Too bad it's not really dead. And, after all the problems and frustrations it has caused, I hope it does anything but "rest in peace." No, I want it painfully thrashing around while it withers and dies.

I do see how you could see that from a developer/IT point of view; however, the modern consumer is more easily fooled nowadays.
I'm not saying that Vista is all bad. Actually, I have beta tested a lot of new features for it, and it seems to be on the high-resource end, but fairly smooth. I do believe, though, that when Vista was first announced as being able to run on a 512MB memory computer, I believe a lot more people should have done more than give Microsoft a slap on the wrist. Just starting up my laptop takes a max of 1GB of memory, but goes down quickly afterwards.
Point being, as with most new OS, if Windows hopes to even play "catch-up" in the OS race with Mac's new Leopard X, they've got more than their work cut-out for them.

I'm encouraged because this is the first time since the introduction of the PC that businesses all said "What benefits do we get for the expense?" It may sound like an obvious question, but for complex reasons it was never routinely asked when considering IT purchases. The market has finally matured to the point that users are not going to buy something because the competition might buy it first, they want to know what value they are getting for their money.

I've successfully run Vista on 800MHz PIII with 512MB RAM. It really worked. It seemed to worked about as well as XP until Antivirus was on there for a while. Of course all the eye candy is off on such an old PC, and that made Vista 'work-able' on such a slow PC.

On an average PC though, Vista is slow. As an upgrade, it should run better on the same hardware, but overall it doesn't. 1GB RAM PC works OK. 2GB RAM works better. 4GB RAM seems like a minimum requirement for decent overall performance.

I was running Vista betas long before Vista went RTM too, and I agree, Vista seemed problematic. I expected it to get better, but it sounds like even SP1 won't help.

The poorer performance of Vista has caused me to pause and consider Linux. In early 2005, I would NEVER have considered it! But I've found that Linux runs quite well on a laptop that was so old it barely ran WinXP reliably anymore.

Linux is looking more reliable, less resource intensive, and much better on the wallet. I'm running Linux at home now and tentatively testing it out in businesses now. It's only a matter of testing existing apps (in WINE) on Linux and/or finding replacement apps before I'll end up recommending Linux in offices where I had recently deployed Vista.

Unless Windows 7 is radically different and radically better, I believe Linux is the answer.

In all the news that has come out about Vista there was a quote I came across that says it all. MS Corporate Vice President Mike Sievert was quoted as saying (late November 2007), "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista."

Apparently, the system's inability to reach critical mass is our fault.

This statement, though if read properly, also says that Microsoft believes it can do no wrong and that it fully understands what the corporate/enterprise user wants and needs. This said, they seem to be continually retrofitting their product lines to respond to what we know we need.

The business community's response to Microsoft is, "Frankly, Windows Vista wasn't 100 percent ready for the world."

It seems way past time for Microsoft to finally understand that we--developers and users-"own" our computers.

We will no longer let the minions of Microsoft determine how we use computers. We use our computers for real work, we understand computers inside and out, and we believe that we have the right to decide when and if we upgrade our OS or software.

Microsoft can ship a lousy OS like Vista, but they cannot make us buy it or use it. Microsoft can stop shipping Windows XP, but that will just force the move to OSX or Linux.

Microsoft is no longer in control of this industry. They will never be in control of it again. They have two choices--create products that people will want to use or ride the company into oblivion.

I believe they will go for oblivion, but maybe they will surprise us.

I said on day one of the release and I quote myself "Vista will be to XP, what Windows ME was to Windows 98. I can see myself asking people with Vista if it was ok to 'upgrade' them to Win XP in the same way I asked people with Windows ME if I could 'upgrade' them to Win98." So far from what I can see I should be a Windows prognosticator!!!!!

I Love Vista!!!

I love it because all of the RAM manufacturers realized that it was such a bloated, slow pig that folks would have to upgrade their RAM and when it didn't take off, they had to lower their RAM prices dramatically.

This caused my 2MB memory upgrade to drop from $600 to $80 in less than a year - which is when I upgraded my Macbook Pro.

Thanks Microsoft for making RAM cheap!!

- Bill

This seems to be a self profisizing type of situation. If enough IT people, say it is terrible, and not worth upgrading, than that makes it so. For the enterprise, it is to bloated, and consumber based. But this is the perfect OS for everybody @ home to use. Maby we will see the split that use to exist for NT and win 95.

