Vista - a flop?

[Tedster]

Turns out first week sales of Vista are turning out very poorly. The percentage of Vista owners is even less than Windows98! Buyers are not rushing out to get the OS. We've seen this all before with Windows ME -one of the worst OSs that M$ ever put out. Vista doesn't seem to offer much more than XP other than bells and whistles and it's overall performance is a lot slower. In addition it requires much more extensive hardware which many end users don't want to lay out the bread for - not to mention the almost $300 price tag for the OS itself.

So in the end is Vista going to go the way of ME?

 

[sw123]

Yes, it looks like it...poor Vista

 

[Po`Girl]

So in the end is Vista going to go the way of ME?

That is a very cruel thing to say.:haha: At least Vista is a respectable OS.
The reaction so far has been deeply underwhelming,it`s true.
I won`t be upgrading any time soon,or late.

 

[JRaml]

Why bother?

Tedster, I hear ya. I couldn't imagine using Vista today with all the driver issues...nVidia just released their drivers a few days ago! Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one, especially since it's arrived 2 years late and with poor support from third-party publishers.

I'm sure in a year or two from now Vista will be a good OS. But I still believe in skipping Vista and hanging on to XP. Service Pack 3 should be out in early 2008, which will likely shore up the OS until the next one arrives.

And did any of you hear how long it took them to make the startup sound? 18 months, no joke.

 

[thewoosterisroot]

Yeah, Vista is shiny, but that's pretty much all it's got (in my opinion). Check this out:

In a memo to his staff, the DOT's CIO Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700789

 

[N3051M]

Sales are slow for vista and office '07.. and i can vouch for that as someone who works in the retail field.

Face it, most people who want vista as an upgrade option from their XP systems will end up getting it from the upgrade guarantee thing and not to mention most people will end up with the home basic version, which is definitely not worth the money (even for postage), unless you plan on using the "better" security and firewall feature (note: fiddly) as well as the search bar. Funnily enough MS did something useful to its OS by including the search bar within the start menu, abit a few years late.

for those who want to get vista, would get a laptop (or prebuilt machine) with vista preloaded, like me, since then you don't have to worry about drivers to make it work, which leaves the other programs and external device drivers for you to worry about. And 1gb of ram isn't sufficient for it. 1.5 or 2gb are better suited for home premium and up. Especially those running integrated graphics.

i give it another few months until it starts to pick up, consumer wise.

...i'm still waiting for my mbox2 drivers to be ported to vista..

 

[jbaines2615]

I downloaded the Vista trial a few mjonths ago. I thought It was great. There is no need to upgrade, Where I used to work a year ago they had only just started upgrading to XP. The main reason people will get vista is because it comes with their pre-built machine. Its mainly a shiny new interface with a only a couple of features that really make a difference. But then whats that compared to Win95 and Win98, and even Win98 to XP. All very successful operating systems, in a few years when nearly everyone has had to upgrade nearly everyone will have Vista. And those of us who build our own PC's will have what we can afford. Thats my opinion anyway.

 

[nickc]

jbaines3625:

I would agree although I think with in a year there will be a lot using Vista (including myself) today would be a bad idea to follow the upgrade to Vista, it has no point...

 

[chamillitarysk8]

vista sucks for it to work you have to have a min of 512 mb of ram compared to windows xps 64 mb of ram no way am i getting it and if i do its gonna be awhile cuz im not paying that much for an OS but eventually i will have to upgrade cuz of program requirements

 

[tipstir]

The Project heading SP2/DST just dealing with SP2 update and DST patch for over 1,000 end users (employee) and forget VISTA Business. This company won't touch that until 2010 and that's if it goes all well...

 

[SNGX1275]

This has happened before with XP, I don't know whether some of you guys are too young to remember that, or just have selective memories. I saw a thread over on our partner site Neowin and a guy compiled a list of quotes from their forum users from when XP launched (we can't do that hear because we didn't have this forum then) and he replaced Vista and XP with a generic new and prior OS label, and it read exactly like the comments I see now.

The fact is people don't like change, everyone complaining about aero and its requirements now are just like those that complained about XP's Fisher Price look and requirements back then. Vista will still run on mid end systems of today, just like XP would then. But the fact is any system built in the last year will run Vista out of the box just fine, just because your 2 year old system won't isn't a reason to bash Vista.

