Dean's World

Heresy! Burn him! Feel the wrath of the internets flames!

Ron,

most manufacturers offer you the option. The pushback against Vista has been to large for Dell et al to ignore.

Yeah, and the faster Vista fails, the happier I'll be. There is nothing good about it. The DRM giveaways to the Media conglomerates, the horrible performance, the drivers that noone can manage to write correctly. Seriously, it's been out for a year, and major components are still using beta device drivers. Even DX10, the thing they were hoping to drive gamers to Vista for, is minimal value, and the only game that even uses it, Crysis, is too intensive to run on ANY current system at 'high' graphics settings.

I've watched people struggle for weeks with intermittent Vista errors, things that work just fine on XP. People are saying 'oh wait for Vista SP1', but as far behind as Vista is from XP now, it's probably polishing a turd.

Who's going to sell you a new laptop with XP on it?

IDK about laptops, but that's not what I'm buying. Dell will sell me an XPS desktop with XP. I was pricing one today.

Dean, yes, they do have some of the same complaints. But having used all of those, the only one that has ever seemed anything close to the issues Vista has was ME, and everyone STILL thinks that was a complete dog.

So XP was below average for problems, and 2k before that was below average. And 98, in my remembrance, had fewer problems than 95. So in the face of a nice trend like that, we're supposed to go back to the average amount of problems? And that's even without the I/O system they had promised but then pulled before release?

I don't think everyone was spoiled by XP. I think the ball was dropped big time on Vista.

Dean,

DRM is a new problem. I can't remember any issues with a new release running twice as slow as the previous version this far out from release. And corporate customers are avoiding it because it's unstable. There is little added functionality. Vista is their worst release ever.

I mean, 95 was unstable as hell, but it was a huge functional/aesthetic upgrade. 98 was slower and didn't add much, but it was more stable. With Vista, everything seems to be worse.

Ultimately Microsoft will simply stop making XP available

They've been trying for a while now, and haven't been able to do it. If they do, Vista might even break the MS OS monopoly, if someone else gets ambitious enough.

I hate Microsoft.

But then again Microsoft obviously hates me and most of their other customers too.

So, I reckon thngs kinda even out over time.

My father-in-law has been nursing his old Windows ME machine along, first waiting until Vista came out, and now until it's faster and more stable. I really think he should just stick with XP.

I suppose it's possible that MS would abandon Vista as an evolutionary dead end, but it seems very unlikely. They'll be service packs to fix the worst of it, and new machines that will be fast enough to make the performance hit insignificant. I expect it will eventually replace XP in the consumer marketplace. It'll happen a lot more slowly than MS wants it to happen, though. Businesses will be a lot more cautious, but that's nothing new - some of them still run NT 4 servers and Windows 95.

My big question of the day is- how long until DRM bites the big one? Consumers don't like it, and the open source hackers will find a way around it, and distribute it. People will rip DVDs and Blu-Rays, and distribute them via p2p. End of story.

Ryan

Shipmates,

Well, I'm an old dog. I don't understand half of what you all are talking about. I still use XP, but only because it's what came with the system when we bought it. My girls and my wife all have laptops with VISTA, but they spent quite some time kicking and screaming before things settled down with their systems.

Me? Well, I'm eventually gonna be retinring this desktop PC for a laptop, but I will still want XP on it. I'm not at all fond of trading for a new OS and having to relearn everything, new terms, all the "kewl" features that noone really needs, etc.

I am, however, building a new desktop for gaming. It's a 486 with DOS 6.2 and GeoWorks as the GUI. I have a ton of older games and software that I dearly love, and the only way i can play them is to build a new machine. Fortunately, I still have all the DOS 6.2 discs and the manuals, etc. I also have all the old GeoWorks discs and manuals as well. Whay a GREAT system GeoWorks is/was.

respects,

Oh sorry to post again so quickly, but I totally forgot an important point: the ever-marching tide of GUI "innovation."

The first thing I've done with my last 3 computers has been a concerted effort to make it look like Windows 95. I like my borders gray and my titles blue, ya heard?! Seriously though, as far as I'm concerned, I was plenty enough happy with the "feel" of Windows 95/98, and for that matter with Mac's System 7/8.

Might as well admit that I've even got my browser skinned to look like Netscape Communicator 4.8 (thank you Foxscape).

So point is, I'm probably a curmudgeonly dork.

The lack of DirectX 10 support on XP will eventually drive gamers into Windows Vista whether they like it or not. Honestly I haven't had a problem with it. Most people who have had problems are people who refuse to buy new hardware. If you don't like upgrading every 2 years then don't dabble in electronics. People treat them like cars. They are not. Vista is still buggy because it is still less than a year old. I remember the complaints about Windows XP, now almost everyone uses it and is happy with it. Same cycle.