XP gets some sort of reprieve

[Fat Tone]

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=207001662

XP will only be 15% of OS sales!?!?? That's because they don't give us a bloody choice. I've had two friends get Vista foisted on to them with their new laptops, despite wanting XP.

[Dr Mordrid]

My solution in these days of high capacity drives: dualboot with XP and make it the default OS

[Brian Ellis]

XP will only be 15% of OS sales!?!?? That's because they don't give us a bloody choice. I've had two friends get Vista foisted on to them with their new laptops, despite wanting XP.

On the principle that the customer is always right, tell the vendor that unless it has XP, you'll go elsewhere. It is still possible. The major problem now is that not all the latest components have XP-drivers, but it is the vendor's job to get round that. I bought a computer for a friend 2 or 3 weeks ago: I had the choice of XP-H, XP-P and three different Vistas. I chose XP-H for my friend and her first remark when I installed it was, "Thank Goodness, it doesn't have Vista!" and that from someone who is not more than 60% computer-literate!

[MultimediaMan]

Watch....M$ will buckle again come May... "Unforeseen opportunities" and all that rot.

[RhinoZ]

I didn't know about all the trouble involved with uninstalling Vista from a new machine. ( Yes I live in a cave ).
A friend just bought a new machine with Vista on it, and thought it was a easy process as Vista didn't have drivers for any of his peripherals. Boy was he wrong. I even googled uninstall vista, for fun and wow was that a big mess of information. My friend returned the hard drive and installed a new one with Xp

[Gurm]

What's the problem?

1. Insert XP disc.
2. Format hard disc using XP setup.
3. Wait for XP to install.

[Adis]

Always the same story...

Few years ago:
-XP is shit
-I don't need XP make-up, I want stable OS
-no drivers for XP
-XP needs 999GB of RAM to work
-I will never remove Windows 98/2000 from my computer
-don't upgrade to XP, it will kill your PC
blah, blah, blah...

Vista is good OS. I'm using it (x64 version) for a year now and have no any problems with it. Last week I've installed SP1 and it works perfect.

[Dr Mordrid]

But in this case Vista is shit.

Try copying large files or install a largish program with it sometime - it took over an hour to install VideoStudio 11 on a new Vista laptop here (dual core Intel/2g/120g HDD etc), entirely because of slowness in file copying.

I gave up and will dualboot it ==> XP rather than use Vista for anything but testing again.

[Fat Tone]

Try browsing a workgroup to find the NAS box, or any other PC for that matter. Even though it worked last week, and even though every single setting has been checked and double-checked. Arghh! Time wasted, hair lost.

[Admiral]

The major problem now is that not all the latest components have XP-drivers, but it is the vendor's job to get round that.

Yup, just bought an ASUS X55SV notebook, came with no OS (saved some money) and good thing there were modded 174.74 XP drivers available for the M9500 GS.
Asus only has Vista 32 drivers on their site, a few also worked on xp, for the other components I had to search.
Notebook vendors forcing Vista is stupid, since most laptops come with less than 4gb of ram and 3D performance takes a hit under Vista that counts more than on desktop computers.

[Dr Mordrid]

Try browsing a workgroup to find the NAS box, or any other PC for that matter. Even though it worked last week, and even though every single setting has been checked and double-checked. Arghh! Time wasted, hair lost.

Yup...still trying to get it to log into the other computers on the workgroup, not to mention "seeing" their printers

[DukeP]

Yup...still trying to get it to log into the other computers on the workgroup, not to mention "seeing" their printers

Yeah whats that about?

And getting other computers to actually use the shares on Vista64 is pretty darn hard as well...

~~DukeP~~

[KRSESQ]

During my trip to Oregon I was compelled to buy a new laptop. Since time was an issue I didn't have many options and ended up with a fairly nicely appointed HP, with Vista of course. The VERY first thing I did was strip out every shred of the crap I'd never use, including the MSOFFICE trial. Installed every update I could find, and OpenOffice. So far I've had only one or two Media Player crashes. I hooked it up to our new cheap lcd widescreen via VGA cable and used it to play The Incredibles on DVD and I have to say the image quality was amazing.

Yeah, 12 minutes to transfer 4.2 GB of video from DVD-ROM to the hard drive does seem a little excessive, and I haven't tried out any video capture. But so far I haven't any serious complaints. It is, as I've said before, very pretty. But so far I haven't seen anything to recommend it over XP, yet.

Fact is, EVERY initial release of EVERY major Microsoft operating system has been a piece of crap. Anyone remember MSDOS 6.0? They couldn't come out with the service pack upgrade to 6.2 fast enough, just to make it useable. Windows 95 was a mess. Windows 98 was late and was a mess. And who can forget ME? You expect better from Vista? Come on.

Besides, Vista wasn't really designed to run on today's machines. It's designed to run on the machines that will be on the market 2 years from now. By then it will be a much more mature product and we'll all be singing its praises. Meanwhile, MS will be designing its NEXT festering pile of excrement to foist upon the computing public.

It's the circle of life.

Kevin

[Admiral]

And that might come sooner than expected, Gates says sometime next year for Windows 7.

[UtwigMU]

Don't forget battery life, XP has up to 30% better battery life than Vista.

Today's typical system is a laptop (1.7GHz, 2GB, 120GB, Intel X31000) which is comparable to typical 2004 system (3GHz, 512MB, 120GB, Radeon 9000). Vista was designed for what would present day hardware be based on projections from 5 years ago when CPUs scaled from 2 to 3GHz in a year and no one foresaw cheap sub 300€ laptops.