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Vista – I’m Not Convinced
by Andrew McCaskey
I had a message from a listener today, saying in effect that I’ve been a part of the blog biased reporting of Vista.
Here’s a part of the message – and I agree in part, I’ve not been the most objective reporter:
”
I’m a regular listener of your show and normally enjoy it. During your 2/21 show you reported on Vista and it had way too much of a soundbite type reporting quality to that segment. You neglected to say why SP1 was pulled. It sounded like you made the assumption that SP1 was a failure after Mossberg tested it and that now Microsoft is pulling it. I’m sure you know that SP1 was pulled because of a problem some people had with the initial update file which is only a temporary problem. I’m getting tired of all the Vista bashers. I’ve been using it on two machines since it first came out. These machines have enough power to handle Vista and I’m blaming manufacturers for not providing drivers in order to sell updated hardware. I’m just not buying the negative view of Vista and I think you should take a look at Ed Bott’s blog to get a real perspective. Too many journalists are jumping on the Vista hating bandwagon. Don’t follow their lead without some solid experience using the OS. “
I responded
Thanks for writing. You are right in that I am probably not providing balanced coverage. I had sort of dismissed a lot of the publicity and went into the wait and see mode. In November, I purchased an ACER 5315 (the famous Walmart Black Friday machine) for my wife, who’s only use would be for web surfing and email – and possibly running a CAD program for quilters (Electric Quilt) . Our other plan was to send it to Grandma for email only. So far we have had a miserable experience with Vista Home Basic on that machine. The initialization went well – in fact she did the setup and it worked for almost two hours in the web browsing mode until a horrible sound caused her to run and turn it off. When she booted back up, there was no sound – and remained so until I located and reinstalled the audio drivers. Next, we continued to have problems with erratic keyboard and touchpad to the point where the machine is unusable. We sent the machine back to ACER for repair under warranty and it came back having passed their checks, new drivers, etc and we are still experiencing the same erratic behavior. I suspected, with only 1GB of RAM that it was totally out of working room – so I put in a Lexar 2GB USB drive and configured it to extend Vista performance. It is unable to run a Wordpad session without keyboard errors and I am getting ready to send it back to ACER again. Regardless of who (ACER, keyboard mfr, Vista) is responsible, this machine is not on its way to Grandma. I plan one more sweep through ACER, an Ubtuntu install and failing that, the dumpster.
It’s probably unfair to criticize an OS based on low end hardware – but my consumer experience with this machine has been miserable – and it is going through a channel that many consumers will fall as unsuspecting victims.
Anyway – thanks for listening to the program and a bit of my personal frustration with my first Vista experience. A year or two from now once this all shakes out, it will be a non issue.
Michael finished up the message thread
That about sums up a bad Vista experience. Rule #1, never buy a computer from Walmart, especially the lowest end one out there. Vista Home Basic is definitely a problem and Microsoft should offer a free upgrade to Home Premium, that I can agree with. I would have to equate it with running XP SP1 still when SP2 is available. It does sound like you got burned on that hardware, sort of like the early days of E-Machines when they used third tier quality hardware that all the other manufacturers were rejecting.
Like Office 2007, Vista is going to be around for quite a while so any new machine that can handle Vista should be purchased with Vista and not XP. Don’t give up yet, it works well on a machine designed for it and newer peripherals. I’m running the beta Vista SP1 and it fixed the slow file copy problem which was the only problem I have really experienced. Both machines that I upgraded are at least three years old now but they were state of the art when new.
That’s just about it: You get what you pay for and I need to move on. It’s going to be a while before I run another Vista experiment.
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