Microsoft to Users: Give Vista a Try, Please...
The Microsofties are appealing to you to try Windows Vista. You'll really, really like it, they insist.
They've gone out of their way to prove to you that it's a swell operating system, too, by creating a series of see-we-told-you-so videos. Watch the Microsoft video.
Microsoft's Experiment
The crew from Redmond dressed Vista up in a flashy new box, called it Mojave, the next Microsoft OS, and foisted it upon -- no, sorry, make that "introduced it to" -- volunteers.
Before the volunteers were shown Mojave, they were asked about Vista. Some said that they hated Vista, even though they'd never tried it. After seeing and playing with some of Vista, oops, Mojave's features, most of the volunteers were impressed, with many of them oooh-ing and aaaah-ing over Vista.
When the secret was revealed, most of the volunteers couldn't wait to get their hands on a copy. One volunteer was nonplussed to hear that Mojave was actually Vista and asked, "why is it faster?" My question, of course, is about the notebooks used by the volunteers. How much RAM was installed, how fast was the hard drive, and what kind of CPU did it have -- and how did that contribute to Vista's great performance?
"That's Vista? Why's it so fast?"
If I had my way, I'd have Microsoft do another video, handing volunteers a copy of Mojave and asking them to install it on their existing PC or notebook. I wonder if their reactions would be quite so enthusiastic.
Vista Resources
I still haven't switched to Vista. I know I'll do it eventually, but for the moment, my system's running just fine. Nonetheless, I want you to know about a few Vista resources, just in case you're using it -- or, like me, thinking about the future.
- Answers to Vista Users' Nagging Questions
- 20 Vista Downloads to Tweak & Improve Your System
- Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch
- Farewell Vista, Hello XP
- How to Get and Keep Windows XP After June 30
The Ins and Outs of Vista
I'm also guessing some of you may need the extra help only a hefty resource book can provide. The book I recommend is Windows Vista Inside Out, Deluxe Edition (Microsoft Press; ISBN-10: 0735625247) by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson. For under $40, you'll get every Vista question answered and learn things about the OS that may improve your experience. It's available on Amazon.
Talkback
Have something to say? You can use Comments below, take one or both of the BussDash polls, or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.
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The "let's-hate-Vista" movement is simply a viral phenomenon in that a large percentage of the population must always go with what's popular. Right now the cool thing to do is slam Vista, so they do what the popular thing is -- slam Vista. One doesn't need a Ph.D in Sociology to understand that this is an age-old human trait that resides among the masses and is common among the pop culture. Had the popular direction started out as "Vista is cool," it'd be a whole different ballgame. I myself have had no problems with Vista and think it's a great OS.
I'm sure if Vista hadn't been launched (and in some ways still has) a dearth of driver support and memory hog issues on lower end machines, it would have gotten the "Vista is cool" narrative.
As it stands, unless it works with all my hardware I don't see a reason to upgrade, and I HAVE an amazing system. Folks that don't have more than a gig of RAM are probably going to balk at potential slowdown when they upgrade their OS.
"How much RAM was installed, how fast was the hard drive, and what kind of CPU did it have -- and how did that contribute to Vista's great performance?"
Right on the mojave website it says that a HP Pavillion DV 2000 with 2GB of ram was used. Look up the specs if you want to. It looks like it's using an AMD 1.8 ghz dual core processor and a 100 gb hard drive. Probably scores about a 2.4 on the Vista experience index.
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@calinco: LOL -- yeah, I need to read more carefully... -- Steve
Social virus? Get real. If you have very recent hardware, Vista can be sweet (properly tuned). If you have modern but less recent hardware (very fast CPU and memory in particular), Vista really is the brutally bloated hog you heard it is. And yes, I speak from eyes-, mind-, and hands-on.
I'm tired of hearing all this whinning! First and foremost, VISTA WORKS! I've been running it since the first release. Sure there were minor driver hickups, but no biggy. I still dual boot just in case there is an old program I need to run. However, if you run NEW releases of programs or updates I've ran across few issues. I know its a bit of a RAM hog, but for christ's sake... get more RAM. Remember when you were excited about a 10 GB hard drive? I don't hear anyone complaining about needing terabytes for storage these days... Use your head, you don't see OSX 10.5 running on a dinosaur, do you? This whole thing reminds me of 2004 when no one would install SP2.... now you're still rocking and defending it. Guess, I'll just sit back in laugh.... stick with the crowd and you'll be cool. Guess you forgot, we're nerds posting on PC World! (By the way, I'm running Vista Ultimate on a 2.08ghz AMD with 1 GB RAM... 2.0 vista score. It works and I'm on a mac right now.
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@drivindisco1223: One thing you said makes me resist Vista: "I still dual boot just in case there is an old program I need to run."
