Ater a torrid time trying to help a friend install Virgin (aka NTL Broadband on a new Dell laptop with Vista installed I have been told categorically by the Virgin helpline that they do no support Vista. Slightly alarming as it seems that all new computers ship with Vista pre-installed.
Brownie points to Dell who are sending a copy of XP so that I can 'downgrade' the machine and get it working. BUT wearing another hat where I deal with the corporate side of Dell I am thold that they would not think of shipping a machine with Vista!
Most graphics cards will fail with it so I imagine Vista is going to go down as the ME of NT.
And that Vista loaded computers will sell a lot cheaper than Xp loaded ones. And to think the Xp does not even support DVD!
As soon as Vista came out all the companies supported by or responsible for RIAA started to wake up and smell the coffee. Even Steve Jobs realises that there is no future in computing for DRM.
So where did your friend get his PC from? A second hand shop? Is he totally illiterate? Or was he off-planet when he started thinking about getting a new machine?
Virgin will work just fine on vista... Follow these steps:
1) Take virgin cd and throw it in the bin along with any supplied USB modem.
2) Buy a decent broadband router.
3) Connect to the PC and configure it with your virgin username and password
4) Tell windows its on a lan. Sorted
Who cares - its hidden behind the router they have no visibility of what platform you are using.
You can still buy them with XP preloaded if you want.
But wise. ANd thus have no real working knowledge of what I am talking about in this thread.
BTB, do you suppose the friend of the OP is not illiterate? There have been a wonderful collection of stories thither and you about what a dog and pile of shit the OS is.
I may be wrong of course and have swallowed all the hype about this work of idiocy, hook line and sinker. After all the Microsoft site does say it works quite well at booting one's machine.
That at least is a plus if you don't also want to use it for standard desktop practices.
Lots of bits of hardware don't work with Vista, try getting a Samsung ML
1210 printer to install for example
And there is lots of fun to be had with the User Account Control and older software packages
But then years ago when XP SP2 was first released once installed my network port and ISDN card stopped working
However many of the problems are due to other manufacturers not providing Vista compatible drivers. There have been many such issues with XP 64bit drivers
Maybe because one is not being unreasonable in expecting an operating system to be backward-compatible? Especially when one is given no choice as to which OS is loaded on a new machine.
The drivers for which the manuafacturers have to pay Microsoft for a "works with Vista" stucker, before they'll allow them to installed on it.
Anything remotely media related is now horrendously messy to write for (which is the reason Nvidia are still struggling to get one working !) due to onerous conditions of a "protected path environment", bit- flipping (which is likely prone to being affected by something as simple as a mains spike), enforced shutdown of any type of output that might be used to copy media of any sort, and degraded video / audio of any non- protected path hardware.
It could be NTL cable. I use this as a backup to my normal connection.
For that, they supply a modem with ethernet presentation. There is a CD that comes with it, in order to initially do the modem config and registration of the modem on the network. A lot of other assorted "user experience" stuff is installed as well and it seems to heavily use Javascript and other assorted material.
The Windows version is bad enough, but the Mac version, which they do claim to support, just doesn't work properly at all. Fortunately, there is a way to manually access the modem and the registration web site without the need for the CD at all.
However, I am fairly certain that you can't just go out and buy an arbitrary cable modem and plug it in. AFAIK, NTL's registration system looks for certain MAC address ranges for cable modems supported on their network. It then hands out temporary IP addresses via DHCP to enable the user to reach the registration site. After registration, the user is handed out an IP address for operational use.
It's possible that the CD won't work on Vista and for that reason NTL could be saying that it is unsupported.
If this is the issue, then this site may be of help
Do they have much choice? Consider a medium size company comitted to using MS for all its corporate office systems/accounts/etc. Can you imagine they horrendous difficulty/cost/staff training of switching over to another operating system - if a suitable one exists. That of course is just how Bill wanted it, tied into MS products. Now industry is reaping the harvest.
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