I guess this is an old post, but oh well, somebody else replied and I felt like joining him . . .
7. Agreed. It seems the new search is like a bandage for the huge organizational problems the Start Menu has, rather than a true solution.
6. Sounds like a hardware incompatibility. You're the first person I've heard describe it.
5. Please try here instead of turning it completely off: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=436&page=4
Yes, it's a bit annoying, but it's one of the top reasons why Vista is much more secure than XP. I'd much rather people take the time to minimize its annoyances than disable it altogether.
4. See #6.
3. Microsoft never claimed their defrag was better, and it's not really a core feature of the OS. To be honest, however, people that need to do a lot of defragmenting generally need more memory, because their system is relying too much on the hard drive.
2. In this case, I'd agree with you: Ultimate is way overpriced and gives you absolutely nothing worth the cost of buying it. I'd agree that Office is seriously overpriced as well.
Unfortunately, that has little chance of changing, since Windows and Office are Microsoft's two primary money making products. They care more about making money by forcing you to buy it rather than by competitive pricing.
1. That'd pretty much how major OS upgrades work. Been that way for a long time. Can't run XP on a 486.
There are only two benefits that Vista has going for it, one is DX10 and DX10.1, and being able to handle more than 4 GB RAM.
Actually, XP also has a 64 bit version, and Vista's 64 bit versions are separate from the 32 bit versions in all but the Ultimate version.
Thankfully, buying the 64 bit version is very cheap if you already have the 32 bit version. I think it was just shipping and handling.
Better Speech Recognition
Agreed. It has more features that help the recognition, but the recognition itself is still marginal at best. I'm still always correcting and repeating my corrections.
Real Word Processing: MS WORD
Agreed, but not gonna happen. Office itself is another huge money maker for Microsoft.
Works was almost worse than nothing, because it had its own proprietary non-doc file format. At least it did the last time I used it, which was a long time ago.
Notepad is unfortunately still horrible when it comes to line endings, and WordPad still needs a spell checker - there are a gazillion free basic text editing programs that do a much better job. Why has Microsoft never fixed these programs? I'm not asking for Microsoft to turn either of them into Word - just to do a minimal amount of tweaking to make them suitable for basic word processing when you don't need a fully featured word processor like Word.
Actually, all they really need to do is to port EDIT, their old DOS word processor, to Windows - that was actually great program, and would be a decent replacement for Notepad.
I might just do that myself someday . . .
Faster and better performance than the previous OS
Unfortunately, that rules out every OS on the planet - even Linux is getting quite bloated these days, especially as they try to make Linux more like a desktop OS.
Frankly, it's hard. Everybody wants a slim OS - but everybody also wants it to be fully featured. Unfortunately, features add bloat.
If I was going to have the sidebar, the first thing I'd have in there is a google map of where the computer is at, instead of a second clock, 4 inches above my digital clock on the system tray.
The defaults aren't that good, but I'd imagine most people either turn the bar off or customize it. It is, after all, designed to be a widget center that's very flexible.
(but I still like Mac OS X's widgets better - I can turn them on and off in a single keystroke)
Driver Support for EVERYTHING
Trust me - Microsoft wants this as well. They hate the driver situation as much as everybody else does. Unfortunately, the driver situation is largely out of their hands.
Emulation won't work for drivers, by the way. You can only emulate devices you know about, and drivers are all about making you know about new devices.
they have an OS which is the basis for everything to run on and 3rd party devs to develop for, not the other way around.
Like Android, the OS that only works on an emulator and has no physical hardware for it yet?
Yeah, that's the fastest way to kill Windows. That plan may or may not work out for Android, but that's because it's not expected to run on any hardware yet. Windows, on the other hand, is expected to run on current machines, and losing support for those machines would kill it very quickly.
Real Backward Compatibility
Easier said than done. Even emulators and virtual machines have bugs and are often imperfect copies of older hardware.
By the way, DOSBox works great for DOS games, and Virtual PC works fine for all versions of Windows I've tested so far (although I'd love to get my hands on 3.11 someday).
Number 4 and 6 are probably resolved by now, since this post is pre-SP1 and probably when Vista was young.
Otherwise, go with the intelligent answer - disable security center and all the built in crap anyway
That's far from intelligent - third party products do
not work at the lowest levels of the OS and do
not provide the same services as UAC. I'd much rather people follow the link I provided above and make it less annoying rather than turning it completely off.
