And windows doesn't include a bunch of software?

And I run Vista Home Premium on a 40GB absolutely fine. It does NOT take 40GB of space. It recommends that amount of space for USAGE, not for install. And yes there is bad press ALL OVER THE PLACE. But then again, there's also BAD PRESS back from 2001 about XP. And in 98 about 98. And in 95 about 95. People hate change, and that has nothing to do with the quality of Vista.

Frankly, unless you absolutely cannot run Vista, I don't see why anyone would buy XP right now. All you're doing is setting yourself up for an upgrade in the near future, when Microsoft finally decides to drop update support for XP. Which will happen, regardless of how much people want to fight it.

Finally, most of the bad press was revolving around driver issues that were solved a good 9-12 months ago, which technically isn't even the fault of Vista. XP has absolutely nothing to offer that Vista doesn't improve on, except save for a footprint designed for PCs back in 2001.

They announced support would end after 2009 right? Doing an "upgrade" (which is a wipe & reinstall, in my case) isn't a big deal, I'm not using it as my primary operating system.

Hrm.

Yes, it probably does require a 15 GB partition to install it, because extra space would be needed for extraction during installation. A final install is about 10 GB though.

Also, why are you surprised to see negative things about Vista on mainstream media? Mainstream media generates stories for views, not for accuracy. The more controversial, the more viewers, the more profit, the better.

Also, we're not "Windows zealots." Windows zealots are the idiots that think Linux runs on top of Windows because they think that creating an OS is such an insurmountable task that only Microsoft can do it (yes these people exist). Historically, on these forums you have expressed significant disdain for Microsoft so it was only an assumption that you fall in line with the other Microsoft haters.

Also, I'm on a Mac right now and the home and end keys only scroll to the top and bottom of documents, not to the beginning of the text in a box and its very annoying. lol apple :downs:

Remember all of the people who were railing against XP, talking about how unstable it was and how ugly the new UI looks and how slow it was in games compared to 98?

There are only three legitimate complaints about Vista: One, the multimedia subsystem strangles everything else on the computer in an effort to play back HD media without skipping on slower computers. Two, the long goodbye still hasn't been fixed. Three, the user interface is extremely poorly designed and utterly baffling for anybody who hasn't been using Windows for decades, especially the completely undocumented shifting.

If they had rewritten the kernel like they originally planned, nothing at all would be wrong with Vista. Most of the problems are happening because they're using an obsolete and bloated code base and attempting to fix it by tossing in more services and modules. That's how you end up with problems like the multimedia one, where they didn't consider the consequences of what they were doing in the big picture. The long goodbye is probably an issue with a low-priority process running in an on-demand/suspended service. Also it would help if they tortured their UI designers to death, because those people are stupid.

I'm not surprised to see negative things. I was surprised that it takes 20-40GB of disk space.

Of course I have significant disdain for MS. That's a well-known fact. I hate product activation, I hate "genuine advantage," I hate all the underhanded illegal things they did to get where they are today, I hate xbox live because it didn't work right for 90% of the time I was using the free trial, I hate vendor lock-in, etc., etc., etc.

The only value I see in Windows is that it can run the games I want to play. In addition, my kids are asking me to get XP so they can watch movies on netflix.com, which requires XP. I am running an old copy of windows 2000.

Just for the record, I use linux as my primary operating system, and I have done so since at least 2000, I believe. But I'm always forced to dual-boot to windows in order to play some games and run other software that doesn't run on linux (like turbotax). Hence the reason I don't really want to open the computer again and replace one of the 4 hard drives with a bigger one.

Speaking of your mac, did you get the new version of OSX with it, or are you still running the old one? Any issues? My brother has a mac and he's wondering whether it's worth the upgrade.

Yes, it's worth the upgrade to Leopard. The GUI updates are probably the least significant of all the changes. From what I can gather about Leopard, it's mostly about the small tweaks that make you think "wow, I didn't think they'd think of that" rather than "wow, that's pretty".

I imagine the same is true of Vista actually.

No, the good features of Vista are basically invisible unless you browse msdn.microsoft.com/library

I remember that very well.. people didn't want to let go of 98' they thought XP was a bunch of crap.

Jon, I think you are way overstating the UI issues. There are minor inconsistencies but they aren't that bad. I know you used to think the same way.

I can't believe anything you say on the subject anymore since you bounce back and forth between loving and hating Windows and Linux every six months.

you mean just like any person who listens to good arguments should?

What inconsistencies are you talking about?

There is a hidden folder in your documents/personal folders that also fills up with alot of stuff. When I looked around about it, it has something to do with precaching application data.

reticulating splines?

My issue was switching from 2K to XP. I knew 98 sucked. I don't think I went to XP until like 2005.

I use it everyday on my laptop, probably more than XP.

1. Network handling is spotty sometimes.

2. It can sometimes be persnickety about moving and deleting files.

3. The thing blue screens too much. It's a whole lot better since if formatted the crap factory install, but even every once in a while is more than I get from XP. It probably comes from taking off the battery a tad too soon after I shut it down, but still.

