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The Advantages of Upgrading From Vista To XP
An anonymous reader passes us a blog posting, which may be just a bit tongue-in-cheek, about the pros and cons of upgrading from Vista to XP. "...there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly."
The first Windows XP was something that was avoided by most for over a year. Win2k was stable, rock solid, why upgrade for the eye candy?
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
Funny, and a nice jab at "upgrading" windows, but really, this could have been much better done by a better writer. How many times did he end up writing "snappy and responsive" to describe XP versus Vista?
also, it really could have benefited from a singular tone. Satire is much better when the voice of the piece doesn't change. Take a page from the onion and just treat this as though it were a review of a "new" OS from microsoft.
All in all, not 1/10 as good as it could have been.
When are we going to feel tired bashing Vista? Until the next Windows release?
Come on... I'm not a fan of MS and I'm posting this with Firefox but I have been running Vista on two machines -- one laptop one desktop -- and two machines on XP. i just don't see anything really bad with Vista. If nothing else, it looks more pleasant. In contrast, one of XP machine is running like snail still after several attempts to clean ups, defrags, and registry cleanings; so i don't even want to boot it up anymore.
Does the extra little candies worth your money? for some here, it is not no matter how good it is. For others, the eye candy worths everything. Isn't that what iPhone is all about?
much longer development cycles between os releases, like 6,8,10 years
and have MAJOR improvements in the mix
for example, i think vista was supposed to have a database like file system when i heard whispers of it way back in 2003/4/5
then i heard that idea got shelved
hey microsoft: if you shelve major improvements, why would anyone upgrade?
if they had that db-like filesystem, then in 2-3 years from now, when that os would have been released, everyone would be talking about what a revolutionary leap forward microsoft had on its hands (yes, i know it's really not a groundbreaking idea, but you know how pr and popular opinion works). now, instead, apple is stealing the thunder for having vista like features before microsoft, when it's just faster graphics card eye candy
windows 95 was such a dramatic step forward from previous iterations
same with xp (patching up windows nt to release to the public instead of business, as windows xp, to increase stability, was certainly an improvement over win me! again, we're talking pr and popular opinion here)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, I'm not sure about Mac OS X. But I did install Windows XP SP0 on a PC five years ago, and it was amazing compared to 98SE (besides the fact that I had to turn off the ugly theme and install Zonealarm, which took all of 2 minutes).
I've heard that from the application developers side, Vista has some useful and expanded functionality over its predecessors. Has anyone developed for Vista yet and can comment?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
They may not like it because of the UAC, or because [favorite program] doesn't work, or, or, or, but the end result is that if XP suits the users better, no amount of "useful and expanded functionality" from the developers side is going to make a difference.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
Hey, but Microsoft is brilliant. People now pay for it twice! Once through the OEM for Vista, then again to get the XP SP2 media. Bet M$FT will have a good quarter bilking the consumer.
and even then quite a few apps still dont work with windows 64 and there many printers and other usb stuff that does not have 64 bit drivers?
M$ do your really need all printers , scanners , and other basic input devices to be forced to be 64 bit?
and why do you have to pick 32 bit or 64 bit?
10.5 does not force you to make that choice.
I cannot wait until the day Windows 7 is rolled out and all the people with their snide Vista comments begin to proclaim Vista to have been the be-all and end-all of Windows OS' and that Windows 7 is a failure on all counts.
I'll say it if no one else will. I like Vista for the most part. While there are some minor annoyances it has impressed me with its stability and increased security. I'm currently running Vista on a desktop I bought last month but I do plan on purchasing a copy and installing it on my laptop as well.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Win2k may have been stable, but what about those of us coming from the hell that is 98/ME? For us, XP was the second coming, for no matter what problems it had, they couldn't possibly be worse than what we had to deal with before. Now we are expected to transition from a very stable, mature operating system to one that gives me nightmarish memories of the pre-XP days.
I, for one, welcome our new karma-whore sig writing overlords
My guess is that they had to add in the new shiny features while simultaneously retaining backwards compatibility with every buggy program and half-broken API they've ever released all the way back to Windows 3.1. That sort of requirement can really complicate things, and you end up having to code everything as conservatively as possible and never take any shortcuts for fear of breaking something.
