So I got a new pc this week. A shiny new Dell with Vista and all its glass and eye-candy. So far I really enjoy Vista it is pretty, does media extremely well and although not as fast as XP might be, not a dead dog either. I guess it helps that the machine is rather well spec'd, with an AMD Athlon x64 5600+, 4GB or RAM and a few more bells and whistles giving a Vista rating of 5.3. Anyway, I was happily reading a blog on not being able to get SP1 to install due to driver issues and noting that I had the same problem (that's how I found the blog).
Unfortunately I read the comments and could do nothing but sigh. How anyone can claim that Linux is better than Windows or that Apple is the way to go, I currently do not understand.
If you write software for a living, you are pretty much "stuck" on a windows machine, unless you want to write java, in which case you either have a screw loose, no girlfriend, don't mind hideous interfaces, fighting with classes and are quite simply leaning towards sadomasochistic. So windows it is then.
Some of you may remember how slow XP was when it came out, how wireless networking was virtually unusable until SP1 and how driver support was lagging for a good few months, but nobody had really used wireless networks before. So it took a while to figure out how to work with the masses.
Linux is great for people that use there pc to surf or write documents. Yes that is naive and narrow minded and I know that with a little bit of know-how you can do anything on a Linux box, but you need to spend the time. Have you managed to sync a Bluetooth device on a Linux box?
A two year old machine will of course be able to run Linux, the hardware is old, and thus there is drivers. Windows 3.11 would run fine on it. There isn't drivers for the latest ATI and Nvidia cards. That's just a fact. My new Canon printer won't play happy and Canon didn't spend the time to write drivers for it either.
If you know what goes into an operating system, to get it to "plug-n-play" with all hardware combinations and software and still stay sans BSOD, you would appreciate what MS puts together. Then you have software vendors complaining that the OS isn't open enough and that they need access to the kernel, otherwise it is unfair practices. So MS opens up and holes appear. When did Apple last open up the OS's APIs for Norton or Symantic?
Apple is great and all, but iMac is custom hardware for a custom OS, of course it works, but I have seen it crash on more than one occasion and as far as viruses and hacking goes, it has a minute install base, it just isn't worth spending time on yet. Same thing goes for FireFox vs IE. A larger install base means more will try hack it. No firefox 3 isn't perfect, 8 million downloads in one day and a huge security flaw to boot. Oh, and while on the negatives, an Apple will also set you back at lest 2 or 3 times what a pc with even Vista Ultimate will.
As for Windows ME, that was the first OS to be built on a non-Dos based kernel and it didn't manage very well. But as far as I remember, MS released Windows 2000 between it and XP as the first NT based OS and many people still use 2000.
I have played with Linux, I prefer XP and I am pissed my new (pre-installed) machine won't accept Vista SP1 just yet. I won't go back to XP at home, I turned off User Account Control and it no longer bugs me. Vista is still young, but it is a step in a new direction. Linux may get there one day, but until hardware gets sold with "Linux Certified" I will be using windows.
Call me a fanboy, I make a living providing a service to the millions of other people who, like me, live in a windows world and most would probably agree, it does just work!
(original post: http://blogs.computerworld.com/my_nightmare_trying_to_upgrade_to_vista_sp1)