Dell offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to frightened customers Dell is actively promoting a Microsoft licensing loophole to channel partners eager to keep selling PCs installed with Windows XP, after Microsoft's official cut off. The Dell channel blog is pointing resellers to the loophole in the Windows Vista license that enables business customers to downgrade from the unwanted Windows …
I am sorry to have to say that the Internet works very well without any Microsoft products, in fact many would say that it would be a vast improvement as we could then just design using international standards instead of having to pander to MS users and their propriety protocols.
It worked very well before windows was even created and would have continued to do so.
odd then how mac os x seems to get faster with each release.
Xp is just plain better on the same hardware than vista. I think it was either this months or last months pc format magazine that did the benchmarks to prove it. Considering there is no compelling reason to make me want to trade off that speed (can anyone name a killer feature of vista? No?) I'll stick with what actually does what an OS should - Operate at a reasonable pace.
I was presented with a new laptop at work a few months back which came with Vista pre-installed. After hearing all the stories I was filled with dread and immediately planning wiping it off and putting XP on, but I thought I'd give it a bash. I'm still using it now and haven't had any of the problems raised. It's always been very speedy for me, never crashed and file copy speeds have been exactly the same as XP. I did however turn off the UAC which immediately seemed annoying, but was very easy to disable.
So I am always a little surprised at the amount of bile and hatred spouted about Vista (especially by those who haven't used it).
As Christopher Emerson said above, It will run slow for some but so did XP and 95 at first. In fact a lot of the bad feeling againts Vista reminds me very much of when 95 came out.
I'm not saying Vista is great - it clearly isn't what people hoped for, but it certainly isn't dreadful either.
The VARs and resellers have to make money, if customers are scared off by Vista, just because cousin Chris, who works with computers says it's rubbish and he told told little old Joan to get XP, then little old Joan will go get XP, no matter what IT geeks, MS fanbois and such like say. The customers will find someone who will sell XP to them. Simple economics, market forces and all that guff.
I can imagine the margins on pre-installed O/Ss, like many other bulk buy/sell industries, are very, very tight indeed. You can't afford to have several thousand people walking away, MS need to understand that DELL and others have to support a business, raw cash coming in, products going out, not pie in the sky dreams with big fluffy ideas.
( Me, I back the penguin, but it's fun watching everyone else fighting. )
So Neil, did you never use XP? It blew by 2K in terms of speed and reliability, especially with its "adjust for best performance" tweak that is buried under System settings.
I could see Vista viewed as an improvement over 2000 in overall speed. But I would have a hard time believing those who opined so had used XP for any period of time at all.
The penguin, because FOSS is the future of computing.
Hi Chris,
I do agree that the hardware needs to be up to spec.
I have a vista media center box, came with only 1GB RAM (core duo procs)
So I updated to 2GB, and while I was at it, also updated my 5 year old P4 to 2GB.
The p4 has XP (and linux, but only use linux for server app testing -- don't do desktop linux (personal choice)).
The 5 year old machine _out performs_ the brand new (well 3 month old, came with vista premium). The only thing I use it for is playing vids on the HDTV, nothing else. Nothing!
I used the MS test to see if the P4 would be good for vista, and it gave me a score of 1.5. The real vista box reports 3 overall. Yet its crud. Why?
Vista crashed post last windowsupdate a few days ago, in fairness to MS, it recovered automagically (kinda) using the last restorepoint.
It did crash though... I have not seen XP do that since SP2.
Quote: "Ultimately, Redmond can just switch off their XP WPA service, so no new XP licences can be installed".
The same would also apply to existing licences whenever re-activation is needed due to hardware changes.
That's why I still use Windows 2000. Let's see them try to stop me using that.
Yes the internet did work well before windows only it wasn't the internet merely a series of connections between static points and it was very expensive. Without the MS driven explosion in home PCs it would have stayed that way, very expensive dedicated links between offices, labs and the military. The best home users would have had would be BBS that people provided.
