

Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even MS is beginning to get it - nickb
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2190228,00.asp

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mattmaroon
I'm missing exactly what it is about Vista that everyone hates. I've been
using it since day one on my Lenovo X60 and have never had any problems. It's
far more stable. Windows rot has not yet forced me to reinstall, and I've
never gone even half this long without doing so on XP. And it crashes far less
(though still not never).

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.

~~~
vlad
After much hype about any new product, customers check out new features first.

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?

~~~
Zak
>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.

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dmpayton
My day job is as a web developer for a small PC repair shop, and this article
pretty much nails it. Many custom builds are requested with XP, and a lot of
customers with Vista complain about it and some have us downgrade them to XP.

I'm just glad I switched to Ubuntu.

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cstejerean
Windows XP is by now a very stable and reliable operating system. As far as I
can tell (I have used Vista for about 5 minutes on a friend's machine) there
isn't much that Vista offers as an upgrade to XP. Some of the UI
"enhancements" are pretty much copied straight from OS X and some of the cool
features that were promised for Vista were either not included (WinFS) or
available for download in Windows XP.

I'm not sure why anyone would consider upgrading to Vista.

~~~
amichail
They would do so for security reasons. Vista runs apps in user mode.

~~~
jamesbritt
"They would do so for security reasons. Vista runs apps in user mode."

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. :))

~~~
amichail
I believe this is mostly a problem with software that was not written with
vista's user mode in mind.

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hello_moto
I use Vista (on my MacBook) more often than OSX lately. Somehow all MacBook
hardware features work (except the camera/mic). The keyboard, tab and scroll
down all work fine.

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.

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nanijoe
I am contemplating switching to a Mac because of Vista

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henryw
i switched back to xp from vista after 6 months of use on a quad-core 4gb ram
machine, because:

\- 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.

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lvecsey
From what I understand Vista needs plenty of resources to even handle network
traffic, for example. Its a sleeping tiger in the sense that MS is waiting for
all the multicore cpus to really make a showing and power the OS to a new
level.

~~~
hello_moto
MS is always like that. They always designed their OS to exploit future
hardware, not current. That's why for every OS they released, it's always feel
"slow" at first.

