Shenan Stanley is an obvious jerk (in my opinion) with his
unnecessarily sarcastic reply below to the legitimate concern
expressed by Malvern. Shenan Stanley apparently has an agenda
(since he is an MVP) and makes excuses for Microsoft by mocking
Malvern as a Luddite who is opposed to technological change.
Malvern's concerns are not about change in general. They are about
changes that represent a giant step backward and a decline in
performance and functionality. Some changes are just not
beneficial. That is the point of Malvern's concern and that Shenan
Stanley mockingly sidesteps.
OK, here is a little bit about me. I make my living as a computer
professional in my own business. I have been involved
professionally with computers since 1982 and in electronics
generally since 1960. So I know what I'm talking about.
At the present time, Vista is a *BIG* money-maker for me because of
how utterly crappy it is. Vista is inferior to XP on almost any
basis you want to consider. Vista is a very poor performer in terms
of graphics because Microsoft abandoned support for the OpenGL
standard as a way of pusing their own proprietary Direct3D product.
So any games or applications that require OpenGL support run at
about 2% of the performance that XP provides. Vista also comes up
short in terms of game performance generally and single application
performance. XP is superior to Vista on all three fronts.
But don't take my word for this. Read the article published by the
benchmarking gurus at Toms Hardware. You can find the article with
detailed comparisons of Vista performance and XP performance on
identical hardware and software at the URL
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/
That article tells the whole story about why Vista is just a big
bloated Turd dressed up to look pretty. Make no mistake. Pretty
is not the same as functional. Most of my clients are businesses
who don't care at all about pretty. All they want is functionality
and performance.
If you want to know why Microsoft is announcing their heavy-handed
sudden withdrawal of support for XP, it is because they know that
most people who know the ugly truth will reject Vista in favor of
its more capable predecessor, XP. The only way to force people to
buy Vista is to use the bludgeon method of forbidding the OEM
menufacturers the option of satisfying customer demand by
continuing to provide XP on new systems. Microsoft knows they can't
sell Vista on its merits because by objective benchmarking
standards Vista has few, if any, merits when compared to XP. Even
the much touted ReadyBoost feature of Vista gives slower
performance that is inferior to just plain additional physical RAM.
See the benchmark article at
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/30878/137/
I have numerous clients (most of them small business clients) who,
against my advice, have made the decision to buy a Vista computer
(most buy Vista Ultimate) and who are having numerous problems and
frustrations. But don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for the
many desperate calls for help that I get from frustrated people who
can't get their systems running properly and who can't find
anything anymore in the new Vista GUI.
I will never understand why Microsoft insists on moving everything
around and renaming almost everything as they did in this latest
RTM version of Vista. To my mind this ploy is merely a hustle by
which Microsoft wishes to make it appear as if they really changed
something. But apart from the new and slightly useful memory
management features, SuperFetch and ReadyBoost, Vista is mostly the
same XP kernel but now actually inferior to XP and having an
awkward GUI that makes it very frustrating to learn to use it for
people who have become accustomed to a Windows GUI that has been
relatively consistent since at least Win98, if not Win95.
To begin with, there a serious problem of a lack of availability of
drivers and manuals, even for new equipment!! A recent example is
the business client with a brand spanking new HP Photosmart C6180
All-In-One multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax that was sold
to the client directly by HP along with his brand new HP DV9000
duo-core laptop (nice box) equipped with Vista. No Vista drivers
were provided on CD with the C6180. Also there was no manual
covering Vista. The provided drivers and manual stopped at XP.
Oh, yes, I found a Vista driver online, but HP Support admitted
that they haven't released the Vista manual for the product yet and
there's no ETA. Please, I don't want to hear that this is not
Microsoft's fault. It certainly is their fault for not providing
sufficient lead time and support to manufacturer's to allow them to
be ready for the launch of Vista with their own product lines.
Even now six months later, major manufacturers are still having
problems supplying Vista drivers and manuals.
Let's not even get started about the lack of Vista support for
legacy peripherals and hardware that is already in use and
installed. That conversation would be the circumlocution of the
self-evident and I've already made my essential point.
=Howard Leighty=
Yes, it is my real email address.
I fear no spam. I use MailWasher Pro.
(
http://www.mailwasher.net/ )