Over A Year Later And Windows Vista Is Still Not Worth It
It has been over one year since my first experience running Microsoft’s *supposed* next generation OS and boy have things not changed. You would think that Microsoft would have made major changes to Windows Vista in an attempt to reverse the downward spiral over the last year but so far no luck. Not surprisingly we saw over this last year two fantastic releases from Ubuntu and the release of Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard with nothing more than a few security patches from Microsoft. As Microsoft continues to waste time trying to force Windows Vista on a much more educated public these other alternatives have been doing nothing but chewing away at their long held lead in the desktop OS market. So has my opinion of Windows Vista changed? Like the OS itself my opinion has not budged so here are four more reasons why Microsoft Windows Vista is still just not worth it.
Technorati Tags: commentary, microsoft, Vista, Windows
1. No advantage to Windows Genuine Advantage.
Microsoft wants to stop software piracy. I get that but creating a system that only gets in the way of honest people trying to maintain their systems is just plain crazy and preventing folks from rolling back to XP after a bad Vista upgrade is even worse! I know of many corporate and government folks who are avoiding Vista like the plague mainly because of WGA and the extra work required to implement it correctly. Operate a network that can’t connect to the internet? Forget about installing Vista because you will need to jump through numerous hoops to make it activate and stay that way for any systems not directly connected to the internet. It gets even more fun for those who use software products to “ghost” copies of systems out onto the network due to the way Microsoft makes you license and activate Windows Vista. This is just plain madness! As if corporate system administrators have all this extra time to devote to helping Microsoft stop piracy….
2. Hardware and software support still sucks.
Although I would normally be the first one to say progress is good even if it has a few bumps along the way the situation with Vista is just way out of control. The reality with Vista is you really can’t expect to upgrade a system to the OS without encountering significant problems with legacy hardware and software support. Not a huge issue for the preverbal college student or home user this quickly becomes a show stopper for corporations trying to run older software. Still my biggest gripe is the complete and utter lack of quality video drivers for many mainstream cards. What ever happened to video games and hardcore gamers driving the market? Quick update for you: they don’t run Vista! Right now any gamer running most off the shelf games is still fragging away on XP (and very happy doing it).
3. Nag your way to less a less secure OS.
Over a year ago I screamed about how Vista was going to not even be the slightest bit more secure than Windows XP. I was wrong, dead wrong. Windows Vista has turned out to be even less secure than Windows XP. Why? Simple. Two words; Nag Screen. What I am talking about is those stupid idiotic pop-ups that Windows Vista does every single time some application tries to do an action that requires “admin” privileges. On paper this does not necessarily sound like a bad idea since Ubuntu and OSX both support similar systems. So why does Vista have such a problem with this? The reason is two-fold; unlike Linux or OSX Windows applications have been run as “root” since day one leading to an issue with many applications expecting to have this level of access, the second reason stems from the way Microsoft has implemented this technology by simply asking the user to click “ok” vs. have to actually authenticate in order to gain elevated privileges. So the end result is we now are creating (myself included) a whole new automatic impulse to just “click ok” to any pop-up we see to compliment the already chronic outbreak of “double-clickers” wandering corporate hallways.
4. The first rats have already jumped.
One year ago I could not have even remotely predicted just how badly Vista would be received by the computing world. If with Vista’s faults it stood a good chance of simply being forced onto the market due to the huge user base already running Windows XP. The current situation is so bad that even I have been shocked at some of the recent news stories of whole college campuses moving to the Mac and how corporations and governments are now running pilot programs featuring Ubuntu or SUSE as alternatives to Vista. Who would have guessed that the future would be a world that was not nearly 100% Windows. Many corporations and especially upper management are currently being blind-sided by this movement as we speak and the momentum is only growing stronger. Unless Microsoft somehow dramatically reverses course I think we can expect a very different computing world in as little as a few more years.
So there you go, reasons enough to look elsewhere for your next desktop OS and if there was one aspect to the entire desktop OS market that really grabbed my attention over the last year it would have to be just how much better the alternatives to Windows have become. Both OSX and Ubuntu in particular have grow from something I would have only recommended to fellow gurus to full-fledged alternatives that in some cases even provide a significantly better experience for the desktop user than Windows Vista.
“Still my biggest gripe is the complete and utter lack of quality video drivers for many mainstream cards”
What? Outside of dated video cards, it supports them just fine. As a serious gamer, all the game cards today are supported that are required to max out todays games. This includes DirectX 10 support, something only Vista offers.
