Awesome discussion going on here.
@RiO: Only reason I moved to Vista was my own judgement. I had not tried any of the earlier beta-RC1-etc releases. My first try with vista was when I got 4GB of ram to play with.
I had decided, If i keep 4GB i use vista, If I use vista, I keep the 4GB. A looped decision, but anyways. I was blown away by the change in functionality from XP-> Vista.
I am a long standing user of XP.... fan boi sort of. I use XP/ Solaris for work, 2003 Ent Edi for a 8 core clovertown machine we have, etc, but when I first tried Vista, I did so with a open mind.
And I found that Vista not only met my expectations of it, but actually managed to wow me with a lot of features (like UC manager, some people hate it... I infact like having the choice at my finger tips to disallow stupid things being done to my system (i love the metaphor you have brought here, city = os)
After using it for 2 weeks, I decided, it was time to invest in my first real software purchase (games don't really qualify as software.)
Decided against Ultimate because the extra features didn't really attract me... Home Premium was good enough for me ATM.
I agree, you specifically mentioned that "some people" are moving to Vista because of peer pressure, but it certainly wasn't me.
@QF: TIQ cannot be trusted even for the fact that "Vista" is a "M$" product. Its hilarious that TIQ contradicts its own "frivolous" statements in a matter of hour with a contradictory article, most of the times by the same author. Many-a-times I have been mislead because of such rubbish articles from TIQ.
@Justin: I whole heartedly agree with you mate. I bought Vista for similar but not exact reasons. I ready a lot of articles about "Vista" being a memory hog.... its simply not that. Vista makes a paradigm shift (atleast considering its a WINDOWS os) by no longer thinking of RAM as a "resource" but instead of as a cache. Would you want cache to be empty? What good is it doing? If the memory management routines are efficient (i believe SP1 will bring in a substantial improvement to Vista) then it doesn't matter how much memory is being used up for cache. As soon as any program demands memory, the memory is "pre empted" and given to the asking program. Otherwise, the cache is used to hold frequently used data/program files which can only lend to speeding up the whole desktop experience.
@Funky: I agree, Vista can be high on power usage... but i believe the laptop manufactures are coming out with new bioses which are making Vista "behave" on laptops. Aero Glass is "obv" a power hog because it activates the 3D part of the accelerator chips. I guess if you enable Superfetch, then it will lend to the power drain as well. These issues should again be addressed with SP1.
@All: As a vista user, I agree, Vista can be a "CPU" hog at times.... most notably, in CSS (a heavily CPU dependent FPS), it is very evident. However, if one has the hardware for it (CPU + GFX), it hardly matters to them. 350Fps vs 300FPS.. big w00t. Also, everyone remember how Windows installation prior to a prepatched SP2 copy used to crash if connected to LAN because of Melissa (did I get the name right?) virus? It wasn't a wonder either. It is only after SP2 that XP because a very reliable OS.
Regards,
Karan
