[PCWorld]

Post your comments for You're Not Alone: Microsoft Execs Struggled with Vista here

[mchittaj]

Yup thats one definitely legal law suit. I think it will be tough time for microsoft to get over that law suit and by the article all i can say is that microsoft is trying to push VISTA ahead of XP without any smooth transitions. All it cares for is just push VISTA onto ppl !!!! (!)

[stormchaser28]

Hi everyone,

The day that Windows Vista launched, I went home and intalled it. I had no problems with installing or running it. Most of the problems related to Windows Vista that consumers did not upgrade their hardware or did not follow the screen prompts closely.

[jakthebomb]

good to hear i am not alone.

i have vista running on a 2003 Dell Dimintion 4600 with 512MB of ram, a Geforce 6200 PCI with 256MB of video Ram, a 120GB 7,200 RPM Harddrive and lastly a Pentium 4 2.6Ghz. it is not running as fast a my Laptop i bought with Vista Ultamet, my laptop is a HP Pavilion dv9000t with 2GB of Ram, Geforce 7600 Go with 256MB of video Ram, a 120GB 5,400 RPM Harddrive, and a Intel Core Duo 1.76Ghz.

i have SP1 installed on both and i Never Had a Driver issue or a non compatible Software. i love vista and i will never switch back to XP again. Vista has never Crashed on me. So all of you Vista Hateters out there, USE VISTA BEFORE YOU CRITISIZE IT. and XP was not in a better situation back in 2001. remember people were still using 98 over XP, because XP required a better PC at the time. so Vista will be the next XP and Windows 7 will be the Next Vista.

Just watch people will be saying, oh Windows 7 does not run on my PC, i am going to keep useing Vista. oh vista is faster than Windows 7, Microsoft can't Stop selling vista, because windows 7 does not run on my Year 2008 PC.

jakthebomb

[Vercer]

I haven't read the whole lawsuit yet, but having onle very recently left the field of PC sales in January one thing I recall was when the Vista Capable program launched MS sent us out a pretty comprehensive list of specs and what parts of Vista would run.

Sounds more to me like unscrupulous PC sales people telling people "Sure this computer with 512 RAM and a P4 with integrated video will run Vista Premium/Ultimate just fine. MS was surprisingly forthcoming to us sales reps about what the requirements would be. If anything they overestimated.

Sounds more to me like they need to be going after the liars that sold them their PC's rather than MS on THIS one.

[thoffnpr]

Well at least we are not alone in having the problems with windows :) LOL

[Chris32]

The lawsuite is dumb. Microsoft is no way lied to the customer because those machines that the stickers were placed on were "vista capable" wheather or not it is vista basic or premium. My best advice to those people is to read the compatibility requirements prior to installing the new OS.

Yeah Microsoft keeps my job busy :-)... but thats not a bad thing considering im an IT guy and Macs keep me busy too :-). If these OS were flawless i would be out of a job... And finally; The driver problem is not Microsofts fault, if third party vendors would get there drivers out fast enough than there would be no issues with this it all.

[TheBigOldDog]

The should have tried to run it BEFORE it was released, not after! That's the problem in a nutshell. Time to clean house starting at the top!

[CTKEN]

So, how is the weather on your planet? I am happy you did not have any problems, but you just might be the only one in the galaxy that can make that statement.



In August 2007 I replaced 100% of my hardware and software. Vista Ultimate was pre-installed on two very highend PC's and a highend laptop. I replaced all of my network infrastructure (modem, router, switches, etc.). I went to great lengths to ensure the new HW and SW was 1) Certified for Vista, 2) Works with Vista, or 3) Vista Compatible. I realized too late that only products identified as "Certified for Vista" or "Works with Vista" had been actually tested by somebody other than the source of the product. Getting HW and SW to work was and continues to be a nightmare.

As an example I purchased an HP 5590 scanner. The online information and the HP salesperson were explicit in stating the scanner and associated software would absolutely work with Vista - just make sure to use the CD's labeled for Vista. Surprise, the drivers shipped with the scanner were NOT usable on Vista. On the advice of tech support, I uninstalled all of the software and the scanner. I even had to manually edit the registry to remove all traces of the original software. The original software was replaced with a 200 meg download named "setupfull5590.exe" posted on their website in January. This was designated as THE Vista SW. In order to download it, one must make two separate choices to get to the Vista download page. The chances of downloading the wrong file are miniscule.

