Consumer Vista Upgrades Moving at Snail's Pace 269
Chester Freeze writes "During the holiday season, many shoppers bought PCs with the promise of quick, free Vista upgrades. The reality has been something else entirely: many Dell and HP customers are being told that they won't receive their copies of Vista before April. 'One source at a major OEM who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the real issue is that OEMs are still not sure which PCs are really ready to support Vista, and which PCs aren't... Customers who qualify for an Express Upgrade also qualify for OEM support for Windows Vista, even if their machines came with Windows XP. The last thing a Dell, Gateway, or HP wants to do is start sending out upgrades to customers who might have video cards that do not have particularly stable drivers yet (or sound cards, or RAID controllers, etc.). This could be a support disaster.'"
Slowly but sure (Score:-1, Interesting)
But isn't this what they planned for? (Score:5, Interesting)
God I remember this hell. WinModem! (Score:4, Interesting)
sound card crashes vista w/ blue screen (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote about it here [blogspot.com], if anyone cares.
Re:really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
They also keep a support sticker on the bottom so they know exactly what hardware is inside when they look up the support sticker. They also require that support sticker when registering for the vista upgrade.
I don't think Dell's problem is that they don't know who would be ready to get the upgrade. I just think they had no plan at all for processing all the discs they promised to send out.
Support disaster? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The quote even specified it.
The computers show up and they have Vista and Office 2007. We have to spend > 3 hours getting it arranged for them to come pick up the computers.
Could be a support disaster? (Score:0, Interesting)
Support for Vista is already a disaster. Customer complaints are rampant, mostly with video problems that are directly a result of bad drivers. In the past, at least we had enough knowledge to get our job done. We could have confidence in newer drivers and we could be relatively sure the machines could support Windows XP. Today, Microsoft has changed the game so much that we are fucked. Troubleshooting this system is almost an entirely different game, so we are forced to play wack-a-mole all day. On the bright side, our product lines are getting a decent overhaul with more standardization. In the mean time, you guys are playing a crapshoot, the result of slapping the Vista logo on anything we can to meet our marketing promises.
When Vista becomes dominant in the mainstream, all of you can expect loads of problems unless Microsoft and the hardware vendors straighten things out. Sure, we should have platform standards. We all know Windows sucks largely because of how badly drivers are written, but they are doing it by screwing with us, the hardware vendors. My group knows what the hell we're doing. We would not be as big as we are if we didn't, but Microsoft are making our lives nearly impossible because they do not consider in the least what we need to support our products.
My advice: do not think you can buy either Dell or HP or from any of the other big vendors soon and expect Vista to work entirely as advertised. Wait a year. Stick with XP or buy a Mac.
Re:I can't possibly understand why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, businesses will still find the money and time to upgrade, but most of them will do a forklift upgrade with a business maintenance plan on the desktop machines. This is a luxury that home pc owners do not have. The only real choice is to switch or suffer the pains of upgrades, license fees, support issues, software headaches, and the continued use of an OS that is the malware hackers preferred target.
This isn't trolling or Linux fanboi-ism, just an observation of what I'm seeing in the general populace.
not running on an apple (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were a shareholder, i would sell sell sell.
I think it's a safe bet to say every shareholder should short-sell before every major release of windows. They do this every single time. Hype it up, stock goes up, release it, disappointing everyone, stock goes down, holding pattern, start all over again.
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SELL SELL SELL! [douginadress.com] | Sometimes I'm bored [prettybored.com]
Here is my issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a reply that said "Thank you for submitting to customer service, your upgrade order has been cancelled per your request so that you can re-submit with the correct information."
So instead of verifying my order, they canceled it, and the page to do submissions are gone, and besides that the documentation said "no copies of this documentation will be accepted," but I had already submitted the documentation via physical snail mail. So I have essentially been SCREWED out of 200 bucks worth of software.
To put it mildly, I will never purchase Windows Vista, and I am sure the Pirate bay can help me get the software I was promised. I have never before had a request for information turn into such a fraudulent cancellation before, and since I already paid for it, I am not feeling under any obligation to purchase it again.
Vista's actually pretty good (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista may be having a slow start, but I think that within a year or so it will be a big winner. I like it (and I haven't had much good to say about Win since forever).
