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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.'
> When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS
> and desktop environment.
Neither do I. That's one of the reasons I use Linux. It just works.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
and then there are the reviewers who are, lets face it, happy to receive free software, hardware and other forms of brib^H^H^H^Hinducement from Microsoft and are only going to tell the company line regardless of what they really think.
My brother bought a brand-new machine with 1/2 gig of RAM. It was slower than a snail through molasses. After he upgraded to 1.5 gig it did work a bit faster, but then he started having problems with Vista accusing him of using an unauthorized copy & refusing to startup. After he removed the RAM the problem went away, but it was again slow as a snail, and MS calls this "usable". Hardly.
Vista is the worst OS I've used since the Windows 3. Perhaps even worse than that. It's a pile of shit with whipped cream on top, and I'm glad it's been replaced with Windows 7.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Moving from 98 to XP wasnt a big issue...
Moving from 2000 to XP was...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
most machines with 1.5GB run linux decently well.
Vista is "okay", after having to do 8 million steps to make it manageable.
no, vista is what you get if you want to use DX10 (likewise DX11 with windows 7) - it's being crammed down throats until wine or other equivalents can find a better way to get around it.
The problem was that marketdroids severely understated Vista's hardware requirements, tried to segment the market too finely with too many editions, and outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability.
I don't think that was the whole problem. Yes, that was a problem: Vista did not perform well on all the machines that were advertised as being supported by Vista. However, that also indicates that there was another problem: Vista's hardware requirements were too high for the time when it was released.
There's also the too-many-editions problem. Home vs. Business vs. Server is about as much of a breakdown as I'm willing to entertain. Also, I won't put up with having to activate my OS under any circumstances. But those are just my views, admittedly, and those weren't really the problem either.
I'd like to claim (and have been claiming since Vista came out) that the big problem is that there wasn't a big enough problem with Windows XP. Or to be more direct, of any of the problems people actually had with Windows XP, Vista didn't solve enough of them to make it worth the trouble of upgrading, let alone the cost of buying new licenses.
I had some free upgrades to Vista available, and never used them. I tested it, but there were compatibility issues with hardware and 3rd party software, and there was nothing Windows Vista did that Windows XP didn't that I needed to do. Vista itself was fine, but upgrading would have meant a whole lot of trouble for me, and the only benefit I could see from upgrading was a cooler-looking interface.