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PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back To XP
The Telegraph is reporting on efforts by PC manufacturers to give customers buying systems pre-installed with Windows Vista a much-sought way to downgrade to Windows XP. ( A few months back we discussed Microsoft's similar concession for corporate customers.) "It took took five years and $6 billion to develop, but Microsoft's Vista operating system, which was launched early this year, has been shunned by consumers — with computer manufacturers taking the bizarre step of offering downgrades to the old XP version of Windows."
To be fair, that's probably the fault of the OEM you bought from loading tons of crap and free offers on top of the system. A clean install of Vista Ultimate on an Aspire 5100 (1GB RAM) works just fine for me performance wise and I like it. I'm seriously doubting your claim of a 6 minute boot time too. Something is definitely wrong if you weren't exaggerating, and it's not with Vista.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The only difference between Vista now and in the beta stages, besides stability, is the system requirements for a well-running system. I was in no way surprised when businesses balked at the minimum system requirement. I can't tell you how many IT departments I've seen out there that have machines that run XP but only barely. Now, a machine that is a year old can't run the latest OS. Hmmm. If the average company would want to upgrade to Vista, they would have to make some massive capital investment to replace things that haven't completely depreciated in order to have IT just for the sake of IT.
XP is a good operating system. And after SP2 came out, it got even better. My place of employment plans to keep using Windows XP for the next few years. It's not that we don't want to upgrade to Vista. It's that we would have to change the whole computer system for each of our 200 seats in order to run it. If the transition was as painless as the jump from Windows 2000 to XP, I don't doubt that we would be in the middle of implementing it right now.
The game.
So, I am a grad student, TA'ing a class in computational physics.
... Vista Business.
... ssh to a linux machine, so they can do their work. The *same* Linux machine, able to handle a dozen students numerically integrating shit without a problem.
... run ssh badly. Lovely. And then the students submit their writeups as .docx's, and I have to fuss at them and ask for something I can read.
Said class is taught in the only lab in the building with Windows machines; everything else is Linux. The old Athlon XP boxes do just fine; I've got Monte Carlo running on some of them right now.
These computers are state-of-the-art: dual-core Pentiums, 2GB RAM, and
1. Half the time you can't log in because "An error occurred contacting the User Profile Service."
2. Sometimes you can't log in because of some other error I forget.
3. The things take forever to boot.
4. The first thing the students do when they get into Vista is
5. We use some shitty software called Excursion that lets you get X graphics back through a Windows ssh session. Trouble is, it sucks and crashes all the damn time.
So we're using ~$2k of Windows licenses and a bunch of spiffy hardware to
I know that it's a unacceptable solution for "enterprise" / "corporate" users to pick up random Windows patches from "non-trusted" sources, but I wonder if there would be a market for a "legitimate" company to start offering such support after Microsoft abandons XP users?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, they're rich because of an industry established OS momentum in place. I pay for their products so I can support them for other's who paid for them. As for the corporate user, they hate change and don't like the idea of an entire IT overhaul be it going Apple or Linux platform.
I knew Vista was going to be problematic. You know, typical Microsoft OS growing pains. I did *not* know how much of a PITA this Vista Experience was going to be. I gave it a chance above and beyond what feel is to be expected. But I'm sorry, I'm dropping Vista like a bad habit. It'll be better for my health too.
Life is not for the lazy.
I bought a cheap (really cheap actually, NZ$600) Compaq PC the other day. AMD Sempron 3600+ with 512MB RAM, on board graphics, ethernet and sound and an 80GB SATA disc (where the hell they found that I don't know). It also came with a copy of Vista Basic so for a laugh I fired it up to see how it worked.
The long and the short of it is that if I bought this machine to run as a Windows PC it would have gone right back as unfit for purpose. Just getting the thing through its configuration took about 1 hour. Add a couple more hours for downloading and installing updates/patches. Then, restart and it takes 10 mins to get to a usable interface. Start more than one program at once and it slows to a crawl (eg explorer and IE7 at once) and the screen locks up. Simply awful. The shop told me that many people have complained that it was slow and their response was that it was a cheap machine. Well yes, but seriously, XP would function well enough on it. CentOS 5 spins along at a perfectly usable rate. Vista Basic. Nope.
MS has seriously lost the plot with this thing. Sure, stick a lot more RAM in and it will work OK but come on. Why is MS allowing companies to sell these woefully underspecified machines. It has a sticker on it saying it was designed for Vista but it really can't run it well enough for real world use. I know Compaq is to blame too, surely they could have tested these things. Even the lowest spec Mac will run Tiger nicely. Once you bump the RAM up on one of these Compaq things you could have bought a low end Mac mini which would still run better.
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
My take on it was that Gates realized that all the easy money to be made had been made, and there was no point, with his net worth, trying to make yet more money for Microsoft. Besides, at that point, with near complete market dominance, the only place MS had to go was down.
The only options: Maintenance, diversification, or decay. The American stockholder does not suffer maintenance, even if you've reached 100% market saturation, and diversification couldn't have been particularly interesting to a guy who fell in love with the personal computer. I doubt he gives a darn about the X-Box and the Zune beyond pride in his own company. The only thing that Microsoft is doing right now that seems to fit with his personal style is Silverlight.
So he packed it in and decided to do something useful with all that money. He is secure in the fact that he won. He pretty much achieved his stated goal of a world of personal computers, all running Microsoft software, and we all know that 100% is reserved for God. He won even to the point of getting a degree from Harvard, and that's all Bill really cares about as far as Microsoft is concerned.
He won, and he was too smart to hang around to wait until someone could make him lose. I don't think he was distancing himself from a bad company. He just quit when he had achieved what he wanted.
Smart guy.
--
Toro
(Wow. That came out a lot longer than I intended.)
Agreed.
I work as a Tech for one of the big notebook companies in Australia.
When our first & second wave Vista machines came out. There were literally no drivers available for downgrading to XP, Even directly from the chipset manufacturers! The most competent people would manage to get XP running but the sound/modem/lan/wlan chipsets were changed so the machines would be largely unusable.
Many Techs would call up almost in tears as they'd just procured 500 of these units and needed to roll them back to XP. I still don't see any certification or claims made on our new machines that guarantee 100% XP compatibility yet they still bitch and moan despite their own ignorance.
Its funny, for the 1st half of the year, We would get daily complaints and death threats from the geeks/techs wanting Vista drivers for their XP machines. Now for 2nd half of the year its been daily complaints and death threats from geeks/techs wanting XP driver for their Vista machines!!
Let me take your car analogy a little further. Remember awhile back, Ford had 2 main Mustangs - the GT and the LX? You could get both of these with a 5.0L engine. Now, which one would you want to get if you want the faster of the two? That's right - you would get the LX. Why? Because the LX is the stripped-down leaner version. You had all this extra weight on the GT. It bogged down the car. Now why do the same to your OS? You want to pick the OS that does not bog down your machine.
"End of Line." - MCP