   Does anyone actually like Vista?
  Every review I've read has trashed the hell out of Vista.  I personally was already pissed off at it because of the whole DirectX 10 being incompatible with XP business.  But I got this laptop, and it has enough RAM and a strong graphics card to run the OS smoothly, and I've gotta say I'm actually enjoying it.  Granted, its bloated as all hell... but it seems like they basically took XP and added a whole lot of useful features.  It seems pretty cool so far.On a side note, does anyone else feel like microsoft never really delivered on the screensavers portion?  To me that seems like such an important aspect of their OS, since its usually the most prominent animated graphical display that their end-user sees the most often.  With Windows 95 came the single 3d object screensavers, and with XP came... the XP screensaver.  And with Vista, the only new one seems to be "Aurora"?  This thing looks like its just a bunch of billboards rotating around haphazardly!  I see the edges of the texture like 90% of the time!  Garbage!   
  I installed vista a few weeks ago and have been completely happy with it.  The major issues people seemed to have were:CompatabilityUAC is too annoying"Bloat"I've had no compatability problems - but then again I use fairly recent software and haven't tried to install anything from the 90sI find UAC quite reassuring - several times it's popped up when I don't expect it and I like the chance to think about why something is trying to elevate to administrative privledge.I think bloat is a loaded term so I won't really address it.  Suffice it to say that Vista boots, logs in and generally runs as fast as any OS I've used without really pushing the CPU so I can't say I've had any problems in that regard.I've actually been quite impressed with the problems/solutions manager which seems to have telepathically solved all the hardware and software issues I've run accross.   ;  One of my roommates switched to Vista on his XP-era laptop, and he likes it better than XP.   ;  I switched to Vista after XP on my laptop got corrupted by some crazy viruses.  I had some trouble at first, enough to drive me to put Ubuntu on my other hard drive, but after the last couple of upgrades and patches, it works fine.  The only thing that annoys me is that sometimes when I put the laptop to sleep on batteries, when it boots back up, the network adapter has disabled itself, and won't re-enable without a complete restart.Oh, and some of my old games that write save games to the Program Files folder have to be run as an administrator, or else they act like they've saved, but reealy don't.On the plus side, I've run Vista for three months with no anti-virus/spyware protection, and just the other day I installed AVG.  Guess how many infections there were: 7 tracking cookies.  I seem to remember with XP and on my older Win98 machine, it was a rare day you could do a virus scan and not come up with anything.   ;  i've found that with every annoyance vista has, it also has an improvement in some area. once i took off all the pre-installed crap (laptop), and turned off uac, and turned off alerts with the balloons... and turned off it alerting me in other ways, and turned off this and turned off that...etc.after all of that vista really is not that bad. i think they went a bit too extreme with trying to "protect" the user, but once you turnoff most of that stuff  vista runs just fine and doesn't get in your way.only compatibility problem i have had so far is that 3ds max will not run properly in dx mode (8 or 9), but i have a feeling this has more to do with the chopped down onboard ati card and its drivers than anything else.   ;  I've been using Vista since march and since June it's been the only OS on my machine; I love it and I've not done anything to it to tweaks it (besides losing the side bar, mostly because it was having 'issues' with some games).At work I have to use XP and I keep trying to do things which come naturally on Vista; like when I want a command prompt in Vista it's just hit start, type cmd and hit enter... in XP I do this and end up in the 'options' submenu and just sigh.A few issues at the start with gfx drivers (no OpenGL for one driver revision) and Creative's X-Fi drivers would just stop working randomly, however even this seems sane in the latest update from around June.Oh, and for the record I hated XP and it's 'cutesy' graphics when it first came out, I only moved to it when my Win2K died it's final death; Vista on the other hand had me since day one. I think alot of the anti-Vista stuff is nit picking and a reaction to the populist viewpoint that people have taken that 'vista sucks!'; hell, this view existed even before it came out.   ;  I've run Vista Business and Home Premium.I think it's very bloated and hard to find things particularly in the Control Panel.  Plus UAC is just irritating, I know what I'm running and when I want to run it, I can't be bothered giving permission when I shouldn't have to.  Problem is, turn it off and you're back to the standard "Administrator account or bust" mentality from XP, the permission system is nothing like as refined as *nix or BSD.  UAC never seems that secure also because it never asks for a password, just click Continue.  This is strange because I saw screengrabs of an old beta build which asked for one, and UNIX and OSX all ask for a password when elevating.  Any average Jim sitting at your computer can just click Continue without your approval and damage things, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense.Aero is just eye candy and doesn't really bring a whole load new to the table.  Virtual desktops are still a third party add on too.Sidebar eats your system and isn't terribly useful, I'd rather have the OSX Dashboard thanks.  Apparently it does cause serious performance with games like how phantom mentioned, I normally have it turned off because it's just clutter.I think it's okay, but it's nothing hugely exciting.  Especially when they didn't manage to get WinFS working on time.  I also think people were right when they said Microsoft have dumbed it down to make it easier to use but ended up making it harder, even a long term Windows veteran like myself had to think hard the first time I used it because I was wondering where everything was etc.It's far from perfect, I do prefer 2000 and XP on the whole I think.   ;  I've been running Vista for more than a year now using the default configuration (I'm too lazy to even change my wallpaper) and I feel crippled when having to use an XP machine. I didnt turn UAC off and I feel like I do what most people do but I rarely see an unexpected or unwarranted prompt. I dunno what people are doing to generate so many - I honestly see them only once a week or so.The only issue I've had was with driver support, but this has been solved in the last six months. The primary offender was the driver for Intel Integrated Graphics - their drivers have not been reliably stable. Fortunately, when they crash, Vista simply restarts it with very little interruption on my end.So yes, I like Vista.   ;Quote:Original post by ukdeveloperUAC never seems that secure also because it never asks for a password, just click Continue.  This is strange because I saw screengrabs of an old beta build which asked for one, and UNIX and OSX all ask for a password when elevating.That's because you're running on an administrator account. If you create a true limited user account on Vista then UAC will ask you for an administrator password.Quote:I think it's very bloated and hard to find things particularly in the Control Panel.Type what you want to do in the search box in the Control Panel (note: make sure you're not using the Classic Control Panel).   ;Quote:Original post by Colin JeanneI've been running Vista for more than a year now using the default configuration (I'm too lazy to even change my wallpaper) and I feel crippled when having to use an XP machine. I didnt turn UAC off and I feel like I do what most people do but I rarely see an unexpected or unwarranted prompt. I dunno what people are doing to generate so many - I honestly see them only once a week or so.Yeah, I pretty much think the same; the only program which I get a prompt for is VS and that's because it's set to run in admin mode all the time.@ukdeveloperQuote:Aero is just eye candy and doesn't really bring a whole load new to the table. Virtual desktops are still a third party add on too."It might seem like 'just eye candy' but I've found my user experiance with the effects to be much more plesant than on XP without them. Virtual desktops have always seemed like a bother to me, tried them when I ran linux for a while and once I got over the 'cool' factor I found I hardly used more than one. And I have two large monitors now so *shrugs*Quote:Sidebar eats your system and isn't terribly useful, I'd rather have the OSX Dashboard thanks. Apparently it does cause serious performance with games like how phantom mentioned, I normally have it turned off because it's just clutter.I probably should have made my point clearer; with the side bar on there were no noticable performance issues, however a couple of games had the sidebar flickering on and off over them during playing which is why I turned it off. Performance was the same with and without it (and no clutter as again... large monitor).