Wait, wait – do people actually line up for OS launches?
I just bought a new home pc, and will upgrade to vista whenever the chinese version is out - in about 2 weeks. I bought a designed for vista pc
already running vista and office2007 on my work tablet as part of my company’s global rollout. my tablet is underpowered so not getting full vista benefits (and this post is tapped out on my pda).
so far a few minor annoyances. on the plus side - desktop search simply works. it’s awesome - bet that saves at least a few hours a week. works so well I didn’t even notice the first week. let’s put it this way, I no longer have to file email into special folders and hope I find it again. Now I don’t file email except to take it off the server.
so far it’s got real benefits and i’m not seeing any significant downside. yes, my brother does work for microsoft.
I doubt it. If I never run Windows as my main operating system again, it’s too soon.
Of course, if that guy’s right (and I feel certain that he is), then staying away from Vista won’t be enough to save you.
I’m not upgrading. Neither is the company I work for. Barring a miracle from Microsoft or Apple, my next OS is going to be Ubuntu.
I’m running Vista now, and like it a lot. I’m a sucker for aethetics, and the OS is beatiful - especially if you are running the Aero Glass theme. If anything, it’s a little bit faster in response than XP, because the windowing layer is now using the graphics card’s hardware acceleration.
As with anything new, there are good things and bad things. There are too many confirmation dialogs. Some of the UI changes are great, and some suck. All in all, I think it’s a decent upgrade.
I tend to wipe my computer and re-install the OS every couple of years, so when it came time to do it this year I just installed Vista instead of XP and re-loaded all my software. So far, everything has worked fine. I’m annoyed that ATI is still releasing beta drivers for Vista, because it means I have to uninstall them and reinstall in a week or so. But the drivers themselves have worked fine.
No. Just…no. Even calling it an “upgrade” is an abuse of the English language.
From all I’ve seen of it, Vista is the distilled essence of everything I hate about Microsoft software–stupid GUI design decisions, ineffective yet intrusive “mother-may-I” approach to security, absurd and abusive content restrictions, abusive licensing…the whole thing is an abomination. I suspect I’ll be forced to use it at least part of the time at work, but I’m going to fight that tooth and nail.
At home, I’ll continue to use XP on my gaming rig, at least until I’m satisfied with my games running on Mandriva Linux (most of them should work as soon as I get around to installing them). Then I’ll ditch Windows entirely. Mandriva had all the “eye-candy” features Vista is adding to Windows at least 6 months ago…and they actually worked, even when you ran Java programs (Vista’s “Glass” features were dying when you started a Java app, at least until fairly recently). Mandriva is also inherently more secure, and won’t be phoning home to Papa Bill about what I’m doing on my own machine.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, folks.
Whenever I get around to building my next PC, I’ll make a decision on OS.
My bet is that Vista will not perform any better than the software manufacturers thought it would when it was first shown to them a couple of years ago. They predicted only about 30% market penetration. So do I.
It won;t become the de facto OS unless the hardware sellers see it as a draw. They’ve been itching for sales to take an uptick, and if Vista doesn’t deliver, you’ll see them offering a choice of Vista or XP-SP2 for as long as Microsoft will support the old OS.
Fortunately, the brand new student computer lab machines that my penny-pinching IT manager put in my classroom aren’t remotely Vista compatible. They’re so chintzy that these brand new machines don’t even have DVD-ROM drives, never mind DVD-recordables. The processor, memory and graphics cards are never going to pass Vista muster, so I won’t have to have it rammed down my throat if it turns out to be a turkey.
At this stage, I’ll wait until I need to upgrade my tower again before changing OS. I’m on XP now. Hopefully by the time things do go “twang” with my HD, they’ll be onto something else.
