I think Ubuntu, and Linux in general aren't going to be general purpose art machines for quite a while, but they're pretty viable as home office machines. In terms of editing video they are probably in the same position Windows 3.1 was in relation to the Mac. You didn't use 3.1 much for artwork.

Given the cost and hardware requirements of Vista, Ubuntu is a great choice for seniors and others on fixed incomes.

3rd party support? Most Linux distros are assembled with the philosophy that all included software must be under GPL. It's not a welcoming environment for pay to play software.

Rob Mack

steveman.. no that doesn't mak you a microsoft hater... unless you go around spouting anti-pc remarks.. do you? i just think it is so silly that people are so anti-vista... but in a year, will not only end up using it.. but loving it, and holding every other OS up to the vista light (i remember everyone being soo scared of XP, on this forum in fact).
can anyone on here tell me why i should upgrade from tiger to leopard? (hypothetically speaking)... OS''s have hit the high mark.. from here on it will be minor improvements...
i have not used vista thoroughly yet, but when i do, i will post back. (i asked a guy circuit city last night how he liked vista.. if everyone is complaining.. and he said no... and that he really likes it, and that he gets so many people knocking it, who haven't even tried it yet! they now sell macs as well, and they have had more problems with those and people bring it in then pc's lately... or so he said... doesn't really matter, point is.. as macs gain in popularity, so will the the bugs and viruses and hardware issues etc....

lets continue this post in one year... when everyone knows what they are talking about...
p

I am clearly wasting my time here.

John - I can't answer from a Vista owner's perspective, but the times that I've used it all I can tell you is I personally like the GUI better - better graphics and better flow for some things. Supporting more memory is the main functional attraction for me, but that may not have as much of an impact on Vegas use.

To answer your specific question, I think the fact that no one can give you a definitive answer, is an indirect answer - none of us really can find a solid reason to move to Vista. Too bad. MS missed the boat big time on this one imho.

Will it enhance your experience? Maybe. If it were a revolutionary upgrade then perhaps the answers would have been 'absolutely and here's why" or "YES!", but instead the best we can come up with is "well, it depends on your definition of the word "experience". ;-)

Whose time is being wasted? I think it's pretty clear where the "not over my dead body" camp is, and where the "I'm already using Vista" camp is. No need for debate, and no need to interfere with Vista users helping each other.

John, I happen to agree that there's no reason to rush to Vista, and I think it'd be prudent to wait a long time before jumping in. On the other hand, I don't see any reason to try to stop people if they've got a jones to do it and some of the people who've done so are giving useful feedback.

What is a good use of time is making sure that your hardware and software vendors know that you want to keep using XP.

Rob

yes john, you are wasting your time.. no one is forcing you to upgrade... if you don't want to.. don't... soon vista will be everywhere, and i want to be familiar with it... who knows.. maybe i will hate vista myself... i will post back when i have familiarized myself with it...
pj

can anyone on here tell me why i should upgrade from tiger to leopard? (hypothetically speaking)...

I think it is safe to say that nobody inside or outside Apple knows what Leopard will look like (or to be precise, what exactly will be in the initial release). It seems that Apple wants to be ambitious.

OS''s have hit the high mark.. from here on it will be minor improvements...

That sounds like "640K ought to be enough for anyone" :O)

I seriously think we'll see a lot of cool ideas in the various flavors of Unix (that I have used from the beginning), Windows (used that too from the beginning), and OS X (I used Mac OS through the beginning of OS 7 when I switched back to Windows as Apple at that time understood the Internet even less than Microsoft, they thought "user friendly" meant error messages like "An error of Type 13 appeared in application 'unknown'," preemptive multitasking was not a priority (no pun intended), etc. [it was really a rudderless time for Apple]), then adding OS X 10.4 which I felt was the first no-compromise Apple OS again (so I run PCs and Macs side-by-side for different tasks, letting each do what they do best, works great ande unlike people they don't badmouth each other...).

Are all dialog boxes in Vista resizable?

I still get increased blood pressure every time I have to poke around system files deep down. Windows Explorer gives me a tiny peep hole on a 30" screen, and I have to "slide the peep hole" back and forth across the pathname of the files I'm looking at. Am I alone in this?

If it had been my programmers, I would have told them, "you can go home when you have made the window resizable like it should have been."

