Vista Shipped On 39% of PCs In 2007 321
Stony Stevenson writes "Vista is proving far less popular than XP did with new PC buyers during the earlier OS's first year on the market. This conclusion follows from statements by Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show. Gates boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January. Based on Gates's statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that shipped in 2007. And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only outperformed first-year sales of XP by 10%, according to Gates's numbers, while PC shipments have doubled in the years since XP's release."
Explaining Vista's flop? (Score:5, Funny)
2. Smart Microsoft employees flock to Google.
3. Dumb Microsoft employees can't implement the designed features.
4. ?
5. Profit.
the missing links (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm surprised that number isn't higher. (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that Microsoft is strong-arming PC manufacturers to offer Vista only, so I'm surprised that number isn't higher.
Re:I'm surprised that number isn't higher. (Score:5, Insightful)
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We've upgraded to VC++ 2005 SP1, mostly for the "parallel-build on multi-core machines" feature, which has dramatically improved our build times. The debugger is also leaps ahead of VC6 in terms of the expressions you can put in the immediate/watch window and have work.
We've mostly upgraded to Office 2007, but s
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Vista is the new MS OS, every new release gave people something to upgrade for and this time they expected the same to be true here, after all it's been 6 years since XP and people might have had an interest in upgrading to the new OS. except for one little snag, the new OS didn't really offer much worth upgrading relative to previous MS releases. People are holding back more tha
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Re:I'm surprised that number isn't higher. (Score:5, Informative)
This is true. In the past (DOS days) people would ask me regarding computer purchase selections. What I said then is just as true today. Find out what programs you need to run and then find the hardware which is capabile of running it.
Many people wanting to do multimedia, photography, video production, etc are needing something with realtime hardware support. Those people are moving to hardware and OS that support the required applications. Vista is not a real time OS and is unsuitable for many capture devices. Alternatives to fill the gap often include Apple and some Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Studio.
Nothing kills a live session more than a request for an Adobe PDF viewer update request in the middle of a session. I got this one during a live presentation while playing a DVD. The DVD on the projector simply stopped. Going to the laptop, we discovered that despite the fact were in the field with no internet connection, Adobe needed our permission to get an update. The fact a PDF viewer has permission to stop the show by having Windows Vista stop it to ask permission for an update without a net connection convinced me that Vista is unsuitable for presentation and digital audio workstation applications.
My Digital Audio Workstation is now Ubuntu Studio based with low latency and no interruptions of a live recording session. Some people prefer an Apple soulution.
Audacity is OSS and cross platform. It works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Many capture devices have serious latency and breakup problems in Vista. Audacity works in Vista, but capturing sound should be done on another platform.
Many popular USB capture devices simply are not supported on Vista because of the non-real time nature of the OS. Here are a few popular interfaces without Vista support;
Roland http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.aspx?ObjectId=743&ParentId=114 [rolandus.com]
http://www.roland.com/products/en/UA-101/specs.html [roland.com]
Beringer http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pdf/man/m_702540.pdf [musiciansfriend.com]
I found some of the Yamaha mixers with built-in USB interfaces list Vista, but the manual was quick to point out problems are caused if it has too little memory, has a slower processor, or several other items that can cause problems with multi-track recordings.
For real-time capture, I prefer to use a hardware priority OS. I have used this instead of Vista for Digital Music Studio work.
http://ubuntustudio.org/ [ubuntustudio.org]
How many are actually running XP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft gets to count it as a Vista sale (and brag), and Big Corp gets to use Win2K/XP.
Same goes for MS Office 2007.
Re:How many are actually running XP? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How many are actually running XP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I would expect that in the retail channel, the vast majority of PC's sold with Vista are running Vista. In a corporate environment, a lot of IT departments are probably not bothering with Vista while others beta test it, and won't have any interest in investigating deploying it until SP1 is well understood. On the common home user front, however, people use whatever their machine came with. most of them don't know what the difference is between Office and Windows. Hell, some of them have trouble grasping the difference between "MSN Windows" and "AOL Instant Messenger." Yes, really.
