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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."
Y'know against support problems, non working applications? No?
Thought not.
Deleted
Just say No.
XP is the end of the line for me and Windows. We've had a long and bumpy relationship, but it's over now. Time to move on.
Money for nothing, pix for free
... it's not like it will actually fix anything, anyway ;-)
I really hate begging. Doubly so when it comes from such a big company.
Now, bribery, I'm ok with... Maybe if they slipped me a couple hundred dollars, I would reconsider their operating system offering.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
I"ve spent the past couple of months trying to switch to Vista and I keep going back to Windows XP. There simply is no compelling reason to use Vista. Not only is it noticeably slower than XP, there are dozens of annoying little things that constantly get in my way.
Windows XP was a major improvement over Windows 95/98 (which is what most people were using when XP was first released) but Vista is a major step backward. Not to mention horrendously bloated and absurdly over-priced.
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Device and application incompatibilities never stopped anyone from upgrading. With Vista, it's not so much that there's a reason to not upgrade, as there isn't a reason TO upgrade.
Annoy a billionaire... Install Ubuntu today!
(Feel free to replace "Ubuntu" with the name of your favourite FreeNIX: Slackware, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, you name it)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You don't want to be the last to get your load on the biscuit.
Am I the only one who finds this sentence profoundly disturbing?
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.
There are two possible groups of people here. Possibly three:
1. Those who already have a PC, are reasonably knowledgeable about it and are quite happy with how it's all running. What's in it for them? Re-learn how to do a bunch of tasks only to wind up with exactly the same as what they've already got but with a few extra bells and whistles.
2. Businesses. What's the benefit? Microsoft likes to peddle things like "increased productivity", mainly because it's impossible to measure and hence impossible to argue with. I would, however, point out that "the IT department having to make sure that everything runs on Vista, scripts don't break and users don't get confused with an interface change" doesn't increase anyone's productivity.
3. Those who either don't have a PC, or do but are unhappy with it (probably because it's dog slow under the weight of all the spyware, but they don't know that). This is the only group which may go with Vista - but they'll go with whatever the PFY in the store tells them to go with. If Apple started offering sufficiently generous kickbacks to retail partners, you can bet that their market share would go up quite a bit.
MS has support for the end user? That's a new one to me.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
thank you very much
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
Unless the thing that they are changing to solves a real problem for them, then they will not change. And having transparent title bars on windows is not a real problem for most people. No amount of begging will convince people that they have a problem when they don't.
Once again, Microsoft proves that its previous versions are its biggest competitor.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
It's good for you.
It would also demonstrate, yet again, that in the world of technology marketing trumps quality every time.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I'm not - I'm just waiting for the next OS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_%22Vienna%22 )
Vista doesn't do anything (for me) that XP doesn't do - it just costs more, requires a more expensive PC and supports less of my hardware (and probably software). Result!
Part of Microsoft's success is the fact that Windows is everywhere, it provides a foundation for everything else to run on the majority of desktops, and if you want to use popular desktop programs, more often than not it's going to be Windows-only, and thus whether you like Windows or not you have to use it. Windows was in your face, all the time, and it can't be discarded (dual-booting is an option but it's actually rather inconvenient, especially if you want to run two things that require two different OSs at the same time).
Cheap, efficient virtualisation totally throws most of the downsides of multiple OS booting out the window (no pun intended). Suddenly you could run Linux or OS X as your desktop and totally ignore Windows until you need to run a Windows program. Windows thus goes from the Master Control Program of your computer to just some shared library that a program loads in order to run. This represents a loss of control over the user, and the one thing Microsoft fears the most is the loss of power, regardless of how small the loss is.
Microsoft loves your money, but it loves your obedience even more. Being able to discard Windows from your sight when you don't require it means you're not being a good little Windows user. Therefore, you deserve to be punished, hence the licensing restrictions.
Didn't think so either.
