Save XP campaign? (

Which brings us to the point that UAC was not added to Vista as a security feature, but as an annoyance (on purpose). A Microsoft Employee actually admitted this (http://www.ditii.com/2008/04/10/microsoft-exec-uac-annoyance-part-of-design/)
Is this how far Microsoft have sunk? Windows seems to be collapsing under its own weight, and Vista is the proof of that,

I'll stick with my XP copy until Microsoft releases a better OS or wrestles it from my cold, dead hands
On a side note, I can't remember if I already signed that petition... =/

Any chance MS will swallow their pride, admit their mistakes, scrap Vista and call their next OS under a different name but under the guise of XP because of the backlash or will Bill Gates do a George Bush and claim we're winning the war (with Vista) ?

I've seen beta builds of the next windows and it's looking a good deal like Vista still In the mean time, I'm building a new PC and trying to ensure all parts will work well under XP, not Vista due to 1) vista being another cost 2) it offers me no real benefits over XP.

I got a laptop with Vista on it earlier this year, and while I'm not quite comfortable with Linux yet, I'm seriously considering dumping Vista in favor of it. (Maybe when Fedora 9 gets released.) For the applications I want to use, Vista and Linux+Wine are pretty much equal in terms of compatibility, and with 1GB RAM (even less actually, since 128MB is reserved for the IGP) Linux runs much snappier than Vista. I could upgrade the RAM pretty cheap, but why do that when other OS's can work just fine with what I've got?

(Of course, I'd much rather have XP on it, but another XP license is more expensive than the RAM upgrade, and I'm not one to pirate an OS. :whistling)

First of all Vista is not as bad as people thinks. Some thoughts:

1. It is true that is very heavy. Regarding RAM, getting a computer with 1 gb or 2 gb is easy and cheap. Regarding CPU, Vista is indeed CPU intesive, and that's the part that makes it heavy IMO, it has a lot of processes in the background, and the sum of all of them makes a considerable HEAVY.

2. OK Vista is heavy, but is unstable? The answer is no IMO, I remember having more bluescreens with the now sacred XP when it didn't have any Service Pack.

3. Driver support? Vista driver support is good. I don't have any idea of what kind of printers or stuff that people say doesn't work with Vista, maybe dot matrix printers from the 90's or what?. We don't expect Vista or MS to do miracles, for example I have an ol digital Olympus Camera. The drivers that used in XP were very buggy, in fact were Win2000 drivers. Expecting for Olympus to release drivers for that old camera will be foolish. On the other hand, take nVidia drivers support for example. They at first offered terrible performance, and no SLI support, does MS is guilty about that? I heard people around the internet and in the real world telling stories like "in vista your thumbdrive won't work", I won't explain more on this, because the point is obvious.

4. Security. I don't remember Vista having problems like the ones XP had, like the Blaster Virus. Blaster was a real mess if you guys remember well, it was a nightmare! Doing RPC and shutting down your PC in a minute wasn't a good idea, you know. But everybody has suddenly forgotten all that

5. UAC. This is were MS screwed up. Is kinda annoying, and a poor solution to security problems. And the "Average Joe" that opens attachments from unknown people, will still click yes to an sudden UAC Prompt asking to install "MEGA SUPER UBER EXCLUSIVE TOOLBAR" kind of stuff.

6. Minimun requirements: they are not so high nowadays but people pretending to run Vista with an old Celeron and 512 Mb of RAM are just plain crazy, and I include "the geniuses" at MS Marketing department for making the Vista Capable and minimun requirements. What happened? Laptops with just 512 mb of RAM were advertised of running Vista in all its glory, but we all know how they performed. Doorstops? Prety so! But what happened, the average consumer was unsatisfied, and from word of mouth Vista started to have a bad reputation. Now even where are Laptops selling with Core 2 Duo, and 2 Gb of RAM, people still think that Vista will run like shit on them and will prefer XP instead. The same goes for big corporations, that will still prefer XP even with pretty good systems.

6. Versions and Pricing: Home Basic shouldn't exist. Plain and simple. Vista most advertised thing was the eye candy. How come you have a Directx9 videocard and don't have the so deserved eye candy then. That would cause a lot of dissapointment, and also make people think that the Eye Candy just was all bullshit. As for pricing is obvious that Vista is too damn expensive

7. Windows Seven: People says that MS is rushing the next version of Windows because Vista it's a failure and that's the reason is going to be released just 3 years ahead of Vista. Everyone claiming that is just plain ignorant. Windows and Office releases were always separated by a 2-3 years period. XP to Vista was a big excepction, but people seemed to forget this again. And Seven looking the same as Vista now, is a ridiculous claim, Vista looked very similar to XP in the first releases. Seven is not even in BETA right now, and everyone claiming that it will be more lightweight tha Vista is just a fool (even with Minwin kernel stuff). AFAIK if that happens it would be the first version of Windows that is lighter than the last one.

8. Social Phenomena: I think Vista opinions and reactions are getting worse over time. I remember that when VIsta was just released enthusiasts didn't talked so bad as Vista as now. Even here in ET people was happy testing the BETAs RCs and stuff. But suddenly flaming Vista, and glorifying XP became the socially acepted thing in the IT world, and everyone thinking different is considered just crazy.

That's what I have to say about it. I have to say that I dual boot, and still use XP a lot more than Vista, but I also use Vista frequently.

