Bursting the Vista sales bubble: 35% of sample "downgrade" to XP | Hacker News Reader

Bursting the Vista sales bubble: 35% of sample "downgrade" to XP

weblog.infoworld.com

6 pointsechair8 comments

Representative sample or not, this is a real phenomenon. A lot of Vista's so-called sales are not really sales at all. Just last fall, I bought an Everex laptop that came with Vista and never even booted into the OS, immediately eschewing it in favor of Gentoo.

Dell is still offering the "Windows Vista Business Bonus" option on new PCs, which really means that for 99 bucks extra you get Windows XP pre-installed and a Vista disc and license for later.

I just recently ordered two of these for a local client that does energy research. They're running some older test software, some custom stuff, and TightVNC on a couple of other systems, none of which works (or works easily, or works well) on Vista. At this point, it's smarter for them to pay the extra 99 dollars to stick with XP.

The "print this page" link: http://weblog.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printT...

"enterprise-class users" are generally clueless and very stuck in their ways.

This survey means nothing, and is classic (and tired) link/flame bait.

I know it's fashionable to shit on Vista these days, but come on.

we had to find our own source of comparison data. Fortunately, one of the parameters we collect from the several thousand members of the exo.performance.network community using the Windows Sentinel monitoring tool is the name of the system manufacturer.

So basically they have taken a completely irrelevant part of the market, definitely thrown that whole "representative selection" thing which is crucial to proper statistic out the window, and extrapolated their way to a conclusion.

Has anyone here even heard about the Windows Sentinel monitoring tool until now? I know for sure I haven't, and I am pretty invested in the Windows platform.

[ Join the exo.performance.network community, and monitor your PC's performance with the InfoWorld Windows Sentinel tool. ]

So a quick read reveals its something you have to install. Something you have to be an active participant in.

If not even techies have heard about it, you can be damned sure that your average Joe haven't, and that these data are worthless for making conclusions on any wider audience.

I'm having miserable performance. Vista takes ages to load, and even then the system will not infrequently "freeze" (turn a zonked-out white and spin internal wheels) while I'm doing nothing more complex than surf the Internet. It takes about a minute after systems load until the cable modem is usable.

In terms of basic usability, Vista is hands-down the worst-performing OS I've ever had. I am genuinely curious how a company like Microsoft could let a stinker like this out the door.

I would downgrade if I could, but have a dual-boot machine and - frankly - don't want to risk letting anything coming out of Redmond screw around with my harddrive and systems while at least 50% (the Ubuntu portion I use most of the time) is the most powerful and stable system I've ever used. The only reason I'm ever in Vista is for audio editing work, so it is tolerable in that sense too.

That might be, but it's still 100% irrelevant. I'm not debating the merits of Vista as a OS, but the validity of these statistics outside the scope in which they were gathered.

If you, a techie, which admits despite hating Vista still having it installed, what are the chances the average Joe's have gone trough with a downgrade?

Until we get actual, real numbers, I see no point in discussing the failure or success of Vista from a sales point of view.

I got Vista with a laptop and I couldn't use it either, but what I've noticed is that most normal users get Vista with new PC's and they are so used to spyware/malware/adware making their computer work like crap that they never even notice how much slower vista is. They just expect their computer to take 4 minutes to start IE and thrash the HDD the entire time its on.

They don't switch back to XP. It never even occurs to them. Most of them have a fairly dim idea about even the difference between Vista and XP. Its just another computer that doesn't work very well. Like all of the other computers they've had.

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