there was a lot of user tweaking involved).

One warning about those service packs.

BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD, BACK UP YOUR FILES!! NO EXCEPTIONS!!

I did tech support when XP had service pack 2 released. Whooo boy, let me tell you what happened. I recieved more phone calls than a hooker gets johns. SP2 crashed more hard drives than I care to remember. I'm talking about an irretrevable crash where you cannot use a previous restore date. Everything on the hard drive was gone.

Just a fair warning, ok?

 

[poppameth1]

I've worked on several Vista rigs now. Do I like Vista? Not at all. Am I going to tell everyone to stay away from it. Not at all. Use it for yourself and see if you like it. Vista is getting better as they fix the problems it legitimately has and as hardware catches up to the software requirements. This happens virtually every time MS releases an OS. Call it growing pains. I personally still prefer XP. On the same hardware I can have XP running at light speed while Vista slowly chugs along. For normal operation they both run comparably. In my experience Vista takes much longer to start up on every computer I've put it on. It takes an insane amount of time to do updates especially if you aren't on a super high speed connection. The UAP functions seem plain silly to me. If I'm stupid enough to click Yes the first time is asking me again really going to make me change my mind? I find it annoying but you can disable it so it isn't something to complain too much over. Vista basically needs a lot of customizing to suit each user's taste. If you do all you can with it and still don't like it (like I did) then ditch it. It's not for everyone. I just don't think its as good of an OS as XP is. Evidently MS agrees to some point since the next version of Windows is already slated for release. XP had a much longer lifespan than any other MS OS has had because it was one of the best OSs they ever made. Vista is more of a stepping stone and I'm not convinced it's going in the right direction. That's just my opinion though.


And on the topic of security software.

Free AV: Avast, AVG, Avira (Avast in my favorite. AVG has starting having too many issues)

Firewall: Comodo, Online Armor

Anti-Spyware: Spyware Blaster for immunization, SuperAntiSpyware for scanning and if you want to pay for it you can get real time protection. Spybot and Ad-aware are both outdated technology, even for on demand scanners. Plus Ad-aware has a history of removing items from their definition files when the author of the spyware pays them to do so.

Internet usage: I recommend Firefox with Adblock Plus and NoScript installed to keeps out most of the bad stuff to begin with.

Other: You can get really anal and hardcore with your security if you want to. You can sandbox your browser with a program like Sandboxie or use shadowing programs to run in a totally virtual environment for internet use and just reboot to make everything you might have done wrong simply disappear. This kind of stuff is overkill for most people though.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Free AV: Avast, AVG, Avira (Avast in my favorite. AVG has starting having too many issues)

Firewall: Comodo, Online Armor

Anti-Spyware: Spyware Blaster for immunization, SuperAntiSpyware for scanning and if you want to pay for it you can get real time protection. Spybot and Ad-aware are both outdated technology, even for on demand scanners. Plus Ad-aware has a history of removing items from their definition files when the author of the spyware pays them to do so.

Internet usage: I recommend Firefox with Adblock Plus and NoScript installed to keeps out most of the bad stuff to begin with.

Other: You can get really anal and hardcore with your security if you want to. You can sandbox your browser with a program like Sandboxie or use shadowing programs to run in a totally virtual environment for internet use and just reboot to make everything you might have done wrong simply disappear. This kind of stuff is overkill for most people though.

I totally forgot to mention AdBlock Plus on Firefox. There's now a free adblock for IE7/8 Beta called AdBlock Pro. It used to be commercial, but they did the right thing and made it free. Sam uses it and it's equally effective.

IE8 is introducing a new feature called InPrivate Browsing. It opens a new window which rejects all cookies, saves no history, saves no passwords, and contains no private information. Essentially, you open a sandboxed window. Close it when you're done and everything disappears into a black hole.

On 64-bit Windows, it'll go a step past that, and the window runs in protected and flagged memory. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out.

Personally, I think Vista's great legacy will be the 64-bit transition which needs to happen as quickly as possible.

Re: AdAware, I haven't recommended that in several years. For me it was the absurd number of false positives. Why is the cookie used to store my Gmail password detected but this site tracker not? Hmmmm... When the bit about them getting paid off came out, well... heh.

