How-To Geek Forums » Windows Vista
Whats your satisfaction rating for Windows Vista?
(29 posts)
Every software is going to have a few bugs here or there. My main criteria with an operating system is that it needs to allow me to customize things to fit my personal workflow.
Vista works quite well for me, and so far I've been able to customize almost everything to fit my needs.
Here is a piece of interesting info: The main cause of Vista crashes being drivers splits as follows
28.8% Nvidia
18.0% MS
17.0% unknown
9.3% ATI
8.8% Intel
18.1% Others
Another serious problem is the downward compatibility design point. That requires to drag around a lot of old junk that is difficult to fit. With Windows7 they seem to make a dramatic change in approach regarding this problem (use of virtual partitions to execute "old" stuff).
And after all let's not forget that Vista is 55 million lines of code. Assume 1 bug per 1000 lines of code, then you get an idea.
well, microsoft seems to be vey excited regarding to the release of windows. i hope vista7 will make a real change.
perhaps the greatest challenge for microsoft is to build an operating system with the high-tech features that is seemingly compatible to all computers even with the lowest resources (requirements)
I give Vista a 5 - Satisfied on your scale. Since I got Vista, I have been learning about it and working to optimize it on my system. Heck, learning about Vista is what brought me to this website. Today I have a reliability index of 9.59 out of 10! That's up from an all-time low around 5. No, it's not a perfect OS, but at least it gives me tools to measure reliability and read more detailed problem reports. That let's me optimize my experience and that's a good thing.
You're missing my point. I did have lots of errors back to the left on that chart where you can't see. My stability index was down to 4.83 and there were red X's all over the place. A 4.83 stability index is 48% -- that's miserable. Would you fly on a plane that had a 48% stability index? I wouldn't. Second, it wasn't luck that got Vista running better but work. I learned as much as I could and used the available tools, such as Problem Reports and Solutions to find out what was wrong and fix it.
I know from experience that XP can become rundown, gunked up, and unstable if you don't keep it tuned up or if you install poorly written drivers and apps. So, now that things are running well for me, I hang out on this forum to help others who are still learning or having trouble. I feel sympathy for anyone having OS trouble because I've been there, too.
If my mht files would behave normally and I could get PSP XL going my satisfactionrate would be a 10.
I love the way things look and now I've found the Geek I know how to customize things to fit my needs.
But not being able to run my main program is a real bummer and not being able to print in Word doesn't improve my spirits too. What good is a computer if it doesn't do what you got it for in the first place?So I'll end up on a 2 :(
Sarah.
(I'll rerate if anyone has a solution to my troubles LOL)
@whs: There is a topic for that problem at http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....loses-word
It seems to be a problem between Word 97 and the HP print driver.
jd, thanks for the link. Really looks like something very special with the old Word version. I guess downward compatibility has it's limits. It is strange though because as far as I know the filetypes for Word 97 and Word 03 are the same (.doc). But it looks like the cause of the problem is her initial "economic print" setting. This apparently got hammered into stone and even later driver updates did not reset it. A system restore at the time would have helped - but for that it is probably too late now. I would suggest she talk to HP to find out how to reset this "economic print" setting - probably some stray bit in the registry.
Thanks Whs, but as Jd2066 says, I already started a topic for it. I have found a workaround, but it keeps nagging at my mind, when things don't work like they should. And my mother has the same installation of Word97 (including my normal.dot, so it's the same for me to work with, whether I'm at home or at her place) and on her laptop the printer works perfectly. And before I changed the setting of the printer to economic printing it worked for me too ... :(
Had I not done that it would probably have been environmentally safer, because I've spent a fortune printing testpages when the HP people 'helped' me. LOL.
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