Upgrade review. Vista to XP :D

Most comments I see on the net and hear in discussions pan Vista. That said, people who are happy with Vista probably don't say much.

More tellingly, MS have delayed the dumping of main XP support in response to major customers not wanting to upgrade and pc sellers like Dell offer XP as an alternative OS.
 
I am strongly considering upgrading my PC to XP from Vista. A more user-hostile operating system than Vista I haven't seen since DOS.
 
Tricky said:
I am strongly considering upgrading my PC to XP from Vista. A more user-hostile operating system than Vista I haven't seen since DOS.
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True, but at least DOS worked (well v6.0 did :))
 
What was it the PR lady said in the Mac vs PC ad? "And by 'downgrading', he means 'upgrading' to an older, more familiar platform."
 
I use Vista at home. I guess I'm just a casual user, because I've not had any problems with it.

ETA: The article was a masterpiece in snark. :)
 
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Just a word of caution.

We are currently in the process of building programs for a financial application. We are developing this for a huge financial institution.

When we installed Vista in one of our machines and installed the development platform and database that was originally used by that institution, Vista went into a loop and eventually, we found out about incompatibilities.
 
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This is going to be very interesting. Microsoft will do their best to pull users away from XP and into Vista, while users will cling to XP until they are convinced that Vista offers considerably more. So far users seem to win the battle, but Microsoft will soon be playing their strong cards with the gamers.
 
I think all of this is nonsense.

I have had no problems with vista, and even if I did, the ability to use more than 3.2 gigs of ram is easily worth it.
 
El Greco said:
This is going to be very interesting. Microsoft will do their best to pull users away from XP and into Vista, while users will cling to XP until they are convinced that Vista offers considerably more. So far users seem to win the battle, but Microsoft will soon be playing their strong cards with the gamers.
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And professionals.
 
I've been running Vista Home Premium for about 2 weeks now, and haven't had any major problems. I've noticed that a few processes run slower than they do in XP. I've also noticed that running networked programs and media is incredibly slow.

Vista gets a bad rap imo. People have very short memories. XP was as bad or worse when it hit shelves, and is only as stable as it is now because of six years worth of development.

Microsoft is dropping mainstream support for XP in 2009. SP3 for XP (Final SP for XP) comes out before April, as does SP1 for Vista (no official release date yet). Vista SP1 RC is out now, and the majority of the speed gripes are supposedly solved even in this early beta version (according to PCWorld).

I'm a gamer, and I was under the impression that MS allready has pulled their strong cards on gamers. DirectX10 is only partially implemented for XP, which is not much of a big deal now... but it will be in a year or so.
 
boloboffin said:
I use Vista at home. I guess I'm just a casual user, because I've not had any problems with it.
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Yup, this echoes my expedience. Once I got compatible drivers for my video card (which took me about a day) I have had no problems at all with vista. It does what I want it to and does it well so far as I can tell.
 
If thinking of upgrade to Vista, I urge everyone to try Ubuntu at least once in their life.
It's free, incredibly powerful, handles plug and play and autodetect some would say better than Windows, and you can try it without even installing it.
Just run it from CD.

The best part perhaps is the fact that it runs rather fast on lower end systems.

Enjoy.
 
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brodski said:
Yup, this echoes my expedience. Once I got compatible drivers for my video card (which took me about a day) I have had no problems at all with vista. It does what I want it to and does it well so far as I can tell.
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I participated in the early and later beta testing, as well as Release Candidate #1, and found the OS to be reliable and well designed. However, the "quantum leap" from, for example, DOS to WFWG, or WFWG to WINNT, or WINNT to WIN2K, or WIN2K to XP, doesn't appear to be present in the XP to Vista "upgrade."
WINNT forced much of the OS to be entirely rewritten, due to it's (good) intolerance of violations of protected space, which violations were the cause of much of the instability which caused problems with the old windows kernel.
Vista is not that type of quantum upgrade. In addition, it has been loaded with a lot of DRM (Digital Rights Management) stuff, which requires more memory and slows things down a little.
It's not a "bad" OS, but not a great leap forward, either.
Linux continues to be an evolving platform and a viable option, and there is lots of software available at low cost. Many web servers are Linux based; TIVO uses the Linux OS; many dedicated systems are Linux based.
Microsoft may have the lion's share of the market, but by no means a monopoly.
Until Vista does something that XP, Mac, and Linux doesn't, it will be slow to be adopted, but it will, in the long term, become a new standard.
Keep in mind that, if one developes and sells a rock-solid OS, one does oneself out of business. Unfortunately, the successful marketing strategy appears to be to market a "fair" (as opposed to "good") product, and continue to sell "upgrades," rather than sell an "excellent" product in the first place.
 
Monkey Napoleon said:
XP was as bad or worse when it hit shelves, and is only as stable as it is now because of six years worth of development.
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So let's wait six years and continue with XP, or in my case 2000.

The Gnomon said:
Keep in mind that, if one developes and sells a rock-solid OS, one does oneself out of business.
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Why?

MS has produced some good and bad products, are you saying that the only way to make money is to produce bad products?
 
Acleron said:
Why?
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Because they'll only buy it once and stick with it, as opposed to buying it, and support an d the various upgrades.
It's like that old saying, build a man a fire and he's warm for a day, set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. ;)
 
brodski said:
Because they'll only buy it once and stick with it, as opposed to buying it, and support an d the various upgrades.
It's like that old saying, build a man a fire and he's warm for a day, set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. ;)
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No.

This is completely ignoring the fact that people want more and more features.

It will be a very long time before every useful feature is implemented, in any type of software. Until then, I look forward to buying newer versions, even when the old ones were "perfect."
 
This is not about XP based application going to Vista. We had an interesting situation in a contract that I had, way back 1998.

The client developed their application using a modelling tool that was marketted (was that right word?) by Texas Instruments. What it does is, it allows the end user to create application using this tool, which in turn, generates Cobol programs. The cobol program was then compiled in the mainframe.

Since the cobol program generated is practically impossible to follow, the suggestion was just to throw away the source as it can be generated again using the tool.

What was generated was ANS74 standard cobol. Mainframe at that time is limited to 24 bit addressing (16M address space). Sometimes, the memory reserved to the application can be as little as 4M, as the O/S could be using the rest of available memory space. ANS74 runs on CICS 1.7 release.

5 years after, IBM released CICS 2.0. It required COBOL2 as the addressing was expanded to 31 bit.

Problem, the PC that they used were sold (with the modelling tool in it). Even if they still had the modelling tool, it'll be useless as it would still generate ANS74 Cobol. Texas Instruments no longer supports the said tool.
 
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