Is Vista really that bad?

No.

Newsweek is running a piece about how the market has been slow to take the plunge for Vista. Which is true, but no more so than with XP. However, the article doesn't address any of the real reasons for Vista's slow adoption rate and instead throws around a bunch of market speculator bullshit. Hint: It's not that Vista is unstable and businesses are afraid to use it, it's because it would most likely require they get an entire fleet of new computers with much better hardware to meet the increased demands of Vista.

This type of crap really annoys the fuck out of me. If you want to bash Vista, there's plenty of viable reasons to do so (increased required specs, nonsensical changes to core features ("add/remove programs" is now just "programs" and causes a lot of confusion for new users)) So, let me address this horrendously, maddeningly bullshit article.

Last year I was meeting with the CEO of a PC company who offered to give me a demo of his company's gorgeous new top-of- the-line notebook, a machine that cost several thousand dollars and came loaded with Windows Vista, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. 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. Speaking in a carefully measured tone, he acknowledged that he had been less than pleased with Vista, and confided that he'd visited Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to express this displeasure in person. I would not have wanted to be across the table from him at that meeting.

So, the laptop refused to boot until after the CEO had removed and then reinserted the battery? That has NOTHING to do with Vista. Vista doesn't control your fucking battery's power at boot. That is handled by the BIOS. The only power management Vista will do is energy saving, such as powering down the HDD or turning off if left running idle for too long.

Wouldn't want to be across the table during that meeting? I sure would. I would love to inform the CEO that his laptop failures are 100% on his side. It's either the BIOS or a design flaw that is preventing the battery from making a good connection.

If Vista is taking a long time to load up, then your laptop sucks. Maybe it loads so slow because you, like all computer dealers, skimp hard on the RAM which is Vista's Achilles's Heel. Vista isn't really a laptop kind of OS anyways, it requires far too much power to be used reliably on a laptop and I would think this guy would know that. I guess not. My computer is far from cutting edge and I load from cold boot probably right under a minute. If your computers are taking a really, really long time to load Vista then it is obviously because you are not satisfactorily meeting the system requirements. Most likely they are trying to skate by using minimum requirements. I say this all the time with Dell. Like my mom's computer which Dell shipped preinstalled with XP and, get this, 256MB of RAM.

Now, XP's sys reqs are as follows:
Minimum - 233MHz CPU, 64MB RAM
Recommended - 300MHz CPU, 128MB RAM

No one in their right mind would run XP with 128MB RAM and especially not 64MB! The rule of thumb is that you want 256MB RAM minimum and at least over 512MB if you want your system to run anywhere near halfway decent. You use cheap, shitty, weak parts, you get a cheap, shitty, weak experience.

"Nobody here looks at Vista as a fiasco," says Brad Brooks, a Microsoft marketing vice president. If that's true, and nobody at Microsoft thinks Vista has been a public-relations nightmare, then the company is in trouble. Vista first shipped in January 2007, after several delays, and immediately had problems. It was sluggish. It had trouble going to sleep and waking up. It wouldn't work with some printers and accessories. Users launched a massive online petition begging Microsoft not to discontinue its old operating system, XP, which is stable, fast and, after six years of patches, pretty reliable. Many consumers like me, who'd bought new PCs loaded with Vista, reloaded them with XP.

Stability issues for an OS at launch? My goodness! What a shock! Why, that would never happen to Apple. Like when I put a fresh install of Panther on my G4; it ran great except for when it froze every 15-20 minutes, Safari crashed the system, programs would begin to load and then randomly close, iTunes caused a 16-bit color reset, and there was a host of other issues. Even Leopard got a lot of flack for being rife with bugs and horrendous instability for some users. Know what fixed my Panther problem? I updated to 10.4.9. Patches are released for a reason. Vista is very stable and runs very well as long as you have the hardware to properly run it.

