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Thread: Official... Vista is totally Cr*p

  1. #11
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    I gotta side with Bill on this one. Windows Vista is the second-biggest failure that Microsoft has ever shipped. (The worst one being the abortion known as Windows ME.)

    Gary, I disagree re: people would never upgrade their OS if they feared the new version. I ran Win 95, and when 98 came out I tried it. But I didn't like all the bloat that came with it, and I thought all the active desktop crap was completely useless. (I don't need or want to use my desktop file viewer to browse web pages! That's what I have a browser for!) So I installed 98 lite, which allowed me to keep the Win 95 explorer shell. This increased the speed of the machine and also reduced my crashes.

    I stayed away from Windows ME and Win 2000, because at the time I was getting along just fine with 98 lite. But when XP came out, I switched. And you know what? XP still rocks. I *like* XP.

    Unfortunately, it's getting hard to find a machine that ships with XP these days. When I bought my son a laptop for college, it came with Vista. What a pain in the ass! The machine is running 2 gigs of ram on a Pentium T2080 Core Duo processor, and yet a lowly Althlon XP 3200 + with just a gig of ram (but running XP) is actually faster! Think about that for a moment... That's a 3 year + difference in CPU generations, yet the XP machine is faster.

    Sure, Vista is pretty. And there are a few nice features (the User Account Control <cancel or allow> gets a lot of grief, but if you run Spybot or any other monitoring software you get the same thing) that probably should have been incorporated into the OS a long time ago. But these few upgrades are not enough to entice me to switch.

    Also, with regard to Mark's comment that the only reason they're still selling XP is because there is a market for it, I disagree. They have killed other versions of the OS in the past to *force* people to upgrade, even when there was still a market for the old version. But this time there are large companies that are *demanding* that they be allowed to buy XP, under threat of switching to other platforms.

    Under extreme pressure from some of these heavyweights, MS caved in and started selling XP again. But make no mistake... They'd much rather force you to buy their shiny new product. They're just afraid that if they discontinue XP they'll force a bunch of corporate users to abandon MS products for Linux. But mark my words, the day is coming when you won't be able to buy XP anymore. (And man, is that going to suck!)

    Adam

  2. #12
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    So what are your complaints about it? It works perfectly for me in every way. So, I am curious to find out what sucks about it for you.

  3. #13
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    Well I'm running Vista on my new laptop (no option for XP when I got it in November), it also runs the FB3 without problems.

    I decided to get the laptop to use for my Open Uni Spanish course, guess what...... it doesn't work with the OU software.

    If I could I would put XP on it, the only problem with that is if you phone Acer support up with any problems they tell you to do a clean install of Vista before they will help you

    Jim

  4. #14
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    Gary;

    Specifically, my problems with Vista are as follows (in order of importance):

    1) It's a bloated resource hog. I've got XP running on 3 year old hardware that runs circles around the one machine that has Vista installed on it - and that Vista machine is running brand new hardware. This is the biggest strike against Vista, in my opinion.

    2) It's unstable with some software. I've had it crash while editing home video DVD's (Pinnacle), while editing audio (Cool Edit Pro), and while burning CD's and DVD's (various software, including Nero and AnyDVD) My son has had it lock up on him while playing games as well. I'm sure there are reports of many other software incompatibilities, but these are the one's I've experienced personally. I haven't had XP crash on me in YEARS... (Not since SP2, in fact, as far as I can remember.)

    3) Many OS tools have been changed "just because they could be changed". There's no point in modifying the way the control panel tools work unless you're adding new features. To change things just for the sake of change is stupid; it makes it harder for the users, and it pisses me off.

    4) The User Account Control doesn't have a "Remember this decision" setting. This is what I like about programs like SpyBot; they're smart enough to let you whitelist certain registry changes that happen frequently. UAC is not, and it gets annoying after a while. (Don't get me wrong; I like the *concept* of UAC, I just don't like how it's implemented in Vista.)

    5) Price. It's more than double what XP costs, yet it doesn't offer any significant improvement over XP. Certainly not any improvement that would justify a 2X price premium.

    If it works perfectly for you, then congratulations! You are one of the few people I've met that have no problems with Vista. Consider yourself fortunate.

    But realize that there are *lots* of people out there that are having real problems with Vista, and they'd just as soon stick with XP because it works better for them.

    Adam

  5. #15
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    Interesting response. The things you mentioned change with every Windows version. But they are legit reasons to stay with XP if you like it.

