Review of an upgrade from Vista to XP

[SineSwiper]

"I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop."

[Tessian]

I only had to skim the article to tell it's total shit. If this article were converted into pounds of shit it could easily bury a 2 story house.

All I see in that article were lies and twists of the truth. This guy should (or probably already does) work for Fox News.

[Zeus]

I love how it starts off:

"...I decided to upgrade my Vista laptop to Windows XP"

Oh how I agree with him

[SineSwiper]

I only had to skim the article to tell it's total shit. If this article were converted into pounds of shit it could easily bury a 2 story house.

All I see in that article were lies and twists of the truth. This guy should (or probably already does) work for Fox News.

What's inaccurate? Vista is shit. He provides many links for references.

[Tessian]

No, he provides many untruths and half truths and no longer truths. No drivers for Vista? Not unless you installed Vista in March. Stability issues? hell no; Vista has been MUCH stabler for me than XP was in its first few years. IE crashes in Gmail? No. Faster startup? Hell no; not unless you've got a dozen applications set to start at bootup and if so it's no different than XP. If anything Vista doesn't bother to give you the illusion that you can do shit while it's still loading apps just cause you have the mouse. His gaming benchmarks are bullshit; I bet he fudged them by using DX10 on Vista and it's definitely true you get a performance hit in DX10 but that's not Vista's fault.

So much else I'm sure if I had read more than 1/5 of the article. I hate having to defend Microsoft here, but Vista got a black mark at its launch and no one will even give it a chance because it had problems 10 months ago. Stop clinging to the outdated talking points of the Apple commercials and grow an opinion of your freakin own.

[Zeus]

XP crashes? I may have had that once or twice since I first installed it the SECOND it came out so all the bugs weren't worked out. And I didn't even install SP2 for years. The whole selling point of XP is that it's stable as hell, much more so than the iterations of Winblows before it. Why do you think I never came up with a sarcastic nickname for it? It's the only version of Winblows that I have ever liked.

[Tessian]

XP crashes? I may have had that once or twice since I first installed it the SECOND it came out so all the bugs weren't worked out.

You're joking, right? XP was much more unstable when it came out than Vista was. I remember it being like playing russian roulette until SP1 came out; not as bad as Windows ME ever was but it was pretty unstable. And omg everyone complained about the requirements-- 256mb of ram?! oh noes!

Come to think of it... Vista is having the same response as XP did, except Vista had a better overall start but got black listed with a few problems in the beginning that no one wants to forget. I stuck with 2000 Pro for so long because it was like XP to Vista-- it was a little fancier, more bells and whistles, but it wasn't that big an upgrade so most didn't bother until they got new PC's or it got mainstream like it is now. There was no real reason to upgrade a PC from 2000 to XP; 2000 was MUCH more stable at the time (hell it had 3-4 SP's by then it better!) but eventually given time it took over as people bought new PC's.

[Zeus]

You probably won't believe me, but I really didn't have any issues with XP right away. And before that, ME worked for me BY FAR better than 98 v2 did.

Maybe it's 'cause I'm a minimalist with my computers. I don't run too much at once and always make sure that I don't have too many extraneous programs running.

[Tessian]

You probably won't believe me, but I really didn't have any issues with XP right away. And before that, ME worked for me BY FAR better than 98 v2 did.

Maybe it's 'cause I'm a minimalist with my computers. I don't run too much at once and always make sure that I don't have too many extraneous programs running.

Luck with OS's has always varied a bit-- it's just that variance has narrowed over the years. Windows ME never gave me any problems... but most people I knew had HORRIBLE luck with it. So much so for my dad he ended up building a 2nd PC just so he'd have better luck of at least one being functional at any given time. ME just was doomed from the start-- it's the first and last time Microsoft let manufacturers rush them on a product for the holidays.

[Kupek]

You probably won't believe me, but I really didn't have any issues with XP right away.

When did you start using it, though? Before or after the first service pack?

My intuition is the same as Tessian's: Vista is going through the same crap XP did. I would buy that there's a degree more reluctance since XP is the first consumer version of Windows that doesn't suck, and there's just less reason to upgrade. Windows 2000 was good, but it wasn't marketed to consumers.

[SineSwiper]

The problem is that Microsoft will never learn to beta test properly. Nor will they learn to quit putting in 1000 features and fixing only 100 bugs. I would rather that they quit focusing on the bells and whistles and just make it work better. If there was a version of Windows that wasn't some SP50 of Vista and was just called "Windows 2010", and it didn't have any extra features (just everything fixed), I would totally upgrade to that. Vista, not so much.

Plus, I have some serious issues with their DRM bullshit. Deleting videos may cause codecs to appear? What the fuck is up with that? Just go to the goddamn NTFS file list and remove the entry. It's not that fucking hard!