The comments are important on this issue. If Microsoft deployed crap that wasn't ready for end-users, then there ought to be a way that those of us end-users that ended up with Vista can form a class and seek some sort of balance in the process Microsoft has subjected us to. I'm writing this comment from work on Win2k, which has been a great OS for my work. I liked XP on my first newer laptop, but my last Acer only came with Vista, and it has routinely had issues and is not as functional for me, a person with a physical impairment who relies on a computer for my work.

I recently purchased a new laptop that came with Vista Premium. I have 14 other machines running Win 2000 Pro. Although I have not had any problems with the Vista machine, I find the human interface to be no better than I found with XP which I found to be poorer tha Win 2K ( the reason we did not change to XP.

I will not recommend it to our clients or upgrade our existing systems based on what we see. If we have to upgrade to 64bit systems because of applications we will look at other OS's as an alternative.

I might also say that the interface on Office 2007 is suffering from the same problems. Our productivity dropped over 50% in our shop with it. We are now going back to Office 2000 and 2003.

I wonder if at some point in the near future there will be another 2000 like incident and we will be told that we have to upgrade.

Microsoft's biggest mistake was not envolving the Enterprise in developing a new system. If they had asked questions like, What do you need for your systems, What kind of devices do you need to interoperate with, What networking issues do you have? All of these would have pointed toward a better network device designed to run on current machines rather than domestic toys for the home. Then, maybe, the businesses with the volume licensing agreements will adopt the new O/S which is mandatory for any real market inroads.

I dont forsee a switch any time soon for the 1000 PCs I control. Most of it is driver/hardware issues for scanners and video cards. If recent hardware (purchased less than 14 months old) doesnt work, I cant recommend we throw out a lot of hardware just to change over to a system that really doesnt provide us ANY benefits. In addition, I wont recommend we change over SOME machines just because we can, yet hold back changing other critical machine becasue of driver and hardware issues. It just NOT worth it!

I am an end user, a CFO/CPA who has a degree in software engineering and I have liked Vista x64 since it was released. I was disappointed that improvements to the file system were not done, but its stability is excellent. I have had XP crash so many times and been left with "can't find NT loader". With Vista the new structure precludes this event and it recovers. I have it running legacy and 64 bit programs flawlessly. I didn't expect it to run on my older machine and purchased a 64 bit dual core HP workstation. Why would I want to continue to run on an old 32 bit machine? Additionally, why wouldn't everyone want to get new software that will exploit the multi-core processors? I hear so much whining about what I think has been an excellent platform. I detest XP. It crashes with too many windows open, crashes when new software is installed and has given me the BSOD all too many times. May that buggy junk Rest in Peace. I am making my IT group change to Vista since summer. Macs crash and suck big time. Everyone just forgives Apple for taking a Unix variant and making it buggy with its Leopard release. Perhaps, Microsoft has emphasized backward compatibility to satisfy all of the whiners who want to continue to run all the same software. Accept change. Microsoft admits its mistakes and is trying to make improvements, but it can't please everyone at the same time. No, I don't work for Microsoft or own any stock in it. I just find the system works well.

The 2000-like event will be Microsoft yanking corporate support for XP. Corporations will adopt Vista in short order after that. What is Microsoft waiting for?

Break the wedge!
www.breakthewedge.com

I disagree in as much as what I am seeing as an IT consultant is businesses taking a second look at their MS enterprise license agreements and saying "if I am not using office 2007 and I am not getting support on windows XP then I'll save the MS ELA cost and simply buy an OS and office with each new PC". This is a huge paradigm shift that if it continues to gain momentum, will have a huge impact on revenue and will definitely gets some attention in Redmond.

Windows ME-Windows Vista Samo Samo garbage

The pro Vista posts seem to be up to their necks in water and staring fixedly at the pyramids.

Corporate users will not switch over working systems just because Microsoft no longer supports them. Especially if Vista breaks the important applications they rely on for running their business. (How many rely on Microsoft for support anyway?)

As far as home users, many are using programs that require far more power in terms of processor and RAM than most business apps. A gamer or 3D artist isn't going to switch to something that wastes half it's cycles spying for the entertainment conglomerates.

I've been using XP in the office for several years, and the only program that caused any problems was PC/Anywhere. And once I switched to XP at home, that was no longer needed and the problem went away. XP is the most stable Win OS I've ever used, and I've been using Windows since the beginning. And based on comments from numerous IT professionals, both in person and on the web, XP is a stable OS, and Vista is the new ME, and few are willing to upgrade given its stability and performance issues, and lack of real benefits.
As for the benefit of home users having Vista, even that is questionable, at best. Unfortunately, most are forced into it because they have no options. It's hard to find anything but Vista on new computers any more in the consumer arena.

