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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.'"
But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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
The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos.
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
Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be. The iPhone was, because prior to release, it bought a ray of hope to US cell-phone consumers that was cruelly dashed.
(Yes, I know the iPhone is number 5 on the list, but it's there for the wrong reasons)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
i'd ever see a new OS that would make people *want* to stick with XP.
It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"
The chant at Microsoft, "We're number one, we're number one!"
So what? It's the year of Linux on the Laptop!
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
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
"...and when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe." Why does that have anything to do with Vista? Isn't that just an indication that Apple make great computers?
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,...
Not that I classify windows users as sensible people in the first place, but why oh WHY are 90% of the windows computers sold today preloaded with Vista, if so many people can't stand it???
My best guess is that MS is licensing to machine retailers at some ridiculously low rate of like $35 for a $299 install, to insure we get it rammed down our throats whether we want it or not. This being the case, MS is taking a calculated loss on Vista, evidently hoping to get more windows users for whatever comes after vista? I don't think it's going to work out that way?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... 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
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The big deal with Vista, yes it's not that bad, but even in its best possible light, its a minor improvement on XP. In its worst light, it is actually worse then the product that was released before it.
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
I have found a great use for it though. I have officially taken the stance that I will "never buy Vista" and will also "not support Vista", which frees me from the usual role of having to do tech support for anyone that knows I am in IT. I will happily support a Linux distro and most XP problems have solutions on the net by now, so my "personal favours" workload has reduced dramatically.
Seems every OS and gadget from 2007 is listed here, including the media darling, the iPhone.
Leopard is listed, which came as a bit of a surprise until I read this:
Adding insult to injury, some upgraders even reported a Windows-like Blue Screen of Death when upgrading from previous Mac OSs.
There's nothing Windows-like about it. There's a big difference between a kernel panic and simply stalling during the boot process on a screen which happens to be a shade of blue.
In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple's reputation, however, may take slightly longer.
It speaks volumes that Apple fixed some problems 2 weeks after the OS was initially released. Their reputation is OK with me.
I don't think anything would please the author of this article unless it wiped his ass or gave him a spontaneous orgasm.
(sorry for the sort of off-topic-ish post)
If you don't like the newer Start Menu, why not just switch back to Classic View?
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.
part of it is that MS put out Vista when there was no need for it. A refresh of an operating system brings new drivers for new stuff, a bit of a different look, and built-in support or roughed in plumbing for what's coming down the pike. With the exception of gamers and videographers, for most people the PC, Mac, what have you, was fast and good enough three years ago. Most people browse the net, post here and there and do some mail/sms. They won't bother with computer or OS upgrades for quite some time, like only if their machine breaks. Companies, well, they dislike change, and the expense it brings, and for their limited computing needs, Vista brings nothing to the table.
The gamers, videographers and other hobbyists, they will have more than enough power to run Vista anyway so that won't really be an issue. That there is not enough superior to XP software for them available in Vista, is another matter.
Really, if Vista fails, it is because MS tried to make a market when there was none. The halcyon days of the 90's when people upgraded like buying shoes is over. Somebody just didn't get the memo.
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.
Is there anyone outside of M$ that has said anything good about Vista? PCWorld said a few good things but their overall dissapointment carries weight because of their past enthusiasm. What this means is that Vista is so bad that anyone daring to defend it risks their credibility.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
People sure do hate Vista.
I have never seen this before. Nope. Not ever.
Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."
Vista is not horrible. Is is great? Not really. But it works and it works pretty well. It is a bit overly secure (but that is because of install base that makes Microsoft OS worth attacking; Apple is expected to be targeted within the next 2 years due to increasing popularity) and overly prettified (but so is everything. I hate all the animations of OS X and now even Linux flavors--they add nothing; my attention span is not that short that I need my windows to be all fancy in minimizing and restoration.) But it works.
People be all acting like Vista is the worst thing ever. It is not. It is not even the worst thing released this year.
