Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now 912
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Sure (Score:5, Informative)
We have several people who've bought new laptops in the past few months, and every one of them is infuriated at how annoying the interface is. I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet, because it makes no real sense where anything is or under what conditions entire sections of the interface are hidden and revealed.
App compatibility is the key (Score:2, Informative)
Bottom line - there is not enough support from key apps out there to make an upgrade to Vista sensible right now, and general performance kills it for most people.
Examples:
- Poor nVidia support
- Nero 6 doesn't work, so you need to buy an upgrade
- Peripheral devide support is poor, but again, you can buy upgrades
- deskop indexing kills the machine
- Aero glass keeps breaking due to app clashes (e.g. Quicktime)
- The overwhelming number of confirmation pop-ups is an extremely irrating feature. One struggles to imagine how Microsoft designers feel this is a good model. Most users won't understand the questions being asked (or the implications) and will simply keeping clicking "allow" until the windows stop popping up.
Both machines now back on XP Pro and working very well.
T.
Re:No problem (Score:4, Informative)
Just like ESR says of Plan 9 (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
I *did* upgrade to Vista... (Score:1, Informative)
The device compatibility wasn't that bad in the end (only my external soundcard failed to work), but the main reason that I went back to XP was the fact that pretty much everything ran so much slower. I've not a terribly old machine, but it is hamstrung with only 1GB installed RAM.
So any application that needed more than a smidgen of memory would grind to a halt as it struggled with the amount that Vista wrenched from me by default.
Back on XP there's nothing that I miss at all, so my copy of Vista is likely to just sit on my shelf (or get ebayed).
We have 10 Vista upgrade licenses... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
With that said....
___
I don't get it.
Considering what a vast improvement security-wise, GUI-wise and feature-wise Vista is over it's predecessors, I don't understand why it's so unpopular with people who've not even used it.
Maybe that's the problem - they go by hearsay. I ran Vista betas for about a year before taking the plunge and upgrading in February.
I have no regrets, it beats the heck out of XP. The features they borrowed from OS X added to the desktop are awesome. Search is everywhere and the Vista equivalent of KDE/GNOME's Alt+F2 rocks. Flip 3D is nice, but frankly I rarely use it. And yes, security is indeed better than in previous versions.
What don't I like? UAC is annoying, but you get used to it.
And Hardware/Driver/Software issues? There are some, but my problem was really 64-bit related (So, just like in Linux, I gave up and went back to 32-bit).
Drivers for all my hardware and peripherals (with the exception of the crappy cheap TV turner card I had - which I never liked anyway and ditched for a better one) were available and worked fine. Heck, drivers for both my 2-year-old printers (Brother MFC 7820N, HP DeskJet 6820) came with Vista.
Maybe I'm just lucky...
No, Vista isn't a godsend and there are some minor things that irk me. But the same goes for Linux and it's desktops (GNOME/KDE/XFCE...).
But yes, Vista is a vast improvement over it's predecessors. And it took 5 years to get to consumers because the development team started over from scratch halfway through the development process (a fact that doesn't seem that well known).
OK, it does have stricter hardware requirements but not that much stricter. Go in to any computer retailer and look at the "cheap" computers they have running Vista. Most of them have hardware approximating what most consumers (who bought a box in the past 2-3 years) have already.
I got my computer at the end of 2004 and deliberately went "overboard" and a higher-end box. My roomies computer (bought a year later) is half as good and runs Vista just fine.
So once again, I don't get it.
So why aren't I in Vista as I write this? Because I use whatever OS suits my mood or needs at the time and Linux was and still is the 1st choice for this OS junkie...
Re:No (Score:2, Informative)
I've never griped about XP, it seems to run just fine for what I need, it supports the apps (and games) that I like, and with a nice fast system I have rarely run into any trouble, system crashes, etc. And with SP2, even some of the minor issues I was having seemed to go away (I mainly remember my wireless USB adapter working much more happily with SP2's wireless configuration). I saw beta versions of Vista, and had the immediate "hmm looks kinda like OS X" reaction as everyone else -- which wasn't a bad thing, I can be a sucker for things like pretty looking translucent windows; but in any case I figured I'd do the smart thing and wait the requisite year or two before upgrading.
So, when I replaced my computer with a new "Vista-ready" PC a few months ago, with the intent of swapping over my old XP install, it was to my surprise that they had left Vista installed on the machine. At this point, I had a hunch that told me I should ignore it and wipe the disk and install XP anyways, but my curiosity got the best of me. Plus, I thought, "hey, free upgrade!"
I'll spare you the details because everyone has made the same complaints before... but essentially, I had to constantly tweak application settings to get things to run properly, and certain things just took a long time to load, my 1 GB of ram felt like 256 MB, and on and on. A couple of specific things that really just irked me:
1. The default "windows picture viewer" took ages to load! As in, double-click a JPG... wait... wait... about 20 seconds later, it opened. Wonderful.