Heck no. I’m also a developer and gamer, and my PC runs Win2k. It’s the most stable thing to come out of Redmond (though XP sp2 is close), and has over 95% of the capability and ease-of-use of Windows XP. It also lacks all the DRM crap they started shoving in right afterwards. (Case in point, hardware upgrades. My mobo at work was acting flaky, so our IT guy replaced it and my CPU. After upgrading the drivers, I got it back to find that Office and XP were both ‘unlicenced’ again. After failing automatic validation, it almost doubled the time it took to upgrade the hardware to phone MS and get an activation key. I’m afraid I cut off the nice Indian lady who has to talk numbers to people all day when she asked the bullshit question they always ask “How many computers is this copy of XP installed on?” Hmm. Well, there’s the dozen here, and then Jimmy lent it a bunch of friends, so at least 50 I guess… oh wait! None! That’s the answer. :rolleyes: )
I admit I may eventually upgrade to XP Pro for the .Net 2 support, but there’s no way I’m ‘upgrading’ to an OS with the ‘features’ listed by catsix above there. My server runs Ubuntu, and while running at least one Gates approved OS is pretty much a requirement for me, if I had another PC it’d be running *nix for sure.
I used Windows 98 for 7 years before moving to XP (some things I wanted to use required XP). For that same reason, it’ll probably be a few years before I (have to) move to Vista.
I imagine I will when I get my next computer. That’s two years from now for personal use and Og-knows-when for work use.
Since I have physical CDs for XP I may not, though.
Dear God. […shudder…]
When it becomes available on our microsoft site license, i may put it into another virtual machine under parallels desktop on my intel mac. While I rarely use any Windows operating system for productive work, I occasionally need to test how the e-learning content I put on the web works under other operating systems, and to test whether I can reproduce reported problems.
No, definitely not. No doubt the place I work will throw themselves wholeheartedly behind it and the results will be chaotic.
Trouble is that you need to activate an XP installation, and that’s something MS can eventually phase out for XP, leaving you unable to install it even if you wanted to.
I will probably have to deal with Vista at work, but I don’t see myself using it at home ever. My next machine will be built for running Linux, probably Ubuntu.
I’ll switch to Vista only when I buy a machine and XP is not available.
My employer installed Vista on a couple of lab desktops so that we could test our applications against it. Every one that my department supports, from PeopleSoft to the simplest web applet, experienced at least one major crisis and in some cases refused to work at all. The Vista machines were returned to XP (the company-standard desktop OS) within a couple of weeks.
Like Nanoda, I have Win2k on my home system (although I’m not a gamer) and see no reason to go beyond that at this time. I also have an older box running Ubuntu, which would probably be my OS of choice if I didn’t have to maintain at least some compatibility with work.
As mentioned earlier, the whole idea that Windows should ask for your attention/tell you something you don’t need to know is one of the reasons why windows sucks so much to begin with. Plug in a mouse or an external Hard Disk. What do you see? “New Mass Storage found”, “Apple iPod Found”, “Your Device is ready to use!”
On OSX there is none of this, and the way you can tell is that it appears on your desktop. The Microsoft guys just have a way of letting the interface get in your way for so many trivial reasons.
It’s truely an idiotic thing to have all of these security features now that request authorization for this and that. If you get 15 of them every two hours, you won’t think about clicking okay anymore if it has become the OS that cried wolf. I’m not trying to make in an OSX vs Vista argument, it’s just that it is all I have to base my judgment on. Well, I’ll stop the rant here, but I sense that Vista will be a big problem for Microsoft in the end. I think they would have been better off dropping the compatibility with the past, and creating something that is more tailored to meet today’s needs. Apple did this for OSX. Sure there are TONS of enterprise customers that would get screwed, but that’s why XP can live on. Although it would cost them loads in the end, I think it’s probably for the best seeing that the COULD possibly get a new chance at getting a good product out the door. And guess what? They could stop supporting XP (it is next on the list). What better way to take advantage of their dominance of the OS world?
They’d be hated even more for this. Not that that’s stopped them in the past, mind.
Given that Microsoft lets the user community debug their shit, I’ll stay with my stable version of XP until Vista has at least 2 years and 2-3 service packs under its belt.