Microsoft Upset About 'Schizophrenic' Vista Research Report

[dc_webster]

Interesting to hear many of the comments from both sides. I would personally only recommend Vista to new business's, or new departments within a corporation and to Home Users. This would be after carefully considering the software required by the business/business unit or home user - lets face it - love Vista or not, most major software is atleast 32bit Vista compatible as is all must have utilities such as Virus scanners etc. I think that Vista with Service Pack 1 and updates with the latest mainboard/video drivers is sufficient for most business users and most home users. I do tend to agree, however, with those that wouldn't upgrade to Vista as that can be problematic, and I personally would only recommend doing that under special circumstances (of which I can't think of any atm)

I'd tend to think that upgrading a large corporate would be a waste of time if XP is doing its job - however, as said, I wouldn't see such a problem of it being installed in new or seriously deprecated areas of an organisation. As for mentioning Home Users, I think most would be happy with Vista 32bit on a fully compliant system with SP1 and all good drivers.

I think the enthusiast will probably go Vista 64 with up to 8GB RAM to really make sure there is a heap of space for each game (tho we must remember 32bit appz are limited to 2GB RAM [please correct me if Im wrong]) - so those apps should have the full 2GB to operate within a 64bit Vista System, and more left for great multi-tasking. Myself and two others are in the process of testing Vista 64 for compatibility with 32bit games and apps to see if its worth while going the whole hog with 8GB RAM in an ethusiast configured system (e.g SLI and RAID etc etc) Most gamers I know use Vista 32 with 4GB RAM and just accept that they'll only have access to about 3.2 GB. According to them compatibility is good in this case.

Lets not forget Security - theres substantially better security in Vista against Viral/Spyware attacks. This may be of use to new business users and more intensive home users alike.

I personally run Vista 32 with 3GB of high quality RAM and found that SP1 and the latest drivers have fixed most problems, and that also most developers support it now. My only pondering would be about going 64bit to leverage more resources in a PC - this is where Vista could really shine - hence why we are testing this atm.

I'd really like to hear others opinions about the issues raised here and above.

 

[mac2j]

Vista is simply terrible.

I installed it on my new Q6600 basically because I thought it couldn't be THAT bad and because I couldn't find an XP installation disk recent enough that it would recognize my SATA II HD properly.

BIG Mistake .... TONS of software doesnt work with it ... and by TONS I mean 30% of what I've tried to run. Sure some like Nero and Endnote etc will work when you PAY FOR an upgrade to the latest version ... but seriously, thats a huge hidden cost in some cases.

Secondly - I work in medical research... so many of our core programs don't work with Vista its terrible. I have this great machine and I can't use it for any data analysis because Vista won't run any of the software reliably.

AND finally - for games - with the same memory and same hardware - its slower than XP.

I have 1 thing to say: GOOGLE-OS!

Help us Google, you're our only hope.

 

[T-Bone]

[citation][nom]akld dfas[/nom]Why would a business upgrade to Vista when Windows XP is running flawless. A business is not going to spend 10K + for computer technicians to come in and upgrade their computers to Vista, work through the bugs (happens in every OS upgrade regardless), buy business programs that work with vista, and possibly buy new computers so they can just upgrade to the latest...[/citation] Couldn't agree more. Point of article is more towards business adoption of Vista, not really consumers. That said, as a consumer I'm not impressed w/Vista because it seems to be a bloated OS put out there to push hardware sales. "It's as fast or faster than XP...yara yara yara" yeah w/tweaks that 90% of the users don't know s about. "But it's that it comes w/all it's features enables & if you disable most, then it's the best thing since slice bread!"
Sure, disable all those great new features and whoa, you got yourself an OS that's better than XP! Yeah right! Now you got yourself XP w/more eye-candy that STILL requires more hardware and horse power to essentially do the same thing. And then you have all those different flavors of Vista: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate; oh yeah, and the "Vista Experience" score. Crap. Should have made option in Vista that allows it to look & work like XP; that would have definitely helped adoption (and kept price same or almost same as XP w/o all that different flavors crap!)

