The head of PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has hit out at Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, saying that the ‘entire industry’ was disappointed by it. Few buyers have purchased new PCs specifically for Vista, Acer’s chief says “The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista,” the head of the world’s fourth-biggest PC maker told the Financial Times Deutschland in its online edition on Monday. Never before had a new version of Windows done so little to boost PC sales, he said. “And that’s not going to change in the second half of this year,” Mr Lanci said. “I really don’t think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista.”
Vista was the first version of Windows that I happily installed only to turn around 3 weeks later and decide I needed to go back a version.
It is a dud for everyone involved with it.
I lost a good deal of faith in MS on Vista.
It is a dud for everyone involved with it.
Don’t overgeneralise. I’d never go back to XP on my laptop.
That makes one of us.
Amen. I bought a 3.6k gaming laptop from Dell that had Vista on it. After using it for an hour, and fearing my hard drive would explode from the insane amount of I/O I went back to an nLited copy of Windows XP 64 bit and voila…my computer that I paid so much money for worked faster than ever! I didnt pay that money to have my machine pretend it was a Pentium 2 class machine to be honest. I paid all that money so I could run any app as fast as it could. Vista apaprently is a booger when it comes to performance. Yeesh!
“After using it for an hour, and fearing my hard drive would explode from the insane amount of I/O I went back to an nLited copy of Windows XP 64 bit and voila”
I’ll second that Amen. I just bought a new Lenovo dual-core laptop with 2 gig of ram and the hard drive I/O is ridiculous. I’m going back to Gentoo or Sabayon very soon.
I have to say this, though. Flash player is lightning fast on a Windows machine compared to Linux, and I’ll miss that.
Pretty much same experience here. I was honestly surprised how noticeable the performance difference was after uninstalling Vista, and installing a fresh XP. I was also a little disappointed by how much more memory Vista used. Just booting used over 500mb of memory. I didn’t have one application running and used taksmanager to kill everything that was not core to the OS. What a pig.
My friend bought a laptop and claims that Vista is faster. I know it is only because he thinks it is faster because his new laptop has a dual core 2ghz cpu and his old one had a 1.4 single core cpu.
I bought my girlfriend a laptop with Vista on it. She loves it. She enjoys that it looks pretty. The only glitches seem to be pretty minor, as well. It does what she wants it to and it looks pretty while doing it. She also loved Ubuntu w/ Beryl.
Also, the media center in Vista is very well done, in my opinion. It runs quite nicely. Sure, it can’t do everything (playback of ripped DVD images come to mind, or maybe it can and I just don’t know it), but it’s very functional.
She doesn’t really feel the need to go back, and despite claims to the contrary, it isn’t sluggish at all. Personally, I prefer my Linux desktop running Fluxbox, but Vista is fine.
Lokken.
I have had no issues either, the biggest bug i find is that the favorites bar gets shuffled in some open dialogues.
Really, i would rather have frontrow over WMC any day. It launches and quits pretty much instantly, is incredably responsive, and very simple to navigate. WMC is more geared towards appliance machines imo, and I rarely use it.
Sure, it can’t do everything (playback of ripped DVD images come to mind, or maybe it can and I just don’t know it), but it’s very functional.
I don’t know about Vista, but if it’s like XP’s Media Center, then it can play DVD file folders. So if you convert your DVD image file to the equivalent DVD folder, you can play it from the harddrive. Just make sure that the DVD folders are within the file hierarchy of a directlry that you have set as one of Media Center’s “Video” directories. Then when you navigate for “Videos”, go to the DVD folder and click it as if you were about to open it – the DVD begins playing.
Gianfranco Lanci is blaming Vista for his company’s poor hardware sales. I hope Acer isn’t really that dependent on the OS to be able to generate revenue. Why didn’t the company ask what they can do to improve their hardware instead of putting Vista on it and hoping for the best? The story above this one says Vista is rising in sales and usage.
The classic example of hardware suppliers and microsoft going hand in hand, trying to sell the newest and “fastest” equipment.. Now see… This is what happens, when someone fails…
(in this case MS)
If U buy a pc, specific made for the ultimate edition, then yes it’s fast and u like vista…
Then… If U have hardware, that was not specifically designed for vista only… Well.. Then U are in a hell-hole.
Now.. Can I say “ME” all over again??
Edited 2007-07-24 15:37
More correctly, both sides know that the vast majority of Windows licences sold are through OEM channels. To sell more hardware there needs to be a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows Vista. If there is no reason to upgrade to Windows Vista, people won’t buy new computers. Basically Windows sells the computers for the OEM’s.
