Never use IE. Change to either Firefox or Opera (my fav).
If you do switch OSes try Linux for a few weeks before you go to apple. Unless there is some heavy duty software that you must have (like Photoshop) I think you'll find that a good Linux distro will handle all of your needs.
The only real reason to stay with MS is games. If you have a legit copy of XP (or even 2000 which I use) I've found that setting up a dual boot machine, which is trivial to do, covers the best of both worlds.
Here is a good Linux distro http://www.ubuntu.com/ . Download the installation CD and boot it to try it out. It makes no changes to your system unless you hit the install button. [If you do install it you should ALWAYS make a backup. I've done about a dozen dual boot installs with no problems but you never know]
Skip
· 2 years ago
I can't say that I'm terribly surprised. Compaq used to have this very bad habit of replacing/extending portions of Windows on the versions that it shipped, and they were usually memory hogs and not very stable. I always avoided them as a result, or if I couldn't, would wipe them and reinstall from scratch. This also had the benefit of getting rid of the gigs of trial/adware and such that come preloaded that I didn't want. The internet explorer problems are probably coming from a toolbar or other addin that either came preloaded by compaq or you inadvertently loaded. And they may, actually be related to the DNS problems - there may be something trying to 'phone home' and hanging because it can't do a name lookup.
So I'd attack the DNS problems first. DNS in general isn't a problem - it's used extensively by windows networking, so if it were failing in general like that there would be zero businesses anywhere able to use it. The first thing I'd check would be to make sure that the vista systems and the XP systems are in fact using the same DNS servers in the same order. One note - I'm not actually running vista anywhere here, there's been no reason to upgrade any of my systems. But I'm sure my next PC will have it. The techniques should still work to troubleshoot though. BTW, I don't mean to insult your intelligence if you've already tried this stuff.
To check this, open up a command window on both systems and run
ipconfig /all
one of the things listed will be the DNS servers. Both systems should have the same addresses listed, and in the same order. Either the order being different or a different set of servers listed could be the issue.
If that's not it and you want to pursue it further, drop me a note offline, assuming you can see my email address from the profile. If not, let me know and I'll send you a note.
olddeadmeat
· 2 years ago
I am going to have to go to Vista to support my clients, but I am strongly leaning towards getting a new laptop with dual-boot XP and Vista for just this sort of trouble shooting.
Just waiting for manufacturers to roll out laptops with enough graphics oomph to actually use the new interface.
Linh_My
· 2 years ago
I currently run, Mac 10.5.1 & 10.4.11, Linux and various flavors of Windows including Vista. Over all I prefer the Mac. Still I do have a very sweet running Vista system. It is a home built i core 2 quad (4 CPU cores) running at 2.4 ghz, 2 gig of memory and a fair video card. It is also the 64 bit version of Vista. This apparently runs roughly as fast as my old Intel iMac core duo 1.83 ghz Mac.
The suggestions above are good. Compaq etc. get paid for installing "crap-ware" on their computers. It was a problem in the late 1990's when I was doing Compaq tech support and it is a problem now. Uninstall it. I bought one of my daughters an HP with Vista Pentium D (2CPU cores) 3.0ghz, 1 gig of memory. After removing the "Crap-ware" it became a useable system, roughly comparable to a high end P-III running XP
R. L. K.
· 2 years ago
Try running Linux with Firefox. All of those problems will disappear. The price is right too. Or - reformat your Vista machines and install XP Pro. Or buy a Mac.
physics geek
· 2 years ago
Bill Quick finally made the plunge to Linux, running his essential Windows only applications using Virtual Box. He made the switch because he couldn't bear to step down to Vista. I suggest it as a possibility for you. Two best open source options? Ubuntu and MEPIS. If you prefer a commercial version which more or less replaces XP, go with Xandros.
Or you can use the downgrade CD to migrate from Vista back to XP.
Alen
· 2 years ago
Disclaimer: I am a computer geek by trade and not afiliated with any computer company, or software manufacturer. I work on mosty WINTEL machines, so my knowledge of Macs and Linux boxes is very limited. I also consider usage of Macintosh to be the same as heresy.(just kidding)
I agree with the posters suggesting using Firefox. Windows IE 7 is, in my opinion, an inferior product to Firefox. I would ask you to check the following things on you laptop:
1: RAM Do you have 1Gb or more? If the answer is no, upgrade immediately. I suggest at least 2Gb to anyone running XP or greater.
2: Virtual RAM (Page File) Do you have at least 1Gb set aside? this is abot the minimum I would set a user's computer to. I would also set the Page FIle size manually and have the minimum and maximum sizes be the same #. THis will decrease fragmentation, and increase performance in the long run.
3: HD How much drive space is left "free" on your HD? If the answer is less than 25% you are risking a lot more crashes. All MS products depend on having a lot of space to expand into. The less extra space you have, the more issues you will have.
4: Video Card- This may sound silly, but most of the video cards out today (pre-installed or after market) come with the wrong drivers. I check for updated drivers for all my hardware as soon as I install a new device. Go to the manufacturers website and you should be able to get the latest and greatest.
warnergt
· 2 years ago
CPM DOS? CP/M was a product of Digital Research. CP/M was most popular on Osbornes and Kapro computers.
Archdean
· 2 years ago
I'm certain that you don't need another opinion so I'll just say this and let it go. You seem to have a knack for investing in losers: 1. Compaq 2. Vista w/o upgrading to max memory as an OS 3. Trying to convince me that CNN did a good job last night (on another topic) 4. :)
BobLeibowitz
· 2 years ago
I like the comment by the fellow who claims "Apple is for dumb people who don't know how to choose their hardware properly so Steve does it for them." As a Mensan might say, cute and clueless.
Apple has a rapidly growing, though still small share of the sales stream, but a much larger share of the installed and operable base as reflected by web share. Interestingly, its share of first class passengers traveling coast-to-coast easily exceeds 50%.
Even the Leopard update, which was the roughest I've had since starting with Apple in 1985, took only an hour, with complete success. That was three weeks ago, the system has not been down since except for the update. No freezes, no lost addresses, nothing except boring 100% functionality.
Ed, you've complained about your machines for nearly as long as I've been reading your blog. Isn't it time to ask yourself "Why?" you continue to stick with an emperor with no clothes? It's getting a little chilly up in your neck of the woods to continue, I'd think.
At any rate, good luck and best wishes. -- Bob
Gary
· 2 years ago
Use linux instead.
AnonymousDrivel
· 2 years ago
If you can tracert to a domain and get name resolution to all of the hops listed as the nodes get pinged, then the problem probably isn't a DNS issue and the DNS flushing is likely inducing a secondary effect at the application layer of some other program and not at the network layer.
A couple of things while scattershooting. Microsoft, in XP and probably Vista (which I don't use), employs an error reporting utility that kicks in during a crash. I don't know if it's a full kernel dump to send off to MS for quality control, but whatever diagnostics it collects can really bog down a PC if not make it appear wholly locked up. I've found it useful to disable error reporting to get my system back sooner to an operational state. The tool is more of a hassle than a help to me, the end user.
More pertinently, your browser may have a phishing utility that queries an external database for suspect websites. Look in your browser settings for such a utility and see if it's enabled or disabled. I've seen Mozilla (Firefox) choke on this periodically and found that an unavailable remote database makes any browsing stop completely. A technical glitch at the remote database or the network connections feeding it can practically kill your browsing client. I've disabled it in Mozilla (I have a separate firewall do the phishing analysis instead) because of that reason as well as its tendency to hoard network resources when operational.
So, in summary, 1) disable operating system error reporting and 2) the browser's anti-phishing tool to see if that at least gets you moving in a more positive direction. System stability is first. Then worry about diminished connectivity.
I've loved Windows 2000 Professional and still use it, but it will probably be my last Win32/64 system. I've since switched my other units over to Fedora Core and CentOS (Redhat-based distros). They're incredibly easy to install now and the X/Gnome/KDE GUI's are top-notch. Operationally, they'll do everything you need them to do and paying for any of it is mostly optional. The open source community and the financiers of it have done a marvelous job of mainstreaming Linux.
Andrew
· 2 years ago
Don't use IE. As a browser, It has a legacy of sucktitude. And as a web designer - it is the bane of my existence.
The reason I continue to use IE 6 is because it is EASY to get DHTML and JScript documentation from Microsoft, and because IE can instantiate ActiveX controls.
Once upon a time, I looked hard for a conprehensive, downloadable documentation of Spidermonkey -- Firefox's JavaScript engine -- without success.
Since you say you are web designer, could you give me a clue where I can find the documentation, and how I can use ActiveX objects under FireFox?
I had the occasion to nuke vista on an Aunt's new Compaq Presario and install XP the other day. It absolutely can be done! The bad news is that it's an involved task and you have to go all over the place searching for XP versions of drivers for all the hardware. I found that this google search result was a good starting place for finding them: http://tinyurl.com/393qsw
Also, you may need to go into the bios and change the SATA controler into legacy mode to get your XP install CDs to work.
Of course I use FreeBSD on my PCs. If you want a rock-solid system, that's the way to go.
Fred
· 2 years ago
Microsoft is a monoculture. The Microsoft way has scaling limits. Vista is an operating system too far for the Microsoft way. It is so large and complex that the Microsoft way of coding breaks down. It ain't 1980 anymore.
I think Microsoft is getting blindsided in other ways. The latest round of new computers is going for $399. Vista is selling for $299. Those numbers are out of whack. Ubuntu Linux is being bundled with those $399 computers. Ubuntu works pretty well.
The people buying $399 computers are looking for an appliance. They want a browser, email, and a few other simple applications that they expect to just work. Microsoft is lost in that world and way overpriced for the limited functionality desired.
Nobody asked for Vista. It's being pushed into the world to suck money out of the established customer base. That, after all, is where the money is now that nearly everybody who wants / can afford an expensive PC has one. Growth from here is going to be cheap PCs with correspondingly cheap operating systems.
Apple should be careful of hubris. The latest version of Leopard has plenty of flaws itself.
khr128
· 2 years ago
To add some diversity to your discussion: Vista works just fine for me. I know MS-bashing has become a sign of sophistication. Actually it seems to be a sign of incompetence.
Apple is for dumb people who don't know how to choose their hardware properly so Steve does it for them. Btw, Apple is pretty good; now that they dumped their own OS for Free BSD and replaced Motorolla processors with Intel hardware, and don't forget SGI graphics, innovator indeed, pfft.
<Performing my secret evasive maneuver>
joated
· 2 years ago
I run both Vista and MAC OS X on separate machines and have little trouble with either. My biggest complaint with any Windows machine is the lack of recognition of periferals. Plug and play is your friend. And not just for "dumb people".
BTW If Apple hadn't come up with the user interface currently on all machines, you'd still be typing in prompts.
Mal
· 2 years ago
Umm,,,,,, Apple didn't come up with the user interface currently on all machines. Xerox did.
Yawar Amin
· 2 years ago
Actually, The Palo Alto Research Centre came up with modern GUI concepts like the mouse. Check out the article.
Fritz
· 2 years ago
First -- I am a Microsoft programmer.
As others have pointed out, unless you build your own box you will have purchased a PC with Vista that is, er, extended by the system builder. These extensions include background services and usually also include plugins into Internet Explorer. That's a fact of life.
If you find that you often need a cmd window running as full administrator, that is easy to set up. I have cmd on my quick launch bar, and can right click it and choose "run as administrator".
Most Vista problems these days are coming from driver issues. That should improve with time as hardware vendors improve their drivers.
naftali
· 2 years ago
I admire your courage, admitting that you are a Microsoft programmer. Is it true (all these crazy internet rumors and all) that Microsoft is coming out with a line of sledgehammers free for all its frustrated users?
KendraWilder
· 2 years ago
Fritz said: "As others have pointed out, unless you build your own box you will have purchased a PC with Vista that is, er, extended by the system builder. These extensions include background services and usually also include plugins into Internet Explorer. That's a fact of life."
