Submitted by Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report. Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product’s first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent.
Of the more than 60 professional computer users I know, only 3 have Vista. Of these three, every single one of them got Vista preinstalled with their newly purchased laptop. Of these guys, all three went back to Windows XP after some hard time trying to run the OS (Yes they even tried, one even resisted 3 months).
Therefore the report is definitely not surprising to me. What’s surprising is that somebody decided to buy that operating system as a standalone box. Lucky me, I don’t know any.
I did buy Vista Ultimate 64 Bit, and it is a GREAT and very stable OS.
It is for sure better than any other OS i have tried, and i have tried OSX, Linux (both KDE and Gnome), and a lot of older OS’es.
Vista is a great OS. It’s just out of the doors too early due to a problematic development (Switching codebase to w2k3), internal problems, and problems with XP and Office taking precious developers from the project.
Sadly, Vista will follow XP; It will need to mature “in the wild”.
Tried installing Microsoft Visual Studio on it? Or Adobe Premiere? or Sibelius 4/5?
Of the small number of programs that I tried on Vista x64, All of the above have major problems.
Well, XP has turned out to be a great OS (Over the years). Sure, it took some service packs.
No wonder people are anexius about upgrading to Vista before atleast SP1.
Yeah, XP did work out well as time went on, minus half of the in-your-face ‘features.’
Of course, 3rd-party tools and reghacks can cure that, and simply configuring the services can make the machine fairly secure.
Of course, I would NEVER fully expose an XP machine to the internet on a higher-speed connection.
Last time I accidentally did that, the system became noticeably slower from spyware in about 20 min, and about ten minutes from there the system was unusable.
I figured out what happened from spybot, but the malware was in too deep to successfully remove ( even after several attempts and programs ), so I tried a system restore and IT ACTUALLY WORKED!
I do like system restore, but it could be done better, and have more configuration available.
–The loon
The artificial price increase to caused by crippling versions of its OS has worked well. In both the home without any features…and the business edition that doesn’t include the business features.
Its not in this article but Microsoft’s aggressive approach at moving towards a subscription based payments for Microsoft’s service(sic), by crippling Vista’s features is also a hot topic for moving revenue.
What I don’t get is with these inflated priced Microsoft Users here don’t want competition in the marketplace…perhaps its because someone else is paying for the software.
Yea VISTA’s ok and runs drivers better than XP. XP kept crashing my sound driver but under VISTA the exact same one works all the time. But why on earth does VISTA take so long to open window contents? And don’t even get me started on how long it takes to load the add/remove programs list. And Aero? Yawn, boreing, oh it has flip 3d – big deal, alt-tab is still faster, other that I see nothing to aero at all and its so called “glass effects”. It’s merely a resource hog. Linux’s 3d desktops can do far far more effects if a person likes eye candy.
But VISTA is stable compared to XP, I’ll give it that and far more secure since its Linux like in that respect.
Yawn, boreing, oh it has flip 3d – big deal, alt-tab is still faster
Ask any graphic designers. Or people like me, who has 60 windows open. This is a _needed_ feature, that saves time when dealing with huge amounts of windows. I would not want to switch back to old alt+tab ever again.
Oh, and if you dont like it, just dont use it.
Start complaining about stuff that dont work instead of features you dont use
Edited 2007-09-12 20:48
Vista might be ok to work with for daily home usage, but not for business. Our IT manager is a MS freak and handed out some Vista laptops to some employees, I hear nothing but complains since then. Not only about Vista, but also about Office 2007.
XP with Office 2003 is lightning fast on today’s hardware, every user that used Windows 95 with Office 95 can work with it.
Give me one good reason for a company to migrate to Windows Vista.
If you intend of staying with a Windows line of operating system, you’ll have no choice before long.
He said “…give me one *good* reason…”
:\
Edited 2007-09-12 21:56
Ok
– Everything is painfully slow on laptops (Athlon 64 3200, 1GB RAM). Running the same set of apps as on XP, everything is at least 5-50 times slower. Bootup, starting apps, working with files. Basically anything that touches the hard drive is slow.
– Too many UAC prompts (somehow, magically Linux and MacOSX don’t have as many, yet provide the same security)
– The new windows explorer is slow and annoying
– Widgets pulse and animate for no reason
– The new start menu is a step backwards (not the search, but the all-in-one design that makes you scroll to see all your apps)
– Standard windows annoyances haven’t been fixed (why can’t I change volume with the scrollwheel over the volume icon?)
