back to article Counterfeit Vista rate half that of XP

The piracy rate for Windows Vista is less than half that of Windows XP, according to Microsoft. The vendor made the claim as it revealed plans to further curtail piracy when it launches the first service pack for Vista. Redmond attributes tougher anti-piracy measures in Vista, which it intends to further improve, for its …

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  1. James Anderson

    Only my personal experience

    But my Vista machine is a lot faster than my XP machine.

    This is probably due to the "cruft" the XP box has collected over the years, but, its perceived performance that counts. Besides it only takes a

    couple of weeks to work out where they hid all the buttons and menus :-).

    A special thanks to ZoneAlarm for the 10 minute startup time on my XP.

    And a special thanks to ZoneAlarm support whose respose to complaints about slow startup is to remove any posts mentioning this from thier discusion boards.

  2. Steven Hewittt

    @ fred muntenara

    The reason you aren't going to use Vista is down to the EULA?! WTF? Every EULA i've ever bothered to look at has been a waste of space. Sign your life away to run this software etc...

    Fraid it's going to take more than a EULA to put me off running some software when we have a legal licence for it. The fact I can't sue MS if there's some gaping hole in their software makes little difference to me, we use Virtual Server instead of desktop builds so VM stuff makes little difference and the DRM thing is completely out of control.

    Just to confirm once again what this 'DRM' in Vista is... If you try to play a HD-DVD or BlueRay Disc that has content protection enabled by the publisher, then Vista will run the data through an encrypted 'tunnel' across your system through to the HDCP enabled output device. If Vista detects hardware changes or suspects hacking, it will stop the media from playing and restart it. No BSOD, no reporting back to MS, no rebooting the machine. It's only for protected HD media, which isn't in use yet. Any remember that this is the same on your HD-DVD or BlueRay drive as well...

    Oh, and I couldn't care less about WGA. Same as XP and Office which has ran fine generally speaking. (Although it does p*ss me right off I can understand why it's being done)

    The number of people saying that they will never put Vista on their machine who haven't tried it is just laughable. There is nothing wrong with it generally speaking. The performance comparisions are just a joke - as people are comparing running a 6 year old OS on a Core Duo 2, 1Gb RAM system with Vista on the same box. I'm sure Windows 2000, Windows 98 or even DOS will run fast on that setup - as the hardware is years above what the specs were when the OS was initally released. I'm pretty sure Vista will blow XP out of the water if we grabed the average box from 6 years in the future and ran Vista on it. (Whilst leaving XP on it's current setup from now-a-days)

    And seriously guys - the number of years the Linux fans have been defending the OS whilst the drivers were shit, and now of course it's a different story that Vista doesn't work with some hardware out of the box. Hate MS for shite coding standards or unethical marketing, but for not writting drivers for 3rd party hardware vendors? Um, isn't it up to the hardware manufacturers to do this? Red Hat doesn't support my wireless card - but it's hardly RH's fault that 3COM suck when writting driver software.

  3. Aaron

    MS miss the obvious

    I myself pirated vista to try it out, mainly because I wasn't about to spend £600 when it first came out knowing that microsoft os's rarely are even usable when they come out.

    I tried it and wiped it and went back to XP (yes I pirated XP to but I do own legit copies of xp but the pirated corporate editions with out WPA etc is nicer so thats what I will use).

    I've been through the cycle of trying vista several times since its come out and each time I end up wiping it and going back to XP. Mainly because its slow unresponsive buggy and directx 10 doesn't seam to do anything for me.

    Before anyone bash's my system's specs im running a core 2 quad q6600 over clocked to 4ghz per core, 4gb DDR2 PC1066, 2xRaptor 150Gb in raid 0, and 2xNvidia 8800 GTX's in SLI. It gets 5.9's on all the vista performance tests so as high as their own scale gets but still doesnt run well.

    Im looking forward to trying it again after SP1 to see if its any better, I will pirate it then as well (because we all know the pirate copys that will allow SP1 to be installed will be out very quickly), and again I will try it to see if its worth my money and much more importantly if its worth using as my main OS.