“the second reason stems from the way Microsoft has implemented this technology by simply asking the user to click “ok” vs. have to actually authenticate in order to gain elevated privileges”
You are wrong. If you are running as an Administrator you will still be prompted and then you click ok. If you are running as a standard user then you must enter the password of an Administrator to be granted access.
Compare with *nix systems. If you are running as root (sudo) you are not prompted at all when a serious action is about to happen. for example, entering “rm -rf /” while root will delete everything on your drive without even asking you first.
You can’t just sit there and say “some of the recent news stories” with out actually linking to them. Well, unless you really want your article to look like horseshit.
On the topic though, I haven’t had any trouble with my Vista Ultimate installation. The only driver it didn’t install was my soudblaster pro card. I’m an avid gamer and I was really impressed that my sound card was the only missing device driver. I’ve re-imaged plenty of XP boxes and had to spend a half hour or more looking for drivers… but with Vista on my custom box it just worked.
My complaints are mostly with the OS and it’s glamorous little extras. The sidebar eats my memory, and if you want to add in some more fun, have the sidebar monitor your performance. It was neat for the first hour and then it needed to go.
I don’t like the back-up program included either, it isn’t quite as robust as the XP version was. They pretty much programmed it like they figured the user was going to be a dumb-ass and not want to do anything advanced. Of course, I could just be missing something.
Overall, I am happy with Vista. It does what it is supposed to for me, so would XP, and so would 2000. What ever is going to make you happy.
I’m looking forward to what they do with the service packs. SP2 made some great improvements for XP, let’s hope SP1 can do the same for Vista.
Either way…. it’s not like I paid for it
On *nix systems, the root user is expected to know what he’s doing. If you were setting up a *nix system for your grandmother, you’d be root, she’d be a normal user. If you were setting up *nix for an office, only IT would be able to do Rooty things (and it would take 18 days to change any major settings).
@Jason
Loads of gamers still prefer XP to Vista, simply due to the 20% framerate penalty of the latter. There are lots of benchmarks out there that have determined Vista plays significantly slower. DX10 is no help there either.
@Nathan
You miss the point. Root on unix is “god” mode where it is presumed you know what you are doing. Vista’s constant and repetitive nagging may appear safer, until you realise that once the user has been prompted way too many times (by poorly programmed windows apps), they will blindly keep clicking OK.
Unix programs almost never exhibit this bad behaviour, thus sudo works as intended. (Something that rarely, if ever, needs to bother the end user for priveliges.)
James, thanks for pointing out that I completely forgot to link those other sources (now fixed).
Great post! I am so fed up with Vista I might lose my mind. The lack of support is the primary motivator.
The problem with Visita is it is behind the times, these days people want simple, clean, unobtrusive, quick not flash, colorful, slow in your face. Look at Google, Apple, Nokia Microsoft are still stuck in 1999.
Well, It has been working great for me. I run lots of games like half life 2, portal, bioshock and such and it hasn’t crashed hard yet. As a matter of fact, if you don’t count putting the laptop to sleep inbetween getting it to classes I haven’t shut it down or restarted for 3 months 6 weeks and 2days. Not too bad for any operating system i’d say. Btw I run spybot once a month as a vestigial habit but it only finds cookies. So thats pretty cool huh!
As a director in business I have to consider every app and how it runs under the OS. We are running Vista in a couple of test settings and have pretty much decided that we will stay with XP until we are forced off the platform. I think the dominant force coming down the apps’ pike is the web based app. More and more apps are going that way. That means the browser is the most important interface, not the OS.
@Nathan
Yeah, that would be because you specified the -f switch. Most Linux distros alias “rm” to “rm -i”. The -i switch means “ask for confirmation before removing each file”. So if you were to type rm -r / it would ask for confirmation for each file before deleting. -f disables that. I’m not sure why that’s an issue.
Personally I’ve been using it for a while. The OS works fine. Lack of support for drivers =/= MS’s problem. Every damn OS has the same issue. Try plugging in an Epson CX7000F to a MAC. If you did it before you installed the drivers (which is what 90% of the population do) you now have to archive/install to get the hardware working.
I could spend all day tearing apart any operating system. Get over yourself. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Do you TRULY feel you need to crusade to get folks to switch. It makes you an annoying mac/*nix nerd. Go be social ffs instead of writing yet ANOTHER lame anti-MS article.