As for
"we could then just design using international standards instead of having to pander to MS users and their propriety protocols"
You might as well criticize Cisco for having to use their proprietary protocols as they have more to do with the delivery system than MS. The internet is built on international standards and mostly uses anything but proprietary protocols (with a couple of non-ms exceptions) for delivering content. If people want to make the content proprietary who are you to say they shouldn't? If it wasn't for people demanding that proprietary content the internet would still be something only geeks had heard about. High Demand = lower costs which has been the driving force behind internet growth. Would that demand have been there if PCs had not become as large a market as they are - no. Who was the driving force behind that growth? Microsoft
You obviously don't know the difference between a delivery system and content and are therefore not qualified to comment.
I'm a tech and I think that people should just get over it. Oh God, its a change! -runs screaming into the night- Honestly people... get over it. Vista is only here until Windows 7 comes out. Vista is basically XP with face paint and some features removed and features added... its got some neat features like the program manager is already in alphabetical order, there is a widget sidebar that allows you to keep up with dates and weather and other things better.
I don't know why everyone is always complaining about Vista sucks... and all that bunch of crap. Its honestly just XP with some changes... its a hold over until Windows 7 comes out... just like Millenium was a hold over until XP came out. People demanded that Microsoft come out with something new, and they did... and helllllllloooooo You've got it now...
I was recently trying to remember when I last saw a company that had forgotten that its job is to sell what customers want, not railroad them towards something that they don't want. And I remembered. That company was Digital, a.k.a. DEC, in the late 1980s. Less than a decade later DEC was history. If Microsoft don't kill Vista soon (maybe they can call XP SP4, Windows 7? ), then Vista will kill Microsoft. Might take a few years, but it will.
Douglas Adams famously invented the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, which made products whose "fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws". With Vista, Microsoft have managed the converse. When a state-of-the-art laptop straight out of the box runs far slower than the three-year-old laptop it was intended to replace, the fundamental design flaws are clearly so great that there's no point even thinking about the details of what doesn't work right with it.
"I was recently trying to remember when I last saw a company that had forgotten that its job is to sell what customers want"
What customers wanted was a more secure, reliable and stable OS. What they got is a more secure, reliable and stable OS in Vista (even if it took SP1 + some time to get). Now people complain that 'waah, security is too annoying, I have to click some extra stuff when I install things' - which is it you want? Security, or convenience?
@ It's all a big con
So far, on all the various sites I visit often, I've read only two posts (one my own) where the writer actually sees the truth! It IS one big con ... MS gets to sell TWO (2) OSs for a single computer. Hooooleeee Sheeeet what a deal! In the world of boosting sales numbers this ploy is pure genius. And MS is laughing and playing dumb & stoopid all the way to the bank.
I have friends who thought I was so archaic to have actually built my family's computers (10 in all) from scratch a few years back. Now I'm giving them advice on what to do when their new Vista "powered" PC just isn't working for them. All are wanting to "upgrade" to XP Pro.
I try and be gracious; sometimes I actually am.
I remember how it used to be to. Innovation, just think, in the space of 2-3 years Commodore had gone from a C64 to an Amiga (sure, they bought Amiga Inc), Atari had gone from the 800xl to the ST etc... etc..
Yet Microsoft and it's huge resources, monopoly and being lead by its so called innovators can't build a decent new version of Windows in 5 years?
People aren't stupid, Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was a huge leap. New interface, plug and play etc...
XP was the first consumer version of Windows to be built around the NT kernel architecture.
What are Vista's unique selling points?
1. It's damned expensive
2. Not all of your hardware will work
3. The interface has changed radically and you won't be able find anything for weeks
4. It does everything XP does, but slower
5. It does very little than XP doesn't do.
Vista has nothing to offer when you look at other Windows milestones other than a different interface.
Sure you are Rick...Linux is less supported than Vista. I have run all flavors of Linux and although its a good OS, support is non-existant, so you're on your own. Good luck finding drivers for common windows hardware. When reality sets in after your linux install, let me know and I will try not to say "told you so".
I said it ran slow, slower, slowest. I didn't say anything about its bogo-security feature.
