Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista Windows Vista is not for Intel, it has been claimed. The chip giant will not be installing the new operating systems on its many thousands of desktop PCs. It has "no compelling case" to do so. So claims an insider cited by the New York Times yesterday. A company spokesman admitted the OS was not being rolled out across the …
That's really quite impressive, because if anyone has a commercial interest in seeing Vista succeed it should be Intel. What is Vista really, really good at, beyond a shadow of doubt or dispute? That's right - consuming hardware resources - which Intel sells!
It's quite reassuring to see that there are still people taking important decisions at Intel based on cost/effectiveness, not what will "look good" to the world at large.
I did spot this survey recently on Steam (Its collected automatically) if you scroll down far enough it will show you what OSes people are using for playing Steam games:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
80precent using XP compared to 15percent using Vista.
Now if even the gamers who are the people most likely to like the Latest Thing TM are massively chosing XP over Vista then this really demonstrates that Vista is unliked.
I have a brand new laptop with dedicated graphics card sitting on my desk and after experimenting two days with Vista I formatted the drive and installed XP.
I am really thankful, that I have a Dell from its Business Line and all Drivers are available for XP...
I dare to say: No wonder noone wants to upgrade...
"Now if even the gamers who are the people most likely to like the Latest Thing TM are massively chosing XP over Vista then this really demonstrates that Vista is unliked."
In reality, what that means is that Vista is much harder to pirate, and gamers don't buy their operating systems.
One, you forgot the 2.6% who ran Vista 64bit. ;) That bumps the figures up to 17.76% Vista users.
But you also see in that survey that 30% of users had ATI cards. So what it also suggests is that ATI is twice as popular as Vista is.
I don't hear people slating ATI for their poor figures...
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We ain't gonna upgrade our 250,000 desktops either, no matter how much the MS support drones we have here continue to badger us to do so!!
I swear, they're like marketing drones now about Vista, we got rid of most of them just to get some peace.
Maybe in a few years. No-one likes change, least of all the muppet users who only want to run the version of Word they've always had to type a memo, no more.
Possibly at home. Corporations are much different story - software and drivers used by all employees on desktops to do their work have to be tested and verified to work with the new desktop OS. Some programs will require upgrades to run on the new OS, and these upgrades have to be tested too. These programs will also affect other programs that happen to share components or just interact with each other. Programs being upgraded might also interact with servers, like file servers (remember how Vista performs in this area?) or other corp. systems, and this requires testing, too. The cost of such an operation will easily exceed licensing cost of the OS, and this is the actual effort that matters. Migration to Linux is not going to be much more expensive than migration to Vista.
None of the companies I work for bought a job lot of XP to put on all their machines - it was implemented with upgrades only, either OEM with a new computer, or a fresh install if a machine had a major rehaul. There are still some machines I know of running 2000 - because they are fulfilling a specific task which has not changed in years, and the operating system is perfectly adequate for that task.
So saying 'we will not roll out Vista' is a bit of FUD, to be honest. Despite disliking Vista myself, I think it's unfair to assume that because everyone isn't instantly upgrading, it's flawed. Yes, it's a failure in that Microsoft should have made it more desirable and compelling, but no, businesses aren't actively ignoring it, to my knowledge.
On a consumer level though - yes, people are actively ignoring it. Even my girlfriend, who bought a laptop to use Word and IE exclusively, and doesn't have any technical skills or desire beyond that - has dumped the laptop on me, asking to have XP instead of the "slow annoying Vista thing".
s/usually/recently/g "...Service Pack 1, usually the point at which a version of Windows becomes sufficiently stable for serious big business roll-outs."
Damn kids - we never had this "wait for SP1" credo last century. Just because you rookies started in business IT support with Windows XP doesn't mean you can speak for what's 'usual' with Windows. Now get off my lawn!
I think some people are stretching things a bit here. Sure, a corporation isn't pursuing Vista, and perhaps that is a good thing if everything is running fine with no compelling need to upgrade. Seeing as how the parts of Intel that would be dealing with modeling and so on would probably be on heavier-duty workstations using more professional cards and driver sets (and perhaps even different operating systems), the old saying applies:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Nice to have such a blanket comment on gamers Chris.
My pc came with Vista, bought the new pc last summer for Oblivion. Shortly after and I do mean shortly it was wiped and went to XP for a little while until the latest release of Fedora which runs just fine.
All my operating systems I user are legit, so no I don't pirate operating systems, there is no need.
Why spend money you don't have too? Vista has its perks, but if what you have is working just fine with no issues, why change that? A company should only upgrade when they have to, not because something new came out.
To those that hate Vista, I agree. Until you get 4 GB+ of memory. And you really have to tweak it to make it easy to use. Don't skimp on the computer and Vista will be fine.
But there again, most large corporates these days don't actually own their machines either, probably on a 24-36month refresh cycle like we are. With 15,000 machines in use it's not practical to update them to Vista (getting XP SP2 out of the door was difficult enough!).
However, from some point next year (once all the software we use has been tested as working on Vista) new machines will roll out with Vista on them.
Of course, I decided this time around I was going to reasonably max out the hardware so I have the Quad processor, 8G of RAM, the big Raptor hard dive for the OS, the terabyte green drive for data storage, and the big honking dual-PCI ATI graphics card. Not exactly your standard business machine.
Oh, yeah, and I have a second big Raptor drive on which I've installed XP because some of the games I like to play, okay most of the games I like to play, don't easily work well on Vista so dual booting was a good choice for me. When I come home and want to play I don't feel like combing the internet for installers, driver updates, fixes, and hacks to make the game run. I do enough of that at work. And all of the gamers I know have paid for their OSes and games, so it isn't the hackability of VISTA, it's the sucky support.
in Brazil, pirated Vista is already common (for hardware that can cope with it). The last machine I saw with pirated Vista had an activation crack. Of course it wasn't able to install any security updates... thereby perpetuating the easily infected botnet-suckers of the XP era. The fact the people install p2p software to pirate movies doesn't help, of course.
