Vista - What am I missing?

Garp · 16-10-2007, 10:50

My XP install was getting nicely b0rked for various reasons I haven't sussed yet and so as I was going to rebuild the box I figured I'd give Vista a shot (I did identify a memory timing issue during the install which may explain a fair number of the oddities)

So.. Vista Home Ultimate 64bit edition. Nice. Identified almost all my hardware (Audigy2 and Webcam failed).

What am I missing? I know I've approached Vista as a skeptic, but so far all I've seen just re-enforces all I already thought about it. Its just a fancy GUI on top of XP so far as I can see (can't really say I'm impressed with the GUI, compiz / beryl does it better under *nix). Its slower than XP, is more bloated (my old XP install was more than a little bloated but still used less memory & swap than Vista), seems to spend a lot of time hammering the hard disk, looks like swapping a fair bit even with 2Gig of RAM.

I'm going to give it until the weekend to impress me, but to be honest I don't see that happening unless someone can persuade me whatever it is I'm missing that makes folks rave about it?

One thing that really irritated me: Vista doesn't like being installed to the non-primary HDD. Most folks won't notice, but I have an IDE HDD in my box that I use for backups. Vista wouldn't tell me why it couldn't install to the primary partition on my SATA drive, just that no appropriate drives had been found even though it had formatted it. Out of desperation I tried booting the box with the IDE drive unplugged, and lo and behold it would then install happily. XP has its own quirks in that regard but it will install to that partition (just calls it drive d:, unless you remove an IDE device) I would at least have expected Vista to tell me why it couldn't install.

16-10-2007, 10:50	#1
Garp Preparing more tumbleweed Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Hawaii Posts: 6,038	Vista - What am I missing? My XP install was getting nicely b0rked for various reasons I haven't sussed yet and so as I was going to rebuild the box I figured I'd give Vista a shot (I did identify a memory timing issue during the install which may explain a fair number of the oddities) So.. Vista Home Ultimate 64bit edition. Nice. Identified almost all my hardware (Audigy2 and Webcam failed). What am I missing? I know I've approached Vista as a skeptic, but so far all I've seen just re-enforces all I already thought about it. Its just a fancy GUI on top of XP so far as I can see (can't really say I'm impressed with the GUI, compiz / beryl does it better under nix). Its slower than XP, is more bloated (my old XP install was more than a little bloated but still used less memory & swap than Vista), seems to spend a lot of time hammering the hard disk, looks like swapping a fair bit even with 2Gig of RAM. I'm going to give it until the weekend to impress me, but to be honest I don't see that happening unless someone can persuade me whatever it is I'm missing that makes folks rave about it? One thing that really irritated me: Vista doesn't like being installed to the non-primary HDD. Most folks won't notice, but I have an IDE HDD in my box that I use for backups. Vista wouldn't tell me why it couldn't install to the primary partition on my SATA drive, just that no appropriate drives had been found even though it had formatted it. Out of desperation I tried booting the box with the IDE drive unplugged, and lo and behold it would then install happily. XP has its own quirks in that regard but it will install to that partition (just calls it drive d:, unless you remove an IDE device) I would at least have expected Vista to tell me why it couldn't install. __________________ Mal: Define "interesting"? Wash*: "Oh, God, oh, God, we're all gonna die"?