Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Vista Upgrades Moving at Snail's Pace
Chester Freeze writes "During the holiday season, many shoppers bought PCs with the promise of quick, free Vista upgrades. The reality has been something else entirely: many Dell and HP customers are being told that they won't receive their copies of Vista before April. 'One source at a major OEM who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the real issue is that OEMs are still not sure which PCs are really ready to support Vista, and which PCs aren't... Customers who qualify for an Express Upgrade also qualify for OEM support for Windows Vista, even if their machines came with Windows XP. The last thing a Dell, Gateway, or HP wants to do is start sending out upgrades to customers who might have video cards that do not have particularly stable drivers yet (or sound cards, or RAID controllers, etc.). This could be a support disaster.'"
On the other hand, it could be easy to mitigate for Dell..
Refund the money. Now. Be the first to say Vista is crap
and you won't support it until SP1, just like the rest of us.
Or, dive into the steaming shithole. Your choice.
well, they sold it. Sort of comes with the territory. I know if I sold a promise to upgrade and received payment for it, I am pretty sure I am obligated to provide it! Sort by law I believe, although IANAL, so I could be wrong.
Clever or not, I got nothing...
Mostly? Finally a Microsoft OS that can run 64 bit reliably, WITH 32 bit support.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I bought a Toshiba A100-TA9 laptop, with the promise of a free upgrade. When I go to the upgrade site, after I select the country (Canada), I am presented with blank drop-down boxes to select the current version I have. I assume this is due to multiple language versions (English and French) in Canada. Email to support is entirely unhelpful.
At the beginning of January, the form was working, but the server would time out at the very end.
Aero is the feature that most regular users associate with Vista. If they don't get that, then why do they even want Vista now? It's not like there are a whole lot of compelling reasons to switch to it at this point. And there are definitely a number of drawbacks. So if their PC can't run Aero, most people probably couldn't care less about getting Vista.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It comes down to marketshare. Microsoft KNOWS they have the market share, and are FORCING users to seek their new Windows ME 2007 (aka Vista)...I'm not biting this time. And I will use my last professional dying breath to tell everyone to stay away.
I keep telling customers and clients to stay away from Microsoft. Their response is "What else is there?"
I spout off about 4 or 5 good, stable, and secure systems, including Apple. They tell me they are not graphic designers. I then tell them that I can't help them unless they think outside the MS box.
I am treating Vista like a plague. And everyone that has a lick of technological expertise should be on that bandwagon.
Brainwashed is EXACTLY what they are.
Time for Linux to step up to the plate. There is such a NEED for a "Super Wine" project to take a big bite out of Microsoft's ass.
The upgrades might be going at snails pace but every new pc being shipped is shipping with vista. It wont be long before there are more installations of Vista than Firefox.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Please, lord, let it be this time... raise thy noodly appendage and smite they foes!
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
The people with a 4 year old machine with those specs are in the upper 1% of PC owners. I know of no one with a one+ year old machine who isn't a high end gamer or code developer who already has 1GB or more on their machine. And you answered your own point vis a vis the video card. If that's the target for Vista upgrades then it's going to be a cold cold winter in Redmond this year. You'd be amazed I think at how few people will chuck $180 for a new video adapter just to run an OS for no other clear reason. You have got be subsidized by someone else if that's how you think.
Again, as it has been pointed out clearly, if you promise something free upon purchase of something else that is not the same thing as simply offering to give something away for free, with a buyer beware, you get what you pay for.
Dell specifically offered to provide free upgrades to Vista for people who were buying Vista ready machines before the release, to get holiday sales.
We can assume that the reason really is the fact that they are shipping upgrades as fast as they can and the only folks who are going to be loud are the ones waiting. To suggest that they are really trying to hold off shipment until they can produce a disk with drivers that work for hardware they already certified as ready would be fraudulent (selling hardware they promise meets Microsofts criteria for whichever level of compatibility without it being true is a class action lawsuit, or a recall)
In any case the likeliest answer is that the release is less than 2 weeks old, we have had terrible winter weather over that time, and the number of people who idiotically were unable to wait to get a computer preloaded with their OS, probably is greater than expected, mostly because they have no idea what it really means to upgrade an OS, since its been some 5 years since there has been a major release.
Lenovo is doing these things A LOT better.
I had Vista running on my old R51, which died a few weeks ago. I got a new T60 - that was around 3.2.07, and Lenovo already had all the drivers out. Ultranav, Rescue and Recovery, Mobile Center Extensions, Fingerprint Reader, Wireless, Bluetooth, Hard Disk Protection.
All working flawlessly. I still haven't got my Lenovo Vista CD with Express Upgrade, so i've got this machine running with a normal VLP License.
Quite nice of Lenovo to support all the hardware at release time. The PC's are less of a problem - they don't have as much fancy stuff as a notebook.
> Didn't MS say openly that every $1 of Vista represents $18 of NEW hardware?
No. What they said was: Every $1 spent on Vista requires $~8 of hardware, $~6 of replacement software (Office 2007 plus everything else they broke) and $~4 of support to make it work.
Businesses will look at that and should see that the TCO is through the roof. It makes Macs look cheap by comparison.
Choose here: Vista Pinto edition, Vista Corvair edition, Vista Edsel edition.
I pride myself on keeping old machines happily doing the day-to-day work of my business. My OS choices;
Linux (Debian)
MacOS-X
Windows 2000
And I see zero reason to upgrade.
Dog is my co-pilot.
After all, that's what MS partisans say about Linux when it lacks driver support for something...
Prompting people to accept every little action does not a secure Windows make. XP is fine by Windows standards. Vista is garnished to seem safer, but annoys you with so many dialogues requesting you to double and triple check what you are about to do as to desensitize you into paying attention to the actual warning in the first place.
I've had few if any truly horrid security problems with my Windows. Those that I know which have had done so by running that which they shouldn't, trusting untrustable content or just simply acting irresponsibly. Vista can't change that. It can only look prettier as it's failing.
Linux loses for me since I do not want to spend the time to fiddle with it
Anyone who trots out this tired old line hasn't tried Linux in a while. Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, hell if your time is so valuable paying for Linspire is an option, all install just about everything you need out of the box to get work done.
Oh, playing games? Not on a Mac, at least not that many and my guess is that's not what you mean.
The only other thing I can think of that may take time to get setup on Linux but not on a Mac is audio/video. Not sure about what a Mac comes loaded with out of the box and what you have to download and install yourself but all of the distros I listed above have quick, painless ways to install codecs and players in minutes*.
So, um, yeah, Vista sure is pissin' off people and OEMs...
* assumes broadband connection is available.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Upgrade Versions of Vista are Poison.
Of course, this has always been true of Windows Upgrade versions, but not to the extent of Vista.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Based on your comment, I truly can't tell if it's just satire, or you're being bloody serious!
.Net. I've heard numerous bad things about these apps running on Vista too. Why? I don't know; I'm not a programmer. I'm only telling you based on personal experience with my clients.
Right now, Vista is very bad for the corporate world being they often run custom web applications. Some of these applications haven't been updated yet to handle IE7. Then, you have applications that run on
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Vista will never be the trusted successor to XP, but right now, it's too soon to be recommending this new OS.
Life is not for the lazy.