Windows user spends 30 Days with Windows Vista: ‘It’s a lemon, an unstable operating system’

Apple Store[H] Enthusiast’s Brian Boyko, an avowed Windows user, spent 30 days with Windows Vista and found, “It’s a lemon… Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data. The 64-bit version is slightly better (which, frankly, surprised the hell out of us and makes us wonder if Microsoft didn’t make a mistake in choosing to only distribute Home Premium 32-bit in the retail channel), but it still has stability problems.”

Boyko writes, “Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.”

“I can see what Microsoft was trying to do, but it may be that keeping Windows backwards compatible and making it more secure, all while trying to keep the OS stable may be an impossible task. I don’t know if Vista will be improved with the next service pack, but the problems I found seem to stem not from flaws in code, but flaws in design,” Boyko writes.

Boyko writes, “I really did want to like Vista. Yes, it is possible to enjoy both Windows and Linux – but unfortunately this product is unfit for any user. I still intend to keep a Windows XP partition on my computer for gaming and some multimedia editing, but as of the time of this publication, I have removed Vista entirely.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Scott” for the heads up.]

MacDailyNews Take: Let’s see, is “It’s a lemon, an unstable operating system, unfit for any user” better or worse than “Five years for a chrome-plated turd?”

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46 Comments

  1. Another shining review. On a practicality standpoint, don’t consumers (as well as government entities) get upset and files massive amounts of charges against companies that release products that are unsafe and/or do not work to specification? Aren’t these companies required to perform a recall?

    The point is, it is seriously dangerous that M$ is allowed to do this at all. Their “products”, so called, should have been canned years ago.

  2. I haven’t noticed any stability issues in Vista. I’d say that it’s far superior to Windows XP in every way, with the exception of 3D game performance. I’m honestly not sure what people are doing to make Vista so unstable. It ran fine on my MacBook Pro, even with the somewhat limited Boot Camp 1.1 drivers designed for XP.

  3. Excerpt from Robert Bruce Thompson’s website:

    “Charlie Demerjian of The Inquirer has dubbed Microsoft’s latest operating system “Windows Vista Me II”, which is so right on so many levels that I wish I’d thought of it myself. In the opinions of many, Vista has already superseded Windows Me for the title of Worst Windows Version Ever. As to the “II” part, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and on that basis Vista is certainly sincere. Vista freely imitates many features of Mac OS X and, although it is seldom mentioned, Linux. Unfortunately, Vista imitates incompetently, which is no surprise.”

  4. They just don’t know any better – the sheep buy Vista because it’s what Micro$oft sells. Hopefully the Mac ads will help some of the sheep see the light.

    MDN Magic Word “good” – a good Mac is always better than Windows!

  5. Dollars to donuts Microsoft takes a very dramatic course of action in the next 18 months. It will be the last hurrah where they pull out all the stops. Shame be damned.

    They’ll adopt Unix or one of its many derivatives as the basis of their next OS and slap the Vista GUI on top of it and the world will think they have finally achieved the world’s greatest operating system!

    80 percent of the world doesn’t know squat about OS X (yet) and Microsoft will be perceived as the enlightened ones who finally developed a truly remarkable OS.

    When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to unabashedly copy the very same path Apple has taken.

    Microsoft has been polishing this windows turd for the last 5 years! They wasted billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours patching holes in an OS that leaks like a sieve! Somewhere along the way Gates declared he didn’t care how broken the OS was, just slap a coat of paint on it and get it the hell outta’ here so that we can focus on something better.

    Whatever comes next, it will have to surpass Vista by leaps and bounds in order to restore what modicum of respect Microsoft may have possessed.

    Kiss legacy goodbye.

  6. @ G4Dualíe
    “When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to unabashedly copy the very same path Apple has taken.”

    Sorry G4, I want to amend that to:
    When Ballmer is confronted with the dismal performance and return on investment of Vista he will become desperate enough to……..
    JUMP OFF THE TALLEST BUILDING IN SEATTLE.

  7. I foolishly bought Vista Home Premium to replace the Linux Mandrake hobby OS I was using. I just didn’t have the time anymore.

    Vista is a sick joke. For everything they got right (device manager is now a control panel) they screw up two basics (Add and Remove Programs has been pointlessly renamed, cascading menus in Start menu eliminated). Change for the sake of change is the theme, and “resource hog” is not anywhere near strong enough a term to describe what an incredible pig this OS really is. I cannot for the life of me imagine what garbage and redundant code you have to have running to bring a 64 bit Athlon with 2 gigs of Ram practically to it’s knees, but Microsoft has done it.

  8. “It’s a lemon …unstable …unfit for any user”

    Imagine a long-awaited (and critically important) new flagship car getting that same review. The automaker would be laughed right out of business!

    Yet somehow MS lives another day. For now…

  9. Dollars to donuts Microsoft takes a very dramatic course of action in the next 18 months. It will be the last hurrah where they pull out all the stops.

    What stops? If Microsoft had any more stops to pull out, surely they’d have pulled them out by now. They’re already bleeding all over the furniture!

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