Well as an open source guy here is my "brand perception" of MS:

Microsoft is a criminal organization that has maintained a consistent pattern of unlawful activity throughout its entire corporate existence.

Leopard, spots etc comes to mind...

...is futile.

Vista runs JUST fine if you have a machine built right. I've been running Vista for nearly a year, and I've had far fewer problems with it than I had with Windows XP during its first 3 years. Do you know why? Because I built my machine properly.

How long was 512 memory considered a standard level with 256 being still available? The answer is TOO LONG. Processors increased in power ten-fold, memory performance increased several times, yet the amount of memory OEMs are willing to package with their systems remained largely the same. If you followed the technology curve between 1996-2002, a gigabyte of RAM should have been the standard around 2004, and they should have been transitioning to 2 gigabytes right about then. Guess what? These scam artists were still under-equipping their systems with memory, choking off the processor and gutting the performance.

Then there's these jackass hardware vendors who won't support their own hardware. Nvidia didn't release a single driver from December 2007 to June 2008, and the December 2007 driver was grossly unstable. Statistically, Nvidia drivers alone were responsible for 25% of Vista crashes. The ONLY semi-stable Vista driver before June was the October driver. You see it time and time again, hardware vendors refusing to support their product and screwing YOU, the consumer.

There's no secret to the system I built. 2 gigabytes of memory isn't that expensive. A semi-decent video card isn't expensive either. But these jackasses are screwing you left and right. Nvidia should have had stable drivers along with the other hardware vendors, and the OEMs should have put more RAM in their systems. It's hard to blame Microsoft when vendors decided to stagnate and screw you. Fact is, Vista works. Vista is stable. Vista is fast. If you want to blame someone, blame Dell, HP, or whoever built your PC. They screwed you, not Microsoft. Put blame where blame is due, and don't go, "Oh, my system runs like crap with Vista! It's got the same memory in it the system I bought 5 years ago had!"

I’m sorry, but for anybody to stand there with a straight face and say Microsoft failed to deliver on Vista because they didn’t market enough, either they are hallucinating from some really good drugs, they have no concept of reality or they’re clinically insane. In some instances, Vista is OK (at best) but it’s certainly nothing to write home about, and when it behaves badly it really leads one to question who is actually in control of the computer? Microsoft is actually capable of doing some amazing things, given the number of bodies of fallen industry giants they’ve stepped over to get to the “top”. However, Microsoft does nothing innovative or revolutionary; at best maybe average… But to say Vista was just misunderstood; are they all on crack?

THANK YOU!

I finally see an intelligent comment on this.

Vista's not a dog. It runs just as fast as XP, as long as you give it twice the CPU and about four times the RAM.

Not that I'm complaining. Hardy Heron runs just fine on all those 'old' machines that people keep giving me 'cos they aren't good enough for Vista, and unlike XP I know I'll still have security updates for at least the next 2 and a half years.

"Microsoft has a perception problem not a problem as an innovator."

MS has never been an innovator but that has never been a problem. They see Vista in a different way to everyone else. Who has the perception problem?

"... they [open source community] will be a bit perplexed when they see the best way to run what they do is on our infrastructure"

I would be outright astonished. I do not have any Vista capable machines. My last upgrade cycle reduced power consumption and noise because the hardware was already fast enough. A bunch of cunning adverts is not going to slim Vista down to the point where it leaves sufficient resource available for my software. MS are promising Windows 7 will Vista with a new name (delayed until there are a significant number of existing machines that are really Vista Capable). MS could be waiting a while as people are looking harder and power consumption. Do I see Vista for Atoms?

There are a couple of easy ways MS can get my software to run well on Window 8. They can choose between MS-BSD, or the Colour-Rectangles-Waving-Flag-Linux distribution. MS can support their users' legacy apps with XP-for-virtual-machines (unless they go for Samba+Wine ;-).

'Ozzie, inventor of the hated Lotus Notes and now driving Microsoft's "software plus services" strategy...'

Says it all. I'm sure there are still some kool-aid drinking Notes admins who still love the thing... but email system should not equal application platform (MS tried promoting that route in Ex2K, and thank god it's mostly died off - get a proper DMS/intranet/Sharepoint if you must).

You said: "Fact is, Vista works. Vista is stable. Vista is fast. If you want to blame someone, blame Dell, HP, or whoever built your PC. They screwed you, not Microsoft"

Yeah, how do you compare how fast the thing is (Vista)? You run it on the same computer were you run the old one (XP). And it is slow.

Maybe you think that the software speed is relative, I mean run XP on a average 2001 computer, it is fast. Run Vista on the average computer of 2007, it is fast. But I like it to compare on the same hardware. It is slower.

Look at the Leopard. MacOSX will be faster *on the same hardware*

Look at Linux. It has the same speed on the same hardware, just more features every year. Heck, I even run full desktop effects (see Compiz) on the cheapest laptop bought in 2003, with 3% CPU usage. This is the meaning of fast.

Get the facts! ;)

Resistence is futile. ...Surrender your kernel!

Microsoft - an Alien in Open Source.

But for me its not that Vista is unstable, its that it gives me nothing over XP, except window edges I can see through. I still just want to do a bit of web, a bit of email, play a game or two, and type a letter or two. I don't need two gigs to do any of that ( unless I really feel the need to look through the edge of my window or be constantly asked if I'm sure I want a program to run). Vista is very expensive, requires a huge hardware upgrade to work anything like the previous version, and gives no improvements I actually need or want.

What? no XP available?

...maybe Microsoft screw Dell, HP or whoever build our PC's?

also, didn't those "nasty" drivers passed WHQL...?

/ I'll leave now :)

"What I've signed up to do is take this show on the road and make the public understand these technologies aren't born full grown."

He's right. At Microsoft, they are born half-baked.

And 'Mike' - blaming everyone else just doesn't work. It's not the fault of Nvidia, or stupid users, or OEMs or hardware vendors. It Microsoft's fault. If you want to build a fast machine and have it slowed down to XP speeds by running Vista, which is what you appear to be saying, go ahead. At least 'scam artists' and 'jackasses' are not screwing you - you are screwing yourself.

Ubuntu Linux runs JUST fine if you have a machine built right.

I've been running Ubuntu Linux for nearly a year, and I've had far fewer problems

with it than I had with Windows XP during its first 3 years.

Do you know why? Because I built my machine properly.

....blah... 2GB... blah... jackass vendor... blah.. MS screwing you the consumer.

There's no secret to the system I built. 2 gigabytes of memory isn't that expensive.

A semi-decent video card isn't expensive either. But these jackasses are screwing you left and right. Nvidia should have had stable open source drivers along with the other hardware vendors, and the OEMs should have put more RAM in their systems. It's hard to blame Canonical when vendors decided to stagnate and screw you. Fact is, Ubuntu works. Ubuntu is stable. Ubuntu is fast. Ubuntu is FREE (as free beer and freedom). If you want to blame someone, blame Dell, HP, or whoever built you PC for not providing a free alternative to MS shite,

They screwed you, along with Microsoft. Put blame where blame is due, and

just go, "Oh, my system runs wonderful with Ubuntu! Even though it's got the same

memory as the system I bought 5 years ago had!"

Ok i can understand that bigger better and more powerful is...progress (comma key broken again) but I prefer progress to be greater efficiency.

Yes you have a built machine...yes you are right about drivers....but i'd still prefer to see an operating system that rather than exponentially increasing its hardware demands for very little extra benefit is programmed more efficiently so even if you throw more hardware at it the resources are left for YOU to use doing what YOU need to...and not just keeping the OS ticking over.

Im not saying i want something that runs on 256Kb of ram and a 486....but Vista is just not all that efficient given the resources it requires and how much it uses just keeping itself alive.

... I want some. But he can keep his software ;-)

Gosh they must have some good drugs at Redmond then.

Talk about rose tinted glasses.

Undoubtedly I'll get called an MS Fanboy, but I have no problems with Vista.

I've always built my own machines to high specs as I play a games that need a lot of power, and use video editing software that needs RAM and CPU time.

I got Vista when it was first released, and installed it on 1 of my machines. I'll admit that the total lack of drivers from hardware and software manufacturers was criminal. But how much of that is Microsoft's fault? The 3rd party developers new that Vista had been coming along for a long time. Did MS fail to hand out specs to these people?

I've only had a couple of crashes since release, and traced them back to video-driver issues (So nothing new there then).

But the average person on the street shouldn't have to build their own machine just to run Vista.. I bought a cheap laptop recently as I needed one in a hurry when I went on holiday as I didn't want to risk any of my 'proper' laptops. I ordered and Xp laptop, and they supplied a Vista-home model instead.

Lets be clear: Vista Home is a piece of crap. It is nearly as bad as Windows ME. And the laptop is not up to the job, with its single core CPU and 1GB of RAM.

