One Third of New PCs Downgraded To XP? 617
CWmike writes "More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, said performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network. 'The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,' Craig Barth, the company's CTO, said. 'People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights.' Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. 'Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn.'"
The Barn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn
Or better yet - BURN THE BARN!
On a serious note, it is sort of sad that Vista has performed so poorly. I mean, I really enjoy Linux, but on my gaming desktop I'd like to have the best OS for the job (with DX10 if it's used). As a gamer, the whole thing put a sour taste in my mouth. I guess I can say I'm happy with Linux, but a bit sad that nothing useful came out of Microsoft's work, except for being able to lord it over them.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
A larger OS will of course use more resources. This does not surprise me in the least anyway since I am sure close to 1/3 of the people who buy new PC's get 1GB of ram or even less nowadays....and with less then 1gb and even 2gb of ram vista will bog down the system when running anything but word processing/email.
I think MS screwed up by launching vista so soon before the hardware was really ready for it. Many people may say it does nothing to improve computing, but I just think its a little before its time... (probably a first for MS anyway.)
laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
It boggles the mind why anyone would want a low to mid range laptop to come with Vista preinstalled. And yet that's the only way to get them (reasonably).
And apparently Toshiba's only honouring the warranty now if none of the original bundled software has been removed. So a friend of mine ended up buying a cheap Toshiba, with the understanding that it functionally has no warranty, since he's immediately nuking Vista off of it.
Re:Me too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every machine I've ordered from CDW has been preloaded with Windows XP, for which I thank them with my continued business. Vista has no place here.
Agreed. Our office has ordered around 120 PCs in the past few months, all with XP preloaded. We wipe and reimage them before the end users see them, but the gesture is appreciated.
Downgrade? How? (Score:5, Interesting)
How is XP a downgrade?
I'm not a Vista hater. I actually like it better - it's UI for explorer (folders) is much better and I like that, unlike XP Home, UAC is in every release of Vista. I think the security is also better but not great yet -- services shouldn't run in administrator level but just be sandboxed to their own account.
But it is dog slow out of the box for many computers with integrated video chipsets (why some manufacturers don't set the Aero level appropriately for their models is beyond me). It takes up too many resources of low-end computers. And Microsoft has gotten way too version happy - 12 versions IIRC (counting 32 and 64 bit seperately). Microsoft is also squeezing wallets for truly inane things - I can't even get 64bit business upgrade easily when I have 32 bit business even though such an upgrade should be minimal costs (somehow my disc doesn't count for alternative media...).
Why is this? I don't know if it's peculiar to Vista, but it really pisses me off when the computer decides that it will restart in T - 10 minutes just for a security upgrade and there is nothing I can do about it -- which pretty much summarizes how Microsoft is treating the customer base in a lot of decisions.
No wonder Macs are starting to get popular on the high end and Linux is starting to get popular on the low end mini notebooks. XP sucks in a lot of regards security-wise, but at least it's small and fast and there were only 2 versions of it for a desktop and all the Apps work on it (Endicia Dazzle still isn't 100% Vista ready...)
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anybody see a pattern here? Most people thought XP was rubbish for the first couple of years that it was out for, and now those same people are proclaiming it to be Microsoft's best OS to date.
I think you can attribute that asstistic to the fact that Service Pack 2 was released.
Blame the Windows Beta Programs (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows XP Service Pack 2 had massive failure rates after its release. This was something which was supposed to be caught during the beta program (silly things like activation being permanently fried and boot bluescreens). There were numerous installation errors which were unrelated to antivirus programs as the team had specified (in fact, a heavy number of these install failures came from machines with no AV or with the AV disabled).
Fast forward to the Vista beta during 2005 and 2006. The same manager (Paul Donnelly. pauldon@microsoft.com) led this beta program through a trip of elitism and hell. Some testers would be massively rewarded for sucking up while others would have nasty bugs closed as being "by design" (including a number of major DWM CPU usage bugs).
The same coordinators managed the same two beta programs, leading to the same results. Paul and his team need to be canned, because they're not doing anything right.
Re:Method for downgrading? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Barn? (Score:4, Interesting)
Try Server 2008 for gaming. It rocks :-)
Re:Blame the Windows Beta Programs (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:2, Interesting)
By "many, many" do you mean "more than none"?
