This is terrible and halarious.

And here's where the Mac people chime in.

Of course, they're still waiting on Leopard, but hey, why not laugh at Microsoft?

Stepkid got a Vista laptop recently...hasn't impressed me yet (the OS, not the kid)...shame it is only Vista basic (or whatever) version. I had no idea the Peter Principle could apply to Operating Systems, but here is your proof.

Wow...

I've not been impressed enough by the differences when I've messed with some Vista machines at the store, but, then, I wasn't impressed with XP when it first came out either.

Is it really that bad that people want to downgrade? What's the major malfunction that's causing people to abandon ship?

Yup, that's my goal: work for 7 years on something just so people can downgrade from it. Where's the rage here? People can get good and pissed off when Apple lowers the price of the iPhone, but when Microsoft comes out with a craptastic operating system that has people clamoring to downgrade from it, people just go "oh well." I bet you anything that Mac OSX 10.5 will be much more maligned than Vista if the .0 release has any bugs. Only difference is that Apple will have those bugs fixed before Vista SP1 gets released.

There are a few DRM-related nuisances that I've found annoying, namely the inability to record "What You Hear" (it isn't even a "hidden" option on my machine, for those aware of the work around). I just don't feel like paying for VAC (Virtual Audio Cables) when it doesn't add functionality that my computer doesn't have, merely works around a needlessly installed barrier to useful functionality.

Also, I bought my system from Dell before they offered the XP option, and every time I boot it up, from the day I got it, I got a warning saying that some drivers aren't compatible (everything works).

@FreeMan: Drivers, and it's spastic OS. Along with deliberate degrading of playback quality to video and audio.

@FreeMan: Also, it does shitty things to ports, enabling me to download via bittorrent but not upload. And yes, there are legit things to download with bittorrent.

when i read about this a few days ago i thought it was a joke. now that its true, after using vista ultimate a few times i can't blame them. just release directx10 on xp already so i can game in happiness.

@omg-ponies: It shouldn't be a Mac vs PC thing to want any company to release good quality software. If Leopard was going to be as late as Vista was, then, yes, as a Mac user I'd be pissed. And I'd be beside myself if I forked over the dough to buy Leopard only to find out that it was so fraught with problems that I couldn't use it day to day and would have to to downgrade to Tiger.

That being said, I never upgrade at the .0 release.

@FreeMan: The problem, I think, is that there's a learning curve with nothing of value at the end of it. They've messed with the system enough so that a person reasonably versed in XP will stumble around trying to find and tweak things; this would have been OK if in return the experience were to be significantly improved, but it isn't.

What's the major problem? XP works fine, while Vista is new and bound to have quirks. When it comes to choosing between the familiar and the new, people will always choose the familiar. Especially when the familiar works perfectly fine.

This is most likely for the people that bought a PC with Vista and come to find out that the one critical application they need to work with... does not work, and the company that made it has no plans to update it, so they are screwed for not doing their research first to see if Vista was for them and if the required software was compatible.

This is the only reason why people would need to downgrade. Poor 3rd party support for programs or drivers. Not a MS problem.

Come Windows 7 in 2010 ~ 2011... the same thing will happen.

Nothing new, nothing to see... move along.

@MalzyWheels:

1) I don't see why the whole Mac v. PC thing has to be so gosh-darned crazy? Microsoft and Apple are really not competitors in the same way that Dell or HP is a competitor to Apple. At the end of the day, MS is a software company and Apple is a hardware company that happens to make its own OS.

2) I'd like bug-free software too but then again, I also want to win the lottery. Neither is going to happen anytime soon. Apple has an advantage on the "bug-free" front because it controls the hardware that runs the OS.

The price a user has to pay for near-infinite hardware configurations in the PC market is some level of bugginess. And don't forget the sheer complexity of the code itself. I don't fault Microsoft for not having 100% compatibility with every hardware configuration out of the gate. I think that's just an impossibly high bar to reach.

Personally, I never minded the fact that with XP, MS had a fairly regular patch schedule. If they didn't have the patch schedule, then I'd be mad. Meanwhile, I'm still irked by the fact that FF on OSX is still unstable. I'm tired of it crashing twice daily.

You may not remember this, but when XP came out, Nearly all of the same things were complained about.

It took more than a year for xp to catch on. IT took more than a year for decent XP driver support.

And XP was a much more stable, and functional operating system than win 95 or win ME. Yet people still complained and did not adopt xp right away.

I still have clients who have computers with Windows 95 on them.

Does anyone actually know the outcome of this downgrade in terms of re-upgrading at a later date?

Given that I have Vista business currently, could I then contact Microsoft, ask for a CD-key for XP Pro where I could then use this until Vista becomes the viable alternative, and reinstall Vista using the initial key?

This would net 2 keys, one for each OS, for the purchase of one system. If so, this might be something to look into.

