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tmuir

Vista SP1

For those that use Vista SP1 has just been released to windows update so hopefully once I've installed it I will see an improvement across a number of issues.
johnreid

I went back to XP
Nick

When I bought a new computer, the only option was vista. I hated it. My scanner would not work, I had troubles with my printer. I too went back to XP.
mogogear

I have to say - I am so happy with XP- I am going to be sad when I have to dump the home computer and am faced with the reality that all new ones will have Vista..I am trying to hold on till the new ones have only improved and a more glitch-less Vista pre-loaded...

Fingers crossed~
Nick

Don't you just wish they'd leave good things the way they are?
Reid

ncseverson wrote:
Don't you just wish they'd leave good things the way they are?

eh? talk a little louder?

Bill Gates is READY to respond to all needs, wanted or not:
Reid

hand cranked cell phone






I love Vista!  I love Vista!  (I say this every day, hoping to convince myself).

Though, seriously, it crashes less than XP did for me.
I have no hardware issues because I don't have old peripherals, or any peripherals for that matter.

It looks pretty, this Vista.  I should love Vista.   I'd rather, though, kiss a cane toad.
Nick

Things do need change though, even though I don't like them right away. Eventually XP will be too outdated and I will have a program I like better.

I still have a computer with Windows 95 on it and I don't see how I ever thought that was any good. 10 years from now, I'll think the same about XP.
MTA

I use XP, and have no plans whatsoever to upgrade to Vista.

Although I plan on getting a laptop soon and they all seem to come with Vista
tmuir

Reid wrote:
ncseverson wrote:
Don't you just wish they'd leave good things the way they are?

eh? talk a little louder?

Bill Gates is READY to respond to all needs, wanted or not:


LOL I have two of those in my workshop waiting for me to restore, they are going to be used for the 'intercom' from the house to my workshop.    

Just installed SP1, only took an hour.
I changed to Vista recently as I got sick of having to ring up India to activate my XP every time I reinstalled it.
Actually I don't mind Vista for the most part and it actually got my printer working again which was something XP couldn't do after I upgraded my motherboard but on the down side it killed my scanner but to be fair my scanner is nine years old.
johnreid

I never had XP crash, some Apps crash but not XP. I tried Vista on this very Computer and it would lock up, half of my hardware was no longer useful. I just am very satisfied with XP. I wish that they had concentrated on improving XP as opposed to replacing it.
The wosre operating systems I ever used were Windows 3.0 and a short venture into using Millennium, I rate Vista with them.
tmuir

johnreid wrote:
I never had XP crash, some Apps crash but not XP. I tried Vista on this very Computer and it would lock up, half of my hardware was no longer useful. I just am very satisfied with XP. I wish that they had concentrated on improving XP as opposed to replacing it.
The wosre operating systems I ever used were Windows 3.0 and a short venture into using Millennium, I rate Vista with them.



SHHH, don't ever mention the M word, as Microsoft sure doesn't.  
Yes if your computer is more than a year old don't put Vista on it as it will only give you grief. One feature I did like with Vista though after I installed it I had to manually install the driver for my network port to get the internet going but after that it found all the latest drivers for all my hardware on the web, downloaded then and installed them which saved me about an hours work visiting all the vendors sites to get the new drivers. But I must admit I only bought Vista in January as I knew SP1 was coming on within a couple of months and I have been avoiding it before until they worked out all the bugs. But now on my fairly new PC it works well. I also like the 'gadgets' as they call them as I have one set up that gives me the current temperature for my area and weather forecasts real time.

I still have the start bar in classic view and the same with the control panel and I have turned off the 'smart' menus as well.
Nick

You won't want that intercom in your workshop when you keep getting called on it and it keeps you from working.
tmuir

ncseverson wrote:
You won't want that intercom in your workshop when you keep getting called on it and it keeps you from working.


