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Vista Makes CNET UK's List of "Worst Consumer Tech"
Several anonymous readers pointed us at CNET UK's Crave blog for a list of what is or was, in their opinion, the worst consumer tech in history. Vista comes in at number 10, in company with Apple's puck mouse (number 6) and Sony's CD rootkit (number 9). According to Crave: "[Vista's] incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list." That's gotta hurt a little, coinciding as it does with Apple's Don't Give Up On Vista attack ad.
I have movies which I ripped myself from DVD's I own. They are in .avi format. I can play them everywhere, on Linux, on Mac, on Windows 2000, Windows XP.
Windows Vista says there's a byte error in the file and refuses to play the movie. This is Windows Media Player, same version as the version on XP.
Vista DRM is a little over-zealous. Or maybe Vista itself just is incapable of playing movies.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
We bought my wife a brand new computer with a faster processer, twice the RAM, and Vista rather than XP that it replaced (the laptop had to be replaced because we lost the screen). The Vista computer is SLOW. I'm sure there's a point where you get a fast enough computer to make it not matter, but it makes computers that could fly with XP look like you're trying to run it on a 486.
And I can only assume you've turned off the security prompts if you like the OS. It drives me bananas to click on something, have the computer lock up for a second, redraw the screen shaded, and then pop up with a security warning. Just a warning. No prompt for a password. Nothing. I feel so much more secure for losing that 5 seconds of my life every time I want to look at that control panel.
It's a POS. I'm sure you could make it work as well (or possibly better) than XP, but who has that kind of time? It's broken as shipped. And fixing it makes Linux's foibles seem easy to deal with. I'm a Linux fanboy, but I at least recognize Windows 2000 and XP as being perfectly decent operating systems. Vista is not. I'd prefer to use Windows Me over Vista. It crashes about the same amount and is quicker.