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Is Windows Vista Ready? 'No. God, no.'
torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott answers the question that some IT folks are asking: 'Is Windows Vista Ready?' His answer is not only no, but 'No. God, no. Today's Windows Vista builds are a study in frustration, and trust me, I use the darn thing day in and day out, and I've seen what happens when you subject yourself to it wholeheartedly. I think I've mentioned the phrase "I could hear the screams" on the SuperSite before.' He also addresses the more important question, 'When Will Microsoft figure out what's important?' and to Paul, like most IT pros, its not about when the next OS will be released, it is about having the OS work."
OK, OK, so it's still in beta. But it seems to me that he is having problems with Windows that are not solely restricted to Vista. Why does he then put up with it? Why not simply say "Enough!", and try Linux or Mac instead? Surely the alternatives couldn't be any worse? Is it simply because he earns money by writing about Windows, so he HAS to put up with it, so he could pay the bills?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Where I work we've got a software product which to be kind would be best taken out and buried in an unmarked grave at midnight (with the mandatory stake, garlic and silver bullet) at some lonely crossroads.... its buggy, seriously flawed implementation of our design (the software is a third party product built to specs from my company). Every month we lurch from one crises to another but our programme management team will not face reality and allow us to slip release... we must release on time no matter how flawed is the message.
:(.
With 6ish months to go until drop dead date we can only fix major or critical issues which will seriously impact functionality of the entire system.
I have total sympathy with the MS developers and designers as I suspect they've got the same bone headed project managers as my firm
I am also using the latest Vista builds (not the public beta 2) at work. It is still NOT ready to me because it drives me nuts. The biggest complaint I don't like about it is the User Acess Control (UAC). I know it can be disabled, but the design is just annoying (memorized alt-c hot key so I don't have to move and click with the mouse) and I don't think it will be changed much. For every thing I run as an administrator seems to pop up the permit/deny. I read this interesting article about why UAC works this way. It remindes me of the way Mac OS X (10.2.8 -- haven't used the newer versions) works.
:)
What's worse on this test machine (ASUS K8V SE Deluxe, Athlon 64 3200+ 754 CPU, 512 MB of RAM, etc.), my screen tend to black out before and after the pop-ups occur. I don't see this problem on a co-workers' computers. Maybe it is because of the old ATI Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder video card. I am using the Aero effects (very pretty). Or worse, the pop-up is in the taskbar minimized without focus. So I can be using a program that calls another EXE, then nothing happens because I haven't granted permission because it is minimized!
Other things that bugged me:
1. How do I access c:\ProgramData\Application Data\? I keep getting permission denied even though my account is already set with an administrator access.
2. How come tab, arrow keys, and F3 keys don't work in command.com/CLI? I miss being able to recall history and hit tab for autocomplete.
3. In command.com, I cannot seem to change long paths with cd command like: cd "Program Files". It says: Parameter not correct - "program.
I was a bit surprised when MS decided to declare RC1 a few builds ago (5472?). I really hope Microsoft decides to delay again and take their time! So what if it loses money! They're rich and can get more after Vista is released with few problems. Make it good and maybe I will use it at home (using XP, Linux, and Mac OS X).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The upgrade from 98 to XP was a no brainer because of how much more stable
and quick XP was. Vista honestly has nothing I want. The longer they take
the better since I heard that the next DirectX will be Vista only, probably
just to piss me off when I can't play new games.
There is a major difference betwen a F/OSS beta and a MSFT beta.
F/OSS beta's are basically feature complete and are being error tested.
MSFT beta's don't even have the full feature set yet and are being error tested while new or rewritten componets are being set into place for the first time.
I have been using Firefox since the 0.3 days of Phoneix. Since that time it has maybe crashed 2 dozen times. Can you say the same about ANY MSFT product?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I know someone who is developing software for the Vista platform. They are porting their product to the next step. For them, everytime there is an announcement of a delay in release of the platform, it is a cause for a quick meeting to re-assess the risk it poses to their plan.
Just my personal experience.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...the more time Apple has to add features and functionality to OS X (according to the WWDC 2005, Leopard should be released in December or January), and the more time the FOSS community has to improve its offerings (KDE and GNOME get better with each release, Linux distributions get easier to use, and FOSS software offerings get a bit more compelling).
