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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?
Launch? What launch?
Seriously, I have a KVM hooked up to "one of everything" (Linux, Mac, XP) When there is a piece if functionality I need that requires Vista, then I'll think about it. Not before
This is a boring sig
For one client who is a medical service provider, I'm pretty sure that the "rights" that M$ has awarded itself via Vista's EULA are at odds with the requirements for keeping clients' medical records confidential. So until someone can provide assurances to the contrary, Vista isn't coming anywhere near their facilities.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I've been using Vista at work for just over a month now. I personally like the sidebar, not that it's anything that I couldn't have downloaded seperately anyway, but I enjoy having the CPU usage meter right on the side, along with a calender, the weather and a currency converter. I do not have Aero installed since this computer would not handle it, nor would I want to use it even if it could. The operating system itself has not crashed on me, and it has run suprisingly smoothly. I've got everything I need for work installed without a problem. There is one thing that drives me absolutely mental though ... in the windows explorer there is no "up" button, and back does not do the same thing, and yes, I am aware that I can just hit backspace, but when I'm in "mouse only" mode, this does not cut it.
I like the added shortcuts (ie windows key+0-9 to launch quick launch programs) but I hate having to use the "search" method in control panel to find the things that should be in the obvious spots. Also the defrag is terrible, while the command line version is significantly better, I would still like a visual display of what is going on.
All in all though, it has worked for me quite well at work, however it will be a long time before I would use it at home, it's simply not worth the money IMO.
Best Buy had a Vista demo station set up yesterday. They were using what looked like a brand-new demo machine, with Vista branding on it and everything.
When I tried to turn up the graphics settings, I got a warning saying that the highest setting would result in severely decreased performance. When I tried to open the Media Center application, it crashed.
I looked around in the Control Panels, Start Menu, and Documents folders, and tried out IE 7, and was amazed at what a disaster the interface was. The cheap eye candy looked tacky and ran slowly, the "Flip 3D" feature was next to useless and an obvious failed clone of Expose, and I still found old Windows 3.1-style dialog boxes and icons littered throughout the system.
More than anything else, the interface was confusing, overly busy, and disorganized. I'm sure a power user would find what they're looking for eventually, but I got a headache just thinking about my parents, secretary, and other casual users trying to puzzle it out.
Frankly, I was amazed at how horrible it was. It seems like an early Beta release, at best - and not a very promising one, at that.
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The company I do IT for is in no way intending to upgrade to Vista any time soon. Yes Vista has more functionality... at a price. More system processes now run when compared to a default installation of XP. A lot more. So the adverse of more functionality is a slower system. What kind of functionality you ask? How bout the new parental controls! I did enjoy the 3d scrolling with alt-tab through running applications, that was neat, but at a cost. And... the indexing service just needs to be shut off. Why the heck do I want a service running that constantly checks on files and folders so that they load faster when truly its just leeching system resources full time?
OK OK, why don't i just go out and buy a new dual core or quad core pc and just stfu? I could... but a manufacturing company with 150pcs doesn't intend to upgrade just to meet the needs of Vista. In the future it may be possible. But it would be a gradual process over multiple years I would estimate.
"That's a nice music library you've got there, be a shame if anything happened to it..."
So long as my existing music works then no problem. The moment I'm locked out of my own files to force an upgrade we're talking RICO suit.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I downloaded and installed Vista from MSDN over the weekend, I've only tried two games so far. On the exact same machine, under XP, I could run Civ4 and Neverwinter Nights with full graphic details enabled, no problems. After installing Vista (fresh install, reformat, etc), Civ4 continues to run (you have to download the latest patch) without issue. Neverwinter Nights, on the other hand, is EXTREMELY choppy, even at the bottom end of the graphics settings.
Overall, I'm not greatly impressed. Lots of shiny stuff, and it "feels" new, but I just really don't see any improvement over XP.
Just wanted to remind fellow CS student slashdotters that your school is most likely part of the MSDN Academic Alliance, and you can get all sorts of microsoft stuff for "free". The only stipulation is you can't use it for for-profit stuff. In any case its a great way to get legit keys to use so you can get the updates "legally". I'm downloading the DVD of Vista right now, I'll prolly install it on a separate partition just to get a feel for it, but I'm gonna stick with XP for a little while.
