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**Simon** · Jul 29, 2014, 12:27 AM

I am not in favor of "bashing" Microsoft, I was a loyal customer of Windows XP for a large part of my life. While I won't lower myself to their standards of bashing Linux either. It is my opinion that XP SP3 was their peak and I only stopped because I found Kubuntu 10.10 was more productive with the absence of malware, system crashes, and other issues that plague the OS. With Vista, I found their ability to be dishonest to their customers most distasteful and not worthy of my trust. I now run Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and have no issues with Microsoft since I am no longer their customer.

Now as for product design I was told by a friend that my Linux looks like Windows 7. I feel that Windows currently lacks the ability to offer me a functional OS for my current system. Eye candy and gadgets seem to be the way to win people. I seem recall they came out back in the 90s with a voice recognition program for Windows like you see on Star Trek, that never seemed to work. Sure it would be nice to have easy methods to interface with your PC but not at the cost of functional loss.

**jlittle** · Jul 29, 2014, 01:30 AM

Originally posted by Tom_ZeCat View Post

... and then XP was really the first decent OS Microsoft released since the days of DOS...

I have two issues with that...

1) Win XP was good by SP1, (except that it used too much RAM after SP2) but then gradually went rotten, and became patches upon thousands of patches, and very slow to start. Also, it was insecure, encouraged users to run with privilege, and had too tight integration with IE. That's from my perspective, I'm sure there's many such that could go on and on.

3) You imply DOS was good. It was terrible, though the braindamaged¹ 286 architecture must take some of the blame.

I fear your gloating may be premature. It's only when the corporate world abandons a Windows monoculture that gloating will lack hubris.

¹Apologies to those that have brain injuries, I use this as a technical term from last century.

**Tom_ZeCat** · Jul 29, 2014, 02:11 AM

Originally posted by Simon View Post

I am not in favor of "bashing" Microsoft, I was a loyal customer of Windows XP for a large part of my life. While I won't lower myself to their standards of bashing Linux either. It is my opinion that XP SP3 was their peak and I only stopped because I found Kubuntu 10.10 was more productive with the absence of malware, system crashes, and other issues that plague the OS. With Vista, I found their ability to be dishonest to their customers most distasteful and not worthy of my trust. I now run Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and have no issues with Microsoft since I am no longer their customer.

Now as for product design I was told by a friend that my Linux looks like Windows 7. I feel that Windows currently lacks the ability to offer me a functional OS for my current system. Eye candy and gadgets seem to be the way to win people. I seem recall they came out back in the 90s with a voice recognition program for Windows like you see on Star Trek, that never seemed to work. Sure it would be nice to have easy methods to interface with your PC but not at the cost of functional loss.

I'm criticizing what I view to be bad choices in serving their customers. If I were bashing them, you would know it. There are numerous memes and photoshops available on the net that really do some serious mudslinging against them. I was tempted to use some of them, but kept it to specific criticisms on what I think they're doing wrong. I agree with you that their bashing of LInux is absurd. Unlike my criticism of MS, their trashing Linux is almost totally without any basis in fact.

Originally posted by jlittle View Post

I have two issues with that...

1) Win XP was good by SP1, (except that it used too much RAM after SP2) but then gradually went rotten, and became patches upon thousands of patches, and very slow to start. Also, it was insecure, encouraged users to run with privilege, and had too tight integration with IE. That's from my perspective, I'm sure there's many such that could go on and on.

3) You imply DOS was good. It was terrible, though the braindamaged¹ 286 architecture must take some of the blame.

I fear your gloating may be premature. It's only when the corporate world abandons a Windows monoculture that gloating will lack hubris.

¹Apologies to those that have brain injuries, I use this as a technical term from last century.

1) It's relative. I call XP "decent" only because it was a huge improvement over the Win 9x OSes. 95, 98, & ME were atrocious, crash prone, and insecure. The interface design was decent enough, but that does you little good if it crashes constantly. XP at least was less likely to crash, though you're right that it still wasn't secure enough. Antivirus and antispyware applications were a must to run with it. It wasn't great, but it was far enough above 9x to be called decent.

3) (You skipped 2). DOS was clunky with some stupid architecture (like the 640K limit), but at least it wasn't ultra-crash prone like Win 9x. It had no GUI, but it was still possible to run some quality applications under it. You just had to know the command line. It got bashed for having no GUI, but I never found the command line hard. Even so, I junked MS DOS in favor of DR DOS. I was in the minority, but DR DOS did have some nice enhancements that MS DOS lacked. It introduced task switching before MS DOS did. It had some cool memory management that MS DOS lacked and some nifty command line tools. It was limited and clunky too with no GUI (except for essentially a file browser named ViewMax). Neither MS DOS nor DR DOS were great, and they looked primitive compared to the Macs of the era, but it was possible to productive with those OSes, and thank God they weren't as crash prone.

