Vista: Am I mad?

milltown

I picked up a laptop on holidays last week with the intention of it being the mainstay of my music and DJing hobby. It's, I think, a decent enough spec for the price I paid: Dualcore centrino @ 2.0ghz and 3gb of RAM. Downside is, it's my first experience of Windows Vista and so far I'm not loving it.

Prior to this I've mostly been a Virtual DJ bunny with occasional forays into Traktor. Trouble is, neither seem to work especially well with Vista. My lappy came with a free Win7 upgrade but it's looking like I'll need to use a mate's address to ship that to, seeing as I bought stateside.

Is there any point, in yizzer opinion, of persisting with Vista until I get my hands on Windows 7? Is Win7 likely to be any better? From what I've heard it's more XP-like than Vista which was a bit like MS trying to reinvent the wheel that nearly everybody was happy with.

So far I'm leaning backwards towards putting XP on and getting back in my comfort zone. Opinions?

jimi_t

I'd be with you 100%; Vista is a festering pile of ****. The worst thing since Windows ME. Make sure to source the right drivers BEFORE you change a thing though, or you might have some trouble booting up

jiltloop

Yeah I've heard terrible things about Vista but apparently windows 7 is a big improvement and i don't think there's anywhere near as much issues with Windows 7 than there was with Vista. I think you should just put up with Vista until you get the upgrade cos putting your pc through 3 different OS changes is probably asking for trouble.

ED E

Vista has been updated hundreds of time since release, and most of the instabilitys are gone now. That said, XP is still that bit sounder, but not as snazzy looking.

I think Win7, from the 10mins of the trial I used, is basically vista but with the tweaks done on release. This kills off a load of the stigma associated with vista.

I'm using vista on this piece of junk(I'm a student) and it does the job. I wouldnt use Ableton on it Live, not that I'd use it all, but Virtual DJ, PCDJ, Traktor, Cue and Deckadance are fine. Wish I could get Mixx working on Xandros BTW.

I'd say turn off Aero and the Sidebar, then give it a shot and see. Its it all melts down in front of you, its XP time.

jimi_t

Lethal_Bullet wrote: »

That said, XP is still that bit sounder, but not as snazzy looking. resource hogging

Fixed

Belive me, regardless of what you say, you'll never get a boot time or page file or RAM usage shorter or smaller than with XP. It's also a way more stable and just less hassle all round.

copeyhagen

i run xp on my laptop with ableton and that on it and vista on my desktop.

desktop has really high spec and loads of ram so it runs vista fine.

when i bought my laptop it had vista on it and it sucked.

3 gig ram on the laptop wasnt enough. so i flashed it to xp the day i bought it

tman

Make sure windows update is fully up to date, as has been said, there have been several stability and performance patches since release...
I personally have had no issues whatsoever running Ableton (with lots of vsts), Acid, Sound Forge or Traktor on Vista..

What kind of problems are you having with it?

old gregg

I moved from XP to Vista when I changed my lappy a year ago. It's used only to run Ableton and sometimes FL Studio.

The key to working with Vista was deciding that it was only going to be used as a music production/performance system and then shutting down everything that would impact upon that. There are plenty of resources available out there on the interweb to help optimise Vista for music production.

My experience is that an optimised Vista works just as well as an optimised XP. Not saying it's going to be that way for everyone but it has been for me. Then again, I've never DJ'd in my life so use it for live music performance which I'm guessing is going to be more resource intensive. I do dislike the look and feel of Vista though.

joker77

I'm running Traktor with my Vestax VCI-100 SE on Vista, and have never had a problem.

I know I'm in the minority, but I've been using Vista since 2007 and really liked it from the start. XP is so old... I have use it in work because some software we use doesn't play well with Vista, but I'd much prefer to be on Vista.

If you want my 2 cents, the initial problems with Vista were because hardware manufacturers were too lazy to write new drivers to support the O/S. This caused a load of problems initially - especially with graphics drivers. That said - once I installed Vista on a clean hard drive, I don't see a problem with it once you get all the right drivers.

I think at this stage, you're safe enough DJ'ing on Vista. I'd prefer it to XP, that's for sure.

acman

If you must insist on using Windows...then yes, XP is your safest, most robust bet. Vista is a steaming pile of horsepoo, and god knows how long it will be before they work out all the teething problems with Windows 7.

My motto is when your PC starts acting up, dont throw your computer out the window, throw windows out of your computer! If you can afford it, get a Mac, you will never look back!