The V Word...

[jmurray01]

Yes, I'm talking about Vista - possibly the most hated Microsoft Windows operating system created.

That said, it is one that I have returned to recently.

As some of you may know, I was a Windows 2000 user for many years (and still would be if I could) and about 3 years ago switched to Windows XP when I needed to use mobile broadband, as the dongle for which was not compatible with 2k.

Last month the old 2004 Viglen had got to the stage where it couldn't even send an email without going into "Not Responding" at least once so I decided to replace it. For some strange reason Viglen had set the maximum installable RAM at 512mb, so there was nothing I could do to improve the performance.

Back in 2008 I bought an eMachines E520 which had Vista Home Basic installed and although the laptop itself was nothing but problems and I gratefully sold it for a loss in 2011, I never had an issue with the O/S. In fact, I thought it to be very efficient and almost as stable as Win 2k which I was running on my desktop at the time.

Therefore, when I upgraded last month I decided to avoid Windows 7, which I have not had good experiences with on the PCs at work, and go for what I knew to be decent and most importantly - modern enough to run most 2015 applications etc...

I'm now running Windows Vista Business on a Dell 760 Optiplex USFF and am very impressed. I am considering expanding the RAM from 2GB to 4GB though as now that I have installed some programmes on the PC it has slowed down slightly - but the stability is still very impressive.

I would be interested to hear if any other members are still using Vista and if not what you do use.

I expect that the most voted option will be Windows 7 but we'll see.

 

[spirit]

I've used them all, but have only used 98 SE, XP, Vista, 7 and 8/8.1 as primary OSes on my main machines.

I always found that Vista was OK in its later life once SP2 had come out and I didn't have the problems that everybody else seem to have, but to be fair I was using it when Windows 7 was very new and most of Vista's problems had been patched. There's no doubt, if you ask me, that 7 was much better than Vista in pretty much every aspect and 8.1 is better than them all.

I've just remembered that my old name round here was 'vistakid', lol...

 

[johnb35]

You only have 2 more years of support for Windows Vista. End of life is April 11, 2017. Not sure what kind of issues you were having with Windows 7 but its been rock solid for me. There is only 5 more years of support for Windows 7 though. If you are going to upgrade, then get Windows 8.1 as upgrade to windows 10 should be free for 8.1 users. Vista runs somewhat terrible on less then 3-4gb of ram. I'm currently working on a laptop that run vista home basic and only has 1gb of memory, somewhat laggy just doing normal things and there is no active virus program installed. Its using over 70 percent of the 1gb of memory at idle.

Unless you can find more memory somewhat cheap, really wouldn't do it unless you plan on upgrading to 8.1.

 

[C4C]

I'm running the Win 10 tech preview on 2 computers and 8.1 on my laptop...

 

[spirit]

I think one problem with Vista was that it didn't work for most people when it came out for a variety of reasons (too slow on most people's hardware, incompatible with software and hardware, expense of upgrading and so on) but I think one problem was that by the time it was a decent OS to use, Windows 7 was literally around the corner. I always thought Vista was fine with SP2, but SP2 came out on Windows Update on May 26th 2009 which was under two months before Windows 7 was available for RTM and under five months before it was generally available.

I never beta-tested Windows 7 (but I did run a beta version of Vista that my Dad gave and installed on my PC for me whilst the beta was current, believe it or not! ) but from what I heard at the time the Windows 7 Release Candidate was quite good, so people could see that the final release of 7 was going to be much better than Vista which probably kind of made Vista seem even worse and probably made people give up with Vista and just go to 7. But I do remember there being some people who felt that 7 should have been a free upgrade from Vista for everybody who purchased it (did Microsoft give 7 for free to those who bought Vista very close to the release of 7 or am I thinking about 7 and 8?)

 

[strollin]

I can't vote since the poll won't allow me to select both Win 7 & Win 8. I use both about 50% of the time.

I never had a machine that ran Vista as it's main OS, I have only run Vista and Win ME in VMs.

 

[beers]

Vista was 'okay' after a couple of service packs, there's really no use in clinging to it though.

If you gave Windows 7 a shot you'd notice it behaves a little better than Vista.

 

[OvenMaster]

My desktop machine uses Win7 but I also use a Toshiba laptop from 2009 daily still with its original Vista SP2 install.