It's not time for a parade-style gloat, but the fact that Microsoft has essentially admitted that they screwed up after ignoring their own beta testers is cause for some gloating. One wonders what would happen if Microsoft actually did collapse. Would we see a Linux world with distros competing to be the standard one? Would there be a huge rush on the part of manufacturers to create versions of apps for Linux? I suppose that's possible, but I suspect the more likely scenario would be that we would live in a Mac world. I suspect a Mac world nearly happened and would have if Steve Jobbs had released his first Mac priced at the same price or only slightly more expensive than PCs.

**NickStone** · Jul 29, 2014, 05:45 AM

I've never used Windows Vista on a day to day basis, can someone tell me their everyday user experiences of this operating system please?
What made working with Windows Vista a "pain in the rectum"?

**life0riley** · Jul 29, 2014, 07:21 AM

I have a laptop from 2007 with Vista. It is slow to cold boot to the desktop. I have better luck being productive if I leave it on the night before I have to use it. Other than that it doesn't give me too much grief.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

**millusions** · Jul 29, 2014, 07:22 AM

I setup my dad's new laptop the other day, with windows 8.
it's ok i have to admit, but has some really retarded things about it.
the email program for example, it has like 5 visible actions/options, it is total crap, specially for someone older like my dad, the whole email program is just a joke it looks like its desinged for 5 year olds, blue screen with 4 folders on the left and one big PLUS button on the right - thats it!! are you kidding me?

**Tom_ZeCat** · Jul 29, 2014, 10:12 AM

Originally posted by NickStone View Post

I've never used Windows Vista on a day to day basis, can someone tell me their everyday user experiences of this operating system please?
What made working with Windows Vista a "pain in the rectum"?

I never had it as my OS on any PC I've owned, fortunately. However, I was working in a retail store that sold computers when the change from XP to Vista happened, so I got the brunt of customer complaints, plus worked with the display models. As others have said, it was painfully slow to boot. It's enhanced security was intrusive. Unlike Kubuntu and other quality distros which simply ask your password to install something, Vista popped up an annoying "Do you want to run this program?" almost every time you ran any program already installed. A customer of mine made the common sense comment, "I wouldn't have clicked on it if I didn't want to run it." You could shut off that feature, but most novice computer users didn't know that and simply put up with it. It's good that Microsoft was trying to make the OS secure, but that was an intrusive and annoying way to do it. Vista also could be extremely buggy with file copying and driver installing. I remember it being painfully slow to simply access an external hard drive to copy some things over.

The most common comment I got from customers shopping for a new PC was something to the effect of, "We don't want the new one (Vista)" or (pleadingly) "Is there some way you could sell me a Windows XP machine?" I had to tell them Vista was the only OS. The only solution I could offer was for them to buy a Vista PC and then buy a copy of XP and wipe it. They therefore would have to pay extra for the OS they wanted in addition to having already bought Vista. I didn't realize it at the time, but there is a way to do an OS downgrade and use your current (Vista) license for XP and get a copy of XP from Microsoft, but I didn't know that at the time. Microsoft certainly wasn't pushing it as they wanted Vista to wow everyone. It didn't. It flopped.

**Qqmike** · Jul 29, 2014, 11:14 AM

A year old, but with good points.
Windows 8.1 is a winner, but ...

http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows/22379/windows-81-winner-pc-sales-will-plummet-says-gartner

**GreyGeek** · Jul 29, 2014, 12:18 PM

My disdain for Microsoft isn't because of its OS or software, but because when faced with ethical, and sometimes illegal choices, Bill Gates & company often chose the low road, and sometimes the illegal one. Ballmer was worse.

My foray into personal computing began when I purchased an Apple ][+ in the summer of 1978, to use in teaching my high school physics and math classes. I resigned from teaching in 1980 and began my consulting business using my Apple.

That graphic is exactly what my apple looked like, but doesn't show my Centronics 779 line printer. Total package price: $5K, sans software, which I wrote using Apple BASIC ][+.
By 1983 I could see that IBM was moving the computer industry to the 8086 CPU and I switched to an IBM PC.

Back in that day putting an OS onto a naked computer was a geek thing, except for Apples and Radio Shack stuff. You had to be a geek or know a geek or hire a geek to install the OS you chose on the computer you just bought. Computers were not a commodity, nor a monopoly back then. One literally had a dozen makers to choose from. Before corporate America settled on the IBM PC with its 8086 CPUs the CPU architecture was in rapid flux. Intel released the 8080A CPU in 1974. The 8 bit Z80 CPU was released two years later and powered the Radio Shack TSR-80. The Apple ][+ featured the 8 bit 6502 CPU. Apple was too expensive, and the Radio Shack computers were built too flimsy to inspire confidence that what you bought would last long enough to get a return on your investment. By the early 1980s the corporate driven market seemed to have gravitated to the 8086, which led to the x86 family of processors, and to the IBM PC.

