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Vista RC2: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect
jcatcw writes, "Scot Finnie continues his love — hate relationship with Windows Vista. He installed the latest beta, RC2, on three machines. First problem: drivers — too many of them that should be available just aren't. User Access Control remains annoying and Vista's Software Protection Platform puts antipiracy above user security. Software compatibility is still in need even at this late date. However, previous problems with the Media Center were absent." And turnitover writes to point us to PC Mag's RC2 review. Their bottom line is that they expect an RC2+ or even an RC3 before it goes final. Here is PC Mag's slide show.
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Second thing - This RC is more like a beta
And well, when was anything perfect?
There's always more work to be done for everything, including vista
Drivers are done on a per company basis. Since vista isn't out, there is no reason to expect official support of any kind on a particular device. As far as piracy controls go... There has to be an exchagne of money there somewhere. Microsoft has more than enough money to tell DRM companies to screw off, so they're getting compensation of some kind. Likely exclusive contract extensions from places like Sony, and other perks to ensure certain DRM compliance.
I have a bench machine that I've tested with Betas1&2 and RC1&2. All except for Beta2 have been pretty bug free, but RC2 fails at the "testing hardware" dialog during install, and after reboot will not give me the Aeroglass option, unlike all previous versions. I'll do some digging later this week to see how to force a re-test of hardware for compatibility, but this was dissapointing after 3 functional previous releases
No time for more refined. Unfortunately that's it.
It's obvious there's lots of patchwork in it. I browse the control panel and display properties and get the same feeling I have when looking at work I did in the last minute with a glue and duct tape.
IE7 still crashes like mad on Google Maps for some reason, and what's with the single tab display properties? What's the point of a tab bar, when you have always one single tab in it? We'll never know.
My Wacom tablet works terribly with Vista newfound tabletPC intelligence, it keep sassuming clicks I never have done, I had to go and basically disable all smart features and it still is funky (I can barely use a combo box with my Wacom in Vista).
It's apparent they'll be shipping it to the factory in few days either way, so I'm just hoping once they're done, they start working on a SP1 to be done for the January release that will fix all this mess.
All RCs are betas.
Not all betas are RCs.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Let's ignore people's feelings about Microsoft for a second. A hypothetical software developer has made a lot of changes to their operating system, rewriting a lot of internals, and making huge changes to their UI. Who here is expecting that this hypothetical software release will be "perfect" when it goes gold?
At best, even assuming Microsoft is a great software developer, there will be bugs and problems when it goes out the door. I don't believe that should be our question. My questions are, Is it usable? Will it increase my productivity over Windows XP? Does the new UI offer something beyond being "new"? Are there new features that I'll actually want to use?
Or to bang all of those questions into one super question, Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade? If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
But if you tell me that there aren't drivers for everything yet, well of course there aren't because it's not released yet, but there will be drivers for most things soon. If you tell me there's some little bug on your particular machine, that doesn't bother me. Release broadens the diversity of hardware that software is running on, and so even if everything was perfect in the beta stage, there will be some bugs.
Browsing the slideshow, I found this beauty.
Please, somebody pinch me. IE is clogging up 1 GB of memory in the final build of Vista before launch?! Well, it explains the insane sys reqs though.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
First off, you cannot just 'run Vista with administrative privleges.' That doesn't work around the problem. What you CAN do is turn off UAC, which is done in the most stupid way possible. You turn off the option and then you must (wait for it) REBOOT VISTA. Excuse me? REBOOT? Then why will anyone ever turn UAC back on if they keep having to reboot to use it.
The problem isn't that Microsoft has implemented UAC, it is the horrible way that they did it. You don't enter a password to install new software, you must click on a button that is on a different part of the screen every time it pops up, and it can pop up a lot if you are doing administrative tasks. So most people will simply choose to disable UAC, reboot, and never re-enable it again. That defeats the entire purpose of the feature.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
For good examples of how to do this properly see Mac OS X or most versions of Linux running a GUI.
Microsoft can't even copy good ideas correctly.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
Right now I'm running RC2 and the firewire controller on my Asus A8N-VM is right there in the device manager. However, Microsoft has removed the firewire networking that nobody used.
With naming conventions like this, it is starting to get close to Street Fighter levels of awesomenessocity. Next up: "Microsoft Windows Vista: Release Canidate 2 Beta Final Alpha Turbo 4...Professional!"