Hmm, Apple's latest OS is also in the list too, and yet they still put the attack ads against Vista on television. Kind of ironic if you ask me.

this years biggest victims of undeserved media bashing go to (in no particular order)

Microsoft for Vista, and Sony for PS3. Neither of which are nearly as bad as all the negative media would suggest.

My xp crashed many times, formatted my HD withut asking questions, gave all sorts of fancy BSOD's etc. Thanks to some ingenious decisions, like not enabling support for over 120GB disks by default, my XP experience was a real horror show compared to Vista.

With Vista everything has worked a lot better than XP did back in 2001.

To people stating that Barcelona should have been #1 - I disagree.

The reason Vista is #1 is because it effects 95% of computer users. There is not one other computer product that effects near as many people as Vista. Vista effects more than just users, it effects developers of hardware and software and services too - far more than AMD's Barcelona.

Everyone has heard about Vista, while there are still many that don't even know who / what AMD is.

For people who knew and cared, Barcelona was more disappointing that Vista, but for the market at large, the flop of Barcelona was no big deal. After all, how disappointed can one get about K10 when you can just get a perfectly working C2D or C2Q?

Calling Barcelona #1 is simply placing more importance on AMD than they are worth.

IMO.

And the same goes for saying R600 should be #2 - that far fewer people than even Barcelona and again Nvidia offered a perfectly acceptable alternative so no one really lost out but AMD again.

Wow I hope these guys don't call themselves PC journalists.

Yeah, okay, when checking the definition of the word "disappointment" Vista could be considered one of them, but the number one disappointment of the year? Don't get me wrong, it should be on that list, but Vista isn't that bad. IIRC WinXP recieved a similar amount of criticism back in it's 1st year and MS (eventually) ironed-out the kinks. Vista works (for most of us) and it's an *incremental* improvement over WinXP. Get over it.

What should've been #1 on that list:

AMD's Barcelona
After a thrilling win for Advanced Micro Devices with the fan-adored Athlon64 line, the Empire struck back with the Intel Core series of processors that quickly put things back out of balance. While the X2 could remain price competitive at smaller profit margins, it was readily apparent AMD would not be able to take the performance crown on the k8. Everyone was waiting to see if they could bring another hit to the table.

And they waited… and waited… and waited…

Until finally, AMD released the barcelona-based Opteron's, and a couple months later, their desktop Phenom counterparts (saying goodbye to the 'Athlon' moniker). And guess what? Even on a good day, they can't match their Intel counterparts, let alone beat them.

On top of that, Intel released their 45nm Penryn cores during this point, as a boxer might throw a left hook while biding his time.

And then to make matters worse, the snowball PR-nightmare known as the TLB erratum that taints the already troubled Phenom and Opteron reputation.

This was not a good year for AMD. You could say this was a very, very disappointing year. For AMD shareholders. For enthusiasts. For consumers.

What should've been #2 or at least on the freaking list:

ATi's r600 GPU

First, let me clear up on thing: Yes, I know (too well) that AMD owns ATi. For some reason, and TR is just as guilty of this, people have started calling ATi products AMD products. Cut that out. Volkswagon outright owns Audi, but we don't see Volkswagon S4's or TT's on the road. We see Audi S4's, and Audi TT's. In other words, ATi still retains it's brand name on their product boxes and products themselves. Stop calling them AMD products.

Okay, the r600, otherwise known as the Radeon HD 2900XT, was ATi's first dx10 compliant GPU but more importantly supposed to be the answer to nVidia's brilliant g80-based 8800 GTX. The X1K series was only so-so, but then again so was nVidia's own 7x00 series of cards. That previous gen was still only dx9, and only had a few standouts from ATi and nVidia (particularly the x1950 and 7600 GT, respectively) but all in all ho-hum. When nVidia released the 8800 line, it broke new grounds and new barriers in benchmarks. People were curious to see how ATi would best their rival, and when they heard that their next part would have a whopping 320 stream processors*, (as compared to the g80's 128) they got really curious. So they waited.

And they waited… and they waited… (meanwhile the g80 is selling) and they waited…

And then the 2900XT came out. And guess what? It stank. It couldn't even match the 8800GTX, let alone beat it. It actually had a tough time competing with the second-tier 8800GTS. It was such a performance embarrassment that it simply undercut the 8800GTS in price, not the GTX. Not to mention that depending on some games, certain effects wouldn't work properly, or even render to the screen (I'm looking at you, Lost Planet ).

Yeah sure, so much later the r6-whatever HD 3850's and 3870's came out but too late. Game over. ATi tried to forget the 2x00 series ever existed, but you can't sweep a fart under a carpet (I tried.) nVidia had enough time to release a superior g92 product that's selling so fast they can't melt the sand quick enough.

So you could say 2007 was a bad year for ATi. Which, oh yeah, means that it was a bad year for AMD. Man, what a disappointment.