If so, I think you may be mistaken. The only people who think Vista is an improvement are the RAM manufacturers and other upgrade vendors.
I still have not met a single human being who willingly uses Vista professionally. After all, everyone who judges an OS based on hype has already converted to a Mac.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:2, Interesting)
When Joe Sixpack asks his tech friend for advice on purchasing a shiny new laptop, chances are the geek may say something akin to "Avoid Vista like the plague." And, if you've ever met Joe Sixpack while working a retail or support job, one-line quips from his geek friend are the infallible word of God.
Which makes me wonder if 1/3rd is too low. How many Joe Sixpacks got their shiny new laptop and wondered why it was so slow and thought that Vista's new user interface was too confusing (a complaint I've heard a lot from Joe Sixpacks upgrading their hardware)? How many went to their neighborhood geek, who promptly produced a questionable Windows XP disc and installed it on their shiny new vista laptop?
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have quite a few friends who work at MS and most of them recommend running XP over vista when asked the obvious question. It isn't a question of hardware being ready for it as much as the OS isn't optimized enough. To add to vista woes, MS brought out tons of SKUS to further confuse customers.
A friendly conversation I had with an MS employee led to his asking me as to why people wouldn't want to upgrade to the latest supported OS and my response was a local school scenario where the budget for the school doesn't exactly accommodate upgrading 30 PCs to be vista capable. An underpaid overworked school employee in charge of the computing lab would probably find it easier to use XP till the OS is supported and switch to a distribution like Ubuntu OR do a smart thing and make the switch to a Linux distribution now and not worry about the change later.
Also in the above scenario it's easier to get the kids used to a new distribution and even keeps them from the mischief they can do in the windows world. My friend had no answer to this except that if the school made a strong case and appealed for aid, MS might donate hardware and I believed my buddy that MS might actually do it.
This is not a case of MS being ahead in the timeline (BeOS was ahead of its time, not Vista) - this is a case of getting a halfbaked product out (look up "code optimization"). I give you just one example as to why not using Vista is beneficial but I am sure there are tons others.
I am a gamer (and yet I do not care about DX10 for now) and I have stayed away from Vista. I do not want a larger OS - I want an OS optimized for gaming. I have a dual core processor with 3 GB of ram and I do not want an OS that can use it all just for the sake of using resources. I am surprised you have been modded interesting...
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Do any of those people not work for one of the major computer magazines?
My latest computer came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. It's got 4 gig RAM and a quad-core processor. I back-graded to XP Pro so I could get work done, but recently, I threw away a weekend giving Vista a second chance. Now I'm back on XP Pro and I've lost about 18 hours that I'll never get back again.
Before I give Vista another chance, Microsoft is going to have to arrange to have my dick sucked, preferably by one of their division heads.
But, since I still craved a great new OS after my failure with Vista, I am now very impressed with the latest Ubuntu Studio, and for the first time can actually do professional work on a Linux machine. I guess I owe Microsoft thanks for forcing me to give Linux another chance.
So now I can record and edit digital audio using Reaper on my XP machine and offload some of the rendering work to my Ubuntu machine using Reamote and ReaRoute over fast ethernet. Cool cool cool.
Just wait a decade. . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Up until this time last year, I was a proud and recalcitrant user of Win98.
I only switched to Win2000 when I started having trouble moving really big files over USB. Then my whole system did that 'releasing the magic smoke' thing and I had to buy a stack of dazzling new gear.
I was happy to discover upon switching to Win2000 that it worked really, really well. With all the service packs in place and all that jazz, I've now got a dream machine.
I waited nearly a whole decade before finally switching over, and that was enough time to see the OS clean itself up. It never crashes and does all I want/need. Cool.
I should add that I did try Ubuntu and a couple of other Linux versions first, but was dismayed to discover that my Wacom tablet wouldn't function properly under them. There are user support forums detailing long sets of baffling instructions on how to get tablets going right, but they didn't work for me and I just ended up frustrated. It reminded me of the days when ripping CD's to MP3 format was a touch & go command line process rather than the plaything of highly automated programs it is today. I'm not a Linux guru and I have no desire to climb the learning curve necessary to become one, so I dropped the whole affair. --Also QuarkExpress isn't supported by Wine. . . Oh well.