Acer along with others were told that Vista would be a revolution, there would be enough compelling features to make people want to upgrade to the new operating system and in turn new system.
The new system have anything to do with the hardware specs? nope. Its like anything upgrade, most people weigh up what is involved vs. just getting one with the new operating system and instead just go for a new system and avoid the hassel of having to find someone who can install and configure it for them – believe me, the average user doesn’t feel confident enough to install Windows even with all the ‘ease of use’ rubbish spewed.
As for OEM’s – they need to wake up and smell the coffee – the symboic relationship with Microsoft is coming to a dead end, they will need something else to push sales forward, they need a new model which allows for long term revenue generation rather than relying on the one off hardware sales upgrade treadmill that runs the industry because once the majority of stuff is pushed onto the web, I can assure you that the number of years between purchase and upgrade will expand even further than it is today.
Your right… Thats what i meant with going hand in hand.
The only reason Vista is rising in sales and usage is that it comes pre-installed on PCs – whether the PCs are powerful enough to correctly run it, might I add…I bought a desktop PC at Future Shop in Canada (for my ex’s parents), and asked if I could get XP. They told me all their new PCs had Vista on it.
It took me three hours to get the system up and running (it was an English version, so I had to reinstall it in French), and once it was all installed it took a full 2 min. 40 sec. to boot (which was 15 sec. more than booting from a Kubuntu LiveCD, incidentally). The system felt very sluggish – this was *not* a PC that should have been sold with Vista.
Dude…
I feel sorry for them (and U too)…
Maby thats why people fail at buying vista alone.. 😉
I came across a laptop being sold with 512MB of RAM, 32MB removed for the shared graphics. It was being sold with actually less than the minimum spec for Vista. Performance was, as imagined.
It’s always been like this though. I clearly remember seeing a laptop being sold with just 96MB of usable RAM with XP. The CPU sat at 30% when idle.
Things are different now. While 128 MB is and was too little for a KDE or GNOME desktop, 512 MB (minus the shared graphics RAM) is more than enough for a modern Unix(-like) desktop operating system to perform well, except for Vista.
Things are different now. While 128 MB is and was too little for a KDE or GNOME desktop
Well…Not entirely correct. I’ve got a machine at home with just 128MB RAM and GNOME runs just fine. I mostly just use the machine for playing music, watching movies or surfing, though.
Gnome and a lightweight distro (even Ubuntu 5.x), and you’re good.
KDE’s the watershed.
It’s a nice thought, and might be true. But since you can not prove either way, how about you accept his statement?
Microsoft was promising to most vendors that Vista would encourage more sales.
It hasn’t as far as we know. (again, another rumour :p)
Therefore it isn’t a wonder PC makers are publicising this, it gives their shareholders a message: “we’re trying, but Vista isn’t helping”
All the local computer stores in my small town are not installing or selling Vista on new computers unless it’s requested and even then they try to talk them out of it. According to one of the employee’s at one I frequent almost every computer they’ve sold with Vista has come back with a request for XP to be installed.
I’m sure that in a year or so most of the problems we read and hear about with Vista will be nothing, but a memory. I think that Vista just didn’t have the support out of the gate it needed from vendors. Business always lag behind in new purchases like this. Every IT guy I know says the same thing, they aren’t upgrading until at least SP 1.
As for rising sales and usage. One acronym: OEM. People don’t stop buying new PC. Most people, I would assume, just take whatever version of Windows comes on the PC. I’m sure some request XP and other probably just complain about how crappy their new computer is and how they can’t get any “real” help.
Your small town, is it the kind where when you try to walk out at one end you end up coming right back in at the other end?
And every night all the people disappear somewhere and one can only hear distant chanting.
j/k
Edited 2007-07-25 02:28
I can talk about my case. I sold 50 windows XP Home Editions OEM in the past 4 months and just 2 vistas because the customers were almost idiots. I have explained to one of vista customers that your graphics card will not work correctly because their were no drivers for it, but he insisted to install vista ( His grahics card was with quad ports Matrox QID low profile, 800$).
2nd customer with vista had vista previously on his laptop and his hard disk became defective, while no recovery disks supplied to him from sony.
If you have P4 it would become PII immediately with vista.
I’m sure this will be taken as a flame by a Microsoft fan. But here goes:
“WoW!”
Maybe this is a Gates `joke` on Balmer. Who knows?
Edited 2007-07-24 16:15
The key to comedy is……………………. timing.
