Category: Geeks r Us
Which do you think is better, Windows xp or Vista? I was wondering whether to upgrade from windows xp on this 3 years old computer, or whether to get a new computer with windows vista already on it. If I did get a new computer, I wouldn't be able to transfer jaws and kurzweil and all my other rubbish without reregistering it first, would I?
hmmm I'm sure there are tons of posts regarding this, and tons being an understatement.
There are a few people who will swear by vista, and I don't exagerate when I say few.
Even in the real world, you will find people who won't switch to vista, have to switch to vista and hate it returning to xp, have no choice but to go with vista cause someone else bought it for them, use both vista and xp, but prefer xp more, on and on and on.
To that I say, if you got the money, get vista and learn and expensive lesson.
Jaws will work on vista, I know for sure.
As to re-registering, you will have to do so whether you upgrade to xp or go with vista, either way.
shrug
At least I know with jaws you do :P
ok as for jaws, it works at least 85% of the time considering it won't read a lot of things. Vista is bloated, full of bugs and eats up resources like there is no tomorrow and no I am not exaggerating that is the truth. Those who sware by it are lying through their teeth or they have a quad core with 16 gigs of ram. seriously though don't waste your money, even those who pirate vista even say they've wasted valuable bandwidth. It is not worth what it is. It is all for looks, that is all even ask someone who can see they can tell you. Everything is more complicated and is no way simple like xp. everything is a control panel such as the desktop properties. But it isn't properties it is now called personalize. Makes it look like more than it really is. Vista's sound configuration is unbelievable, it is very embarrassing. The only good thing about it is that you can adjust each individual program that emits sound. however I'm sure you could get a program to do the same in xp. For more information see the topic rat started and you will see what I mean and yes we have facts to back it up
Hi all,
I know Vista is big but if you have a machine that can handle it, it works fine. Sure, it may have a few bugs but XP does too. I recently had to get a new desktop. It has Vista Home Premium and 3 gigs of RAM and a 640 gig hard drive. Some of the same features that are in XP are actually better in Vista. i know some of you may not agree with me on that but everybody has their own opinion.
Vista isn't all that bad. Granted, it has some bugs and quirks. But so does XP. Jaws works perfectly fine with it. The layout is a bit different, but it's not necessarily worse.
i agree with Brooke. we are running vista and it works just fine. you do have to have jaws nine for it to work with vista though. i actually like some of the features. Most that say it's crap, haven't even tried it. or don't take the time to learn the different features it does have!
I've been a Vista user for a couple of months now and can honestly say that I don't have any major problems with it. Sure there are things that are different, some of it I like, some of it I don't but on balance, I couldn't at this point tell you that I think XP is better. The one bit of advice I will offer Harmony is that if you do decide to upgrade to Vista, don't put it on your current machine. if it is 3 years old then it almost certainly doesn't have the specs to handle Vista. If you have the cash for a new computer, then buy one. If not then stick with XP.
I've heard a lot of people bitch about Vista, however a lot of that bitching is ill-informed bitching in my view. In fact a surprising amount of it comes from XP users who have never touched Vista and just heard stuff from other people, or at most have looked at it for 5 minutes, seen it's different and written it off. Take c-dog's rant in post 3 about the sound settings for example. Now as somebody who has used the sound control, extensively, I can tell you that not only is there nothing wrong with it, but it is actually a lot more accessible and integrates far better with other programs than XP's sound control did. I do a lot of audio stuff, both with Sound forge and Goldwave plus online broadcasting so I do know what I'm talking about and am not just regenerating stuff that I've been told is true by others. In short, I've used it.
Good luck anyway with whatever you decide. In the end I suppose it comes down to this, if you can handle change, go with Vista, if you like exactly what you have now and don't want to have to relearn stuff, stay with XP.
