[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Vista Customer Satisfaction Climbs, Microsoft Claims here

[mikalg]

As we all know, Vista has not been the most marketable OS from Microsoft since Windows 98SE or Me.
We all also know that the perception of Vista (generally) has been somewhat of a stagnant nature. Poor reviews, and even worse adoption rates.
Usually, a new Operating system is NOT adopted by IT administrators until well into its "life cycle". This has been the ACCEPTED norm for decades. This is not going to change, for better or worse.
Vista has had a slightly unique set of circumstances that helped to "kill" the OS for a great number of people.
First, the OS is NOT what was advertised at the beginning of its inception. What I mean by this is the fact that Microsoft gave so many press releases about all of the features (search, etc.) that NEVER actually made it to the final Vista.
LONGHORN was to be the next GREAT OS, with many great features. We received a Vista that was scaled back and limited in its scope (compared to the advertised features of 2 years before its release). Mostly, this was reportedly to "get the OS out the door" MS said at the time.
This made several people, myself included, dubious of the results. Vista was not what we originally were told it would be. How many people forgot the original promises? Not me.
Second; Sales of new PC's are down. Traditionally, IT for business does not spend too much time invested in a brand new OS. Usually, they get the OS with new PC purchases...and get to know the OS at home. THEN move after a service pack or two roll it into the corp.
Well, this isn't going to happen for any business that was not an early adopter (was there really any of those out there?). Instead, Winows, "next" I call it (7 for MS) will be the new OS of business. Why? Microsoft has made the mistake (maybe it wont be a huge mistake) of releasing a NEW BETTER VISTA. This has relegated Vista to the status of 98 Millennium Edition. No one really cares when performance sales are so low, and there does not seem to be any value in the purchase.
I can go on, but these are the biggest issues I see Vista having. Making a big deal about business Vista adoption a year after release is not impressive. The numbers are really NEVER that high! We all know this, but we keep Vista and Microsoft in the news anyway. Virtually the same thing as reporting that "Humans need oxygen to survive" every single day. We all know it already.

[Adama]

I have Vista on my laptop and I'm still satisfied with it.

[rgreen4]

Large corporations purchase their machines in large batches and then use the corporate image on the machines. Thus we have the situation which was prevalent at the company I was working in before retirement, where the sticker on recent machines said XP Pro, but in fact were running Windows 2000 Pro. This company is in the process of rolling out Vista and Office 2007, have jumped over XP and Office 2003.

Add to this the fact that the respected reasearch firm Gartner has released recent surveys that show Vista actually has a higher market penetration at this point than XP did 2 years after it's release.

Many state that Windows 7, will solve all the perceived problems of Vista, yet it has been stated that the kernel for Windows 7 will in fact be the Vista kernel. Thus, Windows 7 will have the same relationship to Vista as XP has to Windows 2000 Pro. Some attempt to portray Vista as a failure, but if it is, it is the most sucessful failure in world history, have delivered over 200 million licenses to date.

Almost all the consumer PC's (less Mac) sold today contain Vista, and they stay that way, as some of the devices in the new machines don't have XP drivers. And 95% of the consumers are happy to leave them alone anyway, and don't understand what all the hoopla was about anyway as their machines work just fine.

[benleo56]

My wife has a Sony laptop with Vista. It stinks. Its slow, has many error messages. She doesn't like it and no one else in the family will use it.
I have since bought many desktops and even Laptops with XP Pro. Its not wonderful but it is better than Vista.
Vista is a demonstration that Microsoft thinks its customers are shmucks. They can pump out any crap and we'll buy it. If only there was a good alternative.
Macs are great for personal use, but just to much bother to use in a business environment.

[rgreen4]

Most of these situations are caused by one of two things. Either the manufacturer skimped on the memory which at the current time is dirt cheap, with 1GB of DDR2 memory in the 200 pin SODIM modules anywhere from $12 to $18 at Newegg. The other cause is what most of the regular members refer to as bloatware, including the infamous security suites by Norton and McAfee.

