Digital Workshop

[rant]
Has anyone had the terrible problems I have had with Vista? I've been using Vista for about 7 months..I got a new laptop and there was no option to get XP. I don't think a day has gone by where I haven't cursed getting Vista. This is my very personal opinion, but I think Vista it is absolutely dreadful. It reminds me of Windows Me, the frequency of crashes and general problems. It just can't multi-task very well. Everything you do seems to start with a 7 second delay??? perhaps that's why they called the next version Windows 7?? I have turned off every effect possible. It still uses between 1Gb to 1.5Gb of memory. I have so many problems with applications which will not run, even Microsoft ones. Explorer crashes regularly, fortunately I very rarely get a BSOD. Compared to everything else, Opus has actually been very good.

The only reason MS have offered the 'XP mode' is to try to recover all the users who had sense and refused to go the Vista route, but they will also have the sense to realise that XP mode just won't work very well, so I don't see that users will move from XP to Win 7 unless it's fixed all the problems that prevented them from moving to Vista in the first place?

I think it's also a sign that windows has lost it's way----it's inexcusable that you have to pay extra to gain backward compatibility.
The sad thing is we are all tied into this operating system.
I'm still considering installing XP on the laptop and keeping Vista for a non critical PC.
I installed Ubuntu and it's very good etc etc, but I'm tied into microsoft applications. If I thought Windows 7 would work as reliable as XP, and they dumped all the stupid user control and mapped file locations etc etc, then I might give it a try.
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Users won't move from XP to Windows 7 by choice; it will be a requirement when they purchase a new computer with the OS installed.

I am not experiencing the problems you describe; in fact I don't feel the experience is much different than XP, apart from UAC occasionally being a nuisance. Vista does require considerably more resources than XP; in my experience it needs 2Gb of RAM and 2.0 GHz duo processor as a minimum. In general, user experience will be worse on a notebook, especially if the video uses shared RAM.
Drivers can be a problem; but then the problem is caused by 3rd party drivers, not Vista itself.
Notebook drivers are rarely updated at all; and a considerable number of PC's and notebooks were sold as "Vista ready" but they were not. Many users upgraded their XP computers to Vista; in most cases this was a mistake because of hardware and driver incompatibility.

IMHO, Ubuntu is not user friendly enough (yet) for general use. Problem with Linux is too many distros and no-one can agree on anything. They talk a lot about co-operation but rarely deliver.

You could try the friendly version of Unix -- buy a Mac and use OS X


Paul

My laptop has the spec, 2GHz Dual processor/3Gb DDR2, dedicated 256Mb Nvidia graphics and I do all the normal maintenance to keep the registry clean etc etc. For me, it's not the absolute speed which is important, but the response time to mouse actions and that's what drives me crasy about this vista machine..... nothing happens instantly.


Macs are too expensive and I work in a business environment where Windows is the norm...so can I have a Mac, at the same price as a windows machine, which runs all my windows software, but looks as good as a Mac with all the nice graphics, but works reliably??? not much to ask for??

I have tried various versions of Linux over the years and was pleasantly surprised how good the Ubuntu version was, especially installing. I had it installed as a dual boot, but not long after I installed it...windows crashed in a serious way...recovery disk serious, so I have been afraid to use it again. I don't think the crash was caused by the dual boot, but the association is there.

I have to say I've come to quite like Vista . I like the application thumbnails you get with Aero, and the blurred window captions and shadows. And having shortcuts to commonly used folders in explorer is very helpful.

It does seem to be doing things for no reason, but some of that is indexing which you can turn off:

http://keznews.com/3458_Disable_and_Tur ... ng_Service

If you think Vista is a memory hog, you may not be comparing like with like. Vista has a different method of file caching, and unlike XP reports the file cache as part of the memory used in task manager. In other words, Vista might appear to be using more memory but it actually isn't.

There's a good explanation here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

I only have Windows 7 running in a VirtualBox VM, which isn't a true test, but it does seem to run faster than Vista on VirtualBox. It'll be interesting to see if the people who hate Vista get on better with Windows 7, as in a lot of ways it's the same OS with a fancy new taskbar.

Sandy, I have to agree with Paul:

And I think that is a significant understatement.
My experience with laptop+vista+nvidia is that neither Asus nor nVidia will provide a robust and updated driver. It took me some few hours on asus users forum to make sense of this. Led to: http://laptopvideo2go.com/

Also since I was trying to update Vista SP1 at the time and also bring drivers up to date, I learned that people's success improved if drivers were installed in a specific order (and a meticulous process of rebooting at certain points).
A good read on that here, you might search for something similar for your make. http://asusg1s.wikidot.com/tips-and-tri ... -rescue-cd


If you are not using built-in trackpad, there are a few potential gotchas with external mouse. Even wired USB mouse can have wasted cycles --- try different mousepad surfaces and see if that changes anything. Wireless or Bluetooth itself is pretty reliable and responsive, but there are sources of interference (cordless phone, wifi routers/connection). When I say 'interference', I do not mean direct radiowave or frequency interference. What I've read happens is that lack of clean signals causes retransmits --- and so takes up internal CPU cycles and hogs the bus.

Overall, I did not enjoy my experience/effort migrating to Vista, but once I got everything settled-in it has been quite a good performer. Migration issues were UAC and also Vista's different approach with the file system/virtual store and application paths, etc.

One last point. AV.
Some anti-virus packages are better than others. I've tried four.
Now use ESET and it has performed admirably --- just a gem.

Hey Dave how is progress on the next Opus with Windows 7?

Windows 7 RTW is out this week to developers should be interesting. I look forward to Opus 7 too.

Windows 7 RTM was installed over the weekend on my laptop, a few small problems with the graphics card driver, but used the Dell Nvidia Vista driver and that fixed the issue.

Overall I like it, much quicker and seems to fix many of the problems from Vista. Improvement over Beta 1.

I have to say this.

Opus 6.4 works better under the final version of Windows 7 than it does under Vista.

As Windows 7 is now out of beta as it has turned gold with RTM earlier this month, I would recommend anyone who has access to Microsoft MSDN to download Windows 7 RTM and install it. After using for two weeks I find it great and the best OS Microsoft has ever released.

Previewing a publication does turn off Aero, and that would be my only hangup at the moment, but that was the same with Vista.

To which I will officially add...

1: We are having a similar experience.

2: Our v7 likes their v7 much more - even with Aero I'm told (I'm predominantly back on XP at present as it is causing more testing issues than Vista).

Paul Harris

Excellent, you know how much I'm looking forward to version Opus 7

Windows XP, hard to believe that's 8 years old now, how the time flies. I'm very pleased with Windows 7, their tag line should be: It just works!

Yes -- I'm looking for to seeing an Opus 7 "What's new" list.

Paul

Anyone notice an issue with changing font under Windows 7, each type I try and scroll through the font drop down for an object, Opus crashes.

Any solutions, anyone else experiencing similar issues?

Is it possibly not a new issue?
viewtopic.php?t=3324&highlight=font+list

Have you got text selected, or simply an insertion point/cursor, when the crash occurs? I seem to recall having a problem similar to post above more than 1-1/2 to 2 yrs ago.