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Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems
notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft's 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista's early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)."
Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to).
Yeah, and the Nazis were pretty popular too!
How we know is more important than what we know.
He blamed everyone but Microsoft?
Why does that not surprise me?
Where they invite users to 'try' the newest Microsoft OS, before revealing it's Vista.
Sure, have users play around a bit with a top of the line machine with a Slim Vista install, it's great.
Go to try to configure stuff, install 3rd party programs, run actual benchmarks, it's not so nice.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. Good for them, I guess.
Continued? What? Continued?? Health? What? Health??
I'm not sure those words mean what you think you mean.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
They had to scramble to get drivers out the door because microsoft hardly gave them any time to work with the last revisions of Vista.
TFA misses a major misstep. Microsoft allowed Vista to be shipped on hardware that just wasn't up to the task. Vista is unusable with less than a gig of memory, but chain stores were flooded with laptops equipped with "only" 512MB. This gave new users a terrible experience. "First boot" of a new laptop took half an hour. No application, not even Solitaire, would run without freezing.
Two of my family members had Vista laptops ... for a few hours, anyway, until I installed Ubuntu. Performance problems all went away after that.
I think Vista is getting a bad rap. I'm not a gammer, so I can't speak of it in that regard. I use my laptop, Dell E1505, dual core, 2 gig ram, ATI video card, sata drive, 6-10 times a day, it runs pretty much 12 hours a day, in and out of sleep mode, on wi-fi spots all the time. Photoshop, MS office, and a couple of custom built apps. No problems since March of 07. If you have the hardware, at least for me, it's been a pleasure.
Although it would be an effective defense if they did!
There's no question Apple is improving its brand.
However, the reason for Apple's popularity is a massive generalisation:
The hardware is slick, but it seems to be getting worse (or being exposed to more scrutiny) as it becomes more and more mainstream. The hardware also has little to do with MS and its products success or failure, in the sense that it is perfectly possible to spend Apple-type dollars on a Windows PC and get a very solid, high performance machine.
The price is ok - I won't restart that debate but it remains the case that Apple is typically somewhat pricier for the equivalent hardware.
But the last part really annoys me - I have been an Apple customer from time to time and they annoy the absolute crap out of me. They deny problems, use proprietary software, aggressively attack anyone who attempts to open up their hardware platforms, and generally act in a self-righteous manner.
What Microsoft needs to realise is not that Apple is gaining on it because it "just works", it is gaining because it works at all, unlike many aspects of Vista.* There are plenty of ways to attack Apple, but unless you have a product that is at least competently made there is no way you can do it.
A case in point is the revised Zune - it looks like in many ways (other than MS's bullshit DRM/proprietary interface stuff) it is the equal of the equivalent ipod. If MS can do the same with its OS, then suddenly it has a product as good as Apple and 80%+ of the PC market already in its corner.
* and yes, I do know what I'm talking about, I have done several Vista uninstalls which have dramatically improved stability and performance of new laptops
Read Pynchon.
The problem with VISTA is that it was launched it BETA. Missing drivers, big footprint hardware requirements, and horrible power management (which drained many a laptop battery) caused the early demise of VISTA. I gave up on VISTA, but I understand that MS is slowly working out the problems. Legacy drivers will always be a problem for VISTA and the TPM/DRM features will continue to make smarter users shun VISTA.
I am back to the DUAL BOOT Linux/XP on my older hardware and performance is decent. Same hardware with VISTA... forget about it.
"and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)"
:D
They just annoy the rest of us who change the channel whenever one of their terrible commercials come on. At least they are even with Microsoft on this point.
I beta tested Microsoft Vista when RC1 came out, and it was a horrific buggy mess, it was dying and spurting. Thanks to many like me, we preached the bad rap about Vista. In retrospect, Vista won't be like XP, hopefully Windows 7 is better than this. But, all in all, if you use vista for a while with the new updates, its tolerable, not great, but it still chugs along. I'm just hoping that Win 7 will have a new kernel(hahaha like that will happen) to streamline the operating system.
The systems they used in the Mojave advertisements were HP Pavilion DV 2000 machines with 2GB of RAM.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/07/31/windows-mojave-advertisements-start-to-appear-in-the-wild
Not really top of the line...
Can we have TFA tagged as 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense', or even 'haha', please?
That's obviously from all those people doing web searches trying desperately how to turn off all the annoying "features" of Vista.
Random and weird software I've written.
An interesting read, but this telling comment was on the last page:
Yes, the June conversation was dazzlingly candid, and we were looking forward to an equally blunt follow-up meeting--a scheduled late-July on-the-record interview with Erik Lustig, a senior product manager responsible for Windows Fundamentals. But then the universe as we know it returned to normal, and Microsoft became Microsoft again. Our interview with Lustig was overseen by a PR representative and was filled with the type of carefully measured language that we've come to expect from Microsoft when discussing "challenges." A "challenge" is Microsoftese for anything that isn't going according to the company's carefully choreographed plans. In the text that follows, we've combined the information conveyed during the mid-June background conversation with decoded translations of the "on the record" conversation we had in July. The contrast between the two interviews is stunning.
The part where Microsoft was open to admit mistakes - even if done with back-handed compliments to Apple and slaps to other developers - began to sound like a breath of fresh air.
But the article itself is highly qualitative and lacks coherence, as if we're missing the director's cut. (Yes, I am comparing a bad movie as superior to this written word - knowingly.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
So lets see, the drivers sucked.. maybe thats because, in order to get the WHQL/"Designed for Windows"/Windows Logo Program/whatever-the- marketing-team-decided-to-stick-into-the-name-today stamp of approval needed to be able to be able to supply a signed driver for 64 bit vista they had to run through a 6 month release gauntlet?
Any software release cycle that gets stuck delaying that long between finding a bug and issuing a fix is going to suck
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)
AT&T. Locked iPhones. Can't do anything not officially blessed with your iPhone unless you unlock it. Can't register your iPhone with anyone other than AT&T. iTunes is loaded with DRM, and QuickTime is pretty annoying... I do love Apple, but seriously, they constantly flirt with annoying their customers far more than most companies.
