Posted on 07/08/2008 3:41:51 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is now acknowledging it screwed up with its initial launch of Windows Vista, and is ready to try again.
"We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?" So Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, fessed up publicly this week.
Speaking at a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brooks signified that Microsoft was ready to admit mistakes and reposition itself to tell a better story about Windows Vista, to counter attacks by rival Apple and let customers know that Vista is finally stable and ready.
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
My Mac software seems to be pretty compatible with my whole life. The only one title I need that isn't on the Mac is made by Microsoft.
I am a long way from a heavy duty user, but my Vista machine has been an unreliable mess, despite tons to memory to run it. Not as bad as my older XP machines, but close.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
As much as I despise Microsoft, they do make (in my opinion) the richest and most easily programmable OS out there. Granted, that richness and ease is due to the market being driven by, and reciprocating with MS. It will be a long LONG time before the Mac/Linux/etc OS’s are viable enough for anything beyond geeks, niche graphics processing shops and low-end users.
Too little, too late there MS. Linux or Mac, there ARE alternatives and the market is taking notice.
I don’t CARE if they “...tell a better STORY.”
Just want reliable software that, you know, ACTUALLY WORKS!
Let them tell their stories to their kids at bedtime.
Are they going to start supporting XP again?
Vista is crap. I told my wife to spend the money on a Mac, she has nothing but trouble with Vista machine.
Oh, GREAT!!! When I clicked to read the whole story, I got this....
Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be list.
[snip]
coincidence?
ping
That’s why I use Camino and Firefox...
I’m posting this from my new Lenovo Vista machine and I haven’t died yet. I don’t see any major or really even minor problems with it. I just wish they’d quit changing the user interface each new operating system.
Vista’s biggest competitor is not Mac, it is Window’s XP.
Firefox gobbles up 2 gigs of RAM on my computer in minutes
Good for them. I have a question for you mac-heads that are sure to post in this thread. At what rate or percentage were or have kernel panics and other crashed been reported to Apple from OSX versions? I cannot find that info anywhere, yet we know apple has had to rush out patches and updates to fix some errors. It’s a serious question though and not a slam.MS released the numbers from Vista crashes for last year and it was a total of 1.666 million reports (or roughly I had to use the number of nVidia crashes, 494000, as being as 30% of all crashes)I just wish to compare the numbers. As it is 1.66 million, assuming each crash was a unique case, and that Vista had between 8% desktop share out of 850 million pc’s for 2007(its up to 15% or so now), that is roughly only 2.5% of all Vista PC’s.
You might enjoy that link. I refuse to use Firefox. It is built on the same network code that Microsoft is, only they have not (yet) been targetted enough to cause them to patch some of that code.
I’m not going back to Microsoft anytime soon. The nice thing about my Mac is that i’m not constantly battling with little annoying issues.
Exactly, and 3.0 didn’t even fix that issue. IE may be slower but it doesn’t eat memory like FF does. And since I do not peruses site of ill respute I don’t worry about getting mal-ware. I still find myself using Firefox in the end though for some reason.
So instead of actually fixing Vista, Microsoft is instead going to spend 100s of millions of dollars on a massive advertising campaign telling us that Vista is really wonderful, it’s just that we are too stupid see it!
Yeah, I’m sure that’s going to go over well.
I've been getting into Mac programming, and so far I've been impressed compared to the .NET with Visual Studio that I'm used to. It's especially impressive if you ever want to do cool stuff since the Core APIs seem to do it all for you.
I know that much of WinForms in .NET is just wrappers around the old antiquated Win32 MFC, and although it does quite a bit to buffer me, the old junk and bad ways of doing things still shine through in many places.
Are you sure you want to do that?
Gaming has been ok on the Vista box. I play eve-online, and it's done well with that, except for losing it's mind on the video drivers a few times.
/johnny
Out of curiousity, what exactly is the problem (or problems) with Vista? I bought a new PC last year, with Vista loaded, and I really don’t see any problems with it. I read a lot of user complaints, but I haven’t seen anything really awful with it.
I have a FIOS internet line, so the updates/patches etc., download quickly, and Vista runs pretty well.
The only problem I’ve encountered is the Media Player is a little slow to load .wmv files; it play mpegs fine, and other video and audio formats. And an old Lexmark printer that I had - I never did get the driver to run the printer, so I just bought a new HP printer, hooked it up, and it works beautifully now.
Other than that...???? What were/are some problems you encountered??? Is there something that I should look for?
Firefox has never gone above about 120 MB on my systems. It is using 105 MB as I write this with five tabs open. Often have 7 to 10 open. On my laptop it is generally using around 75. These are all running Linux kernels.
Define unreliable mess? I have three Vista machines now, one is built at the time of Vistas release, only one has more than 2 gigs of memory and only one has(or had a powerful GPU, its outdated now).
