review of xp after vista (must read lol)

[DLSS]

check it out ^^ :  source : http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/...windows-xp.aspx

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Look & Feel

Windows XP has quite a cartoony look and feel compared to the slick look of Aero Glass, this is mostly offset by the lack of strange screen artifacts caused by malfunctioning graphics code. You know, almost like static on the screen. This was a once or twice monthly occurance on my laptop, and happened on my desktop whenever I logged in, and also whenever I played a 3D game after leaving Vista running for a couple of hours. I also miss the "orphaned windows" I got on Vista, dialog boxes that would not go away, in a sense they became part of the desktop, since you could drag a selection from within them, despite the fact that the Glass would render the selection below them. Such crazy graphics bugs appear to be a thing of the past.

Performance

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some "I'm still starting up the OS" queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codecs pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

http://dotnet.org.za/blogs/codingsanity/Pictures/Cancel%20Copy.png[/img]

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you're surfing, a nice touch.

Device Support

All I can say is "wow!". You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

http://dotnet.org.za/blogs/codingsanity/Pictures/Solutions.png[/img]

Internet Explorer 7 is much more reliable on XP as well, and has so far not crashed once whilst viewing GMail, when it used to do this several times a day. In addition, I can now actually close the thing down normally every time, instead of sometimes having to kill the process. Error collection seems to be far better as well. Instead of a dialog taking a minute or two to collect the information it needs, the dialog comes up and is ready to send error data almost immediately. I am sad to see the back of the Solutions tool though, it may have hardly ever delivered any valid solutions, especially for the standard random crashes, but at least you knew that something under your control was tracking that information. Please, Microsoft bring it back.

Speaking of which, I notice that the Reliability Report is also gone, again a sore loss, I really enjoyed charting the downward spiral of my Vista reliability, there were those occasional humps that got you all excited, and then the graph would continue its steady sojourn downwards. Of course, the fact that it only appeared to pay attention to a tiny fraction of the actual problems was a bit of an issue, but I'm sure they could have resolved that for the XP release. Ah well.

http://dotnet.org.za/blogs/codingsanity/Pictures/Reliability.png[/img]

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowdays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes. So I'm going to have to hard-reset my laptop. This process, by the way, is also something that amazingly seems to almost never be required in the clean and sparkling new XP.

Right, I'm back, thanks for being patient. I mentioned how much quicker you could start using programs from a boot in XP, I must admit that, appealing though that feature is, you won't actually find it that useful. XP almost never appears to require a reboot, so you hardly ever take advantage of a wonderful improvement like that, which otherwise would save you at least 15-20 minutes a day.

Gaming

This is another area where Microsoft have really excelled in Windows XP. Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you're a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory. Whilst there are a few games that won't work as well in XP than in Vista, you'll find that on the whole XP supports almost all the games you'd want to play. In addition, it's vastly increased reliability means you'll spend much more time killing things than restarting, a welcome change I can assure you. You'll also find that non-XFi soundcards with EAX are much improved by their support in XP, which can really add a bit of excitement to your gaming experience.

Multimedia

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model. It's nice to see a corporation like Microsoft stand up to the cyber bullies at the MPAA and refuse to assume that its loyal customers are criminals. In any case, the DRM built into Vista was broken shortly after it's release anyway.

Conclusion

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

[digip]

I have been saying all along, stick with XP. When Vista has like SP3 and a fe wyears under it, and it is on the way out and their next OS is in the works, that will be when I switch. I did the same with XP. I only moved from 98 to XP about a year + 1/2 ago, maybe 2 years ago. I still like the simplicity of 98, but hate the lack of NTFS security for locking down the pc. (unless you have physical access and a few tools, no machine is safe, regaurdless of OS).

Vista basicly, to quote a great man anme Jeremy, it "Sux ma balls". Once it has a few years and updates under the hood, I may(repeat, may) switch, but my next machien will probably be XP64 or Server 2003/8.

On another note, someone put Vista on an EEE PC of all things:

[VaKo]

I can't help but notice that MS is being very quiet about Vista, i kinda think there will be a client version of 2008 or a 3GB service pack somewhere down the line.

[SomeoneE1se]

Vista == XP

it has some nice new features... but a shit ton new bugs and problems

meh, what'cha gonna do?

[digip]

I can't help but notice that MS is being very quiet about Vista, i kinda think there will be a client version of 2008 or a 3GB service pack somewhere down the line.

:shock: 3GB SP! It's already too huge to begin with, how big do you want it to be. When you go from win95 in about 125-200 meg of HDD space with all the options loaded, to Vista, with minimum 4 gig space just for functional options, and then add another 3 gig for a SP, you start wondering what is under the hood. Give me an OS that does what I need and is secure WITHOUT costing a fortune for ramped up hardware requirements and HDD space. I still think XP is bloated, but at least it can be widdled down failry small enough to fit on a 700meg live cd. I think Vista uses about 2 gig just for a base stripped down install(don't quote me on that though). Try running Vista as a live cd(dvd?).

