Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Vista makes C|Net's Top 10 Terrible
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 
Coming in at number 10 on C|Net's Top Ten terrible tech products is: Microsoft's Vista.
I am a well-known Apple fanboy, but I think its a little harsh to lump Vista in with the Gizmondo and Apple puck mouse. I do have a copy of Vista (Business I think) sitting in its packaging waiting for installation on my MacPro - but I have been holding off because XP does what I need it to do.
What are your thoughts on Vista? I mean, it can't really be THAT bad can it?
I am a well-known Apple fanboy, but I think its a little harsh to lump Vista in with the Gizmondo and Apple puck mouse. I do have a copy of Vista (Business I think) sitting in its packaging waiting for installation on my MacPro - but I have been holding off because XP does what I need it to do.
What are your thoughts on Vista? I mean, it can't really be THAT bad can it?
Comments:
There are currently 1 Comments:
-
Zeh said...“I have a mixed answer. While reading it, keep in mind that I'm a windows guy first (even though I do use OSX every day and have been using Macs since system 8).
With that said, C|Net is right. To say that Vista is underwhelming would be an understatement.
Well, to be fair, Vista does a lot of good things right. From a programmer standpoint, it manages to fix a lot of crap that were inherent problems of the previous version.
Where Vista fails, however, is where it SHOULDN'T fail: user experience. It just feels like WinXP with a lot of crap added on top of it. And it's damn slow.
I'm not saying the system is broken. It works. But the problem with Vista is that it put too much crap in front of the user instead of a simple system that simply works. On that aspect, Apple outshines Microsoft easily; they care a lot more about the experience. I'm not really talking usability, because after you tweak the thing to your needs, I really believe WinXP does a lot better than OSX (FOR ME).
But for everybody else, the overall experience of using an Apple system is like getting into a clothing store where everybody calls you by your name, and nobody forces you to buy anything. They feel like friends. Using Vista, however is like getting in a store where the staff working there are shouting insults at each other, where they look at you with mean faces, and where nobody wants to help you anyway, so screw you. In the end they both sell the same products, at roughly the same price, so which one would a person pick? Which one would leave a better first impression?
You know, I'm writing this after just using Vista for the first time yesterday. It came bundled on my new laptop. I tried it a bit, and the overall experience was terrible. I spent like half an hour dealing with crap after the first boot until I was able to simply USE the system. Much of this is also due to HP's fault - shit, I don't want to watch a freaking video on how to use my computer, I don't want to be forced to register with a name and password and email just to go to my desktop, I don't want norton-whatever-crap to keep bugging me, I just want to run it!
Even if part of that is due to HP's crappy user experience, the problem with most Microsoft systems and resellers is that this is pretty much the experience you'll have everytime. You'll be greeted by a bunch of stuff that assume you're a retard by default. And not the good kind of retard, the retard that wants thing simple; but the retard that can't do anything right so they don't want you to do anything that might be dangerous.
In the same token, running XPSP2 for me the first time was an exercise in frustration. It'd keep bugging me that I didn't have an antivirus, I didn't have MS Firewall, I didn't have auto update on, and so on and so forth. I had to disable everything manually and it was very frustrating, just to let the computer stop treating me like an idiot. Crap, I don't have an antivirus bugging my system because I don't need one, I know what I run and how to protect myself, thank you very much; I don't have MS Firewall because I use my own firewalls; and I don't want auto update because I don't want Windows deciding to update in the middle of an online game.
Still, AFTER dealing with all that crap, XP becomes a hell of a system (for me at least). It works well, and fast. But that's just after you've convinced it you're not an idiot. I think that Vista may go by the same route, eventually. But right now, the amount of crap I have to swim through to get to a barebones system with only the shit I want is too much. It's not even worth it trying to deal with the default installation that comes with the computer (on my case).
Thankfully I didn't buy the system for Vista. It just came bundled. I wasn't going to use it; I've bought the computer to use Ubuntu on it, because many of the tools I use are available for it too (and some ONLY for it).
As a result, I've just shrinked the Vista partition to a minimal HD space - I may need it someday, who knows - and I've installed XP for when I need to run Windows stuff. Ubuntu is coming next, I just have to fix a driver issue.
That's how good Vista is. The first windows version that made my rethink my decision on operating system/hardware platforms.
Pray that Apple doesn't become TOO popular. It may go through the same route.”
