Posted on 09/11/2007 9:56:40 PM PDT by abt87
September 11, 2007 Running the numbers on Vista Ina Fried, for News.com Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report.
Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product's first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent. The findings largely mirror the sales pattern NPD saw for Vista during its first week on the market in January.
"It's just not doing well," NPD analyst Chris Swenson said of Vista's performance at retail stores, though he added that most people get their operating system on new PCs, with only a minority of customers purchasing boxed copies. The report, titled "Windows Vista Still Underperforming in U.S. Retail," will be sent to clients Friday.
Ahead of Vista's release, the software maker said that it expected businesses to adopt the new operating system at twice the rate of XP during its first year on the market.
However, many businesses have said they are waiting until Microsoft releases the first update to Vista before considering deployments of the operating system. Microsoft is starting beta testing of its first service pack for Windows Vista, though that update won't be released in final form until next year.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
For me, Vista isn’t a non-stop train-wreck, but it’s definitely buggy. It’s been forcibly closing Adobe on me, and unfortunately I have not yet had the time to fix it. However, some XP-based programs seem to run alright on it. I saved a couple hundred dollars by installing Office 2003 on it instead of going out and buying ‘07.
My father-in-law who is very competent in Windows, went out and upgraded his machine to Visa. Now much of the older hardware is simply not recognized. His modem still does not work and he is so frustrated he is ready to trash the whole thing.
There's his problem right there...I don't think modems work on Windows Visa. ;-)
Most computers from before mid ‘05 or so will NOT work with Vista. Bad move by MS. In contrast, I know someone who got a 2000 G4 Cube Mac to run Tiger, even though the computer’s CPU is only 500 MHz. Not bad for a computer originally designed for Mac OS 9.
By "Adobe," you mean Acrobat?
If you are only using Acrobat Reader, there is a great alternative called Foxit Reader...free. Not sure if it has issues with Vista, as I am still XP.
I was complaining on this forum one day about Acrobat and someone gave me this same tip. I have had extensive experience with Acrobat in a very large network with many applications, numerous of which used Acrobat to format database query results for client machines. In this this large environment with hundreds of programs, Acrobat was far, far the most problematic piece of software we had.
I googled and found a download for Foxit and, as I recall, had it running about a minute later. Much, much faster than Acrobat and completely without issues. Of course, I am now only a light, home user.
Should’ve stuck with American Express.
Thankfully, my two home computers are Macs. :-)
I am very happy that I switched to Mac in February. I couldn't be happier with my MacBook Pro.
As I have stated previously, Microsoft has finally reached its tipping point with Vista.
It gives me an error under the heading “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library”. It then says, after giving the full name of the name of the program (which is reader), “This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team for more information.”
A moment later, Vista prompts me by saying that it can no longer keep Adobe Reader open, and then shuts it off.
For this very reason Mr G bought a Mac yesterday. I had to drag him to the Apple store, kicking and screaming, with our son talking to him on his cell phone the whole way!
Vista doesn’t handle audio things at all well and since his main work computer crashed and burned, we needed one immediately. The only computers available locally were vistas, so he got the Mac and XP to put on it.
After 24 hours, he loves the Mac.
Another Microsoft product that doesn’t add value and then screws up your computer? I’m shocked!
I like Vista. My biggest gripe is it can't handle multiple youtubes and hurricane animations concurrently.
The problem is that the company’s monopoly won’t entirely be broken, due to the fact that many popular software program (including, yes, MS Office) won’t work on Linux, or even Mac OS X. Unfortunately, due to Windows’ large market-share, software developers will continue to cater to Windows. It’s a “chicken or the egg” type of problem, and unless it gets broken, Windows will still have a virtual monopoly.
On the bright side, at least FireFox has been chipping away at IE’s market-share (currently at 20-25% worldwide, and at almost half in parts of Europe). I still can’t believe that there are website developers would only design their sites for IE!
Vista is bloatware. The OS offers NO significant features over XP... it is just 4 times as large.
Performance is a joke. A new laptop I got is a dog.. even after turning off useless services, the memory hog Aero screen, gimmicky menu animations, the stupid side bar, converting back to Classic folder behaviors, turning off indexing, removing ALL preinstalled bloatware,etc, etc.
The laptop I just bought has a dual core processor rated at 1.7ghz and it is SLOWER than a nearly carbon copy dual core based laptop that is a year old and has a 1.6ghz processor. (Both have 2 gigs of RAM and 80gig HD’s so it is a fair comparison.)
Worse, in their attempt to provide “security” you end up with a choice to turn off UAC or run UAC and put up with dealing with permission pop-ups for nearly everything the user does.
I am working on getting all the XP drivers for my new laptop so I can install XP on it. Sadly many manufacturers will cancel warranty support if that is done.
Don’t get me wrong. I do generally like Microsoft but I think Vista was a huge mistake. They wanted something as “pretty” as an Apple, but succeeded in providing nothing useful in return.
Windows XP was replacing the worst-ever Windows (ME). XP has become more stable now and it is not a good idea to trade servicable for the unknown.
You can run System 7 by emulation!
Actually it can run more than that:
"Emulates either a Mac Classic (which runs MacOS 0.x thru 7.5) or a Mac II series machine (which runs MacOS 7.x, 8.0 and 8.1), depending on the ROM being used"
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