Welcome to RCF - WHF

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

Upgrading to Windows Vista has been banned by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), technology giant Texas Instruments and other corporations and government agencies (V1, V10, V11). These organizations are evaluating their options, but overseas it's turning into a stampede to get out of Microsoft software (V15).

School districts in the U.S. are starting to move entirely to Linux rather suffer the cost of upgrading Windows. Examples are the Windsor Unified School District in Northern California and the Bexley, Ohio high school district. Schools making this move have been surprised how easy it is and how much money is saved. (V6, V8)

Leading computer maker HP is reporting "massive deals for Linux desktops" with corporate clients (V4). Runner-up computer maker and long time faithful Microsoft ally Dell has been overwhelmed by demand and has started developing Linux desktop preloads for their notebook and desktop computers (V9).

Even that great bastion of the status quo, the Wall Street Journal, has published an article under the title Linux Starts to Find Home on Desktops (Business Technology, 13 Mar 2007).

Small business and consumer demand for computers with Windows XP is very high, but Microsoft has moved swiftly to make sure they can't get it. No sane person wants Vista, so Microsoft is making sure they have no choice.

It's becoming clear people are going to be holding on to their XP machines as long as they can. Chip manufacturers in particular face a damaging glut of memory and CPU chips because the anticipated Vista upgrade demand isn't materializing. One gigabyte of RAM memory is the practical minimum for Vista (except Home Basic which will run in 500 megabytes).

What went wrong? Basically, Vista was designed with almost no consideration for the needs of Microsoft's customers......

read more:

http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html#v05

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Hooray for Linux

banana

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Yes, W2K was the last OS produced that didn't phone home and give M$ the ability to shut down your PC for any reason. Many suggested that M$ would never disable anyone's PCs, but now we're hearing that M$ plans to do exactly that. Why design in a feature that gives them that power if they never plan to use it???

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

This is the beginning of the end of m$. They dug their own deep grave, now everyone is scatterying out of that graveyard. I can't get my money back but I can and will warn others about vista.

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

I've been warning people about M$ for years, but most don't believe that M$ could be that bad. It amazes me that M$ continues to dominate the OS market. I would have thought that big business would have jumped ship when M$ strong-armed them during the XP upgrade. I hope that this Vista upgrade is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I'm not going to hold my breath though...

munky2

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Well that article in fishead's first post seems to be a good indication there is a huge exodus from Microsoft's dark pit. After Vista Microsoft will have to do some rapid backtracking if they want to survive. They were given enough rope to hang themselves and they did a royal job of it.

sunny

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Time will tell. I'm just not convinced that the exodus is large enough to hurt M$ quite yet. It will still manage to reap huge profits somehow...

munky2

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

There is an option to change the configuration of letting outside access to your pc in vista. Now, I unchecked it to disable it last week and yesterday I saw it was turned on again, perhaps in a different window, but I unchecked that too. That is how ms is getting data as you mentioned nr. I will keep an eye on it and if it stays disabled, I might plug in the internet so I can register with hp and get some updates maybe. After that I will probably keep it unplugged.

The problem has been lack of choice for os, but now linux is turning some heads in PC makers and Macs are just not affordable to most people. Some of us are poor and have to buy what we can afford and now if HP and Dell offer linux, its goodbye windows.