Vist-Grrrr

bigjim

So I buy a new laptop. Cheapest I can find. From Comet with Vista preinstalled. Problem is all my stuuf is from XP and my PC is on XP. To upgrade office etc will cost a bomb and other gear. Old digi camera, psion, old software etc does not want to know. Quite happy to convert new laptop to XP as I have disc but unsure how to do it. I am sure there are quite a lot of buffs out there who know the solution. Please help if you can.

Cheers. Jim

schlepcycling

Your MS Office should work fine on Vista, I have just upgraded my PC from XP to Vista and loaded Office 2003 and it worked fine.

Also you should be able to get all the new Vista drivers you need from the various product websites, the trick is to download them and put them on a memory stick or you can buy an XP to Vista conversion kit which involves a bit of software and a lead which will transfer all your settings etc from your old PC to your new one.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/easytransfer.mspx

Having said that I think Vista is pants :evil: , I'm thinking of going back to XP on my new PC too.

CHRISNOIR

There'll be a Mac user along in a minute to tell you exactly where the problem lies...

cee

schlepcycling wrote:

Having said that I think Vista is pants :evil: , I'm thinking of going back to XP on my new PC too.

Why?

What is it about it you think is pants?

schlepcycling

I had problems reloading applications that were on my XP machine like google earth for instance that even though it downloaded and went through the install wizard pointedly refused to actually load. Also just yesterday I tried to open control panel and when I clicked on it I got control panel but it was empty, so I had to reboot the machine to get it to work, there have been several occasions of it just freezing up and crashing on me necessitating a reboot.

The main problem is that I've set my account up as an administrator but whenever I open certain applications my network and anti-virus software are 2 examples it tells me it can't open these as I need to be an administrator and that I should log on as an admin user to use these applications, so I right click on the icon and choose 'open as administrator'...it's just so f**cking annoying, I've checked my account and I am set up as an admin agent but Vista seems to know better.

Actually I've just remembered the problems I had getting both the Garmin Training Center software and Sporttracks to load, both again go through the install wizard but neither would put an item on the desktop or show up in the applications list, but I could uninstall them both via the control panel, eventually I got them both loaded on about the 3rd time of asking. I had all these things working perfectly in XP.

http://www.vistaisrubbish.com/

bigjim

Thanks for info. Trouble is I wish to keep my PC as it is on XP and be abe to transfer files between each and to be honest I have had a lot of expense already & want to keep things down for a while. Just been ripped off on a diji camera from e-bay. My finepix disc won't work on vista just crashes system and downloads take forever. I don't see the advantage of vista and happy being a luddite, don't see the need. want to spend as little time as poss on computer & more on the bike.

Jim

schlepcycling

bigjim, I don't blame you I wish I'd got XP on my new machine I would have been much happier.

As for converting your new PC back to XP, try googling just that there seems to be loads of people doing the same thing and there's plenty of advice as to how you go about it. As for the XP disc that you have, it may be one of those that came with your old PC if it is it might not be possible to load it onto a different PC as it's supposed to be used for recovery/reload purposes on the original PC. I have the XP disc that came with my other PC but people who know more about this that me have told me that it wont work on my new PC. If you still want to go ahead with loading XP you'll need to buy a copy and that'll be £70+.

Good luck whatever you choose

redddraggon

I like Vista, but I'm running x64 Vista with 4GB of RAM and so don't have any problems. It actually runs better than the XP I had on it previously

When Vista first came out I hated it, but now it's grown on me, I love it. Vista tends to settle down after a couple of weeks and speeds up.

Your office should work aswell.

No one I know personally has had problems with Vista, I think the problems with Vista lie with old outdated drivers (update them) and insufficient hardware.

scwxx77

It's just a matter of inserting cd and restarting pc, making sure the pc boot order is cd drive then hard drive. Then you just follow onscreen instructions.

More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316941

Random Vince

[tolken mac user]

personally, my windows computer is quite annoying, it is XP

if it ever gets upgraded then I'll be waiting until after vista's service pack two has come out to fix the bugs,

its microsoft releaseing half tested software and not bothering to fix some tiny little bugs here and there.

anything is better than windows tbh

redvee

You'll have to formay the HDD and put XP onto you new machine with your recovery disc etc and re-activate XP when install is complete. A simple matter of calling an 0800 number and giving them the 36 digit number onscreen. I done this when I bought my current PC with no OS just used XP that was on my dead laptop. I had to reactivate XP when I doubled the RAM last week too.

il_principe

Arghh I hate Vista, it's just a shoddy attempt at copying Leopard! Leopard on my macbook runs faster than Vista64 Ultimate does on my quad core 4gb pc (yes yes I'm a gamer)!

redddraggon

jashburnham wrote:

Arghh I hate Vista, it's just a shoddy attempt at copying Leopard! Leopard on my macbook runs faster than Vista64 Ultimate does on my quad core 4gb pc (yes yes I'm a gamer)!

When I had only 2GB of RAM, Counterstrike Source and Day of Defeat Source both ran faster (more FPS) under vista x64 than they did with XP. With 4Gb it's even better.

il_principe

Tried Crysis yet? My rig ran it in pretty much full spec - it's a helluva sight!

cee

Everyone says Vista is bug ridden, but.......

Apparently, there are fewer bugs in vista than there were in any previous release of windows, and even fewer bugs (both documented and undocumented) than in the latest release Mac OS.

