Vista 64bit

[BigE4u]

Surprising, figured even i wouldnt be using it since i have win7... but i recently partitioned my hard drive(420/80) and installed vista64 and after tooling around with it for a spell, i find myself using it more than the newer OS, i mainly game on this machine and have had zero problems so far, im thinking of using it from now on till its obsolete, then go back to win7.

[jmilch]

Originally Posted by BigE4u

Surprising, figured even i wouldnt be using it since i have win7... but i recently partitioned my hard drive(420/80) and installed vista64 and after tooling around with it for a spell, i find myself using it more than the newer OS, i mainly game on this machine and have had zero problems so far, im thinking of using it from now on till its obsolete, then go back to win7.

Why? What advantages do you see over win 7? I had vista x64 since it was released. Then I moved to windows 7 and would not go back. Never had an issue with Vista, but 7 is just that much better.

[BigE4u]

Im dual booting atm and wanted to mess with VISTA for a few, you could say im feeling somewhat nastolgic, like XP... but i have 32bit win7/xp on my 2008 laptop with 3gb mem.

Now im getting used to using it alot more than win7 and to me, it appears to me more snappier, games appear to load alittle quicker, internet seems to do the same, no crashes as of yet... if i only had 32bit vista, then i wouldnt have installed it.

[PommieB]

I used Vista 64b for a long time, then updated to Win7, personally I found little difference, but one thing I found with Vista, it was very stable in comparison with the early win7. Win7 hasn't impressed me all that much, it's a good operating system, but not that great an improvement over Vista as Vista is now.

Windows is just a Microsoft money making scheme the more they upgrade, the more OS's they sell, the day's of making one OS rock solid like XP are gone. All the so called improvements that are going to be made with Win8, could have be added to win7, but where's the profit in that.

MS made a lot of money out of Vista, more than they made out of XP, probably make even more with win7, guess it'll be the same with win8. HA HA they've got us where they want us.

[jmilch]

Vista had a pretty bad launch and had stiff requirements for its time.

I had win 7 on a atom based net book with 2 gigs of ram and it ran snappier than xp on the same machine. That was what made me convert all my other computers.

I didn't mind vista, but it was the black sheep aka the windows ME of its time IMO.

Why do you think they pushed out 7 so fast? It wasn't just to male money, they were losing business from OEM's amongst other reasons. XP is nostalgic IMO but not vista.

[BigE4u]

After vista received its service packs(sp1/sp2), its not so bad now and if you know how to tweek it afterwards, it runs evn smoother IMO.

[PommieB]

Win7 lasted even less before win8 which is due for release very soon, doesn't say much for win 7, your reasoning a bit of the mark there J milch. There's nothing wrong with Vista, it was no different than when XP was released, it needed sp1 before it performed within reason, I even went back to win2000 for awhile.

[jmilch]

Originally Posted by PommieB

Win7 lasted even less before win8 which is due for release very soon, doesn't say much for win 7, your reasoning a bit of the mark there J milch. There's nothing wrong with Vista, it was no different than when XP was released, it needed sp1 before it performed within reason, I even went back to win2000 for awhile.

Which is odd considering the lack of excitement for windows 8....

But vista was fine. I was one of only a few who adopted it immediately and liked it.

I should fire up some vista action lol

[BigE4u]

Originally Posted by jmilch

Which is odd considering the lack of excitement for windows 8....

But vista was fine. I was one of only a few who adopted it immediately and liked it.

I should fire up some vista action lol

Now thats the spirit!

[PommieB]

I moved from Vista because of ssd drives and trim, I bought a Intel G2 and ordered a oem version of windows 64b Ultimate which was on special for half it's normal price. My 32b Vista is pre sp1, so I moved pretty early and I liked it, I dual booted with winXP and didn't use XP once in 6 months so I removed the dual boot.

Couldn't understand the hate campaign, put it down to the fact that people just don't like change, sure it uses more resources and doesn't boot as quick, to be honest I never noticed much difference, but then I never ran minimum resources either.

[BigE4u]

Out of curiousity, i checked IDLE memory useage, not much difference but vista64 was slighty lower even with more processes than win7_64 as seen below.

Im thinking of doing a complete wipe and just use vista64 only, its been working great for me...till whenever i go with an SSD, i'll be needing trim support, then win7 shall return.

[bravotsx]

Vista isn't supported by Microsoft anymore and it's got some bugs in it still. For example, if you plug in USB 3.0 hub into one of the chipset's USB 2.0 ports and then plug a mouse into the hub, it won't work. and it won't work because there's a bug in the default hub driver that was fixed in Win 7 SP1 but not vista.

[BigE4u]

I dont own any usb3.0 devices to even use those newer ports, its still usb2.0 backwards compatible and what do you mean vista is no longer supported... i still get updates, even XP still gets updates, unless your speaking of another type of support.

Im well aware of the limitations im putting on myself by wanting to use vista64 as a primary OS, when the time comes for better device and software support, i'll happily switch back to win7... but for now, for what i do mainly(surf/game), i really dont see the need for the newer OS right now.

[PommieB]

Vista is still supported after sp1, it's only prior to sp1 that it's not supported.

[bravotsx]

Vista's mainstream support ended in April 2012 meaning it won't get another service pack or new features. Extended support basically means it's limited to security patches and a few hotfixes, like where XP is today. Functional issues such as the USB one i mentioned aren't necessarily included.

It's true that USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, but the bug in Vista is independent of this. Vista's USB 3.0 support is broken due to the way it handles the bcdUSB descriptor using the inbox Microsoft usb hub driver. The bcdUSB descriptor tells the system which version of USB your hardware supports, and USB 3.0 hubs are supposed to report 2.1 instead of 2.0 for their internal usb 2 hubs. When Vista sees the bcdUSB value of 2.1, it fails to set up the USB 2.0 hub's transaction translator properly, causing full and low-speed devices such as keyboards/mice to fail to enumerate. Windows 7 pre-sp1 has this same issue, though it got fixed in Win 7 SP1. Vista, even with the platform update, still has this issue. (It's funny that Windows XP does not have this issue, but that's because it's not aware of bcdUSB)

[PommieB]

According to the Microsoft site, it says support after sp1, I read that only weeks ago, that's all I know.

[jbmcmillan]

Mainstream support for Vista ended April but security updates will keep on going till April 2017 (XP 2014) and & 7 mainstream support till 2015 and security updates until 2020.

[PommieB]

That sounds about right, the important thing is the security updates, I don't use Vista myself but I have three Vista Os's and I am about to re-build a computer for a friend, I'll put either Vista Ultimate 64b or just the 32b version on the computer, wasted a lot of money on Microsoft, this continual frequent updating of OS's is just a money grab as far as I am concerned.

[BigE4u]

Alrighty.... win7 gone for now, vista64 installed fully in its place with a 12gb recovery partition and i used "norton ghost 12" w/lights out recovery(mbr bootup recovery option), so no need for bootable cd/flash drive devices for system restore.

[Vampire80]

Wow! I'm sorry but Windows 7 just blows the hell out of Vista. I've had zero problems with 7 and I mean zero.