But since you insist: Vista asks security questions out of the blue without giving you sufficient context to know whether it's safe to say yes. You may feel more secure for being invited to click things in this way, but it's as much real-world use as a small kid's security blanket.
I could also have added that before I downgraded to XP, the next two things I found out about Vista (as shipped by Toshiba) were (a) it consistently crashed within 15 minutes of plugging it into a wired GB ethernet, and (b) that it couldn't connect to a wireless network that wasn't broadcasting its SSID. And that for all the time I was struggling with it, and despite its huge 2Gb of RAM, I did not see the hard disk activity light go off once.
Like I said, numerous superficial design flaws made quite irrelevant by the fundamental design flaws. A chocolate teapot (but less tasty, and slower).
"and it's very likely possible that we would still have too many different incompatible systems for something like the internet to work."
Do you work in IT? If you do, this little gem of yours would confirm my long held suspicion that, to work in IT, all you need is to show that you can run an anti-virus and reformat/reinstall that Windows machine when it presents any kind of problem...
Yeah, all systems on the Internet are the same, and they all use protocols that MS invented before MS was even founded, or before it paid any attention to the existence of the Internet (ca. 1995?). Sad, these fanboys.
I have recently bought a Dell Laptop and to my surprised XP was not offered depsite my query so I think, okay let me try Vista and I have to say I have to say it doesn't take me long to install XP with dual boot, due to Vista sluggish performance and endless dialogue box pop out to 'continue' or 'cancel' It's worse than infected with spyware.......
But my friends are less fortunate because they dont have the know how and a copy of XP to have a dual boot in their system and can't play the games that work on XP.
@Anonymous Coward
So the internet wouldn't work without Windows! The internet was based around Unix and Unix remains the core of the internet.
Without Windows the only difference is that there would be more standards compliant web sites and fewer idiots.
I liked it better when you had to be clever to be able to connect to the internet. Those were the days (eyes mist over nostalgically).
Oh, and if Vista is so great, why does Steve Ballmer keep apologising for Vista and saying they'll get it right next time?
A shiny red convertible from the glory days of Ford, but they don't make the 1966 Ford Mustang anymore, maybe I should call Dell? I don't think the drivers will be a problem.
Microsoft can do what they please with XP, if they don't want to sell it then they don't have to. And anyone who wants something other than Vista has many excellent choices.
I'm with Paris because she always likes to drive with her top down, especially in a convertible....
When I read the Vista defenders arguments, why am I hearing echoes of:
"Yes, my Grandpapa smoked 2 packs of Camel brand non filtered cigarettes per day so all you guys who say smoking is bad for your health are nuts !
If you have a machine that runs Vista with no problems ....great.....but accept the fact that, like ole grandad, you are more the the exception than the rule. Ole gramps made it to 85 but smoking puts thousands of people in graves each and every day. Gramps might still be here if he was a non smoker.
There's only 4 relevant questions:
1. On identical hardware, which runs faster ?
2. What has highest software compatibility ? (30k to 2k)
3. What has highest hardware compatibility ? (lost count)
4. What one has more DRM, more bloat and more annoyances ?
Wait. WinXP not being a big leap from Win9x/ME??? I'd agree if you told that it wasn't a big leap from *win2000*. But win9x/ME were really graphical shells on top of DOS, even if they hid it underneath the flashy graphics.
Win2K came from the NT branch, which had boatloads of differences with the win9x branches: true multiuser environments, actual security and even a nifty POSIX subsystem for those UNIX die-hards. Hell... there's even an OS/2 subsystem somewhere.
In fact, Vista seems to the NT branch like ME looked to the win9x branch: same stuff, just crappier. If any MS OS is actually going for the win, it would be Win Server 2008. Given Vista's "performance" I might actually get this as my new OS, because even if I do work with Linux, I still need the windoze for other stuff, like games.
Vista is not just XP with a few changes... if it was, it wouldnt have been delayed. Under the hood its a different beast, hence all the problems getting older hardware to work.
Its not just random forum posters saying Vista sucks. its Scientific benchmarks in the press, showing that it is significantly slower on the same hardware.
