Re: Anyone using Vista?

On Mar 8, 2:34 pm, Clark F Morris <cfmpub...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 7 Mar 2009 10:53:22 -0800 (PST), rip...@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 8, 6:13 am, SkippyPB <swieg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
."

I wouldn't touch Vista.  Hell I've got 4 boxes in my house, 3 of them
on XP Pro and 1 on Win98.  I acutally like the Win98 box the best but
really have few complaints about XP Pro.  From what little I've seen
of either Vista or Win 7, I see no reason or advantage to upgrading.
If they are like most MS operating systems, you'll need a larger hard
drive and more and faster memory to make them work right.  No thanks..

Microsoft develops software to meet the exacting needs of its
customers. You are not a Microsoft customer, OEMs, Gateway, Dell,
Walmart are, you are customers of them.

The OEMs want a reason to make the computers you already own obsolete
so you have to throw them away and buy new, bigger, faster ones.
Microsoft has produced what they want.

The OEMs want a range of products from cheap and nasty that will get
you into the shop (a $500 laptop with Home Basic) but you wouldn't
show it off to your friends so that they can sell you up to a $1000
with 'Premium' or $1500 with Ultimate that gives you 'bragging
rights'.

The users just want a box with an operating system that gets the job
done. Windows 98 did that. Windows 2000 nearly did that. XP eventually
did that.

If XP+ had just been a better XP then it would work on existing
machines and nothing would be there for MS's customers. In fact it is
very noticable that Windows machines slow down over time as they
aquire more software, spyware, viruses, anti-virus, updaters and such.
The solution is to buy another faster machine of course, every year if
the OEMs have their way.

A wipe and fresh install of the OS will usually get the machine back
to working full speed, so a new XP+ would have revived many machines
and not required replacement. OEMs did not want that at all. So the
users got stuck with Vista, and Windows 7 will not return to XP levels
though it may make Vista capable machines work OK.

Actually just after Vista was released MS announced that the next
Windows would be 64 bit only to ensure that all the 32 bit machines
were thrown away.

If MS did not look after its customers this way they (the OEMs) would
look for other way to restore profitability, such as reducing their
vast payments to MS and putting Linux on machines.

The problem with doing that is that if they sell a Windows machine
they know that 2 or 3 years later that user will have to buy a new
machine. If they sell a Linux machine the user will run it for twice
that time or more.

I stopped using my Windows 98 computer when Microsoft finally dropped
support.  

I do actually have a Windows 98 SE2 computer here. It didn't stop
working when Microsoft 'dropped support', I am sure that they would
prefer that it did. As I run the latest Open Office, Firefox and other
non-MS stuff on it, when I need to, and never run Outlook Express or
IE then 'MS support' is not required or wanted.

I am still using the 2004 computer with XP because the
system is supported and it is doing what I want it to.  Using certain
features of the web or possibly getting serious about scanning and
editing my slide collection will require a more powerful computer.
Depending on the collection of functions desired, Linux, OSX, BSD,
etc. could well get to be as resource hungry.  

The main machine that I use for most of my work was setup in 2003. I
did upgrade the RAM to 750 Mbyte but it is < 2MHz single CPU. It has
51 GBytes of 'stuff' on it including several thousand photographs. It
has many, many software packages and development software, including 3
versions of Open Office, its runs PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, ... It's
CPU is currently 99.3% idle. It usually doesn't get rebooted at all,
but there was a power cut last week.

Other systems do not get clogged up and slow down like Windows does.
The main reason for this is that Windows runs several 'update agents'
and spyware from installing applications, and the system also runs
'optimisers'.

I suspect that a 600
Canadian dollar laptop with Vista service pack 1 will outperform both
this computer and my wife's 1 gigabyte AMD Athlon 3200.  


That will be a clean, fresh install of Vista. Try a fresh install of
XP on your old machine and Vista may not do so well against that.


If Linux became popular then it would be good enough to reuse old
machines and there would be no need to buy anything new at all.

The netbooks started with Linux because it would be inappropriate to
pay MS $100 or more for the OS to put on a $200 machine. MS had to
counter that with XP and could only charge $20 or less (some say as
little as $5). If Windows 7 by some magic does run on a netbook it
will be equivalent to 'starter' edition and run only 3 tasks and is
unlikely to be only $20.

While XP on netbooks sells about the same numbers as Linux netbooks,
this seems to be that users want XP and not Vista. They are choosing
an XP netbook rather than a Vista Laptop, not so much because they
want a netbook, but because they don't want Vista.



.

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