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At least two friends of mine have deferred new computer purchases because they don’t want to fuck with Vista.
90% of us have 1 problem.
In the past when you get something NEW, we had instruction.
Even the OLD C64 has BASIC instructions. To poke and prod the machine into doing FUN things.
To Quote an OLD commercial..
WHERE’s THE BOOK??
And at the price VISTA/MS is asking…you would think there would be a WHOLE LIBRARY, that would come with hte product.
I think they made rather an ‘understatement’ with this…
(full disclosure: I run slackware linux exclusively).
One friend of mine bought an HP laptop less than a month ago. Vista was actually usable – barely. But acceptable. Another friend of mine had an almost equal PC, also from HP, bought just before Xmas. It takes more than 2 minutes to boot, and once it does, it’s slooooooow.
It’s kinda like MS Flight Simulator – when it comes to market, there’s no hardware that can run it properly. When that hardware finally becomes available and affordable, another version of MSFS comes along…
I keep using XP, and warn everybody against Vista. I give almost no support to Vista, sorry. Maybe to the next version, but there’s a limit to how much suffering I can take.
This was great! I was all excited about Vista, installed it. Ran it for about a month before I had to go back to Vista. Ran into numerous problems that kept me from getting my work done.
Maybe this new sp1 fix for vista will fix things, but I think I will focus on more productive things.
Sort of XP ME, but I’m happy with it. “Media Center” seems to be a Beta, and there are other things that are just sort of out of place, but if you don’t mind the the resource pig issues, it’s not too terrible. If SP1 does anything useful, it’ll be fine….
The thing to remember, minus the BSOD’s, is that most people are running IE7, Works or MS-Office, and AOL. If you don’t mind using a dual-core 3GB box with 400GB of HD for that, it ain’t bad…. And the hardware’s cheap….
To be honest, if I hadn’t already spent too much time installing my software (I’m a developer – all kinds of other stuff on the machine), I’d probalby have kicked it for XP, but I’ve been around since Windows 3.0…. It’s not as reliable as XP, but still beats Win98ME…. (Win98SE and Win3.11 were the reliability kings before XP in this shop.)
Regards,
Stu.
Maybe I’m just lucky or careful with my new Toshiba. I did have problems with an Intel driver for WiFi (it would randomly drop the connection to WiFi until I rebooted) but that has already been fixed through Windows Update. No blue screens, except for one when I first started my new computer (fixed by reinstalling Vista from the DVD). I got blue screens all the time on my old laptop with XP.
Well, there is something wrong with Vista, but it is not quite the technological disaster some say (at least not on a grand “vista sucks for everyone” or “most machines sold are underpowered” scale.) I used vista for a while on a core duo, 1 gig, dell laptop that cost me 1100 bucks a little more than a year and a half ago (before vista came out). It did fine and never crashed. Seriously–and using the drivers that came with Vista. It wasn’t really that slow. It was faster than XP was on a dell desktop that I got just after XP came to the market (a Pentium 4). Vista is slower on the same hardware than XP, although the difference is not as noticeable on faster machines (pretty much every sold over 500 dollars).
But something is wrong. I used Vista for a while then went back to XP. I like to tinker with the visual styles (and I did like the speed of XP on my core duo.) I found myself making my system look like a Mac, so I finally went and got one. I now have an iMac using Leopard. That is definitely faster than Vista. With the 1 gig included, Leopard is much faster (and nicer) than Vista. I had vista on the iMac using bootcamp and it was OK, but slower than MacOS. And, sorry, the fit and finish of the leopard interface is just better. I have now replaced Vista with XP, and try to use it as little as possible.
Been using Vista on a few machines the last year and have not encountered any of the show stoppers that the anti-microsot crowd claims exist. Sure, its not perfect, never claimed to be, but it’s miles ahead of XP.
” Video – Do You Hate Windows Vista As Much As These Guys? ”
I will, soon.
Wow, the fsf’s badvista blog hasn’t been updated for like 3 months. I guess that means that even the professional Vista haters have given up the ghost and just accept Vista now.
Working in an environment with with a whole mix of windows computers from 2000 to Vista, I haven’t encountered any of the problems that the pro vista hater community runs into.
The funny thing is this movie is woefully inaccurate. You can run Vista on ancient computers as long as you have enough ram, and with Ram costing about $30 a gig right now, why would you not upgrade your computer with as much as it will accept?
I expect this time next year Vista will be the de facto standard on windows computers, putting it right in line with where I expected it to be.
I don’t think there has been a more epic failure of any Internet social networking group than the people trying and failing (miserably) to stop vista. Lol, losers.
Funny, but ultimately more FUD. Vista’s at least as good an improvement over XP as XP was over 2k. Sure they dropped the ball on some stuff: I think they made Media Center worse instead of better and they shouldn’t have dropped WinFS. A classic mode a la OS X would solve the “the old apps dont work any more” problems we have every release.
