No doubt Vista is a disaster, and it 'has' happened to Microsoft irreversably. I bought a vista PC that at first was snappy but within few weeks its has slowed down quite noticeably, infact, intolerably. 

Why doesn't MS offer XP at a discounted price for people who are stuck with Vista? instead of throwing money in trash with useless ads?

Those who talk like 
Vista runs fast can't be doing
video or audio multimedia work.
Example Machine #1 - 2.7 Gig P4 with HT - 2 Gig Mem. - XP Pro sp 3 - Pinnacle Studio 11 - 45 min. avi rendered to mpeg and burned to DVD -- Time 2hrs

Example Machine #2 3.27 Gig with with Dual Core - 4 Gig Mem. - Vista Ult. - Pinnacle Studio 11 - the same 45 min. avi rendered to mpeg and burned to DVD -- Time 21 hrs

Example Machine #2 3.27 Gig with with Dual Core - 4 Gig Mem. - reformated and XP Pro sp3. - Pinnacle Studio 11 - the same 45 min. avi rendered to mpeg and burned to DVD -- Time 55 min

In other words the new mach (#2) rendered and burned a abt 2X of the old machine (#1) with XP on Each and Rendered and Burned at abt. 0.1X with Vista

Maybe if you play games or use Word you might not ca tell the difference, but is you work vith video or audio
you very well can tell the difference

All I can say is bravo to the Apple marketing team. Through their ads and whatnot, they have completely destroyed Microsoft's reputation. It's not just Apple though, it's all the mac fanboys and senile 50 year old tech guys like some of the people posting comments here that are successfully changing the minds of those that don't keep up with the industry. Not to mention that Microsoft hasn't done anything to fight back until now, it's about time. Vista is a perfectly good operating system, but it was created with the future in mind. So sorry, but that piece of crap computer you bought 10 years ago isn't going to run the latest operating system. All I can hope is that these commercials, specifically the mojave experiment, get some attention and start waking people up to the reality of things.

There was a comment above that mentioned that Maximum PC did some bench marks with XP, Vista Pre-SP1, and finally with SP1. It is correct in the fact that SP1 has fixed a lot of issues then when Vista first launched, just like SP1 fixed a lot of things with XP after it first released. 

I do not run Vista at home as I support XP on 600 pc's at work and we're not moving to it any time soon. Reason? Cost. 

Cost of both hardware and software upgrades. Our general base right now are Dells running Pent 4's at 3 ghz with a gig a ram. 

Probably enough to run Vista decently but not at the same speeds that XP runs app's right now and in order to have Vista run applications at the same speed that XP does would require a lot of cash to upgrade/ replace machines.

The other issue's in a work environment is application comp. Microsoft own program Matrix has issues with IE7 depending on what your doing with it. The Vista machines we've tested with it have failed completely and that's MS's own program. There are others that do not work well with Vista and again it comes down to cash in order to upgrade and at 600 user license for each program it can add up hundred's of thousands of dollars easy. 

Migrating to Vista in a work environment for something that adds very little as far as work productivity goes simply isn't worth it for a majority of company's out there. 


If you're actually technically competent, you don't need an ad to tell you which computer to buy or OS to run. Duh. These ads are for people who don't know any better.

IMO, Vista does suffer from bloated development. They forgot to keep it simple. XP Explorer still can't be beaten. They added complexity in Vista when all they needed to do was pretty it up. For non-technical users, that's where they screwed up.

Their other problem is MS doesn't have good graphic designers. Their icons suck, and the UI while it has nice effects, the style sucks. Apple is still the king of style. iTunes, Safari, iLife, all may be inferior, but they have style and are pleasant to use. That's what normal people want. Style, cool, pleasant, and does what they expect. Doing it in record time is less important to normal people using PCs, than it is to the hardcore geek, who overclocks, and measures framerates of his favorite games everytime he tweaks his system for an iota of more performance.

Dear Steve,

Please give me my job back!
Your release of Vista wasn't very good.
In fact, you are giving our company a bad name by releasing Alpha software and on top a bad marketing strategy.
I will do it myself again, as I'm far better selling rubbish to the masses, and they don't even know it.
You remember the prank, windows 2000 with a new look, simply called XP and they all went for it.

