My Vista Ultimate Review

[Alex6969]

Intro
I got Vista Ultimate OEM a few days ago from Newegg, and let me tell you its been an exciting few days. I got the OEM version for a couple of reasons. The first is its about half what retail is, so paying $200 for a $400 product is super nice. The second reason is I just got finished putting my rig together, so I don't think I'll be changing MOBOs anytime soon. The reason why it's so much cheaper is because the license is tied to the motherboard it is installed on initially. I'm sure this can be circumvented by calling Microsoft and saying your MOBO got fried in a freak electrical storm.

A lot of people have been bashing Vista for being a resource hog and copying features from OSX. I always roll my eyes:rolleyes: when people say that stuff. Most of time people who say that don't know anything about computers, they are just repeating what everyone else is saying to look cool. Well in my book tools don't count as a valid opinion.


Needs MOAR RAM!
Yes it does take up a lot of RAM, approximately 1 - 1.5 GB when just sitting idle. This is with Aero on, and misc applications running that I consider background applications (i.e. Steam, Outlook, Alcohol 120%, SetPoint, Side Bar, etc). This is a massive amount of RAM to be taken up by an OS.

However, Vista does a lot of work under the hood that justifies that RAM usage. For instance, the searching indexing is very nice. All I have to do is start typing in that search box on the Start Menu (fig. 2) and applications and files start popping up. Also Vista is a lot more stable than XP ever was. I've had programs crash and Vista imediately recononises that there is a problem and asks me what it should do. Explorer crashes are also handled very nicely, when it crashes Vista tells me then restarts explorer. It's done very quickly, and it restores it to the condition it was before the crash.

Interface and Menus
User interfaces are done very nicely as well. The Aero effects are top notch and tasteful. I've used Compiz-Fusion with Ubuntu and yes, CF does offer a lot more options than Aero, but Aero gives a feeling of purpose and stability that I don't have with CF.

The menu system is different as well. At first the new menus are confusion and borderline frustrating. However, once you get used to the new menus, they become easier to use than XP. Some thing are difficult to deal with and are worth mentioning. The entire network setup menus are a PITA to deal with (fig. 4-6). It just takes time to deal with like anything new.


Applications
Application support is better than I expected. I've heard nightmares about how nothing works with Vista and applications that do work, work horribly. Once again, this is spoken by tools, who haven't tried using Vista, or don't know anything about computers. So far every program I have loaded on my rig has worked flawlessly. Office 2007 and Photoshop CS3 work excellent, and load faster, I think, than XP. Games work very well as well. Crysis in DX10 mode looks gorgeous! Old games work surprisingly well too. I had Quake 2 loaded on my "Games" hard drive from XP and I decided to give it a shot. Not even installing it through Vista it loaded right up and played just as well as it did on XP. I almost crapped my pants when this happened.


The Good Very sexy interface, nice search and stability abilities. Full featured, most things are built in that had to be added to XP. Direct X 10 looks beautiful. Application support is awesome.

The Bad Vista is a reasorce hog. With all the options turned on don't be surprised to see 1GB+ of RAM usage at idle. Some menus are poorly designed. Drivers can be spotty.

The Bottom Line Vista is a full featured, beautiful looking piece of software.

Rating 9/10.

Final Thoughts When compared to XP I would rank the two about the same. XP has support and ease of use, but Vista brings a lot more to the table than XP. I have been using XP since its release and I don't think I'll ever stop using it. XP is my favorite operating system by far, but Vista isn't too bad either ;).

Now on to pictures!!!

Fig. 1
This is my desktop. As you can see I have dual monitors setup. Sadly, there is no nView for Vista yet, so no dual screen taskbar. :(. (I'm in love with Gemma Atkinson btw :wub:)

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08.jpg

Fig.2
Here is the new Start Menu. At the bottom there is the search box that works extremely well. You can see that just in idle, I'm using 1400MB of RAM.