MS will still have a head start even if Vista is delayed another year, since Vista will be sold on all new machines, and not everybody is going to run out and buy a Mac or install Linux. However, more people are starting to learn about OS X and Apple's offerings (especially the fact that Apple switched to Intel, and the fact that they can still use Windows on those machines if they choose to, although OS X is really good; I showed my parents and siblings my MacBook and they got to use it for two days. They fell in love with it), and more people are starting to learn about FOSS. If Vista isn't all what it is cracked up to be, then Mac sales and Linux downloads would go up.
As for me? I hope that Vista improves. Us Mac and *nix users have to use Windows boxes for work and for school, so it would be nice if we got to use a much improved version of Windows. But, after they have gutted out all of the features that I have desired (such as WinFS and the Monad shell), I'm not so enthusiastic about Vista. And, yes, I've got a chance from a friend to use the beta for a few hours. Vista's interface is pretty nice, IE 7 is a browser worth using, and I am fond of some of the new features. However, everything I can get in Vista in January I already have on my MacBook, and the gap may be larger, depending on what Steve Jobs reveals next week during the WWDC 2006.
Here's a possible answer. Many of the new consumer level features aren't present in corporate versions of Vista. Microsoft might be trying to get the core os done and then give them a little more time with the end user fluff. It might also be a shakedown cruise. IT people will most likely start testing vista right away for later deployment and find bugs in the process. I suspect a very quick SP1 release within 3-5 months of corporate customers getting it. Remember NT4 had a service pack immediately. Its also possible they will pull their old games and release a "b" release and later do a special edition or some crap. Windows Server R2 reminds me of Windows 98 SE. It allows them to EOL buggy software faster after they've got a service pack or two under their belts. It also is a great revenue source as people re-buy what they already have. Ballmer is calling the shots now and he's a greedy guy.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I think Vista should be shipped only if it is really in a condition to be deployed to corporate environments. We /.ers may be happy with their *nixes and macs.I myself is on mac but I know my data including credit cards other stuff are with different corporates almost all of them which are on Windows.
I've worked in multiple banks and I know most of the data is not safe enough from a determined cracker. I hope Vista don't come and make it easier for them.
...instead of just adding eye-candy all the time. Seriously, it looks like Vista only features better graphics, and few necessary features. Looks like I'll stick with Gentoo through this one (not that I wouldn't otherwise, though).
So which is more difficult for XP users to switch to? Linux or Vista?
I signed up for the free download of the beta. After the download I installed it on one machine, a lesser of the many machines I have. Nonetheless it was a very capable machine. It was an AMD2500+ with an nforce2 board. It also had a 128mb 8x gforce 4 AGP card. Topping it off was an 80gig HDD with 1 gig of DDR 333 RAM. Oh, and it had a wireless card in it from ASUS.
As you can see that machine is very capable by today's standards.
I did a clean install without any other partitions. The install went well. After it booted up and I was able to work with it I noticed there was a driver for the video card but there was no AERO interface features. I searched and searched to see if I could find a spot to force it on. After some searching I found nothing.
I also found that the wireless card was essentially non-functional. This was also very disappointing. I connected up a wire and installed the nvidia drivers that were available for Vista. I managed to get to the internet and do all the updates where Microsoft's online update finally found a driver for the wireless NIC. I installed that and rebooted. After booting the OS reports that the connection for this is limited or has no connection.
I worked with it for a while. I looked and looked for video drivers that might provide me with the AERO interface. I also looked and looked for drivers and found none.
Most of the chipset drivers I had to use were older XP drivers. It was a serious hassle trying to get and install vista drivers.
I let that machine sit for some time but went back to it periodically to try to learn more about the interface. Networking sucked pretty bad. I couldn't find drivers for some devices. The lack of the AERO interface indicated that this was just XP with a new face. Sure there was IE 7.0 but I had given up on IE long ago in favor of Firefox. I looked at the configuration screens. Confusing but everything seemed to be there. One thing to note is that there were too many ways to get things done. There was a high percentage of features that didn't work and it was obvious that even the screens that did pop up for configuration often had the old XP graphics--indicating they were just altering existing code to work with Vista.
I then received a copy of Vista in my AP subscription and as coincidence would have it I had just backed up and was whiping my main XP box which has a 64 bit 3200+, 1 gig of ram and gforce 6600GT, and a few hundred gigabytes of storage.
I did the install and found that I had the AERO interface. I liked it. After using it for a while I downloaded the beta vista drivers from nvidia. I installed them and the system seemed fairly stable. I did notice huge clunkiness to accessing files and folders and determined that it was the promise SATA drivers. I moved my connectors to a different set of SATA ports off the mobo and the clunkiness went away.
