Consumer Group Demands XP for Vista Victims

thefickler writes "Dissatisfaction with Windows Vista seems to be swelling, with the Dutch Consumers' Union (Consumentenbond) asking Microsoft to supply unhappy Vista users with a free copy of Windows XP. Not surprisingly, Microsoft refused. This prompted Consumentenbond to advise consumers to ask for XP, rather than Vista, when buying a new computer."

It depends upon the system.

[khasim]

WinVista lacks a LOT of drivers (for fairly common hardware, too). If you have hardware that WinVista doesn't support, you're unhappy (see years of previous complaints about Linux).

WinVista also has lots of eye-candy which eats up processor time. So it looks pretty, but runs slower. The eye-candy can be turned off, but then it looks a lot like WinXP.

WinVista has a different security model than WinXP and it takes people some effort to learn and in the meantime, they're unhappy with it (again, see years of previous complaints about Linux).

Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps.

Which is why Microsoft extended WinXP for OEM's.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure whether you're joking or pretending not to understand as a trolling technique or if you honestly don't get it. It costs Toyota real money to make or buy a car. They lose that money if they give that car to someone. They don't get as much back on selling a second hand car. It costs Microsoft nothing at all to issue an XP license. Whether they can resell the license they get back in return is irrelevant because they're not out of pocket at all. Even if they feel bound to give a full package with DVD and a box, we're still talking about pennies. This is nothing at all like a car.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[kryptkpr]

There is overhead involved, even with the off-loading.

Looking at my Ubuntu system, the #1 process for using up cpu is compiz (1h40m of CPU time during 7d uptime), in spite of off-loading the actual rendering to my nVidia card. I don't really notice as I have a Quad-core CPU, but it would hurt quite a bit more with only 1 or even with 2 cores.

Go ahead and mod me a troll

[dotancohen]

Go ahead and mod me as a troll. The unhappy Vista users should give a serious look at Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]. I've been using it for over a year on a Dell laptop, and I've installed it (and previously Fedora) for about 10 or 15 friends. With the exception of specific Windows apps (such as Solidworks), Ubuntu apps do everything that Windows XP (the usual old OS) applications do. Email, web browsing, office apps (OOo 2.3 is remarkable), and more. I could go on but I'm (seriously) not a zealot and I'll get a bad enough trolling mod as it is already.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[jgarra23]

Don't forget that if you're a developer forced to work on a Vista box it's buggy as shit, there are a million and one patches you have to install and god forbid if you're asked to migrate any asp.net apps from iis6 to iis7... talk about undocumented manual conversion... ugh...

Re:It depends upon the system.

[ozmanjusri]

Twofaced aren't we?

From the VistaBlog interview with Dave Marsh, Lead Program Manager responsible for Windows' handling of video;

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista's content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

You can keep the second face. You seem to be getting plenty of use from it.

Re:They aren't kidding

[Heliode]

Hate to reply to my own post, but the scanned ad can be found here [imageshack.us]

As an anecdote; recently, the person with the least technical skill and knowledge I know (and that says quite a lot), told me she bought a new computer with XP on it because she heard Vista "has to many flaws". I'm pretty sure that if even she knows, everyone in the country knows. I'm pretty sure we didn't have this when XP came out.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[Anonymous Coward]

Your video quality claims are misguided, as that lies in the combination of the codec and the graphics card. ATI graphics cards have had outstanding hardware video overlay filtering for years, and yet Vista throws away overlay support in favour of the inferior Direct3D. Yes with shaders you can acheive a comparable quality, but you try running a fullscreen PS3.0 shader on an X1300 and see how your performance goes. The problem lies in the texture filtering algorithms of Direct3D being optimized for speed, not quality (especially video quality - its a different beast altogether)

Your point about memory use is a highly valid one, I'm sick of people trying to free up memory to make their system run better, the ideal thing is to load it up with as much stuff as you can. One way of achieving this in XP is to set the memory use to "System Cache", I hope vista uses a smarter system.

IMHO Vista is premature, it has none of the features I want (WinFS) and all of the features I don't need (Confirm this action). Bring on Vienna.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Billhead]

There was no upgrade edition of 2000 that let you come from 9x/Me.

Yes, there is. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232039 [microsoft.com]

I HATE VISTA

[AmigaMMC]

I just bought a tablet PC and unfortunately I couldn't get it with XP Tablet Edition, instead it came with Vista Home Premium and after one week I already hate it (Actually I hated it after one day). Its random behavior, its intrusiveness and its theft of resources are just a few of the things that are driving me crazy.

Re:*barf*

[digitig]

Who says that the AC has a gripe? It's simple economics, as you point out. The AC has a choice of using an OS with which existing H/W works or use a different OS that offers no apparent advantage but that forces expensive H/W replacement. AFAICS it's a no-brainer.

