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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."
Or possibly people are avoiding upgrading because when they test Vista, they discover that the interface is the most convoluted and annoying one ever developed. Windows Vista -- now with 500% more confirmation dialogs and notification tooltips! Because we don't care about real security, we just want to make sure when something breaks we can blame the user for clicking on the confirmation.
We have several people who've bought new laptops in the past few months, and every one of them is infuriated at how annoying the interface is. I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet, because it makes no real sense where anything is or under what conditions entire sections of the interface are hidden and revealed.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I've had experience with Vista both as an upgrade and as a supplied install on a new PC (Both Dell machines).
Bottom line - there is not enough support from key apps out there to make an upgrade to Vista sensible right now, and general performance kills it for most people.
Examples:
- Poor nVidia support
- Nero 6 doesn't work, so you need to buy an upgrade
- Peripheral devide support is poor, but again, you can buy upgrades
- deskop indexing kills the machine
- Aero glass keeps breaking due to app clashes (e.g. Quicktime)
- The overwhelming number of confirmation pop-ups is an extremely irrating feature. One struggles to imagine how Microsoft designers feel this is a good model. Most users won't understand the questions being asked (or the implications) and will simply keeping clicking "allow" until the windows stop popping up.
Both machines now back on XP Pro and working very well.
T.
Funnily enough MS sent me Vista for free for watching some technical videos. While I don't consider Vista an essential upgrade if you have XP, it is a very pleasant environment, stable and I don't think it deserves most of the badmouthing it is getting. That's not to say it's without annoyances - UAC is a piece of crap and was the first thing I disabled and it annoys me no end that MS Paint, Notepad and Calc NEVER get updated. But the desktop is excellent, as is the Aero Glass theme. I haven't had any significant application compatibility issues with UAC disabled, except for Developer Studio 2003 which I had to enable a UI compatibility mode to stop it hanging during a find in files operation. Other apps and games that I use have worked just fine.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
I'm the network manager, I decide if we move to Vista or not. Here's why we will not be migrating any time soon:
1. Roaming Profiles. Microsoft has a nasty habit of releasing a technology, proclaiming it as the "standard" and then changing the fucking thing. This time, Vista uses a different profile structure than Windows 2000 or Windows XP. That means EVERYONE's existing profile will not work on Vista. How stupid is that? Favorites, Desktop settings, Application preferences...and the list goes on and on. Microsoft should have migrated the existing profile in the absence of a "V2" profile, but I guess 5 years is not enough time to work that out.
2. Mandatory activation. We re-image machines constantly - currently we use Windows XP Pro volume license so we don't have an activation problem. Now Microsoft wants me to run a Key Management server and all my machines need to touch my network at least every six months. Bullshit. Why is their piracy problem my problem?
3. No perceived benefit. I've been running Windows Vista on my laptop now for a couple of months, and I can't see a single damn reason to go through the headache. Sure, Microsoft moved a bunch of shit around, but it doesn't seem easier or harder than Windows XP - just different. That is not enough of a reason.
No amount of press releases will fix these designed-in fuckups.
-ted
I'm one of those saps that actually went out and installed Vista on my existing machine, but I ended up removing it after only a week.
The device compatibility wasn't that bad in the end (only my external soundcard failed to work), but the main reason that I went back to XP was the fact that pretty much everything ran so much slower. I've not a terribly old machine, but it is hamstrung with only 1GB installed RAM.
So any application that needed more than a smidgen of memory would grind to a halt as it struggled with the amount that Vista wrenched from me by default.
Back on XP there's nothing that I miss at all, so my copy of Vista is likely to just sit on my shelf (or get ebayed).
...and only one is currently in use. The one I am using right now. This is how enthusiastically we are embracing Vista. Trust me, it's not worth the bother. It is slow, clunky, and cluttered. I've already disabled window transparency because it was too distracting, UAC because it was annoying the hell out of me, and my productivity has actually decreased, not because I'm just getting used to the new stuff, but because I'm having to wait around for the OS to catch up with what I'm doing - and this is on a PC a little over a year old. Now I know XP was a dog when it first came out (I worked on first line support at the time, and our call volume literally doubled), but I never remember it being this bad. If this is the best MS can come up with after six years, then they really have a lot to worry about. I'm not saying they're doomed or anything, but considering the R&D budget they have, and the huge pool of talent they can draw from, saying Vista is a disappointment is like saying it's a little chilly in Siberia.
I'm going to preface the following statements with the fact that I'm an "OS fanboy". I'm not a Linux, *bsd, or Mac fanboy, I'm an OS fanboy. I never used one that I didn't (dis)like. They all suck and they are all great. For record I dual boot Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu "Feisty". I'm in Feisty as I write this. And I'm run Solaris, FreeBSD, Fedora and Debian in VMs.
With that said....
___
I don't get it.
Considering what a vast improvement security-wise, GUI-wise and feature-wise Vista is over it's predecessors, I don't understand why it's so unpopular with people who've not even used it.
