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Consumer Group Demands XP for Vista Victims
thefickler writes "Dissatisfaction with Windows Vista seems to be swelling, with the Dutch Consumers' Union (Consumentenbond) asking Microsoft to supply unhappy Vista users with a free copy of Windows XP. Not surprisingly, Microsoft refused. This prompted Consumentenbond to advise consumers to ask for XP, rather than Vista, when buying a new computer."
WinVista lacks a LOT of drivers (for fairly common hardware, too). If you have hardware that WinVista doesn't support, you're unhappy (see years of previous complaints about Linux).
WinVista also has lots of eye-candy which eats up processor time. So it looks pretty, but runs slower. The eye-candy can be turned off, but then it looks a lot like WinXP.
WinVista has a different security model than WinXP and it takes people some effort to learn and in the meantime, they're unhappy with it (again, see years of previous complaints about Linux).
Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps.
Which is why Microsoft extended WinXP for OEM's.
I'm not sure whether you're joking or pretending not to understand as a trolling technique or if you honestly don't get it. It costs Toyota real money to make or buy a car. They lose that money if they give that car to someone. They don't get as much back on selling a second hand car. It costs Microsoft nothing at all to issue an XP license. Whether they can resell the license they get back in return is irrelevant because they're not out of pocket at all. Even if they feel bound to give a full package with DVD and a box, we're still talking about pennies. This is nothing at all like a car.
Go ahead and mod me as a troll. The unhappy Vista users should give a serious look at Ubuntu. I've been using it for over a year on a Dell laptop, and I've installed it (and previously Fedora) for about 10 or 15 friends. With the exception of specific Windows apps (such as Solidworks), Ubuntu apps do everything that Windows XP (the usual old OS) applications do. Email, web browsing, office apps (OOo 2.3 is remarkable), and more. I could go on but I'm (seriously) not a zealot and I'll get a bad enough trolling mod as it is already.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Hate to reply to my own post, but the scanned ad can be found here
As an anecdote; recently, the person with the least technical skill and knowledge I know (and that says quite a lot), told me she bought a new computer with XP on it because she heard Vista "has to many flaws". I'm pretty sure that if even she knows, everyone in the country knows. I'm pretty sure we didn't have this when XP came out.
Fox can take the sky from you.
Your video quality claims are misguided, as that lies in the combination of the codec and the graphics card. ATI graphics cards have had outstanding hardware video overlay filtering for years, and yet Vista throws away overlay support in favour of the inferior Direct3D. Yes with shaders you can acheive a comparable quality, but you try running a fullscreen PS3.0 shader on an X1300 and see how your performance goes. The problem lies in the texture filtering algorithms of Direct3D being optimized for speed, not quality (especially video quality - its a different beast altogether)
Your point about memory use is a highly valid one, I'm sick of people trying to free up memory to make their system run better, the ideal thing is to load it up with as much stuff as you can. One way of achieving this in XP is to set the memory use to "System Cache", I hope vista uses a smarter system.
IMHO Vista is premature, it has none of the features I want (WinFS) and all of the features I don't need (Confirm this action). Bring on Vienna.
I just bought a tablet PC and unfortunately I couldn't get it with XP Tablet Edition, instead it came with Vista Home Premium and after one week I already hate it (Actually I hated it after one day). Its random behavior, its intrusiveness and its theft of resources are just a few of the things that are driving me crazy.
Who says that the AC has a gripe? It's simple economics, as you point out. The AC has a choice of using an OS with which existing H/W works or use a different OS that offers no apparent advantage but that forces expensive H/W replacement. AFAICS it's a no-brainer.
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The biggest issue I have with vista, it's got nothing new for me. DOS -> Win98, yay the computer is more usable, as much as I love dos a GUI is nice Win98 -> 2K, yay I can have different accounts for other users now 2K -> XP, yay some of my older games are happier with this Xp -> Vista ??? Want to sell me something, actually improve on your previous offering.
Windows XP didn't offer anything that Windows 2000 didn't already offer.
I see this get posted on Slashdot a lot, but it's just not true.
Things Windows XP has that 2000 doesn't include system restore, driver rollback, fast user switching, a built-in firewall, an encrypted file system that supported multiple users at once (2k's only worked for a single user at once), smart card support, data excecution prevention, better compatibility with pre-2k applications, remote assistance, a remote desktop server in the professional version, and more. Not all (or even any) of those features might be useful to you, but they are there, and there are people who use them.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Mock surprise! Really, do you live under a rock? People don't complain because they don't know they have easy alternatives that work. They just use what they are given until someone shows them something better. Vista's pains have been documented at length here and you can see them for real if you watch what your Vista using peers have to put up with.
