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Vista Revisited

Entry 486, on 2007-03-02 at 16:50:19 (Rating 2, Computers)

What exactly have Microsoft created with Vista? I thought they had backed away from re-writing the kernel and making significant modifications to the internals of the system, so why are there so many compatibility problems, and why is it so unreliable?

I'm not talking from personal experience here, of course. I refuse to use anything with "Microsoft" in its name, especially their operating system. Why would I want to when I have Mac OS X? I'm reporting on the results of the vast majority of conclusions I have read on the Internet.

Just today I read a report from an editor on the BBC site who eagerly installed Vista, spent hundreds of dollars on updating his machine, spent many hours troubleshooting problems, and still can't get some peripherals working, plus he has an operating system which crashes! This is supposed to be an improvement over XP? I know XP has a horrible user interface and is hopelessly insecure, but at least its moderately reliable.

It seems to me that if Microsoft were going to make a new OS with significant compatibility issues and major hardware upgrade requirements, they would have been better off to start from scratch and not even attempt to provide backward compatibility (except for for a compatibility environment like Apple provided with Classic when they switched to Mac OS X). They had to balance two factors: modernising the OS, and providing compatibility. The way they have gone with Vista it seems that the poor suckers who use it are getting the worst of both worlds!

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