As it turned out, Nvidia/ATi were not the only guilty parties in the whole case, but Windows Vista was implicated, too. Microsoft just posted an update for both 32- and 64-bit versions, fixing issues where operating system would not pass instructions for the 2nd GPU to the driver, meaning SLI/CrossFire would effectively work as a single chip cards.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41121

When Vista was released in January, Microsoft just recruited millions of Beta testers who did they not have to pay, better still, these people payed Microsoft to test their beta OS!

Yeah, they got to have fun with a new OS and they got a free copy of MS Vista Ultimate out of it. Sounds fine by me.

Uhm. did you read my post attentively? I said AFTER it was released. Everybody who BOUGHT Vista is in my humble opinion a beta tester, and instead of MS paying us to test their OS, they charge you for it.

Sounds so very not fine by me :/

In a nutshell, customers are always the Guinea Pigs in high tech products
We pay for their success, new product funding and development in hoping that the new is better than the old.

It doesn't always happen all the time; AMD in recent two years is a good example ..... how about 965 chipset flaws that leads to P35.

This time around it happens that some of "us" no longer enjoy being Guinea Pigs for a change



Cute!!

I must add: Whenever we do things that are never done before, we are taking the risks of not being perfect not even close to it. Fun living on the edge of technology.

Sorry, I guess I didn't. Although you did say "beta OS" at the end.

Regardless, it is no different then buying the latest GPU or latest motherboard/chipset. If anything Vista is benign in comparison to those users that buy the just released $500 GPU, and find they can't use it for months due to drivers not working as advertised. Or those users that find their cards aren't supported by drivers at all.

just because others do it too, doesn't make their actions right
the current state of Vista makes it very "Beta OS" in my book, with crippling performance being the worst offender, not talking about the application incompatibility problems

Of course it does not make it right. But so far I don't see the problems with Vista... since you are not talking about the application issues. Some examples might be helpful... otherwise the only thing I see worth being negative about is Nvidia's (And a much lesser extent ATI's) inability to create a simple driver, regardless of OS.

* Memory usage
* Slow disk to disk copy
* UAC

Drivers and software compatibility and not just PC games.