Vista not winning any popularity contests
Written on by Kay
Earlier this week, Gianfranco Lanci president of Acer, the world’s fourth-largest computer maker told the Financial Times that “the whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista.”
The company claimed that Vista has not been generated as many sales of new computers as they had hoped, and the new operating system had stability problems .
The company also claimed that many customers were asking PCs with Windows XP instead of PC, largely because the hardware requirements for XP were less, as well reported stability problems with Vista
While many believe this might be sour grapes on part of the manufacturer, even other PC manufacturers such as Dell are distancing themselves from Vista.
Dell had intended to phase out XP in favor of Vista, but reversed the decision after extensive customer feedback from its IdeaStorm website
Gartner said in a recent press release that Vista has “so far failed to stimulate the market in the way many hoped.”
Microsoft maintains that Vista is one of its most successful software launches. With 40 40 million copies sold, Vista ”on track to be the fastest-selling operating system in Microsoft’s history.”
Although the complaints from Acer may be an attempt to divert attention to Microsoft, its probably clear that Vista is not dramatically better than XP, but is more of a resource hog, less stable than XP and many customers may feel less inclined to upgrade.
Nevertheless, Windows Vista will be come the de facto operating system over the next few years as Microsoft stops support for Windows XP which is very unfortunate. Despite some of the misgivings of XP, it has turned out to be a stable and mature operating system that many users still love.
The following blog post from a Infoworld user sums up feelings many users feelings about Vista. Â
Cringester P. F., whose firm uses PCs for chemical analysis and 3D molecular modeling, would rather chew on a broken pipette than move to Vista:
I can’t deal with stuff that “might” work. …I’m not interested in wasting half my processing and rendering power to have semi-transparent menus. That’s just retarded. I’m not ready to install 4 gigs of ram in machines to get the same performance I would get out of 1 gig if I’m using XP. I don’t want to teach users yet another gui for both the OS and the office application. I simply cannot stand going to OOXML and lose all choice forever. Microsoft says they’re “people ready.” I’m still wondering if I’m Microsoft ready.
I recently purchased a Core2Duo (Santa Rose processor) 2GB RAM laptop with Windows Vista Ultimate. While it looked good to begin with, it was nt long before its became cumbersome with slow loading times and general fuziness
I decided to purchase XP upgrade and downgraded – yes downgraded – and i dont regret doing so. Now the PC is a lot faster and I am spending less time messing about with the operating system and getting work done
Sorry but Vista is not worth the hassle and is too taxing on PC, even though I have reasonably high spec machine. I am not sure that XP can make use of 2GB of RAM but otherwise it operates really well
I have used Vista as litte as possible, but I sometimes have to work on systems with it installed and it is not very popular with me. I got into a pissing contest with a sales rep at London Drugs about Vista and laptops. I told him I wanted a laptop with nothing installed, I would install what I needed myself with XP PRO Corporate. He actually told me that all the new laptops sold in his store had chips in them that allowed in the installation of Vista, nothing else. We exchanged a few terse remarks and he stormed off to a different corner of the store. PLEASE, someone tell me this is not true, I did not believe him when he told me but I thought it worth mentioning to see if the MAN is forcing crap we don’t want.
Allen Jackson
Microsoft reckon that 40 million + units of Vista have been shipped, but how many have been removed from the computers and replaced with XP or Linux? Since Vista came fitted to the computers, I have been spending a lot of my time formatting Vista HD’s and installing XP or Ubuntu. I do this on a small scale, so the 28 machines I have up/downgraded in the last 9 months may not be representative of an anti-Vista rebellion, but I have still to find a Vista user who is happy with the system. I too have had a couple of problems with salespersons who made all sorts of excuses for not downgrading to XP, and most sales outlets are charging a lot on top of the computer price to do the downgrade. If Microsoft are going to stop the sale of XP, then it looks like I’m going to be busy installing Linux.