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.'"

Comments

disappointing, it is relative!

[Fengpost]

Sure it can, you score can go into the negative area since Vista is slower than XP. By my count, it is -5 because of the worse benchmark score and compatibility issues.

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/20071128181/windows-xp-faster-than-vista.html

Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink'

[cashman73]

Probably going to get modded "-1 Troll" for this, but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. Granted, I still wouldn't want to try and run it on a system that only meets the "minimum specifications",... but seriously, who's going to recommend such a system anyway? True, the extra "confirmations" are a bit of a pain, but they're really not THAT bad. I honestly can't say I've seen a Windows Vista system crash any more or less than a Windows XP system (or a Mac, for that matter). Compared to Linux, on the other hand, well,... there's still no comparison,... ;-)

As for all the extra "eye candy" ... yeah, it's probably a little over the top. But on that same coin, Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?

Still, if you have Windows XP, there's still no reason to rush out and replace it with Vista (just not worth the hassle, really). But if you're buying a new PC, I wouldn't freak out if it has Vista,...

It is the price that is wrong

[flyingfsck]

Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.

Re:What about the iPhone?

[Osty]

And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones

Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:

1. Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
2. Import the mp3 into iTunes
3. Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
4. Rename the new .m4a file to .m4r
5. Re-import the .m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone

"Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).

I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion :).

Not to rain on your parade

[westlake]

The w3Schools OS Platform stats for November:

Vista 6.3%
Growing at slightly under 1% a month.
This train may have been slow leaving the station, but it is building up momentum.

XP 72.8%
XP's loss is Vista's gain?
The so-called "upgrade" migration to XP is beginning to look like just another Geek fantasy.

W2K 5.1%
Some good news for the die-hards.

Linux 3.3%
Slow erosion all year, and not much to show for four years of "The Year of Linux"

OSX 3.9%

A healthy niche, but ending the year where it began.

Re:What about the iPhone?

[UnknowingFool]

Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion.

If I understand the whole 32/64 bit situation with Microsoft correctly, the 64bit model that MS chose (LLP64) may cause some issues beyond simple driver replacement. LLP64 creates a new integer type called long long which is 64bit and keeps long as 32bit. LP64 (Unix version) redefines long as 64bit. The advantage of LLP64 is that overflow will not occur since there are two distinct types but casting a pointer to a long will not work. The opposite would be true for LP64.

The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment?

Re:It's called a consensus opinion.

[Sique]

I don't hate it. I just never used it yet. I have still Win2K at home and WinXP on my company's laptop. Even though it is labelled 'Windows Vista capable', and my company is actually the maker of the laptop, it never rolled out Windows Vista to its employees.