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Windows Vista - Still Fresh After 19 Months?
MyStuff writes "ZDNet blog Hardware 2.0 looks at the effect of having used Windows Vista for over 18 months. It Windows Vista the indispensable upgrade that Microsoft wants you to think it is? Writer Kingsley-Hughes says 'Having been using Vista for over 18 months I believe that it's a huge improvement over XP and even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers.' Just the same, he goes on, 'I wouldn't call any of the changes earth-shattering. When I'm using XP systems I miss some of the features but not so much that they push me to upgrade any faster.' He then goes on to give a feature-by-feature breakdown of all of the improvements Vista has over XP, and what long-term use of these features can net." A possibly useful guide for gamers or administrators thinking about upgrading sometime soon.
So, has he actually been able to run Windows for 19 months without reinstalling? That's amazing!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
This was almost exactly my attitude when I started using Mac OS X 10.4. Spotlight indexed searching, well okay, but I don't really do that. I now use spotlight every day for both finding some document and quickly starting applications. In less than a second, using only the keyboard, I can do a search for some string and open that PDF file I was reading about the MPLS adoption in Europe. I don't need to know if it was in my e-mail attachment inbox, saved to the desktop, or if I was a good boy and actually filed it with my research materials. In less time than that I can search for and open some program I rarely use but recall the name of. Imagine if your search was globally accessible from the keyboard and faster than going to the start menu and selecting something for items you haven't made shortcuts for. For those items you did make shortcuts for, there is no need. Photoshop is "cmd-space+p+h+enter" and it is open.
Now my experiences with Vista RC1 were somewhat less encouraging, but I'd have a hard time giving up my indexed search at this point and I imagine in a year or two when MS has ironed most of the bugs out, you may find yourself feeling the same way. I would seriously try using these features for a while and see what your opinion is then, rather than pre-judging them.
I agree. Nothing there to make me run out and buy Vista. The things he mentioned as "improvements" are not things that bother me, I rarely use the Start Menu at all, I don't use sounds as I find them annoying, and the XP fonts look fine to me, I don't do graphics work and my speed is just fine! So, with nothing really cool added and with all the bugs, the embedded DRM crap, the 9 levels of OK boxes to click to change settings and strange quirkly things that software packages that run fine on XP do on Vista, I'll stay away. Plus I don't feel like springing for new hardware.
The problem with the new mac ads is it doesn't show the OS, the system or anything useful. Even worse most of what they say is blantantly false. Yeah a Windows machine is a full work system and has no entertainment value, that's why 90 percent of computer games are still available on the PC. When mom and pa see the commercial and see "mac is fun, PC is work" they think about their system and realize it's not that much work. Adopting a mac would be more expensive to them, be more work and they don't want to spend 1000-2000 for a mid level system.
...." Stop. Realize that people don't use dos based systems any more because they don't want to do that, running 1-2 programs just to get a third working isn't cool, and won't work for most people unless Microsoft disappears, and from the look of it Microsoft is going to be here to stay.
You can lie your ass off to a consumer but the minute they realize what you said isn't the whole truth you're screwed. What Mac has said in their last round of commercials has hurt it because people started smelling the BS, and because people looked into it and see the problems.
Hell their switch ads tried to bandwagon people on with famous faces. However looking back at them I can tell you. I only knew one or two of them. Bandwagoning commercials slowly faded away in the 90s. There's a reason for that, it stopped working so well... except in politics of course, when you're forced to choose if you're going to vote.
As for Linux the steady trickle I've seen going to Linux won't matter, it's still too small, and I still see people returning to windows, most people will continue to use XP. I'm all for using Linux as a back bone to coporate systems, but it's still not good enough to be a platform for business/work, nor one for productivity. People still don't want to do everything by hand, they want the comfort of Windows, and XP has given them a perfect surrounding. The minute you can't run program X from linux, it fails in people's minds. You can start by saying "well you can just run it under
I would go farther and say that if this article is really the result of 19 months of research, then the reviewer is hiding something.
Every point made is vague and subjective, and completely meaningless. If Kingsley-Hughes thinks that the 'Start Menu' is an indicator of performance, I have to wonder if he even knows what an operating system is.
Windows Vista: It's still not a Mac.
You left out nicer fonts!
But almost everything he said could have as easily been done in XP- better fonts, faster startup, improved search... all this could have just as easily been in SP2, or at least SP3, if MS hadn't been expending all that money and energy on Vista.
Here's my favorite quote: ``Some programs still have problems with Vista but the blame for this really falls on the vendor and not Microsoft.''
I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement.
On the flip side, an employee here just bought a laptop with Vista on it. Another admin has spent at least a day working on the stupid thing over the past week or so, just trying to get it to work properly on a network that has been supporting several versions of Windows as well as OSX, Linux and Solaris for years. Granted, he hasn't used Vista before, but he knows Microsoft OSes prior to Vista just fine. (One of the things that pisses me off about MS is that with every release you have to learn where things are all over again.)
And there is NO excuse for scrolling something like a start menu using standard sized fonts. None. Ever. Morons.