Microsoft says ‘hasta la vista XP’ - well, kinda

The Best is yet to Come

I attended the Windows XP launch in Austin, TX (even got a t-shirt) in which Bill Gates, via video, claimed that the Best is Yet to Come.

Hmmm... so, does this mean that every version of Windows being shoved down our throats since Windows 1.0 is NOT the best?

That what we are using is only a stop gap in eventually what will be the best?

(which I am assuming that once the Best is shipped, then MS can no longer justify coming out with new OSs.)

The icon... yeah Bill, you know what you are.

DRM?

"There's plenty of other performance sapping and unnecessary crap but DRM's the killer."

You haven't even installed it, yet you arrive at this tantalizing conclusion based on ...what? Are you a psychic?

In a recent meeting with some other developers, a comment was made along the lines that Windows 7 would fix all Vista's problems. Which, as this article shows, just crud. Windows 7 is all about waiting for OEMs to play catchup with drivers. The Creative Labs of this world are still busy at work cranking out somewhat stable Vista drivers. Heck, some of them still struggle with XP... I'm not sure I am willing to blame MS for the current situation. After all, Vista didn't exactly ship ahead of schedule. Where were the OEMs?

Scientific Terms

There's a term for the progression of Microsoft released products: BOHICA. That's pronounce, Bow (rhymes with "go") - Hick - Uh.

"Bend Over Here It Comes Again"

Get use to it people, buy a giant jar of petroleum jelly, take notes and learn to love it. Until such time as somebody's OS actually competes with M$'s 85% world-wide market share, this scenario will be repeated every time MS comes out with a major product revision.

Errrr?

"Windows 7 (which to us sounds increasingly like Vista, mark two) will land about 18 months from now."

Define 'now'.

Mine's the one that hasn't arrived yet.

I think not

"our customers have made it clear to us that they want broader support for devices and applications in order to enjoy the overall [Vista] experience".

Actually what we want an OS that isn't shite. The fact it's crap with hardware is just another problem in a long list of problems, which range from the incredibly annoying (file copying taking upwards of ten times as long as any other OS) to the dangerous (security software fucked over by a so-called service pack).

You throw in not being able to do anything without confirming it at least twice, a completely unintuitive user interface, the gob smacking (even for Windows) resource requirements to run just the OS, and as noted, diabolical hardware support - no amount of shiny objects will make my organisation adopt Vista. We'll stick with XP even if the patches stop, because at least we can still run anti-malware applications. My organisation has over 15,000 users - and not a single one will have Vista installed on their PC or laptop, I guarantee it.

My own feeling is if they don't go back to the drawing board and start over from scratch, Linux and Apple OSX become realistic propositions. There is fast coming a point where the hardware requirements of Windows are so steep, even a Mac seems like good value in comparison. That's just astonishing given how badly Mac owners are ripped off by Apple.

Remember, this is just the OS. We're not even talking about running an application yet and the machine is too slow with over double the memory and 3 times the processing power needed to run XP efficiently.

They said that the hardware requirements for Windows 7 won't be much higher than Vista! My attitude is if you run Vista and a single application on a 64-bit, dual core processor with over a gigabyte of ram - and you actually have to wait any time at all when switching back to the desktop, it's complete and utter shite. A fucking Amiga could do it instantly with a 16-bit, 7Mhz processor, 1/2 A MEGABYTE of memory and NO fucking hard drive at all. Tell me that something isn't wrong when you need 2 gigabytes of ram just to run the OS and you're an idiot. Remember, no actual applications, just the bloody OS. You haven't even started work yet, you've just booted some kind of retarded OS.

Well like I said, at those requirements even a Mac seems good value in comparison, and if Linux had applications beyond word processing and spreadsheets, we'd already be using it.

Re:Linux IS NOT THE ANSWER

That means your question must be along the lines of :

"What's the most bloated, clumsy, buggiest, slowest POS Operating System I can find, with the worst hardware compatibility, at least 2 back doors, sh*t tonnes of DRM, and phones home a hundred times a day?"

If your question is "What OS can I use that doesn't get in my way or dictate what I have to BUY next, and just plain works?" Then the answer is going to be either Linux or a Mac.

BTW people if you are looking for drivers for XP so you can kick Vista out of your life, check out driverpacks.net I keep a current set on a DVD-RW, unpacked, and when I find a machine that needs drivers (for absolutely anything) I pop in the DVD and let XP or 2000 'automatically' search for drivers. I'm starting to think the temperature in Satan's fireplace is headed south of 32 F, because it WORKS!

