SillyDog701

[iJohnE]

Very interesting article:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=849

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081204 SeaMonkey/1.1.14

[James]

I enjoyed the article, John. Thanks. It's definite that our company will NOT be moving over to Vista. On a personal basis, when my wife and I bought our computers this past summer, they came with Vista so we simply accepted it. Do I like Vista? Not particularly. We have fast computers and there's not the slowness issue. I simply don't care for the way they "moved things around". But then... that could be a product of my age! LOL

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5

[Edward]

People seem to be happy with the way XP is performing, so why should they bother to upgrade?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081204 SeaMonkey/1.1.14

[iJohnE]

Call me a person, of, well, lacking upgrade standards, but I actually prefer 2000.

I mean, I am an Admin at school, and everybody complained when we upgraded to XP, including myself, simply because our hardware couldn't handle it.

But now we are looking at switching over to Vista during the summer, and this is simply something that I do not want to do.

I mean, on the computer I have on my desk in the IT department where I spend most of my studyhalls and after school time, I requested to have 2000 Pro installed, and it seems to work nicely with the XP system.

So, I know personally, on all computers that I own, except for the one my parents got which has Vista Basic (In my opinion XP with a better theme) on it, I will be sticking with either XP (Only if I have to) and def. 2000 pro.


Vista=Eww!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

[iJohnE]

I love how I am dissing Vista, while I am using it.


(I'm on my Aunt's laptop, which has Vista Home Premium on it. Ick!)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

[Edward]

Since you're in an educational environment, have you looked at Edubuntu?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081204 SeaMonkey/1.1.14

[Mandrake]

Vista is far better than any previous version of Windows. All this nonsense about Vista needing the very latest hardware to run and being far slower than XP is just BS, plain and simple.

I've run Vista on an old Pentium 4 2.8GHz with a Radeon 9700 Pro GPU and 2GB memory with no problems. You know, the same sort of gear that was state of the art about six years ago. Even on that old relic, the performance was very satisfactory.

On decent hardware, Vista matches or exceeds the performance in XP. With a GeForce GTX 260 I get a higher score in 3DMark and a higher frame rate in games like Call of Duty 4. Applications load more quickly thanks to Superfetch.

Finally, there's simply no denying that Vista takes better advantage of the latest hardware. The x64 version of XP has very poor hardware support for third party peripherals and - so Vista x64 is really the only choice to take advantage of more than 4GB ram. Vista also supports Direct X 10 - something else that is missing on XP. Some of the latest technologies are also Vista only. For instance, running three or four GPUs in either SLI or Crossfire is only supported in Windows Vista.

I run Vista x64 on a Core 2 Duo CPU with 8GB memory and I'll never go back to XP. It's just a decidedly inferior experience on the same hardware.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5

[iJohnE]

Since you're in an educational environment, have you looked at Edubuntu?

I actually have Edubuntu installed on one of the testbed PCs, right next to the one with Vista Enterprise, and the Mac.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5

[richard mitnick]

I am really tired of all of the Vista negativity. I was going to stay away from this this thread, but I want to support Mandrake.

I have two Vista machines, a Dell XPS M1710 Core 2 Duo laptop running Vista Business; and a Dell XPS 410 Core 2 Duo desktop running Vista Home Premium. I think they are both fantastic machines running a great O/S.

On the one hand, I do not like how Microsoft handled default programs and file types, moving them into their own areas. So, for example, file types for WMP no longer show up in WMP, but in the new area established for file types of all sorts. So, sure, learning curve for me, it took about two weeks to get used to it. But, I bet that there were people screaming for this to happen.

The business about slowness of Vista is a canard. Most people in blogs and critics in magazines compared two brandy new machines, one with XP Pro and one with Vista. But, that is not how people or companies buy machines. More typically, they replace machines when they get relatively old and relatively slow with respect to the hardware. I was replacing two aging PIII's with CPU's of about a gig and 512 megs of DRAM. My new machines both have CPU's of about 2.5 gigs and 2 gigs of DRAM. The difference between XP and Vista on the new machines would pale in comparison with the difference between XP on the old and new machines.

The only problems I had were with two 3rd party providers. One, Epson, solved the problem a week after I got my machines. The other, High Criteria, finally solved the problems it had with Vista, specifically with DirectX 10, and got Total Recorder, an mp3 recorder software suite, running only three or four months ago. My I/T friend says the 3rd party thing was the biggest lax on Microsoft's part. He says it is their fault that Vista met with such negativity, because MSFT failed to ride heard on the 3rd party app people, a failure that it had never committed before Vista.

So, Mandrake, march on.

>>RSM

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5 ImageShackToolbar/5.0.0

[James]

Add my support to Mandrake as well. As I mentioned earlier, "on a personal basis, my wife and I purchased two Dell computers this past summer which came bundled with Vista." We've experienced absolutely no perceived slowdown nor have we had any other issues with our operating systems. In fact, we love the multi-media center which makes working with digital images a pleasure. Just my two cents.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5

[iJohnE]

Okay, so I have been playing around with my Aunt's HP laptop which also came with Vista.


And so far it is running well.

I apologize to anyone I may have offended, and I am in fact looking into getting Vista myself.

UserAgent: Opera/9.63 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en) Presto/2.1.1

[richard mitnick]

Hey! John! No offense taken!!

That is the joy of SillyDog. Explore the possibilities. We all gain. And, my young friend, we gain by your presence.

>>RSM

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5 ImageShackToolbar/5.0.0

[iJohnE]

Hey! John! No offense taken!!

That is the joy of SillyDog. Explore the possibilities. We all gain. And, my young friend, we gain by your presence.

>>RSM

Thanks. I was talking with Don, and was asking him if it was in my right to switch over to Vista on my new laptop. However he said for the stuff I do, that it is not really the right thing to do, and to stick with either 2000 Pro or the XP Pro it comes with.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5

[iJohnE]

Since you're in an educational environment, have you looked at Edubuntu?

The only thing is, the IT management team I am a part of, with for grades 9-12.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.26.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2 Safari/525.26.13

[Edward]

I was trying to find a Linux distribution that I could run fairly well on my Pentium/166 system and once tried the LiveCD of Edubuntu 8.04 without actually installing it.

I went back to running Mandriva Linux on it, but after tweaking this and that, I have it running better. I made the same changes to the Mandriva installation on my K6-2/500. What a difference!

I don't think either the K6-2 or Pentium systems would meet the minimum system requirements for Vista.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081204 SeaMonkey/1.1.14