Office is 10x worse. The "ribbon" interface is horrible. It went from usable and known to clunky and confusing. I hate it. It would be a good package otherwise.
The crazy thing is, microsoft spent an incredible amount of money and time on Vista. Then before release cut a lot of the features that were in Longhorn.
I'm also very cynical about their multi versioning ultimate, basic etc. They're just trying to segment the market to maximize revenue, it's software - it isn't costing them anymore to produce ultimate than basic.
Extra DRM restrictions on HD content etc just makes me want to puke.
I just expected more. Vista and Bill Gates can go to hell.
Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?
This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?
In real world use I see it as:
1. An excellent home OS where applicable
2. An OS that has no place in the enterprise
The hardware constraints (somewhat beefy hardware, drivers issues, etc...) make it nearly impossible to considering implementing in the enterprise in the near future.
But for a home OS I fail to see the problem. It's stable. It has a lot of nice little features (great indexing and file management (probably best I've seen by default in any OS to date), finally something that nicely uses previously wasted RAM and CPU cycles, improved user management and security, nice built in backup features, much better multi-media management (this one sorts goes with indexing and file management I supposed) etc..).
I know, there's ton of issues out there even for those where it should work. But there are for any OS. And for every "my network slows down when I play music" on Vista there's a "if you lose your network drive in the middle of a file move, your file goes *poof*" on another OS.
Sure, your old sound card might not work with Vista. So don't upgrade to it. I don't see that as a knock on the OS. Legacy support is always a give and take when upgrading. The "beefy" requirements to run it are always overstated around here. Turn off aero and your middle of the pack 4 year old CPU will run it just fine with a gig of ram. I don't know if there's enough of a reason to want to upgrade over XP for the cost. But surely after using both a lot I'd much rather have Vista, it's sandbox, and it's interface (even without aero, window thumbnails, and transparent windows) then XP.
Generally I think Vista just gets railed because no real "geek" should run windows, and because for some reason it's not OK for MS to release *new* software only meant for *new* hardware. The negativity isn't based on the actual product because the actual produce isn't that bad.
And to those who claim Vista has been treated unfairly at /. by a bunch of snobby, anti-Microsoft uber-nerds, there is is in black and white. One of Microsoft's major sources of free publicity has just offered to speak at the funeral.
It takes one back. The sneaky-peaky buzz about something called, gasp, "Longhorn". The breathless, it's almost-just-about-nearly-any-day-now blurbs.
And now, this. The honeymoon is truly over, and the groom is sporting a frying-pan-sized lump on his forehead.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The trick is to find out exactly what hardware is in the thing and then go to the HP support site and claim you need the driver for XP. If need be, get a Linux live CD and boot the thing to Linux long enough to do a lspci and you'll have all of the information you need. At this point Google is your friend since you can either search for the hardware manufacturers driver or the HP driver. Just be sure you download at least the network drivers so get a network connection once you have installed XP.
From my experience with my wife's DV9015, HP has XP drivers for all of their hardware. They just don't let you get to it if your system identifies itself as having Vista when you connect to support. That's where using Google to find the XP drivers comes in. HP will let you download the files even if your system is running Linux if you ask for a specific file. It's just that they've idiot-proofed their support site so you can't easily get an XP driver for a Vista system by mistake. Download the driver files, stick them on a thumb drive, install XP, load drivers from thumb drive and you've got a fully functional XP system.
Cheers,
Dave
Note: I stopped at the Linux step for my HP zv6015. See my blog if you want the details: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The "Start" menu has always sucked in MS-Windows. It's never been good. Not at all.
And here's why:
Every GOD DAMNED vendor in the world has their own fuckin' menu! Instead of programs grouped by function or task, you get "Adobe Acrobat" and "Adobe GoLive!" and "Microsoft Office" and "McAfee Virus Scanner" and SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A MENUING SYSTEM?