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08_001.jpg

Fig. 3
Here is my Windows Experience Index. Just thought I'd flaunt it. :) 5.9 is the highest rating that Microsoft has as of right now.

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08_02.jpg

Fig. 4
The following images are how the menus are setup poorly in my opinion.

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08_003.jpg

This menu is just awful. It is confusing and it scares me.
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08_04.jpg

Ahhh, salvation at last!
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee69/atp6969/Screenshot_1-21-08_05.jpg


Well there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Please feel free to ask me questions.

[NavMan]

Eh, I reckon Ultimate is a waste of money. Unless you need the specific features it has, Home Premium is enough. Nice review. I am starting to ask myself why people say that barely any programs work on Vista, as everything I've thrown at it (which isn't much but still :rolleyes:) has worked fine so far.

[Brendon]

I read through your review up to the images of your desktop. Then I stopped.

[Alex6969]

Eh, I reckon Ultimate is a waste of money. Unless you need the specific features it has, Home Premium is enough. Nice review. I am starting to ask myself why people say that barely any programs work on Vista, as everything I've thrown at it (which isn't much but still :rolleyes:) has worked fine so far.

I know it was expensive, plus I haven't even used the Ultimate Extras yet. :(

I read through your review up to the images of your desktop. Then I stopped.

Whys that Brendon?

[KindGalaxy]

Vista has boobs? SOLD!

Nah, not really... XP does everything I need, until it can't (say... if StarCraft 2 was Vista exclusive) than I'm gonna stick with it. Not that Vista is bad, it is a very capable operating system that I'm sure will topple XP; eventually. Not a huge fan of the menu system from my rather limited use, I had already done away the search menu on my work computer, useless for my needs, mainly because I am a folder/file neat freak and can find everything important easily.
Your review was well done, just a few spelling errors (you spelt resource as 'reasorce'), and the inclusion of underwear-clad women is alot better than Vista-stock wallpapers.

[intooblivion]

Well one cool thing is you can change it back to classic style menu anyway, so that's really not a problem. Same with the networking program and control panel.

[Alex6969]

Vista has boobs? SOLD!

Nah, not really... XP does everything I need, until it can't (say... if StarCraft 2 was Vista exclusive) than I'm gonna stick with it. Not that Vista is bad, it is a very capable operating system that I'm sure will topple XP; eventually. Not a huge fan of the menu system from my rather limited use, I had already done away the search menu on my work computer, useless for my needs, mainly because I am a folder/file neat freak and can find everything important easily.
Your review was well done, just a few spelling errors (you spelt resource as 'reasorce'), and the inclusion of underwear-clad women is alot better than Vista-stock wallpapers.

Sorry about the spelling errors, I'm horrible at the English language.

BTW alot? or a lot? lol, spelt I don't think is a word (according to Firefox.)


Well one cool thing is you can change it back to classic style menu anyway, so that's really not a problem. Same with the networking program and control panel.

ORLY? I knew that you could change the start menu to classic, but I did not know you could change how the network panel is set up.

[[CBLA]Xenon]

... spelt I don't think is a word (according to Firefox.)

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spelt

[KindGalaxy]

Sorry about the spelling errors, I'm horrible at the English language.

BTW alot? or a lot? lol, spelt I don't think is a word (according to Firefox.)




ORLY? I knew that you could change the start menu to classic, but I did not know you could change how the network panel is set up.

well the person above covered spelt hehe, as for 'alot' well yeah, its a dead word replaced with 'lot' so to get the same meaning as 'alot' you need to say 'a lot' and if you lived in the middle ages you'd have said 'hlot'. Anyway... Vista cool, review cool, spelling is phun!

[Alex6969]

yea spelling blowz

Anyway, sorry for the screen shots being so small. Apparently Photobucket doesn't like 2880x900 images on their server.

[Carbon14]

My little story about vista...