I come back and do it all over again, as the average Windows user is a sucker anyway :-)

Best regards,

Bill.

There must be a reason why the largest computer chip company in the world is not moving to Vista.

After years of distrust I finally decided I better try Vista for myself, and I did, for a week. The only problem I had was with sound drivers, but everything else worked ok.

I've got core a core 2 duo e6550 with 4 gig of ram, a 250G sata drive and a radeon 3850.

Vista ran ok - but was less responsive than XP. I've noticed before that I can run utorrent under xp and experience 0% cpu usage on both cores - but in vista it's %30 usage on one core and 10-14% on the other. In XP I can game and download transparently; in Vista I can't. Also games that ran perfectly in XP were crap in Vista.

So in the end I went back to XP. Here's my logic: Stay with XP SP3, which works perfectly well and already does everything I want it to. With each system refresh I do, (about every 3 - 4 years) i get a faster and more responsive system. 

Or, upgrade to VISTA, and to windows 7 when it comes out. Buy new systems, pay more money, and put up with something that's slower than the old XP box. 

Is this a hard choice? No. I don't like running the red queen's race... (Alice in Wonderland reference..) and it seems neither do many others. Consumers aren't really stupid, especially tech-aware geeks, though MS apparently thinks they are. In fact they're probably some of the worst people to try to pull the wool over.

Oh and probably every1 knows this already or suspects it but MS employs a fulltime team of people (Like Gavin above) who do nothing more than go to websites and post fake comments about how great Vista is and how they had no problems at all. My apologies Gavin if you're real, but it's a known fact that MS is paying people to do this. (They call it "generating positive buzz", I call it f**ing lying propagandism)

I think the people trying to make Vista look perfect and XP look obsolete are missing a few points here...

1. XP was "close" to perfection in many peoples opinion and still alittle bloated. I and I bet many others expected Vista to be a more advanced XP requiring as much or LESS than XP does. 800MHZ and 512MB of ram for JUST the OS is insane. Vista should been designed to use LESS than what XP uses. 

In many business they like to have the OS on their computers to be universal across every building. They want ALL computers to have the SAME OS so trouble shooting is easier. Vista does NOT work on over half of the computers still used out there. Some computers used by major businesses are still P1s while others are Core 2 Duos. Where I work, most computers are 450mhz w/ 192mb ram with only 6-10GB HDs. They run XP pretty good and do EVERYTHING our employees need them for. We have over a 500 computers like that here still working fine. To go to Vista would REQUIRE us to replace ALL of these computers. Think about the cost of that and imagine all other businesses using older computers aswell. 

2. Drivers. XP can usually function using windows 2K/98/ME/NT4 drivers. Vista basically shits it's self trying to use XP drivers. There is no excuse for this. Since XP can use drivers from the past 3 windows releases, You'd THINK Microsoft would have the decency to make Vista AT LEAST support most XP drivers. Going back to where I work, Many of these older computers are using 2K or 98 drivers because XP drivers don't exist. I suspect many parts for computers even within Vistas requirements probably don't have drivers available for them.

If you only consider modern computers than yea; Vista is fine and dandy. Sadly as it stands many corporations and businesses use computers 10+ years old. If its not broken why fix/replace it?

When you are looking after various companies' computers and the managers are all buying new laptops for themselves and are actually busy trying to work you do NOT HAVE TIME TO FAFF AROUND ON ALL THE MACHINES TWEAKING THEM! Try to get a manager to leave his laptop alone for 5 mins is difficult enough.

Normally it's like this....

Manager: This new laptop I've bought (which has Shitsta on it) won't connect to/run application/copy files/runs too slow....

Tech support: Can you give us the laptop for an afternoon so's we can look into your issue and feck about turning off unneeded crapware.

Manager: Nope, I'm too busy - can't you do something quick to fix my problem.

Tech: Nope.


The result.

One unhappy manager who thinks tech support is crap.

One more techie who having used Ubuntu is now planning on how to get Ubuntu on to all the company's PCs.



