News Acer takes a swing at Vista

So why aren't they using Windows 95 on a good old 300Mhz CPU? I mean IE and Netscape runs fine on it?!

That's why you have Vista Basic, runs fine on a crappy SiS S3 video card with 512MB of RAM... about the same speed as XP. (Home premium requires more power, even if you disable Aero, as (correct me if I'm wrong), I think that Home Basic uses a similar engine then XP for the interface.

 

should be: ...among the top five PC manufacturers.

 

Sure, but then why buy Vista basic if it's basically XP? Really, what is the point?

 

Somebody's going to be fired for that one.

 

6 years of repairing Acer laptops and I have to wonder whether they've ever heard out their customers from the number of equipment developing faults within half a year and their warranty service not doing the job. I'm surprised Acer is complaining when it would seem they are the ones who can't manage Vista. Their competitors all manage fine. All you need to look at is Acer's hardware choices, follow it up with driver support on Vista and that should answer their own question regarding stability. Acer tends to throw a ton of features onto their laptops, make it look like a bargain but have they looked at the build quality or hardware quality/support of their systems? As far as I am concerned, Vista is probably the most stable Windows OS I've come across.


You can easily build a cheap PC that can run Vista including Aero with ease. If £198 inc. VAT (excluding monitor, mouse and keyboard) isn't cheap enough without cutting too many corners, I don't know what else is considered cheap:

--- Asus barebone system | Core 2 Duo E2140 | Geil 1GB RAM | Maxtor 250GB hard drive | NEC 18x DVD+/-RW ---

There's your Vista experience, you can do pretty much anything but gaming on the integrated Intel graphics card. Add a few quid more and you could change some of those components, such as RAM, to some better branded ones. Of course, you still need to add £64 for an OEM of Vista Home Premium. Add a monitor, keyboard and mouse and I'd say it'll be about £370 (19" LCD). For DX10 experience, add £50 for a 8500GT.

Go outside and try to get a similar spec system and you'll need to look pretty hard for specs that don't come close at that price. And going back to Acer, simply look at their T180 series

 

FRY: What if I don't want to be a delivery boy?
LEELA: Then you'll be fired...
FRY: Fine!
LEELA: ... Out of a cannon, into the sun.

I've been waiting to use that quote

 

There was nothing wrong with XP, I don't see why they just didn't spend thier time trying to improve XP. There's too much extra bullcrap in Vista. And that thing where it asks you if your sure you want to do something is really starting to piss me off.

 

I got vista and its fine for everything I have tried so far. Lost planet, tomb raider, WoW and even Warhammer Online beta runs great on vista. Also all my other applications work fine on vista.

I had an acer laptop in the shop today to fix a problem on. only a few years old, windows XP pro and it was installed as an FAT32 file system. i mean wtf? its been years since NTFS was in use. why would they use FAT32. It just shows Acer have no idea.

As usual acer are trying to blame their lower than expected sales on vista.

 

I know how you feel, 4GB bragging rights Cheesecake!

As for Vista being the cause of poor sales, possibly people aren't ready for the change, the problem here (in my view) is that XP was around for too long and thus people have now got this "if it aint broke don't fix it" mentality, even though XP is 'broke', the games work for it.

Now, my other theory is regarding 64-bit, once game developers design for this, the rest of the software will follow

 

recently made the switch to vista, had problems with aero crashing for a little, but upgrading the bios fixed that. overall i'm quite impressed, has been very stable and i haven't regretted it (initially had problems with bf2, but running in xp sp2 compatability mode sorted it right out)

from some of the stories i've been hearing from you guys, acer certainly has no right to complain about low sales, they don't seem to deserve any at all

 

i mosty get acer laptops as thay still ship them with XP on some models

whats broke with XP {SP2 only} to TBO probly there best OS thay made between performace stable XP works fine even before service back one adn 2 came out it served me well

with vista thay did not just add DX10 thay broke program compatbity uses large amount of ram, Brakes networks, networking code is net un-stable in vista, mmmm games do not work well on it but thats more driver related , the New driver model {WDDM?}, it has not more tracking built in to ssend of to M$

Vista requires far more high spec pc and add admin problems in the mix (just wasted an day trying to get 2 Vista computers working with an bunch of XP computers and an printer) and you wunder why most business do not want to use it yet
i even tould them do not buy vista as the stuff you use will most likey not work {dell says other wise saying none of your software will work soon on XP not lieky}

malware on vista = an most likey Format and reload (unless your me and is very good at removeing it)

 

Vista Basic has its place at the low-end of the pre-built PC/notebook market. If people are spending so little on a PC, they evidently don't care about all the bells and whistles so Vista Basic is pretty suitable for that. That said, spend a bit more and you can easily get a PC capable of running Home Premium - £350 gets you a Dell C521 with an Athlon64X2 4000+, 1GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, Vista Home Premium and a 20" widescreen display. Absolute bargain, and I know it runs Vista quite smoothly because my Mum recently got herself one.

Because that wouldn't earn MS any money - who is really going to pay money for a slightly-upgraded version of XP? I sure as hell wouldn't, and yet I bought Vista. Granted, some will say Vista is just XP with a new skin and some annoying features, but I'm quite liking it.