Microsoft will eventually see the light

when the game companies pushing the tech curve all go bankrupt because they demand DirectX 10, and people refuse to get Vista - like me. My XP system's been stable ever since I built it, and having worked with Vista personally - it refused to even install Apache Web Server on a laptop, and ACK'ed and died on PHP code - I refuse to install the beast on my rigs.

As a diehard gamer, I refuse to upgrade until I get a usable OS. Period. Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and all the rest can go belly-up and die for all I care. Maybe then Microsquash will listen to their user base. If my mom had the problems I had with Vista, she'd take the entire computer back to the store she bought it from and demand her money back, and rightfully so.

Once the game companies go belly-up, the sales of computers will die off as the hardcore gamers have no reason to upgrade/replace their rigs. Once Intel, ASUS, etc. feel the pinch, they'll bite Microsoft's ass and whip them back into line. One company can screw up the entire hardware/software market at this point, and Microsoft is playing the idiot spoiler to the hilt right now by forcing Vista on their users.

To MS: Give up on Vista and write a new OS! Do it RIGHT this time!!! I don't care how much money you wasted on Vista, you won't get my money unless the new OS is 100% backwards-compatible and performs at AT LEAST the same speed as the previous OS! I'm sick of this stupid, insipid debate! XP has IPv6 enabled, so I have Internet for the next 50 years - I have Microsoft Office for XP, so I have all the office apps I need - I can buy game consoles instead of PCs, so I don't need DX10! I can always build blank computers and install Linux if I need to! If you can't do this next OS right, then you can go bankrupt and go to hell!

@ Simon Aspinall

"Could you really imagine your Gran running a linux machine. causes my blood to run cold."

Windows is not much better. I recently had to guide my ex-gf by phone on the initial Vista "setup". This is an OEM PC, which should have an easier method for end-users to get it up and running. She was baffled with the EULA screen ... imagine what kind of nightmare it was to walk her through the rest of the process.

Ubuntu's setup (and some other Linux distros like Fedora) are now comparably easier than the standard XP/Vista install, don't confuse end-users with EULA stuff, and don't ask weird questions that the Average Joe is not familiar with.

My aforementioned friend took 7 DAYS to finally get the damn thing working, as I was the only computer-literate person in her circle of friends.

As someone else mentioned, Vista seems to be the new winME; remember back when win2000 was supposed to be "business only"??? I distinctly remember that DirectX was stated to be win2000-incompatible, and that it would be "never, ever released for win2000". Except someone hacked DirectX into win2000, and the masses ditched winME in favor of win2000. Then M$ changed its stance and gave us DirectX for win2000 thru the official channels.

At least they didn't shoot themselves in the foot, as windows server 2008 does support DirectX by default. Though I'd wonder if M$ really wants us to jump from "NT workstation" to "NT Server" as a main platform??? Looks more like a genuine cock-up this time.

Some facts

Vi$ta business and vi$ta ultimate come with UPGRADE rights to XP Pro. you don't have to pay scumbag (M$) extra to use the prefered OS.

For every 100 copies of XP we sell, we sell only 1 or 2 copies of vi$ta.

Nobody wants it.

It is absolutely clear that M$ vi$ta sales numbers are made up purely from the sales to the badge box mfg's... lets face it, M$ sells it to the Hp's and Dells etc for the equivilent of about $2.50 a copy so of course they're going to be complaint and do as they're told no matter what....

Paris... cause even the dumb blond would be so stupid as to install vi$ta....

18 months? Not with DoJ at the helm...

With the DoJ overseeing the development of Windows 7, we will be lucky to see it in 18 years.

Paris, because even she is faster than government oversight and bureaucracy.

HP to discontinue their entire line of workstations?

HP currently offers five lines of workstation computers: the XW4550, XW4600, XW6600, XW8600 and the XW9400. These dual server processor number crunchers are a staple in CAD, GIS, engineering and server software development environments among others.

Not one of these is available with Vista on it. The closest match is "Vista pre-downgraded to XP" which is a bit of a lie since you can't get the things with Vista on them at all. What will HP do? Will they abandon the lucrative high-end workstation market entirely? Will they get Vista to run properly on these (8 core 64GB RAM RAID array supporting) machines? Will they balk and continue to offer XP on them, even with a fictional Vista license? What's the liability there -- selling a computer bundled with a license to an OS that won't run properly on it?