Vista may drive some people to insist that their new machine be made to "work like the old one." But the vast majority of the consumer base just isn't well educated enough in the subject to be able to make a choice between XP and Vista. They are still using Windows 98, and just want to replace the old busted one as conveniently as possible.
It seems that all the statistics and reports about how Vista is doing well, or Vista is doing badly seem to ignore the fact that when it comes to consumer sales, the average buyer is simply incapable of being "excited about the new hotness" or of "rejecting the new beast." Whenever you read these sorts of information tidbits, just assume that about a third of all computers are sold to iguanas.
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Maybe not in the USA, but here in Europe, once you have bought a PC,
you go on using it until it ceases to work, unless you are a hard core
gamer. Since it doesnt need new tyres or exhaust, there is nothing wrong
with the old one. Once it dies, its time to get a new one. Then you ask
a tech-minded family member what to buy - and he, mindfull of the
possibiities of virus-related support calls, says "Get a Mac". Unless
he doesnt know what a Mac is, in w
Re:How many are actually running XP? (Score:4, Informative)
I know it's nice to feel all elite, but that simply isn't true.
Plenty of my friends don't use computers as part of their employment (concrete workers, fitters etc) but are quite capable of basic computer tasks like email, web, games etc. They are also quite capable of recognising that the Vista interface is more confusing, inconsistent and sluggish that the one which preceded it, and are asking tech-minded friends to help them get rid of it. I'd say at least half of the people I know who've bought a machine with Vista installed have asked for the computer to be upgraded to XP or Linux within a month.
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Plenty of my friends don't use computers as part of their employment (concrete workers, fitters etc) but are quite capable of basic computer tasks like email, web, games etc.
So they are in fact experienced computer users but have non-geek jobs? Yo don't have to work with computer to know how to use them. You do, however, have to be somewhat interested, and most people are not, not even the tiniest bit. If you're not interested, you will not change OS (or grasp what an OS is, most of my friends do not).
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No, these are normal ordinary people who can recognize that their computer has become harder and less pleasant to use. It's not that complicated. You don't need to be a guru to understand that things that used to work don't anymore.
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Re:How many are actually running XP? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Basically, and 100+ sized company is likely to use images for their machines, and those are likely XP since there's no need to replace it with Vista.
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I'd be very suprised if there are any corporate environments (other than "mom and pop") which would run OEM preloads at all. Though the likes of Dell just don't get this.
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Not true, actually. Dell offer a service whereby you can have PCs shipped preloaded with your own image rather than their OEM one.
The only problem is Dell don't offer it unless you're ordering something like 100 PCs per year - fair enough, any less than that probably isn't cost effective for them. But 100 PCs per year is a fair few for a
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Ummmm. No graphics driver? No sound? No support? After much googling and forum-digging our techie managed to hack together some older Sony drivers and a
Then over Xmas we think the laptop got bounced and now the CD drive doesn't work. If it goes back it'll either com
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Re:How many are actually running XP? (Score:4, Informative)
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As for why they bought boxes with Vista instead of XP, anything we can come up with is pure speculation and pretty much worthless. However, I would guess that whoever made that decision, knowing that he would just ghost XP onto the boxes with the volume license, just took the cheapest option. Maybe there was a promotio
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Just one question... (Score:3, Insightful)
(I know of 2 new OEM PCs in my home business that were immediately 'Upgraded' to XP fresh out of their Vista promoting boxes in PY2007.) http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206 [slashdot.org]
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Boiling frogs, anyone?
Why does everyone seem so worried about Vista? (Score:2, Interesting)
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I'm not going to install it myself unless I have to, but I fully accept that almost everyone else is going to have Vista in the next few months. Such is the current way things work.
(Emphasis mine.)
