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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."
This new Windows XP should make a great gift!
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It took so long to get Vista People forgot what XP use to be like on the modern systems of the time. Same thing happends with Mac OS X leopard. Most of the problems with Vista is much like when they upgraded to XP, Yes different problems but just as anoying... If you really want to get a perspective Install WIndows XP SP0 on a PC that is 5 or 6 years old... Then you see what you are missing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now if only MS could release a version of XP that didn't have the activation stuff. Get rid of all of the DRM that is in Windows now, aid then they would be "customer friendly".
Quit trying to make the software stop working, and concentrate on making it work all of the time.
Of course, if the customer experience is terrible, nobody would bother trying to pirate Windows.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It's really sad when you see how much power is truly lost on vista. I setup a Mac the other day for a client, and it was also running XP through parallels. It ran both just fine with only one gig of ram. A virtual machine, and two entire operating systems... and most PC's out there that are not quad cores with two gigs of ram run like shit. I used to be a microsoft fanboy... -But sadly the tides are changing.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
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).
Hats off to Microsoft for releasing an OS that is obsolete before it even hit the shelves! That's the sort of market driven forward thinking that we have come to expect from such a great company.
Now only if they would start charging for service packs, that would really add to share holder value.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
DOS. None of that shell nonsense. Straight forward computing for the masses! Fast, stable and with no eye candy what so ever.
Other than DX10.x in Vista for purposefully DX10.x limited specific games releases (HALO 3, et al), what IS the killer app in Vista?
(Don't flame me man! I am serious, what is the Real "advantage" to Vista for gamers?) What is the performance advantage? Is it designed to fully take advantage of future generations of multiple quad-core processors with 8+GB of RAM and not really current hardware which is not optimized to utilize it?
Not intending to get into a flame war at all, I have used Vista and I just don't get it.. why the bloat? Why so much DRM? Why specifically break Direct3d and EAX and force the rapid development of OpenAL sound cards and drivers, etc.. Why completely eliminate the look and feel of the UI users have mastered since Win9x/2k (or at least leave a Classic Win2k option for the UI) I play my games in XP and I love it. Once WINE, etc.. can match the performance in gaming of native XP, this discussion will then be between XP and XP emulation.
DualBrain - Level Up Your Brain! - now available on your iPhone!
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".
Upgrade to MS-DOS 6.1. The screen response is incredible!!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
The anti-Vista whining has gotten more annoying than the silly "M$" thing or the Slashdot trolls talking about Microsoft users sucking Bill's cock.
The genuine problems with Vista (the multiple versions, the price, lack of solid drivers) were exhausted as a subject months ago. Since then, the computer press has acted like a bunch of 15-year-olds with a nerd fetish. Vista is actually somewhat nice.
Backup management is a hell of a lot nicer in Vista -- XP almost forced you to go with a third-party app. UAC works very well, and makes running Windows as a limited user a reasonable experience -- in XP it was doable, but a serious pain. System restore is _much_ improved with Vista, something I noticed after a borked nVidia RAID driver update. The performance and reliability wizards that can go through and look at which of your apps are crashing are a nice little idea. There are hundreds of these little improvements. It's not god's gift computer nerds, but it's not that bad either.
And yes, I am a Linux sys admin. At any given time I probably have more Linux boxes running than Windows boxes.
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.
I'm not disagreeing with you as I've not thought about it enough to say whether my own idea is good or bad, but I think rather than longer development cycles, they might actually need shorter ones. The Linux world seems to make excellent progress with numerous small increments. This of course necessitates a quite modular approach to developing the OS (with the most dramatic example being the separation of OS from Window Manager), but this actually leads to a much greater stability as you aren't suddenly shifting from one system to something very new and different, with all the headaches of testing, driver release, app compatability etc., etc. that this causes.
If a new release of Linux came out ever five years, I think we'd see massive problems with each new release of that, as well.