Presumably the issue is that "The following components are not yet supported on Microsoft Vista Business and HP Workstations; ATI graphics, 1394b cards, dual graphics configurations, Creative SoundBlaster X-fi, RAID 5 10 or data array, memory riser." Really? It's been almost two years now since Vista launched, and HP _had_ to have some advance time as well. To not support these things implies either they're not trying or Vista is really, really bad.

moderate spec girlfriend

quote AC: "I recently bought an ACER 5150 laptop for my girlfriend (Moderate spec but cheap and seemed reasonable for the light use its needed for),"

Where can I get me one of those?

PH because she seems reasonable for light use, but is cheap in only some ways.

@ Simon Aspinall

What rock have you been hiding under? Been dipping a bit too heavily in the microsoft FUD bucket, have you? Any user with casual needs (browsing, email, media player and the like) will be far better served by a Linux box than by anything microsoft has to offer. Lower hardware requirements, no extortionous "licensing fees" and none of that insidious DRM crud that prevents you from using your own media that you've legally acquired.

Obviously you've been so brainwashed by ms-speak that you won't even try a modern Linux distro. If you'd done so, you'd know better.

Dear Kro,

Dear Kro,

I'm not buying any of your OS until all below conditions are met. I'll be running with the win98 licence you force-sold me years ago, propagated by some undisclosed magic, and yet morally acceptable to me, on the only OS that worked after this defective win98, aka XP pro, until then.

1- no DRM whatsoever in your new OS. Anywhere

2- new OS needs to have more features than XP

3- new OS needs to run better on better HW than XP

4- needs to be securely designed, not riddled with legal disclaimers like Vista ("are you sure ...")

5- needs to have a browser, not a huge security hole like IE

6- needs to be at least as stable as XP SP2 fresh after install

7- needs to run all versions of directX since V7 (yeah, I have some games requiring this) and also opengl (yes, it's been used for games also).

PS: I'm certainly not buying the actual failure to allow you to fund the next OS dev. Geez.

@ Simon Aspinall: I'm doing an internet training for elderly people in my village, in august, at their request. Is gonna be done on Linux.

Title wrong

Should it be:

"Hasta Buy Vista, XP!"

?

XP? 2k ....

I never get it, guyz .... we had the same in 2002.

manager: We needa move from 2k to Xp.

me: why?

manager: It's faster, better ... guyz will be more productive, bla bla bla ....

me: XP boots faster than 2k, but is hog slow with 2x the ram that 2k needs. Plus, we needa upgrade 2/3 of the computers .... you mad? Benefit: 15 seconds boot time, slow the rest of the day ...

I left the company shortly after that. I still see NO reason to upgrade the 2k boxes that are running fine, browser here is firefox - ie7 would have been the only thing that misses in 2k. I do not work for Shell :-)

Nobody is gonna tell me that xp is that much faster on core2duos than 2k.

And Vista IS NOT faster than XP or 2k on that hardware!

same bs again, complete bs.

I wanna put solaris on those core2duos, solaris scales better with multiple cpu's/cores ...

Thank GOD...

...no mac zealots have waded in yet.

If Windows 7 is actually 6.1, then lets hope they have refined it and optimised it to death. I can see them doing this specifically to target the new 'netbook' market. Why peddle XP to this crowd when they can peddle W7 for a larger license fee?

Microsoft Listen Carefully

Dear Uncle Bill

I know that this decision is coinciding with your departure and I am wondering this is a deliberate ploy so you can come back in 3 years and rescue Microsoft with Windows 8!

Seriously, we both know Vista is a lame horse and the kindest thing to do would be to take it out back and shoot it (along with some of your developers or whoever approved it).

The biggest problem for me with Vista is performance performance and performance (LACK OF), I know SP1 improved things a bit but network shares are still ridiculous and the PCPro benchmarks show that the thing is still a dog. I am sure that timeouts are a real part of this, put in a CD or access a network and it's SLOWTIME. Why not put some of the OS services on a second core if there is one present, for that matter why not give us the ability to do it ourselves with a CORE SERVICES MANAGER and make it something we can replicate with Active Directory. If your programmers bleat "we can't" tell them NOT to tell you what they CAN'T DO but to tell you what they CAN DO.

The second problem is the PRICE; why should I pay more for a product that makes my current hardware obsolete or at best reduces their book value. What I want is something that extends the book value of my kit from 3 years to 5 years. Intel, Dell & HP have done their bit and made the kit run for 5 or even 7 years, so what is it with you? The answer is to give all your developers crappy old kit, the slowest you can, make them see how awful their code is so that it is optimised as it is developed.