If the general public are installing Vista on pieces of rubbish like this, then they are going to have problems.

Yes, Vista Ultimate is bloated, and uses too many resources. But it is also secure (when you set it up right), and very very stable. But again, the average user isn't going to do these things and is going to have a bad experience.

People seem to have very short memories. All these comments and problems were said when XP was released as well. People were complaining that it was crap compared to Win 98. Now once Vista arrives, XP is suddenly the greatest product on Earth.

I'm not going to say "I've had less problems with Vista than I did with XP" because it isn't true. I never had any problems with XP either. Or 98, or 95, or 3.11, or 2000. That is because I know how to take care of my machines. So while other people are getting trojans and virusii, and getting phished seven ways from Sunday, I don't have problems.

But for the average Joe on the street? Forgeddaboudit.

That would be true only if you ignore bloat. Meanwhile in reality, you see the OpenSource OS's and even OS X get leaner and better performing with each release, while Windows does the reverse. It SHOULD be about the users - the majority of people want something that is simple to use, quick, lets them run the programs they use most -and- looks good. Does it require a 3Gb install to do that? Microsofts insistence on support "old" applications is their major downfall I think - there *are* some nice ideas in Vista, but it's all choked up with compatibility issues and so many layers of technology the average person doesn't need to know about, nor will ever care about. That's why Windows requires such high-spec machines. This is why the Leopard can run perfectly smoothly on a relatively low-spec laptop. Apple don't care so much about backwards support. Now this is not always a good thing either (forcing all your users to update their software), but I really think Windows would benefit from a reset. Throw away everything; launch a sleek, small new OS with no backwards compatibility and a UI that doesn't require game-running video cards just to draw a desktop. Personally I don't think there should be a Windows 7 - there should be something else entirely.

"We have two problems," Ozzie patiently explained. "[First] A number of internal properties we've been selling as enterprise servers and wanted to create a service infrastructure usable by our search assets and the online assets, and [second] that our server business customers have SLA requirements that are substantial,"

Read: "First, our software is crappy and unreliable, and second, every sensible IT guy around knows that." That sounds like serious problems to me. Nothing that a couple more grands in the bribing department can't fix though. After all, people just have to "build the right computer" to run our OS... wait, maybe some people have perfectly good kit that they don't want to discard. Maybe these people will find out that there are OSes that can run on 5-years-old machines, and still offer more functionalities than we ever dreamt of. Sodd it, we'll just have our chief engineer saying we're the bestests, that wil be sorted.

Well, it worked with at least one (1) fanboi. Who, unsurprisingly, focussed on self-made desktop kit while the MS PR stunt highlighted in the article was mainly directed at servers. Go figure...

Penguin because it's the closest match for DragonFly.

Thanks, for this story it'll make me smile all day long. I wonder though, I know I'm bored by Microsoft, having sat through sales and marketing presentations over the past few years driven by enthusiastic Microsofties who love their company and think their products are great, and coming away thinking, well how does this really help my business, my customers business and my life, because mostly it just doesn't.

I wonder how many other people are just getting bored of the Brand.

And thanks Mike for your rant, that made me laugh as well.

Why should you have to run twice as fast just to stand still? Why does a new OS require the computer to have so much memory, CPU power etc?

OS X ran fine and did everything graphically that Vista copied (badly) on much lower powered hardware.

Ditto for Linux

Thank you for supporting Microsoft at this difficult time. Nice to find a customer who understands. There's nothing wrong with Vista; the problem is the computers people actually own and buy. There's nothing wrong with the Vista video DRM architecture; the problem is our hardware partners deliberately put bugs in their drivers to make us look bad.

It's better, it's faster, it's all good and it runs on 64 bits processors. But, if you want to take advantage of it, you'll have to buy a brand new top-of-the line computer. Which will then run only slightly slower than your 10-yo kit running our previous crippled OS. And said previous OS on your new kit would litterally fly, but don't you dare and try it. Our new stuff is 64-bits, so it's better. OK, it's sluggish like hell and you need four times the amount of RAM to perform the same task, but hey, it's 64 bits. It's progress, kiddz! Some 64-bits OSes have been around for ages, but they are Open Source, which is bad. They might be fast and reliable, but that's irrelevant: they are not from MS, and we at MS are the best, so just upgrade your hardware, bend over and say thank you.

So, you're saying that the problem is hardware vendors for not supplying more memory, not Microsoft's fault for building a bloated OS that required far more overhead than any OS should demand?

Wrong. Vista is failing because most people don't need the extra features, and once you've stripped those out there's very little difference between Vista and XP - not enough to justify the extortionate price anyway. I used Vista for a couple of weeks before giving up, because it was incapable of copying a file across a network in less than 24 hours. This was fixed with SP1, but even then it's only truly workable with the search caching and security caching turned off. Apart from the neat Start button, it has nothing to offer over and above XP.

It's possible to dislike Vista for reasons other than speed and stability. It runs fine on my PC as well (dual core CPU, 2GB RAM), However, it's a pigging ugly and annoying OS to use. I don't want to go into display properties and get a big window with a paragraph of text explaining what "screensaver" and "wallpaper" are amongst all the settings. That's ugly, messy and completely pointless for anyone other than an absolute novice user. I want the simple one-window tabbed view that you get with XP that's quick to navigate around and doesn't involve multiple windows.

That's just one example of course, but I dislike Vista not because of speed or stability, but because it looks messy - albeit polished. XP is the opposite. It looks clean but dated and I'm afraid I'll take that over messy polish any day.

MacOS 10.5 manages with 512M, it's perhaps not as quick as it is on machine with 1G but it manages perfectly well. That said, most Apples these days come with 1M. And there's Linux as well, the latest versions also manage to do Vista-like eye candy in 512M. So does Vista do that means it needs 2G?

"These scam artists were still under-equipping their systems with memory, choking off the processor and gutting the performance."

Er, no. Perhaps the correct conclusion is that Vista's a bloated piece of crap and Microsoft understated the minimum requirements to OEMs (see various Register stores). You can be sure that those machines taking part in that marketing weren't kitted out with a memory, hard drive, and processor spec that were considered normal on home machines until Vista came along.

you know. i was thinking of a reply, but then i saw a sign that said "dont feed the troll."

So i put my sandwiches back in my bag and walked away.

Er Gavin? When exactly did Microsoft carry the baton for innovation? Uless you where referring to innovation in interpreting business law.

And Mike. I have been using XP for a years on various different hardware and it works fine. I guess I chose the hardware well. but the point about Vista is not does it work but does it work well enough to justify the money required to set it. The cost and extra hardware might be cheap to some people but can you make a convincing case for me to spend the money on upgrading my stuff and buying Vista instead of keeping what I've got, which does everything I need, and spending the money something more important like strip clubs and Jack Daniels?

Article reads: "Microsoft's normally bombastic marketing has begun blaming Windows Vista's poor uptake on the modesty of its own message"

Perhaps we should plagiarise the statement about some poor politico many years ago to read: "A modest message - with much to be modest about".

I love the way Microsoft has been pulling the wool over punters' eyes for years.

They release a new, more convoluted O/S then, when things start going pear shaped they always come back with the reply "Oh, things will be better on release of the first, second, third etc service pack." And yet they still get people to pay for this sort of scam.

No wonder people are moving over to Apple and Gnu/Linux where things just work. I hear some people saying "Linux ?" Yes, that's right, most distros these days with the exception of Gentoo and its ilk just load and run. Having just retired from supporting Microsoft's product I certainly do not miss the scrabbling around looking for drivers, loading on anti malware, waiting for patches etc. Needless to say I run Gnu/Linux.

Smiley because billg and his appalling messes kept me in a well paid job for years cleaning up after him.

I'd say that the *retarded* aspect was to "design" an operating system (ha!) that was so bloated and so demanding that it needs top end kit just to start, and even worse to deliberately exclude third-party developers thus ensuring that there were far too many application incompatibilities.

but I hear what you say about OEMs ripping us off - just remember that M$ are hand-in-glove with thse OEMs and together the lot of them conned the world that Vista was some great leap forward and... it wasn't.

I think the point you are missing (and this has been made before) is that there is no net benefit from adding the extra hardware to 'allow' Vista to run right. You don't get anything (functionality, stability, security, user experience) substantially better than XP. So, it always comes back to the question, why bother?

Let the flame wars begin!

:) "Vista is fast". Have you been sleep typing again?

I myself have used Microsoft products from DOS to Vista (missing ME out) & built a system using top-notch hardware (with 2GB RAM) specifically for Vista. It runs... well... adequately, but on more than 1 occassion I've been tempted to go back to XP Pro which I know would run at a blistering speed & improve my productivity tenfold.

