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Another shining review. On a practicality standpoint, don't consumers (as well as government entities) get upset and files massive amounts of charges against companies that release products that are unsafe and/or do not work to specification? Aren't these companies required to perform a recall?

The point is, it is seriously dangerous that M$ is allowed to do this at all. Their "products", so called, should have been canned years ago.

Why don't peoeple like this switch to Mac??? It baffles me!! 2 words: Stockholm Syndrome.

The precedent of no recall was set when Ballmer's mother didn't send him back.

WOW!

It starts now, then shortly thereafter you lose your data...

Boy, the great reviews keep coming, don't they! Does Mafia$oft include a jar of vaseline with each copy of Shitsa?

Can't get to the article - server is too busy.

They've been MDN'ed!

I think MSFT is about to suffer Stockdump Syndrome

MW "trade" 'em for AAPL!

I haven't noticed any stability issues in Vista. I'd say that it's far superior to Windows XP in every way, with the exception of 3D game performance. I'm honestly not sure what people are doing to make Vista so unstable. It ran fine on my MacBook Pro, even with the somewhat limited Boot Camp 1.1 drivers designed for XP.

the wow starts when you switch to a Mac.

Works great! (on a Mac)

"Stockdump Syndrome"

I love that!!

Excerpt from Robert Bruce Thompson's website:

"Charlie Demerjian of The Inquirer has dubbed Microsoft's latest operating system "Windows Vista Me II", which is so right on so many levels that I wish I'd thought of it myself. In the opinions of many, Vista has already superseded Windows Me for the title of Worst Windows Version Ever. As to the "II" part, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and on that basis Vista is certainly sincere. Vista freely imitates many features of Mac OS X and, although it is seldom mentioned, Linux. Unfortunately, Vista imitates incompetently, which is no surprise."

They just don't know any better - the sheep buy Vista because it's what Micro$oft sells. Hopefully the Mac ads will help some of the sheep see the light.

MDN Magic Word "good" - a good Mac is always better than Windows!

Dollars to donuts Microsoft takes a very dramatic course of action in the next 18 months. It will be the last hurrah where they pull out all the stops. Shame be damned.

They'll adopt Unix or one of its many derivatives as the basis of their next OS and slap the Vista GUI on top of it and the world will think they have finally achieved the world's greatest operating system!

80 percent of the world doesn't know squat about OS X (yet) and Microsoft will be perceived as the enlightened ones who finally developed a truly remarkable OS.

When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to unabashedly copy the very same path Apple has taken.

Microsoft has been polishing this windows turd for the last 5 years! They wasted billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours patching holes in an OS that leaks like a sieve! Somewhere along the way Gates declared he didn't care how broken the OS was, just slap a coat of paint on it and get it the hell outta' here so that we can focus on something better.

Whatever comes next, it will have to surpass Vista by leaps and bounds in order to restore what modicum of respect Microsoft may have possessed.

Kiss legacy goodbye.

@ G4Dualíe
"When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to unabashedly copy the very same path Apple has taken."

Sorry G4, I want to amend that to:
When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to........
JUMP OFF THE TALLEST BUILDING IN SEATTLE.

I bet that MSFT has either a Unix or Linux version of Windows going in their skunkworks lab.

So true, G4 Dualie. But, in 18 months, Ballmer will be holed up in a hotel with 8 inch nails and a 3 foot beard raving about chairs and Windows and Leopards.

@ OBill-Wan Kenobi
The Only thing happening @ Microslap SKUNKworks at the moment is a BIG STINK!

What a genius - took 30 days to confirm what 30 seconds can accomplish. Perhaps Ballmer will hire this guy as his chair throwing assistant.

@ Another Irish Dude

That and the faint sounds of chairs hitting the wall.

@OBill-Wan Kenobi,
I've been in their lab. Had to take a bath in tomato juice afterward.

@ OBill-Wan Kenobi
I must invest in a chair manufacturing plant near Seattle!!

I foolishly bought Vista Home Premium to replace the Linux Mandrake hobby OS I was using. I just didn't have the time anymore.

Vista is a sick joke. For everything they got right (device manager is now a control panel) they screw up two basics (Add and Remove Programs has been pointlessly renamed, cascading menus in Start menu eliminated). Change for the sake of change is the theme, and "resource hog" is not anywhere near strong enough a term to describe what an incredible pig this OS really is. I cannot for the life of me imagine what garbage and redundant code you have to have running to bring a 64 bit Athlon with 2 gigs of Ram practically to it's knees, but Microsoft has done it.

"It's a lemon ...unstable ...unfit for any user"

Imagine a long-awaited (and critically important) new flagship car getting that same review. The automaker would be laughed right out of business!

Yet somehow MS lives another day. For now...

