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."

Comments

It depends upon the system.

[khasim]

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.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[kryptkpr]

There is overhead involved, even with the off-loading.

Looking at my Ubuntu system, the #1 process for using up cpu is compiz (1h40m of CPU time during 7d uptime), in spite of off-loading the actual rendering to my nVidia card. I don't really notice as I have a Quad-core CPU, but it would hurt quite a bit more with only 1 or even with 2 cores.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[cbhacking]

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). Technically true, but mostly irrelevant. Vista will load 95% of XP drivers without a hitch - the easiest way is if the driver is shipped as an executable installer, since then even if you forget to set Compatibility Mode before running the installer, Vista will ask you if you want to re-run it in compatibility mode should the install fail. If it just comes as a .inf and .sys file, edit the INF to add Vista to the supported list, and right-click -> Install. The only caveats here are that network drivers won't work on account of the re-written network stack and new NDIS, and XP video drivers will work fine but you lose all the advantages of WDDM.

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. If your GPU is decently powerful (i.e. isn't an integrated solution that leeches off the CPU) you'll almost certainly not see this, as the "eye candy" you refer to (much of it, like the thumbnail views of your running programs, is actually very useful) is offloaded to the GPU. The overhead numbers I've heard for using this model are about 5%, and if you look at the CPU time taken by the DWM (Desktop Window Manager) I've never seen it go higher than 5% and it's usually at 0%

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). The people who see more than 2 or 3 UAC prompts per day, top (I'm using an exaggeratedly large number to catch the "yeah, but my program X always needs admin privileges and I run in 3 times a day" responses; most normal users see maybe this many a month) are either incessant tinkerers or admins who need full control. If you're the former, you probably know how to modify access control lists (even easier in Windows than chmod/chown) so things that you need to access and can access safely will run with your permissions. If you're the latter, either deal with a couple (literally, 2) extra seconds on most administrative tasks or run your account as an unrestricted admin (much like logging into a *nix box as root; it's occasionally handy but not something to do regularly). For the average user who shouldn't be using full admin privs all the time anyway (or your slightly-clued-in user who knows this and experienced the pain of doing things in XP as a non-admin), UAC is arguably Vista's best feature.

Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps. Since Vista automatically offers to re-run most programs in Compatibility Mode if they didn't work without it, and since MS provides step-by-step instructions and a helpful wizard for resolving compatibility issues, and since it literally takes 5 clicks of the mouse to set compatibility mode to XP SP2, and since the vast majority of apps will run fine on Vista without any Compatibility Mode at all, this really doesn't seem like a major issue to me.

Re:To all those who "don't understand" the problem

[Yosho]

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.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[suv4x4]

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.