*yeah, I know stream processors aren't the same as the similarly-named processors on the g80s, but it still got people excited.

**I don't own any AMD parts. Not a fanboy. I just call them as I see em.

I would have to say that Crysis takes the cake for the gaming category.

Vista does deserve to be the on the list, but it is definitely not #1 spot. There were a lot more disappointing things that happened in 2008 within PC world. IMO, Vista hovers around the mid-range of that list.

[Edit after seen the list itself]

Wow, Vista is more like #10 on that list. Leopard does not even belong in there. Internet insecurity, social networks a.k.a Web 2.0, broadband woes are a lot larger disappointments.

Office 2007 was on the list; reason: "Microsoft changes almost everything about the interface in 2007, and not for the better," what retards. I'm serious, the new ribbon feature is so much simpler and easier to use, you gotta be a retard to think its more difficult.

However, I'm glad someone said something about Leopard's faults.

Although, they said worse things about Leopard than they did about Vista, yet Vista made #1.

This list makes no sense.

dissapointing? cant imagine why? just look at all the positive things said about vista below this post! Cant find them? me neither.

WinMe was better! at least it didnt take a huge chunk of space for no reason!

Would someone either tell ChronoReverse about the "reply" button, or have him suffer the consequences by moving his threads off-topic.

#113

You should consider looking into what's causing the crashes. Do you have an Nvidia video card? An unusual peripheral? Perhaps bad memory (since Vista actually uses your memory, bad memory tends to be revealed more quickly than in XP). Or maybe even heat problems.

My Tablet PC running Vista recently achieved the 10.0 rating in the Reliability and Performance Monitor and hasn't had a program crash in weeks, much less the operating system itself. Despite having only a 5400RPM hard disk, it also manages to boot in 45 seconds from power button to desktop and I even have to type in my password (XP is actually faster for booting though).

What Vista was promised to be 4 years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IPnyrCdubg

The amazing thing is, seeing the flip3d feature in Vista, it is obvious they could have done all of those nifty UI eye candy. I suppose they figured it would be too new or too much, or just simply ran out of time getting the damn thing to work in the first place than to worry about the UI.

The link above is for those that say everyone has only been complaining about a handful of promised features that wouldn't matter anyway to the general user. The video shows new concepts of finding things in explorer, a more fully-featured sidebar, useful hover thumbnails over images, and the eye candy alone added some nice visual cues for normal day-to-day functions that might be useful for those that are learning how to use a computer.

#71:

And as an anarchist I resent your claim that there are only two parties, as if the human mind cannot be more complex than those two local herds, which imho are just two different levels of conservatism more or less ;)

But yeah I see your point heh.

It's actually a list of 15 biggest tech disappointments.

I'm still a little confused about Net Neutrality. Do we want it or not? Every time I read an article it tells me something different.

Hopefully it'll work out. I use that even in XP simply because I disliked the way folders can close on me if my mouse strayed a bit when there's another folder just under the open one.

I'd just about click the program I want when the mouse would move one pixel out and then the folder that was under the item I wanted would open and I'd start to swear.

Without a doubt my biggest tech disappointment of 2007 has been reading the rash of rather inane and sometimes idiotic editorials written by people posing as tech journalists who constantly whine about everything they don't like--as if they could have done it better themselves. I wonder how many times we're going to hear, for instance, the incessant whining and moaning about "What happened to the promised Vista file system?" It has never occurred to some of them, I guess, that when you set about to make something new and improved you always run the risk of making something new and inferior, instead.

Their attitude about this one issue would lead the reader to think that these people had personally tried versions of the Vista-file-system-that-should-have-been, found it to be unbelievably better than the old tried-and-true file system, and because of that they are mad as hell that Microsoft deliberately opted not to provide it inside Vista as was Microsoft's original intention. It hasn't occurred to them, I guess, that the reason it was left out was simply because it turned out to be inferior to the existing file system in certain fundamental ways. In other words, the notion that the new file system didn't make the cut for very good and sound reasons just hasn't occurred to them. Amazing. I mean, everybody who bought Vista knew when they bought it that it didn't include the new file system--yet they have the sheer audacity to act surprised and indignant about the whole thing. My attitude about it is "Who cares?" If the old is better, I'd surely rather have the old than the new any day of the week.

I could go on at length about the disappointing tech drivel I've read this year posing as "information," and I think a lot of other people could, too. When you really think about it, a lot of the "disappointment" these people are whining over is merely a byproduct of their own mistaken interpretations as to "what is coming" in the first place...;)

Leopard is in there, too, so Mac users can't get too snooty.

The GPU rendering isn't supposed to reduce memory usage, it offloads CPU usage. And the DWM isn't the part of Vista that chews up memory

Yes, Vista eats more memory even ignoring SuperFetch. That said, if you have more than 1GB, it uses the memory more effectively than XP ever could.

