Hahah, oops :D

What a bummer.

Too bad Apple's Snow Leopard is coming out in September...and only costs $29 for an upgrade.

How much does a new Windows OS cost?

I wish they could help me out with the Vista they sold me a year and a half ago.

Here's a patch that will fix Vista.

I really don't get this "Vista doesn't work" deal.
I mean, if it's slow, it's slow for 3 reasons:
1. You cheaped out when you bought your computer. Turn off some fancy effects
2. You installed junk software because you clicked an ad that said you needed to tune up your PC
3. The architecture does indeed favor faster computers, so it does hog some memory. However, get 4GBs of RAM (a sub-$30 upgrade), and the 64-bit version, and you'll rarely use up more than 2GB of RAM. What eats up RAM isn't Vista, but Photoshop when I'm doing HDR processing--3.5+GB is filled, just like that.

My motherboard fried a few days ago, and I'm running on a SINGLE 2GB stick of RAM, single channel speeds. OS is eating up only 1.1GB of RAM, and that's with FF, Outlook, WMP11, uTorrent, UltraMon, and various other apps running. Vista really doesn't hog up that many resources. I use it on my 1.5lb tablet PC that runs off an anemic 800mhz Celeron, and it still works, albeit with a lot more lag than my desktop.

Vista works for beginners because pretty much everything is made into a wizard--connecting to the internet with wireless? Two clicks. Repairing a connection? Right click, all you need.

Like I said, I don't think anyone who blurts out the "problems" of Vista have ever USED Vista...
And all this Apple crap about 7 being a relabeled Vista? Seriously--try it. You'll be BLOWN AWAY by the simplicity. Like Vista, many drivers are pre-installed. It'll even recognize your device's model and features, so no more bloatware from the manufacturer.

if you want to get a real review of 7, check out Giz:

Hows is this news? It's been widely speculated and understood that that windows 7 would be released towards the end of the year despite Microsofts prediction of 2010.

It's been all over forums for months.

That aside, I have Vista ultimate running with 4GB RAM and AMD X3 and it runs fine. Never had any problems so far.

I agree Josh, it's too bad you are still buying Macintosh stuff.

Don't worry, we'll get you changed over someday.

XP4EVA!!! Atleast until my geek kid grows up and makes Linux actually usable.

I think the same of anyone who claims it works that they've never used it, never really worked it out.

Just off the top of my head, problems I have with it on a regular basis include that it can't cope properly with more than one display, it's data transfer rates are pathetic, even after SP1, Aero utterly misses the point of a rendered desktop, UAC makes it less secure, and it absolutely cannot handle hardware properly.

Right now I'm typing this on a laptop with a 2GHz 64bit processor that has 2Gb of RAM. Sure, there are higher spec machines out there but that's not "cheaping out".

Out of the box it ran like an absolute dog. Intolerably slow. Rebuilding it without any of the crap that comes pre-bundled - no faster.

Running a proper OS it's lightning fast and it has more fancy effects than you'd believe running all the time.

Vista is a poor operating system, bottom line.

Windows 7 shows that Microsoft can and have learnt from their mistakes, but even they have acknowledged that Vista was a mistake.

I just don't get Vista apologists who put up these defences. It's dead in the water. It's not like it hasn't happened before and chances are it will happen again. Time to accept it and move on.

What's that on your phone?

Could it be? Yes it is!

You're using Linux...

Hot Damn I had a lot to say about Vista.


I don't really understand why you're having issues--I'm running 2 monitors (with only an 8600GTS ATM, switching to a pair of 9600GTs in SLi when my backorder gets filled) and it works perfectly--right in display options i can choose to clone or extend. So much easier than in XP. I could even do this without installing the nVidia drivers. UltraMon makes my dual-monitoring experience a little better with customizable wallpapers, but I felt that it still worked without it. Now, this is very different from a laptop (only 1 video out, unless you get those USB to DVI adapters, then you're just at the mercy of that hardware manufacturer).

