A Gloomy Vista for Microsoft

I have been using Vista since it was in RC stages. Thats a little more than 2 years now. Vista has never crashed for me. It has, if anything, worked splendidly well. It did require a few tweaks here and there, like turning off the User Account Control and the Firewall at times, but the fact to understand is that the OS is supposed to be used by about 90% of the PC Users. Microsoft has to provide features and benefits of everyone. New security features may seem nonesense to an advanced user, but what about a dummy who knows nothing more than the big E Icon (internet Explorer)? Vista does make things a lot more safer. And if you have the knowledge and are confident of yourself, go ahead and disable those features and and gain on performance...

My name is Fred Richards and I've been a computer and technology hobbyist for about the last twenty years or so. As a young teen, I taught myself the basics of binary and hexadecimal and machine language, to learn how computers "think". I've focused much of my career on studying society and how they interact with computers, as well as networking on large networks such as the internet. I currently work for a Cisco Gold Partner as a Sr Network Engineer for our customers in an entire portion of the country. I've built dozens of computers from scratch, and helped with other countless issues for friends, family and customers. I hold several certifications.

Microsoft's marketing angle has always been to relieve anxiety associated with computer use. Let's also lose the term "computer literate". I personally like "computer-savvy" or even better "tech-savvy". Most of society right now is more tech-savvy than the products Microsoft has to offer. Over the years, the bar has been raised ever so slowly. People aren't falling for the hand-holding anymore. They see it as control. Why do you need to shovel money to Microsoft to use a computer? You don't. People are understanding that there are options, and they 're good ones. Although Macs are Unix-based (quite similar to OpenBSD) they just work and are very easy to use. I think the trend you will see is more people adopting Unix and Linux based operating systems because they just work, and work well. I'm typing this on a dual core 64bit Linux machine which I built myself for very little money, which by the way, virtualizes both Windows Vista and XP whenever I need a specific program I may not have access to within Linux.

I have a Gateway laptop with XP loaded on it sinceAugust 2006 the only problem I am having now after 2 years is on my media edition will not play movies keeps telling me i have codec errors so i use windows media player no problem there PLEASE NO VISTA HERE TO MANY PROBLEMS if you have any ideas to fix my media center player send it to rayjay7628@msn.com THANK YOU RAY JOHNSON

@ Daniel Lyons
"He flipped open the laptop, pressed the power button, and ??? nothing. We waited. And waited"

Um...I have gone through that exact sequence more times than I care to remember on my bosses mac book pro. It has little to nothing to do with the OS. I don't care if someone spends 10K on a laptop, it doesn't make it any better than a $400 per say. They still use the same underlying components and battery technology.

so Daniel Lyons, why do you spread hate? Sure vista is not perfect, but I deal with an equal number of the same issues in OS X, printer problems, kernel panics, networking hiccups, over reliance on the boot drive for EVERYTHING [pagefile] (I know this can be changed but not by a normal or even mildly advanced user), useless (untested) updates trying to be pushed out that are itunes related but also affect QT

Vista out of the box is not great, how could it be when it has to appeal to 90% of the worlds users on thousands of different hardware configurations. I bought tweakvista and it works great for quickly configuring your machine for the task at hand

If I got pulled into a "Mojave experiment" ad, in which Vista was run under carefully controlled conditions guaranteeing it would boot properly and run right, I'd probably be impressed with it, too, but in the real world "Mojave" (Vista) is bloated and buggy.

I have a high end Vista gaming rig (I use a Mac for everything else) and am thinking of putting XP on it because of the crap associated with Vista. Vista will start doing stuff all by itself (default settings) while I am trying to play a game and my game will start stuttering because of all the resources Vista is hogging. It crashes about the same amount as XP ever did too. Not to mention all the built in DRM and having to click yes to everything I do.

"He flipped open the laptop, pressed the power button, and ??? nothing. We waited. And waited. It was excruciating. He tried control-alt-delete. He tried holding down the power button. Finally he removed the battery and snapped it back into place. The machine started up???slowly???while the CEO sat there fuming."