One of the first things I did when I really started getting into the new Dell with Vista was to uninstall and/or disable everything added/extended by Dell, along with all the 'trial' software.
Perhaps I just don't use the technology to the max to encounter all the problems others seem to be having with Vista, but so far, knock wood, I'm not having any serious problems with it. And tech support has always been excellent when I really needed them, so while I'd admittedly rather be using XP, Vista isn't giving me any real grief, and I'm thrilled with the new 'puter.
sharinlite
· 2 years ago
Bill Gates gave us the "Ford" of computing.....he could have given us a Volvo...even a Subaru, but no, greed came into play and we have the PC. I have five siblings in various professions, one a physicist, and none of them will use a PC,only a Mac will do and has for decades. I couldn't afford one then and it may be too late now at my age, but the Mac rules.
I R A Darth Aggie
· 2 years ago
One would think that a flagship product like Vista might have been subjected to a little more quality testing than obviously went into it.
Also, keep in mind that Vista was released well behind schedule, with most of the cool, gee-whizzy stuff promised ripped out and left to shrivel in the dark bowels of Microsoft.
If you feel ambitious (or supremely frustrated), you could try the Ubuntu Live CD.
Norma
· 2 years ago
Oh no. My computer has failed, and the new one only comes with Vista.
Denise
· 2 years ago
Uninstall it and put on XP or Ubuntu :)
janet
· 1 year ago
you can't do that eighter. it won't work
Bluefio
· 2 years ago
I have been reading about your troubles with Windows for some time and I feel your pain. For me switching to a Mac and OS X was easy. I don't miss Windows one bit.
rabidsquirrel
· 2 years ago
Vista - it's everywhere you don't want to be.
Bishop
· 2 years ago
I like the idea of a Mac too if all I did was surf, but if you are a gamer and enjoy the newer games you have to go PC....so I suffer the occasional bout of computer illness. Even my four year old Vaio with XP coughs-up now and then; can't find the ethernet card, loses addresses, keeps the task manager window open and won't allow it to close, etc.
If I could afford both systems I would, but since I cannot I must choose the one which suits all my needs and gaming on a Mac just plain old bites.
Del_Dolemonte
· 2 years ago
Speaking of "gaming"-when Microsoft released their latest version of Flight Simulator, FS X, last year, many people found they couldn't run it on their machines without major tweaks. It was simply too far ahead of its time. When I loaded it on my XP system, the graphics were very slow and the frame rate was almost tortoise-like. I have since managed to strike a happy medium with FSX, but it still has its flaws.
One of the worst flaws with FS X was in the scenery. For a product that was allegedly so long in development, they got some mighty simple stuff wrong. For example, before they came out with a patch, when you flew over New York Harbor, you would see a nice bridge running from Brooklyn, across the northeast tip of Governors Island, and then on across the bay to Lower Manhattan. Of course, this was the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel, but the MS idiots forgot to put it below the earth's surface!
Skip
· 2 years ago
FSX actually did that on purpose, as did FS9 before it when it shipped. The intent was to have something that would have several years of life in it. As for the scenery bugs, eh, not terribly surprising. There's zero chance of being able to eyeball everything in a product that covers the whole world. The road data comes from USGS and they just automatically generate things. And anything like that has to be changed by hand. There are probably thousands of tunnels worldwide that are the same.
The strange texture choices of the ground in flyover country bothered me a bunch more. There are areas I know that are prarie/grassland that are presented as desert, for example.
Del_Dolemonte
· 2 years ago
The problem is that every previous version of Flight Simulator had the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel underground in its correct place. Since this is a scenery area that I would think tould get a lot of use, their failure to get it right is inexcusable.
JackOkie
· 2 years ago
I bought X-plane at the EAA AirVenture this year. Haven't installed it yet - the guys from X-plane said I'd do best with a Mac.
Del_Dolemonte
· 2 years ago
I've got X-Plane as well. It doesn't gobble anywhere near the computing power as the MS flight sims, mainly because its scenery isn't as detailed and it doesn't have anywhere near as many aircraft as FS.
In addition, the new FS is for the first time based on a "round" earth model for the scenery, not a "flat earth" scenery profile which is what they used before. This requires a lot of additional computing power, as it allows you to now fly to both Poles and also fly higher than 99,999 feet. In the previous FS, you could only fly to the edges of the arctic/antarctic regions.
BChoinski
· 2 years ago
Plus the fact that if you really need windows, one can use Bootcamp and create a partition on their machine in order to run windows as needed. Or buy parallels and run windows in a Mac window.
Either way, 2 for 1.
johnCV
· 2 years ago
I just got a new PC with Vista. I absolutely HATE IT. I had to buy all new software for my business (most of which is actually worse that the old version - not directly attributable to MS, but none the less...). Despite the considerably larger drive and faster processor, it is slower. the overhead is enormous. The cumbersome user interface has been altered so that even a 15 year Windows user (me), has to re-learn how to do simple tasks. It constantly asks for 'permission' to continue an operation (what' s up with that?). At least twice a day I have to reset my file view as it 'forgets' how I want my files structure displayed - and why cant I have a large window for my file tree? And don't even get me started on how tMS has destroyed the Office program with it's assinine toolbars. It was apparntly written by MS engineers for MS engineers. We users never were a consideration. My nephew works for an Apple store and says that 80% of his business is now people disgusted with MS. My wife needs a new machine for our home. I told her we will by a Mac (our first). I will NOT have another MS product in our house. Bottom line - if you need a new computer, your stuck with Vista (BTW, new machines will not run XP or earlier versions). You will also need all new software anyway. Get a Mac. Bill gates can kiss my ass.
Anthony Ragan
· 2 years ago
And don't even get me started on how tMS has destroyed the Office program with it's assinine toolbars.
Soul brother! I've been an experienced, relatively happy Office user since it was a bunch of separate products. These new ribbons drive me batty. Menu commands that have been in the same place since, oh, Word for Windows 1.0 now take forever to find. Argh. It was enough to make me switch my home machine to Open Office.
Which means one of the barriers to switching from Windows to Mac (buy new Office software) is gone......
KendraWilder
· 2 years ago
JohnCV complained about Vista:
"It constantly asks for 'permission' to continue an operation (what' s up with that?)."
That's part of Vista's "User Account" control settings, which on startup were established with you, the "User", as the primary account administrator. It involves locking out other people from accessing your computer without permission, often utilizing a password for signin on the computer.
To turn it off, click on the Windows icon (button in lower left with Windows flag icon), then on the popup menu in the upper right there will be your login name with a square flower icon above it. Click on that.
That will open up the Control Panel's "User Accounts" window. There you'll see several "administrator" type options including creating a password, etc. About the sixth option down, it should say: "Turn User Account Control on or off". Click on that, and turn the controls off.
That will disable those prompts which constantly ask for 'permission' to continue an operation.
Actually, I've had very little real trouble adjusting to Vista, once I discovered what the premise of the format was, which is to give the PC "administrative" controls, essentially, so that others in the household could not access nor change certain settings without the primary "User's" permission or knowledge. It's for increased security and privacy for the primary user.
Disabling those things, which I don't really need, plus changing most of the settings to "Classic" mode, converted Vista back to a more WinXP mode, and I haven't had any problems with it worth noting, other than it seems to keep running out of memory, regardless of higher settings.
One thing that seems to help a lot is to run "Disk Cleanup" regularly, and to delete 'temp' files, plus a file that gets created when the computer is put into "hibernation" mode. That file seems to cause a conflict and sap memory. So when I run disk cleanup I automatically check that file for deletion, along with most of the others in the compiled list.
I also use Mozilla Firefox exclusively as an Internet browser, and have added extensions and plugins which take care of a lot of annoying problems. Knock wood, so far so good. Compared to what I had before, this is light years ahead in technology, and I'm thrilled to pieces that my SO surprised me early in my BD week with the new system. I'm a huge PC fan, having had a Mac way back in 1997 that drove me crazy. I've not touched a Mac since because of that unfortunate experience, and Windows Vista hasn't discouraged me enough yet to even consider going back. :)
Del_Dolemonte
· 2 years ago
Strangely enough, I just read a story about this yesterday
Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.
In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s newest operating system.
Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new Service Pack 1 beta package, is shown to be a laggard.
AH_C
· 2 years ago
infoworld also talks about how there is a large migration of companies downgrading their Vistas to XP-SP2. This is why M$ was forced to extend full support & new sales until July 08.
Most OEMs will provide the customer with that option of downgrading, you just have to ask specifically for it. The win-win is that you can keep your Vista license and if next year that Vista SP1 fixes the problems, you can revert back to Vista (if you intend to wipe Vista off the HDD).
The ideal solution here would be a dual-boot setup.
anonymously.
· 2 years ago
My next computer will be a mac, no more Vista. I feel like I am back with the old 98 because of the same problems I had then, only it was better than this vista.
It has some great little tricks, this one. One night it froze while shutting down, and it would not turn off or continue shutting down no matter what I did. I really hate it. Finally realized it has gone to battery power, so took out battery, put it back in and it shut down. Sounds nuts, but the battery level was down so know it took over or the other power went off long enough to make it change, who knows, it was not like the times you have to shut down the computer to unfreeze, It was quite bizarre. The battery regarded quickly. '
If I could I would buy a mac right now, but the new laptop I bought cleaned me out for awhile. A friend bought a mac and is gloating as well she should.
I want my old "office" it was great. Now we are just being testers of Vista with all it's problems and we paid to be used by microsoft.
What else is new?
jlarson43
· 2 years ago
If a battery operated laptop, or even a desktop, refuses to shut down, just hold the power button down until it turns off.
Michael Carr
· 2 years ago
Get a Mac
hap
· 2 years ago
I'd recommend you get Firefox on the machine and see if your life improves. There are few good reasons left to use IE, and if you're already having trouble with it, you have nothing to lose.
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA)
· 2 years ago
Vista ... the ME of our times.
Electric Ferret
· 2 years ago
Captain:
Why beat your head against the Windows Vista wall? It is known to be a terrible, terrible product which is costing untold wasted time by users fixing things constantly as you are now.
Format the hard drive and install a clean version of XP. You will be happier.
Bill Roberts
· 2 years ago
Buy an iMac and enjoy carefree computing/surfing/making videos, slideshows. I've been a Mac user for 20 years and will never go back to a PC.
coyote
· 2 years ago
Ed-
Vista is awful. And in particular, the networking is really unstable. It is no coincidence that XP outsells Vista at Amazon, or that a year into Vista's release, Dell is still offering the choice of Vista or XP. There is absolutely no functionality in Vista that is an improvement over XP, and a lot of things that are worse. Bit the bullet and roll back to XP. Don't even bother to try dual booting, like I did for a while. Roll all the way back. I actually posted an update on Vista problems here.
Mike M.
· 2 years ago
The problem is that the main purpose of Vista wasn't to actually come out with a quality operating system. Vista was more or less bought and paid for by the movie and music industries; it's main purpose was to introduce DRM throughout the entire software system. Quality control has never really received as much importance at Microsoft as it should have, and it was never the top consideration for Vista.
Bob Hawkins
· 2 years ago
I work at a Windows shop, so I pretty much have to have Windows at home. How much do I hate Windows? Whenever I can, I switch to my Amiga 1200, running software that hasn't been updated in over a decade, at 33 MHz. Until I got Firefox and Thunderbird, I did most of my surfing and all my email on the Amiga. I still do some of both.
When I leave this job, I'm going Linux all the way.
Labamigo
· 2 years ago
Captain, Bill Gates doesnt give a **** what you think.
mojo
· 2 years ago
I'm refusing to buy a new Dell, which I like hardware-wise, because they won't give me another OS than Vista. It seems likely MS has some pics of Mike Dell with a goat or something, and consequently they have no choices available other than that craptastic wonder.
So - another dealer gets my cash, I guess. I won't pay for something I don't want because a corp made a bad deal with another corp. Not my problem, guys. Fix your system.
Ah, ain't capitalism wonderful?
