Soooo...do you guys think Microsoft will ever fix the underlying problems with Windows?

[YeOldeStonecat]

You've gotta be kidding me, right?

So you say it sucked, I think I said it sucked....how was I kidding?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I see this quite a bit but I liked ME. It jumped on the Internet without configuration (unlike 98SE) and networked and shared files better than any of its predecessors. I'm trying to remember why it was so disliked.

I think a lot of my perspective was from ME being on cheaper residential grade computers. And I recall a lot of printer drivers for biz grade products either weren't supported, or didn't work well.

 

[Diggs]

I remember running some online game servers on it but had to install an additional app/plugin/option so it could read really large drives. That was the only buggy part I remember. NT had such poor support for printer drivers and such (which 2000 mostly resolved). Sure your not confusing the two - heh!

 

[sapphirescales]

So you say it sucked, I think I said it sucked....how was I kidding?

Yeah, but you said it sorta sucked. Saying Vista sorta sucked is the understatement of the century.

 

[Philippe]

Was Vista SP3 not called Windows 7?

Edit: grammar

 

[overburnz]

Yeah, but you said it sorta sucked. Saying Vista sorta sucked is the understatement of the century.

still way better than ME

 

[Markverhyden]

still way better than ME

With ME you had no where to go but up......

 

[overburnz]

With ME you had no where to go but up......

lololol how right you are

 

[Sky-Knight]

ME on AMD CPUs of the era was fine. ME on Intel CPUs... that was a train wreck.

Visa worked fine too, if you doubled the system reqs first.

Both products suffered from the same problem, Microsoft not being honest about the requirements to be successful running the platforms in question.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah, but you said it sorta sucked. Saying Vista sorta sucked is the understatement of the century.

Eh yer just grasping to try to come up with any complaint to make a dig.
Much like ME, Vista was sorta skipped over by the business IT world...do luckily I rarely dealt with it. Had it on a laptop but that laptop was dual boot with OpenSUSE and I spent most of my time there. Think I might have had triple boot with 08 server in a stripped down approach.

 

[sapphirescales]

Eh yer just grasping to try to come up with any complaint to make a dig.

Wasn't my intention, sorry! It was more of a joke/me agreeing with you than anything else.

Much like ME, Vista was sorta skipped over by the business IT world

Thankfully that's possible thanks to Microsoft's long-term software support. I really hope this doesn't go out the window but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft. Microsoft's natural reaction when people say "this sucks!" is to try to cram it down their throats and force it on them. It never even occurs to them to actually fix the problem.

 

[Computer Bloke]

Both products suffered from the same problem, Microsoft not being honest about the requirements

As I remember it, in the case of Vista the problem was that Microsoft had it ready for release right on schedule but a well-known tier 1 OEM (rhyming with Pewlett-Hackard) wasn't expecting that and had a whole load of XP machines with only 512MB RAM in the channel. Putting pressure on Microsoft to lower the minimum specification for "Vista Ready" status was easier and cheaper than reworking them all, and the rest is history.

Given that Windows 7 is just Vista with a fresh coat of paint it's not surprising that Vista runs really well on "Windows 7 Ready" machines, but by the time entry-level machines were powerful enough to run it properly the damage to its reputation was irreversible. (And Microsoft has learnt the importance of never meeting a deadline again.)

 

[GTP]

Windows 10 on a 12 old Acer laptop with a 1.6Ghz Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM

I have a few clients doing just this. Admittedly not with 512mb ram, more like 2~4 gb, but same specs you mention.
The PC's do just fine.

 

[GTP]

I see this quite a bit but I liked ME. It jumped on the Internet without configuration (unlike 98SE) and networked and shared files better than any of its predecessors. I'm trying to remember why it was so disliked.

I liked ME a lot. It was fresh and clean and resembled 98SE so it was very familiar.
It ran great on any hardware it was installed on too. Games definately ran smoother.
I cant remember all the reasons I liked it - I just remember I did.
Networking was so easy for the time as well.

 

[britechguy]

(And Microsoft has learnt the importance of never meeting a deadline again.)

One of the main reasons I got out of "the software side" of IT was I grew sick and tired of having to meet arbitrary deadlines set by people who had no idea of what was going on or how badly things would have to go in order to meet them.

In a case like the one described, Microsoft would have been much, much better off to push its deadline back so that the hardware and software were sympatico, rather than meeting their own arbitrary deadline and having a fiasco and damage to reputation. Deadlines in virtually anything that involve dependencies should be known to be something that will have to be tweaked as circumstances dictate. Success depends on all being in readiness.

I decided that I'd had enough of living by a dictum stated best by my then coworker: There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.

Addendum: It's so strange how certain coincidences occur. Minutes after writing this I started reading the NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) group I participate on and a topic about, "When is the next release?," where someone was saying it seemed a long time since the last one. One of the spokespersons, who also happens to be a developer, for NVDA replied, in part, "we'd always rather push back a release and put out something which is stable, than push out something just to meet an arbitrary deadline."

I can't imagine a type of software where this philosophy is not more crucial than accessibility software, but the principle should be universal. Alas . . .

 

[Sky-Knight]

Assuming the above conspiracy theory is correct, the problem again wasn't the deadline, it was saying hardware that couldn't do the job was going to do the job. Again, it's messaging about system requirements.

I deployed plenty of Vista into business networks, and it worked fine. But again I doubled what MS said the system reqs were to do it. Those machines went on to run Windows 7 just fine, and a few of them actually got SSDs and upgraded to Windows 10!

Did HP get involved? Did Dell get involved? I have no evidence of that, but it wouldn't shock me. The tier 1 OEMs have been pushing around Microsoft for some time now. Placating those entities is no small part of the reason why Microsoft missed the mobile device train. Not that I'm complaining... MS not having the OS on mobile means we got MUCH better mobile apps out of them.

Vertical monopolies are always bad, which is why I don't support Apple... ever.

 

[britechguy]

it was saying hardware that couldn't do the job was going to do the job. Again, it's messaging about system requirements.

Trying to disentangle exactly what happened is, for any of us, an exercise in futility.

Whether it was the software was ahead of the hardware, or the hardware was behind the software, it was entirely within the scope of Microsoft to wait until hardware caught up (or, if the stated theory were to be correct, to force HP to "fix it" before they consented to allow installation of that OS).

In the end, balls were dropped, by intent, to meet an arbitrary deadline rather than looking at what was needed to ensure that all components would actually work together and waiting until that was the case.

This sort of stupidity just keeps repeating itself to this very day, and it's the end user who's paying the price for it.