Wow, calling Vista unimpressive. Like we've never heard that before. Leave it to PC World trying to keep up with the /. crowd of "Vista is t3h d3ph1L!11!1!one!"

What will they say about Windows 7?

Rinse, lather, repeat.

For those of you who need the UAC prompt, Right Click the shortcut and click the Compatibility Tab. Then check on "Run the program as an Administrator".

I just started using Vista for a month to try and make myself like it. So far UAC has managed to piss me off to no end so I killed it.

When you install games they dont show up in the start menu part of the time. Some of them install and show up fine others are no where to be found.

I set Opera as the default browser and all traces of IE vanshed from the start menu. I had to go to program files and make my own short cut for it.

Opera 9.24 is perfectly stable in both windows XP and Ubuntu and I honestly cant remember the last time it crashed on me. Opera has crashed over and over in vista.

My 200 dollar model airplane flight simulator doesnt work at this point and I dont know if it can be made to work.

The new start menu is brain dead. Why do I have to scroll around and look for programs in the start menu ? You can use the whole dam screen cascade style like XP and have stuff be easy to find.

I would say vista has more than earned the top spot on the list. Probably next years list too.

getting punched in the fact .. does that hurt?

EDIT: i'm convinced there is a bug in this comment system.. thats the 2nd time i've had a "hanging chad" comment. .. was supposed to be a reply to some other comment.

hmm or it could be i'm just a retard. i did have a lot of high fevers over in indonesia.

excuse me guys, i searched this discussion page for "phenom" and got no results. what's going on?

Just got a blue screen in Vista. Havent seen one of them in years in XP.

The whole Zune DRM thing kills me. Hmm I am glad all my songs I put on my Iopd that I bought from Itunes over the last 3 years are DRM free?

The list is good...Vista should be #1. It works fine for me now, after I had to upgrade some software and many "performance updates" later my file copy performance is like XP....slower than OS X. It was total beta when it shipped...and its a lot better now....and by the time SP1 comes out I might even not remove it from a PC that a family member buys and wants me to tweak.

Leopard should not be on that list. While it might not have had "killer new stuff" it made a solid great OS...just that much better. Most problems came from highly modified Mac's.

I don't know what people were expecting when they bought Vista. It's evolutionary, much like Win 98 was to Win 95. It brought some new technologies, attempted to fix the security issue (much like XP fixed the stability issue). Granted, there was stuff left out (WinFS), much I'm sure everybody has survived. It does NOT deserve #1. Maybe # 9 or 10. And Microsoft didn't seem to think Vista was a disappointment, seeing as how they made some very nice profit during those quarters, thanks in part to Vista.

Personally, I'd have thought the HD battle would be more disappointing, since sales of HD disks don't even measure to sales of SD disks. And players? Oh hey! 100,000 Blu-ray players were sold. Yippee, let's party.

Why on earth would you WANT your start menu to cover the entire screen with a hundred items that aren't automatically sorted?

Especially when you can just type the first 3 letters of the program you want and get at it directly.

Plus you can customize the start menu. You want Control Panel? Add it in. You want Run? Add it in. You don't want Pictures? Take it out.

#57

Ah, I see. Still, in XP, there's no good reason to use the Classic Menu since you don't actually save any clicks. You just click All Programs instead of Programs. In fact you don't have to move the mouse as far since All Programs is nearer to the start button than Programs was.

For a while when I got XP, I also stuck with the Classic Menu until I realized that I wasn't actually saving any clicks or time.

Hmm, it looks like you can still turn off the desktop icons in Classic Menu mode.

#54

To add further, you do know that you can increase the number of items that show in the Often Used list right? And there's no real limit to how many items you can pin to the start menu too (besides screen space limits).

I wonder how many Apple fans would come out of the woodwork if an Apple product was at the top of this very authoritative list!

#48

You know that in both XP and Vista you can set the Desktop Icons manually right? (Vista: right-click Desktop=>Personalize=>Change desktop icons (left pane))
(XP: right-click Desktop=>Properties=>Desktop=>Customize Desktop)

#54

If you have more than 25 programs, then typing in the first three letters and hitting Enter is far quicker.

Alternatively, you can simply Pin the programs to the first level. Now you save a click since you don't have to click Programs (or All Programs)

Also, if you really use those programs so often, they'd definitely be in the Often Used list. Change the start menu to use small icons. Now you can see at least 40 items in that list at your stated resolution.

If you had a "small" number of programs, then it'll show up on the list already.

In fact, you shouldn't even need to go to the list as it should show up in the default 9 items in the Often Used section.

Or you could pin it as well which is the same thing except you have control over it.

Looking at my Start Menu in XP @ 1280x1024, I see that one column is over 40 items. That's not small. My laptop with Vista (1280x768) shows 25 items in the column. That's also not small.