Yet another reason to NOT run Vista

Those of you that have followed my posts know that one of the chief reasons for my switching over to Mac is how much I abhor the direction that Microsoft has taken with Vista.

Now there's another reason to not upgrade to Vista - "upgrade" versions will only install over top of an existing Windows installation. That's right - no clean installs if you purchase an "upgrade" version of Windows Vista.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070128-8717.html

In years past, if you had a so-called "upgrade" version of Windows XP, you could still easily do a clean install just by inserting your 98/Me CD and having setup verify that it was a valid copy. Now with Vista there must be an existing install on the disk.

This is also very bad news indeed for those of us who might have wanted to run Vista in Parallels or via Bootcamp. We'll now be forced into a minimum $240 purchase for the retail full version of Home Basic Edition. If you want any of the premium features or the business-savvy version (read: able to work in a corporate, AD-based environment), you'll need to spend more like $400.

Yes, you read that right - $400 just for the operating system, bugs and all.

So, what does $240 buy you that XP doesn't already provide? Let's see:

1. A gussied up user interface reminiscent of what OS X has been providing for years.

2. Inherent DRM protections to ensure that you comply with whatever the RIAA and MPAA want to shove down your throats at any given time.

3. DirectX 10 which Microsoft refuses to release for older versions of Windows, including XP which isn't even close to the end of it's scheduled support end-of-life.

That's about it - unless you count some of the 'new' features like Desktop search which Google has been doing on XP for ages now, free of charge.

For awhile now, I've been thinking that I might upgrade my Windows boxes to Vista after the release of SP1, despite my objections. Well, that about cinches it for me. I have 2 Wintel machines and have no intention of lining Microsoft's pockets with $500 for this miserable excuse for an operating system.

I'm all Mac from here on out....

great stuff as always. i knew there was a reason i switched when i did. you just keep making that more and more clear!

eric said:

great stuff as always. i knew there was a reason i switched when i did. you just keep making that more and more clear!

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I think what irritates me more than anything is that with some of its newest business practices - by that I mean DRM, outrageous pricing schemes, product activation, etc - Microsoft is arrogantly proving that they can do anything they want to and get away with it.

Eventually Vista will become as common as dirt and 'the operating system controlling the user' will become second nature and generally accepted.

If the masses understood technology the way that enthusiasts do, Vista would be an absolute outrage. Instead, it will just go down as another successful page in Microsoft's playbook.

I don't mean to be an anti-Microsoft, ranting lunatic, but the fact that the industry, the press, bloggers and other pundits aren't all over this and exerting their influence accordingly is just beyond me. Very disappointing to say the least.

That makes at least 3 of us. Think this is the first OS MS has put out that I will not be looking to get the first week it's out if at all. I am still up in the air about what to do when it comes time to build a new desktop later this year.

So my ritual of doing a clean install (with XP it's down to about once a year instead of every 3 months like it was with 95 to assure a trouble free machine), with Vista upgrade will require re-installing XP, then installing Vista on top of it? What a crock. I'll bet that's not all, bet the Vista upgrade will not install until XP has been activated also. This would be the only way MS can verify your copy of XP is legitimate and not just the copy of a disk.

Some of the PC Mag editors are seeing red. Have read a couple of articles in magazines that a 1 1/2 - 2 years ago were nothing but on the MS bandwagon and now the editors are writing articles about the reasons why not to upgrade. This is a first in the windows era. One has gone so far as to state in his editorial he will not be moving to Vista.

These main stream PC mags (read windows mags whose primary focus has been hardware for the enthusiast) in just the last 6 months have started writing about Linux fairly regularly. Even OS X and Apple hardware are beginning to make the pages. One PC mag I read has rated the MacBook as the #1 laptop in it's price range. Definitely a first there. I think there will be more MAC hardware within their pages in the days to come.

A lot of us PC enthusiasts have been and more are beginning to look at the alternatives. The overclockers, tweakers and gamers are the ones who drive the high end of the hardware market. As more enthusiasts try a different OS route, this will drive the industry in new directions. MS will have a base of the masses who have Vista because that's what came on their PC. But, I don't think any tech company desiring to be on the top of the heap, including MS, can overlook the strength of the high end users for long.

With MS's new pricing structure, this will also increase the price of the PC. If Apple can continue it's current, very competitive pricing, this will indeed put them in a good place in the market. And with the success of the iPod, this should bring in even more of the younger buyers looking at the Mac.

Hmmmm...I forgot to EVER try M$'s OS (so, never had to 'switch')...meh. guess I didn't miss much, huh?

