No - in fact it’s a royal pain to set up, particularly with Vista pre-installed
Luckily people have written freeware utils to make it easier, as I wrote in another thread I used EasyBCD to set up a Vista/XP dual boot painlessly
(I then found I wasn’t using Vista, so I uninstalled it - but even in its death throes Vista had one final gotcha - the NTFS used by Vista isn’t quite the same as in XP etc and not all partitioning software has been updated to deal with this - so my first attempt at resizing partitions made a real mess of things!)
In fact Bill and Steve come out of those interviews quite well, refreshingly honest - which is why it pains me to have to post this link to a cruel and amateurish attack on Ballmer
But *why? *
What are the great new features that make it worth learning a new way of working? sure there are some new security measures (which users turn off as soon as they can) - but I have never had a virus, trojan etc on my XP systems so I’m not seeing the great leap forward.
One of the things I’ve liked about Windows since 95 has been the ability to use it in my own way; there’s not been a “one true way” as there is on the Mac - until now.
I use the “up” button a lot; I know others who don’t even know there is an “up” button (just as some don’t use keyboard shortcuts)
I tried using the breadcrumbs, really I did, thinking I could find a way to make them work for me - but they are inconsistent (classic bad GUI design) my navigation speed couldn’t get back to where it was because I’d have to pause to consider what I was looking at, and its context.
Adding new features is great, hiding the old ones to discourage their use is ok (if the new methods really are better) – but deliberately removing features totally is a sad departure for MS. And I really don’t want to be told it’s “for my own good” (again, that’s the kind of attitude I associate with Macdom)
It’s not about being afraid of change, it’s about being annoyed by too much change that doesn’t work right.
I am a very basic computer user, some of you guys are talking over my head and I think I am probably in the majority of your home computer users skill wise. I just got used to XP when my desktop died so I got a laptop with Vista and no sir, I don’t like it. Tried to play a game that looked interesting, turns out it won’t work with Vista. Today I had a problem with Windows Live One Care, so I did some searching for the answer on the forums over there. It seems it is also related to a Vista problem and it occurred after the most recent update and neither MS or Live One are gonna bother to fix it. There’s so many other things I don’t like I can’t even think of them all but the main one is that my really fast processor with lots of RAM isn’t all that fast because it has to deal with a bloated operating system. Yeah, I’m nostalgic for XP, too.
I don’t understand why people act like XP had these same kinds of problems. The only problem that I had with XP was that Diablo 2 didn’t seem to work with it. I was using a beta version of XP, and other than that, it worked flawlessly. I dual-booted with '98 so that I could play D2, and found that XP was way better at plug-n-play than 98. After installing both 98 and XP, I would check out the Device Manager in XP, see what I had, download 98 drivers for everything to a partition that 98 could read (the difference in file systems was the only annoyance), and them reboot to 98 and install the drivers.
XP was fine. I got a new Acer PC with Vista about 13 months ago. It went to sleep when it wanted to, woke up when it wanted to; and if it did wake up, usually the cursor would be invisible on one monitor. I don’t remember all of the bugs that it had. After it started having the same hardware problems that kept it out of service for over a month, Acer told me that it was OOW (by 3 weeks, so fuck me.) So I bought an eMachines (with Vista).
It works much better, so I don’t know how many of the problems were due to Vista or Acer. But the fact remains that Vista adds nothing to XP except for a opaque titlebars and a few other useless window dressings, and a 4x memory requirement.
It didn’t. But that didn’t stop people from acting like it was the devil’s spawn that was trying to pry their beloved Win98/Win2k/WinMe(!!) from their cold dead hands. I use Vista, and some things are annoying, but not nearly to the level being expressed here.
hmpf. I’ve been Vista slaying all week. My job uses proprietary software programs that are not happy with Vista. The only thinga I see so far are (1) that the security settings are so screwed down right out of the box that virtually everything needs “permissions” until I have time to unass the settings and (2) it’s pretty.
Depends on what you mean by adequate. If you mean the same way a metal bar wouldbe adequate for hammering nails if you don’t have an actual hammer. Then yes.
Well an up button is always in the same place. Bread crumbs are in random places. If you want to go up 4 folders it’s quicker to click up 4 times then to spend the effort find the folder in the bread crumb.
With your hand properly trained you don’t even need to look at the cursor while it goes to the up button.
The best analogy I think of is say the up button and breadcrumbs were turn signal control types. When you need to turn you can turn on the turn signal without evening thinking about it because it’s always in the same spot.
Now Ford or GM comes out with the breadcrumb turn signal. It randomly moves around the steering column so you have to stop your train of thought and spend mental energy finding it.
