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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.
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!".
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Call me weird, but 99% of the time, I found windows crashes to be due to poor hardware. At least in the 2k/xp world. 9x just crashed on a whim. I easily get several-month uptimes now that I have a UPS. However, I would expect that a beta/rc software would not be that stable. As for not ready for the prime time - well, there are a lot of bugs that don't involve stability.
34486853790
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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:
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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
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
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
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"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!
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I would tend to agree with you - mostly. On a properly maintained machine I'd agree - except for NTFS file system errors (often caused by the bundled third party drive management utils like the "MS" defrag tool).
Now, on an "improperly" maintained machine, I find an equal amount of bluescreens and crashes to be due to virii and spyware that's corrupted an XP install/taken over critical services/etc.
The question is, should we not count those in the total because the end-users should be "properly" maintaining their machines (ie: patches, AV and AS software, a real firewall, etc) - or do we count those towards the total # of crashes/BSODs and hold MS responsible because they released an OS that had so many unresolved issues (after all, many of the buffer overflow/underrun issues have existed in the code since the NT4/2000 days)?
The unfortunate thing about this debate is that depending on what you believe the end-user/MS is responsible for, no matter what you assert, you are correct (based off your assertations).
I'm not arguing either side, btw. I'm just pointing out that either answer is "right" depending on the base premise behind it - which many here and elsewhere differ on (and is yet another debate in it's own right).
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Surprise, surprise. Despite being a big name in the anti-malware business, Symantec seems to put out CPU hogging, slow, virus-insensitive crap. I tend to replace Norton with Avast! on most computers that I work with, since Avast! is faster and actually seems to detect viruses better than Norton.
-b.
Oh wait, there's hearts and spider too! Never mind.
...Rob
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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.
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.
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?
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.