[xbox360]

Originally Posted by shuvd

Which OS should I go for? My rig's configuration:
AMD X2 4400
MSI K8N SLI
3gb DDR
Was offered Vista Home Premium for about 9k, but after reading so many bad reviews about Vista I'm confused. Please help!

I think there is a small but a very vocal fraction of people who have piled a lot of false propaganda against MS and in particular Vista lately.
Frankly I do not buy into any of this as I have been involved in Vista development since Vista Beta days. As I am in the middle of things, I can tell you that there was an unprecedented stress on reliability, security and stability in Vista's planning and development. The results of this focus are apparent if you search for the number of Vista vulnerabilities in the past few months when compared to any of its competitors or even XP. For the past year I have had both pre release and RTM versions of Vista running continuously under stress on 3 machines including a tablet. In this period there was only one crash and that too was traced to a faulty driver. Besides this one crash Vista has been as solid as a rock.
In most of the crashes reported on Vista today the cause for the crash is an incompatible driver. Now since this is a major OS release and a lot has changed beneath the surface, we are currently in the midst of a catch up phase where all significant OEMs need to test and certify their drivers against Vista. As there are gazillions of devices with various usage distributions there is obviously going to be a time where you run into rare incompatibilities. There is a lot of effort that is going in continuously to improve the device and app compatibility of Vista and the compat situation is getting better over every passing day. One off occurrences should not get you to drop the idea of going in for Vista.

None the less I think it is advisable for all who want to upgrade to Vista to check their device, system and app compatibility beforehand by using the Vista upgrade advisor at the following link—
Windows Vista: Home Page
Also you can compare the various Vista editions in detail at –
Windows Vista: Compare Editions
Going by your specs, I think your machine should allow you to savor the full Vista experience. I too think Vista Home Premium may be the right choice for you. None the less do check out the upgrade advisor to see if all is well before you upgrade.

[msdivy]

M$FT will be releasing Vista SP1 earlier than expected. Infact they will be releasing sometime around July 16th. This is way earlier than the expected date of Nov 07.

More: » Vista SP1 beta 1 to launch in mid-July | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Microsoft is expected to emphasize that SP1 is more about fixes than new features. Most of the elements of SP1 are expected to enhance or supplement features that are already part of Vista.
In addition to desktop-search modifications, here’s a list of other fixes likely to make it in:
* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
* Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

[speeddemon2007]

hey my cousin is using windows vista home edition for the past 3 months, he bought it from singpore and it is working absolutely fine.

[jesal]

jus got a new rig and im planning to shift to vista premium, are there any users using this here at all ? what about my network settings will the internet still work after i upgrade cuz its a huge pain for me to get it working i am on a router but still... using a xfx mobo with intels new 6750 proccy. how good is this thing. i just surf the net and a few games really. using 2gb ram btw.

[lancersfx]

Hey Guys .....I would really not recommend Vista as an OS as it is quite irritating and does not make sense to migrate from the existing OS. It is only good if you fancy the looks but really not worth the upgrade. rather.....XP is standard and stable but in case you do come across any Vista issue here is the list of known issues with the Vista OS. Here is a rapidshare link.
RapidShare: 1-Click Webhosting

Hope this file might help Vista users to some extent.....in troubleshooting.

[jesal]

i shifted to vista ultimate 10 days back and could not be more happier all the drivers with internet settings it did on its own. very nice and since i love the way it looks i dig it. damn neat till now no issues. only some games not working like carbon and stuff but i think they have patches for the same,

[kumar2007]

Originally Posted by normally_crazy

UPDATE

I had taken no back up of recovery files or anything (lesson learnt here - the hard way). So I tried installing a pirated version of Vista, which failed - 3 times.

So I was fed up and asked my guy to format the HD and install XP. It fails to format the HD too now. twice. Then we do a quick format which suceeds and try installing XP , it works fine till 45 % and then it goes nowhere. Try again , same thing.

Shut up the system, dump it into the bag and off we go the service centre. Explain the problem to the guy and he diagnoses and says the problem could be due to bad sectors on the HD. Give him the lappy and he gives us the receipt where the problem observed reads " Missing OS / #1-07 FAIL". This apparently means my HD is gone. So we talk to the guy and ask him if he can do us a favor by lending us the HD so that we could try and recover our data. He says not possible but for us he will bend the rules. There is nothing, a little sweet and friendly talk can't get you.

So now I hope get back my lappy with the new HD and Vista again as there is this wierd rule that the HP guys at the Kalina service centre cannot change the OS.

Am hoping for the best. The service centre guys were pretty helpful and co-operative too. Full marks there.

