I have no problems viewing PDFs in Firefox (mozilla-based) browser and never have. I think you’ve got something else wrong there. Maybe there’s a drastic difference between Vista Home and Ultimate, I don’t know.

It’s been six months and I still don’t like it, but generally I can work around the problems. But it’s not something I would have ”upgraded” to if my old hard drive hadn’t gone to electronic heaven.

REPLY: John I was in exactly the same situation, I bought a laptop with Vista Home pre-installed. My old laptop, which I still ahd was XP based. My first disappointment came when I couldn’t transfer any programs from my XP machine to the Vista machine.

After months of fighting Vista, I finally removed my Vista instralled hard drive, bought a new one and installed XP fresh on it. THEN I transferred all my programs from XP to Vista.

I have noticed that web browsing with vista is MUCH faster than with XP, even on another machine with XP (my laptop). And as I mentioned, all the games I play (and there are a lot) are perfectly smooth. Bad frame rates are probably due more to low vid ram or bad drivers.

You are very much right – Vista is a dead end. Though they will never admit it, Microsoft knows Vista is a big failure, probably worse than ME. They lost the proxy lawsuit war via SCO vs IBM / Novell. These are but two of the reasons they have been pursuing deals with open source vendors such as Novell and Linspire. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em (or buy them – antitrust concerns) then join ‘em. The new hot laptop, the Eee by Asus, uses Xandros Linux as its OS. Xandros signed a software pact with Microsoft last summer. In the meantime MS is already working on the replacement for Vista, currently called Windows 7.

Though I am typing this on my Fedora 8 partition (my laptop has three different OS’s) I still use XP from time to time. I have some favorite software or a piece of hardware (audio programs and guitar / firewire interface) that has no Linux support or work-around, and only works with windows

REPLY: In my case, and the case of millions of others that bought Vista pre-installed on a PC or laptop, they did have the high end specs. For example my laptop I’m writing this on has 2GB RAM, SATA drive, embedded AGU/SVGA display and Dual Core CPU. It’s fast by most standards, and far exceeded the minimum Vista hardware spec. It ran like a slug. Put XP back on and it was a speed demon, and I’ll bet Ubuntu would be blazing fast.

I gave Vista almost 6 months before I gave up on it and “upgraded” to XP. I’m in the top end of tech savvy PC users. that builds systems and I couldn’t make it work to my satisfaction no matter what I did. John Q. Public has to be pretty well fed up too.

The whole Vista experience has none of the “wow” promised. And the only thing interesting, the Aero interface, can be had on XP with add ons and runs faster.

Vista’s failure is far more comprehensive than XP’s early nuances. I and many others don’t even bother to try developing software for it, its a dead end.

There are niggles with Vista: For a couple of months I couldn’t use certain bits of software until the manufacturers updated them. But that is the fault of the manufacturers, not MS. And the same thing happened with XP, and don’t get me started on 2000. File transfer between hard drives seems to take longer on Vista.

People have such short memories. Only a few years ago people were moaning about the problems with XP and how it was a load of rubbish etc etc. This happens every time a new OS is released. Suddenly the previous release was a bug free migration from God himself.

The only contradiction to this is of course Windows ME, which was the slowest clunkiest piece of bugged bloatware ever written. I’m still convinced it was written just so people would have to upgrade their PCs.

I’m actually hoping to move to the 64 bit version so my 3d rendering apps can use more RAM instead of crashing.

Mac and Vista are very disappointing in my book. MAC because of the reasons you stated not to mention lack of potability and expense.

But Apple is just pointing out a gaping hole left by Microsoft’s newest disappointment called Vista.

Vista was not put out because of massive flaws in XP, actually with SP2 and soon SP3 XP had become finally a solid little OS with few major bugs.
VIsta, was put out, in my opinion, for profits, and control. As per Microsoft’s standing policy just put out the software, and force your users who paid a bundle for the software to debug it free.

Finally force users happy with the XP OS to move to Vista, either by working back door deals with companies like Acer and HP to no longer support XP with drivers on all new computers, or simply limit the ability to purchase new XP licenses.

So yes Mac commercials are bad but Microsoft brought this on themselves.

My suggestion stick with XP for the next 2 to 3 years minimum it’s more solid and runs fast then Vista for sure and probably Mac too. In 3 years maybe Vista, most likly a linux OS like Ubuntu or SUSE, these OS’s graphically are still in their infancy but have made amazing strides in the last 5 years.

One thing I did find though, Apple Quicktime will cause Vista to go crazy after about a day if it’s loaded at startup. Some subversion by Apple, perhaps?

I did turn off the User Account Control, since I’m an advanced user and don’t need the hand-holding. I like the newer sounds, and the better graphics.

Does it meet up to the hype? No, but then again nothing does, not even a Mac. G4 Tech TV said publicly that in their graphics shop they have an equal mix of Macs and PCs, and that when you make them do similar things, they both crash about the same amount.

My biggest beef with Apple is their new ads. They don’t tell you much about Macs, but only belittle PCs and their owners. One ad even went so far as to say “It’s not a competition.” Oh? Then why don’t you tell us about Macs instead of about how bad PCs are? Can Macs only do photo albums and web pages? Bit expensive for something like that, don’t you think? I think if Macs as the dirty politician who can only talk bad about his opponent, but can’t think of anything good to say about himself.

Upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/

First, this isn’t Vista. Vista had a different disk structure and tree. Vista had top level user specified security. Vista didn’t require a registry. Vista… nevermind. The truth of promises doesn’t matter anymore.

Vista is a bad patching of XP for which millions of lines were added not to improve the product but protect the producer and try to force DRM.

I’d pay Apple tens if not hundreds of billions for two things; a universal OS release (it exists) for $129 to them and the rights to paid tech support for the product.

Vista is not an OS, it is razor blade that fits poorly in most handles because it fits in most handles.