Vista Hating: The Final Chapter

A couple of months ago, I asked readers why people "hate" Windows Vista. I got--and continue to get--lots of responses to my October 31, 2007, commentary ("Why, Exactly, Does Everyone "Hate" Vista?") and December 5, 2007, commentary "How Do People Hate Vista? Let Me Count the Ways…"). As always, thanks for that! I saw four main reasons why some readers hate Vista: "It has a new UI that I don't want to learn," "It doesn't offer that much improvement for the effort of migrating to it," "It's slower than Windows XP," and "We big customers now have to deal with the product-activation irritation that small firms and homes have dealt with since XP." These arguments cover most Vista-haters' objections, but there are many more reasons why people dislike the new OS. Now, I don't want to belabor the point further (although it's sort of interesting from a "sociology of computers" point of view), so let's see how many more I can briefly cover here.

"I hate Vista's new digital rights management (DRM) system," several readers wrote. They're referring to the fact that Microsoft requires much of the Vista software that plays music or videos to be digitally signed by Microsoft. Redmond set these restrictions because it wants to keep people from snooping on multimedia playback, as that sort of snooping would make life easier for people trying to crack the encryption schemes in DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and the like. I must agree that I find this requirement irritating, but honestly there's always been a similar "protected path" for some audio playback code in parts of XP. Thank heavens we've still got the Linux guys to figure out how to copy DVDs!

As I've noted before, some Vista complaints arise from, well, faulty memories. Some readers have claimed that while XP arrived with full driver support, Vista did not; some versions of Vista don't support full networking, whereas all versions of XP do; and upgrading to Windows 2000 from Windows NT 4.0 was compelling because of the mountain of patches that NT 4.0 required upon installation, while Vista lacks such attraction. I was there in 2001, when XP lacked a bunch of patches and XP driver support wasn't considered de rigueur for hardware vendors until late 2003. XP Home has always lacked full networking capabilities, and to the patching argument, take a look at the number of patches that any new copy of XP requires. Six years is a long time, and XP needs a lot of patches. (Don't get me wrong--XP is still a great OS and no XP user needs to upgrade. But then, neither would a Win2K Pro user, if Microsoft weren't phasing out support for Win2K. But saying that XP appeared to great anticipation, with full hardware support, and nary a hitch is, well, rosy hindsight.)

A few other readers wrote in, "The new UI is unprofessional-looking," adding that "Vista Business shouldn't include the eye candy"--a darned interesting perspective! About all the advice that I can offer these readers is to turn off Aero Glass, change the theme to "Windows Classic," and kill the Sidebar. "It takes more clicks to get to many administrative tools--the network properties in particular," others opined, and I can't agree more. That's one reason that I'm a command-line fancier!

"Vista is less secure than XP," one reader complained, citing it as a major reason why he wouldn't recommend Vista to his firm. Puzzled, I reminded him of Vista's revamped firewall, BitLocker, the new services architecture, randomized code location (which makes writing worms very, very difficult), and a host of new security stuff. "How," I asked, "is this less secure?" His answer was that so many people perceive Vista to be less secure, and "perception is reality!"

Perhaps that's the salient point here. Two readers wondered why I was "toadying" to Microsoft trying to get people to buy Vista. (They used less kind words.) As I've said before, I couldn't give a hoot what OS people buy; I just didn't understand what all of the Vista hollering was all about. Now I understand better. And friends, if perception is indeed reality, then the smartest marketing decision is clearly to invite you all back next month for my first Macintosh column. See you then!

(Okay, that was a joke.)

End of Article

That was amusing! I am looking forward to getting a copy of Vista for my family PC. Also taking a further look into its security features.

Verrona January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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As a "command-line fancier", how do you fancy accessing the command line in Vista?

jluethje January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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I don't understand what jluethje is trying to get at. If he's saying that it's hard to get to the command prompt in Vista, he's dead wrong. It's just as easy as in Vista.

I, too, do not understand the broohaha about Vista. I went through the entire beta cycle of Vista and was impressed with how good it was even at an early stage. I'm running it as my main OS at home and have very few problems. No, I'm not in love with the Aero interface, but I don't hate it either, and it works. At first I thought the Sidebar was a joke, but I now find I'm actually using it, especially the news headlines.

I am finding things I can do more easily in Vista. The best I can say is that I use XP Pro at work every day, and I wouldn't go back to it at home.

gcotton@ncc-ccn.ca January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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Oops, that should have been "just as easy as in XP"... obviously.

gcotton@ncc-ccn.ca January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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Hi jluethje

Very simply,
1) start,
2) write cmd in the seach line,
3) and there you go :-).

