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Acer takes a swing at Windows Vista
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 24th July 2007
Gianfranco Lanci blames Acer's recent slow sales on Vista.
“The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista,” he said to the online edition of the Financial Times Deutschland on Monday. Lanci also points out stability issues as well as a lack of people buying new PCs specifically for Vista.
Reporting a $58 million profit after tax for the first fiscal quarter of 2007, Acer has also managed to climb into the number three spot for PC shipments in the same time frame. A 55 percent surge in sales also helped put Acer in the fastest growing spot among the top five PC manufacturer.
With a worldwide growth in personal computer sales of almost 12 percent since the release of Vista and Microsoft reporting nearly 40 million copies sold by the end of May, this statement from Lanci seems to come from nowhere.
Are you disappointed with Vista, or do you think the industry has just found its next scapegoat? Or have you not yet experienced the latest offerings from Microsoft? Let us know in the forums.
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Good, maybe common sense is finally becoming more...common. You'd have to be completely stupid to buy a new PC just to get the new OS.
Actually, it's on my gaming rig :) I have 4GB of RAM, so I'm not too fussed that it takes up 1. ;)
They have every reason to spend less money to get a low-end system that does the job. Computer companies need to be able to offer low-end systems for people like my parents. They also need to be able to sell low- to middle-ground systems to buisnesses. A large corporation has no need for SLI graphics and quad-core processing with 4GB of RAM.
If Vista will run, and run reliably on low-end hardware, then fantastic. If not, then the Acer guy may have a point.
From what I've gathered among the multitude of stories out there, some folks are upset that Vista doesn't run very well on a basic, run-of-the-mill system unless you turn off all the bells and whistles, and strip down much of what makes Vista Vista. For all that, you might as well run XP.
On the other hand, I've also seen an equal number of reports that state quite the opposite: that the worst-case scenario is just that, the worst-case scenario. Some people on these forums have no problem running Vista.
-monkey
"Awesome! Nothing's our fault for a few months!"
That said, I agree with the high-end rig comments. Vista has a lot of things people really don't need - hell, I mostly use a 2k machine (I'm not a big gamer, I'm just here for the modding porn!) and I confess I don't yearn for an upgrade. Buying Vista would mean spending a LOT of money for very little real benefit.
That surely didn't happen. Not everybody can afford monster PCs and even though Vista supposedly runs on low-end gear with the infamous Aero turned off that is kind of a disappointment for most people given the fact that Microsoft has touted this as one of the great experiences of Vista. Security and a better kernel comes second when it comes to the "WOW" factor.
Acer is not alone when it comes to this. NVIDIA has too been concerned with Vista and have stated several times that Microsoft was not very helpful during the initial support of driver development pushing out several new BETA versions making driver developers start all over again slowing it down.
There is a name for people like that...
The majority.
Probably 70% of people will never run anything requiring more grunt than Office. They don't need 4 GB of memory and a modern video card, they just need a simple, basic machine that works (and preferably one they can't break easily). I think this is a tremendous opportunity for the open source community to step forward and hoover up a whole bunch of new users.
And for the record, Vista was the last straw for me. I'm primarily linux now and plan to stay that way! ;)
EDIT: Woot! 2800!
- Having said that, I agree with you: It's ridiculous for the industry to expect a new OS to increase sales - people buy computers for games / office / internet / CAD / ... - not for the OS (which simply hosts that other software).
So why aren't they using Windows 95 on a good old 300Mhz CPU? I mean IE and Netscape runs fine on it?!
Sure, but then why buy Vista basic if it's basically XP? Really, what is the point?
Somebody's going to be fired for that one.
You can easily build a cheap PC that can run Vista including Aero with ease. If £198 inc. VAT (excluding monitor, mouse and keyboard) isn't cheap enough without cutting too many corners, I don't know what else is considered cheap:
--- Asus barebone system | Core 2 Duo E2140 | Geil 1GB RAM | Maxtor 250GB hard drive | NEC 18x DVD+/-RW ---
There's your Vista experience, you can do pretty much anything but gaming on the integrated Intel graphics card. Add a few quid more and you could change some of those components, such as RAM, to some better branded ones. Of course, you still need to add £64 for an OEM of Vista Home Premium. Add a monitor, keyboard and mouse and I'd say it'll be about £370 (19" LCD). For DX10 experience, add £50 for a 8500GT.