As there is more drivers for it.
major ones in some peoples' eyes. First the business version came on my laptop, but since I had plenty of money at the time, I got the Ultimate upgrade. Well thats been a disappointment as my Sony VAIO laptop has two graphics chips in it. A high end NVidia one which makes the graphics scream, but makes the computer hotter than hell, and a then a slow Intel i810. So I always keep it on i810, esp since I'm running FreeBSD which doesn't have very much control over the ACPI, ie it gets hot anyway.
The second problem was the price for something that wasn't much of a difference from XP as far as I can see, but perhaps I just don't care about the advanced features. The Ultimate updates have really never come, so that upgrade was worthless.
But as far as the OS itself, I think they did a good job on it. I only ever had a couple blue screens which were caused by the USB subsystem and were patched quickly. I also found that the only programs that don't work on it (that don't need special drivers) are DOS programs that require full screen display. And finally now I even have a driver for my 10 year old printer. So in the end it hasn't worked out so bad.
But perhaps thats more a reflection on Sony providing all of the needed drivers, updating them, etc, and making a really good laptop. I try to use FreeBSD when ever possible, but I have a couple Windows-only engineering programs so I need the dual boot.
We would expect a new version of Windows to be slower than the previous one, given immature drivers and new features that drain CPU cycles and absorb memory.
Why? Why would we expect this?
Given a stable and feature complete XP, give some rationale for users to eat a steaming pile of regression.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
need i say more?
Mojave was a controlled test and the user did not get to fully use the systems.
So why their certified those faulty drivers?
Most drivers carry the log "Made for Vista" with digital signature provided by MS. That is supposed to have some QA, isn't it?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
But why not pick at least a few users that didn't like to talk about how much Vista sucked? The "after" part made sense: the previous haters were now lovers. Still, if you leave after the first part of the commercial ("Bathroom break!"), all you'd have heard was how bad Vista is.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
wtf
Jeremy
Your grammar is terrible. Are you German?
How we know is more important than what we know.
He couldn't be German. His sentence at the end does not his verbs have.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The six billion wasn't spent on programmers it was spent on a time machine so Gates could send a copy of Windows 2015 back in time and get a jump on the competition. Unfortunately today's machines and drivers won't run it. Just wait until 2015, it'll be a smoking lean OS by then.
WTF? Operating systems are supposed to have two interfaces - an API and a DDI. MS fails at both.
Their technical problems are directly related to their legal problems. They can't be a neutral vendor of systems code while they're competing in the apps market.
Sure, Linux can be a pain in the ass to support, but usually it's a relatively simple build issue. And part of the pain is overly tight control of source code. With MS, there's simply no insurance that your technology will work with theirs.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the last two decades, MS IS ROTTEN TO THE CORE.
Finally he conceded [...] Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to).
Clearly, this "Microsoft exec" isn't informed enough to know that Microsoft Office runs on the Mac.
No, instead MS adopted their normal "fuck you all" attitude and forced a new, ill conceived driver model onto the IHVs.
Sure, XP driver support would probably not been a good long term solution, but it would have been a good idea for a year or two: enough time to make the transition slicker.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think this should have been dated feb 2007.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I hear that Microsoft will fix all of these bugs with its next release: Mojave!
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Every printer, network card, scanner and camera I've installed on Windows in the last ten years has tried to add useless dummyware on top of the driver.
You install the driver, then there's a "print manager" that has extra options, ink monitoring, visual queue monitors, and tons of crap that most people never need to do.
Of course, it also takes up residence in the system tray, in case you need dummyware at a click.
It's like our society in general. By attempting to pander to the stupid, it puts the smart in difficult positions and makes life worse for everyone.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
They have some control. They could require manufacturers to provide actual Windows install discs, not just "system restore" discs that contain the crapware as well. They could also do away with tying OEM CD keys to OEM discs, so that you could use any Windows disc to wipe the system and do a clean install.
Why does anyone at Microsoft think this is relevant now? Vista came out over a year and a half ago. Too little too late doesn't even begin to describe this. The conventional wisdom on Vista is that it sucks. That may change somewhat over the coming months/years, but in short, better luck next time MS.
Bill Gates screamed to his minions: "Make it more like a Mac!"
Windows 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 were absolute failures and they didn't come up with anything usable 'till 3.11.
All the while Bill G. screamed:"Make it more like the Mac!"
But they never got what made the software actually work.
Bill G. should have been screaming to his minions: "Make it work right"
But they never did and Linux came along...
Apple makes the Mac but they're not a computer company, and now they don't even pretend to be.
Linux is Microsoft's real competition but they're focused on the Zune and on the XBox and they're treating themselves like they treated everybody else for years...
Go Tux. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What I really what to comment on here is the state of the FUD surrounding Vista. There were many negative reviews of Vista at time of release, which were deserved, if a little hyperbolic
For any mass-market commodity, first impressions count. A simple, clean design that does not annoy during the early stages of introduction means positive market and mind share. Any glitch -- any glitch that arises during that critical word-of-mouth attention span immediately after a product's introduction will get carried around with the news of its existence. "Oooh, Shiny!" followed by "the battery life sucks" later, is far easier on the general impression of a product than "Oooh, Shiny, but the battery life sucks", which is toxic. It depends entirely on how much baggage trails along with the initial rumor. It's not often recognised how much more important it is to have a painless experience, than it is to be early-to-market.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's a very poor ripoff of MAC OS.
It's funny; one of the reasons I switched to the Mac was that I looked at Vista and thought, "well if I'm going to be running OSX, I might as well run the real thing."
The DRM infection which crippled video play back. And blocked 100% legal content playback.
Not just GPU drivers but sound drivers for things like soundblaster devices.
Broken power savings settings that ate laptop batteries.
A side panel that want a whole core for a news ticker and a clock.
