[Wolves] Now I know what Vista hell is!!!!

[Andrew Lewis]

I hate the idea of starting an OS flame war, but I feel the need to put 
a few things straight here.

DISCLAIMER:
I don't love microsoft, neither do I love linux or any of the 
incarnations of the Mac OS. Furthermore, this is not going to be a rant 
- I've no strong feelings on this, but I do have clear opinions. If 
anyone wants to take my comments out of context blow my opinions out of 
proportion or start commenting on my grammar, spelling, parentage, 
netiquette, dress sense or choice of company, go and find a girl or 
boyfriend and leave me alone.

Now,  to begin:
Kevanf1 wrote:
> If anybody is thinking of using Windows Vista in any shape or form,
> DON'T DO IT!!!!  I have just spent about 2 hours trying to get my
> daughter's laptop to install bother her Creative Zen mp3 player and
> her Samsung phone.  The hoops I would have to go through to get the
> mp3 player working are stupid.
If I can't get my pet elephant into a mini classic, I do not assume that 
the mini classic is at fault. I should have either brought a vehicle 
that can carry an elephant, or brought a different pet.
>   First go into an XP computer and
> uninstall Media Player 11.  Then install Media Player 10 and upgrade
> the firmware on the mp3 player.  Then put Media Player 11 back and
> hook up the mp3 player to Vista.....  The phone just doesn't want to
> know at all...  Yet people say Linux is bad with hardware????
>   
How many wireless cards have I had to extract a cab file on a windows 
machine to get some arcane system file, then go back onto linux and 
download a firmare patch or ndis wrapper class or peform an obscure 
tweak to a file in linux that might be in one of fifteen different 
places depending what type of linux I'm using, and depending on what 
version of what type of linux I'm using? Too many to count, and I can 
count very high indeed (possibly even higher than 9).
> Vista is absolute shite!!!
Compared to XP, on a new machine (with a following wind and a slight 
downhill slope),  I think vista is much better. The gui design is 
improved with integrated searching and some switch-offable eye-candy. 
There is user access control, which is activated as standard and stops 
people who don't know any better from doing stupid things. Vista premium 
has builtin ghost-like backup facilities, and actually goes of and 
installs drivers from a database of working drivers. Webcams are a good 
example here. There is a command called ROBOCOPY in the command prompt, 
which is more or less rsync. Vista detects and installs on most raid 
arrays out of the box, without needing driver disks. You can shrink 
disks dynamically from the control panel, choose to install xp after 
vista and have vista sort out the bootloader with easyBCD. It even has 
anitspyware built in, and a media centre that recognises remote controls 
automagically. All of this makes it far better than XP in my book. The 
only painful thing I've found is that you can't access the mouse and 
keyboard on session 0, which is where all the services run. This makes 
it hard getting VNC to run properly. And yes, you do need a reasonably 
powerful machine to run vista, just like you need a reasonably powerful 
machine to run modern linux or OSX.
> The best of it?  Both will work nicely with my Kubuntu PC in my
> workshop.  I hope Microsoft shrivels up and dies because of their
> arrogance in foisting Vista onto the world.  After this I truly
> believe that Linux deserves to be the number 1 OS (I did anyway but
> you know what I mean)
I could just easily use the statement "Ubuntu is Shite, The hoops I 
would have to go through to get a webcam working are stupid"

Creative make overpriced pap and gadgetry that doesn't work properly 
under any OS, IMHO.

As far as 'foisting' vista goes, I agree to some extent - but would you 
be complaining if all new computers came with Kubuntu or SuSE installed 
as standard - this would constitute the same level of foistage (see, I 
invented a new word: foistage - use it if you like it)

As far as vista in the workplace, you'll typically find that there is a 
downgrade codicil associated with the  vista licence, which will allow 
you to install xp instead of vista if you so desire.

To conclude, I don't think there will ever be a universal #1 OS - I have 
several machines, some are on OSX, some are XP or Vista, some are linux. 
I choose the OS to suit the job I want the computer to do.

As an example, I have an old Tosh 7020CT laptop, which I wanted to use 
for ssh access and text editing. I tried Xubuntu, Puppy, Debian, Fedora 
and RH7 - all of them took around 2-3 minutes to get me into a prompt 
(let alone X), and none of them detected my wireless. Then I tried 
windows 95 OSR2. I was inside a windowed environment inside 1 minute 
from turn-on, and I had wireless running in another 5 minutes, With the 
addition of abbyword, puttly, filezilla and winscp, I had a george 
foreman style lean, mean network grillin machine. So what if it doesn't 
have a bona-fide bash prompt? do I care who wrote the os? No.... because 
it does what I want it to. I'd no more consider buying a games machine 
with linux on than I would consider buying a microsoft web and mail server.

Spline