  4. glenn
    Happy

    @ Steven Hewittt

    Either your couple of year old laptop has some secret processing power, or you are talking complete guff! Our desktop P4 3.2 with 1gig of ram and a 256mb Geforce 6800 GT runs vista like a complete sack of wank, and has a performance rating of 3.7. You do know that being able to boot O/S is a bit different to actually using it with multiple apps running. Vista is turd, so i'll be sticking to XP.

  5. Tim Blair
    Happy

    ROTFLMAO

    great posts people, not worth getting it for free, LOL, over priced bloated junk IMHO,, wish google would kick out their own linux distro' an kick the hardware/software dudes into gear.....

  6. Peter Brooks

    Everybody does not 'love' XP

    everyone loves XP.

    ----------

    What planet do you come from!!!

    People put up with XP, shite that it is, because they can't afford a Mac or don't know how to run linux. I can't believe that anybody actually likes it.

    Vista is, of course, likely to be worse - the more you cobble onto the DOS framework the more that is likely to go wrong.

  7. James Pickett
    Gates Horns

    @Thad

    "I have no wish to spend any more money on MS software"

    Precisely! You can only fool the public so many times...

  8. Dale
    Unhappy

    The File browser in vista is rubbish...

    Its something not a lot of people on here have commented on, but the file browser on vista quite simply isn't as nice to use as the one on XP. Its basically awkward and hides away a lot of functionality. I also makes it awkward to cut and paste large groups of files (You need to click inside the folder you re going to put the files into before you right click and paste), its really annoying for someone like me who works with lost of small files all the time.

    Its the number one reason I went back from Vista to XP on my work machine. The new interface is a drag to work with.

  9. Chris Collins
    Thumb Down

    gui is a nightmare

    Dale is right, vista does have problems with networking bad drivers etc. But the thing that annoys me the most is MS changing the gui so menus are hidden, run is hidden, everything needs more clicks for example in xp I double click my lan icon is systray and I then have my lan properties window, this dont work in vista and have to dive into the now bloated control panel in vista, in xp display control panel has all the display stuff in tabs in vista its all seperate panels. The window explorer I liked in xp, in vista it took me 40 mins to figure out how to get the status bar to show as I couldnt get to the menu bar and then another 20 mins to set options like show hidden files etc. Superfetch makes the hd thrash for ages and ages on a machine with 2 gig of ram and no apps loaded, windows firewall was blocking microsoft update so I had to disable it O_o, a vista lan beta driver. I have to use was ran in xp2 compatability mode as vista auto determined it to be a xp sp2 app which then made it install the xp driver O-o so I had to force compatability service to disabled, I had to install telnet manually which is a basic function in xp. Playing mp3s in wmp uses about 4x the resource as xp and they keep stuttering this I found out is due to drm. Thats all I can remember for now :)

  10. Steve Roper
    Linux

    Vista is good... for Linux!

    I HAVE installed and played around with Vista, in response to my boss wanting an analysis for when we upgrade from XP. After messing around with it, the first conclusion I came to is that it is different enough from "Classic" windows that the staff retraining costs would about equal the cost of staff retraining on Linux. Add to that the cost of upgrading Office and all the publishing and design software on our systems... you can see where I'm going with this.

    Ubuntu, OpenOffice, GimpShop, Scribus and Blender are all free. Windows, Office, Photoshop, InDesign and Cinema4D are all bloody expensive. It's going to cost us the same in training and lost productivity when we upgrade either way.

    So it wasn't difficult to convince my boss that when the time comes to upgrade, we'll be ditching the commercial software and rolling out Linux/OSS across the company. I for one won't be sorry to see the back of the vendor lockins we've been cursed with since day one, and with the Ubuntu box I've now got set up in the admin office humming nicely the rollout won't be too far away.

    As others have said, Vista is probably the best thing that has happened to Linux since its inception!

