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Vista Shipped On 39% of PCs In 2007
Stony Stevenson writes "Vista is proving far less popular than XP did with new PC buyers during the earlier OS's first year on the market. This conclusion follows from statements by Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show. Gates boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January. Based on Gates's statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that shipped in 2007. And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only outperformed first-year sales of XP by 10%, according to Gates's numbers, while PC shipments have doubled in the years since XP's release."
You have to wonder how many of the people that did get Vista on their laptop/desktop remove Vista and install XP? I work for a major electronics retailer and we always have people that buy Vista machines and have us install windows xp on them for a fee. Sort of related but we get an ungodly high amount of computer returns with the reason being Vista sucks.
I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop with Ubuntu factory installed.
Uhhh... I would assume that all the systems were imaged using Ghost or something similar. They would have been anyway with Vista in order to avoid manually setting them up for deployment, so no additional time was spent versus deploying with Vista, and the site license would mean that no dollars were spent versus Vista. So, that hardly seems like an act of pigheaded ignorance. I would have done exactly the same thing, under the circumstances.
They couldn't. The Windows site license from Microsoft is strictly upgrade only - you have to have a valid retail or OEM license to accompany the PC to begin with.
I know it's nice to feel all elite, but that simply isn't true.
Plenty of my friends don't use computers as part of their employment (concrete workers, fitters etc) but are quite capable of basic computer tasks like email, web, games etc. They are also quite capable of recognising that the Vista interface is more confusing, inconsistent and sluggish that the one which preceded it, and are asking tech-minded friends to help them get rid of it. I'd say at least half of the people I know who've bought a machine with Vista installed have asked for the computer to be upgraded to XP or Linux within a month.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
For some reason, a lot of PC manufacturers don't give the consumer an option for a pre-loaded OS.
This is true. In the past (DOS days) people would ask me regarding computer purchase selections. What I said then is just as true today. Find out what programs you need to run and then find the hardware which is capabile of running it.
Many people wanting to do multimedia, photography, video production, etc are needing something with realtime hardware support. Those people are moving to hardware and OS that support the required applications. Vista is not a real time OS and is unsuitable for many capture devices. Alternatives to fill the gap often include Apple and some Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Studio.
Nothing kills a live session more than a request for an Adobe PDF viewer update request in the middle of a session. I got this one during a live presentation while playing a DVD. The DVD on the projector simply stopped. Going to the laptop, we discovered that despite the fact were in the field with no internet connection, Adobe needed our permission to get an update. The fact a PDF viewer has permission to stop the show by having Windows Vista stop it to ask permission for an update without a net connection convinced me that Vista is unsuitable for presentation and digital audio workstation applications.
My Digital Audio Workstation is now Ubuntu Studio based with low latency and no interruptions of a live recording session. Some people prefer an Apple soulution.
Audacity is OSS and cross platform. It works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Many capture devices have serious latency and breakup problems in Vista. Audacity works in Vista, but capturing sound should be done on another platform.
Many popular USB capture devices simply are not supported on Vista because of the non-real time nature of the OS. Here are a few popular interfaces without Vista support;
Roland http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?ObjectId=743&ParentId=114
http://www.roland.com/products/en/UA-101/specs.html
Beringer http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pdf/man/m_702540.pdf
I found some of the Yamaha mixers with built-in USB interfaces list Vista, but the manual was quick to point out problems are caused if it has too little memory, has a slower processor, or several other items that can cause problems with multi-track recordings.
For real-time capture, I prefer to use a hardware priority OS. I have used this instead of Vista for Digital Music Studio work.
http://ubuntustudio.org/
The truth shall set you free!
Doesn't make Vista any less of a pig though. (Apologies to pigs everywhere)
All Apple computers are PCs (personal computers) with perhaps the exception of the XServers (or whatever they are called).