Sorry. I get really het up about this issue. It's one of the simplest, most fundamental problems with every version of MS-Windows. It's the most concise indication of the target audience of MS-Windows.
Other corporations.
Not the end-user. MS-Windows wasn't designed for end user ease-of-use. I've used computers, and helped other people use computers, for 25 years, and MS-Windows is the worst to have to teach. It makes the least sense, and is the least pleasing. It's a sad state of affairs when the biggest MS-Windows proponents say, "But I have to use MS-Windows, since that's the only thing MS-Office runs on," rather than (as most Mac users say), "Of course I use a Mac. It's fun."
The "Start" menu shows just how fucked-up and disorganized MS-Windows really is. It's hard to find a specific program, and when you are looking for a program to do a specific task, you have no idea how to find it. You have to "know" which programs do what, and which corporation makes each program. It's a corporate mash, and it tastes bitter, with a lingering sour aftertaste, like bad wine in a good bottle.
That's why MS-Windows is painful to use, and you'll find very few people who love to use it, even among fanbois. You can tell by how they defend it they don't really love it. It's just the sports team they chose to back.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
They may be spot on by ranking the debacle that is Vista as #1 on their list, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are just following everyone else's lead. FTA "and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets"... obviously they've never heard of Enlightenment, Compiz, Beryl or KDE4.
/.er, but they lost me right there on the second line of the second paragraph.
I enjoy a good MS bash as the next
I'm slightly sick of the Slashdot MS bashing.
:P) I also run a Linux server at my home... Whilst nothing fancy it runs postresql, apache, coldfusion plus also ktorrent - I consider myself fairly agnostic.
They obviously didn't try running Vista on a tablet PC. On my wife's TC4400 with a dual core 1.83ghz celeron and 2GB memory it's the duck's nuts of mobile computing. I absolutely love the upgrade from XP in every aspect - battery performance, usability and especially how wonderful the pen interface is. I've been using it all day to get through a difficult spec and am wondering why I never tried this before - beats the print outs any day.
The only place where WinXP is still better (given reasonable hardware) is games. That'll probably be changed around with 10.1 and the next generation of graphics cards. This is why I multi boot my main PC (3.8ghz Q6600), it's better for games not to have a full application base installed alongside it anyway so a separate partition makes sense.
For the record (karma whoring?
ISO certified == THX certified
Argh! This "consumed a gig of memory just sitting there" is such a complete misconception.
Your operating system SHOULD be using up memory when NOTHING ELSE IS USING IT!
If nothing else is using the memory then the OS SHOULD be using it for caching and whatever else it feels like. As long as it RELEASES said memory when SOMETHING else wants it, what the HELL is the problem with the OS using it?
It's just such a friggen cop out to slam an OS for doing that. I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
Just give it a friggen rest.
Pick on Vista for reasons it should be picked on.
I run it at home and these are my gripes:
* DVD Maker, what could easily be a really nice, quick way of putting video compilations on very pretty DVDs, but RUINED by its complete lack of ability to generate anything like what it shows during ALL it's previews. Either it'll burn it in the wrong aspect ratio, or it'll just quit burning at 99% with no helpful error message.
* Deleting things is sometimes PAINFULLY slow. I mean, how can deleting one shortcut from the desktop take around a minute before the message goes away?
* Copying things can be horrendously slow. Unless you're copying from a local disk it seems to have some serious file management issues.
* It took me a LONG, LONG time to stop the darn thing bringing itself out of standby, no matter how many places I told it not to.
Here is what I actually LIKE about it:
* The games folder is very nice, nicely displayed, good info, very nice, look forward to increasing my games collection on it.
* The photo gallery is GREAT, really easy importing and tagging of photos and great organisation
* It does look pretty
* All my hardware has just worked straight away with it (gamepad, scanner, printer, camera)
* The start menu quick search feature is indeed cool, much quicker to find things that way.