Granted I could upgrade that old app, but if the old version works well under XP, shouldn't Vista be able to handle it? --Steve
actually, drivindisco, my daughter has my 7 year old mac, a dinosaur by anyone's standards, runniing OS 10.5, and it's light-years faster than my neighbor's much newer eMachines running XP, which I just fixed. You are correct, though; Vista is a "bit of a RAM hog".
I upgraded from Vista Ultimate to XP Professional. Vista proved to be too much of crap software; freezing, flickering, and restarting by its own. Please try it ;)
The 5 versions of Vista are an additional problem. Many utilites are missing in the cheaper versions, yet the links/shortcuts are still there. I clicked on one such thing and Vista locked up for 10 minutes, crashed, and when I rebooted, it had some error message that some .msc file or something could not be found. Vista is littered with stupid things like this. It also cannot seem to determine that I have actually opened a program. Shouldnt my permission have been given for the program to be executed when I opened it??? UAC makes sense in some situations, but it is just there to make up for Vista's other problems, like malware running programs. Maybe if they had done the same thing with XP on this system and made it look new, its performance would be better than Vista!
Absolutely, tiotally, unequivocally sucks.
I have been a Microsoft user since DOS 3.0, and a software developer for over 20 years. I have programmed mainframes, UNIX boxes and even IBM 4700 controllers, in languages from Assembler to C#. I used to trust MSFT to deliver a quality product with reasonable performance and high usabilitywhich allowed me to control my own PC - and almost anybody to write software or drivers for it.
They haven't just dropped the ball with this one, they have decided to play a card game instead.
Too bad they don't have the skillset.
Vista is Ballmer's baby.
Spawn of the Devil.
It is a classic blunder maturing organizations make once the vision which made them successful in the first place is subverted by "professional" management chasing personal goals, ignorant of technical reality, at the expense of both the company and the customer.
Think K-Mart/Kresge just before Wal-Mart, or the corner hardware store before Home Depot.
My new ThinkPad T61p with a 2.6 GHz duel-core Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 4 GB RAM with Vista is slower than my old Armada m700 with a 1 GHz Pentium III and 512 MB RAM with XP. Instead of "Why is it faster?", I wonder "Is it faster?".
You idiots, anyone who is a Vista-hater can go boil their bottoms!!! I have been using Vista since March, and haven't had a single problem with it. I transferred all my stuff from my piece-of-crap 1.4 GHz, 3 year old Compaq with an HP symbol slapped on it in about 10 minutes with a USB cable. Everything works flawlessly. I don't see why anyone could hate Microsoft's best OS ever. OSX 10.5 still kicks it's butt though, but I can't afford a Mac, I'm in college. I do know how to hack OSX 10.5 to run on a PC with an Intel chip. Just google OSX 10.5 on pc. My laptop has AMD though. Glassmaster is right, hating Vista is just the current thing. When Windows 7 comes out, It'll be Vista that's got the nerds vote. I will switch to Windows 7 when it comes out, just to prove that it will be just as good if not better than Vista.
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@pjskeleton: The real issue, at least the way I read it, is that upgrading to Vista on an XP-based system that's running well just isn't worth the cost or hassle. --Steve
I'm sure Vista is probably very nice if it supports your priorities.
I am running XP Pro SP3, FF3 and/or IE7, lean and fast, with 1G Ram and a 19" primary LCD and a 22" secondary LCD. This setup has done everything that I have ever wanted it to do.
My priorities are security, productivity, speed, and real estate. I have plenty of protection/security, everything "works right", and I don't have extraeneous toolbars, etc. hogging my real estate or CPU. I don't need a lot of eye candy.
Since I am quite satisfied with my machine, and quite safe for surfing with my programs, I can't think of any reason to switch to Vista.
If or when XP is no longer supported for security patches, I will probably buy a new machine with Vista for 'online only', or switch to Linux for that. I love my XP.
I've only used Vista Ultimate 64 and the only reason I don't use it now is that it's July 31, 2008 and Vista has SP1 and STILL I don't have drivers for my printer HP DJ9800 and Graphics Card.
Most people would agree that this is not a MS problem and that I should contact my peripheral companies. I disagree. I think that if Microsoft wants people to adopt Vista get the drivers out there. 64-Bit computing is no longer a niche market.
To me the argument about Vista/XP speed is meaningless.
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@MikeLevine: You're not the first person vigorously complaining about the lack of 64-bit drivers. --Steve
My notebook came with Microsoft Vista Premium -- it 2ghz pentium, 2gig ram, and 200gig hard -drive. And it's by sony -- and it was and still is top flap machine. Everytime I ran any program on vista it would heat up my machine so much. So called Sony, and they asked me to bring the box to their store in Toronto. Technican checked it -- came to the conculsion which I knew at the time -- machine was fine. Just for the personal test I dual booted with Kubunu 8.04.1, and so far it is very cool -- and uptime in my machine is over "five days!". With Vista laptop would heated up within hours.
