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Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience
Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"
Can't figure out operating system that's been slightly changed.
More news at eleven.
(If I was using DOS at age 10...)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
You know what. Often customers are wrong. That she made a purchase that she regreted is her fault. Ever thought about going to a computer store and USING Vista first? I happen to think Vista kicks ass. I also think XP always was junk, and offered nothing over 2000 but an extended period of support. So I went to KDE on a few flavors of Linux. New laptop, HP was doing deep vista discounts, turned out I really like it. Sometimes I'm lucky too I guess.
The mother didn't even try to find out what gadgets were, or that flavors of them have existed since Borland C for Windows 3.1 came with a dashboard. In a perfect world, she would have downloaded Visual Studio Express VB or C++ and got a few books that she could help her daughter through. And believe me any idiot with a little imagination can slap together a rough VB app in a few minutes to an hour.
Computers demand alot of us now. It's not particularly good, or fair. But there's really no escaping it. Anything with a hundred million lines of code is going to have some corner cases, across a platform of hundreds of millions if not billions of varying machines it's impossible for their not to be more. It's not like everyone isn't aware of this. That the mother failed to adaquately prepare given the obvious, that's her failing.
Yea, because only a monopoly can afford to ignore some random schmo's uninformed opinion.
Seriously. We all agree that Vista has issues; some of them are the problems you'd expect of a windows pre-SP1 release...Bad drivers, no drivers, bugs, etc. The rest of them are either here to stay, or able to be disabled. That's the same crap we always have to eat from a Windows release.
But the fact that some non-savvy mom and her gadget-loving 13 year old daughter don't like it is supposed to mean something? When was the last time you asked someone like that for OS advice? This same chick will be doing the same whining in 10 years because she doesn't want to switch off Vista for XPII, or whatever the next release is, because she can't handle the "new" windows.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That argument is old and tired. Give it a rest. My job is to manage an extremely large Linux server environment. I have a Linux desktop as a jumping off point to the rest of the systems. It sits at a command prompt because I have an XP box that does everything the Linux desktop does, only better. And faster. And more reliable.
Don't want your kids filling up your hard drive with crap and slowing down the machine? Don't make them administrators. Don't blame the OS for your inability to manage it.
Please. People said the same thing about Windows 2000, and people said the same thing about Windows XP
Please, what a ridiculous comparison. 2k had vast usability improvements over NT 4. And XP at least had instant user switching. And check out the system requirements. Basically, requirements doubled between NT 4.0 and 2000, and again to XP. Vista, however, requires a processor three times faster than one that will run XP, needs eight times as much memory, and fifteen frikkin gigabytes of free space!
Personally, I think Vista's pretty damned good.
Why? Because it's "prettier" than XP? Because you have way to much free space? Because that new Dual Core 2 processor is just way to fast and you need something to slow it down? Or is that much of the operating system is not designed with the end user in mind, but selling out to the content industry?
I was going to type up a list of things I like about Vista compared to XP, but, you know what? Your post was so inflammatory and insulting that I'm just going to give one reason to prefer Vista over any other OS out there: Specifically to spite assholes like you.
Then don't make dipshit comparisons, Sparky. If you get tired of your POS OS you can always consider upgrading to Windows 2000.