Hate it or love it, Windows Vista is here to stay.

From the day it hit the shelves, Windows Vista has had a bad reputation, and for good reason. For the longest time, it didn’t work with a lot of hardware and software. I switched back to XP when some of my hardware wouldn’t work with Vista. Its release proved what consumers are willing to put up with in terms of software.

Microsoft tried to force people to upgrade their software and hardware to newer products if they wanted Vista to work well, and no one likes being forced to do anything.

One test, done by CNET.com last year, said “Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.”

The test was run on a system with only 1GB of RAM. I use 4GB, and the speed is noticeable on everyday tasks.

Consumers rebelled, and it took nearly a year for Microsoft and manufacturers to get their act together. People didn’t want to wait, and no one could blame them, and all we could do was shake our heads in disbelief.

Most of us have been using Windows XP since it came out in 2001. We’re used to it, and we understand it. We don’t like change, or to be exact, we don’t like change that makes our lives more difficult.

One change in Vista that really irks people, and certainly irked me at first, is the User Account Control (UAC) prompts that pop up far too often. People are more annoyed then comforted by the security of UAC and the security of Vista in general.

The truth is, Microsoft built Vista with security in mind, not usability. This fact was made crystal clear to technology experts that Windows was created with big business in mind, and not the consumer.

People stuck with XP, since it was still widely available, and worked well. There was really no compelling reason to switch to Vista.

Since June of this year, Microsoft has stopped selling Windows XP, trying to force people to buy Windows Vista. Those who have purchased it discovered that manufacturers have caught up and are making products that now work well, for the most part.

That said, many problems have been reported all over the internet, and consumers have been convinced by word-of-mouth that Vista sucks, even though it has gotten better. Some have become so frustrated with it, they switched back to XP (I did for a year), or even to a “Mac”. Others seem to have very little trouble with Vista.

One good thing to come out of the Vista problems is that consumers have become more aware of their options, and have upped the market share of the Apple “Mac OS X” operating system, and although “Macs” are more expensive, they’re very easy to use.

So, hate it or love it, Windows Vista isn’t going anywhere, in fact, the next version of Windows will be based on it. Macs are here to stay as well. We are now more aware of our choices, which is a fantastic thing.
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Originally posted 2008-10-09 17:18:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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