Go outside and try to get a similar spec system and you'll need to look pretty hard for specs that don't come close at that price. And going back to Acer, simply look at their T180 series :D
LEELA: Then you'll be fired...
FRY: Fine!
LEELA: ... Out of a cannon, into the sun.
I've been waiting to use that quote :D
I had an acer laptop in the shop today to fix a problem on. only a few years old, windows XP pro and it was installed as an FAT32 file system. i mean wtf? its been years since NTFS was in use. why would they use FAT32. It just shows Acer have no idea.
As usual acer are trying to blame their lower than expected sales on vista.
I know how you feel, 4GB bragging rights ftw!
As for Vista being the cause of poor sales, possibly people aren't ready for the change, the problem here (in my view) is that XP was around for too long and thus people have now got this "if it aint broke don't fix it" mentality, even though XP is 'broke', the games work for it.
Now, my other theory is regarding 64-bit, once game developers design for this, the rest of the software will follow :)
from some of the stories i've been hearing from you guys, acer certainly has no right to complain about low sales, they don't seem to deserve any at all
whats broke with XP {SP2 only} to TBO probly there best OS thay made between performace stable XP works fine even before service back one adn 2 came out it served me well
with vista thay did not just add DX10 thay broke program compatbity uses large amount of ram, Brakes networks, networking code is net un-stable in vista, mmmm games do not work well on it but thats more driver related , the New driver model {WDDM?}, it has not more tracking built in to ssend of to M$
Vista requires far more high spec pc and add admin problems in the mix (just wasted an day trying to get 2 Vista computers working with an bunch of XP computers and an printer) and you wunder why most business do not want to use it yet
i even tould them do not buy vista as the stuff you use will most likey not work {dell says other wise saying none of your software will work soon on XP not lieky}
malware on vista = an most likey Format and reload (unless your me and is very good at removeing it)
Vista Basic has its place at the low-end of the pre-built PC/notebook market. If people are spending so little on a PC, they evidently don't care about all the bells and whistles so Vista Basic is pretty suitable for that. That said, spend a bit more and you can easily get a PC capable of running Home Premium - £350 gets you a Dell C521 with an Athlon64X2 4000+, 1GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, Vista Home Premium and a 20" widescreen display. Absolute bargain, and I know it runs Vista quite smoothly because my Mum recently got herself one.
Because that wouldn't earn MS any money - who is really going to pay money for a slightly-upgraded version of XP? I sure as hell wouldn't, and yet I bought Vista. Granted, some will say Vista is just XP with a new skin and some annoying features, but I'm quite liking it.
Your scenario would also put us very close to the way Apple works with OSX, and I'm personally against that. I'm quite happy to pay money for an 'entirely' new OS, but not a slightly upgraded one that continues to look the same.
To get the most of Vista you have to have a good PC. Now, doesn't that sound familiar to win98 machines being upgraded to XP?
Compatibility between XP and win98/ME/2000 wasn't all that great from memory either was it?
hence the reason I don't use it...
p.s: not recommended for security purposes, but if you can't live with it, go ahead and disable it.
Agreed. I'm not so sure what all the fuss is about. Vista was not a bad release, imho. Tim and I both use it for our gaming systems, and neither of us have had any problem with it that's not driver related. We even run our test benches on it and hell, I recently converted my HTPC to it.
As Mother-Gooser points out, it's not SUPPOSED to be for the old systems. Though there is a version that they released which works just fine on them...which, frankly, I think people need to pay a little more attention to. When's the last time a commercial company released different program levels (each requiring a lot of code differences) for older vs. newer hardware? Not since...well, ever that I can recall. The only group to do that so far is open-source with Linux, and I do think MS should be given some credit for following that example.
The truth is that a lot of the bloat of vista is bells and whistles. Who cares? That's what I want if I'm getting something new. Do you go to a car dealer to trade in your 2006 stripped down, no AC, no power anything hatchback to buy a 2007 stripped down, no AC hatchback? No. If you're buying something like that, it's because you don't care about those things and therefore having the latest and greatest stripped down hatchback isn't exactly going to make or break you. Your 2006 model will do just fine.
We have quad cores, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage at our disposal nowadays. Heaven forbid someone comes along and designs something that actually USES any of it. Oh no! Now it's a resource hog! Hey, not on my machine it's not, best I can see is it uses about 20-25% of resources at max. Figure that in 3 years time the code will get even more efficient and processor speed will have increased another fold and we'll all have 4-8GB of RAM on terabyte HDDs because it's the new high-end, and what...they should have cut it back so it looked like utter crap?