Yea sometimes you end up plunked down deep in a folder nest from the start. Like when you use “find target” from a short cut. Open a folder from a search result, use “open containing folder” from your web browser, ect. Other times you pasted in a location. Back\forward are useless then.
Oh they’re a cool idea, I just don’t understand why I can have both? There’s times when the up button is more useful, and times when the breadcrumbs are more useful. ETA: This was not meant to be snarky in any way. I’m running Vista, but don’t have a ‘dog’ in the fight. I’m just curious as to what was lost with the removal of the ‘up’ button. I adapted fairly quickly to the new interface and haven’t found a loss of convenience in this issue.
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Prolly depends what you’re doing on the computer, and how you use it. Vista seems to be aimed at using it one way.
If by ‘does thing differently’ you mean different in the way Cthulhu would do things differently then Buddha? Then yes it is different, I do agree.
Seriously what was gained by removing the up button? There’s a burn button. On what planet would a burn button be more useful then an up button?
I’m happy it worked out for you.
That’s pretty much my laptop too.
I’m guessing you’re talking about in a high traffic environment? Yea it is kind of useless then. Don’t stop glowing. I’m just talking about in a home environment with 1 or 2 networked computers. If it starts glowing and there’s no known traffic source then that means I should see what’s up. Usually it’s just an automatic update.
The globe thing in the corner when you have a path to the internet is nice, I’ll give it that.
I thought that was shareware. Well that’s pretty cool. TY.
That’s pretty much the specs of my laptop, you run an HP dv9000z?
I work with programmers, designers and other people that have been using different operating systems for decades. We’ve got Windows 2000, XP and OS X running on various machines. We’ve avoided Vista, but we’ve had to install Office 2007 on some of them, which uses Vista-style interfaces.
It was a month before anyone realized that the Windows logo in the upper right hand corner was actually a button, and not just a pretty logo. It revolutionized lives and increased productivity a bajillion-fold! Well, okay, not that, but it is proof that the interface is wonky. We can move between old Windows versions, OS X and Ubuntu just fine, but Vista confounds us…
I’m a reactionary old fart and recently bought an awesome 17" Dell Vostro notebook with XP Pro for $600. My ASUS eee is too fucking small to couch surf properly. I am of the philosophy that one should buy a cheap computer that is technologically 6 months or a year behind the times and wait a year or so for a new OS to become stable. Plus, I heard that a lot of my apps won’t run on Vista. I assume that my next computer (3 years or so) will be Vista, unless Ubuntu or some variant makes the decision for me. I’ll install a dual boot Ubuntu system when I get the chance.
Yes, Boot Camp is an amazing program. It really deals with the way Vista is a huge pain in the ass for dual-booting, compared to the previous operating systems.
There’s a lot of ntldr problems if you try XP, and grub issue if you want Linux. Generally, if you’re not using Boot Camp, the only way you can get Vista to dual boot is to have it installed first. This does not make putting it on a computer as a second partition easy, if you, say, wanted to test it before converting your old OS.
I took my newly bought PC with Vista preloaded straight to my computer guy and had him wipe it and install xP.
This after having bought an Acer laptop with Vista preloaded as backup for my main Dell PC system, which has been running xP smoothly and usefully ever since I replaced my 2K computer. I started out trying to be fair to Vista but it didn’t take long to develop a sincere loathing for its bloated sloth and annoying nannying. The fact that troubles with a crucial peripheral forced me to use it regularly for a while really brought home just how much I loathed it – familiarity bred contempt.
So I’ve bought another low-end (ZT) desktop, integrated it into the collection of printers and scanners I need for my business, and it’s running just fine on xP. The laptop is back to occasional tasks and my blood pressure is back to normal.
I don’t need a lot of functions on a computer, but what I do need has to be swift, easy, reliable, and transparent. Vista fails me on every count.
This tutorial describes how to install Vista on a machine with XP already installed, and to be honest I can’t see anything tricky in there - repartitioning is the only fiddly bit, but Vista spots the XP installation just fine and adds it to its bootloader automatically. And this one describes installing Vista on a pre-existing Ubuntu machine using the same old procedure (repartition, install Windows, restore grub to MBR, reconfigure grub for chainloading). So I’m not really seeing what the problem is - Windows installs have always splatted the MBR. Certainly it dual-boots just fine on my work machine, which has grub pointing at Vista and Ubuntu installations. Once booted it’s terrible, of course, but that’s by the by (and more a problem with our work administration than Vista itself).
I am avoiding Vista as I don’t really have the coin to buy a PC, then go out and buy more hardware (RAM, etc) to get it to run properly. This, combined with the fact that I hear it’s a resource hog, and I plan to run some programs that tend to hog resources as well (I am betting Spore is gonna be a bitch that way) I’m working to make my next PC an XP PC.