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- sonicEd, on 07/14/2008, -8/+55"Things have been awfully tough for Microsoft over the past year." They can drown their sorrow in the 20 billion dollars of profit.
- Iluvator, on 07/14/2008, -8/+43The article makes some good points, but it fails to realize that not all of the flak Vista's taken has been just bad PR. There are legitimate issues:
-It's huge memory and HD space footprint
-The fact that the graphics drivers didn't work out of the gate
-Incompatibilities with peripherals and software
Vista has come a long way since it came out, but it's initial failings led to a long term problem that it can't fix: lack of confidence. A company like GE would rather have a system it trusts than one with a few marginally nicer features. It's the confidence that it'll work - that there won't be hideous problems with it lurking around every corner - that make large companies want to upgrade. Bungling Vista for the first 6-12 months is a mistake that will haunt Microsoft until Windows 7 no matter how much PR they get. - dsmx, on 07/14/2008, -14/+34I just can't see any way of justifying the cost of vista when it offers nothing significantly different to xp. By costs I don't just mean the cost of buying a copy of the OS I'm referring to the costs in getting a computer to run vista properly as well.
- theclaw1, on 07/14/2008, -15/+30What about those of us who aren't trolling or jumping on the bandwagon, and actually don't enjoy using Vista?
- grumpyrain, on 07/14/2008, -6/+21Don't be daft. My PC was well under $500 and runs Vista without a sweat (AMD 6000+ / 2GB RAM) . And the OEM costs of the license are practically the same for the equivalent editions, although in my case I could use either through MSDN subscriptions.
I am not going to try and convince anyone to put Vista on their XP box. Once you start having to upgrade different components, you have to question whether the $100 - $200 savings over a brand new box with warranty are worth it. - Dalrek, on 07/14/2008, -3/+18@gfxlonghorn
Turning on new eye candy made a game take an FPS hit? No way... - godzillaWax, on 07/14/2008, -7/+20Part of this alleged "PR nightmare" is perpetrated by arstechnica itself -- whatever subtle dig they can make at Vista, they do. The truth of the matter is, if you had new hardware, Vista is great. If you don't, you had problems.
The same people that lavish praise on Apple for OS X and pick on Vista are the ones that happily threw away their old macs when OS X came out since they were made obsolete. The hypocrisy in the media coverage is astounding. - aliguana, on 07/14/2008, -4/+17There is hypocrisy ... Mac sites will "review" Vista and give it a good kicking, then spend the next three articles saying how wonderful bootcamp is, how "you can run OSX or Windows on your Mac. Take that... Na-na-nana-na". Wait... you mean it's wonderful that you can install an OS you think is so crap?
Vista is a great OS, and we'll go through this same thing AGAIN when W7 comes out... - AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -7/+19Maybe your computer isn't good enough to begin with, has nothing to do with Vista. Vista has higher framerates post SP1 then XP does. Don't place blame so fast on the OS, the hardware is your issue there bub, not the OS.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -6/+18They should, because its a better OS then XP especially, 64 bit flavors.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -16/+28Note for all that want to bash Vista: If you actually took a look at the differences between xp and vista. After Microsoft released SP1 for vista, vista performance has gotten better then XP. Just get some good memory and your set with vista. You would be surprised what SP1 did for vista. Try it again now that it has been released and re-evaluate.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -1/+12Please read entire article:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302527 ... - LMN8R, on 07/14/2008, -1/+12If you built a computer for Crysis and only get 10fps, then you created a ***** build. My sub-$900 computer from last December, merely two weeks after the game came out, easily handles the game at all High settings at 1680x1050. Not a perfect 30fps, but perfectly playable nonetheless.
$105 - Windows Vista Home Premium
$55 - Highly-rated 550W Power Supply
$30 - case
$190 - 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6750
$95 - Gigabyte P35 motherboard
$50 - 2GB Ram (only 800MHz, but highly-rated)
$270 - 8800GT (in and out of stock so often, you'll eventually find one)
$50 - 160GB SATA hard drive
$32 - DVD-RW drive
Total - $877
Today, you can get an even better build for under $800 that will run things even better:
Vista Home Premium 64-bit OEM - $110
550W Power Supply with great reviews - $60
Case - $35
Gigabyte P35 LGA 775 motherboard - $75
Core 2 Duo E8400 or Core 2 Quad Q6600 - $190 or $210
DDR2 1066MHz ram (highly rated) - $60
ATI Radeon 4850 + The Witcher included - $160 after rebate
320GB hard drive - $50
DVD-RW drive - $29
$769 or $789, depending on CPU. - BlackJacket, on 07/14/2008, -2/+12"almost every article about the OS discusses its problems, but never the fact that it's actually selling quite well."
