I am going to attempt to write a series of articles to help current Windows users that are either currently shopping for a new computer or planning on shopping for a new system in the near future consider Macintosh as an alternative to feeding the Microsoft beast.
So lets start with some background of the author and his reason for switching from Windows to a Macintosh himself. Nearly two years ago, Microsoft was pretty close to releasing their latest OS, Windows Vista. We had been hearing about this new OS for quite a few years prior and at this time two years ago were hearing that Microsoft was pulling parts of the OS out in order to help get the OS released by the end of 2006.
We had heard all kinds of glorious stories of a new File System called WinFS that would make any other file system look very primitive in comparison. WinFS was one of the first pieces of Vista to be removed from what would be Windows Vista. This was quite disappointing. There were many other “innovations” that were removed along the way, but I digress.
Around May 2006, Microsoft released Windows Vista Beta 2 to a small population of testers. They allowed anyone who got the install image early enough to join in. I managed to get a copy early on and installed it on my Windows box to check it out.
What I found when I first booted into Vista was interesting. It was certainly an improvement over XP, or at least it appeared to be. There was some decent “eye candy” called Aero and better security in the form of User Access Control. However, as I continued to use Vista, I found that the UAC was going to be quite a pain to deal with.
You see, UAC pops up a dialog prompt, that dims the background, that forces you to make a decision about something bad that a piece of software is attempting to do. Mind you, this is not a bad thing to do at all. For instance, it protects the user from a trojan attempting to install itself. However, it also protects the user from that same user changing the computers time or date, or even changing the resolution of the display they are using. Things that are quite safe and were initiated by the user.
As more and more prompts appeared, I realized that this was going to be a feature that would be disabled as soon as possible by as many users as could figure out how to do it. During my tests, the UAC was appearing quite frequently. Approximately 3-5 times an hour. To be fair, I was making adjustments to parts of the OS, so I’m sure it was coming up more often than it would normally.
It’s better to compare UAC to how Software Firewall’s work. When a firewall program detects internet activity that it doesn’t know about, it prompts the user asking if that activity is OK. When you first install firewall software, these prompts can appear 5-10 times a minute. Over time they will appear less frequently because you have told the software that previous internet access attempts were OK and to ignore future attempts. After a while, the only time the firewall software will prompt the user is for something new that they had no idea was going to happen. This is how people find out that software “phone’s home“; a frowned upon practice by software/hardware makers to typically get marketing information.
Unfortunately, Windows Vista’s UAC can’t learn from prior prompts and will always prompt the user even when he wants to change the computers clock. If the user gets so annoyed with this that he/she disables the feature, think of the boy who cried wolf to many times, when something bad does happen to that users computer, they will never know about it and will turn this new security feature into a totally dangerous feature.
There were other features of Windows Vista that worried me. Windows Explorer had been modified so that by default, it showed way too much information. Most home users really don’t need this information. There is a way to disable displaying this extra info, but it’s turned on by default and that was not acceptable to me.
My final reason for not sticking with Microsoft was the cost involved in upgrading to Windows Vista had I decided to do so. Microsoft doesn’t offer any deals for families that have multiple computers in their home, so if someone wanted to upgrade 5 computers from Windows Xp to Vista Home Premium, they would have had to pay nearly $1,000! There was no way on this good Earth I was going to pay that much money for a new OS.
So I started searching for a new OS and this is where I will leave this series for now. In the next installment, I will discuss what process I went through in making my decision to switch from Windows to Macintosh.
- So You Are Thinking About Switching To A Mac
- Deciding On A New OS
- Which Mac Is Right For You
- Which Mac Is Right For You; Part 2: The Notebooks
- Setting Up Your New Macintosh
- Turning On Your New Macintosh For The First Time
- The OS X Leopard Desktop
- Applications That Come With Your New Macintosh
- Differences between Windows and OS X
- Must Have Apps For OS X
Twitter
Jaiku
Pownce
Even if MS offered a discount family pack, no one in their right mind will upgrade to Vista. MS screwed it up so badly Vista was a 1 year “work in progress” to reach SP1 status and even with SP1 it’s still a work in progress, thank you Steve Ballmer.
XP works fine and with SP3 final release, it gets up to date and still nails Vista to the wall when it comes to performance or reliability. Vista SP1 is slow even on a high end machine with Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz with 2GB of RAM and Geforce 8800GT, while XP SP3 flies on that machine. No brainer really.
Ah, but you forget, there are quite a few home computer users that are not in “their right mind” as it were. They don’t know better and when a salesman tells them that Vista is a better OS than XP, these home users sometimes feel compelled to do what most of us geeks would never ever consider. Don’t forget, even though a lot of companies are not taking the upgrade, Vista is still selling better than XP did in the same amount of time. Someone is buying all those copies.
You forget that Vista is a work in progress for not just a year, but 6 years starting in late 2001.
XP is still a pretty decent OS. It’s got some issues, but overall, it’s pretty stable. It’s certainly showing it’s age though. I haven’t heard much about XP SP3 myself other than Microsoft was working on the patch. What SP3 will have in it above and beyond the hundreds of hotfixes that XP has received since SP2 is hard to say. I suspect there will not be much.
The big question on a lot of peoples minds these days is how long will XP be available for new computer purchases. I have heard stories of June/July 2008 will mark the end of XP. However, if Microsoft really goes through with it, they are going to see some serious repercussions from it.