Linux is closer, and it looks fantastic and feels great to use, but it doesn't do easily (or possibly at all) what I need. When it finally arrives, I imagine I'll not need to switch to XP in 2017.
-FL
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny. I only ran Windows 95 for about 6 months before I switched to NT 3.51.
NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 was not a huge hit in performance, and NT 4.0 was totally solid, even at beta 1 (a couple service packs later on changed that). It had some nice UI changes, but didn't require any huge changes to the way I did things.
NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 was not a huge hit in performance. Windows 2000 was very solid. It had some nice UI changes, but didn't require any huge changes to the way I did things.
Windows 2000 to XP was a performance hit but it wasn't too bad. XP was very solid. It had some really horrible UI changes, but you could turn them off. It didn't require any huge changes to the way I did things.
Windows XP to Vista was a huge performance hit. Vista came bundled with the laptop I bought, and yet it still managed to blue screen pretty regularly. It had UI changes which were mildly neat for about 30 seconds, but got tedious really fast, and I eventually found them ugly and turned them off. Almost nothing I did worked in Vista. I had to tinker around with permissions. I had to dodge security dialogs like the 9th level of Tempest just to rename an icon on the desktop. A bunch of my apps wouldn't run. Network file transfer performance, which I use A LOT, was totally crippled. I finally got sick of adjusting myself to Vista, with absolutely no return in terms of anything being superior to XP. There was literally nothing I found to be improved over XP, but the disadvantages were numerous and significant.
Finally, I switched my laptop to Ubuntu (like all my desktops already were). I got a huge performance boost. It's very solid. It has more UI flexibility that I could possibly want, and I've tweaked it out to look just perfect. And the funniest thing is that it _would_ run on a P3-800 with a dot matrix printer from 1977.
So your point fails. Having experienced the Microsoft OS change from DOS 1.1 to DOS 6 through Windows 2 up to Windows 95 briefly and then on the NT side from 3.51 through Vista, I found pluses and minuses each time, but going to Vista had the most minuses and no pluses.
That's just my experience and my opinion. I was willing to drop a Benjamin to get XP before I finally went to Linux and gave the XP license on a spare machine to my kids for their games.
Re:Server 2008 = Windows 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone. When I built a new computer last year I bought a Vista x64 OEM distro as well. I tried it for a few months with my Nivida 8800 GTS but was not impressed with its performance (system has 3 gigs of ram). I dual-booted between it and XP 64 Pro but ended up just formatting the Vista install because it was rather slow compared to XP on the same hardware and really had nothing extra to give me. DirectX 10 is not worth it, at least not yet in my opinion. And Vista removed a tool I use from time to time to work from home from the Home Premium version of Vista (remote desktop). You'd have to buy either the business or ultimate version of Vista for a tool that's been around for years. Ridiculous.
It's not a hardware problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
I downgraded my Vista machine to XP. A critical pice of software I use was dog slow on vista. Dead-dog slow. By accident, i found out how to speed it up considerably - I unplugged the network cable.
No, this was not a network app. It's a CAD program. It does absolutely nothing over the network. Whassup with that? Unfortunately, I need the network, and after much fiddling and tweaking the network settings (I am qualified...) There was no change.
But, every time I disabled the network, my CAD program sped up. Until I wiped out the HD and installed XP. Now it's always fast as ever on my vista-class hardware.
VIsta gave me absolutely no benefit over XP. What's the reason for this OS?
--
http://www.rlt.com/14100 [rlt.com] See our newest perpetual motion machine (as designed by Leonardo DaVinci)
Therein lies the problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
"When Joe Sixpack asks his tech friend for advice on purchasing a shiny new laptop, chances are the geek may say something akin to "Avoid Vista like the plague."
How exactly do I avoid it when every laptop in town has it preinstalled?
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Add me to that chorus.
I have two laptops through work (contractor, on-site managed services).
My parent company laptop - which I don't actually need for my day to day (as I use the customers laptop) - is Vista Business Premium - Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gig RAM.
Tried it, didn't like it. Apart from security, I fail to see any real advantages, and they also decided to shuffle all the menus and options around just for fun. All I notice is that stuff is slower esp file copying (yes SP1 is patched).
