[Blue]

I hate Vista since I only ever used XP and the one before it, I have Vista on my new Laptop and find it much harder to use than XP but I was told the Windows 7 will be out by X-mas and it's much better.

That's good old MicroSux. They make everyone's software and hardware obsolete as fast as they can.

[jmdeegan]

vista was full of promise early on (as longhorn) but they just axed a lot of the promise, had issues with others and brought it out too soon, because, iIRC, they promised to have it out and didn't want egg on their face. they should have held off on it's initial release.

the hardware issues, i cannot completely use to complain because as tough as some hw issues were, ms did say vista was going to require, or at least run at its best, on certain specs of the higher end variety.

IMHO, a clean image of vista boots slower than an unlclean load of xp. my wife has vista on her laptop, its ok for what she wants and needs, but i have no desire to load it as a vm on my mac. i have xp, 2k3 and windows 7.

and for what it's worth, windows 7 does appear to be vista 'done right". i like the beta, it runs nicely and from what i've heard and seen, is ok with lower resources.

vista was just a debacle in its infancy....but at least it wasnt as bad as Win ME.

[reeftool]

Vista requires a lot of resources. Buying a new computer set up with Vista is fine but for those of us who have older machines, upgrading is not worth it. XP works fine on my machine. I have a 2.4 Gig Pentium 4 system. I upgraded the origional 512 meg ram to 1.5 gig to speed things up and added a 320 gig hard drive to store my stuff. It still works perfectly fine and runs reasonably fast. To run Vista I would need to add even more ram, replace my graphics card, and then replace the power supply also. That would only give me the bare minimum to run the OS and I would gain absolutely nothing. I would have spent my time and money "upgrading" to a system which would be slower than what I now have. On new dual core and quad core systems, Vista runs ok ( but not any faster than XP runs on my current system) but to upgrade an older system is not worth it unless you are willing to gut your tower and go with all new components.

An upgrade would require more than a new motherboard and processor and ram. My hard drives won't work because they are EIDE and the new boards require SATA drives. The same for DVD drives and burners. Some boards still have an EIDE slot for CD's and DVD drives but many do not. My graphics card won't work because it's AGP and new boards require PCI Express. I'm not sure if my printer or scanner would work.

This is the reason Vista gets a bad rap. Several years ago when XP came out, the older systems at the time could not do what the newer computers running XP could do. Win98 and ME were not exactly stable and the old "blue screen of death" was commonplace. XP was stable and it worked. My system ran nicely for 6 years and I never had to reload Windows until I upgraded to larger hard drives. Vista doesn't really offer anyone any advantage to upgrade or go out and buy a new computer unless all the smoke leaked out of your old one. Microsoft did too good a job with XP. By the time SP 2 came out, it was almost a completely new OS and I'm surprised they didn't sell it as a new version instead of giving it away as an upgrade. For me to run Vista on my computer right now would make as much sense as trying to tow a large camping trailer across country with my Honda Civic.

This is the reason Vista gets a bad rap. Several years ago when XP came out, the older systems at the time could not do what the newer computers running XP could do. Win98 and ME were not exactly stable and the old "blue screen of death" was commonplace. XP was stable and it worked. My system ran nicely for 6 years and I never had to reload Windows until I upgraded to larger hard drives. Vista doesn't really offer anyone any advantage to upgrade or go out and buy a new computer unless all the smoke leaked out of your old one. Microsoft did too good a job with XP. By the time SP 2 came out, it was almost a completely new OS and I'm surprised they didn't sell it as a new version instead of giving it away as an upgrade. For me to run Vista on my computer right now would make as much sense as trying to tow a large camping trailer across country with my Honda Civic.

From Windows 2000 and up they started using the NT kernel instead of DOS. (Actually from Windows NT up, but that was not for Home users) That is a staple OS and is in one form or another used on different types of servers. I have on one of my print servers NT4 Server and it would take a lot to crash it.

One thing you have to remember is since Microsoft was/is so popular and is in so many computers they had to be backwards compatible and that just killed things. After NT they gave up trying to get everything to work legacy. And some of the older DOS stuff did work on NT. Now of course hardware seems to have stagnated to a degree.

ME was still based on the old DOS kernel and was a nightmare.

[X Man]

Actually, I think it's exactly the opposite! Microsoft, for whatever reason has been pretty heavily committed to "backwards compatibility" and has continued to incorporate "legacy code" even to this day.

It's said that that's to placate the masses that "need" to run obsolete programs and hardware.

Eventually, and I certainly hope that it's sooner than later, Microsoft is going to have to "cut the cord". Build a new OS from the ground-up like Gates wanted to do with "Longhorn".

Apple, who has an infinitesimal market share if you believe the peanut gallery has made wholesale changes to their CPU and/or OS architecture no less than 3 times in the last 15yrs! From 68k Motorola CPUs to PPC! From OS 9 and earlier to UNIX based OS X! From PPC chips to Intel/X86 chips! That's astounding, and Apple made it clear at each turn that legacy support would be transitory and that Developers and users would have to embrace the changes or be left behind. That's allowed Apple to effectively "Leap Ahead" of MS, big time.

What I don't understand is that if Apple can do it 3 times in 15 yrs, why the hell Microsoft can't do it once? I mean MS effectively has a captive audience with 90% of the market. They should drop all the ancient crap and start fresh.