Next comes the RIP OFF, the features from the lowest end to the highest end should be incremental, taking media things out of the business edition means that all my SOHO workers complain. So I am either forced to buy Ultimate (I don't think so) or install a home edition which does not have the business features I need.

Next is ACCEPTANCE, look you know you made a mistake, so accept it and go back to the XP Code and optimise it further so that next time we are compelled to upgrade. Install an ethos in your coders that performance is everything, look to improve every service in XP and make sure every new line of code is as fast as it can be by making coders compete to produce the fastest version of the same function. If you get this right you can call the next version Windows Sprint or Windows GT. Of course some features are slow in nature so turn them off or give us an install option that allows us to install for optimum performance, high performance and full feature set.

Next comes a LEVEL playing field; why the fluck should we in the UK pay more than the US? Worse still why should India get knock off pricing just because they are an emerging market, is it not bad enough that they are nicking all our jobs (RIP Lloyds Bank IT Dept et al)? I hear you say "it is to reduce piracy", I say "rubbish", piracy is a mentality and they will copy it just because they can. Also the message you are sending is that if we steal software we get a better price.

Finally there are DUMB DECISIONS, I am NOT going to pay for Vista and then PAY MORE to downgrade. Let me make this veyr clear to you, if buying XP costs me more I will install Ubuntu. I will start for new users and then dept by dept, country by country. In these times of recession I will probably get a huge bonus for saving us money.

So to recap:

SPEED

PRICE

RIP OFF VERSION FEATURES

ACCEPTANCE

LEVEL PRICING WORLDWIDE

DUMB DECISIONS

I hope you LISTEN carefully because this could finish you, remember IBM it was their arrogance that led to your success.

To the Vista lovers..

All new products come with some new features, those features may be neat, but it's the package that counts and how it works for the mainstream user base. Here is the cold hard facts, Vista=FAIL for mainstream users.

I know a lot of non-computer types who have PCs with Vista, the consensus is they don't like it either, but not knowledgeable enough to do a 'downgrade'. As a person whose used almost every MS product since MS-DOS days I find Vista completely unintuitive too, and i've done everything from tech support to programming for Windows too (from 3.1 to Vista), and it remains the main platform I’ve used in my over a decade long experience in the IT industry.

The DRM system as others mentioned is a real turn off. Computer OS's are meant to be about freeing the user to make the most of the hardware, not the opposite way around! Vista and ME are the only two OS updates ive encountered on any platform which actually winds back usability, and I’ve used Apple IIe’s OS, Mac OS 7-9 and OS X 10.1+, Commodore 64’s OS, AmigaOS 1.3-3.9, various Linux/UNIX distros and more. And I’ve been using computers since around 1982!

In the corporate environment I see XP mostly being retained too in my experiences, companies I’ve worked with/for have tested out and largely shown no interest in Vista. If Vista was worth have its weight in salt it would at least be able to operate on a greater degree of older hardware let alone a good number of modern machines packaged with the ‘Vista’ capable sticker but it doesn’t, and yet Windows 2000/XP managed to, so what’s Vista’s excuse?

Other OS’s have often historically had the edge over Windows in usability (not in terms of number of application/driver support though), but 2000 improved things and XP considerably so to make it quite a usable OS.

You’ll find more people becoming Mac and Linux ‘Converts’ if Microsoft continually fails to pick up their game and make the ‘Vista Experience’ (heh) a significantly improved one. The ULCPC’s mixed with the Web2/Google world will be only too happy to pull the carpet out from under Microsoft’s feet if they don’t.

@Steve et al. XP needs to live to Windows 7.

"That in mind - what is so bad about Vista? On a new PC with no OEM crap installed there is nothing worse in Vista than XP - but there's a lot better and a lot of new stuff too. (UAC, IE7+, DX10, BitLocker, Instant Search, ImageX, new GPO's, new GUI, better driver support, mobility centre, numberous security improvements, etc.)"

I had to laugh when I read this... I was suckered into buying Vista ultimate because i got it OEM through work and avoided the absolutely mind boggling pricing structure most people will have to pay.

Bitlocker, number one reason I can't upgrade to SP1 of vista home premium on a laptop one of our clients has brought into us. A known fact that M$ seems to ignore. And I have no known use for it. Encyrpting my porn collection or my games files is a little over reactive, most home users won't need to encrypt half life 2 save games. Unless I am missing something.