Its alright if that becomes a problem I just turn on some load equipment and wear ear defenders.  
Mamodman123

The original Windows 98 was terrible     SE was great though  
Mister Occlusion

Ah, to be honest I have a Pentium4 testbed at my feet that still has Vista RC1 on it and I've not put more than an hour on it (mainly because the KVM is wanky and I don't feel like thumping it right now).

That's the sum total of my Vista experience, other than putting Office 2003 on a secretary's home laptop (she wanted to backdate from the horribly interface paradigm-shifted Office 2007).

I didn't much care for it.

I don't like bling.. I don't even like the word "bling"  (offends me that they put it in the dictionary).  I run my XP machines with a custom windows 2000 theme that I've used for years - which is bog-standard win2k but with all of the bright colours muted.  It's ordinary and that's what I like - along with the old Win98 style start menu (I laugh at all of these Make Your XP Look Like Vista programs, as if Vista were the greatest thing to happen to the GUI since Xerox invented it and Apple stole it).

I digress...

My workstation doesn't crash.  I reboot my PC when I feel like it, maybe every 2 or 3 months.

When I buy new hardware I will probably run server 2003 as a workstation OS rather than switch to Vista.

Sounds corny, but it's perfectly doable, and s2k3 is one hell of a nice OS.  And it can be just about as lightweight as XP if you aren't running any server services.

I still miss win98 sometimes.  There are all manner of third party service packs for 98SE that are still being updated to this day.  Despite official support ending MS has still released unofficial hotfixes for various issues.  98 is a perfectly viable OS for that old Pentium 3 system with 256megs of RAM (or less).

It's not *great*, but it does the job.

When I have time at work I will arse about with Vista and see how it behaves on the network.  But, really, why would we run something that won't even install on 80% of our systems, and bring a further 18% of them to their knees?

Hell, we're *finally* getting hardware that can run XP and our horrible antivirus system at a decent performance level (avoid Panda: It's big, fat, and full of useless fluff, just like their mascot).
tmuir

To be honest since I've installed Vista (about 2 1/2 months ago) I haven't had one windows crash, I've had other apps crash but less than they did on XP.

My 9 or 10 year old SCSI flatbed scanner won't work with Vista but it onlu did with XP after a lot of tweaking and my printer works with Vista and it wouldn't work with XP after I replaced my motherboard.

SO for compatibility for me Vista was as good as XP and has a few extra features I like. My PC is fairly new and has 2 gig of memory but I do like Vista. I wouldn't recommend going out and buying Vista just for the sake of it but if you are getting a new desktop that has decent specs don't be afraid of it.

I've built my own computers since the XT days so I have turned off a number of Vista's automated features but for someone who is buying a new computer and doesn't know a lot about how they work Vista is great and for power users some of the new features of Vista are great especially as SP1 has sped up disk access by about 20%.
Mamodman123

Can't remember the last time my PC locked up on XP

Hard drive is almost full too but it just keeps going and going!    

95 and 98 always used to get the blue screen of death or lock up  . Still better than a mac

The good old days    
Steamgirl

Mamodman123 wrote:
Can't remember the last time my PC locked up on XP

Hard drive is almost full too but it just keeps going and going!    


Sounds like this one - I've got a 20Gb HD and got to only having less than 1Gb free at one point, and all it did was a message telling me I was running low on space.

However... I have a new PC being built by a friend's son,  and being both cheap and suspicious of Vista, I asked him to just reinstall the XP from this one, as it's perfectly OK for what I want.  Problem is, I gave him the three disks that came with this one, for loading XP and Office, and he can only find an OEM key for the Office.  We've searched my hard drive and come up with a key, but that won't work.  I begrudge paying out for another copy of XP when I already have one, so does anyone know a way round this?

(I really don't care about the Office, I use OpenOffice anyway, so it's annoying that the key for that works!)
Sandman

Steamgirl wrote:
Mamodman123 wrote:
Can't remember the last time my PC locked up on XP

Hard drive is almost full too but it just keeps going and going!    


