The “Mojave Experiment”

[Singh400]

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

Interesting isn't it?

[avinitski]

Bill, is that you?

[Wild Weasel]

Microsoft is a marketing company; They just do software so they have something to market. There are plenty of people who have tried Vista and don't like it.

I think Vista is all right personally, but I wouldn't put it on a laptop. Oh and the disk defragmenter is a joke.

[Lawrenzini]

Reminds me of 2 girls 1 cup.

[gavan]

MS have really screwed up with Vista.

I'm a techie, my mates are mostly techies. We all have experience of owning and supporting PCs. We've all been exposed to it on our own machines at various points and we all hate it. In my case, I ended up taking the opportunity to change back to XP when I upgraded my laptop hard drive.

It runs slower than XP on equivalent hardware, the disk seems to spin all the time, it takes ages to load, lots of software gives niggles when installed under Vista, driver support is variable, stuff like UAC is a pain and disabling it causes other problems, the list goes on.

Yes, some people seem to think it's OK but far and away this is the most hostile reaction I've seen to an MS OS, with the possible exception of the awful Windows ME.

When I next go to buy a new machine I will not be installing Vista on it. MS had better come up with a big improvement for Windows 7 or whatever they will be calling it.

[funkyspider]

Windows 7 will apparently have a full command line interface so you can run the OS without all the fancy windowy bits loaded if you're a techie, then when you start an application or game which needs the sexy bits they will be dynamically loaded. Vistas problem was that the core of the OS contained everything - it all had to be loaded.

MS recognises that Vista was far too bloated, too resource intensive and I'll bet that windows 7 will see all this being stripped back to a relatively small core OS with optional bits loaded as needed.

No matter how much they try to 'WOW' it up if Vista hadn't been shipped with every new PC sold it would have completely flopped.


But look how things come full circle.
'Mainframes' were command line only, the software was installed on the mainframe and what was sat in front of the user was a dumb terminal. In fact I still work on the modern day equivalent of a mainframe. Very powerful 64bit integrity servers from HP running command line VMS operating system (running intel Itanium processors - 32 of them and 1TB of memory !) and not a popup dialog box telling you to download the latest version of Realplayer in sight, no viruses and more fancy mirrored disk arrays than you can imagine.

Then the PC exploded onto everyones desk. They all had their own disks, their own software and everything was wonderful - until you tried to upgrade the software then a poor techie had to physically go to 'x' machines popping disks in and watching loading bars. It's a management nightmare for big businesses.

The 'PC' has now became a rubbish idea in large businesses. Now we see more software being installed on central servers again and what is sat in front of the users is a graphically enabled dumb terminal (particularly if you look at Wyse thin client boxes etc) . As network speeds increase more and more software will be installed remotely on a server and downloaded to run in a browser container as you need it. Google have already started this with their online spreadsheet, word processor and I believe Adobe and MS are working on online versions of their software. In fact .NET is designed specifically for distributed computing so this is at the heart of MS's future goals.

[Miyazaki]

I've had vista x64 since launch.

The only minor niggle i've had is that hp didn't supply a driver, but vista x64 had their own version which worked fine.

I can't understand why so many people have had problems.

With 4GB of ram, it is an absolute dream, never crashes, very smooth etc.

[Miyazaki]

Having said that I don't get the vista cover flow of windows. Totally pointless and never use it, likewise with sidebar. Gimmicks.

[evilgenius]

Originally Posted by Games Guru

I've had vista x64 since launch.

The only minor niggle i've had is that hp didn't supply a driver, but vista x64 had their own version which worked fine.

I can't understand why so many people have had problems.

With 4GB of ram, it is an absolute dream, never crashes, very smooth etc.

exactly the same opinion as GG. Not one single problem.

[rjs316]

Originally Posted by evilgenius

exactly the same opinion as GG. Not one single problem.

I have the same, no problems here.

[Digger]

How ironic! Micro$oft does viral too. . .

[Noggin1980]

Originally Posted by Digger

How ironic! Micro$oft does viral too. . .

This isn't particually Viral marketing, though of course they would like it shared, it's a website clearly made by Microsoft about their own products that shows that one of their products has some unfair preconceptions about it and is trying to change that. Some people happen to agree with Microsoft and so have passed on the link to the site.

It's very different compared to say Nintendo having a girl in a bra and panties playing on the wii doing a hula hoop game and releaseing it on you tube like it's been made by someone about their girlfriend so they can basically release an advert a bit more risque than they would be able to put on TV (no idea if they did this by the way, just an example)

Personally I think both of those 2 types of advertiseing are good, I have a problem with advertiseing if they are paying people to share opinions that they don't really have and to mislead the consumer with that false information with say a fansite when the fans on it are paid.

[gavan]

Originally Posted by Noggin1980

This isn't particually Viral marketing, though of course they would like it shared, it's a website clearly made by Microsoft about their own products that shows that one of their products has some unfair preconceptions about it and is trying to change that. Some people happen to agree with Microsoft and so have passed on the link to the site.

Anyone I know who has badmouthed Vista (including myself) is doing so as a result of experiences that they have had when they have used it.

As for all their guff about 'trying it' I notice that you don't get much of a choice what you'd like to try when you buy a new PC as MS have forced Vista onto nearly all new consumer PCs using their monopoly position as supplier of the dominant OS platform. Even if you don't want to use it you've still paid for it when you bought the machine.

Face it MS fanboys, Microsoft have finally 'screwed the pooch' with this misfire. Apple are capitalising with more market share and Linux is growing in popularity too as it is a preinstalled option on many of the new 'netbook' type mini-laptops.

I even see that Linux BIOSes are starting to emerge to offer 'up and running within seconds' functionality. eg. Splashtop

http://www.linux.com/feature/128004

Once they take off, and I'm sure they will, MS have had it. Off all the stuff I use my PC for today, Linux or OSX could do all of it. I continue to use XP on my current kit as I'm comfortable with it but future machines will almost certainly have other OSes on them than Vista.

[SeanT]

Vista is fine, it's just XP with bells and whistles, you can turn all the junk off and use it as if it's XP and everything works fine and fast, or you can upgrade your pc and sit back and enjoy - the media centre implementation is sooo much better and the security works ok - you can even use XP drivers for stuff if you force it to. I've been using it for ages now, and working with it every day, and have only ever had minor niggles with the thing. I had ME once - trust me it's not the next ME!!!

I have to concede that it works better on newer systems that are designed for it from the off, but for what previous MS OS has that not been true.

[funkyspider]

Originally Posted by gavan

but future machines will almost certainly have other OSes on them than Vista.

Yes, they'll have windows 7 from end of (hopefully!) 2009 - and from the early sneaked info it's looking like it will be a decent OS. I just hope they strip back and speed up the core.

As for splashtop - The BBC Micro had OS in ROM and instant boot years ago. It all just goes round in circles.