My younger brother decided to get vista, had it installed and on first impression, really cool stuff, things like fast searching and stable and well handled when it does crash seemed great. Anyhow, he likes playing BF2 and CS Source, I told him his PC should be running them at higher settings and to go back to XP to get perfomance back but he was happy with how it was. Then at some point Itunes (hate that program and apple for that matter) crashed vista so horribly it reset the machine and vista wouldn't boot anymore so he plugged in his XP drive. So anyway, he was surprised to find that both those games ran at almost max settings when it had all been midrange on vista. He hasn't bothered installing vista again yet.

Now, his machine IS getting old, so there is the big problem. All I can say however is that I still think that if your the type that runs out buying new pc stuff all the time and are only interested in new games, vista will be fine. However if your not then Vista is a horrible resource hog uselessly wasting resources that could be going towards your gaming, I definitely wont be updating until a few directx10 games force me to and I have a beefier machine.

[Kester]

Spelt is the English word. Spelled is the American bastardisation of the word.

[Collision]

well the person above covered spelt hehe, as for 'alot' well yeah, its a dead word replaced with 'lot' so to get the same meaning as 'alot' you need to say 'a lot' and if you lived in the middle ages you'd have said 'hlot'. Anyway... Vista cool, review cool, spelling is phun!

Alot is a normal word, use in context to place a vote something, I alot my vote to this person, for example, a large amount or, a lot, is and will always, be 2 words.[/nazi]

[NavMan]

Err.. I think the word there is allot.

[Kester]

pwnt.

[P-Thunder.]

Use ultramon for extra taskbar. Not Nview.

[Alex6969]

My little story about vista...

My younger brother decided to get vista, had it installed and on first impression, really cool stuff, things like fast searching and stable and well handled when it does crash seemed great. Anyhow, he likes playing BF2 and CS Source, I told him his PC should be running them at higher settings and to go back to XP to get perfomance back but he was happy with how it was. Then at some point Itunes (hate that program and apple for that matter) crashed vista so horribly it reset the machine and vista wouldn't boot anymore so he plugged in his XP drive. So anyway, he was surprised to find that both those games ran at almost max settings when it had all been midrange on vista. He hasn't bothered installing vista again yet.

Now, his machine IS getting old, so there is the big problem. All I can say however is that I still think that if your the type that runs out buying new pc stuff all the time and are only interested in new games, vista will be fine. However if your not then Vista is a horrible resource hog uselessly wasting resources that could be going towards your gaming, I definitely wont be updating until a few directx10 games force me to and I have a beefier machine.

I agree with you on the performance issue. Vista is a beast of OS and frankly I wouldn't recommend to anyone installing it on a machine with less than 3GB of RAM. I know that is outragous, but having an OS use 1GB just in idle is outrageous. The same thing goes for XP, it recommends 256 or 512, but I wouldn't be happy unless I had at least 1G preferably 2. Windows seems to like making computer owning expensive.

Use ultramon for extra taskbar. Not Nview.

I have ultramon right now for wallpaper and window management but I don't like their taskbar. I would rather have one continous taskbar where the clock and notifications are on the very right of the screens. Other than that, I'm very happy with ultramon, but I'm still waiting for nView. Its the only app that nVidia put out that I love to death. I did not like their network app, or that damned nTune.

[[CBLA]Xenon]

Windows seems to like making computer owning expensive.

Trust Microsoft to invalidate one of its own excuses why people shouldn't own Macs instead.

[Kaze]

Vista is great, but Ultimate is the epitome of a more-money-than-brains line of the OS. The only thing I can think of anyone ever needing Ultimate for is Bitlocker, and you probably won't need it unless you're a government agent.

Half the reason why you're getting so much RAM usage is because of your high resolution dual monitor setup, and the fact that Ultimate has a metric ****ton of extras that you don't need running in the background. Vista is still great at RAM management, though.

