Constructive criticism at the ready; FIRE AT WILL!
I never had a problem with Vista, in fact I used it for nearly 3 years (or there abouts...from the early builds till earlier in the year), until I got a Mac in June. I dislike Windows now, I'll admit it, but I know from experience Vista wasn't that bad (just launch hiccups which taunted its reign), so as long as 7 is an improvement on a perfectly good OS, all is good. Not enough for me to even think about using it as my main OS, but thats just my preference of OS; its very childish to flame somebody because of their choice of OS when it doesn't affect you in any way at all.
1) My girlfriend has a Vista laptop that shipped with 1GB of RAM. Its incredibly slow because Vista attempts to cache everything in memory, but then doesn't have enough memory to handle program launches. I know its s a simple fix -- upgrade to 2GB -- but compared to my best friends Mac Book with 1 GB -- who has room to launch iTunes, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Adium, and iPhoto with no problems -- its insane that a similar spec laptop with Vista would struggle to load Firefox.
2. To uninstall something in windows, since windows 3.1, you would go to a control panel called "Add/Remove Programs". That's been the convention since Vista. That's like a 15+ year convention. Its now been re-named to something complicated like "Program Configuration and Setting". If it was going to change, it should've had a simpler name, like "Uninstall Programs", not a more confusing one.
It seems Microsoft's B-team is just godawful at Design. They're basically the GM of software at this point.
1. PCs are cheaper than Macs, hardware wise, so if you compare them at price-point, Windows will probably still come out on top. 2gb ram on a PC is probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac.
2. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"
Microsoft does have a bit of an analogy to the American car industry - viruses are like the autoworkers unions. Microsoft users need to run antivirus software most of the time (though it's changing because of beefed up security within windows and windows finally not running everything as root), and it's like how American car companies pay $3000 more per car because American workers are more expensive.
>1. PCs are cheaper than Macs, hardware wise, so if you compare them at price-point, Windows will probably still come out on top. 2gb ram on a PC is probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac.
Maybe you haven't heard, but Macs use Intel chipsets now. RAM is RAM. The 90% of the mac faithful that have actually bought a mac before switcher ads know that you never buy RAM from Apple. And let's avoid the price-point argument because it can really go either way depending on what you're doing and what you're looking for.
>2. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"
FAIL. I was using classic view. Its not called "Add/Remove Programs" anymore. I even fired up my Vista Business VHD image on my XP workstation to double check...and yup....FAIL UI still FAILs at UI. The control panel is called "Programs and Features".
Also, your analogy makes no sense whatsoever. GM is billing for pensions and obligations it agreed to shoulder in good faith, but never funded, because it assumed it would never faulter in terms of revenue, and thus, it would have the income to pay out those obligations at a later date. Unions are about 3% of the problem. Bad Design and Bad Management are the other insignificant 97%.
'Its incredibly slow because Vista attempts to cache everything in memory, but then doesn't have enough memory to handle program launches.'
Using left over memory to cache things is what you should do. Linux does it too, I would assume OS X does.
You periodically flush any changed bits in the cache to disk.
* When programs try and use more memory, you simply throw away the cache (except any changed bits you haven't yet written to disk).
* When they don't, your file access is 300,000 times faster
I think the key words in your sentence is "left over".
Vista with 1GB does not really have "left over". Either that, or the Vista's "pre-emptive app caching" algorithms are really terrible, because the first two apps my girlfriend always launches are 1) iTunes and 2) Firefox. It should figure that out and launch them quickly, instead of disk thrashing for 15-30 seconds and then launching them.
Its very childish to flame somebody because of their choice of OS when it doesn't affect you in any way at all
It affects me a lot. People around me are grumpier, the computers I support are more of a pain in the neck, the software ecosystem is pushed towards software for an OS I don't like, people are missing out on really useful features and being less happy and sometimes less productive than they could be...
