Windows XP or Vista?

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hepburn

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has anyone else noticed how much hard disk space Windows Vista eats up? I've just replaced Vista (after 8 weeks) with XP on my laptop and i've freed up at least 10GB, and that's after reinstalling all the same programs and data. As much as I like Vista's appearance and features I just can't justify using it and losing a substantial chunk of space.

Has anyone else noticed this and taken the same route?
 
I refuse to switch to vista, so i'll have xp pro on both machines for a wee while to come....next lappy will be a mac, so even less chance of getting M$ system hog :)
 
I've just set up my desktop as a dual boot Vista/XP setup. Obviously not a space saving idea but I much prefer XP at the moment and some of my older programs aren't being made Vista compatible. I've got a second hard drive that both can access.

Bob
 
We have one machine running Vista and one (mine) running XP. I hate Vista, I just can't find anything on it to sort it out when it needs attention. :puke:
 
I have taken to Vista fairly well tbh. Didn't take me too long to find stuff, and aside from my broken hardware issues, it runs very well for me.

Also, considering a 500GB disk can be had for under £60, I don't understand how people can be worried about space. Admitedy, it does take up more space, but I dont see people moaning about modern games taking up more room? Just my 2p :)
 
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Vista does not like old hardware. got it on my new home built computer and had to go back to onboard sound as my once expensive audigy 2 zs did not work properly despite so called vista drivers. Now everything is new (and I worked out what the user control stuff is all about) there are no problems - so vista stays here.
 
We provide around a thousand PC's a year to businesses and we have been downgrading 80% of them to XP. XP just seems to do everything they need.
 
XP over Vista, every time. More stable, less resource-hungry, more compatible. I've yet to find anything that Vista does better, so all machines in the house run XP, with a couple of dual-boots for testing purposes.
 
i changed from XP to vista about 6 months ago, i quite like vista tbh, enough not to go back to XP anyway.
 
Woodsy said:
Also, considering a 500GB disk can be had for under £60, I don't understand how people can be worried about space. Admitedy, it does take up more space, but I dont see people moaning about modern games taking up more room? Just my 2p :)
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Well... That's fine on a desktop pc but on a laptop it's a different story. I'm not exactly using old hardware either...
 
hepburn said:
Well... That's fine on a desktop pc but on a laptop it's a different story. I'm not exactly using old hardware either...
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Ok, fair enough, I accept that laptop hard disks are more limited in capacity than 3.5" disks, but I'm sorry, Vista is not an XP "+10GB" install. The chances are, what you had was the vista install, and all the error logs, all the crash logs, all the internet temp files, all program temp files etc etc etc, which of course wouldn't have been there once formatted and a fresh OS installed. I do agree that Vista takes up more room, of course it does, but not 10GB more.
 
Woodsy said:
Ok, fair enough, I accept that laptop hard disks are more limited in capacity than 3.5" disks, but I'm sorry, Vista is not an XP "+10GB" install. The chances are, what you had was the vista install, and all the error logs, all the crash logs, all the internet temp files, all program temp files etc etc etc, which of course wouldn't have been there once formatted and a fresh OS installed. I do agree that Vista takes up more room, of course it does, but not 10GB more.
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I have to disagree, although I never said it was an XP+10Gb install. I've installed both OS's many times on different computers and I frequently see a 10gb difference after a while.. I accept what you say about temp files but on my laptop i was always clearing those out, even to the point of rooting in the hidden folders to delete stuff. Part of the problem is the way Vista learns itself and "builds" on its basic install.
 