If you're that fussed about its resources, then by all means, switch to Linux. I personally don't get as much of a thrill from looking at a stripped down interface and legacy design methods just so my RAM sits at 10% used instead of 20%. :p
Sorry for the rant, but yeesh.
Just like XP64bit - Vista 64bit will go by the wayside
The next release of windows - i would seriously expect will be 64bit only
But IMO - M$ should have made vista 64bit only, for the 10 (maybe 20) % of people that wouldn't immediately be able to upgrade, they only have to support 1 OS, there is only 1 set of drivers, its much more future proofed, etc etc
XP really should have been the last 32bit OS - you can already see they were struggling to get 64bit adoption up, and now we are going to be stuck with 32bit for another 5 years,
As for the bells and whistles, if you turn them off - you have XP, but if you leave them on, it may look a bit cooler, but it doesn't really help you do anything, their just bragging rights tbh
Heck you have been able to do it on Linux for years, but people don't, 1 of the big reasons, theres really no need to
the problem with vista, going back to the car analogy, is that your car has AC, it has fancy nobs an buttons, vista has Climate control and the nobs and buttons blink and twinkle
But for these "upgrades" you pay what you paid for your car, plus 50%, and your old car is worthless now
And as with cars, some people will upgrade, and they will waste their money, but a lot of people will stay back, and stick with their old car until they have to change
And don't get me started on MCE, they forced us to buy 2004, then 2005, now they want us to change to vista (and an expensive version at that) - and all this because the previous versions are seriously flawed, but M$ will only keep its latest greatest version up to date, and just say f*** off to the people using the older versions
As for the car analogy, I think you're WAY oversimplifying it. There's a HUGE amount different between XP and Vista, and that mentality is exactly why we have the problems we do today. "It's just a shinier XP" - not at all. That's the status many hardware companies took when MS said "Please look over the new driver model - a lot has changed!"
The entire way that the OS interacts with your computer has been changed. It's like saying a BMW 7-series is the same as a Ford Fiesta with leather seats and wood trim. About the only thing the same is that they both serve similar purposes and you use the same controls.
http://imageshack.us
Sorry, I just have a pet peeve about people saying "M$" instead of "MS" or "Microsoft."
Your right, more people probably buy Fiesta's, and they save kittens and are greener to the environment.
I tried Vista Ultimate for a week, I really couldnt decide what I thought of it, it sat somewhere in the middle of- whats the point in this? and- this is rather annoying
Back on XP Pro now though
Ive just had a thought actually, can you make Vista look and behave like XP and still have the benefits ie. 4GB ram? As you can make XP look like vista?
As a systems engineer support several businesses, I can see the reasons for vista. I can also see the big changes, graphics, drivers, security, etc. From a technical point of view, the operating system is extremely good. But it could have been much much better.
e.g. Graphically, has anyone used an OS-X system lately?
e.g. Speed, it shouldn't be slower than XP, but it is - I expect this to improve.
e.g. Drivers, need a lot more work...
And there was this sudden push for everyone to ship Vista machines when no-one was ready. Now most manufacturers are offering downgrade rights for the Vista machines.
Business is certainly not ready for Vista. There is no reason. All the big apps tend to be XP only or limited Vista support. Security is largely fine in XP SP2. It's on all the machines currently and all the users are familiar with it.
Pros:
Security
Management
Experience
Cons:
Retraining
Cost
Speed
Compatibility
Users do tend to self learn well, but if only a handful of machines are changed then supporting them all becomes time consuming handling the easy questions they have to ask because Microsoft have changed silly little things.
Vista will penetrate the market, but not for another 3 - 5 years. Once everything works well and the OS has been fully explored.
For now, it's just my work machine and one other laptop running Vista.
Ok, I hardly ever say that (unless they do something really stupid - which still happens :( ) nor do I call thier OS WeenieDOS (anymore).
