But, anyway, what caused the negativity? I must admit that I am a bit baffled - i use Vista since June 07, and had zero problems with it. But I admit, I ran and run it on sufficent hardware (Core 2 Duo, much ram)

I think the main factor is that much more people use computers now than in 2001, when XP came out. And thus the user base was smaller but contained much more technicaly savy people (percent wise). XP was far from perfect when it was released (Vista's RTM state was much better), but users back then were more prepared to deal with technical difficulties. The most used OS when XP was released was Windows 98 after all, and no can deny that it was crashy and required some "skills".

Now when Vista came out, XP was on market for more than five years, a whole generation of computer users knew nothing else but XP. So even using another system than XP was quite an adventure for many people. No other Windows OS stayed that long in the market, XP became "teh windows".

In that light some initial quirks of Vista became grossly overstated, minor problems drivers were blown out of proportion. Driver issues always appeared when a new windows OS was released (I can remember how crappy the first generation drivers for Windows 2000 were - shudder!) but because there were so many computer novices like never before when Vista appeared, or people who knew nothing else but XP and never used any other Windows OS (or any other OS) things, that were fairly standard with EVERY windows (and OS) release, became totaly overblown with the Vista release.

Another thing were the hardware requirements. Now, every new windows used more hardware resources than its predecessor, but, again, because of the unique situation in 2007 compared to other windows release dates in the past, people just "forgot" that rule or never learned it in the first place.

Microsoft handled the Vista release like they handled every other windows release in the past. I think that was the downfall. MS didn't see that the userbase changed too much compared to 1995, 1998 or even 2001.

Now there was of course the DRM fud and all that, but slashdot and co badmouthed every windows release, so I don't think that this was the main reason for the negativity.

Well, this is just my opinion anyway, what are your opinions, why did Vista get such an image?

I think the biggest problem with Vista was a serious case of PEBKAC.

Also, I get the feeling that there's just a sort of vibe that goes around.. like a zeitgeist kind of thing. At Vista's launch, the vibe was bad, and as such Vista was deemed bad. Now we're hitting the other end of the wave, and Windows 7 is hailed as the second coming, even though I get the feeling it's not actually that much better than Vista.

There's also the automatic resentment that many will always have against the biggest player's offerings - pathological rejection.

In my opinion Vista is untainted.

I'm sure there are people who ran across problems in their installs, but every release of Windows since Windows 95 has been met with a lot of cynicism from people who dislike Microsoft and spread FUD. I remember when Windows 95 came out all I would read about it was horror stories about people having installations problem. Meanwhile, I was able to install 95 on about a dozen computers without a problem on any one of them. Windows XP when it came out was a very hated OS, but now everyone is calling it the best OS that Microsoft made.

People need to realize that some of the negative feelings about Microsoft products is not their fault. It's that simple. Vista had some problems with its release, sure; I've been a critic of Vista also. But unless a Windows release is flawless and perfect people will badmouth it.

There was so much hype for how amazing "Longhorn" would be, so many overstatements (many of which never originated from Microsoft, though some did) and so many stunning concept videos that simply weren't ever going to be reality. Then features started getting dropped or scaled back (which was really only an issue because people had heard of them) and then there were long delays. The interwebblogs crowd starting to declare Vista a failure, the parroting tech journalists followed suit and declared Vista a disaster and then people who'd never even thought about it decided they'd all heard so much about how it was a disaster that they didn't want anything to do with it.

None of it necessarily has anything to do with the actual product called Vista at all, but that's kind of beside the point.

Which just goes to show, you can get people to believe anything as long as you make enough noise.

LOL

.. that is soo funny seeing as it was mostly stupid people who ended up buying Vista in the first place.

 you guys fail as bad as MS at identifying all the areas of fail bad crap design within its products. 

------------------------

Yea, I am baffled by that too. I have installed the Windows 7 beta, and I was not particulary impressed by it. It looked and felt just like vista, just with the new taskbar and some other tweaks. It's like Vista SP3.

Vista was often unfairly mocked as "XP Service Pack 3" two years ago, something I do not agree with. But Windows 7.. I think it's more justified to call win7 as a service pack to Vista.

Win7 is quite a boring windows release in my opinion, it has some tweaks and improvements and a new taskbar, but.. that's it mostly. Vista was much more ground breaking, even in the cutted state it was released in - DWM, Aero, the new IP stack, the new sound stack, new printer architecture. And despite all that, Win7 is so grotesquely overhyped by the same people who insisted that Vista is the worst thing that affected humanity since the black death.

Win7 is rated so good, because it uses the same driver interface and mostly the same kernel as Vista, and the Vista drivers are mature now. That's it for the most part. I don't think this fact deserves such a high praise, since the mature drivers work of course with Vista too.

Not that something is bad about 7, far from it, but I don't get what's so damn sexy about it, compared to Vista.

I am a bit pessimistic about future Windows releases. Somewhat radical new releases like Vista are gettng badmouthed to the extreme now, while conservative updates like 7 are lauded as God's gift to humanity. That makes it harder to release truly new technologies for the windows plattform, since these will come of course with initial problems, and problems will be blown out of proportion.

One main problem is the stupidity of tech-"journalists". They are incompetent lazy fools. If one "journalist" sets the tone, all the others just follow. Ten years ago, some trainee at a backwater PC journal wrote better stuff than all the idiots at cnet, zdnet combined now. It went really downhill.

Pleasing the tech-"journalists" reminds of the following allegory in Plato's republic:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I might compare them to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him--he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes; and he can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary, having never himself seen, and having no power of explaining to others the nature of either, or the difference between them, which is immense.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Koogle said:

"We now have the crazy situation where people are taking advice from anonymous self-proclaimed experts, and using it as a basis for making decisions, because its easier than thinking for themselves or actually spending time doing their own investigating."

LOL

.. that is soo funny seeing as it was mostly stupid people who ended up buying Vista in the first place.

 you guys fail as bad as MS at identifying all the areas of fail bad crap design within its products. 

That's a nice piece of Ad hominem you've got going there.

Care to come back after taking critical thinking classes?

First impressions being the hardest to sway, and word of mouth being exponentially greater of a marketing force than all of Bills Billions could buy. Now I love vista but I still hear folks saying vista stinks.... Its unfair but so is life. some of this mess was brouigh down by Bills minions unto themselves however, the rest of it is just an unfortunate qwinky dink....

If I remember rightly there was an MS board member that wrote a steaming letter to Steve Ballmer after he put the freshly minted  Vista disk into his home PC and turned the hub of his family's 'digital lifestyle' into a 'f---ing email machine'.

HP readily expected my parents to go out and replace their 1 year old laser printer with a new one as they were not going to provide Vista drivers. Luckily HP's XP drivers came with an install routine that was so badly written that the necessary dlls would get installed correctly before crashing.

