Thread: Vista vs. XP

Had to buy a new computer a couple months back. It came with Vista installed. But, it also came with a Windows XP Pro "downgrade" disc. That's the sole reason I bought it because of the XP backup that came with it. I've heard horror stories about Vista but thought they were mostly exaggerated. NOT!

I tried my best to like Vista, but it is the WORST program ever. My computer crashed on a daily basis, many times more than once. Most everything clashed with it. This is on a very high end Sony Vaio computer. Love the computer, but hate Vista!!!!

I "downloaded" to XP Pro and it is like night & day difference. Loads twice as fast without conflicts. I would sure hate to have to deal with the Vista issues with a large company. I don't know how Microsoft gets away with putting out such a piece of crap!

Bottom line.....Vista Sucks! Buy at your own risk, especially if you have to rely on expensive home inspection software which may or mostly likely WILL NOT be 100% compatible with it.

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• vista 64 bit?

Been running Vista over a Year, No Problems. ( I like it )

I "have" to use Windows XP for my reporting software. How many ways can I say I hate it? Not enough space here.

My home computers are (mostly) all Apple and never have problems with them.

'm going to try this new software that will run Windows on a mac without loading Windows on the computer. It's called Cross Over (or something like that).

I know that Porter Valley Software had issues with Vista for the longest time. They had a beta of Vista and re-configured INspectvue to run on it, but guess what, the version that hit the streets was way off from the beta version. I think I can still here Bill Gates laughing.

One of the main reasons I bought my Dell laptop was because I could get it with XP while most other brands came only with Vista.

Been running Vista on an HP tablet(1 year) and a Samsung Q1(6 mos.)

It's been very good on both.

I got a new Dell a month or so ago. It has Vista, my older printers dont work and my Inspection program doesnt either. It sucks, going to load XP on it.

I suppose it depends on what programs you may be using regularly. I have heard horror stories about vista as well but have had my laptop with vista for almost a year and havent had any issues.

My previous inspection software wasnt very compatible with MS Word 2007 but whether that has anything to do with vista, I dont know.

I was running XP Media center on my Hewlett Packard desktop, XP Pro on my Fujitsu tablet. At least until I trashed the Fujitsu with a bonehead mistake. Had to "upgrade" to a Gateway laptop that came configured with Vista. The laptop actually ran pretty well, and wasn't bad about crashing. Over several months time I decided that Vista wasn't that bad and "upgraded" the desktop to Vista. Big mistake...The desktop has become unreliable and slow, the hard drive runs almost constantly, it crashes several times each day. I have tried updating, downloaded the service packs, etc. I will be restoring the XP system on this one this week. The main difference that I can see may be that the laptop components were designed for Vista, the older components in the desktop just don't find Vista agreeable...
Alton Darty
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Originally Posted by Alton Darty

I was running XP Media center on my Hewlett Packard desktop, XP Pro on my Fujitsu tablet. At least until I trashed the Fujitsu with a bonehead mistake. Had to "upgrade" to a Gateway laptop that came configured with Vista. The laptop actually ran pretty well, and wasn't bad about crashing. Over several months time I decided that Vista wasn't that bad and "upgraded" the desktop to Vista. Big mistake...The desktop has become unreliable and slow, the hard drive runs almost constantly, it crashes several times each day. I have tried updating, downloaded the service packs, etc. I will be restoring the XP system on this one this week. The main difference that I can see may be that the laptop components were designed for Vista, the older components in the desktop just don't find Vista agreeable...
Alton Darty
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Might try to update your video Card first.
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Anyone running the Inspectit program on Vista as of yet?

I was told today if you want XP, you should buy a copy soon as this is the last year for it as it will be no more.

I'm checking into getting either the Panasonic toughbook or the Toshiba Notepad type that the screen flips around on to be a tablet.

I see that Inspectit has the program that can be run on Vista and you can upgrade for not much.

TIA,

rick

Originally Posted by Rick Hurst

Anyone running the Inspectit program on Vista as of yet?