The main attraction of a IBM PC to corporations was its open standards, and IBM's short-sightedness in not locking down the PC and a DOS. Instead of writing their own OS for their PC IBM, IBM purchased from Microsoft a 70 command subset of the CP/M operating system which was called "86 DOS" or "Seattle DOS", from Seattle Compute Products, and renamed it to MS-DOS. It took Gates six weeks to modify what was essentially a clone of CP/M by Tim Paterson, owner of SCP. How Bill Gates managed to get that for $50K is a story in itself. Microsoft began selling MSDOS for other 8086 based computers and computer makers began coping the essentially unprotected IBM PC because they could run MSDOS on their products. That gave Microsoft a HUGE opportunity and Gates, a very intelligent person, saw it and took advantage of it, as you'll see. It gave other software houses opportunities as well and one, Digital Research, wrote its own version of "86 DOS", called "DR-DOS" and did it better, releasing it in May of 1988, at the request of several OEMs. MS-DOS was initially available only through OEM's who bundled it with their hardware. This was the first bundling and became important later on. DR-DOS was sold through commercial retail outlets. I bought my first copy at Barnes and Noble, where I purchased my OS/2 and later purchased a book on Linux featuring RH 5.0, in May of 1998.

Before Microsoft had its hands around the throats of PC OEMs one could buy the DOS separately from the hardware. That also meant that when one purchased a printer or a modem or a video peripheral card it came with the drivers built into the card or was one selected from a group of drivers contained on media. These peripheral devices had their own CPUs and their drivers worked with that CPU (not the CPU in the computer) and presented the results with a standard, OS neutral output. Thus, ZOOM modem could uses Hayes modem's control sequences. Microsoft changed that. Some OEMs were already bundling their MS-DOS. Microsoft approached the peripheral makers with a deal: they take the CPU off of their peripheral cards and write their drivers to make calls to the computer's CPU through Window's OS. They could keep the prices of the products the same and pocket the difference as profit. Who could turn down a deal like that? A large number of peripheral device makers did that and began putting the Windows logo on their boxes to show consumers that the device was compatible with Windows only. That put other x86 computer makers at a disadvantage when their customers began looking for peripheral devices. That strategy was, IMO, a direct violation of the Sherman-Clayton Anti-Trust Acts, which I didn't come to realize the significance of until years later, when it came back to bite me and other consumers by restricting our choices and forcing us to pay more for less. (The exact situation the cellphone market is in right now) As competition increased OEM profit margins decreased. Add to that the expectations of consumers that most peripheral products were automatically compatible with Windows (and only Windows initially) the pressure to put only Windows on their desktops forced reticent OEMs into Microsoft's arms in order to compete against the others who first signed on. Soon, OEMs were putting ONLY Windows on their desktops, which we learned later at the 1999 trial was enforced by secret agreements concealed with NDAs. After loosing both the trial and the appeal, but snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat because of the hypenated judge allowed Microsoft to negotiate its own "punishment", Microsoft switched to ad-rebates to control what OEMs put on their desktops because of razor thin profit margins.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a Microsoft fanboy, but in my business I found that DR-DOS was better, and had better memory control for upper memory than MS-DOS. I was attempting to install Win3.1 beta and encountered an error sometime in 1992, IIRC. I switched to MS-DOS because I was fearful of crashes or other problems.
DDJ's September 1993 article, "Examining the Windows AARD Detection Code," by Andrew Schulman documented a strange behavior. The early release of Windows 3.1 gave a cryptic error: "Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53". This significance of the code that generated this error message, later given the name "AARD code", was not revealed until emails released in the 1999 Microsoft anti-trust case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

The rationale for the AARD code came to light when internal memos were released during the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case in 1999. Internal memos released by Microsoft revealed that the specific focus of these tests was DR-DOS. At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading "You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there feature [sic] they have that might get in our way?" Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."

When I read that article, and how the author replaced the AARD code with NOP's, and Win3.1 installed and ran fine, I was outraged. I switched back to DR-DOS and from that time on watched Microsoft with a jaundiced eye. As far as dirty tricks are concerned Gates and Ballmer never disappointed me. But I was still a fan of Windows, while not of Microsoft, albeit keeping them separate is difficult because when you support Windows you support Microsoft. For example, I still have hanging in my closet a blue T-shirt with "I Love Internet Explorer", or something like that, because I was among the 1st 10,000 to download a copy and got the T-shirt as a prize. (For stupidity, I now realize)
I leave it to others to google "Microsoft dirty tricks" and review their sordid history.

