Quote from thisnameistaken :

OK, well, I found this, which says Vista is slower than XP. So how did you conclude that it is "much faster than XP", exactly?

I never said anything about speed.
Read again what I said in that very quote you used.

Everyone here already knows XP is slightly faster than Vista. I'm just saying people freak out because Vista is using all of their RAM, well that's what you get for going from XP to Vista, is that you aren't used to that. That's just how Vista works, it isn't using RAM as hard as XP does when XP uses all of it.

Quote from XCNuse :

I never said anything about speed.
Read again what I said in that very quote you used.

So the part where you said Vista was much faster than XP, using those words, you actually never mentioned speed at all? Is there some alternative american definition of the word "faster" that I'm not aware of?

Quote from XCNuse :

Everyone here already knows XP is slightly faster than Vista.

Then - pardon my French - what the **** are you talking about?

To be fair XCNuse IS right, Vista seems to do some sort of program cacheing that makes it use a scary amount of RAM doing "nothing", but from what i've read it DOES release this RAM when it's doing something that needs the extra RAM.

Currently Vista's using 999 MB of RAM with a 148 MB Firefox window, an 80 MB Firefox/Pandora windows, Teamspeak (4 MB), Messenger (7 MB), Profiler (1.6 MB), AVG (Roughly 2 MB) and about 3 mb of other Random crap. So far every service is at default EXCEPT ReadyBoost which is disabled on account of gaining 500 MB of "Disk Cache" on a Pen Drive was costing me almost 100 MB of 1337 Ballistix RAM.

It's NO quicker than XP in operation, but it does boot a little quicker and appear to be more stable. Aero is nice, Flip3D is UTTERLY pointless (at least i've used it once and gone "wow thats nice" and then just used Alt+Tab 'cause it's quicker), the little "Document Preview" if you hover over an icon on the taskbar is nice (esp seeing as it works for stuff like LFS with great framerates, the Sidebar is nice but doesn't do anything for me personally.

"UAC" is a fecking PITA ("Hey, you double clicked an icon, are you SURE you want to do that"? "Yes! Thats why i double clicked it!" "Hey, a programs trying to run - are you SURE you opened this program?" "YES!" "This program wants to open. Will you let it?" {UAC DISABLED} :P), useful for n00bs, but tbh even THEY will get annoyed and turn it off.

You don't need a great PC for Vista but you WILL want 2 GB of RAM - it doesn't use much CPU (even with all my crap open i'm using 3% of my CPU) but it DOES use a lot of RAM.

/me goes hunting for services.

Quote from CSU1 :

mac's are great for documents is all, my gf uses one and it don't even got a fan. Its shite for anything else, and paid through the nose for it too.

IMO the mac is a tool for the office and does it well, normal notebooks are too bulky and in a sense just do too damn much(too much goes wrong)...all the extra gingles that come on standard intel/windows notebooks just makes for a bulkier overworked gingle box, if I had bought the gf the same notebook as me I would have no doubt whatsoever that she would be wrecking my head every day to fix stuff on it.

With the mac its different, you plug it in and it just does it in a primative but user friendly way....but dont rely on any sort of excitement from it lol...is just for excel documents and webby surfingIMO blah blah blah...

You do realize that OS X, or any Apple OS ever made in the past, has been intended for quite the opposite. If it's charts, Office and the web you desire, windows is the way to go.
I've been a mac user for quite a long time (as I need it for my line of work) and it's close to perfect OS in terms of all things creative.
No fuss, you never think about the OS itself nor about stability.
It let's you use almost every bit of your hardware to accomplish the task at hand rather then waste a gig or two on looking pretty.

I'm no fanboy by any terms as I believe that one should not need to limit oneself to one single OS. I use OS X for design, Pre-press and photography post processing, XP Pro for gaming and debian for coding/fun.

In terms of MS windows, the best OS I've ever used is XP pro as it's as stable as Win OS gets without being hungry for your resources (at least after some mild tweaking).
Vista looks great but thats been it for me. When it manages to look great AND do it's job I'll gladly delete my XP pro partition.