Therefore, I've got to disagree with your vendors statement. From my point of view they're not the problem... Microsoft are clearly at fault in my eyes. And how many years did they spend developing this product?

Vista's a touch on the lardy side for my liking... really can't understand why it needs to be so bloaty either. Even Microsoft seem to be struggling to comprehend their own code judging from the update fiascos we've had over this past year.

Why must I buy a machine with 2GB of RAM and a fancy graphics card just to run an Operating System ?

If I just want to do some word processing, spreadsheet, browsing, and maybe a bit of photo editing, why do I need such a high-end computer ?

Until Vista came along, we all had far more computing horsepower than we needed. Now Vista is here, we don't have anywhere near enough. This smacks of either sloppy/bad programming, or bloatware. Sites such as http://www.win2008workstation.com/ seem to suggest it's bloatware.

Paris - cause no-one could accuse her of having any bloat

Mike says vista is fine I have a brand new machine 2 gig mem latest Intal chip vista is still slow (running ultimate)

Drops off line for no reason. when on wireless wont let me move certain music files compared to XP slow cumbersome and crap compared to Ubunto even slower more cumberson and more crap.

I have excellent performance on this here 5 year old system with only 512 megabytes of RAM & 2.6GHz processor... however, I'm NOT running Vista... or even XP... I'm running Ubuntu...

Interesting point by Mike. Apparently its not MS fault, its the fact that hardware manufacturers did not meet MS system demands. This is a little bit like putting the cart before the horse.

The fact is, why can't I run vista on 256 MB, 1 GHz processor especially if I am only going to browse the internet etc. Vista is like a all you can eat banquet when all you want is a quick sandwich. Or to paraphase Terry Prachett, if asked customers would tell you they want a 20 course banquet, when in fact all they really want is a plate of sausage and chips with perhaps a tomatoe on the side

It goes to show the lack of MS foresight. They blindly assumed we would continue to want faster and faster machines and they could be lazy with the vista hardware spec. Fact is I would say most people hardware requirements were met about 2 or 3 years ago(I am not talking about hard-core gamers here, just the 95% of other people) and unless a killer app comes along that increases that requirement why shouls they change.As such Vista overshot the mark. Why buy a new PC just to run vista when your present hardware does everything you need and more.

The other market trend is for simpler devices such as netbooks, that does not offer all bells and whistles but does enough functionality in a cheap package. The fact that MS has had to desperately ressurrect windows XP for this market just goes to show how prescient MS really is.

One thing I hope to see in Windows 7 is a truly modular OS, like linux etc that instead of telling people what they require actually meets peoples requirements

"If you followed the technology curve between 1996-2002, a gigabyte of RAM should have been the standard around 2004, and they should have been transitioning to 2 gigabytes right about then."

This, and your other remarks, are all very true but I think it is missing the point. *Why* should operating systems have followed the "technology curve"?

Over the period 1980-1995, the "OS" had gone from a thin wrapper over the BIOS to a full UNIX-style OS with security, device abstraction, multi-threading and memory protection. Over the period 1995-2010, the only significant change is the inclusion of a full network stack (or two, if you run IPv6).

Now, it is true that what people use machines for has changed significantly, and video-editing is rather more demanding than maintaining a stock control database. However, that's *applications* and for those who aren't running them the cost shouldn't matter. It *is* fair to compare (say) NT4 with Vista for the common case of just sitting there surfing the (modern day) web. I think you'll find that NT4 wipes the floor with Vista on the same hardware. *That's* what folks are complaining about, the *irreducible* bloat in recent versions of Windows.

Moore's Law is very nice, but let's not lose sight of the fact that our toys exist to do a job, and if the job hasn't become any harder then it *is* reasonable to assume that the cost shouldn't have gone up either. Too many people in the IT industry seem to take bloat as a given. People outside IT don't understand that. It's not true in any other walk of life.

Please stop astro-turfing - it's boring.

Users are fed up with

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

MS - it's HP/Dell' fault

HP/Dell - it's MS's fault

ad infinitum...

If MS was any good why don't THEY produce a PC. Cos they know the support costs would bust them that's why.

So how come my girlfriend's dual core 2gb vaio pre-installed with vista runs as if it only had 256gb of Ram? Whenever I have to do anything with it - ie try and remind it that we do have an internet connection etc... it takes such a long time to open a window I usually leave the room and put the kettle on.

She is begging me to upgrade it to Win XP - fortunately sony have just released XP dirvers for her particular model so it won't be an issue shortly.

What's your point? You've got a big system?

Why don't you address the issue of what advantages there are in upgrading from a previous version of windows? Note the upgrading qualifier, purchases of new machines have no choice. Don't tell us how wonderful you find vista, that's useless, tell us why we should upgrade.

Mike you shouldn't need 2-4Gb of ram to run an operating system at a decent speed, I don't care how times have moved on and technology has changed, that just takes the piss. I've go a dencent pc, built with 2007 components but when i started using vista it dragged itself around like a 2 legged dog. It never crashed but it took months to finally work out that I had to turn off all Vista's new functions to get it up to speed. That's the problem, you need a level of technical know-how to turn off all these features to get the thing running, and most users don't have that. It was built by geeks for geeks.

I'm afraid you've got a point but Vista still crashes and runs slow on higher spec machines. I built three recently, all with 2GB and had speed/stability problems. Problems that didn't exist with XP.

I'm aware that there's a small group of people like you who have had good experiences but one swallow doesn't a summer make!

Now some of my users are starting to ask why they need so much memory when their son/daughter has got Linux working on an old machine at home. It's becoming difficult to give a convincing reply........

Mike, that's all very well - but what does Vista offer people that's genuinely useful across the board and a compelling reason to upgrade from XP or remain MS-friendly rather than switching to the likes of RHEL? I've had it at home on a system that I made sure could run it competently, and while it's stable enough and functions alright, there's nothing there to make me *want* to switch. Sure, application compatibility may eventually force me to switch over permanently, but that's hardly a selling point. The only genuinely good things I've seen about it are UAC and the integrated support for graphics tablets.

Yes, I agree that bitching about an OS while running it on sub-spec hardware is a bit silly. But on the other hand MS have released an OS that basically won't talk to any hardware more than 18 months old, without telling anyone why they should upgrade to it. The admin team at my workplace use XP computers to connect to a Citrix server, browse the web and run Office. Vista gives them no advantages, so we're not moving them onto it. The same goes for most of the Windows users in the entire department, to be honest.

Now, if Vista would run on hardware up to 3 years old, then I'd be thinking about it. But since rolling out Vista across the board would require updating the hardware for at least half the department *with no significant advantages*, it can wait a while longer...

QFT, Vista runs just fine on my rig as well (and that's running dual Nvidia GPU's on an Nvidia chipset), obviously tho it must all be down to luck!!!

The answer - there is no problem.

There's an old saying that people hate change. They really do. Upgrading the OS on your machine is a pain, and people won't go through that pain unless it offers the solution to a problem.

Vista does not offer a compelling solution to problems that most users have, and most users have no real problem with Windows XP anyway. Therefore, no uptake except in new machines.

What's worse is that more people are realising that their machines don't need upgrading. You don't need a quad core 3GHz Intel with 2GB of RAM and a graphics card with the electricity consumption of a small country, just to browse facebook, order the week's shopping from Tesco online, and watch kittens on YouTube.

Unless, of course, you use Vista, because you need that much grunt just to boot it.

(No upgrades, no problem, so no icon.)

I thought that comment was going to turn out to many similar posts about Vista being 'OK for me', but you had a decent point tacked on the end.

The sellers who are building crappy specced, bloatware infested computers are just as much to blame, as are the poor driver writers (glad Nvidia was mentioned, my card is still pretty gimped compared to all the features it had in XP).

Put it this way: would that Mac be running quite as smoothly if Dell had pre-installed their junk on it before you got it?

In your analysis you seems to forget one point: people want to run applications, not operating systems! Do a browser, a word processor, a music or video player really require much more than 512 Mb if ram right know? I don't think so.

The role of an operating system is to manage hardware resources and make them available to the applications that the user want to run. An OS that requires 1 Gb of ram to run a web browser that only require 250 Mb of ram to run properly is failing to do what it should. Improvement of hardware can lead to two things: more powerful computers OR cheaper and lighter computers, clearly consumers are now choosing the second option. I remember it was not long ago that my computer's RAM cost me around 100€, a significant part of the computer cost. Now I would not accept to pay more than 50€ for ram or even 20€ for an entry level machine.

