Sorry, another Vista v XP thread. I can't find an existing one which is quite right.

[Maurice Picarda]

Vista has better search facilities. I think this is the only really useful new feature, am I right?

Doesn't that mean that it uses half the processor to index stuff whenever it gets bored?

 

[editor]

Vista has better search facilities. I think this is the only really useful new feature, am I right?

It's generally more user friendly for consumers overall. And glossy!

 

[Jorum]

I've been on Vista for 6 months and am happy with it really.
The file transfer thing has been a lot better since SP1.
What i have found is networking seems to be alot better. I have two desktops and a laptop and could never get them to stay networked properly on XP and my with my firewalls. Vista seems to sorted it all out on it's own.
The only real issue I've had is that MS have removed EAX audio from Vista, and most older sound card simply won't work.
Made more annoying as vista sound seems to be more poppy and hissy than XP. Not sure why - maybe because the digital rights management is getting involved all the time and interferring.

If you have a relatively decent PC I'd say go for Vista. My 1gb ram machine seems ok, but 2gb or more is preferable.

 

[stdPikachu]

I must admit, I was rather hoping for consensus.

Amongst computer geeks?! Next up, Pope admits to defecating in sylvan setting, bear converts to catholicism

Fact of the matter is, if you don't run OpwnBSD, you're an absolute fucking MORON and deserve to DIE.

My advice if you can't decide whether you like one over the other is to have a pootle about on a Vista machine at a mates in PC world or something like that and see how you get on with it. Personally, I don't like the changes it's made over XP but some people do, and it is more secure. Horses for courses really, but as with anything IMHO you should use the tool that feels most comfortable to you.

 

[EastEnder]

It's generally more user friendly for consumers overall. And glossy!

It makes more of an effort to helpfully solve problems, although sadly in typical MS style it usually fails miserably. Take the "Windows is searching for a solution..." thingy that pops up when an app crashes - sounds great! except that in over a year of using Vista, despite it "searching" many, many times, it's never once found a solution for any of the crashes I've endured!

It's definitely prettier, the little sidebar gadgets are quite nice, the funky 3D window switcher is undeniably cool but nothing more than a shallow gimmick really.

There's lots of little changes, relatively trivial in their own right, but ones which I do start to miss when I'm back at work using XP all day long.

File searching in Vista is immeasurably better than the god awful excuse for a search found in XP.

Sadly I've not found Vista to be any more stable or better at resource management than XP. It's still very easy for errant applications to bring the OS grinding to a halt, and frequent reboots are still the order of the day.

If I were buying a retail OS for an existing PC, the choice between Vista & XP would be a close one. However, for a new PC with OS installed, I'd probably opt for Vista - in theory, you avoid any installation headaches, compatibility issues should've been addressed by the retailer, and whether you like or not, Vista is the future of Windows, MS won't support XP indefinitely, and I'll bet they're spending a lot more on Vista R&D than XP at the mo...