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Windows Vista RC1 Impresses Critics
bradley fellows writes "Early feedback from testers already using Windows Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) report that the OS is more stable than expected, which bodes well for Microsoft's plan to have Vista out according to its current schedule." Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
I'm so confused.
I'm seeing both "more stable than expected" and "not ready for prime time" being used to describe Vista.
Seemed to be bit of trouble logging in to Slashdot this morning...?
Taco, please tell us you are not testing Vista RC1 for Microsoft!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
OK, I've been running windows XP without reinstalling it for over 3 years. In that time the only reason I've seen it crash is problems with 3rd party apps going haywire.
If you're going to bash Vista, bash it on something more interesting and true like for instance DRM issues. Windows bashing might be a past time on slashdot, but you would think by now people would have refined their techniques beyond "Windoze is teh crashering thing, shnarf!".
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
It's easy to see what they mean, but I think most of us know that a new install of XP can seem shiny and beautiful, but 2 months later, you've got a total piece of crap. This RC hasn't been out for too long, and I doubt they've had the full "Windows dies slowly" experience.
Followed swiftly by:
By the same writer. Methinks he doesn't really understand the term "Release Candidate".
Of course the expectations should be high. While 98 and Me were pure crap, XP Pro is very robust. My home machine goes months without a reboot - except when a patch demands it, and the work computer goes from monday to friday just the same.
...
Overall I think a well-kept XP box is very stable indeed, and I'm not expecting a bit less than that from Vista.
just my 0.03(*)
(*) adjusted for inflation
Andrew Brust called driver compatibility Microsoft's "biggest impediment" to getting Vista out in time. "Driver compatibility will be key," he said.
Is the driver format the same as before or has it changed again? I wonder how many hardware manufacturers are going to need to port their drivers and how much hardware will break again this new release. Also, while these hardware manufacterers are at it, they might give a thought to setting up a cross-platform codebase for their drivers, which will benefit everyone in the long run.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
-- Nothing unusual happened today
Backhanded compliment: I'm sure Vista is already more usable than Gnome.
I know it's easy and fun to poke fun at Microsoft for past Windows releases, but the day of "constant Windows crashes" and unexplained BSOD's have been gone for a few years now. Notwithstanding the large amounts of virii and security issues that must be dodged, Windows XP has been stable and rock solid for a number of years. Many of the stupid instability issues that Linux users like to poke fun at have been eliminated for a while and honestly, a rag like Slashdot should give them a little more credit sometimes. It would be nice if people would stop leting their elitist attitude about Linux muck up an objective viewpoint about other operating systems.
As a matter of fact, up until SuSE 10.1, Linux and its various programs have been far more unstable than Windows XP. Again, that's not counting viruses and security problems. Almost every Linux distribution I've ever installed ended up going down in flames because of silly bugs, unexplained SIGSEV 11 windows and hardware compatibility issues. Try relying on many of the communities built up around Linux and you're often met with the elitist attitude that quickly turns most people off.
I'm not trying to troll here (although I'm sure I'll be modded that way because I realize many of you just don't want to hear all of this), but the last line in this story provoked me. I'm trying to help the Linux community with this commentary, not flame it. I want to believe in Linux, but the issues on most distros boggles my mind... how can something so buggy earn a reputation of reliability?
Extra points for people who point out that the editor said "PC" and not "Windows" when talking about crashes. We all know what they really meant.
From TFA:
Submit to: Digg Slashdot Del.icio.us
I clicked on the link to Slashdot, and it creates a template for the exact submission that we are reading. Why not to cut some corners and, instead of requiring an user to click on the link, to subscribe slashdot to the rss feed of that site and automatically post the news here. Mod me down all you want, but accepting a story created by the very own site that posted the article and not even adding anything meaningful to it is way too much laziness, even for slashdot
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, his name is Windows ME
Having over a decade of IT career behind me, one of the most amazing things I have come to experience in the IT/corporate world is Microsoft infallibility. It is equivalent to dealing with right-wing Christians and their belief of the infallibility of scripture -- no matter how much you point out the flaws.
Or, rather, it is more of a, "Microsoft will get it right in the end." No matter how many times a network goes down due to a minor piece of malware, no matter how many support calls are generated by spyware/adware -- so bad that it has reached the point that techs would rather re-image than try to repair, no matter how many crashes and instability issues, people blindly defend, support and believe in Microsoft. And I'm talking about veteran, senior, experiences IT folks.
Even though they know to keep the big money on a mainframe Unix box, even though they know that it makes more sense to run a hardened Cisco device instead of a Windows-based network node, they are devoted to the Windows workstation and the Windows mid-server solution.
And, if you dare promote open source -- firefox, linux, apache, sendmail -- solutions you are darn near ostracized. It has reached the point now that I follow, in-line, rather than risk the flames.
I'm not sure what to call it exactly, but people tolerate Microsoft like no other company. If any other vendor's products barely hiccups, there is talk, quickly, of replacing it -- and they do, but Windows is as fixed within the corporate world as Everest. Thoughts of removing it being akin to getting rid of desk chairs. It simply will not happen.
It has reached, IMO, a place where every big, corporate business wants to be -- embedded to the point of religion....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Just hand it over from the "reviewer" to a regular user, give them internet access and about 15 minutes, and see how Vista handles those toolbars, spyware, etc. I bet it's slow and irreversably wonky in short order.
stuff |
Windows Vista RC1 has been made available to the general public, with keys available here.
There are various websites that report this build is far more stable than previous versions, but as Microsoft themselves have said "quality will continue to improve. We'll keep plugging away on application compatibility, as well as fit and finish, until RTM"
These builds are set to expire on June 1st 2007
throw new NoSignatureException();
After running beta 2 on my production box for +/- two months now I can say yes it is stable. It even runs Civ4 better than XP. I expect the same from RC1 when I install it later today.
The real issue is has M$ the fixed the things that needed fixing. For instance the "annoy-the-user-to-death" security model and the undocumented symlink thing that even as administrator gives you a unfixable security warning when you try to make changes or follow the link.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
I expect Windows Vista to be a remarkably stable and reasonably secure operating system - AFTER Service Pack 1.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Please tell me what's "expected", after a full load of bad live demos and delays...
did MS get the BSOD feature stable in this Vista RC?
No, YOU'RE incorrect! Win95, Win95a, Win95b, Win98, Win98SE, WinME were ALL based on the exact same Win95 code base. To say that Win98SE is "stable" and Win98's first release was unstable is simply not correct. Win98SE offered Internet connection sharing, IE5, USB support and DVD support. Hardly anything to make Win98SE more "stable" than the original Win98.
To say that XP is far more stable than anything Win9x, well there I agree with you!
LeBlanc said Microsoft has made performance and stabilisation tweaks that testers requested after Beta 2.0, and the latest test version of the OS - which could be the final one before Vista is released to manufacturing - is solid enough for regular use.
I'm baffled. Does this mean that the performance and stability issues in earlier builds (and XP) were only there because we forgot to request them to be removed/fixed?
Looks like it's time to make a Christmas list of other things that MS should have done in Vista already, that I guess we all forgot to request! ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
www.weberseite.at
"more stable than expected".
Doesn't necessarily say a lot.
Now I don't use any MS Software any more but it'd be nice if rather than hype, speculation and derision there was some constructive discussion out there in the main stream media so that people could decide what to do when Vista is released, maybe not yet but just before or even after the release.. Oh except it will arrive on 90% of PC's pre installed so it will gain a dominant market share in 2-5 years regardless of reviews, hype, bugs, features, security or anything else..
What's the point. I use Linux, some use BSD, Windows, Mac OS or whatever (please add your own preference here). Regardless of how easy it is to install an OS, most people never will, so most people will stick to what their PC comes with, so all this talk will have a tiny effect on the general populate.
So at the end of the day its not important how stable, secure, feature packed, or "cool" this piece of kit is, is it?
The question is how do you change that?
Bah
That settles it! Come on Vista, my credit-card is ready!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Windows ME hates you, and hates your hardware, and probably hates Mircosoft for forcing it into it's foul un-life. I'd take windows 3 over windows ME.
I must be ancient, but wasn't there a time when people objected to the soul stealing product activation in Windows XP? I mean it may be rock solid stable no reboot for months on end, but has the activation changed? I can't believe how many people on Slashdot are now willing to submit to such privacy invasion and hardware monitoring. While paying them to do it. What happened here???