IE7 + - That would be the annoying IE version that just does what IE6 did with what firefox brought to the market place in a vain attempt to be cool and hip.

GUI. Yes it has a new GUI, but as other people have said, people want a working OS that doesn't crash and lets them surf the web, play games and listen to music. The GUI is just icing and if the cake is tasteless and bland or lard assed and bloated, who cares for the icing.

DX10 - Only really makes a difference if the rest of the hard ware is upto it (ie an 8000 series graphics card) and ony a few games really show this off. (I can think of two) For most users DX10 is a little known benefit. Solitaire, Word and Powerpoint don't use it.

UAC - The worst and most annoying piece of crudware on this side of any knonw universe. Asking a person upto three times if they actually wanted to do something. It makes people seem like morons who end up second guessing themselves because they don't know what it is or why it is there. If a person clicks on an icon to run something, they clicked on the icon, asking them are they dumb enough to know what they just did is just pathetic.

Numerous security improvements, see above. Treating people like morons to the point they get paranoid and don't use it is an annoyance. Having to run eveything as admin just means everyone will run everything as admin, removing the safterly features behind it. Putting people back to square one. That and the fact rolling out about a dozen patches a week shows how many holes there were and where the M$ staff are concentrating all there time now.

Driver support. Only because SP1 is out with it's 54000 drivers added, Prior to that you were lucky if things worked at all (Halo 2, SLI...)

PC's hardware is capable of running it now, with 2 GB ram and dual core, but that spec gives mediocre performance, in XP that spec gives a much greater boost. Vista chews it up and does nothing with it, running to stand still.

I have gone to linux after Vista because it treats people like they are right to own a machine they bought, and not like moronic sheep who should only do what M$ tells them.

This is the swansong of Windows at my workplace.

That is all. I have convinced the management that linux is now stable and user friendly enough to replace the sub par bloatware that is Vista on new machine roll outs, all our new PC boxes are coming OS free as of this month.

Part of the reason I made such a concerted effort to get this change was that MS seem so wrong-headed in their attitude towards OS architecture and interface design. Everything in Vista is harder to use and configure than in XP. There are no improvements in stability or user friendliness as far as I (and about 90% of our user base) can see. And the system resources used are growing with every release. Its quite frankly pathetic. Business wants a simple, easily manageable and cut down OS, not this bloated, awkward resource hog.

Google are the least of MS worries, as the song goes "You do it to yourself and that's what really hurts"

Contrast this with Snow Leopard

The Vista and Windows 7 path makes an interesting contrast to Apple's path to Snow Leopard. The plan here is to learn the lessons of squeezing OS X onto an iPhone, and use this knowledge to remove bloat. Rumours are that the installation will take about 25% of the disk space occupied by a current Leopard install. Not sure what that says about Leopard...

If they can pull this off, and do all the multi-processor and GPU stuff touted to be in Snow Leopard, we might gain a fair bit of speed.

At some point Microsoft will have to bite the bullet and completely recode from top to tail. The sooner the better if they want to offer genuine improvements and remain relevant.

@Simon Aspinall

Er, you have a strange idea of Linux.

Windows: most software written by 3rd parties, many of them small shareware vendors. Who knows what quality control any of them have?

Linux: most software written by 3rd parties, many of them small shareware vendors. Who knows what quality control any of them have?

If you meant the core OS - you're under no obligation to update the Linux core any more than you're obliged to let Windows Update do its thing. My company runs thousands of linux servers and we control the patch cycle just as we do for the thousands of windows servers.

And if you think that official linux kernels are hacked together by bozos after a night on the tiles, whereas all MS releases are crafted by sober professionals and tested by droves of highly trained experts, you've been at the microsoft koolaid and aren't on the MS Beta test programme....

Mixed Emotions

@Highlander (the Linux kernel approach)

Ain't gonna happen. Let's face it, they still make too much money out of keeping its sources close. It's a nice idea, but politically and economically they would stand to lose too much.

@Seanie Ryan (trying to work out the version progression)

Actually, somebody mentioned this partially, but it goes something like this. Windows NT started alongside the MSDOS version known as 3.1 and progressed from there. Windows 2000 was, indeed, version 5 but the mistake you make is thinking that Windows ME was actually a new version of anything. It was pretty much a third version of Windows 98, hence it would have appeared as version 5 in the progression you had, if it appeared anywhere, alongside Windows 2000, if there were actually any link (which there wasn't really).

