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

Yeah!

[eddy]

Boycott Microsoft for... er... Microsoft. That'll show them!

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.

[Waffle Iron]

Since the eye candy is off-loaded to the GPU it doesn't take CPU time

CPU time is not the problem. Raw CPU speed * core count has been increasing as fast as ever lately, but GUI responsiveness has remained almost stagnant. That's because caching and buffering aren't perfect, and ultimately some things are dependent on disk seek time, which has hardly improved at all in the past few years.

Now throw a bunch of eye candy on top of the situation, which is very data intensive and therefore just going to put that much more pressure onto buffer usage, disk drive seeking and bottlenecked I/O buses. That's a recipie for sluggishness.

PCs are already like 60s muscle cars: a huge engine bolted into a crappy budget family sedan with bias-ply tires and drum brakes. A GPU is like bolting in another engine. It's not going to solve fundamental problems with the system that inhibit good all-around performance.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[pherthyl]

Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME. Now people are coming from XP, which is decent, and even the average consumer doesn't like Vista, not just the geeks.

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.

Flamewar anybody?

[Z00L00K]

It may be time for PC manufacturers to also be able to listen to the consumers and actually ask them which OS they want (if any). This so that when a consumer buys a PC with expected performance he/she isn't forced to select a specific OS or version of OS.

It may be that when buying a PC it only comes bundled with XP Home, but the consumer needs XP Pro, in which case it's necessary to purchase the OS TWICE. Or if the consumer wants Linux it's not possible to get rid of the M$ Tax...

Re:Flamewar anybody?

[ais523]

Actually, it is possible to get rid of the 'Windows Tax'; if you don't accept the licence agreement on Windows and then uninstall it, it's possible to get a refund (see this BBC News story). Presumably this applies whether you want to install Linux, an older version of Windows, or even another OS.

Re:In other news

[Tim C]

And once again we see how bad a car analogy can be - even if I've installed and used Vista, as long as any materials I received (eg disk, manual, etc) are in good condition MS loses nothing by swapping my Vista licence for an XP one and exchanging the disks.

Cars lose the value the moment they're driven out of the showroom.

MS might just have made it a big mistake

[SmallFurryCreature]

The consumentenbond is very powerfull, IF a company has its product rated as best it WILL use that in all its ads, it is marketing gold. Being labelled as bad is the exact opposite, MS just got itself a whole shitload of bad advertising and not by some computer mag or newspaper but by an organisation most dutch people believe.

To give you an idea off how powerfull consumer organisations are in holland, this is the only country in the world were Sony will freely and without question exchange PSP's with ANY defective sub-pixel. The ONLY country in the world. Not after you threaten a lawsuit, not after hours on the phone, turn it into a store, if they make trouble refer them to a letter Sony send to kassa and get your new PSP (did it twice until it went past even dutch warranty). Some stores (not sony itself) still try to make trouble, go ahead ask for the manager and tell them to call Sony, Sony will chew them out for you, Sony doesn't want more trouble.

In fact if you are in the netherlands you don't have to accept dead subpixels on anything. I exchanged my iPod video after 6 months, an mp3 player is a device that should last longer, and Apple just had to replace mine or face a court case it was going to loose by default.

This is the country MS refused to simply give XP (costs them NOTHING) to legit buyers of Vista?

Seriously, MS really needs to hire a better public relations officer. They might be lucky that this is the weekend and as such the free working week newspapers won't carry the story but this is just asking for a whole lot of bad press.

On a side not, might Vista's uptake lack because it is harder to pirate? The only people I know who use Vista are those who got it with their new computer for "free". I build my own (and run linux anyway for desktop) so for me Vista would cost a shitload of money. Piracy seems out, wich makes me not use it and therefore I get no experience with it, except for when my friends ask me for advice and I can't give it because I don't know Vista. This actually matters to some as I have helped two people reformat and install XP to get rid of Vista.

I wish just once there was a story from MS that doesn't make it sound like it got some kind of horrible fascination with shooting itself in the foot.

Re:should have happened long ago

[RonnyJ]

Unfortunately there wasn't a cheaper 'home' version of Windows 2000, and so Windows XP was a good upgrade path, being a huge improvement over Windows 9x.

As you say though, Windows XP offered little to people already using Windows 2000 (and still doesn't offer much extra now, besides the extra support time).

Vista issues? HA!