Edit: hang on a minute... In Vista RTM, network file copy was totally crippled. I remember being shocked when I had to copy my music around for the first time. Also, there was a screaming bug with explorer file views. Some folders would get a special view setting (Music management, picture management) tattooed to the folder. Impossible to change. These were shocking bugs to go to production and force on millions of users. It was enough to convince me not to bring Vista into my work environment.

I think we're in danger of looking back with the rose-tinted spectacles and blaming the industry press for negative reviews. Vista RTM had shockingly bad quality issues, high real-world hardware requirements and took five-ish years to deliver but only represented two years of development work.

Windows 7 is different. It actually feels faster. Things seem snappier, the taskbar is smarter, file sharing is simplified (complicated in some respects too). Microsoft gets the message now, people want a very performant OS (they have a long way to go before many will be happy, operating system rot needs to be solved...) and a secure OS. Microsoft arguably has some pretty secure software now, and with Windows 7, they have something decently performant as well.

Simo said:

Drivers (either bad or non-existent), a long wait from the previous release and an over-generous dose of hype....

If I remember rightly there was an MS board member that wrote a steaming letter to Steve Ballmer after he put the freshly minted  Vista disk into his home PC and turned the hub of his family's 'digital lifestyle' into a 'f---ing email machine'.

HP readily expected my parents to go out and replace their 1 year old laser printer with a new one as they were not going to provide Vista drivers. Luckily HP's XP drivers came with an install routine that was so badly written that the necessary dlls would get installed correctly before crashing.

Edit: hang on a minute... In Vista RTM, network file copy was totally crippled. I remember being shocked when I had to copy my music around for the first time. Also, there was a screaming bug with explorer file views. Some folders would get a special view setting (Music management, picture management) tattooed to the folder. Impossible to change. These were shocking bugs to go to production and force on millions of users. It was enough to convince me not to bring Vista into my work environment.

I think we're in danger of looking back with the rose-tinted spectacles and blaming the industry press for negative reviews. Vista RTM had shockingly bad quality issues, high real-world hardware requirements and took five-ish years to deliver but only represented two years of development work.

HP readily expected my parents to go out and replace their 1 year old laser printer with a new one as they were not going to provide Vista drivers. Luckily HP's XP drivers came with an install routine that was so badly written that the necessary dlls would get installed correctly before crashing.

Really? I have just the opposite expierience. My parent's ancient HP LASERJet works fine under Vista. In fact the setup routine was somewhat simpler in Vista because it's run from a print server and Vista seemed to handle that better.

GoddersUK said:

Simo said:

*snip*

HP readily expected my parents to go out and replace their 1 year old laser printer with a new one as they were not going to provide Vista drivers. Luckily HP's XP drivers came with an install routine that was so badly written that the necessary dlls would get installed correctly before crashing.

Really? I have just the opposite expierience. My parent's ancient HP LASERJet works fine under Vista. In fact the setup routine was somewhat simpler in Vista because it's run from a print server and Vista seemed to handle that better.

Yep, http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=uk&prodNameId=239140&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=239135&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=2093

they spent approx £400 the year before on a LaserJet 1500. No drivers for Vista. I was surprised and then pi--ed off. But as I said, disaster averted as I managed to get the basic XP dlls onto their PC.

In my experience, pretty much every version of Windows works just fine out of the box as long as you have the correct drivers installed. A vanilla Windows install "Just Works".

However, when people purchase an OEM machine, they don't get just Windows and drivers. They also get a bunch of poorly written resource hogging bloat and trialware that make the system unstable and error prone. The drivers that come pre-installed are almost always out of date. An OEM Windows install does not "Just Work".

Naturally, when I purchase a new laptop, the first thing I do is wipe it and re-install Windows and the appropriate drivers. However, the majority of users out there aren't technically savvy enough to do this. I understand that OEM's make lots of extra cash on each computer sold but I would rather pay them that extra cash myself and not deal with the bloat.

I believe that this is a large contributing factor for why OSX and Linux are percieved as "better". Those operating systems are almost always experienced through vanilla installations where Windows is almost always experienced through OEM bloat installations.

I wish Microsoft could do something about this problem but I don't see what they could do about it.

But from someone who paid for Vista Ultimate and has had it on the main home PC for over 2 years, I can tell you it has more than a few faults:

• Driver imcompatability with XP (was that really necessary?) meant a lot of peripherals had to be junked.
• Good quality drivers for even then-current hardware weren't available until 6 months after Vista's release despite Longhorn being CTP'd and beta'd for *years* (not really Microsoft's fault, but it didn't help).
• Still not as stable as XP was after years of patches. I have a quad core machine and a single application can freeze the machine for seconds at a time by accessing the DVD drive.
• Majority of games released before Vista are incompatible (and quite a few released after for that matter). God knows why. I just don't buy PC games any more, it's just not worth the hassle.
• Really poor usabillty changes to the shell.
• Crap included applications as usual (how come Apple can afford to bundle the excellent iLife suite with Mac's and Microsoft can provide *anything* useful with Windows?)
• Vista Ultimate Extras debacle.

It's is a bit snappier, but not to that extend that warrants such rejoycing. I get the feeling as if many people who test Windows 7 never have used Vista after february 2007 or never bothered to install SP1 and the other updates.

---------

LCARSNxG:

Agreed, although people who can't reinstall windows usualy can't install Linux too, so this rule applies only to OSX (preconfigured Mac machines of course, not some hacked version)

By the way, I think Linux is perceived only as better because of rumors. The ubuntu testimonials forum is not really a happy place:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1136106
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1140855
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1133336
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1141426
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997919
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1139592
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1139572
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1143729
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1150169
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1138706
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1064810
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=837019
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1129991

I hold the opinion that Linux is the best thing that happened to Microsoft EVER. Of all the competitors Microsoft had - Amiga OS, OS/2, DR DOS... Linux has the most fanatical following AND is the most inferior (for home users) - a dream combination! MS could have been very well be dust today if, say, Amiga OS in it's day had that much free propaganda that Linux gets now.

No other thing than Linux shows Windows users that the saying "the grass is greener on the other side" [but in reality it's not] is true.


LCARS:

"

"I wish Microsoft could do something about this problem but I don't see what they could do about it."

Giving OEM's better discounts if they won't install crapware?

wastingtimewithforums said:

"Windows 7 is different. It actually feels faster. Things seem snappier"

It's is a bit snappier, but not to that extend that warrants such rejoycing. I get the feeling as if many people who test Windows 7 never have used Vista after february 2007 or never bothered to install SP1 and the other updates.

---------

LCARSNxG:

Agreed, although people who can't reinstall windows usualy can't install Linux too, so this rule applies only to OSX (preconfigured Mac machines of course, not some hacked version)

By the way, I think Linux is perceived only as better because of rumors. The ubuntu testimonials forum is not really a happy place:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1136106
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1140855
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1133336
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1141426
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997919
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1139592
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1139572
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1143729
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1150169
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1138706
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1064810
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=837019
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1129991

I hold the opinion that Linux is the best thing that happened to Microsoft EVER. Of all the competitors Microsoft had - Amiga OS, OS/2, DR DOS... Linux has the most fanatical following AND is the most inferior (for home users) - a dream combination! MS could have been very well be dust today if, say, Amiga OS in it's day had that much free propaganda that Linux gets now.