(disclaimer: I use all 3 Os’s at work. No choice, but I’m not some smacktard bitching about them all)
I don’t think you have actually used Vista for a year, not to mention that it hasn’t even been a year since Vista RTM shipped. Here are my experiences:
[1] I think hardware and software driver support is just fine on Vista SP1. In fact it is great, better than XP for some new devices. I bought steelsound gaming headphones, on XP I had to insert the disk to install drivers, and on Vista just plugged in the headphone in the USB (headphone has an external soundcard) and Vista automatically installed the drivers. Nice and easy.
[2] I bought a Kensington wireless keyboard/mouse combo which is advertised as made for Mac. The instructions said that on Mac, insert this CD to install the drivers first. But you know what, on Vista, I just plugged in the receiver in the USB port and the keyboard/mouse just started working!
[3] I bought a no-namer harddrive, plugged it in, and it just worked!
[4] I bought a second LCD monitor, plugged it in, and you know what, Vista recognized it and multimon just started working.
[5] People complain about Vista being slow, which it was, but with the latest SP1 beta that I installed, speed is great!
[6] People complain about Vista being a memory hog, but there’s two things there. One is that if you put in more memory, Vista’s superfetch is going to try and UTILIZE the extra memory, so it just appears like it is using a lot of memory, while all its doing is utilizing the extra memory by prefetching. Besides, have you checked the price of memory these days, its dirt cheap, dirrrt cheap.
[7] And with all the extra hardware requirements that Vista is blamed to have, look at the price of this hardware. My office mate just got this great deal on a Dell computer, $515 for -
Core 2 duo 2.0 GHz
2 GB RAM
200 GB hard drive
Aero supporting graphics card
20″ widescreen flat panel
Vista Home Premium upgrade for $30 more.
Computers are getting cheaper and better and Vista SP1 works awesome!
[8] A word about the security dialog boxes. I agree they are annoying, but the only time you see a lot of these are right after the first install. Once you are all set, you hardly see those annoying dialog boxes, maybe once a week.
STOP BITCHING ABOUT MS YOU DUMBTARD MAC FANBOY.
Vista is the worst operating system I have ever used. It’s a memory hog and it’s slow and the pop ups are annoying.
I can’t wait until the day Ubuntu is everywhere.
If companies would just create more applications for Linux/Ubuntu.
I’m sick of Microsoft Word being the default Office Software that everyone uses. Please…EVERYONE. Please use Open Office and dump Vista and XP in the trash…
Thanks for the links, they were an interesting read. I think for technicians like myself the market will get more interesting as campuses and companies divide over whether to stick with MS or Open technologies.
The more competition the better, at least I’ll learn more.
The worst OS I’ve ever dealt with is still Windows ME, but it really sound like people are trying to turn Vista into the next ME. This is aside from the NSA’s version of UNIX which I absolutely hated, but to be fair I didn’t know my way around it too well.
To add to my comments, I have my Vista box hooked up to my 32″ widescreen tv. It does quite well putting out my DVDs and Games. However, I couldn’t attest to it’s workability for a programmer or web developer. Like I said earlier, it works with my demands. If I were suggesting to my grandma which OS to go with I would say XP. It is proven and works well for the regular user. Being a SysAdmin and being able to fix the stupid little shit that Vista throws at you gives me a somewhat different opinion on it.
But some serious kudos to you for creating a discussion.
That’s a pretty poor argument about the security perspective. My understanding is you think that Vista is less secure thank XP, simply because you are nagged about confirming operations restricted to administrators, even if you are logged in as one. Firstly, you can disable it, it’s called User Account Control. Even if I were to agree with your statement: that User Account Control fosters a habit of clicking OK to all dialogs; a potentially insecure practice, with it disabled…how is Vista any less secure than XP?
WGA is the price Microsoft has to pay for creating an operating system that is not restricted to a particular set of hardware. It is required to run reliably on practically any combination of hardware. You know that Windows is infinitely easier to pirate than OSX because Mac have their shit locked down so tightly. People don’t bother to pirate OSX cause with it you have to buy Apple hardware and we all know the cheapest way to buy an operating system is bundled with hardware.
I’m a big fan of Vista, I am running it on a Sony Vaio that I bought at the beginning of 2005. It really isn’t a demanding operating system, MSFanBoy is right. Memory is dirt cheap and $90 on Ebay saw my laptop 1GB stronger. I fell in love with it when I plugged in my external USB HDTV tuner. Vista picked it up, Windows Media Center was immediately able to scan for all my stations. I set a show to record, without Windows Media Center even open a little red circle pops up in my system tray and notifies me it is recording. It uses about 5% of the CPU. The software that came with my tuner uses 50 – 60% and practically anything you do on the computer while it’s recording will result in glitches and skips in the recorded video.
