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Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista
pennconservative writes "Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld.com, gives us ten reasons to buy the next version of Microsoft Windows. Some of his reasons sound compelling, and it definitely sounds like Microsoft has found yet another way to ensure market dominance for a few more years. Desmond also gives a few reasons not to buy Vista, but the most compelling of those is the hardware required to run it. Since Vista will likely ship on every new computer anyone buys, I don't see that being a major roadblock."
They will if they want to have a "Made for Windows Vista" logo on the outside, which would be all major PC manufacturers. Trust me, most OEMs are already well aware of the Microsoft Logo requirements for Vista. If it's going to ship on your PC (and by ship I don't mean your brother's girlfriend's ex-boyfriend's PC company down the street) it will probably be logo'd. If it has that logo, it will run Vista just fine.
After paying for 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP I'm really starting to abandon cynicism and derision in favor of good old practical thriftiness. I just can't afford Windows anymore.
Idiot.
Will they get XP if their system does not meet the requirements? Surely Dell will sell a low-end machine that might not have the hardware to run Vista? Or worse yet, they sell a machine that meets the minimal requirements, and performs like a dog. I wouldn't think that they'd want that perception, right?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Is there any way to mod this story 'troll'?
Actually there is.
Seems like I've had 8/10 of those for over a year with my Mac. Way to "innovate". As long as you have to buy a whole new computer to run this OS, why not buy a whole new computer and try a better OS than the one you have now. One that has been out for almost a year (10.4). One that isn't a "1.0" like Vista will be.
If you really like MS though, why not wait for Windows Vista "98" when they iron out the kinks. (OS X had 'em too early on).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I remember when Microsoft's competitors got a lot of flack for just trailing MS. The times have changed. Most of the listed new features in Vista are MS playing catch-up with the competition:
1. Packet filtering capabilities, per-use administrator rights -- from Linux.
2. Tabs in IE -- from Firefox
3. Eye candy/transparency -- Mac OS X
4. Non-awful search system -- everyone was ahead of MS here
5. Better update system -- still no systemwide yum or apt, but the most abysmal thing about maintaining a Windows box was keeping it up to day, and IE was a piss-poor tool to do so with. See Linux.
6. Looks like MS is bundling the equivalent of rhythmbox/iTunes and gqview into Windows.
7. Parental filtering options -- Okay, I'm not aware of anyone else that bundles this in, so this may be new.
8. Better backups -- Linux's amanda.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration -- I don't yet know enough about what this actually translates to to be able to comment on it.
10. (apparently a wishlist item, not a real feature?)
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
10) Upgrade hell....a new motherboard counts as a "new computer" and thus requires a new Windows license.
9) If you don't have a computer capable of running it to it's full potential...why bother?
8) DRM embedded into the OS. Less control for the user.
7) Viruses
6) Worms
5) Spyware
4) Vista will feature ads.
3) It's still Windows, so it'll still look like something made by Playskool.
2) You're going to have to relearn everything anyway, particularly the Office interface which will be radically different with the new release....might as well switch to something new anyway
1) Gates is evil. What more do you need?
it knows what applications you typically use and at what times so it'll preload them into memory making it seem snappier
Could you please provide a link to this article? While I'm interested to read it, I don't really buy this. Friggin' XP can't figure out how often I use programs now. (When you go to "Add/Remove Programs" it is supposed to tell you how often the program is used.) For example what XP says/actual:
Adobe Acrobat: "occasionally" / several times a day
APC PowerChute Personal Edition: "rarely" / is _always_ running
Gaim: "occasionally" / is _always_ running
Firefox: "occasionally" / default browser
Thunderbird: "frequently" / finally got one right
WinRAR archiver: "rarely" / several times a day
I don't want Microsoft deciding which programs it thinks I use most often and wasting memory + CPU "pre-loading" things. Maybe, just maybe if the damn OS wasn't so bloated they wouldn't need to preload applications. Then again, if the OS wasn't so bloated it would stop crashing because they could get all their garbage out of kernel space and back into userspace where it belongs. As it is, they have to put things in kernel space to keep the entire system from grinding to a halt when you run 'calc.exe'. Basically, get the entire GUI out of kernel space. AFAIK they can't do that because it would be way too slow.