I just made a post about this on my blog.

I'm not a Microsoft basher, really, I'm not. I think they've done a lot of things well given what they have to work with. Think about it, Apple only has to develop the drivers and OS for their own hardware. Microsoft has to cater to gazillions of potential configurations. To that point, Microsoft has made operating systems that are relatively stable in recent years.

What burns me about Vista is that they have spent the past 5 years working on this OS and only managed to achieve the things that no one cared about (or didn't want, in the case of DRM).

Let me be honest and say that I honestly don't care about the time it took. I'd rather they take 10 years to refine and stabilize a product if their existing product is still workable (which XP is fine for the most part, post-SP2). But if you're going to release a new operating system, you'd better actually improve it in some major, functional way. Don't add eye candy and then proclaim "state of the art!" - especially when it's been done already.

The NT architecture has some serious flaws. NTFS fragments (no other modern filesystem does this in a significant way). The registry becomes corrupt and causes instability (a bad design made with little forethought). It is too easily infested with malware. It takes ages to boot. It's way too inefficient in terms of memory usage.

All of these things are major problems that need to be addressed. Do you think Microsoft could have addressed even one of them? Well, OK, they tried to make it harder to install malware by creating limited accounts - but their implementation is weak since all it does is add yet another prompt when it's time to run setup, but I digress...

Then they have the nerve to charge more than anyone else has ever dared to.

What really got my goat was the interview with Bill Gates on the Today Show this morning. He was asked what his response was to those that claim that Microsoft has simply copied Apple. He said something to the effect of... oh, we're not copying, we're way ahead of them. ARGHH!! Has he not touched a Mac at all since OS X?

OK, down off my soapbox now.

I'm looking forward to Vista, however I don't think I'll pick it up any time soon. A friend of mine Beta tested it and really enjoyed it, I respected his opinion as he Beta test a lot of different OS's and platforms. I had the pleasure of Beta testing Office 2007 and thought it was a pretty good product.

I can give you one word why not to run vista. MICROSOFT.

Saw this posted on Digg today. Apparently you can indeed use an upgrade edition to do a clean install, after all. Not that I'll be doing it anytime soon, and I'm sure it's not an "officially" supported method, but at least it's possible.

cwa107 said:

Saw this posted on Digg today. Apparently you can indeed use an upgrade edition to do a clean install, after all. Not that I'll be doing it anytime soon, and I'm sure it's not an "officially" supported method, but at least it's possible.

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LOL - another hole

kodorsean said:

I can give you one word why not to run vista. MICROSOFT.

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you can thank MS for...

something other than gem desktop as thats about all was available at the time windows come out.

a decent word processor/spreadsheet when all that was decent was wordperfect for windows (didnt even use TTF fonts insisted in using their own) and lotus 1-2-3 for windows which sucked.. even the DOS version was better

even if you hate IE you have to be glad they bought out something half decent to stop the likes of netscape charging for their bloated pile of crap.. free surfing was the way to go and IE has pushed others to develop theirs

buying autoroute as the company doing before were smallfry and it wouldnt be what it is today without them

just think you could have been using os/2 instead of windows and i wouldnt wish that pile of crap on anyone

end of the day microsoft o/s is about making money and thats what it does... and normal end users are happy with just a look and feel upgrade rather that what techys want/need.

ive used vista in beta and also got full enterprise version.. i cant see what improvements it gives me over XP except the headache of apps not working.. so after a few weeks of playing about with it ive gone back to xp on my pc desktop. and all the other litte security bits are just like mac os anyway lmao

andy_st200 said:

you can thank MS for...

something other than gem desktop as thats about all was available at the time windows come out.

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You mean aside from the Amiga OS (1985), GEOS (C64 1985), and Mac (1984)? Just to name a few....

even if you hate IE you have to be glad they bought out something half decent to stop the likes of netscape charging for their bloated pile of crap.. free surfing was the way to go and IE has pushed others to develop theirs

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I don't remember Netscape charging for their browser, in fact, aside from Opera I can't recall anyone charging for a browser on Windows or Mac.

just think you could have been using os/2 instead of windows and i wouldnt wish that pile of crap on anyone

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OS/2 as in.... the foundation of Windows NT (codeveloped with Microsoft) and the predecessor of 2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista. Not to mention the various other platforms that were technologically superior to PCs.

end of the day microsoft o/s is about making money and thats what it does... and normal end users are happy with just a look and feel upgrade rather that what techys want/need.

ive used vista in beta and also got full enterprise version.. i cant see what improvements it gives me over XP except the headache of apps not working.. so after a few weeks of playing about with it ive gone back to xp on my pc desktop. and all the other litte security bits are just like mac os anyway lmao

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I sense some revisionism here. I don't proclaim to be an expert in computer history, but I did cut my teeth on computers throughout the mid-80's and there were a number of alternatives to the products you mentioned. Most of them were superior in terms of hardware, functionality and efficiency. Microsoft won because of their marketing savvy, underhanded business tactics and a lot of sheer luck, which is how they maintain their monopoly even today.