Sure there are bugs, but really there aren't many. I ran the beta a few months ago and everything ran perfectly except VLC (had to drop to classic interface) and my wireless network card (on a desktop). I realise out of the masses there are going to be issues, some severe, many not, but this all happened with XP too.

Do you guys not remember the HUGE problem with nVidia cards and infinite loop errors in XP? I think there is even a thread on that here from back in 2002 with several hundred thousand views.

Vista is more secure out of the box, has some new innovative features, looks better, and will be the only Microsoft OS being sold with new comps from now until the next Windows release. It is not like ME because with ME you had 98se which was nearly identical or you could switch over to Windows 2000 which was a better OS in every way except gaming at the time. With Vista you have no other choice, the bugs WILL get fixed (if you are even expierencing them), and DX 10 will be required for gaming in the upcoming years.

 

[peepnklown]

I was working in a computer technician shop during the release of Windows XP so I understand what SNG is talking about.
I completely concur.

 

[jbaines2615]

I would agree although I think with in a year there will be a lot using Vista (including myself) today would be a bad idea to follow the upgrade to Vista, it has no point...

Your probably rite. It probably will be within a year. I think there is a point though. Because its cool and new. I certainly wouldnt buy it anytime soon, just as I didnt buy XP untill well after it was released, because I cant afford it, but as I get a free upgrade to Vista home premum with my recently purchased OEM version of XP Media Centre 2005 I'm well up for it. The only thing that would hold me back is if I dont get the Media Centre features on Home Premium. Ive just been getting used to them, Im really starting to like it, so it wouldnt make much sence to upgrade to something that doesnt have it.

vista sucks for it to work you have to have a min of 512 mb of ram compared to windows xps 64 mb of ram no way am i getting it and if i do its gonna be awhile cuz im not paying that much for an OS but eventually i will have to upgrade cuz of program requirements

Well any macine with less than 512mb of ram is a fairly old machine and certainly not capable of running Vista very well. But if I refused to use XP just on the principle that if I happend to have 32mb of ram rather than its minimum req' 64 I'd be screwd with my 2 gigs because 98 probably wouldnt be able to run on my machine and I'd have to use linux *shudder*. Hardware and software both progress, one driving and dependent on the other. If your computer falls behind (thats not a jab at anyone, before I got this computer I was WAY behind) dont be angry at people or software because it doesnt (be a litle bit jelouse instead)

 

[LNCPapa]

I lead the Windows Vista Technical team at my job and I've got to say I'm pretty happy with it. I'm kind of forced to use it because of that, but it has shown me many of the reasons they've decided to do things the way they have and I really don't mind being forced to use new stuff.

I think it's a great OS - will get better performance over time (and as hardware progresses), but if you've ever seen it run on a Core 2 Duo with a half way decent card (even something as low as an X1600) you'll see that it flies. Don't expect faster than XP performance in your games, but most of them perform just about as fast. You'll get used to UAC soon enough and once you configure everything to your liking it will only appear when you really should be getting prompted.

Just because you see me supporting Microsoft in most of the things they do don't think I'm strictly an MS fanboy. I love linux and mac also and I even find the Mac commercials entertaining. I sit in front of all 3 (4 if you count XP) OSes everyday and use them all on a daily basis.

It's starting to get old hearing people bash MS or any other large company when they release a new product which is why I haven't really answered many of these threads, but with my having so much involvement in this one I thought I had to. Give it a chance, but please don't try to stick it on your 3-year-old eMachines and then bash it because it doesn't perform well. XP probably wouldn't on that old thing.

 

[alidabiri]

vista is not really a robust and agile os. xp still efficient. and i don't think vistat offers anything more than bells and whistles? i don't think vista is worth instlaling. i disagree with the statement that people hate change. i was happy with win98. but when xp came along, i was happy. i don't feel the same way with vista. it's a bad resource hog. actually, i wouldn't take vista if they offered it to me free.
cheers.

 

[Tmagic650]

I was working in a computer technician shop during the release of Windows XP so I understand what SNG is talking about.
I completely concur.

Me too :approve: SNG really said it all. Windows Me was a real pain, and I was the only one that had it running stable and solid on our Novell Network. This took quite a while to accomplish, I must admit.

Windows XP can run on many older systems sucessfully. I have found that older Intel chipsets run XP much better than the older AMD chipsets do. With time, we will learn to handle Vista, as the Service Packs are released and applied