I used Vista for a few weeks and tried to test every piece of hardware--printers, cameras, networking, external harddrives (usb and eSATA). I tried the microphone. Tried burning CD/DVDs. Tried flashcard readers, etc. Most everything worked. The only issue I had was with the file access. Opening a drive could take 30 seconds. Opening a folder after that another 30 seconds, clicking back another 30 seconds. Closing and reopening. More 30 second intervals if it even opened them at all. It didn't matter if it was my IDE drivers, my SATA or eSATA. It was incredibly slow. Often times it would lock.
No, Vista is FAR FAR from ready.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The answer (put forth by a MS guy at a seminar I attended), is that many enterprise users bought software assurance contracts with the understanding that they'd get Vista as part of the contract, and a good portion of those contracts will be ending this December. No Vista this year would mean some bad PR at the enterprise level.
And yes, this is entirely hearsay.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
I am not sure how Microsoft had the balls to call it a beta. I've used lots of MS betas and in the main they're quality products with a few bugs to iron out. Not this time around, this was alpha country. I've never seen such a lamentable effort. I knew within 30 minutes of playing around with it that there would be no release this year.
That is a reality of life that we all too often overlook. Nothing is certain until it happens, and even then our interpretation of it may be incorrect. Even if they were the most organized company in the world with stellar software engineering skills, Mount Rainier could erupt causing the release to be delayed (to put it mildly). No one can tell you with absolute certainty what will happen this afternoon let alone tomorrow or six months from now (except for God, but most people here don't believe in Him anyway). I dare say that even the best of us could not say with certainty the exact day that a project of this scale would be released.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
It is the opinion of most of IT professionals I work with that 99% of Windows XP crashes are due to sub-par driver programming by non-Microsoft developers.
To use customer calls as a source of evidence that Windows XP is unstable is rediculous. I would wager that 80% of Windows users are more destructive than productive if left to maintain their own systems. The fact that most people who install and use Linux systems are part of the other 20% (technical users) explains why you might not get calls about broken Linux machines.
In response to the "GNU/Linus" servers you run: What evidence do you have that they are more stable? My experience has been if I install a package without knowing exactly how it will effect the system I'm going to have unexpected problems with stability. This is true for Windows and Linux systems alike. I'm going to go out on a limb here and use the same logic I used before: If it requires more technical knowledge to install a package on a Linux system you will get fewer unexpected problems just because Windows-based applications have wizards. Just hitting next is a tempting alternative to actually reading the installation documentation.
Apple sort of did it with OS X, basing it on Mach and BSD instead of Linux (well actually it was NextStep, but whatever).
This is a model that MS could use as well. Open up or borrow the base layers, and build on top of it. With MS being in the virtualization market, backwards compatibility becomes less of a problem, as it can be built into the new OS.
Heck, rumour is that Apple has already implemented this Windows compatiblity this with OS X 10.5. Apple may have a better successor to Windows XP than Microsoft does.
Maybe learn how to use windows?
Exactly!
I have been telling people for years that if they must run Windows, they should run it under VMWare on Linux or *BSD. The only way to run a broken OS safely, is to run it under emulation on a working OS.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...BSD.
I suspect there is already a skunk works project uniting aspects of Vista with some sort of BSD kernel/userland as we speak. FreeBSD? NetBSD? OpenBSD? Who knows. However, the BSD licence would allow them to completely "Borg" their chosen version of BSD and keep everything closed up tight.
BSD is a venerable OS at this point, proven stable and secure. Vista is in very scary shape right now if TFA is to be believed. If Microsoft released a "Windows" with BSD under the hood, they could in one stroke get rid of the earned perception that Windows is an insecure OS with stability issues.
They could do worse. As in maintain the status quo.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Will it be ready in time? Actually, I think it could be.
Flying pigs come to mind.
It does not matter when they get it out, they are hosed. They have been making and breaking promisses for five years now. "Don't buy anything, our latest and greatest is just around the corner," is a song they've always sung but Vista is a new low. It will be a miracle if they get it out the door within six years, and it's going to be so broken no one is going to want it.