Add to this the fact that a laptop is ALWAYS slower than a desktop of the same clock speed. This is a result of simple heat transfer. Desktops have the luxury of space for a large heat exchanger and multiple fans to move copious quantities of air to remove heat. Laptops generally have two very small fans to move a limited amount of air through a cramped space. I have a 4 year old HP laptop with a 3.2GHz P4 and a 5 year old HP desktop with a 3.2GHz P4 and the desktop runs rings around the laptop - on XP!

If you want to test the heat transfer of the Sony, try using it for an hour sitting on your lap. In far less time than that your legs will be begging for mercy. Those who do use their laptops on their laps quickly develop the habit of moving it around to move the heat source.

[ToyotaTundra]

Vista seems to have problems, PC World Claims!

[TechieXP]

Miklag - First off your comments have soe facts but are more personal. The main reason there has been much ove to Vista on the corp level is teh expense. ay corps like the one I work for are still using systes from 1990's. Which teh exception of a few new Dell's that don't have Vista most of our system are Pentium III's with 1Ghz cpu and 512MB ram..making the way below teh specs needed to run Vista efficiently. ven before the recession Bush put of in companies didn't want to ake teh move because many are still using systems in theis category. So they have to use Windows 2000/XP bec they siply didnt want to spend money to get new pc's plus Windows Vista License. Eve in our small office of 20 ppl it is expensive to but even at tdays prices 20 systems that could run Vista. Also as you did say, upgrading to Vista provide no true benefit if teh applications you have workk fine in Windows XP. On the consumer level, many didn't upgrade because of bad reviews. Aside from Microsoft's Mojave projects mnay are starting to get Vista because many are relaizing it isn't as bad as some said it was. In fact it is better than Windows XP in many ways. The same things everyone is crying about with Vista was teh same things you're saying about XP. People hated XP too. But after problems were fixed everyone now loves it. By teh time Windows 7 is released people will be saying teh same about Vista. As long as you have a system that has proper specs and application designed to run in Vista you will have no ore proble then with XP. The above guy who says they keep getting error messages are never forthcoming with the full truth. Benleo - How many of those applications are you ahving error with were Designed for Windows XP? I built my own system making sure that all of my hardware could be installed just using Microsoft's native drivers and give basic functions only. I have to this date had no proble until i installed programs that were designed for xp. Once I updated them i have yet to get an error message.

And Mik - The next Windows Vista as you call WIndow 7 is far from it. Just like XP though is a by-product of Windows 2000 is much more. Windows 7 isn't teh next Vista improved. I would say it is more if what Vista should have been if MS didn't rush Vista out teh door.

[GetReal]

Are we hearing from the apologists again...facile explanations expounded with ASSUMPTIONS that were never origionally stated.

1) They and some/few friends never had serious problems so then clearly 95% of the world didn't either.
2) Problems are mostly from vendors who are selling systems with inadequate memory and/or installing bloatware---never from Microsoft! And users are lying about circumstances regarding error messages?

However. Part of what was posted seems right to me (if I can read it correctly), MS rushes products out the door---fixes it later (actually, my opinion, most vendors do that now---to user detriment).
Company IT departments upgrade to new versions of OS only when there is clear benefit to the company or a pressing need for new systems & the new systems are only available with new versions of software. Because: IT knows that there will usually be serious problems with an OS over drivers and applications and user training and vendor support and..., making an upgrade about 3 or 4 times as expensive as just the computer purchass alone.

Still there will/should be people who express OPINIONs of "wife doesn't like it and no one else in the family will use it" starting the explanation/apology cycle all over again.
We are in a rut here when postings tend to whitewash everything percieved as anti-microsoft and/or seem to try to present the writer as the most knowledgable about a subject!

[rgreen4]

Major corporations do not sit on old antiquated systems like some think they do. Small to Mid sized business do, but major corporations routinely replace a portion of their systems every year. This is not necessarily a fixed percentage, but it works out to about 15% on average. This is because the older systems are slower and can't keep up, slowing down the productivity of the workforce. They also don't work on an individual system very long. If a PC has a problem, they will spend a max of 30 minutes on it if it is functioning at all. Then the next day a different machine is on that desk. If the machine dies completely, then it may take about an hour to replace the machine.