We just loathe DRM, we don't want a system that's by 20% slower than its predecessor and we know that any MS OS so far has not been worthy the label "release version" before it had a "SP2" attached to its name. That's pretty much all that keeps us from using it. Aside of the "why the heck should I?" question, based on the fact that Vista offers nothing XP didn't already (and that actually offers some kind of additional value to the user). Or, in case you don't care about WiFi, 2k is already all you need.
What it comes down to is that Vista has no redeeming feature, aside of the forcefully opened incompatibilities with the previous versions. And so far, those incompatibilities don't really strike. For example, DX10 isn't really out the door yet, so there are no DX10 only games on the market.
It's not that we don't want the shiny, we just don't want the ugly. And so far, I see nothing in Vista that really offers any value for me. I don't care about the flashy interface, it's probably the first thing turned off to reclaim at least part of the performance hit. I don't care about the pointless "allow or deny pseudo security", actually I see more harm than good in it. I sure as hell care about DRM and I don't want it. Yes, yes, DRM doesn't keep me from using my old content and "enables" me to use all that DRM crippled junk, but the way I see it, if there is nobody able to see DRM crippled content, DRM crippled content is an Edsel. If people can't use it, people won't buy it, and studios will be forced to pull the plug or suffer even worse than they already do due to DRM. Either's fine with me.
So far, MS failed to show me any compelling reason to use Vista over XP or 2k. So, why shell out my dough for a new system if it doesn't give me anything I want that I don't already have with the old one?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
In any normal market the product price would be lowered to increase demand.
I've some evidence.
Evidence 1: Their fact-rich sheet for "partners and customers" is in fact locked to only computer making companies who sign an NDA O_o. Yes, their "confident list" of reasons to use Vista is actually a secret. That makes me wanna switch to Vista for sure!
Evidence 2: How Microsoft explained that they changed their mind back on virtualization of Basic/Home? "The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks". Oh... My... God... They aren't even TRYING. What kind of damn security risk are we talking about? That people will buy cheap Windows Basic and run it on Parallels on Mac, isn't that the one. Pathetic.
Vista is no more of a "technology" release, as putting a spoiler and spinners on a honda is a "innovative" improvement in style.
If they were really minded towards science and altruistic academic improvements, their OS would consume less resources [and power] yet still get the same amount done as before. It would be more standards compliant to make development cheaper and more reliable, it would embrace all vendors of software, even the OSS side, etc.
Vista, in my mind, is basically a GUI change [not upgrade, just change] and explorer.exe re-write.
Put this in your noodle and ponder. Windows is the least standards compliant OS in the world [that is in current production], and YET they can't even keep their own software working with it. That is, they hold all of the cards and still can't make a play. That speaks volumes as to the quality of the shite software they put out.
When something like OpenOffice breaks in Fedora, you could say, well it's not Fedora's fault, they're aiming at UNIX/Linux standards by using industry standard libraries [X11, motif, glibc, etc, etc, etc], and the software just didn't work. But when people write for the proprietary Windows libraries and then Vista goes and breaks it all, that's just amazingly shotty engineering.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First, why upgrade my computer's OS when MS's own evaluation app warns me that my installed apps won't run or will need upgrades (my hardware level is just fine)? Secondly, I've been walking my parents through the process of learning Vista (lots of: where's this, how do we do that, why won't the printer work, etc), after they got a laptop with it, and I don't see the need? Sure it looks pretty, but I need to work, not sit back back and think about how pretty the desktop is.
Why, only about a month ago, we were being told that Vista licenses were selling like hotcakes, with an astounding 40 million being sold in the first 100 days -- the fastest launch in history!
Vista has a few things I could live without (like UAC and mandatory driver signing, both of which I have disabled), but it also has some features that I really miss if I have to use someone's XP box.
And for the programmer in me:
To prevent you from printing the movie frame by frame and scanning the frames in another PC.
Sorry for replying to myself. But reading that again I heard my old boss yell in the back of my head "if you can't offer a solution, don't mention the problem". Ok. Let's see what could've been something that could have convinced people that Vista is the better thing.
