Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling 'incredibly well,' he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. 'Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,' the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on '45 percent of all of new business PCs.' Which is enlightening, since business users are about the only buyers of new PCs that get a choice." Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?

Comments

Who does he think he's fooling?

[westbake]

Even Time magazine has notice Microsoft is "an Empire in rapid decline".

Who's this message directed at? The last people he's going to fool are corporate users. Home users continue to avoid buying new computers because what they have is working just fine. Even if he could convince them to go buy, they have a giant selection of $500 and less Vista failure laptops to chose from if they don't just buy a $300 EEE PC with GNU/Linux.

Re:Who does he think he's fooling?

[trifish]

And, in the mean time, 15% of desktop users use Windows Vista.

Not willingly..

[crossmr]

Not all business users have a choice. Dell gives you a choice. HP does not.
We're an HP value-add reseller and we can't get xw4400 workstations without vista. We had to request a downgrade kit (they will only give 1 to each business address, even though we order hundreds of these a year) and then downgrade them to XP.

I had some friends who have it on their new laptops...

boughtVista

[Paradise Pete]

Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?

I know two people. One is now using XP, and the other got so mad he bought a Mac.

It's PC Magazine and just about everyone.

[ibane]

PC Magazine's editor sure gave Vista the thumbs down. The only thing any of my friends ever tell me is that "It looks nicer" so they like it but they have more problems with it than XP. That kind of opinion does not make me want to risk buying a new PC.

Re:It's PC Magazine and just about everyone.

[Planesdragon]

5 reasons a geek should buy Vista, off the top of my head:

* 4 GB of memory supported on 32-bit Vista.
* Backup to DVD-R or CD-R
* MUCH better Wi-Fi control
* Restore Points can be set for user files, not just system files
* New UI technique -- hit windows key, type the name of your file or program, and hit enter. (The upgraded Explorer has a whole bunch of new and useful bits, but this is the one I miss the most from the Beta.)

If I could upgrade the three PCs my wife and I have for less than $100 total, I'd do it. But since I can't, Vista isn't worth the upgrade price -- but I wouldn't shy away from it if I were purchasing a new computer.

Re:It's PC Magazine and just about everyone.

[ozmanjusri]

* 4 GB of memory supported on 32-bit Vista.

Misleading. 32 bit Vista can only access 3.1GB without a hardware hack called PAE which will not work with all software.

Re:It's PC Magazine and just about everyone.

[Loopy]

Incorrect. Vista32 CAN access all 4GB of address space but must ALSO use that space for graphics RAM addressing and kernel mode stuff, which means you typically end up with 3.1-3.3GB of user-mode memory available to programs (which is what shows up in system properties).

Re:Bad Vista

[awarrenfells]

Let me rephrase, of the Vista Customer's I have worked with, 90% of them have stated that they hated vista. As far as the technical support side, I don't support Vista, just their "internets" :P And usually the reason they don't like vista is because it runs so darn slow, and for strange reasons it plays magic tricks with people's NIC around windows update time =D

Sales of Windows off 24%

[symbolset]

It's remarkable how he can paint a happy face on the steepest decline in the history of the company.

If his figures are correct, the PC market just experienced the largest contraction ever and nobody noticed. Especially odd in that Intel's operating income is up 23%. Top PC seller HP's net income is up 16% on strong notebook sales and huge growth in emerging markets. Lenovo is reporting a 17% increase in sales on strong global demand.

Is anybody besides Microsoft seeing this decline? Is somebody lying to Ballmer? "Gee, no, Steve. Business is off everywhere. It's a recession. People adore Vista. You can put the chair down now."

Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred

[Maestro4k]

I think the hatred for it is overstated, and largely perpetuated by people who don't use it

I've been using it regularly on a new laptop since January and I absolutely despise it. I'm also really sick of seeing people say what you did: just because YOU like it doesn't mean all the people saying it sucks don't really hate it. I'm sure there are some that bitch about it who haven't tried it, but then again I'm sure there are some who claim it's great who haven't tried it either so they balance out.

So why do I hate Vista? I have several very good reasons:

• Vista refuses to show my XP machines under Network (what used to be called My Network Places in XP), I'm always forced to manually type in the address in the address bar to browse the shares on a computer. Yes I know about the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder that needs to be installed on XP machines, and yes it's installed, and yes it's working. Vista does show all the computers in the Network Map and shows the correct network topology, but none of the computers can be clicked on. The shares are browseable, just Vista refuses to make it easy to get to them. (Mapping network drives for all of the shares just isn't practical.)
• Vista really hates my Linux box. In addition to refusing to show the shares on it under Network it's difficult to get it to connect. It makes me try several times (a random number, anywhere from 2 to over 30) until it'll finally connect. This is particularly annoying because I can watch Samba's log file when it does this and it doesn't actually attempt to connect until the time it finally works. It just keeps telling me that the login info is invalid but doesn't actually attempt to connect to the server to find out. Once it does it connects immediately. Frankly I find this behavior a tad suspicious, why does it only do this on Samba shares but not XP ones? Whatever the reason it's inexcusable, none of the XP machines have ever had problems connecting to the Samba shares.
• Breaking standard UI conventions for something different that provides no benefit. The best example of this is that you can no longer right click on the back arrow in Windows Explorer to bring up a list of previous locations. No, NOW you have to click on a little down arrow next to the forward button to get this list (which shows forward and back both). Was there any real reason to break this? I can't think of any, they could have left right click behavior in and still added the arrow link for left clicking as well. This wastes my time a lot, even after 4 months of using Vista I can't get used to this. Another example is removing the up directory button and making you click on the name of the directory above your current one in the address bar. This is not intuitive at all.
• Near constant disc activity until I disabled searching and ReadyBoost. I had serious problems with this when using Firefox, I believe it was constantly indexing Firefox's cache for search. Why? I have no idea but it was very common to open a new tab and wait for a full minute while the disc would thrash. The laptop's got plenty of RAM (1GB) and once I disabled those two services the thrashing mostly stopped so it apparently wasn't swapping. I ran Vista with those two services active for the first 2 months so I gave them plenty of time to prove they were beneficial, and they simply weren't.
• Blue screens. Vista's blue-screened on me at least 3 times since I got the laptop. I haven't seen a blue screen on XP in so long I couldn't even tell you when it last occurred. But it seems to be a far more common occurrence with Vista. This in particular reminds me a lot of Windows ME.

There are other things but they're more minor, the above cut into my productivity the most for no good reason. I've given Vista a chance but it's days are looking numbered, I'm probably going to go to XP Pro soon as I'm tired of Vista wasting my time.

Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred

[jzuccaro]

I have been using it for about 2 weeks now so I can give you a list of improvements:

• MSPaint now saves to JPEG as the default file format.

There you go.

PAE is not a hack

[DragonHawk]

32 bit Vista can only access 3.1GB without a hardware hack called PAE which will not work with all software. Calling PAE a "hack" is also rather misleading.

PAE is a feature of the modern x86 architecture, just like MMX or SSE. It was introduced with the Pentium Pro in 1995 (13 years ago!), and has been standard since the Pentium II (1997). PAE increases the number of address lines from 32 to 36. It also adds a new mode to the x86 MMU (Memory Management Unit) which supports 36-bit hardware addresses. The new mode adds a third level to the page table structure, in facilitate a larger page table entry size.

Both Vista and XP enable PAE, but with a major caveat. Both avoid using any hardware address above the 4 GiB mark because it turns out a lot of drivers can't handle such. That includes drivers which ship with Windows -- and Microsoft takes on part of the support burden of those. (Microsoft doesn't support third-party (non-WHQL) drivers and never has.)

The reason both OSes enable PAE mode is to get NX (No Execute bit) support. (NX is used as a defense against code injection due via buffer overrun. Microsoft calls it DEP (Data Execution Prevention).) The NX bit is only present in the larger page table entries. So they enable PAE -- and take the performance hit of the third level of page table lookup -- but don't actually use the larger hardware address word.

So anyway, because the OSes can't use hardware above 4 GiB, they (re)configure all your peripheral hardware to exist within the 4 GiB space. That includes configuration space, ROMs, buffers, video memory, the AGP aperture, memory mapped hardware I/O (DMA), etc. Any RAM at those addresses gets "shadowed" and is not accessible to the OS.

Linux doesn't have this problem -- it's been 64-bit clean for years, and will happily put your peripheral hardware above 4 GiB. (One can still run into problems with motherboards, BIOSes, and/or expansion cards which don't support hardware addresses > 32 bits, though. Some motherboards don't have the PAE lines "wired". Some BIOSes just don't support it. And some 32-bit PCI cards don't support DAC (Dual Address Cycle), which would let them accept a 64-bit address.)

But to support a hardware address > 32 bits with Windows, you either need to run the x86-64 versions of Windows, or run Advanced/Enterprise Server. (The "Standard" version of Windows Server is limited in the same way as Win XP/Vista.)

Note that all of the above is about hardware addresses -- the actual address lines coming out of the x86 chip. The virtual address space is still limited to 32 bits and 4 GiB. And all software -- including the OS kernel -- use the virtual address space for practically all operations. But with PAE, you can at least have multiple processes which total to more than 4 GiB.

(There are also techniques which let a 32-bit process make use of more than 4 GiB of RAM, such as bank switching (memory windowing). But such techniques are cumbersome at best. Ultimately, a 32-bit process can only directly access 4 GiB of memory. You need long mode (x86-64/AMD64) to get a 64-bit virtual address space.)

(Windows further limits most 32-bit user processes to 2 GiB, reserving 2 GiB for the kernel. There's a BOOT.INI switch which changes that split to 3 GiB for userland and 1 GiB for the kernel. But unless a program was specifically compiled to support that, it will still only use 2 GiB. And robbing 1 GiB from the kernel can impact performance in other ways.)