Months? Surely you meant 'years'. No one, even in Microsoft, thinks almost everyone is going to have Vista in a matter of months.
And even regarding 'years', I'm not so sure. Perhaps demand will force Microsoft to extend sales of XP for another few years, as they have done already; perhaps Apple will rise to 15% market share; perhaps a lot of things will happen. Vista dominating the OS scene like previous Microsoft OSes did is not a given.
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I wonder how many people said in early 2001 that everyone else is going to have Windows ME in the next few months. I think the main reason why everyone is constantly trying to point out how crappy Vista has been is to help Microsoft see that they need to make big changes. Either a widely different SP2 or a completely new operating system.
I for one hope that Microsoft has a new operating system out before I need to up
Do consumers have a choice? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Didn't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
Or maybe they're still counting those pc that came with Vista Basic / Vista Starter editions that was willingly replaced with another Vista edition (x2 Vista sales) or a XP or a Linux...
What they should count is not the number of sales but the number of Vista machines pinging their update servers. (Well since most are connected now anyway, that could at least be an alternative way to co
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How many more PC's are in use since then? I dare bet it's a lot more than 10%.
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We sold 100 buggy whips this year! (out of 200 sold by all manufacturers)
Six years pass...
We sold 110 new and improved buggy whips this year! (out of 300 sold by all manufacturers)
Meanwhile, 30 people traded their new buggy whips in for the older model buggy whips. Another 5 people converted theirs to an open source buggy whip.
They sold 10% more, but their actual market share decreased because more are being sold than six years ago. In addition to that, a good portion of those "sales
Breaking the cycle (Score:4, Interesting)
As a very biased Mac convert, I'm constantly amazed at just how incredibly crappy XP and Vista are. Tonight, in fact, I set up a new computer for my wife who is using XP on a brand-new Dell laptop. There were about 5 times during the setup process where I honestly had no idea which option to select, because the wording of the choices were either esoteric, or what I really wanted was a fourth option "none of the above" yet that option didn't exist. Then, after all was finally said and done, using the thing was an amazingly frustrating experience, with seemingly endless offers/popups, some masquerading as os-level services, some more obvious overtures to purchase 3rd party software.
I've never been more convinced that the market is ripe for a shakeup... and more specifically that OS X (and Leopard) have the chance to break the Windows monopoly. Once MS's marketshare dips into the 70% range, there will no longer be an assumption that you "have" to run Windows for any reason other than you prefer it -- and once that happens watch out. There isn't a sane person who can look at Windows and OS X side-by-side, for a mass-market consumer audience, and actually say that Windows is the better choice.
[Remember I said I was biased... the point here wasn't to chest-thump about the Mac, but to point out that MS's advantage of being the "default choice" might disappear... and if so we might see their marketshare plummet faster than you can imagine]
XP sucks due to third party installations - wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry - but you are, then, saying that XP sucks because of (as far as I can tell) third party stuff?
Windows XP, without any fancy OEM stuff tacked on, doesn't nag you with seemingly endless offers - the only popups you'll get are the to some annoying 'help bubbles', which others find helpful, and you can turn off either way - the rest of your comment seems to entirely point to third party elements.
That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-.
( For the curious - back up QuickTime 6, install Tiger, restore. Old stuff, but gosh - if we can blame third party solutions for XP 'sucking' then we can certainly blame same-party solutions for OS X 'sucking', no? )
Windows, in general, has plenty of attack vectors available to you to point out how crappy it is; there's really no need to drag third party stuff into the discussion.
Re:XP sucks due to third party installations - wha (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like saying OS X sucks because after you bought QuickTime 6 Pro and upgraded to OS X Tiger (which has QuickTime 7), QuickTime will once again nag you to upgrade to Pro every first time you run it - and while it's running, taunt you with greyed-out options that were once available to you but are no longer so... until you purchase the Pro upgrade -again-.