As for the demise of XP, I'm not that worried right now. Certainly I shall not be moving onto Vista in the near future as it just isn't worth the extra money for what I use computers for, either at home or at work. Most of the stuff on offer is available on XP if you know where to look and for a sight less outlay than spending on a new OS, and that's before I even start on the stuff that I wouldn't want on any PC of mine that is locked into Vista.

Mind you, there are only two applications that I use currently that absolutely require a Microsoft OS of any kind. The rest sits happily on RISC OS and Linux and, if I had my way, those two applications would too.

Not as bad as Mac

Apple make you buy an OS upgrade (and install the bloat) to upgrade your Java version or web browser. I'm running and old Safari and Java 1.4 on OS 10.3

In comprason, XP runs IE7 and the newest Java. Vista runs it even better.

Sorry, it's not Linux either.

I have had, or used/installed, pretty much every MS OS since win 3.0 (remember that one?), and most of the MS-DOS' as well.

For a project at a "local bank" I was asked to try out a version of Linux that we were thinking of basing a re-write project on. I duely went out and got a (now pretty old) copy of Red Hat Linux 6.

What a croc. It had a worse install than any MS OS, and failed to even bring up a GUI (any Windows OS will default to VGA 640x480 if it can't find a driver). After many hours of swearing and digging in logs files (once I found the fuckers) I finally managed to find out that it didn't like my graphics card (too new) and that it wouldn fail. There were no drivers to be had.

Thankfully, the bank pulled the plug on the project when we showed them that there wouldn't even be a 'rust' level of support for stuff we could get, never mind the 'gold' level they demanded.

Then my nightmare started. I'm no slouch when it comes to installing OS', but I had a real hard time with getting rid of this virus (opps, I mean Linux). This thing had embedded itself so completely into the HDD that even a format C: /u/c/s didn't get rid of it. You can imagine my horror when the Linux flash screen came up after the format.

I had to dig out my HDD util disc and *low level* format the fucking disc before I could get rid of it. I will *NEVER* touch the Linux virus again in my life.

I also started upgrading my current box (core 2 Duo, 2Gb RAM, SATA2 drives, ATI 1950XTX PCI-E card) to get ready for Vista, like I always did when a new OS came out.

And then I started reading the comments. Bloatware, DRM etc etc etc.

I still use XP Pro and SP2. I have an original install disc, copies of SP2 and 3 (not that I've installed it yet) and all the software I need. My XP box runs like stonk, has a Blu Ray burner, a Duo Quad processor, 4Gb of matched RAM (not that XP can use it all) and has been tweaked to death.

I see no reason to go to Vista then, now or ever.

The picture? Linux, beware......

Vista problems...

Although Vista has a few downside... OK a lot of downsides it does have some features that are good. They should take the good features like new sound options with mixers for each app and the ability to set default sound cards easily and just port them into a less bloated OS. Forget the antispyware and DRM and reserving memory for who knows what (maybe let the user decide).

The inital installtion crashed half way through for no reason and I had to install it again.A two Windows update managed to send my vista install into a reboot loop, I thought once was enough but twice and it started to get really annoying. I had to fix this using Linux to delete the pending.xml file... excelent job there.

Their new Vista Theme whatever its called managed to break one of my apps, (Ok this was a BETA Windows 2000 program for my TVcard). But bizzarely the TV card program itself works better in Vista (without the theme) than it did in XP, which is weird.

DirectX10 has option such as setting refresh rates removed for who knows what reason (I had to fix this by manually editing my monitor .ini file to only allow >85hz) idiots... although now i used an LCD but at the time it was real annoying.

I still think their best OS was Windows 2000... XP was bloated in comparison to that. The bloat should be optional.

I don't see how this stuff got past the beta testers... was there a beta test? and is still not fixed.

sorry but no

just. shut up. you sad fanboi's.

ive used vista - i wont be using it again - lets just say it didnt get the job done.

its saddening to hear that they will base windows 7 off the vista code base - i was kind of hoping that windows 7 wouldnt be utter crap - oh well. does this mean that windows 7 will have all that drm crap in it as well?

"Hasta la VISTA??"

For shame. Get your coat.

re "Sorry, it's not Linux either. "

Er, just be clear on what "local bank" you work for, I might need to close my account.

of course "format c:" wouldn't work, you have to RE-PARTITION the drive silly, you did say you work in IT didn't you?

and the reason Red Hat 6 wouldn't run is that it's 8 years old... Since Linux has all the drivers built in old versions don't like new hardware, get over it. You should have just gone to one of the big distribution's web sites and download the latest copy because it's free anyway.