[achtung]

Question is, should I install it?

[Mars]

NO!!!!!!!

[Turambar]

no

[achtung]

Well, so far everyone seems to be leaning toward what I was already feeling.

[Flipside]

Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

[neoterran]

yes. vista is better than xp.

[Flipside]

Personally, I plan to hang on, new Microsoft releases are always quirky for the first 12 months or so, and I'm certainly not going to consider it as my main OS until OpenGL gets sorted by ATI and NVidia.

[Descenterace]

I agree with Flipside. Vista will doubtless be 'necessary' at some point, but for the first year of life MS products tend to barf rather a lot. Afterward they tend to settle down.

I've already installed Vista on my machine, but it's a dual-boot setup and I dont actually use Vista yet. It's just there and working in case I ever need it. Also, the XP and Vista partitions are both imaged to DVD, so I can get everything back to a clean, working install on my RAID array without any hassle...

Leave Vista for a year, then set it up with dual boot.

[Taristin]

Meh. Ive yet to encounter an issue with Vista. All of the naysayers havent even used it. (Except Descenter there.)


Vista is muuuuuch better than XP. But eeew microsoft evil bad </tard>.

[Turey]

I say no. Unless it's Vista Ultimate Edition. If so, then yes, as a second partition/second drive. Ultimate is likely to get the best customer support, as you've paid quite a bit for it.

[jr2]

...Do the same thing I did when XP came out... dual-boot it.  (You can't lose.)  If you need an excellent free partition manager to create / move / resize your NTFS partitions, let me know, I can't remember the link just now, but I think it's called gparted.

[aldo_14]

...Do the same thing I did when XP came out... dual-boot it.  (You can't lose.)  If you need an excellent free partition manager to create / move / resize your NTFS partitions, let me know, I can't remember the link just now, but I think it's called gparted.

My impression was that Vista had steps in it to prevent dual booting or virtualisation.  In any case, I wouldn't install it until Vista drivers have significantly matured.

NB: taris - didn't you say you had a problem with either Max or Photoshop in Vista?

[jr2]

Virtual PC 2004 was upgraded to 2007 for the explicit purpose of allowing the virtualization of Vista, among other things.

As far as preventing dual booting, I don't think it would get very far... you'd just need a halfway decent boot manager.. Vista could detect other OSes on the other partitions, but I think there would be quite an uproar over that.

[Bob-san]

I'd say a big
N-O, sir!

Wait until SP1 comes out; then you should install and update your system.

[Taristin]

NB: taris - didn't you say you had a problem with either Max or Photoshop in Vista?

Only issue I have is having a non-standard video card that isnt completely compatable with ATi's drivers. Photoshop works perfect. Max 8 works perfect. Max 9 doesnt like the video driver, but if I revert to an older set, it works, too.

[IceFire]

The reading I've been doing seems to indicate that its getting better and fairly quickly.  nVidia and ATI should have the OpenGL thing sorted soon...some nVidia beta drivers are pulling in some good numbers in Vista.  Especially if the hardware is newer. I'm willing to bet there is a sweet spot where anywhere above that point (in terms of hardware) the performance will benefit with Vista...below that point and it will run slower.

[Bob-san]

As with all Windows OS's, the newer version is, in fact, slower than the older version. It has been true from all versions of DOS to Windows Vista itself. The new operating system is meant to take advantage of the newer and faster hardware. You will probably notice a 10%-20% decrease in video performance, at least until SP1 for Vista comes out. Other than that, if you have a modern processor, the OS should run just as smoothly as WinXP. Also, Vista follows the normal rule for recent Windows OS's; "If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day", though this also applies to Vista; "If you give Vista a lot of RAM, it will use all it can". You have to feed the beast called Vista and the memory-hungry issues if you want anything for good performance.

[Flipside]

Well, all I'll say is this, if I'm wrong then I'm wrong, Microsoft are getting nothing more than self-earned outcome of selling me Windows XP 2 weeks after it was released. I'm never going to allow Microsoft products that haven't had at least a year of security testing on my computer again.

I'm really glad that it's working out for those of you that have it, but Microsoft are going to have to earn my money this time.

[IceFire]

As with all Windows OS's, the newer version is, in fact, slower than the older version. It has been true from all versions of DOS to Windows Vista itself. The new operating system is meant to take advantage of the newer and faster hardware. You will probably notice a 10%-20% decrease in video performance, at least until SP1 for Vista comes out. Other than that, if you have a modern processor, the OS should run just as smoothly as WinXP. Also, Vista follows the normal rule for recent Windows OS's; "If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day", though this also applies to Vista; "If you give Vista a lot of RAM, it will use all it can". You have to feed the beast called Vista and the memory-hungry issues if you want anything for good performance.

Actually...when Windows XP came out performance was usually in favour of WinXP over Win98 and definitely over WinME.  As far as the consumer level OS was going...XP was an improvement across the board.

Vista hasn't been as clear cut so far but many of the problems tend to be with drivers.  Some of the memory issues I had with it early on are apparently the result of aggressive caching on a 2GB system (which is what I've been using as a test platform at work for some software deployment and support) so I have less of an issue with that than before.  I do have to say that the interface is quite a bit snappier in responding...far better than any previous Windows OS.  More on the lines of my experiences with Linux.

[jr2]

Meh... the price sux
unless you torrent a local activation server.