In five years time people will be complaining about Win7, and how Vista was “just fine.”
#14
Last year I bet you could have fed your family on AdSense revenue from a vista hating blog. I don’t think you could anymore.
I’m heading to the bathroom now to squeeze out a new release of Vista.
#13,
I will give them this, it was the most epic fud campaign in computer history. If any company but Microsoft were to face the sheer quantities of unadulterated BS that managed to gain traction (the AU ‘researchers’ paper that claimed Vista didn’t run non-drm media files for example) they would have been damaged.
But because it is Microsoft we are talking about and the Vista haters claims were akin to the time Burns pointed that gun and Smithers and told him to get in his model of the Spruce Goose on the Simpsons, ultimately it was all meaningless.
It is kind of a shame too. The loss of focus from the slashdot community allowed Apple to basically wipe out the linux community, and it appears if Linux is on its last legs now on the brink of oblivion. Now that the OS community has… less than zero credibility, I don’t think they will ever recover.
Also, this bodes poorly for Apple as well, and they were the main drivers of the Fud campaign, and with the Linux community now in its death throws, Apple has no one to develop their virtualization and desktop management techniques. Even PHP seems to be slipping away to commercial development. Man what a disaster.
Linux in its death throes??? LORDY LORDY WHY DIDN’T SOMEONE TELL ME!!!!!
I mean, I keep seeing all these people switch, like daily and they don’t realize that is all coming down, I could have stopped them….
Greg do you work directly for Mr. Gates, or somewhere down the ladder?
“It’s crashing, and it won’t boot up” got me.
I will agree that the FSF and Slash have become the anti-Linux propaganda crowd. I don’t believe this has led to the downfall of GNU/Linux on the desktop (aborted takeoff), but rather the quality of applications. Apple is Unix (at least in personality) and has many commercial applications available for it. Individuals who want a nice notebook with both their favorite Unix stuff and purchased applications are more likely going to use a Mac product. It kind of reminds me of the free love hippies generation become the yuppies of the 1980s, but that was way before my time.
At any rate, you are correct in the so-called community lost focus. They turned out to be a little more influenced to capitalism than I think they thought they would be.
I don’t, however, think this spells the doom you claim for Apple given that most of the their code for Darwin comes from a mix of the various BSDs and not Linux.
As for Vista, I really haven’t had that much of a problem with it. It does have some issues with gaming on moderate to high-end hardware, but it makes a completely functional office desktop for basic media needs (media center). The three problems I have noticed are:
1). A couple of applications used to utilize 100% of the CPU (and the system dragged). Of course you could easily kill the rogue process but it required vendors to update (APC).
2). Hibernation seems to not always, at times it gets stuck (1 out of 20 resumes or so) and the hard disk just clicks away at the dialog screen. Bit of problem given keyboard and mouse have not initialized (resetting does nothing).
3). Windows settings seem to be lost at times, this of course is part of the dynamic view that Vista is supposed to give, but it can be annoying.
4). Network performance over the network
* most of these problems are supposed to be fixed in the final release of Sp1, I don’t currently have any MSDN membership anymore. I guess I’ll have to wait until mid March to find out (though the pre-released seemed to sort-of work, though not as well as expected).
Performance:
It runs very well on a dual core system with at least 2gigs of memory. A little less productive, but still usable on a AMD 3500 with 1gig of memory after making some minor changes to the startup processes.
It’s funny that they bash Windows at the beginning with the tired joke of having to press Start to shut down the computer, but the irony is that Vista’s Start button doesn’t say “Start” on it. (It still opens the Start Menu, though, and a “Start” tooltip pops up if you hover your cursor over it.)
I’ve dealt with Vista on multiple platforms. It runs OK provided A) you have a computer with sufficient ram (at least 1GB, 2GB preferred) and a fast enough processor (realistically, a P4 or better). If all you want to run is the standard Office suite, and all you’ll be connecting is new (< 1 year old) hardware, you’ll probably be OK.
That said, if you want to run older software (and by older it could be as new as something issued in 2005-6), or if you want to attach older peripherals (again, 2005-6 constitutes old), you may encounter problems. And by “may” I really mean “will” if you do much at all with your PC. The latest Vista service pack has fixed a few things, but this is still a serious problem.
Now, all that would fall under the “in order to improve we must leave the old behind” catch-all IF there compelling reasons to run Vista. The problem is, there aren’t. The improvements in Vista relative to XP simply aren’t important enough. Apps launch a bit faster, search functions are somewhat better, the GUI is slicker…yeah, OK, whatever. The OS is somewhat more secure under the hood, but that advantage is going to be reduced with the next XP service pack.
Previous successful, compelling OS launches have been powered by the fact that the OS offered noticable, important improvements.
