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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 seeing both "more stable than expected" and "not ready for prime time" being used to describe Vista.
Erm. While XP is Microsoft's most stable OS to date, supporting (indeed, enabling) 3rd party apps is exactly what an OS should do in the first place, and do well. This job description specifically does NOT include the necessity for the kernel to barf on "illegal operations" performed by 3rd party apps which run (in theory) solely in userspace. Yet, this happens, by your own admission, a lot in XP.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I have to agree with this as well. The only time I've every seen a BSOD or any instability issues in my XP Pro installations is either with a hardware issue (SATA Cables, I'm looking at you) or with really crappy software.
Necessary, no. Justified, yes. Since the dawn of Windows95, Microsoft has consistently failed to deliver a stable/secure/high-performance OS without numerous updates and third-party software accessorizing. Until they unveil a major OS release that is as impressive as MacOSX or Ubuntu, I think we are more than justified in dispensing assorted belittlements at their many struggles, particlularly the long, pathethic slog that has been the Vista development path.
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
[XP is] still no where near Linux for server stability
If you want to run Windows on a server, choose a version with Server in the name. XP (both flavours) is a desktop OS.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
And you continue to support that religion by allowing those you work for to support it.
I work in a fairly small company, but it didn't take ANY EFFORT AT ALL to convince the management and owners that Windows was bad. Most of the tech department uses linux (1 Mac) and all the servers are linux. All of customer service is Mac. We have 3 machines that we can remote into if we absolutely HAVE to use IE to do our job. Once IE runs on Mac, we'll be investing in that CodeWeavers software heavily and ditching the Windows machines.
I understand it's quite a bit harder to convince management in a huge mega-corporation. One way to convince them is to simply refuse to work for a mega-corp that doesn't listen. Once they find they can't get decent people without listening to them, they'll listen.
Maybe you're the one who's truly wearing The Emporer's Clothes?
They'll never have to deal with the lack of a good tech team if you keep working for them.
Stand up for what you believe in. Yes, it'll take a little personal sacrifice. But that's what the US is built on. I think in the end you'll even find you are happier.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I bet that Vista would just reboot silently - just like 2k/XP does by default. I managed to "reboot" 2k/XP that way three times in first hour after installation - only later I have found that error screen is simply disabled.
Windows gathered pretty much of bad publicity with its BSODs - so by default they do not show them anymore. And from earlier betas I have seen now it is "RSOD" - "red screen of death" - since error background now is red.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
lol yeah, Norton is a great system destabilizer. Not overly fond of adobe either, but their destabilizations tend to stick to their own software and not take the OS with them.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
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"
commercial software =/= bug-free. maybe you've got a memory leak in something. they're still not unheard of even now.
I've only experienced odd problems if i don't do a "real" reboot (i use the hibernation function) in over 40 days, at which point things seem to randomly not work properly, such as programs not opening when i click them, though these go away after a reboot.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
More and more ISVs are realizing that, unless they're installing drivers for hardware that isn't hot-pluggable, or specifically replacing existing files in %WINDIR%\system32, a reboot isn't necessary. Some of that is Microsoft's fault, because the sick, twisted coupling of Explorer.exe and Internet Explorer forces a reboot to detect plugins that may be installed. Mostly, though, it's been on the ISVs, because the people responsible for the installer packages were too sloppy, lazy, or apathetic to care about what truly required a reboot. But they're getting better.
Vista itself is switching to an image-based installer for the OS. One boot from the DVD to start the installation process and write the system image to the hard drive, then one reboot to start from the hard drive, detect all hardware (instead of only the critical systems used to write the image), and set the initial driver state for the rest of the system.
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This is very easy to fix and many popular distro's fix this by default. What the poster's example is a thread bomb. This is a bit a code that tries to make as many threads as possible. Windows has a fixed number of threads each user can make. In linux, this "limit" is adjustable. On many systems, either the distrubutor or the user hasn't set a limit allowing a fork bomb to affect the system. However, setting a limit is as easy as one line in /etc/limits or /etc/security/limits.conf
If it's no on fire, it's a hardware problem.