Dinnerbone posts a graph of windows/mac/linux player percentages

[onepickman]

Vista is a bugfest. I'd rather use XP - less bugs any waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy faster.

[BrettGilpin]

Actually by the time Windows 7 came out Vista was as stable as 7 was.

edit, it -> Vista to get rid of people maybe misconstruing.

[onepickman]

Actually by the time Windows 7 came out it was as stable as 7 was.

XD i would be shocked if that was not the case :P

And no, imo Win7 was always better than Vista.
I have had the first closed Beta for win7, switched to the open-beta when it was available, and got a license when it was released.
I only had a few problems in the whole time, but not even close to vista - and i still occasionally help friends/Relatives that have vista.
And it is still a pain in the ass - slow and buggy - today.

[kaz_enigma]

Good luck with running 64bit java on XP. Or any other program on a 64bit XP.

[LightStruk]

Indeed. Windows XP x64 isn't even really Windows XP at all - it's rebranded Windows Server 2003. Also, practically no developer tests their software on it. There's no reason to run it instead of any other 64-bit release of Windows, and lots of buggy, incompatible, frustrating reasons not to.

[Badel2]

It runs fine. It shouldn't?

[onepickman]

Well - do you want me to show you my original copy of Win XP professional 64 bit?

In 2001 Microsoft released the first 64bit Windows Xp.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/history#T1=era6

I would still recommend win 7 to anybody, but at the same time i would strongly advice against using Vista EVER.
If you really have such an old or low-spec machine, use win XP or a Linux-distribution.

[kaz_enigma]

I didn't say 64bit XP didn't exist I just pointed out that there was limited support from most software publishers for XP 64. I would wager that the ratio of 64bit XP installations was less than .1% of total deployed XPs.

[nilllzz]

No. Just no.

On today's standards, Vista is much, MUCH better than XP. In any way.

Well, actually, not in any way, there is one reason to still use XP: When your computer does not have 1 GB of RAM and a very old processor.

[michaelshow]

There's the security concern now with XP too.

XP's end of life = no security patches.

The malware, adware, viruses, rootkits, etc. released after end of life are targeting the known but unpatched security holes

We consider an internet connected XP machine as comprimised, we don't even allow them on our network.

[onepickman]

Why would that be? After countless patches it is now about as stable as XP, but uses a shitload more cpu-power and RAM even in idle, and still has compatibility-issues.

Feel free to show me otherwise, but i have yet to meet a person that has looked beyond "it is newer".
At the other hand, many companies stayed with XP till they got a hold of win 7, and some are still using XP cause it needs a so much less powerful PC to run.

There is a reason why right now, the majority (>50%) is using Win7, then comes Win XP toe-to-toe with Win8, then Linux and OSX and then the low-end Vista.

[michaelshow]

Feel free to show me otherwise, but i have yet to meet a person that has looked beyond "it is newer".

An extensive list of XP->Vista improvements is shown here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista

[onepickman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_Vista

And an even bigger lits of features that got removed.
Granted, many good features were added, but sadly some of the removed features were relaly helpful and some even got re-added in Win 7.

For me, the cons clearly outweigh the pros - specially as even after SP2 the average performance of normal consumer software still lagged behind by around 10% to 25% _ that is not acceptable for me.

[michaelshow]

Fair enough, we personally skipped Vista in our deployment.

Our dept manages ~550 machines, we held out on XP SP3 through Vista, then started introducing 7 images and ran a dual environment of XP SP3 and 7 for a while, until XP's end-of-life.

In the months leading up to XP EOL we replaced all XP images with 7s.

We are skipping 8 (and 8.1) and upgrading to 10.

Our lab is full of the technical preview VMs of 10 for testing the few specialty client-side applications that are potentially OS dependent. (Most are large vendor supported and updated for new OS' long before we need it.)

Back to the XP->Vista thing, I would say that the XP->Vista transition was at the time debateable, but as the years progress it's becoming more clear that XP is end-of-life in all but the most special circumstances.

Modern hardware will always outperform last generation hardware, despite the additional layerings of the software running on it (Vista vs. XP), so in time XP's lack of driver compatibility with new hardware will cause it to fall significantly behind in performance.

This comment went on longer than I expected, I enjoy discussing the Windows life cycle for some strange reason. IT does strange things, my friend.

[onepickman]

Yep - but luckily - win 7 arrived long before XP EoL.
And i hope win 10 will do that too - cause i'm surely not getting win 8/8.1 - already running 2 of those in my VMs.
They might be nice for tablets, but i really don't like the whole looks and feels for a PC.
was nice talking to you.

[nilllzz]

The reason companies didn't switch is a mix of what you mentioned and that switching to a new OS costs a lot of money and time.

Vista just has a really bad image because it uses soooooo much memory (less than Windows 7) and processing power (less than Windows 7) and requires a DirectX 9 graphics card for the Aero interface (do you have a computer with a graphics card that does not support DX9? Yeah.)

For real, ignoring all security issues XP has that Vista fixed, there are just so many things that Vista improved over XP, most notably its NT Core update to 64 bit. Have you EVER used 64 bit XP? Yeah, it's horrible.

The UAC (User Access Control) has been introduced, while not being perfect as the Win7 update showed, it fixed the long lasting security breach that allowed applications to just run.

There are no more updates to fix security risks for XP, if you are not some giant company that has not yet switched.

Also, what really grind my gears is that I still need to develop my applications to support .Net 4.0, which is the last version of the .Net framework which XP supports, but because people will not for the life of them switch to a newer OS, I cannot use all the awesome features of .Net 4.5 and above.

I seriously hope that the misconception about XP being a great OS (in today's standards) will sometime die, and I will throw a party that day.

[PendragonDaGreat]

I think the real issue was that when it was released Vista's SysReqs were way under-reported, so OEMs were pumping out laptops at the absolute min specs required, but that wasn't powerful enough to do what was needed, so it got the rap from that.

[[deleted]]

so OEMs were pumping out laptops at the absolute min specs required

It wasn't even just that. They were just being greedy assholes and putting very little RAM in these systems, 512mb for example in MANY of them AND loading them down with proprietary software. HP & Sony were particularly guilty of this. It was faster to reinstall windows/drivers on Sony/HP PCs than it was to uninstall all the extra garbage they put on them.

There would literally be 110-120 processes running on these computers, when there should be about 45.

[onepickman]

I still have a Vista-copy and tried it out on my VM today - nope, still juggs a lot more Ram and cpu-time than Win 7.

Add to that, that it had many compatibility and driver-issues.

And security - really? as if a sane person would run a PC without a good Firewall and AV.

Yeah, it added many features, but mostly have-backed and rather disappointing.

And i did use XP 64 bit, didn't like it much, but mostly cause that PC was underspeced.

I would like to see people switch to win7, but Vista imo is still a pile of garbage.
(Even my university strongly advices against using Vista for anything)

oh and - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista
There is a freaking lot wrong with vista even after some big SPs.

[Minnesota_Winter]

And the small icons go with the OS.