Printers and accessories not working has nothing to do with Vista's stability. It has to do with driver developers being inept dumbfucks and either not caring to develop drivers at or near Vista's launch, or they released shoddy half-assed drivers. The person to blame for that is the hardware manufacturer, not MS.

Microsoft seems to be getting the message. Working in collaboration with its PC-maker partners, it says it has ironed out the glitches. It has embarked on a $300 million advertising blitz aimed at rehabbing Vista's reputation. But that too has gotten off to a rocky start. Microsoft teamed Jerry Seinfeld with Bill Gates in ads, and then, after two weeks, announced there would be no more Seinfeld. Microsoft says this was the plan all along. More likely, it was reacting to the fact that the quirky ads made no sense. Also, hiring a TV star from the 1990s only added to the impression that Microsoft is stuck in a time warp, at a time when Apple is seen as the king of cool and is gaining market share.

So what if the ads didn't make much sense? And they made perfect sense if you actually paid attention to the media campaign. (the idea was Bill Gates would be give Jerry special signals when Jerry said something on the right track to a big, secret, upcoming MS release) I hated the ads. I thought they came off as creepy, not funny or even quirky, just creepy and uncomfortable to watch.

It's important to point out that the struggle to get Vista on its feet hasn't hurt Microsoft financially. In fact, Windows revenue grew 13 percent to $17 billion last fiscal year (a record year for Microsoft), even after the company cut prices on Vista to spur demand. Microsoft says it has sold more than 180 million copies of Vista, which is in line with the adoption rate of Windows XP, and Brooks says 89 percent of users surveyed claim to be satisfied or very satisfied. To drive home that point, Microsoft has launched ads around what it calls the "Mojave experiment," where it grabs people who hold a low opinion of Vista and shows them a new operating system called "Mojave." When the subjects rave about Mojave, Microsoft springs the trick: it's actually Vista.

Ha! That is a major problem with most Vista criticism. It is typically levied by people who have never used Vista or have no understanding as to who's fault some issues really are. (printer driver problems, for example, being MS's fault when they're actually the hardware manufacturer's)

Vista truly is a wonderful, refreshing step up from XP. After I installed Vista, I downloaded the just updated release of Comodo Firewall 3 and found it to run extremely slow. It ran slow in XP, too, but it ran much, much slower on Vista. So, I said "fuck it! and reinstalled XP after only having Vista on my HDD for less than 24 hours. 2 hours after going back to XP I couldn't take how much less user-friendly XP was. I reinstalled Vista and found a better firewall solution.

What I find interesting is this one paragraph negates his entire piece. "People don't like Vista." "Vista has the same adoption rate as XP." "MS should be worried that Vista isn't selling well." "Vista has given increased revenue for the Windows." "Vista runs like shit according to some moron CEO that doesn't even know that his power supply boot operations aren't controlled by the OS." "89% of users report being satisfied with Vista." What the fuck is this piece? Why is this guy a tech writer, let alone a reporter? He obviously doesn't know shit about computers if he thinks it's actually Vista's fault for printers not working. Hint: take a look at the drivers which were done by the printer manufacturers, not MS.

Yet the fact that Microsoft has to run ads like that speaks to the kind of perception problems Vista has had. Why advertise at all, when almost everyone who buys a PC today will get Vista on it, whether they like it or not? For one thing, big corporations—Microsoft's bread and butter—have been slow to migrate from XP to Vista and need to be convinced that it's now safe to make the move. It's the same with smaller customers like Mouli Ramani, vice president of business development at Lilliputian Systems, a tech company in Wilmington, Mass. He's sticking with XP because he knows it won't conk out on him. "I'm not willing to risk my career on Vista," he says.

