Vista lies, damn lies, and lies

I sadly missed this story last week but it bears further inspection. Charlie “The Animal” White wrote a piece “fact-checking” the claims that Vista is buggy, slow, and a big hassle. While I cannot agree that Vista is a sub par offering from Microsoft, I can unequivocally state that it’s good enough for the average user and no matter how much we whine and cry we’re all going to ride the Vista train when we pick our next PCs and laptops anyway, so why bitch? Take this bit of knowledge on Vista crashing:

This one is pure propaganda. In our experience, the only crash we’ve experienced happened when we installed the new version 8.0 of iTunes (how ironic!), and even that didn’t result in the dreaded Blue Screen of Death — just a hard lockup that required a cold boot. System Restore blew out the problem, bringing everything back to normal in minutes.

Sadly, crashing is subjective. Charlie probably has some nice hardware at home and Joe Sixpack in Sixpackton, Wisconsin (next to Madison) is probably still using an on Dell he bought in 2005. Old tech for some is “good enough” for others.

Microsoft isn’t stupid. It’s slow, but not stupid. They know that they can dump bloatware onto the market because it drives upgrades and hardware sales. Without hardware, Vista is just a very boring DVD.

I know working with Vista extensively is a pain in the ass. Doug complains about it all the time and I prefer to install XP Pro on any test machines I’m using just to ensure a baseline. However, Vista is here and it’s not going anywhere. We must accept our fate and/or move on – to Linux, OS X, and points beyond. Excelsior!