Ballmer and Gates defend Vista, drop Windows 7 hints Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday insisted that the firm was not guilty of making huge blunders with its unloved operating system Windows Vista. Speaking at the All Things Digital D6 conference alongside lame duck chairman Bill Gates, Ballmer contended: "Vista's not a failure and it's not a mistake.” He also took the …
If all you're interested in is games, then get a game system and leave comments about computers to those of us who know what they are supposed to be used for. As evidence of your ignorance, I point out that games function on the platform for which they are written. That has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with the developers.
Get a PlayStation or, hell, even an XBox. You'll be happier and seem smarter.
The secret to getting games to run well on Linux is to buy or download games that are native to the OS. Yes, that does limit your selection. TANSTAAFL. WINE widens your selection some, but at the expense of stability and speed. Having two OSes on two separate computers or dual booting fixes the issues most people have, but that's twice the expense.
'Speaking at the All Things Digital D6 conference alongside lame duck chairman Bill Gates, Ballmer contended: "Vista's not a failure and it's not a mistake.”'
They then spent the next hour shouting and screaming 'not, Not! NOT!!!' until they were sent to their rooms and told to stay there until they were prepared to say sorry, and mean it, *and* come up with something better.
I'm running Vista Business on a fairly high-end machine that I built last year. Except for some problems I encountered getting the ancillary settings for that Mushkin performance RAM that I just HAD to have sorted, this machine has never given me any trouble. I corresponded w/Mushkin one time and they gave me the settings I needed to fix the problems, and since then, the computer hasn't crashed once since Sept. '07.
It's a dual boot machine that I run Mandriva 2008 on as well, and I spend roughly an equal amount of time on each OS. So far, I've not had a lot of complaints about either - they both allow me to get the work that I need to do done without a lot of fuss. I share data (mp3's, video, image, .txt files, etc.) between the two OS's on a separate drive that each OS can see, so I'm generally not out of touch with my data no matter which OS I have booted. Each OS has it's setup quirks, but nothing that I haven't been able to sort out, and ultimately, the investment that I made in the hardware and software has been worthwhile for me.
I'm not in the business of suggesting to others what they should not or should do, like, or try. Though I have disagreements with Microsoft regarding their corporate style, I could say much the same for a lot of other companies (computer-related and non-computer-related) with which I deal. To me, playing the whole " I hate X" game seems like a whole lot of emotional overhead and hand-wringing for nothing.
Honestly, who cares if you hate X? It's your affair, not mine. Why subject the rest of the world to your mental masturbation as you vent your precious feeeeeeelings?
if they have any sense at all, they will do an apple, base something on a form of unix, or frankly *anything*, and provide an emulator for legacy applications, with maybe a fancy one for games in a virtual environment (maybe allowing direct access to sound & video in full screen mode).
keep the core OS light and fast, old stuff still runs, the new OS gets the same APIs coded for it, with all the legacy stuff switched off.
if they seriously want fun, make a window manager for X, port office using a number of custom libraries (in effect 'wine+') precompiled X64 only, and release a custom licensed unix of some sort.
kills all the legacy spyware etc dead, if it installs in the virtual machine? yeah whatever.
Having switched to Ubuntu a year ago, I'm non-plussed by the anguish everyone seems to have over Vista. Just pop in an Ubuntu live disk, and be done with it. No viruses (or processor-hogging-monthly-subscription-virus-monitors); perfectly good MS office format compatiblility; click-install-run just about any sort of software you could want (mind-mapping? video editing? sudoku? There are several alternatives for all of them); WINE for any special Windows programs you can't find a replacement for... the list goes on.
Best of all, you get your PC back. You can set it up the way you want, and there's no "we won't let you do this because it might hurt someone's commercial interests even though it's legal in your country". And none of the silly hoops the more computer literate jump through to gain a bit of control back.. Once you've tasted this freedom, you'll start to wonder why everyone else is angsting about the latest version of Windows, instead of just popping in an Ubuntu live disk...
