Vista

[ec437]

Yeah, I had a copy of Vista when it was still called "Longhorn", and that must have been a solid 2 or 3 years ago.

 

 

It sucked then, too

[boseengineer]

 

... MS provides all the documentation hardware and software manufacturers need to make their stuff work with a shiny new OS, but most folks don't bother getting into the beta and making their stuff work. ...

 

 

True but it also costs an ungodly amount of resources and money to do it. For many companies it's a very tough choice: do you put your resources into keeping up with a moving target or do you actually develop new products and add some real value for the customer.

 

It seems that most of Vista is just different and not better. What is the problem with XP that Vista is supposed to be solving? The customers don't want it, the software industry doesn't want it, the hardware industry doesn't want it but MS is using their quasi-monopoly to force it down every bodies throat anyway. If there weren't forcing it, pretty much nobody would buy it.

[WynnD]

Haven't looked a Vista, but I'm a former PC/Network tech with a CNA and A+ certification that has moved happily on to a Mac. I hate software that isn't stable and even XP is less stable than BeOS.

 

You guys are right about unnecessary bells and whistles. If it doesn't make your life better it's a bad feature. That said, I love Apple's

[MrJoshua]

You hate bells and whistles, but you love Apples? I thought Apple was the king of bells and whistles.

[i_wanna_les_paul]

Haven't looked a Vista, but I'm a former PC/Network tech with a CNA and A+ certification that has moved happily on to a Mac. I hate software that isn't stable and even XP is less stable than BeOS. You guys are right about unnecessary bells and whistles. If it doesn't make your life better it's a bad feature. That said, I love Apple's

OSX 10.0, anyone?

[vanlatte]

 

Not hard at all. Boot XP, Format HDD, install, done.

 

 

Sounds great on paper.

 

In practice, not so much.

 

Most new systems don't even give you the option of getting anything BUT Vista.

And even if you do put on XP, good luck finding drivers. Took me a hella long time to get my new laptop working with XP; HP was no help at all because it's "supposed" to run Vista and they don't even provide XP drivers.

 

Oh yea, another great benefit: any and all problems that one encounters will 99.9% of the time be blamed on Vista. "Oh, you have Vista? We don't support that"

 

*click*

 

I didnt even find it all that buggy, although it was slow and I can't figure out why they made simple tasks even harder by requiring more clicks and burying them; but when a good portion of software just refuses to run, well it just turned my brand new laptop into a paper weight.

[sunburstbasser]

You hate bells and whistles, but you love Apples? I thought Apple was the king of bells and whistles.

 

Apple's bells and whistles are tuned to a different key, maybe?

[allan grossman]

 

It seems that most of Vista is just different and not better. What is the problem with XP that Vista is supposed to be solving?

 

 

Mostly security and the added joy of DRM. I moved to Linux instead but am getting friends calling with Vista questions so I just bought a copy to put on my #2 box so I can help them. Waiting for a DVD recorder from newegg so I figure I'll clean install on Monday.

[SteveyDevey]

I'm surprised to be able to say that I've also started fighting with it. I just got a new laptop, which oddly enough had the choice between XP and vista. That was a selling point, because I know the drivers/etc will work in XP. I got the vista version, just to try it out, but 2 days after I got it, I'm ready to go back to XP.

 

No support for my new (to me) mbox, nor a bunch of software I use often? XP wins. I tried an install last night, but it just never moved past some ambiguous part of the XP install. I'll try again tonight.

 

My friend was having some trouble with his new vista laptop, so he decided he wanted to try XP. I gave him a disc, and he came back the next day just amazed at how much better his new box ran without the bloat of vista. Games that ran poorly ran well on XP. Games that wouldn't even run were up and clipping along in XP.

[Bag_End]

Haha!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7RuolTf9ho

[bdegrande]

This stuff amuses and then irritates me. We've talked about this before but we had exactly the same kind of bitching when WinXP came out With thousands of applications and literally millions of possible hardware combinations designing an OS is actually a pretty good trick. MS provides all the documentation hardware and software manufacturers need to make their stuff work with a shiny new OS, but most folks don't bother getting into the beta and making their stuff work. Then you have users hollering that their stuff doesn't work with the shiny new OS and blaming the OS manufacturer, when the beta went on for more than a year, hardware and software folks are invited to join in on the thing and then when something breaks it doesn't dawn on anybody to blame the people who wrote the software or designed the hardware. Apple gets around this by keeping tight control on hardware. Linux doesn't get around it until somebody volunteers to write a driver for the hardware - wireless cards are a perfect example. Wireless in Linux sucks - they have workarounds like ndiswrapper so you can use Windows drivers on a Linux machine, but basically if the manufacturer doesn't care you don't get a driver until somebody buckles down and writes one. In the Unix world they keep even tighter control over hardware than Apple does. Go down to Computers R US and buy a scanner and try to hook it up to something running HP-UX. Bottom line? Manufacturers have had almost two years to get their {censored} together for Vista. If it doesn't work don't blame MS.