:-D Though you'll have to talk to your CS dept. about how to obtain login information.
Linky for the lazy like myself
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows
That's always been my main issue with MS: cost for doing the serious stuff at home. While many people might want to relegate people like me to the insulting category of "hobbiest", there are some of us who want enterprise functionality at home and use it in a serious way. Of that set, there are those of us who want to play by the rules and would therefore buy legitimate copies of an OS. If MS was really smart, they'd realize this and would provide multi system license packs for home users who want enterprise features. I'd happily pay $500 to have the right to legitimately install Windows Vista on five of my fifteen machines at home. I'd happily pay $750 to set up a full Windows AD domain at home with Win2K3 + five Vista clients. While my needs may not be mainstream, there are more people like me that you'd think.
But since MS only focuses on the largest markets, many very important sectors are ignored. That's where F/OSS and GNU/Linux come in. Thanks to FOSS and Linux I've been able to more than accommodate my need for 15 machines plus seven virtual systems without having to worry about licensing or cost. The money saved goes where it counts: large amounts of redundant storage, RAM and CPU.
Regarding the insulting moniker "hobbiest", my main problem is that it downplays the need that the average home has for enterprise class storage, user and resource management, print management and distributed computing. We don't call electricians who work on their wiring at home or plumbers who work on their plumbing at home, "hobbiests". In fact we tend to praise them as being self-sufficient and skilled. The same metric should be applied to the IT guy who sets up enterprise class centralized storage (Global Network Block Devices or iSCSI), hardware assisted virtualization or paravirtualization (Xen + AMD SVM or Intel VT) and centralized application serving (persistent remote desktops using VNC or NX protocols). These are serious solutions to real problems encountered in the home. The age of the standalone PC is long dead, but MS doesn't seem to get that.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Ubuntu doesn't downplay the user/admin split, it takes it to a higher level. Just like MacOS X, Ubuntu uses sudo for admin activities, and the actual root account is locked by default (has no login privileges at all).
This is not getting rid of root, it's making it more restricted in that you still have to have root access to do admin jobs, but you cannot, by default log in as root. Instead, you (if you are on the sudoers list) request root level access on an application by application basis, this way you cannot accidentally run something with elevated privileges, and you don't have to log out of your safe user account to do something as an admin.
I doubt anyone trotted out last night to give M$ money and that's a sign of things to come. It's safe to predict that 99.99999% of Vista sales will be OEM installs. The low price of new computers combined with the high price of Vista will kill over the counter sales. For the price of new software that won't work well with what you have, you can buy a computer with the same. For the immediate future, forcing Vista will hurt computer sales because no one wants it. As the price of computers continues to decline, M$ is going to have trouble gettin money out of OEMs. The margins don't allow it. The end of the M$ monopoly is here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thank you very much for the screen shot of your task manager. OK, so your processor is only 1% used. I also see that Vista is using 1.08 GB of your RAM, and that you only have 30MB of your 2GB actually listed as "Free", after the caching is done. (I assume you took this screen shot after a clean boot, with no user applications manually launched.)
As a gamer, I like having my Athlon 3.5+ GHz system with 2GB of RAM only report that I've breached my first 1GB when I'm running a memory intensive game, like X3. Some of these games actually use > 1GB of RAM. Sorry, but until I see the how-tos for cutting all of the excess fat from the OS to make room for my games, not to mention assurances that DRM isn't going to get in my way, I'm not touching Vista.
Oh, and as far as DRM goes, I've only rip a few CDs to listen to on my MP3 player in the car, so I'm hardly the file-sharing pirate that the RIAA and MPAA claim to be targeting. I just want to be able to use my PC to enjoy my CDs and DVDs when I'm in the computer room. Yet, I'm very concerned about the way in which it sounds like Vista has been hamstrung in order to get the licenses from the media monopolies to use my hardware on the new OS.