2. Flash 8 doesn't work with Aero so every time I opened it, Aero would turn off, giving me a black screen for about 5 seconds while the graphics settings refreshed... eventually I turned off Aero altogether because this got so annoying. Awesome.
Last week, I went and gave my PC an actual "upgrade" by wiping it and installing XP. I can't tell you how pleased I am with the decision. Everything runs so much more smoothly, it really is like having a brand new computer. Microsoft can plead all they want, but I'm going to be pleading right back to everyone I know NOT to install Vista, especially when I know they're going to be coming to me for their tech/computer help. I actually feel sorry for Microsoft (ok not really... maybe just the people who spent six years developing this POS).
Re:Some things I like about Vista (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Um... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
Based on stuff like your comment, I decided to leave Vista on it. It's easy to use! It's pretty! Sure it uses a lot of resources, but it's pretty and it's easy to use! "OK", says I, "we try this pretty, easy to use OS." I was concerned when it seemed to be using like 30% of the RAM resources at idle, but at least the computer had lots of RAM. Then I loaded WOW.
World of Warcraft is 2 years old. It wasn't exactly Quake4 when it was released. I played it quite happily on a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a crappy Intel video chipset. It was unplayable on my wife's new laptop. When I tried max resolution with all the video pretties turned on that I usually use on my Macbook Pro (almost a year old) you could literally watch the frames draw. When I turned the resolution down and turned off most of the video tricks, it was choppy and gave one a headache. I tried everything I could think of. Upgraded the video drivers and sound drivers (Oh, did I mention that sound was stuttering and broken too?) tweaked setting in the game, etc. Nothing yielded more than marginal improvement.
I put XP on that sucker. Now everything runs fine. Should I have chucked the whole OS for one app? Well, she LIKES that app. It's her FAVORITE app. Besides, if a brand new, decently speced computer couldn't handle a two year old mass market game, what could I expect from Photoshop? This was a computer built from the ground up and factory installed with Vista, I feel sorry for some poor sucker trying to upgrade.
Re:Shame on Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
I find it amazing how comments like yours get modded insightful. Where's the insight here? Do you know something no-one else does?
As you are clearly out of touch somewhat with Vista, please review the following 'under the hood' changes to the OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
That's just a list of stuff you'd probably never even notice that's been enhanced. If you're going to bash Microsoft senselessly, please back it up at least.
Re:My battery life is great! (Score:2, Informative)
I like vista (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Informative)
No, vista is differently -- but equally -- broke. MS did fix stuff like having stupid directory names (e.g. "Documents and Settings" -> "users"), etc., but compensated by adding UAC and DRM stupidity.
Short summary of LUA and UAC (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_privil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control [wikipedia.org]
The short version: no, not new to Vista; the idea's been in the *nixes (and before?) for yonks. Windows NT/2k/XP did have different privilege levels but few used them for various reasons, everyone just ran as admin all the time (which was the default). The differences in Vista are, firstly, no-one runs as admin (the "administrator" account you create by default is actually a standard account in every way except that you don't need to enter the admin password every time you elevate); two, applications can request to elevate to admin privileges on a task-by-task basis if they need to (pre-Vista setup programs and the like are heuristically 'detected' and automatically told to request elevation for their entire runtime), and three, there's a ton of backward compatibility stuff to try and mitigate the effects of every program written before 2007 wanting admin rights because they're used to them -- even going so far as to virtualise
....Or not. Some facts here, please (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah... Are they going to indemnify us? (Score:5, Informative)
I couldn't even make it through the 4-5 months that you did... Not because I hated it, but because I was trying to get work done.
My company rolled out Vista on several of our technician laptops to get us familiar with the OS. The problem is that those technician laptops are constantly going out on-site to diagnose/repair assorted network issues. And Vista, even the business version, just doesn't work well with Cisco equipment.
There's no telnet utility. Not a big deal, since I install PuTTY anyway... Except that PuTTY didn't seem to like Vista and crashed constantly. Hyperterm is also gone, which again wouldn't be a big deal with PuTTY - but PuTTY kept crashing. I was completely unable to get the P/S/ASDM to work reliably through IE7 (thankfully it worked fine through FireFox). And then there were the constant prompts for elevation - ipconfig, network properties, NetStumbler.
In the end we had to reformat all the technician laptops and re-install Windows XP just so we could get our work done.
Vista lies about CPU utilization (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps that is why Vista eats notebook batteries so much faster than XP? It's always, secretly busy doing something.
Re:Do I need it? (Score:3, Informative)
The warez scene continued, of course, to refer to the leaked Memphis/win98 betas as "Windows 97" for some time.
"Works on my machine" certification (Score:2, Informative)