Just about had it with Vista.

[ALLT4]

Aside form some fancy crap I never use I see no real benefit to it whatsoever. I was able to buy the Business flavor for $60.00 from PSU as an employee so I figured why not. I had tried Ultimate beta and it seemed good at the time but I should have given it a better work out. I have two WD 74G Raptors in Raid 0 on a Silicon image PCIe controller. These aren't the quietest drives in the world and with Vista doing God knows what all the time accessing them it's really annoying. I never had this trouble with XP Pro, I'll be sitting here typing something and all of a sudden the hard drives start ratcheting away driving me crazy. I try to open task manager to see what the hell is going on and all you can see is the ambiguous svchost or whatever eating up processor power. I suppose something is talking to Mama somewhere? I don't think it should be caching anything because I have 2gig of ram installed. I hear that's that's the max with a 32 bit OS. Yeah I tried 64 bit Vista, too little support for that.

There's other crap that bothers me but the hard drives crunching away all the time bothers me the most.

Has anyone else upgraded to an older OS? LOL

Watch the "Podium" Mac ad, that's the way I feel right about now.

[hoser]

Originally Posted by ALLT4

Has anyone else upgraded to an older OS?

I did, back around Feb/Mar of 07.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora


I wanted so bad to give linux a 'real' chance as my desktop that I burned upthe winderz installation.. haven't looked back. I might back it up just to try Ubuntu.

[Tempus]

I've been running 64bit vista for a couple of months now and I don't get any weird HD activity or anything. I have a system gadget running and usage seems to parallel my activity. Maybe it's your AV or maybe spyware detection eating up your system or maybe automatic back-up checking for new files?

[hoser]

If you have the latest and most advanced hardware available, Vista seems to be flawless. However, ymmv lo

[andyofne]

I spent several hours today working on a brand new, out of the box, HP Media Center machines with Vista 32bit loaded on it.

Within 30 minutes I had a BSOD trying to install updated drivers provided through Microsoft Update.

The Media Center TV card did not work at all with the pre-installed drivers. Oh, wait, it would play channel 5 but that's it.

Every time I tried to load drivers from Windows Update the system would either fail to load them or BSOD.

I went to HP and found a patch that "fixed" the problem with the drivers but it was not easy to find.

I was not impressed.

[hoser]

Might be time for an iMac.

[ALLT4]

Originally Posted by Tempus

I've been running 64bit vista for a couple of months now and I don't get any weird HD activity or anything. I have a system gadget running and usage seems to parallel my activity. Maybe it's your AV or maybe spyware detection eating up your system or maybe automatic back-up checking for new files?

It's not so much a whole lot of processor power being used, I kind of misspoke that. It's the hard drive activity, I don't run anything I haven't run in XP without all the hard drive activity.

Maybe you have quieter drives and just don't notice it. I've turned off anything I can think of, such as the Defender, indexing, UAC and stuff like that. About the only things I run for spyware are Symantec Antivirus and Spybot's Internet immunization.

And Andy, it's a lot of stuff like you experienced with that HP that turns me off also. I do a lot with music and pictures on my PC. Some old Mp3 editing stuff that worked on XP doesn't work with Vista or is limited as to what it does now. It's hard for me to point out specific examples because I just try to forget about them as they happen and write those programs off and search for others.

Can't say I've really had driver issues, then again I buy new stuff almost every 6 months so everything is already Vista ready.

[ALLT4]

Originally Posted by hoser

Might be time for an iMac.

I've been tossing around this idea myself. Try to buy a NICE 20" flat screen and computer specs. the iMac has for less money. It's not that bad of a deal. Plus with Parallels and Boot Camp you get the best of both worlds.

[beanie]

Originally Posted by ALLT4

I've been tossing around this idea myself. Try to buy a NICE 20" flat screen and computer specs. the iMac has for less money. It's not that bad of a deal. Plus with Parallels and Boot Camp you get the best of both worlds.

Forget Parallels, go with VMware Fusion instead. I own both. VMware is much better IMO! Of course, a reboot into Boot Camp gets you a full speed PC.

[Ghanzafar]

Vista is on the out. Microsoft has extended XP and will add DirectX 10 to the next SP. To get the true benifits of Vista you need the 64 bit but the problem with that is most all hardware venders are not going to waste their time making drivers for a OS that is not in Demand. Vista has alot of issues and only time will tell.
Andy for most TV cards to work they have to be certified. HP has always had issues with Media center all the way back to MCE 2004. I have a nice PCI express TV turner It is true HD ATSC http://www.avermedia.com/. You can get it at tigerdirect or newegg for less than $100.