– Brain damaged user interface like the shutdown menu
– Poor network performance. Slow and unreliable. Windows updates often fail to download for no good reason.
– Massive resource usage for no particular reason (in vista right now, with only firefox open, task manager says I’m using 950MB of memory (650MB of physical ram, and 300MB of swap))
– Mysterious hard drive thrashing for no particular reason
– Battery life poor
I could go on. I haven’t mentioned application/driver incompatibility because that is understandable when revamping major parts of the OS. I don’t fault MS for that.
Sure, XP had problems too at the start, but most of them were due to driver and application incompatibility. Even if all my programs worked perfectly on vista, I still wouldn’t use it. There is just no compelling reason to.
Edited 2007-09-12 22:41
Also, I forgot to add, I’m sick and tired of people saying that Vista using tons of RAM is a good thing, because that means its making use of the resources you have.
That could be true, if the system was smart enough to use the RAM when it was unused, and then give it back to applications when they needed it, but my Vista install is using not only physical RAM (600+MB of it) but also swap! Once you’re into swap, your performance is shot, and any performance advantage you might get from pre-loading things is outweighed by the cost of fetching data from swap (especially on laptop drives).
Dude… the swap is used for low usage apps. your most used apps that are loaded get all the memory… that is a good thing.
Vista giving the apps that mean the most to your work all your memory while it starves the apps that do not mean as much to your work makes you work more productively.
You REALLY need to take a class in OS design. There is no point in giving one app all the memory in the system while starving others and thereby forcing them to use swap. Vista should do what other OS’s do, use all ram available first and only start using swap when absolutely necessary.
Sometimes it pays to swap out unused apps, and use the RAM for buffers for example. Just ask the linux devs, they’ll tell you that having some swap available is helpful even if you have gobs of RAM.
Vista has very aggressive caching called superfetch. It keeps commonly used apps at least partially loaded. This will use a ton of ram, but ram used in this way will be released instantly when required.
Combined with disk i/o prioritization, this results in a notable decrease in load times of big applications. And yes, this is a good thing.
“- The new start menu is a step backwards (not the search, but the all-in-one design that makes you scroll to see all your apps)”
Opinion, not a fact, just personal preference.
– Standard windows annoyances haven’t been fixed (why can’t I change volume with the scrollwheel over the volume icon?)
That’s reaching
“-Massive resource usage for no particular reason (in vista right now, with only firefox open, task manager says I’m using 950MB of memory (650MB of physical ram, and 300MB of swap))”
Read about superfetch – it’ll explain it.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vista-039-s-Intelligent-Heuristic-Me…
This is the second link on google after searching for “memory management xp vista”
“- Mysterious hard drive thrashing for no particular reason”
Most likely the Indexer for the Windows search.
This thing is that all Vista does is cache memory, all of it. Vista thrashes your hard disk for a few minutes doing this slowing down other things. Any OS can cache memory but to make applications launch faster for that sake is not always good.
Fine, that particular example might be a minor thing, but all these minor things add up to an environment that’s unnecessarily cumbersome to use. I spend a large portion of my day in front of the computer, and I don’t have the patience to put up with interfaces that don’t make common actions convenient to use.
I know about superfetch, and I know what it’s supposed to do, but obviously the implementation is seriously flawed, because for me everything is much slower than without it (on XP or any other OS). Like I said, as soon as you hit swap, performance goes out the window.
Perhaps, in which case their algorithm for determining when to index is severely broken because it is indexing when I’m trying to use the computer.
Umm… ever work on a system with a ton of software installed? the new Start Menu rocks! being able to scroll up and down is way better than the screen spanning garbage that was the XP start menu.
Did you ever tweaked XP’s start menu settings?
IIRC, there was an option called “scroll start menu items when don’t fit” or stg like that 3 years ago.
Yes, constantly. How is scrolling faster than just looking? When the start menu is up, it might as well make use of the screen space, I’m not interested in the background apps at that instant. Anyway, this is irrelevant for me now, since I use Launchy http://launchy.sourceforge.net/ instead of the start menu (Launchy is much faster and smarter than the Windows Vista start menu search by the way)
Comparing Mac OS and Linux desktop systems to Windows with respect to UAC prompts is unfair on Windows. The design is ‘right’ prompt whenever an application wants to do something dangerous.