Compare any off the shelf Mac wi
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I really don't care about which OS supplants Windows. Most of the candidates seem like good choices - OSX, Ubuntu, Fedora, et al.
In fact, I'd be
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That means among other things:
* The ability to apply only SOME of an update (not 10.5.1, but just parts of that I care about)
* The ability to roll-back an update (currently: "reinstall and patch up to the update before")
* Better QA. (search for wifi woes nearly every other 10.4 update, or AD/samba woes in 10.5.0)
Their product support lifecyc
I bet 100% of all PC's will come with Vista (Score:3, Funny)
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Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, Vista was under-developed, rushed, and had integral features removed. That last part is more significant than it might first appear. If you remove chunks out of the foundations of a building, you can expect the building to collapse. The same is true in software - if it's designed to be present, then removing that feature will destabilize everything depending on it. Yes, it was late. So what. The contribution Vista is making to Microsoft is negligible in terms of sales and disastrous in terms of PR in the European courts. Investing a year or two more work into the project would have been cheaper, produced a better product and generally given Microsoft a lot of plusses.
There was pressure for Vista being released. Yeah, and a company that can pay billions in daily fines without working up a sweat needs to pay attention to such pressure why? Due to lost market share? Lost to whom? Other OS' may be catching up, but it'll be five to ten years before they can capture significant marketshare. Three or four years more development would have kept Microsoft's lead and secured it with far less risk of legal retribution.
All in all, Vista's release marked very poor marketing decisions, not just very poor technical ones, although it need not have been that way.
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This is true, but I don't pay for Linux. I expect to have problems with something I got for free and then spend time tinkering with it, but a $100+ (I'm not entirely sure of the market price...) piece of software better be damn near perfect, minor problems (with quick fixes) aside.
Re:Well, be fair. XP was based on old tech. (Score:5, Interesting)
However my impression is, that MS basically has a failed project in Vista and that they would actually have had to scrap it 3-4 years into development, learn the lesson that they are subjects to laws of nature (or mathematic) as well and start over. They obviouly were not smart or gutsy enough for that.
On the other hand, it is possible that MS is not large enough to develop a new operating system with the fature profile they wanted Vista to have. It may in fact be impossible today to write an integrated OS with these features, because of complexity. Look at the rest of the world: Apple did not build a new OS with OSX, they basically took a working kernel and tools and customized them to some degree at the interface level. Linux is a reimplementation of Unix that keeps the original structure and API to a high degree. Any other (non-embedded) OSes in the last years/decade that were actually written from scratch and not based strongly on a previous design? I don't know any.
But there is one other thing. As OSX and Linux demonstrate, writing it from scratch is entirely unecessary. The technology is there and works. Use it. Possibly MS cannot see this or their market strategy does not allow it. After all they have to tie their cistomers to them. Who would otherwise suffer such abuse? If so, they may very well be screwed.
Microsoft refuses to modularize. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's exactly why Vista was such a cluster (and not the compute or failover kind). Microsoft can't modularize, strategically. They ran into trouble with Internet Explorer way back when, and ended up dispersing its functions across a bunch of unrelated modules so that it was impossible to remove and still have the OS boot.
They've been adding complexity while, at the same time, increasing the incestuous and promiscuous interrelations between their components. OSX & Linux and most other sane operating systems break things, insofar as possible, into unrelated modules with limited and defined interfaces. (See, e.g., here [visualcomplexity.com].) That's because humans can't manage a 50+ million line codebase without strict modularization. Microsoft discovered about halfway through Vista development that even their huge resources couldn't overcome exponential growth in complexity, so they had to throw out much of what they'd done and start from scratch with significantly more modest goals.
