Decided To Install Vista Business

[ConfederateTyrant]

Well, even though I've made some blasting posts about how Vista isn't all that great, I must admit, it's not THAT bad. I got it "free" because of the classes I was taking gave me access to it for download. Now of course, I had to do some tuning for it to be enjoyable, particularly with security prompts and graphics. All of my hardware, and most of my software (Nero 7.0.8.2 and Dell Explorer excluded) installed flawlessly. By the way, I have a ~2 year old Toshiba Satellite with a 1.6 ghz Intel Centrino processor and 2 gigs of RAM, and mine runs just as fast as it did with Windows XP, if not faster.

At work, the supervisors have been going through some major Vista training (8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mon-Fri), and they have shared some of the features. After one of my supervisors got curious, she installed Vista on her machine. I liked the speed and layout of the install, that is indeed a major plus over previous versions of Windows.

Conclusion: It's not worth buying separetly, no Operating System is (that does include the Mac OS), but if you have a copy, I do recommend giving it a try. You can change the look to where it is mostly like XP or the original "Windows Classic" look. With the amount of updates (Service Pack 1 is rumored to be on the horizon) Microsoft has been issuing, it seems to take care of a lot of hardware compatibility problems. And it has been on the market long enough for other companies to redo their programs so they are Vista capable, which was a major issue back in January when it first came out. All these same issues happened with XP though, so it's nothing new, just as long as they keep fixing the issues...

Words of Wisdom: DO NOT install it on less than 1 gig of RAM! Brand new computers that come with less than that run like s***!

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Vista isn't all bad. In my experience (and other network managers I work with) wireless is flaky and half-baked. If you have a wired connection, go for it.

 

[sprintman]

2GB min. My clients (three) are going with 4GB

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

sprintman, Are they running CAD/CAM apps that demand that much RAM?

 

[ConfederateTyrant]

Quote:

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wireless is flaky and half-baked

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Were these laptop computers that came out right when Vista was released (mid January), or were these "Vista Capable" computers that were upgraded?

I ask because laptop manufacturer's did a pi**poor job of testing their wireless card drivers. A lot of students at the school could not connect to our network (this also happened nationwide with major business/campus networks), but when we added USB external cards, they would all connect. The best thing we could do for those was to uninstall the wireless driver, along with the driver software (it's a checkbox when you click uninstall, but it's not always there), then let Windows reinstall it. It didn't always work, but it was the best shot.

The manufacturer's made hardware/driver updates for the newer models, and Windows is/was suppose to release a major update to help fix those that were in that category. For that, Vista wasn't the problem, HP/Compaq/Dell/Gateway/etc (though I don't recall any Toshiba's having this problem) were the reasons for the screw ups.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

CT, both. My experience is with a 2 year old HP with the Broadcom chipset. There was an update (IIRC) back in February to these drivers, but the same problem existed. I do agree with you that the vendors did a poor job with the drivers. You'd think that Broadcom and Intel, the two main players in the miniPCI WLAN market would have got it together. BUT, this is only more proof that Microsoft rushed this thing to market.

Hopefully SP1 will solve this issue. Hopefully SP1 won't be rushed to market.

 

[ConfederateTyrant]

Broadcom was the main one, but I saw it with Intel and a few other chipsets as well. My understanding was that the Broadcom cards also use a different method (it had something to do with the multiple MAC addresses) to communicate with networks.

I agree that SP1 will fix all of Microsoft's rushed screw ups. No doubt about rushing it into the market, and I believe that they didn't let other software manufacturer's have any information so they would know what to do. That was why there were so many compatibility issues.

I think everyone is agreeing that when SP1 is released, then that will be the best time to install Vista.