To mention again. UAC which completely blocked MS ability to deploy Vista at the corp level from desktop to server room. ( Yes I know there are ways around this. But not without a ton of work by the admins. )
Lies about "Vista Able/Ready" branding on new PC's.
64bit non-working drivers for most devices. Still to this day some very common devices have little to no x64 support.
--
With all the years of effort put into building this brick of an OS. Don't you think the marketing guys and QA could have done a better job. Apparently not.
One thing that doesn't seem to get mentioned much is that if you have vista and a Windows 2003 R2 or later file server (or another vista box) they can use SMBv2 to communicate/share files with. This has vastly improved performance over WAN links...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What does Frasier have to do with this?
conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)
He obviously does not use an iPhone...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Saying Vista has problems is like saying George W. Bush is a few fries shy from a happy meal.
Yes, yes, yes, Vista = problems
Of course, for Microsoft to admit that, it took what, uh, XP sales still surpassing Vista's? or the fact that most people downgrade from Vista to XP? (I should say Upgrade.. :)
It's a crappy OS, takes too much resources, let's not even go with all the stupid security windows, etc..
It is said that we can learn from anything, even failure, well Microsoft, Vista should be a heck of a classroom of a lesson for you, that's for sure!
I think sometimes that Vista is to Microsoft, what "New Coke" was to Coca Cola.
A big mistake.
If you overlook the long amount of time it took Microsoft to produce Vista and the large system requirements, Vista is mostly OK. The driver issues and other compatibility issues are mostly the same as any other OS release, and there were some new features.
Having an integrated desktop search is nice (though not much nicer than Google desktop). As is having move/copy/delete dialogs as their own windows that can be minimized. UAC is annoying and poorly implemented, but it's a good security feature. There's a better volume mixer in Vista (you can change the volume in specific applications even if they don't have their own volume bar).
Don't get me wrong, I use XP / Kubuntu, but once compatibility issues get fixed, Vista will be better than XP if your system can take it.
You have to install more memory than Windows is able to address before it works properly?
That's what the Unix people like to say all the time, but it's not very helpful.
AFAIK for Desktop users there's very little difference between rebooting and restarting X.
They lose all their unsaved work - since most of it is still in apps in X. And the last I checked if you restart X, the apps die. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Sure it's not a big problem for people who just use X as an interface to ssh and screen, and for some browsing. But I heard there's this push for "Desktop".
In the old days Windows 95 ran on MSDOS, if it hung, even if you could get it to exit to dos and then you type win to start it back up, it's still not very helpful to most people.
Why don't they have control and why shouldn't they have control? It should be in the interests of the hardware manufacturers to let Microsoft have some control, and it should be in Microsoft's interests to take advantage of it. If it was all hardware manufacturers in a particular category (like video card manufacturers), or at least most of them, it might still be that Microsoft had something to do with it. Microsoft is the common factor between Windows and any given driver, after all. Maybe they just need to review the way they work with the hardware manufacturers.
Were they bad quality because Microsoft didn't give them stable and accurate specifications? Was it because Microsoft didn't give them a useful enough testing environment or some kind of unit testing framework to make sure their drivers actually did what they should have done? Do the Windows developers just need to liaise better with the driver developers?
Stability is definitely one of the areas where open source wins out. If Windows was open sourced, the hardware manufacturers would be able to have a much more intuitive and accurate idea of what's going on inside Vista when they write their drivers. If the drivers are open sourced, the Windows team would have much more freedom to examine and fix them, and maybe re-release Microsoft-patched versions of the drivers for approved used with Microsoft operating systems. Open sourcing certainly isn't the only way to help things be more stable, though.
Here's the thing about Vista, let's say that there had not been any bugs, and it worked perfectly. There still wouldn't be any reason to upgrade.
In the past, the OS upgrades contained substantial improvements that made people want the new product:
Win3.1 -> win95. Huge improvement, 32-bit apps (who remembers the horror of 16-bit addressing, huge pointers etc, that sucked)
win95 -> win2k. Great for business users, brought a better UI to NT4.
win2k -> winxp and win95->winxp. Home users started getting XP, which has a much better kernel, more stable OS than win95. Good game support. Better device driver model.
winxp -> vista? Hmm. What's the typical user get out of vista that's better. More security?
I think MS has basically already implemented all of the major features that 99% of the people want. Vista just added more cruft that didn't really add much value, and added crap like DRM that actually reduced value for their customers. And to add icing to the cake, topped it all off with a host of compatibility, performance, and driver issues that just made it a downgrade over their current product.
I was instaling Mcaffee Antivirus suite for a friend day before yesterday. The disk footprint for this was 7.4 gigabytes. I was in awe of the sweeping grandeur of what is Windows antivirus, requiring 2x the original disk space of Windows XP and all of MS Office. With Mcaffee there was a suite of applications -- a firewall, an antivirus scanner, different scanners for various things, and no doubt heuristic databases for the 1M+ Windows malware packages, their predictable and inevitable real-time variants, and some stuff just to try to catch general suspicious behaviour. Of course there was an updater which (hopefully) connects straight to the vendor for updates, and indeed the first time I ran it 20 minutes worth of download time was consumed updating.
7.4 Gigabytes. For the anti-malware.
Is it horrible of me to think that somewhere on the path to an environment that requires 7.4GB of protection, we might have said, "hey. I think we might go a different way"?
The biggest problem I have with Vista is that we still need 3rd party band-aids to keep it mostly working.
MS still doesn't know how to make a secure OS.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The sky is blue, water is wet (under earth-like conditions)... Movie at 11.
Well in that case, I have an idea. The next version of Windows should be called Excalibur, and it should be a complete bottom-up reimplementation. It will be based on a Mach microkernel surrounded by a fork of FreeBSD, all of which they can codename Natural Selection and release as an open source core of their operating system. Then, they'll simply port the GUI, Win32, .NET, DirectX, and their other programming systems over to this new OS, which should be relatively quick given that the underlying implementation is based on widely accepted standard methodologies. Binary compatibility layers for DOS and other backwards-compatibility stuff they want to support will be added as loadable modules. Most features they need to implement in the system can be implemented by existing F/OSS software, such as Apache, Samba, etc. This will be followed by a recompile of all their applications, and voila! Brand new OS. Brand new implementation. And they can tell everyone how great it is that Windows is based on Open Source and has a rock-solid UNIX core. (Something about all of this seems very familiar.)