I've said before that Vista is Microsoft's "PS/2" moment. IBM discovered that they couldn't take back the PC market. They came out with the PS/2 and the Microchannel bus - and fenced it 'round with patents, and wanted to charge big bucks for others to play there. Third-party companies and consumers failed to beat a path to their door, and used alternatives like EISA until the roughly-as-good PCI came out. Microsoft figured they could just dictate where the PC market would go, too... but the alternatives are getting to be (frankly, have gotten) 'good enough' for the majority of purposes.
The hardware market changed out from under them, too... we picked up a $450 Dell desktop last year, because it was (or should have been) enough for my wife to run the MS Office she's hooked on. It came with Vista Home Basic and we could not believe what a pig it was. I dropped it back to XP at her demand and things are much nicer. People don't spend thousands on single computers anymore, and they badly misjudged the hardware requirements of Vista - it takes a $2000 computer to run well, from what I've seen.
Then there's the whole DRM fiasco... it's a 'perfect storm' for MS. They'll ride it out, like IBM did, but in ten years MS will be one option among many, not the colossus astride the PC market.
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However my impression is, that MS basically has a failed project in Vista and that they would actually have had to scrap it 3-4 years into development, learn the lesson that they are subjects to laws of nature (or mathematic) as well and start over. They obviouly were not smart or gutsy enough for that.
That's exactly what Microsoft did with Vista. Longhorn was in development from 2001-2004 based on the XP code base. Mid 2004 it was "refocussed" (scrapped) and rebased on the Windows Server 2003 code base - removing vast chunks of promised functionality. So Vista actually only took Microsoft 2 1/2 years to release - not the 6 years that everyone goes on about.
Doesn't make Vista any less of a pig though. (Apologies to pigs everywhere)
XP solved problems, Vista creates them. (Score:3, Insightful)
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I call BS. Windows 98 was a dog on 16MB of RAM (from where Win95 ran acceptably). Windows 98 ran much better with 32MB of ram. Windows XP however was a dog even at 256MB. But Win2k (which you conveniently gloss over) ran well at that level.
Vista often runs more sluggishly on the new machines than XP did on the old.
This has been true of every Windows OS. Win95 slower than Win3.1. Win98 slower than Win95. Win2k slower than Win98se (why does everyone conveniently forget the whole 98se gaming benchmark
Of course its not selling... (Score:3, Funny)
Vista and XP (Score:5, Insightful)
When you buy a new computer with Vista it's going to be so powerful that the bloat that's been added since XP (and this isn't a Microsoft problem, OSX and Ubuntu all have gotten bigger) wont be noticed, or even noticeable. You could make the argument that there's no reason a home user needs a dual core processor and two gigs of RAM but that's what is being sold. If the upcoming service pack does most of what MS claims it can do the differences between XP and Vista will be even further reduced. Hardware and software compatibility is a big problem, but it's one that MS has dealt with before. XP had the same issues. Eventually software got updated or replaced and it isn't a problem. It's the same cycle as last time. Machines get faster and software gets updated. The new MS OS goes through some growing pains but eventually becomes accepted. XP was too slow, no compelling reasons to upgrade, 2000 was good enough and faster. Now the lines are: Vista is too slow, there's no reasons to upgrade, XP is good enough.
If you remember back when XP was released it did suck compared to 2000. 2000 was the mature product. You want a fair comparison you'll need compare Vista now to XP 1 year after release. Or compare XP SP2 to Vista SP2, but since we can't look into the future we'll have to settle for the first option.
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Actually, a fair comparison would be to compare Windows XP to Windows ME (or Windows 98). And I was actually able to find one: ZDNet Review [zdnet.com.au]
They seam to be pretty happy with the upgrade, saying that it is "Definitely worth the cost of the upgrade!
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Security is a bonus.
Linux does everything I need, and well, and in many ways better than the MS alternatives. That is what has to change for any death blows to happen...
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Gotta love Win2k (Score:2)
No way in hell will vista ever catch up with 2k.
just maybe (Score:2, Funny)
when Linux and *shudders* OSX gain a higher market share, M$ won't be the monopoly they once were, and they can get out of paying all those fines.
i'm sorry. I just typed 'brilliant move by microsoft' and almost kept a straight face. someone throw a chair at me.