Vista has its problems but I have it running on a 2.2 GHz desktop (home) and a 2.6 GHz laptop (home/work). They run great. Of course for my work desktop that I must count on I run XP for now but I think a lot of the Vista stuff is over blown and being said by people not rolling it out to hundreds of desktops and had a problem with their custom or old kit. Again Vista is not great, but not the total piece of crap claimed. As for XP running faster that is true and if I take the same PC and run 2000 that is even faster. So you need to weigh the benefits of the newer OS versus the hardware you are running it on. As for rolling out and controlling/securing desktops Vista is a step up and if all your users are running is Office, Adobe and simple stuff like the it's even good. People run out and load Vita without doing any evaluation of whether they should and when it doesn't run on their old PC or their 16-bit apps get errors they say it sucks. If you were in IT you would never do that on a production system and identified the performance on a test PC. Which is why a portion of PCs came downgraded to XP because they weren't a good fit for that dept.
I'll stop now, just tired of the Vista flametards who never used it or used it in a scenario that was never going to work and would have benefited from planning.
I get aggravated at plenty of MS software crap from admin'ing many of their products so you'll have to take my word I'm not a fanboy. Just someone who doesn't feel need to jump on the bandwagon...
"Vista's not a failure and it's not a mistake."
Keep telling yourself that, Ballmer. Saying it over and over doesn't make it the truth.
Having said that, I got a free copy of Vista Ultimate 64 for beta testing the OS and I have that running on my machine at home. It's not bad and runs pretty fast, but I am painfully aware of how much fastER it would run on XP. Vista just doesn't offer anything so wonderful that it's worth the performance hit.
The only reasons I haven't switched back to XP are 1) I don't have a 64 bit version of it, and 2) I don't feel like reinstalling my video games...
I recently bought a new gaming PC, pretty top notch item, and I decided to try Vista since I've been resisting for so long. The box I bought came with Vista 64 bit pre-installed, and I played for a bit and it seemed ok, everything worked out of the box (with SP1 already factory installed). Having said that, the company had clearly tweaked out of the box Vista for me to avoid a lot of the normal gotchas. Aero was disabled, and UAC was also disabled. I thought I would give UAC a shot, mainly because it would sandbox internet browsing which is pretty porous on both Firefox and IE (by the way, anyone else noticed firefox becoming *much* less stable over recent releases - I've been seeing quite a few crashes on multiple installations on multiple platforms).
Anyway, what I discovered was the UAC is as buggy as hell - definitely only alpha grade software. Having had 1 software install put UAC into an infinite cycle, and had another result in a bunch of processes each taking 2 minutes to do anything. One game was a nightmare to install until I discovered a trick on a forum to get it to install through UAC. I've spoken to a bunch of friends who use UAC, and to a man they have all turned off UAC to get Vista to work. It seems that there are ways to get it to be usable but the general rule is:
Overspec hardware
Only run it on new stuff
Only run it on a system that has it pre-installed (since it is most likely to have all the drivers)
Turn off all the new stuff MS added etc...
Seeing as we are all bashing/defending/busting our nuts over the technocratical shite.
Most of my experience of Vista hasn't been nice - it's been slow, unintuitive [user error really, I know, but I get on with Ubuntu/Suse fine...] and buggy in the early days - although I haven't seen many problems with the couple of handfuls of Vista machines I have used lately that have been patched up.
It does seem a good spec is a modern C2D-esque processor and a gub of RAM - 2gb seems to work well - with the [really, really] required DX9C GPU to cover Aero. In those circumstances is *is* much nicer to use from a POV of 'flow' - it jerks very infrequently, apps load nice and zippily, etc.
However, I still just can't get on with that bloody new UI layout - after years of 2k/XP I find the control panel setup frustrating, and why segregate the Desktop/Display stuff? What was wrong with the four or five tabs for themes, resolution, screensaver etc? I thought having all that stuff in there worked fine?
TBH I think want MS *really* want to do is to take the Win2k8 setup, drop the SysAdmin stuff that I like [well, I'm a low level sysadmin, of course I'll like it], add Aero, and then you should have most of the speed and stability of 2k8, without the crap of Vista, including all the NuMediaCentre, indexing, etc. Or at least have them disabled by default.