* Live thumbnails of the programs you have open on your taskbar, actually quite handy to see what's going on with other apps.
And what I couldn't care less about:
* The sidebar... waste of resources, never have it on
* The funky task rotating 3D task switcher, pretty, but completely pointless
If they'd just fix the darn bugs I'd be very happy with Vista, it's just a case of having one of them come up and thinking 'How in the hell did this pass quality control?'. It's amazing to think that a company with that many employees doesn't come across the bugs that so many of us actual users do.
The only thing keeping most companies using MS Office is inertia. It would be too much work to retrain people on a new interface with OpenOffice or KOffice or any other alternative. And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. The learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.
Suppose you are writing a technical paper with a coauthor at another institution who uses Word 2003. You upgrade to 2007. You discover that in compatibility mode you can't edit the equations in your own paper (they're graphic images). And if you switch out of compatibility mode, your coauthor will be unable to edit the equations you create. WTF??? How much time is being wasted on this kind of crap for people who were happy with 2003. And if you think I'm making this up, here it is from Microsoft:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444751033.aspx
And the ribbons? I'm sorry. I'm glad you're happy, but for many of us who knew the keystrokes, and took the time to learn the capabilities of the software, it's a huge step backward. I heard the hype and I gave it a chance, but I agree with PC World on this one. If the ribbons are optional, I have no complaint. But they take up a huge amount of precious screen real estate (esp on a small notebook) and they practically force you to use a mouse, which some don't mind, but it slows me down enormously.
And WRT those little icons that you claim have menu counterparts: where is the menu item "Accept all changes in document" when you're tracking changes? Seriously. If it's there I would like to know.
But is Microsoft even _capable_ of adding DirectX 10 to XP? Microsoft is a 'look forward' company and they throw away code bases and start over with every release. Backwards compatability is only important in a check-list fashion, i.e. 'does xxx binary application still work in regression tests?' Then they go in and add whatever kludge makes xxx binary work on the new OS codebase and the bloat grows and grows.
I imagine they've already coded DirectX 10 to well past the point where it could be merged back into XP. That's the Microsoft Way!
If you know anything about developing software, you know that a product that spends 5 years in development before release is going to suck. Has nobody at Microsoft read The Mythical Man-Month? Vista is OS/360 all over again. (Look over the chapter titles again. It's uncanny.) I thought Microsoft was supposed to have tough interviews; maybe they should just ask "have you read TMMM?".
Anybody at Microsoft who spent the last 5 years on Vista either already knew it would suck (before it was even released), or is at least finally learning a valuable lesson about software development. Nobody said life had to be easy; you don't win every time.
If you're working on the flagship product of the world's biggest/richest software company, releasing a "lackluster" product years late, and making every mistake enumerated by a 30-year-old book which is essentially required reading in the industry, that *is* horrible. I mean, that's practically the definition of how to be horrible. Short of going out of business over the fiasco, I can't imagine how to be horribler.
Alan Kay was right: "I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past". If they were a hardware engineering team and nobody happened to know how to apply Newton's results, would anybody be similarly apologetic?
Or a mathematician -- practically everything they do is standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. If you start from first principles in mathematics (like, say, Peano's Axioms), you're pretty much guaranteed to never produce anything innovative. If a group of mathematicians said "well, no, nothing new to report, but look, the old stuff again with this pretty 3d effect!", they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
So no, sorry, as a developer, I don't have a lot of pity for those guys. When you're 2 guys in a garage, it's fine to make rookie mistakes. When you're a $50B company, people expect more than "lackluster" results and a rehash of the industry's greatest blunders from the 1970's.
to the 5 people who own a tablet pc
Even if that statistic represented the whole market, almost all new PC's come with Vista preloaded (due to customer demand? HARDY, HAR, HAR!), and the PC market is still growing. Vista's share WILL grow, because the market is stuffed to the gills with Vista PCs. It'd better be growing pretty damned fast before you start trumpeting Vista's success.