Robin Munn
· 2 years ago
mojo -
When did you try to buy a Dell with a non-Vista operating system? Because they do offer Ubuntu pre-installed on some of their machines now: http://www.dell.com/open
As of the time I'm writing this, there are only two machines listed there, a desktop and a laptop, both in the low-powered (and low-cost) price range. Still if a low-power machine is what you're looking for, you can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it now.
mojo
· 2 years ago
Last week. I even went to our Dell corporate sales rep (we buy a lot of Dell servers) and he told me it was not possible. Can't do it. To which I snorted "bull"...
Guess I'll go check out the "Open" site, thanks.
They really ought to get their story straight, yannow?
RB
· 2 years ago
Ed...I recommend Firefox as well. I'm running IE7 on XP Pro, and the browser's very unstable--particularly its feed-reader features. When I'm blog-checking in the evening, the RSS reader regulary crashes the browser. I also do a lot of photo uploading (hundreds of MB at a time), and Firefox is much more stable over an extended period of time.
That said, I'm sick of having to know how to fix my PC when it hiccups. I've just taken delivery of a 24" iMac and a 13" MacBook (still have the working Dell PC).
py
· 2 years ago
What has been specifically designed for Vista that doesn't run on XP? If Office '07 is that much of an issue, stick with '03, install the compatibility updates for '03 (to be able to read/edit '07 docs, xls, etc.) and stick with XP? Why switch? If I did a corporate-based cost case for upgrading to Vista, the support requirements alone would kill the proposal.
If enough people stick with XP and demand continuing support, MS will have to do a helluva lot more than release service packs to address existing bugs (and introduce new ones). Consumers still have power, regardless of how big Microsoft is...or thinks it is.
coyote
· 2 years ago
Mojo-
I am confused about you point on Dell. Here is Dell selling XP desktops and here are Dell XP laptops I am sure MS is not happy about this and Dell may bury them a bit on their website but they certainly seem to exist. Other alternative, buy copies of XP OEM from Newegg.com for under $100 and just roll back the OS, though this is more of a hassle because you have to track down drivers. But no one should try to live with Vista.
mojo
· 2 years ago
Which still leaves me either on a smaller, cheaper notebook (14 in display, max, looks like) or paying for a Vista installation I'm going to blow away as soon as it hits my doorstep. Not very acceptable.
I already own a couple of copies of XP Pro, 32 and 64 bit, one of which is not active, so I have the OS, but would have to go through the SP3 upgrade process. Pain.
Just give me a box with a blank HD and an XP-level drivers disk. Is that so freakin' hard?
David M. Hartzell
· 2 years ago
Being in the IT industry for more that 30 years (can we say 5081 cards?) has taught me two very valuable lessons:
1 - Never, ever buy the first version of anything. 2 - Never, ever keep hitting the computer with a hammer after it's broken.
In other words, on general principles, I didn't get XP, ME, 98, 95, 3.0 or DOS 5.0. I got XP SP1, 98 SE, 95 OEM1, 3.1 and DOS 6.22, because the kinks in earlier versions were worked out by Microsoft.
If you are having problems, then either try a clean install on Vista, or downgrade to XP Pro if all the hardware is supported. Then wait until Vista SP1 is released next year, and see if that solves the shortcomings. There is nothing wrong in going backwards to something that works.
Ben
· 2 years ago
You're way off base with this comment. DOS 5.0 worked fine. :)
AmendmentX
· 2 years ago
This is another version of my Dad always saying "Don't ever buy the first year of a new model car." I'm putting off buying a new computer until Vista SP1 comes out. I talked to King Banian last night about how long his battery ran and also talked to Michael Brodkorb about the virtues of a Mac. And it seems that Vista is running second to reups of XP.
Flighterdoc
· 2 years ago
Well, I use firefox. And it works very well on my dell laptop. The only problem I have with lockups is an occasional problem when I have multiple tabs open in firefox, and open a .pdf file in another...
Compared to XP, I have to say that I'm pretty impressed.
But I don't use Outlook (I use the last version of Eudora) nor IE - why use programs designed to allow viruses in?
jfm
· 2 years ago
Captain,
General Nanosystems on University Ave, near the University of Minnesota, sells full install versions of XP for $148.
It's terrible to give Microsoft more money, but it's even worse to waste hours trying to make Vista work.
KathyfromAustin
· 2 years ago
I switched all my home computers, both laptops and desktops to Firefox and it has helped enormously. When young son needed a laptop, we bought him an Apple. That is where this family is heading via attrition.
JonPrichard
· 2 years ago
I think it was about three years ago or so that I posted the advice you should get a Mac Capt. Back then you were having problems with XP. Maybe its time.
Brian
· 2 years ago
Like you, I've been using Windows since it came out, and CP/M and DOS before that. I've used every version of Windows for the desktop. About a year ago I bought a Macbook Pro laptop, with OS/X of course. I'm here to tell you, I will never, ever buy another Windows based machine. OS/X isn't perfect, but it's way better than anything Microsoft puts out. Footnote: I have also tried several flavors of Linux, BEos, OS/2, etc. Nothing currently available can touch OS/X.
March_Hare
· 2 years ago
I still use XP at work and at home (DS#1 upgraded our PCs rather than buy new ones last year) and I love using Firefox. However, several of the websites I use at work will only display properly with IE. After the crash-and-burn days of Win95, I'm hanging on to XP!
A friend of mine has Vista. After several months, it's working most of the time. But she has problems using 3rd party (i.e., non-Microsoft) software. I've noticed the same thing with my customers: sometimes Vista will work with our website applications; sometimes they won't.
PD Quig
· 2 years ago
Whatever you do, do NOT install MS Office 2007! We just 'upgraded' at work, and I've concluded that an army of software product managers must have dropped acid before redoing the user interface. The menus hog screen real estate, are not configurable, and the ability to customize the toolbar is limited to a single row of frequently used functions. As someone who invested a lot of time tuning my Word, Excel and PowerPoint interfaces, I am incensed that some a**holes have it dumbed down and added MANY, MANY more clicks to my daily existence. What a bunch of jerks.
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
I've used Macs since 1987 (and still have several vintage Macs that run fine). I'm also forced to support my wife's medical office with c. 20 PCs, running XP Pro. They generall work fine, but we don't ask them to do more than run the client of our practice-management software, and Firefox.
My current MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo 2.33GHz, OS 10.4.10) runs 10 or more applications without blinking; it doesn't crash, and I rarely shut down. OS X is really UNIX with an interface that makes Macs a pleasure to use (as opposed to Windows, which at best is boring). More and more IT pros are using MacBooks, because they can run UNIX apps as well as productivity apps.
If necessary, you can reboot into Windows (using BootCamp from Apple), or use Parallels or Netware Fusion to run Windows (OS of your choice) as a virtual machine. Parallels lets you run Windows completely integrated into the OS X desktop, or in a separate window. I can access the medical office server remotely from Windows running in Parallels over VPN, at PC speeds.
I use my MacBook Pro as a desktop machine, spanning to a 20" Dell display. I use Apple's Mail and Safari, and if I run into a website that doesn't like Safari, I switch to Camino (a Mac browser made by the Mozilla people). Because Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, you have a level of integration that you never find in the PC world.
It is true that Macs are somewhat more expensive than PCs with comparable specs, but IT people will tell you that you quickly make up the difference in uptime. And MacBooks and Mac Minis are available for short money.
Sure, Macs can have problems, and Apple can sometimes be a pain to deal with, but there is really no comparison between the Mac and PC user experience. There is also an active user community, and good forums for help, e.g. http://forums.macresource.com/list.php?1
My wife calls me a 'Mac bigot', and I am.
/Mr Lynn
Bill
· 2 years ago
I agree with David H. above. Never, EVER buy version 1.0 of anything. As a PC tech I can say Win98 and WinXP are about as stable as a MS OS can be. I was running 98 on a laptop for 6 years before it died and the replacement came with WinXP SP2 pre-installed. As I have time, I am currently trying to make the switch to Linux. I do not want to spwnd the money to upgrade a MS OS every few years. Linux does have something of a learning curve, few MS apps will work with it, but it's stable, ther are literally thousands of apps that will do almost everything MS apps can do, and, best of all, it's FREE.
Bill
· 2 years ago
I forgot to mention, Linux will run on existing hardware. Also, most distributions have available a "live" version you can run from a CD; you would be able to try out the OS without even needing to install it.
Seven
· 2 years ago
Ed,
I have used PC's personally and professionally since my first 286 circa 1983; my 1st hard drive had 20mb. Last year I bought a MacBook Pro. With the advent of Parallels and/or Fusion, I will never go back. On the rare occasion that I cannot use the Mac, the dark side is still readily available.
In a word, it just works. I no longer have computer problems, non, nada, zip. (And I know how to fix them, I never used a tech in my 25 plus pc years.)
You complaints about your computers are like clockwork on CQ; If I have not read about a problem recently, I know another one is ready to arise. How long will you keep trying the same method and expecting different results?
KendraWilder
· 2 years ago
Seven said: "I have used PC's personally and professionally since my first 286 circa 1983; my 1st hard drive had 20mb. Last year I bought a MacBook Pro."
I cut my teeth on a Wang PC right about that time, and I've been a reaffirmed PC fan ever since a misadventure into the Mac World in 1997. Perhaps if I took the time to check out current Mac's, I'd have a change of heart, but that would require too much grief involved in the transition to justify the change right now, after having gotten a new Dell for my BD. :)
unclesmrgol
· 2 years ago
Vista sucks for the same reasons that spam pays -- there's a sucker born every minute. Welcome to the candy bin, Captain...
Brad
· 2 years ago
Ed, listen to you're readers already and go Mac. It'll make things so much nicer on you once you get used to the little differences. Plus, if you do it, I'll give you a copy of Cyndicate for your blog reading if you do.
Karl
· 2 years ago
I've run Leopard with no crashes since it came out, and the update to Safari is solid- the only problem you might find is some sites that don't support it, (yet) but jumping to Firefox usually solves it. Leopard was not a simple or small upgrade, so I think Apple should be commended for how well it launched. We work in the graphics industry, and Mac has ruled our neck of the woods since the first graphics software launched. The automatic back up of Time Machine also sold me on the upgrade- drastically reducing the chance I'll ever lose another file. With the switch to OSX and UNIX, this is a rock solid operating system. Mac has come a long way. Not so much for Mr Softie.
vdig
· 2 years ago
Vista is an operating system that I just can not for the life of me recommend to anyone.
If you need stability and control, go for a Linux distro. Linux has proven to me that it is extremely stable, if a bit unfamiliar to me, but nothing that a good set of cats can't fix. Pure power, without all the incessant nagging is a huge plus in my opinion. Finally, having an operating system that runs straight from the CD/DVD definitely helps savant computer techies recover dead computers and/or the information on them.
For those that don't want to have all that user power detonating in their faces, as could happen is Linux, a Mac loaded with OS-X is best. Far more stable than Vista, but friendlier than any Linux distro, Macs with the OS-X system is designed to feel like it, and you, can do anything you want. There is a reason that many mainstream users love to protect Apple, regardless of their mistakes - the problems seem small potatoes in comparison to what they have experience on Windows systems.
If you are a gamer, set up a dual boot with either Linux or Mac OSX and Windows XP SP2. XP has been ironed out over so many years that it has finally emerged from mediocrity into something resembling a stable OS. In fact, it is very stable in the right hands. If you can set up a dual boot, you probably know how to protect your system. There is no reason to go up to Vista yet, if at all, since gameplay slows to slideshow speeds in Vista, and gives virtually no return in graphical one-uppery. If it seems to one up XP, as it does with Crysis, this is fixable by editing a few game config files to open up the highest graphical settings - the developers lock the highest settings to make Vista look more attractive. From what I hear, Gears of War does this random stuttering in Vista, and yields no improvements in DX10.... Stick with DX9 and XP SP2 fellow gamers... but I don't need to tell them that, do I?
E1701
· 2 years ago
I'm gonna have to swim against at least some of the tide here, Ed.