Sell it as VistaLE [as in Limited Edition] and market it at hardcore gamers with a lower price tag for retail purchasers, or as a downgrade option for OEM machines, and I reckon they'd be onto a winner with that, me hearties.
I must admit, I'd pay £100 for that on current hardware as a retail pack - at least until, as Mark notes, Wine gets clever enough to pretty much run anything Windows can without any bugs/glitches.
As for Windows 7, regardless of whether it's just VistaRedone, if they can get the whole 'compartmentalising' and 'modularity' done as well as it appears to be in most Linux distros I've played with, then that would be a pretty major step forward. I suspect however that it will not even come close.
Steven R
[my coat is the one with the WDS PXE boot documentation in the pocket - still haven't learned that for NT6 but it looks sweet and works well for NT5 images if you have a chunky enough LAN]
[PS: I didn't know about the DX9 stuff in WINE, does that mean if I can get my X1650 to work in Ubuntu - fat chance IME ; I love Ubuntu, but like the best lovers it has it's flaws - I could play, say, rFactor and FEAR/HL2 with full shiny acceleromated grahical thingys? ]
PPS: Paris because I'm just rambling on now :-)
Aside from the usual zealousness, Microsoft has been applauded of releasing something revolutionary and accused of essentially forcing people to choose between upgrading their OS, eating or being evicted from their flat (as insinuated by the commie).
Most of us have a fair idea as to why they did what they did and to a certain extent it was a great idea, but piss poorly executed.
Windows, in general & in the hands of a lay user, isn't focused on security right out of the box. Part of this is due to the Microsoft and industry misperception of what the "average" computer user wants, or has the understanding of. And one has to give props to Microsoft for being a pioneer (yes, I said it, with the full knowledge that I will probably get flamed) by making computers relatively easy to use for the average and dumb masses.
With that being said, Microsoft flat out missed the boat, even with the gift of 20/20 hind site, that they needed to be a little more security minded, by protecting the OS from the end user, regardless of whether or not they had elevated privileges. Bad Microsoft <insert punch to the throat, here>! BAD! BAD! BAD MICROSOFT!
Secondly, they failed to make a clean break. Once again, trying to market to the largest possible of permutations, they failed to adequately inform us of a lot of the nuances that Vista seems to surprise us with, every single day. Combine that with the vast array of upgrades to non-OS related MS apps and services, it's like watching an oil taker slowly run aground.
Yes, in some configurations it will work flawlessly, but in a lot of configurations, it's performance and stability suffers tremendously. Most of this was due to, as someone else posted, all of the useless background crap and DRM components, that a lot of people neither need nor want (assuming they even know it).
While I openly confess to not be as intimately familiar with vista as I am other OS's, I view Vista as a mixed blessing, in that it isn't the "silver bullet" that consumers and IT have been fighting for, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a step in the right direction.
As for Ballmer's assertion that Vista's "numbers" were so outstanding... All I can say is he must be smoking crack. Once again, as another poster mentioned, if you factor out all of the downgrades back to XP, vista's sales are less than stellar. If Microsoft's board were smart, they'd get rid of him as he's not only making himself look like a babbling idiot, but he's doing damage to Microsoft that won't be significantly apparent for another 5 or 10 years.
And if any of you remember the rise and fall of IBM in the PC market, Ballmer's lack of vision is setting up Microsoft for the same kind of fall as IBM took back in the mid 80's & 90's.
In the words of the prophet Simon , of the land of sheep botherers.
"So you like Vista?"
"Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator."
"Virtual Server?" the Boss asks.
"Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."
"So you don't like it?"
"No. But it has does have one advantage."
"What's that?"
"It causes a clean reinstall of XP which is generally good from a defrag point of view."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/09/bofh_episode_6/
Tried it on an IBM PC300GL desktop that's fitted with a Pentium 2 266MHz CPU. Installed fine but could not get display working correctly at higher resolutions (damn you Cirrus Logic and your crappy Laguna3D Accelerator!)