Really though, it's not that the OS is bad, so much as it offers nothing new. You get less performance and no discernible gains. (Except the tablet and handwriting recognition is really good. That's the only reason I haven't put XP on my laptop.)

Personally i don't use Vista because i can't get the Homworld 2- Warlords mod to work on it, and the Omega drivers aren't out for it.

It's a great operating system though, And definitely ready for everyone.

This was fixed in an update some time ago.


This is almost certainly due to faulty hardware, or more likely, poorly written drivers. I understand it may not matter for you, but I think it's important to know the difference between an OS causing a crash and drivers causing a crash.

Oh yeah, and it was kind of funny to watch my Bio professor's Mac break down in class today because of this third party PowerPoint thing that lets us use these RF clickers to vote on questions. I hate that stupid ****ing beach ball

Yeah, it hasn't been a huge problem recently. It's most just less snappy than XP in that regard, but it's a trivial issue.




[/QUOTE]

Yeah, yeah, drivers, OS, same difference. I'm not concerned about who's at fault, I'm concerned about the end result. XP pro x64 has been awesome as an OS, but sometimes it's a pita because of crappy support. (Microsoft has been by far the worst about XP x64 compatibility. It's not a problem with anything else now except with 16bit apps and I don't always get beta drivers as ealry as everyone else. )

The end result is, Vista is a bit slower, a bit less supported, and offers nothing in return. I would have switched already if there was something it does better than XP but there is nothing. Heck, Vista Ultimate is already installed and ready to go on my G: drive but I never use it, because there has been no reason for me to. I already have all my programs and everything they way I like them on XP and until Vista provides some tangible benefit, I'll continue to boot to my XP drive.

I think it's funny to watch the parallels that you can draw between statements on vista now and xp about 7-8 years ago.

Vista is the new Windows ME. ME brought System Restore, Automatic Updates, and UPnP, and basically made everyone "beta" testers while they worked on bugs. Then they released XP with the features and it was pretty stable. Now they push out all this new stuff in Vista, and I'm sure Windows 7 will have these features but be stable as well.

Windows ME didn't run for 23 days straight without BSODing >.>

Can't anyone design an os that prevents driver issues from crashing the whole damn thing? I can't tell you the last time my linux box locked up. Maybe never.

How about the fact that the round start button makes it look like a small target? Looks are important. Even though you can still click on the start button from the bottom corner, it doesn't look like you can. This is why the XP start button was garish, bright green and it filled the entire bottom left corner. This is a lesson Microsoft has forgotten.

How about the fact that some Windows have menu bars and some don't? Oh, wait - I'm sorry, the menu bars are still there, you just have to hit the alt key to get it. Sure hope you know what alt does!

But you know what really changed my mind about Vista's UI?

Pretend you know nothing about computers.

Select the recycling bin on the Vista desktop.

Press the delete key.

Now, remember you are pretending to know nothing about computers. You are pretending to be an average user. You get a dialog box warning you about what you're doing. Because you are an average user you will not read that dialog box and instead just hit 'yes.'

You are an average user who did not read the message. How do you get your recycling bin back?

That's stupid. It's a non-feature. Anybody who would ever want to remove their recycling bin from the desktop is probably an advanced enough user that they can find the option in the place where it should be.

In a lot of ways Vista is more obtuse and inconsistent than KDE.




Short answer: No, you can't.

Long answer: You can, except it would make the machine very very slow.

Drivers run as a component of the kernel. A properly-implemented driver shouldn't crash the computer. The problem is that Microsoft has to leave stability and error handling up to the driver writer - a problem that they can only attempt to solve through programs like the WHQL.

Which, I give them credit, because it seems to work in quite a few cases. Especially way back during RC, when the video drivers were utter crap, Vista would catch the crash and just restart the driver, it was pretty impressive.

Of course, now I don't even see that, because such issues have been fixed.

Jon`C: I agree about the menubar issue, that was a horrible idea. Same with IE7's changes. Thank god there's a way to turn it on, though.

Did for me, amazingly enough.

Of course as soon as I came back to get it off the screensaver (this is after like a 2 week trip) it crashed. Irony.

Yeah, I'm talking regular usage. :p

Is the UI really that hard to learn? I have gotten by several months on Vista and I have not had any difficulties with the new UI. Control Panel I've got some beefs. Why oh why was it necessary to rename "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs & Features" I WANT THE DAMN ICON ON THE TOP!

But in reality, you have to concede that John Q. Public is dumber than pile of bricks when it comes to computers and frankly will probably be so for the next generation. No amount of UI design no matter how great, is going to save help desk technicians across the globe from "I know I'm bad with computers but where is the 'any' key? I can't seem to find it."

Yes, the new UI is hard to learn because it is not consistent. Windows' UI has never been very consistent, but it's never been this bad.

