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."

In other news

[the_skywise]

The Dutch Consumers Union ordered Toyota to give '07 model owners the old '06 models due to rising dissatisfaction with the lower horsepower of the '07 models.

Not surprisingly, Toyota refused.

Flamewar anybody?

[Z00L00K]

It may be time for PC manufacturers to also be able to listen to the consumers and actually ask them which OS they want (if any). This so that when a consumer buys a PC with expected performance he/she isn't forced to select a specific OS or version of OS.

It may be that when buying a PC it only comes bundled with XP Home, but the consumer needs XP Pro, in which case it's necessary to purchase the OS TWICE. Or if the consumer wants Linux it's not possible to get rid of the M$ Tax...

Re:In other news

[Tim C]

And once again we see how bad a car analogy can be - even if I've installed and used Vista, as long as any materials I received (eg disk, manual, etc) are in good condition MS loses nothing by swapping my Vista licence for an XP one and exchanging the disks.

Cars lose the value the moment they're driven out of the showroom.

Re:should have happened long ago

[NetCow]

Actually, it did add a few improvements - a better process scheduler and improved backwards compatibility with application not written for the NT product line come to mind. However, that's about it, and, seen as an immutable, an owner of a Windows 2000 license shouldn't have needed to bother upgrading unless specifically running into a problem that was only fixed in XP. Unfortunately, there's the question of product lifetime, and once Microsoft stopped supporting 2000 people were more or less forced to switch to XP if they wanted support. The same scenario is going to be played out sooner or later for Vista too - but by now more people have wisened up to the game and have at least opened their minds to the existence of alternative operating systems.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's just like when XP came out? From what I recall everyone thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead.

Re:Vista isn't that bad

[Shados]

Yup. The only issue with Vista is they took too long to get it out of the door. The amount of people I hear complaining about Vista is indeed great, and its NEVER about how bad this or that feature is. Its always about "I can't find Add/Remove programs anymore!!!!", or some such.

XP was sure as hell a MUCH bigger difference from Windows 98/ME of back then (assuming a lot of people didn't jump by NT and 2k), and people did complain, but not quite as much. Now that computers are much more mainstream (I don't know numbers, but I doubt even 50% of Windows users of today even KNOW of anything before the MacOSX and Windows XP era), XP is all they know, so you change that, and they're screwed. People who remember previous upgrades probably remember how they were a lot, lot worse. (Windows XP before SP1 was completly non-viable for me, I stayed with 2k until 2 months before SP2 if I remember well).

What amuse me though is people complaining about the price, when its no different at all than XP's, if you take out the Ultimate Edition (which is the equivalent of Media Center of XP, which was not available retail, only OEM). Home Premium has a lot more features than XP Home had, Business more features than XP pro, and its all the same price XP was 5 years ago (and thus, adjusting to inflation, is a lot cheaper).

Re:should have happened long ago

[m.ducharme]

Because most home users weren't using Win2000 when XP came out, they were using WinME or Win98SE. XP was a significant upgrade from both of them, and well worth the money.

Re:should have happened long ago

[RonnyJ]

Unfortunately there wasn't a cheaper 'home' version of Windows 2000, and so Windows XP was a good upgrade path, being a huge improvement over Windows 9x.

As you say though, Windows XP offered little to people already using Windows 2000 (and still doesn't offer much extra now, besides the extra support time).

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Waffle Iron]

Since the eye candy is off-loaded to the GPU it doesn't take CPU time

CPU time is not the problem. Raw CPU speed * core count has been increasing as fast as ever lately, but GUI responsiveness has remained almost stagnant. That's because caching and buffering aren't perfect, and ultimately some things are dependent on disk seek time, which has hardly improved at all in the past few years.

Now throw a bunch of eye candy on top of the situation, which is very data intensive and therefore just going to put that much more pressure onto buffer usage, disk drive seeking and bottlenecked I/O buses. That's a recipie for sluggishness.

