So why does Vista look like a horrendous beta OS developed by a bunch of morons?

1. Surround sound. Where the hell has it gone? Vista has completely done away with any kind of surround upmixing by obliterating DirectSound thanks to its "incredible new audio system". Well isn't that nice, my 5.1 setup is utterly useless now. Kudos.
PS. To hell with Creative's ALchemy. It doesn't do anything for movies and music.

2. Ridiculously slow file transfer speeds. I'm talking 3-10MBps file transfer speeds here. It doesn't matter whether files are being transferred from local hard drives, external eSATA, or a DVD - it's unbelievably slow. I've tried everything, from disabling Remote Differential Compression to enabling advanced performance on the drives and selecting a high performance power plan. No change for the better.

What kind of computer do you have? I get about 20MBps transfer on a notebook (specs in signature). Personally, the look to me is a step forward from XP, but slow, I have to agree on. I don't know about the surround sound.

I noticed you can't disable the welcome screen, in any Vista version. Basic, Premium, Business, Ultimate...Nothin', Nada.

To you anyway, why Vista looks like it was designed by morons? It was designed by morons...

Ultra X-Finity 600W
BFG nVidia nForce 680i LT SLI LGA775
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz LGA775 (OCed to 3.2GHz)
XFX 8800GT XT 512MB 640MHz PCI-E DX10 (OCed to 685/1650/950)
4GB OCZ Platinum XTC Rev-2 800MHz Dual-Channel Memory (OCed timings to 4-4-4-12)
Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-II
Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-II
Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-II in iRocks external case (USB/eSATA)
19" LG L1970HR Flatron Slim 2ms 2000:1 DCR LCD on DVI-D
Logitech X-530 5.1 Surround Sound System
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer 7.1 with EAX HD 5.0
Logitech G5 2nd Revision Gaming Mouse
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1


Last week I managed to fix the surround sound and CMSS-3D is once again working. All of my DirectSound3D games are working perfectly with 5.1 sound. Same goes for Winamp. No need for Creative's mediocre ALchemy software which attempts to convert DirectSound to OpenAL, but fails horribly in most cases.

Transfer speeds have gotten better and overall, most of the painful Vista **** has been taken care of. It still doesn't change the fact that Vista failed badly. Hopefully TR Underworld will take advantage of DX10.

I get slow transfer speeds as well, reli annoys me. I agree with kevinzheng - it was done by morons
as for surround, i have realtek hd audio manager which is good; it might work for with non realtek cards, you never know

Originally Posted by penguinpaul

I get slow transfer speeds as well, reli annoys me.

Yep, it's sporadic too. At times it's fast, but mostly it's unbearably slow.

Nice burst speeds, but then the slow kicks in immediately. I would have been better to carry a fuel tank full of reliable stable fuel, instead a small tank of high powered fuel. I got one word to say, XP.

Unfortunately I'm waaay past the point of "no return" here. Once you get everything customized and configured, it's pretty smooth sailing. Still lots of areas where XP hands Vista its bloated ass though.

Well, i can't wait for Windows 7 (Codename Vienna). I've seen some stuff and heard about the Milestone releases. People that have got access to that say it's way better than Vista & XP combined. They say there is an integrated virtualization utility so all the apps that didn't work on Vista will work in 7.

yeh, but its strange - there are vids on youtube with windows 7, and it looks like vista :/
so i recon they will totally change the look of it for the release :P

I really like Vista. I couldnt go back to XP!

I notice i get VERY slow transer speeds when transferring something onto my USB stick, but copying stuff off of it i get around 15mbps.

Originally Posted by penguinpaul

yeh, but its strange - there are vids on youtube with windows 7, and it looks like vista :/
so i recon they will totally change the look of it for the release :P

Yep. From what i have read Vista in its early stages looked a lot like XP. But it changed once it came out...