 

[jaragon13]

Who cares how much they are gonna sell? Let's put it simple : I can do the same thing,who wants to pay more for something that doesn't change enough for me? I am a gamer,sure I have 2 gigs of memory and I optomize my system,but wouldn't I rather be running a Q6600 and a 8800 GTS 512 on XP rather than an E7200 with a 8800 GS?

 

[dc_webster]

BIG Mistake .... TONS of software doesnt work with it ... and by TONS I mean 30% of what I've tried to run. Sure some like Nero and Endnote etc will work when you PAY FOR an upgrade to the latest version ... but seriously, thats a huge hidden cost in some cases.

This is true - hence why I said that I'd have to carefully consider the software one might install on it before going Vista. Its also true that you need the latest versions to support vista, but anything you've bought in the last 12 months should be compatible.

Its unfortunate however how certain specialist programs will not work. Ive had MRI Programs work ok but I guess not all do so.

Still a lot of incompatibilites Ive noticed are due to a dodgy driver or two, but I guess there's a percentage - say 10 to 20 percent that wont.

Doing basic things, like disabling indexing and the like speed up Vista nicely, but it does seem to be over-bloated for what it does do in comparison to XP.

 

[sanctoon]

I've been using Vista since October 2007 and just love it, 10x better at networking(Wired & Wireless) than XP. For me its faster and the longer you use it the more useful you'll find Vista's improvements.
BTW its a lot less buggier than Xp was at its release, even before Vista SP1, but if you don't have at least a 2Gh dual core CPU, 1Gb RAM and decent Video card...STAY AWAY

I think the biggest problem Vista has is companies like Acer, Hp, Toshiba and the list goes on. Who in their right mind can sell a Vista PC/Notebook with a celleron CPU and 512Mb RAM + Intel Graphics. No matter what MS says is the minimum system requirements, Vista has been around long enough for these companies to know what is a optimal system for Vista.

 

[Guest]

I work as primary IT for a small organization and all I can say is we'll probably never upgrade to Vista until the next version comes out. Heck, I'm still converting some Windows 2000 systems to XP to this day. The main problem I've found with Vista aside from needing to upgrade everything else under the kitchen sink is that it's a serious memory hog. While memory is cheap, you need at least 2GB to function correctly while correctly optimized XP works fine in 1GB or even at 512mb. Unfortunately a lot of discount laptops and PCs which many organizations are likely to purchase just happen to have 1GB of ram as I discovered.

I also find it very disappointing that Vista requires so much for basically what amounts to a "pretty" graphical interface. Seriously look at Opensource Compiz Fusion on a 700Mhz Duron with 128Mb Ram on youtube "http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSGf9pFupjg" It's much neater looking than Vista and requires less resources making you wonder what in the world Microsoft did.

 

[Guest]

Heh, found an even better clip: http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qddueXkD8E

 

[Drake718]

As far as corporations go, it is fairly common place to leap frog an OS. My company went from NT 4.0 to XP SP2. So from that perspective It does not surprise me that the adoption rate for businesses is low. As several other posters stated, Vista doesn't offer anything to a business. In fact most of the enhancements either won't run on a typical business computer or IT will insist they be disabled.

Personally, I have installed Vista (pre SP1) on a few computers to check it out and it lasted less then a week before wiping and installing XP Pro. A few relative have it on new machines and I am over there fixing one problem or another every other week. When Microsloth dumps the 32-bit OS option and put's out a 64 bit version that runs as well as XP SP3 on a machine with Single core CPU (2.4 - 2.8 GHz range) with 1 GB or RAM and a middle of the road video card I'll cheer. I run with a Q9450/4GB RAM/8800GT and will be staying XP SP3. I just don't have a reason to upgrade.

