It may be hard at first, but you'll feel better once you've switched. Buy a Mac.
Microsoft just can't decide whether to its OS's for ITgeeks or for consumers so they make 10 different shaky versions of both and still can't get it right. If you really need a Windows box you are either cheap, a sheep, very specialized or cubicled in a corporate purgatory. Sorry.
We bought a PC from Dell a couple of months ago with XP installed. We tried to install Vista but, after a full day of trying to get all of the software and drivers to work, uninstalled it and re-installed XP. Since XP and Vista are both Microsoft products, one would hope that they would both be compatable with the same applications. No such luck! I hold Microsoft responsible. They designed Vista. The least they could do is insure that it is compatable with the same applications as XP.
WHO CREATED VISTA? That is your answer for any bugs or incompatability, the CREATOR is responsible. But what the heck, their stuff is always buggy and filled with holes, sloppy code. Market $$$$$$$$ only concern, let the poor sucker on the street get screwed then we will make a small patch and charge for an upgrade. HISTORY speaks for itself.
J. Potocny
I say *** to all of the companies out there like Creative Labs who took until March 8th to release their official Vista Drivers. I mean, come on...do these companies not have an R&D department dedicated to the betterment of their software packages and drivers? And how long ago was Vista's beta version released so these companies could start programming?
While you certainly cannot blame Microsoft for 3rd party driver issues, you could argue Microsoft should have held off distributing an upgrade version of Vista until more support was available for legacy devices. Backward compatibility is the bane of the computer industry, with certain restrictions hampering inovation just to make sure a product was accessible to everyone. With Vista, Microsoft is trying to push inovation forward at a faster pace, and sometimes that means there will be some left behind.
With that in mind we, as consumers, should look at what large companies do, and that is to wait until a new OS has been out for sometime before migrating to it. Sure we all want to try out all the bells and whistles of the shiny new OS, but it's almost the same philosophy as car shopping. My father always told me, never buy the first model year of a car, you never know what defects are going to show up. I think it is true of Microsoft's OSs. There is no compelling reason to jump on the hype wagon. If you are getting a new system, by all means get the new OS. If issues prop up, at least you have, or should have, the computer vendor to fall back to for support. If you have an older machine, hold off upgrading until you are sure all your hardware and software is supported. And always do a clean install, no matter what some one might tell you.
Typical Microsoft, if they had of released the needed information to these third-party vendors earlier than what was done, the vendors would of had time to create updated drivers. As it stands, more software and drivers are going to be incompatible with Vista. An even more reason to switch to Linux or Mac.
Microsoft created a content protection system for their new Vista OS. This created requirements for drivers and complexity that didn’t need to exist. That and other Vista driver demands (increased security etc.) create a higher bar that driver programmers need to meet for their product to work. That means more code and more code means more room for error.
Before Vista launched Microsoft could have (and may have) done a study and predicted just how many problems the increased complexity of drivers would create.
Vista has been in Beta for longer than any other windows version and now that it’s out and shipping there still isn’t enough driver updates for my Vista Capable computer to actually run Vista. You can blame any one driver on the company that made it but you would be remiss if you tried to blame them all. It’s Vista.
If you want an analogy think about tobacco. Any one person can get cancer on their own without tobacco, but introduce tobacco and you can watch a big part of our population fall over like flies.
I own several Macs. I own several PC's. I use the PCs to talk to the "rest" of the world. Now, I'm not saying i never have compatability issues on the Mac side. But when PC people (me included) were still typing C:/whatever, Macs were pointing and clicking. How Mac let that one slip by will go down as a very big business blunder.
With the advent of Intel-Macs and Bootcamp, the tide is turning. Gamers aside, Macs simply work better, and are much more intuitive. Recently, Mac introduced an upgrade to Final Cut Pro, it was broken, two days later they had a fix.
We're all beta testers to some extent, but not for an entire OS... Hobbiests and geeks aside, the masses will migrate, albiet slowly. Whose playing catch-up now?
I don't use Vista and I'm not going to in the forseeable future and this is EXACTLY why. COMPATABILITY PROBLEMS! I have some old programs that I don't want to part with and each time I upgrade, I lose some of them to compatability.