Anyone care to bet how well the new Vista drivers/SW worked keeping in mind the 200 meg download was released over one year after Vista hit the market?

It doesn't end there. I hit a very strange error message every time I used a certain software package. The result of the condition was the program was immediately terminated (what we would have called the blue screen of death in the good old days). The error code is not listed in Microsoft's list of error codes. Searching the MS website and the knowledge base failed to return any applicable information. Then I did a web search and found hundreds of pages discussing the problem. It seems the problem is pervasive, and not just with the SW I was trying to use. Some kind soul posted a url to a page in the MS KB that described the problem exactly. As usual at the bottom of the article was a button to click to get the patch.

After clicking instead of the usual download dialogue box, a form appeared. One needs to complete the form (providing all sorts of technical information). Upon submission MS decides IF they will allow you to get the patch because it is still in testing (and has been since 11/2007). I must have made a typo since I was unable to get the patch. Anybody want to buy some software Certified for Vista that will not run on Vista?

It is painfully obvious Vista is deeply flawed. I suspect some third-party companies are sloppy, incompetent, or incapable of writing workable code. Given the huge number of bug fixes coming with SP1, it is just as clear Vista is poorly written. FYI: read the stories about what happens if you install SP1. You must be in shock to learn that Vista runs even slower and a list of software that used to run on Vista but will no longer function grows daily.

Welcome to planet Earth.

[jakthebomb]

"FYI: read the stories about what happens if you install SP1. You must be in shock to learn that Vista runs even slower and a list of software that used to run on Vista but will no longer function grows daily."

yea thats what the Blogers say, but i have news for you.

1. on my laptop i have 2GB of ram, before vista SP1 at idle 49% was used. after SP1 39% was used.

2. the reason why SP1 is initialy slower is because the sp1 installer resets the SuperFetch feature, so if you wate at most 2 weeks, vista will be as fast as a squarl on speed.

i guess your sources were reviewing it based on a 3 day usage. the facts are vista is more relyable and better than XP, so you lose a couple of FPS. it does not make a big Difference to me. it's like saying windows 2000 runs faster then XP on the same Hardware. it is true but XP was more relyable than 2000. also Vista is much easyer on your eyes. vista has a more Professional (aka Mature) look to it, XP has a cartoony look.

but everyone says Lepord is better than vista. well why does vista run faster then Mac os 10.5 on a iMac.

no matter what Microsoft does, not everyone will be pleased.

and look at the list of Known programs that stop working on vista after SP1. all of them have a working update. so as again get your facts strate.

jakthebomb

[inuyasha]

anyone else notice that their cooperate email addresses are present in the pdf? nice security blunder, im sure they will receive a ton off spam about this... which might not be a bad thing, maybe it would get through that vista is crap for the price they charge.

[Evildave]

Of course, this being a typical class action lawsuit, the lawyers will collect the bulk of the winnings, and we end-users will get a certificate good for a free small order of fries the purchase of a large beverage and sandwich at McDogfoods.

Certainly not everyone will be 'pleased'. Getting Vista on my new PC is like being unjustly thrown into prison. Sure, you eventually may be released, but you never get the time you lost back. The money spent on 'upgrading' or replacing software for Vista compatibility, chasing solutions to problems in software that couldn't be replaced.

I still mostly blame DELL for crippling my new PC with Vista. They should have noticed it was crap and refused to ship it.

As far as waiting 'weeks' for the internal caching to 'catch up', that's utter and complete B.S. If they actually did fix something, it would fix it NOW, or after an extra couple of hours of churning. It doesn't take 'weeks' to rebuild cached data in RAM. That happens the very next time it boots. If you have the flash memory plugged in, that will take an hour or two to rebuild.

No, what happens is that after you wait 'at most two weeks', you get used to your system chugging like a hernia patient running the marathon. It's only an 'improvement' compared to the triple-amputee crawling through broken glass, the way it USED to run. Maybe when SP2 comes out it'll chug along like an 90 year old granny on her walker on her way to the casino with her social security check.

And no, nothing they 'patch' will make Vista any better for me. As long as they have 'Driver Revocation' hanging over every user's head like the 'Sword of Damocles', a mechanism that can disable drivers without providing a new driver to replace it, there is nothing that Microsoft can do to make me 'happy' about Vista. Always wondering whether the computer will boot up in 800x600 VESA mode the next time with no sound, because somebody found a way to 'crack' protected content through a driver or chipset that my machine needs to work, and since it's a notebook, that means the whole $2500 machine is 'junk' as a result, at least for purposes of running the OS that came installed on it, and all the pricey software installed into THAT.