If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up, and commission VMWare or someone to include functionality for running "legacy/XP" programs in a VM. Then Microsoft's legions of good programmers might be free to come out with something good, as opposed to spending all their brain cycles trying not to break old software (and still sometimes failing, I might add)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Seriously, people need to get over this cliché of vista being the anti-christ. I have it running on two of my machines (one of which dual-boots ubuntu) and I have had little to no problems with it, and I have to say I enjoy it more than XP. Honestly, all XP was, was a GUI upgrade to Win2k (the best microsoft OS leap in my opinion). Vista on the other hand actuall has some neat features that, while don't make it worth upgrading, make it useful to have instead of XP. The only reason people downgrade back to XP is because they're trying to use shitty old printers and devices, and they expect these 10 year old pieces of technology to run on newer machine. The biggest downside to vista is the amount of memory it takes up, both on the HDD and RAM. But you can lower the RAM impact by just turning off things like Aero, and all those services you probably aren't going to use. Seriously people, get an opinion for yourself. Try using vista.
I think it would hit home a lot more if bloggers and technical sites called Windows Vista for what it really is: Windows MPAA edition. It wasn't written for consumers, it was written to satisfy the DRM requirements of the MPAA to be fed to consumers. All that DRM down in the driver level is what is slowing it down.
I was thinking this exact same thing. For me, 2k was the best Windows OS that Microsoft had ever made. It allowed me to run old DOS stuff, had the accessibility of Win98, but was still light on it's feet, being free from the bloat that came with XP.
:1
When XP came out I used 2K for years afterwards, up until SP3 or 4, which basically crippled the stability of the OS to XP-level (everything would crash for me after a certain point, even on fresh installs, which didn't occur before).
I ended up switching to XP afterwards, and it really has become the "better" OS when compared to Vista (I still yearn for early-2K).
Now I run a separate hard drive with Vista (because I just can't afford to use it as my primary OS, it's still too crippled in too many ways), but I need >4GB of RAM for my work, and Windows 64-bit is completely unworkable. I have never been such a frustrated Microsoft customer.
All I want them to do is make a simple, light OS that stays the fuck out of my way. They could ditch almost EVERYTHING from Vista but the fact that it runs my applications, and it would be the greatest OS ever, but I don't think they will ever do this.
It's gotten to the point where I have literally considered learning how to be a programmer simply so I could make my own custom linux builds, but I figure if whole communities aren't able to get decent compatibility for Windows apps I'd never be able to in a million years.
Some things never change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
Windows XP has its shortcomings as well. If you maintain a number of computers for a company, you'll notice that there is no good way to set up one Windows XP computer exactly the way you like it and then duplicate that setup to other computers, unless all of your computers have identical hardware.
Look, everybody trashes Vista because it's eyecandy takes up power. Well, guess what? For the overwhelming majority of PC users, you can put all of the technical improvements imaginable into an operating system, but if it does not look different and do something visual that they have never seen before, they are not going to notice the positive differences. I mean, even the leading linux distro (Ubuntu) has jumped through hoops to get compiz (read: eye candy) to work well enough to leave on by default. Why? People like to see spinning cubical desktops. It's fun. People also like clear window borders with shadows. It's fun.
What's more, if Microsoft does not change the UI across the board a bit, then people are not going to accept the differences that really are necessary for technical reasons. UAC (which is ultimately an improvement, even if it could have been done more gracefully) would never be acceptable to a non-technical user if it was just grafted on top of what looked like XP. For those of us who understand the difference between technical improvements and eyecandy and do not want the eyecandy, it is very easy to turn off. Once it is off, I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS), it is a nice incremental improvement over XP in a lot of ways. For example, the way limited privilege accounts are handled is vastly improved, which is really nice in a multi-user environment (businesses, universities, libraries).
Finally, there is the fact that eye candy can actually improve the usability of the OS. I find that the way vista gives me a little thumbnail of minimized or covered windows when I mouse of the task bar really useful.
I'm typically a Linux user, but as "the IT guy" at the small business where I work, I have to administer a couple vista boxes. I've bought a computer with Vista for my inlaws. They like it. The people where I work like it. Yes, the eyecandy takes power, but eyecandy always takes power, and eyecandy is what the overwhelming majority of PC users want.
Face it folks, for the market at large, Vista is an improvement.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Obviously this is a slow news day and the editors at Slashdot couldn't find any news for nerds or stuff that matters.
Folks, this kind of shit got old years ago.
Vista came out. It has some problems. Guess what. So did XP when it first came out. So did every version of OS X when it came out. So did every previous version of a Microsoft OS. So did every previous version of an Apple OS. So has pretty much every distribution of Linux when they have first come out.