What happened to common sense?

I received a copy of 32bit Business edition when Vista was released. After 3 attempts at an install, I finally gave up and sold it and went back to x64 XP Pro.

The third install finally took and after installing what drivers were available, the machine slowed to a crawl - My Hardware specs are more than adequate to run Vista. Even the little utility to show my Vista Experience was giving me a so-so rating. (AMD3800+ X2 AM2, 4GB PC800 Dual Channel RAM, PCI-e Nvidia 7300 Vid card, multiple drives, etc).

.NET 3.0 is available for x64 XP Pro so if Vegas x64 is written for those library files, it technically should run on x64 XP Pro.

The challenge I have is that the bloated OS drives the consumption of computer hardware - you need more hardware just to run the OS. At the end of the day, one has to look at the real impact of the spin doctors brainwashing the public into consuming another OS and the required hardware upgrades needed. As it is right now, M$ is in the middle of a lawsuit filed by consumers over misleading advertising about the hardware specs required to run Vista (they advertised lower hardware specs than they actually are). I would rather put my money into a camera that can produce an actual ROI (I still haven't jumped to HD yet due to this very issue)

I won't get into a political debate about the environment, but my take is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And by reducing consumption, we each make our own small contribution to reducing our adding to landfills.

I guess what sticks in my craw is that MS is clearly ramming Vista down the world's throat because they can.

One can make the argument that previous iterations of Windows each brought obvious improvements such as the introduction of USB, a more robust file system, and stability, to name a few. With the release of XPsp1 it seems to me that Windows reached a stable high-water mark. What does Vista bring? A somewhat different-looking interface (doable in XP with WindowBlinds) and PC-wide search (doable in XP for free with Copernic or other programs). Oh, wait: it also has DRM hooks, which means a whole bunch of stuff that worked before won't work now, and stuff that eventually works will work differently and often clumsily.

Okay, so it's a competitive market, so if you don't like it just get something else. Ah, but it's not a competitive market, not yet. MS has about 90+% of the computer market and 95% of the new-computer market, so it's extremely likely that you will need MS in order to run your software. If you like and use Vegas (and the fact you're reading this says you do) then you are handcuffed to MS, like it or not. I wish there were a way to port applications over to Linux, but apparently it's a painful process, and MS knows it.

What also would really help is if you could walk into a Fry's and pick the OS from a menu, just like you pick the amount of ram. Dell's recent announcement of having the XP option is a great first step, but it's not pure competition because MS controls that OS also.

Suppose you need to buy a car. You can buy any of a number of cars, but the only engine generally available is a 6-cylinder engine made by MotorSoft. Although there are other engines available on the market, MotorSoft has seen to it that it's the only one available in new cars, and furthermore it's the only engine that's allowed to burn commonly-available gasoline. You can put in a diesel yourself, but you'll have a hard time finding fuel. Finally, every five years MotorSoft brings out a new engine, and while you can continue using the old engine for a while, eventually MotorSoft will no longer sell parts for it, and the gasoline supply will be tweaked to run on the newer engines and will not run as well (if at all) on the older engines.

Okay, it's a crappy analogy, but my point is that monopolies are bad and MotorSoft, er, Microsoft is a monopoly. That said, use any operating system you want, and I'll do likewise.

"Microsoft is a monopoly"

No, it's not. If it were the only OS you could buy, then that statement would be true. They have a very large market share, but they are not a monopoly.

>>but in a year, will not only end up using it.. but loving it, and holding every other OS up to the vista light (i remember everyone being soo scared of XP, on this forum in fact).<<<

That's a hoot. wanna bet?
XP to Vista is no Win98 to XP. Sorry.

>>lets continue this post in one year... when everyone knows what they are talking about...<<

I'll give you all the time you need, and I know what I'm talking about.

Actually Apple is more of a monopoly than MSFT. At least MSFT allows its OS to run on just about any hardware whereas OSX can only run on Apple designated hardware. Apple sure didnt have a problem allowing its users to use Windows on their products now did they?

Not sure what your point is, but Apple is a hardware-based company with few engineers, certainly with not even one tenth of the number of engineers they would need to have if they changed their business model to include selling OS X for use on anyone's hardware.

Could be done, but it would be a major distraction.

