| ZenfoldorVGI said:
A. Games run at lower frame rates on vista. B. Incompatible drivers cause hardware and software not to run correctly on vista, specifically certain business related software. C. Vista has certain copyright protections with the intent of reducing your freedom to do legally questionable things on the internet. D. Vista has no apparent or streamlined advantages over XP, to the normal user.
Anecdotal: 1) My cousin, Greg's company surveys land around my state of Mississippi. At christmas, he told me a story about their new office computers and laptops they purchased, and how they returned the entire set of computers(15 of them) because they could no longer get their cad programs(? I think he said cad, dunno much about it) to bring up many of their old documents. He also told me that their were incompatible, and they couldn't get their "stuff to work" on Vista. 2) He complained that you can no longer get new PC's with XP on them, and that Vista is a "terrible" program, that is not userfriendly, and attempts to make you restart your computing entirely. 3) The problem is, what if this happens everytime MS makes an un-needed update to an old OS. There really isn't any single huge advantage you can point to Vista and say, well, Vista has this, that XP couldn't have had, if Vista didn't exist. DirectX 10? Could work on XP, MS is just holding it hostage on Vista to make PC owners upgrade. 4) The problems with Vista are many, the advantages are few and the userfriendliness is none. I see going back to XP as an upgrade based upon this information, and the only reason it isn't a complete upgrade is because MS seems to be forcing it on the consumer by only releasing updated software and games that only work on the OS, for no other reason than to gain money from releasing a new OS, not because it was necessary. 5) It was released to make money, not because it was a necessary or even plausable upgrade, in fact in many ways, it was a downgrade, but MS seems to be intent on forcing it on people because it contains code to prevent theft from Microsoft and their parent companies, and for little other reason. 6) Why does Vista exist? Why is it necessary? What are its upgraded features? What are its drawbacks? These are tough questions when it comes to this particular product, imo. 7) Now I could be wrong, and will listen to reason, and I would LOVE to read a blog on how mistreated Vista is by the general public, and how awesome it really is. Can I get a link? |
A) Games had significant issues in the beginning primarily due to nVidia and ATI being lazy about developing decent drivers. The overhaul in the driver model meant that they couldn't just drop the XP drivers in place and be done with it.
Generally now, most games run comparibly to XP. This is still a minor slowdown as DX9 content must be wrapped into the new driver model, but from my experiences, you are talking a few frames a second at most.
B) This is an issue with any new OS which has its driver model overhaulled. XP suffered similar issues too from hardware which only supported the 9x range. Even futher back, Win2k suffered more closely to Vista due to the fact it was fairly different from NT. As I've mentioned before, any business jumping on a new OS without testing is definitely going to run into issues.
C) Can you point out what restrictions these are exactly? I've been running Vista for approximately a year now and it hasn't slowed down any of my 'questionable' activities. If you are referring to the DRM used for HD content (HD-DVD/Blu-ray), this has no effect on any non-DRM content.
D) I agree that the advantages for the average user aren't obvious and are significantly less than going from 9x->XP. Unfortunately, some of the advantages (from a technical standpoint) end up being disadvantages in the users eyes. These include things such as full 64-bit support, improved driver models, improved security models, etc.
As I mentioned previously, the upgraded security model causes issues for poorly written programs which think they have access to the entire system. Windows for years has been scurtinised for the fact that it runs users with full admin access, but when this is changed (read: improved), the average user sees it as a problem with the OS as their program doesn't run. This change in security also causes the UAC prompt to appear significantly more often than it should, which is yet another annoyance to users.
1) Programs take time to be upgraded. Given Vista was available to developers for at least 12 months before it shipped, I find it hard to blame Microsoft when 3rd party applications don't work on Vista, especially a year after its release. Once again, this is a problem for any new OS.
2) Vista does have differences, some technical, some due to Microsoft's stupidity. While it does require some relearning to those who memorise button presses rather than concepts, he is exagerating that it requires going back to basics.
On the issue of getting XP, while I'm not entirely sure it covers OEM versions, Vista actually license users to revert back to XP legally. Where you get the media from, etc... I'm unsure about as this is not something I have needed.
3) Let's assume instead of Vista, XP SP3 offered everything Vista does. Now XP SP3 has all the issues of Vista (Don't forget, you need to backport a new driver and security model). Does it really make any difference? Perhaps the issue here is the cost? While I agree Vista isn't worth what they are asking, the number of changes is similar to an OSX update which is charged for.
4) No comment as I'd just be repeating points.
5) Once again, what is there to prevent 'theft'? If you can give me some examples I'll try to elaborate on them.
6) A small amount of research (hell, just a quick look at wikipedia) can answer a lot of these questions. Unfortunately in my experience, the average consumer doesn't do any research into products and when it comes to complex beasts such as an OS, even if they do research, a lot of terminology will be above them.
7) I don't personally know of any link, nor is their likely one talking about how great Vista is (which isn't heavily biased atleast). I too agree that Vista isn't a huge step over XP, but what I am sick of is people being misinformed, which is my gripe against that paragraph. While I am definitely a power user and am entirely aware there WILL be issues, I personally have not seen anything that is a show stopper, and for the last 6 months or so can't think of anything that XP does which Vista doesn't during my daily activities*, and I run Vista x64 which is more likely to have issues.
I think a lot of the negativity towards Vista isn't because it is a terrible OS, but because after 6 years of development, plus a heafty price tag, on the surface Vista doesn't offer that much more over XP and many of the underlying upgrades are causing issues. For the average users, a large number of changes, primarily technical, are (or should be) completely transparent to them, but these are long overdue in Windows.
Perhaps I am slighly biased due to the fact that I've been using NT based OSes as my primary OS since NT3.5, but there isn't anything seriously different happening now that hasn't occured for previous NT path upgrades.
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*Except maybe the MinGW stable not being fixed on 64-bit OSes, but if you can't get the update, you probably shouldn't be programming.