No other thing than Linux shows Windows users that the saying "the grass is greener on the other side" [but in reality it's not] is true.


LCARS:

"

"I wish Microsoft could do something about this problem but I don't see what they could do about it."

Giving OEM's better discounts if they won't install crapware?

wastingtimewithforums said:

It's is a bit snappier, but not to that extend that warrants such rejoycing. I get the feeling as if many people who test Windows 7 never have used Vista after february 2007 or never bothered to install SP1 and the other updates

I use Vista every day at work on a decent spec machine (8GB, Quad Core, ATi HD3450 graphics card) and even with SP2 installed it still doesn't feel as fast as Windows 7 does on identical hardware. I'm not suggesting that Vista is slow, it isn't, but there is a undeniable sense of improved performance in Windows 7 and that can only be a good thing.

rhm said:

Of course a lot of what people say about Vista is based on nothing but hearsay, same as all previous versions of Windows. If you listened to what people write online you'd think Windows got worse in every version. If that was the case we'd all still be using 3.1.

But from someone who paid for Vista Ultimate and has had it on the main home PC for over 2 years, I can tell you it has more than a few faults:

• Driver imcompatability with XP (was that really necessary?) meant a lot of peripherals had to be junked.
• Good quality drivers for even then-current hardware weren't available until 6 months after Vista's release despite Longhorn being CTP'd and beta'd for *years* (not really Microsoft's fault, but it didn't help).
• Still not as stable as XP was after years of patches. I have a quad core machine and a single application can freeze the machine for seconds at a time by accessing the DVD drive.
• Majority of games released before Vista are incompatible (and quite a few released after for that matter). God knows why. I just don't buy PC games any more, it's just not worth the hassle.
• Really poor usabillty changes to the shell.
• Crap included applications as usual (how come Apple can afford to bundle the excellent iLife suite with Mac's and Microsoft can provide *anything* useful with Windows?)
• Vista Ultimate Extras debacle.

 

This must be luck of the draw, because I've not had problems getting even obscure prefiferals to run on Vista, my Vista machine is at least as stable as my XP machine (though they're both fairly crap, I know it's what I do to them and only the fault of download.com et al).

And interestingly all of the older games I've tried have worked (even those that say they don't) - although there is some bad behaviour with one or two. That said I've only tried a small number of my older games.

And MS can't include decent applications because they'd be anti-trusted. They've been done for media player and IE is in the works... think what would happen if they bundled even a semi-decent office suite (such as works). I'm just waiting for an anti-trust case over calculator now.

And a note on bloatware: While toolbars, av trials etc.  earn the OEMs money WTF do they all feel the need to produce their only completely useless, broken, wifi management utilities when Windows does it fine? Why? And it's not just WiFi, on my laptop Acer had added all kinds of crap that I can't imagine anyone pays them to load that replaces perfectly decent features built into Windows.

Grrr...

GoddersUK said:

Koogle said:

*snip*

That's a nice piece of Ad hominem you've got going there.

Care to come back after taking critical thinking classes?

Here, a ticket to bliss:

.user_koogle .content
{
display:none;
}

It's amazing how it brightens up the Coffeehouse!

I finally came to the decision that, despite my like of O2K, I needed to change to something else before I could credibly give advice.  The way I went about it was to download an email program and set it not to delete mail off the server.  I'd use the client while occasionally firing up Outlook to clean up the server.

The teething pains were horrible.  Outlook did things one way while ClientX did it differently!  Why couldn't ClientX do it the same way?  Then I'd start to see some of the advantages to ClientX over O2K.  I'd use ClientX for a week before switching to ClientX2 and starting over.

It finally came down to the highly regarded "The Bat!" and a Japanese program I'd learned of called "Becky! Internet Mail".  I really wanted to like TB! but Becky! just seemed to fit me better.  I decided to stick with Becky! for the 30-day trial before going back to O2K to see how it felt.

Outlook just felt old and clunky and I couldn't do quite a bit of the sophisticated filtering I could do with Becky!  I was sure (still am) that Outlook is perfect for what it's designed for but it just didn't fit me after using different clients for awhile.

Then I became a beta tester for Vista (got my invite from here on Channel 9) and immediately ran into problems.  Some of my favorite programs just wouldn't work and things felt out of place.  Slow, too.  Real slow.  I uninstalled for awhile and then reinstalled a newer release.  Much better experience with program compatibility, it seemed a bit faster, but there were still those annoying UI changes that bugged me.  I uninstalled again.

Another build and another install.  Things felt even better but the UI... sigh.  And then I remembered my experience with moving away from Outlook 2000.  If I couldn't stick with the change for a bit how could I truly evaluate it?  I settled in and forced myself to use Vista, warts and all.

I eventually got a new hardrive (SATA) and stuck it in this box and installed XP Pro.  Yech!

I knew where everything was on XP and how everything worked.  There just seemed to be something missing that I couldn't quite put my finger on and it wasn't the eye-candy.  Things just seemed to be better over on Vista.  Smoother and smarter once you tweaked things to your liking.  I immediately went back to the Vista beta and used it ever since.  Whenever I'm on an XP machine things just didn't feel right.

Then the Windows 7 beta came out and now the RC.  I felt right at home with W7, obviously from using Vista.  I ended up having a problem I thought was the beta but it turned out to be hardware related.  Before I was sure of that I reloaded Vista... and realized something was missing.  It didn't feel as smooth and polished as Windows 7.  I didn't feel as comfortable there.  XP now feels even worse

There's been a lot of talk of Windows 7 being Vista SP3 but I'm not seeing it.  This is a newer, better OS and I won't be going back to Vista.

One last thing, and this has bothered me.  When asked why a person should change from XP to Vista I could never put my finger on the one thing.  There were just so many small improvements everywhere that once you gave them a chance you would notice them missing from XP.

So I told people not to upgrade from XP until they bought a new computer and to then just jump in with both feet.  I'll now say the same thing - if you're really comfortable in Vista then don't upgrade unless you're a geek (me!) or buying a new computer.

And then jump in with both feet and don't look back.

Vista IS the worst OS microsoft released, not ME. ME had its problems most of which were caused by bad drivers but Vista... Vista is really, really bad by itself even when you don't count the amazing number of bad drivers that were and still are released for it (the hard drive of one of my laptops that has a stupid nforce 410 controller just got corrupted for the nth-time (BSOD + chkdsk finding tons of errors at reboot), thank you nVidia drivers) just 1 day ago.