Key word here is PIRATED. So you should expect neither sympathy nor wil you get support from MS right?

[gulgulumaal]

Originally Posted by normally_crazy

UPDATE

Well as per my last post - the service centre in Vashi was supposed to format the HD and let the HP guys and me know about the problem. Also after formatting he was supposed to give me the HD so that I could try and recover whatever I could.

FLASHBACK - But - the HD failed to format. He called me and let me know that the HD is simply not responding and he could not format it and so he has forwarded a request for a replacement.

Today morning a few minutes back, I got a call asking me to come and pick up the laptop. Its ready. I now am leaving for the service centre to pick up my lappy and more importantly to find out the problem.

Will keep you guys updated.

Was this hard disk failure caused by Vista, by any chance?
I hope not, but I remember reading a thread somewhere which said that after installing Vista, the hard disk had some problem and that the user had to do a low level format of the hard disk to make it usable again

[tsk1979]

Software can only accelerate hardware failure and not cause it.
For example you may have some software which parks your disks every 30 seconds, and restart them. This would kill the drive soon.
But Vista doing that? I seriously doubt it. For all the flaws it may have, I seriously doubt something so silly could be happening.
I suspect a partition table corruption. Most people think the HDD is a write off after that, but there are tools available which can repair the parition table like set the LBA to a correct value etc.,

[reignofchaos]

In this case it was simple... the hard drive was on its last legs. The install of an OS stresses a hard drive more than normal daily usage as it entails a lot of copying. This is especially true if a low level format is done. Probably the OS install process only hastened this process and the hard drive died. There's nothing that Vista or XP for that matter did in this.

I've got a machine with dual boot. Its as high end a system as you can find with a massively overclocked Core 2 Duo that runs on watercooling, a pair of 8800 Ultra graphics cards and some of the fastest DDR2 memory you can find on planet earth. However I'm still not satisfied with the performance of vista. Its slower than XP and it especially shows in 3D applications.

Another gripe I have about Vista is that changing hardware causes the it to BSOD and there's no way to recover. I replaced my motherboard recently from an intel p965 chipset(Asus P5B Deluxe) board to Nvidia 680i SLI (Asus P5N32-E SLI) chipset board. While XP loaded up fine and redetected all devices etc, Vista refused to boot. It would not boot even into safe mode and would BSOD even before it began loading. It couldn't even recover when I tried booting off the install DVD. The only option I had was reinstalling it completely. This is totally unacceptable as I change hardware at six month intervals and asking me to reinstall the OS at every hardware change is ridiculous.

[vikram_d]

Well I have been using Vista since the Beta2 stage and never faced any major problems with it. The only problem was with mv TV tuner card drivers were not available. Using Vista Ultimate now and also drivers released so absolutely no problems at all.

Also during the beta days some of the programs would not run properly. Simple fix was to run them in Win XP compatibility mode. Worked like a charm.

[beanstalk_230]

PLEASE DO NOT SWITCH TO VISTA BEFORE VISTA SP1

i have personally used vista premium for nearly 3 months and never had a problem with, and I do accept OS recovery is much better in VISTA because unfortunately i happened to install a 3rd party driver which was not Vista compatible, after that vista would refuse to load after the startup screen but the recovery option (F8 i think) came in very handy, i got all my information back and documents intact but its SLOWWW even when run of 2gb ram when compared to XP, I do agree the Superfetch did improve load times later but vista is still slow as compared to xp

for the GUI there are a bundle of all in one apps and even a single app which can turn your desktop better than the VISTA GUI

its better to switch to Vista untill the SP 1 comes out

enjoy

[Shan2nu]

The Vista on our Sony LT doesn't accept Photoshop 7 and i'm not able to use the internet throught it, as it fails to load the software required to connect the DSL modem.

Speed is not a prob as the LT has 2GB of ram but yeah, i've had probs with the comp hanging a couple of times.

The Xp on our desktop PC is running without any issues.

Shan2nu

[Samurai]

I just moved to Vista Ultimate at home on a new PC with 3GB RAM. So far good. Put Photoshop CS2 back and it opens multiple RAW files very fast. So far happy.

I haven't dared put Vista at work until SP1 is issued.

[nosfreak]

3 things that i use Vista Ultimate for :

1. I love figgting it.
2. Since its got DX10, play most of the games (Lost planet, Stranglehold).. its good
3. Dreamscene....

I did setup my adsl conection on it. It kinda gives a better and steady speed while downloading. My XP gives bout 23 to 26 kbps on a 256 kbps broadband connection. While using Vista i got a steady and good downloading speed of 28 to 29 kbps using Opera while even logged in gtalk,yahoo,hotmail....