[Razer]

I have to agree, it's all the useful Vista features (or both of them, haha) with all the functionality of XP now.

It is truly a fantastic operating system. I keep finding things I like after a good week of fiddling and browsing!

[Mike0001]

6. Looks like Linux

[Razer]

Originally Posted by philthomas

Well .... I have never been a M$ fanboy and must say that I had many quarms about Vista. I still challenge anyone to make a case for what Vista brought, that XP didn't, other than eye candy.

Despite it ate about 4 terabytes of RAM sat idling, Vista's memory management was far superior to XP's. While it sat idle using lots of RAM, it could cut off and move it's own non essential services to the swapfile where XP would just dump the new application in the paging file (Even gave it a new name, isn't that nice).

Vista also had a much more user friendly interface, I found. Assuming you didn't get blocked every 16 seconds from UAC, things were easy and swift to navigate to. That being said, I still forget Add/Remove programs is now Programs and Features.

Start search, while a bit clunky, was a brilliant feature! I never lost anything using that and half of the commands which usually require the "Run" context menu can be run from the start menu, saving that little bit of time.

I think, after the trillions of bugs, Vista did eventually become a good operating system. Lots of things were badly implemented but they were fixed. I think it's now worthy to buy over XP, personally. It's just taken way too long to get to where it is. And with the now released Windows 7, Vista can be confided to the archives at Microsoft.

The old OS order was Vista > XP > 7. Now I think Vista has taken its rightful place in the middle. Alas, nobody in their right mind would but it over Windows 7 now..

[Mike0001]

Originally Posted by Razer

The old OS order was Vista > XP > 7. Now I think Vista has taken its rightful place in the middle. Alas, nobody in their right mind would but it over Windows 7 now..

You mean XP > Vista > 7? or XP < Vista < 7?

[Carbon]

Vista is a superior OS to XP, and had it been executed at launch the way it was clearly intended (as of right now), it wouldn't have been so anemic as far as market share.

The improvement to search and indexing was remarkable. Folder navigation was vastly superior. From an interface standpoint Vista was a major step up. Caching wasn't quite ready for systems with 1-2GB of RAM max, though, and there needed to be more PR telling people the fact that all their RAM is gone is not a bug with the OS.

UAC wasn't implemented very well, but the ability for Limited Users to finally be a viable alternative to setting every user to Administrator was a security jump.

A lot of enthusiasts think OS releases based on user interface enhancements are a joke. They're not - this is why Apple does so well, Linux does so poorly, and Windows (and partially the PC in general) has its reputation as being finicky but workable. The FUD on Vista quickly outweighed its actual downsides, especially as SP1 was released, and I'm glad 7 isn't a step back.

[Mike0001]

Not sure I entirely agree with all that. The security enhancement of Vista was cack handed at most, and akin to the sudo command in linux but without a password.

If user interfaced won the day then linux would be king, but there is too much FUD coming from Apple and M$. Which other OS allows you to choose your windows manager before login and have entirely different GUIs ranging from minimal (command line) to economical (light-weight windowing) to positively baroque (all those wobbly windows, rippling desktops, etc) but STILL be able to run it all with minimal resources? Certainly not Apple and M$!

No, let's face it, the marketing guys are kings in the domestic market. Windows 7 is only one more step towards Unix, just as OS X was just one skin and one windows manager for Unix!