this isn’t news to me…

I was just over at Digg, and I noticed this was the most popular article:

“A computer shop’s sales pitch: We remove Vista.”

This is no surprise to me. I’ve used Vista before, and even it if worked properly, it’d still be on the bottom of my list due to the fact that essentially no computers can run it up to speed. It’s a NIGHTMARE!

The part of the article that I found the most truthful was how customers of the store have repeatedly asked to have their machines downgraded to XP. What’s interesting about that to me is that I work at Bemidji Communications, and we do this sort of thing daily. We downgrade computers that come with Vista preloaded, and we do lots of fresh XP installs. Also, we try to talk customers out of Vista when they’re buying a machine. It’s just a nightmare for us to deal with all the phone calls we get about the OS.

In the article, the store manager says that “a lot of the manufacturers forced people to go up to Vista,” and this has been creating a lot of the issue. This is also true. We at BemCom deal with people daily who order their PCs online through Dell or HP, and when the PC arrives, the customer surprised that it is running (barely) Vista. And what’s with all the variants?!? Jeepers.

I’m not a Microsoft fan, nor am I an Apple follower (I actually get more annoyed by Steve Jobs than most people in the computer industry). I’ve always been a free software kinda guy. Call me crazy, but I’d rather use something that’s a bit more difficult and has no strings attached than something that costs a lot, has crappy service, and doesn’t work.