"The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed"

[#1]

I can’t compare Vista to XP as I upgraded a little while ago from W98 on very old equipment to a shiny new Vista Dual Core thingy but I have to say that I’m very impressed; I guess that isn’t so surprising given the leap in technology that I’ve taken.
I know from reading some of the entries in these forums that many contributors perform all sorts of technical wizardry that I don’t. So I guess that the caveat to my favourable impression of Vista is that I only expect it to do a limited amount of probably fairly standard processes anyway. I surf the net, put music, photos and video on to it, burn music cd’s and film DVD’s (just for back purposes of course), keep household finance spreadsheets and a few other documents and SWMBO keeps documents from her Clerk to Governor’s job at the village school and uses Powerpoint and Publisher mainly for kids related things. It never fails to identify new hardware, very rarely crashes, peripherals work fine with it, I can find music, photos and video quickly and easily; with a minimum of clicks I can be listening to my favourite Clash track and looking at photos of the family on the moors between Hawes and Muker whilst keeping an eye on the progress of England’s all conquering cricketer’s and checking just how far my table tennis League percentage record has dropped recently, all at the same time
As I say, the caveat is definitely that we don’t expect it to do a fat lot, but it does it very well. 
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all on the forums
Rob

[#2]

Whilst a lot of people are leaping to the defence of Vista,
in that they, personally, find Vista to be excellent and Ideal for its purpose.
The fact remains that commercially, in terms of the money and time invested in it,
it hasn't been a big hit commercially.

[#3]

Poppy, try www.aria.co.uk they have a special offer on SODIMM's 800mhz @ £11 for a 2GB stick, so 22 quid will net you 4GB DDR, can SODIMM's be dual channel?  I'm upgrading to 4GB before they run out of stock.
Axis, Vista hasn't been a runaway success, and now it never will be.  What is has done though is develop new building blocks for MS to build on, its build on their trusted wossname principle so built to be more secure, Server 08 is basically Vista with server bits stuck on, and it works fantastically well, it really is impossible to fault Server 08 (even more so as it was free from Microsoft for students :D)
Windows 7 will be built on top of the Vista architect, with the desktop experience being Aero, and hopefully the lessons they learnt from Vista will be applied to 7, namely the one that arrises the most, people want their new OS on their better system to run faster than their old OS on their older system.
In the interest of fairness, it is possible to fault 08 from a gamers point of view, whilst it does run DX10 it doesn't have Game Explorer so you can't find games easily, its also hard to find good AV for it because 08 is a server so you have to pay for it, but the firewall has been upgraded from the Vista one.  I wouldn't recommend Ultimate though, it doesn't bring much to the table, and not enough to justify the premium price tag.
Microsoft did fix many issues with SP1 though, hopefully with SP2 they will fix more of the niggling issues that people have (why can't I add a programme to a "trusted" list so it bypasses UAC?).

[#4]

Quote from: axisofevil

Whilst a lot of people are leaping to the defence of Vista,

I actually agree with you - much to my pain - I was rather hoping the laptop with Vista would be a pain to use - but it just works.
What I find more difficult to come to terms with is Office 2007's new interface - I've used Windows and Office from it's very early days and know it's menu system inside out, but with office 2007 doing the simplest tasks sometimes stops me and I have to use the help facilty . 

[#5]

Have you tried OpenOffice - it's free and the menu system is quite similar to "standard" Microsoft Office?

[#6]

Quote from: dgwebb

namely the one that arrises the most, people want their new OS on their better system to run faster than their old OS on their older system.

For me I expected my new Vista dual core, big memory, up to date spec laptop to be quicker than my four year old tired XP laptop.
Unfortunately it was slower.and much of my software didn't work on Vista.
I did persevere for about 6 months [occasional use] but then decided to  upgrade the Vista to XP and then guess what, my new laptop was like lightening and I was very happy

[#7]

I agree with you, running an OS that is 5 years old on modern hardware will prove to be a much faster experience, though I have fond memories of installing Windows 3.11 onto a RAM disk, now *that* was fast, I wonder if 98 would install onto a RAM disk, maybe ghost the image from an install, now that would be fun to watch.
Vista does have performance issues, no one can deny that, it requires a half decent computer.  When XP came out, it had performance issues also requiring a pretty half decent computer.  You could run Windows 95 on a 486SX33 with 4MB of RAM, although Simcity 2000 was unplayable, XP needed a minimum of a Pentium and a Gig of RAM, way back when a gig cost a large fortune.
An OS will always advance, older OS's should always outperform newer OS's on the same hardware, because it was designed for older hardware.  Its a bit like games in that manner, my 8800GTS will outperform my 8600GT (almost twice as fast), and Unreal (the original one with storyline) will run faster than Unreal 2008, or 2009 or whatever its called, the more I upgrade my hardware, the faster Unreal will run, but it will always run faster than the latest Unreal because its developed for older technology so was designed to run on technology which is years old, when Unreal came out no one had Dual Core let alone Quad, and 4GB RAM on a x64 system?  No chance!
So the overall speed argument is kinda skewed in that respect, yes Vista runs a bit slow (although x64 with 4GB is very perky and responsive), but will it outperform the version of Windows released in 7 years on technology that is 7 years away?

[#8]

Just adding my two peneth (gosh that beat the spell checker!!) there are 3 computers with Vista in this house, 1 Home basic and 2 Home premium, and I think I can honestly say there have been few if any problems with any of them (excepting the very occasional old software or hardware issues that were well documented before it was released and, MS never tried to hide that it would happen) However, I do remember the furore of complaints when XP replaced its predecessors, now you can't tear them away from it. 

[#9]

After spending the last few months upgrading my computer system (motherboard, processor, memory,graphics card and last week the monitor) I was thinking about going from XP to Vista. After reading this thread I'm not so sure. I have no problems with stability so my question is what does Vista offer thats not in XP. I've read the magazine reviews in the past and they keep banging on about fancy graphics but to me thats not important. Has anyone paid for an upgrade and thought it was worth the outlay. I think I've more or less decided not to bother but would still be interested in other opinions.
Paul

[#10]

Don't bother - hold off until Windows 7 comes along.
If you need to buy an operating system and don't fancy *nix then try Windows 7 RC which is free and the license runs until next year

[#11]

Why go to all the trouble of learning to use an OS that is virtually on the scrapheap already?

[#12]

Quote from: paulgul

Has anyone paid for an upgrade and thought it was worth the outlay.

2 questions there:
1. Yes, but for professional reasons (I provide an IT support service and needed my own copy)
2. Only just as a "business investment" and I don't make any use of it other than for familiarisation/testing.
I will probably migrate my own main business operations/admin systems to Windows 7 fairly quickly after release; I already have a good system platform built for that running RC1 x64.

[#13]

Quote from: HPsauce

2. Only just as a "business investment" and I don't make any use of it other than for familiarisation/testing.

Did you put in a receipt to the fees office

[#14]

Ok, thanks for the feedback, I think I will keep with XP, better the devil you know 

[#15]

Left my Vista PC running for a couple of hours while I went round to the Daughter's for tea.
When I came back it had crashed so out of curiosity I fired up PC Wizard and screen grabbed this below.
Without anything to compare it with it doesn't look promising to me.