I think articles like really show just how ignorant people are...especially people who really shouldn't be soignorant. XP had the same issues in the beginning, as did Win2k. I can remeber that Xp didn't even have drivers for Sound Blastercards because Creative dropped the ball and didn't get drivers released until 6 months later. They learned thier lesson from the customer lashback and had thier drivers ready for release with Vista. The problem with Vista is that the hardware vendors can't seem to be bothered to write the drivers to support thier devices, even though they had pelnty of time prior to the release of vista to do so.

I have been running vsta since it came out and even on my crappy ACER laptop it runs pretty good,despite the fact that ATI can seem to get it's crap together and get drivers for it it's chipset and video (yes...over a year later they still don;t have a good driver set). As far as the whining about it needing more memory/processor/drivespace/etc...quit the whining. Every OS as it progresses and add more features is goingto require more juice. Just because you can run linux in command line mode effectivlyon a 386 doesn't mean you should deny yourself modern features because of it. That argument is pretty lame.

Much like every other release of Windows(and new releases of other software as well), most companies won't migrate until after SP1. Most software has bugs until after a first revision has been released. After this, as companies buy new systems, XP will be slowly phased out...the same as what happened with every other versionof Windows.

These doom and gloom articles are intellecually dishonest.

Write a Vista-bashing blog and you're guaranteed to get attention from the Microsofties, open source bigots, Peguinistas, and Mac heads.

First off, your Vista-bashing blog is pretty much crap. "No major new technologies; no paradigm-shifting architectural changes; nothing to whet a system administrator's appetite." Oh really? Recall, for example, one of the driving forces was all the Microsoft-bashing Penguinistas crowing that XP had to be dumped immediately in favor of Linux (pick a flavor) because of security. So, the Microserfs added the sort of intrusive security model that makes Linux only appropriate for geeks and what's the response? Oh, it's slow. It's bloated.

So what's Microsoft doing? For the next version of Windoze they're stripping out everything and building it from the ground up. Will it shut up the Linux bigots? Of course not, they have an endless spew of whines. Oh, you Microserf dummies stripped out all the features I luv. Oh, Micro$oft charges money for it. Oh, it's proprietary. Whatever.

Look at the anti-Vista commenters. I luv Mac. I luv Linux.

Mac's security of late leaves a lot to be desired. Linux still is a fragmented OS with too many flavors, too little vendor support, and too many configuration hassles for the typical consumer or small business.

If Microsoft were smart - and I'm certainly not claiming they are - they would simply ignore the very loyal opposition of boo birds who they appear obsessed with quieting. They never will. Microsoft should concentrate on mainstream business and home users like they did once upon a time.

I used Windows religiously up until a few years ago. I got annoyed having to wait so long for a broken new OS that i started looking for a Linux distro to use. I went through around 4-5 before I settled on Ubuntu.

The machine I'm on now has gone through 6 upgrades over 3 years and is still working fine. I probably won't need to upgrade for another few years either.

I really don't understand why people stick with Windows. I am in control of my machine. I can skip upgrades if I want and do the next one. It works :)

And I've been using Linux at work for 2.5 years now. We use MS Exchange and I use Evolution. No problems.

Please, someone tell me why they stick with Windows.

"These doom and gloom articles are intellecually dishonest."

Holy Mother of Perl!...I laughed so hard I actually threw-up a little bit!
Drink the Kool-Aid with a funnel if you must, but *Please* make use of the Spell Checker. It will help make you look slightly less "Vista Capable".

>Drink the Kool-Aid with a funnel if you must, but *Please* make use of the Spell Checker.
>Drink Kool-Aid with funnel if you must, but *Please* use the Spell Checker.
>Kool-Aid with funnel must, *Please* use Spell Checker.
>Kool-Aid, *Please* Spell Checker.
>, *Please*.
>Please
>P

eric, we know that was you and we appreciate the use of spell check for that other twenty dollar word - anonymous.

As a Linux lover, and a Vista user I have the best of both worlds. My dual core Viao laptop came with Vista Premium and runs flawlessly out of the box. On the other side of the room is my AMD 700 Mhz runnng Ubuntu on a 32M video card!

When are all of us opinionated computer super users going to stop expecting Vista or Microsoft to appeal to high end computer users, and Linux to the consumer? I have been in the loop since Windows 3.1 and Slackware 1.0. It ain't happened yet!