Many people have MP3 players. A library with an API MP3 player manufacturers can hook into for easy transfer would have offered a lot of value. Interoperability is the current big thing in the home computer market, people enjoy plugging everything and their toaster into the computer, so how about catering to that crowd? A co-op with Nokia or Sony-Ericson would've also gone a long way, with libraries to easily transfer data from mobile phones to computers and back. More and more people have USB drives and sticks, so an easy way to (automatically) sync between stick/external drive and harddrive would've been nice. Or how about a standardized library for photo and movie editing tool makers that allows them to easily suck data from a digital camera, similar to what twain used to be for scanners?
Even if all that and more can be fairly easily already accomplished, it often takes an additional step between raw data and processed, and many people would be happy to eliminate that. Comfort and easy of use has always been a selling point for MS, and with Vista they are definitly moving away from that. And it shows in the sales.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
My brother, who's a "travelling tech support" guy, has had the "opportunity" to help a number of people with brand new (not upgraded) Vista installations, and his recommendation is to steer well clear of Vista. I'm just waiting for the flood of cheap graphics cards that are not Vista-compatible but got produced anyway.
-Lars
You've been waiting several months too long.
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
I have a computer that is almost 4 years old; what are the specs?
Desktop computers haven't gotten all that much faster (excluding some insane gaming rigs out there). Why should people go out and buy a new machine when their 3-4 year old computer is comparable to most new computers? The same is true of printers/scanners/etc.
If it isn't broken, and works well, why replace it? If your "upgraded" OS won't work with it, then it's not much of an upgrade is it.
First, I called the vendor and started crawling up their butt about how they must have sold me a bogus copy. They tried the "it's outside of our return period policy" line, but I just came back with "Do you really want me telling Microsoft where I got my bogus Vista?"
So they gave me the number to Microsoft's WGA team. Called that number, gave them my story, and they told me I had to "Validate" now. I already activated, now they want me to Validate. So fine, I jumped through their hoop, got the goddamned thing "Validated."
And as if I wasn't already pissed enough, the helpful MS drone told me that if my hard drive died, I'd have to buy a new copy of Vista in order to reinstall on the new disk. My old activation code would not work now. (She acted like this was normal and acceptable to lose a software license due to a hardware failure.) I felt like I must have popped a blood vessel as I "forcefully" told her how I would never buy Vista again, regretted buying this one, and would make it my mission to convert people over to Linux, probably Ubuntu.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Now that Parallels and VMware on the Mac have their coherence mode, I don't need to even *see* windows on my mac desktop; I can just run that one-off program that I need to without having to resort to dealing with windows.
And, because I'm not looking at windows while I'm using the programs, XP works perfectly well; why install Vista when it has such outrageous requirements and I'm just going to hide it anyway.
If Microsoft wants to win over those waiting for compatibility issues to get resolved, and/or the release of SP1 for it why not just bit the profit bullet and man up on the problem?
A) Send developers out to work on site with hardware manufacturers who are having known device and/or software compatibility issues. (nVidia, I'm looking at you...)
B) Redirect internal resources to get SP1 ready by, say, August.
C) Find a way to build an XP style shell on top of the Vista style base. So you get the technology advantages of Vista (like improved app security), but you still look and feel like you're in XP.
Now, to get to why some people are really not upgrading it's cost. So let's address that.
A) Scrap the idea of "same program, with licensing enabling more features if you pay more" nonsense. At the MOST have a home and business edition.
B) Get price competitive. No, I do not mean give it away for free like Linux, but be comparable to what people are paying for OS X. Right now they're still on the Sony mind train of "early adopters will pay anything" and they need to get off it.
C) Take a page from how our government wants to handle illegal aliens. Offer a one-time cheap "Amnesty program" for people with illicit/older versions. "Have a pirated copy of XP, upgrade to Vista and get a permanent license for only $30. Have a legitimate copy? Upgrade for $20. But this ONLY lasts until XX/XX/XXXX..."