A function of an OS is also to make hardware accessible. Changing the driver model so that older drivers won't work with the new version of the OS and making the new driver model so difficult to work with that it requires a major investment to develop drivers is counter productive. when the general buy a piece of hardware (scanner, printer, soundcard) they get a driver on a disk. If they buy a new computer the expect to just have to put that disk in and have the OS manage with it. If the OS don't because it can't work with the old driver and the OS manufacturer didn't include a compatible driver, it's the OS failing. Microsoft deciding to change the driver model and then expecting manufacturers and users to pick up the cost of the change in driver development or non functioning material is just crazy: MS wants to force changes in the driver model, then it's MS responsibility build a new driver for every piece of legacy hardware out there. If your bank decide to change their ATM system and you require a new bank card they will ensure you get a compatible card for free and in time or there will be outrage amongst the customers, why would it be different in the OS world.

I’ve been running Vista continuously since November 2006 on my Dell laptop, and the only irritation has been that I upgraded to Vista without uninstalling all the Dell crapware.. for months I got compatibility dialogs for software I couldn’t uninstall.

In a year and a half, I’ve rebooted (as opposed to sleep or hibernate) twice.. once to remove Dell crapware loaded as device drivers, and the other to install SP1. That’s pretty good availability for a development machine.

It is not churlish to say that XP’s quality has damaged Vista uptake.. with eight years of patching it is mature and stable. Vista’s problem is that it is late, early and irrelevant:

• Late because 2003 was the year to launch this operating system.

• Early because the next big upgrade is 64-bit and the end of memory swap-files.

• Irrelevant because Aero does not address any mass problems, but the Windows licensing makes PC’s expensive to administer

I don't think PC vendors are to blame if the operating system this year doesn't require any more memory than the operating system last year, meaning that they can stick with the same amount of memory and either sell for cheaper or put something more expensive elsewhere. If you draw a chart of PC prices between 1996-2002 and follow the curve then you'll probably find that general market prices have dropped more quickly than ever before, especially in real terms.

Re: "The whole of [Microsoft] is better than the perception", it couldn't possibly be worse. They may face a perception problem in that people are reluctant to use their technology if it is reasonable to avoid it because they view the whole enterprise as an extortion scam, but that doesn't mean that better PR is the answer. Acting more responsibly and showing humility in technological decisions would be a good start.

Mostly, hardware vendors did have perfectly acceptable drivers.

Mostly, those stable drivers were for Windows XP.

Mostly, users and vendors would have been quite happy with Windows XP, especially if (as you seem to argue) Vista seems to need twice as much memory.

Only MS and its MS-dependent partners cared about Vista selling in volume (and selling the extra hardware it needs).

Mostly, folks who don't remember the Windows ME disaster don't see Vista as a problem.

Mostly, anyone except a pillock (or an MS manager) could see that Vista has the problems ME had (eg no drivers), but far far worse, and with no visible and realistic fallback strategy yet.

What are the advantages to me of Vista? The ability to buy more RAM?

I have a working OS - why would I need another?

I think MS have been fooled by their past success into thinking that there's a massive market for another OS. I don't think there is.

Simple as that really. If the OS you have suits your needs, why change?

I've gotten the newest version of Ubuntu to run on my 10 or so year old computer without it being horrendously slow. (As in, it's faster than Win95 or Win98 or whatever was on it before.) The thing couldn't even handle XP, let alone Vista. Food for thought.

If MS is worried about having its OS being given a bad name by lazy hardware manufacturers, perhaps they should go the Apple route and only let Windows be on their own hardware. Then companies like Dell and HP will end up selling only Linux.

At the bottom of the c-net article...

"People feel guilty (about Vista). It's wrong."

Yep - it's wrong OK, so sure you people feel guilty...

..oh that's not what you meant? Shame.

So which hardware OEM do we blame for the infamous 'Long Goodbye' bug then? When people with 4gig of RAM, quad-core processors and TechNet subscriptions can't get simple file operations like copy or delete to work reliably, one has to suspect that perhaps the world is not as simple as you like to make out.

Bill and his golden ring, since I think that's what you are kissing

In that you need the right hardware/drivers to run it successfully...

I've been developing using MS products for over 10 years, and their primary problem is an inability to provide consistent, fully functional software of the level expected for the price you're stumping up.

It's got a lot better - back in the NT4 days, installing something like Commerce Server was a game of Service Pack Roulette, at least that's pretty much out of the way now.

But when you've shelled out for Visual Studio 2008 only to discover it's XAML support is broken at the build/deploy stage (you have to delete the bin and obj folders along with several files for it to work) or when you try running a .NET app you're working on from inside VS2008, you have to go and rename a temporary file for it to work due to piss-poor file garbage collection, you start feeling no small amount of anger.

MS perpetually screw up - they make something useful and powerful, and then proceed to hamstring it, then hope marketing will somehow fix that. They really are the Sirius Cybernetic Company made real.

> I'm not going to say "I've had less problems with Vista than I did with XP" because it isn't true.

No, you're not going to say it because it's grammatically wrong. If I'm correct about what you really weren't going to say, it should be: "I've had fewer problems with Vista than I did with XP".

Problems are discrete units, i.e. they can be counted. Hence, "fewer". If you meant that, generically, the collection of problems that you experienced, as a subset of the set of all possible problems, was less significant or challenging than a differing collection of problems, then you could say: "I've had lesser problems with Vista than I did with XP". But I don't think that the latter phrase represents the concept that you wanted to communicate to Register readers.

Language is a tool that we use to impart meaning to others, leading to understanding. It can be ambiguous or even meaningless if not used correctly. So, use it correctly.

Grammar Nazi

Feel like a rant.....

What does Vista do differently to XP (or any other OS) that requires all this ram just to do the fundamentals that an operating is expected to do without being outpaced by a snail? Or is Vista actually behind the times and every other OS out there on the market demanding 2GB or more as well? I'd be very surprised if that was the case. How long before you will need 20GB of Ram just to have a 'pretty' desktop just sitting there chewing through ram while it thinks about doing what you asked it to do - or are we already there with Vista? Yes, a 'pretty' desktop can be nice to look at (novelty factor) but when it gets in the way of getting work done, what's the point?

Why do faster processors never mean a faster computer when the new and 'improved' OS comes along? Could you imagine the car industry following this model...

Buy a new BMW, at its next service, the man at the garage offers to 'upgrade' the computer management software for £xxx, it's what BMW recommends is in your car, it makes its look more 'pretty' and comes with a load of things you never knew you wanted. End result, yes the screens look more pretty, but your car comes to a spluttering halt every time you change screens or attempt to use the sat nav. Back to the man at the garage to complain - sorry mate, need to buy a new engine/magic beans to make it work faster, but for a few quid more you could get a new car....

What I am saying is that the main purpose of the car is to get you from A-B, if it comes with 1000 other functions but can't do the fundamental ones well would you buy it? No - so why is it OK for operating systems (and software in general)?

Nonsensical rant ends.....

2 - 3 years ago?? more like 7 - 10 years ago (assuming you're talking about someone who just wants to email, look at pictures, web browse, word process etc.) BBC iPlayer is probably the most demanding thing a light user would try and that is pretty good on a 700MHz P3 (watchable on a 500) Youtube works fine on my 10 year old Mac.

(Paris - do I need to say why? ;) )

o id love to sit here and justify how windows is cool and what not... sad thing is... ITS NOT! its like when people go out to do something and someone says the Simpsons did it first. It is just the same in the linux/unix/microsoft world too! the funny thing about all the eye candy is that linux did it first WAY before windows did... with ALOT less power. i ran that eye candy under linux with a old 800 mhz processor no problem! sure open source isent for everyone but it sure beats the heck out of closed source software.

Why do I need such a big system?

I have a 586 with 64MB of ram that works quite nicely. Damn Small Linux only takes up 24MB of RAM when it runs!!

Internet works fine (and safely), email no probs, OpenOffice for the documents, terminal to connect to 8-core 3GHz machines in the racks...

Finally Microsoft admit that its over, finally!

Why are people defending Vista? you cant even run group policies on it, no business can use it!!!!!

HHEELLOOOOO!

Typical, bloody typical!!!

Excuse after excuse. Buy more memory, buy a faster processor, buy a bigger hard drive. Purchase more expensive hardware to perform the same task it's predecessor did on a quarter of the specification.

Hello people, wake up!!!

Public perception is not the problem. The fact that Vista stinks worse than dead corpse decomposing in the middle of a heatwave is. This was not exactly Microsoft's finest hour and no amount of spin and bull is going to help.

What do you mean 'throw more resources at it'? The usual refrain ad nauseum up until Windows 7 appears on the scene then the cycle starts again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And for the record, yes I bought Vista, yes all my hardware and software is supported, yes it is fully patched with the latest drivers. Also yes to following the various tweak guides available on the internet including Microsoft's own.

Why should I be surprised? I never thought any OS on a clean install could bring a quad-core with eight gigs of ram to it's knees 'till I saw Vista in action.

