As I blogged about earlier this year, Vista sucks. Now comes vindication of my views from PC World’s The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 unsurprisingly, Windows Vista has been rated the most disappointing product of 2007. It’s delicious irony that this OS runs best on an Apple Macbook. See below. Maybe Steve Ballmer will finally get a clue. Heck I might even start running Apple ads on this blog just to spite him. This from a guy who used to hate Macs with a passion, but now sees OSX as a better choice than Vista, and for some users, even Windows XP.
Here is the PC World article on #1:
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?
It’s not that Vista is awful. The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking are much faster and easier than under XP.
It’s just that Vista isn’t all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring–like more efficient file and communications systems–got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP.
When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant–in part because hardware and software makers didn’t feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we couldn’t help feeling more than a little gouged.
No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there’s something deeply wrong with the universe.
We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn’t have it pre-installed. And that’s disappointing in its own right.
XP, XP, for me, for me!
No, no, no.
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.
To someone who plays First-Person Shooters, frame rate is paramount.
I’ll stick with XP and play, rather than move to Vista and watch a slideshow.
You may want to read this, I’ve done this lots.
Upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP
http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/
I’m happy with Vista. I play a lot of FPS games, and I can tell you Call of Duty 4, Jericho, Blacksite, all run nice and smooth, no choppiness whatsoever.
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.
Jeff, I though I should respond. You are right in some things wrong in others, first I completely mac commercial are arrogant, demeaning, and ,in general, lies.
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.
With all respect, Jim, you didn’t say where I was wrong. 😉 All of my statements were opinions, except for the smoothness of games, that was a fact, at least on my system, your mileage may vary.
I’m actually hoping to move to the 64 bit version so my 3d rendering apps can use more RAM instead of crashing.
32bit Ultimate edition. Bought it on day of release (no will power). Not a single problem so far. Improved frame rates, improved stability. Nothing really bad to say about Vista. But then I never experienced problems with XP either.
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.
Have never used Vista, so I can’t really criticize. I use Linux. But I do know that when XP was first introduced, a lot of people had similar complaints about speed. Keep in mind that every commercial OS is designed to specks of higher end machines. That way, people are compelled to go out and buy a new OS AND computer, instead of just buying an OS out of a box. That being said, the thing that really brought Vista down was that the drivers for an awful lot of devices – printers, video cards, etc. – were either sub-par, or worse, non existent. That was inexcusable.
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.
Me and a friend are tech nuts. We watched the five year development of Vista pretty closely and were not surprised that it flopped. We were really looking forward to the new file system they were going to use – WinFS I think it was called – but it was dropped from the OS in the third year of development. Shortly after that, it was announced that the target date for Vista’s release was moved back a year. Then there was another setback and delay, then another, and another. The Jan 2007 release date for the general public (business got theirs a month earlier) happened not because the OS was ready for the public, but because Microsoft was getting the tar kicked out of them publicity wise, and someone put their foot down and said we’re releasing it in January, and thats final! They locked the code at the end of October 06, which gave hardware manufacturers and software engineers only two months to have their drivers and software code ready for release. That’s not nearly enough time to find the major bugs and get the software to function at an acceptable level for the average consumer.
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
PS. How many sun spot have we seen in the last few months?
I don’t get it. I have no problems with speed with Vista. I have both Vista 32 Ultimate and XP Pro installed, and haven’t booted up XP in months.
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.
I was forced onto Vista Home when my bought-in-2000 eMachine died, and I got a T5088 (for my uses, more than adaquate.) I quickly found that much of the software I had was useless, and it took forever to discover that I could make Vista emulate XP and run the software, but running PDF files with my Mozilla web browser is impossible and a real pain (but possible) with Internet Explorer. I went back to Best Buy and asked if it was possible to upgrade my machine to XP; they averred that the new machines were designed specifically to work with Vista and XP would degrade its performance. Is that true? Were they selling me a bill of goods as well as a new (sorta) computer?
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’ve had very few apps that would not install on Vista, oddly one of those was MS Visual Studio 2005, the other was Adobe Premiere Pro.
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.