Some of step B I have seen already. At the local Fry's you can pick up the "System Builders" edition of vista for under $200, and it's the "ultimate" which I thought was costing upwards of $400. This, I think, was in response to the hobbyists who screamed bloody murder and were one of the most prone to switch to Linux groups.
The problem here is that MS has something along the lines of a DECADE of R&D costs to recoup with Vista. These ideas would cost them money. But at some point they need to ask themselves if they're in this to win it, or in this to milk it as long as they can.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I think an embarrassing double backflip involves either ripping leotards or landing awkwardly on something pointy. I'm hoping Microsoft has done the latter (mainly because Steve Ballmer in leotards would look something like a mouldy grapefruit in a sock, and that's as far as I want to take the imagery for fear of going to moderation hell).
Blank until
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
Two data points. My wife and my son.
I had not discussed Vista with either of them. Short story: Both of them bought new PCs this year, both of them after Vista's release. My wife wanted a Dell but ended up picking up an HP at Staples because Dell told her she couldn't get a Dell PC with anything but Vista. My son wanted a Dell and, as it happened, it turned out he _was_ able to get a Dell preloaded with XP, and that's what he got.
Both my wife and my son are what you might call computer-literate, but neither of them has any love for computers. They browse the Web, they do a little word processing, a little spreadsheet, they download and print pictures from their digital cameras, and don't buy new computers until they're forced to.
In my wife's case, she'd been using Win98 SE on a 2000-vintage Gateway. (She picked Gateway because she liked their cow-themed boxes and because in 2000 they had retail "stores" that catered to non-techies). What forced her to buy a new PC was the lack of updates for her Win98SE version of Norton Antivirus, and for IE--and the increasing number of websites she visits that cause her version of IE to hang or crash.
Her approach to me came about a day or two after Vista release and what she said was, "You know, I think I'd better buy a new computer now before I'm stuck with one that has Vista." What put her off of Vista was the impression she'd gotten from the mainstream news that it was a) brand new, and b) rough around the edges. Incidentally, she wanted a Dell, but ended up buying an HP because at the time she called Dell they claimed, truthfully or untruthfully, that they would not sell her the low-end machine she wanted preloaded with Vista. (The reason I even suggest untruthfulness was that the person she talked to said that Dell would not sell any PCs preloaded with XP to anyone nohow no way, that they had switched 100% to Vista, and claimed that every other computer maker had, too). So we drove to the nearest Staples and she bought a sweet little compact HP, new in its box, that had XP SP2 preloaded.
A couple of weeks ago, my son called asking whether I had any idea why performing a virus scan on his machine would make the screen go to black and make the machine reboot. Long story short: Bad fan on the power supply. After reviewing options, he decided that the option he liked was to buy a new machine.
Again, I had not discussed Vista with him. Again, _he_ called _me_ and asked whether I thought he should get Vista. He said he was leaning against it, "because Moose" (a friend of his) "says I'd be crazy to get Vista at this stage," but he was on the Dell website and couldn't find a home machine without one. He asked if I thought it would be all that crazy to get Vista. I gave him the most honest answer I could, which was that if you just want a plain-Jane reliable box, well, XP is mellow and mature and not too bad, while Vista is new and does have significant teething pains. I added that if he was going to go with Vista he should get Home Premium, not Home, because it would be silly to have the headaches and not at least get all the fancy new usability and UI good stuff, and that he should have at least double the minimum "recommended" RAM and disk space and should ask hard questions about the video card.
He called me back an hour later to say that he'd found that if he ordered the machine as a "home" system, he could only get Vista, but he'd found that the exact same CPU... which incidentally happened to be one Consumer Reports liked... was also sold under "small business," and ordered that way XP was an option. And the machine ordered as a "small business" system with XP actually cost a little less than the same machine ordered as a "home" system with Vista Home Basic.
He went with XP.
So, yeah, I'd say Microsoft has a problem. But I think it's a problem with Vista, not a problem with perception, and they'd be better off improving Vista than conducting ad campaigns. No ad campaign is as powerful as word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth on Vista is bad.