Dollars to donuts Microsoft takes a very dramatic course of action in the next 18 months. It will be the last hurrah where they pull out all the stops.

What stops? If Microsoft had any more stops to pull out, surely they'd have pulled them out by now. They're already bleeding all over the furniture!

When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to........
JUMP OFF THE TALLEST BUILDING IN SEATTLE.

That'd be such a shameful waste of a good sidewalk. God, imagine the mess: awful Ballmer blubber everywhere, quivering like Jell-o...

Seriously, Ballmer isn't going anywhere until he finally sinks MS deep into a sea of red ink, and they're looking at smokestack-industry sized "restructuring". Apple's mid-90's crisis will seem positively nice in comparison.

And this is still news? This guy deserves it and needs to suffer some more. With a more advanced and modern OS X clearly available, he chose to try something from a dinosaur corporation known for mediocre (at best) products, poor, annoying and frustrating user experience despite repeated warnings from reviewers and actual users. And expect something different? Classic definition of insane= repeatedly performing an action (or experience) and expecting a different result.

Glad to have the right/privilege to choose.

They could have just copied apple and done the XP virtualization thing in an whole new OS, but no...

Idiots..

When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to unabashedly copy the very same path Apple has taken.

Problem is MS won't be able to do it.

They've created for themselves such a cesspool of legacy code and API's, that the only way out is to completely break with the past and start with a fully clean slate. Whether they'd keep it clean, or just make a big new bloated mess, would have to be seen.

I can very much see MS adopting a Unix base, and then ripping off Boot Camp for the backwards compatibility. However it'd take MS at least 5-7 years to implement, and after Vista I don't see the PC world buying into promises of yet another Holy Grail OS.

Ballmer, can you say "Catch-22"?

A Unix or Linux-based Windows will still be Windows. MS has no idea about human interface design.

What's a typical PC user to do. They get a new PC with Vista. They don't like Vista for all the reasons stated in this article. What are the options?

1. Suffer with Vista and hope the first service pack fixes the major flaws.

2. Dump Vista and install a Linux distro.

3. Sell the PC for what you can get on eBay and buy a Mac.

4. Is there an option 4? Can a new PC owner get a copy of XP without hassles?

Or, computer usage for basic users drops. The ones who know better haven't gotten Vista.

Vista: What a View.

Quick! Somebody call Ralph Nader!

Time to write "Unsafe at Any Speed II".

Editor's Note (at end of article): The fact is that Vista is far from "unfit for any user," and this statement by the author is simply incorrect. If you read the discussion thread linked below you will find there are many Vista users that are having positive experiences. The author's experiences are his own and I think a great look into just some of the complications that can come with upgrading to Vista. Some have had worse experiences and some have had better.

This "review" is not qualified. I haven't read all of it yet but he is not qualified to makes statements like:

"the problems I found seem to stem not from flaws in code, but flaws in design"

Why? Here's an example from the article:

"We don’t claim to be experts in computer security, but what I can tell you is that a system that requires you to enter a password only you know is a much harder system to crack than one which may just require you to click on something or hit a quick standard keystroke. If a malicious program makes its way onto your system, activating a quick keystroke or even taking control of your mouse in order to select the “Allow” option is certainly theoretically possible."

This is completely wrong. He admits to not being a security expert and instead of actually researching the topic he speculates and assumes. He said it would be possible to spoof the allow or deny dialog by giving it input. This is competely wrong since the dialog is on a protected desktop and is inaccessible to other lower privlige programs.

From wikipedia:
Since the Secure Desktop allows only highest privilege System applications to run, no user mode application can present its dialog boxes, so any prompt for elevation consent can be safely assumed to be genuine. Additionally, they can also help protect against shatter attacks, which intercept Windows inter-process messages to run malicious code or spoof the user interface, by preventing unauthorized processes from sending messages to high privilege processes.

MS is actually smart to stick with an OS that will run all the legacy apps for Windows. They don't dare create a new Unix based OS that would require the user to invest in new apps. If the users have to do that then there is nothing to stop them from buying the Mac which is a proven system, fully functional as is.

He also keeps saying after installation of a program it will still require UAC consent. This is wrong again. It will only require UAC consent if it requires admin rights (and requests for these rights). Even if it does require admin rights (but does not request them) Vista will virtualize the folder it attemps to write so as to prevent system wide changes. Most programs should never need admin rights.

The precedent of no recall was set when Ballmer's mother didn't send him back.

Thanks for that! Now I have to clean my screen!

>From the Article: I can see what Microsoft was trying to do, but it may be that keeping Windows backwards compatible and making it more secure, all while trying to keep the OS stable may be an impossible task.

