“Windows Vista has been available to consumers for nearly a month now. Many new and revamped PCs incorporating Microsoft’s latest operating system have been released, with lots more on the way. So far, we’ve looked at a range of Vista desktops from gaming rigs to all-in-one PCs to low-end machines, and by and large, we’ve liked what we’ve seen.” By the way, some people really go to great lengths to… Well, I don’t know.
Windows Vista = Crapware for Joe Public.
Good old FUD from a Linux geek. For me Linux is crap. Despite being free of charge, no one wants it, and when you see Linux in a public library, people dislike having to use it. When Linux reaches the quality, eye-candy and functionality of Vista, we can talk.
I’m not a Linux user, and I really dislike Vista. I think Windows XP is too good, and they’re struggling to surpass it. If it wasn’t for DirectX 10, I have no reason whatsoever to upgrade, ever.
I do agree with your comment though.
Edited 2007-02-24 00:19
I agree. *BSD is better.
No hype, SCO, “Get the facts”, buggy kernels, and best of all, far fewer extreme evangelists.
When Linux reaches the quality, eye-candy and functionality of Vista, we can talk.
Linux was there last year.
But why should we talk to you ?
You want to use Linux ? fine, use it, and there will always be people like me willing to help you….
but the people making Linux are making it for themselves, they are not making it for you.
They do not care that you like the Vista front end, the one on KDE and the one on Gnome suits everyone else.
Here is a quote from Spock…
“Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”
Edited 2007-02-24 07:34
Idiot. I am not a Linux geek. I have never even used Linux, so shut your mouth and go fellate your prophet Billy Gate.
Darn… where’s the “this post is delusional” moderation button when you need one
.
http://www.str8dsp.com/note.bmp
Personally I love how the note animates with mouseovers, in XP media player. I am not kidding.
why is it all the print magazines are writing rave reviews for vista…
yet all the geek news sites are racking it over the coals?
think MS is paying some reviewers for a good word in the dead tree editions of pc news?
i would bet money on it.
The readers of those “geek news sites” are largely haters of Microsoft and those sites are catering to their readers.
I think it’s the other way around: most of the readers of those print magazines are Windows users, and those publications are catering to their readers.
I think both are just as bad as each other; if it isn’t blatent fanboyish swooning around Windows Vista, its the anti-Windows fraternity coming out of the wood working giving Windows a good bashing.
How about this fabulous idea; do your own evaluation; go into your local shop and fluff around with it on the computers they provide; get a basic idea of what it is like, compare your computer specs to whats required – DirectX 9 graphics card, 1gig of memory and a speedy hard disk, and then make the decision.
I made the decision purely on gut instinct and researching what is included with it – then I went a bought it, and quite frankly, I haven’t regreted that decision of moving from Linux to Windows Vista; I’ve got UNIX goodness in the form of Services For UNIX and better still, I have access to all the mainstream applications I want with support for all my hardware out of the box.
What is your point?
*nix users also have access to the vast majority of Windows software and games via Wine, Crossover, and Cedega. The new Mono VB 8 compiler will hopefully bring more .NET software to other platforms too.
For software that doesnt work, the worst thing that can happen is you’ll have to use that Windows XP or Vista CD that comes with your computer and run it in a virtual machine like VMWare, Xen, Parallels, or QEMU on your *nix desktop.
So no, *nix users arn’t missing a thing for not choosing Windows.
Who said they were – I would miss out, however, on using Office 2007 – and no, OpenOffice.org is not a viable replacement, it is a bloated, buggy and slow POS that should be dragged out into the street and shot.
kaiwai,
Wow you really are too much. Open Office is defiently no where near as bad as you claim. The newest version has many performance and stability improvements that you, of course, fail to acknowledge.
Regardless, there are many office offerings: KOffice, GNOME Office, StarOffice, SoftMaker Office, and even ThinkFree Online Office.
But if you cannot part with Microsoft Office, Crossover and Wine now have bronze-level support for Office 2003, gold-level support for Office 2000 and silver-level for Office 2002 (XP).
Office 2007 runs fine in any virtualization solution. It probably incorporates .NET elements, rendering Wine and Crossover unable to support it anyhow (different API implementations).
Edited 2007-02-24 10:04
Wow you really are too much. Open Office is defiently no where near as bad as you claim. The newest version has many performance and stability improvements that you, of course, fail to acknowledge.
And yet you accuse me of not using it? please, take a ticket and move to the back of the ‘line of clueless idiots’ because I’ve been using Linux before moving to Windows Vista, and before Linux, I used MacOS X and FreeBSD.
