Mike Benner: Vista, Not All It WAS Cracked Up To Be

Vista, Not All It WAS Cracked Up To Be

Dec 27 by Michael Benner

So, PC World has been a little down on MS lately and I couldn't agree more. First, they came out and pointed out the fact that Vista ran fastest on a Mac Laptop and now they have come out and put Vista as the biggest disappointment of the year. I have to wonder what is going on in Redmond. I have had

my fair share of problems with MS lately.

I bought Vista a few months back for the Media Center aspect to use with my Xbox 360s and for that purpose it has been great, but for anything else it has been completely abandoned. I made the Mac switch six months ago, my wife followed 2 months later, my in-laws made the switch a month ago and in May my daughter will make the switch. Until then I have actually installed XP on other machines for her and the few things (MS SQL) that I need Windows for. Vista makes my machine to slow, the security pop ups are annoying and don't get me started on IE7.

But as a media center the upgrade was worth it. We run the whole house from that media center and use 360s for "cable/dvr" boxes in the various rooms. This was awesome until the hardware started failing.

Some back story, I swore never to buy another Xbox when my original had multiple failures that MS would not repair and wanted to charge me the cost of a refurb model to fix.

Flash forward, they add Media Center support the 360s, I eat my words and buy a couple. But my fears have been realized. First unit. Red Ring of Death. Second unit. DVD drive failure (won't open anymore). Third times the charm a second Red Ring of Death. Yup, and to top it off remember, we use these for TV, DVD, HDDVD and gaming, so having them fail this much and having to wait for fixes (and pay for the drive failure $99) I am done. We will keep the ones that we have, but my support is over. I used to talk about how cool the whole setup is but now it is great in theory but fails on execution.

Coming back to the top of the post, I would go a step further and put MS as the biggest disappointment, not just Vista. I hope they can turn things around and make things better, but I am watching my friends and family jump ship and break neck speed and wonder how much of this they can take/ignore before it is to late.

Now to find a non MS solution to media recording and sharing throughout the house. It would need to be Mac viewable at this point, heres to hoping something is out there.