JimH wrote:

Harry,
I hate to tell you this, but I told you this months ago. I do agree with
you: Vista Sucks.

You really have summed up my feelings when you said:

It takes days and days to do that sort of thing, and even after that
there is no guarantee whatever problem you had will be resolved, or that
you won't unleash some new dragon.

The answer to this sort of horror lies with Microsoft. It simply is not
doing the job it ought to be doing with these operating systems. They're
too vulnerable, they are too hard to diagnose, their tech support sucks
on these matters. It's not just with a beta like SP1 RC, it's generally.


Harry Krause is obviously in your head causing you to obsess about him 24x7.
Dark Side of the Moon?

JimH,

If you had checked with me before you purchased your laptop, it would be
running twice as fast as it is today:

New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has
twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended
to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with
the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by
researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain
Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest
Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with
SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared
to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.

Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent
compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3
improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed
with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007
through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound
document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement
that although the company understood the interest in the service packs,
they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their
release. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet
the full spectrum of customer needs," the spokesperson said.

If SP1 does not evolve sufficiently, it could be another setback for
Vista, with many businesses waiting to adopt the operating system until
the service pack is released.


A year after its launch, only 13 percent of businesses have adopted
Vista, according to a survey of IT professionals.

Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company
would have liked. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for
Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent
interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.

Microsoft has not done enough to make users aware of the benefits of
Vista, NPD analyst Chris Swenson said at the conference. "The problem is
that there are a lot of complex new features in Vista, and you need to
educate consumers about them...much like Apple educating the masses
about the possibilities of the iPhone or focusing on a single feature or
benefit of the Mac OS in the Mac-versus-PC commercials. Microsoft should
be educating the masses about the various new features in a heavy
rotation of Vista in TV, radio, and print ads. But the volume of ads
(for Vista) has paled in comparison to the ads run for XP."

XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the
first six months of U.S. retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7
percent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release.

Microsoft has had to allow PC manufacturers to continue to sell XP on
new PCs, setting a deadline for the last sale at January 31. However,
the pressure from manufacturers and consumers has been so great that
Microsoft has been forced to extend the deadline another five months,
until June.

According to Microsoft, sales of Vista have been picking up, with the
software giant reporting 88 million units sold