October 25th, 2007
I admit, the title might be a bit misleading, we're not going anywhere nor getting back from there, but let's just ignore that and listen to old CB's senseless mumblings for a while.
A little under a year ago, Microsoft released long waited new operating system - Windows Vista. Many waited for something that would revolutionalize the way we use our computers, it's new after all, isn't it?
Some others knew what was coming, we had been already using the beta and release candinate versions of the said operating system for months.
It wasn't a revolution - but it definately was evolutoion.
Vista lacked, and still lacks, some of the promised features, maybe we will get WinFS in some future Service Pack, or maybe with Windows 7, maybe never.
Regardless of these lacking features, was he operating system a dissappointmen? To some, definately, to others, no.
I find it to suit my own needs perfectly, it offers small, yet practical, improvements over the XP GUI, not to mention it's purdy looks - which you of course can disable if you don't like it, just like you could disable Luna -theme in XP, you can disable Aero -theme in Vista.
Sadly, many people have had severe problems with their systems trying to run Vista. Naturally, most of the blame goes for Microsoft - it's their OS after all, but most seem to ignore that 99% of these problems are in fact caused by lackluster driver quality by 3rd parties, and by user errors.
I've seen in person many struggle with some quite small, yet annoying problems, only to notice after a while that the user is trying to use his Vista like it was XP - this trick worked in XP, it has to work in Vista too - right?
Wrong.
Everything is not the same, it's a new system with it's own tweaks and tricks, most yet to be
found no doubt.
Luckily for the userbase, the driver quality has improved a lot during these last few months, most systems get things working like they should as long as their hardware is relatively new, the manufacturers are taking advantage of the change and dropping support to many bit older products.
But, this isn't really what I was going to talk about.
It was the endless whining and bashing people are on with Vista, it's like a crusade already!
Many of you hopefully remember some previous OS releases, this isn't really much, if any, different from those.
People are afraid of the change, they pick on anything they can, and try to hold on to their dear old system.
But take look on XP - sure, it's a mature operating system nowadays, and there's nothing really wrong about it - but it already lived longer than planned, since Vista ended up getting more and more late.
XP has been the single longest operating system being for sale at once from Microsoft.
But it's time to wave good bye to it - in less than two years, full support for it will be dropped, leaving five more years of extended support in form of security hotfixes to follow - by that time we'll have Windows 7 too, probably.
Why not to upgrade? Because Vista is different? Is it worse? No, I've yet to see anyone point out anything real in Vista that was really worse than it used to be - excluding of course problems caused by 3rd party drivers and programs, but there's nothing MS can do about those.
One big reason many have said is the cost - it's an expensive OS - no doubt about that. But try to put it into a perspective. It's an operating system which you will use for years, the relative cost of it neglible when you compare it to 40-50€ games which only last for 10 to 20 hours in most cases.
Some people upgrade half their machine every few months, and still have the balls to whine on how they can't buy Vista because it's so expensive - hypocrisy at best.
Some don't like all the new features, but they can be (mostly) disabled if the user chooses to.
There's only one real thing I would like to "whine" about Vista myself - UAC - the idea is good and proven by *NIX OS'es for example - but the way MS implemented it is just wrong. Luckily, it's simple to turn off if you really feel like it, though that will compromise your computer security somewhat. Then there's the best option in my own opinion - use a nifty little tweak tool to turn it into "Silent mode" - this disables most of the annoyances caused
by UAC, while leaving UAC still to work.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about DirectX 10, and how Microsoft in all their greed decided to make it Vista only.
People don't seem to realize, that there are actualy technical reasons not to do a "XP port" of it - the practicly only two ways for it would be to turn XP to Vista, which of course is pointless, or to make a OpenGL wrapper which, even if it did work, would no doubt offer next to no performance at all.
Some people I've talked with have recently bought a new graphics card, many of them choosing GeForce 8 -series or Radeon HD -series card - when I've asked them why did they choose the cards they did, the main reason 2nd to performance, was DirectX 10 support. Ironicly enough, only couple of them was using, or even planning to upgrade,
to Vista, rendering their 2nd most important reason a moot point.
And now I think I've confused myself, you and my 3rd personality enough for tonight, it's 6.07 AM, I need to wake up in 1½ hours or so.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, or at least read it through once even if you didn't. And I hope you got at least some idea of what I was trying to say, since I'm not sure at all how this all will look once I post it.
Maybe I'll read this all later today, after a nap, myself, too, and try to make something out of it.
Maybe even rephrase a thing or two, or rewrite the whole blog entry to make any sense out of it.
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