I've been using and programming computers for 34 years. And in that 34 years, I can't think of *any* OS or program, other than maybe "hello world" in what ever language, that has ever been error free on the first version. You show me someone who says "this OS has no bugs", and I'll show you a blathering idiot.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I was just pondering this point 2 days ago.
I think that the Microsoft marketing team has really outdone itself. They have pulled off something that I think is unprecedented--it is downright astonishing to behold.
Microsft was get blasted on all sides for its poor (absent?) security in XP. Wave after wave of spyware and viruses had MS on the roped. Major multi-national power outages were being blamed on MS. XP was the OS that really just couldn't be salvaged.
In August 2004, MS released SP2 for XP, and it helped a lot. But they had lost a lot of PR ground, and had to make that back up. It seemed a daunting task, even for the crack team at MS. But within just 2 years, the geniuses at MS marketing were ready with a strategy that would prove one of the biggest PR reversals in memory. They released Vista to the world.
Suddenly, XP is the best OS around. It is stable, secure, compatible, and manageable. It's been around for six years, and people are banging the drums to have MS extend its life into the foreseeable future. Corporations love it so much they refuse to migrate away form it. PC vendors can't give it up, even though packaging Vista would guarantee sales of 4x as much computing power in each PC. XP is just that good.
Three years ago, XP was the scourge of the computer world. Today, if MS announced that they were dropping Vista and backtracking to XP, the computer world would cheer! MS would be heralded as heroes for placing the needs of their customers first.
Now that, folks, is an amazing job of marketing.
You have failed to demonstrate an actual harm. What precisely is it that Vista does that you are mad about? "impose that DRM on me" sounds like you don't actually know what you can't do on Vista that you would want to do.
I don't use WMP11, so I don't care that the IBX codes are new or whatever. I rip DVDs and TV shows that I believe I am entitled to archive, and I don't see that Vista is going to get in the way. Please follow through on your promise and tell me what your problem is.
I don't like Vista because of the bloat and the inefficiency, etc. Also because Vista offers zero security gains to me, since I have no trouble running XP safely. In short, Vista is for dumbasses who want to blow money on excess computing power to support glassy menus. The DRM thing is a canard, in my opinion.
DRM has more to do with the content producer. By permitted more restrictive DRM, Vista is probably just enabling more content to be sold over the internet. I just won't buy what I don't want. Is this not your plan too?
Really, of all the places to make such a blanket statement, perhaps the only place worse than
Slashdot is full of early adopters, with spare computers & a penchant for hacking. It is exactly the kind of thing that someone on
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What a sucker you are. Every time M$ reduces the functionality and increases the controls people like you come out of the woodwork and claim it's not hurting. Boiled frog anyone?
The tilt bits alone are enough to show that M$ doesn't care about stability, performance or improving the customer experience. It's all about control.
And please, no nonsense about the music industry "requiring" those controls. M$ voluntarily chose to put them in and take advantage.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Guys - Vista is just an operating system. It's not religion, politics, or sex. Calm down.
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
So greed is a more noble cause than ethics?? (by the way, freedom is an ethical, or potentially moral issue, NOT a religious one). Man, I would never turn by back on you.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
-- QED
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No no! I am totally familiar with Linux and LOVE it. Really. Read the rest of my comment up there, I make a note of this even.
;)
I would honestly pay my life savings to someone if they got perfectly acceptable performance and compatibility for 3D Studio Max, Maya, Photoshop, Premiere, After FX, and Mudbox in Linux. I know about all the alternatives to these applications, and I love them but unfortuantely none of them cut it. They just don't. I'm not even being picky here, and mentioning all the games I want Linux to run.
Linux would sweep the market if it ran windows applications perfectly. I laugh at how quickly a person would become the richest man/woman in the world, the instant they release a Windows-Compatible, Windows-Alternative-OS. To me it seems the world is absolutely screaming for this right now. There is such a massive gap here just waiting to be filled by a good operating system with legacy compatibiltiy, it's crazy.
You say that Vista is good to non-Slashdotters. You are talking to a Slashdotter. Perhaps you need to rethink your argument.
"If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up..."
Big mistake! That's precisely what Microsoft and its engineers have never been able to do properly. First they had DOS (which, as you'll recall, they "got" from someone else by whatever means). Then they had Windows, based on ideas picked up from a visit to Apple (which in turn got them from Xerox PARC, but that's another story). Neither DOS nor Windows 1-2-3 was really much good as an operating system, either in terms of functionality or stability. (And don't even think about security - that wasn't on the requirements list at all).