- Vista can't import certificates as easy as XP. That's not pretty if you want to do things like email encryption, or document/code signing, for example.
- Vista FAILS to even move files in some cases. Last I tried moving loads of files (even with SP1), it just randomly stopped. Quality? Hardly.
- The requirements are just a slap in the face for corporations who run a lot of older computers.

I call Vista a Mac OS Emulator

On the other hand, did you guys already tested XP SP3 RTM ?

Installed and working fine so far. Not a single hitch. Install. Reboot. Done.
Takes just a few minutes.
That's more than what I can say for Vista SP1.

Vista is a mess up in many ways.
- Bloated as hell: comes with crap you aren't even interested in
- Removes some things good about XP
- Tries to solve API problems without doing what's seriously needed.

People always say that Vista's changes were necessary to fix some issues with the Win32 API. Windows is inheritly insecure: It's a design issue. Windows makes things overly complex, and does not unify some things. For example, their security tokens are different for nearly everything - POSIX has a unified system. Another interesting thing is in Microsoft's tutorials to go from UNIX to Windows in programming, they don't normally put emphasis on security, often using NULL for security tokens and 0777 in the UNIX examples. This lack of emphasis and lack of unification leads to usermode programs with small bugs and insecurities that could lead to virii or spyware.

The API is also implemented pretty poorly. With the way its implemented, if a security whole were found in the API itself, you could get full control of the system. Let me make an example. Let's say theres an exploit in the Windows menu system, and an exploit in the GTK menu system. In the Windows enviroment, you could get full control of the system: Edit, delete, read any local file, perform any operation that the computer is physically able. In the UNIX enviroment, the GTK app could be exploited but only the permissions of the current user can possibly be granted. GTK is simply a user mode library that tells the computer what to draw by going through the network. (more specifically, when running the app on the same computer as the target display it goes through a special network device that loops data back to the computer itself.) So, You could only do what that user could do. Anyone in their right mind won't be running as root on the system with casual applications, so this exploit can not destroy the whole system.

If Microsoft wanted Vista to be good, they'd have to have a serious amount of developers involved, and break the whole API. Aero doesn't fix the 100s of problems with the API or the monolithic design, it just creates more.

Any OS that was based on the Win9x architecture was unstable. Blame M$ for not telling the user which driver/app was causing crashes and for making the OS architecture THAT messy that a driver would crash Windows even when it was not in use (remember those random crashes when Windows 9x were idle with no apps running in the background?).
Any OS based on the NT4 architecture was far more stable partially thanks to those detailed messages on BSOD cases that would show the "guilty" driver so that we (the end users) would bitch to the driver provider in order to fix it. Unfortunately most 9x applications were not compatible with NT based OSes.

Well, XP brought the NT stability and 9x compatibility together (after SP1 came out at least). Sure, some apps were still failing to work but some things just can't happen.
There is a reason that XP was the only M$ OS that lasted that long and it was that stability/compatibility union.

People will eventually upgrade to Vista since they have technological upgrades regarding Graphics and Sound that some people (ie: gamers, professional musicians, professional artists) will find useful. They also offer interactivity updates that make the user experience better...

The thing is... that compared to what XP had to offer back then that's not much. I have to admit that Microsoft's strategy is amazing if you take some time to think about it. They had to offer an OS targeted to consumers since XP came out (and that's more than 6 years). If you consider what XP offers then it would be difficult to ask for more, let alone implementing this "more". They used the time they had to do all this "more". Yes they took (or "stole") ideas from MacOS etc., yes Vista has high requirements, it's heavy, it's buggy, it has buggy drivers, etc. but it still offers some new features.
The question however is... Who needs those features? Most companies are not interested in technological achievements, flashy interfaces and minor interactivity updates. They want something stable, compatible and extensively tested. XP offers that at the moment while Vista doesn't. Users with limited budget and users that don't really need the features Vista offer have no need to get rid of XP and install Vista either.

Me... I'm stuck with XP SP3 on both desktop and laptop here. For audio related apps I use 3rd party ASIO drivers on both systems that offer almost superb latency on both cases (a little better on desktop but that's mostly Creative's fault for making their Soundblaster Live! cards so excellent pieces of hardware). I don't play new games nor my video card has DirectX 10 support. System is solid as rock since the last format (that was almost 3 years ago). Every application and game I have or need runs fine on it. Is there any good reason to upgrade? Not really...
From the experience I had with the rest Microsoft OSes dating since the Windows 3.11 days XP was (and still is) by far the best OS they made. The years it managed to last by the time of its release and the countless implementations it had are the proof that I'm not the only one believing that. That's one of the reasons M$ has a hard time making people switch to Vista.

Doomulation said:

Installed and working fine so far. Not a single hitch. Install. Reboot. Done.
Takes just a few minutes.
That's more than what I can say for Vista SP1.

Click to expand...

took 30 mins to install SP3 here, but i figure thats because it was resetting my service stack.

ha ha
Vista SP1 takes aeons to install, I expected SP3 to be fast to install indeed.

nmn comment was interesting, what do you guys think about the Singularity Project that MS has for the future? It's too complicated for me, after all I am a psychologist

Not sure if I noted it here, but I got tired of Windows two years ago when I saw Windows Vista beta 1 and saw that it wasn't an operating system I'd ever be willing to install. Hence I've spent these two years getting increasingly well acquainted with Linux. I'm currently using Kubuntu, and have just burned a Debian GNU/Linux CD for my next PC.

So as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft can kill off Windows XP whenever they want. I'll sit here on the outside and watch the empire burn. Any failure on Microsoft's part can only benefit me really.