Vista - Crap Or Work-In-Progress ?

[GhostShip]

You all Know my opinions on this latest DRM ridden anti consumer Operating System but what are other folks saying after this weeks announcements and revelations ?

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15107

Did Bill and the Boyz knowingly scam people by letting PC makers stick ‘Windows Vista Capable’ on PCs when they knew perfectly well the computers could run only the most bare-bones version?” - wondered a p2pnet post, going on:

“That’s the subject of a current class action and in the meanwhile, the company now tacitly admits it overcharged people by saying it plans to massively slash the price of versions which go directly to consumers by 20% to 48%.”

Here is a BBC take on the Vista price cutting aspect

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7270757.stm

Microsoft has said it plans to cut the cost of its Windows Vista operating system sold at retail outlets.
Although no exact date has yet been given, Microsoft said price cuts would be introduced in 70 countries.

In the US, the cost of the most expensive version, Vista Ultimate, will be reduced to $319 (£161) from the current retail price of $399.
Analysts said Microsoft was aiming to boost the number of customers upgrading to Vista, which was introduced in 2007.
The price cuts apply to the packaged versions of Vista, which account for less than 10% of its sales.

This story is regarding the alleged collusion between Intel and MS to hoodwink PC users Into purchasing "Barely Capable" Vista Ready Machines.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/microsoft-lowered-vista-requirements-to-help-intel-sell-incompat/

So now that the "Vista Capable" lawsuit is a full-blown class action, the judge has unsealed all 158 pages of emails between Microsoft execs trying to sort out what went wrong with the sticker program. While bits and pieces have been blacked out, what remains is still fairly incredible -- although Intel's 915 chipset was initially rejected as incompatible with Vista, MS execs flatly admit that "In the end, we lowered the requirements to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded" and "We are caving to Intel. We worked the last 18 months to drive the UI experience and we are giving this up." On top of that, it seems that the company was getting direct feedback from retailers that the stickers were confusing

It looks like this may be the real reason Vista is so unpopular, if it indeed requires more expensive hardware many folks would be struggling to make it work properly.
Lets hope they clean this mess up before more folks stop using what is in effect the Cartels favourite operating system.

[]-[êll.Ôñ.ËÀR'][']-[.]

Vista - Crap Or Work-In-Progress ?

ummmmm just crap 

[ñòóKýçrÕôK]

I say work in progress. If everyone will recall. They also said XP was crap when it came out. And I think it was too. Now I use XP religiously. I also am setup on a dualboot Vista Ultimate, XP Professional system. I think given time they'll iron out the faults in Vista and folks will learn how to disable the DRM in it and be perfectly happy. Some will use it blindly, never knowing about the DRM or what it means or does. I believe the DRM on Vista is a service called Software Liscencing service which I checked into some and what it amounts to is if Vista phones home using Software Liscencing service and MS doesn't like that you have killed so many services or just some of your basic ripping software, or decoding, or encoding software, or they just take a notion and say "This user has WAY too much copyrighted music on his pc along with WinMX (strictly for example). I say we send a shutdown." Software Liscencing allows them the ability to remotely disable your operating system negate your Windows setup. And since the boot for Vista is written into the MBR(master boot record) of the drive, making formatting it a useless workaround, I believe it perfectly capable of doing so and forcing you to either purchase a new drive to reinstall it or seek MS as to why it is no longer working.


As for the 915 intel boards, of which I happen to own one, it is definately true there is no working Vista vid driver for the onboard Intel based video. I have had mine for a year or more and however long it's been since Vista's release there is still no working video driver for it. Only difference in mine being is it wasn't marketed as a "Vista Capable" board because I bought my board from a local pc builder company out of their private stock that they used for building pcs. And unlike XP, Vista disabled the onboard video as a result of incompatibilty where XP would've installed some sort of plug n play drivers to make it work.

[White Stripes]

the MBR can be rewritten... you wouldnt have to buy a new drive...

and the only way i can see Vista being a work in progress is if they trimmed a LOT of fat... (like the phone-home-deactivate thing... overbearing DRM and overuse of resources)

then again i put XPSP2 with its crippled TCP/IP stack and added bloat (XPSP1 and 2KSP4 are fine) into the 'crap' pile too...