 

True enough for someone using all new hardware, but it doesn't help a user whose scanner/camera/whatever no longer works. and he is going to blame Microsoft.

 

Anyway, I prefer Vista to XP. The really annoying User Account Control questions appear less and less over time. You might consider turning UAC off while installing your software, then turning it back on. I think that the added security is worth being annoyed for a few weeks.

 

It DOES soive real problems with XP. XP allowing programs to write to the Registry is insane, and causes major problems. Mpst of the blue screens of death are due to driver issues. Most of the remaining ones are virus/spyware related. Vista solves these problems. XP also doesn't manage memory well. Open a dozen applications and watch the machine grind to a halt and then crash. This doesn't happen on a normal OS.

 

XP's performance degrades over time to the point where, if you install and uninstall software frequently, you probably wind up reloading the OS every year or so to get it back to normal speed. An OS that works as long as you avoid the Internet is also not normal or acceptable.

 

However, Vista is certainly annoying enough people to the point where a lot of them are going to try OS X/Linux/whatever.

[Anesthesia]

This stuff amuses and then irritates me. We've talked about this before but we had exactly the same kind of bitching when WinXP came out

 

The main thing that pissed me off is that it refused to let me install XP...it even locked me out of the motherboard bios

 

meh....I'm ok with it now

it seems to be running all my audiovideo software ok

[vanlatte]

 

XP's performance degrades over time to the point where, if you install and uninstall software frequently, you probably wind up reloading the OS every year or so to get it back to normal speed. An OS that works as long as you avoid the Internet is also not normal or acceptable.

 

 

So are you saying that Vista has overcome this "feature"?

[vanlatte]

XP also doesn't manage memory well. Open a dozen applications and watch the machine grind to a halt and then crash. This doesn't happen on a normal OS.

 

By that definition Vista is not a "normal OS" either.

 

On my laptop running Vista, I was only able to get about 3 running before it ground to a maddeningly slow crawl. XP on the same hardware, running the same apps gives me no issues at all.

[Goofball Jones]

5 years from now everyone will be bitching about the next OS that MS comes out with...saying how great Vista is and they'll never upgrade until they have to blah blah blah.

 

People like to bitch and moan. Everyone wants to be a critic....to dazzle us with what they perceive to be wit.

[baracuda2004]

i've had no problems with my Vista and I can't say as much with XP and 98. I love vista, the only problems i've had have been remembering all my old porn sites so I can {censored} this computer up and give me an excuse to buy a new one that's a super gamer.

[Mudbass]

 

Sorry pal, I don't have the power to change the way computer industry works. New software is always buggy. It's not a Microsoft thing. They're all the same. If you don't want bugs, don't buy new software.

 

 

I agree, they are all pretty much the same, but you can put the blame for that directly on Microsoft's doorstep. Years ago Microsoft developed a competition killing marketing strategy that has been adopted by just about everybody these days. You start hyping a new product months or maybe a year before its release date. You get consumers so excited about the whiz-bang features and capabilities of the software that they put off buying anything else untill they've seen it. Then you rush it through development and testing and release it with so many {censored}ing bugs it makes the Orkin man run for cover just so you can meet the deadline you've been promising.

[bdegrande]

 

So are you saying that Vista has overcome this "feature"?

 

 

For the most part, yest. One great feature of Vista is that viruses/spyware "infect" a virtual registry rather than the real one. This is a huge improvement in security as long as you leave User Account Control turned on.

 

Microsoft was in a very tough spot. They clearly needed a secure OS. One option was to come out with a completely new OS incompatible with the old one, maybe with some sort of compatibility mode. This would have produced a smaller, faster OS, but you would have heard much louder screams from users than you are hearing now. Apple took this path with OS X, changing from their old OS to a BSD Unix based one. Once they went to Intel chips, you can't even run your old software at all. Microsoft thought (probably rightly) that they couldn't get away with this.

 

As a result, Vista is a balancing act between improving security and staying compatible with old software and hardware while adding new graphics features, The result is an OS which needs pretty powerful hardware to run well. More memory helps as does plugging in a USB thumb drive (The Ready Boost feature - I use an old semi-working MP3 player for this).