Microsoft Gives Windows XP Its 17,326nd New Lease on Life

The video card used to power my dual monitor setup at work uses an ATI catalyst video driver and it crashes on a semi-weekly basis, meaning both screens flicker and then go out and the only recourse is a restart. It's incredible to me that a two year old OS can still not have some basic video card support while XP has always worked flawlessly for me.

> The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.

That's not entirely fair to some people. In Vista's early days, things WERE problematic because of how new the platform was and how not-used to it people were. In fact, it's the same kind of criticism people had for Windows XP before SP2 or so. If you give it time, most of them will go away. Probably sometime around the release of Windows 7 :) Then we can await the "Microsoft Gives Windows Vista its 10000th New Lease on Life" article.

Personally, I sort of skipped Vista for Server 2008. O:) (and Mac OS X, etc.)

The problem with Vista is largely that it's just not a compelling upgrade to businesses, and only moderately compelling to consumers. XP does everything they want an OS to do. I like Vista better myself, but I can see how the casual user could be largely indifferent to it.

Combine that with their rollout problems and Apple's hundreds of millions of marketing dollars proclaiming how sucky it is, and it's not hard to see why they've got an image problem.

I can clearly articulate why I don't like vista:

1. Its most annoying feature in my opinion (and its activated by default) is that it caches all your most recently most programs into memory every time your computer starts. Not only do I think this is a stupid feature, it takes ages to complete, hordes the memory, makes your hdd go nuts, and most of all I had no idea wtf was happening with my new computer.

2. file-indexing is activated by default - Microsoft didn't seem to realize this in conjunction with feature #1 makes your computer go crazy every time you start Vista. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. My new computer which i bought 2 month ago was thus brought to a crawl every time I started up.

3. Interface is pretty but not intuitive, a lot of stuff is moved around for no apparent reason, eg you now have to wade through 3 or 4 links just go get to your network connection properties, which is something that should be more readily accessible to the average user.

I know these are all options which can be modified, but hell it took me a good few hours to figure out, and it annoyed me like crazy. Windows XP in comparison just seems faster, simpler and gets the job done quicker.

I don't use it much, but today I needed it. And it crashed twice on me. Once when I was away from my desk--I came back and was rebooted into fedora (my default). wtf??

How about the fact that a significant portion of your machine's resources under Vista are devoted to DRM monitoring?

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows...

There's something seriously wrong when so much engineering effort is put into monitoring and crippling rather than enhancing your users' hardware capabilities. It goes against the very ethos of engineering.

Add to that onerous licensing terms specifying that you don't own your copy of Windows, Microsoft does, allowing Microsoft to remotely disable the OS and install or delete software without asking you. Add to that onerous DRM requirements on third-party hardware manufacturers that drive up prices and reduce overall driver support and availability.

Vista was Microsoft's bid to become gatekeeper and tolltaker of an OS-level iTunes-like digital content distribution channel. But that's not something Microsoft's customers wanted, a fact that has resulted in arguably the biggest software release failure in Microsoft's long history.

Yeah, it's that bad.