In other news…
The head of PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has been killed by an explosion in his home. Although Bill Gates has been seen crouching in the bushes nearby, the death of Lanci has been deemed an accident by Redmond, WA law enforcement authorities.
Well. Some people have no sense of humour.
In my area of expertise, I don’t know a single individual who would ever trust “anything” on a system running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
It’s horrible, Clearly it’s targeting those equipped with “lesser” minds.
You must not know very many people then.
I know lots of people who “trust” Microsoft. They “trust” Microsoft not because they have lesser minds, but rather because they, like millions of others, believe the hype. After all they aren’t the ones reading tech news sites.
“
”
In his defence, he did say his field of expertise rather than his social surroundings. I can quite believe he could have a job that relys on *nix driven software
“
”
I’d go further than that and say they trust Windows because it’s all they know. If you’ve never used Linux and you know your way around Windows, Windows is preinstalled on every system – preset up so little fiddling is required to run from new – then you are going to have a great deal more trust in Windows than in Linux. It’s not down to properganda, it’s just about sticking to what you know.
“Clearly it’s targeting those equipped with “lesser” minds.”
It’s shame that stupid elitism isn’t a valid reason for modding a post down.
Maybe people have powerful enough computers to be able to upgrade to Vista without needing to buy new hardware. That’s even more likely for early adopters.
The irony is that if 100% of XP users upgraded their old computers to Vista rather than buy new computers to run Vista, MS haters would still label Vista a failure because it didn’t drive new computer sales.
Personally, Vista will be driving a computer sale by me, but I’m waiting for SP1. But I won’t be getting an Acer so that won’t help Mr. Lanci. Instead, I have my eyes on one of HP’s Tablet PCs.
Edited 2007-07-24 17:49
I got an HP Pavilion dv9000, and have been nothing but impressed with it. The worst part of the experience was removing all the crap that comes pre-installed, other then that my vista experience has been seamless. (performance equal to xp, no thrashing problems, no stability problems, no compatibility problems, no driver problems, etc)
NEVER BUY A HP LAPTOP WITH VISTA!!!
I helped a client set up her new hp tablet pc, brand new. Took more than 4 hours for the HP preinstall environment to finally complete!!!
My god, I could have set up Vista manually twice within that time.
I wouldn’t recommend an IBM either because of all the extra software (I have no trust for those things), although the laptops themselves are top notch.
At the current moment a DELL seems like the best choice… That is if dell is selling vista laptops…
Thanks for the HP Tablet PC warning. But the HP Tablet PCs seem pretty popular at the various Tablet PC enthusiast sites (like http://www.tabletpcreview.com, where HP’s is the most popular). But I’ll keep your post in mind.
As for Dell, I’ve kind of sworn off them after having two Dell notebooks die within a year (while my old Mac PowerBook keeps chugging right along after 5 years with no problems) and even moreso sicne Dell began preinstalling Google Desktop. :p
Edited 2007-07-24 18:47
FWIW my wife’s had a refurb D800 for several years now and while there have been some case-related repairs needed, the system is solid. My C600 is likewise in good condition.
“I wouldn’t recommend an IBM either because of all the extra software (I have no trust for those things)”
What do you mean you have no trust.
I would buy IBM just for the software that comes with their thinkpads which no other manufacturer did correctly.
Take Dell:
enter service tag and you would find many downloads for your system that actually doesn’t exist on your system
HP:
I am certified here. HP support professional, HP preinstallation environment testing software, HP diagnostics, drivers update tool,…. tooo much confusion and crap
Sony:
a virus still better than their software
Toshiba:
anemic software, but your second best after IBM/Lenovo
IBM:
has
1. thinkvantage suite which makes life easier on your laptop.(for updates, profiles, custom made keystrokes,….etc)
2. RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu Linuxes support with linux thinkvantage version.
So I can justify getting a new PC, thus helping the struggling laptop industry? Anything else?
Currently I have a laptop setup for dual boot with XP PRO and RH. XP is fairly stable, doesn’t give any problems. I have a number of apps I’m using with XP. If I want to upgrade, seems like all the latest versions (so far) are available for XP as well. Frankly I absolutely don’t care which OS I’m runing (as a user). It must support certain set of applications I’m using. So again, why do I need Vista? I just read Microsoft will be offering “Windows 7” in about 3 years, so I may as well wait. (unfortunately, I do have to use Windows, since there is a number of apps I can’t find the equivalent under Linux, but I don’t want to get sidetracked on that).
“I really don’t think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista.”