[Razor512]

vista does the opposite of what technology does. 

humans generally improve technology in order to make things faster, better and more efficient 

but all vista has been able to do is add  eye candy that becomes annoying after the first few times you see it, and make the OS significantly slower.

is there anything you can do in vista that you cant do in windows xp

vista  doesnt offer any new functionality  that can be used in everyday life.

while xp only takes about 1GB of hard drive space, vista takes around 10GB    what does the extra 9GB offer in vista,  other than the new eye candy it doesnt offer much 

usually when it comes to programming,  extremely large programs are signs of something poorly made

just this week alone, 2 people came to me  to  backup their data then  upgrade their laptops from vista, to windows xp  (once xp was installed, there was a instant speed boost, windows booted faster, and with a  good msconfig tweak, the laptops were 100% ready to use in under 25 seconds  and instead of  the usual 400-500MB memory in use,  at startup in windows xp w msconfig tweak, at most was 70MB in use    (for my pc, which has a much more stripped down startup,  windows boots in about 17 seconds 100% ready to use, and only around 60MB memory is in use )

the less memory windows uses, the less pagefile use is needed when running large programs or large games.    windows vista is designed to use a lot of memory and you cant get it to use around 60MB,  it just is not designed to use that little memory, so when you launch a large game with vista,  it has to transfer  hundreds of MB of data, from the ram, to the page file , then when you close the game, it has to clear the pagefile that the game used then transfer the windows vista crap back into memory

windows xp also does this but instead of having to more upwards of 500MB, windows xp only has to more around 20-30MB    which is why  when closing  most games, you only notice  a small burst of hard drive usage then  everything is  ready to use, while in vista,  you can have  over a minute of hard drive usage  in some cases  when closing extremely large programs

[VaKo]

I can't help but notice that MS is being very quiet about Vista, i kinda think there will be a client version of 2008 or a 3GB service pack somewhere down the line.

:shock: 3GB SP! It's already too huge to begin with, how big do you want it to be. When you go from win95 in about 125-200 meg of HDD space with all the options loaded, to Vista, with minimum 4 gig space just for functional options, and then add another 3 gig for a SP, you start wondering what is under the hood. Give me an OS that does what I need and is secure WITHOUT costing a fortune for ramped up hardware requirements and HDD space. I still think XP is bloated, but at least it can be widdled down failry small enough to fit on a 700meg live cd. I think Vista uses about 2 gig just for a base stripped down install(don't quote me on that though). Try running Vista as a live cd(dvd?).

A 3GB service pack would basically be a new OS....

[Strife25]

Vista was the first OS i've used right when it came out (give or take a few months) because my school gives it to us for free if we want to use it.  Well to sum it all up, I am never going to do that again.  Driver support for Vista has sucked, which i can forgive since it is brand new, but features that should be extremely easy to use like streaming media to the 360 has worked out terrible for me. Granted i have been wanting to stream my podcasts to the 360, and i figured the new update would do that for me, but sadly no.  The eye candy is just not worth the extra system resources it takes up. 

So as a result, my winter break project for the next month is to move my computer to gentoo linux and throw on xp pro which will be strippd down to just play PC games.

[Chalito]

That was a freaking good read. I Used vista for a while when It was released and I wasn't impressed at all. I have since moved all my laptops and home desktops over to linux. I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 and i'm loving it. I've been using Ubuntu since Dapper and I think it just keeps getting better and better with every new release. The only time i'm forced to use a windows machine is at work when i'm working with the users in my company. Other than that I made my company buy me a Ubuntu Dell, just to say that I have one.

Ubuntu all the way, Compiz-Fusion, AWN manager. Best combo imo.

[1337n00b]

Meh, I don't really care for Ubuntu. I prefer Open Suse and Fedora.

During the first few months of Vista's release, I installed it on my machine just to see what it was like. At first, I was mildly impressed, but as I started doing some heavy tasks,, the shit hits the fan.  I'll just stick to Win XP Corp Ed for a few more years.

[dred]

Its a sales plot, windows 1998 was better then the sister of vista, the "Millinium edition" this increased there sales as people who had baught 2000 had to go and buy 98 , the same with xp and vista once a new vista machine was baught unless you had a copy of xp you could pay the 250 dollars to get xp back as well as already being charged for vista.. Genius  Mo money Mo money Mo!!!

[VaKo]

You can use your Vista lisence for XP, just not concurrently. However, if your on a tablet machine, stick to Vista.

[DLSS]

You can use your Vista lisence for XP, just not concurrently. However, if your on a tablet machine, stick to Vista.

does tht count for laptops with oem's aswell ?

so how would i go about doing that ?

[VaKo]

not sure, its primarly for buisness and ultimate users, so home basic might not be covered. just aquire XP the normal way. best to give microsoft a call or something.