Windows Vista SUCKS!

[5-90]

While I certainly agree with you that the Vista UI takes some getting used to, I find that while it's different I don't necessarily like it better or worse than XP. When transitioning from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 I had much the same response as many seem to be having to Vista. I thought it sucked, but ultimately I learned to use it and even prefer it over Win3.1/DOS. I overcame my dislike of the UI due to the underlying technological enhancements that were beneficial and eventually required for many applications. While many insist that Vista is nothing more than a visual UI retool of XP, nothing could be further from the truth. Vast amounts of underlying source code were completely rewritten in the interest of speed and compatibility. I can tell a huge difference in the stability of my system with XP vs Vista - Vista wins hands down.

As far as hardware compatibility goes, I personally haven't had much trouble. In March when I first switched to Vista, my NVidia drivers for my video card were awful. They didn't even support the native resolution of my widescreen LCD. The Sound Blaster drivers worked, but weren't anything to write home about. Now the drivers are much more robust. While the XP Sound Blaster drivers do have more functionality than the Vista drivers, nVidia has really gotten their act together and made some great drivers. Never had any trouble with my printer, though. I tend to blame the hardware manufacturers for bad drivers, though. It's not like they didn't know that Vista was coming for ~5 years.

I'm with you on the "software that does everything for you" angle. That's the exact reason I hated Windows 95 so much. But after some experimentation, I've found that Vista is much more customizable than most people give it credit for. Most, if not all, of the automated "helpfulness" can be turned off via the new, unnecessarily obfuscated Control Panel.

I'm certainly not a Microsoft Fanboi or anything, if you don't want to run Vista then don't, I don't care. If you have hardware below the *recommended* (not bare) minimums, then don't even think about it, you won't be at all happy with it.

And before anyone complains about Vista using up half your RAM just to boot, I should explain that this is a feature called precaching. Vista preloads around 40% of your system RAM with the most commonly used programs on your computer, so when you launch one of these apps, it starts a lot more quickly. XP does it too, just not nearly as aggressively.

I just enjoy sharing my positive Vista experience. It seems to me that most of the people who bash Vista have never run it - and I mean RUN it, really given it a chance, given yourself a chance to get used to it and learn how it works. That's what it took to get me to Win95, I had to *force* myself to use it for about 2 weeks.

Windows 3.x was a "shell," that ran overtop of DOS; not an operating system. Therefore, you still had DOS support, and you didn't have the "fragmentation grenade" experience like you did starting with Win32/Win9x.

DOS was nice - it took you about five minutes to shuffle things about when you needed to. You went to the directory for the programme, and all of its pieces were in there (vice Windoze.)

I have never run a new version of Windows "when it first came out" - Win95 I started with in 1997, Win98SE was in late 1999, Win2K was ~2002, and WinXP was about three months ago. Enough time for M$ to get all the kinks out, issue the first few service packs, and for me to get a useful number of reports from the field.

Will I run Vista? Maybe I'll be dragged into it, kicking and screaming. I'd like to see more software support happen for *nix tho - *nix doesn't break anywhere near as often as Windoze (neither did DOS, come to think on it...)

I keep hearing about how "extensively tested" the new M$O$ is, but I also keep seeing "Service Packs" and Gawd only knows how many "Hotfix Updates" for everything - so what were they testing? The interface by Fisher-Price?

I don't want flash, I don't want chrome, and I don't want a cartoonish interface. I don't need to be protected from the inner workings of my OS - tell me how it works, instead. I just want a system that bloody works - how I need it to, when I need it to, and without loading me down with extraneous crapola. Is that so much to ask?

The last M$ operating system I liked was MS-DOS 6.2. Everything else has been used "under protest" - simply because M$ stops supporting old versions of bloody everything shortly after the new version is released. That's why I've got archived operating systems - going back to about MS-DOS 5.0...

Not that I'm a Luddite - but the saying of "Newer isn't always better" definitely applies here.

 

[97CountryXJ]

Which is a bit of the point. Why insist on selling a machine with an OS that it can't handle, and make absolutely no effort to support an OS that the machine will handle.