Nothing for the OSS crowd to cheer about. (Score:3, Insightful)
39% is plenty. As OSes mature, improvements are gonna be evolutionary at best. To be able to achieve a 39% adoption rate over a relatively stable OS (XP) is pretty good. No, in fact, it's a very good result considering the bad press MS has been getting lately. I for one wouldn't consider 39% to be a failure given the quality of the product.
Extrapolating the figures given in the summary, we can assume XP has a take-up rate of 60~70%ish within the same period of introduction. That's when most computers were still running on crappy 98 mind you -- hence accounting for the greater adoption rate due to the significant upgrade.
So no, saying it is far less popular is a stretch. 19% would be far less, not 39%.
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Now, 39% is still gr
Slashdot doesn't like Vista (Score:4, Funny)
Has anyone else noticed or am I just imagining it....
until ms admits v sucks, progress is impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
Customers says, "We don't like Vista!" and MS says, "Yes you do!"
If that doesn't prove that they have a monopolist's attitude, nothing does.
OT: what will happen to the MS-icon? (Score:4, Interesting)
High (Score:2)
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Chances are Vista is still "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, Microsoft allowed their Vista marketing to run away with them and too many people came to believe in the hype and the marketshare projections. Still, after reading a lot of naysaying, I've installed Vista over XP and have been pleasantly surprised. It is better than I was expecting, though the cruft has to be turned down or turned off. It's certainly "good enough" despite shortcomings, imho, which is what counts with Microsoft. So I imagine Vista will continue to make solid progress in the home and on pre-installs. The enterprise is something else. Besides, if it's known that a Windows 7 will appear in, say, 2009 or 2010, many outfits would elect to skip Vista as a matter of course, whatever it brought to the table.
Reinstalling my Microsoft OS has also reminded me how much good open-source software is now available on this platform. It's often said that a resurgent Apple is putting pressure on the market share of desktop Linux. I wonder whether Vista or in future Windows 7 plus a nice suite of the Open Office, Gimp and Firefox kind won't put on similar pressure from a different direction.
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Such as...?
There is no potential upsell opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
ian
What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention all those Vista machines of late that folks want reloaded with XP or ubuntu.
LOTS of them. They might have shipped Vista at 39 percent, but I bet the number still using it after a month is less than 35%.
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again - What? (Score:2)
Speaking of the 99 bucks though - emachines with vista ships with an "enhanced" DVD they invite you to install with no explanation. Do that, and you have to call them up and pay 99 bucks for the upgrade in order to get a license key that works - and the only way to uninstall is to reload t
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Microsofts marketing can use the stat that my laptop shipped with Vista, but they do know it was never activated.
Oh, and Vista ran dog slow on a C700 (dual core) with 1GB RAM, but is lightning fast with Ubuntu. Go figure.
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Retail end users don't upgrade operating systems, ever.
Rarely in a "walk into a shop and buy Windows In A Box of money", no. But I bet there is a moderate number of pirated upgrades. Probably more than the Walk Into A Shop variety, anyway...
Re:What about Win Xp... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.
Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
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Support for these things are getting better by the day. Pretty soon this will be a nonissue. Right now I have all my peripherals working fine with Linux. It's a perception thing mostly...
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Your milage may vary....
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My point being that under windows prety much any piece of hardware is guaranteed to work, under linux most do, but some still don't and "YMMV" is just not enough.
I didn't know anyone still did that kind of thing. Although I know some companies sell printer filters, which you can consider "drivers".
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I do try to use it as a desktop OS once in a while, but give up after a day or two.