This goes to show how out of touch with reality the majority of the big dogs at computer manufacturers are. I personally know two people that have bought new PCs specifically for Vista, and I’ve heard many more anecdotes of people throwing out their old PCs to upgrade to Vista. While it certainly may not be a lot of people, a few is still greater than none.
Never before had a new version of Windows done so little to boost PC sales
What about Windows for Workgroups? Windows Me? Come on now. I’m not a fan of Microsoft or Vista, but I think Lanci is just spreading FUD, whether he realizes it or not.
Seems to me this guy is using Microsoft as a scapegoat for his company’s problems. Vista surely isn’t causing Acer to sell fewer computers than they were before it was released. It’s not Microsoft’s place to push sales of your hardware; it’s yours. Get over it, and do something innovative instead of whining.
Hell, if Vista is so underwhelming, preload some computers with Linux (and do it right, unlike Dell) and see if you fare much better. I think you can a bit, if you tap into the enthusiast community properly, unlike Dell. The enthusiast community may be meager in comparison to the rest of the world, but if your Vista-centric sales are as paltry as you say, it doesn’t matter.
Edited 2007-07-24 19:31
Unlike a hobbyist or a typical OSNews reader, the largest segment of the market (otherwise known as Joe Sixpack) is looking at the fact that he just plunked down $1200 for his XP machine 2 or 3 years ago. From my experience with this type of user MSFT, et al. is going to have to have a really convincing reason to get Joe Sixpack to spend that much money again in such a relatively short time period. Yes I realize that 2-3 years is a lifetime in terms of Moore’s Law, but the way “Joe” sees it, if he spends that kind of cash on anything then it had damned well better last him for more than 2 or 3 years. In a way I can’t say that I blame him, either. Vista’s probably not scoring so well because “Joe” can already do what he needs to do with his present OS and computer.
Maybe that’s why I started using Linux; I usually can’t afford the newest machines out there, so I’m always stuck with kit-bashed units and “hand-me-down” machines. I simply want to be able to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my machine without feeling the need to buy more powerful hardware every other year.
Edited 2007-07-24 20:22
“Maybe that’s why I started using Linux; I usually can’t afford the newest machines out there, so I’m always stuck with kit-bashed units and “hand-me-down” machines. I simply want to be able to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my machine without feeling the need to buy more powerful hardware every other year.”
Don’t feel bad about using old hardware. I’ve gone dumpster diving for mine. Someone tossed a 64bit AMD Box in the trash and I luckily saved it from the landfill. It’s 2 ghz with 512mb of memory and Etch runs quite smoothly on it.
I would NEVER buy Vista simply because I have no real use for it. In my opinion, Vista is just eye candy and something to get people to buy stuff. But I guess MS thought there was no money in releasing a SP3 for XP.
While I think it is becoming more and more apparent that Vista is looking more like a dud, I do not know how much blame can really be applied to Vista for Acer’s sales. In my opinion, working as an HP VAR, I would think this has more to do with Acer’s marketing and options. At least for our clients, the HP’s have much more interest for them from the Smart Buy program that includes a 3 year warranty. At the very least we can always add in 1-3 year extended support at very little cost.
Where as Acer does not have this option. Every laptop comes with a standard one year. This is a real big drawback. As we no longer deal with Dell, 99% of all quote options have both HP and Acer in comparison, and 100% of sales have gone to HP. What our clients care about is the warranty on hardware, the OS they could care less about as any machine that came with Vista would be automatically downgraded as per license rights. Factor in that Acer just does not have the marketing power or channel partners that HP has.
As for the retail market, I think that quite possibly negative impressions of Vista could have an impact, but consider that most retail stores that would have Vista on an Acer would also have Vista on the HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc..
But hey, better to blame someone else than their own poor performance when it comes time to meet with the shareholders
But yes, I think across the board Vista is a failure.
While I don’t know where in the world you’re located, at least in the EMEA region Acer does indeed offer “Acer Advantage” extended (3 year) warranty that the customer can add for a small cost. They also offer Acer Advantage with cover for accidental damage.
According to Gartner, Acer was also the manufacturer with the highest worldwide growth in sales in Q2 2007 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=509905), so their performance can’t be that poor
The errors (features) I have experienced in Vista are well-known items:
1. Slow copy/unzip – copying from a USB drive, or unzipping a file (e.g., 16MB file) often takes 30min to 1 hour. Googling tells me this is due to Windows Defender checking every file before it proceeds. For unzipping I switched to 7-zip.
2. Network failure – my networking died after a day. No matter what I did, I could not get it to work. Thankfully I remembered the IP6 issue with Vista. Even though I am not using IP6, Vista defaults to using it. The solution is to diable IP6 support for the adapter – worked immediately.
