Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
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.
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.
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!
Guys - Vista is just an operating system. It's not religion, politics, or sex. Calm down.
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
"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.
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. SeriouslyThat'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.
The "only techies would get it" agrument won't fly this time around. Decidedly non-techie users are as usual the majority of users for Windows and THEY are the ones driving MS and major OEMs to keep XP available. If the market at large really did see Vista as an improvement, the naysayers wouldn't have had enough market impact to force MS to backpeddle and allow new machines to ship with XP. That was NOT in their plans, it was a reaction to the market.
I agree that not running as Administrator all the time is a good thing. The problem there for MS is they have spent way too many years getting users and developers used to the idea that everyone would run as administrator. Now they have to pay for that by breaking them of that habit. They're going to have to break a LOT MORE bad habits before they will really have a proper OS. If this one change is any sort of indication, the road forward is steeply uphill all the way. The Vista "feature"set demonstrates that MS is perfectly willing to put the lion's share of their efforts into thwarting the user for the benefit of the MPAA rather than in protecting the user from being exploited at every turn. How can your system be user-friendly when you put so much effort into making it user-hostile?
In many respects, Windows is still *STUNNINGLY* primitive compared to Unix (ANY Unix except perhaps, SCO). Imagine, here we are in the 21st century and Windows still considers having more than one person logged in on the same machine at the same time to be some sort of super-awesome-extra that isn't supported out of the box. They still don't get that an Administrator has very legitimate reasons to be able to impersonate a user (for example, to set up software for them) and that requiring the Admin to know the user's password DECREASES security. Experiance with Wondows 95 provided ample evidence that "the registry" causes more problems than it solves and yet, it's still there in all it's ugliness. Unix has demonstrated the superiority of having 100% of a user's data and settings contained within a single directory tree for many decades now. Is it REALLY going to take half a century for MS to figure out that it's a good idea?
That's just the surface. Scratching that and looking underneath is even worse. They still don't get that a bazillion different APIs performing essentially the same function but in different contexts is just a bunch of ad-hockery, not an architecture.
XP doesn't even handle multiple users on the same machine one at a time all that well. Half the time, when a user logs off, it tries to save the last user's profile (again), but doesn't know the password anymore. meanwhile, will they EVER actually kill off the shatter attack? Vista makes some moves in that direction, but because it's a fundamental architectural flaw rather than a bug, they couldn't kill it completely without changing a lot of other things, so they didn't. Windows is supposed to be the easy to use OS that doesn't require any expertise on the part of the user. so why is it so easy for an inexpert user to totally hork the system even when there's an expert admin available?
MS has some real troubles moving forward. They can't solve the multi-user problem unless or until they not only get users UN-used to being Administrator all the time, but get the 3rd party vendors to grasp the situation and quit writing apps that assUme they can just scribble anywhere in the filesystem they please. They're going to have to somehow detangle configuration as well to create a neat seperation between application defaults, local machine preferences and individual user preferences. Not forcing the Admin to know each user's password will require some deep changes in their favorite shared filesystem code or a dirty hack that ends up storing plaintext passwords in the system where badguys can potentially read them.They're going to have to alter the fundamental API so that inter-process communication is a deliberate programming decision or at least so a programmer can deliberatly dis-allow it.