Quote: "XP is the best
NT is the worst"
Windows XP is NT5.1 dumbass
Quote: "I'd say XP is the best, as my experience of Vista was trying to copy a 100kB file and giving up because it took too long (except I couldn't quit the copy, because it crashed)."
How the hell did you crash it? Been running Vista exclusively since Beta 1, and never had a crash issue with the filesystem.
Quote: "I don't ever plan to get a PC with Vista on it, the next time I buy a new computer it's gonna have a half eaten apple on it."
I have MacOSX on here, believe me it's just as demanding as Vista to get it running reasonably. What's actually worse is unlike Vista you can't basically turn-off services without loosing compatibility or entire sections of the OS. So you're stuck with it being demanding.
Quote: "In my experience at least (albeit very limited), Vista is by far the worst;
-wastes resources
-unnecessary
-bloat ware
-DX10 isn't a good enough reason to buy a buggy operating system
-I need my RAM to run the programs, not the OS."
Vista compared to other Windows releases, is actually the most stable release to date. The only time you get wasted resources is running software not designed for Vista; and quite frankly I'm thankful that Microsoft have finally made an OS that protects us from stupid and/or lazy programmers.
As for bloatware, what bloat? The entire OS itself is a 2.5GB image which includes drivers for anything you can possibly connect out-of-the-box. So no hunting for the damn DVD everytime you want to change anything with the OS.. it's just there.
It also reserved another 2GB for SwapFile, and 8GB for System Restore/Shadow Copy. A final small amount (2.5GB) is used for all the programs you want to run.
Turn off System Restore and Shadow Copy, your hard disk requirements drop like a stone. That said 15GB really isn't much considering you can get 250GB HDDs for £50; that's the standard now and has been for a while. 120GB should still be more than enough for the moment for adverage users. So 100GB to play with after the OS isn't enough space for you?
What's more is installed software now automatically deletes and over-writes if it is the same product(brand) rather than installing a seperate directory unless instructed to do so. As well as all of the Windows libraries themselves being smaller and taking up less memory space overall even with quite a few being converted to .NET 3.0
So as far as bloat goes, I'd say you're fairly full of crap on that issue.
DirectX10 not good enough reason to upgrade, is true. I wouldn't say Vista is without bugs; but seriously it's not a buggy OS.
It's been more stable on me in Beta than XP ever was in the 5years I used it.. in-fact Vista is on-par with Windows 2000 stability wise; FROM BETA. Something I've been continously impressed with.
This said let's forget about the fact it has DirectX10 for now, and focus on the fact that the entire desktop is now 3D Accelerated, so the better your graphics card is.. the more impressively quick the desktop responds. Although on my FX5200 the system does show a bit of performance drop when handling alot of windows, but that is a damn low-end card now conserning graphics. As it's minimum spec for Aero; the fact it can handle close to 60windows with Aero on is impressive given XP always died on me at around 25windows.
Vista's performance is something I've been impressed with from the get go, no so much Dx applications (as for some reason they're still slightly slower than XP) but conserning the desktop it is a damn sight quicker. It runs quicker, boots quicker (even with lots of processor intensive tasks, I have XDK, DXSDK, VS, IIS7, Live Server, PHP, and mySQL all running at boot up. On XP it would take me nearly 6minutes for my desktop to become useable on the same rig, on here Vista takes at most 2minutes, often much less)
As for RAM, I noted above.. I've had this comfortably running on as little as 256MB, something the guy in the shop when I went to buy some more ram found shocking. In-fact I've had it running on a PentiumII 500MHz w/128MB ATA-133 60GB WD w/Ti4200 very nicely. Something I could never get XP doing.
More to the point I've been running Vista since August/September last year; although it's been updated to the RTM Ultimate from Beta1 during this time (which was back in February) since then it hasn't slowed down, or required a reinstallation. Something my XP installations would require every 6months if not sooner!
Those who rag on Vista honestly have either never used it, or only bothered to use it for 5minutes and thought "I hate this" because it's so different to XP. Seriously XP was a truely horrible peice of crap, that devoured RAM, had quite a bit of bloatware and was insanely difficult to optimise properly.
You want to optimise Vista? open the Resource/Task Manager, and go into it's admin mode. I honestly don't know any other OS that it's so easy to alter services, settings, see exactly what your resources are doing (Memory, Hard Disk, Processor, Graphics Processor (if on Dx10) and Network) as well as alter what is allowed and disallowed at the ProcessID level. You can manually move things between threads in real-time for gods sake... optimise the damn thing for no matter how many cores you're running (not that it needs you to do that).
Out-of-the-Box, Vista is a far better OS than XP ever was. If you know what you're doing and tweak it, it becomes truely equal to MacOSX and Linux in terms of how you access and optimise... but a damn sight easier to do.
Anyone who fancies bashing Vista, quite frankly use the damn thing for a few weeks. You might be surprised at just how good it actually is despite only small fixes being made within the last 6months.
