Afternoon nerd wars thread [Purp]

Here's something to ponder...

Is Windows Vista actually better than the rep its gotten?

Sure, there were teething problem and such when first released. There was a lot of new code there beyond XP, but a fully patched up install on TODAY's multi-core multi-Ghz hardware (or even 5 years ago hardware), with 4G or so of memory is NOT hideously slow or particularly unstable. An old Pentium 4 with a 1G of memory, and an 80G drive? Well...that's different. THAT sucks ass very much running Vista.

Would you rather have the Windows 8 bizarro world interface or the Vista rolling whorehouse pimpmobile interface? I'm getting kinda comfy with the pimpmobile in a machine I'm setting up to do some Windows Phone phone app development on.

Windows 7 is kinda like Vista minus the sketchy stability (at the time) bloatware glitz, plus moar drivers. I like Windows 7. W7 has a spartan Windows 2000 ambiance -- it doesn't get in your way.

I stuck with Windows 2000 from its release through early 2012. I had it on dual-P133 machines, dual Pentium Pro's, some Pentium II/III machines and found it to be pretty stable on officially supported hardware.

In 12 years of use I can count the number of W2K BSOD's I had on one hand, and all of those were due to busted hardware or some unsupported crap I was trying to prod into functioning with witchcraft and animal sacrifices.

The thing about W2K, and Windows 7 is they run OK on the hardware of their respective eras. There wasn't a big "expectation gap" like there was with Vista.

Suppose Microsoft had done a XP "second edition" with more hardware/driver support and delayed Vista a couple of years until hardware developments caught up with its voracious appetite for consuming hardware?

Would our impressions of it be different? I think so.

I know at the time I read the minimum hardware specs for Vista and thought "Wow, I don't have any machines in inventory with that!", so I passed on upgrading. If I did have a minimum machine, I'd have been disappointed anyway.

But today, you can find machines literally in the trash that have specs to run Vista just fine. In fact, the machine I just installed it on was dumpster dived. I replaced one bad memory stick that made it act like it was stone freaking dead, and it sprang to life again. And the replacement stick came from another dived machine, so expenditure of instantaneous cash for repair was $0.00.

I needed a brief respite from thinking about the Gosnell horror story. This was it. This vid is hilarious.

posted by Open Blogger at 02:35 PM

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