PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back To XP 523
The Telegraph is reporting on efforts by PC manufacturers to give customers buying systems pre-installed with Windows Vista a much-sought way to downgrade to Windows XP. ( A few months back we discussed Microsoft's similar concession for corporate customers.) "It took took five years and $6 billion to develop, but Microsoft's Vista operating system, which was launched early this year, has been shunned by consumers — with computer manufacturers taking the bizarre step of offering downgrades to the old XP version of Windows."
I've been out of it but... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bizzare? (Score:1, Informative)
Then if you check the logs, it will tell you that some DLL hung for 612 seconds or whatever. (I also saw that 612 several times so perhaps it is a magic driver timeout number for Vista?)
Re:I've been out of it but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've been out of it but... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure there are some kernel stuff that should go into Windows and Linux to optimize core usage better than it is now.
Deja Vu? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My one experience with Vista (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bizzare? (Score:3, Informative)
"down grade" your laptop? DO IT! (Score:5, Informative)
My own little experience with Vista...
I was happy enough with XP.
Then some mofo lowlife stole my laptop so have just been forced to get a new one. The shop said they "can't" provide machines with XP, so I was forced to use Vista (with hindsight I should have shelled out for a copy of XP and downgraded the machine).
The weird thing is, you can sense the stirrings of some actual respect for decent security underneath the glittering, laquer-coated turd that is Vista. But sadly, the actual implementation is just as bad as I feared.
My first 2 hours were lost just trying to get an ssh shell working again.
- cygwin doesn't run (easily) - file permission problems. Need to become Administrator to fix them.
- turns out that under Vista, just because your account is an "Administrator account", does not mean you are an Administrator. No, there is an actual Administrator (root) user, which has been thoughfully disabled.
- you can google plenty of instructions for turning on the Administrator account - but because I have the artifically crippled "Home Premium" edition, those menu options are simply not there. I eventually work out that I need to go to the dos box and type "net use blah blah". Finally I can log in as Administrator and change file permissions.
- despite all this, I still find I need to disable UAC to do things from time to time - and of course, reboot whenever I change it. But at least finally cygwin works.
Despite all of these new annoyances, MS has thoughtfully retained some of the quite annoying features of XP (and probably of the devil's spawns that preceded it). eg if you leave a network drive connected, then go to another network, then doing "file open" in an app such as Word freezes for a few minutes.
I think MS has had little choice in releasing Vista. Their bad designed decisions in the past - always favouring absurd "one click and its running" ease of use over normal security procedures - have come home to roost, forcing them to paint themselves into the corner they're in now.
The sad thing (Score:2, Informative)
Windows XP CD detected. Would you like to:
Re:Microsoft : Always badly imitating Apple. (Score:1, Informative)
Guess what Apple just announced? No MacOS X Leopard for PPC 800Mhz. The only supported-by-someone operating system for those machines will be... Fedora. How weird is that?
Re:I've been out of it but... (Score:3, Informative)
Just to remind you, in light of the GP's claim, five years ago we had the Athlon XP at around 1.5 GHz, G4 PowerMacs somewhere in about 1+ GHz and the Pentium 4 probably over 2 GHz pushing the raw clock count. As long as you have enough memory and disk space, you won't have any problems designing your web sites even if you use a good text or WYSIWYG editor alongside Photoshop and have several browser versions to test with. (And if you design your sites with Flash, I don't know or frankly even care.)
Re:The issue is Control (Score:3, Informative)
Either my Vista X-Fi drivers or NVIDIA drivers do not support DRM. I know this because it had in the release notes "Digitally protected content is not supported" or words to that effect. They're signed drivers.
The issue is quality control... not DRM control.
smash
One advantage Vista has over XP (Score:5, Informative)
Vista, supposedly, has the same problem, but that little "Windows Anytime Upgrade" disk that comes with your new computer, conveniently (and undocumentedly, of course) works as install media. When I use it to reinstall Vista and use the product key on my new laptop, I always end up having to call Bangalore to finish activation, but it's still more than what I can accomplish with an OEM XP install.
With that said, I'd still throw on one of my retail XP licenses instead if I could find drivers for everything.
Re:Good riddance (Score:3, Informative)
There are two solutions:
1) Enable NTLMv2 authentication on the domain (upgrade to Samba 3.0.22 or newer)
2) Change Vista's settings to the old behavior.
Seriously, like 10 seconds of googling would tell you how to fix this. And this isn't a flaw in vista, any more than having telnet off by default is a flaw in a GNU/Linux system.
Re:I've been out of it but... (Score:4, Informative)
Naturally, she got an email from her university just after buying her laptop, saying that Vista is incompatible with many features on the Blackboard scheduling and class management system. I decided to install XP for her since she's more familiar with it anyway. No dice. Much of her hardware, including, surprisingly, her GeForce Go 6150 video card, has no Windows XP drivers developed! I searched for many drivers but could only find message board threads featuring questions about where the heck the XP drivers were. Long story short, my third attempt to recover the system worked and she's back to Vista.
It seems that she doesn't even have the option to revert to XP. I hope she doesn't need much troubleshooting (that's wishful thinking) because my few experiences with Vista have been befuddling.
Re:Bizzare? (Score:2, Informative)
I currently use VBox + XP in seamless mode to run software required for one of my classes because it will not run in any other environment I've tried. Maybe someday.
Re:Bizzare? (Score:2, Informative)
It would appear I've spoken a little prematurely, so I apologize. ReactOS has made some insane strides recently. Looks like I should do a little research before running my mouth, eh?