When Will You Upgrade to Windows Vista?

[darkscot]

When XP came out I was very keen to try it out, but I do not feel the same way about Vista. Since XP came out I think Linux has overtaken Windows in all the ways that matters to me.

[Fitzcarraldo]

As I bought my latest laptop at the end of October 2006 I was offered an upgrade from the installed Windows XP Professional to Vista "free of charge" when Vista came out in January 2007. Actually, "free of charge" turned out to be GBP 14 for "administration, p&p" but I went ahead and ordered it anyway.

The Vista upgrade DVD finally arrived about a month ago and has been sitting on a shelf. Having heard of the problems with drivers that some people are reporting, and having realised that many of the applications I use professionally and bought for Windows 95, 98, Me and XP over the last decade (which all run under Windows XP) will not run under Vista, I just don't have the courage to 'upgrade' to Vista.

The final straw was when I recently received an e-mail from the manufacturer of an application I bought a couple of years ago, telling me that the version I own will not work under Vista and that I could buy the Vista-compatible version "at a discount". It was then that I seriously considered creating a dual-boot laptop and installing Linux. Not that this would help me with this particular application, but I just thought that it was time to see what Linux could offer me generally-speaking.

However, there is no way I would abandon Windows XP immediately: a) there are several technical and administrative applications I use professionally that either do not have a Linux equivalent or are superior to an 'equivalent' Linux application; b) I find Windows XP easy to use and reliable (yes, that's absolutely true in my case: I use it daily in my work all over the world, both on my own hardware and on other companies' hardware, and it consistently and reliably 'delivers the goods' in my case).

Nevertheless, the various Linux distro developers are clearly working hard to make Linux more user-friendly and more reliable. I think a lot still remains to be done: even the supposedly novice-friendly distros still have too many problems to be unleashed on much of the buying public. But Linux is progressing in leaps and bounds at the moment, to the extent that I now feel better-served by a PC dual booting Windows XP and Sabayon Linux than with a PC running Vista. However, if developers of applications and hardware continue to support Microsoft to the extent they do (just compare Skype for Windows with Skype for Linux, to take one of numerous examples) then it is an uphill struggle for Linux. That said, I feel that Vista may be the beginning of the end of total dominance of the OS market by Microsoft. Which is probably a good thing, although corporate and governmental users do not like uncertainty and continue to back the de facto standard that Windows became.

End of stream of consciousness! In answer to the original question: "No time soon."

[denijane]

i installed Vista few months ago. Well, it was pretty, all right. But i never managed to crack it properly on my AMD64. All the cracks just won't work on 64x machine. After the third re-installation i gave up

Another problem was that most of the software by then didn't offer vista-comaptibility. One of which was Maple 10 which i use all the time. I guess Maple 11 will work on Vista, but i won't try it for now.
I think Vista have many good features/beside the bad which we more or less know already/ but i just didnt have the patience to discover them.
Besides, it had problem with NVidia video cards- sometimes the start button or control panel won't work just for the fun. You know

And anyway, i think Linux gets better and better. If only someone could work out an easy way to run games or win applications /for example the wine of Sublime Flash won't work well on Sabayon, Maple 11 couldn't install on the previous Sabayon (maybe cuz it's one installation for x64 and x32 duno) and so on/ it would be just great. Windows will go to hell.

As for me, i will install Vista again when it's absolutely necessairy. Till then- dual boot Sabayon/XP

[wolfden]

Do keep in mind that forum policy is not to be discussing cracked software.

[denijane]

Do keep in mind that forum policy is not to be discussing cracked software.

uh? oh well, sorry! I saw that someone talked about that in the beginning of the thread, otherwise i wouldn't have discussed it.
And anyway, i didn't discuss cracked softaware as i couldn't crack it It was just the free 30-day trial.
But sorry again, i don't write that much in this forum so i don't know the rules yet. I hope i didn't cause a problem.
Btw, while we're on the rules, what are they for getting off-topic? Cuz some forums don't mind it at all and some hate it. Lol, if you want to keep the thread clean, you can pm-me.

[davkt]

Well, they took my money for shipping the free Vista upgrade DVD this lappy qualified for then decided the letter from my home insurer confirming the date of supply didn't qualify as proof of purchase (Insurance Co assure me it is all they ever supply in case of a machine they provide needing warranty repairs). Currently trying to get either a DVD (for a tenner it is worth the curiosity value!) or my tenner back!

[wolfden]

Do keep in mind that forum policy is not to be discussing cracked software.

uh? oh well, sorry! I saw that someone talked about that in the beginning of the thread, otherwise i wouldn't have discussed it.
And anyway, i didn't discuss cracked softaware as i couldn't crack it It was just the free 30-day trial.
But sorry again, i don't write that much in this forum so i don't know the rules yet. I hope i didn't cause a problem.
Btw, while we're on the rules, what are they for getting off-topic? Cuz some forums don't mind it at all and some hate it. Lol, if you want to keep the thread clean, you can pm-me.

The rules are pretty relaxed, there is a sticky about no illegal stuff tho, it's just common sense. I was simply just reminding people. I wasn't saying anyone in paticular

[it-guyz]

i wont be using vista i have a computer to run it but im trying to switch to linux for good i just wish that they made autocad for linux it s the only reason i still use xp

have you tried using wine or winex to run autocad on linux?
I understand there are some apps that do crash using wine or winex on linux...

[mbuel]

I have vista on my machine at work, and it's basically, XP with a few "glossy" interfaces. It's not any more stable than XP SP2.

Here's some severe interface inconsistencies:

Instead of right clicking to "desktop properties" to change the screensaver, you now have to "personalize" the desktop. And when you get there, your greeted to microsofts new web page interface that you'll see most everywhere in there setup configs.... except where for some reason they left the 2K-XP interface in... like under the advanced window setup, it's the same legacy window for setting up colors that's been there forever, and is just as limited in what you can do...

Or the screensaver selection screen, instead of pushing the envelope, we get a 12 year old interface for changing the screen saver.

It's amazing to me that the open source community has advanced so much faster, and so much better than microsoft's proprietary, closed source crap.

If I could run access databases, through wine, I would run linux on this machine... any help there?

[rhomp2002]

When I was trying to install Gentoo using their liveCD, it trashed my hard drive which had XP plus 6 Linux distros on it. I then found that the backup disk that came with my computer and had XP required XP to be there before I could re-install. With that in mind I reinstalled the Linux distros and decided that it was an omen to me to get rid of Windows.

Wonderful day! Free at last! Windows will not appear again on my computers. When they came out with that ridiculous Windows Genuine Advantage, I refused to install it on my XP even if they kept reminding me that it was there to be installed. In fact I stopped auto-installing updates because of that. Now that I no longer use XP, I see no reason to go back. They are offering me nothing that I cannot already do on Linux and without having to take out a loan to buy a new computer with all the stuff i would need to run Vista.

Right now I am running PC-BSD plus 7 Linux distros and am narrowing my choices down to see which I will end up with as my main distro. I am currently looking at PC-BSD, Sabayon and Wolvix (Slackware). With the new releases of PC-BSD and Sabayon coming along it will be interesting to see how they finally compare.