IMO, any OS needing close to a gig just to exist is beyond me.

So essentially that memory it's using doing nothing is all the preload cache then, meaning (in theory) programs should load faster? That's not so bad then. I was worried it was using that much just to do nothing

UAC sounds particularly annoying. I find XPs seemingly endless confirmation boxes a pain, I shudder to think what I'd say if I was getting spammed with "are you sure" messages when I tried to do stuff.

I'm not so scared of the upgrade after reading this lot. Well, unless you could unsupported drivers and the risk of some stuff not working, but that's another matter...

UAC takes all of about 10 seconds and a restart to disable to be fair.

I can't comment on if anything loads faster as i'm running a MUCH faster PC than i was on XP, but everything loads pretty fecking quick (But then on this it should).

Drivers weren't too hard, every now and again you'd find you've downloaded the 32-bit/non Vista version and have to go and hunt down the correct version, but the only major problems i've got is the nVidia drivers (Which the older 158.22's have fixed).

Now - Which version do you want? Home Premium should easily be enough, but 32-bit or 64-bit?

Can't speak for speed1, but I'd definitely be after x64. I'm running an Athlon64 AM2 (only single core though), so it makes sense to try and optimise for it. Whether it'd make any difference or not is anyone's guess.

I'd prefer to go for Ultimate, but not at the price they're asking for it, especially since I'd probably end up needing 2 copies when my girlfriend saw it I guess Home Premium would be the one I'd be looking at.

For me, the ONLY thing Ultimate has over Home Premium is "DreamScene" which you can get a hacked version of from the net anyway - i'd like to be able to appear 1337 with my copy of "Vista Ultimate", but the £53 i've saved by "down grading" to Vista Home Premium has paid for 2 extra cores

Quote from Jakg :

EDIT - PB3200 - 32-Bit can support up to 4 GB of memory, but you ALSO have to include GFX memory, Sound Memory and various PCI stuff in that, giving you roughly 2.75-3.25 GB of RAM. With apps using over 2 GB of RAM, Vista x64 is imo a MUCH better idea

Ahh I stand corrected. I did feel 1GB of ram was a bit too low with Vista tbf.

Loading apps in Vista is definately faster for me than in XP. For instance, Firefox launches pretty much instant in Vista, whereas in XP it takes a couple of seconds.

Apart from the post above me, I've read through this whole thread and I couldn't see anything which hinted Vista was a better OS choice. There'll be plenty of 'are you sure' by the time I get around to upgrading, I'm telling you!

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Apart from the post above me, I've read through this whole thread and I couldn't see anything which hinted Vista was a better OS choice.

Okay, Vista is a better choice for a new machine. Xaotik's post may explain it with a lot of bitter (and good quality ) humour, but he's spot on. Preinstalled OEM XP machines are increasingly hard to find, XP has already had (possibly) the longest life cycle of every Microsoft product, there has been a lot of hype about Vista and you can expect harder pushes to shove this OS down the throat of unwilling people, considering sales aren't up to expectations at the moment. This won't happen anytime soon, but in a few months Vista will be your only choice. My advice would be to stick with XP until you're forced to upgrade if you have an old machine, and start with Vista if you buy a new machine.

I know this sucks, but that's the way most software vendors work. And although I dislike some of the intrusive things in Vista it isn't a bad OS, certainly not worse than XP, and not worse than 2000. All things considered, they all share their NT ancestor.

My vista seems to run a lot nippier faster yet better after the performance and reliability patch and seems to eat less ram even though i have installed kaspersky internet security and bunch of 3ds max license services but disabled the tablet pc service here is a screenie and see it only uses 30% ram and used a lot less cpu than the previous screenie i posted in jakgs' post about sidebar

Quote from Jakg :

For me, the ONLY thing Ultimate has over Home Premium is "DreamScene" which you can get a hacked version of from the net anyway - i'd like to be able to appear 1337 with my copy of "Vista Ultimate", but the £53 i've saved by "down grading" to Vista Home Premium has paid for 2 extra cores

...hold on...i got ultimate...whats this dreamScene thingy? and how do I tell if i have 32bit or 64bit thingy too?