Personally, I HATE software that does everything for you, because it always does it wrong. When a software tries to mask everything it is doing, and gives you three warnings every time you try to open a program that wasn't written by the same parent company, and buries all of the simple ways to fix everything under four gellatin colored windows I think it sucks, no matter how good it may have the potential to be,

The people in control keep trying to dumb down the interface so that the end user has less and less understanding of what he's using to the point where he starts to say "I Don't care as long as it works." Which is fine until one day it doesn't.

Ditto goodburbon, I agree totally with you.

Microsoft has a lot of work to do in order to get Vista 100%. Just like the marshmallow fluff registry of Win ME. POS!!!
It's all about keeping the hardware companies stock rotating every few years. Remember the processor wars five or so years back? Now the big king $hit is to have a 64bit system. I have one, it does the same thing as my other computers but faster.
MS drivers will be current with hardware companies that "subscribe" to MS's thought process of product absolesence.
Another five years from now, I will have to get another whole new system and install (fighting and screaming, like now) a whole new operating system that does everything for me automatically, and poorly at that. Then comparing prices for video cards, sound cards and other stuff. Wow, shocking.
What I think that pisses most people off (including myself) is that I spend good money on a rig, set it up right, why cant I just gradually upgrade in steps. Oh sorry, that is Linux kernal and Mac. I have a 20 year old dot matrix printer that still works, 100%
Here is something that puts it all into perspective.

Its not just MS, but who has the next best thing.

If it works, don't mess with it!!!

 

[Daedalus454]

Perhaps you misread my post, I was not talking about switching from "Windows 3.1" to Windows 95, as evidenced later on by my reference to "Win31/DOS." DOS was a great OS, it did it's job just fine, but personally I'm really glad I have a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS to do my daily work tasks on. In the DOS days, their idea of "multi-tasking" was giving you a "shell to DOS" option on a drop-down menu.

Granted you don't need to use Vista to have a PMT OS. I was merely using that as an illustration that just because something "works" doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

 

[mikedashg]

Yeah, I heard about all the hardware conflicts with Vista and it's a big hog so you need big hardware. :badpc:

Wouldn't it be great if there was a company out there that made the operating system AND the hardware so you knew it worked together. And even the computers from 6 years ago still ran the latest OS that just came out a month ago, even on 512MB of ram.

oh wait

 

[cracker]

It keeps it simple that way Mike.

But it is even more amazing that an operating system is designed to run on an infinite amount of hardware possibilites too. (not necessarily better though)

 

[5-90]

Here is something that puts it all into perspective.

Its not just MS, but who has the next best thing.

If it works, don't mess with it!!!

Yeah, I remember those. I remember home computers with storage on audio tape. I also remember the old "washing machine" hard drive units with the "cake box" storage units. And, for a while, I was even able to read paper tape on sight (not quickly, but I understood the punch patterns. Gawd, that was a while ago...)

Daedalus - I think I understand where you were going. My main thrust was just "New" isn't always "Improved." Yes, it's nice having a multitasking OS - and it does beat DOS in that regard. However, DOS didn't break, and you didn't expect much of it. Windows2000 is everything WindowsNT and Windows9x should have been but wasn't - and don't even get me started on WinME...

Windows Registry? Probably wouldn't need to be anywhere near as massive if M$ et al didn't subscribe to the "fragmentation grenade" model of software writing. And, just because the cost per Mb/Gb for fixed storage has come down by several orders of magnitude, that doesn't mean that I want to clog it all with operating system - I'd like to have room for data and applications as well...

Gawd, Tandy and trash-80. And CoCo. And C64/C128/Amiga. And Atari XL/Mega. And TS-1000. You're making me feel old, you putz...

 

[jeeperjohn]

I installed identical software on 12 identical new vista laptops at work and 3 of them needed to be reloaded to run the software without errors.