MacOS, since the beginning, kept the menubar at the top of the screen. It always existed and it was always in the same place, regardless of what application you were running or where the window was on the screen. This is good.

Windows applications have more-or-less always had titlebars with one to three buttons at the top right, an icon at the top left, menubars, one or more toolbars, a scrollbar and often a status bar. This is consistent. Even when some of the buttons and menu items do the same thing, they are there. They are in the same general place from application to application and they all shared similar icons.

These similarities are no accident. Back in the day, Microsoft published usability guidelines that applications should follow. Prior to release, you could apply to the Windows Logo program and Microsoft would verify your application against the extant usability guidelines. There were different styles and layouts for different categories of programs, so you could implement unique functionality but meet the users' expectation that the interface would look at least somewhat familiar.

In fact, this alone is the main reason Microsoft integrated IE into Windows. By using one control, and often times even one application, you could browse basically anything on the system with an identical user interface and overall appearance.

With Vista these usability guidelines are dead and gone. No two integrated components are alike. Pop open your Network folder. Change the address bar to Control Panel. Even though they both use an Icon List-type control the two windows are nothing at all alike. They don't share the same sidebar, they don't have the same bastardized menutoolbar. Microsoft freely and with no semblance of consistency interchanges hypertext links with buttons. In the rest of the world they are not the same thing. Some applications use ribbons. It's my understanding that Microsoft is releasing the ribbon controls in the next version of MFC (hilariously enough) so maybe they'll become a standard component. We can only hope! Because they're awesome! Right?

You want even more UI shock? Vista still comes with Wordpad. They didn't even recompile it.

I will concede that the ribbon is a horrid UI abomination. It takes me 3x longer to find what I'm looking for in Office 2007 than Office 2003. The ribbon was really a drastic UI change that should not have happened. If it ain't broke why fix it. I really don't think it makes things simpler for long and new users of Office.

What. The ribbon is awesome. Maybe it takes you longer since you aren't used to it, but inexperienced users seem to always find it far more intuitive. I know I've discovered features in Word I never knew existed just because of the ribbon.

The ribbon could easily be "fixed" by just adding a search box and a custom ribbon bar where you can add your own stuff. MS made a search box for internal use but has said they won't ever release it.

i can see how ribbon might be easier to use for new Office users, but for people already very familiar with the original office layout, it's hell for the first few days.

Well whose fault is that.

they should've at least retained the menu at the top to accomodate existing users, or an option to remove ribbon and use the traditional layout, even if it would've been redundant.

Well you could simply not upgrade.

The old Office UI was pretty bad though. There were simply too many features for the design to reasonably handle. It's was was just a confusing mosaic of a billion little icons for every different function, and many features were unintuitive buried under layers of menus.

My Vista takes up 10gb ATM. This is without extra programs, documents, settings, although it includes and patches and Microsoft programs that install themselves to Program Files without asking you otherwise.

No, the reason ribbons suck is expressly because they are by definition an inconsistent user interface element.

Let's use a crappy car analogy. You can drive a car very well because you know, without looking around, that the steering wheel makes your car go left and right and one pedal makes the car go eeeeeerrrrh and the other makes it go vroom.
How would driving a car work if you had to press a button to put your car in vroom mode, and then press the vroom pedal? And then you had to press the button to put it in turn mode and stop mode. You'd be constantly hunting for visual cues about what mode your car is in simply to prevent yourself from accidentally doing something you don't want to do.

A customizable ribbon bar is even worse and more stupid. It's a nice feature, but talking about it like it solves the underlying problem with the ribbon concept belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what I am saying.

Besides, ribbons are utterly useless for everybody but the most incompetent users. If you're on the Page Layout ribbon are you really going to bother switching back to Write just to make a line of text bold? No, you're going to hit Ctrl+B. Ctrl+B is faster and you are instinctively aware of where those buttons are without having to hunt for them in a convoluted and poorly-skinned tabbed-toolbar that was ripped off from Delphi 5.

Only an incompetent user would use bold rather than a style. Additionally most of the ribbon toolbars can be turned into floating toolbars.

You could improve your analogy and say that there's a Drive mode, a Radio mode, a Navigation mode etc. The ribbon doesn't put related controls in different modes, that's the whole point.

I'm not saying the ribbon is a perfect, but the fact that it emphasises use of styles rather than direct formatting means that hopefully one day people won't have to spend hours stripping out inline formatting when a company style guide changes or when they want to put that information on the web. I had to take a 500 pag word document and put it on the web and it could have been done an order of magnitude faster if they'd been using styles.

ITT we use crappy car analogies

The ribbon is far from an inconsistent interface.

Just because it's tabbed does not mean that it's inconsistent. If anything, the ribbon could be compared to the usual menubar. You click on the menu header, then click an option. You know that item will always be under that header. The ribbon is exactly the same way. Options do not magically move from one tab to another.

In addition, the car analogy fails since it's always obvious what "mode" you're in, and you are not in a time-critical situation when using the ribbon.