Reviews for Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate - 32-bit - Upgrade

Great

Strengths: Love it.

It's been a long time since coming for this product. A little expensive. Remote desktop should be in the home premium version though. The image backup feature is nice

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Vista Ultimate ROCKS!!!

Strengths: There are more features, as compared to Vista Home Premium, and I've noticed that my PC is a little faster!

Weakness: None so far, except that it's a little expensive overall. I'm quick to say this site had the best price!

I like the fact that I will have some additional protection for my hardware, as well as the fact that I can encrypt what I already have. I think that the entire Vista series, especially Ultimate, shows much promise, and will do better once the bugs are all worked out!

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Vista With All The Features

Strengths: Vista Ultimate has all of the features of the various other editions.

Weakness: Hardware compatibilty especially with scanners is problamatical. Requires lots of RAM and a fast processor.

Vista Ultimate has a host of features that are usually purchased as third party software. The Snipping Tool is an enhanced screen capture utility; the complete image backup utility insures that you can recover from almost any disaster and the DVD Maker creates terrific slide shows with menus and music.

I intend to use the free Microsoft Virtual Machine software to load Win XP and Win 98 within the Vista operating system. If Linux is on your agenda you will have to buy either VMWare or Parallels software.

At this moment Vista is for advanced users, but all should get started on this new operating system. There is a lot to learn and a lot to enjoy

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Vista Upgrade Brand New

Strengths: Better than XP, I like it a lot, great features, nice improvements

Weakness: Absolutely does not let you remove Internet Explorer 7 and Intsall IE 6, which is the one I prefer, so I had to get used to 7.

I love Vista, it was very easy to get used to, but I am having a problem activating it. I think it is because my computer is 3 years old, not because the product is defective. I will add more memory and see if I can re-install Vista and fix the problem.

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Go from old shoes to new shoes!

Strengths: More features and more comprehensive

Weakness: Need decent hardware to take full advantage

I initially thought I would wait a while before upgrading to Vista from XP. But I played around with a trial version of it and was hooked. It really is a step up from XP, and so far I have had no problems at all with it. I am not gamer, so am not concerned about driver issues like many are. I am using a Dell 710m laptop with 2 gigs of RAM and an 80 gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

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My experience with Vista Ultimate Upgrade

Strengths: Nice interface with great support, useful tools, fun games, DirectX 10 for the future of computer games. Rock-solid security. Easy to upgrade from XP Professional using Ultimate.

Weakness: Some peripheral hardware devices that may not have native support. Uses large hard drive space. Supercaching requires nearly constant hard drive activity; sound may skip using AMD Cool 'n Quiet.

I purchased the Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade Edition to take my machine from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate. The installation was relatively quick and simple; the only somewhat difficult part was obtaining my video card and sound card drivers. Everything else, even my minimalist printer, worked with the included Vista drivers on the DVD. Even my wireless desktop card (Belkin) was able to detect my wireless router and function properly on the very first bootup.

Post-installation, I was faced with two major hurdles that hindered my enjoyment of the operating system. The first was a heightened awareness of my harddrive as it continuously spun away for hours at a time. I couldn't figure out what was causing it, until I did an internet search and found that Vista uses a "Supercaching" program to "speed" up the searching utility. Vista has a fairly nice search built into the Start menu that tries to guess and automatically fill in what you are looking for, but to do that, it needs to access the harddrive for long stretches of time. Well, I couldn't take the accessing anymore so I disabled supercaching, and now my harddrive is silent unless a real program is accessing it. I recommend you do the same.

The other major hurdle, which took me much longer to find a solution for, was sound "popping" or "skipping" whenever my CPU was under load. I listen to a good share of music on my PC so I was very disappointed that my beloved music was being spoiled by skips in the sound whenever I tried to do anything significant with my PC and play music at the same time (it occured during PC games, too). So after extensive searching, I finally came upon a forum post where a Vista user had a similar problem and solved it by disabling AMD's Cool and Quiet. I had Cool and Quiet on from the start and didn't think that was causing the issue, but it seems to me now that whenever the CPU steps up its frequency under load using Cool and Quiet, something occurs that temporarily omits the sound signal. The result is a POP noise. As soon as I restarted my PC, pressed the delete key a few times to enter my motherboard's setup screen and disabled Cool and Quiet, the popping went away. I was very happy that day, although I wish I didn't have to sacrifice the energy savings of Cool and Quiet to listen to sound properly.

I also play some PC games, and so far support has been great, although I did receive a significant performance hit of about 10-20%. I needed to disable the "Desktop Composition" graphics setting, which unfortunately removed the transparent windows and neat WindowsKey+Tab program surfing key, but I don't really need either of those that much. I think after doing this my performance hit was reduced to only about 5% judging by average framerates. Other than that I haven't had any issues with games and are looking forward to using DX 10.