Dan.
thank you harp, that is exactly what i've been trying to get across. cody, i run a 2.0 quad core with 3 gigs of ram, which is standard for them i might add, and it's just fine
I'd have to agree with Harp on that one. I just recently bought a Toshiba laptop that's running Vista Home Premium, and it was really difficult to get used to at first, but after playing around with it for a while and installing the necissary updates, it seems to have gotten somewhat easier. The only thing I don't like about it is the change they've made to the windows explorer settup, and the toolbar that's replaced the combobox where you browse through the list of folders for the file you want to open.
I love the fact that they've made some of the games more accessible with Jaws though, that's at least one thing someone could find on the plus side for it.
i agree with both of those points
Is it true that in vista they disabled the wave out or stereo mix thing that was available in volume control? In other words can you record what you hear from your sound card such as streams, yourself playing a game etc? I heard that this feature is disabled in vista and if it is i would be dissapointed if i ever have to get vista because i record a lot of things from internet radio and tv.I hope you can understand what i mean.
Thanks everyone who's replied so far. Well, I've never used v vista yet, but am thinking of getting it anyway before the summer, because the college are t moving to use windows vista because they've already got jaws 9 on their network, so I want to get used to using it. I'm not sure when they're changing over, summer or christmas, but they've got to do it soon.
Ya know it's like this: Change is always a chalange and should be embraced. If it works, use it and enjoy the new features. If it doesn't stay with what you have. I used a rather under powered vista laptop with a gig of ram and believe it or not the only thing that worked well and I am sure it was because of lack of resourses on the machine was system access. ONce I used that I was able to get my work done and found vista to be quite stable. The volume control I thought offred allot of functionality and I did like the way some of the dialogs were laid out. It's the same as people going to the mac. I tell them. get your hands on one and play with it for a while if you can. I love the mac but others don't and that's why it's good to work with it before making a decision. So, in my opinion I would rather have an xp machine which is why I bought xp to run in bootcamp on the mac. I prefer an operating system that doesn't take as much power and didn't see anything that jumppd out and said upgrade to vista. So, long and short, if your machine has the resources and vista is your choise have fun.
For those people who decide to run quad core machines, Vista may very well be all you got. The thing about vista is if you give it power, it'll use that power. People made the exac same complaints about Xp when it came out...Oh, and even without the quad core, someone mensioned RAM. The Vista machine in our house is not mine, though I really wish it were...It's got 4 GB ram. We paid $80 for that ram, and it's good ram. Ram's cheep in the states.
Hey all,
It is true that Stereo Mix is disabled by default in Vista. It is not hard to get it enabled. You just have to play around with things to get them to work in Vista.
I'm embarrassed to say that we finally got a VISTA Machine at work. Embarrassed, because we evaluate and recommend technology for our consumers at our State Rehab agency. I haven't had much time to play with Vista, but I do like what I've seen so far. Going to the start menu to open programs is a breeze, and a really neat interface. I'd listen to the tutorials on Freedom Scientific's website, as they are really helpful, too.
Lou
Agreeing with Lou! yes those tutorials are great and will really help. they have one on the vista startmenu and one on the office ribbin. Lou or anyone else do you know where to find settings in office 2007 you know in 2003 you would go to tools, options and then have the 5 page dialog with lots of stuff in it. where the heck, (woof apologizes for his language) I mean heck is that thing?
Not sure about Office, but to enable stereo mics go to start menu, control panel, sound, the recording tab. You should be in a list of recording devices. Hit your applications key and select show disabled devices or whatever it's called. Now go to stereo mics and make sure it's enabled in the context menu. You may have to provide confirmation in user account control to enable it. You can now close everything.
HTH!
For post 6. You are assuming we have not tried it. for your information, I have been using Windows Vista since it was Longhorn, In fact I have a copy of longhorn build 4074 and i've also run Vista beta 2. When the rtm version was finally released it was even worse. I would've stuck with beta 2 if that was the final release. I know the features, but the UI is not very intuitive, at least not naturally.
for post 7. Then tell me why me and many others have had issues with analog microphones in vista? Why do we have to open 5000000 windows just to get to one check box or slider. In xp it is 1 window. Not this, right click this select this check this slide that. None of that crap. That is a fact, not an opinion.