PCs are already like 60s muscle cars: a huge engine bolted into a crappy budget family sedan with bias-ply tires and drum brakes. A GPU is like bolting in another engine. It's not going to solve fundamental problems with the system that inhibit good all-around performance.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[dave420]

I think it's great. All the eye-candy is performed on the GPU, and the talk about it being DRM-with-a-GUI is nonsense - it performs perfectly as a media player, with astounding video quality (thanks to everything being rendered through Direct3D, and real emphasis placed on media quality). I use Vista at work on my Dell. It only has an X1300 slim-line GPU, but that's good enough to run 2x22" screens at 1680x1050. It runs all the software I want (Adobe stuff, apache, mysql, games, iTunes, etc.), and is never slow. It does "use" a lot of resources, but it does so intelligently. If it wants to use up all my memory, it does so to improve performance, and if applications need it, it is relinquished. I can see how some folks would interpret that as it being full of bloat, but it's just intelligently using the system's available resources.

I don't know why people don't like it. I've got nothing but great things to say about it. Obviously it's not going to be popular with "people who are highly-appreciative of Linux on the desktop" (to choose my words carefully), or those who don't like Microsoft for any particular reason, or "people who are highly-appreciative of OSX on their Macs" (again, choosing words carefully). But, if you've been using Windows for years, and you get on with the differences in the ways Vista works to XP, Vista isn't scary or rubbish or hiding in your cupboard waiting to pounce, it works great.

But that's just my opinion, obviously. I'm sure someone will come along and tell me how I'm all kinds of wrong.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Anonymous Coward]

And thus the slashdot groupthink votes this up.

Once again, until you play DRM content there's no DRM cycles used. Guttman's infamous whitepaper was written without actually installing Vista anywhere, yet somehow it's hailed as fact. If some random blogger put out a whitepaper about Linux saying how much it sucked without ever having installed it we'd be all over him, but Guttman seems to get a free ride. Twofaced aren't we?

Re:Vista isn't that bad

[Dunbal]

Vista is nicer operating system

does not sit well with

Yes, it's new and breaks things

WHAT? Operating systems ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BREAK THINGS no matter how "new" they are. Microsoft has had DECADES of experience writing operating systems, Microsoft has INTIMATE knowledge of computer components and how they work, directly from chip makers and motherboard manufacturers, in fact at times Microsoft even has the clout to DICTATE which direction technology will progress. And yet they still manage to "break things"?

      Give me a break (yes, it's redundant). For all you stick your tongue up Microsoft's corporate backside, you are not getting a free laptop. So please stop being a "gullible consumer" and stop accepting the "fact" that operating systems are supposed to break things when new. That's simply untrue, and Microsoft doesn't deserve to be "cut some slack".

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you. Vista sucks it's a CPU hog. It's main purpose in life is to fuck you over. It's to trick people into upgrading there computers. There is nothing that can't be done on XP better then the way it is done in windows. Yes, you may need third party apps to do it but it can be done. Microsoft had three goals when it made vista. One blame users for how insecure the OS is, keep asking him question until he hires someone to turn off the quistion asking. Two create a DRM based platform so that Microsoft could make money selling Hollywood's shit. Three Answer the System Builders requests for a New OS that needed modern and higher end hard to run well. Which is funny because the system builders mainly buy the shittiest hardware for there consumer products which does not acc8 vista graphics which suck anyway. Oh, where the fuck is the consumer in all of this mess anyway. Somewhere between 75 degrees and 90 degrees.

Go to hell form a many using a cheap laptop that came with fucking Vista. Should have bought the Laptop with the lower specs, higher price and Windows XP. Wait instead of going to directly to hell go out a buy a sub 600 dollar vista laptop and use it until you die; hell will then seem quite user freindly.

Re:Ok, start the flames

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but you'll probably get called a shill. When you visit Slashdot, you're often arguing against people who have nothing in their lives except the OS they use, so you can't expect any kind of rational debate.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[pherthyl]

Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME. Now people are coming from XP, which is decent, and even the average consumer doesn't like Vista, not just the geeks.

bleat bleat (flame bait - sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

This happens every time MS release an OS that changes something. When the "Joe" public went from 9x/me to XP they bleated stuff didn't work. Some guy actually asked me how to downgrade from XP to ME (and that says something about it).

MS write the OS and the MANUFACTURER of the hardware writes the drivers to interact with the OS - it's not MS's fault if HP or any other manufacturer can't be bothered to write drivers - because let's face it, they've known about Vista for long enough, MS have taken a while to get it out and there was a fully public beta trial. None of the mainstream hardware manufacturers have any excuse not to release compatible hardware drivers (unless they choose not to which is just tough luck to anyone with old hardware).