On Vista, several people here nailed it on the head - you bought a first release version of an OS, which is a complete no-no (unless you're testing it) and expected it to work the way you wanted. That doesn't work for Windows, MacOS, AmigaOS, OS/2 Warp, DOS, Linux, or Unix. First editions of *most* pieces of software are essentially finalized betas, not yet truly exposed to the rigors of general use and real-world situations.
Vista is particularly bad, yes, but not unsalvegable. As others have said, at least half of your problem is preinstalled garbage all modern prebuild machines come with (which is why I have refused to even recommend a prebuild to anyone in the past ten years). Decrapification is an absolute necessity, and if you don't do it, you will be paying the price - at this point in time, most prebuilds I get first-hand I will immediately reformat from scratch, minus the extensions. Sony's the worst, IMO, but Compaq/HP, Dell, and Gateway can set records of their own. Haven't tried Alienware or Falcon Northwest yet, but I'd be surprised if even high-end gaming PC makers didn't do the same thing.
Once that's complete, you need to make sure you've got the basics loaded - use IE as a backup reference when checking your blog posts, but for surfing, ditch that mess for Firefox. It's a bit more system heavy initially, but given modern specs, that's a virtual non-issue, and by itself will reduce malware infections dramatically. As a follow up, it never hurts to make sure your system has a good set of anti-malware packs (Spybot S&D and Adaware are free and effective), anti-virus (I do not recommend full AV/internet security packs... more trouble than they're worth), and firewall.
With XP, I've had systems running with an uptime measured in months (and in several cases, ended only by power failures that lasted too long for the UPS's to handle), a laptop that's had the same install of XP for more than three years without a hiccup (well, minus one video driver experiment I conducted), and a desktop that hasn't had a single crash or failure in spite of the mess of software and games I've run on it for the past year.
Now admittedly, Vista has not been so nice - on that same XP machine, I'm dual booting with Vista Ultimate 32, and I honestly don't use it except as a test platform. I don't have a DX10 video card (about the only reason to go to Vista so far), and I lose performance in games... and using Office 2003 with it, if it installs at all, is a nightmare. It's slower, buggier, has legions of driver problems, is not compatible with piles of older software and hardware (to be fair to MS, this is unavoidable if they don't want to make a *complete* hash of the OS trying to be compatible with everything).
So from your perspective, you may have good cause to go to a Mac - you can find software to do your work easily enough, and it tends to be rock stable most of the time, if not quite as versatile as XP.
That being said, I usually don't push Macs - as a graphic designer, I got pushed very heavily into Macs, because they're the industry standard (a meaningless one these days, when a Windows or Linux PC can do everything a Mac can, graphically). The OS is not suited to applications Apple doesn't approve of, unless you dual boot XP, which obviates the point. It's stable, but if there *is* a failure, it tends to be far more catastrophic - data recovery on a PC is a breeze unless you write over the affected sector, and can be impossible on MacOS, and some serious errors are denoted by nothing more helpful than error messages (which while shorter than MS gobbledygook for the average end user, are almost devoid of useful troubleshooting info) or icons. There's also the additional expense, and a design philosophy that does not encourage customization. But that applies more to my current job in IT (we have several Macs in the building, and despise them with a passion... no Vista boxes yet, thankfully), and a Powerbook might be just the thing for you.
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
With the Mac, you don't have to worry about mal/spy/adware, or viri. Really!
And E1701, if you do run into troubles with a Mac, you can delve as deeply into trouble-shooting via the UNIX Terminal as you dare to go. Command-line is not for me, but some folks thrive on it.
/Mr Lynn
ck
· 2 years ago
no viruses just because hardly anyone uses them... same thing with vista...
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
Only partly true. (a) There are millions of Mac users, and market share is increasing at a fairly rapid pace. (b) Although there have been proof-of-concept attempts, the Mac OS is much more secure than Windoze, especially if (as you should with any OS) you run as a regular user, not as an administrator. (c) There are NO Mac viri in the wild at this time. Compare that with some 40,000 attacking M$ software.
Wouldn't you rather not worry and waste time with anti-malware strategies and applications and expense?
/Mr Lynn
chaking
· 2 years ago
Well, Mac users account for about 5 percent of the pc market. So, if everyone decided to switch over, then Mac's OS X would become just like windows xp or vista or whatnot. Running with a unix backbone doesn't really get you out of the danger of viruses, it's just that most people who can make a virus use windows or they have plenty of money since they apparently have the expertise to tweak mac's code. I guess unix probably does have less exploits, but vista is closing that gap a bit.
If you love your mac as much as you apparently do, I wouldn't be recommending other people get it because one of the major things that make Mac's so nice to people such as yourself has everything to do with the small market share. Graphically macs are no better. The fact that when you open the box up you void your warranty make macs no better. They are basically the same thing as a Microsoft or unix based PC but with the OS X and a pre-built, no tweaking allowed, system.
I don't know if there are any currently known Mac viruses, but I do know that there have been Mac viruses (although, admittedly, they didn't get too far).
But hey, I'm glad you like your mac... I know a lot of people that do. Personally I like to build my own system and replace parts as needed, not the whole computer. I got windows vista 64 bit which also has extremely good virus protection (kernel protection and driver signings) and it runs great and I'm happy... So I guess we're all happy... except Ed =)
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
There have been Mac viruses, years ago, but no OS X ones.
You can customize the big Mac Pros all you want, and replace parts as needed, and you can upgrade RAM and HDs and other components on MacBooks and MacBook Pros, wthout voiding the warranties.
/Mr Lynn
chaking
· 2 years ago
You must be under a false impression. Here's one that popped up last year for the OS X: HERE
They have also found multiple vulnerabilities, but they caught them before someone got malicious with it. That goes to show you that with a larger group of users, the probability that it would be successfully exploited would skyrocket...
Again though, I'm glad you're happy with the MAC. I don't have 2500 to spend on a Mac Pro... But it's a good thing its customizable because the video card it has standard is pathetic (7300 GT) and the RAM is laughable (1 GB)... for 2500 that is a complete rip off... I could build the same thing for a thousand or under... Again though, it's preference and ease of use for certain people...
Personally I haven't had any problems with viruses or spyware in over 3 years. I don't mind the firewall I use, and I enjoy the much broader range of software available to me...
=)
chaking
· 2 years ago
Oh yeah - My gf is a micro biologist and we had a huge discussion over whether to get a mac or pc. Finally settled on just using my pc for the time being =); anyway, she told me that there are a couple programs that the scientific community uses and are built specifically for Macs (unix?). You can't get them with windows... It's the only one I've ever heard about, but apparently scientists like Macs too =)
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
I wasn't aware of OSX.Leap.A, apparently not a virus but a trojan than requires a 'social' action, namely an administrator's password to execute, and can only spread via iChat. There have been a few similar attempts, so yes, Macs are not entirely immune to malware, but as far as I know all require user action to activate. Certainly Mac users are not immune from phishing by clicking on bogus web links, but those aren't system exploits.
It's hard to believe the prestige from terrorizing the OS X world hasn't been enough to entice experienced virus writers to break in--from which I conclude that it's pretty hard to do.
I'll take a handful of minor worms to 40,000 viruses any day.
Someone as expert as you will have no trouble with PCs. Macs are "the computer for the rest of us. . ." (slogan c. 1985).
/Mr Lynn
chaking
· 2 years ago
yeah yeah... I was just saying...
E1701
· 2 years ago
MrLynn, yes, I know you can delve into the Unix terminal - I've had to do it to resolve what would have otherwise been extremely simple networking problems. Like Windows (XP at least), OSX is normally very good with handling networking automatically under 99% of user conditions. But in a nonstandard situation, Windows gives you far more options straight from the GUI to make adjustments, while with OSX, you have to use the command line for anything really involved. That's good for typical end users who are willing to ship their Macs back to Apple to resolve problems of that nature, but for those of us in IT who need the machines working every single day, it creates endless headaches. It doesn't happen often - like I said, OSX is rock solid - but when it does, it's invariably a multi-hour job, and often involves corrupted files (something I've very rarely encountered in Windows short of a physical disk problem).
Windows is definitely far more vulnerable to malware/viruses, this is undeniable. At 95% market share that's not too shocking, but the OS itself has a number of security and access holes that allow malware to self-install in the background. Vista fixes this, but at the price of asking the user "are you sure you want to do this?" every fifteen seconds while doing *any* work on the system configuration. ;) Windows also has to be compatible with wildly different system configurations and software environments, while Apple's small market share allows it to configure MacOS primarily to the environments *it* approves of. That's an explanation, you understand, not an excuse - MS has grown arrogant with their market stranglehold, and their handling of Vista's release has been absolutely abominable.
With that said, Windows can be very well protected from malware with some basic steps - every system I build I immediately configure with anti-virus, at least one anti-spyware program, and a firewall. With those and a little bit of basic precautions when opening email attachements and avoiding spy-ridden websites (usually porn), and you won't have any problems. My current gaming rig was built last October, and in spite of running multiple VOIP/FTP servers and pulling massive numbers of torrents, I've not had a single infection. Take that as you will though - I do know most end users aren't up to those kinds of precautions in general, including the rest of my own family. :p
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
E1701, I defer to your considerable experience, though I do not find XP networking all that intuitive. All I do is with XP is join up to the office domain and assign IPs, and even that seems to take more fiddling than it should. But doubtless I don't know my way around XP well enough. I've not had to do even that much with OS X networking, other than join my home-office workgroup, so I can't really compare the two platforms in that respect.
What you say about malware and protection is all true, though I have heard it said that the BSD-UNIX underpinnings of OS X make it far more resistant to penetration than Windows. And it makes a difference for the average end-user. I've known people who junked their PCs, because having some itinerant IT guy come in and clean them up was just as expensive as a new one. And then of course they bought another PC.
/Mr Lynn
jlarson43
· 2 years ago
about 5 months ago, I acquired a refurbished Gateway 15.4 inch laptop with XP sp2 on it, and have been very happy with it.
It takes time to shake down bugs in an OS as complex as Vista. When you consider the poeple-years invested in refining XP, why would any sane person just dump all that investment for a buggy new product?
Despite all the negative comments concerning Microsoft, the reason they dominate the global software market is, given time, their products work. Not the best, not the fastest, not the most elegent, but they get the job done for the vast majority of users. I can create a document on my system in the USA, send it half-way around the world, and reasonably expect the recipient be able to open it and read it.
As far as Mac is concerned, Apple's tendancy to abandon legacy software and change hardware every couple of years turns me off big time. I can run a good deal of my old DOS stuff on my new laptop, and still use my VC++ 5 compiler. As an ultra-conservative, starting from scratch just because my computer vendor wants me to is a non-starter.
Bill Gates is an American hero in my book, despite his liberal tendancies.
Linh_My
· 2 years ago
"As far as Mac is concerned, Apple's tendancy to abandon legacy software and change hardware every couple of years turns me off big time."
As OSX 10.5 is now level 03 certified UNIX, the Mac will have to follow UNIX standards of upgradeability for UNIX apps.
Some of the biggest reasons for MS instability issues have to do with supporting Legacy software. Parallels and VMware Fusion have been mentioned by several posters. I expect the legacy software issue to be resolved by virtulisation and to become a non issue for the next release of both MS and Mac operating systems. Time to upgrade your computer, hook up a cable and load your entire old computer into the new computer as a Virtual Computer. The only thing preventing this from being true today is MS and Apple Licensing issues.
You people are being awful hard on Vista and I never thought that I would defend a Microsoft product. It probably doesn't justify the man hours that went into it but it works well. I just built a new system with Vista Ultimate. It works fine and does better than XP in areas like internet. I have not had any major problems with it nor do I expect any. If you are having major problems with Vista you either don't have enough memory (at least 2 Gigs) or don't have enough or the Vista junk turned off (or both)
Anonamouse
· 2 years ago
Open a command prompt and paste:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
To verify settings:
netsh interface tcp show global
* Must be run as administrator.