Macs have an interesting position, in that not just any old company can actually make hardware (or software) for Macs, this makes the development far more closed than in the windows environment and therefor subject to closer control from Apple.

This means that manyof the Mac bugs are never documented (i.e made public), and have fewer hardware/software houses writing code for it, so the public perception is that there are fewer bugs. This is not true.

The driver issue can be a pest, but most of the good hardware vendors have updated their drivers and these are downloadable from the vendors sites. MS is not responsible for third party hardware drivers.

Linux is for hobbyists who want to spend forever recompiling their networking stack. (I do use a linux box to acces my home network from outside.....spod )

I personally run a desktop machine on XP, a work laptop on Vista Business and a media centre on Vista Home Premium and a linux based firewall/ftpserver etc.

I have to say that after installing all of the latest drivers for the various bits of hardware, i have had no problems. I actually even quite like the fact that i am informed whenever an application tries to get ring0. I honestly cannot describe how much time I spend fixing the the linux box after say trying to get a bluetooth device to connect to it.

It does seem that everyone and their dog (whcih is obviously kept on a lead at all times when walking along tow paths), has an opinion about Vista, but like others here, I do not personally know of anyone who has had issues other than the driver thing.

My motto is: Buy what you want - Don't moan about what other people have bought.

redddraggon

jashburnham wrote:

Tried Crysis yet? My rig ran it in pretty much full spec - it's a helluva sight!

It's a good game graphically, but the game play is poor. How many times do you have to shoot a bad guy before they drop?

il_principe

All true but in my experience of running a mac alongside a windows machine, I've had far fewer (none in fact) problems with the Mac compared to the Vista machine. My main issue is althought it runs games very fast it seem sto be quite slow ith general apps, photos and itunes whic makes no sense given how powerful it is. In comparison my little macbook wizzes through application with far less slowdown...

cee

jashburnham wrote:

All true but in my experience of running a mac alongside a windows machine, I've had far fewer (none in fact) problems with the Mac compared to the Vista machine. My main issue is althought it runs games very fast it seem sto be quite slow ith general apps, photos and itunes whic makes no sense given how powerful it is. In comparison my little macbook wizzes through application with far less slowdown...

I suppose thats the thing tho init..

You say you have had zero mac issues and a few vista issues, I have had no vista issues.....the rest I reckon is the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists public opinion. Hell I don't care if someone wants to run RiscOS

Random Vince

cee wrote:

Everyone says Vista is bug ridden, but.......

Apparently, there are fewer bugs in vista than there were in any previous release of windows, and even fewer bugs (both documented and undocumented) than in the latest release Mac OS.

Macs have an interesting position, in that not just any old company can actually make hardware (or software) for Macs, this makes the development far more closed than in the windows environment and therefor subject to closer control from Apple.

This means that manyof the Mac bugs are never documented (i.e made public), and have fewer hardware/software houses writing code for it, so the public perception is that there are fewer bugs. This is not true.

actually, there are a multitude of freewear and open source software for mac,

the disks for the coding of X11 come with each mac, this way, you can make software for the mac which runs through X11.

yes, its not installed on the computer in quite the same way as photoshop for example, but its how i've got open office installed.

amsn works nicely without X11 direct onto the mac.

redddraggon

Macs can't be that good.

All my software engineer friends have x64 Vista on their home computer(linux@work), and my Computer Scientist friend has linux. If it was any better than windows, they'd have it.

iainf72

redddraggon wrote:

Macs can't be that good.

All my software engineer friends have x64 Vista on their home computer(linux@work), and my Computer Scientist friend has linux. If it was any better than windows, they'd have it.

I work in the Windows space - Just about everyone I work with have Mac's at home - It just makes a nice change. I've got both :P

OSX is great. But if you could put it on any hardware and put it in front of the install base of Windows, it would be exactly like Windows. So would all Linux variants.

Real men use Minix3 anyway.

oakins242

Real men don't know what Minix3 is, nor do they care.

Random Vince

if your working programming for the mass market, you use windows,

just like if you're learning to hack computers you start with the windows fire wall

its what people have most common, anyone else is the exception.

I've got a mac partly due to getting fed up with problems with windows (on 95, 98 and XP) and that i'm doing graphic design and was advised to get a mac, they're tailored more towards the visual design industry and so fulfill my needs better than windows does

Shadowduck

cee wrote:

Linux is for hobbyists who want to spend forever recompiling their networking stack.

I run Linux. *waves flag*

Um... What's a networking stack? Should I worry that I've never recompiled mine, assuming I have one? :shock:

Clever Pun

The thing with Vista is it's too dumbed down

I had to turn off the are you really really sure you want to copy/alter anything but now I get security alerts, it's irritating nothing more realistically.

I got it bundled with a new pc and it's not been a problem performance wise

Sadly I's lost my old office installation cd so I started using http://www.openoffice.org/

mmm free

Doobz

Vista is probably the best O/S I have used to date.. I have never had a crash or any faults or bug reports having to be submitted etc.. I think the longest uptime was about 4 months without any issues..

One thing I can say is SP1 for vista was released to manufacturers (RTM) a few days ago and I have it on my machine and it seems to be fine..

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windo ... a-sp1.aspx

I also have a debian machine as my main home server for files and photo's and music etc and vista speaks and shares files with no problems - I am not much of a gamer so can't comment but I have a few mates who think vista kicks ass with the new Direct-X - I think the problem people have with vista is its a change from XP and if their machine is not up to it then they have issues with slow performance etc..