Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is Vista the New OS/2?

Posted by Cliff on from the vista-wishes-it-had-os/2's-guts dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Well after the long torturous wait, Vista is finally out. Is it just me or do others see similarities between Vista and the OS/2 launch back in the '80's? I mean you need new hardware to run the new OS (Just like OS/2). Even on the best '386 system OS/2 still ran like a dog. Older apps sometimes didn't work (DOS penalty box). And most important, what was the compelling reason to upgrade? Add to this an interview I saw with Ballmer, some time ago, where he was talking about how he knew OS/2 was doomed when IBM kept talking about OS/2's KLOC's (thousands of lines of code), and how bloated OS/2 was. Now I see an interview with him where he talks about how great Vista is due to the, yes you guessed it, the KLOC's of code in it. So is Vista going to see the same fate as OS/2?" This is kind of a hard sell seeing that Vista has Microsoft's might behind it, rather than against it. Still, how long do you think it would take a good percentage of computer users (say 80+%) to migrate to Microsoft's latest and greatest OS?

3 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. No by bwoodring · · Score: 5, Informative

    To rebut your points: 1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC. You may need a video card to get a composite desktop, but I bet people who don't know enough to get a real video card won't care anyway. 2. Vista may not be revolutionary, but it's a clear improvement over XP. It's better looking, more polished and overall a much nicer experience. 3. Almost nobody is going to "buy" Vista. Very few people "bought" XP either. It just makes more sense to get it preloaded. 4. The drivers and other compatibility issues will be ironed out quickly. Right now Vista seems exotic, but it 3-6 months it will be standard on all new desktops. Software and hardware vendors will get on the bus quickly. I didn't run any of the betas or RCs, but I downloaded it from my MSDN account as soon as it came out and I've been impressed. It's probably not 5 full years worth of work, but it's good.

    1. Re:No by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative
      OS/2 was a big improvement over Windows 3.x in many, many ways. It ran Windows 3.x applications, but it also ran 32-bit ones. It had pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, so badly behaved Win16 applications couldn't break the whole system.

      So, why didn't people buy it? Well, at the time, a single seat license for OS/2 was around £500, and a computer was around £1000. Unlike Windows Vista, no one was selling machines with OS/2 pre-installed with a big OEM discount (IBM were trying to sell PCs, so they weren't really pushing other people to license OS/2). Given the choice between Windows for around £50, or OS/2 for around £500, people went with Windows. OS/2 was better, but it wasn't ten times better.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:No by omicronish · · Score: 4, Informative
      "1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC." Buhahahahahahahahaa!!!

      I don't know about other people's experiences with Vista's performance, but mine has been decent. Not amazing, not horrible, but decent. I built my machine 2-3 years ago: Athlon XP 2700+, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB RAM. Vista is installed on a 20 GB partition (I have XP on the other 180 GB partition), and currently there's 2.5 GB free after installing Civilization 4, Visual Studio 2005 Pro, and Office 2007. I'm running at 1920x1200 with full Aero.

      Due to dual booting I've been able to subjectively compare game performance between both XP and Vista, and honestly, there isn't a noticeable difference. Civ4 starts out fast and slows down near endgame under both OSs. Quake 2 through 4, Unreal Tournament 2004, Age of Empires 3, WarCraft 3 were all performant at high resolutions (except Quake 4 which ran well at 800x600 under both OSs). Compatibility is also quite good: I tried a bunch of non-recent games altogether (20+ in all) and the only one with issues is massive texture flickering in Alice. Hell, even SimTower ran perfectly, and that game is over a decade old.

      As for normal usage, I do sense a bit of UI sluggishness compared to XP, although it seems to affect everything so it might be immature graphics drivers. But the system is still very usable, and the sluggishness is only apparent when using XP directly after Vista, which is something I haven't done in weeks.