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Ars: “Microsoft lies to XP users—and they start to love Vista”

Following on Ina Fried’s blog post ‘Microsoft looks to “Mojave” to revive Vista’s image‘ this week with a highlight of Mojave research, Emil Protalinski of Arstechnica has this post on how ‘XP users… start to love Vista

“The company hasn’t figured out how it will use this to market Vista (the company has video footage of users exclaiming “wow!” and so on), but the Mojave project will likely help in Microsoft’s plan to tell the “real Vista story.” This is some real ammo here: these are XP lovers saying they love Vista, not just more Microsoft employees giving statements to sell the software giant’s latest operating system.”

Although expected, some of the resulting comments are of interest. One that sticks with me from one ars reader:

“How about telling them that Mojave is the installed OS on a cheap-ass computer from Best Buy loaded up with trial-ware? Within hours the users will complain that Mojave is worse than Vista.”

And this more positive note…

“That said, Vista is, for me, the best client OS I have ever sat down to. I know this is a personal choice. Some will say that about Mac, some will say that about Linux, some will say it about XP or even Win98 (yeah, those guys are still out there!). This is, IMO, a PR issue. …

“It’s hip to hate Vista. [writer’s emphasis] The hipness will wear off. It pretty much always does.”

Once again, as my kids will be happy to attest, I’m not hip: I actually like Vista SP1.

As Benjamin J. Romano of the Seattle Times posted yesterday in his play-by-play coverage of the FAM (the financial analyst meeting at Microsoft), there’s been some success of Windows Vista with significant improvements over the last year…

“On security, for example, Windows Vista is 62 percent more secure than Windows XP SP2, he said.

“Microsoft has sold 180 million Vista licenses since it launched in January 2007. Sales have been “very balanced” between consumer and business customers.

As Mary Jo notes in her post ‘Microsoft to get more ‘Apple-like’ in PC, phone space‘ covering the FAM…

During the final Q&A session at FAM, when asked by a Wall Street analyst about what he meant by his “changing the way we work with hardware makers” comment, Ballmer said Microsoft is working with its OEMs to “show them additional choices they can make” to make PCs and devices work better. For example, by configuring a laptop one way, boot times can be made faster, Ballmer said… and improve users’ end-to-end experience with Windows and Windows Mobile systems.”

I hope so.  As I explained in my post ‘A USB smart drive is more than just a memory fob…’ whilst configuring my PCs at home, I wiped clean my wife’s old Dell notebook and saw a several system improvements… 

I have found (as have many others) that uninstalling various pre-installed software can improve performance.  In more drastic situations, reinstalling the OS with a clean boot makes for an improved customer experience (assuming that the OEM makes it easy for you to find all the needed drivers, add-on software and utilities).

My unscientific findings: with a clean install on an old laptop, it takes only 20 seconds to recover from Hibernate, and less than five seconds to recover from Sleep.  A DVD inserted in the drive is playing in less than 20 seconds. 

And again, this post by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, who uses a Mac “because The Atlantic uses Macs.”

I appear to be the only person in the known universe who did not have a problem with Vista. My Sony Vista laptop was fast, woke up out of sleep mode just fine, and if I had any complaint it was with the crap Sony loaded on it, not the OS itself. Vista itself was lovely, though I turned off the damn security alerts.

Blast from the past, here’s more info on improving PC performance by removing pre-installed items:

Tags: performance, tips, Windows Vista, notebook, hardware, Dell, HP, customer experience.

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