This seems to be the common reasoning why the Windows XP replacement was so difficult to produce and overdue for for the market:

- Backwards Compatibility
- Security

These key phrases were used so much, it seemed as if MS had its hands tied behind its back in all aspects of Vista development. But it just doesn't make sense. Why couldn't they start from scratch with an entirely new and robust core? They could have added a emulation layer to maintain backwards compatibility. By means of trashing their mishap of a core/kernal/platform known as Windows, they could have implemented at the central level more robust and secure code. Heck, they could've started with UNIX and built a Windows layer on top of it if they were really interested in stability & security.

So, excusing the flaws of Vista as consequences of "backwards compatibility" & "security" don't make any sense at all.

The flaws are with Microsoft itself. I'd guess poor leadership, limited creativity, poor implementation, and such are more to blame. Microsoft's worst enemy is Microsoft.... well, Apple for making it easier to spot Microsoft's flaws.

Sometimes, you get so used to crap you can't smell it anymore.

I really want to see some hard evidence about Vista being unstable or unusable. Maybe a video of Vista crashing, or something to that effect. I just don't believe the problems with Vista are all that critical. These descriptions of flaws in Vistas smell a lot like the idea of viruses in Mac OS X - it smells like total bullsh**.

I installed a pirated copy of Vista running on my iMac, so I could see for myself what this Vista thing is really like. I haven't see any fatal flaw in Vista, or anything unstable about it. Granted I've only used it for maybe 15 total hours, but surely I would have run into some problem by now if it is really that unstable. For my purposes (playing computer games that don't run on OSX) Vista is a good replacement for Windows XP. And for people I know who use PC, I have recommended upgrading to Vista, because it really does seem to be more secure and easier to use then its predecessor.

The review would have made more sense if Boyko had just gone out and bought a mid-range computer pre-installed with Vista from his local store, rather than installing it on a couple of old PCs he seems to have lying around. Try that with OS X and you'd have nothing to write at all.

If any of the old flamers here bothered to read the huge forum that follows the article, they'd see that the vast majority of Vista experiences were totally positive.

I've only used it for maybe 15 total hours, but surely I would have run into some problem by now if it is really that unstable.

Have you read the article? Vista has been used for 30 days, and with 24hrs tests showing instabilities.

15 hrs use of an OS is absolutely *nothing* to possibly say anything about stability, functionality, performance, anything meaningful.

It simply means you have some of the programs that do not make Vista crash or that do not make Vista crash by simply trying to run them. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.
Have you tried the very same programs mentioned in the article to give problem to Vista?
Do you play Quake 4 on a 32-bit Home vs Vista?

@Eddie,

none of the Vista totally positive experience had any depth as the 30-days test of the article. Essentially they all are on the like of "Vista works fine with my <application> here and I use it with <application 2> and had no trouble."

Du'h

Now that I think about it, I did experience one of the stability issues described in the article. At one point, Windows Vista shut itself down and restarted the computer without giving any warning, and I lost everything I was working on (of course this had to happen the one time I decided to do something important on the Windows partition instead of on OS X.) I didn't give it too much thought, it seemed like a fluke (I have also on rare occasions experienced flukes in OS X that amount to a forced restart.) But this guy says he's frequently experienced random restarts on two different computers, so perhaps it is more of a pandemic then just a fluke.

I think what might cause the mysterious restart is automatic update, because updates often require a restart. I have yet to experience the mysterious restarts after I decided to disabling automatic updates. It doesn't seem like an OS crashes, it seems more like a controlled restart done without user confirmation. If that's case, then it is unforgivable for Windows to ever restart the computer without asking permission. Otherwise, it's because the whole OS is unstable.

I have been runnin Vista for 3 months now and have had some minor slowdowns but nothing like what the author described. Really sounds like he's got some hardware issues. I am running on a Dell Laptop and really no issues. I don't claim to be an expert and I don't post my testing on the web!

Yes, I use OSX also which also crawls to halt sometimes! There are still of OSX quirks which can drive you nuts. iPod's got its fair share of problems, too! Nothing's perfect. This guy seems to think that Vista should be perfect but all other OS's can have some flaws.

For the record - I shelled out cash for Vista Ultimate, and have just removed it for the second time due to massive stablity issues. This was on brand new hardware mind you (Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, etc.).

I just can't rely on it. I've pulled it, reinstalled XP on a small partition, and will now do as much of my critical work in Ubuntu Linux. Never had these sort of problems with Linux (I've had the occasional "I can't play this DVD" type issue - but never NEVER has Linux crashed on me causing me to lose work).

Thoughts on Vista - yes, the interface is very nice. It works better than other Windows OSes (it is Mac like, which is good from a usability perspective). But you just get this impression that behind the (beautiful) front end there is an aging, groaning design nightmare - but of couse we'll never know because it's (conveniently) closed source.

Thanks. I feel better now.