I have two laptops runing in the house, mine with XP and the Mrs's is Vista :annoyed:. I hate using the vista machine, I find it slow to boot up and shut down compared to my machine (both are very similar specs), a pain in the behind to use, and just really stupid to operate. It refuses to install SP1 which I'm currently onto microsoft support about, and now it wont boot up after following their support advice :bang:.
 
hepburn said:
I have to disagree, although I never said it was an XP+10Gb install. I've installed both OS's many times on different computers and I frequently see a 10gb difference after a while.. I accept what you say about temp files but on my laptop i was always clearing those out, even to the point of rooting in the hidden folders to delete stuff. Part of the problem is the way Vista learns itself and "builds" on its basic install.
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Fair enough chap. As said, I do accept that it takes more room, and I suppose in a way me arguing that it doesn't make a 10Gb different is pretty pointless, as A) I'm in no way calling you a liar, and B) the fact that I didn't see that large a difference isn't exactly a large cross section of experiance :)
 
gnu/linux.

yes really.
 
Woodsy said:
Fair enough chap. As said, I do accept that it takes more room, and I suppose in a way me arguing that it doesn't make a 10Gb different is pretty pointless, as A) I'm in no way calling you a liar, and B) the fact that I didn't see that large a difference isn't exactly a large cross section of experiance :)
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Points taken. I think we all see our own differences and they often depend on a number of factors. I wonder if there's any official figures floating about on the net?
 
i'm sticking to xp as long as i can as i fail to see the advantage to changing.... yet
 
Vista is truly great if the system it is run on has enough ram (perhaps 2-4 gig) lots of disk space (perhaps 200gig) and a decent graffix card! (too many to suggest). If not then yes it does eat up the pc's resources.

I love it though and would never go back to xp and certainly not to mac systems

Jonny
 
XP any day! one simple example, I try to use disks that came with my printer, do not work so I uninstall and download new vista ones - still does not work and program loops. Turns out that uninstall that comes with Vista does not work properly you need to download a different one to do the job properly :bang: Thats without getting technical :(
 
XP in this household none of our computers run on Vista, we have always had XP i refuse to change to vista i will stick to XP until Microsoft bring out another safe OS. as everyone i know have had problem with vista :)

Thanks,
Ben
 
rasmusrok1 said:
Vista is truly great if the system it is run on has enough ram (perhaps 2-4 gig) lots of disk space (perhaps 200gig) and a decent graffix card! (too many to suggest). If not then yes it does eat up the pc's resources.

I love it though and would never go back to xp and certainly not to mac systems

Jonny
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Just to make mention and prevent anyone wasting money...Vista Home Premium will only use 3 gig of RAM although higher spec versions can use more.

Bob
 
boroboyben said:
i will stick to XP until Microsoft bring out another safe OS
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I dont get it. XP when it first came out was just as riddled with problems, security issues and vulnerabilities as vista, if not moreso! How many viruses have people had with vista? Then think back to XP... SP1 was brought out mainly to tackle one problem. Blaster. What gives people the idea that XP is a safe OS? It has over 90 critical or serious updates and 3 service packs. Vista by comparison is far safer. Unless I'm understanding your use of "safe" incorrectly?
 
Arrggghh I could seriously rant about Vista.

Bought a PC for my Mum from Dell with Vista and it seemed OK so I went down the same route. Mine was a nightmare to get right.

It didn't even boot when it arrived and had to go back to Dell.

1 week later it returned working, but no Vista driver for the Belkin Wireless Adaptor. There was a note in the box with the adaptor saying 'please check the Belkin website and download the latest driver'. :bang: No problem for me as I had another laptop at home but could be a real issue for some people. How do you download the latest driver if you can't get online... :shrug:

iTunes is a nightmare. When I transferred my library to my Vista machine I noticed songs were getting chopped short when playing back on my iPod. The whole song is there on my Ipod as I could fast forward through it, and it plays back OK in iTunes on the PC. I transferred my music library back to XP and it is all working again OK...

I get at least one complete system freeze a day whilst using Firefox to browse the web. Something to do with a Firefox / Vista interaction when viewing SSL encrypted webpages.

Call me a conspiracy theorist but iTunes and Firefox not working well with Vista? :cautious:

So if I had my time again I would recommend XP. Tried and trusted with little compatibility issues.
 