I'd be willing to take a perfomance hit, if there was a compelling reason to. Vista offers nothing, except Longer boot times, and the long goodbye.
Considering that until Vista's flop came apparent, Microsoft didnt plan on releasing Windows 7 for even longer, its not enough to say that vista is a stopgap.
Christopher Emerson wrote:
"... If you don't upgrade, you get left behind, and it doesn't give you any grounds for complaining that you can't run the latest software..."
One of my clients is a small medical transcription shop. About five years ago, I built their computers: microATX motherboards w/onboard everything, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, Athlon XP 2000+ (or so) class CPUs, WinXP, and MS Word 2K. Over the years, the only maintenance necessary has been the replacement of two power supplies.
The transcriptionists always have at least three apps running simultaneously, plus anti-virus and anti-spyware, running in the background.
The systems are I/O bound, waiting for keystrokes. The boss and the employees are facile in WinXP and in MS Word 2K. MS Word 2K *.DOC files are the gold standard: Attached to outgoing email, the recipients can load them perfectly into MS Word 2K, XP, 2003 and 2007.
Yes, both the hardware and the software are, by geek standards, obsolete. They are, however, appropriate to the work that needs to be done.
"it and took nearly ten minutes to get to the point where my nephew could actually get at the game he wanted to show me, and another five minutes to shut down with no User-initiated processes running"
Jeff i'm not a big Vista fan but i'm using it at work i just booted my Vista Sp1 box and timed it (sad i know), it booted then i logged on to the domain then opened IE7 and opened the reg home page all in 1min 14 seconds. The system has one Core 2 Duo processor and 1Gb RAM (yes only 1Gb) and Aero is running.
I have a feeling that there may be something VERY WRONG with your new system and you should have it looked at before blaming Vista.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@ Alexis Vallance
"They need to start from scratch, but they can't. It's too risky if they get it wrong and businesses don't like big upheavals. I don't know what they can do."
Easy they can wind down Windows development but continue to support it for many years (XP,Vista or Windows 7) say 2015 or longer. In the mean time they can turn their considerable engineering talent to producing a Linux distro that would no doubt work VERY well with all of their customers legacy infrastructure and software.
@Christopher Emerson,
"Perhaps all these people winging about the extra hardware requirements should go back to using windows 95 if they want the speed :P
Times changed, hardware improves, the software improves to take advantage of it. If you don't upgrade, you get left behind, and it doesn't give you any grounds for complaining that you can't run the latest software."
Hardware does improve, and software does improve to take advantage of it. "Improve" doesn't mean bloat -- Vista is *BLOATED*. Martin Maloney's example of systems with 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, Athlon XP 2000+ (or so) class CPUs.... Ubuntu runs great on that, while also taking full advantage of the latest and greatest. >4GB of RAM (even on a 32-bit system?) Sure. Multiple cores.. no sweat, it even treats cores and hyperthreaded CPUS properly.. and so on. I mean I wouldn't complain if Vista required 512MB or something, but 2GB and a dual core for reaosnable performance? That's absurd.
Errm... Jeff, not to come to the defence of Mickeysoft or anything, but... _TEN MINUTES TO BOOT_?! And _FIVE MINUTES TO SHUT DOWN_?! What are you running? It doesn't take _three_ minutes for Vista to boot _in emulation, using VMWare_ on my iMac! The same install boots in under two minutes (about 30 seconds more that OS X does) when I boot straight from the Boot Camp partition. And it takes under two minutes to shut down, eiher under emulation or when booted directly. What on _Earth_ is going on when _Macs_ run Vista better than purpose-built WinBoxes?
I had 2 identical laptops arrive last week, both HP's with Vista on.
I fired them both up at the same time, one with an XP install CD in.
I managed to get XP installed, plus all drivers, and sitting on the desktop ready to use faster than Vista booted, ran a speed test and auto-installed the HP bundled crap on laptop 2.
Vista is poor on like for like hardware, but lets not forget the extra strain put on it by shoddy bundled software out of the box. MS should put some quality control on this kind of thing.
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