They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know

The New York Times ^ | March 9, 2008 | Randall Stross

[Obi-Wandreas]

"They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.

By RANDALL STROSS ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”?

Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95.

An alternative theory, however, is that Vista’s reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista.

Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?"

[js1138]

It’s good to be able to fall back on a company that respects open architecture, like Apple. One that doesn’t spend all its resources on DRM.

[indcons]

“(That I could not understand what was alleged to be the English language)”

That difficult-to-understand sentence fragment speaks volumes.

[DesScorp]

Vista: it sucks so bad, even Microsoft execs hate it

[DesScorp]

"Gates is a High School drop out who bought MS DOS from a brilliant programmer in his garage who was too stupid to know what he had for a couple of grand."

Gates was not a high school dropout... he was a Harvard dropout. Pretty big difference there.

[Myrddin]

There's some more inside info missing in your fairly comprehensive tale. Concurrent with what Gates was doing as he was launching Microsoft, the Heathkit company had created the H-8 computer. I still have 2 of these. They hired J. Gordon Letwin to create an operating system call HDOS. Letwin's work included the concept of "mounting" devices and dynamically loadable device drivers. I purchased a copy of the full source to HDOS and wrote many device drivers myself in the 1980-1982 time frame. Bill Gates hired J. Gordon Letwin away from the Heath company and made him the chief architect of the operating system. It is my belief that Letwin's influence was the reason that MS-DOS was delivered with loadable device drivers vs CP/M where drivers had to be incorporated into the BIOS gen. I wrote quite a few CP/M drivers too. Microsoft had also licensed UNIX System 7 from which they created Xenix on the TRS80 Model 16 (68000). I have one of those too :-). UNIX/Xenix included a tree structured file system missing in CP/M. Again, I believe Letwin made the decision to augment the lettered disk system of CP/M with the tree structured filesystem of UNIX. Too bad that he reversed the direction of the "slash" character using for delimiting paths and changed the end of line to instead of the UNIX standard . The tree structured filesystem and loadable device drivers made MS-DOS a superior successor to CP/M.

[Entrepreneur]

I remember the Heathkit computers and came close to buying one. If I had more money then, I would have.

I played around with CP/M machines from the applications side. In college, I wrote a fairly crude CAD system that ran on CP/M. I also created a graphic simulator for a CNC lathe on an Apple II. Punch in the workpiece dimensions and the CNC program and it would show the result. That was a cool program at the time and earned me an A in that class.

I never purchased a CP/M machine, though I did have an Apple II, HP 85A (cassette storage, 16K RAM), one of the first Compaq luggables, and one of the first laptops (Zenith 181? with the blue screen). I didn’t keep any of them. Wish I did.

Anyway, I didn’t know that about Letwin. That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the info.

[gpapa]

switch to Linux, if XP ever stops being supported

I have a feeling they will be supporting XP for some time; 2014???. Too many businesses have migrated to either W2000 or XP, or some combination thereof, and are reluctant to switch OS. I ran an AMD w/ W98 at home for 8 years before switching to an Intel Core2 w/XP Pro & nVidiaGF. Your idea of switching to Linux is a good option when XP support expires.

I have been working with various computer systems since 1962 in eng. college on an IBM1620.

[dragnet2]

Who has money to upgrade to a operating system that isn't even needed? I sure don't.

If Vista came with 4 free tanks of gas, I might consider it.

[Czar]

Your comments are quite helpful.

Thanks.

[Judith Anne]

I installed openoffice.org’s office download today, and now I can’t get it to open. Evidently, I installed it twice. Don’t ask me how—I asked it to repair and replace itself, and it installed itself again. Neither of the two desktop icons will open it. I went to the start menu to try to find a way to open it, and can’t.

Very frustrating. I got my printer and phone installed just fine, no problems. But I have no idea how to fix this office.org installation.

I guess I’ll have to wait for my son to come down and fix the damn thing. Other applications are working fine.

*sigh*

[Judith Anne]

Oh, yeah, forgot to say it was onto Vista Home something.

*sigh*

[George from New England]

I’ve bought a few PCs in the last year. Best Buy keeps losing my business as they only sell Vista loaded machines.

I got to Wal-mart and get an emachines with XP.

[Schwaeky]

My understanding was that the Iraqi Information minister, due to his limited role in the affairs of the Iraqi government (ie not taking part in the mass murders, military offensives etc), and his advanced age, was left a free man. Only targets such as close circle Baathists in Saddam’s inner circle were marked for death.