The Advantages of Upgrading From Vista To XP 765
An anonymous reader passes us a blog posting, which may be just a bit tongue-in-cheek, about the pros and cons of upgrading from Vista to XP. "...there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly."
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:5, Insightful)
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
too clever for its own good. (Score:2, Insightful)
also, it really could have benefited from a singular tone. Satire is much better when the voice of the piece doesn't change. Take a page from the onion and just treat this as though it were a review of a "new" OS from microsoft.
All in all, not 1/10 as good as it could have been.
Aren't we tired? (Score:5, Insightful)
When are we going to feel tired bashing Vista? Until the next Windows release?
Come on... I'm not a fan of MS and I'm posting this with Firefox but I have been running Vista on two machines -- one laptop one desktop -- and two machines on XP. i just don't see anything really bad with Vista. If nothing else, it looks more pleasant. In contrast, one of XP machine is running like snail still after several attempts to clean ups, defrags, and registry cleanings; so i don't even want to boot it up anymore.
Does the extra little candies worth your money? for some here, it is not no matter how good it is. For others, the eye candy worths everything. Isn't that what iPhone is all about?
the lesson for microsoft is: (Score:4, Insightful)
and have MAJOR improvements in the mix
for example, i think vista was supposed to have a database like file system when i heard whispers of it way back in 2003/4/5
then i heard that idea got shelved
hey microsoft: if you shelve major improvements, why would anyone upgrade?
if they had that db-like filesystem, then in 2-3 years from now, when that os would have been released, everyone would be talking about what a revolutionary leap forward microsoft had on its hands (yes, i know it's really not a groundbreaking idea, but you know how pr and popular opinion works). now, instead, apple is stealing the thunder for having vista like features before microsoft, when it's just faster graphics card eye candy
windows 95 was such a dramatic step forward from previous iterations
same with xp (patching up windows nt to release to the public instead of business, as windows xp, to increase stability, was certainly an improvement over win me! again, we're talking pr and popular opinion here)
You are wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard that from the application developers side, Vista has some useful and expanded functionality over its predecessors. Has anyone developed for Vista yet and can comment?
Re:too clever for its own good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:5, Insightful)
They may not like it because of the UAC, or because [favorite program] doesn't work, or, or, or, but the end result is that if XP suits the users better, no amount of "useful and expanded functionality" from the developers side is going to make a difference.
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:4, Insightful)
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
Hey, but Microsoft is brilliant. People now pay for it twice! Once through the OEM for Vista, then again to get the XP SP2 media. Bet M$FT will have a good quarter bilking the consumer.
Vista 64 is better then xp 64 (Score:3, Insightful)
M$ do your really need all printers , scanners , and other basic input devices to be forced to be 64 bit?
and why do you have to pick 32 bit or 64 bit?
10.5 does not force you to make that choice.
I cannot wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll say it if no one else will. I like Vista for the most part. While there are some minor annoyances it has impressed me with its stability and increased security. I'm currently running Vista on a desktop I bought last month but I do plan on purchasing a copy and installing it on my laptop as well.
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vist... *out of resources* (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that they had to add in the new shiny features while simultaneously retaining backwards compatibility with every buggy program and half-broken API they've ever released all the way back to Windows 3.1. That sort of requirement can really complicate things, and you end up having to code everything as conservatively as possible and never take any shortcuts for fear of breaking something.
If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up, and commission VMWare or someone to include functionality for running "legacy/XP" programs in a VM. Then Microsoft's legions of good programmers might be free to come out with something good, as opposed to spending all their brain cycles trying not to break old software (and still sometimes failing, I might add)
Vista is not that bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows Vista = Windows MPAA edition (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:5, Insightful)
When XP came out I used 2K for years afterwards, up until SP3 or 4, which basically crippled the stability of the OS to XP-level (everything would crash for me after a certain point, even on fresh installs, which didn't occur before).
I ended up switching to XP afterwards, and it really has become the "better" OS when compared to Vista (I still yearn for early-2K).
Now I run a separate hard drive with Vista (because I just can't afford to use it as my primary OS, it's still too crippled in too many ways), but I need >4GB of RAM for my work, and Windows 64-bit is completely unworkable. I have never been such a frustrated Microsoft customer.
All I want them to do is make a simple, light OS that stays the fuck out of my way. They could ditch almost EVERYTHING from Vista but the fact that it runs my applications, and it would be the greatest OS ever, but I don't think they will ever do this.
It's gotten to the point where I have literally considered learning how to be a programmer simply so I could make my own custom linux builds, but I figure if whole communities aren't able to get decent compatibility for Windows apps I'd never be able to in a million years.