No Shit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows XP Home Edition offered the stability and other improvements of Windows 2000 rolled into a consumer oriented OS. Compared to Windows 98 and (shudder) ME it was a huge improvement for consumers so it's no wonder more people wanted to upgrade to XP. What does Vista offer? A series of confusing versions to choose from, required hardware upgrades for most, software compatibility issues for many, annoying as all hell UAC prompts, Windows Software Protection Platform that can completely lock down your system if it thinks your running a pirated copy of Vista and the list goes on.
I can't think of one reason I should upgrade to Windows Vista. In fact, XP is the last version of a Microsoft OS that I will run on any PC I own. I've switched to a Mac and I couldn't be happier. I've got Boot Camp installed to play the occasional game but I find I'm spending less and less time gaming so I suspect by the time games appear that are Vista only it will no longer matter.
Re:Support disaster? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:really? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's what they DO know.
They don't know which piece of hardware Vista is going to cause to smoke and explode.
Remember linux drivers in 1998? This is worse... it's proprietary. And delayed.
Even if hardware is supposedly "supported" by vista doesn't mean it will work.
It just means it's supposed to. (Eventually)
Meanwhile, on planet Dell, the phones begin to ring nonstop for 5 years.
And 100,000 new customers choke on their tongues swollen from screaming.
Re:not running on an apple (Score:3, Interesting)
I heavily use a 12" PowerBook which dual boots with OS X Tiger and Ubuntu Edgy Eft. It's great, often I use OS X heavily and am very happy with it. But the thing cost me $1500 when I bought it a year and a half ago.
I've been wanting to buy a new desktop, but the options are limited. I could get a Mini, but you can't expand it. I don't want to have to clutter up my desk with multiple external drives and audio interfaces (I do audio editing in my spare time, so I need lots of storage and good audio interfaces). The only option for something expandable is a Mac Pro, which is ~$2000.
Instead I built a Core 2 Duo E6600 based machine with a ASUS P5B Deluxe, two 320GB sata drives, 2GB DDR2 800 ram, M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound, etc for $1100. It's now running Ubuntu Edgy Eft and works perfectly.
If Apple would sell some midrange machines that were expandable I would of bought a Mac for that instead.
Re:not running on an apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux loses for me since I do not want to spend the time to fiddle with it (also you could factor in a bill rate, say $40/hr for how much it costs you in time), and MS loses due to cost of anti-virus and other add-ons and the amount of time I have to fiddle with it to get it to work.
When I factor all then in I think Apple was my best, least expensive purchase overall.
Of course YMMV
Re:But isn't this what they planned for? (Score:4, Interesting)
They decided to require fancy graphics cards to run the best version of Vista. This is because Vista offloads the graphics performance from the CPU to the card. This also means that the extremely common "shared memory" graphics subsystems are unusable with the modern Vista, making a lot of strong-selling hardware obsolete overnight. This is the same hardware that makes the $299 PC possible, so you can probably tell how happy this makes hardware vendors.
The funny thing is that if you have a 400mhz Titanium PowerBook you get those effects and they run a little slowly but just fine overall. Surely the right thing to do with a modern 3.2ghz PC would be to make the effects run off the CPU unless the graphics card was capable, like Apple does with the MacOS?
I have to guess that Microsoft really wanted to sell video cards, but not even the video card makers seem too happy about this - early reports indicate that driver support still seems a bit shaky.
So why does the system essentially require 1gb RAM to run applications, when 512mb is ample for XP? It's hard to believe that much requested features like user account control and trying to protect "premium content" would double the requirements. And using your flash card to increase available RAM seems like an act of desperation.
My best guess is that Aero Glass is really piggish for some reason, but that doesn't explain why even Vista Basic has similar memory requirements
Maybe some other Slashdotters can tell you about that, but hopefully at least I've clarified the video issue a bit.
D
Vista support confusion -- huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? MS has already released recommended specs.
It ran quite well on my old P4 2.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM and Geforce 6600 GT...
That is, far below what e.g. Dell has sold the past few years.
Re:Vista's actually pretty good (Score:1, Interesting)
My geforce card runs the dual heads without any issues and performance isn't bad at all. (3.8 ghz, 2gb ram)
Lessee, GeForce card with dual heads, 3.8 G proc and 2 G RAM and performance isn't bad at all. Geeez, man, that is a very high end machine! Vista should just scream on it! Unless a lot of people here are right and Vista is a bloated POS!