Security. Real security built in and operational, not just some boxes ticked. That means normal user accounts running unprivileged and decent permissions on system directories and files by default...
I won't hold my breath.
Deleted
RC1 is MUCH more stable and polished than beta2... However the 64bit release is still nowhere near ready for mainstream use, very poor application compatability I think it will be a long time (at least another year) before I'd recommend people move to 64bit OS.
You Linux nerds crack me up. You still think its 1996 or something and everyone still uses windows 95 because of the "OMGZErs the windows crashes all the times!" For people who claim to be on the cutting edge of technology, you sure as hell seem to have missed the last 10 years of OS history.
UMM NO.
Windows 2000 and XP are VERY stable. I literally cannot remember the last time ive seen a blue screen, or had the OS crash on me where I needed to reboot, and ive been working in IT for 15 years. Yes, ive had apps fail, but you shut them down, and relaunch them. Yes, occasionaly an MS update will require a reboot...so what? I won't get into my personal experiences with Linux and fun times involving driver frustrations and dll hell.
Now I haven't used Vista so I wont comment on it, but this whole "Windows crashes all the time it sucks!" just shows you ignorant you really are. You wanna convert more people to Linux? Stop acting like 10 year old children arguing over the best cartoon show.
You may have a hardware problem, check for faulty RAM. I haven't had a sigsegv 11 in years.
Deleted
When it is released and avaiable for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate everytime a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
...Slashdotters still like to criticize betas.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I spin the volume control wheel on my keyboard... the stupid OSD that is built in to windows seems to really screw stuff up... It can't properly draw on the screen, the sound skips as it goes up each bar, and if you move the wheel more than 3 ticks at once, the entire sound sub system crashes and no more sound til you logout/login. Atleast they made it so you don't have to reboot when the drivers fall in the toilet.
... since he apparently doesn't know that 3rd party apps don't necessarily run in userspace.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
it's not as bad as I have expecetd, if you talk strickly on stability, i would say it's as stable as my XP machine. But again, I am only using my vista machine to do the most simple tasks such as office and image applications as well as surfing the web. The reason it's not ready for the prime time is because I feel they still need to work out a lot of the functionality bugs and make the UI easier to use.
If nothing else, it sure is a pretty OS comparing to XP but still not as good as OSX
I've had Vista on my Media Center PC since Beta 2 started, running 24/7 serving up TV and it hasn't crashed yet. The only times I've rebooted it have been to install new builds, and to fix an nVidia audio bug (audio dies and needs a restart to get it going again), and that's been pretty infrequent, maybe once every couple of weeks.
1. The user interface concerning wireless/wired networking was cumbersome. I go between work and home and church (all 3 are wrlss hotspots) and Vista had trouble remembering the network keys as well as refused to connect automatically.
2. Internet Explorer gave me some issues; mainly being that it asked me to install an extra plug-in immediately after installing, and afterwards, the only way to get IE to open without crashing was to "Open with plug-ins disabled" that obviously did not allow me to view flash objects and other things.
That being said, there are things that Microsoft did in Vista RC1 that I loved. For example, the start menu has been reorganized. When you open it, it looks pretty much just like the start menu in XP, however, when you click "All Programs", the quick access menu on the left is replaced by a scroll down list with all the programs listed - rather than having menus expand across your screen. It is simply more organized. I love the gadgets bar on the right side of the screen as you can customize it to have a clock, the recycle bin, calculator, and my personal favorite, dials that track memory usage and percentage of processor clock time being used.
All in all, there are good things, but I chose to roll back to XP for the issues I mentioned. I hope that Microsoft takes its time and does this one right... wouldn't that be a shocker?
Sniper's Motto: One shot, One kill- If you run, you'll only die tired.
Submitter could at least have made the smallest of efforts by writing something of his own. Now it appears he only clicked the "Submit to Slashdot"-button at the bottom of the article.
:)
And then CmdrTaco just clicked the "Post-MS-Bashing-comment to story"-button in his editor control panel
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
So let me get this straight.
"It doesn't crash as much as windows Me did..... Woohoo! Call it stable! Microsoft has done it again!"
Now, if they could just design a simple UI that didn't so many bells and whistles on it that it might have to display a warning for people with epilepsy problems.
Oh, and to all you people building Vista ready PC's now? Get a clue. The requirements are steep, no doubt, but as newer hardware comes out, driving existing costs down, as it always does, this will be a cheaper hurdle to overcome in the future. So, in a nutshell, you are building a top dollar machine to run an OS, right now, that isn't even out yet. One whose system requirements are almost assured to go up a bit more.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
"Dont Feed the Troll"
:)
And on another note, antifood: surely you know by now that Windows ME is just a myth in the windows world, the sorta story you tell your kids to give them nightmares
there are no keys listed, this is only available for existing testers only
meaning if your not already a tester you cannot install it (without cracked keys)
i might as well get it from P2P if iam going to go the illegal route and mess with dodgy keys and cracks
rejected because your post is useless (unless wasting your time downloading 4.5gig iso's is your thing)
Is Slashdot now purposely trying to be -utterly- useless when reporting on issues regarding Windows, or is this just an example of the editor's technical incompetence in admining Windows?
The ISO is 2.5+ gigs... just for a bare-bones, alpha-beta-delta-gamma-RC-OMG-WTF-BBQ OS with basically no end-user apps but a text editor?
That's friggen insane.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
I am expecting the ME of the NT kernel series. Can I expect more?
1999: Win2000 is still crap! Hardware vendors want a new OS... let's package the old stuff with a new look: Win ME.
2003: Longhorn is crap! Hardware vendors want a new OS... let's package the old stuff with a new look: Vista.
did that on a 2k box, and a few times on my xp box. Next question? Oh, and if you want to have any crdibility, you might want to cut the intentional misspellings, that makes it less believeable.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Windows. MS. If you want to be taken seriously, spell things right so you don't look like a bitter 12 year old kid. And my little XP box could do that easily. And aside from installing sound card drivers (which actually worked before Creative stupidly forced asked for a reboot), I haven't rebooted/shut down my computer since installing Vista RC1.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
I love the comments about other OS's made by the typical Apple fanboi. Leave the evaluations and commentaries to those of us that DO use Windows and Linux as well.
While Apple hardware is my number three platform (in time used) after Linux and Windows, I can assure you that
1) The MS OS's (Win 95/98) never crashed more than the contemporary Apple OS's (Pre OS-X).
2) Windows has not crashed much since Windows 2000.
Almost EVERY blue screen of death I have had has been tied back to bad hardware since Windows 2000. I reglarly leave my Work PC up for two months at a time, and while I do eventually reboot to apply patches and free up leaked resources, it NEVER crashes.
P.S. I have NO love for MS - but the truth is the truth! Honesty is just as important in the rest of our lives (OS's) as it is in Science. (you listening HP?)
Yes its true, a rolling monument to all that is the wonderous windows vista. Basically an RV with some fancy screen printing loaded down with large lcd/plasma displays and packed with one too many rackmount computers (which make it hot as hell in there). Anyway, a couple months ago I had the .. um fortune? of climbing into this rv and harassing the pr guy. I asked him quite plainly why as a business person I would want to upgrade my employees to WV. He looked almost taken back... he paused. I really could see him searching for the "right" answer when suddenly he says "well... I would say people really like the way it looks.". I stared in shock (dismay?) before asking him to give me his complete sales pitch. He then proceeds to show me around various office applications word, excel, etc, and he clearly tells me "its the old api underneth, but the interface is completely redone. Each application is specialized now so theres no more standardized menus that seem out of place." ... WTF!?!?! Great, so not only did they not upgrade anything (aside from porting), now there is zero consistency in every application? I'd like to know the genius who came up with that idea. Then, and I by no means am exagerating, he goes on to tell me that even as a non gamer I would need 2 gigs of ram and a fancy video card just to have a "usable" system and then as if I hadn't been astounded enough, he points to a laptop with a logo that says Windows Vista Ready. He says "Don't trust these stickers... its some political stuff, it won't run good on most of this hardware". Yes its true, he admitted it was SLOW and pratically unusable without top of the line hardware. As I continued to be-friend this nice fellow I got the feeling he didnt like WV at all (he doesnt use it himself infact). But for some reason he had been trained (much like a lab rat) to repeat "wow just look at those borders!" ... I never could make sense of this. Though for weeks after I found myself shouting "Just look at those borders! I love Microsoft!! Whoo!!" everytime my computer pissed me off.
