News Gartner: Windows is collapsing

Am I the only one that doesn't find Windows full of devastating problems? It fricken works and if there's a problem here and there I can google and find a solution. Simple as that.

 

munim, you and I included.... Vista regular drivers carries a larger database, and even then the online search allows easy access. My computer is 3 years old and had no problem whatsoever when i did a full clean install of windows vista ultimate 32 bit.... With the advent of SP1, i again did a full clean install, and to my suprise, there seemed to be less junk files in the windows subdirectories (even though a cleaning was still required and some base extensions were optimized). I feel with windows vista's vastness of support (in terms of recent hardware), allows it to be a stable operating system just like windows xp (even more so in my case), although you have to be more software and technically savvy in order to get the most out of it.... somewhat akin to linux.... no?

 

There was this one Mac-addict that blamed Microsoft for trying to pressure hardware manufacturers into submission and leash them with standards. Conversely, he praised Apple for making OSX work without compatability issues!

On a sidenote, I thought 64-bit Vista already had a type of virtual machine kernel. The news hyped it a while back, saying that it prevents malicious programs and scripts from harming the kernel.

 

I love how these people who whine that vista isnt as fast as XP simply refuse to give it a chance, XP has had over 7 years to mature in to what it is today. It was the same with 2K and XP when it first came out.

 

Gunsmith, then im sure those people will switch if and when Vista matures. But that is not now.

 

the mac osx is only design to run to hardware that they want it to run on, if microsoft did the same and produced there only pc's like apple then there would be none of this bitching, but upgrading you pc would be pretty much impossible.

so do you want a static pc and OS that is not hardware upgradable, or do you want a windows pc that isnt going to bitch about it when you replace your motherboard and processer?

 

ill take the nix install thanks

 

+1

Horses for courses, but if every one bought a licence for every computer in there house i suspect windows would be much less dominant, or there would be far fewer old computers in circulation.

 

well hopefully reports like this will push a couple of larger firms to the penguin side of the OS front

 

nix is okay if all you want to do is office type stuff, internet and email, play and watch media. as a gaming platform it's pretty poor!

 

Why don't companies look at having diskless linux systems running from a central server? Common hardware, no hard drives, centralised storage and a clean install every reboot. It is (relatively) simple to set up and will reduce the manpower required to service all of your IT systems (instead of having a team of 20 servicing 1000 PCs, you have a team of 5 servicing, say, 20 servers).

Cost savings on the Windows licenses (no Client Access Licenses to worry about), Open Standards (don't mention OXML, it isn't even Open in the proper sense of the word) and little exposure to viruses. Why do companies stay with MS???

 

XP versus Vista benchmarks have proved time and time again XP is faster, especially with the release of the new service pack. Given benchmarks and current security of XP (post SP2), I see no reason for the Vista crew except eye candy / propriety applications. Ill take a lean (comparatively) system with as much open source as possible any day.

 

One of the most common arguments for vista is that it has some bugs, But XP has been out longer. I'm not sure you realize that they started developing the previously codenamed 'longhorn' back in 2002. Not long after XP was released. XP started birth with Whistler Beta in late 2000, and then was pushed to retail in just about a year. They started working on Longhorn in July of 2001. Thats 6 years of development and half of which was beta testing. When programmers are being paid up to 6 figures to get work done and the head of your company is the richest man in the world. Sorry if I expect little less than perfection.

When longhorn was announced they declared a revolution in the way you would experience your PC. What they delivered was last years model with a new paint job, some extra plastic on the sides and in car entertainment system, but with the same reliable but not so exciting power plant under the hood. Then they jacked up the price even higher then what the other model was at its release.

I'm not blaming it all on MS, though I don't know the whole story. I find it hard to believe that every hardware manufacture on the planet was really that lazy to develop drivers for the OS. I mean I would expect things like this from Creative. But nVidea, ATi, and a host of others. All of them being that slow to release drivers?

I think I have been fairly honest in my assessment of the situation so far. So let me take this time to speak for the positives of Vista. It does indeed boot amazingly quick, it shuts down really quick, it resumes speedy, it is relatively fast. No complaints there. But let me also mention this point. I have seen in the comments about it being slow because of all the hardware it has to support. Thats a load of crap. The built in drivers for the OS aren't constantly looking for something to install. Sure it takes up some extra space on the HDDs. But that has nothing to do with hoe much memory it uses. Thats where its downfall is. I also find is Super Fetch to slow down the computer more then it speeds it up. When I say the computer ran speedy, it was after I disabled the Super Fetch.

My computer would boot and for another 15-20 minutes just sit there cashing programs into memory. It was damned near unusable during that time. Once I disabled that in the registry, everything was golden.

So in the end the reason I don't like Vista can be summed up like so. Its like talking to my kid and telling him "I'm not angry at you, I'm just intensely disappointed" I don't hate the OS. It's just not worth anything for how much time and effort they said they were going to put into it.