Please read the above sequence of events and the following PC startup sequence

1. Power button is pressed
2. PC motherboard receives power and some lights come on to indicate powered status
3. Motherboard allows BIOS (not designed by MS) software to find a device (such as hard drive) with operating system software (such as Vista).
4. Operating system (such as Vista) takes over the startup process.

In your description of the sequence of events the motherboard never received power and located the Vista software to take over the process. I think the CEO was "fumming" over poor hardware design quality within his own business.

Before you challenge my "hidden motives." Let me explain that I have no affiliation with MS. I am a mechanical engineer (not IT) employed by a petrochemical equipment supplier.

I have been using Vista on a Dell laptop for a year now and I am extremely impressed with its automatic driver / security / operating system / update, convenient change roll back, fast ready boost, predictive / optimized sped up software loading during boot-up, restore point and legacy software identification / compatibility support.

Before you get creative in your rebuttal, I don't even own MS stock! I have disliked them as a business since the IE anti-monopoly legal action days. But, Vista is working fine ... I can't sit back and accept lies about that.

"He flipped open the laptop, pressed the power button, and ??? nothing. We waited. And waited. It was excruciating. He tried control-alt-delete. He tried holding down the power button. Finally he removed the battery and snapped it back into place. The machine started up???slowly???while the CEO sat there fuming."

Please read the above sequence of events and the following PC startup sequence

1. Power button is pressed
2. PC motherboard receives power and some lights come on to indicate powered status
3. Motherboard allows BIOS (not designed by MS) software to find a device (such as hard drive) with operating system software (such as Vista).
4. Operating system (such as Vista) takes over the startup process.

In your description of the sequence of events the motherboard never received power and located the Vista software to take over the process. I think the CEO was "fumming" over poor hardware design quality within his own business.

Before you challenge my "hidden motives." Let me explain that I have no affiliation with MS. I am a mechanical engineer (not IT) employed by a petrochemical equipment supplier in Houston, Texas.

I have been using Vista on a Dell laptop for a year now and I am extremely impressed with its automatic driver / security / operating system / update, convenient change roll back, fast ready boost, predictive / optimized sped up software loading during boot-up, restore point and legacy software identification / compatibility support.

Before you get creative in your rebuttal, I don't even own MS stock! I have disliked them as a business since the IE anti-monopoly legal action days. But, Vista is working fine ... I can't sit back and accept lies about that.

I have a divided experience with Vista. On the one hand I Vista Home Premium a laptop (Compaq) I bought a year ago. I runs fine. I even use a hardware intensive game (World of Warcraft) and have had no significant problems. On other hand I have desktop generic computer that is over four years old. I installed Vista Home Basic about a year ago and immediately had problems. MS's patches have helped but the PC still doesn't run right. However, I only have the minimum amount of recommended RAM (500 MB) installed and use the original graphics card (hardwired on the board) - I do wonder if I upgraded RAM to the max the board could handle and the card if my problems would vanish. I'll have to wait and find out some time. But I do wonder whether most if the issues are being caused by a need to upgrade hard or the whole PC. I am no MS fan myself - I use open scource software as much as possible, but I am forced to admit that somethings I want to do require MS (I'd like to see somebody try to run WOW on Linux using WINE - I'd bet only a super-geek could get that going - only after weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of tweaking).

I am still upset about vista not being able to run my old HP printer. Under XP, the HP software allowed a complete scan and digitizing of documents to either convert them in PDF or in MSWords and, as well, a proper maintenance of the printer function. Vista Home Premium does not allow this. You must use the scanning software developed for Vista and it is a real mess. In addition talk about stealing i.e. blocking an HP perfectly working software and offering a real piece of sh??? as an alternative.

I wonder how many of these nay-sayers actually run Vista. It runs just fine on my PC. Starts up in 10-15 seconds. And I don't have a lightweight set of background programs. I'm lazy and run about 50 background services for development purposes that I really shouldn't, but hey, my PC seems to handle it fine with Vista. Nor is my PC some kind of super computer; Its about 6 months old and I bought components that were sub-state of the art to save money. Its just "current". It catches viruses that my supposed virus scanner doesn't. It has a very pretty UI (if that matters, as it seems to Mac users), automates my hijacking of other people's unsecured WAPs (probably foolish Mac users themselves) along with a plethora of other niceties. Things that, I could agree, should have been there years ago, are now there. If anything, that was justification enough for me to buy Vista.