Evil SEO said:

What caused the negative Vista image? Maybe you can start from the longhorn videos that portrait something entirely different instead of that slow P(OS) with so many broken features (Resolution independence? Broken (the sidebar misbehaves, IE7 requires an obscure registry key to do proper scaling or all the pages look completely messed up...). Firewall? Broken (if you have ONLY 1 public connection all sharings are turned off on ALL connections? WTF design is that?). Higher performance with DX10? Can't still see a faster game. The new audio architecture? Broken (audio skipping, network throughput dropping while playing audio, unbelievably high CPU usage of WMP while playing content because of the protected pipeline DRM cr*p...). The new TCP/IP stack? Broken (how many routers is Vista incompatible with? And don't blame the routers for these stupid useless tcp/ip settings Microsoft forced that you can't even disable without obscure command-line commands). The new Explorer? Ultra-broken. Desktop Search? Can't count the times I had to delete the index. The new Windows Update? Can't count the time updates and even service packs failed to install and rollbacked. and the list could go on and on...) and plenty of bugs (how many cumulative reliability packs in just 2 years? a dozen?). Not to mention the many consumer-screwing marketing choices you could even write a top 10 about.

Vista IS the worst OS microsoft released, not ME. ME had its problems most of which were caused by bad drivers but Vista... Vista is really, really bad by itself even when you don't count the amazing number of bad drivers that were and still are released for it (the hard drive of one of my laptops that has a stupid nforce 410 controller just got corrupted for the nth-time (BSOD + chkdsk finding tons of errors at reboot), thank you nVidia drivers) just 1 day ago.

Now aside the fact, that I have no problems with routers or high CPU usage with WMP, Windows Update or audio skipping...

What's so great about that longhorn video?  That's something I never got. The redeeming GUI features of the OS that is featured in that video seem to be flying pictures in the explorer and flashy effects.

I don't see the fascination with it, sorry. A decent programmer could copy that effects within a month with WPF. I am glad they didn't went THAT over the top route, if I want flashy, I can always get Linux with Enlightment.

I actually received a remark when a colleague of mine saw that I was running Vista on my mobile pc... "I heard it sucks really badly" - he said... "have you even tried it?" - I asked... "NO" - was the simple answer, and the usual "I don't even want to try it because it's so slow" suffix came shortly after. I even had a really extreme case where an accquaintance of mine smashed his Vista DVD because he installed it on his old PC, and shortly afterwards, his 80GB PornWarehouse Maxtor HDD (which he carries around everywhere in a rack, whether it's hot or cold, dry or humid) died on him... he actually blamed Vista for it's "sudden failure" because a friend of his told him that "Vista probably broke it"...

Of course, Apple's tendencies to jump aboard the train and kick Microsoft while it's down didn't help too much either...

PS: I call the "ME > Vista" claim to be such a retarded statement that even a wet door knob would probably get the answer right...

bureX said:

The biggest cause of the negative image that portrayed Vista is exactly the post above me (Evil SEO). FUD, plain and simple.

I actually received a remark when a colleague of mine saw that I was running Vista on my mobile pc... "I heard it sucks really badly" - he said... "have you even tried it?" - I asked... "NO" - was the simple answer, and the usual "I don't even want to try it because it's so slow" suffix came shortly after. I even had a really extreme case where an accquaintance of mine smashed his Vista DVD because he installed it on his old PC, and shortly afterwards, his 80GB PornWarehouse Maxtor HDD (which he carries around everywhere in a rack, whether it's hot or cold, dry or humid) died on him... he actually blamed Vista for it's "sudden failure" because a friend of his told him that "Vista probably broke it"...

Of course, Apple's tendencies to jump aboard the train and kick Microsoft while it's down didn't help too much either...

PS: I call the "ME > Vista" claim to be such a retarded statement that even a wet door knob would probably get the answer right...

"I even had a really extreme case where an accquaintance of mine smashed his Vista DVD because he installed it on his old PC"

Wow, sounds like a nice story. Why did he install it in the first place?

Seriously, it's a true story... He's not the brightest bulb in the ceiling lamp, and he's currently 19yrs old, which is supposed to be... hm... an age where you act responsibly and rationally. Or not. He installed it because he's a "the bigger the application version is, the cooler I become" type, and he wanted to try it out on his secondary "portable" drive... obviously he liked it, but then again, Vista didn't like him and fried his poor old overheating and crackling HDD (I had a chance to hear it), along with all his Mariah Carey wallpapers... what a shame... Oh, and by the way, he didn't actually tell me about it, but his mom made sure I knew about it since she was worried that I would too fall victim to the dreadfull product that spells out Wee Vee.

Note: We're talking about a guy who ripped his whole telephone cable out (along with the wall socket) because he thought he was in the process of being infected by a computer virus and that disconnecting the phone cable would solve the problem (actually, a burnt fuse made his PC shutdown, but he obviously didn't realize that almost every light in the house went out from all the panic).

bureX said:

By "nice story" I sure hope you don't mean "cool story bro"

Seriously, it's a true story... He's not the brightest bulb in the ceiling lamp, and he's currently 19yrs old, which is supposed to be... hm... an age where you act responsibly and rationally. Or not. He installed it because he's a "the bigger the application version is, the cooler I become" type, and he wanted to try it out on his secondary "portable" drive... obviously he liked it, but then again, Vista didn't like him and fried his poor old overheating and crackling HDD (I had a chance to hear it), along with all his Mariah Carey wallpapers... what a shame... Oh, and by the way, he didn't actually tell me about it, but his mom made sure I knew about it since she was worried that I would too fall victim to the dreadfull product that spells out Wee Vee.

Note: We're talking about a guy who ripped his whole telephone cable out (along with the wall socket) because he thought he was in the process of being infected by a computer virus and that disconnecting the phone cable would solve the problem (actually, a burnt fuse made his PC shutdown, but he obviously didn't realize that almost every light in the house went out from all the panic).

Mostly just brain washing.

bureX said:

By "nice story" I sure hope you don't mean "cool story bro"

Seriously, it's a true story... He's not the brightest bulb in the ceiling lamp, and he's currently 19yrs old, which is supposed to be... hm... an age where you act responsibly and rationally. Or not. He installed it because he's a "the bigger the application version is, the cooler I become" type, and he wanted to try it out on his secondary "portable" drive... obviously he liked it, but then again, Vista didn't like him and fried his poor old overheating and crackling HDD (I had a chance to hear it), along with all his Mariah Carey wallpapers... what a shame... Oh, and by the way, he didn't actually tell me about it, but his mom made sure I knew about it since she was worried that I would too fall victim to the dreadfull product that spells out Wee Vee.

Note: We're talking about a guy who ripped his whole telephone cable out (along with the wall socket) because he thought he was in the process of being infected by a computer virus and that disconnecting the phone cable would solve the problem (actually, a burnt fuse made his PC shutdown, but he obviously didn't realize that almost every light in the house went out from all the panic).

he's currently 19yrs old, which is supposed to be... hm... an age where you act responsibly and rationally

That's still a child in my view. I know that most countries define adult as 18, and will send them to die for their country at that age, but research has shown male brains are still growing until as late as 25, with females a few years earlier... and that until they stop growing, you are still in the "crazy" stage of adolescence with hormones screwing up your thinking.