The reason why Vista has so many of these prompts is because application developers have always assumed that users are administrators. Now that Vista blocks requests until the user enters a password means that these applications become annoying to use. In the Unix world, users are always assumed not to be administrators so application developers wrote the software accordingly.
This kind of security is new to the Windows world and it’ll take a while for application developers to catch up. The operating system design is right.
This is a good change and will make application developers think about privileges that users have.
True, but a lot of these developers seem to be working for microsot, because I get a lot of prompts from the built-in vista apps. Why do I need a prompt for accessing the performance monitor? why do I need a prompt for stopping a windows update?
I think the problem is that there is no centralized system. In linux, I enter my password once, and then I update every single app on my system at once. On windows, every second app has its own updater service, and I get prompted for each and every one.
What are you talking about? on my AMD X2 4200+ system with 2 gigs of ram, Vista runs great!
Aero’s main improvement is the compositing, period. I would say that any OGL/D3D based UI has that as the only thing of benefit. Yes, some 3d actions are helpful tot he user, but the smooth UI is the only one that really matters.
And please explain to me how a UI that operates out of the GFX card is a resource hog?
The UI does not “operate out of the GFX card”.
If the GFX card did handle all of the UI, why would your PC perform much better with Aero disabled ?
The main CPU does the majority of the work in the UI, the only thing unloaded to the GFX cards processor is the 3d effects.
Oh, and you say it runs great on your machine ? I am not surprised with those specs.
Edited 2007-09-13 05:25
Not that I use windows _ever_, but I’ve heard from reliable sources that on higher end video cards, disabling Aero actually slows down the interface. The reason is that Aero offloads a good majority of the drawing off to the GPU. The CPU isn’t nearly as performant at things like vector math as a GPU.
It actually makes sense that disabling Aero would slowdown the computer provided you have plenty of ram and a beefy video card.
Again, I’m a Linux (3d desktop that beats Vista, <insert linux rant here>) user and this is just heresay from a buddy.
Mind you, these aren’t the only two, but they are very important to keep in proper context:
1. Windows 98 (how many people actually voluntarily tortured themselves with ME? Windows 98SE was actually decent and fairly stable for such a system that was rather backwards-compatible – assuming you knew what you doing) wasn’t able to make effective use of hardware resources that were becoming readily available, and wasn’t capable of dealing with internet security issues very well.
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn’t really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also… Windows 2000 didn’t have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
XP, when setup and administered correctly, is more than capable of keeping up with most modern hardware, assuming device manufacturers keep providing XP drivers for them (silly not to at this point still), and is also (assuming well-written drivers and proper administration) boringly stable with stable hardware that’s not overclocked or pushed past engineered environmental design criteria. In addition, there’s plenty of drivers still available for XP (via Windows 98 drivers that may still work, or newer XP-specific ones) for what’s now considered “older hardware” so why should people go out and buy a new OS that likely requires that they go through the trials of testing out new drivers using a new driver model, assuming they’re available?
Windows XP is Windows Vista’s worst enemy: it’s more than good enough for those that need to use Windows, and at this point, is most universal and compatible with all but the most ancient of software. If you administer it correctly, you don’t need to reinstall for many years at a time (I only had to do a new installation last year due to the booting hard drive dying, after installing it once when it came out). Sadly, I don’t represent the average user experience in that it seems most people self-inflict most problems by installing ad-ware, getting spyware installed, etc. by their habits and not practicing safe hex.
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn’t really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also… Windows 2000 didn’t have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
Why just, is not created a win9x compatibility mode running in virtual machine mode?
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn’t really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also… Windows 2000 didn’t have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
Why just, is not created a win9x compatibility mode running in virtual machine mode?
“Sadly, I don’t represent the average user experience in that it seems most people self-inflict most problems by installing ad-ware, getting spyware installed, etc. by their habits and not practicing safe hex.”
You mean… you screw your computer?
**walks away…**
Stay away from Vista for as long as you can.
This is what we tell every user that asks us about this “new Vista thing”. We tell them to buy a Dell with XP preinstalled.
