Why Do People Cling To Windows XP?
In response to this article about Windows 7.
I’m a professional computer technician and I’ve been at it since the days of DOS.
The problems I see with Vista, or what I believe people don’t like about it, is it seems to offer very little new stuff and yet adds all this extra baggage.
Oh, computer people gush over all the new features Vista has, new interface, better security, smarter caching, etc, etc… but regular users don’t care about that. They want web, email, Facebook, MSN, Skype and video games. Maybe the odd bit of word processing. Vista doesn’t do these things any better than XP. In fact, when it comes to video games it is often worse, because some of your old favourite games simply don’t work. I don’t think users even care that Aero Glass looks awesome because it doesn’t make the web – what they care about most – look any better or go any faster. Youtube looks the same on basically every browser.
They notice faster, though. My old Athlon XP with 512MB of RAM can pull up a working XP desktop from a cold start in around 30 seconds. I have yet to see a Vista machine do this. Even a modern Vista box with 4GB of RAM is ponderously slow at times and users hate this. Worse, Vista doesn’t always tell you when it is ‘working’ so inexperienced users are left scratching their heads, wondering if they double-clicked fast enough. I don’t know about you, but when I click on something I want to at least know the request was understood and is being worked on.
Computer geeks will say, “Well, it needs more resources because it has all kinds of new features.” To a typical user, such a statement is meaningless. They want their MSN to come up in 10 seconds just like it did on their old rig. They don’t want to have to wait, or buy an extra gig of RAM to not wait.
Computer geeks might also be inclined to say, “Maybe they should just stick with XP.” Well except that they can’t. Their computers break down for good, need a new one and their only choice is Vista. Can’t re-install the old OEM copy of XP, oh no, that would be in violation of your software licence, to say nothing of the fact that the vendor provides no XP drivers for the thing anyway.
The unwritten promise with XP seems to have been, “You give us better hardware and we’ll give you a better OS.” In my opinion, XP lived up to that and more. With Vista, the promise seems to be, “You give us bigger hardware and we’ll give you the same OS, only prettier.” From a functional standpoint, this is not an improvement.