This is my favorite part though. The very page you linked to sums it up best: Statistics Are Often Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.
Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers. Can't get much clearer than that.
No, I actually have been posting that from what I've seen at school, it wasn't being adopted. My university recently joined the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Allience (MSDNAA) and all CS students could download free copies of Vista Business edition. Many installed, but as I reported, I didn't know of even a single version that lasted. Every single one went back to either WinXP and/or Linux. I didn't go so far as to suggest MS would end up a laughing stock, but I did say it seemed to fail.
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1267/vistanokx6.jpg
I had an expectation of 0, but the reality was closer to the square root of -1.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
Neither was XP. And when Windows 2000 came out I didn't see people leaping from NT4 like ants to a sugarbowl either.
Other than Windows 95/NT4 which was an amazing upgrade from Win3/NT3, no Windows release has been terribly exciting. Win98 from Win95? No big deal. Windows XP Pro from 2000 Pro? No big deal. Windows ME from 98...nothing could be less compelling. Windows XP Home from Win98? A boost in stability to be sure, but 'worth the cost of upgrading' for the new features? Hah!
The only real issue with Vista is that its just an evolutionary step. All the Vista hype was monsterously out of proportion to the actual product. Some of that is Microsofts fault... and some is just the internet doing what the internet does.
Hell, even in the Mac world... really, other than MacOS6 to MacOS7 in the early ninties and MacOS9 to OSX 10.0 each release hasn't been a wondrous new dawn upon the world. (Although in Apple's defense the OS 10.x revisions have come out more rapidly than the revisions to Windows. But then again...even Vista Ultimate at full retail is a fraction of what it would have cost to upgrade to each 10.x revision. (Although to Apples credit the family pack pricing is an excellent idea I'd like to see from Microsoft.)
Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."
I did a lot of computer repair work back when XP first came out AND handed out a lot of advice. I am also as uncomfortable with Microsoft as the next guy. When someone would buy XP back then. I had to admit, it was a step up from 98. Now I did not want to change from 98, it was plenty stable for me and used less resources.
But I could understand why people upgraded. It was more stable for the average user who did not know how to tweak his machine. Some people even liked the fisher price interface. A good laptop or desktop ran XP decently.
Of course spyware and drive by downloads made XP a disaster for the average lo-tech user. Since 2004, it takes less than 3 months to reduce XP to such a mess, that it has to be reloaded.
Flash forward to today and I could not say the same thing. Anyone who is in the market for a computer I warn to not try vista, especially if they are comfortable with XP. It runs slower on hardware that would make XP fly. If you are an average lo-tech user, you will be confused by how everything you are used to has been moved around. Many new features are downright invasive.
Being objective about things. I have gone from "upgrading from 98 to XP, well to each his own" to "upgrade from XP to Vista, you will regret it".
We have one Vista laptop user left at work and he is begging to get back to XP. Lets face it. Vista is a dog no one wants to take for a walk.
vi +
People who play at a rigged game eventually get sloppy. That much was entirely predictable.
Background: I work for various schools, managing networks. Have done for years. Linux fan (Linux-only at home) but always recommend most sensible solution at work, which means XP at the moment (and for the past few years) when you have Windows software you need to run. Schools can't really do non-Windows when their local authorities are demanding they use Windows packages for finance, inventory etc.
Vista is a heap of rubbish. We looked at it when it first came out, and didn't even bother to keep the OEM-installed Vista image on the hard disk on the trial computer that we used. After ten minutes of trying it out, we wiped it back to XP. Nothing new, nothing useful, nothing that saves us time, in fact the exact opposite. Verdict: No benefit.
Later, having moved schools and been given more time and complete say in a new network, I installed it on a laptop that, ironically, we'd specified as XP only but happened to come with OEM-installed XP and a Vista Business Key/Disk. Install procedure was fairly unobtrusive. I remember one or two quirks though, where I heard myself say "I'm not an idiot, just do what I want."