 

[ezkl]

Microsoft may have sold 180 million Vista licenses through OEM licencing, but how many of those were downgraded to WinXP?

I recently bought a new PC and preferred to order it with Linux pre-installed, and as of today i´m loving the OS.

 

[harrycat88]

ROFLMAO,
I guess Micro$oft forgot that over 90% of the computers in corporations are AGP based and a lot of them have Intel or Nforce3 chipsets in them with dual core processors.
Maybe next time Micro$oft will remember that most of these computers in corporations are 3 to 10 years old.

 

[harrycat88]

ROFLMAO,
I guess Micro$oft forgot that over 90% of the computers in corporations are AGP based and a lot of them have Intel or Nforce3 chipsets in them with dual core processors.
Maybe next time Micro$oft will remember that most of these computers in corporations are 3 to 10 years old.

 

[aevm]

[citation][nom]1234556[/nom]Seriously look at Opensource Compiz Fusion on a 700Mhz Duron with 128Mb Ram on youtube "http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSGf9pFupjg" It's much neater looking than Vista and requires less resources making you wonder what in the world Microsoft did.[/citation]

Microsoft put together a system that tries to support 500 million users, each of them with his/her own ideas/preferences/culture/needs. Opensource Compiz Fusion on the other hand was meant for 14 people, all young single American males with more interest in computers than dating. OK, I'm exaggerating, but I hope you get the point. Vista is bloated because it tries to do everything for everybody. For example I'm sure you can't play Crysis in DirectX 10 mode on that Fusion thing.

 

[lowguppy]

I think the failure of Vista is really a testament to the success of XP. XP had horrible horrible security issues at launch, but they've gotten it to a point now where it does work. XP is in its prime as an OS, and hasn't really started to show its age yet. Microsoft has had a hard time selling consumer or enterprise users on the advantages of Vista, because XP is so solid now. They would have done much better to delay the launch until the hardware and drivers were ready.

Why do you think Blizzard waited so long to make a sequal to Diablo 2? Because people were still buying and playing it. XP was putting no pressure on MS to upgrade. The pressure they felt was from Apple's OSX, and it shows in the ways they tried to make Vista more "mac-like" at least interface wise, which just turned off long-time PC users. It also put them in the awkward position of producing something that could be compared to an Apple, rather than producing another Orange.

 

[lowguppy]

I think the failure of Vista is really a testament to the success of XP. XP had horrible horrible security issues at launch, but they've gotten it to a point now where it does work. XP is in its prime as an OS, and hasn't really started to show its age yet. Microsoft has had a hard time selling consumer or enterprise users on the advantages of Vista, because XP is so solid now. They would have done much better to delay the launch until the hardware and drivers were ready.

Why do you think Blizzard waited so long to make a sequal to Diablo 2? Because people were still buying and playing it. XP was putting no pressure on MS to upgrade. The pressure they felt was from Apple's OSX, and it shows in the ways they tried to make Vista more "mac-like" at least interface wise, which just turned off long-time PC users. It also put them in the awkward position of producing something that could be compared to an Apple, rather than producing another Orange.

 

[Guest]

It seems this entire topic is nothing more Tech Tabloid Fodder ....

It's not that Vista is a poor platform. It's just that there's not enough feature benefit to justify the additional hardware requirements and overhead of running vista in a corporate environment.

This is nothing more than tabloid journalism within the tech industry.
Rise above it people.

gnice!

 

[Guest]

Hey - aevm!

All though I am limited to playing Crysis on my VUx64 install, Quake Wars: ET runs smooth as silk with full details under Compiz/Linux with a ton of effects enabled.

Linux+Compiz is by far the most advanced desktop environment to date.

 

[caskachan]

lols i can seee why games must become better and fancier and force us to buy better pcs,

i dont see why an operative system has to get slugier and heavier , looking out of my window (pun intended) i see the other oses always becoming lighter and or not slower , or resource needy, ill stick to xp till gaming is near flawless in other oses =D, one day and soon i hope!