[crowbarsarefornerdyg]

I applaud their efforts to get M$ to let the consumer trade in Vista for XP, especially after my experience with my wife's computer. We bought her a Compaq SR2010, which came with a "free upgrade" (LOL!) to Vista Home somethingoranother. Anyway, when we got it, I went ahead and installed it, because she wanted to try it. She'd already experienced it on my new computer. The damn thing even had the little "Vista Capable" sticker on the front. Cool, it's worth a shot.

I installed Vista, used the HP Driver Disc that came with Vista to upgrade all my drivers, and waited. After everything was done, I checked the system, and two or three devices weren't working. I went to HP's website, and there were no new drivers for them. To make a long story short, we reformatted her computer, and I wiped the drive on mine and we both went back to XP.

Re:Vista isn't that bad

[Dunbal]

Vista is nicer operating system

does not sit well with

Yes, it's new and breaks things

WHAT? Operating systems ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BREAK THINGS no matter how "new" they are. Microsoft has had DECADES of experience writing operating systems, Microsoft has INTIMATE knowledge of computer components and how they work, directly from chip makers and motherboard manufacturers, in fact at times Microsoft even has the clout to DICTATE which direction technology will progress. And yet they still manage to "break things"?

      Give me a break (yes, it's redundant). For all you stick your tongue up Microsoft's corporate backside, you are not getting a free laptop. So please stop being a "gullible consumer" and stop accepting the "fact" that operating systems are supposed to break things when new. That's simply untrue, and Microsoft doesn't deserve to be "cut some slack".

Vista is part of the failure model...

[argent]

Vista is a pretty good operating system. The worst things about it are that: 1) it's new.

2) It provides little or no functionality that consumers actually want over XP.
3) It's more complex than XP, due to the "secure-path" code in the kernel.
4) It's less reliable than XP, due to the additional copy protection and secure-path code in the kernel.
5) It has higher kernel overhead than XP, due to the secure-path code in the kernel.

The reason that people go on about the "horrible DRM" is not because the DRM itself is the problem. It's because the changes that were made to support that DRM are most of the real kernel level differences between XP and Vista.

In addition, the new user-visible security features (UAC and the sandbox for IE) are bandaids. They have not made any attempt to address the real problems in the network services, Win32 APIs, and user-level applications that provide such a large surface area to attackers.

Microsoft's real problem is that they did too good a job, for the desktop at least, with Windows 2000. The only shortcomings to Windows 2000 are features that should have been shipped in feature packs... most of them were originally developed on 2000... and everything they've done since then have been attempts to artificially create the appearance of "newness". There were no fundamental changes in XP, and the only fundamental changes in Vista are things that provide no real benefit to the consumer (and actually hurt them).

They got a pass with XP because they presented it as the upgrade path from Windows 9x. They could have done that with Windows 2000... my "Wintendo" (my Windows gaming box) runs Windows 2000, and the first program I found that wouldn't run on 2000... that actually required XP... was a couple of months ago. Something like 8 years after release and 5 years after XP came out. I don't know why they bothered with Windows Me and didn't just push EVERYONE to Windows 2000 as the upgrade path, but I guess they wanted the income from another upgrade cycle. Anyway, XP gave people something new. Vista can't do that.

With Windows 2000 Microsoft has put themselves out of the "operating system company" job. They've reacted by trying to force people to upgrade, and people don't like that. Unbundling Windows and selling the bundled components as separate packages would get them out of this trap, but after fighting so hard to keep that from happening against their will I don't figure they'll do it.

In the meantime everyone who depends on a stable Windows ecosystem is the loser.

They aren't kidding

[Heliode]

The Consumentenbond is taken very seriously here. Today I found an ad folder in the mail from the Mediamarkt (big computer/electronics store here in Holland) with a large ad in it advertising new computers with XP. "We have them again!". I can't find anything about it on their website. I scanned the ad, and I would upload it if I had some place that could handle the load. I'm open for suggestions!

I thought this was news for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, having read the comments on this article, I would have thought I was reading a Microsoft forum. Isn't this slashdot? Where are all the M$ haters?

Well, I'm personally not an MS hater per se, and am very happy with working in C# and Visual Studio over using Java and Eclipse. However, when I tried Windows Vista, it lasted all of one month on my computer before I went back to XP. I did really like some of the interface improvements. The Aero interface does look nice, and I liked the screen preview feature of the taskbar. But that was about all I liked.

Why did I switch back to XP?

1. Half of my games wouldn't run in Vista.
2. I quickly got sick of having to click "OK" on 3 different security validation popups every time I'd want to run a program.
3. I got sick of having to acknowledge that I'd turned off security every time I booted up (see number 2).
4. I got tired of having to install half of everyting I bought twice, because it would fail the first time due to the Vista "protect the user from himself" theology. Even though my logon acct was Administrator, it wouldn't install apps as administrator mode until it failed the first time. What the?
5. Of the half of the games that did run, graphics performance was about 15% worse than on Vista. Even when I upgraded to a dual-core and was running two ATI cards in Crossfire mode.