But more important, no patch to Vista will matter to me because I already abandoned WIndows for Linux. I still run Windows in a VMware session, but at least I finally tracked down an 'old' XP CD to install and run. Vista may run badly on the six month old notebook it came installed on, but it runs even worse in VMware, even with 2GB allocated to it, it doesn't quite run tolerably. All the momentary freezings and hiccups went away right away under the XP virtual machine with the same software installed... but hey, I knew that would happen.

[jakthebomb]

i guess i can consider my self one of the few that has no issues with vista. honistly you all can complain up the wazoo. my relyability index score is a 9.75

for all who complane show off your index score.

also those of you who bought a new pc with vista. i found out that on a dell that i have, came with crapware, and one of the programs was causeing Aero to shut off. now with a clean install on the same pc. 1. vista was 3X faster. 2. every bell and wisle worked fine. this just shows that every single prebult PC from dell, hp ect. are running slow because of the Greadyness to make more money. i pay $1,000 to buy a pc with more ads then the sunday daly news. if like in the old days you bought a new pc with vista i can gurantie that it would run faster. and in the old days if you used a system restore disc, it would only install the OS not the extra crap. so everytime i would restore my laptop, i have to clean out all of the crap that comes with my pc. it seems that it is worth it to just download the OS install disc and do a clean install on any new pc.

so if you don't like vista just don't buy it. stop complaning. because i can probably fix all of your problems you are having with vista.

jakthebomb

[tonyatn]

I'm Happy with XP. Why Vista."If it ain't broke don't fix it."

[Marcomike]

If this lawsuit goes against M$, then I wonder about people that weren't given a choice about what OS they wanted, when the purchased new systems? When I purchased my new laptop, I wasn't given a choice at all it was only which version of Vista??????

[RastaMon]

Quote

but everyone says Lepord is better than vista. well why does vista run faster then Mac os 10.5 on a iMac.

I call BS. I've seen Leopard installed on 1 GHz iMacs (5 years old) that runs faster than Vista runs on new machines with much higher specs.

Vista may in fact be an improvement over XP, but it is painfully slow.

[crblackburn]

Jakethe bomb, do you have any idea what program in particular on you Dell was the problem? If so, please do tell.

[Nortnarg]

You have started an action in Vista: Are you sure you want to do that? Yes.

You said yes you wanted to say yes to starting an action. Are you sure you want to say yes, and did you really do that? Yes and Yes

Vista has started an action because you said you wanted to do that action. Shall Vista proceed? Yes

Vist has started the action now. Are you real sure this is what you want to do? Yes

Action done, Would you like to comment on the user control feature?

[Evildave]

Vista looks to me to be the sort of thing only a mother (or Microsoft shill) could love.

Seeing people say it runs 'just great' if you have 2GB of RAM and a NEW PC comes across as utter BULL because I have 4GB of RAM and a NEW PC, yet somehow performance isn't all that impressive under Vista. When I boot into Linux or even into XP it is much better, smoother, faster, etc.

What some people call 'improvements' in Vista are absolutely abominable to me.

All that automatic background crap that I used to be able to trivially run at my convenience is a major step backwards. I don't need a computer to start defragging and indexing the hard disk and endlessly scanning 'security attributes' as soon as I sit down to test a game I'm working on. Some of this (the 'security attributes' by lsass) can't ever be turned off. This was all present in various forms in XP, but they made it all much worse for Vista.

When I want to search for a file, I'm absolutely fine with spending the extra five seconds watching the search happen in a non-indexed mode. Especially if it means the PC won't be spending hours beating the crap out of my hard drives every day. Somehow Linux comes up with files 'instantly' when I search, and there's never any noticeable 'scanning' going on to support that.

When I used to want to 'defrag', I was absolutely fine with waiting for it to complete when I started it, because I usually turn it on and go read a book or watch TV or go out or something. Same with all manner of gruesomely time-consuming 'scans' Windows machines need that Linux does not.

Here's a big hint, Microsoft: if it NEEDS to happen, attach it to a big button that says "Do all the annoying sht that takes forever and drags the system to a #^& crawl... and then SHUT DOWN.", so it actually gets done at the end of the day, rather than annoying the living bejesus out of everyone ALL DAY LONG in its attempt to be 'stealthy' and run in the background, or typically being disabled and postponed indefinitely. Of course, making it so Windows actually DOES shut down reliably on its own seems to be an elusive goal for Microsoft, so I don't foresee this happening any time soon.