Just a couple days ago i bought a "smart" usb thumbdrive, linux would only see it as SCSI-Generic and not as a disk, and obviously i couldn't mount it whatever i did. it worked fine under WinXP, but to get it to work with linux i had to download some stupid tool from the manufacturer that did some lobotomy to it and it stoped being "smart" but did
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Some time ago my brand new computer with a mainstream motherboard (gigabyte) based on a mainstream chipset (intel) was complitely impossible to install linux on as the kernel would either see the IDE CD OR the SATA HD, depending on bios settings but never both at once. It took about 4 months and a couple kernel versions until it was fixed.
I've had that setup for a while on several systems with a number of revisions and never had that problem, nor have I ever heard of something similar... but I guess that doesn't help when it happens to you ;)
On the very same computer it is STILL impossible to get 5.1 audio without manually doing arcane tweaking to ALSA configs
The Alsa drivers don't evolve very fast and are poorly documented. There are lots of "you can try this and that option and see what happens" but basically the sound subsystem still sucks. I have a laptop where sound *sometimes* works. Quite frustrating although apparently fairly typical of Intel sound
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Last week I needed to install a codec, the gnome media player (I forgot its name, can you imagine) sent me to the correct opensuse webpage concerning the missing codec, I there went to the 'community' solution and clicked an automatic yast install link. This opened yast and I had just to press some buttons. But then, a dependency conflict!
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Joe Bloggs will buy XP... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Joe Bloggs will buy XP... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even those forum posts probably relate to that. Vista needs more RAM than the low end systems it is sold on. Especially Laptops. Just like XP was sold with 256MB and had problems, 98 with 16MB(32?) and 95 with 8MB. The new Widows was being sold on last gen hardware and everyone lost (well not the stores that get to sell high-markup RAM).
XP needs 1GB to run background (non-spyware) crap + Office, and Vista needs more. Systems are not being sold with enough and people are complaining. Since all their specs went up and it is slower they see Vista as the problem.
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Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.
As for your comment about corporate buyers and PC enthusiasts, you underestimate their effect. Corporate is where the bulk of MS's revenue comes from. And PC enthusiasts affect much more than their own purchases, as they're generally the "support tech" for their entire extended family and thus will be the ones asked whether someone s
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If people are using Vista, then it may be possible they are using it under duress. The manufacturer gives you a nice shiny comp and only ships it with vista. I for example, have asked many dealers to give me a quote with the Vista (whatever edition) replaced with XP SP2, but they said they couldn't do it legally. So, between choosing
Re:I'm running Vista Home Premium ...so what? (Score:5, Funny)
The grammar check on it sucks.
So why "upgrade" at all? (Score:2)
If I am going to spend good money to upgrade my hw and os, I want something that is *much* better, otherwise, why bother? I want an actual reason to "upgrade."
I am running a 5 year old PC that dual boots debian and w2k, let me know when there is an actual reason for me to uprgrade. I just
Re:Vista hasn't been out for a full year yet (Score:4, Insightful)
9x to XP was a bigger step, but XP was a 0.1 upgrade from w2k, which meant that even when XP was "new" it was already a few years old in a lot of key respects. Most drivers for 2k worked with XP and were already mature, for example. The networking stack was essentially 2k, and it fit into w2k networks exactly the same...pro even came with the CALs 2k pro did... etc, etc... so there was a lot less resistance.
It was essentially already a "mature established product" even when it was new.
Re:Vista hasn't been out for a full year yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to conclude that the article's author, Paul McDougall, must be a moron and/or a troll. McDougall's math:
- Vista shipped on 39% of PCs in 2007: (floor of Bill Gates's "more than 100 million copies" boast for 11¼ months) divided by (nine-month-old estimate of the last 12 months of PC shipments)
- XP shipped on 67% of PCs in 2002: (14 months of XP sales) divided by (12 months of PC shipments)
I think it's obvious that Vista sales percentages are well below initial XP sales percentages, but we don't need dishonest math to exaggerate this point.Win2k also the last version of windows with no DRM (Score:2)
Agree 100%.