On the other hand, can we realistically expect Microsoft to, so to speak, "proof run" every program that's been written since who knows when, when they do upgrade? I think not!
Therefore, I'm REALLY against Microsoft periodically, coming out with a new operating system just to get some "COOL LOOKING" features without any REAL substance. I think XP is pretty good and could have survived much longer.
It is easy to blame the manufacturers. They, of course want to sell you the next gen of their hardware. Even microsoft sells hardware. BUT! Ever notice that microsoft rarely has to update drivers as often as your scanner manufacturer? It takes a rather significant OS change for MS to isue an update to hardware drivers. More often than not, the drivers for your 5 year old joystick are nested in the new system, even after MS has supposedly dropped support.
The question becomes, that if the XP drivers have all of the information necessary to convey a hardware's function to XP, then why does it have to be changed for Vista?
Things work well in the Mac environment because Apple does not change the game for the "programmers interface guidelines" with every OS release. The last time the game changed in any major way for Apple, was the migration from OS9 to OSX.
It becomes obvious that MS has changed something to cause the drivers to have to be rewritten. MS could have even provided a way to load legacy drivers and ported the changes for newer hardware within the OS. My scanner has not demonstrated one single improvement or new feature with any OS change from MS.
It would have been trivial for MS to have legacy drivers work with Vista. MS could have even provided two separate load mechanisms for legacy and new drivers. It would have been trivial. It takes an act of god for a customer to get a manufacturer to rewrite drivers for a less than new piece of hardware, to function in a new OS. The only thing a driver does is pass information to the OS about what the device does or does not do. This is not about the differences between one CPU type and another type that does not use the same instruction set.
It has gotten to the point that it is virtually imprudent to purchase new hardware about a year before an anticipated OS change.
Remenber that it is only a few lines of code that separates a user from his legacy hardware. It is called a driver.
Micro$oft Window$ started out as a collection of programs that were collected to run together under DOS (formerly QDOS for quick and dirty operating system). If they operate under the same culture,and there is no evidence to the contrary it is still a collection of programs cobbled together to work. It was painfully obvious with patch after patch in XP and 2000. I am not suprised that Vista is not a rollout. Like all their other iterations of operating systems they are more like birthing processes.
That is why I switched to Mac.
There's plenty of blame to share on this one, but Microsoft is going to be the one with egg on their face.
I had a similar experience with SP2 for Windows XP, when my hardware vendor flatly stated that they didn't support it. When I persevered, Microsoft provided excellent support(!). Later my hardware vendor came up to speed.
Introducing a new version of Windows is bound to involve a mountain of work, and although the vendors of hardware and software need to do their share, the ultimate responsibility lies with Microsoft to enlist these vendors. They also need to pay the price to cast wide net for beta testers amd pay close attention to their feedback.
Fortunately, my computers are relatively new, and by the time I need Windows Vista, maybe it will be ready for me.
While Microsoft attempted to sell us all on their arduous efforts to ensure that Vista had no bugs, it was nevertheless incumbent upon hardware and software vendors to insure that their products worked with Vista.
I did my first computer build--relatively successfully, although my new Memorex 18x DVD multi-format burner is incompatible with Vista! According to Memorex website this is their newest DVD burner. Further, Nero advises that they will not support the software for the software was bundled with Memorex's product.
This situation is an embarrassment for Memorex and Nero (and tangentially for Microsoft.
I agree. It's really not Microsoft's fault at all. We knew this was coming out since like 2002. There's been beta and alpha testing for almost THREE YEARS. Vendor's have to get off their ***** and work! And don't tell me mac's are better either. If i wanted to run 1/10 of the software i currently do I'd buy a mac. Also, dual booting macs with windows is also crap because the hardware is so limited you really get a limitedly upgradeable p.o.s. Microsoft did a great job and this is a great operating system. If anything, run OS X on a PC! It's against the licensing agreement of apple though so i'm not saying you should but there are fixed versions out there that work on PC. The ultimate solution, Vista and OS X on a PC.
Congratulatons! Better late than never. Just make the move to Mac and all those complaints you've listed will become dim memories.
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