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
If these drivers are "Windows Certified", then 100% of the blame lies with the one doing the certification.
If not, I think microsoft better do something about it because any asshat with a USB lightwand can tell the user to install his software.
Once you've accepted that there were problems, why the HELL attempt to deflect blame like that (making yourself look worse to anyone who actually thinks).
This kind of reaction is way too common and really bugs me.
Read the subject as well as the post - it was intended as humor, not trolling. Check out what Godwin's Law is, and you'll see why it's funny or at least obviously not intended to be taken seriously.
Really, is Vista that bad? Have you yourself ran it to full capacity? Maybe some of you should be on that commercial for "Windows Mojave." Sure it might be heavy software, but at least it is advancing the hardware industry. Think about it, 2 years ago a pc/ notebook was considered good w/ 1 GB of ram, now its 4 GB. You are paying the same price for a machine that blows away a machine 2 years ago because vista invoked a massive hardware movement with memory, gpu's , cpu's, and HDD/ SSD. Good for all of you that think vista is a bad thing! Get real.
The revised zune has taken the mp3 market by storm has it? Taken a chunk out of iPod sales? Oh wait, it hasn't.
MS worsed enemy isn't Apple or Linux, it is MS. MS wasn't loosing Vista sales to Apple or anyother OS company/provider, it was loosing Vista sales to XP, its own product.
That is REALLY REALLY scary for a company, after all, yes they COULD copy more of Apple or whatever other product but you can't make a copy of your own product without people wondering, if it is the same, why should I buy a new one?
Vista, as many predicted, turned into Windows ME and people just didn't upgrade and then slowly just stayed with what they had and decided to wait for the next version. MS can't have that, forget the home user, it means billions in lost sales if industry decides not to upgrade. Sure sure, they get Vista with each new PC, but MS has been counting on upgrade sales that now just ain't coming. Worse, MS had this offer where you could suscribe to upgrades. One of the reasons Vista launched earlier for business is that they needed to have a new product out to allow all those companies that had subscribed to actually update just ONCE.
Do you think that in future companies would be less willing to believe MS on a similar upgrade program? That is a lot of lost sales.
And now MS has to fund the development of a new windows, that is promised for 2010 but lets face it, when has MS ever launched on time? Worse, what if it again is a dud? Sure sure they promise lot of new stuff, but they always do that and never once have been able to deliver.
MS still is very rich, but the cracks are showing, it is no longer the darling of the stock market, it has had to pay dividend because its increase in price was no longer enough to keep shareholders happy. MS got a lot of money and a lot of money coming in but it is also bleeding money like mad. The 360 finally managed to beat Sony only for Nintendo to popup again out of nowhere. So MS will have to fight yet another round that might NOT turn a profit straightaway on that market. The Zune still ain't doing well. There is no Microsoft music store that anybody uses. Its office suite is under near constant attack. Netbooks can't run Vista but can do Linux. Apples market share is constantly increasing. Vista can be as easily pirated now as all previous MS software.
The real problem that MS has? That they got far to many problems to list. But the biggest is simply that they are to big to really feel the effect of their failures. Billy boy and dragged out into the streets for Vista or Zune or MSNBC or live search etc etc. MS bleeds some money but the company survives easily and that means they never adapt, never learn from their mistakes. What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But what is also true, that which doesn't hurt us, doesn't force us to change.
Apple on the other hand has felt the bite of failure and has changed because of it. That is what created the iPod and OS-X, because they screwed up before and felt it, so they learned from their mistakes and improved on it. Yes Apple is heavy-handed with its customers and denies problems, that is because so far that attitude hasn't hurt it. Its customers tend to forgiving in that department.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let's see if I've got this straight. You "can't abhor being LIED to", you hate FUD. So your response is to use a Microsoft product?
I just don't know what to say to that.
*walks away shaking head*
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
He couldn't be German. His sentence at the end does not his verbs have.
Does that mean Yoda was a Nazi?
Reason #8 that Vista sux is that they built it chock-full of internal DRM that simply wastes CPU cycles and memory trying to prevent you from using your hardware as you may wish to use it. This was never Microsoft's job to do, and I find it curious that this design decision doesn't even get passing mention. Makes me doubt how sincere and forthcoming he has actually been about the rest of the issues.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Last year when I got my new PC I needed to copy my employers source code tree from one directory to another, something I've done countless times under XP, yet under Vista it froze on me each time. I was shocked how crap like that could be certified for release - basically told the admin to reset the PC back to XP and don't ever intend on touching Vista ever again. At home Fedora rocks!
Really? I must have missed it. But then i am still using W2K, works fine.
I hated Vista at first, dumped it ran, but I went back to it about 2 months ago and installed all the patches and SP1 and was genuinely surprised at how good it actually was now. Alright it still has some silly niggles, but there is some genuine attempt at getting the MS house in order. Obvious stuff like not just allowing adhoc writes to the binary dirs, not just running shit as admin by default, alright UAC can be a pain at times, but I think it;s more a case that you've had to so easy over the years with Windows that you just assume it will do stuff without an argument, but Vista like all sensible O/S's forces you to think twice. I guess it's partly security but also a little bit of arse covering, you agree to it and it gets messed up,well that's your fault now.
I am not an MS fanboi, I use Kubuntu on my work and home desktops 90% of the time, but I was genuinely surprised, now hopefully they can pull their fingers out and get it right in Vista MK.II!
they didnt create enough artificial demand. then at least it would have been a profitable failure!
Need i say more?
Windows 7 won't have these problems! It'll fix everything!