And, just maybe, when Microsoft thinks about "customers," they should be thinking of my wife and my son and attending to their needs... not the needs of PC manufacturers and the RIAA.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues"
Yeah, and some of us have tried Vista and have first-hand experience with those "rumored" device and application compatibility issues.
I doubt any marketing campaign, no matter how "fact rich," can change users personal experiences.
Vista! Applied directly to the
My blog
...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've been on Vista for 3 months now. When I bought my new Thinkpad I made the leap, thinking that it would be better to be slightly ahead of the curve than to have to upgrade my OS at a later point. Big mistake. Don't do it. Below is a quick summary of the hassles I have endured since day one, and continue to endure. Anyone else see this shit?
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
My Grandpa recently got a shiny new Dell with a shiny new operating system, a shiny new graphics card, and a shiny new 20" wide-screen LCD. You know what? He loves it. He thinks "the new computer" (read windows) looks fantastic. After looking at it myself, I have to admit, it looks pretty good. It'll be the second biggest thing going for it in the home computer market (after OEM lock-in), and its no small victory.
But yeah, in the geek/corporate market, it'll flop.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
M$ should hire the Video Professor to handle their ad campaign.... "So please, try our product!"
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
I am not buying Vista primarily because Nvidia has yest to release actual working drivers with the same performance characteristics as the XP drivers. I play games I need performance, pretty simple. Not Microsoft's fault directly, but still not going that route until I can get the same or better performance.
The other reason I am not buying is the utterly insane price. My OS shouldn't be the second most expensive componenet of the entire system.
The only thing in the system I paid more thana the price of a copy of Vista for is the SLI Video Card setup.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
> The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1
;-)
Who said anything about waiting until SP1?
Slow: "Please wait. And I emphasize the 'Wait'"
Intrusive: "Vista has found a number of movies and MP3 recordings that you may not be licensed for. Please wait while Vista authorizes licenses for these."
Obnoxious: "You've positioned your coffee on the left side of your keyboard this morning instead of the right side. Please wait while Vista reauthorizes your license. Sorry we've screwed up a script on our website so we'll assume the worst and now run your PC in degraded mode."
Dilbertesque: "To help developers test their software under Vista, we won't let you test your software on a virtual machine. Go out and buy a new PC and test your software on there. This will make you more productive, or so the crack-smoking marketing executive who came up with the idea thought."
Tedious: "UAC: An Application is about to do something. Are you sure?"
A Bridge too far: "Congratulations for installing DirectX 10: Only available on Vista! As the 10th person to use DirectX 10 you qualify for a special prize. This will be a DirectX 10 game of your choice, when someone finally decides to write one. (We're hoping a Mac programmer will do it. They like to target obscure niche markets.)"
I put Vista on my box at home and 24 hours later my video card was completely hosed. Thinking coincidence, I ordered a replacement and Vista hosed that one too. This was an alleged Vista-compatible card (BFG 7800 GS OC). I got a THIRD card and put XP back on my machine, and it has been running like a top for three months.
Yeah, incompatible software isn't exactly my first complaint (SEE: DRIVERS), but that said I hear plenty of guys in the office grumbling every day because the company ordered their new laptops with Vista and their audio recording software won't work, or their phone data sync software, or whatever.
You are so right! I recently bought a Compaq laptop that had Vista Home Premium on it. I found Aero to be a massive resource hog, even with the latest system and video drivers. Even listening to WinAmp with no visualization turned on would result in 25% CPU utilization! So, I shut off Aero after which the CPU utilization when listening to WinAmp dropped to about 5-10%. All right. Great. One hurdle overcome.
The big kicker for me was that I was completely unable to use Ulead's Media Studio Pro, which is my video editing software. The laptop has a Firewire port, so that made it a big plus for me to be able to do some editing on the laptop when I'm not at home. Thanks to the new way that Vista talks to the hardware, MSP was useless for all but basic editing. The Preview window didn't work and the audio didn't work, which made it impossible to be able to sync up audio and splice video segments together. Changing the compatibility mode in Vista made no difference.