3. Xampp – this is not a Vista issue directly, but PHP cli.exe has a problem with Vista, and a message will pop up every few second saying “CLI has stopped working”. It makes it impossible to do my PHP development with Komodo under Vista. I have to boot into Linux and use that version of Komodo and Xampp, or use my XP laptop, which is a slower machine. I will have to wait until PHP fixes that. It is not a Vista problem (necessarily), but it is the kind of problem you can expect.
I am using Vista Business that came with my new desktop.
LOL, my year old Acer laptop runs GREAT with Vista, I have actually easier time installing Vista than XP, all drivers were included with Vista, with two exceptions, which were downloaded by Windows Update. P-M 1,74 GHz, 1 GB RAM and ATI X700, runs flawless.
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…suddenly Vista is not the success it used to be.
Oddly nobody is saying the fastest growing PC maker. Is openly criticizing Microsoft…and this is the second time I can remember the first was over Vista home basic being so crippled nobody would want it…and people have very little to say on that topic. When I find it astonishing.
It shows how much software *drives* hardware sales when it never used to be the case…and thats not healthy. It also shows that companies relying on Microsoft’s Monopoly, are at the mercy of their products. Personally I always thought they liked Microsoft products with there built in hardware obsolesce things like DirectX, USB, Fat32, compositing desktop etc etc. I don’t actually see what they gain from complaining unless they are hoping for a discount to *shut up*.
I think the bottom line is 64bit/Multicore and Vista offer little more than WindowsXP on a 2Ghz Pentium. I actually think the only real driver for sales will be a *killer* 64bit application…and I haven’t a clue where that will come from.
Oddly he ended with “Stability is certainly a problem,” which makes a change from its the drivers.
Edited 2007-07-25 04:36
Vista did okay right away because the Windows/Microsoft fanatics bought it, just like the Mac OS X/Apple fanatics do with Mac OS X.
Then, it came down to real needs and a lot of people apparently don’t need it or have the hardware to run it.
It’s sad that Vista didn’t help Acer’s sales but that’s life with computers, right? It’s like the t.v. commercial where the man is driving his new computer home only to find that it’s been replaced in the product line.
It’s obvious that Microsoft aren’t selling sufficient numbers of Vista or they wouldn’t be backpedaling on their licence agreements concerning virtulisation, etc.
If Acer had better reliability numbers, they might have better sales.
I don’t like the term fanatic when its used by Vista users, and I can see a lot to be excited about with Apple, although not really the OS, although hopefully their next OS offering will come with a few surprises.
You can use terms like despair; desperation; apologizing; scapegoating; blinkered; blind because *those* terms are true and you don’t have to lower yourself.
It did well because of mass buying of licenses by OEM, the Vista users your referring to get it *free* from work. If they had to pay they would be as enthusiastic as these sales figures.
Acer have proportionally better sales they are the movers and shakers of the OEM world. Its a small article you should look at it. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39285526,00.htm
Acer is forth and climbing.
Vista hasn’t successfully obsoleted XP simply because of the backward compatibility problem Windows makes an awful lot of money from and 1 billion users is difficult to shift…look at GNU adoption, and well Vista has *problems* adoption being the one that matters most here.
The bottom line is software drives hardware adoption, this is a massive turnaround, and now hardware manufactures are paying not just the price of crippled hardware development, but of adoption as well. Microsoft stopped time…and well people are just waiting for the machines to die.
Edited 2007-07-25 06:03
Basically ALL Windows NT systems (NT, 2000, XP, Vista) are still pretty much like the Old Win9x only with the DOS kernel and command line recompiled to 32 bits. If you go to the command line in any of these systems you still see the DOS heretage of A:> _, C:>_, D:>_ E:>_ etc., at the prompt to describe storage devices rather than the more direct floppy, hd (for hard drive), cdrom, zip, and other more direct designations used in Linux, Solaris, BSD and all other extent *nix type systems for storage devices. Also the command line commands for the NT series are still those you can find in old books about DOS 5.0, 6.0, 6.2 and 6.22. Neither does the NT kernel even have the multitasking capabilities using the F keys that still makes command line software like Emacs popular amongst *nix geeks. Everything about the NT command line still says DOS in big red splash panel letters. I know most users only go for GUI related software and OS interfaces these days but it is at the COMMAND LINE where you find out the TRUTH about Microsoft operating systems.
Microsoft has just simply reached the end of the bloatware it can continue to shove on top of the DOS kernel and command line even when it is recompiled to 32 or 64 bits.
