Branners Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 Bought my new computer from Overclockers a few weeks ago and decided I should try Vista on it as at some point XP will be desupported. So after 3 complete drop and rebuilds I find it takes a serious dislike to my USB hub, enough to hang the machine for 60 seconds at a time. Rebuilt it without the hub and it was working pretty well. Sadly my scanner was 'too old' for Vista and so no drivers. At that point Im a hub and a scanner down but keep trying. So the Vista experience is nice, good graphics, nice and quick. But usability starts getting on my nerves. Things like switching users isnt as simple as XP, and the 'up' button is gone in folder views (Alt-up arrow does the same job). I run a game called Toon Town. That starts playing up, wont let me through doors. I then try getting my kids games on there, Zoombinis and Reader Rabbit are a couple, and Vista just throws its arms up and says NO. So all my kids fabourite games are unsupported and unlikely to work. So I just spent 4 hours doing a drop and rebuild back to XP, and Im a happy person again. So, in summary, if you have old software then Vista may not be the OS for you. Cant wait to see things like Far Cry 2 on this machine though.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 Vista came with my new laptop too. I couldn't get it to work with the laptops built-in wireless network adapter! It lasted less than an hour before I binned it off and installed XP. Supra Pod was good though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 I found Vista's eye candy okay actually (with a decent specced machine), however it seems to consume resources like a crack ho with a 3 week dry spell. I've made it my personal mission now to move everything in the house to a linux based platform. The problem is, I even tried something like vmware/virtual pc under vista in order to run win98 for the kid's games as well. Performance made it a complete non-starter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedM Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 I have had no trouble with Vista. I did get rid of it in favour of a Linux distro but ended up recovering it and now have a dual-boot laptop that does everything fine. In fact, I couldn't get FA to work when I tried installing XP. Computers eh! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Branners Posted October 30, 2008 Author Share Posted October 30, 2008 I contemplated using VMWare, I use it on my Vista machine at work and its quick and stable. But the chances of getting the kids in to Vista, and then in to Vmware and waiting while it starts up would be nil. Im tempted to go dual boot so I have vista there, but I cant see I would ever use it. Nothing in its feature list is anything I want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 I contemplated using VMWare, I use it on my Vista machine at work and its quick and stable. But the chances of getting the kids in to Vista, and then in to Vmware and waiting while it starts up would be nil. Im tempted to go dual boot so I have vista there, but I cant see I would ever use it. Nothing in its feature list is anything I want. Something which I've been working on is a Linux based terminal network (using LTSP), for the kids. It uses PXE booting with no hard disks needed in each client. Suprisingly I was able to play to videos on the thin clients (it does help that I have a gigabit network), but I was pleased with the performance. I'm intending to try using KVM/QEMU to host a few win98 machines which will be streamed to the client X-windows (hopefully with some performance) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted October 30, 2008 Share Posted October 30, 2008 Vista lasted about 30 minutes with me, the constant questions asking me if I am sure really fecked me off so I fecked it off Its designed for muppets at home, I would never consider it for any business purpose. Windows 7 seems to be ticking the right boxes at the moment so lets see how that pans out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Branners Posted October 30, 2008 Author Share Posted October 30, 2008 we use thin clients at work as internet stations and they are surprisingly good. The latest HP 5730 units have audio and IE7 built in. We build them, lock them down and on each reboot they reset themselves completely so the customers can never break them. I cant believe how poor Vista actually is, and how many people just blow it away. The only problem is I dont have the XP drive disk for the motherboard so I have a few items in device manager which are unrecognised. But its XP and I now how to fix these things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carl_S Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Xp is lovely becuase it is so stable, and I value that above Vista's prettyness. But one day I hope to use vista, partly due to bill gate's genius and humanity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 The last straw for me with Vista was the broken networking. I found that once you have more than about 10 PPTP connections in Network Connections, things start to go very wrong - 45 second delays every time you right-click the network icon in the system tray. I went on the newsgroups asking where I go to report bugs to Microsoft. Nobody knew. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marbleapple Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 I love Vista... works fine as far as I can see. I accept that I don't play Toon Town or Reader Rabbit though (might I suggest Fallout 3 instead?) I did have problems with very old games but then there is a reason they are 'old' games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 This is why OSX is gaining such widespread (deserved) popularity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 I gave Vista a go for a day at work. It's not getting installed on any of my PC's again. The constant User Access Control stuff was so annoying, they've obviously tried to take the security model from *nix systems (limited user account and using 'sudo' to execute commands as root if needed), but implemented it so incredibly badly. User Interface design for control panel items and elsewhere is inconsistent, and some settings have been moved to seemingly random locations or you have to go through 6 other levels to reach them (I forget what I was trying to change in the network settings but it took me 15 minutes to find what I was looking for!). I'm a big Linux user so coming from that will full blown compositing effects, I was actually unimpressed with the eye candy in Vista. I hope Windows 7 will be better, but it needs to improve a hell of a lot before I'd consider upgrading a machine from XP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbeh Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 I've used Vista since day one and never really had any problems. I think it was a bit overblown with things just to make it look and feel a little more Mac like.. but its failed in that respect as the Mac handles the same sort of tasks much better. I like it though, but yes XP is simpler especially from a sysadmins point of view. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 This is why OSX is gaining such widespread (deserved) popularity. yup, and Linux I get asked quite often "should I get a MacBook", and my answer tends to be "If you fancy one, yeah, why not. The O/S is superb, build quality is about the same as a mid-range PC laptop, price is good for the spec, and it's not got Vista". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caseys Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Vista seems to be DRM'd to heck bloatware. If anyone can give me more than 1-2 benefits of going to it from XP bar DX-10 I'd be amazed. The file system for ages has had the problems with copying things between networks, I'm not even sure if that's properly fixed in the first service pack. Yes it looks pretty, but I've got OSX for that. XP SP3 is imho the windows way to go currently if you're one that wants performance and is not fussed by visuals in your OS. OS - Operating system, the O's there. Vista = POS - Pretty Operating System... or the other meaning of POS What spec you running JB? Running freon cooling or anything? The last Windows OS I liked was Win2000, ok it was literally NT5 underneath the covers, but damn it was stable. Had a Sony Vaio lappy running it and not the only crash I had in those 3 years was me playing about with PGP encryption. Bar that I've been playing with Linux and OSX. I may dual-boot my Mac Pro when it becomes worth it. I don't know why, this thread wants me to break out my 48k speccy and play tonight whilst waiting for trick or treaters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 There are some Vista benefits, but the downs outweigh them too much for me. Parental controls are good for home users. Offline files cache works better, and fast user switching for remote desktop means a computer can be used for remote desktop by more than one user, without forcing the other user's applications to be closed. Networking performance generally seems to be fucked though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Branners Posted October 31, 2008 Author Share Posted October 31, 2008 What spec you running JB? Running freon cooling or anything? nothing that special, its mostly for browsing and kids games, its an AMD 64 X2 dual core 5600+ running at 2.9ghz, 4gb memory, 250gb hard drive and an ATI Radeon 4670 512mb graphics card (which is using the spare 1gb of memory for itself which was a surprise). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Something which I've been working on is a Linux based terminal network (using LTSP), for the kids. It uses PXE booting with no hard disks needed in each client. Suprisingly I was able to play to videos on the thin clients (it does help that I have a gigabit network), but I was pleased with the performance. I'm intending to try using KVM/QEMU to host a few win98 machines which will be streamed to the client X-windows (hopefully with some performance) Have you seen the SolidICE videos? RedHat recently bought them out so there's a possibility the technology will be open sourced in the future. S4DZwYqnyJM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Have you seen the SolidICE videos? RedHat recently bought them out so there's a possibility the technology will be open sourced in the future. S4DZwYqnyJM Hmmm, cheers for that, looks VERY interesting... Busy looking through it at the moment. http://www.qumranet.com/products-and-solutions/video-library/27-video-library/82-solid-ice-product-demo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Hmmm, cheers for that, looks VERY interesting... Busy looking through it at the moment. http://www.qumranet.com/products-and-solutions/video-library/27-video-library/82-solid-ice-product-demo Seriously badass isn't it, and it sounds like what you're looking to achieve, and everybody else in an ideal world.. I had a customer yesterday who wanted "no computers on desks, but a big server in the cellar". I explained about terminal services and that he wouldn't be able to go onto RedTube or anything, but that he's not alone and this thing Solid ICE fits the bill, but it's cutting edge, really cutting edge - i.e. the answer is no for now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 Seriously badass isn't it, and it sounds like what you're looking to achieve, and everybody else in an ideal world.. I had a customer yesterday who wanted "no computers on desks, but a big server in the cellar". I explained about terminal services and that he wouldn't be able to go onto RedTube or anything, but that he's not alone and this thing Solid ICE fits the bill, but it's cutting edge, really cutting edge - i.e. the answer is no for now. LTSP is more than capable of doing flash video, as I said, I managed to stream an AVI file playing on the desktop from LTSP. My LTSP config -> Intel E6750, 4GB ram, 2x250GB disks, 1 x gigabit connection... Client -> AMD 2500+, 512mb ram, booted via PXE and utilizing the LTSP disks over the network. The 700mb avi played fullscreen without any issues. It can supposedly do multi monitor as well, although I've not tried it yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 LTSP is more than capable of doing flash video, as I said, I managed to stream an AVI file playing on the desktop from LTSP. My LTSP config -> Intel E6750, 4GB ram, 2x250GB disks, 1 x gigabit connection... Client -> AMD 2500+, 512mb ram, booted via PXE and utilizing the LTSP disks over the network. The 700mb avi played fullscreen without any issues. It can supposedly do multi monitor as well, although I've not tried it yet. That's impressive then. I was of the impression (more assumption) that LTSP was just using VNC? I know that would be Xvnc, so nicely integrated into the X server, but still I expected crap performance and laggy mouse-cursor. Is that not the case then? xRDP looks good, and has some involvement in LTSP somewhere: http://www.css-networks.com/2008/09/linux-as-an-rdp-remote-desktop-protocol-server.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 That's impressive then. I was of the impression (more assumption) that LTSP was just using VNC? I know that would be Xvnc, so nicely integrated into the X server, but still I expected crap performance and laggy mouse-cursor. Is that not the case then? xRDP looks good, and has some involvement in LTSP somewhere: http://www.css-networks.com/2008/09/linux-as-an-rdp-remote-desktop-protocol-server.html VNC is horrible really, RDP is marginally less horrible. NX is better IMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl0s Posted October 31, 2008 Share Posted October 31, 2008 VNC is horrible really, RDP is marginally less horrible. NX is better IMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology I've used NX, both the proprietary implementation and FreeNX, and xRDP is better, IMO It's pretty easy to get it going too. NX makes the entire screen look like it's been jpeg-ized, i.e. lossy compression. RDP does a nicer job. RDP clients are everywhere and very light. NX requires an X server on the client. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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