I'm not able to give you a lot of technical "this process was x because they did y in Vista" but the above were my experiences with what was bad about Vista versus XP. Personally, I consider Vista to be on par (as far as MS OS's go) with Windows 98 First Edition. I liked 2000 because it stopped me from getting he "buffer underrun" error every time I'd burn a CD. I liked XP because it gave me a lot more "home" and gaming functionality. Vista is a downgrade from both.

Stop stalling

[jlarocco]

Will you Windows people stop whining? In the next few years you're going to use Vista, because that's Microsoft's new thing. People whined about XP, and look where we are now. So get on with it. Stop whining and take the plunge. We all know how it's going to turn out, and the rest of us are tired of your bitching.

Alternatively, try switching to a different operating system. For years the most common reasons for not switching to Linux or Mac have been that those operating systems don't support necessary hardware or software and are significantly different than people are used to. Now that Microsoft's own "new thing" is significantly different and doesn't support much hardware or software, it's the perfect time to put your money where your mouth is. Switch to something else, or shut up and take it.

Straight out of Redmond - Conspiracy Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

These "I had a wonderful Vista Experience Posts" sound
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.

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

[erroneus]

With all the people out there 'hating vista' I find it amusing that there are some confused individuals who actually love Vista out there who are asserting their denial that Vista sucks.

I think the reasons people are offering for hating Vista are both valid and inconsequential. I say this because it's not the reason that matters so much as the fact that there's discussion about it at all... what's more, there's actually pockets of consumer action growing out there.

Let's take a short walk through recent history shall we?

Windows 3.1:

It was the first "usable" version of Windows. It did things that were arguably miraculous. They created a unified printing, display and user interface such that all software written for it was simply easier and better. No more hoping there is hardware support for your applications. Does anyone remember hunting for drivers to support a printer under AutoCAD or Word Perfect? Not too many people here are old enough to remember that stuff, but I'm here to tell you that it was a big deal and I was singing Microsoft's praises as a savior for the PC and its users.

Windows 3.11... Windows NT:

Progress and improvements! Things just kept getting better. People were happy and excited to upgrade. Things couldn't be better! ... or could they?

Windows95:

WOW! What an amazing difference! A bar at the bottom of the window with a menu system? Sure it was Mac-like, but it was still a wonderful improvement in terms of style. For those already accustomed to Win 3.1 and all that, we knew it was essentially the same OS but with more 32-bit-ness which, even though we didn't fully appreciate what that meant at the time, we knew it was good somehow. Windows95 wasn't "worse" than any of its predecessors and we were still happy to get it because it just looked cooler.

Windows98:

More 32-bit-ness. Cooler still. More old DOS stuff being hidden from the user... some didn't care for it, others appreciated it. We were all generally accepting of it though.

Windows 2000:

Awesome. We didn't have to understand that there were some serious underlying differences to be experienced there... we could just "feel" the differences somehow. It was still Windows NT and as such required more computing power than Win95/98, but for those who craved the improvements that Win2000 offered, it was worth giving in and upgrading the hardware to get it somehow... and yet many remained with Windows98... some serious departure from the "Happy Microsoft Upgraders" mentality is really starting to show now.

Windows ME:

Do I really need to mention it? I guess there were some 'good ideas' in there, but frankly, I never used it. If I wanted to "upgrade" from Win98, I went to Win2000. Like most people, I just stepped right by WinME.

Windows XP:

It's all about the eye-candy. Windows XP didn't offer anything that Windows 2000 didn't already offer. What's more, there was no "Windows XP server." What was that all about? My first attempt at putting WinXP on a machine revealed a slow machine that was once pretty nice under Win98 or Win2000. And given that XP didn't actually offer anything exclusively better in terms of functionality, I ignored it for a long long time... eventually as old machines died and were replaced with newer, better machines, I didn't mind going to XP so much... so eventually XP won its way in by exhibiting patience. No one clamored for XP... they just accepted it. But neither was there mass rebellion against XP.

