Have You Made the Vista Switch Full-Time?
Or are you still dual-booting?
Tuesday, March 6, 2007 by Island Dog | Discussion: Windows Vista
Well Windows Vista has been out for a little while now, and several us have written about our experiences at the beginning. I have read probably hundreds of forums posts across many communities about peoples experience with Vista, and how some are using Vista as their main OS, and some just using it as a secondary on a dual-boot system. The reactions have been very mixed, but the biggest complaints seem to be hardware compatibility, especially in the video card area that is stopping people from running it full-time.
I recently built a new PC and tried to run Vista as my
primary OS, but with my printer not working with Vista, and a few other
incompatibilities I had to partition off some space and go back to dual-booting
again. Now I have been reading many posts here at WinCustomize and have
noticed a few people who have purchased Vista, so I was interested in knowing
how many members here are using Vista full-time, or are dual-booting still.
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Reply #2 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 1:46 PM
Reply #3 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 1:49 PM
Reply #4 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 2:17 PM
My laptop still got XP, but that's because I don't use it that much. Only a convenience for when I travel of go to interviews.
Reply #5 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:16 PM
Reply #6 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:24 PM
Reply #7 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:24 PM
Purchased and ran OEM's of Vista Home Premium on both personal machines (1 DIY desktop, and 1 Dell notebook). Although I really enjoy the icons, address bar navigation, ease of networking, and the idea behind the new Windows Driver Display Model - I nevertheless have reverted back to XP Pro on both machines for the following reasons:
1 - Adobe CS2 runs much better on XP Pro at this time.
2 - The ATI drivers are still in their infancy and are basically just 'vanilla' drivers.
3 - Nero 6 just works on XP Pro and I am not excited about all the extras in Nero 7 - especially the fact that 'Nero Scout' is not offered as an optional install on the downloaded version (not sure about the CD version).
4 - The search functionality, multimedia functions, and Tablet PC functions all increase the process count to the point that my poor Dell notebook with a single-core 760 processor has it's hands full just trying to run the OS. Turning off some of the Tablet PC functions is possible so that a Wacom tablet driver will only run 2 or 3 processes, but stopping the search and multimedia processes just defeats the whole idea of a Vista upgrade.
All in all, I have to say that Vista is exactly what I expected; a new operating system that has a lot of potential for use with hardware that has yet to be released (or is currently on the 'bleeding edge'). I think the need for a multi-core processor is absolute if you want to run 45 - 60 processes in the background and still enjoy efficient use of the installed programs. I look forward to next year when a good DX10 video card can be purchased for a reasonable price and will be supported by stable drivers with good control options. This should also give me time to save enough to invest in Adobe's CS3 package.
Of course, I may just decide to go with the Mac platform by that time. 
Reply #8 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:33 PM
The only time I have booted into XP since I installed it was to get a list of installed apps.All of my drivers work fine. The Nvidia drivers aren't that bad. I only have issues when gaming for a long period of time. BF2142 works great!
I have 2.8ghz, 1.5gb, 250gb, GeForce 6200 256mb.
Reply #9 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:41 PM
(eVGA 7900GT 256mb to Radeon X1950 XTX 512mb)
Reply #10 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 3:42 PM
XP Pro, XP Home for my gaming platform and Vista Ultimate.
My HP printer 3-in-one isn't fully functional in Vista as yet, so I'll reboot into XP Pro when I need to print up documents typed in Vista. Other than that, Vista does pretty much everything I want/need it to, so I'm probably in there most.
Still setting up Vista to how I want it, but the more I use it the more I like it.... and Dreamscenes/Deskscapes are absolutely awesome. Thanks MS, thanks Stardock, thanks to all the artists who've created the fabulous content.
Reply #12 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:36 PM
I do have issues with PDA software not compatible but this is only due to 64bit OS (had same issue with XP x64). Instead of dual booting I will be running a virtual machine (32bit XP) from within Vista. This will save an extra OS installed on another partition as well as not needing to reboot into XP each time want to update my PDA.
Reply #13 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:53 PM
Dual booting by the way, Vista 32, upgraded over my XP and then Mepis 6.5 beta 7 64-bit on the second harddrive.
Reply #14 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 5:29 PM
Everything else works great in Vista.
Reply #15 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 5:49 PM
At work the entire company now upgraded to Vista (15 computers in all, 6 running Ultimate spectacularly, 9 running Business spectacularly.
All-in-all I'd have to say Vista has been trouble free and yes, spectacular.
Reply #17 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 10:10 PM
I have an XP Pro laptop that is a little underpowered to switch over so it will remain XP... or maybe go to linux.
Reply #18 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 1:15 AM
1 desktop with Windows Xp Pro
Laptop with Vista Ultimate.
Vista is running adorably although a few programs have some glitches and others don't work at all, yet....still Vista is doing more than fine with Office, Thunderbird, Opera and other browsers, Winamp works fine (it' still not 100% compatible)...will try more this week but what I need it for, Vista is doing an excellent work (beside networked printers most of the time).
Reply #19 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 1:28 AM
And thats fine with me cuz I wasnt impressed even tho my moderately crappy pc ran it fine.Its less usable and less configurable than XP.Gui looks like a beginner designed it.(ok an accomplished beginner with some talent worth developing)
I hated the Start menu,task manager,the 'personalise dialog PAGE,shellstyle is gone,toolbars are the worst ever.None of my windowblinds make the crossover for crap.
I did like live folders and the zoomable thumbnails with previews(too bad they didnt work with .psd's)Dreamscenes will be cool eventually.Thats not much to like for 400$(I'm sure EVENTUALLY it will be a better OS to customise,but for now,it looked to me like 2 steps forward and 1 step back.
Reply #20 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 2:09 AM
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Reply #1 Tuesday, March 6, 2007 1:44 PM