On top of that, I needed to download a Vista-compatible DVD of Stuido 10 Titanium from Pinnacle's site. It was a free download and it worked fine as far as I could tell, but I'm glad that I have FTTH/FIOS because it was a 1.4 GB download!
There are also a number of other issues with Vista that cumulatively made me decide that enough was enough, like the initial issue that I had where my account would work fine but my wife's account, which I set up as an administrator-level account, couldn't log on stating that she didn't have the rights to log on. (!!!) I bought a 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg, threw it into the laptop, and installed XP. All of my hardware and software are working just fine. And now Microsoft is trying to push me to go back to Vista? They can kiss my ass. It's not happening.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Here's a free clue for you, Microsoft: I'm planning to phase out the last of the Windows 98 SE systems at work later this year. Hopefully. Then all the Windows workstations will be XP.
As far as Vista, there is at this point absolutely zero reason for us to want to deploy it, as far as I'm concerned. The reason I deploy any version of Windows is because people are already familiar with it. Otherwise there are other systems I would prefer to support, because they're easier to maintain -- but they are unfamiliar to people. I deploy Windows XP in many cases because it cuts down on user training and support, because people are already comfortable with it. If I were willing to give that up, I wouldn't be buying Microsoft. So Vista needs to be out for at _least_ two years, preferably three, before I want anything to do with deploying it.
Then there's the situation on the home front. My family is still using Windows 98 SE, and I have talked to them about upgrading, and they want no part of it. As far as my mom is concerned, anything that changes the computer's OS in any way is distilled evil. She was not, at the time, very happy with the move from DOS 6 to Windows 98 SE, even though she only ever learned three or four things to type at the command prompt (none of which she now remembers I'm sure). It has taken her years to learn how to use Windows 98. She doesn't like when dad changes the wallpaper, because she gets confused about where the icons are that haven't even moved. I'm afraid the OS on that computer is almost certainly going to stay the same until the computer physically gets replaced. (Which will probably not be very many more years, but we'll put it off as long as we reasonably can.)
The long and short of it is, we wouldn't upgrade to Vista right now even if Microsoft paid us $100 per computer to do so. Naturally, they'd prefer to charge us for the upgrade. They can go to Redmond. We don't want it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Vista. There are some significant improvements there, not least UAC. I'll be happy to replace XP with Vista, when it's practical to do so, i.e., when the users are as comfortable with Vista as they are with XP. But that's going to be a while, so chill out, Microsoft. Learn some patience. We've certainly been patient enough with you, listening to your Longhorn announcements for five years or so now, waiting for it to actually materialize. Time for you to return the favor.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"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();
I'm running Vista at work to test how well it works as well as a copy home.
At home, I have a 3.5 year old machine. It was beefy at the time: 3.2 Gig Pentium, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig hd, etc. I have replaced the video card, since those tend to go out of style from time to time. XP on that machine was fast. As fast as I'd ever need for daily use. I was starting to need to crank down resolution in games to get acceptable framerate, but that's standard fare in the gaming world for computers getting long in the tooth. I installed Vista. Wow, is this machine a pig. It takes LONGER to boot (clean wipe install), takes forever to do file copies/moves, really creeps and crawls with anti-virus enabled, and popups galore with UAC enabled. It looks clunky, it feels clunky, and it runs clunkily. One would think that a 3.5 year installed XP would be slower than a fresh Vista install: not so.
At work, I have a dual core 2.4 ghz with 120 gig hd and two gigs of RAM. Under XP, it booted in like 10 seconds, but using it for work didn't feel much faster than my home machine. It has, of course, a crap-ass graphics card, but I don't play games at work. I install Vista (clean wipe) and have the same issues as above. It takes almost 3x longer to boot, file copies around the network are painful, even moving files around on the local machine takes forever. Symantec does have a version of their corporate av product, but it will spin the cpu at 100% for 24 hours during a simple av update (not Vistas fault, per se). I've had to run un-manged in order for that not to happen. Scheduled scans make the computer unusable where under XP I could hardly notice anything happening.
