Rants and shants on Vista
Microsoft Windows Vista. 5 years in the making. Their largest and most ambitious project ever. Now its terror is released upon the world. So, what do I have to do to get XP on a laptop? Well, here's the list of places offering it that also offer reasonable quality hardware:
Lenovo
Dell (Business class, not that crappy consumer shitt)
Newegg
CDW
Tigerdirect
Now for the list of places that offer XP on good hardware AND are affordable enough to purchase from:
...
...
...
Well, you get the idea. I think the best thing we can do as a race at this point is not wipe out global hunger, poverty, or stop fighting, but to convince ALL of the computer manufacturers of the world to BAN Vista. Seriously, XP runs smilingly happy on 256+ megs of ram. Vista REQUIRES 512 megs just to do its base level operations. If you wanna open notepad, well, that's an extra couple-hundred megs of ram. XP loads into memory, and leaves your hard drive alone for the most part. VISTA, on the otherhand, has to constantly search and index your hard drive to find files, pre-loads as many apps into its "cache" as possible - meaning it copies and pastes a duplicate of content you use a lot or it thinks you will use a lot, and it ties a LOT of unnecessary services together in the services.msc program such that disabling say, your multimedia controller service mutes all audio. As far as I can last remember, I used to be able to double-click the freaking sound icon, open the mic properties, and adjust volumes despite 3 bulky-ass services running all the time.
If that weren't bad enough, the default behavior of almost ALL ways to turn off your computer is to put it to "Sleep" or "Hibernate" mode. Why is this, you ask? Because VISTA IS SO FUCKING SLOW THAT IT TAKES SEVERAL MINUTES ON A MONSTERFULLY POWERFUL COMPUTER JUST TO BOOT! Its actually faster to dump 1, 2, or even 8 megs of data to your hard drive in hibernate mode than it is to load from your hard drive.
What about security? The only differences in security is that Vista is so wildly UN-FRIENDLY, that no one in their right mind would attack it! It has the SAME firewall that XP does as far as I can tell. BTW, that is the best software firewall I've ever encountered. It doesn't let shit get in and takes minimal resources compared to ANY other I've encountered. So, what about if you leave your computer logged on and you're away and your worst enemy or a child pops onto your computer? Well, the built-in IE7 is so horribly slow and choppy and won't let you move buttons onto the same line to save space that few would desire it. Trying to change settings brings up a "ALLOW OR DENY" box that scares most normal as well as power-users into not doing anything with it. It has a backup option that will back up to a hard drive or onto a CD. But NOT a network drive, USB drive, or memory card/stick. Why? Its not like its hard to support - they JUST DECIDED TO DISALLOW IT!
"But what about the rolodex?" Yes, you can get that with home premium or ultimate and the "Aero" theme. All it does is have more-translucent windows so you can't read the fucking text clearly. The rolodex takes tons of power if you don't have a monster dedicated video card.
"But they said it'd be great for games!" Only the newest games. If you have something more than a few years old, it won't work in many cases. Why not? They changed a LOT under the hood in DirectX 10. Many core files are renamed. Not that they'd HAVE to be, but they are. Master of Orion 2, Diablo 2, and others are buggy as sin. I installed VMWare Server on my vista laptop just so I can get NORMAL apps to run.
Windows media - its been a joke ever since version 7. I see nothing redeeming about it. WMP is slow and sucks the life outta your computer. I used wmp 11, mplayer2 (the trusty version 6.4 wmp), and "media player classic" (a 3rp party single-executable media player with very fast playback and TONS of good features). Mplayer2 wins hands down over WMP 7-11 and "Media Player Classic" wins over both of them.
If you turn off services that seem TOTALLY IRRELEVANT, you will make your vista computer reboot with no warning or way to stop it. I've done that many times before while trying to get it to work at LEAST as fast as a 386 12 MHz processor system with 2 megs of ram. Its almost hopeless.
Allegedly, Vista doesn't use the registry. That's a lie if I ever heard one. There's no reason Microsoft should say that when the Registry is FILLED with shit as much as ever. Not just an empty skeleton of the registry, nooooO, but a FULL BEAST waiting in the darkenss.
