Eric the Red

King, your post really made me think about if I get vista through school too. So I called up the IT dept in our school. It turns out we do get it.

Its funny because they don't advertise it, you have to actually call the department up and then send them an email to get your copy with a Cd-key.

I'm going to get the copy and key from the school and install it in a years time.

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alphonso

I've been running Vista Business edition ever since its release here, which was February 3. In my opinion, there were some things that make Vista better than XP; case in point, we all remember what happened in the 1st year of XP - a lot of errors were always popping out - however, ever since my installation, I have found no errors; none I can think of anyway, but there was definitely no BSODs. Here's a hint though, if only one account is being used in your PCs; disable the User Account Control; it's so annoying. I also noticed that Vista boots faster than XP, and it provides better security than XP. The major disadvantage I found on Vista was that it's so new, developers are still making programs for it. For example, if you download ZoneAlarm firewall and run the Setup, it will say that the firewall is not built for Windows Vista, or something like that. By the way, if you want to get Vista at about half price, I suggest going for the OEM, if you don't mind all the other fancies that's inside. Here's my rig:

AMD Sempron 2600+ (yeah you got that right; a budget Sempron running Vista)
ECS K8M800
1 gig RAM DDR
NVidia MX440 128 M 64 bit

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Polyphemus_

Here's a brief review of my Vista experiences :

I recently bought a Macbook Pro, and installed Vista next to Mac OS. Vista doesn't run entirely stable (I've had 2 blue screens already), but I guess this is due to the fact that Vista was not designed for Macbooks, and Bootcamp's drivers are still in beta state, of course.

I must say the graphics of Vista are not bad, though they tend to get slightly annoying after 3 days... When compared to Mac OS, Vista resembles much of a fair. When sitting a few hours in front of your PC, it gets quite busy for your eyes. But that's a matter of opinion.

One thing I noticed is that Vista is continuously reading / writing to your hard disk. This can't be swapping, as I have 2 GB ram and I wasn't doing anything heavy.
Also, the boot time of Vista has not significantly improved over previous versions of Windows. Especially compared to Mac OS - which needs only about 20 seconds to boot (yes, I timed it...) - Windows needs time.

When configuring and installing drivers I got rather annoyed with finding the right buttons and thingies. In the control panel, all options are spread over a number of categories, but not in a way which makes much sense. Next to that, a number of dialogs are still as small as the Windows 95, and cannot be resized. I have a 17" and a 23" monitor with high resolutions, so those windows tend to get unnecessarily small.

I guess the security has improved, though sometimes it is rather pathetic. If I open WinRAR, my display goes dark, and a dialog pops up whether I'm sure I trust this program. Also, when installing, you get a number of these dialogs. Very annoying, as I like to do other things when installing, and not staring at my screen waiting for these dialogs (which make the installation program hang for about 30 seconds, before anything happens). I have not yet made time to find this little checkbox hidden behind 15 buttons to turn this function off.

Generally, Vista didn't really impress me. It has some nice additions, but Mac OS impressed me a lot more (both in prestations and accessibility). Now don't get bitchy because I would be a Mac fanboy, because I honestly keep things real for myself .

Anyway, if you think about switching from XP to Vista... I would wait for the Service Pack, if I were you.

Ooble

Am I the only one here who likes Vista?

It feels like advertising, but I wrote an article a couple days ago about why, though it's not the best OS around, it's light-years ahead of XP. Clicky.

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DaWei

I suspect that the variety of opinions will be spread across a spectrum ranging from the technological cognisenti to the lovers of eyecandy and "I gots me the latest".

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Jimbo

I can't say whether I like it or not. Couldn't get the darn thing to install. Maybe I'll try again when the quarter ends.

Nice read on the article btw, though I think one point you (and everyone else defending them) never seem to mention is that Vista maintains better backwards compatibility with earlier systems than OSX did with OS<=9. Apple pretty much cut everything off and started from new, whereas Microsoft has allowed for a more gradual change. Admittedly, it's not perfectly backwards compatible, but that's probably a good thing too.

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pal

Improved voice recognition feature is nice, gui looks interesting...
but I won't be getting it any time soon, because linux is more convenient for me. I'll just use it when my school changes all the computers to vista.

Ooble

I have to say the thought never popped into my widdle mind. I'll point it out if it becomes relevant.

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a thing

VistaP ! :: MacOS9:MacOSX

Underneath, Mac OS X has nothing to do with Mac OS <X.

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Jimbo

Yeah, that was kinda my point

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