Paris? A more desirable icon than messrs Gates or Ballmer.

The problem with Vista isn’t that it’s buggy and unstable. All MS OS are buggy and unstable when they are first released. They mature.

The problem with Vista isn’t that it’s a hardware hog. All MS OS are hardware hogs when they are first released. Hardware gets faster.

The problem with Vista isn’t that compatible software and drivers aren’t available. The same thing happened with XP when it was first released.

The problem with Vista isn’t that it’s over-hyped by MS. They over-hype everything. People learn not to believe them.

The fundamental problem with Vista is that it just isn’t a sufficient improvement over XP for anyone to make an effort upgrading to it. After eight years of patches and bug exorcisms, XP is the closest thing to a perfect OS (I said the CLOSEST thing) MS has ever produced. Why change? What does the average home (or even corporate) user actually gain?

Why buy a new computer just to run Vista when <<insert Linux distro of choice here>> will run on hardware that is 5 years old? Think of the environmental damage caused by forcing users to buy new hardware just so they can run the latest operating system with see-through (tm) window technology!

This is the angle the Linux supporters need to take to win the public over away from Vista... Being green is *the* big thing to be at the moment and people will do almost anything/pay any tax to get there. I hereby dub this effect as the 'nice warm green feeling'.

You simply wont convince the Microsoft fans that Linux is better just because it is 'faster', 'more stable', 'less expensive', 'more innovative', 'more secure' etc. These reasons are simply not good enough for them to move away from a product they have used for the past 10 years and love.... Remember, these are the same morons who buy a new car every year but still feel they are 'helping the environment' because it produces 0.1% less emissions etc. they also equate the cost of a product with quality, so the more expensive something is the better it is, anything that is free is s**t.

Please find more emotive and less relevant reasons to convince these muppets to switch, they're so used to being fell bulls**t by Microsoft that this is all they can now digest. They are so accustomed to being raped from behind (and paying for it) that they have actually come to enjoy it (see Stockholm syndrome). These folks probably think its quite amusing that 'those cheeky chaps' at Microsoft took the time out from fixing bugs in Microsoft Word to install a hidden pinball game. Who gives a crap about code bloat when massive hard drives are so cheap? If it's full, just buy another one like you would with memory/video card/processor etc.

Anyway, if you can somehow suggest that as well as being 'green' Linux can also stop 'Islamic Terrorism' and 'Increase House Prices' then you are sorted! Microsoft are genius with their marketing and it sucks the fools in every time. We all know that Vista is a steaming pile of crap but Linux supporters need to be just as creative as Microsoft in their 'marketing', having a massively superior product just isn't good enough.

sheesh another "Vista is great and has no problems if you have the right hardware" thread. Fact is MS'es marketing backfired this time. A history of crap OS'es meant that the new version was in fact better than the old. Then Win2K came along and after 6 (or maybe that should be 7) service packs it got to be pretty good. XP came along...was a bit buggy (surprise) but again, a couple of service packs and driver updates later and and it got to be OK too. Then...Vista...well MS said you gotta get the WOW factor...a lot of people religiously went for it 'cos MS said so...not knowing really why they were doing it. But uh oh, no-one was going "WOW". Even after Vista SP1 a lot of people find it slow and want to go back to XP. Not surprising when the average punter just wants to surf the web, read email and mess around with their digital photos without having to upgrade their hardware.

This year I ran a lab in which I was able to observe XP, Vista and GNU/Linux running on a variety of hardware:

1)Vista sucked on AMD64 X2 5000 with 2 gB RAM

2)XP was OK on P4 with 512 MB

3)GNU/Linux on thin clients with 64 MB was the best.

I should explain the last item. I ran 24 users on thin clients from an old XEON server with 2.4 gHz clock and 2 gB RAM, 80 MB per user on the server and 64 MB on the client=144 MB and 100 MHz per user on the system. This means Vista is many times less efficient than GNU/Linux. Vista may be designed to maximize profits for M$ and Intel but it sucks bigtime for the customer/user.

A recent server by KACE found that 11% of IT professionals were in the process of switching from M$ this year, more next year and a bunch after that. In two years the M$ monopoly will be down the drain, thanks to Vista and M$'s contempt for users. M$ could fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but they cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

M$ should invest its billions re-inventing itself and not the OS. If they do not they will be a dinosaur within five years. Once the monopoly is broken, they will have to compete on price/performance and Vista-like OS will not make the cut. It's time to change to a UNIX-like OS be it MacOS, openSolaris, FreeBSD, or GNU/Linux. I recommend GNU/Linux because it has been doing the job for ten years or more, has fantastic (and still improving) device support, is modular and configurable, and is lean when you need it to run on anything built in the last ten years or more.

In 2006, I built a complete IT system for a school using GNU/Linux. They were able to afford twice as many seats plus toys for the price of a system running M$. M$ makes no sense to anyone who cares about price/performance and who is not locked in. Emerging markets are not locked-in and M$ will be irrelevant soon. Get used to it, Mike.

It just doesn't really offer anything compelling to bother changing. If you're buying a new PC or OS then Vista is a fine choice, but if you're already running XP, there's no real need to upgrade.

"In a year and a half, I’ve rebooted (as opposed to sleep or hibernate) twice"

So you haven't installed any security updates other than SP1, good luck with that one!

10.5 runs like a absolute pig on 512 and only a little better on 1 gig. By all means enjoy your OS but enough of the BS.

"So how come my girlfriend's dual core 2gb vaio pre-installed with vista runs as if it only had 256gb of Ram?"

Laptop + pre-installed OS = a metric shitload of crappy OEM utilities.

I've used XP on my 2-year-old machine, and I've used Vista, and vista performs better for a user perspective, imo. I'm quite sure intensive benchmarking may show it is worse for certain classes of intense number crunching, but what I want from my computer is for the UI to respond fast. Vista does this*. It's also more stable, has a better security model (even if you don't _use_ UAC the fact of its existence will force companies to write software properly), and a lot more intuitive. I wonder how much of the perception of bloat in vista is due to people misunderstanding memory metrics...

*So does gnu-linux-ubuntu-KDE, but I don't have to grovel in text files to get 3d-accelerated desktop with multiple monitors in vista.

Bored, Bored, Bored come on it's getting silly now.

We have all had a drink, let's all go home and call it a night!

Are Mike and Stef, who both built their own high-end systems (according to their posts) in order to ensure the hardware was able to handle Vista.

Which is great for them, but not for the less proficient user who buys an off-the-shelf desktop from PC World brand new, and doesn't know/care how to upgrade it and change all the settings to make it more efficient, which is the primary home market.

From a more technical-user side, you can call me a luddite if you like - XP & Ubuntu work well for what I require, and I have no compulsion to spend the money on extra kit, and the time putting it together, just to get frustrated at the lousy file manipulation and endless succession of dialogs that get in my way, no matter how "pretty" it is, and no matter how much MS tell me that I only think it's shite because of their poor marketing.

By Pierre: "Well, it worked with at least one (1) fanboi. Who, unsurprisingly, focussed on self-made desktop kit while the MS PR stunt highlighted in the article was mainly directed at servers. Go figure..."

Congratulations on not bothering to actually read what I said. I clearly stated that Joe Public shouldn't have to be building super power machines just to use an OS that is supposed to run household systems. You "unsurprisingly, focussed" on one aspect of my post to support your arguement. "Go figure..."

So I am a MS fanboy for not having problems with Vista and saying MS need to get their act together. Go figure.

By Anonymous Coward

"> I'm not going to say "I've had less problems with Vista than I did with XP" because it isn't true.

No, you're not going to say it because it's grammatically wrong. If I'm correct about what you really weren't going to say, it should be: "I've had fewer problems with Vista than I did with XP".

Problems are discrete units, i.e. they can be counted. Hence, "fewer". If you meant that, generically, the collection of problems that you experienced, as a subset of the set of all possible problems, was less significant or challenging than a differing collection of problems, then you could say: "I've had lesser problems with Vista than I did with XP". But I don't think that the latter phrase represents the concept that you wanted to communicate to Register readers.

Language is a tool that we use to impart meaning to others, leading to understanding. It can be ambiguous or even meaningless if not used correctly. So, use it correctly.

Grammar Nazi

"

My God, I'll bet you are fun at parties. Picking apart people's grammar on internet forums really is scraping the bottom of the barrel. At least you spelled 'grammar' correctly which is more than most grammar Nazis manage.

I put that part of my text in quotes to indicate that it was the number 1 thing that Vista fanboys say when supporting Vista. I CLEARLY TYPED THAT I WASN'T GOING TO SAY THAT, you even quoted it. So it is not my grammar you are correcting you small minded. Feel free to rip apart the grammar in this posting too. I am sure it will make you feel vastly superior as you polish you Buffy or Xena figurines (Or whatever figurines it is you guys polish these days).