Tried it on a brand spanking new Compaq Presario C700 laptop. Hangs at the install screen.
Has the team actually tried running this on a real PC?
Paris, because surely she'll react to this OS.
.......And one has to give props to Microsoft for being a pioneer (yes, I said it, with the full knowledge that I will probably get flamed) by making computers relatively easy to use for the average and dumb masses.......
Not flaming you, but no way should M$ get anything but abuse for doing that.
Thanks to that particular policy and the subsequent use of computers by people who quite frankly shouldn't be given a remote control for a TV, we now suffer from vast amounts of spam and phishing scams. (The same dumb masses are the ones that fall for the crud ware)
Simple truth is anyone with any sense moved from using windows ages ago. Why anyone would want to pay through the nose for a bloated, bug ridden, malware magnet is beyond me. The only possible use I can think of for a windows box is to play games that can't be run via cedega.
I run three laptops one with XP, one with Vista and one with Ubuntu Hardy Heron (plus an old one with windows ME).
Ubuntu is definately the nicest runs on an old thinkpad but boots up quicker than the othe two. The Vista machine is Ok reasonably nice to use once you figure out where little used features like "save" are hidden and get used to mysterious blasts of random disk activity. The XP machine has got slower and slower as the years go by and takes an inordinate amount of time to boot up (thank you ZoneAlarm!) and is
now only fired up when the wife wants to laod a new selection of girly
music on to her ipod.
So Ubuntu rules.
Vista OK.
XP decommisioned ASAP.
Windows 95 -- still hanging in there.
I was an ex-XP fanboy who always weas the first to cry "VIsta is worthless waahhaaa" and then a few months back I decided to try VIsta and haven't looked back since, I really like it. Everything works smoothly, the OS never bogs down for me like XP did, and with UAC and indexing turned off it's a great experience. XP is history now in my eyes, albeit an important piece of history.
"With Windows 7, we're trying to more carefully plan how we share information with our customers and partners. This means sharing the right level of information at the right time depending on the needs of the audience"
They do this and hardware manufacturers don't get told, so they don't make drivers in time.
It happened with Vista and SP1 still had 54000 drivers in it. Windows 7 should come with thost 54000 drivers. So Microsoft should be coming out earlier to it's partners and it's customers not holding back more. It's quite simple, you tell those that make the computers what the OS is and they make drivers for it. Only do it before you start selling the OS.
They still don't understand...
I am happy though on this report as it clearly states (to me at least) Vista RIP.
@Colin.
Games. Pure and simple.... only you can't on Vista as drivers are laggy and bug ridden. XP it is. Cedega? (goes to google and starts looking)
No.
I have two machines bought in the last year and they both run Vista. They were both delivered with Vista and I had no problem with that.
One machine was a challenge as I dropped a HD DVB-S card into it and had to use Beta drivers. That issue's now not an issue.
The other machine's a laptop and was randomly not sleeping when I closed the lid. SP1 seems to have eradicated this issue.
Frankly, I may be someone who does not care that much about the operating system. I can get Vista to BSOD but it behaves in a similar manner to XP in robustness (my opinion).
I have a mix of Vista, XP, FC and OSX.
One thing Vista has tried to address is user-retardedness - the number of people who simply click on Yes, Install, OK, Screw My PC and other buttons on pop-ups is frankly very high.
The Penguin - because he can be an alternative.
I think the difference though, Steve, is that 2000 and XP were designed to complement each other - one was aimed at business, the other at home. Didn't work out that way in the end, but hey. Windows 7, however, is a replacement for Vista, which was supposed to be the all-singing all-dancing OS for everyone, and turned out to be the bloated all-indexing resource-hogging privacy-invading freedom-restricting drive-thrashing upgrade for no-one.
I used NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and skipped Win2000 (NT5.0) to XP (NT5.1).
My 386 server with 12M RAM was fine with NT3.5
My NT 4.0 RAID5 Server was fine till this year. Had to update to Server 2000 to run WSUS to reduce amounts of downloads for our XP clients. Server 2003 (NT 5.2) needed more RAM than could be afforded (RAMBUS RDRAM!!).