Edited 2007-07-25 08:08
I just have to say for someone to have spent that much time typing up a retarded response without doing ANY research whatsoever, I am truly amazed.
You know absolutely nothing about what you are saying. The reason they still use drive letters is because that’s what people are used to. Internally, there is a more complex naming scheme akin to what you see with udev on Linux. You can see it when you use Windows administrative tools. The reason why the command line still looks like DOS is because…yep, backwards compatibility and that’s what people are used to. It’s not DOS at all, it just has the same commands. Yeah, it is limited. Yeah, Microsoft knows it. That’s why they came up with Monad, which is even ahead of bash and other Linux shells.
I could write a shell for Linux that looked exactly like the DOS prompt. If someone used it, would you say that all the sudden, Linux is just DOS “recompiled to 32-bits” (which, again, shows how incredibly ignorant you are of anything related to programming or operating systems)? No. cmd.exe sucks. We know it. It is NOT, I repeat, NOT, the interface to the OS. It does not reveal anything interesting about the kernel or structure of Windows NT. For that matter, neither does bash. Command prompts/shells are just as distinct from the OS on Linux as they are on Windows (remember, the command prompt on Windows is cmd.exe, just like on Linux it’s /bin/bash or whatever).
I do want to ask…how does Windows do multitasking if it’s just the DOS kernel? It wouldn’t work very well I don’t think. How does it do protected virtual memory with just the DOS kernel? How does it have its own driver architecture (light-years ahead of Linux) if it’s just an old DOS kernel? DOS didn’t have any of that. Even Windows 3.1 ceased to use DOS for more than booting and filesystem access (more of a library for the operating system rather than an actual OS). Windows 3.1 had its own virtual memory manager and could multitask DOS sessions, not vice versa.
I suggest you do some reading on Wikipedia or somewhere. Hey, even check out the book Windows Internals, which goes into great detail about how the NT kernel works. I think you’ll be surprised.
Ignorance is Bliss as George Orwell so beautifully put it in the book “1984”. If that is true, you must floating on Cloud seven with that quote above. LOL.
NT Kernel is NOT a recompiled DOS kernel, not in a LONG shot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nt_kernel
The NT Kernel came from the base that IBM and Microsoft started together back in the late 1980s – early 1990s. They were working together a project called OS/2. That’s right, OS/2. They had a split and both companies agreed to share the work done together. IBM took the shared kernel and made OS/2. MS took the shard kernel and made, you guess it, the first NT based kernel.
Who cares if the CLI uses the same commands as DOS. IT’S JUST A SHELL!!!!! With same logic one can say that the modern linux kernel is just a recompiled AT&T Bell Labs Unix kernel just because it uses the same SHELLS.
C’mon if you are gonna bash a product, do it after you have educated yourself on it. If you don’t , you’ll make yourself look ignorant.
Basically ALL Windows NT systems (NT, 2000, XP, Vista) are still pretty much like the Old Win9x only with the DOS kernel and command line recompiled to 32 bits.
Never mind the reams of existing NT documentation, anyone with even rudimentary windbg skills can quickly prove everything you said wrong. But because I am always willing to admit I might simply be ignorant or wrong, please feel free to show us where the DOS PSP’s are in NT, where the VxD’s are loaded and where io.sys int21h calls are being used. Please feel free to post disassembly, stack trace, etc., as I would be interested to see exactly how Vista’s kernel is ANYTHING like the Win9x kernel.
Hardware industry is disappointed and I can understand them. Since Windows 3.1, each Windows release made them sell a lot of newer machines since Windows was both able to match increased hardware capabilities and obiouvsly required more horse power for newer features. That’s why hardware makers have been in love with Windows since the beginning: it was a driving force to sell more PCs and it was a good reason to upgrade or replace existing ones.
Vista is a fine-tuning for Microsoft OS concept. So the switch won’t be easy nor quick. However, it’s not Microsoft’s fault and Lanci is of course defending its side. The real problem is PC market stalled regarding innovation. If you look at what happened since last few years, nothing much happened about hardware. They switch from super-quicky single core machines to multi-core ones was mostly a tuning (required by industry to save energy, not to increase performance). HDD became slightly larger, slightly faster. Video cards have more memory onboard and they improved their performance and capabilities and that’s the field where most improvements happen today but they’re improvements, nothing revolutionary. Other slight improvements could happen in Flash technology replacing HDDs but again, that’s nothing revolutionary.