Microsoft tried to emulate the 'sudo' user elevation behavior that has existed in Linux for years... and botched it badly. See the previous post Nortnarg for a fine example. They just sort of threw in a half-baked hack and called it a 'feature'. Yay, way to go. Probably still has some big, fat holes in it, too. This is actually a POSITIVE direction, but Microsoft made it so annoying that people disable it or have trained 'muscle memory' to simply dismiss the security warnings without actually 'seeing' them.

The formerly plugin things that get installed that can no longer be removed are high on my list of ugly. 'Windows Media Player' can't be uninstalled after an early patch of Vista (and even if you did uninstall it, it would end up back on your system with any later patch). You can at least disable the 'Windows Defender' if you are persistent enough, but you can't REMOVE it. Like 'Internet Explorer' in that infamous class action suit, it is all now "Part of the OS, integral."

One nice thing about Linux, booting into the GUI mode AT ALL is optional. That's right, the desktop and every GUI toy and scheduled background thing in it is OPTIONAL. If you want to, you can boot the kernel and a shell and that's IT. You can even go without the command shell if you want to dedicate the whole machine to being a server of some sort. Any desktop/GUI you like, even a clone of MAC or Windoze can come up under X and still be Linux.

That's FLEXIBILITY, and that's why Linux is already running in your home, and you don't even know it. Got a Kindle? Got a wireless router? Got a TiVO? Got any sort of 'information appliance'? Chances are extremely high that it's running a Linux kernel. It has two big things going for it. If you want a single-chip computer that costs $1.00 each to embed inside a 'toaster', you can trim Linux down to run just fine on that. Second, it's free, so you don't instantly blow $50 per unit on your $1 device licensing the OS from some morons who can't even write an OS that runs well with all the resources available to modern man.

A small sampling of Linux devices... not even up to date.

[rgreen4]

I have a graphics conversion program that won't run in Vista. I think I'll sue Microsoft. Oh, by the way - it won't run in XP either. Can I sue them twice?

What Horse manure! The responsibility for ensuring a program runs under a given operating system rests with the developer of the SOFTWARE!

Vista is released on Jan 30 and some one has trouble running it on Feb 2 - that's news? Everyone had some problems running it initially as the menus were re-structured to make them easier, and for someone just getting started, it was. It was all the people who had become accustomed to XP's quirky arrangements that had problems.

Most people buy software, install it and then dive right in and voila - have problems finding things. I bought the book, read parts of the book - like the chapter about the differences in the menu structure and then installed it. Kept the book handy. Course that was three month's after the release of Vista.

As for Linux - the list of hardware without Vista drivers pales into insignificance compared to hardware without drivers in Linux. Those accustomed to Microsofts drive and folder arrangements stuggle with the Linux arrangement.

If Linux was all that great, ran all that well, and supported so many programs and devices, whay hasn't the world beat a path to their doorstep, seeing how it free and all. And why do all the Linux shills spend so much time with an operating system they hate so much when they write about it, venom drips from their words? Most will answer - well I have to work in Windows. Clue - they work in Linux because functional programs that do the same jobs are not available in Linux.

I'm sure those that have to pay thousands for a program like Autocad would love an open source free program that did the same job. As good as Open Office is, it's not 100% compatible. I have a spreadsheet that is password protected. I can open it in Open Office, but if I make changes, I can't save it in Open Office unless I convert it, and then it's not interchangable with others on Windows and Excell. Solution - dump Open Office, install MS Office 2007 Home and Student under Vista and it works. Of course I must be one of those MS shills since I have Vista on three machines and don't have a problem with any of them. One is an upgrade from XP Media Center, the second an OEM install on a built up machine and the third a factory install on a laptop.

The laptop caused the most problems. It came with a boatload of crapware. It took me several hours of downloading the Norton's removal tool to remove NIS, downloading PC De-Crapifier to remove most of the rest and good old Windows uninstall to remove the rest.

I think I'll sue Microsoft - it must be their fault that the manufacturer put all this stuff from Symantec, the internet suppliers, and all the sample programs on my machine.

My built up machine must be defective since it boots faster under Vista than XP or even Windows 2000 Pro (triple boot system).