I have yet to experience slow data transfer rates--Vista plays well with my RAID 0 array, although I have found that my motherboard's SATA drivers just won't play with this one specific eSATA dock I have, but transfers via eSATA are BLAZING compared to USB--try that on a Mac. I move photos from my shoots all the time--I can easily hit a sustained read speed of 20mB/s from my SD cards. Non-RAID 7200RPM drives write at about 36-28mB/s.


I agree though that the #1 issue with Vista was driver compatibility, followed by software compatibility. I have this one old wireless PCI card whose manufacturer never cared enough to release new drivers. That doesn't mean that my OS was for waste--There's no way I can live without 8GB of working RAM. Leopard was terrible with 8GB of RAM.

On the side of software compatibility, Vista had the problem of an over-reliance of XP by companies and gamers. Vista didn't include a virtual machine, so developers had to re-write their code. My opinion was that, from a PR POV, it was a kind of jackassy way to tell your developers to re-write code, unless they didn't want to have any more customers. They, then passed along "Vista doesn't work with anything" to all their customers, so that was a PR blunder. I can list only 3 things that haven't worked with Vista:
1. PeerGuardian. 64-bit V requires driver signing for added security (you can disable this). Thus, I wasn't able to install PG on my desktop, although my tablet got infected with a rootkit because it was 32-bit V.
2. That wireless card--chipeset was made by Marvell and works on one motherboard (also 64-bit V), but not another. It's in my HTPC/media streamer right now.
3. This one PC game that I forgot about now. I think it's been patched, but I didn't care enough to follow up on it.

Now, Vista is NOTHING like ME. I shudder when I think about ME--ME was a bad OS in a familiar shell to try and hide the fact that MS wanted to revamp their OS. I think that's worse than a whole new looking OS with a weaker backbone.

(Asides: (my thoughts on vista and the errors of the model Microsoft had in mind)
I believe that Microsoft, in making Vista, had done a bad job of balancing innovation and protection. On one hand, Vista had these great features that had previously involved installing fancy software and lots of tweaking, like touch/voice recognition. However, Microsoft didn't realized that not than many people talked to their PCs--instead they talked to each other. They failed to make video chatting easy/integrated into the OS, so Mac users suddenly seemed ahead of the game with their iChat effects even though webcams had been out since 2002, but no one really figured out how to use them with their chat clients in a seamless way. Microsoft also failed to inform the basic users of Vista on the ways it made their everyday tasks much easier, such as a much improved networking UI. On the visual side of it all, Aero preview wasn't a big hit because not that many people had input devices that could seamlessly go into that mode. Many PCs are desktops, which means that no one wants to move their hands from the mouse to the keyboard to input a shortcut keycombo. I have a MX Revolution, and I assigned a key to preview, although I never use it. Why? Well, it's a horrible design. Expose is a much better way of seeing and selecting windows (although it gets cluttered VERY fast). I find myself using my mouse shortcut for alt+tab instead (I maximize all windows unless I'm working in "essay mode" aka three windows--two Word windows stacked side by side on the 24", and FF on the 19". Lets me see a full 3 pages of text for referencing past works, and online documents as I write my own essay without having to reside windows. All as simple as right clicking the taskbar and selecting that option. Also great for when I'm programming.