And from what ive seen so far, 64bit support in vista is just as pitiful as XP
once again going back to the car analogy, vista is the next model in the series. the seats and interior are nicer, the sound system is slightly better, there's more footroom and luggage space, there's more and better safety features and they've completely reworked the engine and the rest of the mechanics. some will run out and trade in for the new model straight away, while others will probably wait until the next in the series is about to come out meaning they can get the current model for much cheaper, along with some of the slight revisions made along the way (security updates and service packs)
And the car interfaces with your mobile phone and dials up the police every minuite to report the speed you have been doing, and where you are
It's important in any conversation to be dealing with the facts, lest you become quickly a fanboy or anti-fanboy. I'm not feeling like you're even posing logical or factual argument anymore - just running with the "herd" of bloggers who know very little about what's actually inside their computer but opine on it anyway. I understand that reading all of these opinions on it may have distorted the view and certainly given you enough outside ideas to consider it 'researched,' but I think you should consider the source.
Anyone familiar with OS technologies or who has programmed for Vista at a driver or kernel level or who has released hardware for Vista has acknowledged that the entire way it functions is changed. And believe me, if it's one thing that working for Bit has given me, it is a lot of people in this industry that I have the privilege to talk to that actually work with this stuff.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3044
hell even you have said about the vista phone home stuff
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07/03/built-in_vista_probing_tools_exposed/1
and as for the re-writing driver thing, its just another thing that makes me think, if you have to redo everything for vista anyway, why not just it for 64bit - 2 versions just causes far more problems
as for the 2-4gb ram (although 3.2gb is the max in 32bit ?) - if you launch quake 4 on max settings, it will happily eat about 1.8gb ram for breakfast (possibly more)
I can understand in Linux where the ram is used for caches and stuff, but in windows, its actually being used, its not just a temporary store
And windows still doesn't utilise all the ram available for caches and stuff, which Linux has been able to do for ages
Yes Vista is young and no it does not show the optimisations of a now almost 6 year old Windows XP. And yes, it does indeed take up more memory. With nothing else going on and using a 7-series GPU, it takes a whopping ~100MB more than XP did in the same position. Considering that when XP launched, most computers had 128MB of RAM and when Vista launched most computers had 512MB-1GB, I'd say doubling isn't really that unrealistic.
And as you can see by the anandtech article, at least some of that is due to drivers using Vista's memory addressing in an odd way. Which also brings me back to how companies were sleeping while Vista was made, then came up with some half cracked "Oh, we just got this!" excuse. If you'll remember, I wrote a column about that in regard to NVidia specifically - which ruffled a lot of feathers. As the drivers have improved (slowly) overall memory usage has gone down...so with this in mind, where do you think the finger should point?
What I'm not seeing is where all this vitriol that it is a resource hog and just does things prettier than XP is coming from. Which was my whole point against your argument - yes, it takes up more but the average computer has way more to give. And no, it is absolutely not just a nicely skinned XP. The worst we can say about it right now is that it phones home on occasion, and even that is more sensational than actually dangerous.
even the conclusion says
Also MS now have the limited number of activations, which is complete tosh - if i payed for the rights to a copy of vista, it should be usable as long as i have the right to a copy, limiting users to 10 computers is bogus
On top of that if you pay for an upgrade from XP, you cant install freshly, and will end up with all the junk that happens with upgrading(well without jumping through loads of hoops, which Microsoft will probably fix in the next Service pack anyway)
Yes there are nice things MS have done in vista, i will admit that, but all the crap they are now putting users through, its just not right
Example: If you have Home Basic and want to upgrade to Ultimate, you can.
You can turn that off if you want.
You've already mentioned the Search bar - for me, that makes up a pretty large component of Vista: usability. The interface and the way it's used is much more refined and works far better in Vista than it does in XP.
I moved to Vista purely for the sake of it - Vista didn't offer anything I immediately needed, I just wanted to do it. Aside from an audio problem I'm having (that isn't even Vista's fault directly), I'm very happy with it. It looks fantastic, it works very well, it's stable, and it's very quick (potentially quicker than XP in some aspects).
I didn't cling to Windows 98/Me when XP came out, and I'm not clinging to XP now that Vista is out either. I'm quite happy to move on (although I'll have still XP for sometime because I won't be upgrading my notebook).
the eye candy sure is useless, except for making the os require a high end pc..., but other than that, vista aint too bad.
As I said, until I have to get Vista, I'll be dual booting with XP and Linux (Fedora 7 at the mo). As an aside, does anyone know if Office 2000 works on Vista 64?
You see, that's the other problem; with having 4GB RAM (2x2GB OCZ sticks, hopefully) and hoping in the future to upgrade this to 8GB, I need a 64-bit OS. I have heard that 64-bit application support in Vista, especially games, sucks at the mo. So, until I can guarantee that my games (CoD:UO, CoD2 and Civ4) all work under Vista 64, I won't be moving that way at all. Under Linux, I won't have a problem. I foresee loads of problems in the future under Vista.
