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.'"
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
They haven't had qualms about that in the past. What's stopping them now?
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
I used up all my good Vista jokes on the last article! :-(
Didn't MS say openly that every $1 of Vista represents $18 of NEW hardware? I think they did. So it's no surprise that there would be a lag. I'm sure that in by the end of the year, all PC's will be moved to Vista and once MS abandons XP the upgrades will fly off the shelf. I was in Staples today and the price for XP Home upgrades and basic Vista was the same. So if you're smart enough to read the box, why would you buy Vista for an upgrade on a machine that's more than a year old and can't run it?
I was working at an "experimental" call center. Place was called Stream and the client was Dell. The objective was to figure out if the customer had a simple problem or if one that required level 2 support. (Bit more complicated than that, but that's the jest) I was working there between the great Windows 95 to Windows 98 upgrade. It was miserable for ANYONE with one of those damn USR Robotics modems. It got to the point where we would NOT send out a replacement modem unless the customer did a complete reinstall, from scrach, not with the rebuild image. It also didn't help that most of our techs had a 75% turnaround in three months, couldn't speak English well, and that we told the customer we would call them in 48 hours to "help" them though the reinstall. Gezz. Thank god I work on Dell Servers now. Dell afford to piss off their consumer customers, but not their enterprise. PS - I remember the trainer telling me that Dell is for "quality" and would never sell a computer under $1,000. Even when he said that, I laughed. (1998-1999 was when he told us)
I upgraded to vista, but I have to disable my sound card in the device manager before rebooting or Vista will not start up. The sound card driver is provided by MS from Windows Update. Why would they provide a driver that crashes the system, and even alerts you that it is not made for vista?
I wrote about it here, if anyone cares.
I upgraded 1 computer in my company (my friend's one, didn't work with XP, hardware problems). After everybody saw it, nobody wants it anymore. Especially after problems with installation of few crucial programs (ie. Acrobat Reader 8, but 7 was fine). And those people use IE and think that Windows is the only operating system.
Plus windows didn't detect 3 different USB memory sticks. They simply didn't work. But USB mouse and keyboard are fine...
I've seen enough. Bells and whistles are not enough for operating system to be successful.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
You guys really sucked for forcing people to totally wipe their computers when all you needed to do was uninstall the Winmodem software (I assume that's what these junkers were), delete the USR infs from %systemroot%\inf, reinstall the software, and reboot. Clearly, those INFS were still hanging around.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Believe it or not, some people are just brainwashed.
We had someone (not a techie, but a user with a silent L) verbally call Vista the "latest and greatest." (Personal aside, I want to find whoever coined that term and just beat them to a bloody pulp.)
Never mind we're having nothing but problems getting it working for them; they seem oblivious to this. (And no AV support until May...)
MS should just cut to the chase and call the next Windows what it is... "Windows Shiny Car Keys" *dingle, dangle* You like the new shiny, don't ya? Shiny shiny!
I know why people will give it up... DRM, or more specifically the hoops you have to jump through to install Vista. Many people are trying to not pay the license fee now, and Vista will only push them farther toward trying Linux. Hey, the price is right, and it does all that they want to do anyway, so now is the time to drop MS products.
Sure, businesses will still find the money and time to upgrade, but most of them will do a forklift upgrade with a business maintenance plan on the desktop machines. This is a luxury that home pc owners do not have. The only real choice is to switch or suffer the pains of upgrades, license fees, support issues, software headaches, and the continued use of an OS that is the malware hackers preferred target.
This isn't trolling or Linux fanboi-ism, just an observation of what I'm seeing in the general populace.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I'm not running an apple ; mostly because I have a pc right here in front of me so why pay more money. But is there any reason now NOT to run an apple? Microsoft would have done better to not release vista ; they're ensuring people hate them and try the competition.
If I were a shareholder, i would sell sell sell.
I think it's a safe bet to say every shareholder should short-sell before every major release of windows. They do this every single time. Hype it up, stock goes up, release it, disappointing everyone, stock goes down, holding pattern, start all over again.
---
SELL SELL SELL! | Sometimes I'm bored
Ace
What is the major draw of upgrading to Vista?