Where have we heard this before? (Score:2, Insightful)
Some things never change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke [wikipedia.org]
XP sux (Score:2, Insightful)
People Like Eyecandy, dammit!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
What's more, if Microsoft does not change the UI across the board a bit, then people are not going to accept the differences that really are necessary for technical reasons. UAC (which is ultimately an improvement, even if it could have been done more gracefully) would never be acceptable to a non-technical user if it was just grafted on top of what looked like XP. For those of us who understand the difference between technical improvements and eyecandy and do not want the eyecandy, it is very easy to turn off. Once it is off, I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS), it is a nice incremental improvement over XP in a lot of ways. For example, the way limited privilege accounts are handled is vastly improved, which is really nice in a multi-user environment (businesses, universities, libraries).
Finally, there is the fact that eye candy can actually improve the usability of the OS. I find that the way vista gives me a little thumbnail of minimized or covered windows when I mouse of the task bar really useful.
I'm typically a Linux user, but as "the IT guy" at the small business where I work, I have to administer a couple vista boxes. I've bought a computer with Vista for my inlaws. They like it. The people where I work like it. Yes, the eyecandy takes power, but eyecandy always takes power, and eyecandy is what the overwhelming majority of PC users want.
Face it folks, for the market at large, Vista is an improvement.
Same old song, a thousand verses later. (Score:2, Insightful)
Folks, this kind of shit got old years ago.
Vista came out. It has some problems. Guess what. So did XP when it first came out. So did every version of OS X when it came out. So did every previous version of a Microsoft OS. So did every previous version of an Apple OS. So has pretty much every distribution of Linux when they have first come out.
I've been using and programming computers for 34 years. And in that 34 years, I can't think of *any* OS or program, other than maybe "hello world" in what ever language, that has ever been error free on the first version. You show me someone who says "this OS has no bugs", and I'll show you a blathering idiot.
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:1, Insightful)
I think that the Microsoft marketing team has really outdone itself. They have pulled off something that I think is unprecedented--it is downright astonishing to behold.
Microsft was get blasted on all sides for its poor (absent?) security in XP. Wave after wave of spyware and viruses had MS on the roped. Major multi-national power outages were being blamed on MS. XP was the OS that really just couldn't be salvaged.
In August 2004, MS released SP2 for XP, and it helped a lot. But they had lost a lot of PR ground, and had to make that back up. It seemed a daunting task, even for the crack team at MS. But within just 2 years, the geniuses at MS marketing were ready with a strategy that would prove one of the biggest PR reversals in memory. They released Vista to the world.
Suddenly, XP is the best OS around. It is stable, secure, compatible, and manageable. It's been around for six years, and people are banging the drums to have MS extend its life into the foreseeable future. Corporations love it so much they refuse to migrate away form it. PC vendors can't give it up, even though packaging Vista would guarantee sales of 4x as much computing power in each PC. XP is just that good.
Three years ago, XP was the scourge of the computer world. Today, if MS announced that they were dropping Vista and backtracking to XP, the computer world would cheer! MS would be heralded as heroes for placing the needs of their customers first.
Now that, folks, is an amazing job of marketing.
Re:Aren't we tired? (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, talk about missing the point!
The coolest new feature of the iPhone is "visual voicemail", which changes an O(n) operation into an O(1) operation. Optimizing a *human* operation that much is a really big deal.
I don't know that much about Vista, but I certainly haven't heard any stories about how it made users dramatically more productive. I've heard about several features being more of a pain, and I've heard about how other features make the user experience slower on the same hardware.
From what I've heard of both of them, Vista and the iPhone are complete opposites.
Re:I cannot wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
I bought a laptop a few months ago with Vista on it. I can't help but wonder if the majority of people bitching about Vista have even used it.
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't use WMP11, so I don't care that the IBX codes are new or whatever. I rip DVDs and TV shows that I believe I am entitled to archive, and I don't see that Vista is going to get in the way. Please follow through on your promise and tell me what your problem is.
I don't like Vista because of the bloat and the inefficiency, etc. Also because Vista offers zero security gains to me, since I have no trouble running XP safely. In short, Vista is for dumbasses who want to blow money on excess computing power to support glassy menus. The DRM thing is a canard, in my opinion.
DRM has more to do with the content producer. By permitted more restrictive DRM, Vista is probably just enabling more content to be sold over the internet. I just won't buy what I don't want. Is this not your plan too?
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, of all the places to make such a blanket statement, perhaps the only place worse than
Slashdot is full of early adopters, with spare computers & a penchant for hacking. It is exactly the kind of thing that someone on
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:3, Insightful)
What a sucker you are. Every time M$ reduces the functionality and increases the controls people like you come out of the woodwork and claim it's not hurting. Boiled frog anyone?