Peace out.
M$ is teh \/\/0r$7! Only losers use any software from Money$oft! They bluescreen constantly d00d! M$ sucks!
Everyone I know who uses M$ products has to reboot at least 5 times an hour. 5 times an hour! My main system is a 386 with 8 meg ram running Gentoo, which I use to tell time. It has NEVER crashed or bluescreened on me.
BTW, you have totally l337 uptime!
Look, no offense, but are you fucking kidding me? You're claiming bragging rights because of a system that's been up a whole ten weeks?
Umm, dude...sorry to break this to you, but it's called updating source code. How else to you explain how unstable ME was compared to previous versions?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I don't need to claim, I have solid stability. I don't throw away computers, I usually upgrade one part at a time and sell off the old part to people who don't need the newest tech. I'm pretty sure I haven't had my computer on for 71+ days, but there's no point in wasting electricity if one doesn't need to have it on overnight as my gaming rig isn't a server, if it was, I'd be running linux. As for the people you know, all of their hardware doesn't need to be faulty for windows to "crapout". They probably have a poor-quality peripheral with bugged drivers, or something else bugged. I'm glad that you're happy with your laptop, software doesn't run on the exterior though, so I don't really think you can call it faulty. If the RAM was broken or the HDD spat out random data at regular intervals, I doubt any OS could function properly...
P.S: I don't care about the subject enough to keep my computer on for 100+ days just to prove that XP is stable. In fact, I hope more people start using linux, and that people like you spend some of that energy on improving it so that we gamers can some day in the future run linux instead of windows.
Early Testers Say Vista RC1 Not Ready
Windows Vista RC1 Impresses Critics
Anyone else think that this is a crazy non-scientific psychological experiment to find out how slashdot crowds respond to suggestive headlines?
Can you say defrag? and I've had more ntfs filesystems eat themselves then even ext2.
Can ntfs both journal metadata and data?
"think of it as evolution in action"
I'm just glad that my 2 year-old laptop (P4, 2.66GHz, 512MB, 32 MB NVidia 5100) barely meets the minimum requirements for minesweeper and solitaire (I get an "Experience Index" of 1.0)... it's too bad it doesn't meet the recommended requirements for it, though. It definitely won't run fancy Aero-Glass.
Nevermind that it handles XGL/Compiz very, very well in Linux, for some reason it's not up to par for the "optimal experience" in displaying windows and playing very basic games.
As long as ps shows more than just the years for processes, you have crappy uptime. Nothing beats seeing tcsh sessions from like 2002 still running :-)
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/do wnload.htm
0 48645
Haven't read this article, and I don't think I'll waste any more time reading about Vista, especially after reading the previous one http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195829&cid=16
Nice to see we're getting articles with the troll bait built directly into the headline. Though I suppose it saves us from a few dozen, "More stable than expected? I expected nothing! LOL! I am clever and unique." jokes.
more stable than expected?
as in, my dog took a dump in the back yard, it's not as smelly as I would have expected?
20% - Windows Bug updates
20% - Media DRM
20% - Virus Scanner
10% - WGA verfification
10% - MS Paperclip
20% - Other
This post has been updated with new security enhancements. It is recommended that you reboot.
Yes - Reboot Now
No - Reboot Later
Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
Seriously, are we still living back in the windows 95-98 days? I run an network with hundreds of windows servers and clients and day to day operations are relatively smooth. Windows 2000/XP is really not bad in terms of reliablility.
Would it be fair to the Linux community to claim "Linux is nice, but a pain in the ass to setup - a soundcard and video card took 3 hours to configure....but that's OK because i'm used to it"?
That used to be true 6 years ago, but no longer. While not perfect, hardware support in Linux has gotten tremendously better over the last few years.
Whatever happened to IT guys (and gals) without and agenda? I only hire people that are willing to use the right tool for the job - without any religous prejudices.
-ted
from the post "...frequent crashes as normal operation..." - what the hell are these users doing that their PC crashes frequently. Under XP, the only way to crash the OS is via bad drivers. If people didn't buy the cheapest, crap hardware, especially for video cards, XP would be rock solid. I might have an application crash now and then, but it NEVER brings down the OS. I get a BSOD maybe once a year or so. So, who the hell are these users???
"It'll come installed on new PCs so people will be forced and MS will win again!" Oh boo hoo. MS has done a trememdous job of generating hype for this OS. As far as PC manufacturers are concerned, Vista will be a selling point that will help them move more of their products. Does that make all the parts vendors and manufacturers evil too? Intel and AMD (as harsh competitors as they are) are probably high-fiving.
While I love free and OSS, this really does show the strength of a marketing department: when was the last time you saw "hype" for linux? Linux is never marketed (as well as Windows), it is only worshipped covertly. AMD had X2 come out, and Intel countered with Core 2 Duo. NVidia and ATI are back and forth as fast as a pirate ship ride. "Linux Lovers" sit in a corner and spurn M$.
I agree with the assessment that there is too much elitism in Linux. The first time I installed Red Hat many years ago to run a little server in my house, it got hacked within 20 minutes. Not only was it hacked, but when I went online for advice, I got more RTFM n00b than I did real help. If someone took the time to market and to show people "here is why you should use GNOME, look what it can do - and it's free!" and the rest of the community behaved more like that, Linux would make more strides.
You don't like M$ or Windows? Fine! Don't use it! But it's dumb to bash it too, your energy is mis-directed. M$ is focused on making their own sh1t better, not on "har har har, the new Ubuntu crashes when you push alt-f1-return-t and type 'I'm a happy gorilla.'" Instead of hating MS, compete with them. I know, create a "Linux Panorama" that's realeased the same time as "Windows Vista".
it would be great if threads like this turned into some real discussions about real pros and cons. "It runs Civ better than XP!" "The Wireless interface and support is a bit sketchy still." "Overall it's pretty good, but I had some browser issues that I didn't want to continue working with, so I rolled back to XP." Thank you. Those are real comments.
You need to make some new friends.
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
..MS Windows doesnt crash that often anymore. Just a joke: Win9x was more secure than anything, any hacker logging in couldnt last in the system longer than 4 hours. Seriously: Explorer sometimes does crash. Some Applications do, likely some of the Company with the red A. However - not the kernel. It is really HARD to crash xp kernel with rock solid software. However, not exiting a DirectX Black Screen anymore, Iconmess on the Desktop, random crashes from Explorer, High CPU Usage from some programs (again Explorer) at random points, high infestation rate (not on my machine but i have to fix a lot of them) - by programs not even INSTALLED by the user (where do they come from?*), and last but not least: speed issues over ethernet, Memory consumtion increase, bad responses to certain events like "moving a mouse" after 32h of running, and mostly the speed breakdown if many processes are running because of the "Great Eternal Caching Of The Swap"... I cant say, linux is doing it better all the time. I have memory leaks in my X (fixed but i was to lazy to upgrade) and encounter a lot of crashes even there. I protest to ppl who still talk about bluescreens. The kernel is working. it is crashable, but hardly. But I cant think of any situation, where somebody, even if he considers Windows as the best choice available, doesnt have some story about XP nagging him. It's like this: most people dont expect it to get any better. There will be holes. There are always holes. And a common enemy unites a community. Thats why all people are still canting the song of "Screen the Blue", even if it is already a historic thing. Yesterday it crashed entirely, today it crashes randomly, tomorrow it will run and run infested forever. * I know how they come, this was rhetoric.
Here is a Vista Tech Article that I wrote. I know that this is a shameless plug, but it does touch on the changes MSFT made on TCP-IP, Terminal Services, and VPN. There are some notes on navigation stuff as well. Stewart
It's more stable then expected, but most critics (at least security critics) still say it's FAR buggier then it should be.
Either way though it's only the first RC, there's almost definatly 2 behind it coming down the pipe, so it's not big deal. still Vista will only give us marginal improvements on XP except graphics then demand double the hardware resources, which is completely unfair because at the same time I'll have to still keep my Anti-virus on the system, my Firewall, and so on, so the little benefits they give will not be enough.
The funniest thing is Directx 10 will not be adopted like people think, sure for office programs it will, but when Doom 4 ships will carmack say "fuck the Xp users" or rather "oh there's about equal users for xp and vista.. why not just do Directx9?" Somehow I think the latter is what most companies will say. It's one thing to adopt a better API, it's quite another thing to screw over half the buying public, when on a PC you already need every sale you can get.