Of course the release schedule is driven by marketing, rather than developers so it might seem academic, but I have a suggestion to Microsoft on the million to one chance that Ballmer is reading through these articles in a dark fit of depression. A better solution would be to take an incremental approach to Windows releases and to make money through a subscription process. We know that customers resent being forced to go through an expensive upgrade cycle. Wouldn't the pill be easier to swallow if so long as they paid their very modest subscription to Microsoft, the updates just kept rolling down. One day it doesn't support a journaling files system, the next day it does - much like Ubuntu updates? Microsoft want to be in a service industry, providing media packages and other options with a steady stream of income, not a risky forecasting of sales for each new OS or version of Office. Wouldn't a subscription model suit that better, enabling lots of services to be rolled into one? And at a stroke you've cut down on vast amounts of piracy of the Windows OS. It's surely better to have a million users paying $24 a year than it is 500,000 maybe paying $80 once every five years. New PCs would as usual just come with a modest 1 year subscription free!
I know that I'd be happy with this model and a lot less resentful of seeing the big cost of the OS added to the price of the PC as one big extra cost. There are so many things that could be rolled into a subscription model in other areas of Microsoft's business that its almost silly.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like a good idea for both Microsoft and its customers. They're no longer competing with other proprietary OS's (bar the Macs). They're competing with free. And you can't do that by demanding $100 from people. You can do it by asking for a couple of dollars a month and people feeling that they're getting something good in return. If anyone knows the chair launching one, point him in my direction would you?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
That may be accurate in some cases, but it appears that it has more to do with the REQUIREMENT from Microsoft to only use their SOFTWARE mixer in Vista, thus breaking nearly all Hardware audio effects (my read is: for *DRM* requirements):
"...DirectSound3D on Windows Vista
With Microsoft's decision to remove the audio hardware layer in Windows Vista, legacy DirectSound 3D games will no longer use hardware 3D algorithms for audio spatialization. Instead they will have to rely upon the new Microsoft software mixer that is built into Windows Vista. This new software mixer will give the users basic audio support for their old Direct Sound games but since it has no hardware layer, all EAX® effects will be lost, and no individual per-voice processing can be performed using dedicated hardware processing.
EAX has become the de facto standard for real-time effects processing. It has been incorporated in hundreds of games and has become the method of choice for game developers wanting to add interactive environment effects to their titles. Some of the best selling games of all time use the EAX extensions to DirectSound 5.0 and beyond, including Warcraft3, Diablo2, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Ghost Recon, F.E.A.R. and many others. Under Windows Vista, these games will be losing the hardware support that came as standard under the previous Windows Operating Systems, and will no longer provide real-time interactive effects, making them sound empty and lifeless by comparison to the way they sound on Windows XP.
In some cases, where a game specifically looks for a hardware audio path, it may even fall back to plain stereo output. This will be a very different landscape for 3D audio than the one that both Creative Labs and Aureal Technologies® pioneered 8 years ago. Both companies dedicated hardware power to rendering increasing numbers of 3D voices, with each voice taking full advantage of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) technology, wave tracing and other advanced processing. With the native Windows Vista audio APIs, all this advanced, hardware-based 3D audio processing will be inaccessible. Instead, basic mapping to a generic speaker placement scheme will be employed, and all interactive processing and rendering will be dependent on the host CPU. While it is true that CPUs continue to get faster, the Vista audio architecture intentionally simplifies things, such that the potential processing load for multiple 3D voices is limited. Inevitably there is a tradeoff. This will be especially true for gamers that have come to depend on the kind of high-end 3D audio experience available from products like the SoundBlaster X-Fi, with its advanced headphone 3D audio processing and dedicated hardware DSP effects. For gamers this would be the most noticeable loss in Windows Vista, and it would be a definite step backwards for PC gaming audio if developers only had the option of using native Windows Vista audio APIs. However, they do have a legitimate, proven alternative in OpenAL..." http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html
1) If existing OS: run complete antivirus scan and clean existing install, fix everything. Then run a GOOD antivirus scanner (I like Kaspersky), and do it right.