Vista doesn't run any faster in any way I've ever seen. Between XP and 2000 XP booted and shut down faster with enough Ram. Vista won't. Vista automatically schedules disk defragmenter for you to run in the background. Surprise there - its just task scheduler. But wait! it works now! It used to work in win95, 98, and me. Then they broke it in XP. Now, it works again (supposedly) and the disk defragmenter does NOT show you your hard drive fragmentation. Why? BECAUSE YOU'D PISS YOURSELF AND SLIT YOUR THROAT if you saw how fucked up and fragmented your files are.
Vista keeps track of if you have a microphone or speakers plugged in and won't let you configure any audio that IT doesn't recognize. Not talking sound cards here, but your ACTUAL ANALOG SPEAKERS and MICS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Vista does warn you when you run software that it KNOWS won't work. It offers to alert you when said software's manufacturers make a "vista patch." A likely story - Vista is crap!
Networking... its NOT easier. Its MUCH harder. It has a damn annoying 'Network Sharing Center' that it brings up when all I fucking want is to see my damn wireless card's IP address. The "Repair' option is missing, now it is "Diagnose" - IT FUCKING TRIES TO TELL YOU What's wrong instead of just fixing it.
Even with "Explorer windows launched as a seperate process," it still fucking locks up.
Autorun now asks you EVERY TIME if you want to let software run or not. Good for people who are the victims of purposefully-made viruses using autorun.inf files, bad for everyone else (its like 6 billion people to 1 here! COME ON!!!)
In short, I hate vista, but cannot replace it because my boss said I have to "learn it." I know enough to tell everyone I meet that its not worth it. Vista isn't worth being paid $1000.00 to use because its THAT horrid!
In short, if you or ANYONE you know is planning on getting a new computer, get an XP one, or a Mac, or even Linux. The headaches are infinitely LESS. As a note to anyone supporting someone who uses Vista - if you have to work on their computers, you'll work FAR LESS if you back up their data, reformat and put XP on, and restore all software and data. Even if you have to BUY a FULL VERSION of XP and all the software again and you're dead broke, you'll be done that much sooner that its worth it. Its even more worth it than getting paid back as a tax writeoff.
Thanks for listening.
Lenovo
Dell (Business class, not that crappy consumer shitt)
Newegg
CDW
Tigerdirect
Now for the list of places that offer XP on good hardware AND are affordable enough to purchase from:
...
...
...
Well, you get the idea. I think the best thing we can do as a race at this point is not wipe out global hunger, poverty, or stop fighting, but to convince ALL of the computer manufacturers of the world to BAN Vista. Seriously, XP runs smilingly happy on 256+ megs of ram. Vista REQUIRES 512 megs just to do its base level operations. If you wanna open notepad, well, that's an extra couple-hundred megs of ram. XP loads into memory, and leaves your hard drive alone for the most part. VISTA, on the otherhand, has to constantly search and index your hard drive to find files, pre-loads as many apps into its "cache" as possible - meaning it copies and pastes a duplicate of content you use a lot or it thinks you will use a lot, and it ties a LOT of unnecessary services together in the services.msc program such that disabling say, your multimedia controller service mutes all audio. As far as I can last remember, I used to be able to double-click the freaking sound icon, open the mic properties, and adjust volumes despite 3 bulky-ass services running all the time.
If that weren't bad enough, the default behavior of almost ALL ways to turn off your computer is to put it to "Sleep" or "Hibernate" mode. Why is this, you ask? Because VISTA IS SO FUCKING SLOW THAT IT TAKES SEVERAL MINUTES ON A MONSTERFULLY POWERFUL COMPUTER JUST TO BOOT! Its actually faster to dump 1, 2, or even 8 megs of data to your hard drive in hibernate mode than it is to load from your hard drive.
