Windows 7 Vs. Windows Vista

[Frank Jr.]

Well I am here to eat some crow, sort of..... My install did not go well so I found out. After the install when I surfed the internet everything was in Japanese. I first tried to fix it myself but no joy. I called HP support. That guy took control of my computer and made things worse. I finally discovered that it was an issue with my google desktop. I reinstalled it and that problem disappeared. Today as I was poking around W7, I discovered that my LAN drivers were corrupt and the pc was using the wireless connection even though with Vista I was connected through the Ethernet connection. Fixed that and things do seem somewhat faster than Vista. One thing I really like is before with Vista when I removed an SD card I would lose all function of those drivers until I rebooted. That has been fixed with W7. Still think it should have been a service pack upgrade, sort of.

 

[avg1joe]

I had played with the beta and release candidate on different older pcs. I upgraded my vista laptop to windows 7 today.

The only hitch I ran into was I had previously uninstalled Avira antivirus. The upgrader wouldn't continue until I uninstalled it, which I already had. I had to run an Avira registry cleanup tool before the upgrade would continue. I had been running Vista with most of the eye candy off and had to go through and turn it all off again in Windows 7.

In the end I am not noticing much of a performance difference. I'm not sure upgrading is worth the money or hassle. So far everything seems to work though.

 

[Frank Jr.]

I had played with the beta and release candidate on different older pcs. I upgraded my vista laptop to windows 7 today.

The only hitch I ran into was I had previously installed Avira antivirus. The upgrader wouldn't continue until I installed it, which I already had. I had to run an Avira registry cleanup tool before the upgrade would continue. I had been running Vista with most of the eye candy off and had to go through and turn it all off again in Windows 7.

In the end I am not noticing much of a performance difference. I'm not sure upgrading is worth the money or hassle. So far everything seems to work though.

With all the continuing problems I had I decided to do a complete custom install which wiped out all other stuff like adobe, java, google desktop, etc, etc..... I am pretty much caught up with all that. Wished I had started out this way, would have saved a lot of time. I like you are still wondering if it was worth it......

 

[TheForce]

Based on all the compelling reasons given in this thread ( basically none), I think I will stick with my Vista 64 on my one machine and ditto on my wife's machine. Speed hasn't been an issue. Plenty snappy for me. I do mostly high end HD video editing therefore dealing with multi gigabyte files and I don't have any issues with Vista 64.
So, I will go to windows 7 when I get ready to buy a new computer and it comes with win 7 preinstalled from Dell or HP.

I wasn't excited about Vista 64 when I bought these boxes but that's what was required to get the memory capacity and driver support. It boiled down to a Mac or Vista 64. The options on the Mac were too expensive and too limited.

 

[diogen]

With all the continuing problems I had I decided to do a complete custom install... Wished I had started out this way, would have saved a lot of time.

This has been the case with every Windows since 95, when the registry was introduced. And has been recommended here many times.

If you turn off completely the visual stuff, there is no difference between 7, Vista, XP or 2000.
If you look at its video playback capabilities, 7 is in a league of its own.

Diogen.

 

[avg1joe]

After using it for a few days I've noticed that checking my mail seems faster.

My settings when using the s-video output in clone mode had to be tweaked every time I hooked and unhooked the cable in Vista. Now it is saved. Since I hook and unhook the laptop to a tv at least twice a day this alone is worth the hassle of the upgrade to me.

I'm noticing flickering at times in the game Oblivion with Win 7 (there was none in Vista). I am using the latest video driver for my intel gm965.

 

[philhu]

Well, internally, Win7 is much better

They rushed Vista out, so alot of functionality that was SUPPOSED to be in the OS Kernel, ended up as addon system-level apps running in the background.

This swamped the schedulers and if a 'piece of Vista' crashed, then you lost functionality, things 'didn't quite work right', etc.

They got it all right in Win7. It runs superb and I will finally say, better, than XP

Not only that, but Windows Server 2008 shares the EXACT same codebase as Win7, Finally.

 

[harshness]

Then this month I purchased an HP laptop with an Intel Core Duo 2 motherboard and 4 MG RAM running Vista Home Premium 64-bit. While many of the features of Vista are similar to Win 7, I immediately saw how Win 7 was more responsive, quicker to boot, quicker to resume from hybernation or sleep mode, quicker to shut down. And when I started to use the Vista taskbar, I realized it was missing some of the features I had learned to depend on with Win 7.

Comparing all but the most powerful laptops to a desktop is going to net you similar results whether your running Vista or Windows 7. Typically, the bottleneck is the relatively low performance hard drives found in most notebooks.