To suggest that perfect grammar is required in a format such is this is beyond ludicrous. But as you did suggest it, I'll return the favour in kind:

1) You've used several contractions which you really shouldn't in such a formal posting. It does not help our foreign readers either. As you said "Language is a tool that we use to impart meaning to others, leading to understanding. It can be ambiguous or even meaningless if not used correctly."

2) Your use of "i.e." should really have a comma after it. I realise this rule has faded somewhat in recent years, but as you said: "use it correctly."

I realise those are very minor points, but as you seem to expect perfection on a blog perhaps you could take more care? Next you'll be claiming that online petitions actually mean something.

Penguin, because I've finally got this box to dual boot Linux/XP

"...the laptop is not up to the job, with its single core CPU and 1GB of RAM.

If the general public are installing Vista on pieces of rubbish like this, then they are going to have problems."

You're getting it the wrong way round - the OS is meant to run the hardware, not vice-versa. (Remember, it's an Operating System, not an Operated System.)

So if Vista can't operate most people's hardware then it's no good for them, is it? I know that computer technology marches onwards and upwards, but Vista requires a Great Leap Forward in terms of power and cost which most people aren't prepared to pay.

Microsoft fumbled - they wanted people to buy Vista but XP running on an old PC with 512meg of RAM does everything most people want. Why pay good money for no obvious benefit?

Vista is the wrong OS for your laptop, obviously, but MS offer no suitable OS for sale. If Microsoft is wanting to sell a niche OS for high-end gear then that's their choice, but I don't think that was their plan.

"If the OS you have suits your needs, why change?"

Indeed.

For a couple of work machines, I needed to. For one of my home machines I needed to. For the rest, why change when XP works just fine?

(Of course, the MS pricing strategy of "Buy Vista now or any subsequent OS from us will cost you 50 times more" is clearly open to criticism.)

My namebrand laptop was sold with Vista installed and with decently large specs - dual core 2.0Ghz w. 4 GB memory and 256 MB or dedicated video memory. Vista is slower than the dual bootable Ubuntu w. Compiz effects enabled. Boot time is slower, trivial graphics are jerky to the point where I have turned off several effects under Vista trying to boost performance.

So my next system is going to be home built - basic box for email and web access for my dear old auntie. Modern atom based, mini-ITX mobo with 2.5" HD (or maybe flash) aiming for an idle state power consumption < 4W so she doesn't have to worry about how to turn it on and off. I worried all the clutter and confusion and issues of Vista would freak her out. (un)Fortunately Vista won't run worth a damn on these spec's and I will be forced (relieved) to install the Ubuntu MID edition which has an uber-clean UI delivering only what the old bird will understand without all sorts of unnecessary panic inducing crap.

Ironic isn't it that I can buy new yet a horrendously underpowered (for VIsta) mobo from Intel in this day and age. Stupid Intel, don't they know to kowtow to MS. Or maybe the times they are a changing...

"But the average person on the street shouldn't have to build their own machine just to run Vista.. ...Lets be clear: Vista Home is a piece of crap."

I've also had a specially built and tweaked Vista machine running sweetly. But it took just as much work to get into that state as Linux desktops were taking 5 years ago.

We now have a strange situation where "consumer" Linuxes like Ubuntu "just work" on most everyday machines, and the flagship Microsoft OS needs TLC for it to be usable.

I'd be interested to know whether anyone has bought an OEM machine (Dell, HP, whatever) where Vista runs wonderfully "out of the box" and hasn't needed any tweaking. If not, Microsoft is in really serious trouble.

"Those leading Microsoft labs and its software architecture are blaming poor communications for the fact the company is now widely disregarded as a force for innovation."

When are they going to figure it out: you can have your marketers claim that you're an innovator until they're blue in the face, but that doesn't make it true.

You have to innovate to be seen as an innovator. Microsoft have a pretty poor track record there, and they're being judged on their actions.

BASIC on microprocessors: nice idea, well executed, but they weren't the first to do it.

DOS: they bought that one (QDOS - not the Sinclair one, the CP/M cloned "Quick and Dirty Operating System") when they realized there was no hope in hell of delivering it in-house in time.

Windows: Beaten to the consumer GUI by Mac OS, AmigaOS, GEM, and probably some other more obscure ones too. Oh, and of course Xerox, the grandaddy of the GUI. Spun it out of their work on OS/2 after stabbing IBM in the back and pulling out of their partnership.

Windows CE: beaten to it by Psion and others. Pretty lame effort even then.

Office: A reliable workhorse for sure, but nothing new.

The Internet: "it'll never matter". *BZZZT*. Sorry, that was the *wrong* answer.

Web browsers: Late to the party, again, but got to #1 by throwing lots of developers at it and bundling it into their monopoly OS. Then they let it stagnate horribly for several years before Firefox came along and shook them out of their stupor.

Exchange server: a reinvented wheel, designed only to fit Outlook clients.

Product lock-in: The big iron boys were doing that when Bill was still in elementary school.

Internet search: Late again, resulting in being third place in a one horse race. Throwing furniture around isn't going to change that. Google really innovated to get their number one position from a standing start. Imagine what Microsoft could have achieved from their established position, if only they KNEW how to innovate!

Whining about people pirating their software: OK, this was a new concept back in the day. Way to go guys! :)

Xbox: Hey, these guys who sell consoles are making a killing! Why don't we do that?

Sync: Hmm. Maybe? At the very least they might have been first to market with something new for once. They could probably make a comfortable living just doing this for FoMoCo. There's hope for the old dog yet I suppose. :)

Notes/Domino is still the best document management platform there is

Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.

Sure the client may be a pita at times, but the flexability and capabilities of a Notes Application far outweigh anything you could do with sharepoint or any open source offering.

Email is a fucking joke, anyone still relying on it for internal communication should be shot.

As for all the vista vs xp stuff, I think vista got a load of shit because they changed so much of the UI when the didn't need to. That plus the "OMG ITS USING SO MUCH RAM!!!!" complaints from users too stupid to undestand caching are probably what caused its downfall. Theres nothing wrong with it and it ran fine when I used it on my old workstation. I had a pos 64MB vid card too. Our parent company nixed my vista use because they're security nazis, or i'd be using it right now.

Vistas failure comes down to 3 things:

1. Morons who do shit like disable superfetch BECAUSE IT EATS SO MUCH RAM OH MY FUCKING GOD!!! and then post about it on their blogs.

2. Morons who take the blogosphere as gospel

3. Its not much of an improvement over xp/2k3 (both of which are excellent).

oh, and lol at all the lunix on the desktop guys. You're always good for a laugh. "I DONT NEED SOFTWARE I HAVE TEH WEB!"

@Mike

I've got to join the chorus. I'm on XP SP3 and have yet to hear a single argument for moving to Vista. I've got the processing power and the memory on the machine, but don't see the rational in devoting all those resources to the operating system when I don't have to. I'll be with XP for a long time and after that I think me and M$ will be parting company Ubuntu gets nicer each time I look at it.

I've also recently moved over to open office. It's excellent, and gives me everything that I need in an office package. It's much easier to install and update because it's free. Once the public and small businesses catch on to this the only people who'll be buying office will be businesses with workflow systems built around M$. For everyone else there is no argument for spending money on an inferior product. I think M$ are screwed and the death of Vista is the beginning of the end.

Paris, because like Microsoft she's rapidly approaching he "best before" date.

You need to chill a bit mate, I was referring to Mike's comment, which was the first and only fanboi's one at the time I typed mine.

"oh, and lol at all the lunix on the desktop guys. You're always good for a laugh. "I DONT NEED SOFTWARE I HAVE TEH WEB!"

Care to explain that one????? (yes, a link to your blog where you presumably explain it in great lenght would do).

"... they [open source community] will be a bit perplexed when they see the best way to run what they do is on our infrastructure"

Actually, when that happens, I'll be more than a bit perplexed.

I mean, don't get me wrong: My hardware consists of an 1.3GHz Mac with 512M RAM and an 800MHz Via Eden with 256M RAM running Linux. Microsoft, on the other hand, has thousands of servers far beefier. Of course it would be faster for me to run my stuff on their infrastructure.

However, my problem is that he's saying it's the 'best' way, and, as I understand it, breaking into Microsoft and installing my Linux image on one of their servers has *got* to be illegal. At least, in my book, being illegal makes it right out for being the 'best' way.

Oh, wait. Sorry. Wrong frame of mind. Yeah, with Microsoft's attitudes to legal compliance, I'm sure they'd think that the best way for me to get my work done would be to install my stuff on their boxes on the sly.

Nice try, Microsoft, but I'm not going there.

