Your opinion of Vista ?

[Jeff_Birt]

So to recap, you have found that Vista 'works' pretty much like XP, in that there are no drastic changes to the UI to hamper usability. And, in your opinion, that shows that is is just fluff?

Why not take a few minutes and actually do a bit of research into what IS new in Vista, before rambling on in ignorance? Not trying to pick a fight, it just kills me when people offer opinions on things they are ignorant of. I would suggest starting with http://channel9.msdn.com/, and then searching MSDN for whitepapers, etc.

Again, don't take me wrong, I'm not being mean, you seem like your probably a smart guy. Take some time, do a bit of research, and form an intelligent opinion on the matter. If you still find yourself not liking Vista, than great 

[sandiegoRC]

I never said that I did not like it, just that I found it, for what I use it for to be unimpressive.

I work with half a dozen application programs and don't really "use the OS". Most of the world is moving online making the "OS" mostly irrelevant. We probably have different definitions of OS.

[sandiegoRC]

I just checked out the MS Vista page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/seeit/default.mspx and see very little that could not be done in XP and are things that I've had in other systems for years.

[TetraLite]

Windows has always been bloatware. Microsoft tries to make an operating system that does everything for everybody -- whether they want it to or not. So as the new versions come out, the computer is forced by default Windows installation to run a whole bunch of routines just in case someone might want to use them. For XP you are advised to stop many of the processes that Windows want to run at startup if you want to run Mach. I set up my mill on a 1GHz computer running Windows 2000 and I disabled as much of the unnecessary processes as I could. It is a very clean machine. The thing I like about it is it works. It doesn't crash. Mach 3 runs without a hitch. Windows 2000 is much less encumbered by crapware than XP. Why would anyone even want to run an OS any more complicated than Win 2K? In my opinion, running anything else on a CNC controlling computer is a serious mistake and the computer should be dedicated to running the CNC machine. As far as Vista is concerned, it is trying to do things we don't need even more than XP. Another thing that makes Win 2K attractive is it doesn't require the Windows activation. It installs much cleaner than XP. There is no advantage I can think of to using a Windows version newer than 2K if you are dedicating the computer to a CNC machine. Vista is another of Microsoft's attempts to please all the people all the time and in that attempt they have opted to run an overabundance of processes that most of the people will never use and these processes only serve to hijack computer resources and possibly conflict with what you really want to do. I recently put together a Vista computer because I need to test my products to make sure they run on Vista. I find Vista to be very annoying, much like the way I found XP to be annoying until I learned how to trim it up. So far, there is nothing about Vista that appeals to me enough to make me want to use it for everyday computing over XP. For CNC I say keep it simple and run Win 2K on a dedicated machine. Oh yeah, and whatever OS you use don't connect to a LAN or the internet with your CNC machine while you are CNCing.