Got into Vista and followed my standard "join to domain" procedure. This involves installing the usual Flash, etc. players and Office and configuring network interfaces, turning off certain options etc. Installs went fine (albeit blighted by the UAC which I eventually turned off completely because I couldn't have that bugging me, so my users certainly weren't going to tolerate it) and then I got round to doing things like setting IP's/DNS, proxy servers, setting up local users, etc.
Then it just turns into a nightmare. Everything's moved, quite often to even more nonsensical places. "Classic" modes for anything don't actually put things back how they were in older versions of Windows. Some options gone completely (like turning off that "new" Login window which, incidentally, totally stopped my usage of the machine - if my users have to type RANDOMSERIALISEDMACHINENAME\theirlocaluser they aren't going to bother. Instead of just selecting from a drop-down box like in XP... there I was thinking that computers were supposed to save you time and having to type in long, obtuse commands. And what happened to the double-Ctrl-Alt-Del classic login? Or the option in GP to turn it back?), some just weren't powerful enough any more.
There is no way that my users could do some of the things that Vista demanded of it. They are not going to sit and click through twenty-odd UAC dialogs that make absolutely no sense just to install their local software (this is why they get a local login for out-of-school use - so they can install their own software for testing, evaluation etc. for the next academic year without buggering up their network profile), nor are they going to remember to type in the machine name, or even have a clue where that was stored when they do need it.
Everything was suddenly more complex, like going back ten years. I could seriously look at Vista and XP and if I didn't know better I'd say that Vista was a first over-reaching attempt to improve on Windows 98/2000 and then people complained and it was replaced a few years later by the much calmer and more friendly XP. It really is that bad.
And that's before I even bothered to look at activation, program compatibility, etc. which would (from my own research) be killers for the types of places that I work. We run a lot of different programs. At least 25% just weren't avilable/updated/ready for Vista at all and still aren't - but the fact of the matter is that most of them were nothing more than a few webpages stored on a CD with a simple executable interface or children's games using things like Shockwave to display. I don't mind Vista breaking compatibility, so long as it provides advantages. We had to upgrade most (not all) software in the 98 -> XP era anyway because of similar problems but we got advantages by doing so - better security, better network integration, etc. Vista just takes
I'll happily concede that in openness and freeness, OO.org is the clear winner, but the GP's stated reason for switching seemed to be that the interface of office2k7 was more different to the previous version than oo.org, and that being different was a bad thing.
personally I really hope that OO.org do adopt something similar to office2k7's ribbons. finding features I havent previously used has never been a simple task for me in oo.org, or any previous version of office, but in office2k7 things seem to be grouped with a little more sanity than previous efforts. office was never the pinnacle of interface design, and OO.org was more or less a crappy copy of that design. sometimes you just have to know when to throw a design out and start over
TIAEAE!
You can still run Win32 apps on Win64.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64
It's quite efficient too
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1857484,00.asp
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
it's inaccurate in that it's actually turning out to be far worse than Windows ME
:(
Indeed ME was quickly replaced by XP, 2K was availible to those who wanted it and many people unofficially downgraded to 98 even though they weren't meant to (since piracy protection was nonexistant in 98).
OEM vista buisness and ultimate come with downgrade rights but you need to already have the media/key to excercise it and if you end up using retail or system builder (whitebox OEM) media/key then you will have to telephone activate. Those who got vista home basic or home premium with thier machine and don't have a volume license agreement they can use to get the machine up to professional and onto software assurance have to either buy XP retail or bend the rules on system builder packs. Using a pirate copy of XP is another option but that brings problems of it's own (if you don't have access to a legit XP corp key that hasn't been widely leaked and you don't very carefully control installation of updates then you are likely to run into wga). Then you have the whole issue of drivers etc to consider (though presumablly this was an issue going me-98 as well).