So where are those innovative features Vista should support? Vista tuned in most of real improvements HW industry made (better video cards support, better audio support, optimization for multi-core CPUs, wide use of Flash technology and so on) but there’s nothing so special which could force people to replace their 2-3-4 years old PCs.
The driving force was gaming but many games developers are still not able to benefit from multi-core capabilities so this won’t be a push for a while. Many everyday tasks are switching from your home PC to your mobile phone or pocket PC and that’s where major growth will happen.
So I’d tell Mr Lanci: bring to the market something cool and software will support it. There’s a limited innovation software could drive without hardware assistance.
As for me, I think some good innovation could happen in UIs field if touch-screens get more cheaper and widespread. Microsoft has pioneered both TabletPC and touch-screens markets but as Apple showed, there’s not much you could do about an OS if other software won’t be “touch” enabled. And software makers won’t invest in touch technology until hardware makers will be able to push that technology for a price cheap enough to ensure widespread adoption.
Mr Lanci could innovate instead to hope Microsoft will make him sell more PCs…
Laptop stayed Vista (after a second reinstall)
PC went back XP after 2 months try
The improved resume/hibernate is pretty much the only reason it stayed on laptop.
(ps: i would have never bought it but it comes with the laptop)
Edited 2007-07-25 13:25 UTC
Not just Acer but everyone, Dell has even said the same thing in not so many words. More info can be found in the links below.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41176
German Article: Acer attackiert Microsoft
http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Acer%20Microsof…
Let’s see New version of Windows is terrible, OMG it’s sucks. No need to upgrade. It’s SLOW. Worst version of Windows yet. This is the end of Microsoft…… I’m staying on my old version of Windows. I’m moving to Linux, Solaris, Mac, Unix…
Now…. when did I hear this…..
OH YEAH…..
6 years ago when Windows XP was released…..
*REALITY CHECK*
True not all of us have the funds to upgrade our hardware right away, but Vista WILL BE the mainstream OS within a year or two. Why? As a previous poster pointed out, Joe SixPack just bought that new computer 2 years ago and sees no reason to upgrade, but Joe Sixpacks kids are going away to College. So he gives kids old computer and buys a new one… with Vista. Kids go to college and decide they want to upgrade old computer to Vista, they get student discount at college. Seeing the treadlines here?
Microsoft did not and does not expect Vista to be an overnight landslide success. I remember hearing stories in 2001 about people buying new computers and removing XP for Windows 98 or 2000. This is common… it’s called CHANGE and people fear it.
For most of the people out there who have tried Vista with bad results. I believe most of you tried it with the preconception that it will fail for you, so you nitpicked it to death and then gloriously proclaimed that it SUCKS.
I’m typing this on a older Dell Inspirion 1501 running Vista Business with Aero on and it runs fine. It doesn’t I/O thrash, it just …. works.. and works fine.
90% of the Vista problems right now is NOT Microsoft’s fault it’s the hardware manufactures and their slowness on putting out new updated Vista Drivers. When Vista first came out HP didn’t have a full driver for my Network attached All in One Printer. Their website said, just add a printer and make a network port for the printers IP. Great… but then I can only print, not scan or fax. It took them 3 months to put out a driver. Is that Microsoft’s fault? Matrox still hasn’t put out good video drivers for Vista. Is that Microsoft’s fault?
I know many people, including the company that I work for, that have migrated to Vista already and have had NO problems and have been extremely happy with it.
Does that make Vista the perfect OS? Hellz no! No such beast, not even Linux is perfect.
I love this site but at same time I hate it, but I keep coming back. Linux users like to beat their chests and claim they are “enlightened” or not a “lesser minded” user. But some of them are also the first ones to show their ignorance and blant bias without research. SOME not ALL, I do respect majority of the peoples OPINIONS here.
Sorry for the rant,
😉
Dropping all the anti-hype, and other nonsense, there are some really compelling reasons to like Vista such as prioritized IO, prioritized paging, a fairer scheduler, vastly improved audio, video and network stacks and a solid security model. That said, there is no denying that Vista hit some non-trivial initial snags that revolved around three key problems:
1. Several big hardware vendors’ drivers simply were not ready (as in badly, badly broken). While this problem has gotten much better, driver maturity is still a problem for some vendors and will likely remain so for a while to come. Some of this is due to the radical changes in several key driver stacks, some of it is Microsoft’s fault for not pushing hardware vendors harder and a lot of this is just apathy and sloppiness on the part of some vendors.
