First thing I did when I got my new laptop a few months back was switch off all the stupid stuff. As if Windows isn’t big and slow enough without 3D effects and font-smoothing… Grrr.
The instant extra RAM thing is a neat idea. That’s the only good thing I have to say about Vista. I didn’t like Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP. I don’t like Vista either. But the sad fact is that hardware manufacturers write more and better device drivers for Windows than they do for Linux, and in the UK, Mac is nowhere near as well supported as it is in the US.
There is just more software and hardware that works with Windows (I use “works” in a theoretical sense here).
I’ve also heard tell that you can still get a blue screen of death with Vista. I’ve not had that yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long. Never took long with any of its predecessors…
I am a Linux user and have Vista (NOT as my main OS… on a secondary computer) it’s AWFUL! Compared to Linux there are NO effects and it runs slow and eats the system. it is TERRIBLE! If you think the effects are even kind of cool take a look at Compiz: http://compiz.org/Home/Screenshots
Windows has always made their latest OS work best on top-of-the-line machines…When 98 came out, when 95 came out, when 2000 came out, everyone complained what a resource hog they were. We used to say Windows 95 was the quickest way to turn a Pentium into a 386.
A year or two from now, these kinds of complaints will be moot. When you have the hardware and memory for it, Vista runs just fine.
Sure, you CAN get an os that isn’t as much of a resource hog. Heck, I can go back to MS-DOS 5.0 if I’m that worried about it. But I’m not My machine handles vista, and so it suits me just fine. It’s a good strategy for Microsoft, because it gives the OS a little more shelf life.
The only problem with Linux is that you actually have to learn how to USE it. Not something most people are prone to want to do. If you want to compare operating systems, Mac people are the ones who like their steak rare, with a warm center and their martinis shaken, not stirred. Windows folks are just happy to get a hamburger with both parts of the bun. Linux folks, on the other hand, prefer to butcher the steer themselves, and cook it their way.
I love Linux. I used to run SuSe as my main box. Unfortunately, every laptop I ever tried with Linux had display adaptor driver issues and I work with a laptop mostly.
It can be fine if you run stuff in isolation, but when you work in a Windows environment with an IT dept who are all MS fans… well, you just can’t win. They claimed they couldn’t get me connected to the network for a start.
Also, a lot of the software I use (in collaborative projects with Windows users) isn’t there for Linux - Adobe Premiere Pro, for example.
It’s a great OS, and I am a big open-source fan, but for some users it is not supported well enough by drivers and software to be a real option for serious use. For that reason, I am stuck with Windows - which I don’t like.
As for Linux with effects… Why the hell bloat and slow down a small, fast OS by adding a load of pointless effects? That’s for kids and gamers (no offence, Chris). If you’re trying to get some work done you don’t need frills and nonsense taking up system resources.
And if you’re not working, why spend so much time in front of a computer?
Your OS can have shelf life without outstripping machines that M$ stated very clearly and specifically that Vista would have no problems running on.
The fact that Vista, according to M$, was supposed to work on the everyday machine right out of the box with 100% of its features turned on bothers me to the n’th degree.
I specifically requested extra RAM with my most recent laptop because I knew Vista would be a pig in the mire without it, and quite frankly my machine opperates at what M$ claimed would be an average level despite having 2g of RAM with all the doodads turned off. Now, according to Microsoft, I should be able to get these results with all the doodads turned on, but that’s just not the case. Like I said before, there’s more than enough room for improvement; IMHO, prolly more than XP ever had.
And quite frankly, one doesn’t need a Jesuscomputer to get that kind of eye candy; look at what some people are doing with gentoo, it’s gorgeous and completely capable of running on less than a gig of ram.
Now, you say vista runs just fine on your unit, but is your unit what the average computer user goes down to best buy and picks up? I’m betting not. MS didn’t pay attention to what average joe computer user actually needed in an OS; no, they made every attempt to throw a nuke at OSX and ended up shooting the average end user in the foot, and let’s be honest, you and I are most certainly not the average end user. We know very well what we’re doing and how to make our operating system do what we want it to do, but average joe computer user doesn’t; he doesn’t have the time, if not the inclination, to become a power user. A truly good operating system would work with what the average user is buying, and vista does not in many cases. How much has truly changed about the features of the average joe computer user’s computer purchasing options in the last two years? Not a whole heck of a lot. My five year old laptop came with a 1.8 ghz processor and 1 gig of ram. They still offer pretty much the same damn computer at the store five years later, in a shiny new case with a higher definition screen and a DVDRW combo drive. My computer was certainly not state of the art when I bought it; I bought it at Best Buy for just shy of $1k, because that’s all I had to spend at the time. I could have bought a boutique laptop and had a stellar performance machine that would still be viable another two years from now for under another grand, but I didn’t need it.