Well, yeah. You can't buy a PC from a store that doesn't have it on there. Thats like saying, "Despite rising prices, consumers are still using gasoline in their cars."
Unless you buy a Mac or build your own computer, you have to buy Vista. Yeah, I know Dell is selling computers with Ubuntu, but most big box stores aren't. - Giga, on 07/14/2008, -0/+10Dreamscene is also an optional download, you didn't have to install it...
- LMN8R, on 07/14/2008, -10/+20The problem with Vista is a perception problem, plain and simple.
"Memory hog" ***** coming from people who don't understand superfetch and the concept of pre-caching - something that OS X does too.
Game performance *****, coming from people who don't realize that Vista performance is now, in fact, faster than XP performance -
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500 ...
Driver compatibility *****, seeing as millions of drivers have been added since Vista's release, and only the most obscure and old hardware doesn't work.
***** performance comparisons to XP where the Vista system has only 1GB of ram. Vista needs 2GB, period. With 2GB and a decent dual core processor, it's far smoother and faster than XP. Even a year later with tens of games and hundreds of applications installed and sometimes removed over time. Newsflash: run OS X on a machine with only 1GB of ram and it will be slow as *****.
Rose colored glasses coming from people who forget how absolutely catastrophic XP's launch was:
http://windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthurrott/articl ...
And it goes on and on and on. You can make the argument that maybe, just maybe, Vista doesn't offer enough *new* to entice happy XP users to upgrade, but enough of this ***** about XP being better. It's just plain objectively wrong in every single way. - inactive, on 07/14/2008, -11/+20the OS was tested. blame lies with HP for building a laptop and releasing it with ***** drivers.
- twigboy, on 07/14/2008, -0/+9They need the guy that did wonders for Hancock.
- jordn, on 07/14/2008, -1/+10You should try putting some speed holes into your case. I heard that works well for Crysis.
- grumpyrain, on 07/14/2008, -0/+9Not at all. XP will sit there with 4GB of RAM achieving nothing. Vista tracks the applications you most frequently load, and loads them into your *otherwise unused* RAM. Word or Firefox launches as fast on my Vista box as notepad does on XP, because they live in RAM. If the RAM runs too low, Vista just drops applications from its cache immediately.
- Murdats, on 07/14/2008, -2/+11you idiot, you probably disabled superfetch, which means you are taking a large performance hit so that you can needlessly have free ram.
- Dalrek, on 07/14/2008, -0/+8The reason XP has been out for so long is because of a huge rewrite to Longhorn a couple years in to XP's release cycle. If that hadn't happened, XP would have been taken off the market much sooner.
- fowl2, on 07/14/2008, -1/+9Wow, people aren't burning Vista!
(wait, this isn't slashdot... never mind) - Murdats, on 07/14/2008, -3/+11I believe you can reduce the hard drive usage a lot by removing what is essentially the install disk from the hard drive.
remember the days of 98 where when you tried to do anything it would ask for your window cd? that has been solved by keeping a copy of the install files locally.
its huge memory use is actually prefetching, a feature soon comming to linux and apple, but of course people will only realise how its a good thing when people who arent microsoft do it.
there were some nvidia problems early on and having to find the most stable version at the time, but thats happened with every version of windows, and nvidia did have ~2 years to get some working drivers out, hardly microsofts fault.
and I have yet to come across any hardware or software (besides things like AV and firewalls) that dont work on vista, maybe less support at first and I am sure there are some things that dont work at all, but generally they need to be replaced with something from this decade anyway. - bipolarruledout, on 07/14/2008, -1/+9There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Vista. The best thing that Microsoft could do at this point is drop the price and throw some more marketing into it. A free feature enable/disable utility download might also be a good way to wring some additional performance out of it but there are disadvantages to this as well.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -2/+9Test it first hand before bashing it buddy. I use it, after SP1, if you have correct drivers all is fixed. Performance in gaming is matched, if not better in Vista then XP.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302527 ... - gjokkel, on 07/14/2008, -1/+8The problem here is not about gaming, frame rates and stuff like that. The real question is the following:
As a company using 34 intranet servers, 450+ desktop boxes, 1500+ laptops (half of them used "on the road") should I spend over a million bucks for hardware and software upgrades and risk an enormous chaos in the IT department, or just let everything run smoothly for another 2 more years?
Guess my answer. - GoKings, on 07/14/2008, -0/+7You act like those 2 aren't really good reasons to go to or stay with windows.
- srg13, on 07/14/2008, -7/+14"Really? You want to play that card with the common person having upwards of 500GB and not thinking twice about it?"
