Everyone at Slashdot hates Microsoft and bashes Vista, right? Maybe not. I have my filters set pretty high at /. and all of the following comments made it through on a single thread:
I don’t really get all the Vista hatred
I bought Vista, I use Vista, and once I turned off UAC I’ve had no problems with Vista. I think the hatred for it is overstated, and largely perpetuated by people who don’t use it – the only problem I’ve had is a lack of printer drivers for a printer, and that’s because Samsung want to sell new printers rather than make new drivers for their old ones…
Wait, this is /. – I mean, uh, Microsoft suck!
I have 2 computers running Vista. Neither of them came bundled with it. I am very happy with Vista… I haven’t had any problems at all (even though I will likely be modded as such, I am not trolling).
Vista is a fine operating system. Most people hate it for the same reason they hate Paris Hilton: When the crowd speaks, you must obey!
[…]
If you are a neophyte computer user, you’ll have problems with Vista as you would with any operating system. If you’re an idiot who has only used XP, but never a secure operating system like Linux or OS X, you’ll hate UAC. If you’re just kind of slow, you won’t like how some things are now colored differently. Oh no, confusing!
Frankly, I am really, really, tired of all this Microsoft bashing. If it were real criticism, related to reality, they might benefit from it and come up with a better OS. It’s not. Basically, it’s a loud message to Microsoft: Don’t innovate, we can’t appreciate it. The color of the taskbar is more important that impovements like Start Window search, improved booting and recovery (that has saved my ass at least once), improved security, vastly polished system tools of all sorts; no, what matters is that not everything is in the some place it used to be. What matters is that there are a few geriatric scanners that nobody has released Vista drivers for. Good god, most of the people having problems with Vista shouldn’t be using computers in the first place — that’s the real crime here.
…and I bought a copy of Vista to update a multiprocessor Opetron workstation, back a month after Vista came out.
I’ve also upgraded two recent purchases from Windows Business/Home to Windows Ultimate.
In addition to Vista, I run a few Linux systems (Gentoo, Ubuntu), some XP, and an OS X laptop. So when I say "I’m happy with Vista" is based on experience with the alternatives.
Vista is not crap. Vista, in many ways, is a significant improvement over XP. And all other OSs have their own problems and good points. I think some tech people need to grow up and stop being pedantic fanatics.
To head off the inevitable "Vista sucks" comments: The fact that some people actually like Vista and prefer it to XP does not mean your miserable Vista experience didn’t happen. It might, however, mean that your miserable Vista experience could be turned around if you’re interested in doing so.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I finally gave in and installed Vista on my main system in January, keeping XP in a dual-boot config, mostly because I figured I’d still be using my XP install most of the time. Since then, I have booted into XP exactly twice, both times to transfer some settings from programs that I couldn’t otherwise access. Personally, I love Vista. Sure it needs some tweaking to make it perfect for me, but that’s the story with every OS. The only problem I’ve had is with an old HP scanner, which I couldn’t get drivers for. And that’s not Microsoft’s fault, that’s HP’s for not providing them.
The while anti-Vista thing is overhyped and overblown.
I’am not really a MS fan but the hate campaigns towards Vista are ridiculous. I’am using Vista now since one and a half year on 2 computers (Packard Bell desktop and Acer laptop) and i had no complaints at all. Everything just works fine and fast.
I have a 2GB Ram, 1.9ghz Duo Core (not even Core 2) Toshiba laptop running Vista Home Premium.
I also have a 2.4ghz Quad Core with 3GB of ram Dell running XP (thanks for the tip on that one by the way, Ed 😀 …)
Although I love my new Inspiron 530 that came with XP, I MUCH more prefer my laptop for pretty much everything. Even though my XP machine is loads faster, I have found that so many things, big and small, I just can’t live without. Small things like application launching with keyboard short cuts to big things like instant-desktop search…. that’s why, when I get the money, I’m upgrading my Inspiron 530 to Vista Ultimate 😀
I have XP on my desktop and Vista on my laptop. Vista has run fine for me. The operating system is obviously very reliable. The thing that has always bothered me are some of the UI choices. Just as one simple example, consider when you want to view the desktop properties. XP (like previous operating systems) had one window with multiple tabs. Vista makes you open multiple Windows. I think for the average user, when things have looked the same since Windows 95 and then they are changed, they have a hard time dealing with that. Professionally I’m an IT guy, and I still don’t like dealing with it.
