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

@ac

"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?"

Probably. Although it is to be hoped that, if they base it on anything, then will base it on the Server 2008 codebase which, though related, seems to have gained a lot more public acceptance.

As for the guy that (rightly, IMHO) claimed Windows 2000 as the best thing they ever did, just look under the bonnet of any Muckysoft OS since then and you will find that it is firmly related to Windows 2000 anyway. And that, however much they would like to deny it, includes Vista! The Beast of Redmond wouldn't know how to write a completely new OS these days if their lives depended on it!

@@Sorry, it's not Linux either.

"I don't blame you for being peed off by a system which wasted your time but from the description of your experience I suggest that you may have expected a bit too much of Linux. It isn't, and at that time it certainly wasn't, a simple GUI driven architecture. You have to tinker in the background and it takes time and effort to get it right. But there are many rewards in using it, especially for a software developer."

Agreed, but the guy was talking of RH6, which is a pretty ancient distro now. Seems a little odd trying to compare RH6 with the latest M$ offerings.

And yes, I'm using openSUSE 11 at this very moment. So there! ;)

posted before

This is what windows 7 needs to do....in no particular order of importance:

(1) built-in recovery and backup (CD, DVD, HDD)

(2) force apps to use their own files only - no registry entries by apps

apps install in their own program folder and may make shortcut on start- program list or desktop only

(3) no app install can require a reboot

(4) no windows updates should require a reboot

(5) all updates to windows create an automatic rollback file

(6) rock solid and secure (no BSODs)

(7) proper device interfaces that don't change with every release

driver updates should not require a reboot

(8) no drm

(9) no nagware or registration

(10) apps cannot automatically register for startup (except maybe AV & Firewall)

until then, i guess i stay with the known of xp...the only person i know who is happy with vista is running vista 64bit

i wish i had a penguin to do everything xp would...

A little knowledge...

Unfortunately, the chap playing with RH6 probably knows little of how a system actually boots, whether it be DOS, Linux or anything else.

The "viral" problem experienced was because the master boot record was not reinitialised by format, and fdisk wouldn't do that either, ordinarily. On an IDE disk, a format [DOS 'format' command] isn't truly a strict format either, it's a zero-fill and would only fill the partitioned space, not the bootable region which is quite separate (logically if not physically). The solution would have been to use FDISK /MBR, an undocumented feature of MS's FDISK utility, and this will zero the master boot record and the MS installs (any Windows you care to name) that one might then run will see that the MBR is empty and install a boot record of it's own. RHL6 merely installed it's own boot-loader, not unreasonable really. No need for any "trusty utilities" if you know what you're doing. Even MS are sensitive to the possibility that you might have a multi-boot machine and don't presume to overwrite a non-zero MBR, it would be most inconvenient if they did. I'm not surprised that the RHL experiment was a flop, but with no prior exposure to the guts of Unix (et al), I'm not really surprised at the reaction or the results obtained. A determined repeat over some weeks with an up-to-date distro would be worthwhile, I think.

Otherwise, I believe in horses for courses, and I have to say that my particular requirements of a horse haven't changed much over the years. I was happy with Office '97's functionality, and XP has been reasonably stable. I was gifted a copy of Office 2000 which I upgraded to for file-format reasons more than anything else, but otherwise my basic NEEDS have changed little. I daresay that many other people are in a similar position.

Some time ago, I tried OpenSuse10.1, and I found that I could do everything I needed to do (although I'm not a gamer). Today, I use an 'ancient' Sony laptop with 512MB and a ~1GHz CPU with complete satisfaction, still OpenSuse10.1, and I have no compelling reason to change this setup. I quite like the idea of being able to still use the same laptop five years more since my actual needs will probably change little, and the likelihood is that things that need to be kept upto-date (like firefox) will still run well enough. So what if new hardware is cheap? It seems better to be able to re-use old hardware if you can do what you need to do with it, and Linux/KDE allows me to do just that, and it's one less piece of hi-tech junk to bugger things up for everyone else.

However, Linux distros aren't for rank amateurs, and you need a geek such as myself to sort out the sometimes knotty problems especially at install, but once it's up and running it's completely plain sailing, and you're a bit more of a geek yourself if you were paying attention. If you want to really learn something about computers, you cannot do this properly with Windows - play with some Unix/Linux etc distros, it will do you good and you will learn much, and there is a lot to learn too!

Intel passes on VISTA-ME

Intel will have no use for it...

Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/et-tu-intel/index.html

Isn't supply and demand the cornerstone of capitalism?

When customers demand a product that already exists over another and that maker of that product refuses those customers then stops selling it at a time it's out selling the other choice there is something other than supply and demand taking place.

If their business is not about supplying the demand then what is it really about?

@Hardware not capable - Peter

"Honestly, this is my biggest grievance is that people can't be bothered to figure out what they need to properly run something, then gripe about it once they buy something underpowered and find that it's nto running it in the manner they expected."

A couple of you guys have completely misinterpreted my earlier post - The point being that vendors are shipping Vista on hardware which is clearly not capable for the job. Surely its the vendors responsibility to have done the work of making sure they're installing a suitable OS on their products?

At the time I bought the 5150, there were almost NO other lower end laptops available for the education sector which still come with XP. Those that do tend to be the £700+ machines with core2-duo processors.

@Marc - Not as bad as Mac

You're using Safari and complaining? Loser. Install Firefox or preferably Opera, and you can happily run the latest Java. (I run both on my Mac Pro).

Vista's just the new ME

i remember windows ME coming out and microsoft saying it's got win 2000 security with win 98 user interface. was meant to add security for home users the same as office users

except that the reason it screwed up nearly everything installed on it was it had 2000's code protection functions so you install some thing and it makes a change to a windows file 2000 would make a copy of the orginal file incase it needed it and let the software use the modified file protecting itself from issues ME had the same function but the modified windows file would be deleted so next time the software tried to run it died this prompted Microsoft to put together xp

vista to me seems to be built on the same flawed plan but this it it seems to have been saying thats cram server and desktop security( which always seem to fight each over) in one operating system then over lay a pretty GUI on top

which wouldn't be so bad if they had then gone we will push it really hard and phase out xp so when win 7 comes along and it's security works and has vista's pretty interface every one we run to it.

i'd bet good money that 7 is the real replacement to XP and vista was the rushed stop gap so show there are actually doing stuff

and as for the version numbers

windows 3.11

windows nt 4.0

windows 95 (4.3home edition )

windows 98 (4.8 home edition)

windows 2000 (5)

wins me (no idea as it was a mesh or 98 and 2000 so maybe 4.9 )

windows XP (5.1 effective the 95 or 98 of it's day only real benifit is it's little easier to use and security was on be default i still run it in classic mode so may as will be 2000)

vista i'll guess 6

windows 7

The Way We Were

The resistance to adopting Vista is no mystery. The move from Windows 98 to XP was eventually successful but that move was long, hard, and fraught with "new OS" mines. The buying public, and many corporations, don't want to go through that all over again. The move to Vista MAY in fact be a technological advance, but it's massive, overriding message is one of a step backwards in usability, adaptability, and affordability.

If Vista had been what it was originally promised to be, it likely would be the Windows OS of choice. But it's not, and given today's economy, the price of moving to Vista is simply to great for what's being offered. What benefits there may be do not justify the "cost" in many areas.

Regardless of where your individual sentiments are, the facts show Vista is not being adopted, and actually used, in numbers large enough to make it a product line success.