Many users had to upgrade the firmware of their routers or replace them (if unsupported) because of Vista autotuning (there was even an article on slashdot about a full provider having that issue), because Vista requires a special non-standard OPTIONAL DHCP flag that many routers don't support to get an IP address. Sources: (1) (2) (3)...

"Windows Update"

lucky.

"high CPU usage with WMP" "or audio skipping..."

Because you have a core2duo, try on a slower machine (like an Atom-based UMPC) to play a video on WMP both on XP and on Vista and you'll see an huge speed difference, it's so huge that even putting the mouse over a tooltip could make the video skip (there's even a funny KB about the issue on Microsoft's website. Solution? Don't move the mouse while playing...).

"What's so great about that longhorn video?  That's something I never got. The redeeming GUI features of the OS that is featured in that video seem to be flying pictures in the explorer and flashy effects."

Longhorn was set to be released 3 years before Vista and was planned to have major changes not just in the UI but Microsoft decided to do a "reset" of Longhorn development because they couldn't finish it in time and all people got was an OS with a superficially pretty UI where many features were delayed, cut or just left half broken because even after the reset they had to rush to avoid releasing something outdated. That video is not so amazing according to today's standard but it was really astonishing in 2002-2003. Vista was really too little and too late and the high hardware requirements, bugs, missing drivers and that resident unfinished feel certainly didn't help its image.

"The biggest cause of the negative image that portrayed Vista is exactly the post above me (Evil SEO). FUD, plain and simple."

If mine's FUD yours is plain ignorance. Come here and counter all of my points, if you can. I can find plenty of news or forum posts that prove that a lot of people had those issues, can you prove the opposite? I dare you, counter all of my arguments properly, then, and only then, you could call them FUD. Come on! Don't be scared! I'm waiting..

A few weeks ago I helped set up a wireless network in my friend's new apartment. She had a laptop with Vista Home Basic, and it was horrendously slow. Fortunately she seemed to be smart enough to blame her laptop at least as much as Vista.

Evil SEO said:

"Now aside the fact, that I have no problems with routers or"

Many users had to upgrade the firmware of their routers or replace them (if unsupported) because of Vista autotuning (there was even an article on slashdot about a full provider having that issue), because Vista requires a special non-standard OPTIONAL DHCP flag that many routers don't support to get an IP address. Sources: (1) (2) (3)...

"Windows Update"

lucky.

"high CPU usage with WMP" "or audio skipping..."

Because you have a core2duo, try on a slower machine (like an Atom-based UMPC) to play a video on WMP both on XP and on Vista and you'll see an huge speed difference, it's so huge that even putting the mouse over a tooltip could make the video skip (there's even a funny KB about the issue on Microsoft's website. Solution? Don't move the mouse while playing...).

"What's so great about that longhorn video?  That's something I never got. The redeeming GUI features of the OS that is featured in that video seem to be flying pictures in the explorer and flashy effects."

Longhorn was set to be released 3 years before Vista and was planned to have major changes not just in the UI but Microsoft decided to do a "reset" of Longhorn development because they couldn't finish it in time and all people got was an OS with a superficially pretty UI where many features were delayed, cut or just left half broken because even after the reset they had to rush to avoid releasing something outdated. That video is not so amazing according to today's standard but it was really astonishing in 2002-2003. Vista was really too little and too late and the high hardware requirements, bugs, missing drivers and that resident unfinished feel certainly didn't help its image.

"The biggest cause of the negative image that portrayed Vista is exactly the post above me (Evil SEO). FUD, plain and simple."

If mine's FUD yours is plain ignorance. Come here and counter all of my points, if you can. I can find plenty of news or forum posts that prove that a lot of people had those issues, can you prove the opposite? I dare you, counter all of my arguments properly, then, and only then, you could call them FUD. Come on! Don't be scared! I'm waiting..

Evil SEO, you make some good points backed up by facts. Too bad many of the people simply dismiss your points as FUD. There has to be a word for it, something like fanboism. People can become so enamored with a thing it almost becomes a religious quest for them to defend or promote it, acting on feelings (or faith in the case of religion) rather than looking at facts. It's somewhat sad actually.

sysrpl said:

Evil SEO said:

*snip*

Evil SEO, you make some good points backed up by facts. Too bad many of the people simply dismiss your points as FUD. There has to be a word for it, something like fanboism. People can become so enamored with a thing it almost becomes a religious quest for them to defend or promote it, acting on feelings (or faith in the case of religion) rather than looking at facts. It's somewhat sad actually.

I'm sorry, I used Vista every day on a 2GB machine I bought a year before Vista was out and performance didn't bother me at all. I just got really tired of people telling me I should hate it and think it was crap.

I hear Vista ran terribly on netbooks and UMPCs, so EvilSEO is right that Vista sucks, if you're running a UMPC.

Most people like the breadcrumb bar, most people aren't interested in deleting the search index. The largest problem with search in Vista is that aside from the Start menu, Microsoft failed to make it very accessible to users. Most people would have never found features like stacks and automatic filtering because they wouldn't be looking for them. The search form in Explorer was also very limited.

Again, I'm not a fanboy, I was just enjoying the features in Vista and got tired of people telling me I should hate it.

brian.shapiro said:

sysrpl said:

*snip*

I'm sorry, I used Vista every day on a 2GB machine I bought a year before Vista was out and performance didn't bother me at all. I just got really tired of people telling me I should hate it and think it was crap.

I hear Vista ran terribly on netbooks and UMPCs, so EvilSEO is right that Vista sucks, if you're running a UMPC.

Most people like the breadcrumb bar, most people aren't interested in deleting the search index. The largest problem with search in Vista is that aside from the Start menu, Microsoft failed to make it very accessible to users. Most people would have never found features like stacks and automatic filtering because they wouldn't be looking for them. The search form in Explorer was also very limited.

Again, I'm not a fanboy, I was just enjoying the features in Vista and got tired of people telling me I should hate it.

 

You are free to enjoy Vista, jsut as I am free to dislike the chaos I see in the new control panel design. But then there are also the factual problems, such as those described by Evil SEO, or the factual problems I encountered: slow newtork file copy, USB peripherals not working, important software incompatibility problems like with QuickBooks QBXML, and one nForce powered system I had refused to run Vista.

Obviously many people had other probems with Vista as well. You may have not had their problems, maybe you didn't need you didn't need QBXML, but that doesn't mean it was unimportant to large numbers of users. As I said before, Vista offered me nothing beyond XP aside from aches. It took six years for Microsoft to develop a new consumer OS (XP to Vista) that I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) didn't care for. Six years is a log time to wait for a disappointment, and being a developer, I was quite upset with Microsoft for stymying progress (again, as I saw it).