So for the most part non techincal home users who get vista with thier PC are stuck with vista until MS releases thier next os
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The interesting thing in the article that no one mentioned (and none of the Microsoft bashers at Slashdot ever want to mention) was this blurb: "When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant--in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated." Vista was in Beta for over 3 years. Microsoft gave 3rd parties FOREVER to modernize and get used to the new UAC --- but they dropped the ball. Poor, cheap, no-nothing 3rd party developers that can't figure out how to write a program that doesn't run as admin / root are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft did everything in its power to force these idiots to change --- but they failed --- and now many of those some idiots (including a lot of you that post on slashdot) blame Microsoft for poor compatibility. You bitch for years about poor security. They give it to you, and you now bitch about incompatibility. What do you want?
The thing about Vista is that while it has almost no major improvements compared to Windows XP, if you add up all those tiny little "nice" additions, it does improve the overall user experience if you have a computer that doesn't suck. Honestly, if you turn off the idiotic UAC botherware and just use the OS for everything from productivity to games, you will probably find that things tend to run decently.
As for benchmarks, I really wonder when the last set of benchmarks have been run to compare Windows XP to Windows Vista. Driver support from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD has improved quite a bit, and I am curious at this point if the differences in performance have become minimal between the two operating systems or not.
Keep in mind that if you test with computers that only have one gig of memory, you are unfairly penalizing Vista in the same way that running Windows XP with only 256 megs of memory will be unfair if you compare it to a Windows 98 machine. If you starve the OS during testing, then you can't expect to get fair results. Vista has a number of additional services running for various things, and they do take a bit more memory and CPU power. How much of the reduced performance is caused by all of these services(many that may not be needed)?
So, Vista may not be fantastic, but if you compare Windows XP to Windows Vista with four gigs of system memory, Vista may not seem quite as bad as many would have you believe. If you tested the OS a year ago, the improved drivers may very well change how well it works for you. Just don't give me that garbage that it doesn't run well on your three year old computer, because Windows XP ran like crap on older computers too if they didn't have enough RAM.
OS X Leopard, especially on PowerPC feels like you downloaded a beta torrent by paying $130 (more in my case, family license).
There are inexplainable issues, they simply make no sense and I am not speaking about that "move files" bug, I never moved any file on any OS, I always considered it a risk.
In my case, OpenGL is 40% slower (tested multi, multi tools) than Tiger 10.4.11. As Nvidia says "it is up to Apple" for drivers, I reported to Apple and never heard back except one really redundant and irritating question.
Those people doing a massive job to port thousands of open source tools to OS X have to start over. Developers never had final version before it hit shelves by a childish (I think) reason as "They are leaking them". There is a blame game going on and those tiny Mac fanboy fascists are trying to censor every kind of feedback on web. I am not speaking about posting a security issue to public forums and whine to slashdot when it is deleted.
I am patiently waiting for 10.5.2 update, I will see if it fixes anything or gives slightest hope and if it doesn't, I will do my first OS downgrade since Atari 800XL DOS 3.0 back in 1985.
I don't like to post bugs to public but I have seen some idiots modded down (using overrated censor) some posts making sense here.
Vista? I have used it for 3 days, I haven't seen major issues but it was a professional developer machine.
As much as I hate the OS, Vista is the most disappointing product of 2006. It wasn't released this year, it was released last year.
Microsoft Halo doesn't need Windows Vista; it's also available for Xbox or Xbox 360. Nor will any Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, or Super Smash Bros. game be likely to require Windows Vista. The closest thing to a Windows version requirement for games on consoles that I've seen is the requirement of Windows XP (and not Windows 2000) to use Nintendo's USB Wi-Fi adapter ($40), but a cheap wireless B/G router (also $40) works around that problem handily.
So this narrows it down to PC-exclusive games that need DirectX 10. I am not convinced that those will come out in the next three years because nowadays, many PC-exclusive games are either MMORPGs or games from smaller studios, which need all the customers they can get.