BTW I've seen a fair number of clunkers still in use here - even in businesses - the most pitiful had a Cyrix M2 333MHz / 64MB (miraculously it was not running pirated XP!).
Actually, it is easier to pirate Vista then the pirate XP.
That aside, Vista is not worth it unless you are only looking for DX10.x. And I for one am still play games using DX9 even though I have Vista and DX10 capable GPU.
There is a misconcept that Gamers = Pirates... if so, then who is buying enough games to keep game companies in the business? It must be all those good non-gaming people out there who wish to keep game companies in the business, right? If a game doesn't sale well, then the game developer should take a look at their games, and not simply take the easy path and say "it is due to piracy".
While I am at it, getting a noDVD/noActivation patch is not piracy if you have bought the bloody game. If it is then all those who jailbreaked their iPhones should do the time (while we're at, what about locking up those who lend books to others instead telling them buy their own.... even lending a DVD movie to family and friend is a lose of sale to the studio if you think about it!).
The enterprise is a-changin'.
Vista may be the planning and architectural tipping-point that forced each business to stop and reassess its long-term needs. The reassessment has repeatedly shown no demonstrable motivation in Vista's favor.
Businesses with a few thousand desktops and a few hundred servers must find a strongly-compelling business (read: cost/benefit) reason to make a wholesale O/S migration. Vista actually tipped the see-saw toward its predecessor; it made XP look a whole lot better. If XP goes away and Vista isn't a good alternative, larger enterprise IT managers are thrashing for options. They are, by all accounts, considering a return to the past.
In slow motion, architects and IT managers within the thousand-desktop enterprise are migrating back to mainframes (in the form of terminal and web applications). Vista is not necessary for thin clients running Citrix or browser-based software. (Imagine. The industry discovered another use for which Vista is not well-suited.)
The question is not whether business should ever migrate to Vista. The question is whether the night manager at BooBoo Burger should hire anyone who ever worked for Microsoft on the Vista project. I don't think I would. I don't have an important job like night manager at BooBoo Burger, though.
Just because something is crap it dosnt mean you have to buy it, or is it supposed to be the other way round, Im never sure with Microsoft now?
If only the morons realised, people want an operating system that works & not some fisher price activity centre that dosnt do what its supposed to & runs like a slug.
The Steam games are very difficult to pirate, as they are tied to single use product activation keys. It is possible to install them on more than one computer, but if you are connecting to the Steam servers for multi-player games, then you have to log on, and each activation key is registered against a single sign-on ID. It won't allow you to register a key against two accounts.
If you try to set up a LAN game with the same copy on two PC's, again they will tell you, and the second one won't start.
The only games I've had problems with are
1) DOS games. Vista x64, thus no 16 bit subsystem.
2) Oblivion in 2GB RAM. It's not enough under Vista and grinds to a halt after 10 minutes. That's rather annoying. 4GB ECC FTW.
Otherwise, I've had everything from Grim Fandango to Freedom Force working without an issue (well, Freedom Force is buggy, but it's buggy under XP too..)
Then again, in only the second real upset I've had with Vista it refused to load my user profile last night meaning I had to resort to safe mode and roll back prior to the last hotfix. The only real current niggle is the dropping of tape support in the backup app for Vista and Server 2008..
THey have no idea what will happen if they install Vista on on thier IBM laptops.
A year ago when I worked there, they found out that any laptop that had an intel wireless network card would not work with Cisco wireless access point. Dont ask me why. The fix was to get the drivers from Intel not IBM.
If you click on the update from IBM it would override the the new Intel drivers you just installed. SO you see it more than no benefit, they have no idea how it will behave. Also some of their custom software through fits on XP but worked in 2000.. That was do to bad coding. The soft would not run on 95/98 so the installer only worked if it saw w2k. Any other version of windows and it quit.
I made an observation yesterday. In a comment I likened the relationship between Microsoft and it's users as 'symbiotic', both existing for mutual benefit but at the expense of everyone else.
Suffice to say the moderators took exception and did not print it.
Vista has become the product to break this mutual benefit scenario. Even bought and paid for partners are eschewing Vista for XP.
Even Intel, the hardware company with the most to gain from Vista adoption, says it will have only a limited install base within the company. How many others will follow suit?
Does Microsoft eat it's own dog food? Do they use Vista internally?
Will this comment even be printed?
Guys, I'm planning to buy a new Dell but the machine I want won't come with XP unless I buy a seperate XP Pro licence and install that. Considering it will be a 4GB beastie used for home use, team fortress 2, iTunes, a bit of PotatoShop and office stuff is it worth spending money to go back to XP?
I don't really want Vista but if it's the only choice and I don't want support headaches in about 3 years should I just grin and bear it?
and before you start... no linux based answers for me please. Just XP vs Vista.
I left the MS camp long ago hence tux, but i have used Vista on friend's laptops that came with whichever OEM version it was.
Although I like to slate MS, it doesn't seem that bad... if only it didn't crawl at doing it.
New Toshiba laptop (so not a cheap piece of low spec rubbish), with an OEM OS, should perform at least as fast as its predecessor.
This was not the case. Its just another example of having to upgrade your hardware by a factor of 100 just to get the same speed.
And as for the 'improved security' line as some kind of justification, that should be taken for granted as i do on both linux and mac and they don't sacrifice performance.
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