Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even MS is beginning to get it
eweek.com
eweek.com
The only driver I've been unable to find was for a very old, very cheap Logitech webcam. Everything else has been no trouble whatsoever.
I think almost all problems attributed to Vista are actually due to shoddy hardware used by budget conscious OEMs. Buy a Dell and you'll hate Vista, but then again, buy a Dell and you'll hate any OS. Buy a Lenovo and it's rather pleasant.
In this case, customers realized that the sidebar wasn't very special, the voice control features were iffy, and much of the software and driver CDs that came with their computers did not recognize this version of Windows and displayed error messages, or customers discovered by trial and error that they should go to each vendor's support page for the best and updated drivers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many installations were upgrades, and not fresh installs. That also generates problems and differences.
Vista over-promised and under-delivered, but it is a good operating system.
Now, nobody cares about special features like voice recognition. They fire up their tabbed web browser and virtually ignore the environment altogether.
Yes, Microsoft has released many patches for Vista since its release. Also, nearly all software and driver downloads support Vista, while very few product pages listed Vista as a supported operating system earlier this year (and therefore hadn't been tested on Vista yet.)
But, after users install and configure their printers, file sharing, applications, and wallpaper, they don't even notice or stress about the differences between Vista and XP. I know I don't.
And why do you think Lenovo uses better hardware than Dell?
I used to think that. My Thinkpad Z61m is starting to convince me otherwise though.
It's the subtleties that matter.
I can say that I have heard more positive things about Vista during launch than I heard about XP during its launch. The architecture change is bigger and better than in 2K->XP. In this regard MS should not be worried...
What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed. And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL. Using XP instead of Vista is the only way people has to hurt MS.
Another difference is the huge amount of time it passed since the last release. MS made lots of companies to subscribe to any SO updates that would have happened in the last 6 years.
Then they released nothing during that years. They got the money and provided nothing in exchange of that money. That's a (very valid) reason for a lot of companies to dismiss Vista, as in 'this is payback time'.
So the initial opinion of Vista is in fact better than the initial public opinion of XP. But, public opinion of XP changed slowly but surely towards positive, specially with service pack 2. All its problems were technical and nothing else. Vista has already fixed most of the technical problems and public opinion is still bad. I see no signs of the public opinion of Vista getting better.
Seems like people finally understood that DRM sucks and should be repeled with full force.
Yes. 10.0 seemed like a public alpha. It was unbearably slow and missing important features. 10.1 was like a beta - faster and more polished, but still slow and a bit rough. 10.2 was significantly better. Since then, they've been more like point releases.
Vista is trying to address that, and while most smart people are either using linux or have xp configured acceptably, mom and pa are probably better off with Vista's security B&D.
And updates still require reboots. Grr.
Just read this sentence out loud: Absolutely "empty" Vista PC with no applications running is consuming about 400MB of RAM. Sure some of it is disk cache and I do not have exact numbers that 400 breaks down to, but that is not the point. To do any kind of work you'll need about 1GB of memory. Isn't it insane? Especially since XP is doing great on machines with 256MB RAM of memory?
Enough about RAM. How would one explain that after you turn your PC on, Vista spends about 10-15 minutes doing crazy amount of disk I/O on various system processes/services. What is it doing? My Vista laptop (very powerful T60p) needs to just sit and "calm down" for like 10 minutes after I turn it on.
Now do the math: Vista is not cheap. And on top of that you'll have to buy 1 more GB of RAM and (probably) more powerful video card. And wait 10 minutes after power on. And tolerate DRM and annoying security popups. But why? What for? Where is it what I pay dollars and my time for?
For people who have XP, there is no point in changing. The same goes for office pack, no significant added value. The price is not worth the benefit.
By trying to force people to buy Vista with FUD about incompatibilities with prior version, Microsoft is in fact pushing people to try and go for Ubuntu or other equivalent free Linux distribution.
The only thing that keeps me using windows (XP) is the Visual C++ IDE which has no equivalent in term of quality in the linux realm, and some games that only work on Windows. I hope this changes.
I'm just glad I switched to Ubuntu.
I'm not sure why anyone would consider upgrading to Vista.
That, for me, became so annoying after a few days I turned it off. (I do keep running into inexplicable instances where I am not allowed to delete or move files I created without engaging in much unintuitive file property manipulations, so the machine still seems to be boss of things.)
Vista is amazingly annoying in so many little ways. I suspect that is true of all OS, and people just become numb to them, but Vista seems keen on reminding me what "opinionated software" is all about.
So far the only thing that keeps me from replacing Vista with XP is the pre-installed Media Center software.
(I already set up the dual boot for Kubuntu, for Serious Computer Usage. :))
Also, like mattmaroon above, I fail to see why people hate Vista so much. I have no problems with it. Its stable, has support for my hardware and seems fast enough. And I run the x64 version, which is likely more quirky that the 32 bit one. I did do a fresh install, so I maybe upgrades are more problematic. I have also been a Mac/Linux user since the Windows95 days, so have little experience with XP and 2003.
Putty works better for me compare to the default xterm that shipped with OSX. The "just work" phrase doesn't seem to reflect that based on my own experience.
For development, Vista has pretty much everything while OSX has almost everything minus .NET (yes I know there's Mono but I don't need Mono, I need Microsoft .NET and its tools Express or Full-package).
I prefer Office 2007 than Office 2004 or iWork. Outlook feels my need.
At home (PC desktop) I use Media Center frequently. Front Row isn't anywhere near. Oh, I never use Front Row because it doesn't do much.
I prefer to use Windows Live Gallery than iPhoto because WLG is simpler (for me) than iPhoto.
Overall, Vista is smooth for me. My machine is a budget one; it took $450 CAD to build it. Here's the spec:
ASRock (or ASUS I forgot) mobo with built-in vid-card AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4400+ 2.30 GHz Kingston RAM 2GB DDR2 800MHz Samsung 160GB SATA2 Haupauge WinTV PVR 150
Windows Media Center detects the card with no problem at all and it fetched all cable channels. You could also watch tons of clips from MTV via Windows Media Center. While I understand the real-world situation that the author describes, there's no need to hate something that you've never tried.
- vista took 800mb just to boot up
- aero is slow
- can't download torrents right on vista
- games run slower on vista
one good thing about vista is that i moved a hard drive from an amd machine to an intel machine and it booted up like normal. great driver support.