Who goes from Windows 7 to Vista and likes it?

[ClassicVista]

I do for one. Anyone else? How does this happen?
Easy. My first Vista experience was with a used Compaq 4 gig x2 Athlon 64 that had Home Premium installed. I liked it but my girlfriend talked me into upgrading to Win7.

Win7 disappoints. It seems the interface is "flat" and even "stripped" and lacking much in the way of contrast and color, things that make Vista look classy and that 7 lacked. I enjoyed using 7 but missed Vista's color and feel, I hated the flat color of the task bar.

So, I bought Vista Ultimate on Ebay and put a clean install over 7 and spent the next 24 hours updating that pre fixpack version up to fixpack 2 and viola! Vista!

She's a beauty. Just as responsive as 7 was with a bit more class.

Anyone else reverse and decide Vista was what 7 should have been?

 

[MWRed]

I don't know if i'd go as far to say that Vista is what 7 should have been.
I'm one of the oddballs that has both, and likes Vista more.

To this day, haven't had a single issue with it. It is now on my kids desktop PC, which I use here and there.
The laptop I got came with 7, and I learned to like it too, considering it is mostly like Vista with a few quirks.

I wish this laptop had Vista on it. I was so used to Vista that I didn't want to change again so soon.
At least it's not XP.

 

[ilikefree]

I had seven and switched back to Vista

 

[Mbclem]

All my programs run just the same whether on Vista, 7 or 8. Went back to Vista with 7 Transformation Pack ( I like 7's taskbar) - works just fine.

 

[Cytherian]

I had read some testimonies that Windows 7 runs faster than Windows Vista. Not "exceptionally fast", but enough to notice. I can't recall what some of the speculation was specifically, but if memory serves me well the higher number of background processes in Vista partially contributed to it (although some non-essential services can be stopped, it was said that the core set of services numbers higher than in Windows 7).

I haven't had any notable operational issues with Vista. I prefer the extra level of security and don't mind clicking through an extra dialog to have that added peace of mind against malicious software and intruders.

 

[Mbclem]

In case anyone's interested, on my i5-2500 4G ram, onboard graphics on a Gigabyte motherboard, here's my Passmark numbers with a fresh install OS, all updates and no extra programs. First column, Vista 64, second, Windows 7, 64.

Passmark - 1552.8, 1594.4
CPU Mark - 6791.5, 6859.1
2D Graphics - 813.1, 435.0
3D Graphics - 210.8, 244.2
Memory - 1359.2, 1553.5

 

[whs]

I liked Vista too. But now all my systems run on SSDs and Vista has no Trim. Besides, Win7 has more functions, more things are automated and also more codecs. And since I do a lot of video work, that is important. I would not want to muck around with Codec packs. But I am still a Vista fan. It was a lot of fun.

 

[ClassicVista]

I don't know if i'd go as far to say that Vista is what 7 should have been.
I'm one of the oddballs that has both, and likes Vista more.

To this day, haven't had a single issue with it. It is now on my kids desktop PC, which I use here and there.
The laptop I got came with 7, and I learned to like it too, considering it is mostly like Vista with a few quirks.

I wish this laptop had Vista on it. I was so used to Vista that I didn't want to change again so soon.
At least it's not XP.

Well. I use 7 at work and I have a clean install Vista Ultimate at home with all the latest updates and it is as smooth and responsive as well as more three D and colorful. My Vista task bar is three D, less crowded and I love the way the tasks blink in contrasting rich color when trying to get my attention or highlight in rich color when I put my mouse pointer on them. Clearly a classic windows U.I. taken to the limit. So, in short, a new clean install Vista with all the updates is beautiful and just as responsive as my 7 at work is and it is imo more secure, I appreciate Vista asking me if I want some program taking control before it does, but that may be the professional I.T. person in me.

 

[Cytherian]

^ I've been a PC techie for a good 20 years and also prefer to know more about what's going on with my system. I still find it annoying how the list of active processes don't show you who called it. For example svchost can be launched by many other programs to do a variety of things. If I see one out there that is consuming a lot of memory (relatively speaking), I want to know who launched it. Anyway, things have certainly gotten quite a bit better from Windows XP days.

I've not yet explored SSD's as they're still quite expensive. What's the trim issue with Vista in using these?

 

[Night Hawk]

There are some MS freebies you might be interested in for that like Handle and Process Explorer as well as ProcMon. You can find those in either the MS TechNet or MSDN libraries for download. Generally those will provide a good breakdown on things.

As for 7 being what Vista should have been is in opposite of the Vista being what 7 should have been concept. Vista ran here until the decision to move forward not backward was seen with the 7 Release Candidates but having already known that the replacement for the 32bit Vista would be the 64bit 7 when looking over the information prior to the beta builds in 2008.

Surprisingly the build at the time saw the XP(still on prior to XP Mode) dual boot with Vista(what a relief from XP) along with both flavors(32/64bit) of the 7 beta build. With the 64bit 7 found to be far more responsive then Vista while Vista was a solid OS about to see SP2 go on it was still time to see it go except for running in on a VM for a bit.