Aero? pffft have you ever tried compiz-fusion or any of the derivatives on any modern linux distro?
Desktop search? addons for XP and linux available.
DX10? 5% extra eye candy for 10% less performance = bad deal in my book. Of course this situation will change. Also irrelevant for busineses
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and to address the chicken and egg thingy, they make a home energy station [honda.com] that converts natural gas to hydrogen.
Can we lay off the car analogy now?
That number is probably low (Score:5, Interesting)
I find Vista lacking in just too many ways. Until recently, I have never actually used it however. The facts before it is used speak well enough on their own. So throwing out any discussion about the user interface, enhanced effects, backward compatibility, increased stability or anything else that often results in subjective discussion, there still remains the two most important facts about Vista:
1. It requires more memory and processor resources to do the same job that XP does
2. It doesn't do more than XP does
Those are the reasons I have avoided Vista like the plague. Now the fact that in the office, the version of AutoCAD we use is known not to work particularly well with Vista is simply leverage over the fact that I see no business reason to change. Pursuant to my reluctance to change, I bought volume licenses for Vista... so that I maintained my right to downgrade to Windows XP. So now that machines are ONLY shipping with Vista, I am careful to be sure that XP drivers for devices are still available in any hardware selections I make and simply reload machines with XP.
My plan has started to pay off as I needed to buy a Lenovo laptop for one of my users. It came with Vista. I decided to test what should have been a PERFECTLY tweaked and tuned Vista installation. After all, it came with the hardware right? Pre-installed? One would think that it was done right. Perhaps I am over-estimating Lenovo, but I have never had a problem with the stock software load from Lenovo when it is running XP. In fact, those Lenovos [IBM Thinkpads] running XP have lasted years and have never been reloaded and are still running efficiently today. (That's saying a lot considering the typical pattern of "Windows Rot" I'm sure we're all familiar with.) So my expectations of quality and stability are based on my previous experience with Thinkpads and XP.
I powered up the Vista laptop and went about trying things out just in case my own prejudiced had really colored my view too badly. I'm really quick to admit when I'm wrong. That's why I use the name "erroneus" to begin with.
The machine suffered a very bad error that I can only describe. It wasn't a blue screen and it wasn't a lock-up exactly. It was something else... something weird. It was going through some sort of self-configuration stage after I agreed to not hold Lenovo or Microsoft liable for their products. I decided to move one of the Aero styled windows while the circle was circling so that I could entertain myself with the semi-transparent windows. The process was taking an odd amount of time in my opinion. Anyway, the window stopped moving and the circular cursor stopped rotating. The mouse cursor did move away from the window and in a particular rectangular region of the screen, the "busy" circle cursor would resume its rotation but there was no window there. In all other areas of the screen, it was the normal arrow. The hard drive was still chunking away so I let it go thinking it might catch up. It never did even after 45 minutes of doing "something." I tried to three-finger it, but no reaction could be observed. I waited longer... another 20 minutes or so. (I do other things too, so letting things ride for long periods of time is no big deal!) No changes could be observed. I forced the power off and powered back on. It resumed its setup process and continued on as if almost nothing were wrong. (It did acknowledge that something bad must have happened but at least it didn't try to blame me the way Windows9X used to do.)
Things seemed to go better this second go around but the hard drive NEVER stopped chunking and churning. I let it idle for hours and eventually over-night. It did eventually fall asleep only to wake up with a beep and go back to sleep again.
This machine has 1GB of RAM. It *should* be enough for Vista. It's not. And I haven't even loaded a single application on it. It's JUST the OS. What the hell? The damned swap file was growing and growing with no indication that it wo
Re:it's all a bit silly, really (Score:3, Interesting)
While part of me understands that as time goes on hardware requirements will increase, the fact that many *nix GUIs (ie: KDE, XFCE, Gnome) as well as the *nix core itself are able to IMPROVE the performance of their software between both minor and major releases makes me at least question the rate at which Microsoft increases the hardware requirements between services packs and major releases. Couple this with the financial incentive they have in forced obsolescence (ie: obsoleting hardware = more sales), and I have little faith that the sharp increase in hardware requirements is anything but an example of what happens when a marketing department runs an engineering organization rather than actual engineers.
