To be clear, I am not anti-Microsoft nor pro-Apple. I am anti-bad products, and pro-good ones.
Mark my words, Vista will go down in history as a bigger debaucle than Windows Millenium Edition – not because it’s technically worse, but because it’s 7 years later and they should have known better. Details to substantiate the title of this post are here. Microsoft has handed market opportunity to Apple on a silver platter. I was absolutely fine with XP, and still consider it my favorite OS to-date, but if you are forced with a new computer buying decision, either find a PC that can get XP support, or pick up a Mac.
Don’t forget – don’t buy the Sony Vaio SZ-460N (now, 3 months later, the Sony Vaio SZ-470N), as it is a terrible laptop with terrible support from Sony.
ps – I am sorry to my friends at Microsoft, I’m sure this is a rough time for many of you. Hopefully messages like these make their way up the food chain to enough people to make sure you don’t ship anything else like this in the future.
pps – for those of you at Microsoft who were responsible for this mess, I hope you are paying a lot of attention, and not writing off these complaints as from some minority population. You’ve made a huge mistake. My wife doesn’t like Vista on my laptop (that Vaio SZ-460N, you remember, the $2500 piece of junk that gets outperformed by my $1100 MacBook?), nor does my mother like Vista on her new Dell laptop. It’s a big stinking mess, and you should be out with brooms and mops cleaning it up, whatever it takes.
While OS X is my favorite OS, I still prefer Vista to XP. Sure it’s not perfect, but the security alone is enough of a reason to use it. I wouldn’t recommend anyone use any OS that doesn’t prompt for credentials when changing systems settings or installing applications that could screw something up.
My biggest problems with Vista, is the performance issues, unreliable resume from hibernate and complicated way to configure networking.
The real problem isn’t Vista specifically more than likely. It’s drivers. Awful crappy hardware drivers. Apple has it easy by not supporting much (internal) hardware (like network cards, video cards, sound cards, etc.), and motherboards, and … Laptops seems to be especially bad about driver support.
I bought a new HP PC in the spring — the installed drivers on Vista didn’t even work! Tech support was baffled. I ended up using non-OEM drivers for one of the internal cards to make things work, because HP couldn’t figure it out.
Vista is a marginally better OS than XP. There are some nice features that I miss on XP.
I’m not sure why your wife would like Vista on the laptop that you hated so much according to your earlier posts? Hardly adds any fuel to the fire.
What would you suggest Microsoft do? How would they clean things up and make you happy Jeremy?
I don’t recall everyone being happy about the Windows 9x to XP upgrade either (or even windows 2000-XP). Time heals some wounds …. 🙂
Windows Movie Maker on Vista does not record from analog sources, whereas XP does. Crazy!
Ah, you could always step up and use a real OS, Linux! 😉
Jeremy,
Despite Vista’s woes, today’s NYT suggests Apple hasn’t gained any market share.