Slashdot Mirror
Windows Vista Launches To Mixed Reactions
Several users have submitted stories reporting on the launch of Microsoft's newest operating system. The Guardian focuses on virus warnings already threatening the OS, while the New York Times discusses the bug hunt that's begun. With hackers writing scripts to attack, and well-paid bounty hunters looking for bugs to defend, Vista's first few months on the market are sure to be interesting. In the meantime, what is your impression of the OS? Have you had a chance to use the retail version yet? Are you supporting it in a business environment? What's the launch of Vista been like for you?
Since XP support is due to last until 2011, I'll let you know how it is in about four years.
-JWR
I've been poking around for a while trying to ask the same questions. There's a fairly good write up at Tom's Hardware on performance differences. Tom's hardware is typically pretty even handed in their benchmark reviews (IMHO), they'll often use a demo or script for a video game and run it a few times to get a solid number.
As you can see, the difference is small but present (favoring XP for games) with the notable standout of Unreal Tournament 2004, however as the reviewer notes, this has a lot to do with the current driver support.
As far as I can tell, I think in the long run when games start making use of DX10 and such, we'll see some nice results, but in the short run games will be better run in XP.
If you need a Windows OS (and I just built a gaming computer myself, so I'm in a similar boat) some stores will sell XP with a free Vista upgrade. That's what I purchased, that way I can use XP for a few months (while Vista figures out what it's doing) and upgrade when I'm good and ready. I'd list where I purchased from, but I'd hate to have my post be construed as advertising, suffice is to say you should be able to find some offers via google.
Hope that helps.
This is the second time I've heard this figure cited on Slashdot and I have no idea where it's coming from. I call bullshit. Here is the Task Manager of my Vista system running idle. This is a 3.4GHz single-core P4 system (with HyperThreading, hence the two CPU meters), with 2GB RAM and an nVidia 6600 with 256MB. I have Aero enabled and this screen shows the system with several processes running, including Thunderbird and the Windows Media Center services.
The only thing I can guess is that a lot of the people who are reporting outrageous system demands from Vista are running to check the performance meters right after the system boots. (Just because you can move the mouse doesn't mean it's done yet.)
Breakfast served all day!
I've been running Vista since the RTM was released. I'm running Vista Ultimate x86. I have a dual core AMD Athlon system on an Nforce4 motherboard with 2 gigs of RAM. I'm not interested in trying betas or release clients at this point in my life, I've got more important things to do with my time. So when the RTM came out, I decided to use it on my primary workstation in a dual boot environment. I have nothing good to say about Vista actually - and lots negative. I use my workstation for the following things:
1) Email, web surfing, word processing - all the basics.
2) Video editing with tools like Adobe After Effects, VirtualDub, DivX, etc.
3) Web development - I have a version of ColdFusion dev installed, which is supposed to work with IIS.
4) Database development - SQL Server 2005.
5) Local network administration for the windows network here in the office - Active Directory, Exchange management, etc.
6) Linux server management, I only need an SSH client here.
7) Backup DVDs to either my iPod or for backups for our car.
While I may not be the prototypical end user, I think most of the stuff I do would be common and stuff that Microsoft would make sure was ready - ESPECIALLY their own tools. Here is a list of the tools that don't work are aren't stable on Vista:
1) Exchange 2003 System Manager, won't even install. It uses IIS6 for some stupid reason, and IIS7 (despite what it says) is not backwards compatible.
2) Active Directory - as a result of no Exchange tools, you don't get the exchange based tabs to administer basic email properties of user accounts. M$'s solution is to RDP to a server. Nice.
3) Windows Live Messenger - crashes all the time, mostly when you go to exit the program. It's annoying as hell.
4) SQL Server 2005 - You get a warning when it installs about how it won't work, but I did it anyway. It's mostly functional, but you still have the occasional system freeze, etc. Good times.
5) Since none of my 3rd party DVD making apps seem to want to work with vista, I tried Windows Movie Maker. After opening a raw avi movie file straight from my video camera, movie maker decided it didn't want to work. It just hung and after a failed attempt to kill it with task manager, I had to reboot. I tried again with exactly the same results. WTF?
And those are just the Microsoft products that don't work, which seems completely idiotic to me. You would think with an OS in development for 5 years, you'd iron some of that shit out with your own software. Now for the 3rd party apps:
1) Nero - I use it for CD and DVD burning like everybody else. For whatever reason, everytime I move my mouse over an mpeg or avi file in windows I get a RunDLL32 stop error and windows freaks out. This only happens after installing Nero. I'm running the latest verison as well, straight from Nero.com as of yesterday. If you do anything with videos, windows throws up these errors. Makes video editing impossible.
2) iTunes 7.0.2 - basically, nothing about iTunes works for more than 5 minutes. You can't burn cds, so that's bad. Then if you leave it open for 5 minutes, eventually the user interface freaks out and starts blinking in parts and removes the colors, etc. Then if you minimize it, you'll never get it back without restarting or manually killing it with task manager.
3) Firefox - about one out of every 10 times I open up Firefox, I get the blue screen of death with a MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error. This only happens on one of the workstations I put Vista on, the other doesn't have this same issue despite the fact that it's the same hardware exactly. Very strange.
4) Nvidia drivers - using the latest nvidia drivers from their website as of yesterday, my machine becomes completely unstable. Windows Explorer crashes every so often. I had to roll back to the default microsoft drivers for my Geforce 7600GS.
Now if all that isn't bad enough and reason to stay away, here are my gripes about the OS itself:
1) It's slow as he
Show me what Linux can do for a business, and I'll show you how Microsoft does it 20 times better.
My business is molecular modeling.
I need to do a lot of coding in C, C++, F77, and F90, along with some csh, ksh, bash, and perl scripting. I need to test the same code on my PC that runs on the 128-way SMP boxes in the high-performance computing facility, so I need compilers that support a POSIX-ish C api and MPICH, and I'll also need good (scriptable) connectivity ala ssh, scp, and rsync. Oh yeah, one of the data centers uses Kerberos. I also need reasonable data analysis tools like Matlab (though Octave will do in a pinch) and Maple. I need visualization tools like PyMOL, viewmol, vaspview, and GaussView, but also an X server so I can run beefier packages like Cerius2 directly off the big machines. I need to be able to write both small reports for quick printing and large (50+ page) papers with lots of mathematical formulas and endnotes/footnotes, and of course I need to output PDF. I also need virtual desktops to keep my workflow organized: desktop 1 is development, desktop 2 is remote terminals, desktop 3 is data analysis, and desktop 4 is general purpose desktop. Finally, I need to be able to back up my work easily, preferably with just a simple file copy, and all of my file formats will need to readable for 20+ years.
So far my needs are met at near zero cost with Debian Linux plus two commercial packages (GaussView and Maple). I have ssh, scp, rsync, perl, csh, ksh, bash, gcc/g++, g77, gfortran, MPICH, MPICH2, X11, LaTeX, Emacs, Octave, KMail, and OOo. And as a nice bonus with Debian my PC both plays DVDs (and ignores the UOP flag allowing me to skip directly to the menu) and browses the 'Net with ease, and so far I have had no problems with viruses.
I'm very interested in how a Microsoft solution will be 20 times better. Please tell us more!
What's pegging your CPU at 30% is the rendering of the clock gadget. Sounds silly, but try turning it off (only the round clock gadget, not the whole gadget sidebar) and see the difference. Looks like it has something to do with IE7 rotating the clock hands images each second.