At one time, I had Vista, XP, and Ubuntu on my tablet, and was thinking of making it a hackintosh. Only Vista had impeccable handwriting recognition, and the driver support for the touchscreen. "It just worked". I was incredibly impressed by the way Vista handled the many different inputs seamlessly. I can only imagine how much touch capability will be improved in 7. Media sharing is also amazing--I can have my desktop beam my 4TB of data anywhere in the house just like that--I use my tablet as a fancy wi-fi streamer and remote and can send audio wirelessly to the Home Theater using a wireless bluetooth adapter. Now THAT is the future of consumer computing--people with more than 1 PC in their home, using them to continuously sync together with home/work/school. The old model of a family PC isn't working anymore, and Vista didn't address enough of these concerns. UAC failed because many users didn't understand why many actions were considered risky, and when they disabled UAC and got viruses/malware, they blamed it on the OS. I work in my University's tech center, and I have never seen a rootkit on a PC that had UAC enabled. Other spyware, yes, because people were clicking away to install "new codecs" to watch their TV episodes, but never a rootkit. Why? Well, they would bring their PC in saying, "Hey, the popups that normally warn me of things...well it had a new thing this time, something about the registry and it looked fishy..." So I love UAC because it generally protects people from bombing their computers, but yes, it does get a bit annoying.

Thus, Microsoft was alienating its old customers without being able to show off its new technologies (think Surface). Apple had the advantage of a single set of hardware, and could then easily single out its customer base. However, this had caused a lot of issues for their customer base in terms of slow hardware innovation--like 64-bit processing (Apple always made it seem as if no normal consumer used 4GB of RAM up until last fall), or even having an SD card slot (until today). Same goes with SSDs--Windows 7 has done a great job at optimizing the algorithms for data writing (there's a 20+ page article on the inherent problems with SSDs that involves decreased performance as the drive fills), whereas Apple has been telling its users that SSDs can still wait (yes, it's a new tech, but still worth having as an OS drive alongside a HDD for media). Microsoft does indeed pioneer some good work, it's just that it takes well-informed users to stay up to date with it all instead of thinking that this OS should work like the last. When they switch over to OSx, they don't have this expectation, so Apple can use this imbalance of information to tailor their OS.

If Snow Leopard works as fast as the guys in Cupertino say it does, I will give it more of a chance than the 80GB partition that's rotting away in the media streamer. If Linux ever plays well with Lightroom...hah. right.)

happy with xp for now

You sure did. Really all I can add to that is that my experience with Vista contradicts yours. I'm not the only one who has issues with dual monitors - it simply can't handle them right. Sure, setting them up is a doddle but how many times do you do that? What I'm talking about is if I lock my screen I want a) it to unlock without having to restart Aero and b) for it to remember where all my open windows are. If it could do b) then I wouldn't need to throw in my c) of finding it really very important that it doesn't place windows outside of the bounds of the visible desktop.

Cross network and on the same machine in different OSes, data transfer is consistently slower in Vista. SP1 improved it, but not enough. At least now it can burn a DVD in minutes rather than days.

And I could continue to compare and contrast all the way through.

The bottom line though is that I find it sub-par - there's too much compromise, too much that just doesn't work and too much that has been excluded. I need to do a lot of remote administrative stuff daily and the official Microsoft fix for their failure to make their software compatible with Vista is (and I kid you not - this is genuinely in their knowledge base) to RDP onto a machine running XP or 2000 and run the tools on that.

That's not really an acceptable situation.

The ME comparison does stand because it's an ill-conceived stop-gap measure instead of a fully fledged operating system. It stands because MS realised very quickly in the release cycle that they had made a mistake and extended the life of XP while bringing W7 forwards.

The time has come to lay it in the dust and move on. It simply doesn't do what it should.

Instead of worrying what Vista could have been I'm more concerned now with what W7 will be.

Is Android Linux? Heh...didn't know..all I know is that I can upload my youtubez vids, tweet my ass off, get my gmail, g calendar and GPS with google Latitude and it always works, and rarely freezes...so if that is Linux I say! Linux YES! and if it will run Lightroom 2 and CS2 I'll put it on a PC.

It is indeed. And that reminds me of what I forgot to put in my reply to Breex.

In my last job I was dealing with Adobe quite a lot and they were very aware of the need to provide product support for Linux.

Various developers have told me that Linux is becoming more and more of a priority for them and this has been born out with the more visible support of Flash.

So only a matter of time, it seems, before you could be running Lightbox under Android on a PC.