Windows Vista:

It was a long time in coming. For some it was a dark cloud. For others it held the promise of fixing a lot of things and delivering a LOT of new, interesting and exciting new toys and technologies. Delivery and development delays kept coming and coming. Eventually features were dropped one by one... the hopefuls began to lose faith... the "dark cloud" folks were actually a little relieved since it meant the possibility of less chaos when it

Mod him down, but he's right

[willfe]

I hate to agree with a so-called "troll" here but he really does have a point -- I lived in his "hell" for a month on this HP/Compaq notebook that came with Vista. When it spontaneously uninstalled its own hard drive controller driver last week, rendering itself unbootable (ironically, the bootloader could bootstrap the kernel, but mysteriously then the kernel instantly forgot how to talk to the disks -- the only repair option available? Blow it all away and reload the factory image), I removed Vista entirely and stuck Ubuntu 7.10 on this thing. I've been happy every since :)

Things run faster, are more stable, and I have more useful tools and software here. OpenGL (3D stuff) works great, I can still run all the apps I use (since they're cross-platform anyway :)), and I get my work done much faster. Strangely, I'm even getting *much* better battery life out of the internal battery on the laptop *and* on the external battery I use to extend the internal battery's life. Bluetooth *never* worked right in Vista, yet I'm tethered to a Windows Mobile 6-based phone wirelessly (via Bluetooth) for its Internet Connection Sharing right now to post this.

I think I'll take this idea offered by the original article here and go bug HP for a refund for Vista (or, if they won't do that, mebbe an "upgrade" to XP ... not that I'd use it :)).

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[Eivind]

My wife got vista for her new laptop half a year back. She didn't know any better. (neither did I, I'd have opted for Ubuntu, but I honestly wasn't aware that Vista is so horribly much more annoying than XP as it is.) (as if XP ain't annoying enough: Wanna reboot now, or should I nag you again in 3 minutes ?)

• It asks for "confirmation" in literally hundreds of everyday situations. This adds nothing to security, because inside of the first week everyone gets used to automatically click "yes, do it, go away, let me -use- the damn computer, stop nagging me damn it" (the option says something else, but this is what people thing, aproximately)
• it lacks support for bog-standard 2 year old mainstream hardware. Much worse than Linux has been on the hardware front lately. For example, our bog-standard scanner doesn't work, a driver is promised "in 2008", this is a scanner from 2005. One that sold 700.000. Same for our laserprinter, though there it's possible to have it work halfway by using a driver which exist for a smaller model. This loses the functionality lacking in that smaller model though (such as the duplex-unit)
• The backwards compatibility for games suck. This matters, since more games is one of the sole remaining advantages for Windows over the competition at this point. Heroes of M&M IV works, but is buggy, especially the network-support. Capitalism II doesn't even start. SC3K seems to be working, sorta, it's hard to say, the palette is messed up, something I ain't seen on linux since X11 used to run in 8-bit palette-modus...
• It's a resource hog. The laptop of my Wife is a Core-2-duo, 2GB ram and decent graphics. Should be more than adequate. Isn't. It's -swapping- as I write this very moment, There's no programs open other than FF which eats 112MB, if we believe Vista, and Thunderbird which eats 87MB. Don't ask me why it's swapping under these circumstances, but it is.
• Java-support sucks. Yeah, that's probably partly a sun-issue. But Eclipse, under the same version of the same JVM crashed regularily on Vista, never experienced that on XP or Linux or Panther.
• "Fast user switching" is a joke. The -fast- part particularily. ctrl+alt+F8 takes how long on Linux ? A second ? In vista, you click on switch user. It then spins for 10 seconds (with the aforementioned powerful laptop), it then displays a login-prompt. Where you can log in a second user, and in another 10 seconds or so you're good to go. This rigamarole repeats itself on each switch. That's rigth, even if both users are logged in, you still need to wait for the login-screen to load, then click on the user you want to switch to and enter the password. Half a minute for switching a user ain't fast in my book....
• It still doesn't have any of the neat stuff that unix invented in the 70ies. Ok, so maybe I shouldn't have been hoping for that, but it's still a mystery. "shortcuts" are still a hack in the shell and don't universally work like symlinks and hardlinks have for literally 30 years in unix... Disks are still managed with "drive letters", and you've got no way to say move a directory from C: to D: and have the move be transparent to the user.
• It still can't manage to move, rename, delete or in some cases even -read- a file if some other program has the file open. All of this stuff actually worked, literally, in the 70ies on unix.

The biggest problem though ? There is not a -single- actually relevant improvement from a user-perspective. Not one. Lots of drawbacks, no advantages. Oh, I'm sure they're there allrigth. But how splendid are they really, if the user doesn't even -notice- them in the first half-year of use ?

At this point my wife would swap Vista for XP in a heartbeat. Hell, she'd swap it for Windows-98 if given the chance.