[Zodduska]

TBH the same thing happened with windows 95, 98, ME (ok this one was worthless) 2000, XP.. loads of people complained about steeper hardware requirements, the OSs being buggy and not as compatible at release so they stick with the older one for as long as possible. We have never been as connected as we are today so there is more awareness and ignorance at the same time regarding Vista and people sticking with XP, granted a lot of weak computers really do suck with Vista but that's not really Vista's fault.

Personally I've always been one to try a new OS as soon as it hits RC1 beta and I've been very satisfied with Vista 64 Ultimate since release on my solid hardware.. Backwards compatibility is not very important to me but I dual boot XP just in case and have booted into it maybe 5 times in the last year.

 

[Agnostic]

Vista is working fine here and I like it. Had some initial problems caused by bad non-Vista compliant drivers which were solved once I could get updated drivers.

I actually did some gaming performance tests between Vista and XP mainly running F.E.A.R. before I switched. Those were won by Vista with about 10~15% performance increase.

My only complaint is Photoshop CS3 which slows down a lot during use, but that's an issue that has to be fixed by Adobe.

 

[dgbiker1]

In the windows realm I still prefer XP, from an interface standpoint Vista has been a step down in my experience. The only reason it's still on my computer is that I'm too lazy to uninstall MS Project and Visio to reinstall in XP. Some day I'll get around to it

Overall, it's not as bad as it's made out to be though. What I don't understand is why more people aren't complaining about Office. The 2007/2008 versions are HORRIBLE. I "upgraded" the week before I sat down to write my thesis, and I just about had an aneurism while writing it. When I upgrade my software, I expect to be able to do things I did back in 1997!!!

 

[Arainach]

I find the new Office UI much faster to work with and far more intuitive. What, exactly, do you feel you "can't do" anymore that you could before?

 

[dgbiker1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif I find the new Office UI much faster to work with and far more intuitive. What, exactly, do you feel you "can't do" anymore that you could before?

I agree the concept of the new layout is good, it's just that some of the more fundamental features were skimped on. And for the sake of disclosure, I admit I was soured right off the bat because of licensing issues. I bought office through my university's microsoft partnership for a great price, but wasn't told the package only included 1 license instead of the 3 with regular versions (it was marketed as a regular version, not a watered down one). Turns out the student "discount" is more expensive per license than the regular version. I wasn't too excited about that. Now I can only have one computer online while using office. It's a PITA, but I can live with that.

VB support is gone from Excel, meaning no more statistics toolbox (or any toolbox). As I understand it, macros are gone too. The old one was broken (ANOVAs were incorrect), but it was a nice convenience for quick & dirty stats like t-tests, chi-squares or f-tests. I have a LOT of statistics in my thesis, and it was nice to have excel's toolbox to try out analyses before I used matlab to do them more reliably. Solution: bust out the 9-year-old windows 2000 machine with office 97

The plots generally seem to work, but I had a hell of a time figuring out how to label the axes. Instead of one plot menu that does everything, they now have 4 or 5 menus

Labeling the individual bars on a bar graph? Never got that one to work, had to jerry-rig the legend to fit under them. I just miss the old plot wizard, the new style just breaks everything up into separate menus you have to bring up individually.

There's a bug in Word's page numbering system too, when I do section breaks it mixes up the formatting of the different sections (styles from one section, numbering schemes from another, etc.). The text wrapping for the figures was also very wonky.

New format: no one has the new office, so I can't even use it. When I convert my documents though, I get all kinds of formatting errors (i.e. yellow fonts in tables). Annoyance more than anything, and i realize it's good for the long term, but the transition could've been smoother.

But my favorite bug: it can't update! I get auto update messages for the new version, but it never installs. Tried it on 2 computers, 4 different people, and we can't seem to get it installed. It looks like it installs (it downloads), but a few days later you get the update message again.

I'm sticking with office for the thesis, but when it comes time to write manuscripts to send out to journals I'll be using openoffice.

 

[dgbiker1]

I read my post and it sounds pretty negative. I should emphasize that while my experience was disappointing, I applaud microsoft for taking a risk on one of their bread & butter products and taking a HUGE leap forward. The old interface was getting long in the tooth and MS made the tough, but necessary decision to rebuild everything from the ground up. My problems are all typical growing pains that I'm sure will be rectified in a few versions- it's just too bad my update tool is broken

 

[fjf]

Well, once you get fed up with those greedy *, you can try some free (as in beer) and also great alternatives: lotus symphony (from IBM)

IBM Lotus Symphony

And OpenOffice:

www: OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

 

[armoured]

I'm a mac user and I love vista. I don't get why people hate it so much. I'm using the 64bit version.

 

[kansei]

I used Vista for about 6 months. From my personal experience:

- kind of buggy
- the service pack improved things greatly
- hardware support is buggy (Lenovo in my case)
- some of my older software was acting weird
- I felt it got "loaded up" after a few days and absolutely needed a reboot
- I could not change the laptop screen brightness after a few days - this is a hardware hotkey feature - weird!!
- despite turning off all of the fancy features (snapshots, system restore, indexing, etc) it still hogged up the system at times.

I got tired of the shenanigans and put XP back on the box. It is quicker and more stable. I did like Vista, but not enough to reload it every 4 months to get it to work right again.

 

[thoughtcriminal]

If you strip down all the glitz of vista, its quite usable and fairly stable.

I've learned to live with it. For now. Until 64 bit Linux gets some better third party support. then I'm gone

 

[Arainach]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kansei /img/forum/go_quote.gif - despite turning off all of the fancy features (snapshots, system restore, indexing, etc) it still hogged up the system at times.

Vista is not XP. If you go screwing with its services, you will hurt rather than help performance. Leave it alone and it will fix itself.

 

[kansei]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif Vista is not XP. If you go screwing with its services, you will hurt rather than help performance. Leave it alone and it will fix itself.

I'm a professional. Turning off the indexing, snapshots and system restore really sped up the performance. These are turned off in their respective menus under the Control Panel (indexing and system menu, if memory serves), and I did not need to stop any services manually. Since I have a filing system, I don't need the machine to keep track of where I put files. I don't really need the hard disk snapshots or the system restore.

 

[deltaydeltax]

Hate it, hate it, hate it. My notebook came with it. So, I did a dual boot with that and XP just in case I really do need Vista. One of my programs for laying out PCBs won't run on Vista. This is a $12k program! I also have a hard time running some student versions of software. Hate it.

 

[Barock]

Seems all right to me. Configured it to look like XP, updated a few drivers and I can't tell the difference (from XP), well apart from some of the explorer 'features' and installing warnings etc. Not to say I love it, but it works, kind of...

 

[krmathis]

Simply hate it!
Its a slough compared to Windows XP, which I "just" dislike...