The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

I couldn't agree anymore...the spread of vista is only linked to laptop and preinstalled machines...no one with a clean hardware can choice to load vista...

 

I did. And I was a very outspoken opponent of it just months ago.

 

Hey i'm not an anti-vista fan,i've tried it for one month and there are some things useful but those things are too expensive in terms of memory occupied,aero is too heavy and i - like most of you - don't use a laptop only for gaming,it's not simple to have photoshop,flash and fireworks plus firefox and see that memory is running out on vista!!! also being a programmer i use visual basic and it's funny to see that after upgrading to last update it don't work on vista!a microsoft software that don't work on microsoft os...amazing
Also if you use vista for gaming you have dx 10 but they are useless at this point cause there's a loss of performance,and if you are a tuning maniac and want to squeeze every little framerate from your hardware the choice is simple forget vista...

EDIT
Pulp with you hardware even windows 2010 should run well,you must think that not everyone has a 8800 or a quad core or 4gb ram...i work with pc with 512 mb ram in some offices !!!!!

 

umm if it bothers you that much then shut up and go get a copy of xp or a macbook. it's as e-z as A - B - C and simple as 1 - 2 - 3.

 

Do you know the meaning of the word "forum" BHD?
...don't get it as a personal thing kid

 

not the word per se but i do understand the concept and hence my input however you may want to interpret them

 

It might have been a valid point if RAM isn't cheap...

 

It's not. I don't want to add $100 to the cost of the computer just to make it run like it should have in the first place.

 

I just dont understand how MS or companies discard what works and take a quantam leap in the wrong direction. i thought vista's point was to improve the interface (usuability), security, searching and wireless configuration. It shouldnt be doing this in a massively inefficient way, degrading usability by eating RAM (and battery time in laptops) and generally having such rife compatiability issues with s/w & hardward! its a bit more than teething problems! SP3 for XP is meant to increase XP's speed by ~10%....mature products are better but MS have started off on a very bad foot with Vista

 

Good thing I have a Macbook Pro.... runs fine... Although there's an ungodly wait time to start up SetUp programs. Still would definatley not use it for anything but gaming.

 

The point is that Xp sp2 it's a solid and fast os and with Firefox + nod32 + zone alarm + peer guardian it's more secure than any vista integrated solution.
For the first time in microsoft:

1)some functions of vista will be implemented in xp with sp3
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/nap/napfaq.mspx

2)vista is the first and only os that has the OPTION(???) to downgrade to his predecessor

 

Well, I'd say it's still a work in progress. Should get better after M$ patches it and releases service packs I guess.

 

Vista is a work in progress... it works reasonably well on up-to-date hardware when a reasonably skilled person configures it.

This is false... those programs emulate what Vista does, but does not have the changes under the hood at the OS level.

We recently had a virus infect EVERY XP installation it contacted... that includes some of our more paranoid developers and a few of their well-configured systems.
Meanwhile even the most basic user running Vista completely stonewalled that bug.
(all systems are running non-windows firewall software, anti-virus, and have firefox as their default browser)

Vista has its moments.

 

Not a bad article overall. I think it does not lie anything regarding Vista, as of today. The work is still in progress, hopefully they'll progress faster.

 

PCWorld doesn't have any creditability with me. They should check more of their articles before publishing them, IMO.

 

Good choices there, I agree with most of them.

 

Honestly, I agreed with the article, not because I am anti-vista, I seriously wanted Vista to work because I am always the early adopter type; I want everything that's the newest. So, I gave Vista 2.5 month of time to impress me, and all it gave me was compatibility error, slow performance, and tons of disappointment. BUT there are some really nice feature I totally missed in Vista, such as the aero interface, the securities and some convenient feature MS put here and there. However, I am a gamer, and at this point of time Performance comes above everything vista has to offer now.

 

Oh look apple fanboys will be mad - #9 Mac OSX 10.5

What did that add though lol other than making your webcam much more fun?

 

How can a magazine named PC World leave the HD 2900 XT off its list? Oh, I know, because the magazine is for nubs that can't tell a graphics card from a gaggle of gay geese.

 

WHAT!?

you can get a 2GB DDR2 800MHz SINGLE stick now for 32$ on newegg. or a 2GB dual stick kit for the same price..

