My first encounter with Vista.....
.... A friends retired mother recently asked advice from me regarding the purchase of a PC. She bought her laptop from Dell with Vista regardless. In her own words, "it would have cost another £130 quid for a Windows XP license buying from Dell".
Between Dell's, "value added software" (ie crap like the Google desktop, amongst others), and Vista itself, it took an estimated 5 minutes to + to finish starting up even after a spot of what can only be termed as decrapification in an attempt to make the beast usable. Despite a dual core processor, and goodly amount of RAM, it ran like a crippled pig in comparison to my full fat P4 (none of your crappy mobility processors for me thanks) 3.2 Mz, 768 MB RAM Amilo D 1845, a machine I have now owned for more than two years.
The overwhelming impression is that Vista as I saw it yesterday, despite all of the appropriate updates being applied is borderline unusable. It reminded me strongly of beta releases of Windows I have tested in the past in terms of stability. Tools that Windows users rely, such as display properties appear to have been hidden away under new applets purely in order to drive training revenues. Basic tools fail to start, despite running under what passes for admin rights. The control panel regularly took 3 minutes or so to finish loading......
Less annoying Windows next year ? Upgrade now.....
..... Let's see, we pay MS in order to be annoyed, increase our hardware and training costs and piss off users when stuff that should "just work" doesn't...... Thank god my buddies mother doesn't want to do much more than browse the web and send emails. Who knows what would happen if she wanted to watch a hi def DVD, or heaven forbid work for instance.
Laughable.
The thing about Linux, FreeBSD et al, is that it's free. In the main however it works as advertised. Vista, in its current condition can only aspire to such quality.
What kind of brain damaged corporate IT department would order Vista as the O/S of choice in the condition it os in right now ?
I do hope I understand correctly that MS bloggers are talking about fixing this mess of MS making, rather than, as is implied by comments above they are thinking about a new Vista edition and leaving existing users to their fate.