Vista is better than you think it is says Microsoft
Ed Bott tells us that Microsoft’s upcoming ad campaign is going to convince us all that Vista is better than we think it is. If you don’t believe Microsoft realizes how bad Vista’s reputation is then get your head around this- the ad campaign will be a $300 million campaign. That’s million as in big gobs of money.
Microsoft’s biggest challenge is not in convincing us how misinformed we are about Vista in spite of what they might think. No, their biggest challenge is going to be convincing those of us who actually use Vista, especially on mobile computers like laptops and Tablet PCs, that it’s not that bad. I for one get exhausted dealing with continual issues on laptops that Vista dumps on me. I’m not a newbie and I don’t junk up my systems, at least not my main work machines. I keep them trim and mean because the need to pick up my PC and get to work is paramount. Vista regularly fails to cooperate with this scenario though and Microsoft is going to have to spend more than $300 million to convince me otherwise.
I’m not the only one who is tired of Vista’s antics, not by far. Recently Warner Crocker had to hunker down and get some work done under trying mobile circumstances and found that over time he was increasingly frustrated over Vista’s (and XP’s too) failure to reliably work for him. Experiencing his systems slowing down over time when all he was doing was using his PCs for work was like fingernails on a chalkboard for Warner.
I had the luxury of putting both machines through a real grind over aperiod of months, and I’m going to restate something many already know.Again, the Motion was running XP and the HP was running Vista. Over thecourse of time both machines began to slow down, almost the way amachine does when you are constantly installing and uninstalling newsoftware. That wasn’t the case here though as I was far too busy toindulge in much software experimentation. But I did notice that thingsgot considerably slower on both machines over the course of this work.The Motion fared better here than the HP. Yes, I know we all learned tolive with that with XP, but it seems the same thing is true of Vista aswell. The longer you work with it, the slower it gets.…
Again, I want to stress that I think the slowdowns I experienced weremore a fault of Microsoft’s operating systems than the hardware. Thatsaid, the machine isn’t usable without an OS. On the Motion it waseasier to deal with. On the HP, it got to a point where I didn’t wantto go there.
These issues with Windows just won’t go away and are unquestionably even worse in Vista than in XP. I routinely see slow resumption from sleep mode, long disk thrashing running Outlook (another Microsoft product), and even worse occasional system crashes while a system is sleeping in a dock. I am convinced that it’s going to take more than an expensive ad campaign to fix what’s wrong with Vista. Customer misconceptions can be redirected but not when they are based on fact. In the case of Vista the earth really is flat.
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Well James, I don’t know about your problems with Vista, I’m using it from day one and I wont back to XP.
Vista is not perfect but it’s getting better and to most of the problems I have found a fix or a work around. Still things that need to be addressed but overall I’m satisfied.
I also consider that many of the the problems that you see around the web and that people are blaming on Microsoft OS are more drivers relative than MS issues.
The other day I had a conversation with a friend and when he told me that Vista was around 40% slower than XP. I went and gave him the link to my Vista Score tables and benchmarks. Vista is less than 15% slower than XP. In fact, I have a test where you can see that a XP manchine with 1 GB of RAM performs the same than that same Machine with 2 GB or RAM.
the bottom line, many of the comments I have seen about Vista are not based in facts and are unjustified. And those with facts have been largely exaggerated.
Frank, I hear what you’re saying. I only write about my own experiences however and I stand by what I see with Vista.
I always find it difficult to comment on articles like this as people hold very strong views based on their personal experiences.
I have the benefit of running my two copies of Vista on high end hardware and I could not go back to XP, mainly due to the wonderful search and tablet benefits. I use my M700 tablet every day for a minimum of 3 hours for work typing docs, spreadsheets, blogging, MSN with cam, trying out new software etc. and it works like a charm. Fast and stable. In fact the only issue I have to deal with is that Firefox will sometimes hog 80 to 100% of one CPU until I kill the process (which I notice when this happens due to the M700 fan firing up).
I firmly believe that there is a failure at a hardware driver level causing many issues. We know that Vista was released with immature drivers and poor third party support. This has increased greatly but these problems that are seen, while common, are not universal.
