Linux has driven me to buy Windows Vista

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:44:12AM -0500, Michael Lauzon wrote:
> I would have waited until Windows 7, seeing as how Vista is the new
> Millennium....

It really is not.

The worst thing about vista is that it is rather big and a resource hog.
On the other hand the improvements ot the GUI and usability are huge
(too bad that doesn't make a nice bullet point for advertising).

Yes it really does want 2GB of ram to run properly, just like XP really
needed 1GB to run well.  It also seems to take 15 to 20GB of disk space,
for I have no idea what.  Now given that's about $0.25 worth of disk
space these days, I guess it doesn't matter.

Yes the eye candy is just that, eye candy.  it does look pretty and it
can be turned off.

The ability to search in the start menu and control panel and lots of
other places is briliant though.  If I have to deal with a machine
running windows, I want vista, not XP and certainly no 2k.  It's just
too much work.

Windows 7 will of course get the benefit of all the new driver hassles
having been solved by vista, so where vista looked bad for having driver
issues, windows 7 will look good for having no driver issues because it
is using the same drivers.  XP got away with that too by using the same
drivers in most cases as 2k.

I do think the initial pricing on vista was nuts though.  Ultimate
edition was $500 or so, although it is now a slightly more reasonable
$300.  Still a lot of money for the OS, when you can get a better OS for
nothing.

Now Windows Me was just awful.  It was all the legacy of windows 9x,
without the ability to actually use the legacy (DOS) when you wanted to.
So it had DOS underneath but wouldn't let you boot to it directly
anymore.  And they tried to replace the network stack and a few other
things with pieces from win 2k as far as I know, which also didn't go so
well.  Overall it was unstable, and had no benefits over win 98, only
disadvantages.  Vista clearly has benefits over XP, although they are
not the ones microsoft has been hyping.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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