You can also buy single 1GB sticks of up to PC6400 (including laptop versions) for about 25$ each.. How the hell is that a pricy upgrade?!

Hell, they're starting to sell 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR2 kits on newegg for about $100 and less... again, how is that a pricy upgrade or a valid argument?


If you can afford vista in the first place, then mabe you should have upgraded first.

[EDIT] That entire article is worthless...

 

this is a bit unfair to vista, i believe almost the same type of issues happened with xp? how short some people's memory are....

and infact vista is inheritly more secure than xp at default install.

although my real quip about vista, which is the same with all window os, is the amount of tweaking i need to do, ie removing uneeded programs and disabling of services.

with the maturarity of hardware support, which seems to be the biggest hurdle that vista needs to overcome, it will only get better.

unless your running hardware from the mid to late 90's, vista should have no problems running, even on 1 gig of ram. yeah, 2 gigs is recommended, but isn't this the same of OSX as well?

 

Looks sexier and the addition of Stacks, Time Machine, and the complete version of Boot Camp is nice. Although it feels like it could have been just a software update and not an entire new OS

 

also on that note, didn't pc world state that the MBP was the fastest vista laptop in the world, which subsequently gave fuel to apple...

 

Quite ironic. Apparantly Apple is doing better since they started using Intel chipsets and Boot Camp to run Windows. Good for them, they make killer hardware, but Vista really should run well on any PC if it's got the same specs... I mean... all Apple computers are anymore is just normal PCs packaged with OS X, and the minimalistic Mac style case. Shouldn't Vista run equally as well on a normal PC with equal specs?

 

i think you missed my point.... look at my sig and try again... or for that fact the clevo 900/901. it blows the MBP out of the water interms of performance, bar none.

 

Yea that would make a lot of sense since other laptops have faster processors. Oh wait...thats just a lie

 

yeah...

remember the powerpc vs x86 cpu wars, how apple adamantly stated that powerpc were by far superb in terms of raw cpu performance

oh, and the "simple" graphs showing people how much pewpew they have...

really, it just makes you wonder

 

The difference of the specs in your sig and a MBP is that you have a better GPU... and everything else is on par or worse.

 

I ordered my dell with XP.....there is still hope...

 

Quite a lot, really. A lot of the things changed are under the hood, so not noticeable to the average consumer but is greatly improved for developers. In the next year, when developers start developing for OS X Leopard, they'll be a lot more efficient as well as can do a lot more quickly using the tools OS X Leopard provides. This will benefit users, of course.

And there's a lot of upgrades in OS X Leopard that speeds things up, makes things more convenient and other. Definitely worth the $130 for a full copy (compared to $260 CDN for Vista Home Basic).

 

I did too, but I reformatted it anyway.

XP Pro > XP Home

 

I guess At least Apple isn't charging its users $499 to actually get the WHOLE OS. The price on Vista is rediculous.

 

really? everything else? the difference in cpu is minor, yet the difference in GPU is more than better. and everything else is on par, not worse, unless your referring to aesthetics, which i will give you.

so the problem i have here with pc world is that if they are going to do a benchmark of laptops and make a bias opinion of what they think is the fastest vista laptop, they should do themselves a favor, and just shoot themselves on both feet.

really, do abit of research. at that moment when they did the benchmarks, how come the rebranded clevo's 900/901c were left out, they are laptops correct? i had thought i noted this before.....

 

No one's doubting there are better laptops than a MBP. Don't get all bent out of shape man! It's just one writers opinion, and it was probably incredably biased or bought. I really don't think Vistas ranking on that list would have changed if they didn't consider it runs well on Macs anyway.

 

Apple is okay but takes for me to get "used to it" i only got hands on the windows. Vista is fine for me except the hangin on the shutdown and goes to video mem dump but that is the laptop driver's fault. it is fact that vista has better features than the xp but xp is less complicated. all are good.

 

That's why you buy $180 OEM version of Ultimate, or $110 OEM HP. When I look at Macs' prices, I feel like they sell their OS way more expensive than microsoft. Of course it's cheaper to buy the upgrade in the store but how much you paid for your current edition?

I installed Vista everywhere at home, couldn't be happier.

What people seem to completly forget about the memory is that the OS will cut in the base-used-RAM when needed....


For most games, you won't even see the performance difference if you turn FPS counters off.