 

I remember all the hoo-ha about XP when it came out, and most of the comments we are seeing are similar (takes up too much memory, too slow etc etc). However, they redesigned Vista so that problems like the Blaster worm are less likely to happen. That is why nVidia, AMD/Ti, Creative etc have had such a hard time designing the device drivers for Vista. IIRC, the new design separates the drivers from the kernel, whereas previously, the drivers could hook into the kernel directly and run in kernel space. This is not possible with Vista and the hardware manufacturers had to develop a new way of thinking.

That said, Vista doesn't do anything different to XP (IMO). It is an Operating System, and the only reason I got Vista was for the 64-bit support (I know, XP has 64-bit support, but I want my system to have up-to date support). Most of my programs are on XP still and I can't see that changing for the foreseeable future (unless I get a game that has a 64-bit client). Sure, Vista 'looks' nice, but it isn't really giving me anything different, in the way of a user experience, that XP is doing now. I get more satisfaction from my Fedora install than I do from my Vista install.

I think the reason why people are 'disaffected' by Vista is the hype that was generated before it was released. It was going to have a new filesystem, intelligent search etc etc (I can't remember exactly what it was going to have) but all this was cut because MS couldn't get it to work. All we really got was Aero (who actually keeps it running?), Superfetch and pre-fetch (?), semi-intelligent search and a couple of extra games (not to mention the update to Minesweeper ). Oh, and we got all this in 6 different versions too. Vista was overhyped, was not backwards compatible for businesses and created more problems in the hardware department (complete hardware refresh required before you can run Vista on a standard business desktop) than it solved. I'm running XP on a Dell Optiplex GX280 (512MB RAM, 2.8GHz P4, 40GB HDD) and I've got Word, Excel, Outlook and an XSession open at the moment. Could this PC run Vista? No. Is the IT department going to shell out to replace 800+ perfectly workable Pcs and laptops just to run Vista? No. That is why Vista is failing in business space.

Andy

 

Blah, blah, blah, XP is faster then Vista, blah blah, 98 was faster then XP at first as well, blah blah blah.

I love my Vista Ultimate x64 install and cannot imagine going backwards to XP again. Just like I thought about all the silly people who were praising Win98SE over XP, I still think those same people are just as silly now saying the same thing with XP over Vista. I wonder if any of those people are the exact same ones and see the irony of the complaint now?

 

I refuse to buy vista or probably any windows os going forward. Don't get me wrong, I love my xp pro. After years of hacking, I've brought xp to it's knees. I pwn xp. But going forward MS wants to tighten control over the OS with a big focus on bowing to the content industry. That said, if MS offered say, a desktop environment on top of Linux like gnome or kde, I would drop a hundred bucks on it without thought. I want control of my computer. But if the content companies demand control over the content, I don't mind giving them a sandbox running on top of my OS. I just don't like giving control of my whole system.

 

Well, I will just say a few words. "worldcom" and "bear stearns" microsoft is not going anywhere. they may end up back tracking to one os and keeping it alive much longer than they like but MS is not going anywhere. anyone who thinks about how deep this rabbit hole goes will know that. the industry just is not ready for opensource (Linux etc) a few may disagree with the linux statement, but it has been proven several times recently. and the MS fangs go deep.

 

I don't disagree with the intent of the statement, but with the analogy. The world isn't going to wake up one day and say "You know what, I'm ready for open source!". Rather it will continue to be a growing segment until one day the open source movement becomes a mainstream market in and of itself.

Each iteration of both Windows and linux is moving us closer to that day.

 

I agree only to a point. the only thing separating them is just a "click". but it is a big "click" and when I say click. we have become a point and click world. and Linux just is not there. consumers as a whole are dumb, I do not mean to offend anyone by this but it is the truth. everyone here has seen it. example I was in walmart and a woman was returning her tomtom because it did not work. point in fact it was her cigarette lighter in her car that did not work. she complained to the girl behind the counter that it was broken and that it only worked for about 1 hour before it broke. the girl asked her if she had it plugged in to the cigarette lighter and the woman said OF COURSE I DID DO YOU THINK I AM STUPID OR SOMETHING. the girl asked her if the light on the cig adaptor lit up when it was plugged in. the woman said she did not know. and I just made the comment that she might want t check the fuse for the cigarette lighter and the woman said to me rather snotty like that the wire to it burnt up a while back because her son had put a penny in it, and she could not get it out. I tried to explain that if the wire was burnt up the tomtom would not get power. (at this point it occuerd to me I should have never said anything). the woman said well it was broken because it did not say anything about needing power. now people this is not a once in a lifetime story, it is the norm everywhere you go. now people here @ bit-tech for the most part have taken the next step up the evolutionary ladder and I do say for the most part but there are some here who do similar things. until this is not the mainstay you are talking a big "click" that separates the two operating systems. the fact is all you need to know to install something in windows is select install or setup, in most cases it will start for you all by itself. Linux just does not have that, it is one of the things that make it more secure than windows. and I will not even go into the linux based pc's that walmart sold recently for $250.00 and had a 70% return rate because people just did not realize what they were getting themselves into.

 

Let me ask, how long ago have you used Linux?

Install in Windows: insert CD, press next 50 times and then ok
Install in Linux: Open package manager, select the package, press apply.