Think I'm a Microsoft totey? I write, compile and debug C++ applications with Eclipse + CDT + MinGW GCC with GDB just fine on Vista (an all Open Source config because I do not want MS licensing in any form on my programs). I use Google Chrome, just fine. My games, run just the way they should. I even upgraded straight from XP without a "fresh install". Could it be that these people need to upgrade that antiquated box of transistors they call a PC? I think so.

I used to loathe MS, still do really, but if you want to run the latest games you got to have a Windows OS. I was wary of Vista at first, but they did a fairly good job on it. Of course, I was intelligent enough to wait for the first service pack to go out and buy it and make my final decision. Any complex system (dual use there) is going to have problems at first. Especially one designed to support a broad range of hardware vice a targeted throw-away platform (ie, Macs) like OSX or w/e. Need those new device drivers as well. I am assuming MacOS runs perfect all the time because of all these bombshells thrown at MS from Mac users. And Linux... its a nice idea, but I digress to my need for mainstream applications like games.


And BTW, if you want to run DirectX 10 games, you'll need Vista. There is, and never will be, DX10 for XP. Developers, thus far, have been kind enough to support DX9 with reduced "shiney" for now. No telling how long that will last.

I wonder how many of these nay-sayers actually run Vista. It runs just fine on my PC. Starts up in 10-15 seconds. And I don't have a lightweight set of background programs. I'm lazy and run about 50 background services for development purposes that I really shouldn't, but hey, my PC seems to handle it fine with Vista. Nor is my PC some kind of super computer; Its about 6 months old and I bought components that were sub-state of the art to save money. Its just "current". It catches viruses that my supposed virus scanner doesn't. It has a very pretty UI (if that matters, as it seems to Mac users), automates my hijacking of other people's unsecured WAPs (probably foolish Mac users themselves) along with a plethora of other niceties. Things that, I could agree, should have been there years ago, are now there. If anything, that was justification enough for me to buy Vista.

Think I'm a Microsoft totey? I write, compile and debug C++ applications with Eclipse + CDT + MinGW GCC with GDB just fine on Vista (an all Open Source config because I do not want MS licensing in any form on my programs). I use Google Chrome, just fine. My games, run just the way they should. I even upgraded straight from XP without a "fresh install". Could it be that these people need to upgrade that antiquated box of transistors they call a PC? I think so.

I used to loathe MS, still do really, but if you want to run the latest games you got to have a Windows OS. I was wary of Vista at first, but they did a fairly good job on it. Of course, I was intelligent enough to wait for the first service pack to go out and buy it and make my final decision. Any complex system (dual use there) is going to have problems at first. Especially one designed to support a broad range of hardware vice a targeted throw-away platform (ie, Macs) like OSX or w/e. Need those new device drivers as well. I am assuming MacOS runs perfect all the time because of all these bombshells thrown at MS from Mac users. And Linux... its a nice idea, but I digress to my need for mainstream applications like games.


And BTW, if you want to run DirectX 10 games, you'll need Vista. There is, and never will be, DX10 for XP. Developers, thus far, have been kind enough to support DX9 with reduced "shiney" for now. No telling how long that will last.

DON"T YOU THINK ITS ABOUT TIME THAT GIANTS LIKE MICROSOFT STEP ASIDE AND GIVE THE SMALLER GUYS A CHANCE TO SHOW THEIR PRODUCTS, IT WOULD CERTAINLY CREATE MORE INNOVATIVE THINKING AND PERHAPS IT TIME FOR OUR GIANT MR GATES TO REALIZE THAT TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS NOT GOOD, TO BE HONEST I CANT IMAGINE A WORLD WITH ONLY CHOICE BUT WINDOWS THERE SHOULD BE MORE