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Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista
harrymcc writes 'We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution--but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.'
Vista ain't bad, and really Win7 isn't as different as Vista was to XP. I tried very hard for 10 years to use Linux. Not any more; it's too much work. When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS and desktop environment.
Neither do I, it takes enough time to be constantly fixing friends' neighbors' and family's copies of XP & Vista.
I am not a crackpot.
>>>>> When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS
>>
>>That's one of the reasons I use Linux. It just works.
Challenge - Connect to this ISP (with webaccelerator) on a Linux machine. I tried and tried and tried and could not get it to work on my Ubuntu Linux laptop, and it's kinda crucial since many places I travel have no other internet access - http://www.getnetscape.com/getnetscape/?
I also had problems getting my Atari Stella and NESticle emulators to work properly (they ran but only played 1/3 of the games). Plus when I tried to use VLC Media Player to open some songs, rather than play one song at a time as you'd logically expect, Ubuntu tried to open 100 copes of VLC at the same time. My ancient Amiga OS 1.0 had the same stupid flaw. What is this? 1985?
I was forced to yank the battery of my laptop to rescue it. Linux doesn't "just work".
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't know what hardware your friend has, or how you set it up, but Vista flies on my machines. The file transfer issue you talk about was fixed years ago - it can easily max out our gigabit ethernet at work. Backwards compatibility was indeed broken for drivers, as it uses a new driver model to increase stability. I've used vista for years, without re-installing it, and it's fine.
Close, no cigar.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
AFIK, most of Vista's problems came from a decision Microsoft made.
For the entire history of Windows, backward compatibility was king. They even emulated old bugs in newer versions.
In Vista, they decided to eliminate the absolute requirement for backward compatibility. Yes...Apple had done this several times already, but for Microsoft, it was a MAJOR philosophy change.
Because of the lack of backward compatibility, users who needed to run old programs stayed away.
Windows 7 is also not backward compatible, but more time has passed, so presumably, less users care about running their aging software.
This is the same old complaints over again.
And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.
Slightly, perhaps. But that's because of backwards compatibility, not some sort of horribly conspiracy against the public. OS X has the advantage that all the apps written for it knew they'd be rendering to the GPU.
And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.
Except you only really get UAC prompts:
1) When you first install all your software. After the first two weeks, and all the programs you're likely to use are already installed, you only see UAC when patching. (This is what gave people the bad impression, but what's the alternative? If Microsoft game installers a pass, like Apple does, they would have been crucified for insecurity.)
2) For buggy applications. Applications that break the multi-user contract pop-up UAC prompts often, yes, but those applications were already broken-- Vista is just exposing their brokenness. (And, UAC enables them to run *at all* automatically, without you having to use "Run As... Admin" like you would on XP and Windows 2000. In Windows XP, a broken app like that would just fail with a vague error message.)
And if UAC is throwing up multiple alerts for one task, you're tinkering with the guts of the OS. Stop doing that.
And inexpicably long file transfer times.
Patched over 2 years ago.
And backward compatibility.
Possibly worse than other Windows releases (although the compatibility from Windows 98 to Windows 2000/XP was pretty iffy, too), but still better than any other OS on the market.
Comment of the year
This has nothing to do with "depth of Microsoft's problems". Your school probably pays for MSDNAA as a benefit to students (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/default.aspx/). This program has been around for a long time. I used it to get windows 98/2000/xp from my university back in the day.
I had used XP for years and was quite happy.
My wife needed a new PC and it came with Vista. Never had I seen Vista. No manuals. So out of the box it was fully functional in 30 minutes with no confusion and all for Dell's cheapest mail order $400. Now it is a year later ... no crashes or other issues, she doesn't even know what OS is on the machine, she just uses it.
When I needed a new machine, I bought a no-name eMachines from Costco on a whim. Came with Vista and had a trivial experience setting it up and using it. I'd say its actively used 12 hours a day over the last 6 months and I don't recall a crash despite more than a half dozen external peripherals via USB. For $379. I do use a UPS on both machines and they do have 2-3GB of memory but no high end graphics or high speed CPU..both low speed dual processors.
As one whose OS experiences go back 40 years and who did a load of an alfa from floppies of W95 that took over 24 hours, I know OS horror stories. To me...Vista isn't one of them. I've had and have zero issues with it.