I understand that you've enjoyed Vista, but I also hope you can understand why many people have a negative view of Vista.

The control panel was one of the things I liked least about Vista, although I think they've made it more palatable in Windows 7. I don't care that its in a web-style view instead of property sheets, it looks pretty nice, but its a bit too much like a maze of links when they could consolidate a lot of the pages.

brian.shapiro said:

I don't think Vista's release was problem-free just that the problems are overstated. A user buying a new computer with an OEM copy of Vista would have experienced no real problems, but people were advised by zealots on the issue to downgrade to XP.

The control panel was one of the things I liked least about Vista, although I think they've made it more palatable in Windows 7. I don't care that its in a web-style view instead of property sheets, it looks pretty nice, but its a bit too much like a maze of links when they could consolidate a lot of the pages.

 

brian.shapiro said: The control panel was one of the things I liked least about Vista, although I think they've made it more palatable in Windows 7. I don't care that its in a web-style view instead of property sheets, it looks pretty nice, but its a bit too much like a maze of links when they could consolidate a lot of the property pages.

Well stated and agreed.

Evil SEO said:

What caused the negative Vista image? Maybe you can start from the longhorn videos that portrait something entirely different instead of that slow P(OS) with so many broken features (Resolution independence? Broken (the sidebar misbehaves, IE7 requires an obscure registry key to do proper scaling or all the pages look completely messed up...). Firewall? Broken (if you have ONLY 1 public connection all sharings are turned off on ALL connections? WTF design is that?). Higher performance with DX10? Can't still see a faster game. The new audio architecture? Broken (audio skipping, network throughput dropping while playing audio, unbelievably high CPU usage of WMP while playing content because of the protected pipeline DRM cr*p...). The new TCP/IP stack? Broken (how many routers is Vista incompatible with? And don't blame the routers for these stupid useless tcp/ip settings Microsoft forced that you can't even disable without obscure command-line commands). The new Explorer? Ultra-broken. Desktop Search? Can't count the times I had to delete the index. The new Windows Update? Can't count the time updates and even service packs failed to install and rollbacked. and the list could go on and on...) and plenty of bugs (how many cumulative reliability packs in just 2 years? a dozen?). Not to mention the many consumer-screwing marketing choices you could even write a top 10 about.

Vista IS the worst OS microsoft released, not ME. ME had its problems most of which were caused by bad drivers but Vista... Vista is really, really bad by itself even when you don't count the amazing number of bad drivers that were and still are released for it (the hard drive of one of my laptops that has a stupid nforce 410 controller just got corrupted for the nth-time (BSOD + chkdsk finding tons of errors at reboot), thank you nVidia drivers) just 1 day ago.

I have to admit, that longhorn video was great.

sysrpl said:

brian.shapiro said:

*snip*

You are free to enjoy Vista, jsut as I am free to dislike the chaos I see in the new control panel design. But then there are also the factual problems, such as those described by Evil SEO, or the factual problems I encountered: slow newtork file copy, USB peripherals not working, important software incompatibility problems like with QuickBooks QBXML, and one nForce powered system I had refused to run Vista.

Obviously many people had other probems with Vista as well. You may have not had their problems, maybe you didn't need you didn't need QBXML, but that doesn't mean it was unimportant to large numbers of users. As I said before, Vista offered me nothing beyond XP aside from aches. It took six years for Microsoft to develop a new consumer OS (XP to Vista) that I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) didn't care for. Six years is a log time to wait for a disappointment, and being a developer, I was quite upset with Microsoft for stymying progress (again, as I saw it).

I understand that you've enjoyed Vista, but I also hope you can understand why many people have a negative view of Vista.

 

sysrpl said:

important software incompatibility problems like with QuickBooks QBXML, and one nForce powered system I had refused to run Vista

Which is of course one of the other problems, poor third party products. Is the fact that Quickbooks has problems really a Vista issue, or does it also fail in Standard User accounts on XP? Is NVidia's inability to write a decent driver really the fault of Vista? When choosing who to blame, who do you pick, the OS vendor or the Application vendor? Rightly or wrongly, most people blame the OS.

sysrpl said:

To answer the OP's question, when Vista first came out...

Network file copy ws completely broken. It would take forever to copy large files with every system I tried.

My USB peripherals and my Sound Blaster Live PCI card plain did not work. One computer I have with a nForce chipset, a 2Ghz CPU, and 1GB of RAM refused to run Vista.

UAC was overly annoying. Some important (to me) software programs didn't work when it was on. Some important (to me) software features didn't work at all. (QuickBooks QBXML interop for example).

Little things annoyed the hell out of me. I don't like the breadcrumb metaphor extended into explorer the way that it was. I did not lke the breadcrub path bar. I liked to see and edit the full pah always. I liked being able to press backspace to go "up" a folder and was annoyed that backspace now went up. I was annoyed that you can no longer easily change file type icons. The control panel was a mess in my opinion, you know ... moving away from applets with dialogs that had property sheets towards a "web like" explorer view. Not good IMO.

The Windows theme API introduced in XP was depricated for no good reason.

In general, Vista ran slower and hardware drivers were unstable. I believe Microsoft is partly at fault for this for changing the driver model quickly a few times leading up to the release of Vista, pulling the rug out from under hardware vendors causing them to lose confidence and dollars chasing Microsoft's changing dates.

There was also the whole Vista Capable Intel IGP fiasco.

Most importantly, Vista offered people little to no benefits over XP. In most cases it was beneficial to stick with XP, as you could be reasonably sure all hardware and software would work with it, whereas with Vista it was questionable.

I could go on, but  think you get the idea. I had complaints and XP was good enough. It took six years for Microsof to develop a new consumer OS (XP to Vista) that I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) didn't care for. Six years is a log time to wait for a disappointment, and being a developer, I was quite upset with Microsoft for stymying progress (again, as I saw it).

Cheers

I agree that stability was an issue and it felt mostly driver issues.  I bought a brand new Dell in March 08 with Nvidia 8800GT graphics and although drivers were available, it took 6 months of driver updates before there was one available that did not randomly drop the system into low res mode requiring manually resizing the desktop.  This was very annoyning and painted a very poor picture while I used my XP laptop with no issues. 

Mind you that I bought my machine over a year after Vista general availibility and still had massive issues. Imagine the experience of people who bought in Jan 2007.  Although today Vista is actually very good, after years of pain there was just no way to rescue the Vista image. The only way was to rename the system and cut the cord to the past...  Windows 7 is very much Windows VIsta, but it is Vista 2009, not Vista 2007-2008. 

I have IT pros at my company that wouldnt touch Vista with a 10 foot pole but are excited about Windows 7.  I think that is good news for MS.  Let the upgrade cycles begin...