DreamScene is essentially a video wallpaper.
Go to your display settings, background, and in the drop down list of wallpapers locations, you'll find DreamScene listed.
If you've downloaded the various updates available you should have at least 5 of them available. There are more available if you hunt around, but I've not bothered doing that as yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DreamScene

To find if 32 or 64 bit:
Run -> control system

DreamScene - Set a video as a wallpaper (Tides, Volcano's, "other stuff"...)

To see which version of Vista ya got - Right Click "Computer">Properties>"System Type" - at least in Vista x64 it says "64-bit Operating System"

ok sorry for the obvious questions....

Going back to Dajmins question "can all the crap be turned off? I have no need for stupid weather updates (I have RL window to see that), I don't use my PC to play or organise movies or photos, I don't need RSS feeds or pretty much any of the sidebar gadgets. I know I won't get rid of the "pretty-but-essentially-pointless" 3D alt-tab system, but I only need basic functionality. I'd love to turn off like 90% of the new features.
Is this possible? And if you can turn them off, does it improve performance at all? "

...im sure I speak for most to say all these 'whistles and bells' are fun, they greet us when we first sit at our machine serving there purpose within the first minute or two of boote.

My problem is; I want to be able to control envoirment(running services/processes) in profiles... press one button and all the bell's and gingles go away, ready for LFS

Is there such software? envoirment profiles and stuff for vista...or even XP for that matter?

I got Vista Ultimate 32-Bit and few months ago i thought about switching back to XP, but I haven't done that and I won't anymore, because patience is key here. So I would say, just keep your computer up to date and....yeah anyways, right now with firefox open, it takes 511MB of ram right now, I've never had 900MB ram usage, maximus what I've had is about 720MB. As said before already, just for sure, take good 2GB ram too

PS: Excuse my inability to make normal sentences

I hate to be a pain but how do you justify having your OS use 511MB to run itself and a browser? Under any normal circumstances that should be less then 200 TOPS unless I'm misunderstanding the way Vista deals with memory.

Quote from gohfeld23 :

I hate to be a pain but how do you justify having your OS use 511MB to run itself and a browser? Under any normal circumstances that should be less then 200 TOPS unless I'm misunderstanding the way Vista deals with memory.

With AVG, UltraMon, SpeedFan running:

Quote from Jakg :

With AVG, UltraMon, SpeedFan running:

Your windows uses healthy 2GB of memory for those, pretty insane...

3 Vista machines decided to get blue screen at boot, only reinstalling helped and now all runs ok again, waiting next week with terror. (15 of them in total)

It doesn't use 2GB just to keep them programs open. It uses it to cache other (commonly used) applications in RAM, so they start up faster. People seriously need to look into Vista's memory management (including SuperFetch, which is responsible for the caching) before they complain about high RAM usage

If anyone is on the fence and thinking of Vista one word of warning, as it's not exactly in big glowing letters. The OEM version is much cheaper (as usual) but any significant hardware change will result in a call to MS to get it re-activated. I had an OEM copy and simply changing the power supply resulted in it de-activating itself.
If you plan on doing regular upgrades I'd avoid OEM unless you don't mind the hassle. If you have the OEM on a pre-built box I'd imagine you'll be in the same boat.

ps. I have to say they didn't complain when I did re-activate, but it's something I couldn't be bothered with every time I changed something.

Quote from JohnUK89 :

It doesn't use 2GB just to keep them programs open. It uses it to cache other (commonly used) applications in RAM, so they start up faster. People seriously need to look into Vista's memory management (including SuperFetch, which is responsible for the caching) before they complain about high RAM usage

That 1360MB was not added it was subtracted from usage of ram when I did calculate it...

And why in hell I would like to use 1GB or more of my memory to get some application to load faster when application I'm currently using is going to struggle because of that illepall

It does not change status of bloatware if those bloatfeatures are having fancy names

It is bit like bridge that says can carry 300 tons, but 250tons is used by bridge itself