Sorry if I rambled, too many late nights lately (and not because of gaming either!)
Andy
Actually, vista is 64-bit code. It IS redesigned from the ground up...hence needing two full versions. It's not quite the same as XP 64's idea. 32 bit code does run just fine on it, but it's not native. Someone with more programming knowledge would have to step in here as to what's done under the hood, as I will say that above knowing it IS proper 64 bit code, I'd be speaking above my knowledge on the subject (of 32 bit vs. 64 bit interoperability).
Drivers on the other hand, i don't think its just a case of a 64bit compiler (due to the interaction with the kernel and such)
Well for one the kernel is better protected in x64 edition (patchguard + requiring signed drivers).
And of course the x64 architecture is cleaned up from x86, so I assume that Vista takes advantage of extra registers and such.
"Vista is unstable (because of bad drivers)"
"Vista have bad compatibility (again, drivers)"
"Vista is too expensive"
"Vista have lots of functions i'll never use, so why upgrade?"
Turn back your clock about 5 years and you'll see that we had the exact same questions then, only "Vista" was replaced with "XP".
Why are people so afraid of new things? the same happened here on bit a few weeks ago aswell. Everyone was afraid of the new forum structure, and "noone" liked it. How is this situation now? Sure, both the forums and vista needs some fine tuning, but it will get there pretty soon.
As for the comment from acer, they just complain that their bad hardware can't keep up with time. With XP they could put in bad hardware that XP never used anyway, but looked good on the advertising. Now, however, the OS actually NEED this hardware.
the strange thing is that it doesn't seem like ano other big companies have this problems. (HP actually have drivers released for vista on their older models, that was never meant to run vista. (they just became "vista capable" after a couple years on the market)
I see why they do this. Stuff like this can be software related. If you have tried to talk to an average person trying to explain a problem over the phone, and afterwards you get to see the problems yourself, you will often find that the explanation and the actual symptom/problem doesn't match AT ALL. This is because they have talked to a "computer expert" (the neighbors 12 year old son...) who "know" what the problem is, so they tell what they think is the problem, and not the symptoms.
You have no idea how many times i have heard "it just doesn't work" from a customer. Trying to get them to tell me what the symptom is, they don't know anything. (some times i wonder if the word "symptom" is even a part of the Norwegian language)
Why don't you still run MS DOS 6.22? (or Win3.11 if you want the windows functionality) It uses very little resources, you know.
Exactly!
You just did that yourself...
I have 3 computers running here. They have the exact same specs. One running XP, one running Vista, and one running Kubuntu (Linux).
The difference in performance on day to day use isn't that different. Vista is slower at startup. (Kubuntu is slower than XP, BTW)
(I could go on here, but then this just becomes yet another Windows VS. Linux thread....)
(Edit: The one running XP runs 512MB less RAM. (1,5gig VS 2gig on the other two))
It was a warez version though so it might explain why... When I will upgrade my PC, I will buy it for 30$ (computer science student). But as of now, XP is exactly what I want in an OS, especially after tweaking it.
I will have a hard time to adapt to vista :-/ ...
Is it possible to use StyleXP skins on vista? Because I would rather use my current LSD theme than Aero
I know some laptops have problems even playing DVD in XP with power saving activated.
And it certainly wasn't a lack of power since this is the laptop :
Aero was usable, but not confortable. It was like playing a 3D RTS at 10fps, it's playable...but annoying
I'm not going to buy vista for DX10 - I'm not going to be bullied by MS to pay £100+ to get a new OS when they really could have made DX10 work in XP - maybe not as well as vista, but it would have been possible
Plus for the time being there isn't a single decent DX10 game out, and there isn't anything coming out yet that will require DX10 (and is a decent game)
And the searchable start menu is nice, but not nice enough to make me change OS
I'm not anti-MS as such, i use XP - OK id rather have a choice (games = windows for the time being), windows does do a good job, its very hard supporting billions of things and a huge backwards compatibility catalogue
But MS's business practises are sickening, and i don't like the way that they force everyone to do things their way
Hell we cant even use UEFI because windows doesn't support it yet, and therefore no-one else on the planet can use it because MS dint support it people wont make motherboards for it (well outside the server market)