Satire involving Vista

In my rss feed inbox thing (what are you supposed to call it?) I received a link (via kiwiblog) to Peter Griffin’s “Ten good reasons why it’s worth switching to Vista”.

Heh heh, lets get started shall we?

1. Revamped Search

We’ve done a bad job of search up until now (the dog? the weird indexing thing in 98?) so we think we’ve fixed it now. It’s better. It’s no WinFS because we scrapped that, but its a good fix.

2. Better Security

The top two reasons start with a verb? These aren’t new features, they are the proper implementation of the original feature.

3. Dynamic Thumbnails

To quote Peter Griffin:

A nice little feature that displays a thumbnail of the application you are running or the webpage you are visiting when you run your cursor over the task bar.

The key words here are “little feature”.

4. Media Center

Reason to get Vista: Media Center. (XP Media Edition?)

5. Networking

Wha? I thought XP had networking?
It’s been made ‘nicer’.

6. Great Looks And Aero 3D

We made it look nice. Sweeeeet.

7. Built For Gamers

Direct X 10 and you can make your games Xbox Live probably by paying Microsoft.

8. Readyboost

You can plug in a USB flash drive and have your commonly used programs run off it for a speed boost. Interesting.

9. Gadgets

This has been done before but it’s a useful feature. Yahoo Widgets

10. Parental Controls

Yaaaaarrrr. Pretty cool but nothing to write home about.

Out of the 10 reasons to get vista:

3 are fixes
5 are small features
none are good reasons to get Vista.

It’s worth noting at this point that some people like to put fish into the recepie at this stage. Sometimes canned salmon, sometimes tuna. Don’t do it.

Hopefully everyone knows this.

I, however, plan to get Vista as soon as Halo 2 comes out. :(.

7 Responses to “Satire involving Vista”


  1. 1 Razor

    Halo 2? You mean 3 right?

    Just to add to your list, the reason dx10 is vista only (aside from sales to people like you) is because they finally changed the driver model or some such to get rid of some the overhead involved in sending small batches to the graphics card. Overhead which OpenGL never had.

  2. 2 Tom

    This post is mostly satire. As I understand a lot of the changes from XP to Vista are under the hood and great for developers.

    Halo 2 has yet to be released off the xbox platform (as I understand… am I living under a rock?). I’ve heard that when released it’s going to be vista only to increase sales.

    I like to think I’m objective about the whole XP vs OS X and general slagging on Windows. Sure I like OS X more and think it’s a better OS, but I still know about Windows and agree that there are great parts of it and for some people it’s paradigm is great and very useable. I hope I’m not a blind zealot.

    So yeah… tongue in cheek.

  3. 3 Razor

    Ah, right. Halo 2 seems long past though. Been there, done that, didn’t buy any t-shirts. Halo is the one shooter I prefer to play on a console. I was disappointed that they took out rally though. That’s always so much fun, fighting to be the first to get your warthog up the ramp and get the checkpoint.

    I don’t honestly care about vista, I can’t afford it so it’s a moot point. I admit though, I may be slightly jealous of all the people strutting around geforce 8800’s and experimenting with dx10.

  4. 4 Craig

    May I ask, why vista came out with so many versions? Are the cheaper ones the same as the more expensive just with some of the features taken out? Is there more to it? To me it seams a waste of time.

  5. 5 Tom

    Probably no more than to ‘fit’ the market better. Get the most money.

    Copypasta:

    Windows Starter 2007 - This edition does not include the Aero graphical user interface, hence it’s not Vista-branded. And there’s no 64-bit edition, no networking, no Fast User Switching, no DVD Authoring, no gaming common controller support, and no image editing with enhanced touchup, and only three applications/windows are allowed to run simultaneously. Good only for really basic users with low budgets.

    Windows Vista Home Basic - This is the true baseline version of Windows Vista; think Windows XP Home Edition. You can expect to find features such as Windows Firewall, Windows Search, Photo Library and etc. And every other edition below will be based on this edition. Good for general consumers or even the kids.

    Windows Vista Home Basic N - Same as the Home Basic Edition, but minus the Windows Media Player. This edition is for the Europeans as they have antitrust rulings against Microsoft which does not allow the player to be bundled.

    Windows Vista Home Premium - This edition includes features such as Media Center Extender support, Cable Card support, DVD authoring and Tablet PC functionality. This edition is best suited for notebooks and networked home desktops, but it’s probably insufficient for the geeks.

    Windows Vista Business - Analogous to the Windows XP Professional, this will probably be the most widely used edition in corporate environments. This edition allows joining of domains, non-Microsoft networking (Netware, etc), Remote Desktop and Microsoft Windows Web Server. Most geeks and IT professionals will want to go for this edition.

    Windows Vista Business N - Just like Home Basic N Edition, this one is meant for the Europeans and comes with no media player.

    Windows Vista Enterprise - This edition will come with several new features such as Virtual PC, multi-language user interface (MUI) and Secure Startup (BitLocker Drive Encryption).

    Windows Vista Ultimate - This one is going to be the most expensive, most feature-packed, and perhaps the most pirated edition of Vista. It’ll include new and unique features such as Game Performance Tweaker, Podcast creation utility, online “Club” services and privileged product support. This edition will be perfect for Windows fanboys.

  6. 6 Craig

    I see. So is it possible to buy the cheapest most basic version, then slowly upgrade to the better features through buying them separately/ downloading? Or is it that if you buy ‘crap’ you’re stuck with ‘crap’ until you buy one of the better versions?

    Another question is vista still running of dos like xp or have they redone the whole thing? Meaning did they start from scratch or simply add things?

  7. 7 Tom

    XP is not running on DOS. Neither was Windows 2000.

    Vista is a significant addition on top of XP, but it is still built from it.

    I don’t know about upgrade options, I am not considering purchasing it soon.

Leave a Reply

You must login to post a comment.