Your problem is with your router not be able to handle TCP windows scaling. To revert back to default run:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
Hope this helps.
ajacksonian
· 2 years ago
Well, I have had the displeasure of acquiring a refurb Dell laptop with Vista. The very, absolutely, first thing that has do be done is remove McAfee A/V from a system: it will eat up 10-20% of system resources when nothing is going on. After that I started turning off every bell, whistle, and extraneous UI piece of junk I could. Then I removed the Dell software. I installed Avast! A/V home (free for non-pro use) and Win Defender (from MS, based on the Giant anti-spyware engine), plus poximitron with Neil Van Dyke customized blocker list, put in Avant browser for a good and useful MSIE skin that removes *its* bells and whistles and installed FFX and T-Bird. Every bit of flash, fade and 'neat look' is turned off... and I am tempted to just go admin on my daily account to get rid of the pop-ups on changes to the OS and major software pieces, but it is a good reminder not to do something stupid.
After all of that, there are still some things I detest on Vista. And those idiotic 'diagnose problem' pop-ups are top of the list: I know what the problem is after having fixed them in DOS, Win 3.1, Win95, WinNT, Win2K, WinXP x64... by putting those pop-ups in and trying to make the OS 'helpful' it is slowing me down from fixing things and that has eaten up literal days. The NT 4.0 interface is one I liked, and I do my best to strip everything else out... which includes multi-media junk from MS: there are far better players out there, with VLC (VideoLAN) at the top of the list. The Combined Community Codec Pack does the rest of the lifting.
It is not ready for prime time the way Win95 wasn't, and that means a 3 year wait for MS to get it right. I want a stripped down UI that does not eat up processor time with everything... there is a difference between 'user friendly' and 'Big Brother snoozing on your sofa' and Vista is the latter. But McAfee is the worst offender , for me, and good riddance to it. If you have McAfee: toss it, stake through the heart, holy water, wafer in the mouth, cut the head off, and then seal in concrete. Any software to 'improve your experience' and 'phone home to the mother company' also needs the boot.... Dell's stuff was useful up to the milisecond I updated the drivers, then it was ad-ware.
I have had minimal problems on internet connectivity, and most of those are due to wireless problems where the laptop is used. Any problems there are normally driver based, and once those are updated, the culprit is the OS itself. If it is stock equipment and under a return period, send it back and complain bitterly. If not, and it is under warranty, then bug 'em continuously for a fix.
When the laptop is out of warranty, I will get a nice new copy of something compatible... probably check the spec list on xp x64... the system was worth it at the price, but the long-term experience will require it to go.
mike
· 2 years ago
It won't accept my printer. I hate it.
Lonestar 88
· 2 years ago
Get a Mac. That is all that needs to be said
ck
· 2 years ago
I run windows vista 64 bit on my home computer and have never had a problem. It runs faster than xp and looks better. Firefox starts up as default for me just fine. Asking for permission to do things is a security feature. It stops unwanted programs from accessing things only you as the user should allow access to. Look at the number of viruses tailored specifically for XP and then look at the number for Vista --- night and day difference. Moreover, vista 64 bit is almost virus proof at this point!
I have no problems with drivers or anything. I updated to nvidia's newest drivers, and got the realtek drivers and all is well.
I love vista, much better, much faster and prettier OS than previous versions.
Pho
· 2 years ago
I come to the Cap'n for commentary on all kinds of topics but I never thought I'd get PC info that applied to me... lol
Thank you Ed. I have had my Vista based PC for probably 3 weeks or so. I've had this exact DNS issue all that time with regularly visited sites suddenly coming up unavailable. Usually if I wait a while and come back they'll pop right up like normal. Usually after I've already looked up what I wanted on my XP laptop right next to it though...
Unfortunatly I work in "the industry" and the only thing that bugs me more than far, far lefty wakos wanting to pick my pockets for yet another pork program... is working on fixing my own PC's after coming home from work fixing everyone else's. So I hadn't even bothered to look up the problem yet...
I don't use IE unless someone makes me. But this happens with both IE and Firefox, at least to me.
I never thought I'd say this when XP originally came out... but long live XP.
Course I remember saying the same about Win98SE, when XP came out...
chaking
· 2 years ago
Hey Pho - Just so you know: President Bush has repeatedly attacked Congress for its earmarks and pork barrel projects. Yet a new House Appropriations Committee report accompanying legislation funding the Department of the Interior “shows that Bush requested 93 of the 321 earmarks in the bill. A panel report for the financial services and general government spending bill showed that Bush requested 17 special projects worth $947 million, more than any single member of Congress.”
WD
· 2 years ago
I believe that MS released Vista WAY TOO EARLY. Too many bugs...too slow...too many crashes...too much of a resource hog....etc etc etc. I became so disgusted with Windows that I wiped it completely off my laptop and replaced it with Fedora Linux and started teaching my wife how to use a computer with Linux...not Windows. Been happy ever since. Linux does take some tweaking to get all the audio and video working, but that's a license issue anyway...and can't be corrected easily with freeware Fedora. You can download 3rd party audio/video drivers and now I'm running a very capable, steady, and reliable OS. Bill...are you listening?
Disillusionist
· 2 years ago
I bought my wife a new Toshiba laptop for her birthday, and of course, I could only get it with Vista. What a pig. It takes a good 5 MINUTES from the time I tell it to shut down until the power actually goes off. I tried to turn it into an XP machine, but I couldn't find any drivers anywhere for some of the hardware, and had to put Vista back in. The thing that I found absolutely unbelievable, though, was the new version of Office. After 15 years of browbeating the entire PC industry to standardize on the application interface, the rocket scientists at Microsoft decided to.....completely change it. It took me five minutes to figure out where the hell the "Save as..." menu was. Fortunately, it was a free trial version, so I felt no compunction whatsoever about installing OpenOffice to replace it.
Personally, I run Win2k on my home machine. It's five years old, and it's a tank. I run it 24/7, and go months without rebooting it. The only time I ever got the blue screen of death was when I had a corrupted scanner driver. I just put a new ATI video card into it, and I'll probably add a dual-boot XP drive, just for gaming; otherwise I'll stick with it for a few more years.
I, too, only run FIrefox, as I have for years. There's no reason to run IE, which has always had maddeningly slow startup.
Joelist
· 2 years ago
Captain, I thought better of you than to see you enabling anti-MD FUD like this thread.
Not only do I run Vista with absolutely no hiccups, I have set it up for six of my friends on their machines. No hiccups whatsoever. It's fast and stable, and pretty secure.
By the way, turning off User Account Control is not necessarily wise. It's there for a reason, which is to require specific permission for programs to have elevated privileges. And that is a good thing, in fact both Linux and OSX would do pretty much the same thing if software wanted to run as root. Those having UAC issues are seeing them because of poorly written third party software (I'm sorry, but there is no logical reason for, for example, a photo editor to need elevated rights).
That said, Vista does need more RAM and at least decent integrated graphics (Intel GMA950 or better). This is because Vista has a different memory model than XP. It makes use of all the RAM like a giant cache (which OSX also does to some extent) to preload programs you frequently use so that loadup is faster. If you do something that needs that RAM, it dumps the preloaded stuff and does what you ordered. If your machine lacks the proper hardware specs, then don't put Vista on it; it's that simple.
Sansoucy
· 2 years ago
The Good News about Vista is that it supports several million discrete pieces of hardware from multiple thousands of vendors. The Bad News is that no OS could possibly do this perfectly.
That's the real difference between Apple and Microsoft. Sure, OSX works great .... on the handful of hardware platforms and the tiny subset of devices and the even tinier subset of software it's possible to use with it. But the price you pay for this increased reliability becomes quite obvious when you drop by a software emporium and note the titanic, glittering array of software and games for the PC ... and then lament on the laughable little ghetto of stuff you can run on a Mac.
And dear Apple fanatics; what - *exactly* - is so demonstrably "Apple" about a system that threw out all the Apple hardware in favor of Intel years ago, and threw out all the Apple OS code in favor of Unix at roughly the same point? Sounds kinda like the tale of George Washington's axe:
"This is the very axe that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. Well, of course, it's had fifteen new handles and five new heads along the way."
MrLynn
· 2 years ago
"And dear Apple fanatics; what - *exactly* - is so demonstrably "Apple" about a system that threw out all the Apple hardware in favor of Intel years ago, and threw out all the Apple OS code in favor of Unix at roughly the same point? "
Simple: it's the Aqua OS X interface. That's what makes a Mac a Mac, and why it's a pleasure to use and not a kludge, like Windows.
And BTW, Macs work with most peripherals and 'devices'. Heck, Macs have always been better at working with network printers. And most of the PC software you can't use on a Mac is vertical-market stuff. For that you can run Windows on your Mac, and it'll be more stable than on your PC.
/Mr Lynn
Mike G in Corvallis
· 2 years ago
Your stability problems might stem from the fact that Vista isn't so much an operating system as an enforcement mechanism for Digital Rights Management.
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection -- by Peter Gutmann
Executive Summary
Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.
Executive Executive Summary
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
jlarson43
· 2 years ago
And that article is depressing as hell.
After all the advances in processing speed achieved through hardware accelleration, it is disgusting that so much horse power will be wasted to protect Hollywood's profit margins. Not to mention the idea that ordinary, law-abiding folks are treated like suspects as MS forces hardware vendors to design "Protected Video Paths" inside our own computers. And how about "tilt-bits," which could cause the movie you're watching to simply stop dead in its tracks, while Vista resets the graphics sub-system because it thought someone was trying to hack the video.
I've run MS OS on my machines from DOS 2, but right now, if this "Digital Rights Management" and "Content Protection" crap isn't ripped by its roots out of Vista, my next OS is going to be Ubuntu.
Yech... .
Ledger1
· 2 years ago
Poster Chalking hit the nail on the head explaining why Macs are not purchased by a lot of people – money. I know quite a few clients who rule out Macs simply based on price, period. Which goes to his second point of why M$ has the market share and the market share of malware. It’s the huge install base.
Vista was supposed to solve the security/malware problem. But, they ended up with an OS that nobody likes.
As for buying XP from a box maker like Dell, coyote notes that dell does sell a decent box with XP on it – but, its XP Home edition. That means you cannot connect it to a domain at work (This also goes for the Vista home versions – they stay at home).
Dual boot XP and Vista is an option. But, that really just takes you back to XP platform with the Visa being undesirable second choice.
That leaves reformatting and installing XP Pro SP2. As Ted points out it certainly can be done on a desktop but it gets much harder on a laptop. Finding the drivers is the hard part.
But, given the situation with Vista and its slow and sometimes unstable environment I would recommend moving back to XP Pro until M$ fixes Vista (which could take some time).
Kait
· 2 years ago
Compaq sucks. I have, unfortunately, a compaq presario desktop and laptop. The laptop has vista the pc has xp. Vista is so terrible, but compaqs are made badly.
Dustin Lewis
· 2 years ago
I hate it just as much. I have a new HP laptop and am constantly losing my connection to the internet. I just bought another copy of XP and am about to downgrade. Vista has also been incapable of doing anything (a complete freeze) about 100 times in the middle of a simple task like opening MS Word.
I wish I bought a Mac
· 1 year ago
Yes, I agree Vista does suck BIG TIME. At first, it was OOOH AHHH with the look until I started to use my PC and after a few months of "can't find this, driver can't be loaded, shutting down to save data, locked up screen (where you have to manually shut down, and even when you tell it to shut down--it doesn't and goes and freezes on you anyway. I can't tell you how many times I have seen "blue screen" and then I have to "start Windows normally...." I was sooooooooooo close to buying a Mac but no, I had all this software..... I never had this much problem with XP ever.
All Comments
If you do switch OSes try Linux for a few weeks before you go to apple. Unless there is some heavy duty software that you must have (like Photoshop) I think you'll find that a good Linux distro will handle all of your needs.
The only real reason to stay with MS is games. If you have a legit copy of XP (or even 2000 which I use) I've found that setting up a dual boot machine, which is trivial to do, covers the best of both worlds.