.Net
2) Format system disk.
3) Install new MS OS (Win2K or better)
4) Install all updates EXCEPT:
5) Remove unnecessary schmutz (unneeded services, drivers, games, etc.)
6) Replace MS MediaPlayer with Media Player Classic.
7) Do not install any further MS software
8) Ever.
9) Seriously, not ever.
10) It's not that hard, and will very rarely crash.
11) Oh yeah, don't install too many Adobe apps, either, and keep as much crap from auto-starting as possible (Adobe gamma, Adobe Reader starter, etc.).
12) Don't use Internet Explorer (any version - the people who tell you IE7 is 'okay' are idiots).
Put some hardware in between your machine and the Internet at large. Being behind even a simple NAT box will help enormously.
Enjoy.
Ok, in IT, there's essentially two paradigms. Microsoft and !Microsoft (which that alone is a sign on how succesfull MS are).
The !Microsoft oriented people seem to have a lot more distaste for Microsoft stuff than the other way round, and article postings such as this one is evidence of that. Being, let's say, heavily based in Microsoft, I have tried and indeed on occasion promote OSS tech over MS tech sometimes, and the same goes for my colleagues. Every time I've asked someone bad-mouthing MS stuff how much time they've given to Vista for instance, and the response is along the lines of "fuck off n00b".
Now, I don't think for a minute that if Microsoft could wave a magic wand and have OSS disappear they wouldn't (no matter how expensive that wand might be), but you all miss a trick here. For Microsoft people, this war isn't about religion, it's ultimately about money. That means any anti-Linux propaganda they may (or may not) push out is calculated with a cool head.
On slashdot, anti-microsoft propaganda is often pure bitching and rabid foaming at the mouth by some obscure geek sat at home with an opinion the rest of the world doesn't care about. Sometimes you guys have a point, let's not pretend it's all ranting (not even nearly), but you must realise, school-ground article submissions like this one only serve to make you look like kids, and very unprofessional. That image sticks, and spreads too - all of which is a shame BECAUSE FOSS projects genuinely have thier own niche in the IT universe.
Remember, IT isn't religion, it's a profession, a skill, a choice, whatever. Microsoft for all you bash them, in my opinion look far more organised and professional than the anti-Microsoft people seeking at all costs and turns, to bash and tarnish them. And Microsoft are winning already; just keep checking that MSFT ticker.
Bring the mod points, this is an unpopular opinion I know, but to quote a cliché - "I've got karma to burn"
throw new NoSignatureException();
Somebody apparently decided to develop an OS on his spare time and released the source code for anybody to improve on.
I've heard it's taking off like gangbusters.
Even has a GUI and all.
Some Finnish kid, though.
Sounds un-American to me, doing stuff for free. The American way is to pay through the nose for stuff that doesn't work. Gotta buy American or the Chinese will own everything. including the oil. Or maybe the Finnish. (Never gonna use any cell phone except Motorola.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- Vista plays MP3s just fine.
- Vista plays AVIs of your favorite shows just fine.
- Vista plays DVDs just fine.
- You can run software to rip DVDs on Vista.
- You can rip CD audio on Vista.
- You can convert your DVD movies to AVIs on Vista.
- If none of that is good enough for you, you can install a couple plug-ins in Vista and play all the Ogg and Matroska files you want.
Seriously, Vista does kinda suck, but when you go around talking about how it sucks for reasons that aren't even true you kinda just sound like a dumbass fanboy.Breakfast served all day!
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.
Vista is really annoying because it has several important, useful, and/or cool features that really make it a better OS, for example:
1. IO Scheduling - the scheduler now tracks IO requests and priorities, not just CPU time. This is probably my #1 complaint with almost any OS: Any app can bring the system to a crawl by issuing constant disk IO, regardless of how much CPU time it is using. Use up a lot of memory to cause swapping and you can effectively DoS just about any system even with no admin rights whatsoever. But since Vista considers IO in its scheduling a low-priority process can't flood the disk with requests. No technical reason this can't be back-ported to XP.