I have a copy of the 1st NT, 3.1. The 2.0 version of NT was essentially MS OS/2 with LAN Manager. (NOT IBM's OS/2). Not many people used it.
Personally I am still putting systems in that run on VIA powered ITX boards. VISTA simply will not run on this hardware with anything approaching usable speed, and even XP is not ideal, so W2k still has to be installed for best performance. I don't need gigabytes of Digital Rights Management and advanced graphics - it all gets switched off.
So what OFF THE SHELF version of windows should I be using?
I'm a non techy in a big way but a little more savvy than a lot of my friends (20 years in the industry in one role or another and you pick up a few things), so that probably makes me around average as a home user. And everything I've read about Vista tells me that when I upgrade my home PC I definitely do NOT want it.
Those people who say it's great usually end up qualifying that with "of of course this was after I disabled this function, and turned that one off" - well I've got news for you guys, the "average" home user doesn't want that hassle & most couldn't do it anyway, they want something that runs well out of the box without technical fiddling. The vast majority of the new bells and whistles just won't get used, e.g. they don't want the OS to do indexing for them, they just want to stick it all in the relevant folder in My Documents or possibly a sub-folder there. The more complex it is, the more confused they get. And the more complex it is, the slower it gets for doing all the stuff we bought a computer for in the first place.
What the "average" user really wants is a PC they can take out of the box and immediately do reasonably basic stuff like web browsing, emails, games etc on without any hassle. If they thought about it, they would problably like it to be reasonably secure too. Full stop.
Techies like shiney new toys, so the designers put lots of them into Vista. But in the same way that not everyone needs web access on their mobile phone but just uses it to make calls, not everyone wants added "features" that complicate life on their home PC.
What Microsoft should have done IMHO is release Vista normal and Vista "Shiney Toys" versions, with the normal having all the "presumably good" upgrades and the "Shiney Toys" version having all the bells & whistles that complicate matters. Or just make the standard install be without all the extras and let people add them in a custom install
Have you ever considered the possibility that - when soooo many people are of the same opinion - rather than everyone else being a moron out to slate your OS of choice, perhaps you're one of the lucky ones?
I have used Vista. I was forced to support it at my old job. I hated it from the minute I got hold of it. I've used it since. I still hate it. Any questions?
My experience is that most Windows games don't run on Windows, so WINE has nothing to beat. I have about a dozen games for pre-school kids that I've tried to install and run on an XP box. At least one of the titles just didn't install, no matter what. For the rest, various combinations of QuickTime version and DirectX version that allow different permutations of titles to work.
Such laughably naive approaches as "the latest version of each" just doesn't cut it because the clueless fuckwit who wrote the version check didn't know about ">". Nearly all of the games requires the child to have administrative access to the machine. These programmers should have their hands cut off so that they acnnot write another line of code.
I no longer buy games for my children. I can no longer bear to spend several hours discovering the optimal combination of system breakage, only to find out that this game only works at the expense of another of their favourites. (My kids don't like that either.)
[Takes deep breath.] Thanks for listening.
I have a Core 2 Quad clocked at 3GHz, 4GB of RAM and 2 8800GTX graphics cards.
A somewhat meaty spec and I have only had ONE issue with Vista 64bit, and that was random lockups and bluescreens for the first few days.
It turns out there was a bug when using more than 3GB of RAM and there was a hotfix for it - installing it has seen the end of the one and only problem I have ever had with Vista.
I have seen no issues with copying files, SP1 went on without a hitch and the performance has been fantastic.
No doubt there will be all the accusations that I am a shill, but for the record i've also been running nightly Minefield snapshots for the last year and i've seen the progression from Firefox 2 up until Firefox 3 RC state night by night and again, i've never had a single issue with any build.
Clearly I must also be a Mozilla shill too...
I bought a little Vaio TZ a couple of weeks ago. It came with Vista installed *and* an XP "downgrade" disc. I fully expected that a move to XP would be required considering all the negative reports I'd about Vista.......