Microsoft started work on their plans for "Longhorn" in May 2001, some months before the release of Windows XP.[3] It was originally expected to ship sometime late in 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and "Blackcomb"
2003, 2005, 2007, they keep putting it off by two years because, fortunately, they can't get their worst lock down to work though they have been trying for 15 years. The non free software development model has been out of steam for just as long. When they threw DRM into the mess, they nullified their driver advantage for a system that's never going to work right. They have made all the wrong promisses to all the wrong people and their customers, who buy iPods have noticed. The list of new features are a sad kind of echo to all the Linux networking and desktop productivity improvements that they have been saying don't matter. Under the hood, there's even less. The lockdown is a massive waste that's ruining them, not saving them.
Their competition is running rings around them. Over the same time period, Debian has released two stable systems and is about to get in a third. Each has brought great improvements without adding too much confusion. The same software works everywhere, servers, desktops, laptops and hand held computers. Companies have been putting it in embedded devices and desktop penetration has been slow but steady. Apple has continued to rock on and is taking a sharp aim for Microsoft's bread and butter with new lower priced machines. In games, Xbox has been trounced. There is no place they are not taking a beating for their second rate offerings.
The release of Vista will be the end of them and it will signal the rise of the free desktop. It's not going to work right and people are going to be pissed. There's enough Linux out there for it to fill the performance void.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Apart from another brain-dead UI design, it appears that Vista has some annoying performance issues, which my be one of the reasons Microsoft snapped up Sysinternals.
Mark Russinovich's blog http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/ makes interesting reading.
IBM sells services and the occasional bit of hardware.
HP sells hardware and isn't doing badly, but they're not having stellar financial results either.
SGI's filed for bankrupticy.
Bottom line: Services is where the money is, and that's what Microsoft's is trying to do. And failing.
Scratch that. My friend has a new Dell. It bluescreens all the time.
I think SP 2 of XP is Microsofts biggest problem right now.
It works fine. I think a lot of the Vista re-designs and such have been to address the problem of "why would any volume license customers upgrade?" They've been having this problem with office since '97 (hence the dinosaur ads)
It's a larger problem in closed source software : eventually if you are successful, you dominate the market with a pretty functional product, and suddenly you're your own biggest competitor. There are a number of techniques to deal with it. Breaking compatibility is a classic (cough - Apple). Arbitrarily rearranging your interface (cough - Adobe) to force training headaches on your customers is another. Microsoft has generally had the benefit of a very fast moving target platform - generic x86 hardware - to make OS upgrades really needed. But computers are more similar to themselves 5 years ago than they ever have been, and XP is a flexible enough system that its unlikely that major changes around the corner will render it suddenly unusable.
Sure Vista will sell - nearly every new PC that is sold sells a copy of Windows, and in the long run, offices will probably have to upgrade - MS can offer cheaper service contracts or whatever. But the real question here isn't if Vista will generate sales, its if it will sell the slow but noticable drift toward Apple (just look at those laptop numbers) in the end-user market and Linux in the corporate market, and if it will have enough hard-to-reproduce features to prevent someone (google, IBM, some "anyone but microsoft" coilition) from releasing an actually functional-for-dummies desktop linux.
One wonders what MS would be looking like if Dell etc. weren't bribed into not offering OS-less PCs. Shouldn't I be able to use the XP license I had on my old machine on the new one I buy?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Times have changed. An average corporate desktop bought in 2002, if they thought of the future at all, will have a Pentium 4 processor between 1.8GHz and 2.53GHz, probably 256MB to 512MB of RAM, at least a 40GB drive, a DVD-ROM or combo drive, and a Windows XP license on the lid. With $150 of parts (RAM and possibly a hard drive), these machines are more than adequate for most corporate tasks. While a few companies still toss machines at that age, regardless of condition, more and more are realizing that it's no longer necessary to toss that 2.53GHz machine, only to replace it with a 2.8GHz machine. These aren't the olden days where you threw away a 486 to upgrade to a Pentium Pro four years later.
Vista will be the same way. While Windows 95 was a worthwhile upgrade from WFW (at least it had an integrated TCP/IP stack, better UI, 32-bit app support from the get-go and better DOS compatibility), companies are realizing that Windows XP, and even Windows 2000, are more than adequate for their needs now. (A well-known Fortune 100 company still uses Windows 2000 on all their machines. The only thing that W2K doesn't have built-in is the WiFi software--and they don't support WiFi anyway.)
On the consumer side, the gravy train still rolls on, where people throw away perfectly good machines to get a $700 Vista PC with prettier menus and no spyware (until they get back on the web, that is.) But I think PC manufacturers (and Microsoft) better expect a large slowdown from their corporate customers for a while, until something rolls along that necessitates upgrades (and a pretty new version of Office isn't it.)