Please tell me you're not a software developer... The 'who cares if it's inefficient, computers will only get faster' attitude is exactly what leads to bad software (like Windows) - kenplaysviola, on 07/14/2008, -7/+13I'm a systems administrator and I can see why Vista wouldn't be worth the cost for an individual workstation point of view, but there are some new features in Windows Vista that only work with Windows Server 2008 that would make it nice in a medium to large enterprise environment, although this doesn't mean businesses really need Vista. But it helps when Microsoft gives my organization a huge discount and a volume license. For some of my users, I have already upgraded them to Vista and things are running smoothly.
- joshualamgroup, on 07/14/2008, -0/+6it's 7 years btw, not 6.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -2/+8Exactly, t0x2c was just an idiot when he was building his computer. Most likely he spent over $500 for a case or something stupid like that and skimped on all the parts that actually have anything to do with performance.
Two options:
Either A.) He really didn't have a new build, and just wanted to be first here to comment so he could bash vista and run away, or B.) He has no idea what hes doing when it comes to selecting components for a computer. - redxii, on 07/14/2008, -0/+6Thank god you're not the programmer or designer, it would have been much worse.
- _HAM_, on 07/14/2008, -4/+10I still see no reason to 'upgrade' to Vista.
XP sp2 is a decent OS. It might have took'em three decades to make a decent desktop. But I like it.
At this point they would probably have to make a *nix style OS for me to leave XP behind. - ramtsam, on 07/14/2008, -2/+8I use both Vista and XP. I like vista more. It runs smoothly with 2 GP Ram. It is for more faster than XP with 1 GP ram. Many virus scanners are not suitable for Vista. One care and Kespersky works better with Vista. Other virus scanners effects the registry in Vista OC.
- mphree, on 07/14/2008, -4/+10What matters here is that it was an HP. First Generation Vista machines from HP are absolute *****. Blame it on all of the horrible software and drivers that come with the machine, not Microsoft.
- insanebrain, on 07/14/2008, -5/+11Don't lie to us.
- ZippyV, on 07/14/2008, -4/+10If you update your drivers you will see the framerate is about the same.
- AChopra, on 07/14/2008, -3/+9gfxlonghorn, give vista a second go, and pick your gfx drivers without using a blindfold this time and you would be surprised what giving an OS a try without any pre-conceived fears or anything like that will do for your internal performance meter. The only reason you think that it runs better on XP is either you never used vista before and are here just to bash it or you can't pick drivers for sh*t.
- fowl2, on 07/14/2008, -1/+7The problem with such long (apparent) voids between releases is that people forget the last one. XP was a disaster when it first came out - no one seems to remember that.
- luftrofl, on 07/14/2008, -2/+8You suck at building computers or you wanted to make a crysis computer for $5
- bluemist, on 07/14/2008, -7/+12I think they should not promote Windows 7 yet, or much better, delay it beyond 2009.
A 3-year cycle for an OS would seem odd presently because XP is still relevant after more than 6 years. Vista would really be like ME if it gets squeezed like this.
I have Vista in my laptop, and it works perfect. All the bad things written about it are either bad PR or misinformation. - godzillaWax, on 07/14/2008, -2/+7It uses half your RAM at startup because you have 4 gigs available. It's designed to make use of what you provide it.
- waydee, on 07/14/2008, -2/+7Funny how anyone i've ever known to actually give Vista SP1 a chance and spent the time to configure it how they want has always found themselves liking it and being annoyed to have to go back to using XP.
- PhishTahko, on 07/14/2008, -1/+6With RAM being so prohibitively expensive I can totally see your point. Who can afford more than 512mb RAM @ $20 a gig. Madness I tell you, MADNESS!!!
- ohplease, on 07/14/2008, -4/+9
The only people with good things to say about Vista are people that actually use it. I am one of those people. - spacebuddy, on 07/14/2008, -0/+5Using Vista 64bit for gaming, I love it :)
- fowl2, on 07/14/2008, -1/+6Upgrade in you next hardware cycle...
No one has suggested loading Vista on your old p4's with 512mb of ram...
(Just like no one has suggested loading xp on you 386's.) - jdago, on 07/14/2008, -5/+10i have vista and i dont have any problems bury me to.
- bipolarruledout, on 07/14/2008, -1/+6Depends on how important security is within your organization, I would be a little concerned with that many laptops depending on how they are used. Security is the really big advantage within the enterprise and XP doesn't even come close to Vista in this area. The one thing that is certain is that moving to Vista now will make the transition to Windows 7 VERY easy. I'm not saying anyone should move to Vista right away but XP is starting to show it's age and it's unlikely that there will be any major new service packs released.
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