  11. fred muntenara
    Happy

    @ Steven Hewitt

    The EULA places restrictions on the OS's reuse on other hardware, resale, use in virtual machines without valid keys (fair enough). But it is the combination of this with Microsoft's phone-home activation that allows them to ENFORCE the terms of the EULA. I can't confidently buy a copy of Vista knowing that I'll be able to use it on the machine I'm typing this on, and on the one I buy in a couple of months, and on a machine I may buy next year, even if I only ever intend to have it on 1 system at any time. I certainly can't be confident that I can keep a backup VM containing content I create today dust it off in 20 years, fire it up and hope that MS still thinks I should be "allowed" to be running it any more.

    The fundamental problem I have with all this stuff (and the discomfort started with XP's WGA), is that the ability of my machine to keep on doing what I want it to do, now and long in to the future should not rely on permission from some company across the sea. Microsoft will be around for a while yet, and admittedly their stuff generally works well. But it only takes a few cock-ups (like WGA mistaking some legitimate XP installs for illegal copies) to make me less than comfortable with the situation.

    You admit you haven't yet experience protected HD content :) You admit to WPA p!$$ing you off - you at least have some sense of the limitations to your freedom - those are the bars of your battery hen cage. It may be roomy, predictable and comfortable for you, but its still a cage. Not for me.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    I love vista stories

    Hell I love all XP news too, it always always has the same "moral of the story" - just buy a mac.

  13. William Hinshaw
    Thumb Down

    Who wants to pirate crap

    Who wants to pirate something worse that Windows ME? That is why the numbers are down. Vista sucks and SP1 isn't going to fix some of the major issues with it. If possible we will skip this pile of crap and hope for the best with the next OS from Microsoft.

  14. N

    Vista piracy?

    Why in Gods name would anyone want to pirate such a complete pile of cr@p?

    Ive just returned from a client whos unfortunate enough to have bought a very powerful laptop with Vista

    Vista took 3 minutes to come out of suspense with several error messages before it could do anything useful.

    Vista is simply not worthy enough to be pirated.

  15. Suburban Inmate
    Pirate

    Windows will always be pirateable.

    The harder MS make it for the pirates, the more individuals will be forced to shell out for Windows. Corporate customers already have to anyway.

    Except those people who cannot afford a legit copy of Windows. Like the single mum on a modest wage for whose kids I just sorted out a P600 box running a cracked VLK copy of XP. Microsoft built its market share on the total or near-total lack of anti-piracy measures in 3.x, NT, 9x, and other apps.

    Make it enough of a pain in the arse and people like me, who no doubt install the vast majority of pirated software, will simply start installing a suitable Linux distro and pointing them in the direction of some tutorial sites.

    Cue a load more people well versed in, or at least comfortable with Linux.

    Cue them getting into management positions, IT jobs, and even running their own companies, ever mindful of the bottom line. Or just causing word-of-mouth.

    Cue MS going mental and releasing windows on a license similar to a lot of apps: "free for home and non-commercial use".

  16. Dan
    Thumb Down

    WALOB

    I've been using a pirated version of vista for two months now, not had a single problem with it, and it runs everything just as well as XP. I tried UBUNTU on the same machine and it was an abysmal failure of an installation, it will be a long time before I touch that amateur piece of pooh again.

  17. Dana W
    Jobs Halo

    Once a user, always a user?

    "How many of those on the hate-vista campaign here, has actually tried it? Register: Can you check your httpd logs and see how many of those were posted from OSX or Lin(s)ux machines?"

    And how many of us Mac and Linux "I use both" users ARE former Windows users?

    We got sick of it, get the clue, Personally I'd like to thank Vista, without it I would never have gotten into Linux, and from there into OSX. I'd still be using that Microsoft trash and thinking that computers are SUPPOSED to crash daily.

  18. Paul Hughes
    Unhappy

    reduced functionality mode

    Microsoft obviously made some mistake - it seems all versions of Win Vista are stuck in "reduced functionality mode" by default!

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