Article has no information content. Don't bother reading it.
(omg i wanted plaintext) ..MS Windows doesnt crash that often anymore.
Just a joke: Win9x was more secure than anything, any hacker logging in couldnt last in the system longer than 4 hours.
Seriously: Explorer sometimes does crash.
Some Applications do, likely some of the Company with the red A.
However - not the kernel.
It is really HARD to crash xp kernel with rock solid software.
However, not exiting a DirectX Black Screen anymore, Iconmess on the Desktop, random crashes from Explorer, High CPU Usage from some programs (again Explorer) at random points, high infestation rate (not on my machine but i have to fix a lot of them) - by programs not even INSTALLED by the user (where do they come from?*), and last but not least: speed issues over ethernet, Memory consumtion increase, bad responses to certain events like "moving a mouse" after 32h of running, and mostly the speed breakdown if many processes are running because of the "Great Eternal Caching Of The Swap"...
I cant say, linux is doing it better all the time. I have memory leaks in my X (fixed but i was to lazy to upgrade) and encounter a lot of crashes even there. I protest to ppl who still talk about bluescreens. The kernel is working. it is crashable, but hardly.
But I cant think of any situation, where somebody, even if he considers Windows as the best choice available, doesnt have some
story about XP nagging him. It's like this: most people dont expect it to get any better.
There will be holes.
There are always holes.
And a common enemy unites a community.
Thats why all people are still canting the song of "Screen the Blue", even if it is already a historic thing.
Yesterday it crashed entirely, today it crashes randomly, tomorrow it will run and run infested forever.
* I know how they come, this was rhetoric.
I prefer Macs for personal tasks and use Linux on servers, but like most people, I have to interact with Windows from time to time. It's like death and taxes: unavoidable. My take on Windows is that since most of the world's personal computers run Windows, improvements to Windows are a good thing. If people suffer less annoyance, less hassle and less stress, they may gain more productivity, and perhaps even a happier computing experience. Just because I've found Windows to be lacking doesn't mean that I would wish a crappy OS on the vast majority of computer users.
Sometimes I get the feeling that many Mac and Linux users wish Windows users ill, as if they deserve punishment from on high.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'm pretty sure I haven't had my computer on for 71+ days, but there's no point in wasting electricity if one doesn't need to have it on overnight as my gaming rig isn't a server, if it was, I'd be running linux.
The reasons for leaving your computer on are place keeping and time savings. The typical Windoze using "information worker" will go get coffee while their computer boots. It won't be finished scanning for viruses and loading all the other utilities by the time the user comes back to a clean slate they will have to fill with all of their work. Me, I open a screen and move a mouse and everything I was working on is right where I left it. A system with functional power management takes care of saving electricity without bothering the user. Laptops have been able to do this for a decade with APM, unless they are crippled by buggy M$ software. Desktop support is not as good because the dominant OS does not work. I've moved almost all of my computing to laptops and left the desktop machines as servers. They use less power and boot times are a distant memory.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, all those people who claim "XP is rock-solid for me" are quick to add "the only problems I've had were due to faulty hardware" or "the only problems were due to third-party device drivers".
I use Linux, except for a couple of games that don't run under Wine. And I have *NEVER* had any crash under Linux that I could claim to be caused by faulty hardware. If the hardware is faulty, the computer will not turn on, or will not boot, will not find the hard disk or keyboard, etc. Detecting faulty hardware is done by the BIOS, not by system crashes. Some times, with very cheap fans, the fan bearings will stick and the CPU will overheat, that's true. But in those cases, rebooting will do you no good, the CPU won't start working again until it cools down.
As for third party device drivers, the only one I have in Linux is for the NVidia card. It has given me some trouble a few times, after I did kernel upgrades. Then I have to reinstall the driver, but the system will never freeze when running normally.
Defective hardware or device drivers don't cause the system to crash; they may not let the system start up but they will not kick in while the system is running and cause it to freeze. Not under Linux.
Defective hardware causes problems like the ones you get in a car. If the ignition breaks down, your car will stop working. Getting out of the car and then getting back in will not make your car work again. Hardware faults are like that. When XP crashes, if you turn off the power, turn it back on, reboot and the system starts working again, then it was certainly not a hardware failure.
Then, if not a hardware failure, what caused it? Why is it that one gets more XP crashes on cheap hardware than in better systems? Answer: because it has race conditions that are better handled by faster CPUs. It's not that you get less crashes on "better" hardware under XP, you get less crashes on faster hardware, which is generally considered "better".
One of the most common causes of crashes is when two different kernel routines which are incompatible with each other try to run at the same time. With a fast CPU, there is a higher probability that the first one will finish before the other one kicks in. If you look into the Linux kernel discussions, you'll notice how much talk there is about avoiding race conditions and deadlocks. When there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people working together, there is a higher chance that some very obscure race condition that occurs rarely will be detected by someone looking over the code. That's why Linux can use older hardware that will not run under XP, not because Linux is leaner or XP is bloated, but because the Linux kernel has been carefully combed with a fine tooth comb by many people.
It seems people saying that "Windows never crashes these days" are getting a lot of mod points in this thread. It's absolutely true that Windows has gotten a _lot_ better in this regard. However, of all people I know, the ones who use Windows are the only ones I hear complaining about the stability of their systems. I know Windows has mysteriously rebooted my system a few times. My mom has a computer that often doesn't get to the login screen before it BSODs, but it will run fine for days under Ubuntu. Windows crashes are not gone yet, despite what your individual experiences may be. Also, even if they had been completely eliminated in one or two versions of Windows, Microsoft's reputation for making unstable operating systems would still have been deserved - because of all the others.
Secondly, there's a difference between the system not crashing and the system working well. If the system gets infested by malware, but keeps doing what the user wants it to be doing, the user may not notice anything wrong, but it's still a bad system. Microsoft seems to be very serious about improving this in Vista, introducing features like address space layout randomization, which helps a lot against certain types of attack, and WHICH MANY LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS STILL DON'T INCLUDE! (I'm a long time OpenBSD user, and I don't sleep soundly at night without the pro-active security measures that make buffer overruns (one of the most common classes of vulnerability) nearly impossible to carry out).
The main problem that people around me have with Windows these days is usability. The knowledgeable folks complain about the constant stream of patches, virus scanner updates, the need to periodically scan the system for malware, etc. and the fact that they have to do this not only on their own systems, but also on those of their non-knowledgeable friends and family. The non-knowledgeable complain about the difficulty of certain tasks: getting the new printer to work, getting pictures off the digital camera and on a CD-R, not being able to figure out how to tell the machine which of the available connections to use, etc.
What I see when I look at Windows is lots of ugly grey boxes with christmas tree decorations around them, and about the only thing that is consistant among applications is that questions will have [Ok] and [Cancel] for answers, being less than informative about what's actually going to happen when you click either button (and yes, users do get confused by that). And there's no package manager that provides a single point to get all your software updates from, let alone one that automatically tracks dependencies.
I notice this, because on other systems (OS X, GNOME, KDE), these situations are noteworthy; typically, the system has some good looking theme applied, applications are built on a toolkit that handles sensible layout of widgets, and buttons have text on them that tells you what's going to happen when you click that button (thank you, Apple, for your Human Interface Guidelines). Also, my printer and scanner are immediately recognized and usable when I plug them in, and so is my webcam under Linux. Other people have reported similar experiences (the story is different for wireless network cards, but the situation seems to be improving rapidly). Depending on what system you use, all this may or may not be the case (many, many Linux distros suck at usability), you may or may not have a good package manager (OS X doesn't, for example), and there may or may not be a constant flood of updates (Ubuntu Dapper has one, Debian stable doesn't).
Alright, this is long enough. I'm not going to talk about anything else.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I do not know enough about linux. I'll admit: I can't even install my sound card without following a tutorial step-by-step. But hey, if youse guys can get me a stable linux distro that will run CS:S, NWN2, BF2, WoW, GW and some others (easily without a pain-in-the-ass configuration process that takes 700 ungodly hours to complete, especially when you do not know the 1st thing about linux), I'll convert me and all my friends to linux.
That being said. I use Windows (XP SP2), and I use Linux (Ubuntu 6.0.6). I think they are both good. They have their uses, and as of now Linux just cannot replace Windows for gaming.