  6. #16
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    One of the biggest problems with Vista IMO is the fact that the OS NEEDS about 1gig of memory by itself. Period!

    If you take a look at an add for a lower end Vista computer or one of the many adds for Vista computers when it was first released most of them ONLY offered 512mb of memory. How can any mfg assume that their customers will be happy with that?

    Dell is a big culprit - I have never been nor will ever be happy with Dell. Personal opinion here, but I work with those computers, as the school I work for has some sort of contract with them, but I cant stand them. There is so much un-needed crap on them to begin with, when people ask me to fix their computer I have to spend an hour if not more deleting applications they don't need or don't even know what they do even though those apps run in the background and use their memory and processing power. When they ask me to fix a computer I ask if its a dell and if it is I wont touch it. I personally work on a HP laptop, one that I have also spent time removing apps that dont matter, but it was much less work on my part. My desktop I built over 4 years ago and is still as fast as ever, and I have only reformatted it once (about 2 months ago).

    /rant

  7. #17
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    I don't see the need for 1 gig of memory as being a problem. A gig of memory costs what now? $50 at the most. OS2 required 8MB of memory. A lot less, but that would cost you well over $200 at the time. So in terms of memory vs cost, Vista probably has the lowest memory cost requirement than any other OS in history. Sure, it needs more, but it does more. But it is cheaper.

  8. #18
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    Interesting thread, I downloaded Vista as a beta earlier last year and installed it on one of my pc's. It installed fine and everything looked great, when I started installing some of my other programs, I got a BSOD. When that happened, I promptly followed this guys advice (http://www.break.com/index/how_to_pr...oad_vista.html) on how to properly install vista, and now my shredder works better than ever. I'm of the thinking that if it aint broke, don't fix it. I think Windows XP is great, I'm sure some day I'll have to load vista, but I'm hoping by then they will have all the bugs worked out. Also, if you really want to know how to make XP work the best for you, you should talk to SPEC, he knows how to make XP his bitch!

  9. #19
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    Also, with regard to Mark's comment that the only reason they're still selling XP is because there is a market for it, I disagree. They have killed other versions of the OS in the past to *force* people to upgrade, even when there was still a market for the old version. But this time there are large companies that are *demanding* that they be allowed to buy XP, under threat of switching to other platforms.


    Adam[/QUOTE]
    I think you misunderstood me Adam.

    Microsoft like to make money. If people don't want Vista , to the point of not buying an MS product , they will supply XP, if there is enough demand. It doesnt matter where the demand is , just that it's worth the effort to continue to support XP , and they don't don't lose a customer. ( regardless of how big the customer is )

    Market forces and demand have proved they can still make money from XP , so they decided to continue to sell it.

    Many retailers stopped shipping XP with new PC's , but quickly changed when sales fell and Vista complaints about compatibility flooded in. The mighty (?) dollar still rules the roost. No profits , no XP !!

    IMHO !!

    Regards

    Fluff

    Fluff
    The light at the end of the tunnel. Its' a white laser.
    www.rocknite.co.uk

  10. #20
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    ^ Exactly. And you can blame all of the 3rd party vendors who did not provide updates to their software on a timely manner. My HP laser printer will not work with Vista. HP refused to update the driver for it although they easily could have. But, since it wouldn't have increased their profits they didn't. Also, my Netgear SC101 external data storage (which is still being sold by Netgear!) would not work with Vista for a year or so because they would not create Vista drivers. They had plenty of warning and time to do it. In fact, there was a hacker who figured out how to get the existing XP drivers to work long before Netgear provided the Vista driver. So, it wasn't like there were huge code change issues, they just needed to update some version info.

    Largely, the reason hardware independent software doesn't work with Vista is because of lazy programming on the part of the 3rd party guys who bypass recommended programming practices and end up writing code that isn't forward compatible. It's basically like the Y2K issues where the programmers didn't bother accounting for rolling over from 99 to 00 because they didn't figure they would have to deal with it later.

    There will always be some software/hardware left behind when a new OS comes out. And in fact, some of the complaints about Vista being bloated, is due to having to support a lot of that old crap. You can't have it both ways and expect there to be any progress in OS technology.

    People complain about security and expect fixes and then when the fixes come they complain that their old crapware full of security holes no longer works. I guess as a software developer that has to deal with these type of complaints all the time I am worn a little raw by people who say that something sucks just because their other crap doesn't work.

    Sorry for the rant.

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