Why do people dislike Vista?

[stevegoad]

rwalk... Welcome to the group. Glad you're here.

Yeah, both vista posts are quite old... but I guess they still have some validity. I don't think I jumped into any of them before anyway.

I have 3 computers (not mentioning Lisa's laptop or Theresa's laptop).

My laptop, that I use for e-mail and the business end of my studio is vista, only because it was what was on the computer when I bought it. Nothing evil about it... it seems to work like every other windows unit.

My duplication computer (also for video editing and analog-to-digital conversion in the studio) is Windows XP - again, what was on it when I bought it (strange, since it is newer and more powerful than my laptop.

My main recording computer is a Mac G4 with some version of OS X... not sure, since it was on the computer when I got it - it was a gift with protools already installed, so who could argue.

Sometime in 2010 the mac will be upgraded, and we will go from there. But for me, right now the plan is to change when I change computers... I would rather update the unit that to pay the cost of upgrading windows and still not expand the life of my computers.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by brenthomer

When I run windows, it is not shiny, and I have no desire to lick it.

I've never put "Makes me want to lick the screen" on my list of OS requirements.

[shayward]

If Vista was released back in 2006 in the state it is in today then there probably wouldn't have been as much "Vista Hate". Windows 2000 was a solid work from early on, as was XP.

Vista had a lot of problems out of the starting gate, including big ones that Microsoft knew about at the time of release. SP1 killed several Vista machines, requiring a full reinstall. And many of the security "features" made the system at least annoying and at worst unusable (the latter especially for enterprises).

Subsequent patches and updates have resolved a lot of these issues (yet not all... especially for enterprises), but the bad taste was left with so many people that Vista continues to have a bad rep.

Windows 7 will not differ significantly from Vista and yet people seem to love it, so there you go

[tedanderson]

Being a die-hard NT4 fan, I would have to say that when 2k hit the street, I was impressed. Then when XP came out, I could confidently say that they finally got it right. I said, "Leave it right there and break the knob off."

The initial problem that I had with Vista was that the driver support was very limited.
People who bought some of the first copies thought they would make their PC's work better but instead they got trashed in the process. The other thing that I never liked about vista is that it has too many safeguards. I don't need to be warned every time I go on the internet or plug in a thumb drive and I don't need to be scrutinized if I want to burn a CD or draw a chart in powerpoint.

[[Admin] danroth]

Originally Posted by brenthomer

When I run windows, it is not shiny, and I have no desire to lick it.

I think that's probably a good thing.

[shayward]

Being a die-hard NT4 fan, I would have to say that when 2k hit the street, I was impressed. Then when XP came out, I could confidently say that they finally got it right. I said, "Leave it right there and break the knob off."

I know what you mean. That said, there is always room for improvement, new developments, new ways of doing things. Vista, as it was originally spec'ed, had huge potential. WinFS, had it come to fruition, would have been worth the price of admission.

I think, with Vista, they tried to re-invent the whole OS (as Apple did with OSX, which was really the advancement of NeXT). To my mind, Microsoft would have been better of to say, "Here's what we want our next OS to be, let's achieve it over the next 3 releases", releasing a new incremental OS every 2 years or so.

I really do have very high hopes for Windows 7. Microsoft knows the next OS will make or break them. It looks like they've really taken the Vista issues seriously and are working very hard to "right the wrongs", as it were.

[twj]

When I bought my laptop it came with Vista Home Premium. I didn't mind it except for all of the warnings. When the SP1 update came it seemed to work ok but now Internet Explorer locks up for no particular reason. No virus or registry problems and processor usage looks normal. I have to close IE with Task Manager. Web sites tell me I don't have Flash Player installed even though I have downloaded the latest version.

FireFox works fine on it, though.

[tedanderson]

Microsoft knows the next OS will make or break them.

I hope that they figured out that we don't need the OS to second guess our decisions and suggest otherwise on our behalf.. Which I think is the reason why AOL also lost popularity. They had plenty of wonderful things to offer other than internet. But with every later version of their software, they took over more control of your computer. One day I put a blank CD in the drive and I got an unexpected warning:

AOL noticed that you have a blank CD in your writeable drive. Would you like to log on to AOL now?

Overall I would have to think that someone on the Microsoft development team figured that improving the classic "Are You Sure [Y/N]" prompt was a good thing.

[shayward]

With that whole "request to allow/deny" thing, Microsoft is actually trying to force developers to write computer programs in such a way that they do not cause this thing to pop up. I haven't studied it in depth, but from the little I have ready I understand that if you write your app correctly/securely, the popup won't happen.

Something else I read somewhere and can't cite any sources is that they took the project manager from the Office 2007 team and they are now heading up the Windows 7 team. That would make huge sense considering how popular (and frankly incredibly well-designed) Office 2007 is. Office 2007 continues to amaze me on a daily basis. I don't know how I ever got anything done without it.