Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now

SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."

Comments

I still can't get vista to work

[Ambassador Kosh]

I have spent a fair while on vista 64 trying to get the dang thing to work. After a recent driver update it now hard locks on startup and using the roll back option also hard locks so it looks like it will need a complete format and reinstall again. Vista 64 is one of the reasons I decided to just get an xbox360 to play games on instead. I only use windows for games and keeping windows running on this box is a pain in the neck. XP 64 works ok but not great, however some things like 3d sound don't work and many games just crash. The problem seems to be that I have 8GB of ram in this box and creative labs cards under windows have a lot of problems if you have more then 3GB of ram or so. Under linux every piece of hardware in this box works flawlessly. I have seen the direction that windows has been going, it seems to keep getting harder to get the darn thing working and take more fidling to keep it working. My kubuntu install worked the first time I installed and it has kept working, the most complex thing I need to do to maintain the box is to click on the update icon and tell it to go ahead. ;) This leaves my time free to get my actual work done, however I am tired of booting over to windows to play games only to have the games crash, the system crash etc. For me the consoles have won now, I have a wii and xbox360 and both of them are working great. If microsoft wants to really convince me that windows is the future they need to support some basic things better first. From what I have read so far it appears the major thing that xp64 and vista64 lack is support for an IOMMU which apparently can take care of all of these problems I have with the hardware under windows since that would allow transparently mapping 64bit address spaces for 32bit aware hardware. Apparently vista +1 *might* support it, meanwhile linux has supported it for a while and it works fine. So in 3-5 years maybe windows will be ready for usage again.

Re:....Or not. Some facts here, please

[SEMW]

I suspect I could install Windows 98 and still do everything I do today on XP. You're probably right. In fact, I feel like testing your hypothesis -- I'm now composing this message in Windo--

/\/\ This program has performed an illegal operation
\/\/ and will be shut down.
If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.

--ws 98, and it seems to be working so far... Albeit with a few --

/\/\ WOWEXEC has caused a General Protection Fault in
\/\/ KRNL386.COM at 0000:09F9.
WOWEXEC will now close.

--teething problems, but nothing I can't--

The instruction at "0x947B3A9F" referenced memory at "0xFFFFFFFF". The memory could not be "read".
Click on "OK" to terminate the program.
Click on "Cancel" to debug the program.

--handle... Aaaargh, who am I kidding! Come back XP, come back Ubuntu -- Come back, Vista! All is forgiven...!