Incidentally, Vista shipped with way more drivers than any previous release of windows.

Right about now you're probably thinking ooh my new doesn't work and it should - well no, actually that's up to the MANUFACTURER of your device you've just purchased to develop and supply that, and if they don't well that's just hard luck really.

There are very few things in this world that are the same but are not. A PC can have so many different bits of hardware in and attached to it that nothing else really compares to it. So it can't be expected that everything works, and that anything that worked before still works - because it's never that straight forward.

And finally, Vista for our machines has been pretty good in picking up hardware and peripherals.

And finally, finally - it took sometime for Vista to be driver friendly and accepted by the "Joe" public, so I reckon by this time next year everything will be right with the world again - provided Google don't break anything with Vista SP1 (yes I said Google XD !!)

Stop stalling

[jlarocco]

Will you Windows people stop whining? In the next few years you're going to use Vista, because that's Microsoft's new thing. People whined about XP, and look where we are now. So get on with it. Stop whining and take the plunge. We all know how it's going to turn out, and the rest of us are tired of your bitching.

Alternatively, try switching to a different operating system. For years the most common reasons for not switching to Linux or Mac have been that those operating systems don't support necessary hardware or software and are significantly different than people are used to. Now that Microsoft's own "new thing" is significantly different and doesn't support much hardware or software, it's the perfect time to put your money where your mouth is. Switch to something else, or shut up and take it.

Microsoft Is Only Half The Problem

[A_Mythago]

Having Microsoft provide copies of Windows XP to customers will only fix half of the problems on many new PCs as several of the newest laptops and desktops have limited support from the manufacturers for Windows XP (read: non-existent in most cases). In many cases I get a customer who "downgraded" their system only to find that several components are unsupported in XP or have proprietary settings that prevent the generic drivers from working. I hold the Toshiba A215-S7447 laptop up as a good example of this. Although the cynical part of me praises the industry for this revenue stream, it shows that just giving the OS would cause more problems and frustrations for customers in the long run as the software and features pre-installed by the manufacturer that the customer has come to expect are missing from a "vanilla" install of XP.

Most of the complaints I get regarding Windows Vista are of the "I cannot find this feature" or "my 5+ year old piece of software will not work". In nearly all cases like this the problem can be fixed by a little advise on the help system and showing the customer how to use compatibility mode. Hardware is the biggest complaint but again it is almost always for 5+ year old equipment (many of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer) and these are incidentally the same type of customers who complain their sub $500 computer does not have a parallel port.

The majority of the customers that come to me and say "Vista sucks!" are the ones who bought a sub $500 desktop or laptop running Windows Vista Basic meeting the absolute lowest requirements. When you add shared video memory overhead to an already low installed RAM it is no wonder the system bogs down when attempting to do more than one task at a time. Microsoft's biggest mistake was to make this version as in my experience the person who wants to pay the least for a product is the one who tends to be the most vocal about any perceived problems.

One more thing that comes to mind is "who pays"? Microsoft can not be required to pay companies to develop and support their operating system or provide OEM copies of additional value-added software such as DVD decoding or advanced burning capability. The manufacturers of the hardware and especially the large system builders are just as guilty of making the transition as painful as it is.

Vista is not perfect, in fact it reminds me a great deal of Windows XP pre-SP1 and there are a lot of problems that are being ironed out over time. The fact of the matter is unless the hardware manufacturers are willing to incur the additional expense of continuing to develop and support Windows XP drivers, a move to "force" Microsoft to provide "downgrade" disks would be useless to the average customer.

Straight out of Redmond - Conspiracy Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

These "I had a wonderful Vista Experience Posts" sound
very much like they are coming straight from Redmond's
PR people. They sound way too much like the official
press releases and media events.

Microsoft did the right thing

[Metalenkist]

Microsoft did the right thing here I think, It's very easy to blame Microsoft for all the problems here but who should support hardware in first place? Microsoft or the manufacture of who made the hardware? We're 8 months now after the release of Vista many company's had time to build Vista drivers for their hardware. If I had a HP printer who doesn't support Vista, I'll blame HP for being to lazy to support my printer. I fully understand that consumers are disappointed when hardware is not working with the newest Windows version and that they blame Microsoft for it. From a consumers union I expect that they tell consumers the truth and how things work and who to blame when things are not working. The consumentenbond takes the easy way here!

