[Dusteh]

Going to buy a new PC, and have a choice of Vista Home or Vista Business as the operating system.

Having looked at the Microsoft features page I can't really see any advantage in either of them, all of the bells and whistles seem rubbish to me. Anyone here using Vista as their working environment? Got any horror stories to tell? Does it make the slightest difference which one I plump for?

[seen.to]

As long as you've got the latest versions of all your software (and it all supports Vista) then you're golden.

Few features were lacking in CS2, mainly working with raw photos and exporting PDFs, CS3 fixed that.

I do find that I can have less progs/windows open at once than with XP - it just refuses to let me open any more rather than bog down and crash.

Interface is pretty for a week or so.

I use home premium FWIW.

[Do Gooder]

use a PC for admin and testing and while it brings up warnings, it runs most of my old software fine.

got home basic because the extra fluff seemed superfluous.

spend most of my time trying to find how to turn vista 'features' off (like the indexing thing that has the HD permanently grinding away and the security stuff that blindly questions your every move). in hindsight i wish i had stuck with good old XP for longer.

[pgo]

I have Home Premium and I like it alright. I won't be using the "Media Center" crap, though. If given the choice over again, I would have gone with Business because it has less bloat and includes Remote Desktop, which is always handy for the "professional-on-the-go".

The bells and whistles are rubbish for the most part, but I'm really digging...

The address bar/directory path allows far more navigational possibilities. Very handy.

Directory structure is no longer as confusing as it once was - no more "Documents and Settings" crap. C:\Users\Patrick - beauty.

The Windows Sidebar (lol mac rip) is pretty nice, overall. Some handy widgets...er...gadgets, sorry.

Aero interface is purty. A bit over the top with the gradients and drop-shadows, but it's nice.

Of course, I end up making it look very "Classic" - with the classic start menu and such. I don't care for the litte previews on the taskbar. The scroll between windows is nice (WinKey+Tab), though - but it's not really any more useful than Alt+Tab.

Really, it's just a pretty version of Windows XP.

[RaelRode]

I hate Vista, I had a PC which said would run Vista fine, but in fact, it didn't.

Vista was slow and crap for me, hated it. Ended up using the basic theme (like '98) to make it work at a bearable pace.

Personally I'd go for XP or OSX86.

[herkalees]

Originally Posted by pgo

C:\Users\Patrick - beauty.

He is pretty.

[H3LLRA1Z3R]

Make sure on your new pc the drive is not sata native. ( long story )

I had vista and just had enough its fricking crap nice bells and whistles but just crap over all , maybe in a few years it will be ok but not now. And because my pc was designed for vista only getting xp on it was a nightmare, ( lucky for me I found a HP tech guy who was running same pc as me and had made most of the drives I needed)

IMHO get a custom pc made for you and get xp pro on it. From memory vista uses 300 mb of memory by its self.

[bazzle]

Originally Posted by H3LLRA1Z3R

IMHO get a custom pc made for you and get xp pro on it. From memory vista uses 300 mb of memory by its self.

That will be what they call superfetch. Performance it automatically loads your most highly used applications into the memory.

Many people hate the idea of caching, but personally, I don't care if half my ram is used up, it enables my applications to load about 5 times faster than it did in XP.

So unless you really want to know what every last chunk of your memory is being used for, Id recommend getting vista, with a large chunk of ram, instead of xp which operates like a blind geriatric looking for his slippers.

[Dusteh]

Going to be using 4gb of RAM and dual core obviously - does XP support those properly? Thought you had to have Vista 64bit to take full advantage?

[RaelRode]

XP is the same as Vista. Both can take 3.75GB of RAM.

Unless you have a 64-bit version which can take up to 3.94020062 × 10^115 GB RAM

[H3LLRA1Z3R]

Originally Posted by bazzle

That will be what they call superfetch. Performance it automatically loads your most highly used applications into the memory.

Many people hate the idea of caching, but personally, I don't care if half my ram is used up, it enables my applications to load about 5 times faster than it did in XP.

So unless you really want to know what every last chunk of your memory is being used for, Id recommend getting vista, with a large chunk of ram, instead of xp which operates like a blind geriatric looking for his slippers.

I only use that pc for design stuff and most of my applications are always running so xp is ok for me. I didn't know a lot about the vista vs xp caching so going to link now so I can get learnid.

[Hunch]

Vista has 2 limits. The application limit, and the OS limit.

Essentially Win32 applications (those designed for 'regular' Windows) can only address 2 Gig of RAM. The OS itself can address 4 Gig, but will usually only show 2 Gig as being installed. I have 4 Gig in my Mac Pro, but it shows up as 2.

Either way, unless you get the 64 bit version of Vista you're not really going to take full advantage of the available RAM over 2 Gig and even then not all apps will necessarily be able to use it.

[pgo]

I dunno, Vista seems to have no problem telling that I have 3GB of RAM.

[Dusteh]

I'll definately be getting the 64bit edition as its the same price as the vanilla version.

[Herr Kurm]

Steer the fuck clear from Vista. TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS: It fucked up my ID, Illy and PS in about that order. And somehow it pissed all over my distiller too.

It is absolutely worthless if you are working on tightly integrated CS3 apps, CS3 is still buggy and when you add another buggy piece of software under it (Vista) it goes batshit insane. Stick to XP or OSX, as far as Ive used both it seems to me that OS related CS3 bugs are fewer on OSX then on XP too!

[bazzle]

Originally Posted by Dusteh

I'll definately be getting the 64bit edition as its the same price as the vanilla version.

I don't know much about it, but a friend of mine bought the 64bit version and he had such a nightmare finding drivers and applications that worked on 64bit vista. For convenience i'd get the 32, I don't think theres a lot of difference.

[H3LLRA1Z3R]

Buy a playstaion3

[haku]

They gave me a sony Vaio with Vista and 2 gigs of ram here in my office. I used it for a week, then went back to my old PC with XP and 1.5 gigs of ram. Vista looked pretty, but annoyed the hell out of me, and was slower than my wife when I'm in a rush to get the fuck out of the house because she's already made us late by doing her make-up for half an hour even though she knew for a week that we had to leave fifteen minutes ago or we would be late.

[abbasinho]

nice haku, nice.

i'd stay clear of vista, it'll throw up a warning everytime you want to use the pen tool.

[Ehab]

if you do end up getting vista, dont ever use the disk cleanup utility (start menu/accesories/system tools or right-clicking my computer). i used it a couple of days ago cause i like keeping my computer clean and organized all the time, almost too much.. but anyways i ran the disk cleanup which i havent done before and found an entry saying 'per user something something'.. offered to delete lots of GBs away so i thought awesome, i mustve overlooked this somehow. so i ran it and im in my computer following how much space is being cleaned up. it went from 30GBs of free space to 60 in a few seconds, then i thought oh shit something must be wrong here and thank god i stopped it then and googled the entry exactly. appears to be a known bug with vista and a lot of ppl have been screwed over by it. i personally think it is unforgivable to allow microsoft to get away with it, disk cleanup is part of the OS, a utility that you should trust and it should never have authority to go and delete everything in your documents and eventually the whole pc if i let it.. but whats one person gonna do ? so anyways, if you do end up getting vista.. be very careful of this dick cleanup bullshit. its completely hazardous and has caused a lot of ppl a lot of damage, me one of them now..