2. Vista is big. You can’t get around the fact that its in-memory footprint is bigger than XP. Yes, people have been misreading the memory counters and such. Yes, much of what people perceive as memory utilization is actually pre-fetched pages in the system cache (standby list). However, the actual working set of many of the base system processes is simply larger and there are new subsystems that just didn’t exist in XP. This isn’t all bad, as the system tends to scale much better on large memory configurations. That said, Vista really doesn’t run well (e.g. as well as XP) with 1GB. It needs at least 1.5 to run well, which means 2GB for most peoples configurations.
3. Vista implements some cool IO technologies (IO priority, bandwidth reservation), but it’s also susceptible to poor IO subsystem implementations. Some hardware vendors implemented disk subsystems with serious latency issues. The biggest problem is these systems may still obtain decent winsat scores, but actually perform very poorly in terms of actual user experience. Given item 2, Vista end’s up doing more IO’s (especially) on 1GB and less configurations than XP, thus highlighting the problem much more clearly. Systems with good storage subsystems (7200 RPM disks or 5400 RPM disks with large caches and a quality controller implementation) tend to perform quite well, even on lower memory configurations.
Now, with all that said, the above problems are in the process of being resolved or will simply become non-issues as the relative power of common hardware increases. Remaining issues that ARE actual bugs will get fixed (software isn’t perfect people).
The Windows folks made some very hard decisions with Vista, including breaking a lot of drivers and legacy code in order to move the platform forward. These were good and necessary changes that will pay BIG dividends over the next few years. Furthermore, on a modern machine, with plenty of memory, a modern (dx9+) GPU and fast disk subsystem, Vista today is a better OS than XP.
Edited 2007-07-25 22:52
This perhaps arguable right now.
Vista does, however, contain a number of provisions which deliberately will make Vista stop working or work only with reduced functionality.
DRM “tilt” bits and WGA checks are just two such provisions that are known about right now.
When in the near future these “shoutdown Vista functionality” features begin to get triggered, either in error due to bugs or maliciously due to malware … then we will begin to see a fallout of Vista problems that are due directly to Microsoft writing Vista in Microsoft’s interest and not the user’s interest.
Other features of Microsoft software that are undeniably written exclusively in Microsoft’s interest and not the users interest is Microsoft’s avoidance wherever possible of open formats and protocols. Lack of SVG support, attempts to make it so that Vista clients can be served only by Windows servers, poor support for web standards and utter refusal to include proper, integrated support for ODF in Office 2007 (that is, so that ODF could be chosen as the default file format) are the best-known examples of this.
All of these endemic and severe problems with Vista are directly and unequivocably Microsoft’s fault.
Gianfranco Lanci is right.
Edited 2007-07-26 02:06
Regarding driver problems, perhaps Microsoft could write their own drivers for the hardware like most other operating systems.
I own IT Consulting firm and recieved a call today from a client who was planning on purchasing 245 Acer computers for his company after reading about the comments he felt it was Acer who couldn’t handle Vista correctly and now want to purchase HP desktops. I know 245 pc’s are not the largest amount but all it seems Acers negitive comments did is drive more potential pc sales away.
I am sick and tired of valid, but unpopular points of view being modded down. The mod system is not intended to enable mob censorship.
If you don’t agree, reply and discuss it. But don’t just vote a post down.
These “provisions” are put in the OS to stop piracy. If you are using the software legally then these are NON-ISSUES. As for the DRM, I’ve been using Vista for almost 5 months now and have NEVER had an issue with any downloaded or my current media files. DRM is an issue with media bought from sites like iTunes and Microsoft’s music service. <Stamped>FUD</Stamped>
It’s THEIR product and they can do what they want with it, but regardless it’s a logisitics move as well. Think about it. Windows and Windows Server are used in MANY places. If Microsoft had builtin and fully supported support for “cross-Platform”, the
Tech support alone would be monsterous! Joe Sixpack IT Man from Rosie’s Car Garage is having problems connecting his Windows XP desktop to a OpenLDAP/Samba Domain (NT4 support only mind you). Who will he call? Samba project leaders? Not likely and if he does he’ll get the answer RTFM. He’ll call Microsoft and then the MS Tech will have to not only support their product but a open source project as well. Too much overhead. Do you blame them?
It would be like buying a Ford car and wanting to tow it behind a Winnebago, but you are having problems linking them up. Who do you call? Ford? Is it their fault they didn’t make thier car fully compatible with everything in the world?
As for ODF, you can install a ODF plugin for Office 2007 and make ODF the default file format.
I meaning to argue but displaying another “Devil’s advocate” view on this. The world and business is not a local Burger King, You can’t have it your way right away.
Edited 2007-07-26 15:36