Have been relentlessly calling SONY support, and their customer relations team, they are blindsided and sticking with the “Virus” vista. Am requesting a refund according to the LICENSING TERMS IN THE VAIO SETUP SCREEN and they are not co-operating, so it is time to file suit, claim with ATTORNEY GENERAL OF NEW YORK. Have been promised XP drivers and an XP recovery disk for this model from SONY Tech support for months now, enough is enough.

SONY, you made my shit list. No more endorsements for SONY.

Rob

To Vista Product Managers, and Microsoft Senior Executives.

Nov 21 2007

I own & operate about 10 Windows PC’s and am a 30 year Computing & PC Professional.

I am writing to say how disappointed I am with the Product Quality & Reliability of Vista. I own 4 Tablets the came with Vista Home Premium bought on May 2007. One of them I upgraded to Ultimate as I’ve long used advanced features such as Drive Mapping with Offline File access. I can find issues with most every part of Vista that was supposed to be innovative & productivity saving. A prime example is the Search Feature. This feature does not work on my Offline Mapped Folders where all my work data & files exist. In Vista I have no way to search my files and data with the product as it stands now.

I acknowledge it is a huge challenge to develop, introduce, support & ensure compatibility and mobility of customers who need encouragement to move to new Microsoft Platforms. There is long term benefit for everyone when customers are smoothly migrated to new product platforms.

However I find so many problems with my Vista platform, I hesitate to commence reporting them all. As a tiny businessman I can only say I have zero financial resources to commit to document & communicate these problems. In some cases I have filed bugs with my Hardware Supplier HP whom should take half the responsibility with some aspects of problematic peripherals. (Sadly to date I’ve had no confirmation from them of the problems reported). What is more worrisome is that the MS Knowledge base alone does not seem to contain records of the bugs I, and many other customers have. The finding struck me deeper when PC dealers echoed the same sentiments that I have discovered. Ditto with SP1 which is rumored to fix corporate system level issues with Vista but not customer problems. It’s October release notes suggested it would fix none of the problems I experience.

As a courtesy to myself and the many customers who are suffering with Vista’s poor product quality, I wonder if Microsoft would not consider upgrading all our licenses to Ultimate so that we have a clean option to go back to XP as this license provides such choice. At the same time such would clean the feature slate of what Microsoft should be expected to put 100% support effort behind.

I for one paid for one such upgrade to Ultimate from Home Premium. But the pain of living thru Vista’s bugs, and related Third Party software compatibility issues (ie Adobe CS2) as a whole makes me very reluctant to invest another penny in software of such low quality.

My suggestion to Microsoft is consider what I suggest or to alter the license of Vista to allow downgrading to XP as is provided under Vista’s ultimate product and to completely open your support services to logging and documenting problems your customers are experiencing. Even in cases when problems can’t be confirmed.

In my opinion Microsoft has taken a similar hit with Vista as it did with Windows ME in terms of furthering it’s reputation of not putting sufficient resources into product quality, problem resolution & customer satisfaction.

I prefer Microsoft OS’s but at this point I recommend to no one to consider purchasing Hardware with Vista installed. Go figure that Walmart at this point in time is doing strong business in its low cost Linux PC offering.

I hope Microsoft will consider aggressive alteration of it’s Vista marketing & support plans to win back the trust of so many faithful customers now thrown in doubt by Microsoft’s rush to deliver something by Christmas 2006. Of any software company anywhere, Microsoft is a company that can save its skin should it recognize injustices caused to customers.

Radical problems with Vista demand radical responses. One should expect such from Microsoft, a revered world leader in Software products & product quality.

I await proof & commitment from you that Vista’s quality will parallel my learning investment in it.

It is not just vista. Here is the list of buggy or in some cases non-functioning upgrades MS did in last couple of years :
1. Visual Studio 2005
2. Windows(MSN) Messenger 8.x
3. Virtual Server 2005
4. SQL Server 2005 (mostly utilities)

I can continue the list , but the point here every 2005+ upgrade form Microsoft has disturbing similarity : it is slower(much , much slower) than the previous version, setup is either non-functioning(MSN messenger) or incredibly difficult (SQL Server, Virtual Server). The new releases also incredibly CPU/Memory hungry and in addition to that use 2-x as much user handles and threads(which in my s-d world usually sign of sloppy programmer). In addition to that all of the products crash on regular bases.