personal opinion:
everyone who downgrades is retarded or otherwise mentally impaired in some fashion that prevents them from seeing the glaring stupidity in what they are doing. Thank you.
truth:
There is absolutely NO benefit of downgrading to vista (which, FYI, means chicken in latvian). Do you all remember what it was like a little while - say, half a year - after XP was originally released? I do. People weren't so happy about things. Even that was not a good thing. And I'm just saying that from my VERY, VERY BRIEF experience with vista that this will be worse. 1000$, you say? You wish. In your sweet dreams. It's cheap in the US compared to Norway. But then everything is.
I would like one of the people who are considering downgrading to vista (or who have already done so) to take a quick read through the 100 best things that was posted in the first post(I'm not going to waste my time doing it), and write down every one of the items on the list that:
1) are actually new.
2) are actually an improvement.
Good luck.
From my POV, there are two things about Vista:
1) It hasn't changed much
2) It has changed TOO much
Those may seem to contradict one another slightly, but they don't. They apply to change in different ways:
On the outside, to the common average user Joe, vista is nothing revolutionary. There is no change, beyond the nastily shiny (and may I say terribly ugly) UI. Aero isn't actually even usable by all systems. For the 30minutes I used Vista for, I found out that my computer wasn't even powerful enought to run the 'great new graphics'. AND IT DISABLED THEM FOR ME. How retarded is that? I should be able to control what goes on in my own computer, with an O/S that I have given BLOOD to buy (well, I didn't, but that's another matter). It's rather sad that they won't run on my laptop, which runs every combination of the FOSS equivalent (beryl, compiz, etc) perfectly. But that they don't trust that a user can make a descision on their own is absurd. I should be able to take the consequences of my own actions, and if I'm stupid enough to do something with my system that I shouldn't have, then I deserve to take the full consequence of my actions. I consider myself a responsible person. Clearly, Microsift doesn't. So there is nothing new about that. And did you know that Aero wasn't actually made by M$ themselves? Smooth sailing.
On the other hand, MS seems to be trying to take over your computer COMPLETELY, now. DRM; HardDrive Lock; WGA - all methods that take your control and dump it right in MS's hands. It is a complete change in direction for the people who actually know what they are doing with a computer. With XP, they prided themselves that you could take a HDD out of one computer, dump it in a box of a completely different configuration and after 15 minutes and one reboot you could have a fully operational machine. It also worked with 98 (I know from experience). And that is a remarkable feat, I must admit. Not many Linux distrobutions can claim as much (also from experience). With vista and it's WGA, you can't change a component of the machine without it locking. Your processor dies on you (most likely BECAUSE of vista) and you have to get both a new processor and a new license. The latter likely twice the price.
DRM. Digital Rights Management. You can't watch something vista doesn't think you own. If it thinks you don't, vista will pwn you and your system. How *BLEEP*ed up is that? I can understand that they don't want people DLing unauthorised media and the likes, but a computer shoudl do what YOU, the USER wants it to do. Vista isn't an improvement for the user. It's an improvement for the producers of content. An interestingly relevant quote:
Quote
ESTRAGON: We've lost our rights?
VLADIMIR: (distinctly) We got rid of them.
As indeed we are. Excuse me. As indeed YOU are. Stick with what you have.
I have recently been told that shell is switching to vista sometime soon. Just had all the software ported from UNIX, which worked fine for all our needs, to Red Hat linux, which worked slightly faster - though admittedly not much, and it was probaly not worth the change for most employees. Every little bit of speed is needed for big operations - they get left on overnight as it is. And now they say port all that *BLEEP* software to Windows Chicken. Not gunna ask what the people who USE it think. The only possible reason I can think of is that the higher ups want to impress people with having their sections running vista. Impress? the only thing that's impressive is the PRICE. But I guess that however little it makes sense, some people will always think that the expensive things are somehow better than the free stuff. I'm SO glad Vista isn't the best thing available, and I'm SO glad I still have the choice in my own home to choose the O/S I want to use all inside my stupid little retard user brain, with no uncle bill to tell me. But how long will it last?
Vista comes with a very interesting new feature HardDrive Lock. I didn't explore this feature AT ALL, and for obvious reasons, beyond confirming that it does indeed exist. It sat there in the top right corner of the Control Panel (which of course hasn't changed more than any other part of Vista) looking at me with this evil stare... 'Click Me, I want to pwn your HDD and destroy non-M$ files....' I left it well alone, as mentioned. Unforteuneately, not everyone did. And as often as not, it gave no information as to what it was going to do. Now, I understand that what I said about being responsible for my actions, but there is a difference between crashing the GUI and
LOCKING THE HARD DRIVE. I assume from the anguished posts by the less forteunate that they could no longer edit the partitions. I believe that they have taken this feature further since, but I can't prove it
So... What changes are there in Vista that are new AND good?
I am asking the world: What good lies in Windows Vista?
, Please 
4