As a "home user", and one with generally above-average tech-geekiness, I can promise that I will *never* switch to Vista. In fact, I'm more than happy to build PC's for people I meet who want new hardware but don't want Vista, just so they don't have to buy a system with it prepackaged.

To John P... If you're having *that* much trouble with XP, you've got some serious system issues beyond just your OS... I've run XP Pro since early 2002, on several different systems.. I've had those computers die from many things... component failure, lightning strike, 4 year old spilling pepsi into the case... I've *never* had a single BSOD running XP.. ever.

I have installed "dubious" applications, just to see how infested they were with malware/viruses.. and had to reformat the PC accordingly... I've tried overloading my PC's with running programs, just to torture test them... Not one BSOD under XP. I've had *other* issues.. but not one BSOD.. ever.

It's a stable and reliable OS, and actually pretty secure, if you go into services.msc and turn off all the useless, security-hole, "Features" that Microsoft enables by default.. and as long as you avoid any version of IE and Outlook like the plague...

Vista deserves to die. The only things that are positive about it from a "home user" standpoint are DirectX 10 and support for more RAM. PERIOD. The negatives, such as the intrusiveness of Microsofts "latest and greatest" (yet still wholly ineffective) security measures, the bloat and lackluster performance, the lack of hardware support, and the efforts of the IT world's largest convicted monopolist to become shills for the racketeering efforts of the RIAA/MPAA...
just ensure that there's really no positive reasoning sufficient for the home user to adopt Vista either, much less the Enterprise user.

In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of the current "Vista Adoptions" have been due to OEM pre-installs and hardcore gamers itching for DX10. There's really no point to shelling out far too much money for such a monstrously inferior OS.

I have two Vista machines running in a SBS & XP environment. Alas, I may wind up downgrading them to XP. They take forever to boot, almost as long to shut down (on the laptop), both running on more than adequate hardware. Office 2007 is nice though. I have been a Windows user since day 1, but this release just isn't doing it for me.

"Macs crash and suck big time. Everyone just forgives Apple for taking a Unix variant and making it buggy with its Leopard release. " -- John P

??? -- what planet are you from? My Mac has crashed 2, maybe 3 times in 9 months. My XP machine would do that in a week. My Vista machine (at MSFT, ha!) has crashed a dozen times in half the time, and is noticeably deficient compared to my Mac. I can run the Mac without rebooting for weeks and months at a time, while I can barely make it a week on Vista w/o being forced to reboot.

I can understand the Mac/Linux reactionary response -- had it myself for a long time. I had it until I couldn't take the crap anymore and found myself forced into checking out Mac and Linux. Glad I did.

I am at a loss to understand how you can have experience so diametrically opposed to everyone else's that I can't take it as fully credible.

lol @JohnP, nice that your defense of Vista largely relies on trashing XP! You're like Microsoft marketing: old Microsoft products suck ass! Upgrade!

I see you did throw a few ignorance-based swipes at MacOSX in. I stopped the madness and switched to Mac thanks largely to Vista, and my experience with it has been vastly superior to years of dealing with soul-crushing, neuron-dessicating Microsoft Mediocrity.

You go have fun with Vista now.

I'm resisting marrying Ms. Windows-Vista, my XP lifestyle is perfectly satisfying to me already!

The user interface changes in her sisters Ms. IE-7 and Ms. Office-2007 are worse than annoying. They are absolutely anti-productive.

I'm already dating OpenOffice 2.3 and the new relationship is getting serious because she behaves more like the familiar but departing Ms. Office-XP and Office-2003 than does their younger, bling-crazed, my-way-or-the-highway sister.

Ms. IE-7's excessive love of eye candy and unwillingess to live by the IE family GUI traditions has driven me to consider firing her sister Ms. IE-6 and adding Firefox to my PC's employee headcount.

Flabby Ms. Windows-Vista looks less and less attractive while Ubuntu gets more capable with each passing day. If the feminist software company in Redmond believes that she can coerce me into a relationship with her by committing an app-rape of my PC, she's sooooo mistaken.

The problem with pronouncing Vista dead is that's all that's for sale at Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, etc etc. I do note that they are all slashing the prices on these machines and that their sales people agree with me that they wouldn't buy Vista. At Staples they do tell me I can special order with XP on-line, but there's no XP in house. I think Vista is killing the laptop business at the retailers. So do some of their retail clerks.