[Alex6969]

Half the reason why you're getting so much RAM usage is because of your high resolution dual monitor setup,

How's that? isn't that handled by the video card?

[Kaze]

How's that? isn't that handled by the video card?

I won't bother explaining.

Run a game at the highest resolution you can with all your memory in.

Now, take a stick out and do the same.

[Alex6969]

Xenon;282654']Trust Microsoft to invalidate one of its own excuses why people shouldn't own Macs instead.

I paid the same amount for Vista Ultimate as Leopard. Plus I built my computer to play games on it, Apple fails in that department. I just don't see how OSX or Apple is superior to Microsoft.

[[CBLA]Xenon]

I paid the same amount for Vista Ultimate as Leopard. Plus I built my computer to play games on it, Apple fails in that department. I just don't see how OSX or Apple is superior to Microsoft.

I do, having used both on a professional level.

[Alex6969]

I won't bother explaining.

Run a game at the highest resolution you can with all your memory in.

Now, take a stick out and do the same.

I know it will have adverse effects on the game, but if you wouldn't mind, please explain what is actually going on, I'm interested.

[Kaze]

I know it will have adverse effects on the game, but if you wouldn't mind, please explain what is actually going on, I'm interested.

If you don't know how RAM works (which you don't seem to), then it's kind of pointless to try to explain.

[MaxTheLimit]

Xenon;282678']I do, having used both on a professional level.

So do most graphic designers and web page developers. Doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.

[Kaze]

Xenon;282678']I do, having used both on a professional level.

Tell me, exactly HOW is a Mac superior?

Don't even say viruses. That's a completely moot point that is the fault of the user.

"OMG LOLOLOL FINAL CUT"

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

"OMG LOLOLOL PHOTOSHOP"

Supported OS': Mac OS X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X), Microsoft Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows)

Plus, shall we mention the fact that Windows is generally easier to navigate, can support nearly all games, is supported by pretty much every application out there, and that you aren't forced to give your soul to Apple by being forced to buy specific hardware for your Mac.

[Alex6969]

If you don't know how RAM works (which you don't seem to), then it's kind of pointless to try to explain.

*sighs* No, I guess I don't know how RAM works.

Tell me, exactly HOW is a Mac superior?

Don't even say viruses. That's a completely moot point that is the fault of the user.

"OMG LOLOLOL FINAL CUT"

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

"OMG LOLOLOL PHOTOSHOP"

Supported OS': Mac OS X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X), Microsoft Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows)

Plus, shall we mention the fact that Windows is generally easier to navigate, can support nearly all games, is supported by pretty much every application out there, and that you aren't forced to give your soul to Apple by being forced to buy specific hardware for your Mac.

They makes games that aren't for Windows?

[intooblivion]

Not really. They just port windows games to mac.

[Alex6969]

That's what I thought, the only game I can think of is Oregon Trail for the Apple II, but that's a DOS game so there goes that theory.

[BahamutBBob]

All of the Blizzard games come on a hybrid disc that you can install on PC and Mac. Other than that, Marathon comes to mind, but that's over 10 years old, so :rolleyes:

[Winged One]

I've heard nightmares about how nothing works with Vista and applications that do work, work horribly. Once again, this is spoken by tools, who haven't tried using Vista, or don't know anything about computers. So far every program I have loaded on my rig has worked flawlessly. I agree. I heard that from almost everyone I talked to. But I am able to run everything.

There was this guy in a GameStop talking to this woman. She wanted to buy her son C&C: The First Decade. She asked the obviously brain dead cashier if it would run on Vista. He replied "No, Vista does not run anything that I know of." I promptly walked up and said "Have you actually used Vista?" to which he replied "No, but I've heard the stories." "Okay," I said. I turned to the woman. "Buy it, your son will love it. I have a Vista computer, and it has run anything I've put in it."

[Alex6969]

Now old games like that I wouldn't expect to run on Vista. Games like Warcraft 2 or the original C&C but most of the time those don't run with XP anyway, unless you have DOSbox or something like that.