I was told today if you want XP, you should buy a copy soon as this is the last year for it as it will be no more.

I'm checking into getting either the Panasonic toughbook or the Toshiba Notepad type that the screen flips around on to be a tablet.

I see that Inspectit has the program that can be run on Vista and you can upgrade for not much.

TIA,

rick

Some years ago I bought a gateway tablet pc. I guess it depends on the software you use to be affective or are the types of computers you are talking about the small ones.

I thought I was going to use mine all the time but just never did. Not like you could walk around with a laptop/tablet.

I have actually been thinking about getting the inspectit software. Obviously you like it. Is it fairly easy with out a lot of pull just to type a report into or are there crazy amount of different pop up screens you have to deal with.

I have been running Inspectit and OfficePro on a HP 9200 series laptop with Vista for about a year. No problems to report. Somtimes its slow to load but I remember W95 and that was slow also. If I was forced to answer, I would have to say that I "like" Vista but that is with a lot of caveats attached to it. Since I'm stuck with it now, I hope it sticks around for awhile.

Originally Posted by Billy Stephens

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Might try to update your video Card first.
.

Yep, that was the first thing that I tried. After spending another $480 on this and a couple of other pieces of hardware I have given up. HP says that the problem is the motherboard and some of it's embedded components, and of course they are working on a fix.
Alton Darty
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Originally Posted by Rick Hurst

Anyone running the Inspectit program on Vista as of yet?

I was told today if you want XP, you should buy a copy soon as this is the last year for it as it will be no more.

I'm checking into getting either the Panasonic toughbook or the Toshiba Notepad type that the screen flips around on to be a tablet.

I see that Inspectit has the program that can be run on Vista and you can upgrade for not much.

TIA,

rick

Rick, I have been running InspectIt on my Gateway laptop since I got it and it has been pretty stable. No major problems to report, actually runs with decent speed and few or no crashes on the laptop. As I said earlier though the pc I use in my office is a different story. When I was using XP on my office pc it was troublefree (with the exception of my Palm handheld locking up when I would try to transfer an InspectIt file from the handheld to the desktop pc).
All in all though the InspectIt program runs pretty well on most platforms that I have seen, I've been using it since I started with different versions of MS Word and on different pc's and few issues with the program itself have come up.
Alton Darty
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Originally Posted by Ted Menelly

I have actually been thinking about getting the inspectit software. Obviously you like it. Is it fairly easy with out a lot of pull just to type a report into or are there crazy amount of different pop up screens you have to deal with.

I just got my money back on the inspectit software. Thats the software I was talking about that wasnt compatible with Word 2007. I was told there were several bugs associated with it by their tech people and I would have to downgrade Word to a lower version. One problem was that I would add arrows to problems in pictures only to have them disappear. I also didnt like the look of the reports using that software either so I decided to get rid of it and get my money back.

To me, the inspectit stuff was nothing more than word document with a couple more bells and whistles to it.

My wife must use XP and IE 6 because the company's software (she processes resumes online) isn't compatible with Vista or IE7. Her HP desktop is a P.O.S. power-wise. Slow on the internet (except for the jpb she has to do). Can't open Outlook and do something else. I even upgraded her to 3 G of ram, but it didn't help. I just got her a new ACER 4 Gig Dual Core yadda yadda running Vista Home Premium. This thing screams! I haven't seen a smile on my wife's face like this since (well, maybe that'll be another thread). So, I set her up with a KVM switch so she can use her monitor, mouse and keyboard with both computers. My laptop is running Home Basic for over a year. Granted I had to turn off Vista's fun stuff and run it like XP, but it runs fine. So far Vista has proven to be no trouble. I will admit, I do like XP, as I had it on my pc before it crashed. But, like some things, when you've gone without for a while, you just don't notice it anymore.

"slight drift in thread here" --

Rick H. - Have heard that InspectIt TREC 7A-0 template does not meet TREC standards. Something about placement of certain elements required by TREC.

They've been advised, but have not made any changes yet to correct and with 7A-1 likely due by end of year they should also make the update meet the new standards.