As for performance, it comes down to preference again. You prefer to get every little ounce of something. I prefer to get an OS that could get kicked in the face and not care much.

In my experience, XP is about as stable as, let's say, Yao Ming. Due to talent and skill, he's gonna stay up pretty well, but he's tall and lanky so it's not THAT hard to knock him down. Vista has been like trying to topple a stone cube. It's up there with OS X and the related Unices. Also, it doesn't gunk up like XP thank God!

 

[JackVanderson]

Hey Jimmy ^_^
I'm with you 100% on this.
Don't bash an OS cuz of miniscule problems or because of the hype built against it.
I've been a happy vista user for quite some time now, and I haven't had a single issue.
Thanks for making this thread.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Thank you for this thread, Jimmy! I've been looking at new laptops but was put off by the terrible press I have read about Vista. I wonder how many "Vista problems" were actually Norton problems. My XP used to crash all the time until I uninstalled Norton AV and switched to a better product.

My laptop is over six years old and runs better than when it was new. The only problem is that laptops can't be upgraded much; I am still using only 256 MB of RAM.

Heck! Norton, McAfail, and all the other bits of crapware that OEMs install all were factors. There are literally hundreds of useless little things that get crammed in by PC makers. From hoggy AV software to that stupid "welcome video". It all screws your box over in the end, and I'm pretty sure that most of it actually hurts security, too. The number of little apps they install that phone home constantly? That's just like a beacon to crackers and other badguys.

The computer buying public needs to raise some Hell IMO and demand that makers get rid of all this BS. It's absolutely absurd, really.

 

[poppameth1]

www.pcdecrapifier.com

A nice little program specifically designed to clean all that junk off a new computer before you do anything else. Works exceptionally well.

 

[Sockstickler]

www.pcdecrapifier.com

A nice little program specifically designed to clean all that junk off a new computer before you do anything else. Works exceptionally well.

Will that get rid of McAfee, or as Jimmy so eloquently put it, McAfail? I've been trying to delete it for a while now, but it's always saying deleting it takes more clearance than I have. >.<

 

[highwing]

I'll go on record in saying that Vista does work fine, but I am a little disappointed in the final product. Note, I got Vista Ultimate for $90. It's really not worth the full price of admission that is sells for in stores. The OS is a memory hog, so I have to challenge your statement on it running smooth on ANYTHING under 1GB. In theory it can happen, but you have to gimp on the visual settings. As for XP hanging, well, I'm sure you're doing something wrong there :-\

I'm not dissing Vista. Out of the box, it's crap. Turn off 80% of the crap features, and it works fine. I don't have major compatibility issues, and if there is one, you can easily work around it. I still use Vista, but am eagerly awaiting the next version of Windows, and hoping it presents the power of Vista, with the simplicity of XP.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

I'll go on record in saying that Vista does work fine, but I am a little disappointed in the final product. Note, I got Vista Ultimate for $90. It's really not worth the full price of admission that is sells for in stores. The OS is a memory hog, so I have to challenge your statement on it running smooth on ANYTHING under 1GB. In theory it can happen, but you have to gimp on the visual settings. As for XP hanging, well, I'm sure you're doing something wrong there :-\

I'm not dissing Vista. Out of the box, it's crap. Turn off 80% of the crap features, and it works fine. I don't have major compatibility issues, and if there is one, you can easily work around it. I still use Vista, but am eagerly awaiting the next version of Windows, and hoping it presents the power of Vista, with the simplicity of XP.

That's coming dangerously close to the negativity that I asked not enter this thread.

Your challenge has been tested before you made it and it is found lacking. I ran Vista Home Premium on a Celeron 633 with 512MB and it was perfectly acceptable.

Have you done this? No.

As for doing something wrong, I suppose installing it and running it must be doing something wrong. While installing and running Vista must be doing something right.

Oh wait... I think I just answered our question.

Just a reminder, this is not a thread for debate. I no longer value negative opinions of Windows Vista, whether they're based in truth or not. If you have a negative opinion based on your experience, keep it to yourself and thank all your like-minded bloggers for making me not want to hear what you have to say.