DISQUS

entmike · 1 year ago

@Daniel J. Pritchett
You might say that I have a little bit of buyer’s remorse when it comes to Vista. The day that it came out I bought Vista Ultimate 32 bit and ran it up until a few weeks ago. For 95% of the things I did, Vista was not a problem, but when I started getting back into more non-casual tasks and gaming, Vista would start dragging. It would take 2 hours to install a game, etc. Pretty much anything that did i/o on the disk would bring the system to a creep. The only thing I am losing by reverting back to XP Pro is DirectX 10, which I’ll just live without.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 1 year ago

Are you running on a 64bit system? I have not kept up lately but the initial Vista complaints I read were mostly from people on 32bit systems who just did an in-place upgrade with the same hardware.

entmike · 1 year ago

Mine was a fresh install, 32-bit. I have a friend who swears that it was because I was running 32-bit that I was having these terrible i/o times, and he says 64-bit smokes. I just don't feel like buying another license for 64-bit. Honestly, that's another gripe all in its own.

I think it's more OS mechanisms than it is instruction set, that was causing the problem. It took around half an hour to install SAP on XP 32bit where it took over 4 hours to do the same task on Vista. Something is wrong with that.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 1 year ago

Sounds like the moral is 'never trust Vista'.

jgilber1 · 1 year ago

W3rd.I like mine too.

Rickster · 1 year ago

Vista Premium 64 bit rocked for me until I wanted to add "X" device that required 64-bit drivers. Smaller vendors were/are using Vista as an excuse to not provide driver support --at all or 64-bit versions -- for peripherals that were less than six months old upon Vista's public release. So I now have a $200 hologram (art deco?) coaster, with XP 32 working like a champ on my system. (As expected.)

entmike · 1 year ago

What's interesting is all my hardware was purchased either after or the same time as the Vista release. Simple stuff like an Intel board and processor, some SATA drives, and a GeForce 8800. Nothing legacy or uncommon, so I don't know if drivers had anything to do with my situation or not.

Rickster · 1 year ago

I think that is congruent with most of what I've read about the Vista versions. Vista 32-bit, while having good driver support, had poor I/O performance and other quirks which made it undesirable, whereas Vista 64-bit had poor driver support but had none of the performance issues found using Vista 32-bit. I also recall not having problems with just hardware drivers, but also database drivers -- I couldn't connect to localhost MySQL server (32-bit) from localhost IIS (64-bit) due to a lack of 64-bit ODBC drivers. The only alternative at the time was to use some obscure 64-bit version of PHP that wasn't well supported, all in the name of 64-bit ODBC support for MySQL from PHP.

entmike · 1 year ago

I agree. I consider myself to be a forgiving and optimistic person when it comes to software, whether it be open-source or something I paid money for. However, after two years of this sort of behavior from my OS, I made the decision to revert back to what worked. I'm no /. zealot, but in my case it just made better sense. If MS ever addresses these issues, whether it be Windows 7, or what I consider the more responsible alternative, to fix it with their current release, I will gladly return to a later OS.