Re:It depends upon the system.

[TheRaven64]

There was no upgrade edition of 2000 that let you come from 9x/Me. The two flavours of 2000 Workstation were the full version, at several hundred dollars, or the cheaper upgrade from NT4. Those o us who were running NT4, upgraded to 2000. Those running 9x stayed with it. When XP came out, XP Pro let you upgrade from 2K (or NT4? Not sure) while XP Home let you upgrade from 9x. While XP Home was a step down from 2K, it was a huge step up from 9x.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

So it's just like when XP came out? From what I recall everyone thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead.

Not really. Windows 2000 -> WIndows XP simply didn't add anything that people needed. Windows XP -> Vista actually breaks things that people already have.

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

[erroneus]

With all the people out there 'hating vista' I find it amusing that there are some confused individuals who actually love Vista out there who are asserting their denial that Vista sucks.

I think the reasons people are offering for hating Vista are both valid and inconsequential. I say this because it's not the reason that matters so much as the fact that there's discussion about it at all... what's more, there's actually pockets of consumer action growing out there.

Let's take a short walk through recent history shall we?

Windows 3.1:

It was the first "usable" version of Windows. It did things that were arguably miraculous. They created a unified printing, display and user interface such that all software written for it was simply easier and better. No more hoping there is hardware support for your applications. Does anyone remember hunting for drivers to support a printer under AutoCAD or Word Perfect? Not too many people here are old enough to remember that stuff, but I'm here to tell you that it was a big deal and I was singing Microsoft's praises as a savior for the PC and its users.

Windows 3.11... Windows NT:

Progress and improvements! Things just kept getting better. People were happy and excited to upgrade. Things couldn't be better! ... or could they?

Windows95:

WOW! What an amazing difference! A bar at the bottom of the window with a menu system? Sure it was Mac-like, but it was still a wonderful improvement in terms of style. For those already accustomed to Win 3.1 and all that, we knew it was essentially the same OS but with more 32-bit-ness which, even though we didn't fully appreciate what that meant at the time, we knew it was good somehow. Windows95 wasn't "worse" than any of its predecessors and we were still happy to get it because it just looked cooler.

Windows98:

More 32-bit-ness. Cooler still. More old DOS stuff being hidden from the user... some didn't care for it, others appreciated it. We were all generally accepting of it though.

Windows 2000:

Awesome. We didn't have to understand that there were some serious underlying differences to be experienced there... we could just "feel" the differences somehow. It was still Windows NT and as such required more computing power than Win95/98, but for those who craved the improvements that Win2000 offered, it was worth giving in and upgrading the hardware to get it somehow... and yet many remained with Windows98... some serious departure from the "Happy Microsoft Upgraders" mentality is really starting to show now.

Windows ME:

Do I really need to mention it? I guess there were some 'good ideas' in there, but frankly, I never used it. If I wanted to "upgrade" from Win98, I went to Win2000. Like most people, I just stepped right by WinME.

Windows XP:

It's all about the eye-candy. Windows XP didn't offer anything that Windows 2000 didn't already offer. What's more, there was no "Windows XP server." What was that all about? My first attempt at putting WinXP on a machine revealed a slow machine that was once pretty nice under Win98 or Win2000. And given that XP didn't actually offer anything exclusively better in terms of functionality, I ignored it for a long long time... eventually as old machines died and were replaced with newer, better machines, I didn't mind going to XP so much... so eventually XP won its way in by exhibiting patience. No one clamored for XP... they just accepted it. But neither was there mass rebellion against XP.

Windows Vista:

It was a long time in coming. For some it was a dark cloud. For others it held the promise of fixing a lot of things and delivering a LOT of new, interesting and exciting new toys and technologies. Delivery and development delays kept coming and coming. Eventually features were dropped one by one... the hopefuls began to lose faith... the "dark cloud" folks were actually a little relieved since it meant the possibility of less chaos when it

Re:It depends upon the system.

[aliquis]

His point was that aslong as you don't use that functionality it won't affect you, and I don't see how it would, do you? If you don't play DRM content there is no problem.

And even IF you play DRM content and there is a problem it's not Microsofts fault, it's the content providers and in the end the consumers which accept it fault.