I'll keep with my 6+ years old computer with 1GB RAM running KDE beautifully.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
XP and virtual machines (Score:5, Interesting)
High on the list of Microsoft's greatest fears is virtualization.
I'm seeing *lots* of Intel Macs with one of Parallels/VirtualBox/VMWare. More than half, I'd estimate. Almost all with XP.
Virtualization, while it means an upgrade path for Microsoft, also means that people can upgrade to another OS. And, when they specify their next round of software, it's going to be software that runs natively on Mac or Linux.
Also, people are finding hardware without XP drivers (elsewhere in this thread). Virtualization can get around that. If Linux runs on it, xVM will.
Vista is bloated for many reasons, but the fact that its bulk and overhead make it a poor choice for virtual machines is surely considered a real positive around Redmond. That is, if they can make enough software *not* work in XP, people will stay in Windows, rather than Windows becoming a little legacy corner of their screen (Right now, I'm watching Olympic coverage in Silverlight in a corner of my Linux desktop).
Think again (Score:3, Interesting)
.
Walmart.com currently stocks 16 Vista laptops with 4 GB RAM. starting at $1000. You can get 64 Bit Vista Premium at this price point.
The 64 bit Vista Premium desktop at Walmart.com with 4 GB RAM also starts at $1000:
Quad Core CPU, 750 GB HDD, NVIDIA 9500 GS Graphics, HDTV Tuner and Combo Blu-Ray Player and DVD Burner.
HP Pavilion s3530f Slimline Desktop [walmart.com]
Absolute rock bottom for the MS Vista Basic desktop at Walmart.com is the $329 Compaq Presario SR5505F w/ AMD Athlon X2 4200 Dual-Core Processor [walmart.com]
--- and for the laptop the 1 GB Vista Basic Acer 15.4" Aspire 5315-2326 Laptop PC w/ Intel Celeron M Processor [walmart.com] at $448.
The dual core laptop with 3 GB RAM starts at $800. Toshiba 15.4" Satellite L305-S5883 Laptop PC [walmart.com]
It goes without saying that OEM Linux at Walmart.com doesn't come within ten light years of the specs of the MS Vista system at - any - price point.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not driver changes. They redid the entire rendering system from the old 2D (GDI) that has been in use and mostly unchanged since 95 and created something almost entirely new that leverages 3D (WGF), tossing the old 3D system (which was relatively unstable). This was a Major Change, and is likely the cause of 60% of vista problems, with likely another 30% being driver problems related to it (It's taken the driver devs awhile to get up to speed on the completely different way of doing things), and another 10% for other stuff.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:3, Interesting)
They should have just slapped the Aero GUI on XP and called it Vista. It'd Just Work(tm) and it would still consume much less resources than Vista does now. Vista didn't even deliver most of the stuff like WinFS that was supposed to make the upgrade headache worthwhile. It did, however, include the latest and most virulent DRM as well as other non-critical crap.
Again, Microsoft, just put Aero on Windows XP as service pack 4, and then you can pretend that your customers really, really do prefer Vista over XP.
They don't even need Aero - the content already exists for XP. I just installed the phenomenal Area o4.2 [customize.org] Visual Style on an installation of XP SP2, and it looks and runs wonderfully. This [belchfire.net] is a reasonably helpful explanation of how to install non-MS visual styles in XP.* There are also various packages around to add widgets and other bits and pieces to give XP a convincingly Vista/Aero feel in terms of the desktop (Rainmeter or Samurize, for example).
Microsoft should absolutely get a few visual styles along these lines, integrate as many good known fixes and up to date drivers as possible into the base installation package, and release XP SP4 as a standalone product. If it makes them feel better, they can call it Windows Classic 08 or something and release it as a new product at a reasonable price (say, under $100). Hell, I'd buy it.
* NB - if you actually try installing the theme above following the instructions on the second site, note that you need to rename the .msstyles files to match the folder names (or vice-versa), it wouldn't work for me until I did this.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
that's because marketing keeps changing history to suit their needs.
It is one thing about linux I like. you can see the progression of change in the software. everyone else tries to hide what horrible things and stupid ideas they tried in the past. In 6 years time people are going to go there was Vista?