 

Hmm?

Mac OS X Leopard full version is $129 US. With Student Discount in some universities, its as low as $69. $69 for an entire OS...that's less than MS Office Student. The same price was with Tiger (but with Tiger, Student Discount made it $69 for sure, whereas with Leopard, some universities offer it at $69, but its no officially $69). How is that more expensive?

 

Sure vista is not mature and i hope that they can light aero and retro compatibility with some programs without tuning and i hope that vista don't do the winMe's end...
but if the vista sp1 don't make any improvement we must admit that vista it's an half job unless you are a microsoft fanboy (in my case i'm a maximum performance fanboy...reminds crysis )
And for the ram question you are not considering that to run aero you MUST HAVE a good video card or your os visuals will be equal to xp...So to the ram add the cost of a new decent video card with 256Ram...
Anyway the passage from win98/winMe to win xp was very simple and at that time there was'n a reason to stay with older system.Today is not that case and i prefer to stay with xp sp2 but if vista will improve i'll stick with it tomorrow...

 

The price you pay for it when you buy your computer, by how much $ are the macs more expensive? I don't know about the US but here in Canada even desktop macs are at least 150% the price of the same PC.

Oh and, Office 07 PRO is $60 with student discount FYI

 

FYI, Microsoft has student discounts as well.

Under stand that that $129 gets you access to a VERY small percentage of software.

Mac users need to buy virtualization ($60-80) software AND a copy of XP or Vista to get most of what PC users get for their $180. (they can skip the virtualization software and just boot to Vista or XP, but then lose the GUI they paid so much for)
That's $129 + $60 + $180 = $369 for the priviledge of running the VERY few mac-only titles and a different GUI.

PC users take their $180 and run the vast majority of the software and just skip the handful of mac-only titles and wait 1-2 months extra for the ones still developed on Mac first.

Despite MacOS's strengths, it is currently being used as a GUI-wrapper for Windows anyway.

 

Vista is a disappointment, yes, BUT I would not place it in first place.

 

fanboy, lawls

as much as i like vista, i am dissappointed in it. i still do not like the fact that vista installs all this default crap, i much prefer the old style linux where the customization was much greater and you had much more influence on what is being installed. also, wished it was abit more like osx, with each release, the os is tweaked and the intergration is much tighter. i really do hope that linux and osx grab a big chunk of the marketshare, each with 20% and force MS to build efficient software. competition = w4us.

 

Sorry, RAM isn't cheap? 9 months ago when I bought my laptop I purchased a 1GB SO-DIMM for £90. Now look at the sort of money you are paying for RAM. RAM is an awful lot cheaper than it used to be, theres no way around that seeing as I could buy a 2GB module for £30 today. Memory usage should not, and cannot, be used as a way to attack Vista - not with prices like that on the market.

 

Some are valid disappointments, but Office 2007? Ribbon is not-intuitive and cluttered? Did those guys even try to use it? Office 2007 is a major improvement over office 2003, and it is by far the best office software I have used.

 

For some reason, these top disappointment lists love hating on Vista, putting it on top of their picks. Probably not so much as it is, per se, the biggest 2007 disappointment, IMO, but rather to serve as a wake up call to MS to get their butts working on improving Vista.

Although I think a lot of people do agree that Vista is in fact the biggest disappointment of the year, mostly because people had high expectations.

 

Actually I disagree, the new system is good, but every office user got used to the old structure. Where is the improvement in just re-locating the old functions and make it difficult (a little, not too much I must say) to locate these functions?

 

While i don't like vista i don't agree with the article on Office 2007 because it is more intuitive of his predecessors and has some new features that make the difference in word-processors

 

At first I was lost with office 2007 but god I like it right now.

@Sub-D: Vista was also meant to use the more memory it can so yeah it does get annoying people using ram/page file usage as an argument

 

Yea I totally disagree with office 2007 being on that list, its actually much easier to use when you know where to find everything as you don't have to go through five sub-menus anymore just to find margins etc...

 

Ditto on that. The ribbon thing really isn't that hard to figure out. Turns out after a little time with the software, I can do things a lot faster.

As for Vista, I don't think it should be number 1. It isn't perfect, but it isn't as bad as everyone seems to claim IMHO. It did take me a loooooong time to get used to it though, that I will not lie about.