[PCWorld]

Post your comments for One-Third of New PC Buyers Opt for XP here

[rgreen4]

This reminds me of a quotation from my stat course. "Figures never lie, but liars figure".
Back in the late '70's when the hated double nickle (55) MPH speed limit was in effect, a survey was promoted buy the Georgia DOT that said 85% of drivers supported the lower speed limit. On the highway, actual surveys showed that 78% were driving over 65.
When they examined the dichotomy, they discovered the GDOT survey was taken among drivers waiting in the State Patrol Offices to renew their drivers license.
Surveying 3,000 PC that happen to have this software loaded and then extrapolating it over the hundreds of millions of PC's is very poor statistical analysis even if it does serve a prejudged position and provide a catching headline.
Perhaps they can provide information about who has this software loaded? Only 3,000 PC's? That's not even a good sized national company, and we know they have a standard image across their PC's.

[DeadlyAssassin]

not a person ive personally talked to has said they like vista and yes all including myself have tried it.
microsoft knows vista sucks and is why they basically are forcing new pc buyers to have vista so they can say more and more are moving to vista but will leave out the part that their forced to do so.
there are vista lovers their call ms employees.
i myself have used vista before and after sp1 and i still think vista sucks, its still slower and it still freezes up a pc more often.

[rgreen4]

DeadlyAssassin said:

not a person ive personally talked to has said they like vista and yes all including myself have tried it.

You keep posting this same statement, yet there are at least three members who have contradicted you in each post. Vista is not slower than XP on my machine and it dual boots both Vista and XP. Vista does not stall, does not freeze, does not blue screen. Nor does XP. The last Blue Screen I had was with Win98 some 5 years ago. I have Vista on three machines, and all three are doing just fine thank you.

[Dom2354]

Vista fine work well. Economy BAD REALLY BAD cost to much for new software that doesn't work on vista but do work on XP, blame economy not MS knuckleheads

[moorrbrt1]

One of my daughters has Vista on her new Dell laptop and she loves it. One of my favorite columnist from About.com says he's had it for awhile and has no problems. From all I've heard Vista probably would not preform well on my almost two year old laptop without significant upgrades in my hardware. I'm satisfied with my PC as is. If I were in the market for a new one I'd be OK with trying Vista as long as I had the option of downgrade.

[RoyC]

I installed Vista Ultimate SP1 on a 2 year old custom built Hypersonic PC and ran benchmark test using Performance Test 6.1 and Futuremark and both showed XP Pro SP2 to be almost 40% faster using the same hardware...I'll keep my XP, thank you...

[JustDoIt]

I'm still not quite convinced with Vista as a whole. Many people seem to like it but they had to adapt. I was told by a college professor that Vista will probably be at it's best in around 3-4 years. I think I will also keep my XP.

[gridley]

The journey into the unfamiliar is always stressful for some. I'll grant you that Vista is a resource hog and things are not in the same place and are often buried deep beneath the surface, but, once you familiarize yourself with Vista I don't see that much difference. That said, I can see no compelling reason to "upgrade" to Vista from XP. Training costs for employees is a big expense, so I would assume that is the real reason businesses are staying with XP.

[jrbales]

"According to data ...35 percent of Vista-equipped PCs have been downgraded to Windows XP." Taking that number into consideration, that means that 65 percent are still running VISTA. Still not too shabby! I happen to be one who has used VISTA since its retail launch and have been extremely happy since the beginning. Having hardware that was ready for VISTA went a long way to a positive experience.

[Number3124]

Vi$ta is definitely not on the agenda for. I guess if I had to get a new rig I'd have to use it for gaming but I'd also take up drinking herbal tees to help keep myself from going insane.

[Monty]

microsoft should spent there money on making XP a bit better and at a lower cost to them....xp2 is a great o.s. to much money was spent on vista and it is not worth it.....

[6stringbass]

I purchased and installed Vista Home Premium on a new build computer I put together, if for no other reason so I could learn it's ins and outs as I work on computers as a part time business. I figured I'd better get familiar with it as it's out there on computers and sooner or later I'm going to have to work on some of them.

Over all I have no problems with it. I like a lot of the things I see and some of the features it has. Driver availablility has matured and that has helped quit a bit I think.

The downside is that many older versions of hardware and software that worked fine in XP will not it Vista so that stinks. I for one can't afford to upgrade many of my software programs or hardware either so I'll probably not being upgrading the rest of my computers to Vista anytime soon which is another added cost.

Overall, XP in whichever version I'm using is still working fine for what I need so I intend to stay with it for as long as I can.

While I cannot whole heartedly recommend Vista Home Premium or above, neither will I bash it. For someone who will not be needing to move older office type programs, etc. to Vista and will be using it as is or adding new, compatible software and hardware it should work fine.

Oh yeah, one other negative, at least for me is it can be a real pain in the hindermost parts when it comes to setting up internet connections, whether wireless or not. I'm still trying to get a wireless and/or lan connection to our router at church on a laptop we bought recently.

gdb

[scottselke]

I have run Vista on a number of PC's, and it is my personal experience that it runs much more slowly than XP does, even when given more than adequate hardware. My current PC is home built gaming rig with an Intel E8400 (dual 3.0ghz processors with 6mb cache), 4gb of PC8500 RAM, a GeForce 9800 GX2 video card, and a 750gb Seagate SATA-II hard drive with 32mb of cache. I have Vista Ultimate 64-bit installed on one partition and Windows XP Professional 32-bit installed on another, with all my games available to both OS's. I can say without reservation that my games work much better under XP than they do under Vista, even given the obvious advantages of DirectX 10 in Vista. One game in particular, Company of Heroes, which was chosen to showcase DirectX10, still plays better under XP.

I will say that Vista's performance did benefit from SP1, but it still lags behind XP by a significant margin. I will also say that for me, Vista has been very stable. I might even go so far as to say that it is a little more stable than XP, but not by much.

I do not see large corporations making the jump to Vista any time soon. The learning curve is significant, the security model is so different from XP that EXTENSIVE testing will have to be done in corporate environments before Vista can be deployed with confidence, especially in places that run custom or home-grown applications. Getting all the techs up to speed will play a big role as well. The move from 2000 to XP was considerably more gentle than the move to Vista could ever be.

I'm very curious to see what Vista's successor looks like....

[Gordy]

I would go for Vista for the folks who acually use it love it, My Son said that he doesn't know why people are bitching about it as he likes it.

Gordy Turner

[Bartje]

no doubt, I'll remain with my dual boot XP - Ubuntu and once MS has given up supporting XP, I'll just dump Windows, because by that time I hope to be fully familiar with Linux - Ubuntu

[RoyC]

Security updates and other critical updates for Windows XP will continue until April, 2014.

[hsweet]

XP. I would choose XP as all of my current PCs use this OS. I would also reject VISTA for all of the reasons that you've already heard and because of change itself. I consider myself to be a very flexible guy and handle change well. Never-the-less, dealing with change is taking up too much of my time. As a matter of fact, it has become a focus. There are better things to do in life besides chasing after software changes.