I recently recieved a questionaire from Microsoft asking when I plan on deploying Vista to the rest of our environment; my response, "I'm not planning on deploying this software this year or next year." This announcement certainly sounds like Microsoft must have gotten a lot more professionals stating the same thing.
We are buying Vista, though. We don't have another option with our computer supplier. Fortunately, we have Software Assurance on our copies of Vista. This allows one to run OLDER versions of software for which you have a license of a newer product. A license on Vista, we're told, allows you to run XP if you choose. So Microsoft thinks we're running 20+ Vista computers, but really we only have one.
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).
The issue of the start menu has come up previously. The last time it did I remember reading a blog of the MS guy who was working on it (can someone supply the reference).
I found it, and the related posts to the menu by Joel.
That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.
Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].
By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.
approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.
Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.
Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:
In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.
Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:
I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:
Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.
teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".
Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:
Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not
"GE is full of really smart people, and if the ever get organised then they will be a force to contend with"
People used to tease us at Apple about this, back when I worked there in the nineties.
See what happened when they got organized?
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.
As opposed to Ballmer's song:
How many chairs must an angry ape throw
before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n how many sales must his vista sell
out of their glorious marketing hand?
Yes, 'n how many times must their CTO fly
before XP is forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' more hot wind,
the answer is blowin' more hot wind.
Back before computers, we called that toilet paper. But it wasn't transparent glass toilet paper, and it came off the roll faster.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I think the real point is if it has something that I need. I realize that Microsoft needs it but I don't really care what they need.
If they made an updated version of XP that didn't add restrictions and was refined to be more efficient I would be interested in buying it. I'm not interested in anything that is new in Vista. Slow animated transitions? (I took them out of XP too...) More complex visual displays? A completely redesigned layout that isn't more efficient or intuitive?
Now why would you expect me to want to buy this again?
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's not far off from Google's own spectacularly successful unprocess. Not to mention the cat-herding controlled chaos of FOSS development.
Didn't we just spend the past ten years criticizing Microsoft for quashing innovation and discouraging creativity? I'm just sayin'...
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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.
Doesn't Run Movies
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Well, of course. I don't need to browse someone's livejournal to discover that the city isn't moving over to Vista -- a good proportion of them still haven't moved over to XP. What you're routinely conductioning six-figure transactions, you don't rely on *any* software that's barely 6 months out of RTM, DRM or no DRM.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Not all of the code was written from scratch. To prove this in a obvious way on any Vista machine do the following.
In the control panel clasic view open Fonts. Hit the alt key to show the menus. Select File => Install New Font...
Notice the style of the dialog box. This is the old 3.11 dialog box style. Notice the drive selection method. Hey, it still works.
Compare this to the dialog box used to select a file in notepad.
On the other hand, I noticed a while back that a Windows XP Pro workstation license that has not been used for a year or two could be reinstalled on a new machine without a hitch.
Well, the network is evil to MS interests.
They couldn't replace it with MSN.
All unpatched MS systems directly connected to the Web get infected in minutes.
Web apps are making some desktop apps obsolete.
They are afraid... very afraid.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Since when is making up bad info about Windows and Microsoft *not* worth +5 Insightful on Slashdot?
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
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.
"...a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. "
Boy, I hope it is as accurate as there "Get the Facts" web page that talks about how it's cheaper to buy Microsoft products than it is to use free software. You know the "Total Cost of Ownership" thingy that only looks good on paper if you assume you already own all of the Microsoft software.
Yeah, upgrade to Vista people. It's slower. It's showing itself to be buggy. Your drivers may not work and it breaks most of your software but hey, it's new.
The sad part is that they are going to shove it down people's throats.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I've wasted several weekends and evenings now purging both Vista off of peoples brand new computers and moving them back to XP or wasting hours trying to turn off every single UI effect in order to eep out a 1% performance increase to make the computer usable trying to put off the reinstall until I have the time to deal with it.
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
Grumble grumble grumble
The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
I wonder if they offer special downgrade pricing?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000818.h tml