fung0 wrote:

Ask yourself: how many of the fixer-upper utilities that we all use in XP have been rendered unnecessary in Vista? For me, the answer is a negative number: I need MORE little helpers to make Vista as usable as XP.

I have asked myself that, and for me there’s a lot of them I wouldn’t need (I don’t have Vista yet). I wouldn’t need Launchy because of built in search in start menu, w/ slick autofocus on winkey hotkey. I wouldn’t need Copernic desktop search because of Vista’s built in. I wouldn’t need Y!Widgets because of Vista’s sidebar. I wouldn’t need skinning app because of excellent visuals built in. And there’s probably more I can’t think of right now.

I’ve actually become addicted to the Vista gadgets, but Yahoo! Widgets still seems to have a better selection available. So I’m sure you’ll find yourself missing some of your favorite Yahoo! Widgets.

In some recent benchmark tests they have shown that Vista is slower (I don’t think it was 3x slower though), but from my own use I would say that it is faster because of its advanced prefetching. Of course the more RAM you have the more it can prefetch, so that is what really determines the results.

I was considering each Linux distribution to be its own operating system, but that is wrong. I think that Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, and BSD are all considered separate though.

That is a really good analogy. And yet by the time things are done we’ll probably have more operating systems than languages.

Good luck with that, we only have two of ‘em so far: Windows and *nix ([en.wikipedia.org]*nix).

Ask yourself: how many of the fixer-upper utilities that we all use in XP have been rendered unnecessary in Vista? For me, the answer is a negative number: I need MORE little helpers to make Vista as usable as XP.

I have asked myself that, and for me there’s a lot of them I wouldn’t need (I don’t have Vista yet). I wouldn’t need Launchy because of built in search in start menu, w/ slick autofocus on winkey hotkey. I wouldn’t need Copernic desktop search because of Vista’s built in. I wouldn’t need Y!Widgets because of Vista’s sidebar. I wouldn’t need skinning app because of excellent visuals built in. And there’s probably more I can’t think of right now.

1. In the case of Vista, we have a product that’s literally a DOWNgrade in many ways, compared to XP. The user interface is LESS convenient (especially the idiotic new file “Explorers”), performance is generally REDUCED (in most benchmarks, by 5-10%), and we’re now paying for massive DRM even though it’s not there to benefit us at all, and probably won’t work anyway. Even the much ballyhooed DirectX 10 comes off as a big snooze. (I’ve played Crysis both ways, and the difference is just NOT worth the Vista upgrade.) And games are inexplicably stuffed into a “Games Explorer” that creates a whole needless new UI paradigm. (Check the forums: one of the biggest questions lately is “where did my game go after I installed it???”)

2. New features? You must be joking. A photo browser that’s not as good as ones you can download for free?? A “Sidebar” thingy that lets you further clutter up your desktop, and adds no real functionality? IE7, that looks like a joke next to the free, well-behaved, rapidly-updated and infinitely-expandable Firefox?

3. At the same time, Vista fixes NONE of the well-known problems of Windows XP. Some examples: Explorer windows STILL tend to forget their settings on a FIFO basis. (This would be so trivial to fix, it’s almost embarrassing to talk about.) Newly added network devices STILL don’t show up. Configuration is confusingly different, yet no better in any way. For security, there’s insanely-annoying UAC, but only yet another joke firewall. The list goes on and on. Vista SHOULD have been XP taken to the next level; but it’s NOT. Ask yourself: how many of the fixer-upper utilities that we all use in XP have been rendered unnecessary in Vista? For me, the answer is a negative number: I need MORE little helpers to make Vista as usable as XP.

Meanwhile, the price has gone up dramatically.

As consumers, we MUST continue to “bash” products like this. And far from becoming apologists for inferior design, sites like this one have a duty to NOT to accept a dribble of novelty as “good enough”… but instead to continue to hammer away tirelessly at products that quite obviously should be much better.

I think a lot of Vista bashing comes from people who’ve installed it on top of XP rather than done a clean install. MS OSs historically do a pathetic job of this and in Vista’s case I can confirm this.

Ooooo, that’s a good one. I’ve never done a major upgrade in that fashion so I can’t comment on how smooth it would go. I like having the fresh start.

That is the bottom line, but many times people complain about Vista without providing constructive criticism. Microsoft needs to know what they can improve on to make it the operating system everyone expected. Responses like “it sucks” or “it’s slow” generally doesn’t help them much. You need to tell them what’s slow, such as the file transfer speed. When articles start going that route then they won’t be bashing Vista, they will be suggesting improvements.

Well, I pretty much covered that in my response immediately above this one, but the way most users are “bashing” the operating system doesn’t provide Microsoft with the information they need to correct the issues. Take CNet’s article for example, they say it is one of the worse tech products but provide very little to back it up. Whatever happened to constructive criticism? If you don’t like something say how you would make it better.

I have yet to run into any DRM troubles with Vista, but then again I try to stay away from the DRM plagued media.

That is a really good analogy. And yet by the time things are done we’ll probably have more operating systems than languages.

A public of mixed OS’s is a problem, just like a nation of mixed languages.

2 Gigs of RAM. Silly to start with, but let’s look a little more closely. You’re running Vista host with Firefox, AIM and “a few other programs” including 2 firewalls and 2 AVs – which probably means you are running one in the host and one in the guest. And then you run IE in the guest. Whoopty do. You’re not even using the computer and you have no problems. That tells me nothing, other than the fact that Vista can run under 1Gig, and so can XP (assuming you ran a 50/50 split on the VM). We already knew that.