On Dec 29th, 1997, I purchased a new Sonly VAIO desktop which came bundled with Windows 95. By May 1st of 1998 I had to reinstall Win95 FIVE times to restore some semblance of stability. Between installs I painfully learned to back up my source code every five minutes or risk loosing everything I typed in since the last backup. The Sony had what it called a "Medi-Kit" layer between the hardware and Win95. The purpose was, I learned, to recover from Win95 behavior problems, although the documentation didn't say exactly that. At first I thought that Sony's hardware was crap, and the cause of all the problems, but it became obvious that Win95 was the problem. I decided to return to OS/2 and went to Barnes & Nobel to buy a copy. There I saw a book titled "Learn Linux in 24 Hours", by Bill Brush (or Bush?) and in the back was a FREE copy of Red Hat Linux 5.0. Never heard of it before, but free was a LOT better than paying $100+ for OS/2. Besides, if it didn't work out I was only out $25. After I installed Linux in dual boot I tried it out. Suddenly, that Sony was stable as a rock. During the next four months it and RH5 never crashed once! And, it was faster, too. That fall, in September, 1998, I saw an ad for SuSE 5.3 which featured KDE 1.0. I ran SuSE for five years and used KDE as my desktop every since.

For most of My professional work, up until 2004, I used Windows. From then until I retired I developed solely in Linux on a KDE desktop. When I purchased my Sony VAIO laptop in 2008, and when I purchased this Acer V3-771G a couple years ago, and I noticed something during the completion of the install Of Win7. It looked and felt like the install sequence of Kubuntu, and a couple of other distro, all of which were around before Win7 was released in October of 2009. VISTA, released in 2005 had the same look&feel that Mandriva and SUSE had before it was released.

However, most of the GUI interfaces that have been released in the last 20 years are just GUI fashion shows, revealing only cosmetic changes for the most part. For example, look at Steven Jobs "NeXT" computer of 1988:

Doesn't that look familiar?

**SteveRiley** · Jul 29, 2014, 05:02 PM

Originally posted by Tom_ZeCat View Post

Full article: http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/28/wi...#ixzz38oTvadts

Ah, the Daily Caller... despiser of the "liberal media," bastion of the right, upholder of all that is good and moral. Funny, the "suggested stories" accompanying this article appear to be the exact opposite of what one would presume to be wholesome news:

**GreyGeek** · Jul 29, 2014, 06:03 PM

From the far Left to the far Right, they all have links to "Who knew these 20 ..." and other curious things. How many do you think would click on the link of that gal scratching a rectal itch?

As I've pointed out before, journalists change employers as fast as babies have their diapers changed. Working at CBS or NBC one day, Fox the next. I noticed a blonde doing news at CNN. She used to do the Saturday show at Fox.

BTW, I noticed that several other sites, both Liberal and Conservative, have picked up that story.

In a similar vein, here is Jimmy Hicks predicting the death of the Windows desktop.

**SteveRiley** · Jul 29, 2014, 08:12 PM

Lesson? Click bait >> family values. Siiiiigh

**Simon** · Jul 29, 2014, 09:42 PM

Originally posted by GreyGeek

My disdain for Microsoft isn't because of its OS or software, but because when faced with ethical, and sometimes illegal choices, Bill Gates & company often chose the low road, and sometimes the illegal one.

I totally agree with this statement. Which brings me to Nick's question;

Originally posted by NickStone View Post

I've never used Windows Vista on a day to day basis, can someone tell me their everyday user experiences of this operating system please?
What made working with Windows Vista a "pain in the rectum"?

Back in the early days of Vista, many apps had issues working with the new and improved OS. This made it undesirable to buy the OS, let alone a PC hosting it. Instead of releasing a "fix" or service pack ASAP and telling all the customers "We are so sorry." They made a media blitz of very lame commercial spots (like this one) where they promoted the OS much like a Pepsi vs Coke challenge or "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter". Making matters worse, some of those "actors" came forward telling the press they got paid to act in the commercial spot. Again no "we're sorry" instead they ended up adding unreadable print stating this was a reenactment. Now would buy something off of a company that needs to go there for their sales?

Everyone makes mistakes, Microsoft doesn't own up to their mistakes.

**GreyGeek** · Jul 30, 2014, 10:41 AM

Originally posted by SteveRiley View Post

Lesson? Click bait >> family values. Siiiiigh

What? You don't have any "family values"? I'm sure you do, and just like everyone else's, yours are unique to your family as mine are to my family. The only way two people can agree exactly on all aspects of an issue is if one of them is brain dead. In a Democracy all sides of a debate on "family values" should have equal rights to marshal support for their own.

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