In my experience (I have Vista Ultimate on my machine) and I'll
answer only those I've messed around with:

No more defragging: No, still have to defrag.

15 sec. or under boot time: No, mine takes about a minute.
I've read others that are complaining about 3 minutes.

Free anti-virus...: Yes, but from what I've read, it's not very good.
Get a 3rd party one.

More config like tiny firewall: yes, but confusing interface (for me anyway)
I went with PC Tools firewall only because one like tiny
doesn't exist for Vista.


Better backward compatibility with old programs and hardware: Well, if you grab the latest drivers, IF they're
available (still no profiling software for my joystick
available). If anything uses the old game port, forget it, it's
unsupported. Some old programs just flat out won't work.
There is a compatibility tab for older windows releases
for a program. I have to keep swithing BF1942.exe from
Vista to XP occasionally because it will crash as a map load
nears completion. When that doesn't work, a reboot
takes care of it.

No linux app support that I could find.

This sounds almost like a linux fan club post, but I'll bite. My Vista install boots faster than my RHEL5 (Redhat) install, in about 30 seconds. Granted, my RHEL5 install has other 'services' which take a little longer. Vista doesn't nativly include linux application support, but cygwin still works. On that note, Linux doesn't nativly support windows applications either, which is why you need wine.

On a side note, I wouldn't want my AV integrated with my OS. I prefer to have a company who's priority is security managing my virus definitions than.. well, microsoft. There is a lot of other things that microsoft has done this OS to make it more secure, and in essence chrooting some applications, or at least requesting permission, but there is more than I'm going to go into here.

Not a fan of Linux; I can point out dozens of things they are missing too. (And actually, once posted such a message in a Linux fan board call hydogenaudio-listing evident inherent weaknesses of the OS/open source model and ideas for change--, I was thoroughly flamed, then promptly banned by the administrator for being flamed-the luxury of a not for profit operation.)

But the above queries are the only things that would compel me to upgrade, even if MS gave the upgrade away for free. Upgrades are painful, time consuming, and very costly. The above, are problems I run into all the time with XP pro, the only real problems I see, and remember now, with XP. I just find it sad, an upgrade is coming out, not addressing these issues (except security and conflicting about boot time), and probably introducing many new issues.

My experience with apps and "Backwards compatability" has been interesting.

basically, if the App is designed to tell what kind of OS it is installing on, and if it doesn't like your OS it will refuse to install, then you are in for trouble. If you can get past that, most seem to run.

so for me, the list of what doesn't work:

My MoBo apps and driver disk... yeah, I know, bad start. I tried to run them and got the message off of the CD that "Windows ME is not supported"... Go figure the coding that caused that one.

My Trend Micro PC cillin came right out and said this disk was not for Vista, it got it right atleast, and directed me to where I could go to their website, and download the version I needed, and use the CD key from the disk I had to activate it. Actually a lot less painless than I was expecting.

Almost any older Autodesk product like autocad or 3ds Max. This is because of their license management software is very intrusive and picky. Heck, Restoring from backups often breaks their license keys in XP. C-dilla rights management software is really picky as to the OS and when I tracked it down, it was exactly because it didn't recognize my OS that it failed to install, not because it woudln't be able to run if it did.

Adobe Encore (DVD authoring Software) 1.5 because it didn't recognize the OS, and 2.0 throws a fit because of where it tries to write all its files to.

a funny note, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 runs fine, but it recognizes my OS as NT6.0.

If the program is really concerned about what vrs of Windows you are running, or is coded in a way where it wants to tinker with all of your system folders, then you are in for headaches.

If you are running a program that is reletively self contained, doesnt' want to edit system files, couldn't care less about what your computer is running as long as the hardware and OS know what to do with it, and its antipiracy concerns were only about as deep as having you enter a valid Key, or registering online, or making sure you had the original disk in the drive... then it should run fine.

I'm still using my old Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10, and Microsoft office 2000 from college. As far as video games go, Oblivion, Doom 3, all of the Half-life's, Rome and Medieval 2 Total War all installed and ran with no problems what so ever.


As far as bootup time, it seems to boot about twice as fast to me than XP, but its a new build without too much extra junk in the background yet so its hard to tell. I do notice that it seems designed to let you start doing you thing pretty much right away as it still loads startup apps into the background. I can alreayd be surfing the internet or working in word as I see icons appear in my system tray.

as for the 100% cpu grabbing, it does seem that taskmanager and ctrl alt del truly get a higher priority. I can always seem to bring them up.

And the registry, and the system folders and files do seem to be more protected. If you want to be really protected, make sure your admin account is password protected and do most of your day to day work with a standard account then anything that tries to write to those locations (like most malware) would need to be elevated to run and thus need a password and permission or fail. Granted, it's not foolproof and people spend all day in their parents' basements coding away at finding ways to mess with your system, but standard accounts are much more usable in vista than limited accounts were in XP.

These areas have just been a summary of my experiences with Vista, and are probably quite subjective, but hopefully they can give you some ideas of what you'll face if you upgrade.

Your list is quite exhaustive. Frankly, some of the "issues" that you are having are not problems for OSes to handle, and expecting an OS to perform such tasks or provide such features is really piling on the bloat (bloat is the primary reason Windows is plagued with as many problems as it is).