"Laptop + pre-installed OS = a metric shitload of crappy OEM utilities.

I've used XP on my 2-year-old machine, and I've used Vista, and vista performs better for a user perspective, imo. I'm quite sure intensive benchmarking may show it is worse for certain classes of intense number crunching, but what I want from my computer is for the UI to respond fast. Vista does this*"

Sorry but I already removed all of the OEM bollocks and shut down a bunch of unecessary processes - it is still slower than the old desktop she had with XP on it. I also have machines with Linux (Mandriva + Ubuntu) and old XP pro + XP 64 ( on 4gb quad core beastie) obviously the quad runs mega fast, but the 2gb dual core vista machine shouldn't be slower than the 1gb AMD 6800 with xp pro on it - straight out of the box or post tweaking. This is why vista is smelly pooh.

I have however sucessfully trained my 68yr old Mum in using mandriva and it runs great on her 5 year old machine and I haven't had a support call for months.

People are not buying bigger, better, faster, anymore. People are buying slimmer, cheaper, lighter. This is a paradigm shift that Microsoft simply haven't clocked, yet. Vista is great ... but it requires beastly amounts of CPU and memory - and people aren't prepared to pay for this anymore.

The idea of running Vista is as appealing as the idea of running a Hummer with today's cost of petrol. Nobody in their right mind buys a 2GB+ system for Vista, when a 5-year old computer will run XP just fine (and probably faster than the newer system running Vista).

The bottom line is this: XP has been out for 6 years now, and will run most software just fine on even a budget PC that's 3-4 years old now. Most people with such systems will be looking at Vista and thinking "What's the point?"

You may be right that the latest drivers are not up to scratch. The question then is this: Why aren't manufacturers pulling their digits out to get up to speed? Afterall, MS and the OEMs have been in cahoots for decades forcing users to go through perpetual upgrade cycles. Both parties made a lot of money at the expense of users.

Maybe the OEMs have wised-up that Vista is one OS too far and thus won't invest money in driver upgrades. Maybe users realise this too and refuse to shell out money every few years for the latest system that doesn't deliver extra functionality or performance. Either way I think this cosy cartel is coming to an end.

What I'd actually like to see is MS going it alone in the future by developing performant OSs that don't require new or upgraded hardware. Just buy whatever new OS they release and install it on your old hardware. That would bring a smile to OEM faces, not.

and at the risk of shooting at my feet:

i installed Vista on my ASUS UMPC (R2H? don't remember..).

(900 Mhz, 1G Ram, 40G harddrive)

it (and Microsoft Origami) seem to work and play well together.

of course, now when i go home tonight, it will be flopping around on the floor with smoke coming out of it...

And yet another plea to the unhearing...

Can't we all just get along?

Isn't everyone tired yet of:

Less filling!!!

Tastes great!!!

Well my system..

Oh Yeah!

Yeah!

Well, my dad can beat up your dad!

Reggy reported only recently that a couple of the OEMs were selling their PCs as a new package (one called it "Vista bonus" or "Vista advantage" or something) - the bonus of the package is they automatically use the downgrade license, and simply sell you an XP PC.

MS still get to flag it as a Vista sale, though.

If MS was any good why don't THEY produce a PC. Cos they know the support costs would bust them that's why..

Blink, did you hit your head or some thing. IF MS made computers they would be hit with anti trust law suits faster then people here can say F vista

"IF MS made computers they would be hit with anti trust law suits faster then people here can say F vista"

Which would be fast indeed. But that's not true. All the big iron guys have been doing that for ages, not to mention Apple. MS have problems -less than they desserve IMVHO- because they use less-than-glorious techniques to force their OSes on *external* companies' hardware. If they did that on their own kits, I bet no-one would have anything to object. But when the infamous Zune is your flagship piece of hardware, you don't want to get anywhere near conceiving real machines.

While I'm at it, about the drivers. Last time I checked, the OS was meant to keep your hardware spinning, not the other way round. So writing drivers _should_ be the OS vendor's job. Now I reckon that it would be easier if hardware makers didn't feel like they had to design the most complicated interface they can. And if they released their protocols. Still, I'm using various *NIX-like OSes (a couple different GNU-Linuxes, a couple BSDs. PLus BlueBottle, but that hardly counts) and most of my drivers are kindly provided by my OSes' "vendors". Not by the hardware maker. So if a couple of freetards with no money can do it, I don't really see why the gazillionaire corp that is MS can't.

I am still trying to work out why the girl over in accounting needs a computer with a 3D graphics card and 2 Gigs of RAM to run Excel.

"trying to work out why the girl over in accounting needs a computer with a 3D graphics card and 2 Gigs of RAM to run Excel."

Because Bill and his mates (the PC vendors, the IT-department PC-jockeys and their managing empire-builders in the CIO's office) say so?

There is no clearly need for it, and definitely no business justification for it.

Fortunately for Bill (for now), those in the CIOs offices largely can't admit it to their bosses that Vista is pointless, because if they did admit they'd been led up the garden path and wasted millions of dollars (and a small fortune in staff-hours) on unnecessary software, hardware, training, services, etc, they'd look a bit daft, wouldn't they.

Whereas the ones who are admitting Vista is a dead end, and in particular those who are putting together a Vista-independent business plan with demonstrable financial savings and other business benefits, will be the ones getting bonuses in due course.

'Course if the CEO susses all this before the CIO spots the CEO coming with the tricky questions about return on investment in Vista, and that CEO kind of thing, that's when the interesting conversations happen, *that*'s what MS and their fanbois need to be afraid of.

Fact: if you want to buy a Dell with XP, you still can (eg on the "Customise and Buy" page for Optiplex). Dell can even get away with charging an extra £27 for XP instead of Vista. That wouldn't be happening if there wasn't sufficient demand for it.

Wake up fanbois, you better learn to understand your leaders' weak spots, and start thinking about your very own salary preservation plan, because the opposition are in the house (hell, Redmond are their own worst opposition!).

Let me explain a little bit about how processors and memory work together. Newer, faster processors are capable of feeding more memory in a given time period, and require more and faster memory in order to run at their full performance. A 64-bit processor can also address twice the memory in a single operation as an equivalent 32-bit processor.

So, what do we actually have here? We have a situation where OEMs should have been increasing their memory to match their CPUs, but they did not. Even with XP, it's going to be choking the performance; it's a simple matter of mismatched hardware. It may seem blazing fast, but you're not taking full advantage of your processor. With multiple cores, we are also reaching the stage where having more than 4 gigabytes of memory can be beneficial in some rare instances, but in order to do this you need a 64-bit OS. A 64-bit OS on a 64-bit processor, what a novel idea? XP only lets you use 50% of your processor, and is only capable of addressing half as much memory per operation as your processor is capable of.

Vista will run just fine on 1 gig of RAM as long as you're using Office products or very low-level gaming. It will run very nicely with no noticeable speed decrease, unlike XP where running with marginal memory results in massive performance degradation. For gaming, you should have 2 gigs. You may choose to go above 2 gigs, although I have yet to encounter a program that would benefit from it. I'm sure some games such as Crysis might, although nothing I use does.

As for the interface, well, that's personal preference. Yes, it's different. I find it to be more efficient to use, however, much like how Windows 2000 was more efficient than Windows 98. I consider myself a power user, though, and use all aspects of the system. Yes, it's different, but most things are simpler.

So really, in all practicality, what are you expecting? I first tested Vista on a 1.4 ghz Athlon Thunderbird with a gig of RAM. It ran just fine and performed about the same as XP. I can build a system for $550 or less that'll run Vista perfectly. Incidentally, that's what I have always considered bare-minimum to build ANY PC correctly, and is about the same price as these budget POSes OEMs sell you with some minor upgrades. Decide who your real enemy is here: Microsoft who built an OS for modern systems, or OEMs who are milking you for every last dollar and selling you stuff they know is inadequate, yet could do it right for only a few dollars more. They create systems that are less than the sum of their parts.

...is to operating systems what SUV's are to personal transportation.

They both work fine, and they both demand enormous resources.

You're basically telling us you spent a few hundred dollars to end up where the rest of us already are running XP, except you now have a more intrusive, annoying, slug of an OS that like all MS OS, will become even more bloated over time.

We all know a fresh clean XP install runs faster than one well worn over time. Come back and tell us how that Vista slug box does when it's in the same shape.

Yes XP was buggy at first. Nobody is trying to compare that, we're comparing what OS we can actually use today to run a computer, the reality of the situation.

The funny part is you seem to think you have some special insight on building a computer "right" but if that were the case you wouldn't have had any sigificant issues with XP today.

I find it funny that the article was is 'MS products just too cool to comprehend, say MS geeks' and then you get a comment from the MS geek.