Average joe computer user is buying computers with specs very similar to ones offered five years ago. Dropping an a-bomb of an OS on the market has been slow to change that. During the year-plus that Vista has been on the market, the market has indicated that people are going to buy according to their needs, and that the category called ‘needs’ doesn’t neccisarily include extra expense for optional equipment to facilitate the switch to a new quirky OS.
There’s nothing wrong with designing an OS for what technology will come down the pipe in the future, however, making that programming work properly with what the average user has or can be offered is important too, and vista has aptly demonstrated why. What M$ has done with Vista has done is most certainly not good business; if it was, why would manufacturers suddenly be offering downgrades to XP or other OSs some months after Vista debuts? This is not making MS any dough… Why, for as small a chunk of the market as they have, would Apple experience their largest increase in market share in the company’s history? Between the release of vista and today, Apple has taken a bigger bite (however small that bite might be) out of MS than they ever have before. Macs have had more anual “converts” since the release of Vista than ever before as well. Many if not most of those who switch to apples state that dissatisfaction with MS and Vista as impetus for their switch. This is not good for MS, no matter how small a differece it might be. It might be nominal now, but lets say, just for sake of argument, that Vista doesn’t end up getting its act together the way XP did; will more users be driven to Apple? It’s a distinct possiblility.
Before vista was released, I never once had someone ask during casual conversation if I knew anything about Linux, now the average question I get from friends and family about Linux is “What do you know about Linux and would it be feasable to switch to it from vista.”
I’d be willing to bet that even a year from now we’ll still see stores selling basic average-joe computers that will just barely run vista. Another year, and yes, the very idea may well indeed be moot, because either what the average joe computer user has available at a reasonable price will have caught up to what vista requires to run properly or there’ll be another OS coming down the pipe…hopefully M$ will do it properly that time around.
Quite frankly, I’d rather wait a year or two longer for a relatively bug-free OS that will run on what is available instead of trying to force a market upgrade. That’s exactly what should have happened with vista; it should have stayed in beta form in R&D for another year. If M$ would have spent the last year polishing their development of Vista instead of trying to beat OSX to the punch, Vista could have been a truly great operating system, and it most certainly would have knocked a blow to OSX, but as it stands, it’s just mediocre even with a years worth of updates.
Don’t get me wrong, Tyler. I’m no MS fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. I was just making the observation that the Vista rollout really is not much different in terms of creativity, completeness, bugs, and system requirements being at the high end of the spectrum than any previous version.
Whenever MS puts out a new Windows version, it’s the same complaints, every time. By now, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
I hear where you’re coming from, there, but I have to be honest when i say I really don’t remember having to tool around as much with XP when it came out as vista just to get it to operate on a level I’d consider optimal. I bought my first xp box when I was living in BC (coincidentally where XP was partially developed ). It was such an improvement over 9.x that I was certainly willing to overlook a few little bugs, but I don’t think I’m looking at it with rose colored glasses either, if you know what I mean. When I bought my xp machine, it worked just fine right out of the box (IIRC, it was an HP, 1.3ghz pentium4, had a 30gig HD and I opted for an upgrade to 500mb of ram. Cripes, but I think XP only occupied 2gig of the HD IIRC…). Vista was just plain buggy right out of the box, and took a bit of tooling around just to get it to run smoothly on a brand new computer. (up to this point we’ve just been talking about new computers; we haven’t even gotten into the horror that is the Vista upgrade. With my old pent3 Dell, I was able to upgrade to XP no problem, still runs great…I tried upgrading a friends computer that’s only 2 years old to Vista…ummnotsomuch… )
What really gripes me is that M$ claims that Vista will run just fine on a unit having only an 800mhz processor and 500mb of ram. that’s tootin’ baloney right there. At one point in time I shared a story about computer shopping with my little sis who’s a decade my junior and just getting into college this year. She took me along because she knows next to nothing about the newer stuff on the market.