I am wondering if you are one of the few who still suffers from nVidias initial crap drivers that should never have been released from nVidia.
I think you both need to get Firefox 3. It’s done much better for the memory usage and stability.
As if apple os’s and updates don’t braek even the machines apple builds as it rights the code to run on those machines.
updating a mac is always a crap shoot and you have to do it lots more often. On the bright side, at least they dumped that lousy PPC crap.
What’s to fix? They released numerous updates, including sp1, most people out there(and including you it seems) are still thinking about its release and not that it has actually been fixed.
It would be interesting to know about the total reported OS X crashes.
An Apple Macintosh will do just about anything, from the low end user to critical data at the government level.
They're just hellaciously expensive. That's their only downside.
Well, lately, Outlook has refused to load. It just won’t come up. When I restart, it tells that it failed to start (or shut down) properly and that I should only start it in safe mode.
There have been a lot of little problems like that, but they are piling up.
Been there. Done that. Returned the t-shirt.
Right now with FF 3.0 opened to 5 sites and IE 7.0 opened to the same sites I am sitting at 125000k for FF 3.0 and 10000k for IE. Eventually the FF will shoot up to 450-500000k
Where did you hear that? Microsoft's network code is proprietary, having stripped the BSD networking code years ago. I can't see how it would end up in Firefox. Firefox is using the efficient memory allocation code from FreeBSD 7 though.
Recently bought an Acer laptop with Vista. Very uneventful, it just works, using dual core and 2GB Ram.
Soundblaster drivers for initial Vista were even worse than NVidia’s. For one, if it did not crash, you could get no better than stereo, no matter how many speakers you configured.
The only thing that sucks with Vista and laptops is that you have to turn of Aero glass when you are on the battery, but that is small sacrifice.
From a technical journal many years ago. It could be incorrect - enough junk gets published in them that I could believe that.
I heard about that. I am not a audiophile nor that hard core of a gamer so I don’t mind spending a few extra cpu cycles for onboard audio.
But laptops and rackmount servers are all I use, unless a client wants to furnish a dedicated machine.
I don't have room for towers, or want to pay the power bill for them, or support them.
Laptops meet all my needs, unless it's a screaming (linux) rackmount with multiple processors, fast HDs, and dedicated HVAC.
/johnny
Yeah.
BTW I should have said in that post on crashes that the info was incomplete. MS news report is just for the entire year, it doesnt state say ‘for the first 4 months xx% of reported errors occurred’, so it could be that Vista had a high percentage of crashes at first release but once drivers matured crashes dramatically decreased so the real world percentage could really be higher or lower than what I came up with.
My Zuma game sucks now on Vista. I also don’t have a fax on my home version. I do miss XP.
Oh, and the FreeCell game on Vista sucks big time.
I had just started where I am now and they had Novell Groupwise. As I finally got the hang of how it really worked, I really learned to love it. It was reliable, sturdy, and had a good junk mail filter.
It went away and along with migration to Active Disastery (Directory) came Outlook. Vista is slated to come in the next year and I am not looking forward to it.
If I can survive this year, I am looking at going into another line of work or go into business for myself, providing BHO doesn't destroy the economy first. Supporting Microjunk coupled with our heavily restrictive policies canmake even the simplest task a multi hour or all day ordeal.
First, she bought it because her desktop crashed and she needed to immediately print some legal documents. The Vista machine does not recognize the HP printer we have. There are no drivers that will make it work.
Her internet via wifi is slow. Her xp machine has no issues, my mac via wifi has no issues.
She likes to browse with firefox, it crashes or shuts down often. This does not happen with her XP nor my Mac.
Her itunes causes the computer to shut down or crash. Maybe it's the other way around, Vista and itunes don't play together well.
Her Ipod crashed when she plugged it into the laptop. She had to let the battery on the Ipod drain and then plug it in on her Vista machine to reload the music and videos.
And, I forgot, probably not vista related, but she had to get a new motherboard 2 weeks after she bought it. Toshiba paid for that one.
Long post. I am sure I am forgetting some of the other issues.
She rarely uses the laptop anymore.
Sounds like your wife just has a bad laptop overall. My Fujitsu rocks all of those and more and rarely if ever has the typical laptop issue of overheating.
Be thankful this door stop I use has m.e. I hate being poor.
I still have my disc for installing Windows 98 Special. I’ve seriously considered erasing VISTA Special Home and installing Windows 98 and ignore using the Toshiba for web work, printing, or editing. Would it work?
You are so very wrong about this... You should probably head to the closest Apple Store and get a look at Xcode. The FREE programming environment included with every Mac. As a long time programmer of all the OSes you mentioned, I can tell you that NOTHING comes close to the Apple platform - PERIOD...
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