Between the release of XP and the present day was six years, and I bet a lot of people FIRST started using computers during the XP era. XP is what they’re used to, XP is how they think a computer should behave, XP is what came with the computer and darned if they’re going to do anything technical with it…
The more technical people got computers earlier, and aren’t as afraid of switching.
Agreed.
Part of my job is to train new employees. Our company runs various Unix based solutions, there is a few machines with Windows on them for POS.
When the new people come in, most of them do not know what Unix is, do not know what Windows 2000 is, cannot recognise XP if it is in classic view, and do not know XP with a theme is still the same XP.
After two days of training them on other systems, most of the XP users will quit.
I don’t know, some people would rather look for another job rather than try to learn new things.
XP clearly offers more advantages over its predecessor than does Vista, and it’s not even close. So of course, “standalone retail sales” of Vista would be much less than those for XP. I would never recommend anyone switch a current XP installation over to Vista.
Nevertheless, Vista’s userbase appears to already be larger than that of any OS except XP, according to web usage stats:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
That userbase is due to OEM installs, which Vista will rely on rather than “stand alone retail sales”, to a far greater extent than XP did.
Not even close to second according to these stats:
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Anyway Vista has been disaster from early beta days, I still can’t figure out why it was released in the first place. It is still an alpha/beta stage OS with huge number of wrong design decisions and critical bugs to be used for anything seriously.
I have had it installed since betas oon my pare drive and even with all the updates that made it so far into Vista it is still as bad as it was on RTM day.
From what I hear SP1 is on the same track.
Not even close to second according to these stats:
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
—————————
Actually, Vista is *very* close to second, even according to w3counter.com’s stats. w3counter.com’s stats show Vista at 3.66%, and the second largest share is Windows 2000 at 3.87%. I’d guess Vista will take over second in a month or so.
But note that w3counter.com shows that Latvia, a country with a population of ~2.25 million, makes up 4% of all internet usage (which is, according to w3counter.com, nearly equal to UK’s share and larger than the shares of countries such as Canada and France, all of which are anywhere from 15 to 30 times larger than Latvia). In fact, according to w3counter.com, Latvia has the 4th largest web activity of all nations! That in itself is enough to bring w3counter.com into question as an indicator of internet usage of the general population.
w3counter.com’s stats are interesting to talk about, but I think marketshare.hitslink.com’s stats are more reliable for getting a feel of what’s going on in the general population.
Edited 2007-09-13 05:45
[/i]”w3counter.com shows that Latvia makes up 4% of all internet usage. That in itself is enough to bring w3counter.com into question as an indicator of internet usage of the general population”[/i]
“This report was generated 09/10/2007 based on the last 34,463,182 unique visits to 5,698 websites.”
I know what you meant, however, the sample of the 5.698 sites could have a few hundred very popular Latvian sites for all we know. They could be sampling a Latvian news site, or Googles Latvian portal for all we know. So the countries results will be skewed.
The same goes for OS’s. 3.71% OSX use, hmm, is that global or just in the countries sampled ?
Why? We don’t know how either of them sample their data.
hitslink has Intel Mac’s larger than Other. I doubt there are more MacIntel boxes than Linux boxes.
General population of *what*?
I wouldn’t recommend anyone currently using XP to switch to Vista either, however, if you are buying a new machine and don’t mind putting up with a few issues until Vista reaches maturity (ie, when SP2 is released), I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against it either. I’m planning on installing Vista Ultimate 64 when I finish my new machine – purely becasue Sonar 6 has a 64bit version designed for Vista, and that constitutes the bulk of my computer usage. If you want to use older software, I’d stick with XP a little while longer or use VMware.
If I recall correctly, XP had lots of issues until SP2 was released – this is standard fare for Microsoft. In a few years, people will wonder what all of the fuss was about, and will be moaning about Windows 7’s lack of compatibility with old Vista software.
I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here. Windows is very complex software that services an enormous userbase and is expected to work with an incomprehensibly large variety of hardware. It is just not possible for Microsoft to release an OS into the wild and not get mountains of bug reports, and it takes time to fix issues.
IMHO, there are a few points to consider. First off, if you are a gamer, you just have to be dumb to use vista. While the drivers are a hell of alot better then they were at launch (i can run bioshock on my laptop, which is impressive), they still leave alot to be desired. So if your pc is primarily a gaming platform, it isn’t even a decision.