Vista isn't having any worse of "perception problems" than XP did when it launched. People shat all over their, now beloved, Windows XP. People were saying to screw XP, they'd never adopt and there was no reason to stop using Win98. Why advertise at all? Because not everyone buys a new PC every year and there are still a lot of Vista capable computers that could be running Vista, and thusly having a much better and easier experience. Lilliputian Systems is a hardcore experimental tech design company. Why the fuck would they even need Windows for anything other than normal desk clerks? They should be running *Nix to free up more system resources, not XP and certainly not Vista. They're sticking with XP because, I can bet you, the software needed to perform many of the testing operations, calculations, etc. is not available for Vista. I would also be willing to bet that much of that software is special coded by either in-house programing dept. or is contracted out.

Meanwhile, Apple's Mac computers, which run Apple's OS X operating system instead of Windows, have been gaining share, reaching 11 percent of the U.S. consumer market, according to researcher NPD. That's a small slice compared with Microsoft, whose software runs on 90 percent of the world's PCs. But Apple users tend to be the kind of people marketers refer to as "influencers" or "tech elites," the in-the-know folks who adopt the coolest new technology and set trends. Apple's highly effective "I'm a Mac" ads have done a great job of positioning Apple as the machine for hipsters, and Windows-based PCs as the choice for dorks. Remember how AOL used to be cool, but then became the service used only by people who didn't know any better? Microsoft is heading down that path. "You fly business class today, and it's nothing but Macs," says one former Microsoft executive, who's now carrying a Mac himself, albeit with Vista loaded on it.

Wrong. Macs, being now Intel-based, can also run XP via Boot Camp. Vista can be installed on a fresh Mac, sans Boot Camp or OS X install, and will boot just fine. How? Why? Because there is absolutely nothing different between the hardware of a PC and of a Mac. Sort of. The chief difference, and why most OSX86 folks need these hacked kexts, is because a lot of PCs today, just like for many years, boot via BIOS setups. Macs boot via EFI. However, many PC motherboards are now starting to use EFI boot up. Vista can be booted either using BIOS or EFI. Ergo, Vista can be installed on a Mac instead of and without ever having to install OS X or mess with Boot Camp.

Firstly, AOL was NEVER cool. Secondly, you contradict yourself. You say that Mac users are regarded as "tech elites", cool tech people that actually don't know anything about tech, but think they're really cool anyways. Then you warn that MS needs to worry or else they'll be ssen, like AOL, od no longer being cool. MS and Windows was never, has never, and I don't think ever was or will be considered "cool." Lastly, if trying to be cool means they're "elite" tech people, then keep them the fuck away from my computer. I enjoy my "tech elites" to actually be elite about their tech, not about posturing and keeping up with the Jones'.

Everyone in business class is using a Mac? Whoopee doo! Good, they should be. These are the dumbshit assfuckers that riddle their PCs with viruses and then infect thousands of others because they are incompetent with a computer. It only makes sense that they'd be suing a dumbed-down OS. I like OS X. It's sleek and easy to use, but if you know your way around a computer, OS X can be annoyingly restrictive, has minimal 3rd party software support, and only a small fraction of that minimal software is actually worth paying for.

Yet another challenge for Microsoft comes from PC makers themselves, who are sending mixed messages about Vista. HP insists it is committed to Vista, but also touts the fact that its engineers have created little Linux-based software modules so that HP customers can perform basic tasks, like checking e-mail and playing DVDs, without booting Vista at all. HP calls this "innovating on top of Vista," though "sidestepping" might be a more accurate description. At Lenovo, a team of engineers has been working with Microsoft for the past year to improve Vista. And Lenovo loads Vista on machines it sells to customers. For its own use, however, Lenovo still runs Windows XP as its corporate standard. Make of that what you will.
- Source

HP sucks shit. They build horrible computers with shitty hardware configurations that are notorious for all sorts of problems. A Linux-based "module" to check email and browse the web? Why not just fucking install Fedora? I'm sure an OS designed by HP works incredibly well, considering how well most of their other shit works. No one buys HP for anything anymore. Not even printers, which used to be HP's bread-and-butter. Nowadays Canon is leading in that field by leaps and bounds. (I thoroughly love my mom's Canon PIXMA (at least I think it's a PIXMA) great printjobs, does photo printing very well, excellent color reproduction, easy to use, quiet, it's just been a really great printer for the price)