And yes…if you hate Vista that much don’t use it. Use the alternatives you’ve been raving about. It sounds to me like you’d prefer them.
….wtf….Vista is great…and i got all the drivers for my GPU etc etc and i havent had any problem with vista that is software related. but the “nag screen” yuh …Microsoft failed on that ……its the stupidest program ive eva seen….*or pretty dam close* but ova all works great …on my end
in my job I go out to people’s houses and help them with computer issues and frankly i wish MORE people had vista. up there on Mount Olympus you seem to find no value in it, but down in the trenches where people don’t know what the hell a browser is or the difference between spyware and a virus, i find vista to be a helpful OS. things are WAY WAY WAY the hell easier for computer illiterate people to work with. This is EXACTLY why Microsoft makes 50 baJILLION dollars a day and the Linux people have to give away their OS.
i understand that vista isn’t the BEST OS out there, but I’m giving props where props is due, Microsoft knows how to cater to the computer dummies.
I call BS. Vista can run games just as fast, if you’re smart enough to know what to disable. It’s not that terribly hard. Hardware support is fine, and it seems speedy enough to me. Just because the basic requirements of a decent speed computer haven’t changed in 6 years, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.
I got sick of Windows and the never-ending problems. I tried out OSX and it took me a month to get used to it, but I’ve been entirely happy ever since. Everything on OSX is not simple, as they say, but “straightforward”. Things just make sense. My friend bought a laptop with Vista on it, and it took us 10 clicks to get screen mirroring on. Moreover, it wasn’t a clear path at all. On my OSX, I can do it in one click. The entire system is based on clear, direct ways of doing things. With Windows, bah, I can’t even insert a USB key without a bunch of windows popping up and alerts…
Moreover, text is rendered much nicer on OSX, and exactly as it would be printed. On Windows, it’s a guessing game as to how it looks on the screen versus how it will print.
Moreover, I can have over 30 apps open at once on OSX and not have to worry about crashes. On Windows I’d have to close programs to make sure I wasn’t running too much at once. It’s so awesome to have so many programs open at once and flip between them – without it crashing!
How can you call the “release of Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard” a “fantastic release”. Its a joke and there is not much difference if any between 10.4 and 10.5.
“a much more educated public ”
The public is getting more dumb as compared to educated. Apple gets people to buy the OS every release and people happily pay almost $200 for it and still say it is much more better than the last.
And when M$ releases an OS every 3-4 or so years you guys complain and say it has holes, its buggy, it hard to use. Wait till crackers start to attack the MAC OS then you guys can go crying back to Apple.
MAC OS is easy to use because it is meant for dumb people…basically the “much more educated public”.
pasted from digg.
What a load of crock.
“Over a year ago I screamed about how Vista was going to not even be the slightest bit more secure than Windows XP. I was wrong, dead wrong. Windows Vista has turned out to be even less secure than Windows XP. Why? Simple. Two words; Nag Screen”
I’m still waiting on your promised viruses and trojans that would render my computer useless, with or without UAC. I haven’t had a virus since I installed Vista on my computers (about a month after launch day). Also isn’t it funny how Vista hasn’t been out for a year yet the title of the article is ‘a year later and windows vista is still not worth it’. Ah, so he’s been pretending to know something about Vista since before it’s launch, since before he even used it first hand. That should blow his credibility out of the water already.
“Although I would normally be the first one to say progress is good even if it has a few bumps along the way the situation with Vista is just way out of control. The reality with Vista is you really can’t expect to upgrade a system to the OS without encountering significant problems with legacy hardware and software support.”
Bullshit. I’ve upgraded numerous computers to Vista and each one has ran absoloutely fine with legacy drivers (granted my most recent upgrade needed drivers because there was no 16:10 support but it was no more than a simple download). If you sincerely want to use legacy drivers for your hardware forever then you are in fact a luddite and should buy an OEM system and STFU. Considering the range of hardware Vista is compatible with its competition (Linux/OS X) looks like a joke. I’m sorry but there really isn’t a better alternative, blame whoever you want, but Vista has the ability to run the largest combination of hardware any consumer could ever want.
“Not a huge issue for the preverbal college student or home user this quickly becomes a show stopper for corporations trying to run older software.”
Older software? Is this guy for real? I have no backwards compatibility problems with any of my software, even the ones MIcrosoft said wasn’t supported in Vista (Visual C++/C# Express/XNA) ran fine for the longest time until Microsoft officially said ‘yes we now support it’. This is in sharp contrast to some of Microsofts competition that have not been able to retain the sheer backwards compatibility Microsoft has. As it stands I don’t think there is a single piece of software out there that will work on XP but not Vista.