As someone that has been a hardware enthusiast (primarily due to being a hardcore gamer most of my life, and was for many years prior to such a thing as a computer you could have in your house) for particularly the last 12 years or so as it relates to computers, I must say that I am not really a MS hater.

Not only was XP the only OS that allowed me to go out and pick the hardware I wanted and have it work prior to that hardware becoming functional with any other OS (and I tried, and yes I know that is mainly due to the monopoly MS has had on the OS market and plenty of the hardware manufacturers only writing drivers for MS), but XP really has been a good OS for me. And then, I know how to give XP an oil change and tune-up.

When MS starts catering to someone other than the end user (read 'me') of it's product, that is the point at which it's usefullness and my desire for that product is on the decline. Dunno, just feel when I pay for a product, I should be able to use that product in whatever way I see fit, whether or not that meets with the designers/creators expectation and intent.

cwa107 said:

(just a bunch of brilliance as usual)

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i don't remember ever paying for netscape/composer either. unless he means much later on after aol bought them and mutated it into a price competitive (ISP) arm of aol to fight netzero.

I've heard hardly anything good about Vista over the last couple of days. There was a 'Have Your Say' section on the BBC site where a few hundred people pretty much laid into it.

I'm wondering if MS will actually struggle to get 15% of PCs running Vista over the next 12 months.

I might have considered it if was a heck of a lot cheaper and XP apps didn't lose about 10% of their performance running on it. But it's way way way overpriced.

It's funny how MS have spent 5 years trying to match Jaguar/Tiger and now Leopard is due to come out a few months after Vista.
I'm suspect Leopard will be more of a change between OS's than we've seen for a while.

The last OS I used was 8.6 ... fast track to 10.4.4 & now 10.4.8.

I totally missed out on Jaguar and Panther and whatever was in between. I just love Tiger and probably won't upgrade to Leopard for ages.....or will I just do it?

this is really funny...

found this article linked from c|net:

"Vista's actual launch? Think whisper, not bang"

in that article was a poll, which i voted on, and these were the results so far!



nice.

bobtomay said:

As someone that has been a hardware enthusiast (primarily due to being a hardcore gamer most of my life, and was for many years prior to such a thing as a computer you could have in your house) for particularly the last 12 years or so as it relates to computers, I must say that I am not really a MS hater.

Not only was XP the only OS that allowed me to go out and pick the hardware I wanted and have it work prior to that hardware becoming functional with any other OS (and I tried, and yes I know that is mainly due to the monopoly MS has had on the OS market and plenty of the hardware manufacturers only writing drivers for MS), but XP really has been a good OS for me. And then, I know how to give XP an oil change and tune-up.

When MS starts catering to someone other than the end user (read 'me') of it's product, that is the point at which it's usefullness and my desire for that product is on the decline. Dunno, just feel when I pay for a product, I should be able to use that product in whatever way I see fit, whether or not that meets with the designers/creators expectation and intent.

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That about sums up my sentiments exactly. I know it may not sound like it, but I'm not an MS hater. Sure, they've done some things that irritate me from time to time, but in general there products suit my needs just fine.

It's Vista that I have problems with for exactly those reasons pointed out above.

Regarding Microsoft's success.I think it's kind of interesting the way people view Microsoft as a company that bsuts down people's doors and forces them to use their product. We live in a free-market economy and people are free to buy what they like. Granted Windows is everywhere and has cause people to buy more recently due to the fact that's it's everywhere else. But back in the day people had choices and nobody was on top. For some reason, they chose to buy Windows and the rest is history.

For those who think Microsoft is a monopolizing, underhanded company who offers inferior products, I don't want to ever see any of you shopping at Wal-Mart!! Andi f any of you out there invest in a large-cap mutual fund, chances are you have given money to and own part of Microsoft (Bill Gates thanks you).

As for me, I live in the real world, make my choices (which is why I have a MBP), and realize everyone has the power to make their own choices.