But really. Blaming everyone but Microsoft? The drivers, when they deliberately changed the driver model at the last moment so XP drivers wouldn't work? What?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This is IMHO one of the most ridiculous statements snuck into that article: "we are willing to accept a few points performance hit for a new OS".
Well, excuse me but I wholly disagree. I would like someone to explain WHY I should accept that everything newer is slower. I already have more computing power in a word processing desktop than the whole of NASA used to send a man to the moon, AND - I - STILL - HAVE - TO - WAIT.
It takes minutes to do a boot up, whilst there are BIOSes out there that had to be slowed down to wait for the hard disks to spin up: why? It can take in certain circumstances near to centuries for Windows to boot up (con trick #4556b: showing a desktop to make the user think the system is available - oh no, not by a long shot).
So, summary question: why do we all accept that newer = slower and thus means new hardware? That you want new toys, fine, but after throwing out handfulls of good cash at a new system you have basically achieved standing still. And it boots even slower.
What I don't need: fancy bleeps and toots from Windows (the logon/start/stop and other sounds all get nuked on the first day, I'm not paid to market Microsoft and the sounds do not contribute anything functional). Animated cursors: no thanks, not if it slows things down. A new user interface: no thanks, the old one was quite OK, and any "productivity gain" (already damaged by online spellchecks and email alerts breaking my train of thought) is offset by the "where the f*ck did they stick it this time" search times and "oh sorry, I will save it for you at an older format" rewrites (one of the most hateful tricks they pull on people). And I don't need "the weakest link will nuke your data" DRM embedded either - we'll take care of our security ourselves, thanks, because then WE are in control of it. And the events with WGA haven't exactly strengthened my desire to trust you with my security, thanks.
So no, MS, don't give me fancy crap. Try and give me something that works faster on what I have - THAT is productivity gain, and THAT I would buy. Until then, keep it.
a.k.a. Windows Vista.
I like the bit where he complains about the crapware and payments:
I've worked in one of the vendor companies. Why do you think that places like Fujitsu Siemens, Dell and the like have the tag lines that say "[Insert company] recommends Windows Vista® [pick a version]"? It's because Microsoft give them kickbacks and payments for it!
Where's the difference between saying "Yes, use Windows Vista [version] because we get paid" and saying "Yes, have this 'useful' bit of junk on your machine because we get paid (a proportionally smaller amount, because it's a smaller app)"?
Vista! Don't let anyone else fool you. ME had a similar problem.
I haven't actually had any driver problems with vista and my old printer works fine. The computer came with 2gb of ram and it runs ok. BUT I can't copy a large file without it taking forever to estimate the copy time. I can't unzip a file without it taking forever. When I click the drop down address menu I don't get a tree of were I am in the directories I get some auto complete list of guesses which is really annoying.
I mean what sort of operating system is released that has trouble copying files? Its the stupidest thing since windows 95 "make your system disks" wizard which was the first thing you saw and broken so it never went away.
He slagged companies off for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end?
Was he standing in a faraday cage when he said it?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
...wasn't that the idea why signed drivers were introduced in Windows XP? Namely to reduce the risk of buggy drivers crashing Windows?
Does that mean that Vista is therefore a step backwards? Or do Microsoft finally admit that they rushed a beta product to release?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I originally put Vista Ultimate on a homebuilt Rig that I built primarily for Video processing (quad core, 4G of RAM) and I had numerous irritating problem such as, only 3.2G of memory could be recognized by any process (not entirely MS's fault), sound drivers that would glitch when you dropped down menus or popped up the Start menu, to general slow performance for network and file operations.
On a hunch, I installed the X64 version of Vista and the improvement has been remarkable; in general, the computer was significantly faster for day to day operations, the sound glitching was gone, and best of all, the OS could now recognize lots of memory, so I promptly upgraded my memory to 6G which makes all my applications faster (less paging).
If you have to run on Windows, Vista x64 is the "good" version.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
UAC is NOT poorly implemented. UAC implementation is much better than Linux's sudo. The programs are poorly implemented assuming administrative privileges for everything!
"He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks" - this is the best description of Vista I ever heard...
I bought a copy of Vista Ultimate, and it works great. . . .just needed to install the AC'97 audio codec to stop it crashing lol
Anyone else had a Canon printer not print because new software to only recognise Canon cartridges made it stop working and then the fix was to accept every fifth line being italicised?
You cannot make this comparison as they are not the same thing.
"Sudo" (which is a generic UNIX tool, not just for Linux) is designed to allow a user to run programs as if they are root whereas UAC is more about allowing programs system-level access.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think it's not much different than the current pizza hut/hardies ads where they pretend to be much more upscale than they really are - like serving their burger in an actual(or fake) upscale restaurant.
Then again, the fact that they need to do this indicates the same thing - people think their product is inferior.
Can you imagine what Honda would be doing if a significant portion of people became convinced that a 02 civic was superior than a 08? Or a Ford F-150? Any car company's line? There'd be heads rolling!
I don't read AC A human right
No. Only that he was German.
theefer
I am an apple customer (by proxy). My mom being the wonderful person she is bought me a new ipod nano for christmas last year. I don't think I've ever been more annoyed with a company. First My christmas was slightly miserable because we only had a windows 2000 computer at the house. Now apple arbitrarily decided the newest version of itunes (which was required in order to use my new ipod) shouldn't be released for windows 2k though I can see no good technical reason. So I couldn't upload anything to it on my holiday. This was step one in annoying me half to death. After that I thought to myself this thing is so cool I can't wait to put linux on it. Only to find out that they had some god awful firmware encryption on the device to thwart any efforts of running your own code on it. By this time I was really starting to hate apple. I can understand the need to protect their software from reverse engineering but what was wrong with giving others the ability to sign code to run on the thing!? Then I come to find out that it also had some other horrible protection algorithm to stop me from uploading music from linux. I believe this was eventually cracked but at the same time I was never able to upload pictures or videos from a linux box. I also don't think I ever got it to work with a bsd machine. In fact I believe a lot of the times I plugged it in to one it made the kernel panic and crash the machine. This is a terrible thing especially considering the amount of source they drew from bsd to create their new os some time ago. You couple this with the fact that they closed the source for their kernel after promising to keep it open. (too me this is like saying "we are going to punish all of you because you didn't give us enough work for free" even though they got a completely free code base to work with) At that point I really began to hate apple. In fact I despise them and regret ever promoting them for the cool things I thought they where doing and then turned around and undid that their earliest convenience. In fact I hate them so much now that you'll never here me speak another good word about them for the rest of my life (or until they renounce their evil ways!!). If this ipod wasn't a gift from my mom I would have thrown it out by now. Hell I'd rather be carrying a microsoft product rather than an apple one at this point and I thought I'd never be able to hate any company more than microsoft for the longest time. At least M$ encourages others to write software for their shitty operating system and devices!! if anyone at apple is reading this... Let us run our own code on the device the WE OWN. Once that thing was paid for it stopped fucking being yours now act like it. God damn it.
