Back to XP for me...

[Guest]

Well after getting 2 copies of Vista (one for laptop and deskop), I really
tried my best to be happy with vista, but unfortunately I'm having to go back
to XP. Perhaps when Microsoft release SP1 for Vista then I'll reconsider
putting Vista back on my laptop.

Normally my laptop battery lasts 8-9 hours under XP, and on Vista the fan is
constantly running at max speed, and I get about 4-5 hours of battery life.

And why oh why does it take sooooo long to copy files from one location to
another?!?

This list goes on......hopefully MS will resolve many of the issues in the
SP1 release.

 

[AJR]

Or course you realize that the XP power settings do not apply to Vista -
Vista by the way has expanded power options outdistancing those of XP
(RTFM).
Check out the microsoft.public.windowsxp.general newsgroup and you will be
surprised to note that problem posts equal, or exceed, those in the
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general newsgroup =- in other words - no
advantage, only a waste of time and opportunity for experience by not
tackling Vista now!!

 

[Guest]

Normally I would agree with you, and I have experimented with every power
setting that Vista makes available to me. The Laptop is a Sony Vaio VGN-TX
series, which has Sony's Power Management software installed and running,
which creates a new "VAIO Optimized" power profile, and the settings on this
profile are identical to those under XP, yet the battery doesn't last nearly
as long as it does on XP. Under XP, the laptop fan only operates at high
speed if the there are some processor intensive processes running, like if I
was doing some 3d rendering or applying effects to a number of images. Under
Vista though I notice in task manager that the CPU is always running between
20-40% even if I'm not even using the laptop, which is causing the fan to run
at high speed, therefore presumably draining the battery faster.

If this was the only problem I had with Vista, I might be tempted to live
with it. Although this is just one of many problems I had. I also don't see
why an Operating System has to consume 15GB of Hard Disk space as opposed to
approx 2.5GB under XP, and why the memory consumption is double that of XP!
It just seems that as hardware is getting faster and faster, software is
getting bloated and slower!

So if I want to go again with Vista, I may have to sit down going through
all the services, startup processes in the registry and removing / disabling
everything that doesn't apply to me.

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

Make sure Sony has all the right hardware drivers for that machine with
Vista...and it's much better to do a clean install than an upgrade... The
file copy problem is known (some kind of network driver issue) and should be
fixed.

I don't know about battery life in my new HP laptop because I've never run
out yet. I did disable Windows Search, which was hitting the hard drive
quite a bit, and managed to get my CPU use down to the single-digit range.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Aftermath]

I went back to XP a month ago from Vista Ultimate. I wouldn't even dream of
going back to Vista until it receives a major overhaul.

 

[Fat Bastard]

Windows Vista can be a battery hog if you have Aero Glass on. With that off,
your battery life and processor utilization should be as good or better than
XP. Also, there is a patch to take care of the slow file copy issue. And it
is not really using more memory, it just looks like it is due to the way in
which the memory manager does caching, so it doesnt waste unused memory.
This blog post explains that:

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/04/13/memory-management-dude-where-s-my-ram.aspx