LEE GRANT
Prepare your email clients for action as Lee defends Windows Vista, before explaining how he turned a Windows 10 PC that wouldn’t into one that would
Prepare your email clients for action as Lee defends Windows Vista, before explaining how he turned a Windows 10 PC that wouldn’t into one that would.
Windows 11 has crashed into view and it’s a critical moment in the history of computing. Will it be inducted into the “Windows Hall of Fame” to join 3.1, XP and 7 or exposed in the tabloid “Hall of Shame” with ME, 8 and RT?
As a retailer, a new OS can be a delight. It drives sales as the public use the release as a justification to thrash the plastic and treat themselves to something shiny with a warranty.
As a system builder, a new OS can drive me insane. When customers take delivery of a machine loaded with the latest OS, there’s an unspoken expectation that it should be faster than their old PC. If I delve back into the archives of our business, this hasn’t always been easy to pull off. You’re one of the sharper-eyed readers and spotted the omission from our Hall of Shame, so brace yourself as I’m about to spout a heretical viewpoint: Vista wasn’t a bad operating system.
Take a moment to gather yourself before continuing. I remember the day that I built a Vista pre-release test rig to see how responsive and resource-hungry the forthcoming OS was. My first thought was that there was something wrong with the machine, so I swapped components, tweaked a few settings but the performance remained poor. XP on the same unit was, for pre-SSD times, blisteringly quick, so Alison and I made ourselves unpopular with customers. We put our prices up.
Vista introduced Windows
Desktop Gadgets or, as Windows 11 is calling them, Widgets. Microsoft is (rightly) making noises about how Windows 11 can play Xbox content, but Windows Vista was the first OS to allow Movie Maker playback on the console. Windows 11 has stunning glass effect translucency to graphical elements, first seen in Vista as part of AERO (Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open). I won’t go on, but it’s a reminder that Vista was very progressive, but its awful reputation is down to the clumsy way that it was launched, marketed and delivered to the end user.
Many manufacturers were simply tearing off the XP stickers from existing stock and slapping on a Vista badge hoping that no one would notice. Users did – normally within a few hours of opening the box. We’d spotted that Vista needed much more power to deliver performance parity to XP, so our builds had more RAM, higher speed CPUs and better GPUS. This is why our prices went up.
When the public outcry became too loud, the Microsoft and manufacturers solution was Vista Basic (strapline: “Like XP, but worse!”), which was bundled onto lower-powered machines and had the AERO turned off. Bizarrely, Microsoft also removed DVD Maker, but presumably this was to shame people who were too poor for a “real” Vista machine into not being able to make DVDs of the holidays that they clearly couldn’t afford. The low-power and low-cost Vista Basic experience was horrible, and it created a two-tier system of those that could manage to buy laptops to make the OS run properly and those that couldn’t. This is certainly in the top three reasons why the public clung to XP for so long.
Why this trip into ancient computing history? Because
Windows 11 is triggering my traumas of selling Vista to the public. The rhetoric of Windows 11 is exemplified by Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, writing “Windows 11 is designed to bring you closer to what you love” in his treacly blog about the new OS ( pcpro.link/325panos).
Nearly 20 years in PC retail has taught me that what people love is a machine that works and doesn’t take a fortnight to start up.
Microsoft needs to use its brilliance to make Windows 11 super-smart. I want the company to recognise that not everyone can afford a £1,500 laptop and that the default 11 experience on a £300 unit shouldn’t be “the same, but slower”. All of Windows 11’s features should be offered, but the software should not install ones that will kill a lowerpowered PC. Perhaps the choice should go back to the user with a helpful message: “We can re-enable this feature, but your hardware really isn’t up to it.”
Vista tried to bring everything to everyone, but it was a disaster and Windows 10 is the same. My 10 machines are crammed with Xbox integrations, gulping resources whilst waiting for me to press something. Not once has an annoying paperclip popped up with, “It looks like you don’t own an Xbox, shall we unload all this junk and give you back some resources?” Injecting performance back into 11 is vital because there is an elephant in Microsoft’s room and it’s enjoying an Apple.
During the Windows 11 launch, no direct mention was made of ARM, with references hidden behind Qualcomm branding. Apple’s ownbrand, ARM-based “M” hardware has phenomenal performance, which Apple has shoehorned into a sub-£800 iPad – and it will eventually drip down to the sub-£350 version. If you’re an everyday user needing a new machine for £350, would you buy a turbo-charged iPad or a Windows PC that will only get faster if you drop it from a great height?
Maybe Microsoft’s continued reliance on AMD and Intel will turn out to be correct, but at a time when I’m gearing up to sell a
“I want Microsoft to recognise that not everyone can afford a £1,500 laptop”