So this is why I bought this mini mac, I don't think so Microsoft. I don't like you nor your operating system. I'll keep one of my box with XP -- just for the hell of it.
I run multiple XP-pro systems on a 4 year old HP Pavillion desktop with Pentium 4 2,6 GHz. And on my HP laptop with Core 2 Duo T7300 I run both XP-Pro and Vista. Both the Vista and XP systems run exactly the same programs. I cannot see any big difference between them but use Vista 95% of the time because it's nicer looking and the sound is better.
In my opinion the only reason why someone would want to go back to XP when they have Vista installed is because their computer isn't up to the job of running Vista properly. Many of the cheaper computers on the market fall in that category. That's also the reason why I would never install Vista on my desktop .... it's just not up to it. MS was dishonest in giving a too low specification for running Vista and this has backfired on them in giving Vista a bad name.
My biggest gripe about Vista is that it uses approx. 4 times more GBs than the XP system running the same programs! Which mean slower backups and larger backup HD's for 2 systems which do the same job! No wonder that it needs a fast computer to run properly.
Pause2Reflect: No social virus? Think again. Why did thousands of people line up to buy the first iPhone for $600, then find out the connection was super slow, spurring on many PCW articles and angry readers? Hmmmmmm. Another funny thing about that: was it not 6 months later that Apple dropped the price a couple hundred bucks and those people who just had to have the iPhone because it was "cool" got pissed off and demanded money back, which Apple did, trying to avoid a PR nightmare? No social virus? It's all over the place in our culture, just look around. Because Vista needed more power to run well and to take care of its new graphics technology, lots of people got pissed off because they had to shell out money not only to buy the OS, but also upgrade their system's RAM or get a new computer capable of handling Vista. Couple that with the "let's-hate-Microsoft" movement and there's where the "Vista-hating" started. Go ahead: buy a Mac if it makes you feel better.
I have a home network, with my main HP Vista desktop computer connected by ethernet to a Dell desktop with WinXP, and wirelessly to an HP Vista laptop and a second Dell XP desktop. Guess which computer Vista consistently refuses to recognize? Yes, the ethernet connected Dell XP. It took me several months to figure out Vista wants all computers freshly booted so it can "discover" the network. It will categorically ignore the Dell XP that is physically connected by an ethernet cord until I reboot the computers, and even at that, it takes several minutes for Vista to search and find. That same Dell XP used to be hooked up to an old Dell Win98 computer with the same line, and it NEVER failed to recognize and instantly display the other computer. I'm not a newbie at this, but setting up the network with Vista was and continues to be a nightmare.
I recently purchased a new desktop computer. It came with XP Pro preinstalled. It also came with a Vista Business CD should I wish to upgrade to Vista. I decided to dual boot into both XP and Vista. So I installed Vista.
After using both XP and Vista, I now exclusively use Vista. I like it more than XP. Over the years that I had XP on a previous computer I was restoring and reinstall XP. I must have reinstalled Windows 25 times. I was continually hacked.
I now feel and am secure using Vista. I have had and have use it for 9 months. I love it. I have been able to install the programs that I used in XP on it iwth no problems. I have setup three printers with no problem. I have had no problems with Vista.
I can not understand the negative writeups it gets. As I said I love it. Between XP and Vista. I would rather have Vista.
MS claims you need a computer with 512k or more memory to run Vista. That's either grossly misleading, or more likely, it's just a whopper of a lie.
MS should have told consumers if you want vista to respond similarly to xp, you need four to six times more memory (2g min)
In Feb 07, i bought a 1g computer to run vista and wasted $600 because MS did not have the integrity to tell the truth.
Instead MS took the money and ran! MS's dishonesty has left a sour taste in my mouth, that I suspect is shared by millions of other consumers.
The way MS conducted the most recent Vista "comparison" is just further evidence, they'll say or do anything to get your money.
Mike
A little over a year ago, my trusty Toshiba Satellite bit the dust and I went shopping for a new laptop. I bought an HP Pavilion with Vista Home Premium, a 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 256mb nVIDIA 7600-series graphics card. I didn't really know much about Vista, but it was the only choice at all the big box retail stores.
The various bugs, tweaks, driver issues and countless other glitches were very irritating! I was also trying to acclimate to Office 2007 along with Vista and that only made things worse!
I eventually sold the HP to a friend, bought a new ThinkPad with XP Pro and hoped to never see Vista again...
After cooling off for six months or so, I found myself needing a new desktop. I gave Vista another shot, this time with SP1, and it's been a MUCH better experience....not perfect, but better...