That last line should be ‘this has IMPROVED greatly and these comments that are seen…”
I didn’t have high hopes for Vista initially but I’ve been pleasantly surprised running it on both my desktop and laptop/tablet. The laptop took awhile to tweak; I needed to find the “right” version of the Intel video driver and disable the Omnipass automatic password utility before performance was acceptable.
My biggest issue with Vista is the amount of storage space it requires. Including hidden files and the 1GB recovery partition, Vista Business consumes about 15GB of space on my laptop. (By comparison, XP Tablet consumes about 8.5GB.) That means a 30GB HDD or 32GB SSD with Vista only provides about 12-14GB of available space for applications and user files; not very much if you want to use the machine for unclouded (“clear sky”?) computing.
My best experience with Vista so far has been with it installed in a VM in Fusion on a Macbook Pro. It screams in that scenerio, very usable. I’ve tried putting it on various other hardware around the house and it falls flat for one reason or another. Or, in the case of my main desktop, no reason I could figure out. The hardware is top notch, plenty of ram, large, fast drives, fast, dedicated video card…Vista absolutely sucks on the thing and I couldn’t figure out why to save my life. It runs XP now and XP loves it. Granted, I didn’t spend a week trying to figure out why it sucked, I don’t have that kind of time, but it did and it’s totally usable on the MBP with Fusion. Go figure.
I think, for the most part, people are tired of spending a lot of time and money on something that does not really provide a whole lot of value.
I’ll throw in my 2 cents. I recently re-installed Vista on my laptop (specs: 2.2 Ghz AMD solo core CPU, 2 MB RAM (upgraded from 1 MB when I got it), Nvidia GeForce Go 6100 video card). It came (last August) with Vista installed. I immediately did a clean re-install of Vista to get rid of all the crapware. From day 1, I had constant issues that, while not making the laptop unusable, made it “not fun.” I even regularly (but not consistently) got BSODs when coming out of Sleep. I don’t know what the specific problem(s) was (were), but I think it was related to either the video or wifi drivers.
So, I put XP on it. I had to hunt around for all of the proper XP drivers since the mfg didn’t support XP on it. I got everything working and XP worked well (I had niggling wifi issues, but no other major problems — and I don’t think I ever had a BSOD).
Over time, things just seemed to be running slower and slower, though — nothing seemed “snappy.” Plus, I got tired of the Zune theme. I figured it was time to re-install the OS to get rid of Winrot. Vista SP1 had just been released, so I decided to give Vista another try since I had to re-install everything, anyway.
Long story somewhat longer: I’m pleased so far with Vista SP1. Everything works well, Vista looks much better than XP (IMO), no BSODs (so far), and Vista actually seems “snappy” on my middling specs laptop. I only have two issues at this point: 1) my webcam is so old, it doesn’t have Vista drivers — I have to buy a new webcam; 2) the most current video driver for my graphics card is the original version released early in 2007 (or maybe even in late 2006). While it seems to work properly in all other respects, I experienced the “disappearing mouse pointer on a second monitor” problem. I found two suggested solutions: 1) use a newer video driver; 2) turn on mouse trails. I tried using a newer Nvidia driver (not specifically for my video card, but Nvidia has “universal” drivers), but that introduced a different issue — the UAC “black screen” would appear for about 10 seconds each time, instead of the usual 1-2 seconds. Although, I don’t get UAC warnings that much, it’s still a pain for it to be that way. I really hated using a driver kludge this way. So, I went with the mouse trails solution. It’s not that annoying if you put it on “short,” and it solved the problem.
So, I’d give Vista SP1 a thumbs up, at this point. It seems to have addressed whatever issues my laptop had with Vista 1.0. I couldn’t imagine going back to XP, now — I hope I don’t have to.
That’s an interesting picture reproduced at the top of this post showing a sailing ship from when? – maybe the sixteenth century? – and the slogan ‘At one point everyone thought the Earth was flat’.
The ancient Greeks knew the Earth was not flat! Maybe people get to know the truth sooner than is generally realised. Maybe they already know the truth about Vista.