But in a way I agree with you, it's the vendors fault for not supplying the right software for the machine. but however, Microsoft has an agreement with the vendors that specify that they must sell Windows on their systems. so it is still Microsoft's fault for forcing us to use a half-baked, half-OS X/Linux.

I don't say the above lightly, I very recently had a problem with a component of my HP computer, I asked the tech support for a replacement component. The girl on the other side of the phone, never asked me what operating system I was using (and I was in a playing type mood). After 30 mins of 'Press F8 to get into Safe mode', I gave up, and said I wasn't using Vista, I was using Linux. The very next thing she said was 'Sorry, your warranty is now void' (the reaction to that wasn't quite a happy reaction). I then asked why, she said that Linux doesn't have the drivers for the component (BTW it was a keyboard, yes a keyboard, no really a keyboard (also considering that all keys worked (including the multimedia keys), I doubted it was the drivers)), getting more angry, I then had a go at her for about 30 mins. after that, I then said how to get my warranty back, she said that I must install Windows Vista. After 2 hours of install Vista (luckily I backup my data a day before). the problem with the component still existed.

The truth is we are as users (or should I say sheep), forced to use Windows, and only Windows because of Microsoft and no one else. you can't blame vendors because they are there for the money, and if Microsoft bribes them with a percentage of the sale. they will always go for Microsoft. The reality is until Microsoft runs out of money, we are stuck using Windows in at work and at home (unless you know something about computers and can install Ubuntu yourself, which I can thank god). Also the majority of sheep, are to scared to tried something new, which benefits Microsoft.

That is why I like the idea that http://linuxmadeeasy.org is doing. to help the scared sheep know more about their computer and suggest an alternative for their current solution.

The only thing left to say is we need to change before it's too late, and Microsoft destroys the internet with Silverlight, and in that case, OS X will also fall and we are then stuck with Windows for the rest of history.

Mike, are you a mong?

You wrote "Vista runs JUST fine if you have a machine built right. I've been running Vista for nearly a year, and I've had far fewer problems with it than I had with Windows XP during its first 3 years. Do you know why?"

The answer is probably because the Vista shitware is (marginally) less than 3 times as crap as XP. MMMMMMMhhhh! It's simple (simple is good) arithmetic, Mike. 3 years divided by 1 year equals 3. Therefore your Vista system could be anywhere upto 3 times as crap and you could still make your assertion.

Can I ask whether your A) a politician, B) a Microsoft employee / reseller / agent / convert, or C) some combination of A) and B)?

Maybe someone needs a bit of a reminder there. Faster processors and faster memory are supposed to exist to do your stuff, well, faster. Obviously. Now run Vista on it, and suddently it runs significantly slower than your old dusty kit, even before you actually try do have anything done. XP is maybe "using only half your 64-bits processor", as Mike puts it (which is quite inacurate, btw), but then how come its a gazillion times faster? Also, you might note that Vista is not the only 64-bit OS around (not even the first, it's been largely beaten by Linux -again-). It's just the less efficient. By far.

NO, NO and NO, the fact that anyone can now buy what would have been called a "supercomputer" 10 years ago doesn't mean that new OSes HAVE to be crappy and bloated and unusable. They should be more efficient and more functionnal, thus providing an exponential increase in performance when combined with more powerful hardware. Instead of that, the likes of MS think they HAVE to even out the benefits of better hardware by releasing bad code.

And just another precision, for the nutjobs accusing HP, Dell and the like of selling you less hardware than what you need: these guys make money out of selling you harware. That's what they do. That's why they usually LOVE MS: it keeps people buying new harware every 3 years. I would accuse them of anything, but NOT of trying to prevent you from buying hardware from them (yes, it includes RAM and storage). You'd have to be seriously crazy to think that.

He's getting very very desperate if he has to revert to the "64bit" tactic.

I've been working with 64bit chips since around the time of Windows 3.1, as have other users of Alpha, and MIPS, and maybe even SPARC and PowerPC. 64bit OSes have been around for almost as long, it's just Windows that is late to the 64bit party. 64bit is interesting, and has its place (usually on servers or with high end workstation apps), but 64bit CPUs and OSes are irrelevant for routine home use. [I've cut the 64bit techy stuff but Mike is clearly either clueless or bad at explaining]

That irrelevance is part of the reason why there are almost no 64bit apps for PCs (can anyone name six?). And without the 64bit apps and the 64bit drivers (because the 32bit ones don't give you the alleged benefits), the 64bit OS is pointless. Just like Vista. (Linux has 64bit flavours too, and as with Windows, they're not very relevant at home, but geeks can at least look inside them).

Now, anyone remember, what's the main point of a computer, and an OS? Iirc an OS is supposed to enable the punter to use the necessary apps and the necessary drivers to get the job done (or run the relevant games, or whatever).

Instead, with Vista, MS have delivered a DRM infestation, whose primary purpose is as a trusted delivery control and copy protection platform for the favoured entertainment industry pigopolists and their copy-protected oh-so-valuable HD content. Outside that domain, Vista has no benefits that aren't available elsewhere for less.

Pining for the fjords? Vista will be soon.

A veteran tech and network administrator. I have been working on computers for 12 years, and building machines for 8 years. I am a network administrator and have managed a network with 7 servers and 200 clients. You want shit hardware? Try 200 IBM Netvista 1.8 ghz computers from 2002 that IBM decided to use up old memory stock on, and instead of using DDR they used 128 megs of PC133. Some of them had IBM Deskstar "Deathstar" drives, but even those were more reliable than the Seagates. I pity the bastards who had to take over that network, what with around a 40% disk failure rate over the course of a year. I tried to source new machines for them, but the funds weren't there.

Yeah, they sucked. But I made them run, and they ran pretty damn well. I know my shit. I know when a system is running well, and I know what it needs to run well. Those systems should have had 256 memory. They didn't, although with all the machines I cannibalized in a year's time there was probably enough left over. I should note that when you're running an organizational network, open source software is generally considered a security risk because it does not respect network security policies and is of questionable quality. Unless you're utilizing it in a standalone server role, it's generally avoided except for a few industry-accepted applications.

Point being, I'm well aware of what a machine SHOULD have, and well aware of what you can put in one for any given price. And I'm in tune with my systems well enough to know how they're performing. You dare call me an MS-fanboy, well, I can look at you can call you sheep. "MS BAAAHHHD!!!" That's about all I hear coming from the crowd. What do you propose we use? Linux? It's rotten to the core and totally unsuited for use as an end-user OS. The OS of the future isn't built around a mainfram OS that originated in the 1960's that has a totally flawed and proven-wrong security model. OSX? Enjoy paying money for service packs (what do you REALLY think Tiger, Leopard, etc. are?) and gaping security holes that Apple denies exist. I thought support was supposed to come with the OS purchase price? Look at reality here. If you buy junk hardware, don't blame the software.

Mike, I think you've missed the point.

A new version of an operating system should be better then the previous version. That is, it should be more stable, and *more* resource efficient, proportional to _functionality_.

Vista (as an OS) doesn't provide much more functionality than XP. (In some cases, such as file copying (a basic OS function), it performs worse) However, the hardware requirements are drastically higher. This is why people say Vista is bad.

That you need 2GB RAM just for the OS to run decently suggests:

a) Bad sloppy code.

b) Dodgy deals with hardware manufacturers

c) Both

If you ran XP instead on your super-duper new machine (and think yourself lucky you can afford it), would your applications run faster or not? Probably yes, as there'd be more memory available for disk caching for a start.

You've a point about hardware vendors being piss poor with drivers, but that hasn't stopped MS Fanbois screaming "Linux is crap" because the vendor doesn't provide (or give the necessary info for) a linux driver for their hardware. MS is in a much stronger position to pressure vendors into providing decent drivers for their OS.

OEMs aren't entirely to blame either. Look at the class action lawsuit in the US over "Vista Capable" badged machines...

(FTR, I use FreeBSD. A pox on all your houses! :-) )

Hmmm... choice...

I'd love to buy a better grade of crap - but, frankly, I can't...

I'd love to install something other than Vista on it - but it's hard to get a piece of crap WITHOUT it pre-installed.

Why is it pre-installed on my piece of crap?

Because Gill Bates says so... d'oh!

(I haven't really bought a piece of crap - I've got the same crap I bought in 2000 - running Win2k - sweet)

Working on computers for 12 years makes Mike a veteran does it? Even NT has been around for longer than 12 years. I'd have said that based on what Mike's written here it makes Mike look like a clueless noob (there's a lot of them about these days).

For example, what does "a mainfram OS that originated in the 1960's that has a totally flawed and proven-wrong security model. " mean? What's wrong with the Unix security model? What's better in the Windows one? Who (other than the vendor) says it's better? (Yes we know the "HD content providers" don't like the lack of t