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Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
This was under discussion (again) just the other day... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206
Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html#
*The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox
... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine, which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html
If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.
So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.
The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.
If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.
That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.
No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.
The price.
No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.
No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.
P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.
One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.
Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.
Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.