Then came the big turning point, when Gates had the wit to hire Dave Cutler and his crew from DEC, whose management was doing such a great job of driving it under the waves despite having the most powerful engines on the high seas. Ironic, really - DEC had great hardware and software coupled with lousy management, and Microsoft had great management coupled with lousy software. Naturally DEC didn't have the wit to hire some Microsoft managers, because its own managers were too dumb to think of that.
Everything you like about Windows since the mid-1990s is directly attributable to Cutler and his team. They laid down a steel skeleton for the "Black Pearl" that was Windows 3, while (regrettably) keeping the same user interface more or less intact. The result was a series of OS - NT, 2K, and XP - all of which (once debugged) are solid clients and pretty reliable servers too. To this day much of the internals of Windows bears a striking resemblance to the internals of VMS, right down to the names of data structures.
The trouble with Vista was precisely that Microsoft tried to get clever and creative. The further they get from the original NT steel skeleton, the more lost they are. (Don't even get me started on WinFS, which they never even managed to deliver).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I'm really sorry to see that you've been marked as Flamebait. It's a sensible point and deserves areply from anyone who disagrees, not a stupid modding.
The reason that its so difficult to play this content on OSX and Linux is because of the DRM. Without that DRM we would be fine. One problem with Vista's DRM is that by implementing it, content providers are able to use it and change the conditions they sell me my product under without actual recourse to law or pricing, but simply through imposing the technology on me. Not implementing DRM would not have stopped this content being available - nobody stopped producing DVDs when we started to play them on computers - but it would have meant that the content was sold in a way that other OS's could use. Microsoft benefit from the DRM because it increases lock-in which they desparately need over the next few years. Hence we're not deploring the fact that Vista can play this content, but the consequences of Microsoft creating the situation in the first place. At least that is my argument. I can't speak for the nimrod who modded you flamebait.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Indeed - backup is a vital task. I remember those "backup machines" for the NES / Megadrive (Genesis in yankeeland) fondly. So, let's be quantitative here: Demand for non-DRM media is fuelled by:
- 90% "I want to pirate this stuff". (I'm in these 90%, but I don't fool myself)
- 10% "I want to put the contents of the disk on my central media streaming server" (And I'm being generous here)
Knowing my own filesharing habits (or just checking out the amount of traffic on TPB), I can hardly fault content producers for wanting DRM. It's a fully legitimate safeguard.
It doesn't sounds like the DRM problem was a Vista issue. It seems much more likely that this was an Adobe Acrobat DRM feature -- the PDF format has extensive DRM support built into it, since it's quite commonly used for specifications, marketing materials etc. that company's consider their 'IP'.
Seriously. SeriouslyYou're probably right.
Add to that list just about every single piece of industry-specific software out there. From a software-for-the-masses standpoint it really isn't up to the polish of even Openoffice.
However, these kinds of programs are EVERYWHERE. That's because the wonderful devs that develop beautiful open-source media players don't know anything about load distribution on airframes, or fluid flow in sewer lines, or hydrodynamics in a chemical reactor, or small-molecule binding to proteins, or how to manage the workflow of 4000 tax accountants, or how to track every package being delivered in a 8000-employee highrise.
Welcome to the world of industry-specific apps. EVERY industry has them, and you don't learn about them in your computer science program. They're unpolished, and some still even run on green-screens. And if they stop working the guy who made them stop working is fired, blacklisted, and possibly hunted down by a hitman. Companies pay $2000/seat for licenses and they look like they were written for Windows 3.11.
These apps are precisely the reason that nobody in the industrial world is using Vista. Some guy in the desktop engineering ivory tower says "why do you use that lousy software?" - and then some guy in an IT service org on the factory floor points to the 500 robots putting cars together and asks when Microsoft Robot is being released. They might not be pretty, but these apps are essential to any industry - large or small.
That's quite clearly not the case if you think about it. No DRM has on popular media has yet had any effect on piracy. Any song sold by iTunes, any DVD with Macrovision rubbish, is still just as available online as any other content. Nobody who obtains their media through unlicensend downloads has had to care about DRM. The only people who have had to care about DRM are those who have purchased media legitimately and been inconvenienced and those who are worried about the future effect on the market place of vendor lock-in and reduced functionality, such as myself.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.