Ah, but it's not just the knowledge, it's the availability of the resources.
You get to the point where you start needing petroleum products, how easy is it going to be to get access to those oil reserves with your bootstrap technology, now that all the easy pickings are gone? Same thing with a lot of metals... the easily accessed deposits have been mined out, and the hard to get at stuff requires higher technology... which may well require the hard to get at stuff in the first place. Catch 22.
I think what things would look like if we had to restart civilization from scratch would involve entirely different kinds of figuring shit out... it would be about reuse and recycling rather than re-implementing old technologies from whole cloth. Why spend time with wood and stone when you've got a bunch of metal already laying around? I don't think the jump to metal actually would be the hard part; I think the jump to non-petrochemical bases would be the hard part.
Yeah, yeah, it's all off-topic, mod me down, I know.
No relation to Happy Monkey
That's a pretty complicated reason. I think the real one is simpler. By using IE Microsoft can dictate to a large extent how the web works. Yeah, there are standards and standards committees and such, but really, if it doesn't work with IE, it doesn't work. So MS makes IE just a bit different than the standard (do you REALLY think that all MS's programmers can't implement web standards properly?) and by doing so web page developers' support for everybody not running Windows is an afterthought at best.
No I don't mean about Vista, I mean about what Thurrott has to say. I've RTFA about a half-dozen times this year to his articles, and have become convinced that he's just not very bright. I don't get why his stuff gets linked to at all.
/. links to indicative, and if so, what keeps him visible? Is he buying off editors? (j/k)
Example from this time: the whine about IE7 and his employer's use of ActiveX. This is a problem of Microsoft's? I'm all for punishing them for their past sins, and ActiveX qualifies, but to use them doing the right thing to kill off dangerous controls in IE7 (which is what his description sounds like) as ammo in talking about Vista being broken is unfair, and worse: it's shallow. A deeper thinker might note that their choice to DTRT in IE7 will cause pain, but it really isn't part of a case for whether Vista is or is not ready.
So is this guy capable of writing anything that isn't a waste of the reading time, or are the things
No, I didn't forget XP. I use it evet day at work and home. And I reserve my greatest scorn for it.
I think XP is Microsoft's greatest failure to date. Period. I'd rather not mention it at all.
Rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Took me a good 15 minutes to find http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0 DE2DB143FF932A3575AC0A961948260
1 997w3x.pdf
c ts
And some enigmatic stuff here: http://www.gaby.de/ftp/pub/win3x/archive/softlib/
And a cryptic reference to the Mach 10 and 20 here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeobsoleteprodu
Other than that, there is not much info left out there.
I think the Mach 10 was an 80186 with RAM and such on an 8-bit ISA card, probably an 8MHz or 12MHz part. The Mach 20 was a 80286, and cooler. Probably a 16MHz part. I think the Mach 10 would take 1.5MB RAM, as a heaping shovelful of 16- or 22-pin DRAM. The Mach 20 similar. Both had an InPort for Bus Mouse. I guess the Mach 20 could be had with or without the RAM expansion, and with or without an updated FDC to run 3.5" drives. I had an XT-Turbo at 8MHz that already handled 3.5" drives. Woot...
Just a quick look, but it seems about the only thing there with less info on it out there is Modern Jazz.
rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
we've about 65,000 desktops in Europe (same again in US, plus a chunk in Asia) and they're all going to Vista. We didn't move to XP as we still had perfectly adequate Win2K platform, supported by MS until 2010, so there was no real advantage moving to XP. Now's the time to look at our next generation as lifecycle for 2k's getting shorter - so we're going Vista. We're not alone in this - all the organisations who didn't really see the point in XP in a corporate setting when they already had Win2K will be in the same boat. If it's ready, then it's ready: putting it out on a corp volume licence implies they're satisfied it's up to enterprise-level stability. Going corp first implies their confidence that it *will* be ready is high. If it isn't, and they were to put out an unstable build on volume licencing then that'd be about it for MS...
At least FreeBSD anyway. Play around plugging in and pulling out UBS devices without unmounting them first while processes are still accessing them and see how long it takes for the kernel to crash. Believe me , it won't be long. The same trick also works for mounted floppy disks. Someone in BSD land seriously needs to revisit the kernel mount subsystem.