I'm just passing along what I've heard and don't have any more granular detail.

Just a head's up.

I have Inspect-It (ReportPlus) software and like it a lot on XP. I tried it with Vista but didn't care for it. The less clicks I make the faster I can get the report done. I also like their software for their palm which cannot be used with Vista.

I have talked to a couple of computer guys and they are saying that VISTA is here to stay.

Did a recent inspection for a software designer at Dell here in Austin, I asked him about Vista and he smiled and said he'd never put that piece of junk on any of his computers. Even though most Dell's now ship with Vista. He also said that when running XP to NOT download the service pack 3 for Windows XP as it has many elements of Vista incorporated that will make XP somewhat unstable as well.

I also had purchased the Office 2007 programs and found the new Word 2007 to be unusable for me. It is a complete revamp of Word and since my inspection program software is based on Word I found it took me over twice as long to do an inspection report. Yes, there is the learning curve, but Word 2007 is NOT even close to Word 2003 so I deleted it and went back to Office 2003. Whenever I tried to create a .pdf from Word 2007 the program would lock up and crash over half the time. Auto text formats were switched around and took more keystrokes to use, etc.

As for me, Windows XP and Office 2003 have provided the most stable software platforms so far. Maybe instead of trying to switch to Vista or Office 2007 I should be looking into the Mac's for future purchases.

Originally Posted by Ken Larson

Did a recent inspection for a software designer at Dell here in Austin, I asked him about Vista and he smiled and said he'd never put that piece of junk on any of his computers. Even though most Dell's now ship with Vista. He also said that when running XP to NOT download the service pack 3 for Windows XP as it has many elements of Vista incorporated that will make XP somewhat unstable as well.

I also had purchased the Office 2007 programs and found the new Word 2007 to be unusable for me. It is a complete revamp of Word and since my inspection program software is based on Word I found it took me over twice as long to do an inspection report. Yes, there is the learning curve, but Word 2007 is NOT even close to Word 2003 so I deleted it and went back to Office 2003. Whenever I tried to create a .pdf from Word 2007 the program would lock up and crash over half the time. Auto text formats were switched around and took more keystrokes to use, etc.

As for me, Windows XP and Office 2003 have provided the most stable software platforms so far. Maybe instead of trying to switch to Vista or Office 2007 I should be looking into the Mac's for future purchases.

I had the same problems with InspectIt software and word 2007. It wasnt compatible with it and I had so many problems that I just dumped inspectit and am looking at new software. I assume you are using inspectit as well since you need word to run it.

I'm not using any third party inspection programs. I'm using a basic MS Word template that I created with some macros to run the program. Word also has an auto text feature that allows me to save my "canned" narratives so I can easily drop them into my inspection report as needed.

Using XP with Word 2003, A typical 18-20 page report takes between 45min-1hr. including photos. Using Vista with Word 2007 took twice as long and frequently crashed. ???

It seems some things do NOT get better in the revisions. Since there are some folks who don't seem to have issues with Vista, and many more that do, I would agree there is a combination of some software programs that just don't do well with Vista and cause it to crash. If you have Vista and everything works, great! It just doesn't work for me and my programs. Plus switching back to XP I find everything on my computer loads and runs much faster.

I'm using XP and a word 2003 based template and it works great. I have a second machine with Vista and mechanically it's been fine. It just annoys me that most of the software I bought for XP doesn't run with Vista. Had to buy new Adobe writer and Quickbooks... those two combined were over half the cost of the new machine. It seems kind of ridiculous....

Speaking of computers... I've been toying with the idea of a smaller laptop to carry so I can work on reports between jobs and elsewhere. Also, I just upgraded to a 'Smartphone' which I can tether a laptop through to get reasonably fast internet access anywhere.

Anyway, I'm absolutely amazed at how cheap used laptops are on Ebay. It's been a couple years since I really investigated. 3-4 year old IBM thinkpads - 12" screen, Win XP, 1ghz processor, 512 ram, 40GB HD goes for around $300 in great condition. For anyone who doesn't know the IBM thinkpads, they're the best out there by quite a ways. Those prices and specs are for a 3.5lb laptop with a full keyboard that's about 1.5" thick and rougly the dimensions of a piece of notebook paper.