Sounds like this one - I've got a 20Gb HD and got to only having less than 1Gb free at one point, and all it did was a message telling me I was running low on space.

However... I have a new PC being built by a friend's son,  and being both cheap and suspicious of Vista, I asked him to just reinstall the XP from this one, as it's perfectly OK for what I want.  Problem is, I gave him the three disks that came with this one, for loading XP and Office, and he can only find an OEM key for the Office.  We've searched my hard drive and come up with a key, but that won't work.  I begrudge paying out for another copy of XP when I already have one, so does anyone know a way round this?

(I really don't care about the Office, I use OpenOffice anyway, so it's annoying that the key for that works!)


On your old machine go into My Computer.
Then click on View System Information
You'll get your serial number on the window that opens.

Good Luck.

Sandy.
johnreid

If you decide to call Microsoft, tell them that you were only replacing the hard drive, nothing else and lost your numbers. It might work. If you tell them you are replacing the Motherboard or the whole computer they will only help by selling you a new copy of Vista.

Look for the paperback book that came with XP the number is probably on its cover, if not, it would be on the CDs jewel case or on a sticker that was stuck onto the computer that fell off when the computer got warm.

Write all of those numbers down, and place them with all of your Restore disks in a ZipLock Bag and store that in tour PCs case. If it needs work in the future all of that stuff is there for whomever does the work.
Mister Occlusion

The number in system properties isn't the product key, just to point out.

If you know where to look in the registry, you can find it (and even I can't remember where the hell it is)

Go to Majorgeeks.com and search for Windows Key Finder.  There are dozen of freeware programs that will pull your installation keys for windows/office/etc.

Here's one (I've never used this particular one)

http://www.majorgeeks.com/geProduct_Key_Finder_d5478.html

It has to be run on the system that is running the windows that you want the key from.  IE: you can't put your hard drive from the old PC into the new PC and pull the key from it if the new PC is running Windows on its own hard drive.

Now where you might run into a problem is with Product Activation.

If you do not have a corporate version of XP, it will have to be reactivated on the new PC.  Now, the activation counter resets after something like 120 days, so if your old PC hasn't had windows reinstalled within the last 4 months (or otherwise forced you to reactivate due to a hardware change) you should be able to reactivate XP on the new one.
If not, then you can call the phone number provided, tell them you are junking the old PC, and they will give you an activation code for the new one, since it is perfectly legal to transfer the license to a new system (though it might not be if you've got a Dell or some other OEM brand and are moving to a different brand or beige box: those licenses might NOT be transferable).


Here's another tip.  If you do not want to reinstall from scratch, it is possible to o put your old drive in the new PC and run XP in repair mode.  This essentially purges the old HAL (think of it as the core hardware drivers) and installs a clean one that will allow windows to boot, whereupon you can install your new hardware drivers.

You will have to reapply all of the updates and service packs again, and some of your software may be broken until you do (for me Nero was fussy about that), but it can save you the hassle of reinstalling fresh.  Personally I prefer clean installs.

To run this repair, you boot from the XP cd.  When the initial screen comes up asking if you want to install or repair, select Install.  
It will go a few more screens and then detect your hard drive.  IF there is nothing wrong with your old windows and the drive is not corrupted in any way it will show you your C-drive with a windows directory on it, and it will ask you if you want to install a new copy of windows, or try to repair the current one.  This is where you can choose Repair.  The first time I did this it scared the crap out of me because it looked exactly like a normal XP set up session and I thought it had wiped the drive.  No worries, though: it's doing what it's supposed to.

Just wait the half hour or so and you should see your initial boot screen.  Then get all of your motherboard and peripheral drivers installed, grab the service packs from windows update, and you're golden.