The features include:
A lot of these features have been on other OS's for quite a while, but they are welcome additions to Windows for people who are used to them on other platforms, but need to use Windows occasionally. In a year or so once it is stabilized and third parties have things together, it will probably be an improvement on XP
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
I submitted for an upgrade waited weeks and weeks, and then sent an e-mail to the support email asking why I had not received it, and if I had somehow mad an error in the documentation and such that I had sent.
I got a reply that said "Thank you for submitting to customer service, your upgrade order has been cancelled per your request so that you can re-submit with the correct information."
So instead of verifying my order, they canceled it, and the page to do submissions are gone, and besides that the documentation said "no copies of this documentation will be accepted," but I had already submitted the documentation via physical snail mail. So I have essentially been SCREWED out of 200 bucks worth of software.
To put it mildly, I will never purchase Windows Vista, and I am sure the Pirate bay can help me get the software I was promised. I have never before had a request for information turn into such a fraudulent cancellation before, and since I already paid for it, I am not feeling under any obligation to purchase it again.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
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
You: So where is it?
Lawyer: It doesn't have a location, it's a license.
You: So what does that mean?
Lawer: It means we fulfilled our legal obligation. Good day.
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.
An instant +5 Interesting post template. Who knew...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Huh? MS has already released recommended specs.
It ran quite well on my old P4 2.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM and Geforce 6600 GT...
That is, far below what e.g. Dell has sold the past few years.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
They are doing everyone a big favor. Vista's upgrade process is absolutely not robust enough yet for the average consumer.
...could mean, oh, your audio hardware is having some issue, or it could just mean you have 4GB of RAM (See KB929777), or any number of other things.
Last weekend, I spent two days upgrading to Vista on a machine that was just purchased in October. I did succeed in the end, but it was not without a considerable amount of hair-pulling.
The essential problem is that if ANYTHING goes wrong, the upgrade suddenly becomes a non-consumer-friendly train wreck. The most painful thing is that there are any number of small hardware problems that can cause the boot to blue screen. If the boot blue screens, Vista tries to boot again. That is, you end up in a boot-loop. The blue screen does not stay up long enough to read it. So, anyone debugging the problem needs to learn about the F8 menu, where they can request that the machine not reboot on boot failure. THIS time. Then, you have to look at the blue screen, and hope that it's something that'll give you SOME clue as to what's wrong. After all...
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Vista WILL NOT FINISH INSTALLING until you have done at least one clean non-Safe-Mode boot. However, it WILL NOT allow you to use Safe Mode until it has finished installing. So, there is no way to remedy any problems (short of yanking hardware out of your machine) unless you boot off of the install DVD, and go into the command line tool there. However, you cannot get to the command line tool directly. You have to ask for it to do a Repair first. However, Repair hangs on some machines. (Man, I wish I was making this up.) So, you may have to cancel out of Repair, just to get to the command line.
None of the three distinct problems that were preventing my upgrade were detected at all by the tool that was supposed to determine if my machine was Vista compatible. Not a single one of them. So, I had no idea where to start looking for problems.
Okay, now imagine your typical first-level tech trying to guide a consumer through this swamp.
They can't. This is not something that can be realistically handled by first-level customer support. Moreover, the "just do a clean install" line that Microsoft has been feeding to anyone who contacts tech support REALLY isn't going to fly with people who were told their machines would be ready for a Vista upgrade when it became available. They have already been using their machines, and they expect a smooth upgrade -- not a clean install.
These companies have a vested interest in making sure that the Vista upgrade process is not going to blow up in the faces of their customers. Because their equipment is very consistent, they face a situation where it's either going to be a disaster for everyone, or it's going to run smoothly for almost everyone. The stakes are very high for them to get this one right. The cost of botching it up will be phenomenal. So, give them some time. Let them get this one right. Or, their poor customers are going to find yourself with your machine torn apart all over the floor, gnashing and wailing, like I was. Upgrades should never be this hard.
Ah, I see now what Microsoft meant when they said that Vista would create over 100,000 new jobs in the US and in Europe: Support desk jobs for the resellers.