The sales guy we went to tried to pawn off a “minimun requirement” level computer on us, saying it would run vista no problem. He tried to convince of that fact by showing us a demo model of what we were supposedly looking at. I specifically asked the salesperson if it had identical specs to the one we were looking at, and he reassured me it did (there was even one of those stickers they put on the front of the towers to reassure you of it’s capabilities ). Sure enough, it ran fine…
Now, I’d been using vista for some time on my computer, and I know full well that a minimum system requirement unit isn’t going to run vista worth a dang, so I pop on over to the properties menu on MyComputer, and sure enough, that damn showroom model had been upgraded. I could speculate as to what their game is, but that’s another thread…
It just gripes me crazy that M$ will claim up and down that consumers are supposedly able to run vista on so little, but that the OS itself isn’t even 100% maximizable at the “Vista Premium Ready” level. My computer exceedes their reccomended specs by double and still doesn’t run at its full potential with all the options turned on. Even running with an extra 4gig via readyboost its still not quite to where M$ claims it should be.
If they want a pretty OS, great, I’m not opposed to that (in fact I love eye candy, but not when it interferes with the functionality of the system…by the way, Dear Microsoft, Aero is for Saabs, not for Microsoft…NOT YOURS! )[/i]
Well, Tyler, I dunno what to tell ya. Vista has run fine, without being buggy, on my machine.
You say you bought a new machine and got XP on it…so I’m not surprised it was up to spec. You didn’t experience the great wailing and gnashing of teeth that people experienced putting xp on older machines that ran 95/98 just fine. Windows XP wasn’t really ready for prime time until SP2.
A quick internet search finds plenty of people the same complaints about xp that you’ve mentioned about vista. Examples: http://tinyurl.com/2ux7r
I bought a second hand computer which had Windows XP installed.
However, XP was faulty and would not boot. I decided to downgrade to Windows 98 as I had no intention of going out to buy XP.
I have a P4 1.6G computer with 256k memory. I recently had my computer wiped and upgraded from Win 98SE to Windows XP Pro and also had a new video card installed. After the installation, everything in the computer seems to be running very very slowly. Load times are taking an incredibly long time to do the simplest tasks (ie. Just opening Word). Programs and games now either do not seem to be working or runs at what seems to be half the speed as before.
And remember, people complained about the learning curve for XP, too, because it’s built on windows 2000 technology, whereas 95/98 was built on 16 bit DOS. Things were simply different, but eventually, people got used to them.
And there were plenty of programs (especially games) that wouldn’t run on XP that ran on 95/98, because the platforms were different.
And check this out: http://www.crn.com/it-channel/18829228
A year after XP came out, only about 10% of MS’s installed base had upgraded. MS knows that any OS they release isn’t for today’s market–early adopters will also upgrade their machines. It’s for people who want to buy new machines a year or two after the OS is released.
To me, this Vista rollout is pretty much “par for the course” in terms of microsoft OS rollouts.
My Vista machine had 4 gigs of RAM a high end Duo Core Pentium, and a 8800 graphics card - the specs can wrestle Vista easily. Still I find the occasional hard lock up requiring reboot. Other than the wireless network adapter and earthlink as my service provider and Kapersky as my security don’t know what could be the problem. I keep looking. It does
boot up faster than anything I have ever seen and I like it, but would also like to minimize the lock ups - perhaps SP 1 will help.
I can remember the agonies upgrading to w98, when plenty of folk, including me, still had 286s or 386s. Hell, I can recall the achievement of getting windows 3.11 running on an XT.
There is a program that will strip Windows Vista down to just what is needed. I think I found the story on slashdot, but I didn’t bookmark it. It might even be on Thomas Scott Sexton, that’s the web site of my youngest son that is in the US Air Force.
If you think the effects are even kind of cool take a look at Compiz: 
My machine handles vista, and so it suits me just fine. It’s a good strategy for Microsoft, because it gives the OS a little more shelf life.
If you want to compare operating systems, Mac people are the ones who like their steak rare, with a warm center and their martinis shaken, not stirred. Windows folks are just happy to get a hamburger with both parts of the bun. Linux folks, on the other hand, prefer to butcher the steer themselves, and cook it their way.
bwahahahahahaaa 