Joiseystud said:

sysrpl said:

*snip*

I agree that stability was an issue and it felt mostly driver issues.  I bought a brand new Dell in March 08 with Nvidia 8800GT graphics and although drivers were available, it took 6 months of driver updates before there was one available that did not randomly drop the system into low res mode requiring manually resizing the desktop.  This was very annoyning and painted a very poor picture while I used my XP laptop with no issues. 

Mind you that I bought my machine over a year after Vista general availibility and still had massive issues. Imagine the experience of people who bought in Jan 2007.  Although today Vista is actually very good, after years of pain there was just no way to rescue the Vista image. The only way was to rename the system and cut the cord to the past...  Windows 7 is very much Windows VIsta, but it is Vista 2009, not Vista 2007-2008. 

I have IT pros at my company that wouldnt touch Vista with a 10 foot pole but are excited about Windows 7.  I think that is good news for MS.  Let the upgrade cycles begin...

Another thing... the price was too high. 

I hope this time around MS is agressive with pricing and lenient with Licenses.  I would like to see a family upgrade plan that covers 3 machines. Apple does this and it is great.  I would upgrade every machine in my house if this was done, otherwise it will be likely that I will be living with Vista until I replace my machines.  This could take a long time because my machines are all pretty modern.  I dont see the need to replace my Dell Laptop with 4GB of ram and 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo any time soon.  Really, if MS has any chance of upgrade sales, they will need to be aggressive on upgrade pricing to get users away from Vista. 

Joiseystud said:

Joiseystud said:

*snip*

Another thing... the price was too high. 

I hope this time around MS is agressive with pricing and lenient with Licenses.  I would like to see a family upgrade plan that covers 3 machines. Apple does this and it is great.  I would upgrade every machine in my house if this was done, otherwise it will be likely that I will be living with Vista until I replace my machines.  This could take a long time because my machines are all pretty modern.  I dont see the need to replace my Dell Laptop with 4GB of ram and 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo any time soon.  Really, if MS has any chance of upgrade sales, they will need to be aggressive on upgrade pricing to get users away from Vista. 

And if you want to use the new promoted 'HomeGroup' and 'Play To' features in Windows 7 the other devices need to run Windows 7 too. So i really hope they come up with a plan to cover multiple machines.

Deffining a number at 3 might be the wrong way to go though. Maybe sell additional license keys for same Windows 7 version at lower cost if you bought retail package.

BTW: Which package do I have to buy if I have Windows Vista? Is that 'upgrade' ? Or 'Full Editon'? And can you do a 'contum install' and do a fresh install (no upgrade) when you buy the upgrade version? It's very confusing...

------------
"Many users had to upgrade the firmware of their routers or replace them (if unsupported) because of Vista autotuning (there was even an article on slashdot about a full provider having that issue), because Vista requires a special non-standard OPTIONAL DHCP flag that many routers don't support to get an IP address. Sources: (1) (2) (3)..."
--------------

I swear to god, that I haver never heard about this issue until now. I am not saying you make it up or something, since you provided the links and all, but seriously, I have never heard it before. And I had never trouble with routers.

I never had problems with providers. Actually, my PC is directly connected to the DSL modem now, never had a problem with the provider.

I think this issue was not that widespread, otherwise the noise on the internet would be much louder. Imagine the Apple ads: "Vista kills your router!"

SEO:
--------------------
"Because you have a core2duo, try on a slower machine (like an Atom-based UMPC) to play a video on WMP both on XP and on Vista and you'll see an huge speed difference, it's so huge that even putting the mouse over a tooltip could make the video skip (there's even a funny KB about the issue on Microsoft's website. Solution? Don't move the mouse while playing...)."
--------------------

Sorry, but this is purely anecdotic, because I have a story too:

In 2006 my best PC was an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512 MB RAM(!), 80GB HD and a Geforce FX 5600 graphics card. Not really hightech for that time. I have installed the Vista Beta back then on that machine. And it worked. It wasn't really fast, (the main problem was the disk trashing), but workable. Tried some games, like Warcraft III, they worked, without much slowdown. And, I was able to play videos in WMP without any audio skipping issues or other problems. I tried mpg, avi and wmv videos. Streaming worked too.

And this was ON THE VISTA BETA! With BETA DRIVERS FROM NVIDIA!!

This experience was the reason I bought Vista in 2007 when I got a new PC.

That's why I am not convinced by your horror stories. I am not doubting that they happened, but it seems that Vista was not the sole factor for all that problems people had. by the way, you are just one guy on a forum that had negative experiences, I had positive. Does it prove something? No.

Judging by forums, Mac OS would be the biggest pile of crap on Earth:

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=235&start=0#threads

Cannot restore Mac OS X to previous version with time machine
gmail wont show any emails in mail?
10.5.7 Macbook sleeps once, freezes second time
10.5.7 update deleted all mail accounts except MobileMe
Mac os 10.5.7 update messed up my mail. cant see message viewer!!!
Stand-by problem with 10.5.7
10.5.7 update problems
Internet is ~8x slower on Mac than in Windows
Irritating pop up from old deleted app...please help me get rid of it!!!!
Looping blue screen with 10.5.7 install
Distorted graphics in Leopard when scrolling
Time Machine Error - again again..

And so on and on for wooping 7207 pages!

Some anecdotic problems that some people had doesn't explain the massive hate against Vista.

SEO:
------------------
"Longhorn was set to be released 3 years before Vista and was planned to have major changes not just in the UI but Microsoft decided to do a "reset" of Longhorn development because they couldn't finish it in time and all people got was an OS with a superficially pretty UI where many features were delayed, cut or just left half broken because even after the reset they had to rush to avoid releasing something outdated."
------------------

Agreed, features were cut. But this fact doesn't explain the negativity. Most people don't give a crap about cutted features or delays of an OS. I still think my explaination that I gave in my first posting in this thread is more valid for the negative image.

SEO:
----------------------
"That video is not so amazing according to today's standard but it was really astonishing in 2002-2003. Vista was really too little and too late and the high hardware requirements, bugs, missing drivers and that resident unfinished feel certainly didn't help its image."
----------------------

It was not THAT astonishing. And of course, all eye candy was badmouthed from the get go, here is an article from 2004:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/browse_thread/thread/a1fb7bfa41151de8/f3ccccc2eb4349f1?hl=en&ie=UTF-8

-----------------------------------

Longhorn Tastes the Apple
Wed May 5
Richard Fisco - PC Magazine

The first day of WinHEC 2004 (the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference)
in Seattle had, as expected, a major track on Longhorn. It focused on the
new user interface and what Microsoft is planning for its next-generation
operating system. A big part of it could be summed up in a word: 3D.

3D graphics on a PC have long been stuck with a "for games only" reputation.
Of course, you could rightfully argue that 3D performance has been the
driving force behind most recent PC performance increases; usually, the
"application" that needed all the horsepower your PC could muster wasn't an
application at all, but a high-powered 3D game. But now the shroud of
illegitimacy is about to be lifted, as Microsoft prepares to rely on 3D
performance to power its Longhorn operating system.

