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  Sascha - January 18th, 2007 at 5:54 pm PST

  I’m getting really tired of hearing it, it’s the same everywhere, people bashing other people for liking Vista, people complaining about hardware requirements, OS monopoly, upgrade peer pressure, and so on and so forth.

  I’ve been working and developing on Vista at work for quite some time now, and all I can say is, it’s not such a big deal! Yes, it looks nicer, but it takes about 3.5 minutes for the average geek to get used to the new look. Nobody keeps starting at the desktop icons or start menu the whole day, so most of the time you run your favorite browser or Word or development application in full screen anyway, and it just looks like before on XP with some nicer buttons and borders. Big deal. For most people it will just be like a better looking XP, without the feeling of being pushed into an upgrade where all hell breaks loose.

  I’ve installed the exact same suite of programs I typically install on a development machine, and except for some known problems (with workarounds) for Visual Studio there was not a single problem. I didn’t have to upgrade my hardware, the system feels as fast and responsive as before, and I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. I installed it on my two year old laptop, and it runs fine, with Aero and all bells and whistles. Again, no need to upgrade.

  Most of us who have been around for some time made the jump from Win3.11 to Win95, then to Win98/ME (which wasn’t as much of a change, I know), then to Win2k, then to WinXP, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I hear the same stuff about people being forced into upgrading, being forced to buy new hardware for their old PCs to run the new OS they were forced to buy, and the whining just never stops.

  Technological evolution comes with change. Get used to it. End of rant.

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  NW Guy - January 18th, 2007 at 6:29 pm PST

  Point taken Sascha. Is the laptop a development machine also? My guess is that your two machines are slightly more powerful than the typical machine at use within the business departments of your company.

  A well equiped business machine that is over a year old probably has 512M of memory? My machine has that configuration and is often a dog with XP and a few apps open.

  MSFT is in a good/bad position - they OWN the market (good) and have for over 15 years (anchor). Every time they try to make a major leap (XP, Vista) forward they are bogged down by history (legacy machines, software) and backward compatibility. How many of us expect other systems to work with the same formats/functionality that old?

  The question is whether they did the right thing with compatibility or let that hold them back from making true breakthroughs. Maybe they should have built a new clean platform and said…wait until you are truly ready to take the leap before buying this.

  We all have to decide how much we are willing to invest in the newest technology; if we want it than we will pay for hardware, software, whatever is necessary. If not you will always be able to find a machine (probably used/eBay) that has the config that you want.

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  Owen Green - August 29th, 2007 at 1:52 pm PDT

  The search in Vista is without doubt the WORST in a long line of WORSTS that the Gate has had the brass neck to fob us off with. The search in Win 98 was perfect! Why fuck it up? Each Windows edition has just got worse as far as I’m concerned. I’ve just bought a new ACER Aspire between ACER and Windows a massive 20 GIGs of space is used up. 10 for Vista and 10 for Acer. Of course I didn’t find that out till I got home!

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