Why stick with Vista when Ubuntu etc is free?

I don't know if this question belongs here, but I'm curious.

I'm not a computer expert. All I do on the computer is surf the web, watch a few videos, use youtube, play WoW, do some non-snazzy word processing. I'm not into bells and whistles, and I'd guess that this is fairly typical of home pc users.

What I do not understand is why anyone in his right mind would pay through the nose for Vista, a software that is riddled with viruses, hogs memory and still does not work properly, instead of using Ubuntu etc, a system that is relatively secure, does work, and does so for free? I realize that Ubuntu etc is growing, but why isn't more commonly seen? At the moment, my $75 university swap-shop computer is more functional than my mom's $700+ laptop, which came with Vista installed :confused:

people don't know it exists. and windows would really have to suck for someone to spend the effort to research and install a new os which is exactly how i ended up here oh and most people don't buy the os they buy the computer that comes with the os

I think your view on Vista is somewhat wrong, for me it worked perfectly, I used it for a year before I downgraded to WinXp Pro, reason is that as long as my WinXP runs perfectly and (at my old computer) is faster than Vista, I have no use for Vista.

Also, what OS you need/want to use is all based on what you actually need to do at your computer. For me as I said before I use WinXP on my main computer, for gaming and random stuff and for my laptop I use Kubuntu. My laptop is old and slow, whilst Kubuntu is neat and fast - and provides me with everything I need for surfing, word processing and so forth.

I don't like to take sides, as long as the OS give me what I need I don't care which by todays standards are considered "greatest" - if it work, why fix it? If it doesn't work, why use it?

Sports, why isn't it better advertised? As far as effort--these forums are super-helpful, and if I can install it, and I am, to put it very mildly, a computer idiot, then a five-month-old baby can.

Sprut, I think that here we're running into the issue of my computer idiocy. When my mom's laptop arrived with Vista, it did not have enough memory installed to run Vista. So I had to install more memory into her computer, which soured me to start off with. We then discovered that it did not quite work as well as it should--slow, lots of viruses etc. We didn't think about it, because my mom's eighty, and she doesn't really use the computer much. Then my ancient machine running xp got the blue screen of death, and I switched to my mom's laptop with Vista, and, for one month, experienced nothing but slow service, lots of bizarre bugs, lots and lots of misery. So I got my $75, stripped down computer. At that point, I was so disgusted with both XP and my mom's Vista, that I went with Ubuntu.

But you're right...if you know what you're doing (I don't) then I'm sure that you can get Vista to work. What I'm surprised about is why more people are not disgusted enough to make the switch. Sadly, I think that many people share my computer stupidity. My dearest friends have a Dell, with Vista. They're having the same trouble, but they simply go on using the thing which moves slightly slower than treacle.

Anyhow, I shouldn't have taken sides, especially as I'm in no position to do so, being a complete computer idiot. Sorry!

As I said, if Vista doesn't work for you and Ubuntu does, problem solved. I didn't do anything to Vista to make things work, so I really cant answer why things didn't work for you.

Why not more people make a switch I guess is as simple as because people know what Windows is and don't have a clue what linux is.

jalehtor said: I don't know if this question belongs here, but I'm curious.

I'm not a computer expert. All I do on the computer is surf the web, watch a few videos, use youtube, play WoW, do some non-snazzy word processing. I'm not into bells and whistles, and I'd guess that this is fairly typical of home pc users.

What I do not understand is why anyone in his right mind would pay through the nose for Vista, a software that is riddled with viruses, hogs memory and still does not work properly, instead of using Ubuntu etc, a system that is relatively secure, does work, and does so for free? I realize that Ubuntu etc is growing, but why isn't more commonly seen? At the moment, my $75 university swap-shop computer is more functional than my mom's $700+ laptop, which came with Vista installed :confused:

If that lap-top of your mom's had Linux pre-installed on it, it probably would have cost $400-$500 instead of $700+. As for Linux being more commonly seen, It never had the billions of dollars backing it up, or a monopoly stranglehold on PC manufacturers like Microsoft has.

But I do see the grip is slowly becoming more free.

You say you do not understand why people would pay for Vista, and I also see you mentioned WoW. Now why would anybody pay for WoW, if there is over 5,000 FREE RPG games out there to play? That is just from SourceForge alone, you can Google other places.

It is a matter of choice, people choose to pay for Vista just as people choose to pay for WoW, even if free is available to them, it is called a addiction...

MS goofed they should have put the effort in to a clean 64 bit OS. instead we got a resource hog

my wife's 32 bit laptop came with vista [slovista] she likes Ubuntu better and it does not interrupt her for its daily burping [security and AV down loads]

Cope57 said: If that lap-top of your mom's had Linux pre-installed on it, it probably would have cost $400-$500 instead of $700+.

As for Linux being more commonly seen, It never had the billions of dollars backing it up, or a monopoly stranglehold on PC manufacturers like Microsoft has.

But I do see the grip is slowly becoming more free.

You say you do not understand why people would pay for Vista, and I also see you mentioned WoW. Now why would anybody pay for WoW, if there is over 5,000 FREE RPG games out there to play? That is just from SourceForge alone, you can Google other places.

It is a matter of choice, people choose to pay for Vista just as people choose to pay for WoW, even if free is available to them, it is called a addiction...

Excellent question: we pay for WoW because my kids are addicted to it, and I've got the bug as well :( The difference here is that after you install WoW, it works--at least it does for most people. If too many people were having the problems many people are having with Vista, if characters unexpectedly ceased to exist, if the game kept crashing unexpectedly and had to be restarted, if people kept getting error messages etc, then people would, I'd guess, find another game to play.

On the other hand, for all I know, people are having all these problems. Happily or unhappily, we're not, and the game works beautifully on Ubuntu. I do wish we could all get over WoW, and switch to a less expensive form of addiction...$40 each for WoW, BC and LK, PLUS $15/month to play the thing...unbelievable! I just did the math: we've been playing for one year, and so far, this single game has cost my family $270. Jesus...I could have left my kids with my mom, and gone on a Baja vacation for two weeks with that money. I wish you hadn't mentioned this.

Sheeple.

• they don't know that other options exist
• in most cases, Vista supports their laptops hardware better than Ubuntu (Linux)
• for many, me included, Vista works just fine

Most people don't even know what an Operating System is.

Isn't this just a variation on the "What can Windows do that linux can't thread?"

As for myself, like another poster...Vista works quite well even on a Toshiba A205 Celeron 540M 1GB RAM.

I did find that the vendor (Toshiba) had cluttered the install with tons of "added value" trash that was loading on startup.

Once this was corrected, Vista runs wonderful...and quite fast.