Don't think it's not happening either. We've got one test PC running Ubuntu in to one company - and another larger one is ripe for switching cos the (switched on MD) knows that the root of all the problems is MS.

Single users like yourself are the core of the support for MS. That's because you're prepared to spend hours and hours of your own time unpaid to fix their crappy OS.

I mean, come on, let's be real here. I have been using Vista since the beta and, agreed, it is not perfect but certainly not the trash some like to portray.

When Xp came out it was the same. Whine and complaints all around, some justified most not. Now XP has attained sainthood it seems.

Not to mention that Apple OS is seemingly perfect to a lot of people. No matter how many bugs come out, cries for help get drown out by the choir chant.

Maximum PC mag did some benchmarks last month with Vista, Vista SP1 and XP. Since SP1 Vista network and file transfer issues have improved dramatically. Their conclusion was that Vista SP1 was basically as speedy as XP and that some issues were even the result of crappy drivers.

As for memory issues, my home notebook is a Sony Vaio with 2Gigs running Vista 32bit and it handles everything beautifully. I can even play AoC, albeit at a reduced resolution given the older graphics chipset (GeForce 7400). I simply do not understand how so many people here seem to have issues with 2Gigs.

As for the last guy getting business from people wanting to downgrade, it is not surprising. I have a co-worker that bought some new PCs for his kids and installed XP over Vista, without even checking it out. In his own words: "I won't even try out that piece of crap."

It seems to me, more people like to believe the FUD, just because MS is a big fat evil company rather than because they really had a bad experience using the OS.

This commercial is ridiculous. None of the dialog had anything to do with Vista, what it can do, or the user experience. What about Jerry showing up at a Lan Party that Bil G is at playing Crysis on an Alienware Laptop?? What about showing Jerry doing what I just did yesterday- Buying an Acer Laptop at Walmart for $398 that runs Vista with no prob??? Ten mill wasted on a comic who became famous for a show about nothing. $300 mill wasted with an advertising firm run by MBAs?? WTH???

Considering the sheer number of clients I have that have had me come in and install XP Pro on a machine that came preinstalled with Vista because some software would not work, I can't recommend it to anyone doing anything other than surfing the net.

Quite like folks that stick with IE vs Firefox and refuse to change to a proper antivirus program, replacing Vista had made me lots of money.

or maybe they could spend that money on actually improving their product so they wouldn't need to spend money on advertising.

...people who claim to be happy with Vista seem to be running small supercomputers.

I use a normal laptop (1GB/80GB/Intel945+T5500-1.66) and have found that Ubuntu (Linux) works twice as fast, boots 3 times quicker and shuts down 4 times quicker. The fan is hardly ever on, even with the 3D desktop effects (Vista's 3D effects won't even run according to the 'Windows Vista CAPABLE' sticker.) But this is compared to XP.

Why don't MS make an OS like that?
Because they want you to buy more hardware. 
Because then you'll buy more Windoze.

I think Canonical should advertise this. Maybe with Keira Knightley - lightweight and sexy.

Oh, and apparently Ubuntu is 'glacially slow' compared to other distributions of Linux (Linux Format).

There is no justifiable reason to spend twice the money for an "operating system" that runs twice as slow, takes more than twice the resources to run, and has additional limits on what you can do with it...
Consumers are right to reject it... After 7 yrs of hard work Microsoft were unable to improve on XP... Instead of dealing with this truth they are trying to bully vendors and buy their way out of the mess they created... (I hope they fail.)

Someone commented "...what can vista do that xp can't?...dx10 (big deal)..."

EXACTLY. 

Let's see: Unknown millions of dollars in development, more millions for the release, more millions for inevitable fixes, more millions for crap I haven't thought of...and now $300 million for a has-been comic...what does all this equal? MONEY that microshaft wants to get back from you just to break even and lots of MORE MONEY to make a profit.

What did you get in return? SHAFTED. That's right folks, you are plain suckers. It's the 21st century and the next person to say that vista is up to the standards of 21st century computing has their head so far up their butt that it's no wonder we can't hear their muffled cries for help. 