Yes, I am accustomed to OpenOffice.org, and when in that position, I quickly moved to KOffice – which although lacked a tonne of features, atleast it actually integrated nicely with the desktop and was snappy enough.
I agree with you about OpenOffice being slow compared to MS Office, but I disagree with everything else.
On Windows, OpenOffice is a 125-or-so MB download, and with the whole enchilada installed, it only takes around 250 MB of space. That hardly qualifies as bloated compared to any MS Office version above ’97. If software bloat is an issue for you, you should look into SoftMaker Office or GobeProductive, both of which kick MS Office and OpenOffice’s ass when it comes to size and speed.
What bugs have you experienced using OpenOffice 2.1? I’ve yet to encounter any bugs aside from issues opening MS Office files, and I use OO Writer and OO Calc almost daily.
As for OpenOffice being a “POS”, that is nothing but mindless insulting at best unless you provide objective facts to back it.
I agree with you about OpenOffice being slow compared to MS Office, but I disagree with everything else.
And the worse part; the so-called ‘breaking up’ of OpenOffice.org was meant to fix it; sitting at 2.1 ant is still a nightmare.
On Windows, OpenOffice is a 125-or-so MB download, and with the whole enchilada installed, it only takes around 250 MB of space. That hardly qualifies as bloated compared to any MS Office version above ’97. If software bloat is an issue for you, you should look into SoftMaker Office or GobeProductive, both of which kick MS Office and OpenOffice’s ass when it comes to size and speed.
Office uses more, but thats because it includes more fonts, more templates, more clipart and the likes – want to compare like with like, compare the different components size rather than just a point blank “it takes more” whilst neglecting that Office 2007 delivers more.
What bugs have you experienced using OpenOffice 2.1? I’ve yet to encounter any bugs aside from issues opening MS Office files, and I use OO Writer and OO Calc almost daily.
Crashes, slowness; KDE integration is broken when trying to access removable media, constant problems with the directionary – with that being said, alot of it has to do with the crapness of it on Linux and lack of sharing of settings between OpenOffice.org and the desktop environment.
As for OpenOffice being a “POS”, that is nothing but mindless insulting at best unless you provide objective facts to back it.
I’ve used it; infact, I started using it along with Solaris when StarOffice was given away for non-commercial usage – so you can say I’m a veteran of using it it; used it on CDE, GNOME and KDE and it sucks on either one of them.
Quite frankly, they would have gotten better results had Sun purchased Corel and uses Mainsoft to port it over to *NIX – atleast it would be on par, interface wise, with Office.
I’m not sure the two possibilities are mutually-exclusive.
Edited 2007-02-24 04:52
Don’t you remember the good old Win ’95 days, where from 1993 on every month again there were hype articles about upcoming “Windows Chicago”?
And OS/2 3.0 Warp was released and they spent a 1 page article about it (stating it is revolutionary), while 7 pages of the same mag were filled with “what will perhaps be in Windows 4.0”?
Reasonable?
Not all the print magazines are writing rave reviews.
Vista was slammed pretty hard by Forbes
I think a lot of it is wishful thinking and blind marketing. I saw a computer on sale this week with Vista preinstalled. It was a 3.o Ghz P4 (not dual core or anything) with 512 MB ram. How the heck is that suppose to run Vista? It doesnt even meet the minimum specs. What kind of crap experience is the user going to have with that machine when they finally get it home and turned on? A friend of mine who is a tech just recently bought a Dell desktop, and returned it in less than a week because she couldnt get decent drivers for any of her peripherals. She bought a new machine and paid extra to have XP on it instead. Too many people believe MS can do no wrong.
Edited 2007-02-23 22:07
How the heck is that suppose to run Vista? It doesnt even meet the minimum specs. What kind of crap experience is the user going to have with that machine when they finally get it home and turned on?
I am running vista comfortably on a 1.73Ghz Pentium M with 768MB RAM and an Ati Radeon x300 with 128MB of dedicated RAM.
Sounds similar to my setup; I have a Toshiba A100 (review http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1733035099;fp;32768;fpid… ), specs are on that page – and Windows Vista runs bloody well, its faster, more stable and more reliable than Windows XP SP2 with all the latest patches.
Yes, it will run in that spec, Vista needs 720MB to load, but can you do anything useful with it ?
And can you do a comparison with the same machine running XP ?
768mb is just a little too close to having to use the swap file…
Yes, it will run in that spec, Vista needs 720MB to load, but can you do anything useful with it ?
I said “runs comfortably”. That ought to be enough right? My laptop is my most-used machine, and it runs Vista just fine. I use the machine for my university work as well, which means PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Excel 2007, Outlook 2007, Firefox (x10) all running side by side just fine.