2. Hot-patching - long overdue, but at least it is being delivered. Other than swapping out the kernel there is no excuse for rebooting to install or update any subsystem. There is no technical reason why this can't be supported by XP.
3. User-mode driver framework - Even if we can't have microkernels, at least we can start moving more stuff into user mode. The audio subsystem is one of these. Frankly, except for some very minor pieces, not only should most drivers live in user mode I think most drivers should use a form of managed code as well (perhaps with some deterministic GC or other memory management mechanism). Switching ring levels isn't the massively huge hit it was on older x86 processors. Again, no reason this can't be supported by XP.
4. DirectX scheduler and video virtualization - long overdue; let the OS virtualize the 3d hardware and dish time out to any app that needs to do some rendering. We've all been over the DirectX 10 scandal before and are well aware that it could be back-ported to XP.
5. Explorer improvements - more multi-threaded (less blocking) and (FINALLY) it doesn't b0rk an entire file copy job just because one file failed... now you can retry or skip the offending item. Welcome to 1993, apparently.
6. Pending IO cancellation - the IO subsystem finally understands how to cancel pending IOs. Ever had a zombie process that wouldn't go away, even though you did an End Process or kill on it? It probably had an incomplete network or disk IO request out there, but under XP and earlier Windows can't cleanup the process until all the IOs are finished. In Vista the IO subsystem understands how to cancel the IO, or if it can't be cancelled will automatically take care of cleaning it up when it returns... no need for the process to stick around waiting on a request to complete that it doesn't give a shit about. Again, this should have been part of an XP service pack.
7. Async SMB/Net - All the SMB/Net calls and apps support async IO now, so you can finally CTRL+C a 'net view \\machine' command and have it terminate immediately, instead of having to wait 60 seconds for that CTRL+C to register while the network operation is blocking. This one I can't even understand... Windows has supported non-blocking IO since the original NT. IO Completion Ports (essentially callbacks when an IO operation is complete) are fast and used throughout Windows for all sorts of things. Except in this one area.
8. Kernel transactions - now the Registry and supported filesystems (NTFS), along with any subsystem or kernel object that cares to implement support for it, can participate in transactions. This one makes installations far easier and simpler - just run all your registry and file updates inside a transaction and commit when done. Also makes hot-patching support easier, since running processes keep their open handles to the previous version of the file prior to the transaction. All filesystem should have supported transactions in like 1995; no idea why it has taken this long.
9. Shadow Copies exposed - this one is really dumb; XP already supports shadow copies, it just doesn't expose them to you. Again, something we should have seen on clients several years ago when disk space started getting really cheap. Empty sectors on a disk are like empty blocks of memory: a complete waste. Just as ever
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
A nice incremental move forward. Lots of stuff under the hood for SAs (Kerb'd NFS), filesystem based directories (oh, so sweet).
VNC built-in such that when I see a machine on the network, I can bring up it's desktop. Super for around the house. Bring up a remote dual screen and see a really long screen in the VNC window. No muss, no fuss.
Some nice subtle changes in the GUI. Where it especially shines is when using it as a media center. Drop links to network shares of movies and music into your movies and music folders and they show up under frontrow, like magic. Login to resources is auto-magic (keychain).
Drop cover art and it shows up like magic too. DVD rips, mpeg4, what have you. Frontrow's new version makes it so much better. A mini + leopard is Apple TV with a slot loading DVD and an accessible desktop.
Certainly not revolutionary. Nicely revolutionary.
(I got rid of my last XP desktop (AMD 64's) and got an 8 core MacPro when Leopard was released. Switching was like curing a dull toothache that had been causing me pain for years.)
I play MP3's all the time in the background on Vista. I have a duel-core 2.6Ghz Intel with 4G of memory, and as the screen changes... menus popping up, heavy disk activity, you can hear little glitches in playback. Almost like a 1/10 of a second cut in the song.
It's amazing they managed to struggle with all the processor power and memory when Amigas can play MP3's.