[....]

Microsoft's demonstrations were interesting and somehow familiar. After
looking at some images and icons that grew bigger or flipped when chosen, I
couldn't help but think of the dock on Apple's OS X. There's more to
Longhorn, of course, than just that dock. Microsoft is looking to have
applications add useful, related information in bars alongside open
documents, like upcoming appointments and related cases if you're in a law
program, or favorite-show information if you're in a TV search tool.

Overall, though, Longhorn still had an Apple look to it. I suppose imitation
is a form of flattery, after all. It'll be years before Longhorn launches,
but it should be fun to watch it develop. Microsoft is giving out early
copies of it at the end of WinHEC, so there'll be lots more written about it
in the coming weeks.

----------------------------

So, Vista was badmouthed pretty early already, and the eye candy was one of the reasons. If Vista would have been released with EXACTLY the same GUI as in that Video, it would be damned anyway, because of the reasons I wrote in my first post.

Why do people hate Microsoft? People hate Microsoft because Microsoft is fundamentally in everyone's business. Intel hates AMD, AMD hates Intel. They are bitter competitors. But Microsoft competition is basically the whole software industry and then some. They compete with so many different entites, eg: Oracle, IBM, Apple, Adobe, Google, free software, Sony, Nintendo. These entities might not even share much of anything in common otherwise.

If Microsoft was a good little boy and stayed in their little nitch they wouldn't get as much hate. But they seem to want to own everyone's business. Pretty much they would love to bankrupt everyone, and control the whole industry. That's why so much Microsoft hate. Hate is just a natural response to a threat. No matter how big they think they are I believe Microsoft opened too many fronts against too many "countries", and it's going to (or already is) biting them in the * in the end.

my 2 cents about Vista.

PEBKAC umm... Only if the chair is in Redmond.

Main issues IMHO

1. Backward compatibility with existing apps. (This was the biggest issue.)

I had 3 apps that needed serious work a-rounds to get working. Two were in use in companies. After that they just started down grading to XP and waited for a Vista version of the Apps.

I know.. I know.. most were caused by the app not being very secure. User data in program folders etc.

2.System requirements.

I can say that the requirements going from 3.11 to win 95 were as big a step. But MS failed to say from the get go you need serious kit. They did it better with win 95 but not as well with Vista.

3. Drivers

Drivers were more of an issue for me going from 3.11 to 95 than with Vista but they still are. I still have an XP partition to use a scanner [ and play some games   ]

Other issues

System lockups still..

I have a quad core with a total of 8GB ram Vista Ultimate x64 and it still locks up!!!??

Win Vista is nice don't get me wrong and I do like it _now_ , but looking back it was a #####  .

I think with W 7 there is not as big a jump in sys requirements and most app's and drivers will work.

It is capitalism that is at the heart of this, growth, diversification and so on. Once upon a time you had Glaxo. Then Glaxo + Smith Kline, then Glaxo + Smith Kline + Beechams, or here in England you had Lloyds of London the Bank. Then Lloyds + TSB and now Lloyds + TSB + Halifax + Bank of Scotland.

For all the companies that loathe Microsoft, most would exchange places in a second. I also think the Bill Gates foundation has done more for humankind than most Governments put together, certainly more than Oracle, IBM and even the FSF

"Why do people hate Microsoft? People hate Microsoft because Microsoft is fundamentally in everyone's business. Intel hates AMD, AMD hates Intel. They are bitter competitors. But Microsoft competition is basically the whole software industry and then some."

[....]

--------

Yeah... but what has it do with Vista? Customers don't give a rats * about corporate politics. Why is Windows 7 praised as if it is made by angels and was fed by ambrosia? Win7 should get the slack also by that logic. And why is XP so heralded now? (it wasn't when it was first released)

I still think my explaination makes more sense. Never before were so many computer novices like in 2007, and they got for the first time a different operating system! And, compared to previous consumer operating systems, like win98, ME... XP was very stable in 2007.

Many people encountered for the first time initial problems with an OS, which they never have experienced before (since they only knew the by then mature XP), and they panicked.

Win7 gets the praise, because it is basicaly Vista 1.1 and all the drivers and third party applications are mature now.

Another issue is that Vista doesn't profit as much from the CPU than you would think. I have a friend who basicaly bought the same PC as me, with one difference: the chipset. Mine is a 965P from intel, his was cheap crap from SIS. The RAM amount was identical, as was the CPU.

Vista ran on his PC slower, the chipset made a noticable difference. I think that even if I had a slower CPU (say 200 mhz slower) my PC would be still faster than his.

Unfortunately, too many people only care about the RAM and the CPU forgetting everything else. Microsoft makes the same mistake, I wish they would highlight the need of a good hard disk and a sufficent chipset more than just the CPU.

vesuvius said:

That is completely correct.

It is capitalism that is at the heart of this, growth, diversification and so on. Once upon a time you had Glaxo. Then Glaxo + Smith Kline, then Glaxo + Smith Kline + Beechams, or here in England you had Lloyds of London the Bank. Then Lloyds + TSB and now Lloyds + TSB + Halifax + Bank of Scotland.

For all the companies that loathe Microsoft, most would exchange places in a second. I also think the Bill Gates foundation has done more for humankind than most Governments put together, certainly more than Oracle, IBM and even the FSF

 

Being pedantic, but Lloyds of London != Lloyds TSB

I dealt with many a unhappy soccer mom and.... pick some pithy idiom for the males... who purchased a dirt cheap Vista Home Edition PC with 1GB ram at... pick your favorite box store.

These people had a legitimate beef... IMHO.
Sure they could'a should'a would'a done some home work but, they didn't. They trusted the labeling.

Edit: And... remember... they had little choice! They could not opt for XP and, really, Linux wasn't an option (sorry Linux fans).

ScottWelker said:

Bingo! "...VISTA capable tag on equipment that was obviously not really capable of properly running the thing"

I dealt with many a unhappy soccer mom and.... pick some pithy idiom for the males... who purchased a dirt cheap Vista Home Edition PC with 1GB ram at... pick your favorite box store.

These people had a legitimate beef... IMHO.
Sure they could'a should'a would'a done some home work but, they didn't. They trusted the labeling.

Edit: And... remember... they had little choice! They could not opt for XP and, really, Linux wasn't an option (sorry Linux fans).

True, the Vista Capable thing was definitely the biggest cockup they could make. It's interesting to read those leaked email, how even some of the toppest of brass were violently against it. I have no idea who decided to pursue it, but it'd be nice if they were held responsible for it somehow.

Bas said:

ScottWelker said:

*snip*

True, the Vista Capable thing was definitely the biggest cockup they could make. It's interesting to read those leaked email, how even some of the toppest of brass were violently against it. I have no idea who decided to pursue it, but it'd be nice if they were held responsible for it somehow.

I was amazed that it went away so quickly. Surely some kind of fraud was being committed there.