I agree. One of the great things about Linux is it's more or less linear progression. Things that work well and can't be improved much are left alone. Things that don't work right are constantly revisited and modified. Support for new file systems, hardware, network protocols, etc.. are added.
Windows just moves stuff around, slaps a new GUI on and calls it a major release.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
"IT departments seem hopelessly caught up in their own inertia"
That may be true in megacorps like J&J but not all IT departments act like this. However, once you have a unified environment, where every workstation is identical and running a trusted OS with trusted apps, and everything is well-documented, you'd be a fool to rock that boat. Management is much simpler in an environment like this, upgrades are usually a snap (hardware, sometimes software) and you have a solid test bed that you can say, without question, will work equally well in a live environment.
Most IT departments should be running XP only, or throw a few Macs in for the mouse-challenged design staff or some Linux boxen for development/hosting. Vista is junk, IT knows it, and nobody that I know of has even considered implementing it yet.
Everyone said "wait for SP1" then it dropped...and nothing really changed. Vista still destroyed the user experience for everyone and ran apps at half the speed while eating a ginormous swap file and thrashing hard drives constantly for no apparent reason. Sure, if the search indexing wasn't so damn busy all the time it would be handy. Prefetch may play into this too, but when your drive is too busy to load apps, it's pointless.
Vista is like Doom3. It was created with some future technology in mind that never really materialized. Well...only with Doom3 eventually it did.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting point I'm pretty geeky I have core2duo notebook dual booting Hardy Heron and XP, a Powerbook and a dual G5 tower and probably spend 6 hours a day at least on a computer yet in all that time I've spent MAYBE 5 minutes in Vista including consulting work. Nor do I have any desire to try Vista I think the fact that power uses tend to reject spells trouble for M$ in the long run.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank God for ASUS laptops. They come with a magic disc that works wonders for changing Vista into XP. Pop it in, boot, and insert a driver CD about twenty minutes later. The whole process takes about an hour and a half. Not every laptop they sell comes with the easy XP downgrade, but the ones that do are incredibly easy to come by.
As for all those vendors who are doing their best to kill off XP before Microsoft stops support, screw 'em. Desktop downgrades aren't too hard, because of parts standardization. Laptops today are almost impossible--the last one I had to driver hunt for took almost three days of downloading and forcing to get a fully-functional and stable XP install. The look on the customers' face when the machine was at least twice as fast (perception-wise) was worth it, though....
Sign me up (Score:2, Interesting)
Just chipping in with what I'm having my company do (I'm the Director of IT). We have no Vista machines on our network, we don't support them at home (even for executives), and we are downgrading all new purchases through Dell to XP Pro. We have evaluated Vista extensively, will not be implementing it at all; instead, we'll continue to downgrade.
We have begun implementing some Macs at the company, including one running VMWare Fusion and a copy of Win XP inside to handle a specific catalog application. While not perfect either, the Macs play nicer than Vista, and running XP in a VM is a real pleasure on a loaded Mac Pro.
Our biggest issues with Vista are the same ones than many people have mentioned over and over in here. Since MS is not even owning up to the problems, we're taking matters in our own hands.
If Windows 7 is little more than a modularized Vista, the only thing that may save it is hardware speed and the ability to carve out the exact "Windows" overhead we need to function.
Re:Not exactly surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
So...why has compositing always been fairly straight forward with Linux then?
Re:DOS 4.0 was a flop like ME & Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a very optimistic appraisal. The only problem is that Windows98 was not as forcibly removed from the users who needed it as is the case with XP. Vista is being pushed so hard and XP hindered, it makes me wonder what sort of existing good will Microsoft is losing in this practice. Or was it intentional in order to force me to buy Vista licenses with downgrade rights so that their numbers are higher?
And another thing: Will the next one after Vista (assuming we can continue to survive by with XP) be more frugal with memory or will we have to trash perfectly useful and powerful machines?
I don't know if anyone has noticed it or not, but we have reached something of a plateau where adding memory no longer speeds a machine up... it just gives a machine more room to work.
When comparing DOS 3.3-4.x-5.0 to Win98-WinME-WinXP and WinXP-Vista-????, you're really comparing Oranges to weird genetically modified fruit that doesn't exist yet.