$180 for ultimate oem and $280 for ultimate retail as of today means that you could have bought a fairly decent piece of hardware upgrade and have actually noticed a COMPLETE increase in performance and efficiency. Instead, many idiots have been fooled into upgrading hardware for the sole purpose of spending money on another operating system with NEGLIGIBLE increases in anything other than its footprint. 

From day one, the software dictated the hardware and it's SUPPOSED to be that way. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the geniuses at microshaft decided that their OS should fall into the same category as other shoddy software for the purposes of ripping us off instead of developing a background PLATFORM which should have been the MOST efficient, the MOST powerful, and the MOST non-intrusive while effectively doing what it was meant to do: make all those components and apps play nice. They definitely didn't do that and it's going to be a long time before they ever do because why should they when they own the world?

I FEEL I NEED TO YELL THIS AND CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, WITH XP BUT ESPECIALLY VISTA. YOU MUST OPTIMIZE IT FOR WHAT YOU USE IT FOR. ONLY GOD KNOWS WHY MS DECIDED TO HAVE JUST ABOUT EVERY SINGLE SERVICE RUNNING AT FIRST BOOT. 

I DON'T USE A PRINTER ON MY MACHINE SO I DISABLE THE SERVICE. SAME WITH WINDOWS INDEXING AND SEARCH, I DISABLE IT BECAUSE IT'S AN INCESSANT AND NEVER ENDING GRUMBLE ON MY HD . THERE ARE ABOUT 25-30 USELESS SERVICES THAT RUN ON BOOT UP THAT SUCK UP A LOT OF MEMORY. UNFORTUNATELY YOU HAVE TO DO THIS MANUALLY AFTER EACH FRESH INSTALL BECAUSE WELL IT'S MS AND EVERYTHING THEY DO MAKES ALMOST NO SENSE.

OPTIMIZE VISTA'S SERVICES AND INSTALL SP1 THEN TRY IT AND CONSEQUENTLY START COMPLAINING IF IT'S STILL SLOW.

VISTA IS NOT THAT BAD, IF I REMEMBER CORRECTLY XP WAS A SIEVE THAT WAS ONLY USABLE AFTER MANY PATCHES AND TWO SERVICE PACKS. MEMORY LEAKS EVERYWHERE.

Search "Black Vipers Vista Service's Guide" For More Info On What Services To Disable.

Vista is all but unusable ... if it works, it works fine (except the user interface is needlessly busy). If there is a problem, something that happens all to often, then you've got a real problem because its really difficult to get into the thing.

The way I likened it to someone recently was that it was like one of those mobile phones that's got all those little applications in them, the ones you never use, except that Vista doesn't actually make any phone calls.

Its possible to turn a lot of this crap off but its not obvious to the average user. As for me, I've got plenty of other computers that work just fine, I don't need this BS.

Vista's problem is it has no WOW factor or brings something really new to the table. My niece has it on her laptop whilst my sister has XP on a slightly worse spec laptop. 2 guesses which runs faster!?!?!?!

I think is unforgivable for software companies to develop software that is bloated and unoptimized.

It might be true that Vista runs great with 4 GB of ram the latest video card and a multi core processor, but, does Vista allow you to do much more than our old XP in exchange for all that.

We should strive everyday to optimize things and achieve more with less resources. The fact that you can buy faster hardware shouldnt be a license for a developer to be sloppy regarding the resources employed by its software.

Personally i wont buy another Microsoft product till they change their software development policy, I consider grotesque that they force me to spend my money doubling hardware requirements just for some eye candy.

MS are annoyed about Chrome browser, because it's clever, thought out well and seems pretty cool.

MS are annoyed at Apple, because Apple are delivering nice to use products that look cool.

MS gave us Vista, a royal pain in the arse for small businesses and home users.

Vista Problems:

Vista Backup - won't allow you to choose the files, just "audio, video, etc" are the options.

Vista Email - doesn't do IMAP, it's only Outlook Express 6 with a newer front end.

Vista Network - Will not work with common home and small business networks without a lot of time and effort downloading patches and setting things up.

Vista eats resources, a few small businesses I know are finding their employees are using the "faster xp" machines when needing to do any work that pushes the pc's capability.

Vista is slow, fat and so obviously pushed out the door to meet a time frame.