Re:It depends upon the system.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really different. XP had the fisherprice looks but that could be changed and the system had improved since Win2000. Everyone is used to XP now and SP2 improved things a lot, there is nothing hugely wrong with it.

Vista is based on its looks which are ugly and the underlying stuff is worse than XP, heavy DRM, resource hungry, slower than XP etc. etc. There is no compelling reason to "upgrade".

I was going to buy a laptop but without the choice of XP, I'll probably go with Dell/Ubuntu or OS X, so MS lose out. I've seen a lot of people buying XP at the local BestBuy, people dislike Vista and its very real problems.

Mod him down, but he's right

[willfe]

I hate to agree with a so-called "troll" here but he really does have a point -- I lived in his "hell" for a month on this HP/Compaq notebook that came with Vista. When it spontaneously uninstalled its own hard drive controller driver last week, rendering itself unbootable (ironically, the bootloader could bootstrap the kernel, but mysteriously then the kernel instantly forgot how to talk to the disks -- the only repair option available? Blow it all away and reload the factory image), I removed Vista entirely and stuck Ubuntu 7.10 [ubuntu.com] on this thing. I've been happy every since :)

Things run faster, are more stable, and I have more useful tools and software here. OpenGL (3D stuff) works great, I can still run all the apps I use (since they're cross-platform anyway :)), and I get my work done much faster. Strangely, I'm even getting *much* better battery life out of the internal battery on the laptop *and* on the external battery I use to extend the internal battery's life. Bluetooth *never* worked right in Vista, yet I'm tethered to a Windows Mobile 6-based phone wirelessly (via Bluetooth) for its Internet Connection Sharing right now to post this.

I think I'll take this idea offered by the original article here and go bug HP for a refund for Vista (or, if they won't do that, mebbe an "upgrade" to XP ... not that I'd use it :)).

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

[webmaster404]

Totally agreed. 3.1 was a leap ahead of DOS, 95 and 98 were easier to use then 3.1 and had the taskbar, 2000 was decent, although I never ran it when it was new, just on pre-existing machines, XP was, in my opinion, the best version of Windows, sure it wasn't the best it could be, but it kept the same learning curve as 95,98 and 2000, if you could use 95 you could use XP, It was that, that was keeping Linux from leaping ahead of Windows, now though Vista throws it totally out the windows, if you knew how to use XP, you still have to learn a new OS, so why pay $50 (OEM) to over $200, (Ultimate) when you can get the same level of functionality with Linux thats free, almost always gets better (mostly the code gets optimized, applications run faster, bugs get fixed....) unlike Windows where the next version seems more sluggish then the other version not to mention how easily you can get spyware/viruses just by visiting a website with IE. Most Windows "Everyday" users won't ever mess up Linux enough to even put it in an unusable state, the most that can usually happen is your home directory gets wiped. Thats it. With Windows even a simple hardware upgrade can give you a Blue screen of death (Once on Vista I got one because my Wireless card wasn't pushed in all the way....) on Linux that hasn't ever happened to me. I was happy with Windows until Vista, that just made me jump to Ubuntu even faster,

MS has alienated its customers, the age of MS is passed, like the age of IBM before it, now the age of Linux looms before us, a world where you can actually get the OS that you want

Re:Mod Parent Up

[HiThere]

Any proof of this? MS has a long history of pre-loading dirvers, and even large sections of programs "for faster response". As such, I have no difficulty believing that they'd do it again, and a bit of difficulty believing that "but *this* time they didn't do it".

Still, I'll admit I've no evidence. Merely an established pattern of behavior.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It depends upon the system.

[coolGuyZak]

What's worse is when you've been the anti-MS zealot, wizened up, and returned from the brink. You try your damnedest to like Microsoft, even recommending it to your clients... and subsequently hate the decision, hate Microsoft (again), and wonder why you ever offered MS a second chance. But now, you're stuck maintaining Windows-centric software, waiting for the resources to port operations to a UNIX/POSIX platform.

I try, I really do. Microsoft doesn't even make that easy enough. So, I bought a Mac.

More insightful than ya'd think

[Almahtar]

It's just funny how when Vista doesn't have drivers, there's a real feeling that manufacturers are at fault. But Linux? Fuck it. :(

I would have said the same thing, but without using the guy's own words with a find+replace to say so. I think your method proved the point far better.