Digital BW, The Print

I concur completely with the sentiments expressed below. Vista treats 
the user like an idiot, demanding that certain files be placed in "I 
know better what you want than you do" directories. I had my first 
desktop in 1977, a Digital Group machine (Z-80), so I consider myself 
reasonably experienced. Vista is so bad that I'm never going to buy 
another Windows machine. Never.

Roger

Shoshanna Moser wrote:
> 
> 
> Tom, this is another of those areas in which you'll no doubt encounter
> fierce opinions, and while I've no intention of wasting time or energy
> debating the issue, I'll be glad to share with you my experience.
> 
> After having used XP since its introduction, and having considered it
> the best ever release of Windows (I've used computers since '83, and
> well remember when major advances in DOS were heralded as miracles), I
> finally, this spring, wound up with two high-end HP laptops equipped
> with Vista.
> 
> I'll spare you the horrifying details of the month and a half I spent in
> "Dell Hell", resulting from the obscenely premature death of a
> 3-month-old $5,000 Dell laptop, but when it was finally over-- at least
> until my proposed national holiday, "Put-A-Bullet-In-A-Dell" Day, gets
> off the ground-- I went to HP. The two laptops run very well, but they
> run on Vista, and I loathe it.
> 
> I'm convinced that Microsoft designed and intended Vista for people who
> use it to play games, send and receive badly spelled email, download a
> little porn, and perhaps share their truly dreadful photos of their kids
> with other people who take equally dreadful photos of their own
> children. Inotherwords, the 90% of the home PC-owning population for
> whom the computer is a toy with which to play, rather than a tool with
> which to work.
> 
> The OS is so voraciously power-hungry, and its own absurdly unnecessary
> (but "cool"-- don't forget "cool"!) bells and whistles are so demanding,
> that the standard 1 or 2 gigabytes of RAM with which it's usually
> equipped cannot handle much beyond those minimal requirements placed on
> it by the average user.
> 
> In each of my laptops I have 4GB RAM, and a version of the OS that
> allows every bit of it to be accessed. Despite this, I have problems in
> Photoshop (CS3) that never occurred with XP. When working with a file
> of more than 500MB (pretty common) or with more than 50 layers (ditto!),
> there are problems. Vista also has intermittent issues with all three
> of my Epsons, Corel Painter (the other major graphics app I regularly
> use), and several longtime favorite plugins for Photoshop (which I've
> used since '92) will no longer run at all. (They worked perfectly in
> XP.) Although I bought a new Intuos graphics tablet a couple of years
> ago, my older version-- a 9x12"-- will not work properly with Vista,
> despite having downloaded new drivers and a boatload of patches.
> 
> Vista is a step backward, not forward. Its appearance is slicker, but
> its usability is atrocious, and for someone who places a lot of demands
> on his or her system, it's a nightmare. The less you play and the more
> you work, the worse it becomes.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Shoshanna
> Gold Beach - South Coast of Oregon