Vista-Irate Mother and XP SP3-My personal concerns about XP’s fate.
Posted by Kirk M on 11 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: BackWoods tech
One of the things that has been percolating in the back of my mind of late is the question "What’s going to happen my poor XP PRO OS in 8 months when all support for this version of XP is dropped? I happen to be one of those old(er) computer techs who has no problem with MS keeping my system up to date so I have all the bells and whistles of background functionality installed (with the exception of Desktop Search which is too much of a resource hog for my tastes) so I’m more than satisfied with my with the way my PC conducts business. I’m also one of those crusty old PC users that know their OS inside and out and I’ll tell you up front, I like my fully updated XP OS just fine and I’m definitely not looking forward to the time when I might be forced into looking elsewhere when the updates stop rolling in.
And now this rather irate mother takes good old Steve Ballmer to task on Windows Vista (which I’m already not liking…a lot). Her problem with Vista is the same complaint a large portion of other PC owners who upgraded are going through–reverting back to XP after shelling out the $$$ for Vista.
Mother’s ire puts Ballmer on defense over Vista
"I’m one of those early adopters of Vista," said Yvonne Genovese, an analyst who was interviewing Ballmer along with fellow analyst David Smith on stage at a conference forum. "My daughter comes in one day and says, ‘Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets — I need those.’"
Said Ballmer: "I love your daughter."
"You’re not going to like her mom in about two minutes," said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.
After reading the entire article, does it seem that Ballmer was pushing the IT aspect of it, never addressing the home user’s experience at all?
Whatever…
I certainly understand the reluctance in upgrading
from one version of Windows to another but I have to chuckle when I read excuses like this as one of the defenses given for the lack of uptake on the new OS: "This is exactly what happened when XP rolled out", they say.
Uh…no…not really.
Sure, there was the typical slow start when it first hit the streets like any new OS version experiences and since this was a 32 bit operating system only and the previous Windows versions from 95 up were a combination 16/32 bit affair, it added to the amount of time before the uptake began to really get it’s steam up however, even in it’s original release, XP was a far superior OS than anything that came before (albeit overall, the IT folks complained a bit at first) and it was much more stable as well and Vista, in my opinion, has not proven the same.
So here’s Vista and I say–so what? By what I’ve seen by using other PC’s (various set ups) with Vista installed, once I’m past the eye candy, I wasn’t impressed with what I saw or the way it performed. Yes, it’s brand new OS, I realize that and perhaps it will improve over time but it didn’t give me the rush I had when I first put XP through it’s paces and XP didn’t have the massive UI changes that Vista has to catch your attention in fact, it looked like Windows 95 with a only a few minor improvements in the looks department. It was the the performance, functionality and solid feeling of the XP OS that grabbed my attention (and kept it) and Vista definitely did not have that in it’s favor.
Oh well, like all things that have to do with the ubiquitous PC and with the upcoming release of XP SP3 sometime in the first half of 2008, things never remain the same even when it comes to upcoming releases of anything Microsoft. Who knows, we just might see good ol’ XP around for some time yet and personally, that would suit me just fine. The idea that I might shortly be faced with having to go to Vista (if it’s not significantly improved upon for the home user), OSX or one of the Linux Distro’s definitely does not appeal to me.
Possibly Related Matter
5 Comments »
on 11 Oct 2007 at 8:00 pm 1.janet said …
I’ve had vista since shortly after it’s release. It operates much the same as xp IMHO, but I’ve yet to really get to know it. Funny.. I’m on my old laptop right now with xp. What distubes me more than anything is the dang keyboard.
on 12 Oct 2007 at 12:16 am 2.Malignition.com said …
Now that I’ve been using vista for almost a year, I can’t say that it varies too greatly from xp. Yes, you have the fancy start menu and sidebar, but that doesn’t do much in the way of functionality.
on 12 Oct 2007 at 10:21 am 3.KirkM said …
Hi Janet,
Thanks for the BOB by the way.
I never did like laptop.notebook keyboards. Considering my typing ability, I don’t really like any keyboard.
Hey M.I.
Yup, I took a look at your blog. Way to go on a unique idea. I love it.
With what you and Janet are saying I’m understanding that Vista works okay for you but is not that much different than XP? Still not a reason to upgrade not that I would attempt that on my current PC. By the time I need to upgrade the hardware to an entire new machine, I’m really hoping that they’ll have the new OS and it’s current problems smoothed out.
You know, I just might put up a short post asking for folks that are currently using Vista to give their views on it. Might be interesting.
on 17 Oct 2007 at 7:41 am 4.Rob O. said …
I’m right there with you, Kirk… I’ve used every version of Windows made - not as a home user, but as a corporate IT guy - and XP is the bomb. It’s the easiest Windows to install (good grief, don’t get me started on NT 4.0) and it’s comparably rock-solid stable.
Vista offers mostly useless, resource-devouring eye-candy. (Sitting idle, the OS chews up nearly half a gig of RAM, for goodness sake!) And they’ve made enough underlying changes to give us IT guys sleepless nights. But functionally, Vista is just a slower version of XP.
Stick with XP. It’s not going away anytime soon.
on 17 Oct 2007 at 4:12 pm 5.KirkM said …
Rob O.
Oh, the memories of NT 4.0.
I remember when I tackled (just for the perversity of the thing) installing NT 4.0 on the PC that I used for beta testing back in ‘97. I had been testing beta builds of Win98 for sometime before then (MS ruined it with the final) and beta 1 of IE 5.0. It took me a week but I finally had NT 4.0 running with IE 5.0 beta 1 complete with most of the bells and whistles of Win98 beta 3 installed including “Active Desktop” (remember that?). If it hadn’t been for having to run those god awful service packs every time you wanted to upgrade anything, it would have been a nice setup.
Yup, I think I’ll stick with XP for awhile longer.