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Originally Posted by BlackArcher101
Exactly Burninator. It's the same every time and the naysayers have no factual reasoning behind their belief it sucks. Mainly just because it is Microsoft. Question, if it was free, would it suck then?
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If I were to put aside subjective things like OS look and feel (which I love, BTW), the OS has extremely poor stability in comparison to it's predecessor particularly if you stress it. That is a big problem. Here are some observations I made, in no particular order, from upgrading to Vista day one until about 2 weeks ago when I finally removed it and moved back to XP:
1) Vista does not overclock as well as XP. Consistently across the board people are achieving lower overclocks with the same hardware configuration from Vista as they were with XP.
2) Vista does not support hardware sound <-- big problem for people that purchased high end sound cards. At least Creative is providing Alchemy for free to bypass this problem, but it's a pain to have to run a separate middleware to get something working that was working before. You have a Turtle Beach or E-MU? Well MS says "Screw you, you now have onboard sound like everyone else!". This isn't a defect, but a design decision, it's supposed to provide a common interface for developers moving forward to develop for sound hardware. They could have provided both so existing consumers don't get screwed.
3) Vista has terrible driver support from the video card manufacturers (nVidia and ATI/AMD). Lower frame rates across the board in the order of 10-15 FPS (although the new nVidia beta driver out right now did a really good job with pulling it within low single digits at least for single GPU configuration). Broken SLI implementation (extremely low framerates in SLI when compared to XP). Ironic how my $1500 DirectX 10 graphics cards don't work properly with the only OS that supports DX10.
4) For those unlucky (such as myself) constant crashing due to the "nVidia driver has stopped responding and successfully recovered" issue that is known to be tied in with the memory management implementation in Vista and how it plays with the nVidia driver - a synchronization issue. I've managed to get a relatively more stable configuration by running the RAM at "Link & Sync" which effectively halves the clock rate of the RAM, though it still crashes in occassion.
5) Dreamscene crashes regularly with fatal error. On that note, let me talk a little on "Vista Ultimate Extras". Pretty pitiful when you're paying 66% more than the next best consumer version at Premium ($500 vs. $300) and the only "extra" since launch is a broken program that allows animated backgrounds. It's like upgrading to the LE model and all it comes with is an extra cup holder which spills your drink sometimes.
OK, OK, I'm exaggerating here, you do get multilingual support (which was the selling feature for me) and a bunch of other features such as bit locker which isn't offered in the junior versions.
As you can see, not all those issues are completely the fault of MS and Vista (i.e. driver instability), but the OS vendor should have adequately worked with the hardware vendors to provide decent working solutions when launching their product. Particularly when they are using DirectX 10 to push their new OS and not having proper DX10 solutions available.
Oh, and if it was free, I'd still roll back to XP and be upset that I wasted a DVD to burn it out. IMO it's not ready for prime time. The Vista experiment is over for me at least until SP1, which probably should actually be the first retail release. The only crappy thing is losing DirectX 10. Oh well, they'll get it right eventually, I just wish they didn't rush the release and screw the early adopters.