Captain's Quarters Comments - Latest Comments in Why Does Vista Suck?

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

I wish I bought a Mac — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:39:14 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

janet — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:40:47 -0000

you can't do that eighter. it won't work

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Dustin Lewis — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:59:22 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Kait — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 02:26:28 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

jlarson43 — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:43:36 -0000

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... .

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Ledger1 — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:47:25 -0000

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).

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Mike G in Corvallis — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:52:07 -0000

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.

This is worth reading:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.n...

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

MrLynn — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:12:12 -0000

"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

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

MrLynn — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:01:45 -0000

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

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

E1701 — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:51:14 -0000

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

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Sansoucy — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:55:44 -0000

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."

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

chaking — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 03:10:02 -0000

yeah yeah... I was just saying...

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Yawar Amin — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:57:39 -0000

Actually, The Palo Alto Research Centre came up with modern GUI concepts like the mouse. Check out the article.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Joelist — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:18:04 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

MrLynn — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:32:46 -0000

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

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Disillusionist — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:15:14 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

chaking — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:44:27 -0000

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 =)

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

chaking — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:34:11 -0000

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...

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

KendraWilder — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:35:45 -0000

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. :)

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Denise — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:30:01 -0000

Uninstall it and put on XP or Ubuntu :)

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Mal — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:22:57 -0000

Umm,,,,,, Apple didn't come up with the user interface currently on all machines. Xerox did.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

KendraWilder — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:19:11 -0000

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.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

MrLynn — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:11:04 -0000

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

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

chaking — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:56:36 -0000

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.”

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

KendraWilder — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:50:26 -0000

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. :)