Granted TFA was very much non-technical, some things missing from the list: (If I'm wrong about any of these being in XP, please feel free to correct me.)
- for-real no-shit multitasking. Linux has it. OS X has it. It aggarvates me to no end that the system severely drags and/or blocks while doing things like copying large files, burning a CD, scanning the "network neighborhood", or basically any other process which the kernel determines is "intensive". I can do 8 semi-CPU intensive things at once with no problem on a *nix machine without X slowing to a crawl. Good luck trying that on XP. A user-space process or application should never be allowed to block.
- Real ability to disable write caching. This is more a technical point, but nonetheless. The little box that is supposed to disable write caching for USB/Firewire devices seems to have no effect. I'm constantly getting the "This device cannot be stopped right now, try again later" BS from XP. Again, this is a "feature" to speed things up because the system is so inefficent.
- Stop the auto-mounter. Goes along with the above: the ability to turn off automounting of filesystems, or at the very least mount them as read-only. Windows will *always* try to write to a filesystem no matter what. Writing to a hosed disk is a good way to make it worse. Sure you can mount the disk while acting as user who doesn't have write privs to files, but that isn't the same. XP stills writes system and metadata to the disk.
- Unbinding IE from the system. I thought this was decided by a court that they had to do this. The last time I tried to uninstall IE the clipboard stopped functioning in MSOffice. Until I reinstalled IE, of course.
- Make it easier/possible to stop services that are not critical. This fails on XP mostly because nearly all of the services are "critical" to the operation of the OS. Again, to compare this to the *nix model - I can stop almost any service except for init and the system will continue to run. Why can't I enable networking and disable the filesharing by stopping the service that makes the SMB ports listen? A firewall is needed, yes. But it would be even more useful to be able to stop those services which should not be listening anyways.
- Stop telling me "access denied" when I'm the fracking system admin. I really hate that. Processes can't be killed, services can't be stopped, files can't be deleted, etc because "Access denied". Kill the damn process if I tell you to.
- Stop with the stupid exclusive file locks. Some of this is the fault of applications
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
I was thinking much the same. For example, when I read this...
...I thought most usability research had pretty much thrown out this sort of visual jiggery-pokery some time ago now, having discovered that since monitors are basically flat, 2D surfaces, trying to project things in funky 3D or to impose layers through transparency just disorientates users. It's always possible that Microsoft have come up with a new and qualitatively different approach to that of the research labs at other big software places like Sun or IBM, of course, but I'm betting heavily on "gimmick" until I see any evidence to the contrary.
It seems to me that the vast majority of the 10 "reasons to buy" have already been more than adequately addressed on Windows platforms by third party software, some of which will presumably still be necessary since it sounds like MS isn't going to include any anti-virus software unless you pay for it. On other platforms, it either was never an issue, or is likewise addressed by third party add-ons. Putting it into the OS may or may not be an advantage relative to starting with nothing, but relative to where we are, who cares?
Of the remainder, if they're genuinely getting serious about security, that's great, but on the flip-side, we all know about the Trusted Computing rubbish, DRM, and all that jazz. On top of that, we have the recent stories about national governments wanting backdoors and entering talks with Microsoft to ensure they get them. If a government cracker can break my system, so can a script kiddie with the right friends, and that's game over for Microsoft's security drive. It's not secure if it has deliberate backdoors!
The more I read about Vista, the less I care, and I'm someone who (at present) does run XP both at home and at work, and uses some OSS for practical rather than philosophical reasons. I've been looking seriously at shifting to an alternative platform for a while, and with all the security and DRM badness going around lately, the obvious commercial alternative -- Apple -- is pretty much ruled out of the game by its own actions. This could be the best thing to happen to open source software since forever.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.