Now I'm not picking on anyone here just using examples.

Arrggghh I could seriously rant about Vista.
It didn't even boot when it arrived and had to go back to Dell.
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Not a Vista Problem then.

no Vista driver for the Belkin Wireless Adaptor
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So not a Vista problem then

. When I transferred my library to my Vista machine I noticed songs were getting chopped short when playing back on my iPod. The whole song is there on my Ipod as I could fast forward through it, and it plays back OK in iTunes on the PC. I transferred my music library back to XP and it is all working again OK...
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Again not a Vista problem

Something to do with a Firefox / Vista interaction when viewing SSL encrypted webpages
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Gues What!!!!!!!!


I see and hear all this Vista knocking regulary.

It happened with XP when it was released to how 98/2000 was so much better.

The examples above are all cases of 3 party providers not acting quickly enough to develop there new drivers/code when they were given the source from MS many months before the public release of Vista.

Yes Vista had and still does have niggles, all OS do that is why updates are released.

It is not fair thought to lay the blame all at MS.

I am an I.T Consultant system designer and personally use both 2000, Vista and XP, all easily networked together.

Vista is the most stable I've ever used. and my systems get hammered as test beds regularly.

Most problems arise from people not having checked compatibility with older hardware and software.
 
PsiFox said:
Not a Vista Problem then.
Not a Vista Problem then.
Not a Vista Problem then.
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All issues are due to an interaction with Vista that is the problem. The issue doesn't exist on XP with Firefox, Itunes or the Wireless driver. Vista blame the OEM. The OEM blames M$.

The poor user caught in the middle just wants a solution, not who's fault it is.

Vista is the most stable I've ever used.
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Not in my experience. The whole system freezing while using Firefox is not stable IMO. Again I don't care who's fault it is (M$ or Firefox or Apple) but at the end of the day I wouldn't recommend moving to Vista yet.

As you say:

The examples above are all cases of 3 party providers not acting quickly enough to develop there new drivers/code when they were given the source from MS many months before the public release of Vista.

Yes Vista had and still does have niggles, all OS do that is why updates are released.
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Does the user really care? From his / her point of view just wants to get a system that runs as expected.

OK maybe M$ get more bad rap than due. But the OP just wanted to know whether to go for XP or Vista right now.

Guess what my recommendation is after my experience!!!
 
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PsiFox said:
Most problems arise from people not having checked compatibility with older hardware and software.
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That might be true, however, does the average user know how to check the compatibility of their hardware and software with operating systems? Does the average joe public user know what an operating system is?

These things appear simple to us computer techy nerds, but is it that simple for someone who doesn't know one end of the keyboard to the other? Computers are supposed to be user friendly to everyone.

My experience with vista - its slow, something keeps crashing on it (something to do with the graphics drivers, not sure if its vista, the drivers or boths fault at the moment..never happened with xp in my experience), lots of pointless gizmo's that take up resources, its a pain trying to navigate around it and finding stuff.

Yes XP has its flaws, but if you are careful with your browsing and install decent anti-virus, spyware, adware (etc..) programs then you should be fine with security.

:)
 
I'm not seeking to knock Vista, nor dwell on it's problems. I think the corporate take up of Vista is sufficiently low to demonstrate my point, which is - XP will do everything I need it to do without the horrendous disk space overhead of Vista. Given my hardware (laptop) is less than a year old and therefore newer than Vista, one would think it would run Vista just fine. But it doesn't, it gets clogged up with Vista's overheads and when I examine the Windows folder I find best part of 15Gb devoted to it. My XP windows folder is currently 3Gb, albeit only after a week rather than 8 weeks.

So to put this thread back on topic, the original question was how many of us have dumped Vista and stuck with/gone back to XP. A pertinent question given the way MS has foistered Vista upon us as the default OS with a new bit of kit.

Oh, and I say all this as a regular user rather than a guy with 30 years technical experience in IT. ;)
 
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