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.
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?
I disagree with your words on cheaper hardware. Vista makes your computer slower and buying more "iron" only makes the effect less noticeable. When something gets so much slower, people what to get something in return. What is it that I get back in return for all that eaten RAM and CPU cycles? I do not run Aero. I do not see any new features or significant imporvements that justify extra 512MB of RAM Vista needs.
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?
Vista doesn't have any significant added value compared to XP but it introduces some potential sources of incompatibility with XP (ex. directX10). It already comes with incompatibility with some hardware ;)
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.
No hate here. I just haven't heard any reason good enough for me to spend cash on it. I'm opposed to DRM, so I'd need a really good reason to upgrade to begin with.
I'm running XP Pro on my desktop now, no problems either, so why should I upgrade? I use Vista on my laptop and it's slow and clunky, what good is a new version of an OS if it isn't significantly better than its predecessor?
Exactly what was said of XP before SP1. "XP is just 2000 with eye-candy and more crashes." The same argument can be made for Os X upgrades as well. Is any one Mac Os X upgrade "significantly better" than the last?
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.
>Is any one Mac Os X upgrade "significantly better" than the last?
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.
I got a trojan horse for the first time in a long time a few weeks ago. It occurred to me that, yeah, the zombie problem is very real--there are literally millions of computers out there in bot nets causing god-only-knows how many billions in damage.
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.
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.