Worst OS I have ever tried to use

I went to see a friend this evening who has recently acquired a new
PC, purchased for him by his work so he can work from home. It is
running Vista Premium, about which I have heard much, most of it bad,
but this is the first time I have actually had the opportunity to
experience Vista first hand.

It is even worse than I was led to expect

It is far slower than Windows 2000 was on the PII 300 laptop with 64M
RAM I was loaning him in the interim, and far more crash prone. It is
running on a PB tech box with a GB of RAM, I cant recall what CPU or
video card off hand, but this is a fairly standard box with NO unusual
hardware or third party software on it at all - it is pretty much
fresh out of the box bar the drivers for the broadband modem.


On initial startup it looked OK, apart from IE being very slow and
with several windows only rendering partially. Copying files from the
old machine to the new was relatively painless, they copied onto the
new machine almost as quickly as they copied off the old. It looks a
bit like a version of Kubuntu a freind has, but without the speed or
reliability. The hourglass has been replaced with a small circle which
looks nice, just as well since I was to spend the next two hours or so
mostly looking at it.

Trouble really started after it updated itself and restarted. On
restart it threw up numerous errors, and I had to do checkdsk to get
it to start normally which it finally did after several restarts and
an hour and a half of waiting for it to "configure updates" during
which it crashed twice. Eventually got it going again so he could go
on the net, but when he went to turn it off it restarted and reloaded
ALL the updates all over again. And then crashed. Again.

I have recommended that he at least gets it upgraded to XP, or better
to Kubuntu. I saw Vista running on a laptop a guy at work brought in,
and he ended up upgrading it to XP in the end after putting up with
the flakiness and instability for two weeks.

I have heard people call Vista the new Windows ME. Having had
experience of both, I think that is probably unfair - to Windows ME,
anyway. Market ready it certainly isn't.

Regards
Peter Jenkins
see http://www.sensiblesentencing.org.nz

 

Sounds like something OTHER than Vista causing the problems here...

 

Anything with KDE is going to be slow and unreliable. I pity anyone
whose first experience of Linux is KDE-based. It's the Fisher-Price of
desktops. Chunky and clunky and breaks if you look at it funny.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

That is not correct. KDE runs just fine on all of the boxes I have tried it
on. And it was the first desktop I used with Linux (although things were a
bit more manual-matic back then).

Of course, that is the strength of open source; user choice. Some folk
prefer Gnome, others like KDE, others go with xfce, etc. I've tried Gnome
on several occasions, but it seems less flexible than KDE.

However, I agree with the OP that Vista is not pleasant to use. Turning off
the eye candy (Aero, translucent dialogs, desktop widgets, etc) does help,
and you have to have quite high end hardware. Even with all that, it seems
not as good as Win2000 for ordinary office tasks (running Excel, Word,
etc).


Peter

 

The "advanced" mode on this Asus Eee I'm using to type this is KDE. I'm
using KNode for USENET, the KStars planetarium app, the Kalzium periodic
table ... all running quite nicely on a 900MHz Celeron M processor with
only a half gig of RAM.

 

Yet again an inept user blames his tools.

 

Vista is an eye opener alright. I'm damn glad the laptop that I got to use
Vista on isn't mine.
Windows 7 will be worth seeing. Should be like XP on steroids.

E. Scrooge

 

I just knew Mickey Mouse would be the first to reply, with a defence
of Vista!

 

You hope.

 

Although to give him his due he is probably right. I haven't seen
problems as described by the OP on any of the 30 or so PCs running Vista
that I look after. And before you accuse me of being another Vista
apologist, I like Vista so much that I have 'upgraded' my new laptop to
XP.

 

Why?

What about it will make it worth seeing, but not worth installing and
using?

 

Yes, it's good to have people who can think objectively about a problem
instead of just chiming in with some anti-Microsoft FUD, isn't it? Myself, I
wonder about the machine's hardware specs and condition. The OP's claim that
this was "a fairly standard box" isn't saying much. Was it certified by the
vendor as Vista Premium Ready? Did the vendor do the original Vista
installation? And was everything certified as working properly when the
machine left the shop? If so, then the purchaser should either be looking
for a repair or a refund. Or was this simply another case of an upgrade
buggered by someone who didn't know what they were doing? I seriously doubt
we'll hear answers to these sorts of questions from the OP, who after all
was just trolling.

 

And you evidently hope not...

geoff

 

I hope nothing. I simply observe the facts. Like that the much-vaunted,
supposedly-stripped-down "MinWin" kernel, which is supposed to form the
basis of Dimdows 7, is using about twice the RAM of a full-featured Linux
kernel.

 

So what? Ram is so cheap its not really a problem.

 

lol - the fan club...

As someone who builds their own systems, and does actually have a few years
experience of diagnosing hardware and software issues on Windows systems, I
can say that what was described is definitely non-standard behaviour that
warrants a much more in-depth analysis than simply a "blame it on Vista"
cop-out. Although that is a much less appealing answer for the FUD-packers.

 

That's what they said about Vista.

 

Here's a review <http://www.mcseworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10244> of
a book called "Windows Vista Annoyances", about how to get Visaster working
better, or at least, less suckingly.

Apparently the first sentence of the book is

Windows Vista is like a papaya: sleek on the outside, but a big mess
on the inside,

 

What is your obsession with saving RAM anyway? A 1 gig stick of it costs
50 bucks.