Another company hasn't updated to Vista? Wow, how unsurprising. Again, unless there was some specific feature or reason to upgrade, I wouldn't do so as a business. If you're handling a shit-ton of spreadsheets, Aero-Glass doesn't help worth a damn. Vista is, in itself, not enough of a functional improvement to validate most businesses spedning the money to purchase license keys for their computers and possibly having to buy whole new computers just to put this OS on. If I was managing, let's say a college campus administration, I would upgrade to Vista because of the increased usability, but that's only if we were to get new computers anyways. Why only if getting new computers? Because, unless you are running Home Basic Edition (if you buy Home Basic you're an idiot. stay with XP), you should have at least 2GB of DDR2 RAM. You can "get by" with 1GB, but you can also "get by" with 512MB in XP but it won't be pretty.

In short: Why in the shit is this guy a tech writer? This story is full of holes, delivers no real substance whatsoever, and makes some seriously idiotic and baseless assumptions (namely that people don't like Vista, it isn't selling well, etc). The entire premise of the article is even admittedly contradicted when one looks at the data for Vista's rate of acceptance and sales.

Some might view this as me shitting on the Mac. I do love Macs and wish mine hadn't been fried by that fucking power outage. I'm actually ordering new parts to whip up a Hackintosh. (I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay Apple prices for the same hardware that I can get and put together myself for much, much cheaper. I'll buy a copy of Leopard, but I will not buy their ridiculously overpriced hardware) Macs have several advantages over Windows, namely that it is so locked and dumbed down. It's harder for these knuckleheads to seriously fuck up their computer when they're using the "training wheels OS." It has native Post Script support which makes print jobs faster and has native PDF support. There's also a lot of things I don't like. Such as OS X profiting from ripping off OpenGL and giving nothing back. Requiring users to pay for updates that really should be free (10.6 should be free. users should be expected to have to purchase a whole new OS version 1 year after the last one) and the mash of other BS micro-transactions that Apple uses to suck every last dollar from you. (no free video editor? no free fully functional video player? (no fullscreen or playlists unless you buy. i recommend nasty letters to Apple and using Video LAN) no rudimentary draw/photo editing program? the word processor is fucking joke)

So, is everything peachy about Vista? No. There are too many versions (Home Basic should not exist) and the price of Home Premium is too high and Ultimate does not have enough features to fully justify it's price. Either get some sys specs or GTFO. 2GB DDR2 RAM is a MUST! You can run Vista with a Pentium 4 HT, but I wouldn't bother as you'll have bottleneck issues. Get a Core2Duo or GTFO. Inconsistent treatment of shortcuts in the menus. Sometmes I will have 2 listings for Desktop due to 1 of them being a default that cannot be changed. However, I must have the other self-put Desktop shortcut because the default doesn't show on all of the menus. Bizarre name and format changes to crucial places, namely Control Panel and My Network that aren't really that helpful. I liked the old My Network better. It was sleeker, more minimal yet had a lot of functionality, and was simple to navigate. The new My Network reminds more of Apple's atrocious design to their various system settings utilities.

See? Vista isn't perfect, but itsn't anywhere near as bad as many of the dipshits, such as the quoted author, make it out to be. Shoddy drivers and all of that was a problem. Assholes who know nothing about computers blamed Vista and MS when anyone and everyone that knows anything about computers knew that the real fault were the driver manufacturers. If you're an XP user and you have the sys specs to move to Vista, I would seriously recommend it. If for nothing else than the ease of the Search Bar in the Start menu. The Aero Glass is pretty, Dreamscenes (available in Ultimate only) is hella cool and really adds a nice new element for the home user. Even if you're a Mac user and you get your hands on a copy of Vista Premium or better, give it a try via Boot Camp.