Here is a good Linux distro http://www.ubuntu.com/ . Download the installation CD and boot it to try it out. It makes no changes to your system unless you hit the install button. [If you do install it you should ALWAYS make a backup. I've done about a dozen dual boot installs with no problems but you never know]
So I'd attack the DNS problems first. DNS in general isn't a problem - it's used extensively by windows networking, so if it were failing in general like that there would be zero businesses anywhere able to use it. The first thing I'd check would be to make sure that the vista systems and the XP systems are in fact using the same DNS servers in the same order. One note - I'm not actually running vista anywhere here, there's been no reason to upgrade any of my systems. But I'm sure my next PC will have it. The techniques should still work to troubleshoot though. BTW, I don't mean to insult your intelligence if you've already tried this stuff.
To check this, open up a command window on both systems and run
ipconfig /all
one of the things listed will be the DNS servers. Both systems should have the same addresses listed, and in the same order. Either the order being different or a different set of servers listed could be the issue.
If that's not it and you want to pursue it further, drop me a note offline, assuming you can see my email address from the profile. If not, let me know and I'll send you a note.
Just waiting for manufacturers to roll out laptops with enough graphics oomph to actually use the new interface.
The suggestions above are good. Compaq etc. get paid for installing "crap-ware" on their computers. It was a problem in the late 1990's when I was doing Compaq tech support and it is a problem now. Uninstall it. I bought one of my daughters an HP with Vista Pentium D (2CPU cores) 3.0ghz, 1 gig of memory. After removing the "Crap-ware" it became a useable system, roughly comparable to a high end P-III running XP
Or you can use the downgrade CD to migrate from Vista back to XP.
I agree with the posters suggesting using Firefox. Windows IE 7 is, in my opinion, an inferior product to Firefox. I would ask you to check the following things on you laptop:
1: RAM Do you have 1Gb or more? If the answer is no, upgrade immediately. I suggest at least 2Gb to anyone running XP or greater.
2: Virtual RAM (Page File) Do you have at least 1Gb set aside? this is abot the minimum I would set a user's computer to. I would also set the Page FIle size manually and have the minimum and maximum sizes be the same #. THis will decrease fragmentation, and increase performance in the long run.
3: HD How much drive space is left "free" on your HD? If the answer is less than 25% you are risking a lot more crashes. All MS products depend on having a lot of space to expand into. The less extra space you have, the more issues you will have.
4: Video Card- This may sound silly, but most of the video cards out today (pre-installed or after market) come with the wrong drivers. I check for updated drivers for all my hardware as soon as I install a new device. Go to the manufacturers website and you should be able to get the latest and greatest.
You seem to have a knack for investing in losers:
1. Compaq
2. Vista w/o upgrading to max memory as an OS
3. Trying to convince me that CNN did a good job last night (on another topic)
4. :)
Apple has a rapidly growing, though still small share of the sales stream, but a much larger share of the installed and operable base as reflected by web share. Interestingly, its share of first class passengers traveling coast-to-coast easily exceeds 50%.
Even the Leopard update, which was the roughest I've had since starting with Apple in 1985, took only an hour, with complete success. That was three weeks ago, the system has not been down since except for the update. No freezes, no lost addresses, nothing except boring 100% functionality.
Ed, you've complained about your machines for nearly as long as I've been reading your blog. Isn't it time to ask yourself "Why?" you continue to stick with an emperor with no clothes? It's getting a little chilly up in your neck of the woods to continue, I'd think.
At any rate, good luck and best wishes. -- Bob
A couple of things while scattershooting. Microsoft, in XP and probably Vista (which I don't use), employs an error reporting utility that kicks in during a crash. I don't know if it's a full kernel dump to send off to MS for quality control, but whatever diagnostics it collects can really bog down a PC if not make it appear wholly locked up. I've found it useful to disable error reporting to get my system back sooner to an operational state. The tool is more of a hassle than a help to me, the end user.
More pertinently, your browser may have a phishing utility that queries an external database for suspect websites. Look in your browser settings for such a utility and see if it's enabled or disabled. I've seen Mozilla (Firefox) choke on this periodically and found that an unavailable remote database makes any browsing stop completely. A technical glitch at the remote database or the network connections feeding it can practically kill your browsing client. I've disabled it in Mozilla (I have a separate firewall do the phishing analysis instead) because of that reason as well as its tendency to hoard network resources when operational.
So, in summary, 1) disable operating system error reporting and 2) the browser's anti-phishing tool to see if that at least gets you moving in a more positive direction. System stability is first. Then worry about diminished connectivity.
I've loved Windows 2000 Professional and still use it, but it will probably be my last Win32/64 system. I've since switched my other units over to Fedora Core and CentOS (Redhat-based distros). They're incredibly easy to install now and the X/Gnome/KDE GUI's are top-notch. Operationally, they'll do everything you need them to do and paying for any of it is mostly optional. The open source community and the financiers of it have done a marvelous job of mainstreaming Linux.
www.getfirefox.com (or) www.apple.com/safari/
-Andrew
Once upon a time, I looked hard for a conprehensive, downloadable documentation of Spidermonkey -- Firefox's JavaScript engine -- without success.
Since you say you are web designer, could you give me a clue where I can find the documentation, and how I can use ActiveX objects under FireFox?
Also, you may need to go into the bios and change the SATA controler into legacy mode to get your XP install CDs to work.
Of course I use FreeBSD on my PCs. If you want a rock-solid system, that's the way to go.
I think Microsoft is getting blindsided in other ways. The latest round of new computers is going for $399. Vista is selling for $299. Those numbers are out of whack. Ubuntu Linux is being bundled with those $399 computers. Ubuntu works pretty well.
The people buying $399 computers are looking for an appliance. They want a browser, email, and a few other simple applications that they expect to just work. Microsoft is lost in that world and way overpriced for the limited functionality desired.
Nobody asked for Vista. It's being pushed into the world to suck money out of the established customer base. That, after all, is where the money is now that nearly everybody who wants / can afford an expensive PC has one. Growth from here is going to be cheap PCs with correspondingly cheap operating systems.
Apple should be careful of hubris. The latest version of Leopard has plenty of flaws itself.
Apple is for dumb people who don't know how to choose their hardware properly so Steve does it for them. Btw, Apple is pretty good; now that they dumped their own OS for Free BSD and replaced Motorolla processors with Intel hardware, and don't forget SGI graphics, innovator indeed, pfft.
<Performing my secret evasive maneuver>
BTW If Apple hadn't come up with the user interface currently on all machines, you'd still be typing in prompts.
As others have pointed out, unless you build your own box you will have purchased a PC with Vista that is, er, extended by the system builder. These extensions include background services and usually also include plugins into Internet Explorer. That's a fact of life.
If you find that you often need a cmd window running as full administrator, that is easy to set up. I have cmd on my quick launch bar, and can right click it and choose "run as administrator".
Most Vista problems these days are coming from driver issues. That should improve with time as hardware vendors improve their drivers.
One of the first things I did when I really started getting into the new Dell with Vista was to uninstall and/or disable everything added/extended by Dell, along with all the 'trial' software.
Perhaps I just don't use the technology to the max to encounter all the problems others seem to be having with Vista, but so far, knock wood, I'm not having any serious problems with it. And tech support has always been excellent when I really needed them, so while I'd admittedly rather be using XP, Vista isn't giving me any real grief, and I'm thrilled with the new 'puter.
Why? this is what happens when one assumes a monopoly position in a market. Microsoft believes that you simply have too much invested in their software to make a switch to (Mac|Linux) more painful than dealing with Vista.
Also, keep in mind that Vista was released well behind schedule, with most of the cool, gee-whizzy stuff promised ripped out and left to shrivel in the dark bowels of Microsoft.
If you feel ambitious (or supremely frustrated), you could try the Ubuntu Live CD.
If I could afford both systems I would, but since I cannot I must choose the one which suits all my needs and gaming on a Mac just plain old bites.
One of the worst flaws with FS X was in the scenery. For a product that was allegedly so long in development, they got some mighty simple stuff wrong. For example, before they came out with a patch, when you flew over New York Harbor, you would see a nice bridge running from Brooklyn, across the northeast tip of Governors Island, and then on across the bay to Lower Manhattan. Of course, this was the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel, but the MS idiots forgot to put it below the earth's surface!
The strange texture choices of the ground in flyover country bothered me a bunch more. There are areas I know that are prarie/grassland that are presented as desert, for example.
In addition, the new FS is for the first time based on a "round" earth model for the scenery, not a "flat earth" scenery profile which is what they used before. This requires a lot of additional computing power, as it allows you to now fly to both Poles and also fly higher than 99,999 feet. In the previous FS, you could only fly to the edges of the arctic/antarctic regions.
Either way, 2 for 1.
Despite the considerably larger drive and faster processor, it is slower. the overhead is enormous. The cumbersome user interface has been altered so that even a 15 year Windows user (me), has to re-learn how to do simple tasks. It constantly asks for 'permission' to continue an operation (what' s up with that?). At least twice a day I have to reset my file view as it 'forgets' how I want my files structure displayed - and why cant I have a large window for my file tree? And don't even get me started on how tMS has destroyed the Office program with it's assinine toolbars. It was apparntly written by MS engineers for MS engineers. We users never were a consideration. My nephew works for an Apple store and says that 80% of his business is now people disgusted with MS.
My wife needs a new machine for our home. I told her we will by a Mac (our first). I will NOT have another MS product in our house. Bottom line - if you need a new computer, your stuck with Vista (BTW, new machines will not run XP or earlier versions). You will also need all new software anyway.
Get a Mac. Bill gates can kiss my ass.
Soul brother! I've been an experienced, relatively happy Office user since it was a bunch of separate products. These new ribbons drive me batty. Menu commands that have been in the same place since, oh, Word for Windows 1.0 now take forever to find. Argh. It was enough to make me switch my home machine to Open Office.
Which means one of the barriers to switching from Windows to Mac (buy new Office software) is gone......
"It constantly asks for 'permission' to continue an operation (what' s up with that?)."
That's part of Vista's "User Account" control settings, which on startup were established with you, the "User", as the primary account administrator. It involves locking out other people from accessing your computer without permission, often utilizing a password for signin on the computer.
To turn it off, click on the Windows icon (button in lower left with Windows flag icon), then on the popup menu in the upper right there will be your login name with a square flower icon above it. Click on that.
That will open up the Control Panel's "User Accounts" window. There you'll see several "administrator" type options including creating a password, etc. About the sixth option down, it should say: "Turn User Account Control on or off". Click on that, and turn the controls off.
That will disable those prompts which constantly ask for 'permission' to continue an operation.
Actually, I've had very little real trouble adjusting to Vista, once I discovered what the premise of the format was, which is to give the PC "administrative" controls, essentially, so that others in the household could not access nor change certain settings without the primary "User's" permission or knowledge. It's for increased security and privacy for the primary user.
Disabling those things, which I don't really need, plus changing most of the settings to "Classic" mode, converted Vista back to a more WinXP mode, and I haven't had any problems with it worth noting, other than it seems to keep running out of memory, regardless of higher settings.
One thing that seems to help a lot is to run "Disk Cleanup" regularly, and to delete 'temp' files, plus a file that gets created when the computer is put into "hibernation" mode. That file seems to cause a conflict and sap memory. So when I run disk cleanup I automatically check that file for deletion, along with most of the others in the compiled list.
I also use Mozilla Firefox exclusively as an Internet browser, and have added extensions and plugins which take care of a lot of annoying problems. Knock wood, so far so good. Compared to what I had before, this is light years ahead in technology, and I'm thrilled to pieces that my SO surprised me early in my BD week with the new system. I'm a huge PC fan, having had a Mac way back in 1997 that drove me crazy. I've not touched a Mac since because of that unfortunate experience, and Windows Vista hasn't discouraged me enough yet to even consider going back. :)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticl...
excerpt:
Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.
In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s newest operating system.
Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new Service Pack 1 beta package, is shown to be a laggard.