“Still my biggest gripe is the complete and utter lack of quality video drivers for many mainstream cards. What ever happened to video games and hardcore gamers driving the market? Quick update for you: they don’t run Vista! Right now any gamer running most off the shelf games is still fragging away on XP (and very happy doing it).”
WTF? Are you stil living in the launch window where nVidia still hadn’t gotten around to releasing drivers for the 8800GTX? Right now if you want to play the best looking games on the highest settings you NEED Vista (Crysis, Bioshock, UT3, World in Conflict all support DX10 for which nVidia/ATI happily support both in hardware and drivers).
I think it’s time people STFU and stopped pretending to know whats going on, the mere fact he’s blaming Microsoft for third parties not providing graphics drivers, WHICH THEY ARE shows he’s probably never actually used Windows Vista thusfar. I can go on and on about what an idiot this guy is but I know at least 80% of you folks here probably agree with him (and about 99% of that number have never actually used Vista) so whatever.
Another sensationalist piece of shit by some kid who brought together all the negative articles he could find (from back during the launch window) and presenting it as fact, probably in an effort to get to the frontpage. Of course if people put value into truth they wouldn’t bother with this biased piece of shit. I mean vista has problems, so criticize them, the ones that are real and there, don’t make up shit just to stir the pot.
I tend to agree with this article. Being an independent consultant, I’ve run into my fair share of Vista problems (Web cam drivers, printers, modems) that just would not have existed in XP, problems that required my clients to call me in and pay a service charge for stuff they *should* have been able to handle themselves. And I fully agree with the UAC bullshit – it could not have been implemented worse, and is one of the most frustrating aspects of working on a Vista PC; the worst aspect being the shit that doesn’t work for unknown reasons, without any way of figuring out why?!? (Have you ever tried the problem solver? It ALWAYS says that it doesn’t know what the problem is. Good luck!)
Now I recommend all of my clients to stick with XP (if I can’t convince them to try Linux), or to try to find a new PC without Vista, which is getting to be harder and harder.
I find the complaints about Vista are rather foolish. I’ve been using it since beta, and it’s a solid, secure operating system. I haven’t had my system crash once since the Vista Premium install. Every single one of my components was recognized (including my video card). My UPS, my drawing tablet, wireless mouse and keyboard, printer, everything.
As for performance, I don’t know what anyone’s complaining about. My system is three years old, and running with 1gb of memory and Vista runs as well as XP did. I was worried at first, especially with the beta, that my system wouldn’t run Vista well at all, and I got a shock. It runs great. The networking is fantastic, and the media center also works flawlessly.
As for the security notices, I haven’t even had any issues with that at all. I got the notices right after the install, and since then only when I install a new program that wants to connect to the internet. And I can hardly complain about the system notifying me of that. No viruses, no spyware, in months.
I use my system for desktop publishing and design, and so I call BS on the guy above who said you can’t be confident that printed output on Windows will look as it does on screen. It does. But it convinces me that a lot of the complaints about Vista come from people who have never used it, or know absolutely nothing at all about computers.
The OS is fine. I’m sure some people prefer Leopard or Linux, but their obsession with trashing Vista (ignorantly, I might add), says more about them than about Vista. I mean, have you ever tried to explain a Linux install to someone not experienced with computers? Compared to Linux, Vista is a breeze.
I wholeheartedly agree with your article. I bought the Vista upgrade with my Dell Inspiron 6400, and I wish I’d never done it. It has made even the simplest tasks dog$h!t slow. I dual boot with Sabayon Linux, which runs blazingly fast. When I get more free time, I’m going to restore back to XP Pro, because this just isn’t worth it.
(Seriously, you really need to enable _date_ stamps on these comments, I have no idea how old this article is…)
Vista is still garbage and I cannot fathom the idiocy and ignorance of people that seem to chant off their support of the Vista excrement. I bet these morons haven’t even looked at the size of their Windows folder.
There are tons, and tons, and tons, of reasons to hate Vista, far beyond just the poor performance and bloat. Usability, design, and the whole “ten extra steps to get something done” approach that Microsoft seems to have taken. Vista is a piece of garbage.
I’m still on XP, and looking at Mac for my next OS. And I’ve been working with PCs for about 12 years. I’ve hopped on every new OS, I was in the XP beta, and the Vista beta (Longhorn). Vista is the first Microsoft operating system I can definitively call “utter shit”.