Today Apple is still small and nimble, while Microsoft has been described by analysts as "a dinosaur in a tar pit," i.e. a company where every decision has to be filtered through massive committees and middle management layers.

Interestingly, MS does have a few internal initiatives that have been magically separated from this morass. If they could expand those...

Okay, I'll back off slightly and amend my earlier post. Microsoft is not a pure monopoly, but it assuredly exerts a monopolistic influence on the personal computer industry to the extent that the consumer is harmed.

soo... who was right? still suckin on the APPLE nipp? paying 45$ for "lightening cables"

I went with Vista Ultimate 64 bit because I got it at a huge discount from Microsoft with a free upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit when it came out.

So I the same as got a huge discount on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

The Vista install is laying around somewhere in my living room.

Now that worked out real well.

I originally did install Vista out of curiosity then did an upgrade to Windows 7 and eventually did a clean install of windows 7 only.

"Are all dialog boxes in Vista resizable?

This definitely grates on my nerves too.

I've done a fair amount of windows development, and i can tell you that the really stupidly silly thing here is that when creating a new window or dialog, the *default* is for it to be resizeable! The programmer actually has to take an extra step to disable resizing. Why the heck do they do that?

But, back more on topic, i was just waxing nostalgic over the fact that since the introduction of Win95, pretty much every mid-to-high end PC manufacturer has offered the previous OS as an option and they've all been thanked and respected for doing so.

"Thank goodness HP is still offering 7. 8 is awful."
"Hurray! I can still buy Vista from Dell. I don't want to switch to 7."
"Yes! Asus is still offering XP. That Vista looks like a disaster."
"Good! Compaq still ships with 2K. It's so much more business oriented than that ugly XP."
"All right! We can still buy 98SE on our new laptops. 2K would be too much of a learning curve."
"Hey, we should order from NEC. They're still shipping 98 and that new SE version would be too much of a hog."

... and so it goes.

Wow--a thread resurrected after six years.

Very cool to take a moment and go back, kind of like looking at some very early websites via the Wayback site.

So, the hot topic back then was how a large percentage of companies stated at the outset that they had no plans to migrate to Vista.

I remember starting a thread a few months ago about how a large percentage of businesses STILL were on XP (EDIT: Here it is). And here we are, three operating systems later. It would be interesting to see if the companies that said "no" six years ago are the ones still staying the course with XP, though my first assumption would be that they are.

And it looks like those companies that said no to Vista were right after all. I think these days Vista is almost a dirty word, akin to W98me. The odd family member that no one wants to talk about.

As for me, I do feel older, but not six years older. More gray hair and the body has more issues, but mind still razor-sharp. Wait; where the heck did I put my glasses?

Actually WinME. It wasn't 98 or 98SE or any variant thereof, it was a new independent version.

Although, basically, it acted like 98SE with the Win2K interface grafted on it, which was what killed it. People who wanted the 2K interface preferred the "business style" of NT and avoided the consumer versions, while those who preferred the more easygoing style of 98 hated the more business-like 2K style. It was pretty much the worst of both worlds scenario.

I also am 30% sure I will not go Vista ;)

2K was absolutely the best operating system MS ever produced. It still was an "operating system" as opposed to a means to attempt to lock the user in to a set of apps that he didn't want.
Kunduv like going down to the store to buy a pickup truck, 2K came with an empty bed so you could load it up with whatever you wanted when you got home.
<Rant> I mean who, apart from MS, would attempt to convince the public that the pink piano they load the bed up with was always part of an operating system? <Rant off>
Xp was a nasty surprise, they hid things and made it real difficult to get it to work like 2K. As for 7, I still can't get it right the way I want it, but at least it lets me use tons of RAM.
Does anyone know how to get all folders on the desktop to have nice big icons for the items inside them, whilst a folder opened in the File Manager always defaults to details?
Please?

I ran Vista 64 for 2 years. Loved it. No problems at all. In fact I've probably had more issues with my win 7 64 than I ever did with Vista.

"soo... who was right? still suckin on the APPLE nipp? paying 45$ for "lightening cables"
Yeah, that's just friggin insane isn't it. Believe it or not that's actually a price drop. They used to be $50.

Apple just loves to rape you... and they're pretty good at it too!