Have to say: I like it.
This is no powerhouse laptop, it's bleedin' tiny, and Vista is snappy and friendly - I'd go so far as to recommend it.
I have vista on both of my home laptops and apart from some initial teething problems with driver support over a year ago, it's worked brilliantly. Not only is it stable and quick (this is new hardware) but the extra software that is thrown in with the OS is brilliant too.
My girlfriend who is a teacher had to make a DVD from a load of stop-motion footage that her class had filmed, and mix in a soundtrack with narrative and music in numerous files. Windows Movie Maker made this task an absolute doddle for her, and she didn't even require any support from me. It just worked. When the time came to burn the video to disk, Windows DVD maker did the job effortlessly and each member of her class now has a DVD with menu and extras like deleted scenes that they can take home, show to their families and be proud of. I know that XP has the same two bits of software, but the new versions are loads better.
And I didn't have to lift a finger to help with complex software, or even help find the necessary shareware to do it.
So, bollocks to all you haterz out there, Vista is more than an OS.
Shut the F*ck up!
I'm sick of your constant whinging.
I've been running Vista corporately and at home since it was released, on both desktops and laptops. Not a single problem. Currently rolling out SP1, still no problems!
I've a laptop at home that for the second time this year needs to be formatted and reinstalled - guess what - it's running that pile of shit called XP!
This time I'm installing Vista - no more problems with this one!
I don't work for Microsoft and I really use Vista.
My belief is that the tossers who bitch about how good XP is and how Vista is crap haven't actually tried installing and using Vista.
You fail to appreciate that different people are having different experiences with Vista, some good, some bad. Mine was bad, I brought a new laptop (samsung q45), it came with vista pre-installed. It was a pain to setup, it took a long time to go through the patch/update cycle, when I installed firefox and OOo it presented me with a shed load of ok/cancel request boxes which i stopped reading. It came with a 60 (?) day demo of office, I tried to uninstall it, I couldn't, it complained about being installed in a different language. In the end (well the same day actually) I gave up and installed ubuntu. I got it up and running very quickly and it all just worked.
I would not touch vista again, my first experience with it was bad, I also don't see any value in it. Its a huge piece of software that (from a users point of view) does nothing. It comes with notepad, IE, and demo software, thats about it.
To me an operating system enables other software to access a computers hardware, it should be light weight, fast, and not have ridiculous hardware requirements. Also by making it incompatible with old software/hardware drivers microsoft have (temporarily) lost the advantage they had with previous versions of windows. Its the software that sells the operating system, for some unknown reason microsoft broke their lock in with vista, which is why people are looking at Linux/macs.
isn't this all part of the traditional pattern for microsoft?
* with huge fanfare, microsoft apologise for previous crappy version of windoze and announce the latest, greatest, newest version
* new OS runs like shite and everyone hates it
* millions of self-hating windoze drones buy it anyway and then spend the rest of the year complaining about it.
* microsoft send a spy to apple's WWDC* and carefully note down anything new and innovative
* microsoft apologise for current version of windoze but announce that - honestly! we mean it this time! - the next version will be really great and will feature the never-before-seen... '<insert something copied off apple>'
* microsoft executives take cash from sales of the current release of windoze to the bank in a fleet of huge diamond-encrusted wheelbarrows, sniggering up their sleeves and shouting 'suckers!' at anyone they see using the OS.
[wait a year or two. then repeat]
the only mistake microsoft made this time was having their press conference a couple of weeks before apple's WWDC. hence the 'unusual reticence' in announcing what was going to be in windoze 7 - apple hadn't thought of it for them yet!
[* WWDC = world-wide developers conference]
I have a laptop with Vista on it and to be honest I have no problems with it.
I use FF2.whatever the latest one it asks me to install is rather than IE and other than that it is fine.
Takes a few tens of seconds to present the desktop after I open it up (need to logon, no auto logon crap fro me, so add a few extra seconds for typing password) which is perfectly good.
Never switch it off and only ever restart it when it makes me after an update. WHich isn't that often to be honest. It has never crashed or blue screened in the 8 months or so I have had it.