The tilt bits alone are enough to show that M$ doesn't care about stability, performance or improving the customer experience. It's all about control.
And please, no nonsense about the music industry "requiring" those controls. M$ voluntarily chose to put them in and take advantage.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sites like Slashdot are Proof MS will Win (Score:3, Insightful)
silly revisionist history (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People Like Eyecandy, dammit!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is it that Microsoft gets to release Vista and make billions of dollars, but Hardware Manufacturers are expected to spend money writing drivers for old equipment?
Instead of making Vista compatible with XP drivers, Microsoft broke the old driver model, in part to implement their DRM schemes, which are designed to give them more control and make them more money. The new driver model is difficult and expensive to code for. And Hardware Manufacturers are supposed to lose money doing this, so people will be more inclined to upgrade to Vista so Microsoft can make more money?
Microsoft is the one that profits from this. They should pay for writing the new drivers.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just in time for the holidays! (Score:3, Insightful)
I would honestly pay my life savings to someone if they got perfectly acceptable performance and compatibility for 3D Studio Max, Maya, Photoshop, Premiere, After FX, and Mudbox in Linux. I know about all the alternatives to these applications, and I love them but unfortuantely none of them cut it. They just don't. I'm not even being picky here, and mentioning all the games I want Linux to run.
Linux would sweep the market if it ran windows applications perfectly. I laugh at how quickly a person would become the richest man/woman in the world, the instant they release a Windows-Compatible, Windows-Alternative-OS. To me it seems the world is absolutely screaming for this right now. There is such a massive gap here just waiting to be filled by a good operating system with legacy compatibiltiy, it's crazy.
Re:£50 upgrade to be exact (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is out of its depth (Score:5, Insightful)
Big mistake! That's precisely what Microsoft and its engineers have never been able to do properly. First they had DOS (which, as you'll recall, they "got" from someone else by whatever means). Then they had Windows, based on ideas picked up from a visit to Apple (which in turn got them from Xerox PARC, but that's another story). Neither DOS nor Windows 1-2-3 was really much good as an operating system, either in terms of functionality or stability. (And don't even think about security - that wasn't on the requirements list at all).
Then came the big turning point, when Gates had the wit to hire Dave Cutler and his crew from DEC, whose management was doing such a great job of driving it under the waves despite having the most powerful engines on the high seas. Ironic, really - DEC had great hardware and software coupled with lousy management, and Microsoft had great management coupled with lousy software. Naturally DEC didn't have the wit to hire some Microsoft managers, because its own managers were too dumb to think of that.
Everything you like about Windows since the mid-1990s is directly attributable to Cutler and his team. They laid down a steel skeleton for the "Black Pearl" that was Windows 3, while (regrettably) keeping the same user interface more or less intact. The result was a series of OS - NT, 2K, and XP - all of which (once debugged) are solid clients and pretty reliable servers too. To this day much of the internals of Windows bears a striking resemblance to the internals of VMS, right down to the names of data structures.
The trouble with Vista was precisely that Microsoft tried to get clever and creative. The further they get from the original NT steel skeleton, the more lost they are. (Don't even get me started on WinFS, which they never even managed to deliver).
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm really sorry to see that you've been marked as Flamebait. It's a sensible point and deserves areply from anyone who disagrees, not a stupid modding.
The reason that its so difficult to play this content on OSX and Linux is because of the DRM. Without that DRM we would be fine. One problem with Vista's DRM is that by implementing it, content providers are able to use it and change the conditions they sell me my product under without actual recourse to law or pricing, but simply through imposing the technology on me. Not implementing DRM would not have stopped this content being available - nobody stopped producing DVDs when we started to play them on computers - but it would have meant that the content was sold in a way that other OS's could use. Microsoft benefit from the DRM because it increases lock-in which they desparately need over the next few years. Hence we're not deploring the fact that Vista can play this content, but the consequences of Microsoft creating the situation in the first place. At least that is my argument. I can't speak for the nimrod who modded you flamebait.
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:3, Insightful)
- 90% "I want to pirate this stuff". (I'm in these 90%, but I don't fool myself)
- 10% "I want to put the contents of the disk on my central media streaming server" (And I'm being generous here)
Knowing my own filesharing habits (or just checking out the amount of traffic on TPB), I can hardly fault content producers for wanting DRM. It's a fully legitimate safeguard.
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't sounds like the DRM problem was a Vista issue. It seems much more likely that this was an Adobe Acrobat DRM feature -- the PDF format has extensive DRM support built into it, since it's quite commonly used for specifications, marketing materials etc. that company's consider their 'IP'.
Re:Vist... *out of resources* (Score:3, Insightful)
Add to that list just about every single piece of industry-specific software out there. From a software-for-the-masses standpoint it really isn't up to the polish of even Openoffice.