So after some of the above tweaking, I am very happy with Vista Ultimate. I think that if you have the hard drive space, decent technical knowledge, some money to spend and some patience, you too will enjoy Vista. Remember that the user interface is important to your productivity level and I think that Vista's is second to none. Also consider that these are only the opinions of one person and that you should not base your purchasing decision on this review alone. Thanks for reading and good luck with your purchase and installation too.

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Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate - 32-bit - Upgrade

Strengths: 32 or 64 bit available, doesn't need nearly as many patches as XP, yet. Runs very fast.

Weakness: Takes some work to get things working on the 64 bit version, but I found solutions for all my problems by googling on the issue.

Don't try the 64 bit version if you don't have a lot of experience trouble shooting problems. Eventually 64 bit will be the version of choice for everyone after companies get all the drivers and applications written and updated for 64 bit Vista.

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Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate

Strengths: Security,dependability

Weakness: Much unsupported software, slow

I upgraded(?) from Microsoft Windows XP Professional to the Windows Vista with the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade software. No doubt it depends what software you want to run on Windows Vista, but a lot of software is still not Vista compatible. After 5 months I just went back to the Windows XP Professional. My system has a Pentium 4 3 GHz processor with 2 GB SDRAM memory and I found the Vista to boot considerably slower and perform slower than the Windows XP. When you click on something in Vista, it will eventually click open. There is a lot of security checks with the Vista and in this age that is important. I will no doubt reinstall this Vista upgrade down the line when more of the software that I run becomes Vista-compatible.

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Reasonable Product, Not Convinced It's An Upgrade

Strengths: Installs quickly, 32-bit support (for the most part), clean interface.

Weakness: Support for 64-bit version, price.

I've only scratched the surface of Vista so it doesn't seem like much of an upgrade to XP. OK, so the interface is a little more attractive and some menus & services are better organized but on the surface it's just cosmetic changes. Some have complained about the speed/sluggishness of Vista though it appears comparable to XP to me. I'll have to get further into Vista before I can say whether it's worth the price.

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Indeed the Ultimate!

Strengths: Built on Server 2003 stability, this OS is amazingly stable and beautiful. Even though it is new and will have the usual lack of older hardware driver issues, it knows most newer hardware.

Weakness: No REAL weaknesses at all

Many think it is a weakness to need more memory or better graphics cards. Think about it for a moment and it is obvious that it SHOULD need more memory and better graphics cards to support all the better features and the entire OS. Many folks should just upgrade their PC hardware or buy a newer PC altogether. It is time to do so. Vista (especially Ultimate) makes computing fun again!!!

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Windows Vista Ultimate (Product Upgrade)

Strengths: 64 bit version available, latest version of Windows

Weakness: Slow, doesn't support a lot of software or hardware

Wait until a service pack (or two) before relying on Vista. It is buggy, slow booting, and not a worthwhile upgrade from XP. I believe it does have the potential to be a good operating system, once the bugs get hammered out and the hardware and software support is improved.

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Vista Ultimate Review

Strengths: Just about everything: the graphics are great!

Weakness: None

Anyone who has not been able to get Vista Ultimate to run speedily on their pc needs to upgrade their RAM. Ram is something you need to get it working properly. I have been using it for 6 months and it takes about 20 seconds to boot up. You just need RAM.

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Big improvement over XP

Strengths: Aero, Features, 64bit

Weakness: Need more ram than XP

Vista is far ahead of XP considering vista has not had the time to mature like XP has. People complain about the compatibility problems but that is the hardware companies fault, its their responsibility to release capable drivers.
Vista is does require more ram than XP, but what do you expect new features and functions without a cost. Ram prices have plummeted in recent months so that is not a hard pill to swallow.

Vista offers a much better user experience than XP.

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I think it's great

Strengths: It is more attractive and has more features, I like the sidebar, for instance.

Weakness: I've hit nothing in particular, yet.

I upgraded my entire computer, the only thing unchanged was the case, but continued running XP for awhile before getting Vista Ultimate (ordered it earlier but vendor problems slowed delivery). The people complaining about Vista being slow or sluggish must be running on an underpowered system. I find Vista loads fast. It also responds quickly. I've noticed sites load much faster on the net which surprised me and I can't really understand why. And it just feels solid, no more apps suddenly freezing up. Again, I upgraded my system to a fairly high level, but ran XP on that system for awhile before getting Vista and Vista kicks the bleep out of XP in performance.

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Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate

Testseek.com has collected 8 expert reviews for Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and the average expert rating is 79 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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