Windows

The Decision Should Be Mine

Posted by on Nov 27, 2007 | 3 Comments

Gnomie Craig writes:

After using the Amiga OS for almost 15 years, I came over to Windows 98SE around 1999. For the most part, I wasn’t very happy with Windows; Amiga was so much simpler — even though Windows was capable of so much more than what the Amiga OS offered.

Having dealt with the transfer of OSes (and also the language barriers, as I am a programmer), I eventually came to like and support Windows 98 going to Windows 2000. I then found, like many others, that Windows ME offered more but was also very buggy. Then XP came out (how many hours that kept me up!) — as with Vista today, there was very little hardware driver support. But XP had a likeabilty factor, and when service packs one and two came to light, XP became a major force to the working of my daily life.

I recently brought a new laptop that was Vista ready (HP Pavilion dv6030) — oh, I was so excited thinking I had the machine that was capable and truly able to run this beast OS (wrong). It was not a nice experience at all — Vista was shoddy; it was slow and it lagged. Its eye candy was impressive, but Aero became boring and CPU hungry. It was turned off within hours. It had full driver support, but just didn’t have software support. (An interesting note: did you know that the most incompatible software with Vista was Microsoft’s?) Visual wouldn’t work and I was gob smacked. It took me three weeks, but I now have XP running (and while some drivers are iffy, it’s still a better experience than Vista ever was). I hope that Microsoft does manage to pull Vista together and with time call upon and try to develop with the hardware vendors to make more of the existing hardware compatible. Vista is shipped with the biggest amount of drivers on disk, yet many don’t work. Why is that?

It comes to something when you buy a machine and you’re willing, within days of opening up your sparkly new PC, to void the warranty by running an OS (XP, in my case) that is not supported by the vendor. Some systems even come equipped with a setting within the BIOS that disallows you to run XP. The option should be mine — not the computer company’s and not Microsoft’s.

The argument with Vista can go on and on. A few love, but loads hate. The numbers say it all.

Web cams, scanners, printers, sound, graphics, and NIC cards are all victims. I’m not sure what MS is thinking or hoping for.

Good luck Vista, but in my books, long live XP.

  • ArtC

    Anyone got a pointer to any sort of site, list, ANYTHING that can help identify machines with BIOS ‘features’ disallowing XP?

    For that matter, anything similar about manufacturers who say the warranty will be voided if other than Vista is installed?

    Not legal in Australia and we would just love to crucify some b******s for these practices!

  • Daz

    Firstly you state “it had full driver support, but just didn’t have software support.” and provide details of one program that didnt work yet you finish with “Web cams, scanners, printers, sound, graphics, and NIC cards are all victims. I’m not sure what MS is thinking or hoping for.” MS are thinking that maybe the makers of webcams, scanners, printers, sound, graphics and NIC cards had many months to develop and deploy drivers for windows vista prior to vista’s release.

    I feel you should of be seeking more guidance from the people at HP for the problems with your Laptop and not blaming Vista. I also believe you need to learn a bit more about OS’s cause if it took you all of a few hours to test vista and type the above dribble and then it took you 3 weeks to get XP working them something is obviously wrong with the user.

    Pack it back in the box, take it back to the shop/seller and tell them your to stupid to use a computer..

  • ennui ->anomie

    I have to agree with Daz on this one. Driver development falls in the lap of hardware manufacturers. I have an NVIDIA card and the latest forceware drivers are no where near where the need to be to deliver the best possible content on Vista. Is that Vista’s fault?… no.

    Overall I have had very few problems with Vista and I’m not sure what kind of bizarro hardware configurations or programs people are trying to run that leads them to be so pouty. I remember when XP first came out and everyone was whining about it as well, and now people are hanging on to it like it was a gift from god or something. It isn’t.

    I think what annoys people about Vista is that it doesn’t work *exactly* like previous incarnations of Windows. They feel out of their comfort zone. If they can’t do things exactley like before they get defensive, give up and blame the OS. If the user isn’t willing to change gears a bit and shift their thinking they are going to be frustrated by Vista and sulk. I was reading a post somewhere where the person had some trouble with recent items in the start menu in vista. The problem could have easily been fixed, but their response was instead ‘F it… I’m going back to XP!’ I see a lot of this kind of response over the most trivial matters.

    I think the other thing that annoys people about vista is that 90% of them are running it on systems that don’t meet minimum requirements. You MUST get more RAM. 512mb doesn’t even come close to cutting it… but this annoys people as well even though running things off of RAM the vista way is faster and far more efficient then the XP virtual memory way.

    Sigh.

    A couple of years from now, we’ll be able to look back on these vista-bashing posts and be able to substitue ‘Vista’ for ‘XP’ and everyone can whine about how terrible the next release of Windows is… “it ruined my life!”