This is because they have images of the standard setup which they just burn to a new drive partition. I had a machine that randomly did a reboot, sometimes in the middle of updating a complex spreadsheet. On the first instance, I put it up to happenstance. On the second instance, I put in a repair ticket. The IT intern came by to find out exactly what was going on. He replaced the memory (with a mismatch) and went on his way. On the third instance, another IT intern replaced the memory with the correct memory and went on his way. On the fourth instance they replaced the machine. All the applications were there, I only had to reset the number lock so it came on with the boot, and one day later one specialized application that ran off the corporate machine was up and running.

The stripped down my previous machine, reformatted the hard drive and passed it to a local school. As I was retiring, they were in fact rolling out Vista and Office 2007 to replace Win2K and Office 2000. This was on 3,000 PC across multiple locations, so they were doing one location at a time. They had already acquired the multi-use licenses and ordered several hundred PC's to replace the old ones. They stuck with Win2K until it's support was about expired, and moved to Vista because it will be supported further into the future than XP will.

[GetReal]

That system of PC replacement is probably correct for office environments, where most users would not need a variety of applications or support hardware. It is not even close to correct for manufacturing facilities. I also recently retired from a separate devision of the corporation that built the space shuttles. At retirement my plant in that division had about 1400 workers and my work-bench had two PC's, one was a P2 running Windows-95 and the other was an "old" P4 running Windows-Xp home. This was a common configuration on the manufacturing floor where premier aviation equipment was being produced.
My Win-95 machine routinely produced at least 2 BSOD error weekly and I was informed by an IT supervisor "When this happens just restart." Asking why we did not get replacement PC's I was told that buying new PC's required buying new software and that copies of semi-custom diagnostic software cost around $8000 each, so we would just have to live with one older/different version alongside the one new!
Since the product line consisted of about 200 items, some few retailing near $100,000 each and since each product was tested only on one or two work-benches, there was no corporate model available to setup a system or replacement hard disk.
In the material procurement and shipping offices I did see some PC's that likely were "cloned" as described, but not many.

[spoz]

I've been trying to post a comment to this article for the past 30 minutes ... but Internet Explorer keeps crashing (I tried four times, one with a
reboot!) every time I access the site. Thank God I have an old copy of Netscape around ... it seems to work with Vista.

I find this article ("*Vista Customer Satisfaction Climbs, Microsoft
Claims*") preposterous, inflammatory ... I don't know what to
call it.


What I do know is that my Win2K worked perfectly well,
and did not NOT support my Canon Scanner, Palm sync app, etc etc. Vista is just
plain poorly thought out. It
* is unreliable - apps work one day, and crash the next
* does not even support native Microsoft apps - Outlook has started crashing REGULARLY ... just "like that", i.e. with no system change, other than regular Microsoft updates; IE crashes one day, works the next - crashing today inhibited my posting earlier
* is a step backwards in many respects, e.g. the SEARCH function in Windows Explorer, which simply does not work
* is a resource hog, with more hidden processes and services running than ever before - and most being totally useless, e.g. the Windows Search nonsense, which simply doesn't work


I wish I could contact this ludicrous Microsoft VP, who dares make this idiotic statement ...
but my internet Explorer keeps crashing. Good thing I can fall back on
Netscape.
Somebody at Microsoft, at some point, HAS TO get out into the
real world and understand how they are RUINING PEOPLE'S LIVES! And I'd be
thrilled to show them!!!
I so regret listening to "expert advice" and loading Vista on this new smoking hot laptop ... Win2K may have run it slower, but at least IT RAN RELIABLY.

This Vista is just so pathetic ... I only wish I had an option. I'm stuck in this pile of Microsoft cr*p!

[ClaudeD]

If you can't market it as Vista, how about as Mojave. Are people really this ignorant? Vista's only getting better reviews from users who have little or no experience or because it's forced on them and they know no better. Go ahead put lipstick and a dress on an alligator and try to give it kiss. Go Mojave!