I just don't get it.
There are actually great reasons to upgrade to Vista. A massive boost in productivity (for power users, at least) is one of them. In defense of Vista article outlines some of the other reasons.
I've been using Vista since February and once file copy performance issues were sorted out, I have nothing bad to say about it.
If you lot are bitching about performance, get the fuck over it. In 6 months, it will be irrelevant, just as the performance differences between 95/98/2k and XP are. I currently run games on vista with no performance problems - if you have a machine built with vista in mind, it's all good.
If you *don't* have a machine built with vista in mind, then why are you shocked and surprised that the user experience sucks? Yes, it's built for new hardware. Given that 90% of the time, all that cpu and memory is sitting idle on most people's machines, it makes sense to try and utilise it for useful purposes - for example, previous versions, search indexing, etc.
Most of that background crap can be turned off if you're really anal about it, but sooner or later you'll (or rather, perhaps one of your users will) do something stupid, like delete a whole heap of crap you don't need or whatever, and wish you hadn't.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Vista is, clearly, both less reliable and less efficient than XP for a significant proportion of people who have tried it. If it had one bad review, that would be one thing, but the web is full of them and of reports from lab tests confirming it in various contexts, and my personal experience and conversations with friends who have seen it is entirely consistent with those reviews and tests. So I have no problem accepting that Vista is inferior to XP in significant ways.
Now, it may be that it's not really down to the DRM. I find it credible that it is, given the nature of DRM technology, and I guess most people reading this have read the high profile articles with more technical details that claim so. But in any case, it doesn't really matter a whole lot why the performance is worse than XP, just that it is worse. If DRM is getting the blame and MS is suffering bad press because of some FUD here, I'm not exactly full of sympathy: it's not like they have a history of being whiter than white in their objective criticisms of their competitors' offerings, nor like the claims about poor performance/compatibility/reliability aren't essentially all true.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't see the problem. Why, this guy was able to install it in only a couple minutes.
I took the VISTA plunge (as a test) on a new laptop. I plan to upgrade to XP over Christmas break. VISTA drivers are still pretty rough and have crash issues. I think I finally have achieved a stable laptop with no blue screens, but system performance is an issue. VISTA just idling consumes about 10% of the CPU, not to mention it is always waking the harddrive up. Amazingly, VISTA (the new king of all multimedia) doesn't have a built-in app that uses a USB webcam... very strange.
My biggest beef is that the VISTA System Recovery software doesn't work. I did a complete VISTA backup to DVD and wanted to test a system restore. I booted the VISTA CD and selected Restore Entire System but the restore software doesn't recognize the DVD backup set. This irked me since laptops no longer come with restore media, so I guess it is back to Ghost.
My feeling is that VISTA is much akin to Windows ME which was the retarded cousin on Win98. Everyone knows that VISTA is a hyperactive drooling OS and most will just take a step back and see what MS churns out next, or move to Ubuntu. At least my plan is to put VISTA back in the box and ignore it.
-- QED
I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS)
Why is it that Microsoft gets to release Vista and make billions of dollars, but Hardware Manufacturers are expected to spend money writing drivers for old equipment?
Instead of making Vista compatible with XP drivers, Microsoft broke the old driver model, in part to implement their DRM schemes, which are designed to give them more control and make them more money. The new driver model is difficult and expensive to code for. And Hardware Manufacturers are supposed to lose money doing this, so people will be more inclined to upgrade to Vista so Microsoft can make more money?
Microsoft is the one that profits from this. They should pay for writing the new drivers.
This ad space for rent.
Windows Vista 64-bit edition does not load any unsigned kernel-mode drivers, and it does not load test-signed drivers outside of an ugly "test mode". It costs $500 per year to get a code signing certificate from VeriSign. (Google will tell you more.) Providers of assistive technologies, especially individuals and small non-profit organizations, often can't afford this expense.
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.
They've made XP too good. Hey wait, there's "Service Pack" 3 coming.
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.