Vista is so bad that DELL are charging £50/$100 per XP pc and companies I know are willing to pay it. That's how bad Vista is, DELL can overcharge for the old operating system, lol.

MS should let us have XP.

www.reactos.com - free XP clone that works with windows API's. Reactos - it's not linux, it's based on Windows APIs and it's free. XP for free = Reactos.

Yep, instead of improving the PERFORMANCE of the Broken OS, Micro-dicks would rather give money to a so-called "comic", who, IMHO, is as funny as dog droppings cooking on a sun-drenched sidewalk. A totally futile effort. Who do the vast majority of people turn to for computer advice? Not Steinfeld, that's for damn sure!

Try appealing to the technically competent out here, Ball-mer. Oh, wait, you can't!

It's not too surprising that MS is doing this, the surprising part is why have they waited this long? Those with long memories may recall that old Canon EOS Rebel camera commercial starring Andre Agassi "Image is Everything" and in the case of Apple certainly this is true. Apple is nine tenths "Image" and how their base perceives their own hipness in the wide world of computing.

Not to say there isn't also some substance behind the style...of course there is. And the same is true of MS. The new Seinfeld campaign is simply to gain style points and seems to be quite well done from the one I have seen so far. There is a little Vista logo that flashes on the screen for 7.3 milliseconds at the very end of the commercial...other than that, Vista was not mentioned. Very unobtrusive.

..and long overdue.

"OS as awkward, resource-heavy and infected with unfriendly DRM"

Your comment there, along with similar articles pushing the same agenda are partly the reason MS are doing these Ads. Perception of a product is shaped by others and the constant anti Vista FUD by you and your colleagues is bias beyond belief.

Vista runs perfectly well on a modern PC. Admittedly it doesn't heal the sick, help with world peace or allow dogs and cats to live together which possibly is where your seething dislike of the OS comes from. A year and a half after release, It does however provide a decent, modern OS experience. I run on Vista 64 on a Quad Core and Vista 32 on Dual Core Laptop, 4gb Ram with each and the experience is very smooth, stable and fast. XP feels old fashioned and clunky now in comparison, in my opinion. 




I totally agree with the article altho i do want to get something of my chest.

I've used Vista for months now (devel, design etc. usage) and I have no problems what so ever...

I'm happy to know lucky when it comes to that ;)

Maybe it's because i used to build my own pc and did try Vista on it, which sucked btw. Now i bought a notebook and it works wonderfull.... which a few lil tweaks offcource.

T7250/2GB/Mobility Radeon X1350 for the interested onces under us.

Vista is ill. It's like a big strong person with the cold or flu. The strange thing is that when first installed it's seems fast and responsive almost a joy to use. It's after some time that it incessantly and relentlessly bangs away at the hard drive and brings performance to a crawl. Good Heaven's what can it be possibly doing thrashing your hard drive to death? Yes I know about super fetch and most of the other tweaks but Vista is just sluggish and at the end of the day what can Vista really do for that XP cannot? DX10? (big deal)
5 billion in development and who knows how much in SP1 fixes now 300 million in advertising for this stuffed turkey.
I would like to use Vista but when M$ fixes it, until then it just doesn't do it for me.

It's articles like this that mean MS have to spend that 300 million. I read no end of sneering, jaded, back biting pieces about Vista from people who, in all likely hood, have only used the OS for a few mins or used one that has been pre-installed with OEM junk. I'm getting a little sick of the continuous tirade.

I've been using Vista since SP1, much like I did with XP and Win2k before it, I've not experienced a BSOD, start-up times are quick, it performs as I would expect and it's generally a pleasure to use.

On the reverse side of things nobody seems to mention the number of Kernel panics OSX has on known and controlled hardware configurations. Why is that? My time using OSX was fine. It's nice but nothing made go wow and it's certainly not worth my undying devotion, it's only an OS after all.

Neither is Jerry.

I have seen the first ad, where both are in a cheap shoe shop, and they don't seem to even mention Vista at all. The ad does nothing to indicate it is even about anything computer related apart from Jerry Seinfeld asking some crappy question about edible computers!!

The ad is shite, confusing and generally pointless.