"The reverse side also has a reverse side." - Japanese Proverb
I would put the blame squarely on norton there. It's a memory hogging piece of trash. I have a box i use for development (vs2005 express, visual C++ 2003, a bunch of older ms dev tools, e-tax) and it runs for months without problems
GREAT, another 'holier than thou' /.er. Just what the world fricken needs.
It not hard to build a solid system, just keep away from buggy drivers and software.
Think about that for a moment. Consider exactly how software should ever be capable of crashing the operating system, the very platform on which it is running. If poorly-written (or malicious) applications can crash the entire operating system, the operating system is quite simply not doing its job.
But recently we got an industrial control system from an outside supplier that runs in XP. The manufacturer has given very strict instructions on how to operate that system, such as definitely no connections to outside networks, defragment the drive regularly, and reboot at least once every week. I asked them why the reboots and they answered Because. Or Else. The only official answer I got was that XP needs regular defrags and a reboot at least once a week to work reliably.
Why? Why reboot? Why defrag? Why doesn't Linux need defrags? As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to defrag a Linux drive. I don't know how to defrag a VAX/VMS drive. What have I been missing?
They've got a lot of work ahead of them if they expect anyone to upgrade existing equipment. Or for that matter, if they expect people to not complain about Vista feeling slower on their new machines (where it came preinstalled) than XP did on their old machines.
I tried it out on a very capable home-built machine that 's less than 3 weeks old (which Vista rates a 4.2). It felt slower than XP on the same hardware even using the "Windows Classic" theme with all the GUI bells and whistles turned off.
If that kind of performance drag still exists in what ends up on el-cheapo Dells, the negative buzz will spread very fast.
~Philly
Then you should've been fired from your job, cause you were doing something wrong. I work for an oil company, and we do very data-intensive work with our workstations (3D seismic/geological modeling), and they have uptimes of 60 days (we deploy windows patches bi-monthly). If you were having to shut down at night and turn on in the morning, something was very, very wrong.
Also, as many people have said before, if you're using Norton, you don't get to call yourself an IT guy. That is pretty much one of the worst programs ever. It leaks memory like a sieve and isn't even very good at finding viruses.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
Will these FINALLY be replaced by consistent, generic configuration tools offered by the OS, the drivers just sitting somewhere there behind a sane API, Linux-style? Explaining WLAN configuration stuff to Windows users is painful because every case is different.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
it is the devil they know and msft *stuff* provides their work, self esteem and paycheck.
we are implementing an mrp system at work. i went to a quality training to see if the system could handle the work of a program i designed to yield production level quality information.
the instructor asked me if the current program was "real." no, lady, its fake. -lol-
bottom line, people are emotionally infested in their core area of expertise. most folks *know* windows, warts and all, so they invest in windows.
don't be surprised, a new poll came out that said 43% of americans currently believe saddam hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
my guess is the vast majority of this 42% of americans use windows. i couldn't resist.
It is rather obvious what your problem is. You are probably running a resident program (this may be even something as benign as Office update or something similar that came bundled with one of your software packages) which has a memory leak. Windows itself has not such a problem since early Beta. It would be probably wise to check on latest updates not only for Windows but also for Office and other software packages. Also, please note that Dreamweaver is a nice concept, but a very poor implementation app (i.e. the app totally hangs while trying to connect to ftp, so if you are offline, you can forget about Dreamweaver for the next couple of minutes unless you want to resort to the three-finger-salute), so it will likely be sluggish no matter what kind of computer you use. I'd also drop Norton crap and get the free AVG anti-virus software, it is much less intrusive and heck, you certainly can't beat the price.
As far as the infection is concerned, I wouldn't exclude that just yet, since other computers that may be inside your domain (and therefore unaffected by the external firewall) may infect your computer... Also, think if you had ever used your USB flash drive, floppy, and/or other stuff on another machine and then hooked it up on your machine...
Finally, sometimes slowdowns are a direct result of a misconfigured motherboard (although I've never seen them deteriorating over time as you've suggested).
"still Vista will only give us marginal improvements on XP"
I have to use XP at work. I wonder if Vista will FINALLY let a corporate user log in without pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE first as Win2k and XP does. How primative.
A sad story indeed, Norton seems to adopt the methods used by malware companies.
Having been pretty happy with their antivirus for the last few generations I updated to nav2006 last week when my subscription ran out without second thought.
Buying, downloading and installing went pretty smooth, but after a restart Norton had disabled the Windows Security Center and replaced it with their own Protection Center (??!!) I wasn't aware having asked for it in the first place. It didn't provide anything new. It didn't just put a small notification icon in right part of the taskbar but grabbed a huge chunk of the main pane. Where the default security center warnings were discreet, norton really wants to grab your attention with big colorful dialogs. You couldn't disable it. Nortons support pages didn't prove helpful. I uninstalled NAV and reinstalled, this time making sure that no checkboxes we're ticked - that didn't seem to bother it at all...
It took the most of an evening, but you can get rid of it: run services.msc, disable the "Norton Protection Center" service, and reenable the default one.
It all brought back sad memories of Real Player back when it peaked, but having payed for the experience this time really made me feel like an idiot...
Norton allows you to run the full version for 15 days, so do yourself a favor and find out if you're willing to put up with it, before throwing money at it.
If you expect it to crash every two minutes and it only crashes every 3 then yes, it does surpass expectations but that doesn't mean it is any good.
I remember several years ago when I was trying to get some tech support via email and didn't get any help at all. Afterwards they send an email satisfaction survey and one of the questions was, "Did we meet your expectations?" I knew going in that the chances they would be of any help at all were very slim, so yes they did meet my expectations -- as low as they were.
I sent them back a response telling them how poorly worded and meaningless their question was. I never heard back from them -- once again meeting my expectations...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
1) I use a laptop (HP Compaq nc6220) on a docking station on my desk, and at home on my wireless network, VPNing into the office. If I just sleep my laptop on the docking station, pop it out, and take it home, I have all sorts of problems with Outlook through the VPN. It hangs, runs super slow, can't find network drives, etc. Other networked apps (Dreamweaver, Explorer) run just fine. It's just Outlook. And if I log out/log in, the problem is fixed.
2) When I close the lid, it takes around 5-10 seconds between lid close and actual sleep...the machine just sits there thinking for that time. In constrast my personal computer (an iBook G4) sleeps and wakes almost instantly. It's a minor thing but 5-10 seconds feels like a long time to just sit there waiting at the end of the day.
3) Working with big (~60MB) PDF files on our site today, I and my users were running into all sorts of incomprehensible memory errors when trying to view them in IE using the Adobe Reader plugin. Turns out the IE temporary internet files folder was choking due to the file size. First of all this just shouldn't happen (plenty of space on the HD) and second of all the error handling was ridiculous--we were literally getting assembly memory addresses in the error box. It took forever to troubleshoot.
People may have detailed advice on how to fix or prevent these issues in the future. I'd appreciate hearing it, but that's not really the point of my post. I'm not a Windows whiz, but I'm not a dummy either, and these (and other) little problems annoy me and are difficult to get rid of.
Also people might say that these are not XP issues. Aren't they though? Outlook 2003, IE 6, and a Cisco VPN are not exactly exotic, unsupported software. The hardware is from one of the biggest companies in the business. XP is a mature operating system. Yet these sorts of minor problems persist. It's not the BSOD (haven't seen one of those for many years) so I guess XP didn't actually "crash". But they are real problems on a pretty standardly-configured XP machine that is just a few months old.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Windoze requires a daily reboot...
The problem with facetious claims like this, is millions of "Windoze" users know you're wrong. I call your personal integrity into question. You're lying. Intentionally.
Consider
Does you, the
\
I had to reply to the summary on the home page of Slashdot. It says this: Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
I recently started using Mandriva Linux. I have never seen software crash so often. Not even in the MS-DOS 2.11 days did software crash this much.
Then you should've been fired from your job, cause you were doing something wrong. I work for an oil company,
Bullshit. IT is supposed to work for me, not the other way around. I never did anything to my computer but I should have been able to do whatever I could. Blaming the user for using their machine is a pretty sorry excuse for softare that simply does not do what it should. Given your attitude, the only kind of oil your company sells comes from snakes. In my brief stay at Murphy Exploration, I mostly saw Unix workstations for that kind of work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Funny, that's not what OS News is reporting...
