Vista Problems ? ?

[Clocker]

So my co-worker has three kids and his wife doesn't work. He needs a new computer but can't afford it, his 12 year old P4 system was letting him down. So I dig in the parts bin and this is the gift I build to give to him:

Case: Antec P180
M/B: Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe
CPU: Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego Core 2.4Ghz
RAM: 2.5GB DDR400 RAM (mixed brands)
HDD: 160GB Samsung SATA 7,200 8MB Cache
O/S: Vista Business 32-bit (Got it free when I bought a copy of XP waaay back)
PSU: Antec Earthwatts 380W

It was actually my first experience with Vista as I went straight from XP to Win7. I don't know what all the hoopla was about Vista sucking. It seemed OK. UAC might not have been quite as well worked out but it was working fine after the huge amount of Windows Updates that were performed.

He did have some trouble setting up his 4.1 speakers with the onboard sound, took some figuring to get it going. He also had to mess with his scanner for a while to find the correct software settings. Mostly user error I think. One thing that did stick out was that his Vonage router could not assign IPs to Vista correctly via DHCP so he had to manually do the network settings. I think it was the Vonage box's fault though.

.....But other than that it was fine....what was the big problem with Vista?

 

[timwhit]

I think the service packs for Vista helped a lot. UAC was tweaked in SP1.

 

[BingBangBop]

There were several significant issues. The first was UAC. It was an annoyance, that XP didn't have. Secondly, Vista is outright slower than XP which was particularly noticable with gamers and notebooks. Third, Vista introduced a new driver model that caused a lot of old HW to fail since many manufacturers didn't have working drivers. Forth, there were lots of applications that worked on XP that didn't on Vista that caused people to have to buy new apps. Fifth, was that Microsoft implemented a marketing campaign before release that certified machines that were supposed to be "Vista ready" and when Vista came out the new OS didn't work right on the new HW specifically they certified machines that couldn't run Aero because the video HW wasn't up to the task.

The conversion from XP to Vista is now much smoother if for no other reason than everything is built to Win7 standards now and because Vista is very similar, most everything works fine. The driver models are the same, applications don't have issues going back to Vista from Win7 like they did moving from XP to Vista.

 

[Mercutio]

Application and device compatibility were god-awful. A lot of it was eventually addressed, but for example there are an awful lot of Inkjet printers that flat out couldn't be made to work with Vista, especially the 64-bit version.

On top of that, a LOT of Vista systems, especially notebooks, shipped in completely inadequate hardware configurations. Microsoft said 512MB was fine, after all. Nowadays we find 4GB DIMMs in our cereal boxes, but even now I'm finding systems that never should have been sold with Vista on them.