That's a lot of computer for $300. These sold new for about $2500 a few years ago. As time moves on, technology really becomes affordable.

Matt,

I've completely removed all Adobe products from my computers. I've been using a FREE download called PrimoPDF to convert all my Word docs to .pdf. I can also password protect them. It's an awesome program and the price is right! I just don't like giant "bloatware" on my computer and Adobe products are way overpriced, huge, and run so slow. Free PDF Creator - Convert to PDF from Any File You Can Print - PrimoPDF

Originally Posted by Ken Larson

Matt,

I've completely removed all Adobe products from my computers. I've been using a FREE download called PrimoPDF to convert all my Word docs to .pdf. I can also password protect them. It's an awesome program and the price is right! I just don't like giant "bloatware" on my computer and Adobe products are way overpriced, huge, and run so slow. Free PDF Creator - Convert to PDF from Any File You Can Print - PrimoPDF

.
Ditto on Micro Soft word processing , excel, and their whole Office Software.

I have been using download: OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 Downloads as Freeware on both XP and Vista. Works great no problems on writing, opening or sending any documents using this Free version of MS Office.
.

Xp is better then Vista.

Since this thread is over 4 years old, I'm guessing the OP's software issue is past. I went from XP straight to 7. I haven't had any issues with 7 and Inspectvue seems to run fine with 7.

I run XP Pro on my 6 year old custom built computer. It was a kick butt computer back in the day, but it still does what I want to do.

According to a letter released from Bill Veghte, Microsoft Microsoft Senior VP, Windows XP will continue to be supported and will include “security updates” and “other critical updates” until April of 2014.

Originally Posted by Jack Feldmann

Since this thread is over 4 years old, I'm guessing the OP's software issue is past. I went from XP straight to 7. I haven't had any issues with 7 and Inspectvue seems to run fine with 7.

I have 7 on a few computers. I was told by several folks the problems they have had.

Never a glitch in any computer. Crashes a thing of the past. Xp was one of the better past versions.

SSD drives and fast memory is the only way to go today and of course a good motherboard and I-7 CPU and at least 680 video cards. My computers are maybe 30 seconds from off to full up and running. From sleep mode I never bothered counting. They are about instant on.

Windows seven Professional and Office professional. Never a hint of a problem.

Can you say" Andriod or iOS" ? Fast, reliable, low cost and is the future.
I hardly open my laptop any more.
Jeff

I have Vista on the laptop bought in 2010 and on my present desktop and they are both fine, no crashes or conflicts. I feel lucky.
Vista does annoying things with my folders and files that XP never did but I have learned to live with it.

Originally Posted by Jeff Langhorn

Can you say" Andriod or iOS" ? Fast, reliable, low cost and is the future.
I hardly open my laptop any more.
Jeff

I edit pics, show pics to my clients and then I burn them a disc. Laptop for that.
I am old school, so notes in a folder or on a folder and pictures. I don't open the software until I'm done with the client, snug in my home or mobile office.

I will have to try a new digital notepad eventually. Link the client's iPad to the cloud, I suppose.

I hated the Palm Pilot. My curse on the company probably helped lead to it's demise.

XP was great..... Vista pretty much stinks but isn't terrible - Win 7 is a great OS but is leaving us too soon. You're hard pressed to find a machine that doesn't come loaded with Win8. I'm currently working on setting up my second Win8 machine and after 4-5 hours it's really not that bad. The best way I could describe it is that it's like you own a condo and can pull into the parking lot and your front door is in the same place.... somebody just took away all the sidewalks.

Basically, it's the same windows it's ever been. You just have to find out how to get "under the hood" to make things work. Little things like getting to a list of programs or into the control panel are not where they use to be. In most cases you can drag shortcuts onto your desktop and it's not too much of a distraction.