No more defragging.
No filesystem is free of file fragmentation. NTFS (which has been the default filesystem since XP on Windows systems) produces much less fragmentation than previous filesystems (FAT and FAT32). The act of constantly filing up the drive, removing files, and putting on more files in a constant "freeing up space" race is why so many people have constant fragmentation issues and no filesystem can protect you from that.

real time chk dsk while idle, if needed.
No, there aren't automatic background checks. Just like XP, Vista automatically runs file consistency checks at boot time if it finds a partition to be "dirty". Waiting for this check can be annoying at times, but in my experience, it happens very seldomly and typically takes less than five minutes.

15 second or under boottime.
I don't know where this number came from, but it definitely sounds like one of those "pie in the sky", with a very specific set of bare-minimum install options on a very specific set of hardware, it might happen kind of thing. In my opinion, they were probably talking about 15 seconds to come back from one of the power conservation modes.

free antivirus in OS.
No. And you really wouldn't want it anyways. Microsoft makes the majority of its money selling solutions to corporate environments. Companies like Symantec and McAfee make their money by researching how to protect machines from the latest viruses and similar threats. Rely on the people that make their money keeping your system protected from specific threats.

More config like tiny firewall.
The firewall options in Windows always have and most likely always will be pathetic. The firewall in Vista is a joke at best. This stems from my previous comment that Microsoft primarily focuses on making their corporate clients happy. Stick with a third-party firewall.


Better rollback like go back except, exclude dirs, drives and file types--with vault to retrieve rolled back files.
Vista has some new file versioning options that allow for restoring to previous versions. I don't know exactly how it works since I haven't tried it out, but I doubt it offers what you are looking for.

Built in spell checker that will work in every ap.
No. I can't imagine how that would even work. There are unlimited ways to make a specific type of program. How would Windows know how to spell-check certain things, not others, and provide a seamless interface to highlight the misspelled words and provide proper spellings? Imagine chatting in World of Warcraft and having the application minimized because you typed in a word that Windows didn't understand and it popped up a balloon notice to tell you about it. The idea sounds nice, but the implementation would be a beast, wouldn't work well, and would provide innumerous headaches. This is definitely not a job for an OS.

Better backward compatibility with old programs and hardware.
My experience with backwards compatibility has been great. Every program that has complained that I'm not using the correct version of Windows installed and ran properly when I put it in compatibility mode.

For those of you that complain about not being able to install your software, have you tried to turn compatibility mode on for your programs? All you do is right-click the executable, select Properties, select the Compatibility tab, put a check in the "Run this program..." box, and select the appropriate OS version. I have yet to find a program that wouldn't work when I did that. Drivers are another story, but the only one I couldn't get to work was a driver for a Zonet USB wireless adapter. I blame Zonet for that one. I contacted them about getting a Vista-compatible driver. They told me they weren't going to make one.

Better termination of programs that freeze machine up with 100 percent cpu grabbing.
This has gotten much better. The tiering of processor access has advanced greatly. The most I've had to wait to get the Task Manager to pop up in order to kill an unruly program was less than ten seconds. It seems that Vista is coded to force certain Administrative functions much higher processor priority than standard applications.

Better memory stick diagnosis when bad. (bad ram will cause all sorts of os wipeouts every few months.)
Vista has a memory diagnostic utility built into it that you can run. It does require a reboot, but does provide a helpful report when the system comes back up.

Protect registry from program writing to it except own portion of registry windows allows. Also, programs should stay in own directory, never allow writing outside own dir.
I don't believe Vista has any feature like this.

Built in wap text browsers with on fly image show, for dialup users.
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about this subject.

Built in MS dialup accelerator, like slipstream.
Not to my knowledge. If I understand how Slipstream works, it is something that the ISP provides. Having software on your end without the proper caching, proxy-emulation, and compression algorithms on the other side will produce nothing. So, I don't see how any benefit would be had unless your ISP specifically supported that feature (in which they would provide the software anyways). Seems like a moot point feature for an OS to have.

Built in vb files, sun java, and autohotkey.com engine. Should be under c:\program files\languages\sun etc.
I don't understand what you are asking for here. Are you asking if many non-Microsoft programs are prepackaged (many third-party programs are included, but Java and Autohotkey are not), if Microsoft made their own version of these programs (nope), or if Vista forces programs to reside in certain locations (Nope. You can install them where you like, which is the way it should be.)?

Built in feature to restore each installed program individually with one click, once you do a system reinstall. Better tracking of installs that are classic and those we just try.--eliminate reinstall hell of reinstalling all relied on aps.
Nope. On a side note, how would Vista know what software you installed for the purpose of just trying it out?

Ability to run linux applications (reverse wine.)
Most Linux applications are open-source and have pre-compiled binaries that work in Windows. I don't see where the problem is here.

Several older software compatible with XP are not with Vista; even when using install and run in compatibility mode for 98 or xp. examples of some of mine are Ulead PhotoImpact 11; Power DVD; Musicmatch; etc. Trying to install these then run either resulted in windows not allowing the install or killing the ap as it starts to load or ap causing blue/white screen. So you have to try the software to see; some may work some may not...part is software and part the configuration of the computer setup. Just my experience with Vista so far. take care, Magikil