SincerelyAnnoyedWithVista


Sincerely Annoyed with Windows Vista

Rant from BillWebb, Sep 2007, permalink Rants and Raves

 

The following is a letter that Bill was happy to allow me to publish. Keep on ranting Bill.

 

Dear Mr. Ballmer,

 

I have been a Windows user since 3.1, and have gone through 95, ME (ick), XP Home and now XP Professional. While they have had their problems, I have generally been satisfied. In fact, I recently bought another copy of Pro to hold until I need it, which I am sure I shall for the following reasons.

 

I have been involved with four PCs running Vista -- none of them mine, nor purchased at my recommendation -- belonging to family members. Three are OEM machines (a Dell and two HPs) and one is an upgrade from XP Home to Vista Premium on a Systemax that was running fine on XPH. (What a mistake that was!) All four have had multiple problems that took hours to sort out. I'm not going to enumerate them because I solved them and I don't expect action from Microsoft in any case.

 

Then, over the past weekend, two of the four were crippled by Microsoft's server problem, which took another three hours of my time in travel and fooling with reactivation.

 

Enough is enough.

 

I will continue to use Pro until support expires, formatting the drive on the laptop I expect to purchase next month -- that will, doubtless, come with Vista -- and installing the copy of Pro that I purchased a couple of months ago. I'm doing this as a matter of personal convenience, because I use several Windows programs and don't want to bother transitioning the work to other systems. But come the expiration of support for Pro, unless Microsoft has come up with a system comparable in every way to the Mac OS, I'm SO outta here.

 

It is ridiculous that the largest software company in the world cannot seem to create an operating system that is trouble-free and runs properly out of the box.

 

With sincere annoyance,

 

Bill Webb

 

And below is the reply. Bill noted that they really don't say much.

 

Hi Bill,

 

Thank you for your feedback and for being such a longtime customer of Microsoft.

 

Since launch date, hardware and software support for Windows Vista has been growing in quantity and quality at an exponential rate. Microsoft and its partners have been working hard to provide updates and fixes not only to address known issues, but also in anticipation of possible future security exploits. We are also in the process of beta testing Service Pack 1 for Vista, which is scheduled to be released to the public early 2008. This service pack will include security, reliability, performance, network and internet and hardware support fixes.

 

More details here:

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/pages/windows-vista-service-pack-1-beta-whitepaper.aspx

 

Let me assure you that Microsoft is commited to making Vista the best operating system we've ever released.

 

If you have further queries regarding this message, please respond to this email.

 

Thank you,

 

Jack Zhou

Microsoft

Response Management Team - US

 

Bill is a well known blogger and a good friend.

 

 

He writes at Backwash.com as DigitalZen,

and here at Lockergnome.com.

See also: Crackerboy.us & Digital-dharma.net