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15753
Vista: 'Not Yet Ready for Prime Time'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 2006-09-06 18:24:19 UTC
Two negative reviews of Vista RC1. First off, CRN says: "Microsoft is making its first Vista release candidate and pricing information more broadly available to partners and consumers this week. Solution providers who have seen it say it's not yet ready for prime time." Our favourite Microsoft Apple Microsoft zealot Paul Thurrot posted the 2nd part of his RC1 review: "Overall, Windows Vista is a stunning bit of work. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and Microsoft has never been very good at consistency and that final bit of polish that separates something competent from something wonderful." In the meantime, one of Vista's lead developers has left Microsoft.
I haven't seen a BSOD in over 5 years, but I have made it a habit to shut down every night and restart the machine in the morning. Otherwise the machine gets slower and slower, and starts exhibiting odd behaviour.
My guess is there are still too many WinXP/Win32 programs that allocate resources which don't get properly released. I can't see Vista fixing that, even if every single bit of the entire OS and all it's applications were recoded in C#.net. As long as apps need to communicate, one of them needs to create the shared objects, which means they can leak.
The most important change I hope to see with WinVista is security improvements, not stability. Running a post-Win2K server with one service is stable enough for the reboot-once-a-week datacenter, and every box in those datacenters gets rebooted including the mainframes, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and HPUX boxen.
If nothing else, a reboot is a precautionary measure to make sure that all config and services is running as intended. Even experienced SA's will periodically forget to do something like a /etc/rc.d/some-service restart after changing config files.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't have normal crashes with my PC's, the only time I've had issues is with games, but that is the games fault and not MS's.
Now, if they could just design a simple UI that didn't so many bells and whistles on it that it might have to display a warning for people with epilepsy problems.
They did. It's called WinFLP.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Don't hold your breath, I have a feeling that nugget will still be there at least for Vista.
I'm still waiting for biometrics where I sit infront of a computer my personal login immediatly gets set up before I turn on the monitor. My data is pulled up, and if I want I can lock it so someone else can look at the code in my seat.
Notwithstanding the large amounts of virii and security issues that must be dodged, Windows XP has been stable and rock solid for a number of years.
I have one token XP box on my network and it does stay working for long periods of time. The reason it stays working is that I don't connect it to the internet unless I'm downloading patches, and then it's NAT'd, firewalled, monitored and just as quickly disconnected. So, yeah, if you let Windows run apart from the internet, it's a great operating system.
I don't think it's entirely fair to separate the security issues out and claim Windows is a stable system. In the absense of the security freak show it's relatively stable, but that incremental improvement in function from a company the size of MSFT, with the resources at their disposal, is, in my opinion, a weak effort at best. Especially considering how much you're paying for Windows and the anal rapage EULA you have to accept. I'm not sure, taken as a whole, the issue of stability is much of a mitigating factor.
If that's the best jusitication Windows users can come up with, that's pretty lame. Even if Vista was the most stable OS ever fielded in the history of computing, I'd still be asking myself why I'm paying for something MSFT should have been doing all along.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You "can do" a lot of things to a computer. Doesn't mean you should.
I don't sell snake oil, I sell bridges. I've got one that runs Linux, so it never collapses. You want it? I'll sell it real cheap.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
I have never had any issues running Symantec AV Corporate. Obviously, if you are running the home version called Norton AV on business hardware, YES you DO deserve to be fired!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I've never messed around with AV Corporate. I had Norton AV eat a computer and freeze a couple others and have refused to use anything related since. I was just responding to his earlier post about his computer having a memory leak and blaming it on XP.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
You ./linux geeks can't get this.
Vista is arriving (you colud bash forever but..), Mac OSX is on his way to update.
Linux Dekstop will R.I.P. or zombie forever...
will never get a chance to get critical mass for desktop systems.
Rommel said: Never fight a battle where there is nothing to win
My 0.025 cents(*)
* due to euro conversion
It's been running great for me. I installed it onto a separate IDE drive, thinking I would be right back over to XP after a couple days like I was with Beta 2, but thus far I am quite impressed with what I am seeing.
Note: I did disable the user access control. I don't have to see the annoying popups flashing my screen like I did before, also I am running on modern hardware. (Athlon 4400+ X2, 2 gigs ram, ATI 1600XT). I downloaded the ATI Vista RC1 drivers and they seem to work fine.
The performance doesn't feel degraded like Beta 2 felt, from XP. I have all the graphics options cranked up and it feels snappy and responsive.
Programs that I use frequently work great. I spend a lot of time doing Java dev on Linux server, so I have Putty open w/20 browser windows. My email client is GMail and I use IM clients from most of the networks. Office 03 runs fine, haven't had a glitch yet with that. On my free time I do play World of Warcraft, and once I disabled the UAC and installed the ATI drivers, it works great. I can tab out without any problems, and I have fewer problems tabbing in and out of the game than before. I don't know if it's my imagination , but the game actually feels faster and I have less stutters when tabbing in from another program. (I think the process affinity would attach to the second core.. not sure what exactly was causing it in XP, but I haven't yet run into that problem).
I disabled the Sleep functionality over time, the monitor will turn off after an hour.. but when I leave the 'sleep after x-time' , it has a problem waking up. It's likely drivers or something on my hardware that's causing problems.
I know this post will probably get modded down, as it's not a 'I hate Microsoft Ubuntu4tehwin!!11' , but I would go so far to say that I will likely just keep using RC1 until Vista ships, and I don't think I will have a problem going out and buying the OS once it hits the shelves. (OEM of course!)
If I can give one word of advice, is to disable the UAC until programs your running frequently have had time to test their own QC against running in a more protected environment.
BTW, I grabbed a copy of RC1 off a Torrent and installed it with my Beta2 key without any problems.
It's easy to be purely theoretical about how an OS should never "allow" software to cause a crash, but in doing that you hand-wave the the necessity of giving certain types of software direct access to hardware via drivers.
If you'll examine my posting again, you'll notice I emphasized the word "software" rather than the word "drivers" when quoting the GP. And you'll also notice I never remotely suggested this was supposed to be easy.
Exactly what is it you think the OS should be doing to prevent badly written software from asking a potentially badly written driver to do with the hardware?
I'll answer that (hopefully rhetorical) question with a counter: How should I know, and why should I care? I only stated that the job of the OS is to prevent such problems. It's not easy, as you mentioned, and obviously I don't have the solution ready to post here. If you're suggesting it's intractible, I'll simply disagree and leave it at that. But even if that's true, it just means that an ideally "solid" OS is an impossible goal; yet it's a goal nonetheless.
You want full abstraction? Meticulous bounds checking?
Well, yes, actually. Both of those would be reasonable expectations of a "solid" operating system. And many more checks and balances to ensure the OS doesn't allow applications to crash it. Of course this may impact performance, perhaps significantly, but so be it; I for one would have many uses for such a stable OS despite the performance hit.
There's unfortunately no easy way to mitigate bad software occasionally kicking the hardware in the crotch without incurring a significant performance penalty.
There you go again, talking about how it's not easy. An OS is a complex piece of code; I don't expect a "solid" OS to be thrown together by a couple of amateurs in a a few months. I have no idea why you think I've suggested it should be easy.
When the OS depends on that hardware for basic function (e.g. video card), there's generally no adequate recourse but a core dump and reboot.
I wholeheartedly agree. Hardware-related problems obviously trump the OS. Generally speaking, the hardware is the platform for the OS, and the OS is the platform for the software. If the OS fails, the software will be unstable; if the hardware fails, the OS will be unstable.
Actually, I'm not even sure what the point is of your reply, other than to proclaim that it's not easy to create a "solid" OS (which I certainly never disputed).
Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
This thing is on 24/7. I reboot when appropriate (like the second Tuesday of every month). I run normal stuff, mostly, and some stuff most normally do not. I don't play games on it, however. This thing crashes maybe once every six months, but to tell you the truth, I don't remember the last time it did, though I do remember last time DSL stopped working. In truth, the electricity to the house goes out more often than this PC crashes with XP Pro. My "other" PC with XP Pro hooked to the TV has, to my knowledge, never crashed, though I don't use it nearly as often.
In my last job where there were 500 machines and 40 or so servers, the servers rarely went down. Users, on the other hand, would sometimes have problems and need to reboot, but it didn't take long to detect a pattern. Why DID they have 10,000 messages in their inbox? And why DID they need to open 20 programs at once? Funny that when we'd finally swap out their entire PC for a new one (because "I have a bad PC that always crashes.") the same thing happened on the new one.
