Comments on: Vista Update — It Still Sucks

By: M1EK

M1EK — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:04:20 +0000

Too bad the government refused to adequately enforce antitrust law back when there was a commercial competitor to Windows who could have kept the market more honest, huh? (and, no, linux isn’t even within orders of magnitude of the same thing).

By: Mesa EconoGuy

Mesa EconoGuy — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 02:29:51 +0000

Windows XP still looks like a hack job â€“ Vista is probably worse (I havenâ€™t seen it yet up close).

I work for a major corporation, and there are already multiple known Vista compatibility issues with our internal and external software and apps. We are strongly cautioning clients not to upgrade to Vista at this time.

Microsoft is on the downswing for a mature product, and a shortening cycle, with platform convergence and multiple substitutable products. If you own this stock, I would consider selling it. Microsoft is continuing to put out crap products, and they canâ€™t get away with it anymore.

By: Max

Max — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:20:29 +0000

Indeed the copyright features are a can-do of the producer, but he has to live with the setbacks in a truly free markets. However, we don't have such a thing when it comes to operating systems.
Yet, I think Microsoft has shot itself in the leg with Windows Vista. Not only has it massive hardware requirements (which office station needs a Direct X 9 graphics card?), but the DRM restrictions will lead people to investigate into alternative solutions (is linux really so hard to install?).

By: Matt W

Matt W — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:00:38 +0000

I just built a new computer, so I went with Vista (the pricing really isn't that different from XP, especially for the OEM version). So far I'm impressed. Like all new things, it, along with Office 2007, takes some getting used to (and as someone who spends all day doing modeling in Excel, I'm thankful they kept shortcuts the same). Overall my impressions are favorable, although I think it's slightly too "Mac-like" in that it seemingly adds an extra layer between the end user and the system configuration tools, though this could just be a result of not having figured out where exactly everything is.

That being said, I'm not sure that in most cases it provides enough additional functionality to justify an upgrade (though bitlocker could make sense for business laptops, as mentioned earlier).

Also, as a libertarian/anarchocapitalist, don't you think that DRM restrictions are the right of the content producer? I'm certainly not a fan of the government getting involved in things like that, but it seems that if the company puts conditions on the use of their product through a contract, and you agree to buy it anyway, that's perfectly fine from an ethical standpoint. I'm not opining on the business sense of these restrictions (I personally think they're counter-productive and harm the business in the end).

I don't know if you think it's immoral to do this or are just mad with the companies the way someone gets mad at poor service. However, it seems that many people out there, including libertarians, have started to abandon their ideals in the name of free music.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:41:10 +0000

I agree. Even without the DRM problem, I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade. It's effectively a version 1.0 release.

I'll probably end up with a computer running it for learning and lab test purposes, so I don't end up supporting it for people when I've never seen it myself, but that's about it.

By: Xmas

Xmas — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 11:34:55 +0000

Don’t even go there for DirectX 10. They (them, those guys, rabid gamers) are predicting that DX10 won’t be stable until mid-2008. You’ll probably need to upgrade your components to get ones that work well with DX10.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/12/2212248

By: Knox

Knox — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:28:06 +0000

This concern is overstated. It only comes into play when you're attempting to access DRM'ed music or movies. Do you really allow music and movies at work? I don't. Even for personal use, I've looked at a movie on a computer maybe twice in the last 10 years. All my music is on the computer, but doesn't have any DRM on it. Although I'm sure the Video got more complex (and more needlessly complex due to the DRM), it also got more reliable not less reliable. The technical reason is that they moved the video drivers into user memory space, which means they can detect a fault and restart the video driver, something that is impossible under XP.
If you have power users at work, with hundreds of documents that they deal with, then Vista has benefits for the power user. Even for basic users, it has significant security improvements that alone are worth the upgrade. I plan to quickly move our companies laptops to Vista because of the better security and Bitlocker encryption security that makes it a LOT harder for the bad guys to steal info off of a laptop. Do you have any business information worth stealing off your computers?
As we speak (er, blog?), I'm pricing out new computers from Dell, and Vista Business is $99 versus XP Pro being $150, which kind of suprised me.
The first commenter is wrong, or at least partially wrong in that Microsoft Office 2003 will run on Vista. Older Office won't. Get OpenOffice if you don't want complete compatibility.
Love the blog, keep up the good work!

By: CyberCelt

CyberCelt — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:25:39 +0000

You are so right. I had a laptop go kaput and I went looking last week. Three days after Vista was released all the laptops and computers in town were loaded with it. I happened to ask if the MS Office and Front page software I already have would run on Vista. No, it will not. But you can go buy $700 worth of new software. OMG! I just kept looking until I found a laptop with XP on it.

There should be a law against this.