Vista Sucks -- Fact of the Day
I won't go into my bad experiences with Vista, nor into the story of my purge of Vista from all personal and corporate computers, but you can read here and here.
Here are some interesting Amazon sales rank numbers as of 10/16/07 for Vista vs. XP, which Vista supposedly replaced 12 months ago. All the following are sales ranks in the Amazon software category, with a lower number implying higher sales:
XP Home Full Edition: #19
XP Home Upgrade: #105
Vista Home Basic Full Edition: #277
Vista Home Basic Upgrade: #174
Obviously this is unscientific, because it is just one channel. Also, Vista has more different segmented SKU's, so the product comparison is not exactly apples to apples. But it is interesting, no?
The OEM market is going to skew towards Vista because that is what OEM's tend to load by default. But even so, Dell, for example, is still offering Windows XP as an OEM option, a pretty unprecedented move this long after a new Windows launch. But the Amazon traffic is probably 99% OS changes, since almost everyone with a PC gets an OEM version loaded. Most of the Vista purchases are going to be upgrades from XP, and most of the XP purchases are going to be downgrades from Vista. Does this mean Vista downgrading is outstripping Vista Upgrading?
Postscript: It has now been two months since I downgraded to XP on my kid's laptop, and we are still amazed at how much better everything runs now. I was afraid I could not get all the drivers for XP but in the end I was succesful and everything, including the sound, is working great. There are a LOT of websites nowadays to help you downgrade. Or you can try dual booting.
Update: The real indicator that this is Vista downgrade sales of XP is that the Full Edition is out-selling the upgrade edition, which is a reverse of history when XP was the lead product. When I downgraded, I found I could not use the upgrade version of XP and had to use the full edition. My guess is that others have the same problem, and that the very high sales rank of the XP full edition is very likely due to high downgrade demand.
Tom G:
I dual-boot as well. Only for me, it's Windows XP and a distribution of Linux (SimplyMEPIS).
October 17, 2007, 6:31 amMy wife insists that she won't ever get Vista, so I am curious what she plans to do after XP is no longer a viable option. I plan to go Linux full-time (only needing windows for one game at the moment), but she hates it (with very little knowledge of it) about as much as she does Vista.
Chuck W:
I bought a new tablet preloaded with Vista Business in April. Have been nothing but frustrated ever since. Everything seems incredibly slooooooow to load or even when I try to shut down Windows to power off. I happened to be poking around on the vendor's web site and discovered that I could get full XP recovery disks for the princely sum of $45.00 (which should include all the appropriate drivers since this system was sold with XP when it first came out). Now all I have to do is take the time to load it.
October 17, 2007, 12:50 pmChuck W:
I bought a new tablet preloaded with Vista Business in April. Have been nothing but frustrated ever since. Everything seems incredibly slooooooow to load or even when I try to shut down Windows to power off. I happened to be poking around on the vendor's web site and discovered that I could get full XP recovery disks for the princely sum of $45.00 (which should include all the appropriate drivers since this system was sold with XP when it first came out). Now all I have to do is take the time to load it.
October 17, 2007, 12:50 pmBen:
I purchased a new desktop from Dell about three weeks ago. It came loaded with Vista Home Premium. Vista was a little confusing at first, since things have been organized differently. There was one program that wouldn't run but I found a replacement that turned out to be even better. Other than that, Vista has been rock solid for me.
October 17, 2007, 2:01 pmMax:
Microsoft is already up to there old embrace, enhance, extinguish strategy with XP. They have "embraced" support of XP with a new SP3 release. They will "enhance" XP via the service pack route, adding Vista features. They will "extinguish" XP when it is trsnsformed into Vista-lite.
October 17, 2007, 6:02 pmDoug:
So let me see if I have this correct. You ("one," actually) buy a PC because it's a better bargain than a Mac, and you're about to adopt a new OS, like it or not. According to all reports, PC discounting has not yet begun, so you're paying more money for a PC this year than last due to the increased cost of Vista. And now you have to pop for an additional $200 for a downgraded OS? How's that price comparison to an iMac look now?
I'm constantly astonished at the how people only consider the up-front costs of their PCs with zero regard to what it's going to take to maintain their PC pigs. Don't you value your time? If you're going to change your OS, why not at least consider a Mac, or even Linux? (The latter for REAL propeller-heads -- who's mother will ever understand Linux?)
October 17, 2007, 8:04 pmGreg:
I was planning to wait until Vista got out of this retail beta testing program before considering it, but I think I'll wait a little longer now.
If it weren't for games and a few other programs Linux would be a viable alternative. Maybe with my next hardware upgrade I'll dual XP and Linux and try some WINE with the Linux.
October 17, 2007, 11:04 pmCharles D. Quarles:
Sorry to hear that your experience has been so bad, but my own is excellent. I have all of my computers running Vista, with the weakest one running Ultimate 64 bit as a file server. I have XP and Ubuntu running under Virtual PC 2007 on my middle grade dual core Athlon 64 machine with lots of processes running in the background. My game machine runs a upper middle grade Intel Core Duo machine with a high grade video card. All run great. As they say, YMMV. The game machine is running a 32 bit version. The other two are running 64 bit versions. I also remember the same complaints when XP first came out.
October 24, 2007, 7:13 pmmc:
I have been a software developer for 10 years using mainly Microsoft products. I have always liked microsoft products but VISTA JUST FLAT SUCKS. My first day with it, and I had all kinds of security problems. I am logged in as administrator yet it asks me if I want to run a program as adminstrator. Ummmm no I think I will run it as someone who has no authority to do anything. Some "brain" at Microsoft decided that they should make the security nearly impossible to use. See this post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control
After a week of working with it, it became slower and slower. I decided to just format the hard drive clean and reinstall the OS. Reinstall failed due to driver problems. Dell could not solve the problem so they sent me a new laptop. Ok, maybe it was hardware trouble I thought. Well yes and no. Yes it now runs but God forbid I should have to reinstall the OS at any point. The thing is hopelessly slow. I am running a DUO Core 2 2.2 ghz processor with 2 gigs of RAM and it frankly is not nearly enough. The sad thing is that Visual Studio 2005, the flagship product for developing software runs worse on Vista than it did on XP. I begged dell for an XP disc for my laptop and they refused saying this model did not have XP drivers.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that they go messing with a good thing for the sake of marketing. Well it backfired big time.
February 13, 2008, 6:29 amVista is garbage:
Okay, when you spend good money to buy an OS like Vista, you expect it to work and work well. I do not upgrade because I like dishing out extra money, I do so because the OS is supposed to bring benefits to my computing experience. Not daily crashes.
Seriously. My vista-driven computer gives me the blue screen at least once a day. I am appalled.
This OS is junk. Not even worthy of being labeled a beta release. Period.
July 8, 2008, 3:42 amVista is garbage:
Okay, when you spend good money to buy an OS like Vista, you expect it to work and work well. I do not upgrade because I like dishing out extra money, I do so because the OS is supposed to bring benefits to my computing experience. Not daily crashes.
Seriously. My vista-driven computer gives me the blue screen at least once a day. I am appalled.
This OS is junk. Not even worthy of being labeled a beta release. Period.
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