Graham, I felt your pain when I first started using Vista. It was like someone had come into my house and put the kitchen in the garage and the bathroom in a bedroom closet. It frustrated the heck out of me. Things that would take seconds on XP, took minutes in Vista. Overall, as I used it more, I began to appreciate some of the choices, especially from the perspective of a new computer user. I will say that overall Vista has made me a better technician, learning the .cpl shortcuts and command line executables that used to take me 8 clicks to accomplish in the past, working through the menus. I will lodge one Major complaint about Vista, and that was the destruction of my favorite keyboard shortcut in XP. The Start+U+U shortcut that would allow me to turn off a computer in less than a second. Now it’s Start+->+->->Shutdown. Four keys instead instead of three, and it’s hard to get that pattern down.
It’s the little things about Vista that bugs me, such as I have a networked computer for backups. I can copy and paste files to this backup computer but when I try to use the Backup & Restore Center Vista asks me for a name and password to continue, I don’t use passwords so therefore I cannot continue.
I have a DVD burner drive and when I place a previously burned CD in it Vista won’t read it and wants to prepare a blank disk.
And I really miss XP photo and fax viewer, Vista Photo Gallery sucks.
I’ll apologies in advance if you’ve already blogged about this, but hears further evidence that the FUD hight be waining. This is fromPC World via Neowin:
Vista’s UAC has a security feature that marks it out from any other type of Windows security program — it can spot rootkits before they install. This is one finding buried in a report published in two German computer magazines some months ago after testing by the respected AV-Test.org, which set out to find out how well antivirus programs fared against known rootkits.
The answer: not particularly well … either for Windows XP, or Vista-oriented products.
Of 30 rootkits thrown at XP anti-malware scanners, none of the seven AV suites found all 30, a similar story to the six web-based scanners assessed. Only four of the 14 specialized anti-rootkit tools managed a perfect score. For Vista, only six rootkits could run on the OS, but the testers had to turn off UAC to get even this far. Vista’s UAC itself spotted everything thrown in front of it.
In a period of where Vista has received criticism, Microsoft’s programmers can at least point to evidence that UAC is efficient at stopping infections from happening automatically.
Have a great holiday!
Cheers
Mark
I have been using Vista myself for about a year. I love it as well. I love the start menu search and they photo program. My only problem is that Vista on my new desktop takes 2 minutes or more to wake from Hibernation. I have been working with MS about this issue and am begining to think its something in my hardware causing it. But everything else has been great for me. I also have Vista on a laptop and it is very fast and efficent. And hibernation works great on that machine.
I’ve been using Vista since it first came out. I upgraded my Sony Vaio from XP (which I too both loved and hated) to Vista. Initially, I did have a few minor issues which were easily rectified, but since then I’ve had NO major problems running Vista on my pc at all. Yes, it was a bit slow when transferring files, but that was corrected for me since I installed SP1. I’ve changed a few other settings too, added some new apps and I can truly say that I really love the way Vista handles now. *****
I support what Nick B. stated: The anti-Vista thing is overhyped and overblown.
FYI: I installed ‘TrueLaunchBar’ – – (http://www.truelaunchbar.com) and ‘TrayManager’, a free download from PCMag. Both apps do for me what Vista was unable to do.
Microsoft – Take notice !
I would observe that turning off UAC does wonders for end user satisfaction with Vista. Perhaps Microsoft should have given more thought to the “annoy the users plan” ( http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6237191.html ) for getting ISV’s to spiff up their applications since many of the smaller ones have been and continue to be notoriously slow and as far as I can tell, only the users are suffering.
In a related vein but of less general interest, I was also less than pleased to find that by default legacy applications that stored data in Program Files had their data whisked away to the user profile by Data Redirection (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160980.aspx ). It’s likely transparent to the average user but an initial surprise to a developer trying to lash the data from several such together.
All of the above observations come from fixing a relative’s Vista machine purchased to replace an XP machine used extensively for a variety of ecommerce activities. The good news is that I told them to check device driver compatibility for their special printer before they bought it. The bad news is that the spiffy new HP system didn’t have a parallel port, but that’s not Vista’s fault.
@Dave Hunter – I’m also a developer and also came across the issue of legacy data being stored in a redirected folder if it was attempting to do so in the Program Files folder but instead of being annoyed at Microsoft I was annoyed at the developers that didn’t release a modern version of their application.
Microsoft has been telling us since XP five years ago to stop storing data in the Program Files folder yet a lot of lazy programmers kept dumping their data right next to the .exe even though there are clearly marked folders where settings and data are supposed to go. The Vista guidelines and beta had been out for a solid year before release so the fact that there weren’t Vista updated versions of a lot of applications on release day showed me just how fat and lazy most Windows vendors had become. They were used to XP, knew XP and didn’t invest any time or effort into discovering how the new OS was going to affect their applications.