Maybe that's the problem - they go by hearsay. I ran Vista betas for about a year before taking the plunge and upgrading in February.
I have no regrets, it beats the heck out of XP. The features they borrowed from OS X added to the desktop are awesome. Search is everywhere and the Vista equivalent of KDE/GNOME's Alt+F2 rocks. Flip 3D is nice, but frankly I rarely use it. And yes, security is indeed better than in previous versions.
What don't I like? UAC is annoying, but you get used to it.
And Hardware/Driver/Software issues? There are some, but my problem was really 64-bit related (So, just like in Linux, I gave up and went back to 32-bit).
Drivers for all my hardware and peripherals (with the exception of the crappy cheap TV turner card I had - which I never liked anyway and ditched for a better one) were available and worked fine. Heck, drivers for both my 2-year-old printers (Brother MFC 7820N, HP DeskJet 6820) came with Vista.
Maybe I'm just lucky...
No, Vista isn't a godsend and there are some minor things that irk me. But the same goes for Linux and it's desktops (GNOME/KDE/XFCE...).
But yes, Vista is a vast improvement over it's predecessors. And it took 5 years to get to consumers because the development team started over from scratch halfway through the development process (a fact that doesn't seem that well known).
OK, it does have stricter hardware requirements but not that much stricter. Go in to any computer retailer and look at the "cheap" computers they have running Vista. Most of them have hardware approximating what most consumers (who bought a box in the past 2-3 years) have already.
I got my computer at the end of 2004 and deliberately went "overboard" and a higher-end box. My roomies computer (bought a year later) is half as good and runs Vista just fine.
So once again, I don't get it.
So why aren't I in Vista as I write this? Because I use whatever OS suits my mood or needs at the time and Linux was and still is the 1st choice for this OS junkie...
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
I completely agree. And just because I am normally pretty indifferent to the whole "OS war" (I'm happy with XP, although I'm happy to use someone else's Mac and I had Ubuntu running on my system at one point just for the hell of it) I figured I'd chime in with my own Vista story.
I've never griped about XP, it seems to run just fine for what I need, it supports the apps (and games) that I like, and with a nice fast system I have rarely run into any trouble, system crashes, etc. And with SP2, even some of the minor issues I was having seemed to go away (I mainly remember my wireless USB adapter working much more happily with SP2's wireless configuration). I saw beta versions of Vista, and had the immediate "hmm looks kinda like OS X" reaction as everyone else -- which wasn't a bad thing, I can be a sucker for things like pretty looking translucent windows; but in any case I figured I'd do the smart thing and wait the requisite year or two before upgrading.
So, when I replaced my computer with a new "Vista-ready" PC a few months ago, with the intent of swapping over my old XP install, it was to my surprise that they had left Vista installed on the machine. At this point, I had a hunch that told me I should ignore it and wipe the disk and install XP anyways, but my curiosity got the best of me. Plus, I thought, "hey, free upgrade!"
I'll spare you the details because everyone has made the same complaints before... but essentially, I had to constantly tweak application settings to get things to run properly, and certain things just took a long time to load, my 1 GB of ram felt like 256 MB, and on and on. A couple of specific things that really just irked me:
1. The default "windows picture viewer" took ages to load! As in, double-click a JPG... wait... wait... about 20 seconds later, it opened. Wonderful.
2. Flash 8 doesn't work with Aero so every time I opened it, Aero would turn off, giving me a black screen for about 5 seconds while the graphics settings refreshed... eventually I turned off Aero altogether because this got so annoying. Awesome.
Last week, I went and gave my PC an actual "upgrade" by wiping it and installing XP. I can't tell you how pleased I am with the decision. Everything runs so much more smoothly, it really is like having a brand new computer. Microsoft can plead all they want, but I'm going to be pleading right back to everyone I know NOT to install Vista, especially when I know they're going to be coming to me for their tech/computer help. I actually feel sorry for Microsoft (ok not really... maybe just the people who spent six years developing this POS).
Try Launchy - Win+space-or-whatever catapult-style app.
Well I hate responding to a troll, but check out the forums at www.insanelymac.com. You can build a Mac-compatible system out of commodity parts for well under $300 (I have $285 into hardware for mine and that was not recycling ANY older parts; Celeron 2.6ghz, 1GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive, and a Geforce 7300LE). Sure you gotta run a hacked copy of the OS, but I'm sure Steve will come to his senses and start selling it for all systems eventually :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Well maybe some people are judging without trying... I am not. We went and bought my wife a brand new laptop three weeks ago. It was a pretty nice desktop replacement spec system: Athlon X2 dual core, 1 GB of RAM, mid-level Nvidia Gforce Go, High def sound and built in Altec Lansing speakers. It used shared video memory, but she wasn't planning on running Unreal Tournament on it so ces la vive. I even sprung for an extra gig of RAM (brought it to 1.5 GB, I didn't think both slots would be populated).