Most OEMs will provide the customer with that option of downgrading, you just have to ask specifically for it. The win-win is that you can keep your Vista license and if next year that Vista SP1 fixes the problems, you can revert back to Vista (if you intend to wipe Vista off the HDD).
The ideal solution here would be a dual-boot setup.
the same problems I had then, only it was better than this vista.
It has some great little tricks, this one. One night it froze while shutting down, and it would
not turn off or continue shutting down no matter what I did. I really hate it. Finally realized it
has gone to battery power, so took out battery, put it back in and it shut down. Sounds nuts,
but the battery level was down so know it took over or the other power went off long enough
to make it change, who knows, it was not like the times you have to shut down the computer
to unfreeze, It was quite bizarre. The battery regarded quickly. '
If I could I would buy a mac right now, but the new laptop I bought cleaned me out for awhile.
A friend bought a mac and is gloating as well she should.
I want my old "office" it was great. Now we are just being testers of Vista with all it's problems
and we paid to be used by microsoft.
What else is new?
Why beat your head against the Windows Vista wall? It is known to be a terrible, terrible product which is costing untold wasted time by users fixing things constantly as you are now.
Format the hard drive and install a clean version of XP. You will be happier.
Vista is awful. And in particular, the networking is really unstable. It is no coincidence that XP outsells Vista at Amazon, or that a year into Vista's release, Dell is still offering the choice of Vista or XP. There is absolutely no functionality in Vista that is an improvement over XP, and a lot of things that are worse. Bit the bullet and roll back to XP. Don't even bother to try dual booting, like I did for a while. Roll all the way back. I actually posted an update on Vista problems here.
When I leave this job, I'm going Linux all the way.
So - another dealer gets my cash, I guess. I won't pay for something I don't want because a corp made a bad deal with another corp. Not my problem, guys. Fix your system.
Ah, ain't capitalism wonderful?
When did you try to buy a Dell with a non-Vista operating system? Because they do offer Ubuntu pre-installed on some of their machines now: http://www.dell.com/open
As of the time I'm writing this, there are only two machines listed there, a desktop and a laptop, both in the low-powered (and low-cost) price range. Still if a low-power machine is what you're looking for, you can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it now.
Guess I'll go check out the "Open" site, thanks.
They really ought to get their story straight, yannow?
That said, I'm sick of having to know how to fix my PC when it hiccups. I've just taken delivery of a 24" iMac and a 13" MacBook (still have the working Dell PC).
If enough people stick with XP and demand continuing support, MS will have to do a helluva lot more than release service packs to address existing bugs (and introduce new ones). Consumers still have power, regardless of how big Microsoft is...or thinks it is.
I am confused about you point on Dell. Here is Dell selling XP desktops and here are Dell XP laptops I am sure MS is not happy about this and Dell may bury them a bit on their website but they certainly seem to exist. Other alternative, buy copies of XP OEM from Newegg.com for under $100 and just roll back the OS, though this is more of a hassle because you have to track down drivers. But no one should try to live with Vista.
I already own a couple of copies of XP Pro, 32 and 64 bit, one of which is not active, so I have the OS, but would have to go through the SP3 upgrade process. Pain.
Just give me a box with a blank HD and an XP-level drivers disk. Is that so freakin' hard?
1 - Never, ever buy the first version of anything.
2 - Never, ever keep hitting the computer with a hammer after it's broken.
In other words, on general principles, I didn't get XP, ME, 98, 95, 3.0 or DOS 5.0. I got XP SP1, 98 SE, 95 OEM1, 3.1 and DOS 6.22, because the kinks in earlier versions were worked out by Microsoft.
If you are having problems, then either try a clean install on Vista, or downgrade to XP Pro if all the hardware is supported. Then wait until Vista SP1 is released next year, and see if that solves the shortcomings. There is nothing wrong in going backwards to something that works.
I'm putting off buying a new computer until Vista SP1 comes out.
I talked to King Banian last night about how long his battery ran and also talked to Michael Brodkorb about the virtues of a Mac.
And it seems that Vista is running second to reups of XP.
Compared to XP, I have to say that I'm pretty impressed.
But I don't use Outlook (I use the last version of Eudora) nor IE - why use programs designed to allow viruses in?
General Nanosystems on University Ave, near the University of Minnesota, sells full install versions of XP for $148.
It's terrible to give Microsoft more money, but it's even worse to waste hours trying to make Vista work.
A friend of mine has Vista. After several months, it's working most of the time. But she has problems using 3rd party (i.e., non-Microsoft) software. I've noticed the same thing with my customers: sometimes Vista will work with our website applications; sometimes they won't.
My current MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo 2.33GHz, OS 10.4.10) runs 10 or more applications without blinking; it doesn't crash, and I rarely shut down. OS X is really UNIX with an interface that makes Macs a pleasure to use (as opposed to Windows, which at best is boring). More and more IT pros are using MacBooks, because they can run UNIX apps as well as productivity apps.
If necessary, you can reboot into Windows (using BootCamp from Apple), or use Parallels or Netware Fusion to run Windows (OS of your choice) as a virtual machine. Parallels lets you run Windows completely integrated into the OS X desktop, or in a separate window. I can access the medical office server remotely from Windows running in Parallels over VPN, at PC speeds.
I use my MacBook Pro as a desktop machine, spanning to a 20" Dell display. I use Apple's Mail and Safari, and if I run into a website that doesn't like Safari, I switch to Camino (a Mac browser made by the Mozilla people). Because Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, you have a level of integration that you never find in the PC world.
It is true that Macs are somewhat more expensive than PCs with comparable specs, but IT people will tell you that you quickly make up the difference in uptime. And MacBooks and Mac Minis are available for short money.
Sure, Macs can have problems, and Apple can sometimes be a pain to deal with, but there is really no comparison between the Mac and PC user experience. There is also an active user community, and good forums for help, e.g. http://forums.macresource.com/list.php?1
My wife calls me a 'Mac bigot', and I am.
/Mr Lynn
I have used PC's personally and professionally since my first 286 circa 1983; my 1st hard drive had 20mb. Last year I bought a MacBook Pro. With the advent of Parallels and/or Fusion, I will never go back. On the rare occasion that I cannot use the Mac, the dark side is still readily available.
In a word, it just works. I no longer have computer problems, non, nada, zip. (And I know how to fix them, I never used a tech in my 25 plus pc years.)
You complaints about your computers are like clockwork on CQ; If I have not read about a problem recently, I know another one is ready to arise. How long will you keep trying the same method and expecting different results?
I cut my teeth on a Wang PC right about that time, and I've been a reaffirmed PC fan ever since a misadventure into the Mac World in 1997. Perhaps if I took the time to check out current Mac's, I'd have a change of heart, but that would require too much grief involved in the transition to justify the change right now, after having gotten a new Dell for my BD. :)
If you need stability and control, go for a Linux distro. Linux has proven to me that it is extremely stable, if a bit unfamiliar to me, but nothing that a good set of cats can't fix. Pure power, without all the incessant nagging is a huge plus in my opinion. Finally, having an operating system that runs straight from the CD/DVD definitely helps savant computer techies recover dead computers and/or the information on them.
For those that don't want to have all that user power detonating in their faces, as could happen is Linux, a Mac loaded with OS-X is best. Far more stable than Vista, but friendlier than any Linux distro, Macs with the OS-X system is designed to feel like it, and you, can do anything you want. There is a reason that many mainstream users love to protect Apple, regardless of their mistakes - the problems seem small potatoes in comparison to what they have experience on Windows systems.
If you are a gamer, set up a dual boot with either Linux or Mac OSX and Windows XP SP2. XP has been ironed out over so many years that it has finally emerged from mediocrity into something resembling a stable OS. In fact, it is very stable in the right hands. If you can set up a dual boot, you probably know how to protect your system. There is no reason to go up to Vista yet, if at all, since gameplay slows to slideshow speeds in Vista, and gives virtually no return in graphical one-uppery. If it seems to one up XP, as it does with Crysis, this is fixable by editing a few game config files to open up the highest graphical settings - the developers lock the highest settings to make Vista look more attractive. From what I hear, Gears of War does this random stuttering in Vista, and yields no improvements in DX10.... Stick with DX9 and XP SP2 fellow gamers... but I don't need to tell them that, do I?
On Vista, several people here nailed it on the head - you bought a first release version of an OS, which is a complete no-no (unless you're testing it) and expected it to work the way you wanted. That doesn't work for Windows, MacOS, AmigaOS, OS/2 Warp, DOS, Linux, or Unix. First editions of *most* pieces of software are essentially finalized betas, not yet truly exposed to the rigors of general use and real-world situations.
Vista is particularly bad, yes, but not unsalvegable. As others have said, at least half of your problem is preinstalled garbage all modern prebuild machines come with (which is why I have refused to even recommend a prebuild to anyone in the past ten years). Decrapification is an absolute necessity, and if you don't do it, you will be paying the price - at this point in time, most prebuilds I get first-hand I will immediately reformat from scratch, minus the extensions. Sony's the worst, IMO, but Compaq/HP, Dell, and Gateway can set records of their own. Haven't tried Alienware or Falcon Northwest yet, but I'd be surprised if even high-end gaming PC makers didn't do the same thing.
Once that's complete, you need to make sure you've got the basics loaded - use IE as a backup reference when checking your blog posts, but for surfing, ditch that mess for Firefox. It's a bit more system heavy initially, but given modern specs, that's a virtual non-issue, and by itself will reduce malware infections dramatically. As a follow up, it never hurts to make sure your system has a good set of anti-malware packs (Spybot S&D and Adaware are free and effective), anti-virus (I do not recommend full AV/internet security packs... more trouble than they're worth), and firewall.
With XP, I've had systems running with an uptime measured in months (and in several cases, ended only by power failures that lasted too long for the UPS's to handle), a laptop that's had the same install of XP for more than three years without a hiccup (well, minus one video driver experiment I conducted), and a desktop that hasn't had a single crash or failure in spite of the mess of software and games I've run on it for the past year.
Now admittedly, Vista has not been so nice - on that same XP machine, I'm dual booting with Vista Ultimate 32, and I honestly don't use it except as a test platform. I don't have a DX10 video card (about the only reason to go to Vista so far), and I lose performance in games... and using Office 2003 with it, if it installs at all, is a nightmare. It's slower, buggier, has legions of driver problems, is not compatible with piles of older software and hardware (to be fair to MS, this is unavoidable if they don't want to make a *complete* hash of the OS trying to be compatible with everything).
So from your perspective, you may have good cause to go to a Mac - you can find software to do your work easily enough, and it tends to be rock stable most of the time, if not quite as versatile as XP.
That being said, I usually don't push Macs - as a graphic designer, I got pushed very heavily into Macs, because they're the industry standard (a meaningless one these days, when a Windows or Linux PC can do everything a Mac can, graphically). The OS is not suited to applications Apple doesn't approve of, unless you dual boot XP, which obviates the point. It's stable, but if there *is* a failure, it tends to be far more catastrophic - data recovery on a PC is a breeze unless you write over the affected sector, and can be impossible on MacOS, and some serious errors are denoted by nothing more helpful than error messages (which while shorter than MS gobbledygook for the average end user, are almost devoid of useful troubleshooting info) or icons. There's also the additional expense, and a design philosophy that does not encourage customization. But that applies more to my current job in IT (we have several Macs in the building, and despise them with a passion... no Vista boxes yet, thankfully), and a Powerbook might be just the thing for you.
And E1701, if you do run into troubles with a Mac, you can delve as deeply into trouble-shooting via the UNIX Terminal as you dare to go. Command-line is not for me, but some folks thrive on it.
/Mr Lynn
Wouldn't you rather not worry and waste time with anti-malware strategies and applications and expense?
/Mr Lynn
If you love your mac as much as you apparently do, I wouldn't be recommending other people get it because one of the major things that make Mac's so nice to people such as yourself has everything to do with the small market share. Graphically macs are no better. The fact that when you open the box up you void your warranty make macs no better. They are basically the same thing as a Microsoft or unix based PC but with the OS X and a pre-built, no tweaking allowed, system.