Also if apple isn't enough to annoy you I bet a couple of fanboys who irrationally think OSX is the greatest and most secure OS in the world for no other reason than it is made by apple will annoy you something fierce.
You have a hardware problem ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Can't this person proofread?
In comparison, there are Windows-based hardware/software music combinations which allow you to use whatever you want as your music software and don't require you to install bundled media player software.
Sure, some MP3 players show up as USB mass storage class, presenting a FAT16 or FAT32 volume to the host OS. Others use MTP, which requires the user to add songs through Windows Media Player, not Windows Explorer. These usually say "System requirements: Windows XP; Windows Media Player 10". I don't see a big difference between the requirement of Windows Media Player+DirectShow and the requirement of Mac Media Pl^W^W^W iTunes+QuickTime, especially prior to May 2008 when the USBIF revised the still camera class to include MTP.
It's a load of the usual microsoft speech: they never admit anything unless they have "fixed" it or they need people to upgrade to something else.
It happened with windows millenium, with the first versions of XP, with COM, with the win9X security, etc. If you asked MS about windows millenium, NOW they'll tell you it sucks (and that you can buy an upgrade to vista for half the price, only for today!). Never mind they've been saying up to a certain point that it was the best thing ever made since sliced bread.
Interestingly enough, the product that's replacing the one they criticize (Vista SP1 replacing Vista release) is free. That's the only variation of the usual process.
We all know the truth here: Vista was released early and SP1 is the real release. With this "we were wrong" thing they change that so that they look better ("no, we didn't release experimental crap, we just were wrong but now we've fixed it, honest").
Knowing microsoft, wait for service pack 1 instead (and by SP1 I mean SP2, as SP1 is the real release). You'll get another "we were wrong" speech at that time, that's certain.
GPG 0x1B479C78
He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines..
He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end.
You mean like Vista?
See my Home Theater
And the only time UAC ever fires is: a) in a situation similar to sudo, or b) when a program hasn't been written to follow Windows programming practices that have been in place for over EIGHT YEARS.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Yes, they do, it's called WHQL Testing. If the driver isn't good you don't approve it, and you don't sign the file.
If the driver is crappy, and it is signed, it means that Microsoft didn't do testing well enough.
The only thing you need to know about why Vista s*cks is this line:
"...necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. "
Other than M$ & their "partners" why would anyone care about this?
Thats all fine and good until you have an iPod blow up on you because of a failed iTunes update that destroys your entire library and it takes 2 days to restore because apple support can fix there slick hardware. "Thank GOD for BackUps"
All computer systems, and hardware fail at one time or another, I don't care who the vendor is.
Don't buy microsoft products prior to SP2, that's my rule, not matter how slick they are.
Good Day!!!
Hardware vendors needed to make significant changes to their drivers and thought they'd get by with shoddy (probably outsourced) effort.
1. You know nothing about how device manufacturers work with Microsoft or any other OS. The smart companies wait for a "gold master" GM release before they write a single line of code because the changes/bugs leading up to GM are too many. The result is arguably a better driver. **Everyone** in the industry knows this and yet this jerk from Microsoft has the balls to blame the device manufacturers.
2. Manufacturers that develop on pre-release think they are getting a head start on their competitors, but guess what? They release buggier drivers! Try developing on a _very_ complex platform that is always changing sometime and get back to me.
3. A "shoddy (probably outsourced) effort." Besides insulting developers around the world lets just say that where a driver is developed has nothing to do with its quality. It is some combination of schedule, resources, and complexity that has the most to do with a quality driver.
There is no reason, besides ignorance, your comment should be rated insightful.
This "honest assessment" is blame-shifting which suggests their next OS will be worse than this one because it's everyone else's fault. Which is okay by me...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
an iPod blow up on you because of a failed iTunes update that destroys your entire library
Haven't had that happen, but I've had my system disk fail and take my whole iTunes library with it.
Thank god for backups? No, thank yourself for backups, God had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, I think the point is that Apple doesn't go out of its way to annoy customers, though they're beginning to copy some of Microsoft's annoying behaviors (like unnecessary popup dialogs (to make up for broken application security), and copy-protected operating systems (though only on the iPhone family so far)). They haven't followed Microsoft down the strong DRM path and into the Redmond-Seattle Fire Swamp of Windows Genuine Advantage yet, at least...
You know, there is really no reason whatsoever that you can't use an open source driver with windows. The driver API is well published, and there is nothing stopping the community from stepping up and writing its own drivers.
That would be a dead-end. As 64-bit becomes the norm, the Vista kernel requires Microsoft-signed drivers. Are you going to pay Microsoft for the honor of providing a driver for their OS?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
To test Vista versus XP performance, we built what we think is a fairly middle-of-the-road rig--an Intel Q6600 quad core with 2GB of memory and a GeForce 8800 GTS videocard.
I don't know who thinks this is "middle of the road", but I sure don't.
Do all of your peripherals from 1999 still work with OS X? I doubt it, if you want to blame someone for the lack of drivers for your shit, blame the hardware manufacturers, they are the ones who didn't write the drivers.
