Posts by Peter

Microsoft says ‘hasta la vista XP’ - well, kinda

@Hardware not capable

First of all, a "cheap" Acer notebook will never perform properly. It will have a low-end chip, little RAM, and probably a slow disk that's not made by a good manufacturer (likely a Hitachi).

Second, a Sempron is not a fast processor and 1GB of RAM is insufficient to properly run Vista. Realistically, that machine should not have been shipped with Vista.

To run Vista (on an AMD notebook), it should have had a Turion processor and 2GB of RAM, and preferably not been made by Acer.

As to your claim that upgrades for laptops are not cheap, actually, when it comes to RAM, they aren't any more expensive these days than for desktops (at least, not in North America at somewhere other than your local big-box store [e.g. Best Buy, Future Shop, etc...]).

In addition, there is one performance eating element of Vista which you can't turn off... Indexing. This combined with memory paging due to the amount of RAM is probably why that machine is failing so hard.

Honestly, this is my biggest grievance is that people can't be bothered to figure out what they need to properly run something, then gripe about it once they buy something underpowered and find that it's nto running it in the manner they expected.

Windows Vista has been battered, says Wall Street fan

@Doug Glass

Well, really, two things of note to respond to here....

""Those of us that use Vista don't seem to have any strange trouble that is typically talked about in articles like this. The naysayers seem to be the ones with journo badges, linux/apple fanbois, and luddites."

Where have you been? Under a damn rock? Sure it works for some people, it'd be ridiculous to think otherwise, but that's not the issue. The problem is the overwhelming number of people that have severe problems. The success of a very limited population of users doesn't support calling Vista a success or even a good program."

One thing you (and a lot of others) seem to forget here.... very seldom do people post if they have a good experience/success with something. That's typically reserved for a bad experience with anything. Therefore, the "overwhelming number of people", which a lot of times comes from a given individual posting on about 15 different sites to try to make a bigger impact, when there are likely many times that number who've had no issues and just haven't posted anything online.

"And of course MS will facilitate "upgrading" Vista machines to XP. Hello!! They get to sell two operating systems for each of those machines."

This is really the interesting one.... because if the person actually cares about the option of using the downgrade rights to go to XP.. they buy Vista Business/Ultimate, where no, Microsoft does not "get to sell two operating systems", because the downgrade rights are a license to XP Pro (x64) as appropriate.

Mine's the one with the hands in the pocket, walking out the door.