That's good old MicroSux. They make everyone's software and hardware obsolete as fast as they can.

[Blue]

Actually, I think it's exactly the opposite! Microsoft, for whatever reason has been pretty heavily committed to "backwards compatibility" and has continued to incorporate "legacy code" even to this day.

It's said that that's to placate the masses that "need" to run obsolete programs and hardware.

Actually, Vista isn't as backwards compatible as you think. Secondly, I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade all of my software and hardware at work or at home just because Gates wants to release a new OS.

Part of the issue is that some of the hardware makers didn't develop drivers and such for some of there older hardware etc.

Secondly, MS has been notorious for releasing new OS with 64,000 plus bugs. I don't think Gates every developed anything major from the ground up. He pirated the original windows and IE was based on Mosaic that he acquired from Spry because in 95 he stated that the internet and browsers were just a fad in response to Netscape.

Edit: I am not going to debate Apple because they are a hardware and OS developer and serve a Niche market. MS has been a developer for the various IBM clones out there.

[ryan s]

From what I've read on the net, Apple "outdates" their hardware after 2 OS releases...for example...on a G4 machine, you can only run OS 10.4 even though .5 is the newest. After .6 would be released, you're stuck with 4. They also stop updates on older OS versions when the new one comes out, just like MS did with XP once Vista was out for a year or so.

Most of my arguments against Vista have been brought up already. My personal peeves are: stop it with the popup boxes!, the OS sounds are stupid, and the visualization tweaks are worthless since they slow everything down. I don't need a "pretty" interface.

Still on XP...still happy...

[X Man]

Well, what you've "read on the net" is flat out wrong. Plenty of G4 Powermacs out there running the latest OS X release, Leopard. I'm running Tiger, 10.4.11 and while there may not be anymore "Point" updates, like a 10.4.12 Security Updates as well as plenty of Apple Software updates continue to be available.

Now, Apple does move on and 10.6 will be Intel only but that's the right decision and keeps Apple moving forward instead of lagging behind.

Regards,
Mike

From what I've read on the net, Apple "outdates" their hardware after 2 OS releases...for example...on a G4 machine, you can only run OS 10.4 even though .5 is the newest. After .6 would be released, you're stuck with 4. They also stop updates on older OS versions when the new one comes out, just like MS did with XP once Vista was out for a year or so.

[ryan s]

My (former) G4 Powerbook was able to run Leopard although I never bothered with it. The 786Mhz processors could not, if I remember right...which would have been the very first Powerbooks and every G3 processor.

The point is that, at 1Ghz, I doubt that Powerbook will be able to run anything super new although OS X is "more efficient" than Windows...and also that Apple has said they would keep moving forward while leaving legacy users behind. So stay with the old OS or upgrade your hardware.

At least MS said it would be more beneficial, if you will, to use newer hardware with Vista.

[joele]

I run Vista on my home and work desktops and laptop (all core 2 duo) and it works great I have no problem, the only problem I had was before SP1 when it had slow network performance, but that is fixed now...

I am sick of XP to be honest, on my netbook I run eeebuntu..

[Vylen]

i run gentoo linux on my laptop... take that!

oh, and i use a 2006 iMac for home :P

[OregonJim]

I was told the Windows 7 will be out by X-mas and it's much better.

Microsoft has been using this line since 1993. The "when" part has never been true. The "better" part has only been true twice: 95->98 and ME->2000.

Believe whatever you want, but don't expect too much. And hope all your hardware is less than a year old.

[aamir515]

i found the vista alerts very annoying, so the first thing i did was to turn it off.... i got a cheap laptop with 2 gig ram and dual core 1.6... works like a charm.... hasnt crashed on me once in more than a year.... couldnt be happier....
i cant overpay for an os that tries to think for me in the name of being easy and was built on unix platform.....
well... to answer why microsoft is still carrying legacy support, look at most of the businesses use MS, if u invest a billion dollars in some system, u wud want new microsoft os to support it, wouldnt you?

[stewart_photo]

See, I don't "get" this at all. I'm a Mac user and my Macs aren't new either. Not even close to new. Still, there's no way that I'd willingly run a nearly 10yr old OS release unless it was purely for nostalgia. However, I know plenty of folks running XP on new hardware and I must say...

They do not "fly".

Gigs of RAM and Dual Core processors are a complete waste on XP IMO. The memory management and multi-tasking algorithms in XP and earlier just aren't built for todays hardware. It's like dropping a 500 H.P. motor into an otherwise stock Chevy Cobalt.

The fact that so many would choose to run an ancient OS on new hardware really blows my mind. (snip)

Complete and utter nonsense. Just as Apple has substantially upgraded OS X since it's initial release in March 2001, Microsoft has also substantially upgraded XP since it's release in October 2001 (seven months after the release of OS X).

Windows XP today is a fast, robust, operating system, every bit a match for Apple's OS X. I know that for an absolute fact since I have a brand new iMac (wife's computer) sitting on the desk opposite the two year old XP-based PC I'm using at this very moment.

At the same time, Windows XP is more than capable of handling todays hardware, especially since much of that hardware was built specifically with XP (the most popular OS today, by far) in mind.

stewart

[stewart_photo]

(snip) just like MS did with XP once Vista was out for a year or so. (snip)

Just in case you haven't noticed, the demise of XP has been grossly exaggerated. Windows XP is still being sold and is widely available.

stewart