Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘vista’
They will bring back this charming vista to our cities
Hanging laundry to dry is a common prescription by environmentalists. This picture is from 1900, the last year we were at some of the CO2 targets currently being proposed.
Most of my readers know that I have been a Vista hater (I still am by the way -- I have one machine running Vista SP1 and it drives me crazy -- just last night I had to reboot three times, each time just to be able to clear some permission state that would not let me delete a file).
The early returns look good for Windows 7, particularly for those of us looking for a home media sharing platform (the only reason I use Vista at all is because I have been toying around with Vista Media Center and a media extender, but more on that in a future post). Here is Engadget:
The mood at Microsoft seems (understandably) high about this release. It's clear that lots of folks see this as the big, shiny band-aid for many of the Vista woes that people have been experiencing -- and in many ways, that's exactly what it is. If you're at all curious about what Microsoft has been up to, you should absolutely grab this install and take it for a spin (when you can); there is a metric ton going on here, and it's certainly worth taking a second look at. Bottom line, though? This is still Windows, and it's still got a lot of Vista in it. If you weren't feeling it the first time around, there may not be enough here to convince you otherwise. However, this is a valiant effort from Microsoft and it shows that the company does understand it's burned some bridges throughout the last three years -- this is a big step for them both in technique and tone, and that's certainly not lost on us.
Frequent readers will know that I have reversed all the new Vista machines in our household back to XP and I have banned Vista from any computers purchased in the company (Dell is quite happy to sell XP rather than Vista). Here is a how-to on how to downgrade to XP.
Now, PC World has voted Vista as the technology failure of the year (I would also vote the box as the packaging failure of the decade, and the new user interface in MS Office as the hose-your-installed-base gaffe of the year).
I thought this was an interesting fact, from PC World several months ago:
Certainly sales of Vista aren't blowing away XP in stores. Chris
Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says
that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a
healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By
contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP's launch in
October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of
retail sales.
I made a similar observation using Amazon sales rankings of XP vs. Vista here. Finally, just for the heck of it, I checked the OS's of users coming to Coyote Blog. In the past, our users have demonstrated themselves to be ahead of the technology curve (Firefox eclipsed Explorer as the #1 Coyote Blog brower long ago). As you can see, Vista barely has 4% share, in a near tie with Windows 2000 and Windows NT and barely edging Linux:
The laptop I bought my kids 6 months ago is rapidly becoming the worst purchase I have ever made. Not because the laptop is bad, but because of a momentary lack of diligence I bought one with Vista installed. It has been a never-ending disaster trying to get this computer to work. A while back, I put XP on a partition and my kids spend most of their time on XP since, well, it works. Vista does not. It is the Paris Hilton of OS's -- looks pretty but does not work.
In particular, the networking is an enormous step backwards from XP. The wireless networking was a real pain to get set up in the first place, in contrast to XP and my wife's Mac which both worked and connected from the moment the power switch turned on.
Now, we are getting two new errors. First, at random times, the computer will stop being able to connect to the internet. It will have a good wireless signal, and see other computers on the network fine, and the other computers on the network will see the internet, but Vista does not. Just rebooted the computer into the XP partition, and XP sees the Internet fine -- its just Vista that is broken.
Second, and perhaps even more inexcusable, I have to reinstall the printer driver in Vista at nearly every log on. There is a bug in Vista such that laptops that move off the network and come back will find that the network printers are now marked "offline" and there is nothing one can do to bring them online short of reinstalling the drivers. Really. I thought I was doing something wrong, but searching the web this is a known problem. None of the suggested workarounds are working for me.
Vista is rapidly becoming the New Coke of operating systems. I have had every version of windows on my computer at one time or another, including Windows 1.0 and the egregious Windows ME, and I can say with confidence Vista is the worst of them all by far. More: corporate demand for upgrading to XP from Vista; DRM hell in Vista; how I set up dual-booting on a Vista machine; and what happened to the File menu?
Looks like the XP partition is soon going to be the only partition. But recognize how serious this step is: Laptops, unlike desktops, have more model-specific device drivers. For example, instead of one Nvidia graphics driver for all cards, you tend to need the driver for your specific card in your specific computer model. The computer I have has never and will never publish XP drivers. I have found drivers that work for XP for most things, but not for sound. So I will be giving up a substantial piece of functionality -- sound-- in exchange for never having to swear at Vista again.
