Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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