Your scenario would also put us very close to the way Apple works with OSX, and I'm personally against that. I'm quite happy to pay money for an 'entirely' new OS, but not a slightly upgraded one that continues to look the same.

 

I don't know why everyone is surprised by vista being a resource hog, it was billed as one from the get go! It isn't a new OS for Old Hardware, it is anew OS for New hardware, it is designed to work on a dual or quad core with 2gb of Ram, it can work with less, but it likes a little more.

To get the most of Vista you have to have a good PC. Now, doesn't that sound familiar to win98 machines being upgraded to XP?

Compatibility between XP and win98/ME/2000 wasn't all that great from memory either was it?

 

hence the reason I don't use it...

 

if you don't like it, disable it. It's a check box away!
p.s: not recommended for security purposes, but if you can't live with it, go ahead and disable it.

 

Agreed. I'm not so sure what all the fuss is about. Vista was not a bad release, imho. Tim and I both use it for our gaming systems, and neither of us have had any problem with it that's not driver related. We even run our test benches on it and hell, I recently converted my HTPC to it.

As Mother-Gooser points out, it's not SUPPOSED to be for the old systems. Though there is a version that they released which works just fine on them...which, frankly, I think people need to pay a little more attention to. When's the last time a commercial company released different program levels (each requiring a lot of code differences) for older vs. newer hardware? Not since...well, ever that I can recall. The only group to do that so far is open-source with Linux, and I do think MS should be given some credit for following that example.

The truth is that a lot of the bloat of vista is bells and whistles. Who cares? That's what I want if I'm getting something new. Do you go to a car dealer to trade in your 2006 stripped down, no AC, no power anything hatchback to buy a 2007 stripped down, no AC hatchback? No. If you're buying something like that, it's because you don't care about those things and therefore having the latest and greatest stripped down hatchback isn't exactly going to make or break you. Your 2006 model will do just fine.

We have quad cores, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage at our disposal nowadays. Heaven forbid someone comes along and designs something that actually USES any of it. Oh no! Now it's a resource hog! Hey, not on my machine it's not, best I can see is it uses about 20-25% of resources at max. Figure that in 3 years time the code will get even more efficient and processor speed will have increased another fold and we'll all have 4-8GB of RAM on terabyte HDDs because it's the new high-end, and what...they should have cut it back so it looked like utter crap?

If you're that fussed about its resources, then by all means, switch to Linux. I personally don't get as much of a thrill from looking at a stripped down interface and legacy design methods just so my RAM sits at 10% used instead of 20%.

Sorry for the rant, but yeesh.

 

Not at the current rate, seeing as M$ released both the 32bit and 64bit editions, however, driver support for the 32bit edition is pretty bad, but the 64bit edition drivers are practically non-existent (not including the other stuff they put in 64bit to annoy people)

Just like XP64bit - Vista 64bit will go by the wayside

The next release of windows - i would seriously expect will be 64bit only
But IMO - M$ should have made vista 64bit only, for the 10 (maybe 20) % of people that wouldn't immediately be able to upgrade, they only have to support 1 OS, there is only 1 set of drivers, its much more future proofed, etc etc
XP really should have been the last 32bit OS - you can already see they were struggling to get 64bit adoption up, and now we are going to be stuck with 32bit for another 5 years,

As for the bells and whistles, if you turn them off - you have XP, but if you leave them on, it may look a bit cooler, but it doesn't really help you do anything, their just bragging rights tbh
Heck you have been able to do it on Linux for years, but people don't, 1 of the big reasons, theres really no need to

the problem with vista, going back to the car analogy, is that your car has AC, it has fancy nobs an buttons, vista has Climate control and the nobs and buttons blink and twinkle
But for these "upgrades" you pay what you paid for your car, plus 50%, and your old car is worthless now

And as with cars, some people will upgrade, and they will waste their money, but a lot of people will stay back, and stick with their old car until they have to change

And don't get me started on MCE, they forced us to buy 2004, then 2005, now they want us to change to vista (and an expensive version at that) - and all this because the previous versions are seriously flawed, but M$ will only keep its latest greatest version up to date, and just say f*** off to the people using the older versions

 

From an industry perspective, I disagree with most of your assumptions on Vista. 64 bit is getting way more of MS's future support, because every processor now supports it (including the mobiles). It will take some time, but it's the 32 that will disappear.

As for the car analogy, I think you're WAY oversimplifying it. There's a HUGE amount different between XP and Vista, and that mentality is exactly why we have the problems we do today. "It's just a shinier XP" - not at all. That's the status many hardware companies took when MS said "Please look over the new driver model - a lot has changed!"

The entire way that the OS interacts with your computer has been changed. It's like saying a BMW 7-series is the same as a Ford Fiesta with leather seats and wood trim. About the only thing the same is that they both serve similar purposes and you use the same controls.

 

Sorry, I just have a pet peeve about people saying "M$" instead of "MS" or "Microsoft."

 

Your right, more people probably buy Fiesta's, and they save kittens and are greener to the environment.

I tried Vista Ultimate for a week, I really couldnt decide what I thought of it, it sat somewhere in the middle of- whats the point in this? and- this is rather annoying

Back on XP Pro now though

Ive just had a thought actually, can you make Vista look and behave like XP and still have the benefits ie. 4GB ram? As you can make XP look like vista?