Per post 9. Who cares about games? We're talking about productivity here, or at least I am anyway. If these posts are about having fun I'm sorry, but I actually like getting things done.
To post 11. Yeah good point. Where in the hell did stereo mix get off to? Xp it was right there, nothing was hidden.
To post 14. Good point, why in the hell does a 90 year old grandma need a frickin gamer's box? Vista takes up power and resources and you call that useable? I don't see anyone else on here other than me spike and nick who actually care about these things? These are the people who absolutely be running xp. To post 13 Willy I agree but it has been a year now. If people don't make up their mind yet Vienna will be here before they know it.
Per post 15. Don't want to play I just want it to work and be intuitive.
And finally per post 18. If this is how you enable stereo mix I certainly am turned off. That is, as said before, embarrassing.
Ok - i'l try to give balanced viewpoints on this subject.
I myself am a xp user, for the main reason that vista as of yet has not been able to give me anything that I would want enough to upgrade.
Another reason is that most of my computers are very old and whilst they can take xp well enough to use, they really would not like vista, I am unsure of the logic in upgrading something to run software that gives me no improovments that I will use and that will also slow my system down.
However, having said this, if I was given a vista machine that could run it comfortabley, I would spend some time evaluating vista and then diside if I would keep vista or put xp on it.
One saying that many people quoat in the computer world is "if its not broken, don't fix it", in your situation, this is still true - your not really having any problems with xp at the moment are you?
One thing thatother people have mensioned is that if your computer is 3, it will most lightly not like vista that much. If you are finding xp sluggish and wanting to upgrade to vista because of this, there are several things that you can do that will cost you less than a copy of vista homebasic, upgrading your ram beeing the first that came to mind.
Hth.
ps: I have actually used vista on a friends machine and it seemed smooth enough, but it did have 3gb of ram.
Completely agree with posts 13 and 20. I am an XP and Leopard user. I have heard some tutorials on Vista, but I don't think I'll upgrade anytime soon. I had never used a mac until about 2 months ago, and the first thing I did when I got it from my tech school, was to mess around with everything, and see what it could do. I have used XP for most of the time that I've used a computer, but, if I was given the chance to, I don't think I would mind playing around with Vista, and seeing what it could do. I'm not saying i'll switch to vista right away, but, if it had improvements that I liked, i'd consider it. With the games being more accessible, that's a point for it. With it being u have to enable everything as admin,...eh...not so much liking that, same with the thing to enable stereo mix., not liking the way u have to do that either too much, but I guess I would really have to play around with it. Maybe its not that hard to do, and it just looks like a lot when your reading it on here.
you actually have to use vista for an extended period of time to really know it. plus service pack 1 has done wonders to make it faster, and more stable. i've been using xp my whole lift until i got this machine, and said i'd never go to vista at first. look at me now, using a vista machine as my main computer, and wanting to remove xp from my laptop.
my feelings are personal and as a computer tec. don't change your os unless you really need to. what's the point. many things will work with xp for years to come yet. old addige, if it ain't broke,,,
I've just got my windows vista laptop. Not many people like windows vista round here, but the sighted person who was helping me set it up tonight said she's just got the same version and quite likes it. In fact, I'm using my new laptop to write this board post, so it can't be that bad.
Vista is great and I find it a lot easier to navigate then xp.
The only trouble is, I can't seem to install windows live messenger on it. That's kind of annoying.
well, you should be aboue too, maybe uac's getting in the way
I ment you should be able to instal wlm on that vista laptop but uac's getting in the way
Yeah, things like UAC're a pain in the... but other than that, I think Vista's one hell of a lot more secure than crappy X anyday, so I'm sticking with it and that's that.
I've managed to install msn on here and I think I've got a ... copy ... of microsoft office 2003 to work on here! Hahahahahahahha!