Bottom line: XP is a good OS. Vista is barely better, and breaks too much in its wake.
Lol, as if Linux and OS didn’t have it bad enough, Microsoft just that all their developer tools are now free.
Kwad, what sort of revolutionary advance did XP offer over 2k? Pleople made the same claim back then even though it was more stable, had built in CD burning, remote desktop, and a slew of other nice if not extraordinary features.
Vista’s the same way. People call the new gui eye candy, but pushing the gui load off on the gpu frees up the cpu for other things. It handles memory management better. The search indexing promised in XP actually works in Vista. DVD burning support. Media Center. Its more stable, but when it does crash it does so more gracefully.
Its not a quantum leap. Neither was XP. Neither was Leopard. There are improvements; people claiming there aren’t doesn’t make it so.
After a year this March with Vista, not going back to XP. I tried the Mac OS for a month, hated the differences. It’s good, but not enough to switch.
Have Ubuntu on a second PC, it’s nice, still prefer Vista. Have not had a single issue with DRM. Even DVD Shrink still works fine. The Vista FUD is annoying, as are those Apple ads. But it gives some folks something to do.
I moved from Win98SE to XP when my video file size needs exceeded the 4 gig limitation. All my existing software worked on XP as well as it did on 98. So assuming someone who reads this blog uses their computers for other than web browsing and email, what incentive does Vista have for me? . None that I can see.
tcc3: said:
————————————————
Kwad, what sort of revolutionary advance did XP offer over 2k? Pleople made the same claim back then even though it was more stable, had built in CD burning, remote desktop, and a slew of other nice if not extraordinary features.
————————————————
You are correct in that the upgrade to XP over Win2K was NOT compelling. I didn’t migrate for over two years, and the IS departments in most companies took at least as long.
But the lineage there was : NT->NT4->Win2K-> XP
That was the corporate track. These were the more stable operating systems. They were also more costly, harder to use (NT/NT4), and were less widely supported with respect to commercial software and peripherals. VERY few home users used NT/NT4 and while Win2K made greater inroads in the home market, it was still not heavily marketed to that segment.
Most customers of Windows weren’t on that corporate track. They were on the 95->98->98SE->ME(ugh)->XP track. XP was a wonderful improvement over any predecessors on that track.
To be honest, the transition from Win2K to XP was not compelling on the basis of features and functionality. The transition was ultimately mandated by the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting Win2K with updates and that software and hardware vendors started to drop Win2K support. (This isn’t a surprise, since with XP, they could easily support both the ‘business’ (XP-Pro) and ‘home’ platforms (XP-home) with one set of drivers–something that was not true of earlier parallel releases.
Bottom line: Someday, the Win2K -> XP scenario will likely repeat itself, and an OS upgrade will be mandated by the realities of the market. But for now, there is no compelling reason to upgrade XP.
I can see where some of mmy software will not work on Vista. Some PS filters for instance. None of my old DOS software will run in a shell. , Yep I still run it as nothing in windows is comparable, so Vista is great if you buy new software for every release of an OS. But then I don’t have the time to learn new software for video editing, audio manipulation, photo reworking and such, every time bill Gates needs a few bucks. Apple on the other hand, is on the other hand. Some folks just like stroking while typing I guess.
Seems to me the types of folks who had to go from 98 to XP (due to lack of availability or support) are the same sorts who aren’t going to upgrade from XP any way. They’ll get it the same way they got XP: in the coming years when it comes bundled on a new PC.
98 to XP was a sea change – but it also was a huge jump in sys reqs, just like vista is. Can you imagine running XP on some of the old slow PII or older hardware? It would be a dog, just like people complaining Vista is now. It also broke compatibility for programs and drivers.
My point is that there is nothing new under the sun. People don’t like change. Period.
#23 – Is this something new you have a link to or are you just referring to the Express Editions of Visual Studio?
Qsabe – If nothing broke for you between 98 and XP you got very very lucky. XP had many of the same compatibility problems that Vista does now.
Every release is going to break compatibility some. The only way that isn’t going to happen is if they don’t make any changes or improvements to the underlying code. If that were the case people really would be claiming theres no reason to upgrade. Given some of the security/ stability issues of the older OSs, changes needed to be made.
The ony way ’round this is some sort of sandboxed compatibility mode, much like Classic was for OS X.
This is an oversight on their part and should definitely be a feature of Win7. With virtualization they could offer “probable” compatibility all the way back to DOS if they wanted.
It would solve two problems: It would quiet the critics who’s software breaks with every new release and their OS would no longer be shackled to old crappy code and methods for compatibility. We could really see some improvements in both security and stability.
#31,
No their pro developer kit, the whole stack is now free. Server 2003, SQL server, expression studio pro, and visual studio pro. However I read beyond the headline, and it is for students… Still that will pretty much kill off any new PHP and Tomcat projects for the foreseeable future.