What about security? The only differences in security is that Vista is so wildly UN-FRIENDLY, that no one in their right mind would attack it! It has the SAME firewall that XP does as far as I can tell. BTW, that is the best software firewall I've ever encountered. It doesn't let shit get in and takes minimal resources compared to ANY other I've encountered. So, what about if you leave your computer logged on and you're away and your worst enemy or a child pops onto your computer? Well, the built-in IE7 is so horribly slow and choppy and won't let you move buttons onto the same line to save space that few would desire it. Trying to change settings brings up a "ALLOW OR DENY" box that scares most normal as well as power-users into not doing anything with it. It has a backup option that will back up to a hard drive or onto a CD. But NOT a network drive, USB drive, or memory card/stick. Why? Its not like its hard to support - they JUST DECIDED TO DISALLOW IT!
"But what about the rolodex?" Yes, you can get that with home premium or ultimate and the "Aero" theme. All it does is have more-translucent windows so you can't read the fucking text clearly. The rolodex takes tons of power if you don't have a monster dedicated video card.
"But they said it'd be great for games!" Only the newest games. If you have something more than a few years old, it won't work in many cases. Why not? They changed a LOT under the hood in DirectX 10. Many core files are renamed. Not that they'd HAVE to be, but they are. Master of Orion 2, Diablo 2, and others are buggy as sin. I installed VMWare Server on my vista laptop just so I can get NORMAL apps to run.
Windows media - its been a joke ever since version 7. I see nothing redeeming about it. WMP is slow and sucks the life outta your computer. I used wmp 11, mplayer2 (the trusty version 6.4 wmp), and "media player classic" (a 3rp party single-executable media player with very fast playback and TONS of good features). Mplayer2 wins hands down over WMP 7-11 and "Media Player Classic" wins over both of them.
If you turn off services that seem TOTALLY IRRELEVANT, you will make your vista computer reboot with no warning or way to stop it. I've done that many times before while trying to get it to work at LEAST as fast as a 386 12 MHz processor system with 2 megs of ram. Its almost hopeless.
Allegedly, Vista doesn't use the registry. That's a lie if I ever heard one. There's no reason Microsoft should say that when the Registry is FILLED with shit as much as ever. Not just an empty skeleton of the registry, nooooO, but a FULL BEAST waiting in the darkenss.
Vista doesn't run any faster in any way I've ever seen. Between XP and 2000 XP booted and shut down faster with enough Ram. Vista won't. Vista automatically schedules disk defragmenter for you to run in the background. Surprise there - its just task scheduler. But wait! it works now! It used to work in win95, 98, and me. Then they broke it in XP. Now, it works again (supposedly) and the disk defragmenter does NOT show you your hard drive fragmentation. Why? BECAUSE YOU'D PISS YOURSELF AND SLIT YOUR THROAT if you saw how fucked up and fragmented your files are.
Vista keeps track of if you have a microphone or speakers plugged in and won't let you configure any audio that IT doesn't recognize. Not talking sound cards here, but your ACTUAL ANALOG SPEAKERS and MICS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Vista does warn you when you run software that it KNOWS won't work. It offers to alert you when said software's manufacturers make a "vista patch." A likely story - Vista is crap!
Networking... its NOT easier. Its MUCH harder. It has a damn annoying 'Network Sharing Center' that it brings up when all I fucking want is to see my damn wireless card's IP address. The "Repair' option is missing, now it is "Diagnose" - IT FUCKING TRIES TO TELL YOU What's wrong instead of just fixing it.
Even with "Explorer windows launched as a seperate process," it still fucking locks up.
Autorun now asks you EVERY TIME if you want to let software run or not. Good for people who are the victims of purposefully-made viruses using autorun.inf files, bad for everyone else (its like 6 billion people to 1 here! COME ON!!!)
In short, I hate vista, but cannot replace it because my boss said I have to "learn it." I know enough to tell everyone I meet that its not worth it. Vista isn't worth being paid $1000.00 to use because its THAT horrid!
In short, if you or ANYONE you know is planning on getting a new computer, get an XP one, or a Mac, or even Linux. The headaches are infinitely LESS. As a note to anyone supporting someone who uses Vista - if you have to work on their computers, you'll work FAR LESS if you back up their data, reformat and put XP on, and restore all software and data. Even if you have to BUY a FULL VERSION of XP and all the software again and you're dead broke, you'll be done that much sooner that its worth it. Its even more worth it than getting paid back as a tax writeoff.
Thanks for listening.