HenrikWieder January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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Mark, you miss many points about Vista:
1) There are more than enough versions of Vista, totally 6 versions.
2) Vista is very expensive; Ultimate version is $450 and the more popular one, Vista Business is $220 whereas the XP Pro was only $150.
3) Vista's Recovery Environment recovers only the Vista installations, not the previous OS versions. You can repair the previous versions with any OS prior to Vista.
4) Upgrade path is the most problematic one:
It is not possible to upgrade 32-bit XP to 64-bit Vista.

It is not possible to upgrade 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Vista.

muraty January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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I've been a developer and consultant for 25 years and have used and developed on every version of DOS and Windows (except ME) from 2.01 on as first a pre-release beta and then the final RTM. If folks think Vista was released without good hardware support I'd have to say what are you smoking?? I don't have a faulty memory about any of the migrations. I remember the real pain of going from Windows 3.1 to NT 3.5 when device drivers were the least of the problem. The minimum 16M RAM requirement was very hard to deal with when at the time it cost $600 to jump from 1M to 16M. NT4 was a back-peddle in stability to make the explorer win95 UI work, 2K was a great improvement but was the 1st version of NT I didn’t have to beg vendors to support. At one point I swore I would never use XP because of WPA but faced reality and did anyway but it took 3 years to get driver support for half the common devices I had and the as referred to at the time, the cartoon-like Luna theme looked very bad – and still does. Aero to me is very polished and is the first time I have not turned off all the windows effects and to date I only have one hardware device that has yet to be patched by the vendor. Yes, Vista seems slower than XP but then so did Win 3.0 without an expensive (at the time) video card, however it screams on a modern PC. And don't get me started about all the Linux versions I've tried over the years and their lack of support for many common sound cards and such. MS made it very clear from the beginning that the hardware requirements would be stiff so what’s the big surprise? I too don’t like to dig to get the network properties dialog but I almost never need to do it so I don’t think it is any big deal. Networking just works. Anyone remember what t was like to set up a DOS PC to be on a network???? My only nit is the changes to sndvol.exe (was sndvol32.exe) have taken the analog audio inputs and hid them in a buried property sheet.

Leightym January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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You know why people don't like Vista? Because they're ignorant! That's not an insult, it's just true. Most of the time you'll hear people quote some mac-huggers blog and say they "never installed Vista because it's so horrible" or, "I uninstalled in 30 seconds after I bought it". It's the same across the board, people don't like change even if it's a vast improvement! It's not perfect, no, but for all the LITTLE problems it has I find myself not pulling my hair out like I did with XP at times.

I've also found that Vista is ridiculously faster than XP. I have 22 second boot times.

Cfischer83 January 02, 2008 (Article Rating:

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"It has a new UI that I don't want to learn" -- people don't want to learn Start search, Favorite links, filters & other Explorer enhancements? These are features I miss every time I'm forced back to XP.

mjhinton January 03, 2008 (Article Rating:

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Hi all --

First, as I note at other articles, it's always better to respond to my email in the article -- I don't get to these Web pages often because I've got over a thousand articles. On to the comments ...

jluethje -- command's easy.
a) Windows orb (the old "start" button) / type "cmd" and press Enter.
b) If you use it a lot, as I do, then it ends up in your most recently used area, or, better, put it in your "always here" part of the start menu. Then it's Windows Orb / Command Prompt.
c) Press Windows Key and then R.

muraty --
a) I'm not sure why lots of versions are so troubling. The ones we'll see in the commercial market (Business, Enterprise, some Ultimate) are about 98 percent matches, so what real difference does it make?
b) "Vista's more expensive." I've already agreed, see my previous articles. Heck, I thought *XP* was too expensive when compared in price to, say, NT 4 workstation.
c) Can't comment except to say that I appear to be able to work on any NTFS 5 volume (Windows 2000 and later). It lacks some nice features like disabling services offline but regedit (which is in WinRE) can do that. Or use SC.exe, that works too.
d) Upgrade paths: yes, I wish I could use an upgrade path to shift between 32 and 64, but how does that make Vista DIFFERENT from earlier Windows? You can't do that with 32 bit / 64 bit Server 2003 or XP.

Cfischer83 --
Remember that almost no one "buys an operating system," they just USE one to get their stuff done with their apps. Personally I think that UIs should mainly stay out of my way and be inconspicuous, but the truth is that people don't just buy beige matte-colored cell phones and MP3 players, they buy burgundy and aqua-colored ones. It's a matter of taste.

Again, PLEASE engage me, folks, but please do it on e-mail. I can't thank you all enough for taking the time to read my stuff!!!!!

Mark

MarkMinasi January 04, 2008 (Article Rating:

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