Is that thing still around? Wow. Hooda thunk?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Mod me down like no tomorrow for this, but at least from my experience (getting vista a year after it came out) I have had no driver failures, and just disabling UAC fixed almost any problem. Readyboost actually makes vista boot faster than XP on my desktop, getting to loading windows now takes longer than the actual process. I like the sidebar more than the OSX gadgets, and I find the media center "decent" for its role. Yes, vista takes up more resources than xp, but XP took up more resources than 98 (ME doesnt even count as an OS), and XP lacked drivers in many regards for months.
The flaw in vista was that unlike XP, everyone saw vista as absolute dominance of the market again, and no one looked at its good qualities (few, but DX10 and 6 gigs ram is nice, not worth the cost, but I prefer vista to XP on a system of competent specs) over the bad ones, like drivers (I think all parties are to blame : Nvidia for being lazy, M$ for being so secretive like its a huge deal, and consumers for being too stupid to know what drivers are) or the UAC, which.. you can just turn off.
Compared to XP, vista has 1) Tons more glam 2) 64 bit and DX10 and 3) more memory consumption
Look at winxp, it was the consumer NT, and it had 1) Tons more glam 2) NT kernel 3) more memory consumption
Everyone went to XP... why? Because the environment of vista is very different from XP. XP was released as revolutionary, and most people had so little experience with all the changes and underlying breaks that they ignored them. When Vista came out, the media was more prepared and shot it down.
Likewise, Mac is so successful because the word on the street is that everyone has an ipod, uses itunes, and wants an iphone. Why not get an ibook, or heaven forbid an icar. Maybe an ihouse. People like synergy, and most of all like wasting tremendous money on a label like apple to make themselves look cool. Im writing this on a mac running tiger, and I honestly find vista to be more feature rich and operable than OSX.
Let's see how many articles about the failure of vista we can submit before this dead horse we happen to be beating turns into dust.
Jesus H. Christ.
In other news:
The Pope discovered to be Catholic. Bears found to defecate in woods. MS not resonsible for crap software...
... bugs were not limited to GPU drivers and such, the whole Os is full of bugs.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
The TV-broadcasters should stop the commercial half-way, and insert this one instead. Linux adoption would sky-rocket.
I'm not insane! My mother had me tested.
...if you don't. With regards to third parties, Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. They are the dominant operating system vendor. They can't exactly lock out third party developers or pull the kind of crap that Apple is doing with iPhone devs.
In this case they made radical changes at the last minute to their definitions of video card drivers, hence the longhorn video drivers developed by ATI and Nvidia would not work in Vista without complete redesign and without even a VESA driver from Microsoft to fall back on.
It's their OS, they broke it and their action of trying to blame hardware manufacturers for being slow at writing Vista drivers for nothing is a copout.
The guys at MS blamed everyone but themselves. they could have owned up to the massive DRM infestation in Vista, the 47+ programs that collect information and report it back to Microsoft, etc. You should no more let Microsoft into your home to invade your privacy with their hidden programs that you would allow the police to put a hidden camera in your home to monitor you. You should no more let Microsoft do this than let say a large screen LCD TV manufacturer monitor what you watch and do on your $3,000 to $7,000 HD wide screen TV, especially since the cost of Microsoft's product is no where near the cost of the TV.
I have vista as I inherited it on some used computers. I also have over 20 years of experience working with computers and performing repairs, doing custom builds, etc.
Vista is just horrible and it is no where near as stable as as he makes it out to be.
In the article there was little to no mention of anything Microsoft said except maybe some rehashed interpreted and probably highly restricted wordage. I would also have to say that the guy was nothing more than propaganda writer for Microsoft. He talked about WGA but he didn't talk about the other massive DRM infestation. He talked about WGA but he didn't tell them that having WGA means Microsoft insists that everyone is a thief and must prove their innocence.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
This is exactly what Microsoft did with WDF, released in December 2005 and shipped with all of the Windows Driver Kits released since then (including all of the Vista Beta kits).
WDF has two components: KMDF (kernel-mode) and UMDF (user-mode). In a nutshell, they are well-documented object-oriented libraries which implement much of the complicated synchronization logic and rules imposed by WDM architecture, freeing the driver developer to focus only on aspects unique to their hardware. WDF drivers generally have fewer lines of code, because thousands of lines of bug-prone WDM code is already implemented by the framework.
The transition process from WDM to WDF will take time. There are countless old WDM drivers written for Windows for nearly every conceivable device you can use on a PC (in fact, some consider this Windows greatest strength). It would be stupid to ditch all of this code. But for NEW drivers, this is the way to go.
Developer education is one key aspect. Now there is a book on WDF for driver developers that requires no previous WDM experience.
Windows Logo certification involves running automated tests supplied by a self-test kit called the Windows Logo Kit. Each device requesting a logo and a WHQL signature for the driver must fit into one of several pre-determined device categories, for which Microsoft has written hundreds of tests that must pass.
The set of tests covered by the WLK is fairly extensive. In fact, depending on the category, the breadth of testing generally surpasses what most vendors can afford to develop in-house or are willing to test themselves. (Think fly-by-night manufacturer mass-producing a USB widget at the lowest possible cost.) However, obviously the public never sees what bugs are caught by these tests; the public only sees bugs which slip through the cracks...
You are of course, correct. I am the only person I know of who actually likes UAC. I am continuously finding myself denying programs the chance to run... and I LIKE it.