Vista has been out for nearly a year and the consensus opinion is that it sucks in all the usual M$ ways and then some. Lots of the breakage is intentional: M$ wants to own your digital life and is doing it's best to force you onto their media player, their photo managers as well as their crappy productivity software. You don't have to take my word for it because twitter made a nice log of other people's opinions. The M$ PR people really hate it, so you will probably be put on the terrorist no fly list for just looking at it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Nice try :) I'm wrote it because that's the truth. I do not, have not, or ever will, work for Microsoft. I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I don't own a Zune but an iPod. Every single server I host customers' web sites on runs Linux of some description. If it's similar to what Redmond says would happen to users, then I guess they knew what they were talking about, at least for this user.
What is so bad about Vista? I have not used it yet. I've seen it, and I know some people that are using it and they don't complain about it. What's the deal? Is it just that it's new?
The reason isn't simple. Anyone giving you one single reason so many people reject Vista would be silly. Here are few:
- yes it's new, means back compat issues with software hardware
- eats lots of resources and delivers little for it (comparable Linus/OSX interfaces run on lesser GFX chips and deliver faster responce... why this is, no clue, let's hope Vista SP2 fixes it)
- no direction, GUI chaos, feature chaos
The latter is a bigger problem than one can imagine, since it's not one that solves itself with bugfixes and time.
Vista clearly lacks focus and lacks central philosophy behind its GUI. We see that a huge team worked on this OS, but no one gave them a single set of rules to work behind. Everyone just had its own idea how to change the Windows experience and simply went for it without regard to the rest of the OS.
Last time we talked someone said "but typing to find apps is so much faster than menus! I hate the whiners that don't like vista's start menu".
Right. So if typing is so much better, how come they converted the Explorer address bar from *hinted typing* to *menus* in vista (you need to right-click, then deselect, and then you can finally double-click a segment to retype).
Or maybe the Start menu exists in a universe of its own from Explorer.
The Control Panel is entirely unpredictable. It starts like a web page, but half of the features pop-up the old XP control panel applets, with the other tabs disabled (or not disabled.. again, all this is random).
Unhiding hidden files, which is what many people do, causes two "desktop.ini" files on the Desktop (they had the sense not to show those in XP and before!).
So, basically stuff like that. It's not crucial, you can do your work, but it's a *lesser* experience, it's a pain, and goes against you, for no good reason than "I'm new, buy me". And why go for the lesser experience, when you can go for the better experience, which is XP?
So there. Now Microsoft will have to weight both sides: can they admit failure and fix Vista, or keep demanding it's just fine, but we need to get used to it?
I really wish they fix Vista, but they don't give a sign of doing this so far though. SP1 will build on performance and stability features, which is great, but they only fix couple of UI issues.
Maybe SP2 is where they will do it. We'll see.
You do realise that most of the "advances" you tout existed on various other systems for years before Windows.
And I'm not talking about some exotic "spend $$$$$ because you're a massive business with a budget to match" - many were available to the average end user. For instance, in the UK Acorn had 32-bit processors (well, 24 bits in some parts of the CPU and 32 bits in others) in 1987, complete with a printer driver system similar to what's in Windows, a bar showing programs and disk drives along the bottom of the screen. About the only big thing it did not have which you would expect on something today was protected memory support.
Steam (the gaming platform) has a stats page where you can compare your setup to those of other gamers...I was surprised, if not amused, to see that 90% are still running XP. I personally won't touch vista. It's a DRM-infested cesspool.
Harder to pirate? Of course not. It's actually easier to pirate Vista than it is XP SP2. I don't use either as my main OS, but occasionally I do boot into one or the other to check odd things.
Just go download them from the Pirate Bay. Vista (all versions) come on ONE DVD. Run one program (crack) after you get it fully installed and start downloading the updates... genuine!
Now with XP, download either a corporate, home, or professional version. With Corporate, make sure you got a corporate serial and you are all set. With home or pro, make sure you got a home or pro serial. Now with home or pro you need an activation crack and a genuine advantage crack.
I installed XP SP2 on this comp... hmm.. months ago. No problems with updates or WGA ever. I installed Vista basically the day I found it on the Pirate Bay... must have been within a week that Vista first came out (back in January). Haven't had any problems with updates on it either.
DRM is a lost cause. Software lives in a land where ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. So if it's possible to lock down something, it's also possible to remove the lock. So why even try?