Anonymous

Maidstone, Kent

Software Developer

To those who blindly yell in favour of Microsoft…

Having used Vista in BETA, RC & Retail flavours I can say with experience that Vista is not (in its current form) any kind of improvement over XP.

It’s unstable, 20-25% slower across the board, very poorly supported in legacy drivers and even the most expensive “editions” offer little in the way of new features. Its interface is trying to imitate the Mac. I for one don’t want a Disney Pixar animation every time a file is copied. What a waste of CPU!

What I wanted to see was a faster more memory efficient version of XP with some genuine new features (not gimmicks). Instead we get a dumbed-down white elephant, trying to be a cash cow and failing.

As a software developer on the Windows platform (I neither have nor want a Mac or Linux, thank you) I expected something better from Microsoft, especially as it is their second attempt at a new OS. They already went back to the drawing board with Longhorn.

Since the Torrent & Warez sites barely list Vista, the non-paying individuals out there share this view. The paying customers also think Vista is less-than-desirable; witness Dell returning to selling a range of XP-installed workstations at the behest of their customers.

Microsoft claim Vista sold 20 million copies in the first month, (over XP’s 17 million) but their figures are for more like a two month period and include upgrade vouchers shipped with XP machines and licences sold to OEM channels. Licence sales to OEM’s are not sales. Since independent figures put US PC sales at 3 million, Microsoft’s claim really begins to unravel. Gartner and IDC forecasts show no significant uptake in PC sales because of Vista.

Those people who I know who ARE using it, have XP installed and dual-boot to run games, Adobe apps., scanners & PDAs, since they don’t work well (or at all) under Vista. And live in hope that the NEXT nVidia driver release will be the one that fixes it all.

Microsoft may have 90% of the OS market currently, but they won’t keep it with Vista unless they fix it. Speed, DRM, security & hardware drivers all need sorting out before I’ll touch it again. See you at SP1.