If you want to talk about totally unrelated things, I can tell you that my MythTV box is viewing, recording, and serving music, TV, and videos throughout my house on a Athlon XP 1800 CPU with 384MB RAM. My other laptop is running a dual-boot Ubuntu, giving me all the features of Vista (inlcuding the “Aero” interface) on 512MB. While this is not relevant to my original point, it addresses your implication that Vista is a memory hog pretty well, I think. But let’s get back to the point…

For example, let me explain a wonderful feature I am running into with Vista. When you install MS Office 2003, Outlook is simply not registered as the default mail program… it’s not even available in the list. I haven’t looked too hard yet, but I can’t seem to find a quick way to get Outlook 2003 to be “registered” as the default email client in Vista. Why is this a problem? Well, when you run Adobe Photoshop Elements in Vista, it allows you to email the picture through your default email program. However, IT can “see” Outlook, and tries to send it there, but then provides an error for some reason. You have to then select Windows Mail (Vista’s built in emailer) to get it to sent it through that, at least. So, now, the customer has to use Windows mail for outgoing pictures, and Outlook for everything else… on the same email account. Remember, Outlook is an MS program… you’d think they could get it to register on Vista without much issue… but it seems this is not the case. And why does this happen? Because Vista is better.

As for the WiFi knocking out, my Vista has never done that, and you can not attribute customer complaints to Vista’s overall problems. It could simply be that they did not set up WiFi correctly (which is common for most common consumers), or that their internet went out for a little bit. So many things can affect WiFi, especially on the version they are using. Maybe, just maybe, they went out of range of their antenna (it’s possible).

One customer’s system would simply refuse to connect while sitting NEXT TO his wireless router. The router is fine, as it works with his other laptop. I used it on my router (which also works fine with my other laptop) and it would only connect when there was >4 bars of connectivity. It would repeatedly and unexpectedly drop connections for no reason (I wasn’t moving around). Turns out, the Windows Update for new drivers, as well as the new drivers from the manufacturer (Realtek) and the ones from Gateway ALL would refuse to work properly. However, with the original drivers that shipped with the laptop, the machine seemed to work acceptably. So, it took all that troubleshooting just to get the damn thing to work properly… because of a friggen Windows update. Nice.

Another user simply loses her connection with her brand new Dell for no reason. We still don’t really know why, but we do know her ancient XP laptop with an external Dynex Wifi card works just fine all the time. WTF?

Finally, the whole forcing Vista down our throats thing is complete nonsense. Mac does it all the time and no one complains. I would much rather start out on Vista and decide for myself whether or not I like it before having to shell out a couple hundred later to get it when it is isn’t “crap.” It is cheaper to buy a copy of XP and downgrade, even if it may take a few more steps.

I’m not saying Mac is any better. I never brought that up at all. However, if this happened on that side, I would complain there too. My issue is that this time, for purely money reasons, MS decided to force us into Vista. They didn’t do this before (that’s called precedent) so we EXPECTED not to have to be forced into it… yet, here we are. Mac, in this case, has no such precedent. Without precedent, of course no one would complain about the “other” way of doing things. That’s a silly argument.

Vista really is not all that bad. The only problems I have with it are when I do something I am not supposed to do with the registry or something that an average consumer should barely even know about. I am not calling anyone an idiot here, but face the fact: you can talk to someone of high intelligence about changing a registry value to allow *insert change here* and they can look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. Not everyone is a geek (a name I proudly give myself, lol).

Yes, Vista is fine for basic web browsing and such simple tasks. The minute you do something harder, it seems to have issues (games are slower, the whole OS is simply not as snappy, etc). My parents, who just use email and IM, are fine with Vista. But any of my other customers who do marginally more than them run into problems left and right.

As for being a geek, no offense, but just because you can change a reg-key doesn’t make you a geek, or an expert user. You are certainly more competent than any average user… but unless the threshold for geekdom is what the Geek Squad is capable of (which is not much, but that’s another story) let’s not pump ourselves up too much.

The real question is, what does Vista really give you? As far as I can see – nothing. My XP install at home runs circles around Vista with all the many programs I am constantly running – on only 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t bluescreen on me, nor does it crash or give me any other issues. Again, this is a credit to many years of improvements. But what BENEFIT does Vista give me? Faster? No. Easier? No. So why should I say it doesn’t suck?

Again, to reiterate, eventually, this will all change, and Vista will be much better. But to simply say “we need to stop bashing it” is total crap. If it sucks today, then it sucks today… period. There’s no reason we should stop bashing it for it’s faults. In fact, because it’s forced upon is, we should continue bashing it more than XP, since we at least had a choice back then… and today we don’t. Maybe next time MS will learn from this idocy and not force Windows 7 (or whatever they call it) down our throats.

I’ve been in the IT support/analyst game for over 12 years. You name it, I’ve used it. My experience with Vista? They delivered a half-baked product. Most IT analysts know this.

Nuff’ said. The REAL experts know the deal… and Vista DOES suck for anything more than email and web browsing.

That is part of the problem is that the opinion of so many people regarding Vista is reliant on what they’ve heard. Having been a not-so-proud own of ME I would say that Vista is leaps and bounds better. I don’t think I went a day with ME not giving me a Blue Screen, whereas I’ve only gotten one BSoD on Vista in over the year that I’ve been using it, and it was from me trying to install an antivirus app that wasn’t compatible with Vista.
I’m guessing that in reality Leopard is just as bad if look at the ratio of users. Vista has got to almost have 10x the number of OS X users, so it is understandable that more people are complaining about it.

That puts everything into perspective. Thanks!

>> Please tell me you’re 9 years old…
Look. I know I went along with the “Vista-is-crappy” crowd, but not having used Vista myself yet these pieces of information were all I could use to form an opinion about Microsoft’s new OS. So please give me some credit, would ya?