There are so many distorted views of Vista being promulgated on the internet right now. It does seem that more than the usual amount of complaints brought about by those generally disgruntled by Microsoft in general are surfacing at a high pace. On the other hand, there are those who cling to the story that Vista has worked well for them, and they are sticking to it. For these second types, I have said that they probably are happy – they genuinely have no problems, because their computing adventure is very narrow in scope, and fits entirely within the Vista safety zone of things that work reasonably well (and their expectations are few).

The others who are genuinely trying to get useful information to make a bad situation better are being given misinformation by others, and being criticized for either nescience or stupidity. These are among the ones I suspect are being salted through the community, as paid shills, to provoke these people further, and pursue the idea that almost all problems can be traced to user error.

On Betanews, as an aside to a comment on the new Windows Desktop Search 4.0 release, someone identified as AnthonySPT made these remarks to another who was not trashing the Search feature, simply stating how it was not living up to the description given by Microsoft – and that, like many MS products, was still not ready for prime time.

Vista in current reviews is faster than XP in gaming, faster than XP in business applications, and is faster than XP in graphics & Video applications, and is faster than OS X in all of these areas as well. (Run bootcamp with Vista on 10.5 and do the numbers yourself.)

Here are the rules, if you have 1gb of RAM, Vista is faster. If you have a Geforce 5200 card from 2004 or newer, Vista is significantly faster due to the GPU based optimizations.

(Yes even WDDM shoves some GDI/GDI+ features through the 3D GPU, in addition to bitmap decompression and font drawing, so even with the ‘pretty’ glass, Aero is faster than turning it off and is also faster than XP.)

The Vista Myths and FUD needs to stop at some point. There are over 100 million Vista users, and very few have any problems. It is either the OS Fanbois that hate MS or people that didn’t want to learn the UI differences that are the biggest whiners on the Internet, and they make up less than 0.01% of the actual Vista users. PERIOD.

to which I answered

Cite one example, other than Ed Bott’s flawed results, which were refuted by co-worker at ZDNet, A Kingsley-Hughes. I have begun to think there are way too many paid shills for Microsoft, so that they can pump up the Vista rep - people like you are the ones spreading misinformation, and FUD.

My results go somewhat like this - Vista might come close to XP speed, if you have a GeForce 6800XT or better, and 4GB RAM. This is what has been observed by me as I work on many machines, and I’ll grant that Vista is less a pig than before, but not close to XP speed - if you read the design ideas, it isn’t supposed to be. MS decided they could get parity in speed because they assumed that users would be getting a machine at least 50% faster than the ones that were running XP, so externals were counted upon for speed, not great coding.

If Gates, Ballmer, or anyone near the top would simply admit this, so much enmity would be gone instantly. The vast majority of people will have tremendous patience with someone who says, earnestly, ‘I have some problems, but work is continuing to resolve all matters’. People get irate when told that the problems observed are either self-inflicted or non-existent.

Microsoft has shown the world it is not above paying people to use their inferior search services, who thinks that this company is not beyond paying for good reviews and, when possible user condemnation?

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