[Ares]

^It's hit or miss with them sometimes. I've been able to run Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Claw, and Close Combat 3: The Russian Front sometimes without even using the "Run this program in compatability mode for:" option.

MechWarrior 2 on the other hand required me to find, install, figure out, and use DOSbox, then go through a checklist of how to get it to work with DOSbox.

[jedipoodoo547]

Now old games like that I wouldn't expect to run on Vista. Games like Warcraft 2 or the original C&C but most of the time those don't run with XP anyway, unless you have DOSbox or something like that.

Hey really great review Alex. I have never used Vista before, prior to this past week, so i was expecting extreme frustration, but so far, after about a week, i am pleasantly surprised. I have Ultimate too. There are many things that are harder to find, but i am sure i will get used to it. Vista does seem more intuitive and i don't think i could ever go back to XP now even if i tried.

Most of my games seem to work, so far:

Crysis (the only fps i own for pc), Guild Wars and Guild Wars:Eye Of The North, Lord Of The Rings:The Battle For Middle Earth 1 and 2. That is pretty much it, since i did not install any other games yet. I am hoping The Movies and Star Wars:Empire at War, Warhammer and all it's expansions, Parawrold are compatible. But games Like Southpark and an older Casino game, i am thinking they will not.

[tigger]

i won't get an OS that costs more than 50 squid, and needs more than half a gig of RAM to run quickly: just because I have that much ram doesn't mean i should have to give it to the OS, the OS is really just there to facilitate other things, not to be an end to itself.


oh and one more thing: i hate macs with a vengeance :)

[Alex6969]

Ah the linux user. Don't get me wrong, I love linux to death, I use it at work exclusively for all of my projects. But there is something nice about putting installing a game and playing it without much work.

[bluseychris]

As far as Mac games go there's CNC, anything that's done by Id due to a unix base, CoD series, Unreal series, Blizzard games, the list goes on. There's also Crossover for Mac, the equiv of Crossover Linux (based of Wine) so you can run PC games.

My gripe over Vista is that it offers me what I already have with OS X. Plus it comes in multiple versions, when I upgrade OSX I get OSX. Not fisherprice, or standard or comes with a shed load of stuff you aren't going to use, just the same OSX for everyone.

As far as using on a pro level, MacOS has typically been quicker. I find that it uses far less spec to do similar tasks. It looks pretty and it's simple to use, many installations I've done on it have been simple drag and drop procedures.

To be honest I won't touch Vista untill I have to, the way games are starting to appear on Mac and Windows more often now I may just stop using Windows by that point.

[Collision]

If you want, you should join Apple's SDK community, there is so much more you can do with OS X using the X Code tools and everything else that comes with Leopard (download of the beta available for Tiger, honestly, there is no difference), also the price, Leopard is $150 AUD, Vista is what? $400 or something?

[Alex6969]

I paid $200US for Vista Ultimate. I feel no pitty for someone who pays $400 when they can get it for $200. The only difference is that it doesn't come with the pretty box.

OEM FTW

[jambo]

If you want, you should join Apple's SDK community, there is so much more you can do with OS X using the X Code tools and everything else that comes with Leopard (download of the beta available for Tiger, honestly, there is no difference), also the price, Leopard is $150 AUD, Vista is what? $400 or something?
$180 for Home Premium.

[bluseychris]

£160 for 3 licenses for OSX

[MaxTheLimit]

Vista home premium retail is under 300 bucks in CAD for retail (63 or 32 bit versions) 130 or so for OEM, which will never be enforced, if it is I bet if you make a stink on a call they'll give you a break.

[jambo]

My mate works in a computer store and he said that Microsoft have told him that it is indeed LEGAL to sell OEM versions of Windows by themselves.

[MaxTheLimit]

uh....yeah. I didn't realize that was up for debate.