Now to behold what bad rep got tossed at Vista for being a bloated OS would fit the next version soon to come only in the opposite direction of being chopped up! Besides the Metro you now lose Media Center and no more dvd playback in WMP!

In the comparison between Vista and 7 however Vista only saw some things in the Ultimate and Corporate editions while 7 sees the option for creating a full system image backup in all editions as well as placing gadgets on the desktop rather then the need for a sidebar.

The cons for 7 over Vista would be loss of the Classic Windows theme with Classic menu over the Aero Basic and Aero style themes. So far the strongest point for 7 besides all that is the support for Fat has returned in 7 now that Fat volumes on usb flash drives and exFat is common on many external hard drives Vista needs a 3rd party program supplied by the drive manufacturer over 7 having Native support for Far returned.

The 32bit 7 has another surprise of seeing many old XP games and apps run that won't even install on Vista. Those same games and apps however will run into more problems with 8 then either Vista or 7 due to no longer be able to add DX 9c on with DX 10 or 11 on the two newer then XP versions. Say good bye to many old titles that will run into Open GL issues fast!

With XP, Vista, and 7 all being loaded to the hill with programs, games, etc. which one has fared best? Well that would be with 7 only seeing a few BSODs period since 2009 when beta. With Vista several over 2 1/2yrs. of use. But forget XP entirely despite the final fixes seen with SP3! That was a walking Blue screen Mare!

Vista proved to be STABLE and far less problematic in it's favor while being larger in size. But it got an undeserved bad rep when MS made the mistake of lowering the minimum system requirements catching too many offguard with what 512mb or 1gb of ram? Even XP runs much better with 2gb installed!

 

[Cytherian]

Interesting stuff, Night Hawk. I have a feeling that a lot of issues or benefits experienced have a contextual influence. One can't forget that hardware makes a huge difference, especially where memory is concerned. The great thing is that memory has become rather cheap. My mother was struggling with 512Mb of RAM for quite a while, something which I advised her about when buying the laptop (I told her to get 2Gb of RAM). She trimmed back on a few things to save $$, and I didn't realize she did that with memory. Anyway, I got her upgraded and wow what an improvement it was.

Anyway, I've got an upgrade to Vista Ultimate on the way, which I'm getting used for a good price. It won't offer a performance improvement but I'll be able to make use of the added features.

 

[Night Hawk]

Before 7 was out in beta I upped the ram to 4gb while still running the 32bit Vista Home Premium which was bought OEM(OEM for System Builders) for the last custom build I ran for just over 2 1/2yrs. The RC1 had been run for a time on the previous XP Pro case. 2005-2007 when replaced by the last build to eventually test 7 on.

The prices on ram falling is an understatement since the original price for the exact same pair of 2gb dimms ran for $300 while I waited almost a full year to see the prices come down! From a whopping $300 down to roughly $90-! allowed me to run with 3.571gb of ram. I took the 400mb hit for the extra while still running the 32bit Windows while the real leap was seen when going from 1gb to 2gb over simply adding more while running XP alone on past builds.

For the 64bit 7 the 4gb was just that 4gb in full until trying to run multiple VMs simultaneously and the ""out of resources" problem came up and why the present build sees 8gb of Mushkin(four 2gb dimms) about to be replaced by 8gb of Kingston Hyper X(pair of 4gb dimms) leaving room to expand to 16gb IF and IF ever the need comes up while not an essential.

Why does it take longer for both XP and Vista to shutdown then 7? While Vista is certainly a far better OS then XP until SP3 came along and still better yet over the older buggy Windows 7 was found more responsve as well as the faster shutdown time which is easy to see fixed in the two previous versions as well.

That would be the value set for one registry entry being 20,000 for XP and Vista equaling 20 seconds, 12,000 for 7 equal to 12 seconds, and for 8 try 5,000 for 5 seconds. Here I lowered that to 800 while still having XP set up in dual boot with Vista while testing 7 to each shutdown in the same amount of time.

Stability wise and for security both Vista and 7 surpass the previous versions altogether. But Vista has a much larger kernel then seen with 7 that uses a newer MinWin type or modular kernel which improves overall performance. The newer version is also lighter to some extent on resources.

 

[Cytherian]

I run with 4Gb of RAM. My shutdown is actually rather quick. I think the last time I timed it, the process took about 20 seconds. I usually go into sleep mode and then wake-up is just as fast as shutdown. A cold start-up is 5 minutes until everything has finished winding up (meaning, I have Internet access and I can launch programs without big lags). I'm tempted to go for 8Gb of RAM, but honestly I don't think it'll improve things more than 10-15%. That's not much for an outlay of $140.

Also, there's the used laptop market... amazing how affordable some machines have become. True, you do take some risks, but if you buy from a reputable and honest seller, you can do quite well. I'm kind of torn between trying to upgrade my machine with 8Gb total RAM and a blu-ray drive... which would run me around $225. That's almost half-way to a very nice used machine with DDR3 RAM, faster processor, and blu-ray.

