"The fact that Apple has made it possible for grade school kids to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard and not skip a beat has to be one of the most inspiring and stunning computer science accomplishments of the 21st century."

Not so much the kids, who were born into a time of personal computers, but people like my mother. She is nigh unto 80 years old and never touched a computer other than an ATM until she was about 60.

I have lived with Vista Premium for two months now and all I can say is "meh." The only thing I am impressed with is how easy it is to create a DVD from a digital camcorder.

I do not think it is so much that people are afraid to upgrade from XP as it is simply there are not enough compelling reasons to upgrade. I tell people just wait until you order a new computer. Or get a Mac...

One of the scariest things about updating Windows is worrying about the drivers, especially if you have a laptop. While I find Windows XP to be superior to Linux when it comes to supported devices and ease of installing drivers, even I am somewhat nervous about updating to Vista until I'm sure all the hardware on a computer has supported Vista drivers. Mac OS X never faces that problem because any hardware that can work in a Mac is supported by Mac OS without additional drivers. (Except when Mac OS X 10.1 did not like my iMac Rev A's built in graphics accelerator, so I could play Star Wars Racer in Mac OS 9 but not in X.)

It's worse to go from Vista to XP, though, as a friend of mine found out. She's totally non-techy, but her brother installed XP for her since she didn't bring her Vista CDs and it broke almost everything. I spent well over an hour trying to find drivers for the laptop and couldn't get things working, so I advised her to just put the default Vista back on it when she could get her CDs back.

That kind of story is what I fear, even though it is in the reverse direction. Anyone who didn't understand what was happening wouldn't know it was from Vista to XP that broke, and would simply believe that installing OS's is scary. So I can see where some of that comes from.

That said, I think Guest is right in saying that Vista just doesn't have enough flashy features. Jaguar had features I wanted. Panther had features I wanted. Tiger just had multi-person video chats in iChat that I wanted. Leopard has several features that I want.

Vista is just a different looking XP where some things are better and others worse, and it's worse feature is just that it's different, so I can't figure out how to do anything without spending lots of time. (Occasionally I get asked to fix things on Vista at work or by friends. I've never used it as my primary OS.)

A lot of Windows users can't upgrade to Vista because their hardware doesn't meet the requirements. That would be another reason that new computers are out selling copies of Vista.

Vista is forced on new computer buyers. Most now are backwards updating there new PC's with XP Pro because Vista doesn't run or have drivers that are needed. Microsoft would love for us to think everyone who has bought a new PC is actually using Vista. That is hardly the case.

I recently helped a friend buy a new laptop from Dell. They were shocked at the difficulty of picking a system without Vista. They up spending $75 more to get XP over Vista because they had to forego Vista rebates. To them, it's worth it. That's a sad commentary in my opinion. Their reason for not going with Vista was based on the fact they had heard no compelling reason to upgrade. If it's still broke, wait until it really gets fixed.

How many XP licenses has Microsoft sold since Vista was released?

Quote

Guest wrote:
How many XP licenses has Microsoft sold since Vista was released?

That is the millon dollar question, me personaly am looking at a mac to upgrade not a windows, being a windows guy for so long im getting sick of beeing fed this line of bull crap, my belife is that vista was never on sechedul, they were behind on getting it done so they pushed it out even though they new it was a pice of garbage, and that still had MAJOR flaws. so thats my 2 cents

I run two desktops on XP home and a laptop on XP Pro. They all work fine so why buy a new OS? The discount on the OS when buying a new PC makes it hard to justify buying the OS separate. I don't quite understand Mac fans that run out and buy every new OS release; wasn't the old one working? However, I do own some Apple stock and the recent runup is sorely tempting me to sell some, take the profit and buy a new PC with Vista. So keep buying those Macs cause maybe I'll want a new widescreen monitor as well! Thanks!

Quote

Anonymous wrote:

Quote

Guest wrote:
How many XP licenses has Microsoft sold since Vista was released?

That is the millon dollar question, me personaly am looking at a mac to upgrade not a windows, being a windows guy for so long im getting sick of beeing fed this line of bull crap, my belife is that vista was never on sechedul, they were behind on getting it done so they pushed it out even though they new it was a pice of garbage, and that still had MAJOR flaws. so thats my 2 cents

Um, it was off track, in 2004. You bash Vista because you don't understand Vista. Vista is meant for machines that have 6 to 192 Gigabytes of RAM, are capable of rendering graphics in 4320 x 7680 resolution, and have in excess of 8 cores. It is the operating system that will actually beable to take advantage of these resources, XP could only handle 4 GB of RAM, including the video card RAM! Very few components of XP were actually capable of running threaded for more than 2 processors, and even fewer programs available for XP were able to run more than one thread at a time.

Vista is not meant to run programs from the 90's, it's meant to run programs from the 10's. The time to get Vista is when you have a computer with 4+ cores, and more than 4 gigabytes of RAM.