And how the fuck can you screw up signal control?! Make Task Manager the program with ultimate priority and allow you to kill anything INSTANTLY! There should be no "oh, wait, let me hang for a while, just because". End task. Would you like to End Task a 5th time? At least XP allows you to kill a process pretty quickly and it almost instantly dies. In Linux, I type "kill -KILL [pid]" and it's dead. Instantly. It doesn't complain. It doesn't wait to collect data. It doesn't sit there to see if you'll click on "End Task" again. It doesn't ask questions. It just kills it. Nothing can stop a KILL signal. It's just dead. Dead. Dead. Dead dead dead.

Microsoft: why can't you design an untrappable KILL signal?

[Tessian]

I've... never had problems killing processes in Vista's Task Manager, so I have no idea what you're talking about. You close the process, and at best when the program terminates you may get a warning about how the program terminated unexpectedly-- would you like to Diagnose or just close? Close and move on.

[Kupek]

Microsoft Beta tests extensively. You're just underestimating the difficulty and complexity of getting Windows to work. The combinatorial explosion of possible hardware configurations means it's impossible for Microsoft to do exhaustive testing before they ship. A lot of the early issues are also driver problems, which are inherent to the problem. Keep in mind that Mac OSX works on a strict set of hardware, and Linux is basically under a continual testing process. (And even then there are issues when some distributions are first released.)

I've had lots of problems killing processes in XP. I've had some in Linux, too, but not nearly as many.

[Zeus]

You probably won't believe me, but I really didn't have any issues with XP right away.

When did you start using it, though? Before or after the first service pack?

My intuition is the same as Tessian's: Vista is going through the same crap XP did. I would buy that there's a degree more reluctance since XP is the first consumer version of Windows that doesn't suck, and there's just less reason to upgrade. Windows 2000 was good, but it wasn't marketed to consumers.

Been a while, but I believe it was before. I put it in only a couple of months after release

[SineSwiper]

Keep in mind that Mac OSX works on a strict set of hardware, and Linux is basically under a continual testing process. (And even then there are issues when some distributions are first released.)

That's kinda my point. Yes, there are kernel problems in Linux, but mostly the releases are much less damaging than the ones I heard about with Windows. I really think they should be following a similar testing model.

[Zeus]

ME just was doomed from the start-- it's the first and last time Microsoft let manufacturers rush them on a product for the holidays.

I wish they were under ANY kind of pressure. Most of the problem stems from the fact they basically have a monopoly. If ME is the result, bring on the competition.

It's amazing that a company that hires so many of the "best and brightest people" (they actually have an office in the University of Waterloo Math & Computer building they're there so much recruiting) yet it took them how many years just to make something that worked. That's just sheer lack of competition. Look what happened when Netscape wasted them (didn't they have 90% of the market at one point?) it FORCED them to make IE better. Then Netscape dies (well, AOL bought them, but that's the same thing) then IE becomes stagnant. Now you've got a couple of pretenders in Firefox and Opera that have what, 20% of the market combined? Not enough to force them to make their shitty product any better.

And that's what it boils down to: morons continue to give them TONS of money for their shitty products and with the lack of competition for that money, the product has no reason to become any better.

[Tessian]

Keep in mind that Mac OSX works on a strict set of hardware, and Linux is basically under a continual testing process. (And even then there are issues when some distributions are first released.)

That's kinda my point. Yes, there are kernel problems in Linux, but mostly the releases are much less damaging than the ones I heard about with Windows. I really think they should be following a similar testing model.

No one's going to pay for an OS that's constantly in beta. Linux distributions don't really have much resources so they rely on the users to beta test and give feedback-- that's the whole point of it and some people love that. As a regular home user or a business owner I do NOT want my computer to be running an OS that's constantly a work in progress. Linux kernels may be stable now, but see how long it takes for a new kernel (not just fixes) to be used main stream. You also don't hear about Linux problems as much because the population is a lot smaller and a lot quieter. No Linux user will be outraged that the new open source version of Ubuntu won't work-- they knew that risk going into it and also didn't pay for it.

Kupe's response is a great one-- Windows is the only OS out there that tries to a) work on any combination of hardware and b) do it without the help of an open source community that's both patient and understanding.
Leopard had some big problems at launch too but you didn't hear shit did you? Because Mac users are so freakin fanboi-ic they keep quiet for starters, and they're smaller. Leopard had pretty bad problems with their new firewall that I don't even know if it's fixed. It also isn't fair because OS X has to work on, what, a dozen different architectures? Whoopie that must be hard to test. They just need a few models of every PC they've sold and they're done. Just wait and see how fast OS X goes into the shitter if they open it up to all x86/64 chipsets-- you'll beg for a copy of Windows ME. Unfortunately Apple will never let that happen for that very reason.

[Kupek]

That's kinda my point. Yes, there are kernel problems in Linux, but mostly the releases are much less damaging than the ones I heard about with Windows. I really think they should be following a similar testing model.

That's not possible with proprietary, off the shelf software. I think the way Linux does things produces a more stable system, but it's not a good way to make money, so it's not viable for Microsoft.

Tessian, plenty of unpatient and not understanding people rely on Linux. They only deal with stable releases, most often from a known-good distribution. I also heard lots of complaints about Leopard upon release. And dear god, no one would beg for ME.