Microsoft: Vista is so misunderstood!
The Register has a great article deconstructing Microsoft's "Five Misunderstandings about Vista" (Recently pulled down, but not before The Register captured the document.)
Apparently, Vista has been slow out of the gate because it's misunderstood in five key areas: 1) User Account Control, 2) Image Management, 3) Display Driver Model, 4) Windows Search, and 5) 64-bit architecture.
Please join me in shedding a tear for Redmond....
Whatever the validity of Microsoft's five-point discussion (and The Register largely rips these up), the biggest problem with Vista's adoption doesn't even make the list: Performance:
What about performance? In my view, this is far and away the primary problem users have with Vista. It is not in any sense a misunderstanding, however Microsoft spins it. It is bewilderment: why does my new machine, which should be fast, spend so much time spinning its little bagel when I want to get on with my work?
Amen. The reality is that Vista is almost certainly not as bad as detractors suggest (myself included), nor as good and faultless as Microsoft suggests. Regardless, Microsoft may have to wait until Windows 7 to redeem itself. Will it be too late?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The only people who have problems with it are people who either have not used it, or who have unreasonable expectations of speed.
Now, I will be the first to say that Vista is a memory hog....... but Microsoft is trying to fix that. The same accusations were also leveled at XP when it first came out, but once computers were updated and upgraded a year after it was released...... those accusations disappeared.
My experience with Vista?
a) Never buy the upgrade. It runs like crap on P4s and Pentium M's (with 1 - 2GB of RAM) that are only a couple of years old. Forget about Celerons and low powered laptops. Oh I'm sure some shill out there will say they got it done, but most of the people I've read have had a dog on their hands. Same as me.
b) Never trust the "Vista-Capable" sticker you see on so many machines. It's a load of bull
c) Never trust M$ upgrade advisory tool. Ya know, the one I foolishly downloaded onto my 2 year old XP machine to see which version of Vista it will take. Well I did that and I was wrong. Fortunately I ghosted my C:\ so I'm back in business, but I'm still out $150.
Any complaints about XP six years ago pretty much died out after the first 6 months. It's now a year and a half since Vista came out and still no end to the criticism. That says a lot.
I'm a microsoft fan. I've been running windows since Windows 2.0. Vista is just terrible and I rue the day I'll have to install it because support has been pulled on XP.
Vista does a lot of nice things, as it states in the magazine and I have never suffered any real performance issues. People get so brainwashed from the media they can't see past what the news says.
I've enjoyed vista since it came out and will continue to promote it.
If your having performance issues, get a better computer. Or maybe perhaps we should always stick with celeron processors and 512 mb ram and build operating systems around that. Go linux if you have an issue
I cannot speak to a poorly configured pc as mine seems to be optimally configured (hp2050). I would imagine any pc, regardless of the OS, if poorly configured would run like a dog.
For what I do, I want/need every horse power my CPU can spit out. I'll stick to XP as long as I can, and if forced to go the Vista route, I am considering (seriously) going Mac.
I compared a Mac and a Vista computer SIDE-BY-SIDE at Best Buy recently (was researching a new computer for a friend). Same specs, same hardware basically..... both of them were comparable in speed.
Too late for what? The survival of Windows? You are joking of course. Microsoft owns the business world. Visit almost any business in the USA (or any other country for that matter) and what OS will they be using?
Maybe it's just that some people just hate to see a company succeed!
Listen up all you Microsoft bashers, Vista will make its way in the world, one PC at a time. It?s just that simple.
Unfortunatly, that counts. It is a bad thing to have to adjust an unfamiliar sytem to get to work right. It should work good right out of the box.
The only users that like it so far in my experience is graphic artists. Everyone else HATES it.
Now, personally..... I have NEVER seen ANY DRM on my machine in my normal usage. None at ALL. Everything I download off the internet plays, I can backup DVD's and images that I have made onto DVD's, etc.
Now, would I have preferred that Microsoft left out the DRM? Yes, but they didn't really have a choice considering that they had big name companies saying "Include DRM or we will sue you out of business!" With their deep pockets.... they could have done it!
a) Give it enough RAM. 2 GB is good. RAM is very cheap these days, and 2 GB ought to be standard anyway.
b)Get good drivers. Probably the biggest reason for Vista's poor performance on some machines. Luckily my laptop drivers are stable and seem to work flawlessly.
c)Don't install junk. Goes for XP too.
d) Don't use resource hogs like Norton. Get something like AVG free. Same for the browser- get Opera.Goes for Xp too.
e)Keep the drives defragmented. Vista accesses the drive very often, so keep it happy. I use Diskeeper 2008 and it keeps the drive in great shape.
Vista runs very stable and all my programs work on it perfectly; even old ones. No BSODs, no spinning donuts. YMMV.
The hardware manufacturers have realized that Vista is a memory hog (I cannot really blame Microsoft totally for this, this was starting when DOS was around) and are adjusting their systems to compensate.
Secondly, Mac's ARE incompatible and isolated, though not slow. No games work on a Mac system (at least none that a normal person would want to play). Most programs don't have a Mac equivalent. When you buy a Mac, you are locked into using only the hardware that Apple supplies for it. Add to that the price premium on Mac's..... and you see why a Windows PC is a better choice if you are EVER thinking of gaming in any way, shape or form on a computer.
Perhaps owning the OS and actually doing a bit of research will help.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/ultimate/default.mspx
The UAC can be turned off.
The MCE is great. The Expolrer is great. The Voice Recognition is great, the Pen support is great. I do like vista.,
Just the Spinning bagel. and the favorite apps which dont have a Vista release..
the problem is that most PC confgs aren´t like these.
recently my fiancé bought a HP DV6000 notebook (160GB, 2GB ram, amd 2.0GHz) and i tought this config. should be fast enough for her... but it wasn´t! the Nonebook came along with the NORTON antivirus software and and it was painfully slow!
i had to desable some features and to uninstall the norton to get the notebook running on the 100%.
hope Windows Seven will be much better... I almost bought an IMAC...
if you have a nice system vista is the way to go, but if you have a crappy system, celeron, ect, stick with old OS that is not demanding, like windows 2000 or linux
and we really need new writes here at cnet, currently just wasting people's time with mediocre opinions without anything backing them up.
ms will be here, but hope some of these writes don't,
sam
- by cardfan1212 May 20, 2008 1:41 PM PDT
- There's just a lot of idiots out there that don't know computers. They want it stupid and Macs deliver..
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- by MrBoomshadow May 20, 2008 4:08 PM PDT
- There are also a lot of us who do know computers, and would rather use Windows XP because it does what we want it to do when Vista won't.
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- by Composer_1777 May 26, 2008 3:45 PM PDT
- lol well said.
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