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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."
This seems to be the theme on slashdot so much that you would think it was true, except that out in the real world, I've seen and heard very little about Vista one way or the other. All in all, it seems to be a fairly ho-hum release that people don't care too much about.
But on slashdot, where the editors wage a continual jihad against Microsoft, you'd think people are burning Vista discs in a bonfire. For a supposedly Linux-centric site, they sure focus on Microsoft bad news more than anything else. This MS fud needs to stop. BSOD jokes need to end at some point.
Vista is a pretty good operating system. The worst things about it are that: 1) it's new. And that's it. (You have my permission to ignore anybody who talks about "the horrible DRM in Vista" as a raving loon.) Vista is nicer operating system than XP in lots of ways. Yes, it's new and breaks things, but that is the price of change for any OS. (Don't whine to me about how Linux never breaks, you haven't been using it as long as I have.)
However, I hope that the uproar against Vista will teach Microsoft something. "Same old" isn't good enough any more. There are too many alternatives now. People are not going to satisfied with minor improvements any more.
I personally wish that Vista had never happened. An OS is just something for controlling your hardware and running more than one program at the same time. Another service pack for XP would have been preferable to Vista. Vista is better than XP, but not nearly enough better.
The worst thing about Vista isn't a problem with Vista -- it's a problem with Microsoft: there are 6 editions. If Microsoft had released a single edition there would be a lot less to gripe about.
I use Vista and have since its release. The only thing that I really hate about it is how slow it is at moving/copying/replacing files. Whether you're moving files from a flash drive to your hard disk, or from your hard disk to a folder on the LAN, or from one external drive to another, it's dog slow. I routinely have to upload about 40MB of files to a network folder several times throughout the day. This takes approximately 30 minutes from either of my two Vista machines, and approximately 2 minutes from my XP laptop. So no surprise, whenever I have to move files around, I fire up XP.
This is apparently a very well-known problem that everyone using Vista experiences, Microsoft knows about it, and yet it's something Microsoft has been unwilling or unable to fix in the last year that Vista has been on sale. That's just disgusting and inexcusable to me.
There's speculation that the reason file operations are so slow is because Vista has to check each file for DRM before it will copy it to a different drive or network location. I don't know if that's the true reason, but if it is, this should be reason enough for anyone to steer clear of Vista.
People who already bought a disfunctional Vista should install Mandriva Linux, but if they are really locked into Windows already, then the Pirate Bay is a good solution for a copy of ExPee.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's not drivers, it's basic software.
* "COM Surrogate has stopped working". WTF is that, why should I be informed (once every 10 secs) about this crash, which doesn't seem like it impacts anything.
* "Internet Explorer doesn't respond". Hell no it doesn't, I fucking shut it down, it should not be responding, and no, a program you shoved up our OS to further your monopoly abuse should not be that buggy.
Don't call my platform buggy, friends with a brand new Dell have the same issue.
very much like they are coming straight from Redmond's
PR people. They sound way too much like the official
press releases and media events. They have to because of jerks like you. Anybody who wants to say something against that goes popular (and often ill-informed) opinion has to walk on eggshells or face negative moderations and a slew of heated "you must be on their payroll" rebuttals. If you don't like people sounding PR'ish when they post, then don't use moderations to enforce your opinions and don't hit 'reply' to accuse people of having Feringi-esque motives.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Talk about the Vista failure and out causes come the fanboys.
Wow, presented with a tremendous list of complaints from government officials, industry executives, wintel rag editors, and ordinary people, you conclude that no one is complaining. Denial.
How about a little recent, personal experience? I've actually met two people unfortunate enough to have bought a laptop with Vista. My comment about owning your digital word comes from watching one of them try to load up her camera software. Vista did not let it work, but the built in photo manager worked. So much for user choice and the myth that hardware with the little flag "just works". The other user has a tablet PC and the touch screen is worthless. Despite M$'s hype about multitouch surfaces, the table fails because it reads your palm as input while you try to use a stylus. Brilliant interface! Now I understand why M$ tables are also a failure. I have not watched long enough to see just how buggy it is but both are much slower than you would expect from beautiful new hardware. Neither of these people complained because all they want is text editing, light math, email and web browsing. The industry has let them down by saddling them with Vista.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
COME THE FACK ON! WTF? This is so fricken out of hand.
The worst thing about Vista (other than DRM) is compatibility issues. That is its number one problem and guess what? Right now there are very few "mainstream" programs left which aren't fully compatible with Vista.
I've been using Vista off and on since it came out. In march it reached a point were with my skill set as a computer repair tech I could handle the issues that cropped up day to day. It is now October and I haven't had to "fix" anything in over 2 months. All the software I use including Firefox, Nero, Alcohol 52%, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro, Adobe Flash CS3, uTorrent, Winamp 5, Zoom Player Pro, mIrc, Winrar, Trillian Astra and Trillian 3 Pro, FileZilla, Last.fm, Quick Time, Steam (and all associated games that do not require dosbox emulation), Avast! AV for Home, and VMWare Workstation are working perfectly. All the hardware in my machine is fully enabled via manufactures drivers EXCEPT my Razer Barracuda sound card (which is odd because Razer is pretty much the only company with a sound card product who isn't capable of fully supporting Vista... if only I didn't hate creative so much). The only program which is still not fully functioning for me is dosbox (works under 32bit but not 64bit).
Let's address the other common complaints one at a time:
1: The price.
This is certainly a very legitimate concern for those who are upgrading their computers or building a new one. If you purchased Vista through an OEM then you paid about 15 dollars for Vista (how do YOU think dell offers a $300 dollar computer when XP/Vista OEM alone is $150 bux). For those who don't wish to spend so much on Vista for your new computer/upgrade you have many options. If you're upgrading: don't. At this time very few people NEED to upgrade (I needed to in order to learn Vista and get to know its quirks so I wouldn't look like a monkey doing a math problem when I need to fix a Vista computer), and upgrading your OS without upgrading your hardware is almost always a bad idea. For those building a new computer, its not hard to get a down and dirty cheap OEM copy of Vista on ebay, or you can purchase from any of a number of outlets that wont question whether or not you are a licensed OEM if the OEM copy is bought along side a mother board (newegg for example). Besides, if you know enough about computers to build one then you shouldnt need vistas spiffy new security model or easier interface anyway (and honestly no one NEEDS 64bit support). There are more, but I think you get the idea.
2: There is no significant difference between Vista and XP.
If 1 is the difference between Windows 2k (no SP) and Windows 2k (still no SP) and 10 is the difference between Windows 2k (no SP) and Windows XP (no SP). On a scale of 1 to 10 Vista is around a 15 compaired to Windows XP (no SP). For starters not much ever changes from one operating system to another. The difference between Windows 95 and Windows 98 was that windows 98 had better driver support, increased stability, and support for larger file systems (which was added to 95 in the osr2 version). The difference between Windows 98 and Windows ME was improved interface design and organization, removal of the legacy DOS environment as a base for Windows, and a massive increase in bugs. The difference between Windows ME and Windows 2k (which is rather trivial any way since they were released along side each other) is the more stable NT kernel, the improved performance, and some of the worst multi-media capabilities to grace a Windows OS since Windows 3.11 (but then again 2k was never meant for multimedia). The difference between Windows 2k and Windows XP was improved driver handling, better memory management, a vastly better organized user interface, and working multi-media support (and no security was not worse in XP than 2k... for those that weren't paying attention spyware/adware didn't really catch on till 2003, XP was released in 2002).