However, these kinds of programs are EVERYWHERE. That's because the wonderful devs that develop beautiful open-source media players don't know anything about load distribution on airframes, or fluid flow in sewer lines, or hydrodynamics in a chemical reactor, or small-molecule binding to proteins, or how to manage the workflow of 4000 tax accountants, or how to track every package being delivered in a 8000-employee highrise.
Welcome to the world of industry-specific apps. EVERY industry has them, and you don't learn about them in your computer science program. They're unpolished, and some still even run on green-screens. And if they stop working the guy who made them stop working is fired, blacklisted, and possibly hunted down by a hitman. Companies pay $2000/seat for licenses and they look like they were written for Windows 3.11.
These apps are precisely the reason that nobody in the industrial world is using Vista. Some guy in the desktop engineering ivory tower says "why do you use that lousy software?" - and then some guy in an IT service org on the factory floor points to the 500 robots putting cars together and asks when Microsoft Robot is being released. They might not be pretty, but these apps are essential to any industry - large or small.
Re:Jesus, give it up with the DRM already! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's quite clearly not the case if you think about it. No DRM has on popular media has yet had any effect on piracy. Any song sold by iTunes, any DVD with Macrovision rubbish, is still just as available online as any other content. Nobody who obtains their media through unlicensend downloads has had to care about DRM. The only people who have had to care about DRM are those who have purchased media legitimately and been inconvenienced and those who are worried about the future effect on the market place of vendor lock-in and reduced functionality, such as myself.
Re:People Like Eyecandy, dammit!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
The "only techies would get it" agrument won't fly this time around. Decidedly non-techie users are as usual the majority of users for Windows and THEY are the ones driving MS and major OEMs to keep XP available. If the market at large really did see Vista as an improvement, the naysayers wouldn't have had enough market impact to force MS to backpeddle and allow new machines to ship with XP. That was NOT in their plans, it was a reaction to the market.
I agree that not running as Administrator all the time is a good thing. The problem there for MS is they have spent way too many years getting users and developers used to the idea that everyone would run as administrator. Now they have to pay for that by breaking them of that habit. They're going to have to break a LOT MORE bad habits before they will really have a proper OS. If this one change is any sort of indication, the road forward is steeply uphill all the way. The Vista "feature"set demonstrates that MS is perfectly willing to put the lion's share of their efforts into thwarting the user for the benefit of the MPAA rather than in protecting the user from being exploited at every turn. How can your system be user-friendly when you put so much effort into making it user-hostile?
In many respects, Windows is still *STUNNINGLY* primitive compared to Unix (ANY Unix except perhaps, SCO). Imagine, here we are in the 21st century and Windows still considers having more than one person logged in on the same machine at the same time to be some sort of super-awesome-extra that isn't supported out of the box. They still don't get that an Administrator has very legitimate reasons to be able to impersonate a user (for example, to set up software for them) and that requiring the Admin to know the user's password DECREASES security. Experiance with Wondows 95 provided ample evidence that "the registry" causes more problems than it solves and yet, it's still there in all it's ugliness. Unix has demonstrated the superiority of having 100% of a user's data and settings contained within a single directory tree for many decades now. Is it REALLY going to take half a century for MS to figure out that it's a good idea?
That's just the surface. Scratching that and looking underneath is even worse. They still don't get that a bazillion different APIs performing essentially the same function but in different contexts is just a bunch of ad-hockery, not an architecture.
XP doesn't even handle multiple users on the same machine one at a time all that well. Half the time, when a user logs off, it tries to save the last user's profile (again), but doesn't know the password anymore. meanwhile, will they EVER actually kill off the shatter attack? Vista makes some moves in that direction, but because it's a fundamental architectural flaw rather than a bug, they couldn't kill it completely without changing a lot of other things, so they didn't. Windows is supposed to be the easy to use OS that doesn't require any expertise on the part of the user. so why is it so easy for an inexpert user to totally hork the system even when there's an expert admin available?
MS has some real troubles moving forward. They can't solve the multi-user problem unless or until they not only get users UN-used to being Administrator all the time, but get the 3rd party vendors to grasp the situation and quit writing apps that assUme they can just scribble anywhere in the filesystem they please. They're going to have to somehow detangle configuration as well to create a neat seperation between application defaults, local machine preferences and individual user preferences. Not forcing the Admin to know each user's password will require some deep changes in their favorite shared filesystem code or a dirty hack that ends up storing plaintext passwords in the system where badguys can potentially read them.They're going to have to alter the fundamental API so that inter-process communication is a deliberate programming decision or at least so a programmer can deliberatly dis-allow it.