My Issue with vista

[munrom]

The biggest issue I have with vista, it's got nothing new for me. DOS -> Win98, yay the computer is more usable, as much as I love dos a GUI is nice Win98 -> 2K, yay I can have different accounts for other users now 2K -> XP, yay some of my older games are happier with this Xp -> Vista ??? Want to sell me something, actually improve on your previous offering.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Read the Vista Failure Log.

[Erris]

What is so bad about Vista? I have not used it yet. I've seen it, and I know some people that are using it and they don't complain about it. What's the deal? Is it just that it's new?

Mock surprise! Really, do you live under a rock? People don't complain because they don't know they have easy alternatives that work. They just use what they are given until someone shows them something better. Vista's pains have been documented at length here and you can see them for real if you watch what your Vista using peers have to put up with.

Vista has been out for nearly a year and the consensus opinion is that it sucks in all the usual M$ ways and then some. Lots of the breakage is intentional: M$ wants to own your digital life and is doing it's best to force you onto their media player, their photo managers as well as their crappy productivity software. You don't have to take my word for it because twitter made a nice log of other people's opinions [slashdot.org]. The M$ PR people really hate it, so you will probably be put on the terrorist no fly list for just looking at it.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[JebusIsLord]

I actually find Vista's UI to be much more professional looking and quite easy on the eyes vs. XP.

Heavy DRM? How so? I've been ripping CDs and DVDs the same as ever. I know they included some stuff to let me play new DRM-laden formats, but I can choose to use them or not. you'd have prefered they leave the functionality out entirely?

Resource hungry, slower? This is true. You need lots of RAM and it does run slower. Agreed. This will become less important over time, as was the case with XP, 2000, NT etc.

Ultimately I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't improve very much, but it IS an improvement over XP. I expect the first service pack will make it paletable to most people who don't have an irrational hate-on for Microsoft.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[rs79]

" When XP came out, XP Pro let you upgrade from 2K (or NT4? Not sure) while XP Home let you upgrade from 9x." "

Not exacly true. You can upgrade from 9 to xp pro. Actually you can upgrade a freshly formatted drive to xp pro. WTF dude?

I put xp on a few machines here but kept 98 on this machine.

Oddly, 10 years after the fact I'm still seeing errors I haven't seen before.

But, it does everything I need it too and it a helluva lot more stable that it was in 98. In fact I rarely have to reboot these days. Meanwhile xp shits itself with alarming regularity.

Maybe it really was the drivers that made 98 wonky.

Keep in mind my folks use ME and have for 7 years and never had a problem with it.

There's a non-zero chance, of course, I live in a parallen universe or something.

Re:Straight out of Redmond - Conspiracy Theory

[dave420]

Nice try :) I'm wrote it because that's the truth. I do not, have not, or ever will, work for Microsoft. I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I don't own a Zune but an iPod. Every single server I host customers' web sites on runs Linux of some description. If it's similar to what Redmond says would happen to users, then I guess they knew what they were talking about, at least for this user.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[cbhacking]

WinVista lacks a LOT of drivers (for fairly common hardware, too). If you have hardware that WinVista doesn't support, you're unhappy (see years of previous complaints about Linux).

Technically true, but mostly irrelevant. Vista will load 95% of XP drivers without a hitch - the easiest way is if the driver is shipped as an executable installer, since then even if you forget to set Compatibility Mode before running the installer, Vista will ask you if you want to re-run it in compatibility mode should the install fail. If it just comes as a .inf and .sys file, edit the INF to add Vista to the supported list, and right-click -> Install. The only caveats here are that network drivers won't work on account of the re-written network stack and new NDIS, and XP video drivers will work fine but you lose all the advantages of WDDM.

WinVista also has lots of eye-candy which eats up processor time. So it looks pretty, but runs slower. The eye-candy can be turned off, but then it looks a lot like WinXP.

If your GPU is decently powerful (i.e. isn't an integrated solution that leeches off the CPU) you'll almost certainly not see this, as the "eye candy" you refer to (much of it, like the thumbnail views of your running programs, is actually very useful) is offloaded to the GPU. The overhead numbers I've heard for using this model are about 5%, and if you look at the CPU time taken by the DWM (Desktop Window Manager) I've never seen it go higher than 5% and it's usually at 0%

WinVista has a different security model than WinXP and it takes people some effort to learn and in the meantime, they're unhappy with it (again, see years of previous complaints about Linux).

The people who see more than 2 or 3 UAC prompts per day, top (I'm using an exaggeratedly large number to catch the "yeah, but my program X always needs admin privileges and I run in 3 times a day" responses; most normal users see maybe this many a month) are either incessant tinkerers or admins who need full control. If you're the former, you probably know how to modify access control lists (even easier in Windows than chmod/chown) so things that you need to access and can access safely will run with your permissions. If you're the latter, either deal with a couple (literally, 2) extra seconds on most administrative tasks or run your account as an unrestricted admin (much like logging into a *nix box as root; it's occasionally handy but not something to do regularly). For the average user who shouldn't be using full admin privs all the time anyway (or your slightly-clued-in user who knows this and experienced the pain of doing things in XP as a non-admin), UAC is arguably Vista's best feature.

Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps.

Since Vista automatically offers to re-run most programs in Compatibility Mode if they didn't work without it, and since MS provides step-by-step instructions and a helpful wizard for resolving compatibility issues, and since it literally takes 5 clicks of the mouse to set compatibility mode to XP SP2, and since the vast majority of apps will run fine on Vista without any Compatibility Mode at all, this really doesn't seem like a major issue to me.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[suv4x4]

What is so bad about Vista? I have not used it yet. I've seen it, and I know some people that are using it and they don't complain about it. What's the deal? Is it just that it's new?

The reason isn't simple. Anyone giving you one single reason so many people reject Vista would be silly. Here are few:

- yes it's new, means back compat issues with software hardware
- eats lots of resources and delivers little for it (comparable Linus/OSX interfaces run on lesser GFX chips and deliver faster responce... why this is, no clue, let's hope Vista SP2 fixes it)
- no direction, GUI chaos, feature chaos

The latter is a bigger problem than one can imagine, since it's not one that solves itself with bugfixes and time.

Vista clearly lacks focus and lacks central philosophy behind its GUI. We see that a huge team worked on this OS, but no one gave them a single set of rules to work behind. Everyone just had its own idea how to change the Windows experience and simply went for it without regard to the rest of the OS.

Last time we talked someone said "but typing to find apps is so much faster than menus! I hate the whiners that don't like vista's start menu".

Right. So if typing is so much better, how come they converted the Explorer address bar from *hinted typing* to *menus* in vista (you need to right-click, then deselect, and then you can finally double-click a segment to retype).

Or maybe the Start menu exists in a universe of its own from Explorer.

The Control Panel is entirely unpredictable. It starts like a web page, but half of the features pop-up the old XP control panel applets, with the other tabs disabled (or not disabled.. again, all this is random).

Unhiding hidden files, which is what many people do, causes two "desktop.ini" files on the Desktop (they had the sense not to show those in XP and before!).

So, basically stuff like that. It's not crucial, you can do your work, but it's a *lesser* experience, it's a pain, and goes against you, for no good reason than "I'm new, buy me". And why go for the lesser experience, when you can go for the better experience, which is XP?

So there. Now Microsoft will have to weight both sides: can they admit failure and fix Vista, or keep demanding it's just fine, but we need to get used to it?

I really wish they fix Vista, but they don't give a sign of doing this so far though. SP1 will build on performance and stability features, which is great, but they only fix couple of UI issues.

Maybe SP2 is where they will do it. We'll see.

Re:To all those who "don't understand" the problem

[jimicus]

You do realise that most of the "advances" you tout existed on various other systems for years before Windows.

And I'm not talking about some exotic "spend $$$$$ because you're a massive business with a budget to match" - many were available to the average end user. For instance, in the UK Acorn had 32-bit processors (well, 24 bits in some parts of the CPU and 32 bits in others) in 1987, complete with a printer driver system similar to what's in Windows, a bar showing programs and disk drives along the bottom of the screen. About the only big thing it did not have which you would expect on something today was protected memory support.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Das Modell]

The people who see more than 2 or 3 UAC prompts per day, top (I'm using an exaggeratedly large number to catch the "yeah, but my program X always needs admin privileges and I run in 3 times a day" responses; most normal users see maybe this many a month) are either incessant tinkerers or admins who need full control.

UAC prompts you for virtually everything. Renaming, deleting and moving files will prompt you no less than two times.

Re:And I just thought I'd point out...

[symbolic]

Steam (the gaming platform) has a stats page where you can compare your setup to those of other gamers...I was surprised, if not amused, to see that 90% are still running XP. I personally won't touch vista. It's a DRM-infested cesspool.

Re:MS might just have made it a big mistake

[Almahtar]

On a side note, might Vista's uptake lack because it is harder to pirate?

It isn't. I have a few friends that know pretty much nothing about computers (they're casual gamers and that's it... like if the guy at Best Buy tells them something, they believe it). They've managed to pirate Vista without headache. Some liked it, some went back to XP, but none had any trouble pirating it.

Re:MS might just have made it a big mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Harder to pirate? Of course not. It's actually easier to pirate Vista than it is XP SP2. I don't use either as my main OS, but occasionally I do boot into one or the other to check odd things.

Just go download them from the Pirate Bay. Vista (all versions) come on ONE DVD. Run one program (crack) after you get it fully installed and start downloading the updates... genuine!

Now with XP, download either a corporate, home, or professional version. With Corporate, make sure you got a corporate serial and you are all set. With home or pro, make sure you got a home or pro serial. Now with home or pro you need an activation crack and a genuine advantage crack.

I installed XP SP2 on this comp... hmm.. months ago. No problems with updates or WGA ever. I installed Vista basically the day I found it on the Pirate Bay... must have been within a week that Vista first came out (back in January). Haven't had any problems with updates on it either.

DRM is a lost cause. Software lives in a land where ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. So if it's possible to lock down something, it's also possible to remove the lock. So why even try?