 

[markaz]

Getting ready to do it. I started a thread a few hours ago regarding same and the specs on the laptop I want to switch over to Vista. Nit gonna bash Win 7, but I 've never had one problem on my 3 year old Vista PC and developers have done a great job making all the add-on I prefer compatible with Vista , but not 7. It's a matter of taste and mine prefers Vista.

 

[Night Hawk]

The one thing to remember about Vista when having more then 2gb of memory installed as for the 64bit Windows is the need to remove all but the first 2gb due to installation errors. You won't see that with 7.

As for seeing any performance gain when going from 4gb to 8gb don't expect any with either version. The real gain for the 64bit would be going from 2gb upto 4gb since the 64bit Windows preloads more data into the active ram resulting in far less swapping out to the drive by way of the paging file.

The 32bit on the other sees more swapped out to the drive using less active ram and the main reason for seeing 2gb for 32bit, 2.5gb for the 64bit as the original recommended amount of memory even for 7. The 3gb barrier factor is actually 3.12gb for the 32bit XP and 3.571gb for Vista when 4gb of memory is installed while that 3gb+ helps the larger of the two versions run smoother overall.

For 7 on the other hand I had run a test of the newer version on an old XP build(6-7yrs. old back in 2010) seeing a 128mb AGP video card and a pair of 512mb dimms. The 32bit was the choice there for a temp install while the present build was down temporarily due to a bad supply cooking the first board!

The 32bit 7 showed far more backward compatibilty when old XP drivers were installed without issue for the video card, set of board drivers, and even noticably the onboard sound. Generally you would expect only the latest if found to work on a newer version of Windows while that old board never saw any Vista updates! Everything worked however.

That old case was later to see a fresh install of XP go on when being given away for a friend's kid for school work while the idea of running Vista wouldn't have worked. The one thing to mention here is that only one of the two dimms 512mb was working when first seeing the temp install of 7 go on until the entire case saw a cleaning right after where the dimms as well as video card were pulled, slots cleaned, and contacts on memory as well as video as well using a pencil eraser.

BINGO! 1gb instead of 512mb on the next power up! Of course you knew that the 4gb first installed later to be swapped for 8gb of another brand was still being missed one week. :D Reverting back to Vista now after 3yrs. of first testing and later running the retail 7 would be an impossibility here except for firing up the previously build once again with a new board and supply.

When the old supply gave out the replacement is what cooked the board on the new build! A second new board as well as a change of brand of supply! Another new supply is still needed once again for the old case in order to fire up a fresh Vista install. Why revert when you have two systems to work with?

 

[UltimateSilence]

I use both, but I think I like Vista more.
Windows 7 removed a lot of nice features like freely arranging files in a folder, classic Control Panel view, etc.

No problems with Vista here. Not even a BSoD.

Also, I love Vista for the UI. It is very fine and consistant!

 

[Night Hawk]

I hardly saw any BSOD when running Vista until late spring back in 2009 with the exception of a VM install at one point. I simply found Vista to be a far better OS then XP which was loaded with bugs finally addressed with SP 3! to some extent. Otherwise XP meant BSOD frequently!

In the amount of time at this point having run 7 for as long I even found fewer problems in Windows while some of the same programs still run into the exact same glitches! But some of those same programs that were run on 98SE are now still running on the 8 CP! Funny how that worked out. :D

And yes I actually missed the Classic theme Vista still offered when upgrading out of an XP/Vista dual boot for the retail 7. The side bar however was always a "No Thanks"!

As far as reliability the present install of 7 or rather an image restored in October 2010 from the May '10 clean install is still running well despite being loaded to the hills with a large variety of programs and utilities. To compare that with past versions XP would have likely seen two cleans installs during the same time period while Vista may have seen one during late summer early fall 2011.

W7 keeps hanging in there however despite whatever I put it through! The two versions are very close in this regard while 7 is still the preferred OS here. Vista would still be second on the list however. :D

 

[jons]

I would like to stay with vista, go to 64bit vista. But people keep telling me on forums it will be too much trouble with drivers.
Is this an exaggeration?

 

[Night Hawk]

You can run 64bit Vista drivers on the 64bit 7! The two have a close compatibility seen there. Presently Vista updates for both the 32bit and 64bit alike are abundant.

The problem was seen when Vista was first out and why MS was demanding that drivers be made available for 7 while the newer version was still in pre-beta stages! Back then I had to run XP for some time and kept running XP due to a one year wait for a Vista update on some add-on devices like a tv tuner card.

The manufacturers were way too ssslowwwwwwww... back then being one reason why many simply turned away from the new at the time version to stay with 2000, XP until 7 came along. At this time and date you would easily see most as optional updates through the MS updates site.

 

[whs]

I've not yet explored SSD's as they're still quite expensive. What's the trim
issue with Vista in using these?

1. I just bought a $69.95 SSD. It has 60GB which is ample for the OS on a desktop. So "expensive" is relative.

2. Since Vista dows not support Trim, the write speed is cut in half. That would not be the case in Windows 7 which supports Trim.

3. Here is interesting reading. Read all 5 articles. It is useful information that you should have before you select yout SSD. Garbage Collection and TRIM in SSDs Explained - An SSD Primer - The SSD Review