My main desktop is XP and I must say I have absolutely no intention of upgrading to Vista, but when I replace the computer I am also unlikely to exercise the downgrade option. Might put XP in a VM if I need it for anything though.
Linux can't even sleep properly without editing conf files... (something to do with my NVidia drivers) hardly good for laptop users.
Ubuntu 8's Gnome crashed when I entered an incorrect WPA key on my wireless network (silly me). Yes the OS didnt crash, but I had to restart the window server, so it might as well had. Ubuntu also doesn't work with my soundcard. While I love Linux for development, as a home entertainment system, or mobile system - it's miles off.
Vista on the other hand works with all my hardware, sleeps/resumes reliably and doesn't crash when i mistype a network key. Yes it's not perfect, but nor was Mac OS X 10, 10.1, or 10.2 (10.3 became usable). User Account Control and Windows Defender means if you have common sense, you can not bother with AntiVirus software (woo give me back that CPU cycles!)
Don't get me started on Mac. Imagine if Microsoft charged users £100 to upgrade their browser or get the latest Java version- that's what Apple do. I'm still on 10.3 and it's out of date and useless (for a Java developer!). Windows XP (released prior to 10.3) on the other hand is still usable.
Bottom line: Don't believe what you read in the press. Do a Google News search for Windows XP in 2000 - 2002 see how many negative articles you find, tons. Now everyone loves it!
I've used Vista Ultimate 32 bit since March 2007; got it on a new machine.
I've had a wonderful experience with it so far, marred only by two things:
1/. initial nVidia driver problems - long sorted
2/. my propensity to 'I wonder what happens if I do/delete/alter that'
When I first got my new machine I plugged in my HP DeskJet 990cxi and it installed automatically without me having to do anything further. I've had no hardware problems, period.
Games? I'm not into FPS games but my RTS ones all run brilliantly, as do the simulators.
Networking has been problem free.
The Vista 'reliability monitor' proved interesting reading when I discovered it. It keeps a detailed log of all system hiccups; what I noticed was that 90% of problems were due to a few applications going postal - stand-up Firefox 2 in particular. Still love and primarily use Firefox but would like improved memory handling and the stability of IE7 on my machine. Looking forward to Firefox 3...
I oversee several Vista installations and they're all successful.
Yes, Vista is slower than I'm sure XP would be on my machine (overclocked E6700 Core 2 Duo with 3GB overclocked RAM) but that's why I bought a new machine. It would have been strange indeed for a new OS to come out 6 years after the previous one and it not demand greater resources. Doesn't bother me at all.
Service Pack 1 was a breeze, on all installations. Reliability is A1 on these machines.
Even the often attacked UAC (User Account Control) is actually pretty useful in stopping auto-click-happy-mania and after a relatively short while of using Vista hardly bothers you.
I say all this because too many people have:
1/. been too ready to blame MS for 3rd party application developers not getting robust drivers ready in time - despite having aeons of time. I'm reminded of an HP support guy telling me in 2001 that he didn't think HP would bother getting XP drivers ready for my recently purchased printer. 6 weeks it took them.
2/. installed Vista on unsuitable hardware. MS could've made things clearer it's true, with all the Vista Capable & Vista Ready labelling confusion.
3/. just been trolls who have wanted to diss MS because they love to hate MS. Corporations are corporations and none of them are 'goodies'.
I use other OSes happily enough but really like Vista and want to add some balance too.
Steve
Well personally I have a bad experience of Vista because I've used other OS's. Vista runs. It makes programs run and it uses the hardware to do so.
So for those whose expectations are so low or have nothing else to compare it to, Vista works.
If they could reinstall XP (even though XP speed went down considerably with SP1), they may see how bad on the same hardware Vista is ****in relation to other OSs***.
I run Vista on my desktop alone as a test for the office (bought a new PC, Vista was pre-installed, orders from above that we'll be moving to it anyway within a year so I figured a test was a good plan).
