Jim Louderback, outgoing editor of PC Magazine, writes about why he's soured on MS Vista. Money quote: “If Microsoft can't get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.”
I wonder what former PC World editor, and Vista enthusiast, Ed Bott has to say about this.
i’ve got a 12 month old Dual Core AMD 3800 and a lowly 1GB od RAM, it’s configured with a triple boot XP, Vista & Ubuntu and the biggest performance drain isn’t Vista it’s actually Trend Micro 2007. That thing totally kills my machine, and people complain about Vista.
I’ve got nothing against Vista, although i was dissapointed in it in general not because of it’s resource usage.. So i tend to boot in to one of the other two more often depending on what i’m doing.
Carly,
I have a machine running Vista for six months now. The only problem I have had is that iTunes took the machine down when I tried to burn a DVD, looks to me like there is a driver issue with the DVD drive.
Apart from that the machine is fast and slick even though it is driving a 2560×1600 pixel monitor at full resolution. I expect it will drive two monitors without problems and could probably do three or four if I had the desk space.
I bought a second machine for the younger kid, it runs fine without any problems at all so far.
The bad reports I have heard are all from people who have tried to upgrade an existing machine to Vista. The problem with doing that is that Windows XP drivers tend to be pretty crappy at the best of times, when they are running on the O/S they were tested with. So the machines tend to run more slowly.
Vista runs just fine if you use hardware designed for Vista. The catch here is that almost no machines that are more than a year old are going to meet the hardware requirements.
To run the big monitors I have a quadcore VooDoo overclocked to 3GHz with 4Gb of memory and twin nVidia 8800 GTS video cards. Today that costs more than most people are prepared to pay but the price is only a bit higher than the upper end Apple machines and the build quality is considerably higher. The smaller machine was less than $800 from Dell with a 20″ LCD monitor. Within a couple of years the VooDoo rig will be available for less than a grand.
Michael,
You inspired me to write this:
No more Vista whining, please
My comments are probably not worth very much, because I’ve preemptively switched from Windows to MacOS on my personal desktop machines (and not because of any Vista suckiness; some of my relatives have brand new built-for-vista notebooks and complain bitterly about sucky performance, but I’d switched over to MacOS before I heard those complaints,) but an argument of “well, you can’t expect Vista to work properly unless you buy a sealed box from the right supplier and NEVER EVER touch it yourself” isn’t what I’d call compelling.
People tweak machines. People tweak _macintoshes_, for christ’s sake, and the Mac makes all the PCs out there look like the original IBM PC in availability of technical documentation. If the market for the Spiffy! New! Microsoft OS excludes those people (the people who are called “power users” when the hardware vendors try to build a market for their latest and greatest expensive components,) it excludes a large chunk — possibly even a majority of — the technical editors who will publish reviews of that OS. And it’s not whining if they _can’t get their machines to run properly_.