Vista's alright if you have no other equipment, or it's all recent. In my case I just replaced Windows 98 SE on a PIII with Vista Home Premium on a Thinkpad T61 laptop to find:
* gratuitous DHCP incompatibility with older routers
* switch to Link-Layer Topology Discovery broke Network Neighborhood
* stupid incompatibility with NTLM v1 authentication broke file sharing with NAS and XP
* older USB drivers won't install
* HP scanner incompatible (a $40 third-party driver is available)
* Office 2000 mail merge broken
* Windows Address Book change breaks Outlook 2000

There are hacks and registry settings and workarounds for most of this, but it was a miserable four day slog and I seriously considered demanding a downgrade from Lenovo. However, MS will drop XP eventually so you suffer the upgrade incompatibility pain now or suffer it later.

Other software and hardware vendors go along with the gratuitous incompatibilities Vista introduces, because its their chance to sell new hardware and software. Gratuitous obsolescence hurts consumers but companies love it.

The things that migrated flawlessly were Mozilla SeaMonkey e-mail+browser and Bitpim phone sync, both open source. I should have upgraded to a Linux distro.

@skierpage: Once MS drops XP I'm moving over to Linux of some flavor. Why should anyone have to pay to "suffer" through their crap of incompatibility and DRM. You really have to be into some big time masochistic bent to pay someone to torture you like MS does.

Just to let you know, Apple and Microsoft are competitors, Apple does not make hardware, it simply badges it. The hard drives, displays, and processors to name a few are all made by 3rd party companies. Apple makes OS and so does Microsoft.

The only thing that really bugs me about Vista is that the media center app is pathetically unstable. It crashes A LOT with Divx files. The installed codec doesnt matter, official divx, xvid, ffdshow, it crashes with all of em.

People talk about DRM issues, but since using Vista since release, i have yet to be attacked by DRM, and i do it all.

Incompatibility? There isnt a single piece of software or hardware right now in my PC, or the one before it which was a P4 that is incompatible, and i like to trial quite a bit of software. I dont have a single game that has compatibility issues. I really dont get it.

Are you sure your using Vista? I guess i have a different version then all of you, because its running like a dream for me.

Im not touting Vista (or at least not trying to), but i have to admit. I dont see the problems all of you claim to have.

But its your PC. Put on it what you want, and what gets the job done for you.

@davekaybsc: I use the "Vista Codec Pack" and the 64bit extensions for it. I also get two registry files that allow the use of MKV files, as well as generates a thumbnail, and i dont get a single crash, ever. X264, Divx, Xvid, Mov, RM, etc. etc. etc. Not a single crash, and im on media center all the time (Its my PVR).

You think thats all bad? Try running Vista Ultimate -- but instead of the 32-bit version, the 64-bit version of doom.

Now, granted, it was my choice to install Vista 64-bit on my system, but it was mainly for experimental purposes. When MS sent me both copies (I was on their beta team --- our incentive package at the end was a copy of both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate) I decided it would be fun to run 64-bit on my dual core system.

Never have I had so many problems right off the bat.

First off, I had a brand spankin new X-Fi Elite Pro system that I had just put in to my case that Vista absolutely HATED. Every time I tried to play music or anything, the screen would freeze at random moments and this high pitched scratching/squabbling noise would come into my headphones, which would cause me to throw my headphones off and nearly impail my Viewsonic LCD because of it hurting my ears. Looked for literally about 3 months for a fix for it (which, btw, even if you still look today there are thousands of people still having the problem I had) and Creative couldnt help me (their tech support is just about equal to crap. Every time I called in, they would "send me an email" with what I needed to do to fix the problem.) and finally in the end it turned out that it was my nVidia drivers for my Ethernet ports that was causing a problem for my sound card because of the way that Vista was built. Um... I'm sorry, but does that make sense to ANYONE else? I finally had to just disable my ethernet connection entirely when I was in Vista and totally wipe my drivers for the controller and connect now through to the web using my wifi card. Mind you, this is just one problem -- I'll spare you on the rest.

Luckily for me I was smart enough to make a dual-boot system: 1 for XP Pro and 1 for Vista. Suprisingly, they play nicely with one another and haven't had any problems with running one because the other is on, but still 8 months down the road from getting my copies of Vista I still do just about everything in XP, and just run Vista every once in a while so it doesnt screw up on me.

I've been using x64 vista since release and once most drivers came out, and I did a lot of tweaking, and it runs just fine (with minor headaches now and then. Hello enforced driver signing).

The biggest issue vista has imo, is the craptastic driver support from other vendors. I think MS is shooting itself in the foot by doing this, instead of pushing to fix things that people have issues with.

Just wipe vista off with some isopropyl alcohol and install XP Pro. BOOM! Everything works the way it was supposed to. Just no fancy graphics for a year or two.