Out of the box, it ran like a sack of crap. Took ages to boot, ages to log into the network and indeed do anything network related. Applied every update that was available, improved things dramatically though network performance was still painful. Then I did some tweaking with some things I'd found on the net, disabling the global autotuning. It was perfect after that. Applied SP1, slow network performance, it had changed the setting back.
I must admit that, on this new £300 dell (2.8GHz Dual Core) I find I have no problems with it at all other than the odd IE lockup which I'm still trying to resolve. Certainly not all the issues everyone else has been having.
I guess the key would seem to be that it depends very much on setup, infrastructure, programs that are installed etc. I mean everyone here will be running different setups - it might well work faultlessly out the box for some people, others like me it'll work with a little tuning, and for some people it clearly doesn't work at all.
I think what I'm trying to say is don't assume because something isn't working for you that it must be broken for everyone and anyone who says otherwise is lying/working for MS. I mean I'm not sat here saying it doesn't work for you because you're a numpty am I? ;)
I find the "Multi-touch" technology amusing. I guess this mean I have to buy a new touch screen monitor to run windoz 7.
I am sure large (and small) companies are going to rush out and buy new monitors for their computer users. Please note the sarcasm in my comment.
One other thing, it is bad enough when I have to clean my mouse after my kids use the computer. Imagine how my brand new touch screen monitor will look after a few months.
Hi, yes Vista was not great when first released, but when I got Vista SP1 it worked much better and it was faster. I also got the beta of Windows Search. There are still some strange slowdowns but it occurs rarely now instead of often. This opionion comes from a computer geek/reseller who goes back to CP/M, DOS, Windows 286, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP with 30 years of computer ownership. I am happy with Vista SP1 now. Windows XP SP3 installed fine too on my old laptop. If you read about the whiners yes you will get a negative feeling but what's worse is the Linux geeks jump in to bash Windows. Nothing wrong with Linux, but its still not for desktops but servers. And forget gaming on it, most games are Windows based.
"If all you're interested in is games, then get a game system and leave comments about computers to those of us who know what they are supposed to be used for. As evidence of your ignorance, I point out that games function on the platform for which they are written. That has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with the developers.
Get a PlayStation or, hell, even an XBox. You'll be happier and seem smarter"
wow, well done... 2 paras and makes you sound like a really condescending twat...
1) if it wasnt for pc gaming PCs would be a damn site slower than they are now, gaming on pcs has single handedly increased PC power over the years due to driving for a 'real' experience. if we all relied on you linux geeks who would prefer to sit in a terminal window all day we would still be back inthe days of DOS etc... the fact that PCs do more than just geek stuff is the reason why most homes have a pc of some variety now.
also many people do not want a bare bones system that can just access a dos prompt. we need things like media players, indexing service (that the apple people think rocks on their platform - its surely the fastest way to find files on your PC - even though desktop search is very limited imho) etc...
now, i wont use vista here at work (im in charge of IT here and XP is fine for business use) but for home its seems ok, we have one contractor that uses it here 2 days a week and its a nice environment to work in, albeit the confirmation msgs are a pain but they can be turned off... i have also seen people buying vista laptops that are far from capable of running vista - i think this is where a lot of the problems come from. the ex bought one and the spec would barely run XP well (512 ram etc... some shared to the video card) - even though it was 'vista capable'
linux still isnt a viable alternative for everyone... gimp seems good if you have never used photoshop or are a pretty basic designer - but its like comparing a ferrari to volvo. people do not want all this WINE and mucking about to get games working... they arent interested in open source - they want the same OS/office suite that their mates have and they use at work - as it makes things easier for them. remember that the vasy majority of none-IT people do not want to spend ages messing around with their PCs - they just want to do basic tasks.
quick story for you linux people:
contactor came in a few weeks ago moaning that he cannot buy a laptop without xp/vista on. he said to the manager at dixons (more money than sense i know) that he was going to stick ubuntu on it. they refused to sell it as if he did they would not support it and it would invalidate the warantee. he then contacted linux format to moan about this - to which they replied that linux has been well known in the past to kill hardware due to dodgy drivers...
odd eh?
mines the fireproof one :)
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