Secondly, if you are on an old pc, don’t bother upgrading to the minimum requirements. Just wait until you buy a new pc, not only is the oem cheaper then the boxed, but you really need new hardware to run the os well.
Last of all, you have to keep in mind you are an early adopter, and will most likely run into odd bugs. If stability is your biggest concern, go for the os that has been in the wild for 7 years. If you like to use the latest and greatest, and are willing to put up with the downsides, then vista is a viable option.
For me personally, this is the first version of windows I have actually liked, and alot of the improvements are the very things that had me hating on windows since the first time i tried it. For me, the biggest problem is the lack of integrated authentication on home premium, which keeps me from using the F5 key to launch the visual studio debugger for asp.net apps. Instead of F5, I have to go to Debug->Attach to process… and double click on w3wp.exe. Not exactly the end of the world.
But thats just me, if you are happy on xp, then ignore marketing hype and stay on what works for you.
I used Vista x64 on my Athlon64 3200+ 1GB machine. Worked perfectly. No noticable slowdown, even played Quake4 on it very well (ati x1300 512MB).
The only thing that was noticably slower, was the boot up times (roughly 20 seconds more, perhaps the recent vista fixes might have cured that).
And even though Vista on a cold boot used 76-86% of memory (figures from the cpu gadget), I never ever noticed that apps ran much slower than on XP.
So I really don’t quite get what the fuss is all about. Maybe it was my hardware that worked in harmony with Vista…
I built a new machine – Core2 E6600 2GB memory. The only thing that I can say is deffinently faster is Adobe Photoshop and large images (100MB files, that’s roughly 3500×2800 pixels uncompressed).
Perhaps opening some other apps and explorer windows also open faster by like 0,5-1 sec.
So that’s my experience. And about why Vista is not selling so well, there are only 3 simple reasons:
1) Box versions cost way too much. Ultimate costs 4x more than XP pro, but people don’t earn 4x more money than before (considering they haven’t changed jobs)
2) Most machines out there are with 512 or less MB of ram. Considering that Vista does not bode well with 512MB of ram and regular Joe is not going to upgrade his machine, we will have to wait until Joe wants to buy a new machine
3) No defining reason to jump onboard Vista. XP->Vista is not as big of an improvement as 98->XP was.
Also there are some glitches getting Vista working in Windows Server enviroments. Things will probably be much smoother with Windows Server 2008…
And finaly, about Vista trashing the hard drive. Well Vista does like 4x more things automatically than xp does:
1) Index the hard drive
2) Defragment the hard drive
3) Anti-Virus and Windows Defender scans
4) Probably some other HD releated stuff – swaping things from memory, other services, etc…
Yeah, I noticed that too.
Suddenly for no reason the hard drive starts trashing for a while.
Interesting because I did not tell Vista it could index, defragment, or do any antivirus scans.
And I definitely did not tell Vista to do anything else.
So basicaly we have an OS that controls the computer.
And who controls the OS?
Yeah, once you install Vista you’re no longer in control of your computer.
Stay away from that junk.
Don’t be ridiculous. You can switch off all of the automated HDD indexing, defragmentation etc. if you want to. The OS automates things so you don’t have to do them manually. But you can still do them manually if you want. Just because something is enabled by default doesn’t take your control away.
“Anyway Vista has been disaster from early beta days, I still can’t figure out why it was released in the first place.”
I know some die-hard Windows user will see this as an attack but one single word.
Money
Microsoft is its own worse enemy. It could have taken five to six years and millions to totally re-invent its operating system. Two words.
Oh well.
I purchased a new Dell laptop to send my son off to college with . . . 2GB ram, dual core 2ghz machine with 7200 rpm HD. Even after I turned off some of the eye candy I could not believe how sloooooow it was. It was painful. My desktop (2.ghz P4, 512mb ram with XP) which needs to be refresehed after 4 yrs of the kids screwing it up seems lighting fast in comparison. This with the desktop blue screening and locking up once or twice a week and taking a minute and a half to start up.
If the laptop was my machine I would have loaded XP and Kubuntu on it. I ran a Knoppix live-cd on it and it was quick and very responsive.
Vista has some nice features but speed isn’t one of them.
Listen to all of you trying so hard to make Vista appear worth the 5+ years it spent in development. It’s a big fat clunker. You know it and MS knows it.