This also works on Windows 2000
Steamgirl

Thanks for the tips, everyone. I'll show them to Mark and see what he says, because it's almost another language for me!  
Mister Occlusion

Ah, a computer geek named Mark.  That fills me with great confidence
TE1A_man

If you need your win xp cd key, you can download belarc advisor, it will tell you everything about your computer, Including what updates you are missing.
I don't have the link, i would just google it. But, im still running xp sp2 on my new amd athlon 64 3200+ that i built as a gaming rig. No troubles except sometimes when running a cpu intense program and speedfan at the same time, it will cause a SMbus error, and run my cpu at 100% until i restart. Im thinking of running vista buisness so i can run DX10 on my nvidia 8600GT to get more FPS on call of duty 4. But from what i've heard, it dosen't help much unless you have a dual core processor. So i just overclock my processor from 2.2ghz to 2.4 and call it good. Bought a new heatsink so i can bump it up to 2.6ghz, and 2048mb of ram to upgrade from the slow 512mb. Almost as fast as a core 2 duo.
Mamodman123

TE1A_man wrote:
If you need your win xp cd key, you can download belarc advisor, it will tell you everything about your computer, Including what updates you are missing.
I don't have the link, i would just google it. But, im still running xp sp2 on my new amd athlon 64 3200+ that i built as a gaming rig. No troubles except sometimes when running a cpu intense program and speedfan at the same time, it will cause a SMbus error, and run my cpu at 100% until i restart. Im thinking of running vista buisness so i can run DX10 on my nvidia 8600GT to get more FPS on call of duty 4. But from what i've heard, it dosen't help much unless you have a dual core processor. So i just overclock my processor from 2.2ghz to 2.4 and call it good. Bought a new heatsink so i can bump it up to 2.6ghz, and 2048mb of ram to upgrade from the slow 512mb. Almost as fast as a core 2 duo.


You only need 30 as thats what the human eye works at, any thing above and you simply won't notice  
TE1A_man

But most games have a FPS they look best at, true, as long as it is over about 25-30 it will look smooth. But a game like COD4, looks best at (i believe it is) 40 fps, thats when everything is the most life like movements and speed.
Mamodman123

TE1A_man wrote:
But most games have a FPS they look best at, true, as long as it is over about 25-30 it will look smooth. But a game like COD4, looks best at (i believe it is) 40 fps, thats when everything is the most life like movements and speed.


Well really you just don't want it to drop below about 25, anything above and it'll be smooth enough

Have you ever had Mafia for the PC? That game even on todays top PC's will not run smooth when another car is on the screen, when there are no other cars its like 80FPS

All the game engine..i.e crappy  
TE1A_man

Like crysis, when it was released no computer hardware could run it at full settings. The only way the creators of it could run it at full settings was they took a dell server with dual 3.33ghz intel core 2 quads with 12gb of ram and put 2 sli linked 768mb 8800GT's in it, ran vista ultimate 64 bit on it. Even with all that it would still cough up at moments.
Mamodman123

TE1A_man wrote:
Like crysis, when it was released no computer hardware could run it at full settings. The only way the creators of it could run it at full settings was they took a dell server with dual 3.33ghz intel core 2 quads with 12gb of ram and put 2 sli linked 768mb 8800GT's in it, ran vista ultimate 64 bit on it. Even with all that it would still cough up at moments.


Crappy design, a lot of it is down to the makers!

IF you look at games like Perfect dark on the N64 thats an example of how to push a machine to its limits without killing it!  
TE1A_man

Actually, crysis uses the half life 2 engine, its just has such good graphics that even a xbox 360 can't run it on medium settings.
Mamodman123

TE1A_man wrote:
Actually, crysis uses the half life 2 engine, its just has such good graphics that even a xbox 360 can't run it on medium settings.


A PC somewhere should run it, it was designed on one  
kusuchi

I don't understand a word you're saying     All these new operating systems come loaded with bugs.  Not for me.  I'm sticking with Fortran and Cobol..
johnreid

kusuchi wrote:
I don't understand a word you're saying     All these new operating systems come loaded with bugs.  Not for me.  I'm sticking with Fortran and Cobol..


I used to use ADA does that count? That was back in the 70s
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