So what is with this "Windows always crashes" nonsense? It is either the inexperience and inability of the user to exert a modicum of sense coupled with an insistence to blame anything and anyone other than themselves (an all too common character trait for people full of themselves who know next to nothing), or it's the tiresome knee-jerk automatic pilot response of the anti-MS crowd who are just so angry that Windows has been so massively successful.
So go back to the ceaseless tweaking of your MS-DOS look-alike character-based Unix clone. The one where you recompile the kernel, load device drivers manually or in massively complex autoexec.bat-like files, the one that takes five miniutes to boot up minimum and then rewards you with a $ prompt. Whoopee. There goes the penguin. Waddle on, where domination is found--in Antarctica.
Really pathetic. Check this out http://blogs.msdn.com/embedded/archive/2005/03/23/ 401377.aspx
Amount of time and energy require to secure it and protect from viruses is pathetic.
for full release
service pack 2
hotfix # 273
Then I will think about buying a new PC
until then I will keep XP, 2k pro, sudder 98
and my linux boxes
--
The more I learn the more I realize, people are stupid.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
So systems CAN run pretty much forever.
-- ac at work
"Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC."
All I heard was I LOVE LINUX I LOVE LINUX I LOVE LINUX I LOVE LINUX.
An AC complains, "Then label me a troll because my PC becomes sluggish after being on for 24 hours. I only use Commercial software (MS Office, MS Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, Norton's AntiVirus). [...] The slow downs gets real bad after 24 hours without a reboot. If I right-click on the desktop and got New... it will take over 30 seconds before the next menu appears. This is on a 1 year old P4 2.8GHz"
That's all very typical of a system infected with a recent version of Norton Antivirus. I've seen NAV slow down a P4-3.5GHz/512mb RAM system to literally XT speeds -- it took up to 30 seconds for a simple dialog box to finish drawing, and as long as FOUR MINUTES (I timed it) for it to respond to a mouse click.
I uninstalled NAV, and the problem went away.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And hell, looking at your posting history it is clear that you are a Microsoft apologist, whether by monetary compensation or conviction is hard to say.
Just yesterday I had Win2k look up completely because a badly-coded, but very widespread application in Spain (Infolex) decided to look up. There was no way to kill the task or bring the machine into some form of responsive state.
The fact that an application is able to do this shows how far behind Microsoft still is when it comes to stability. So to those of you who everytime that a Microsoft story comes up, post how great it is and how you haven't had a crash in years, I say, either stop spreading false information or start living in the real world.
Btw: Microsoft's own crash statistics as gathered from logs sent to them show that PCs crashing and crashing consitently remains part of the Windows experience. I wish I could find the article where a high-ranking Windows executive said the same to news.news.com.
Later.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
I see. Then let me ask another question: why is the software running in any Microsoft OS always so "buggy", if the OS is not to blame? How is it that I can download and install random applications from Sourceforge and run it in Linux without problem, yet XP seems to have so many problems in running applications from one of the leading aerospace companies in the world, which is the case in my company?
In VAX/VMS I ran open source applications that weren't always so kosher, at first they came from DECUS (Digital Equipment Co. User Society) and later from other sources in the internet. Never had any problem. In our Linux server, the users run every sort of applications they download from who knows where. Our policy is to let them do it, we never had any problem with that. But XP must be kept locked into a strictly maintained configuration. Why didn't our VMS software vendors ever warn us against installing third party software in our machines?
From all these discussions, one conclusion is obvious: either developers who write applications for Linux and VMS are incredibly superior, or XP is an inferior OS. In any case, I have deep misgivings about this use of XP in mission critical applications. I have warned my managers, in writing, about this. The fact is, it doesn't matter if it's the applications or the underlying OS which is at fault, from the experience I have had so far, XP is inferior to either Linux or VMS when one needs reliability.
Get it through your head!
Alpha means: "We're still working on it, but it kind of works, so go play with it."
Beta means: "Nothing major's going to change, but we want you to test it and help us shake out the bugs."
Release candidate means: "None of our Beta testers or developers can break it anymore."
If bugs are found in rc1, you fix them and put out rc2. You keep doing this until an rc -- no matter how late, could be rc15 -- survives for a fixed amount of time (usually measured in months) without any bugs reported at all. At that point, that particular rc is released, exactly as it was.
There is some fuzziness about what's pre-alpha, alpha, or beta. It's my opinion that MS betas are alpha quality, compared to the rest of the industry. But putting out a "release candidate" with known bugs is pure marketing bullshit, to keep them from getting crucified for further delays. When they "release" software, that's more marketing bullshit -- XP was certainly a release candidate before SP1, and arguably before SP2. Would you please stop defending their marketing bullshit?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's Twitter for ya... he can't believe anyone could possibly have a stable Windows box. He'd probably blow a gasket at my XP box with its 11.5 month uptime record (only ended due to a lightning storm), or even at this Win98 box that right now has been up since [checking] July 20th.
Here's a tip, fanboyz... if you can't get something stable, seek advice from someone who can. Maybe the problem isn't the OS, but shitty hardware, or [gasp] your own ignorance. After all, if us WinDLLs users can't get linux to run stable, you claim it's because we're too stupid to set it up right... well, it works both ways!!
(Oh, and I have a couple linux systems and a Mac in the house too, so don't go accusing me of being a Windoze bigot. I'll try any of 'em.)
Besides, if you want to get into an uptime peeing contest, Netware regularly measures it in years, not mere days or months.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista:
Wireless networks:
Wireless Networking support in Windows Vista has been upgraded. Support for wireless networks is built into the network stack itself, and does not emulate wired connections, as was the case with previous versions of Windows. This allows implementation of wireless-specific features such as larger frame sizes and optimized error recovery procedures. It will also be easier to find wireless networks in range and tell which networks are open and which are closed. Hidden wireless networks, which do not advertise their Service set identifier (SSID) will be better supported. Security for wireless networks is being improved with improved support for newer wireless standards like 802.11i. EAP Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS) is the default authentication mode. Connections will be made at the most secure connection level supported by the wireless access point. WPA2 can be used even in ad-hoc mode. Windows Vista will also provide a Fast Roaming service that will allow users to move from one access point to another without loss of connectivity. Preauthentication with the new wireless access point will be used to retain the connectivity. The wireless card may also be virtualized to connect to multiple wireless networks simultaneously.
Audio:
Windows Vista features a completely re-written audio stack designed to provide low-latency 32-bit floating point audio and new audio APIs created by a team including Steve Ball and Larry Osterman[19][20]. There are three major new API components to the Vista audio architecture:
Multimedia Device API - For enumerating and managing audio endpoints.
Device Topology API - For discovering the internals of an audio card's topology.
Windows Audio Session API - Very low level API for rendering audio, render/capture audio streams, adjust volume etc. This API also provides extremely low latency for audio professionals.
All the existing audio APIs have been re-plumbed to use these APIs internally, for Vista, all audio goes through these three APIs, so that most applications "just work".
A completely new set of user interface sounds are being introduced, including a new startup sound created with the help of King Crimson's Robert Fripp[21].
The new audio stack is run at user level, thus increasing performance and stability.
It also allows controlling system-wide volume or volume of individual audio devices and even individual applications separately. This feature can be used from the new Volume Control windows or programmatically using the overhauled audio API. Different sounds can be redirected to different audio devices as well.
Sound Recorder has been replaced with a new application, Windows Audio Recorder, which supports recording WMA, and can record clips of any length.
Built-in support for microphone arrays, which will let a user connect multiple microphones to a single system, so that the inputs can be combined into a single, higher-quality source. A likely implementation of this is for laptops to incorporate multiple microphones at different points.[22]
Although frankly, I've found sound cards always worked better if you don't install the manufacturers utilities & drivers. Creative drivers especially were complete crap.
As for graphics cards, Widnows has always supported them for everything you need out of the box, but gamers will always want the latest and greatest drivers from the manufacturer, which will inevitable have their own control centres for the latest and greatest features. Although these are also usually crap. Nvidia aren't bad, but I don't know how ATi gets away with the horribly buggy mess that is the Catalyst control centre.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Twitter, foe to all things Microsoft, says, "Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
twitter@gift:~$ uptime
08:37:14 up 71 days, 16:53, 6 users, load average: 0.28, 0.50, 0.38 "
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal. What am I doing wrong??
Oh, and it spent most of the past month doing work that had CPU usage pegged at a continuous 100%.