I don't know if there are any currently known Mac viruses, but I do know that there have been Mac viruses (although, admittedly, they didn't get too far).
But hey, I'm glad you like your mac... I know a lot of people that do. Personally I like to build my own system and replace parts as needed, not the whole computer. I got windows vista 64 bit which also has extremely good virus protection (kernel protection and driver signings) and it runs great and I'm happy... So I guess we're all happy... except Ed =)
You can customize the big Mac Pros all you want, and replace parts as needed, and you can upgrade RAM and HDs and other components on MacBooks and MacBook Pros, wthout voiding the warranties.
/Mr Lynn
HERE
They have also found multiple vulnerabilities, but they caught them before someone got malicious with it. That goes to show you that with a larger group of users, the probability that it would be successfully exploited would skyrocket...
Again though, I'm glad you're happy with the MAC. I don't have 2500 to spend on a Mac Pro... But it's a good thing its customizable because the video card it has standard is pathetic (7300 GT) and the RAM is laughable (1 GB)... for 2500 that is a complete rip off... I could build the same thing for a thousand or under...
Again though, it's preference and ease of use for certain people...
Personally I haven't had any problems with viruses or spyware in over 3 years. I don't mind the firewall I use, and I enjoy the much broader range of software available to me...
=)
It's hard to believe the prestige from terrorizing the OS X world hasn't been enough to entice experienced virus writers to break in--from which I conclude that it's pretty hard to do.
I'll take a handful of minor worms to 40,000 viruses any day.
Someone as expert as you will have no trouble with PCs. Macs are "the computer for the rest of us. . ." (slogan c. 1985).
/Mr Lynn
Windows is definitely far more vulnerable to malware/viruses, this is undeniable. At 95% market share that's not too shocking, but the OS itself has a number of security and access holes that allow malware to self-install in the background. Vista fixes this, but at the price of asking the user "are you sure you want to do this?" every fifteen seconds while doing *any* work on the system configuration. ;) Windows also has to be compatible with wildly different system configurations and software environments, while Apple's small market share allows it to configure MacOS primarily to the environments *it* approves of. That's an explanation, you understand, not an excuse - MS has grown arrogant with their market stranglehold, and their handling of Vista's release has been absolutely abominable.
With that said, Windows can be very well protected from malware with some basic steps - every system I build I immediately configure with anti-virus, at least one anti-spyware program, and a firewall. With those and a little bit of basic precautions when opening email attachements and avoiding spy-ridden websites (usually porn), and you won't have any problems. My current gaming rig was built last October, and in spite of running multiple VOIP/FTP servers and pulling massive numbers of torrents, I've not had a single infection. Take that as you will though - I do know most end users aren't up to those kinds of precautions in general, including the rest of my own family. :p
What you say about malware and protection is all true, though I have heard it said that the BSD-UNIX underpinnings of OS X make it far more resistant to penetration than Windows. And it makes a difference for the average end-user. I've known people who junked their PCs, because having some itinerant IT guy come in and clean them up was just as expensive as a new one. And then of course they bought another PC.
/Mr Lynn
It takes time to shake down bugs in an OS as complex as Vista. When you consider the poeple-years invested in refining XP, why would any sane person just dump all that investment for a buggy new product?
Despite all the negative comments concerning Microsoft, the reason they dominate the global software market is, given time, their products work. Not the best, not the fastest, not the most elegent, but they get the job done for the vast majority of users. I can create a document on my system in the USA, send it half-way around the world, and reasonably expect the recipient be able to open it and read it.
As far as Mac is concerned, Apple's tendancy to abandon legacy software and change hardware every couple of years turns me off big time. I can run a good deal of my old DOS stuff on my new laptop, and still use my VC++ 5 compiler. As an ultra-conservative, starting from scratch just because my computer vendor wants me to is a non-starter.
Bill Gates is an American hero in my book, despite his liberal tendancies.
As OSX 10.5 is now level 03 certified UNIX, the Mac will have to follow UNIX standards of upgradeability for UNIX apps.
Some of the biggest reasons for MS instability issues have to do with supporting Legacy software. Parallels and VMware Fusion have been mentioned by several posters. I expect the legacy software issue to be resolved by virtulisation and to become a non issue for the next release of both MS and Mac operating systems. Time to upgrade your computer, hook up a cable and load your entire old computer into the new computer as a Virtual Computer. The only thing preventing this from being true today is MS and Apple Licensing issues.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Regards
It probably doesn't justify the man hours that went into it but it works well. I just built a new system with Vista Ultimate. It works fine and does better than XP in areas like internet. I have not had any major problems with it nor do I expect any. If you are having major problems with Vista you either don't have enough memory (at least 2 Gigs) or don't have enough or the Vista junk turned off (or both)
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
To verify settings:
netsh interface tcp show global
* Must be run as administrator.
Your problem is with your router not be able to handle TCP windows scaling. To revert back to default run:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
Hope this helps.
After all of that, there are still some things I detest on Vista. And those idiotic 'diagnose problem' pop-ups are top of the list: I know what the problem is after having fixed them in DOS, Win 3.1, Win95, WinNT, Win2K, WinXP x64... by putting those pop-ups in and trying to make the OS 'helpful' it is slowing me down from fixing things and that has eaten up literal days. The NT 4.0 interface is one I liked, and I do my best to strip everything else out... which includes multi-media junk from MS: there are far better players out there, with VLC (VideoLAN) at the top of the list. The Combined Community Codec Pack does the rest of the lifting.
It is not ready for prime time the way Win95 wasn't, and that means a 3 year wait for MS to get it right. I want a stripped down UI that does not eat up processor time with everything... there is a difference between 'user friendly' and 'Big Brother snoozing on your sofa' and Vista is the latter. But McAfee is the worst offender , for me, and good riddance to it. If you have McAfee: toss it, stake through the heart, holy water, wafer in the mouth, cut the head off, and then seal in concrete. Any software to 'improve your experience' and 'phone home to the mother company' also needs the boot.... Dell's stuff was useful up to the milisecond I updated the drivers, then it was ad-ware.
I have had minimal problems on internet connectivity, and most of those are due to wireless problems where the laptop is used. Any problems there are normally driver based, and once those are updated, the culprit is the OS itself. If it is stock equipment and under a return period, send it back and complain bitterly. If not, and it is under warranty, then bug 'em continuously for a fix.
When the laptop is out of warranty, I will get a nice new copy of something compatible... probably check the spec list on xp x64... the system was worth it at the price, but the long-term experience will require it to go.
Firefox starts up as default for me just fine.
Asking for permission to do things is a security feature. It stops unwanted programs from accessing things only you as the user should allow access to.
Look at the number of viruses tailored specifically for XP and then look at the number for Vista --- night and day difference. Moreover, vista 64 bit is almost virus proof at this point!
I have no problems with drivers or anything. I updated to nvidia's newest drivers, and got the realtek drivers and all is well.
I love vista, much better, much faster and prettier OS than previous versions.
Thank you Ed. I have had my Vista based PC for probably 3 weeks or so. I've had this exact DNS issue all that time with regularly visited sites suddenly coming up unavailable. Usually if I wait a while and come back they'll pop right up like normal. Usually after I've already looked up what I wanted on my XP laptop right next to it though...
Unfortunatly I work in "the industry" and the only thing that bugs me more than far, far lefty wakos wanting to pick my pockets for yet another pork program... is working on fixing my own PC's after coming home from work fixing everyone else's. So I hadn't even bothered to look up the problem yet...
I don't use IE unless someone makes me. But this happens with both IE and Firefox, at least to me.
I never thought I'd say this when XP originally came out... but long live XP.
Course I remember saying the same about Win98SE, when XP came out...
President Bush has repeatedly attacked Congress for its earmarks and pork barrel projects. Yet a new House Appropriations Committee report accompanying legislation funding the Department of the Interior “shows that Bush requested 93 of the 321 earmarks in the bill. A panel report for the financial services and general government spending bill showed that Bush requested 17 special projects worth $947 million, more than any single member of Congress.”
Personally, I run Win2k on my home machine. It's five years old, and it's a tank. I run it 24/7, and go months without rebooting it. The only time I ever got the blue screen of death was when I had a corrupted scanner driver. I just put a new ATI video card into it, and I'll probably add a dual-boot XP drive, just for gaming; otherwise I'll stick with it for a few more years.
I, too, only run FIrefox, as I have for years. There's no reason to run IE, which has always had maddeningly slow startup.
Not only do I run Vista with absolutely no hiccups, I have set it up for six of my friends on their machines. No hiccups whatsoever. It's fast and stable, and pretty secure.
By the way, turning off User Account Control is not necessarily wise. It's there for a reason, which is to require specific permission for programs to have elevated privileges. And that is a good thing, in fact both Linux and OSX would do pretty much the same thing if software wanted to run as root. Those having UAC issues are seeing them because of poorly written third party software (I'm sorry, but there is no logical reason for, for example, a photo editor to need elevated rights).
That said, Vista does need more RAM and at least decent integrated graphics (Intel GMA950 or better). This is because Vista has a different memory model than XP. It makes use of all the RAM like a giant cache (which OSX also does to some extent) to preload programs you frequently use so that loadup is faster. If you do something that needs that RAM, it dumps the preloaded stuff and does what you ordered. If your machine lacks the proper hardware specs, then don't put Vista on it; it's that simple.
That's the real difference between Apple and Microsoft. Sure, OSX works great .... on the handful of hardware platforms and the tiny subset of devices and the even tinier subset of software it's possible to use with it. But the price you pay for this increased reliability becomes quite obvious when you drop by a software emporium and note the titanic, glittering array of software and games for the PC ... and then lament on the laughable little ghetto of stuff you can run on a Mac.
And dear Apple fanatics; what - *exactly* - is so demonstrably "Apple" about a system that threw out all the Apple hardware in favor of Intel years ago, and threw out all the Apple OS code in favor of Unix at roughly the same point? Sounds kinda like the tale of George Washington's axe:
"This is the very axe that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. Well, of course, it's had fifteen new handles and five new heads along the way."
Simple: it's the Aqua OS X interface. That's what makes a Mac a Mac, and why it's a pleasure to use and not a kludge, like Windows.
And BTW, Macs work with most peripherals and 'devices'. Heck, Macs have always been better at working with network printers. And most of the PC software you can't use on a Mac is vertical-market stuff. For that you can run Windows on your Mac, and it'll be more stable than on your PC.
/Mr Lynn
This is worth reading:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vist...
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection -- by Peter Gutmann
Executive Summary
Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.
Executive Executive Summary
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
After all the advances in processing speed achieved through hardware accelleration, it is disgusting that so much horse power will be wasted to protect Hollywood's profit margins. Not to mention the idea that ordinary, law-abiding folks are treated like suspects as MS forces hardware vendors to design "Protected Video Paths" inside our own computers. And how about "tilt-bits," which could cause the movie you're watching to simply stop dead in its tracks, while Vista resets the graphics sub-system because it thought someone was trying to hack the video.
I've run MS OS on my machines from DOS 2, but right now, if this "Digital Rights Management" and "Content Protection" crap isn't ripped by its roots out of Vista, my next OS is going to be Ubuntu.
Yech... .
Vista was supposed to solve the security/malware problem. But, they ended up with an OS that nobody likes.
As for buying XP from a box maker like Dell, coyote notes that dell does sell a decent box with XP on it – but, its XP Home edition. That means you cannot connect it to a domain at work (This also goes for the Vista home versions – they stay at home).
Dual boot XP and Vista is an option. But, that really just takes you back to XP platform with the Visa being undesirable second choice.
That leaves reformatting and installing XP Pro SP2. As Ted points out it certainly can be done on a desktop but it gets much harder on a laptop. Finding the drivers is the hard part.
But, given the situation with Vista and its slow and sometimes unstable environment I would recommend moving back to XP Pro until M$ fixes Vista (which could take some time).
The laptop has vista the pc has xp.
Vista is so terrible, but compaqs are made badly.