XP - The OS of choice?

[Chris]

Vista is shit, and always will remain shit in my eyes.

[m-in-m]

I've used Vista at home for over a year now, I have just started using it at work and have to look at how we bring it under similar control as we have with XP. Complete different ball game from using it at home.

[Dr Lobster*]

as far as vista is concerned, i've never been able to see the 'value' in it. the most useful feature (instant search) is already available in xp (a more flexible bitlocker equivalent is available in the guise of truecrypt which is free)

there are a few people who rave about the 'interface', i mean, clear title bars... who gives a feck? i feel more for those sad people who brought the 'ultimate' edition of windows vista expecting great things from the 'ultimate extra' programme... what did they get? animated wallpaper. brilliant. more for them if they fall for that trick again.

vista had more of what i would call 'incremental' additions - sure there are a few nice tweaks to explorer and so on but fundamentally it does nothing you can't do with xp with a couple of tweaks or free 3rd party addons.

[cdd]

I agree it's no quantum leap, but it is generally better, I don't understand why anyone would want to downgrade.

[Nini]

Just want to bring this back to Waxpaper's issue, what in the fuck do you mean by OP?

[Dr Lobster*]

I agree it's no quantum leap, but it is generally better, I don't understand why anyone would want to downgrade.

perhaps they only have a single core cpu with 1 gb of ram (or less)... maybe all they do is browse web pages?

[Pete]

it's many of the minor things that I do like. The breadcrumb naivgation for example.

[Stuart*]

Just want to bring this back to Waxpaper's issue, what in the fuck do you mean by OP?

I meant 'OS'. Can someone change it, please?

[Stuart*]

I agree it's no quantum leap, but it is generally better, I don't understand why anyone would want to downgrade.

perhaps they only have a single core cpu with 1 gb of ram (or less)... maybe all they do is browse web pages?

I don't want to 'downgrade', I simply want to be able to dual boot so that I can run some programs which don't work in Vista.

[Beep]

Just want to bring this back to Waxpaper's issue, what in the fuck do you mean by OP?

I meant 'OS'. Can someone change it, please?

Go back to your first post. Press the "Edit" Button. Change the title. Press Submit.

[cwathen]

Isn't it a tad ironic that when XP was still the latest version, everybody whinged about how 2000 was better, but now that Vista is the latest version, XP is like precious gold?

My issue with XP was the way that they essentially just bolted a fisher price interface and bundled in some extras onto the Windows 2000 codebase and then marketed it as a major new product and a quantum leap forward for Windows when technically XP was only an incremental release (if you go to help/about you'll see that 2000 is version 5.0 and XP version 5.1). True, it did bring home users off of the old hybrid versions with an MS-DOS codebase, but it was only marketing (and at launch, a crippling lack of drivers, although that was fixed fairly quickly) which prevented that from happening with Windows 2000 - just because basic 2000 was 'professional', it didn't mean home users would have problems using it, and equally just because XP offered a cheaper 'home' version without features from XP Pro which they don't need, it doesn't mean that home users would be complicated and disadvantaged by those features being there anyway.

I use XP now (have done for about 3 years actually) mainly because Microsoft forcibly killed off 2000 by no longer issuing anything other than security updates for it (even those will end soon) and whilst the bright colourful interface has grown on me, I still see nothing wrong with the functional (if bland by modern standards) Windows 95-derived interface from 2000.

Vista however, just seems like Windows ME was to Windows 98 - it's essentially a heavily marketed stopgap release offering (in 32 bit form at least) no real advantages over XP and which has only been put out to bring in a bit of money and force hardware upgardes whilst the *real* successor, Windows 7, is being developed.

To me, Vista in some respects still seems to be in beta stage - the way they've started to ditch the familiar tabbed dialogue boxes with OK/Cancel/Apply buttons which have been around since Windows 95 and replace them with huge web-page control panels, some of which don't have an OK button, some of which have icons to click on, some text links, and many of which then open a tabbed dialogue box with a single tab to actually control the feature (the messy way display properties is implemented is a prime example). The new interface all seems to be a bit of a mess which was never fully completed.

As others have said, one of the only genuine examples of progress within Vista - a proper indexed search system which can locate things instantly rather than having to wait for the system to trawl through the entire disk every time you want to search for something - has been back-ported to XP anyway.

it's many of the minor things that I do like. The breadcrumb naivgation for example.

That's hardly new, with respect. That feature (or rather, one with the same functionality) made it's debut in 1997 with the IE4 'explorer shell integration' for Windows 95, which survives into XP. With that on, you can set the title bar and/or address bar to display the full path to the current folder so you can see not only where you are, but where you have come from (exactly the same way as breadcrumbs), and the drop down arrow next to the back/forward buttons shows you a list of all those location so you can jump backwards/forwards to whatever place you wish with a single jump (which offers the same functionality as breadcrumbs, just a different way of doing it). Vista has only improved this feature by letting you click directly on the path - the functionality itself is nothing you couldn't do for a decade before Vista was released.