BTW, the Win98 box I'm using right now is on day 49 since last restart (no, it doesn't suffer from the rollover bug... that needs a hardware bug to manifest), and yeah, it is getting to where I probably should restart it, if only to clear out the resource heap.
(All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
W2K was fantastic. Only this year did I finally upgrade to W2K3, because some software required it.
Have to disagree with you on XP. I've seen it crash on many computers regularly. (A select few of those boxes has another OS which did not crash.) I wouldn't touch it. And haven't.
There is no compelling reason for Vista. I've already begun migrating to Ubuntu and OS X, by attrition.
after reading that article I think I threw up in my mouth a little, and now I have a bad taste of a poor attempt at propaganda.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
I agree with a lot of people here in that 2000/XP is pretty damn stable. In short, if your XP is crashing its probably you doing something you shouldn't or because you have shitty hardware, NOT because MS made a shitty OS. I'm just as critical of them as everyone else, but at least I can give them credit where credit is due.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Welcome to the wonderful world of twitter; where FUD is acceptable if he spouts it.
I thought he'd improved a little last night when he stopped using the "M$" and "Windoze" bullshit, but clearly he had just taken his medication.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I will call it whatever the hell I want to call it. People should take me seriously for my argument, especially in a place like Slashdot where argument should be more important than presentation.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Except that half of an argument is about presentation. If every other word I typed had a spelling mistake in it, you wouldn't take me seriously, would you? Going back to childish terms like Windoze or Winblows (while fun as a joke) is not a way to convince other people about your argument; it merely makes you look like an idiotic fan boy that's completely biased and doesn't acknowledge the facts.
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
In other words, "Works for me, therefore you're lying." Uh, sure. If you think that's a valid argument, I have a cold fusion reactor I'd like to sell you.
And if brand-new, name-brand PC hardware is "faulty", then what sort of magic hardware do you need in order for it to work right? Linux on the *same hardware* isn't nearly as bad.
Or maybe you're defining "faulty hardware" as "any hardware that doesn't run Windows XP stably". In that case, your claim is a tautology.
I'd also say that an OS that tries to be friendly to the average man(like Windows, Mac, and some Linux flavors) should be easier to set up, make secure, etc. than the Linux and BSD flavors that don't cater to those users. And this is neither here nor there but I want real orthogonal persistence.
Another random fact I noticed is that the pro-Linux extremists like twitter always seem to have a cluster of anti-twitter types following them(you're not one of them because you actually have a valid point, these types respond to just about every post he makes with the exact same crap) and yet the people like Overly Critical Guy(who, 95% of the time, formulates his opinions by the simple formula of inverting what people like twitter say) have nothing such. But again, neither here nor there.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"However, both LeBlanc and Hoffman noted that Windows Vista is still lacking driver support, a particularly sore subject because Vista has been billed as an OS in which devices will work as soon as you connect them without any further hassle, Hoffman said."
I always thought they wanted to include that feature in Win98!? Back then it was called "plug and play"!
Why do brief? *ponders*
Because it was a temp job, stupid.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
Last week a classmate of mine installed XP and it made him reboot -=16=- times because of all the "patches" required. He started from a brand new CD on a brand new laptop. A live CD would be a good move for M$, but a net install is the best because CDs get old fast. I thought that the five or six reboots required by Win98 and W2K was bad. I've never seen a stable distribution of GNU/Linux that needed more than one reboot on install.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I find that 99% of things that ask for a reboot don't really need it, even in XP. I mean, I plugin my webcam, the drivers install, and it asks me to reboot, when I can bloody well see that the camera is working! Why? ...
DRM?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It seems to me that slashdot is no longer Linux pro but microsoft pro. And the people saying that windows XP never crashed is somewhat true but why forget the frequent reboots
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal. ... All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS. ... What am I doing wrong??
You are lying or you don't know when the thing reboots. If you are telling the truth you missed a year's worth of "critical" updates which required reboots. Given the rate of exploitation of those and other flaws, your little XP box has probably been rebooted several times over by other people who want to clean out the cruft you leave running.
About the only thing you said that's true is the bit about DOS being more stable than any M$ OS released after. The funny thing is that with each release M$ claims the new version of Windoze is more stable than the last. If that's true, DOS had 0 days of uptime. Of course, that's not true just like it's not true that M$ has improved stability with any release. It's all been buggy junk that's gotten worse as they continue to buy and kludge new parts onto it without ever really integrating any of it. They do not and never will have the resources to fix the problems the way the free software people can.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"you basically eliminated any possibility that anyone would take you seriously as a professional by using a word like 'Windoze.'"
wow! i can even see the guy shivering of fear: "boo hoo! the slashdot crowd don't take me seriously as a professional"...
I don't feel like it...
i can see a zillion XP users defending their choice on here
but in every post I see, "well maintained WindowsXP" does not go down for months
I have been using linux since 2003, and let me tell you the diff between windows and linux
linux needs no maintenance, just run update check regularly. thats it.
and if u r so worried about that rare reboot or cash. use CentOS or Slackware
The XP machine nest to my desk at work was last rebooted almost five months ago. And that was when we moved offices.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Oh yeah, there's always someone claiming "solid" system stability for Windoze. Keep telling yourself that and I'll keep using the perfectly good computers folks like you throw away. Putting any distribution of GNU/Linux on the thing magically fixes 90% of the problems, which is amazing given how sorry home electronics really are. Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
twitter@gift:~$ uptime
08:37:14 up 71 days, 16:53, 6 users, load average: 0.28, 0.50, 0.38
twitter@gift:~$
And that's on a laptop that IS faulty. I bought it used and crucial structural members had failed, so it flexes if you carry it around much but it works great as a desktop replacement. Laptops stay up longer because they are not dependent on the power grid, which is the limiting factor in most of my uptime.
Everyone I know who runs any version of M$ has routine crashes and crapouts, despite rebooting daily. There's about zero chance that all of their hardware is faulty. There's about the same chance that you really have that kind of system stability.
When M$ first marketed w2k and XP, they flooded the world with bullshit about how it was based on NT and therefore "stable". It was a lie then and it's a lie now that they have funked it all up with six years worth of DRM add-ons.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have an alternate explanation. The people saying this are Linux-users who haven't even LOOKED at Windows in years and years, and yet somehow think that Windows never changes.
I wish that M$ had vanished without a trace back in 1995, but sadly normal people are surrounded by them. By most M$'s own gloating, they dominate the home and business markets. M$ is still able to bully the big vendors, most people still pay a $70 windoze tax when they pay for a new computer and don't bother to replace what they get. Even at Universities, less than 20% of the people I meet have free software. I see them boot their laptops everyday, and you can't go to a public place without hearing the obnoxious start up noise every five minutes or so. Worse is all the work arounds you have to get up to to work with them. They don't have sftp and you would not want to give them a password anyway, so file exchange is by usb fob. Then you have to fire up that Open Office pig. No, we are all aware of M$'s flaws and limitations from personal experience, even if we don't run the crap.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My XP box isn't used online, so I see no reason to potentially compromise its stability with patches it doesn't need in its boring, unconnected life. If it were used online, I'd probably do critical updates in occasional clumps, but only after other people had stopped bleeding from 'em :)
:)
:) Twitter may have FOE'd me, and turned off half his brain out of sheer hatred for M$, but he still occasionally makes good points. In the current case, I might not have bothered to reply (nothing all that new to say), except that I thought the -1 mod his post got wasn't justified.
The Win98 system is my internet box, and it has never been compromised -- and yes, I'd know if it were. (I've ID'd several viruses and trojans in the wild, before any AV apps "knew" them. Hex viewers are your FRIENDS.
But I don't use IE/Outlook, I do use a firewall, and I don't download and run every piece of crapware that comes down the pipe.
I think you are right, in that given an ideal design, the easier an OS is for the average joe, the easier it should be in those critical ways -- notably setup and security. For me, Windows is easy, because if you eliminate risky behaviours, and add basic security apps, it's secure enough for all practical userland purposes. (Servers are another realm we won't consider here.)
I view Windows as a big hairy DOS app in drag -- not as a mysterious black box (tho I realise that's how a lot of the anti-M$ fanboys do view it). Conversely userland linux still has something of a blackbox quality to me, and I don't feel comfortable with linux security issues because I don't feel like I can see what's happening like I can on a DOS/Win box.
As to one set of fanboys following around and trying to convert the other set of fanboys, yep -- shades of old-time usenet flamewars!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?