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Consumer Vista Upgrades Moving at Snail's Pace

Posted by Zonk on from the playing-the-waiting-game dept.

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.'"

6 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But isn't this what they planned for? by Danse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure, there are some video cards that are a year old that can't run Aero but not running Aero is a vastly different thing than not running Vista.

    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
  2. upgrades might be slow but ... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. Could this be it? by OriginalArlen · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I've been reading about how the next version of Windows will be the one that finally contains so much crap, so many bugs, and so many restrictions on your freedom to actually use your own computer for as long as I've been on Slashdot, which is ... dear god, eight or nine years or so now. After Windows 2000 and (especially) XP failed to be complete turkeys that finally opened users' eyes to the possibilities offered by the alternatives. As as result, I am embittered, prematurely aged, and have an irritatingly adolescent habit of peeling off the "Designed for Windows" stickers from any computer I get my hands on and sticking it to toilet flush or kitchen scraps bin. It's taken me almost as long to move from tentative newbie hopelessly failing to install Debian 2.0 to a seasoned professional well used to the process of decontaminating new servers, desktops and laptops, and usually getting all the hardware to work. (WPA2/AES wifi auth, which we use at work, is still a pig involving kernel compilation, and the latest version of Mandriva has broken my access to the corporate PPTP VPN becuase MPPE has been removed from the kernel, and I never managed to acquire any proficiency in the /usr/src/linux shuffle.) But... even having read the much less breathless and reflective piece on the Reg before seeing this, a wild and audacious hope is leaping up in my breast... it's either political advertising subverting ordinary discourse, or it's the end of the beginning of the end for Microsoft. (The beginning, for me, was the anti-trust case. Even though they walked away laughing thanks to Dubya and a foolish judge, anyone in the industry who followed it who DIDN'T already know how evil MS are, were left with no illusions.)

    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
  4. This is silly by gelfling · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:really? by drooling-dog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    how is it that they still can't be sure that my laptop is ready for Vista? Shouldn't that read, "how is it that they still can't be sure that Vista is ready for my laptop?

    After all, that's what MS partisans say about Linux when it lacks driver support for something...
  6. Re:But isn't this what they planned for? by sabernet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.