I remember back in the Windows 95 days seeing programs writing to the C:\Windows\ folder and scratching my head saying to myself, "why would a program need to write to any directory other than the one it is installing in?". I began to notice ALL programs did it. WTF? I wanted to stop them so bad but I was powerless... and now here is UAC. UAC allows me to stop the behaviour that I think is bad. Writing to anywhere in the C:\Windows directory is BAD.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Another quick story... I was briefly employed at Teradata in El Segundo (1 day). They had a database application that was hand written in assembler and was just over 1 megabyte of executable code. I was astounded as I had never seen a bina ry that large before. You should be able to do anything in a megabyte of ram... A million bytes, wow!! Bill says 640K should be enough for anyone. Back when the purpose of a computer was to read input, do some calculations, and output the results, that was very true. Many mainframes at that time had 16-32K of main ram. But Apple proved with the early Macs that people weren't happy with text editors, they needed word processors, with fonts, and colors, and graphics. Needless to say, editing productivity fell off badly when we started wondering which font to use, when we used to just be worried about getting the words right. Clicking and dragging and dropping, eye candy, Xeox Parc stuff put larger demands on the CPU and memory and hardware, for the sake of the presentation layer. But even in the early Windows days, a few megs of ram was plenty, because windows apps like mac apps knew about sharing memory, and only using what was needed. As of Windows 3.1 with Enhanced mode (386 required) we no longer had to worry about giving back ram because we had plenty (16MB = $1200), and there was virtual memory of sorts to help garbage collect. Don't worry about memory usage Microsoft said. If you are honest and your memory still works, you will admit this. The advent of the open architecture IBM-PC brought us infinite hardware combinations and the operating system had to become magnitudes larger to contain the enormous amount of drivers required for modern computers. Then as the average user went from one to four applications open at the same time, memory usage blossomed. I wondered if Microsoft hadn't invested in memory manufacturers because Windows was eating memory like there was no tommorow. My first microprocessor (i8085) had a whole 4k of ram (4116's) and 2K of eprom. My latest machine (Mac Pro) had 16GB of ram. I assume that it will take me several years to figure out how to use all that ram, but the day will come when I challenge that boundary too.
All of this is why I have always had a spot in my heart for embedded programming. Sometimes it is nice to work on something with an actual specification that has maximum limits and limited functionality, so that you can do an elegant job of writing the minimum code that reliably and efficiently handles to hardware and does a job well.
This is why each vendor has their own... The deliniation between hardware and software becomes vague in the world of FPGAs and GALs.
Of course many hardware builder try to make the hardware look the same, but cheaper, so they can use the built in drivers.
...just a really big "buck" to pass????
Joe Investor
These all very interesting points of view and conjecture and like they say, everyone has an opinion. What I don't see here is comments from anyone who has actually worked at MS. So to fill that little gap I'll post my observations and comments. I live just south of Redmond and inevitably, if you do contract work around here, you will spend some time at MS. I've been there a few times. Two of them in test labs. I'm not new to test labs. I've run a large testing and certification lab for a local airplane manufacturer as well as a porting lab for a large rival software manufacturer. When I first walked into the MS lab I'd be working in I was appalled. I thought they were joking. Were they SERIOUS?? Was I really going to be testing their next generation OS with this crap equipment, in this dingy cramped room they called a lab? Granted, I was only testing a part of the OS, but I was incredulous! And that was just the beginning of my bewildering year testing "Longhorn". The only goal was to get the tests done. Do not interpret this as trying to find the defects. Yes... the goal of testing is to find defects, but the goal of the team I worked with was to run the tests and be able to report they had run a certain number of tests. I routinely developed test scenarios based on what was coded, not what was spec'ed. I was told writing test cases based on the specification took too long and I needed to write the test cases based on what was coded. So I ran the installations, configured the software, used it and wrote a test scenario based on what I had just done. Also, since testing is part of the development division, I routinely saw emails from the Longhorn developers. That's another story, but I'll just say not everybody was happy with what was coming out. So these are a small sample of my experiences working as a contractor at MS. I have other experiences doing other things at MS that are just as enlightening. But my observation and comment on what I saw of the Longhorn development is GIGO. Quality is NOT job 1. One final comment... There are some very fine engineers at MS that rail against this approach, but they get overridden and sometimes, if they protest too loudly, get fired.
I here people complain that we're "wasting" money on the LHC, between 6 and 9 billion dollars. Ya know, "they're not curing little kiddies diseases and stuff". Bet they wouldn't blink at MS spending 6 billion. Of course, it's private, not public money. But regardless of that fact, which sounds like the bigger waste to you?
Who created the bigger black hole? CERN or Microsoft?
J1M.
Lets not forget that everyone had so many years of XP, that in the end everyone learns its mood. Out of the box, XP is not that usable.
You still have to tune it, stop a few services, hide/show some icons, give it a full tour of control panel in order to tame the confusion. Fortunately, by now, everyone know what is doing.
This is also true for Windows Vista. You have to stop UAC, disable indexing, find a way to stop Defender, you know, tame the horse. The full tour of control panel is also a must.
Second of all, nowadays laptops and, generally speaking, portable computing has taken way off. People prefer to buy mediocre laptops for obvious reasons while most of the time they forget to realize that for the same price (ex. 1,000$) they can buy a desktop box that beats their laptop on every performance aspect (double the ram, better cpu, way faster and bigger hard drive, quite decently dedicated gaming gfx).
The obvious bad result is that they run a new generation of OS, that they dont know how to tame on mediocre hardware.
Of course, you're not supposed to tame anything as a regular user. But thats Microsoft. But im tired of hearing people that XP is i dunno how better and Vista is i dunno how worse.
To sum things up. I chose the new desktop which was cheap but is way better than a 1000$ laptop. I installed Vista Ultimate SP1 with full Aero. I made the control panel tour in one hour and thats it. I have a machine that runs smooth, looks better than XP, crashes less often than XP, it feels and acts more modern. And everyone is impressed when they get to use it. If you come with a 1000$ laptop, Ill do the same, in the same amount of time. It will just be XP.
First off, I think personally that macs look stupid, but that's beside the point. A week ago I downloaded iTunes for the hell of it, was turned off by the advertisement all over the goddamn place, and uninstalled it. Since then, Apple hasn't shut the fuck up. Every day, a new e-mail is in my inbox going on about the new iPod. I marked them as spam, I've tried to get off the list. I haven't succeeded yet. Fuck you apple.
Ah, sod it, I'll stick with XP and Ubuntu until 7 comes out with a service pack or two. I got XP feelin' all good right now anyway.