 

[Daedalus454]

5-90 - Windows 2000 Pro was, in my estimation, the epitome of the Windows desktop OS. I used it for MANY years and my only complaint was the lack of hardware support from certain vendors. And don't get me started on the Amiga. My first PC was an Amiga 1000 with 2x 3.5" floppies and the 512k RAM upgrade. One of the niftiest machines of it's time.

 

[5-90]

5-90 - Windows 2000 Pro was, in my estimation, the epitome of the Windows desktop OS. I used it for MANY years and my only complaint was the lack of hardware support from certain vendors. And don't get me started on the Amiga. My first PC was an Amiga 1000 with 2x 3.5" floppies and the 512k RAM upgrade. One of the niftiest machines of it's time.

I shan't argue either. I've had my share of 8-bit machines, and I was running Win2K (ThinkPad T20 and ThinkPad T30) before I "had" to go "up" to XP with this T40. It was just about the latest model they had "Certified Used" without having to go to bloody Vista...

My 800XL (Atari) eventually had a total of four 5.25" FDD, as well as the audiocassette drive I mentioned (this was when 15-minute audiocassettes were still easy to find. Easier to store things on, and find them later.) I also had a C64 with two 5.25" FDDs and an audiocassette drive at the same time - dot matrix printers for both, and - gasp! - 300 BAUD MODEMS for each! This wasn't counting the machines that wound up on my other desk/workbench - I was always fixing something for someone else... I probably still have service manuals for just about every popular 8-bit machine made in storage in Indiana - Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Coleco, T/S, ...

Those old 8-bit machines ran a lot like DOS on early PCs - you couldn't bloody crash the things (at least, nowhere near as easily as Windoze!) and they did what you told them to do, when you told them to do it, and they didn't do any thinking on their own. I miss that...

Yeah, you pretty much had to shut them down to swap programmes - but they booted in a few seconds - probably faster than most programmes load under Windoze anyhow. At least you knew you were starting with a clean slate every time.

Programming them was easy - all ran a form of early BASIC at some level, so porting was simple (some of them mapped memory a little differently - as long as you had the manuals for both, you could translate.) Hell, half of your programmes were on cartridges for Gawd's sake! Hard-coded into silicon, and not stored as ordered magnetic patterns (just try wiping out a cart without running it over with a truck, squashing it in a vice, or smaking it several times with a hammer!)

"Double sided" disks? Easy enough - just make another notch in the other side of the thing, and flip it over. Et viola! - your 180Kb disk just became a 360Kb disk!

Direct access to system hardware? Just about all of your calls involved direct access, since the OS wasn't "smart" enough to hide anything. Now, you have to install a code package to give programmes direct access to hardware (DirectX for Windoze.)

It's too bad XP came around while 2K was still in support and circulation - because that was the effective demise of 2K. XP isn't really an "improvement" to me - and I damn sure don't like the UI.

Give me a dual-boot with DOS and Win2K, and I'd call it "acceptable". Three-boot with a version of *nix as well (Redhat or Ubuntu, I think) and we're getting somewhere. As I said - I don't want "flash and trash" - I want "simple and unbreakable." If I wanted a "bleeding edge" computer, I'd build one myself. I don't - never have.

 

[Rawbrown]

5-90 - Windows 2000 Pro was, in my estimation, the epitome of the Windows desktop OS. I used it for MANY years and my only complaint was the lack of hardware support from certain vendors. And don't get me started on the Amiga. My first PC was an Amiga 1000 with 2x 3.5" floppies and the 512k RAM upgrade. One of the niftiest machines of it's time.

I had one of those for years. man those were some fun games.

 

[mikedashg]

I got one too

lighting-fast 20 MHz, for the low low low price for eght and a half G's (monitor and mouse not included)

 

[97CountryXJ]

Thats sweet!! Back in 89, you could get a decent car for $8500.

 

[mikedashg]

Thats sweet!! Back in 89, you could get a decent car for $8500.

You still can in my book. Never paid that much for a car. Not even half of that.

 

[97CountryXJ]

You still can in my book. Never paid that much for a car. Not even half of that.

OK, decent new car in 89. Either way, Vista still sucks!