Topic: My first experience with Vista

[Cobra951]

My daughters are visiting, and my older one brought her very sick laptop with her.  Everything became unresponsive shortly after booting, and it would restart itself after that.  It was so bad I could do nothing at all under the OS itself running in normal mode.  It behaved the same way in safe mode until I went to the really limited one with Command prompt.  From there I was able to launch explorer.  I thought the issue might be hardware-related until then.  The computer behaved perfectly in this mode.  I considered reformatting and installing XP.  The XP install disc couldn't see the HDD.  Then I learned all about AHCI vs ATA, plus all the other hoops I'd have to jump through to get this Inspiron 1525 happy with XP.  Drivers galore to locate and install.  I was ready to bite the bullet, and changed some BIOS settings so I could start doing that.  Then the XP installer showed me what was on the hard drive.  One of the partitions was Recovery (D:).  Dammit!  Reboot, F8, repair computer, restore from factory image.  That worked, and the PC basically traveled back in time to 2008.

So, with that preamble, I got my feet wet with Vista for the first time.  Everything was easy up front, including getting online.   I got MS security essentials, Firefox, and some nifty add-ons like noscript and adblock plus.  Then I started to discover why everyone bitches so much about this OS.  UAC is a pain, though not horrible.  I disabled it.  The 2nd time I restarted the system for some reason, this task called TrustedInstaller launched, and proceeded to eat up most of the dual CPU.  Found out Vista will basically let it have free reign over everything once something decides that it needs it, like Windows Update.  For a while, the desktop wasn't even refreshing right.  Windows like FF's would go blank and stay that way for most of a minute.  For a while, I thought maybe the system itself really was FUBAR'ed.  I let all the needed updates get on there, then turned off auto updates, stopped the service, and made it manual.  So far, no problems since.  The system boots up nicely, and CPU usage seems to stay below 5%.  (Process Explorer from sysinternals.com is much more informative than task manager.)  I just wonder what else may end up using this unholy resource hog in the future.

Once I got through these problems, I find little to fault with Vista, though I must add that my daughter upgraded from 1 GB RAM to 4, with 3.49 available to the OS.  It's very intuitive for XP users.  No surprise there.  A couple of days may not be enough to form a very valid opinion.  I'm sure there are other annoyances lurking.  So, any tips?  My goal is to keep this thing as free of bloatware as possible.  I was quite successful with Win ME, making it behave more like 98SE.  So I figure I can keep Vista close to XP leanness.  I just don't have any more time to probe and tweak.  My girls go back to NY tomorrow.

[ScaryTooth]

Yeah, Vista is kind of a memory hog. But I think it allocates memory based on what you are using at any giving time. Like if you are playing a game, it allocates more memory to the game than anything else. Not sure if that's 100% true, but it seems like it. I don't really think there is much you can disable to get rid of all that bloatware.

I just installed Windows 7 on my PC a week ago, and I'm liking it so far. It runs a little better than Vista did on my system and it has some decent features. It looks slick as well. But I remember using Vista and it would use about 1GB of physical memory when I was barely doing anything. Maybe just running around with firefox. Can't say 7 is much better. Right now I'm just running Firefox and it's using 800mb of my memory. I have everything that I can disabled. I remember XP using about 200MB...

Not sure what all you can do. Scott might know more about it.

[Pugnate]

I really love Winodws 7.

I had heard all sorts of good things about its boot time, but was skeptical, because all OSs load fast within the first few weeks of installation. But it has been a few months with 7 on my two PCs, and it is still working really well.

There are quite a few other smaller changes that have worked nice as well.

Windows Vista wasn't so bad as people made it out to be. The UAC was terribly annoying, but turning it off was simple. There were also many compatibility issues, but really, that's to be expected.

It isn't that MS suddenly turned things around with 7. Because of Vista, a lot of popular programs were updated to work with that kernel, and that's what they are using in 7.

[scottws]

I still use UAC.  I was already used to it from Linux and Macs at work do the same thing too.  It happens a little more often in Vista than in Linux or on Macs or on Windows 7, but most of that is because of lazy app developers that always want to use admin rights even though they don't need to.  I think the security benefits of UAC are worth the slight inconvenience.  For instance, while Conficker ran rampant in many networks based on XP and 2003, networks with Vista and 2008 with UAC enabled were not really affected.

It's really great in scenarios where a user isn't a local administrator.  Much easier and more intuitive than how those situations were handled in XP.

Sorry Scary, I have no idea regarding your issue with Firefox except that versions using the older Javascript engine from 0.1 - 3.0 had a memory leak and you had to close it out to stop that.

As far as Vista being a memory hog, it is in the sense that it has more going on than XP or other previous MS OSes, but it also introduced SuperFetch.  SuperFetch is pretty awesome.  It sort of figures out what applications and executables and libraries you use most often and loads what it can from them into memory so that next time you launch the program, it loads very fast.  It is pretty awesome and I really miss it when I use XP.  But a lot of people see the memory usage and think Vista is a sloppy beast but that isn't really the case after SP2.  Vista uses however much memory it needs and then if anything is left over, SuperFetch uses it so your RAM is almost always maxed out.

[Cobra951]

The Windows philosophy can be expressed as "free memory is wasted memory".  It makes a lot of sense to me, so it doesn't bother me to see most of the RAM allocated in a hurry.  CPU use, however, is a different matter.  A background process examining the system and grabbing updates should not be hogging well over half the CPU without yielding to other tasks.  That's just poor design.

[ren]

My daughters are visiting, and my older one brought her very sick laptop with her.

Generational gap? The rest of that paragraph confused me after this sentence because when I hear about a sick laptop I think of a very good one.

I never had any problems at all with Vista. UAC was annoying at first but after a few days when most of your applications are installed I could go long periods of time without it coming up.

That Dell recovery drive has saved me once or twice. Although before that happened I made the same mistake as you by trying to do every other conventional way of reinstalling Windows before seeing the one-click method that was sitting right there the whole time.

[scottws]

I do Acronis True Image backups every day now.  It isn't the same as a complete wipe because you are going back to a recent time, but in many cases it is better because you can go back to before a virus infection and then you are already almost all the way patched up on programs and have all your programs and files right there.

[Cobra951]

Generational gap? The rest of that paragraph confused me after this sentence because when I hear about a sick laptop I think of a very good one.

That cracked me up.  I will not be held responsible for conflicting colloquialisms.