I don’t know about gaming, but I quit that pointless past time about when I was 5.
I had a similar problem with my mother. She purhcased a Dell system with Windows XP when said system had less than half the reccomended amount of memory. It ran at a crawl, and it took a lot of tweaking to get it to anything near reasonable operating speeds.
The people who run large hardware corporations are usually not very aware of how computers work.
“She bought a new machine and paid extra to have XP on it instead.”
Then your friend is a fool. MS is providing downgrade licenses to XP for OEM customers. She’s also a fool for not testing out Vista first (if she’s a tech, I’m assuming she had a machine laying around…at the very least she could have partitioned it, installed Vista, and tested out drivers).
Wow. She’s a fool? She was supposed to know these things?
According to the parent poster, she was a “tech” so yes, one could surmise that she had the ability to test vista out first with her existing peripherals. I thought I made that clear in my response.
1) She’s a tech, so she has access to a fully licensed copy of Vista on which it’ll be easy to test all of her peripherals? I’m a tech, and that’s not (exactly) my case. I’d probably sooner just buy a new PC and return it if my stuff doesn’t work. That’d be less bother and more fun. And I’d get to test peripherals on the OS *and the hardware* on which I’d be using it.
2) Again, I’m a tech, and I’ve never heard of the downgrade license option.
Calling people fools is easy to do on the Internet. Still doesn’t make it very nice.
I agree. XP, and then probably Vista, needs a dual-core for an enjoyable experience. A high-end machine, seems to work very well with XP.
Windows Vista Minimum Requirements (See bottom of page):
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/sys…
A 3Ghz P4 with 512MB of RAM does meet the minimum requirements fairly comfortably. As long as it has a supported video card (almost any DX9 card), all it needs to run well is another 512MB of RAM.
Lately, I’ve been shopping around for a PC. I use my machine mainly for programming and crunching audio, so I’m looking for a machine with some horsepower with a quality sound card (though not necessarily pro audio). Problem is, I think too many companies assume that just because you’re looking for a high-performance PC, you will most certainly want a $500 video card so you can get 5000 FPS in whatever is the latest boring FPS flavor of the month, and then some companies (*cough* Dell *cough*) skimp on the sound card by offering an integrated one. On workstations, it ain’t much better, as they try and shove a Quatro FX down your throat.
Moral to the store – high-end PCs don’t necessarily have to be about gaming and CAD/photo editing.
Moral of the story is: If you know exactly what you want why not build it your self or let a computershop build one for you? The HP’s and Dells are for people that don’t care and just want a computer.
Before the fanboys start making idiotic “horse and buggy” analogies, let me remind everybody that previous windows upgrades actually *did* have measurable improvements over their predecessors. They were not just eye-candy and gimmick upgrades.
Until I have a need for directx 10, I’ll stick with W2K. W2K is fast, efficent, runs all of my hardware and apps, doesn’t require activation, doesn’t require new hardware, and doesn’t have a default fisher-price interface. And I doubt I will ever have a need for directx 10.
Then obviously you’ve done very little reading up on the changes they’ve made in Windows Vista, especially at the kernel level – oh, and btw, you can use classic in Vista and XP; so if you want the traditional interface, it is there for you to use.
Stop lying and coming up with half baked, half assed excuses for your foam-at-the-mouth hatred of Microsoft and Windows.
>>Stop lying and coming up with half baked, half assed excuses<<
Lying? That is an awfully strong accusation, care to back it up? Exactly, specifically, what was I lying about?
Half assed excuses? Again, please be specific? Will Vista run, as well w2k on my present hw?
This is after all just an operating system, nothing more. So do this, get yourself a copy of Vista and Linux. Then install both on your PC. Then spend 30 minutes looking over each. Afterwards make your OWN decision on what YOU prefer. Finally, after spending this one little hour, shut your computer off and enjoy the world around you.
Especially you Linux fanboys, most of whom just spew whatever greatness about Linux because of their hatred for Microsoft. If you do not like MS, then just do not buy their products. How freakin hard is that? But trying to win people over to Linux by bashing Windows only makes you look like fools. Either let Linux compete on its own merits, and if it fails then get behind any BSD flavor and support a project that would rival Apple’s.
From the PCMag article:
‘We’ve shown that even a low-end Vista Home Premium machine such as the eMachines T5224 can smoothly run Aero; it did so with just 1GB of RAM and shared graphics.’
The words ‘even’ and ‘just’, just made me shake my head, how conditioned those Windows ‘followers’ are!
Great article, the author totally backs up all of his assertions. Lots of screenshots:
http://kadaitcha.cx/vista/dogsbreakfast/index.html