[rgreen4]

Daily crashes of Outlook and IE are ABNORMAL. It is not Outlook, and it is not Vista. (BTW IE7 is integral to Vista). It sounds more like you have a malware infection than anything else.

[spoz]

[rgreen4:|~22087]

I
certainly agree this regular IE/Outlook crashing is abnormal.
However, I can GUARANTEE you that there is no malware on my machine -
nor has there ever been, since I first started running Windows. I
was one of the beta testers for Norton's original utilities ... and
then the virus checkers. I was maong the first to install
Zonealarm firewall back almost ten years ago. I have had
installed on my machine some core utilities (startup program checker
(Winpatrol), Firewall (Zonealarm), malware detectors (Spybot,
SuperAntiSpyware), and antivirus (Norton)) for longer than I can
recall. These run in the background, with major sweeps done
regularly.

<> And I always come up clean.

I wish
it were otherwise! I'd be thrilled to know it was just some
stupid infestation - then I could eradicate it, and move on.
Unfortunately, not so.

I
have been looking much more closely at the Outlook crashing, in
particular. I dug around on the Web ... guess what? There's
a HUGE discussion thread on Microsoft's Website in the Vista forum that
talks about ... Outlook suddenly crashing after SP1 ... I am not
alone. I tried to corroborate events in the "Reliability and
Performance Monitor" tool that comes with Vista ... but it's unclear
which set of updates is the seed of this rot - though the most likely
seems the batch of the Nov 11 second-Tuesday stuff, as Outlook started
to crash more regularly after I installed these.

I would be very pleased to bet you a beer that the problem is in one of these unfortunate updates.

[Stevepaul51]

I have used Vista with a new Acer laptop. I like it. I put Windows Xp on it...the laptop worked faster but I must confess I like the gizmos and gadgets with Vista. It is a really smart system.

[taustin1382]

the only reason vista has a higher adoption rating is that it was shoved down everyones throats!dell was charging a $200 downgrade fee at one point and you still had the vista license.... thats concidered an adoption.... I have 2 new laptops at home. mine did not even survive the first boot before it BSOD.... It did not even make it to the installer.... I was going to give vista a chance as i am well aware that Xp was frowned upon way back when... I popped the installer disc from manufac in the drive rebooted... reinstalled.... it got to the setup window after removing the disk and locked up.... another reboot and it got to the same point and BSOD' ..... i pulled out the ubuntu 8.04 disk and installed it straight! wifeys laptop was running fine until SP1 which crashed her office 2007 install and a reinstall was needed, it now BSOD' at least once a week. unfortunately we are stuck because acer does not support XP on the machine she has and we cannot find drivers for it. she requires windows for work so she is SOL....

as a private IT business owner contracted to a very large company I can tell you first hand that not all enterprise businesses have a standard coreload and I can also tell you that last year dell started shoving vista on us even though we had not tested it in our corporate environment. I had nothing to do with the testing as it was handled at another facility but it did not go well.... we are still using xp where we need to have windows and ubuntu 8.04 on the pc's where we do not need wondows.

I can also attest that many companies sit on old pc's for software reasons more than hardware. we have quite a few windows 95/98boxes running custom labeling software that was written way back when in DOS.... we also have a couple IBM dos boxes controlling conveyors and PLC's again a custom one off job that they refuse to replace due to developement costs. I also have a freind who is a systems admin for a medium size data warehousing company that has had nothing but problems out of server 2008... BSOD's every few weeks.... completely unacceptable for a server OS! they are in the process of downgrading to server 2003....



on the other hand I am sure there are plenty of people having no problems with vista but the reality is there are plenty of people that are completely disatisfied.... MS is showing scewed numbers.... i own a MS vista license so i am in that group, every PC we get from dell is in that group even though they are running ubuntu or XP. fact is you cannot but a pc with out it so of course they are going to look to have a great adoption rating.... you dont have any other option....



and before yousay "why dont you buy an ubuntu preloaded dell" .... corporate tells us what hardware we can and cannot buy.... we have a choice of 2 laptops and 2 desktops.... all 4 are vista.... other facilities have been using xp licenses they got from dell to downgrade....