IMHO, YMMV
"Vista sucking has a lot more to do with sociology than technology. The problem was that marketdroids .. outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability", QuoteMstr
:)
"More internal Microsoft e-mails were unsealed today in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit, detailing the wrangling that took place inside the company and across the industry before and after the operating system's January 2007 launch. The plaintiffs are using the messages to support their contention that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was involved enough in decisions to warrant a deposition"
'The "Vista sucks" meme, however, spread virally because 1) we all love to hate Microsoft, and 2) most users really can't tell the difference between good technology and bad', QuoteMstr
The "Vista sucks" meme spread becasue Vista did really suck, really
"From: Stevan Sinofsky
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:08 PM
To: Steve Ballmer Cc: Bill Veghte; Jon Devaan
Subject: Re: Vista
A lot of changes led many Windows XP drivers not really working at all - this across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories (fingerprint readers, smartcards, tv tuners), and so on"
Opening a directory with 50 video files may slow the Explorer window to generate thumbnails... but only the first time you open that window. It doesn't regenerate them every time, so it won't take any longer to open that window the second time through.
If the Quickload installer won't launch, try the right-click-run-as-administrator trick. Or go to its properties and turn on compatibility mode for XP SP2. Or usually if an installer fails, Vista will pop up a more-or-less helpful window offering to try "with recommended settings."
For what it's worth, I checked out their website. They'll send your friend a Vista-compatible disc for $15 S&H. I suppose that's what you get when you're still targeting Windows 98 as a supported operating system!
Another thing to consider: Your friends' preinstalled copy of Vista is going to be garbage because of all the broken sometimes unremovable shovelware. Ditto for the restore image on the recovery partition or the CDs, and doubly so if it's a laptop. All the computers I see (laptops especially) are practically unusable, even fresh after a recovery partition. Install from a regular boxed-copy Vista disc, type in the OEM key (you'll have to back up your activation or give Microsoft's automated line a call) and the same laptop will fly.
DATABASE WOW WOW
This guy's post is not a "troll". It's an OPINION..... please learn the difference and learn to tolerate others' opinions even when you disagree with them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hundreds. And they're not pretty. http://www.microsplot.com/vista
Agreed, but most of those issues disappeared with SP1 (and UAC was easy to turn off and/or work around to make it less annoying, and even if left in place, became less annoying over time as it really was hit up front as you installed everything and set everything up).
Since SP1 came out, I've been quite happy with Vista.
In fact, every time I have to go back to XP, I get frustrated with how old and obsolete and inefficient it is. I miss things like the screen snipper and the start menu search and a lot of the nice enhancements to Windows Explorer.
Vista stumbled badly out of the gate (bad expectations set with the "Vista Capable program" combined with too-high memory requirements, and poor compatability with older hardware, graphics cards, as well as the bugs in such things as the file copy issue). It's perception never, ever recovered, even though the OS itself more or less did.
And under Win7, UAC is even easier to work around and get to be non-annoying.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I have been forced to use vista at work for the past month or so. Here are the things I hate, mostly from the first week. Keep in mind this is based on using 2000 and XP, and having certain expectations about how Windows in general is supposed to work. No one's going to read this, that's fine, I'm just spitting in a hurricane.
- duplicated functionality, users have to retrain their muscle memory. Makes sense, but loyal Windows users are
That is 50% truth and 50% microsoft apologist bullshit.
The truth is, it takes time to load all that crap into memory, and it takes time to discard it and fill it with real program when you launch a real program, and then it takes time to fill it back up with crap when you close the real program. Performance during all the swapping is bland. Obviously it *wasn't* worth the theoretical speedup, since 7 changes the algorithm to keep those operations from being so noticeable.
"All modern operating systems do," is, again, bullshit, especially the claim that Linux does it. When XP on fresh startup is using 250 MB of RAM, Ubuntu (any version from 7.10 to 9.04) is using 400, whereas when I boot Vista it'll be in the 1.2 to 1.6 GB range before I click anything, clearly "all modern operating systems" DON'T do it the same way. Modern operating systems buffer-on-load, whereas Vista's obviously preloading a ton of crap based on some unknown aggressive algorithm that makes poor choices.