Based on stuff like your comment, I decided to leave Vista on it. It's easy to use! It's pretty! Sure it uses a lot of resources, but it's pretty and it's easy to use! "OK", says I, "we try this pretty, easy to use OS." I was concerned when it seemed to be using like 30% of the RAM resources at idle, but at least the computer had lots of RAM. Then I loaded WOW.
World of Warcraft is 2 years old. It wasn't exactly Quake4 when it was released. I played it quite happily on a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a crappy Intel video chipset. It was unplayable on my wife's new laptop. When I tried max resolution with all the video pretties turned on that I usually use on my Macbook Pro (almost a year old) you could literally watch the frames draw. When I turned the resolution down and turned off most of the video tricks, it was choppy and gave one a headache. I tried everything I could think of. Upgraded the video drivers and sound drivers (Oh, did I mention that sound was stuttering and broken too?) tweaked setting in the game, etc. Nothing yielded more than marginal improvement.
I put XP on that sucker. Now everything runs fine. Should I have chucked the whole OS for one app? Well, she LIKES that app. It's her FAVORITE app. Besides, if a brand new, decently speced computer couldn't handle a two year old mass market game, what could I expect from Photoshop? This was a computer built from the ground up and factory installed with Vista, I feel sorry for some poor sucker trying to upgrade.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
"Vista, in my mind, is basically a GUI change [not upgrade, just change] and explorer.exe re-write."
e w_to_Windows_Vista
I find it amazing how comments like yours get modded insightful. Where's the insight here? Do you know something no-one else does?
As you are clearly out of touch somewhat with Vista, please review the following 'under the hood' changes to the OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
That's just a list of stuff you'd probably never even notice that's been enhanced. If you're going to bash Microsoft senselessly, please back it up at least.
throw new NoSignatureException();
you realise that this means you are using the computer on average less than an hour a day and it chews up half the battery? not 'great' battery life i'm afraid. especially as you 10-15 mins work probably isn't too cpu intensive (i may be wrong there though).
Sorry to go against the stream here, but I like vista. I'm not a microsoft fanboy (I use linux for my server needs), but I recently bought a laptop (high-ish end, $2000) and it works great. No major complaints to speak of, all the compatibility I want is there, and the interface looks pretty good. Is it the greatest thing since sliced bread? No. Is it the worst thing in the world? No. Is it a competent upgrade that needs a few work arounds (running as administrator instead of just double clicking)? Yes. Overall, I like the UAC (that only pops on when I'm doing something new :D) and it's decent and reasonably compatible with past versions. That's all I'm looking for anyway.
No, vista is differently -- but equally -- broke. MS did fix stuff like having stupid directory names (e.g. "Documents and Settings" -> "users"), etc., but compensated by adding UAC and DRM stupidity.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_privil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control
The short version: no, not new to Vista; the idea's been in the *nixes (and before?) for yonks. Windows NT/2k/XP did have different privilege levels but few used them for various reasons, everyone just ran as admin all the time (which was the default). The differences in Vista are, firstly, no-one runs as admin (the "administrator" account you create by default is actually a standard account in every way except that you don't need to enter the admin password every time you elevate); two, applications can request to elevate to admin privileges on a task-by-task basis if they need to (pre-Vista setup programs and the like are heuristically 'detected' and automatically told to request elevation for their entire runtime), and three, there's a ton of backward compatibility stuff to try and mitigate the effects of every program written before 2007 wanting admin rights because they're used to them -- even going so far as to virtualise
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I couldn't even make it through the 4-5 months that you did... Not because I hated it, but because I was trying to get work done.
My company rolled out Vista on several of our technician laptops to get us familiar with the OS. The problem is that those technician laptops are constantly going out on-site to diagnose/repair assorted network issues. And Vista, even the business version, just doesn't work well with Cisco equipment.
There's no telnet utility. Not a big deal, since I install PuTTY anyway... Except that PuTTY didn't seem to like Vista and crashed constantly. Hyperterm is also gone, which again wouldn't be a big deal with PuTTY - but PuTTY kept crashing. I was completely unable to get the P/S/ASDM to work reliably through IE7 (thankfully it worked fine through FireFox). And then there were the constant prompts for elevation - ipconfig, network properties, NetStumbler.
In the end we had to reformat all the technician laptops and re-install Windows XP just so we could get our work done.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
A coworker of mine has a Macbook with Vista installed in Parallels; when the Vista VM is "idle" and showing no CPU activity, OSX shows Parallels using up to 25%! Note that this does not happen with XP, Solaris 10, or Linux VMs.
Perhaps that is why Vista eats notebook batteries so much faster than XP? It's always, secretly busy doing something.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
There was no such thing as Windows 97. Windows "Memphis" referred to itself internally for a while as "Windows 97" in places; by the time of the final betas of Windows 98, all such ambiguity had been removed.
The warez scene continued, of course, to refer to the leaked Memphis/win98 betas as "Windows 97" for some time.
You're doing it wrong.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000818.h tml