I say this with over 15 years of successful retail experience... Microsoft is failing to capitalize on what made previous versions of Office and Windows Successful... That is retail.. In the past with windows 98, 2000, xp, office 2000. They gave much of the retail sales People a copy of said software and even gave it to the Microsoft field representatives who used it and showed trainings on it every day at retail... I call these people the seeds of Microsoft sales and products... They got free copies while early in their careers and always remember Microsoft with a kind heart and thus recommend and use it wholeheartedly... My family members who just happen to be IT managers at large banks... Are asking me that question... Should I upgrade?? At this time I'm very iffy about it. Plus, lacking a full product to play with.. I'm not inclined to recommend this product especially with the way Microsoft has been treating their overworked retail team and Retail lately. Eighty percent of decisions are made at retail and Microsoft is severely lacking at retail this year. Everything literally getting barely done in the 11th hour when they've had over 6 months to work on it and forcing those under them to work down to the wire to finish what could have been done with a higher attention to detail and fixing mistakes made up the chain but can't because of a lack of the ultimate premium called time.. At retail I'm seeing bad things.... All little stuff that's not reminiscent of the Microsoft I once knew. Who was detail oriented, Well planned, well executed, every time. I suspect Microsoft will learn their lessons from this... Its been too long since they launched a product... and these old lessons will come back to bite them and many of them know it just not the right people.. -Viken L
One of the features of Vista I was looking forward too was less rebooting. The driver model is vastly different, so driver replacement should (in theory) result in no reboots. There's also a manager that's supposed to handle services better, so there's another area where reboots should be lessened.
Unfortunately, I haven't really seen much change in the number of reboots. I uninstalled fax and scan manager along with installing the new games. Reboot. I installed a new beta driver for my video card. Reboot. I installed the updates that came though today. Reboot. Not a great track record MS.
I've also been unfortunate enough to have a motherboard that has AGP drivers unsupported by Vista (nforce). So the video card runs on a PCI-PCI driver at reduced performance. Some may argue that this machine is "too old" to expect support for it. Maybe, I've got a video card that supports Aero, 1 gig of RAM, and a speedy HD, so the rest of the hardware is up to snuff. I guess you can put the blame for this one on Nvidia, as it's not Microsoft's responsibility to write drivers for the AGP bus. Aero is speed enough, I'm just not expecting good gaming performance with no support for my AGP bus.
So that's the bad side. The upside is that the new interface is pretty usefull. I really like the search function, no hunting around for different apps, or hidden control panels. The menu structure seems a lot more intuitive. The sleep function actually works! I haven't seen sleep/suspend actually work properly on a non-laptop running Windows before. It'll certainly save me some money on electric bills. I'm also glad to see they ditched the stupid IE interface for Windows Update. Ugh, that POS was nothing but trouble. It CONSTANTLY broke on my various windows machines. Hopefully this new non-IE based Windows Update will work properly. I also like the Aero theme. I'm quite glad the decided to ditch the Fisher-Price themed XP. I could never figure it out, and was a major reason why I never bothered with XP. I know you can switch the theme to Windows 2000 (and I did), but XP was actually less reliable for me than 2000.
AccountKiller
That's not really a requirement. Have you ever fixed someones computer for them? Did they give you anything in exchange? Even if it's a can of coke? You just sold your services. Big deal. Microsoft doesn't really care.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
So instead of popping up Clippy (utilising system resources that are comparable to calculating Pi to the 10,000 digit) we get Clocky? I just demoed Windows Vista at Best Buy across the street over lunch and I can confirm the ~30% figure for the clock. The widget menu bar also has a 'cpu monitor' which conveniently lets you see real time how detrimental the new UI is to performance.
I find it interesting that there's no big launch party, midnight madness, etc for Vista. Wii got it; PS/3 got it; Xbox 360 got it; heck even The Burning Crusade got it. There is a definite lack of hooplaa with this release. I think the retailers know that its a dog sales wise; its a standing in place upgrade whose main sales will come through OEM equipment.
This is probably the most underwhelming release since Windows ME. I get the sense that Microsoft really has jumped the shark. 5 years for this? Oi vey...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
If you think that Leopard sounds only like an upgrade of niche, end-user features, I think you'll be in for a pleasant surprise when it is actually released.
There are some compelling features under the hood that are being added for developers that will make their code less buggy, fit in better with the flash and glitz of Mac OS X, start taking advantage of newer hardware features, and offer more public access to the bits of code that Apple used to develop and keep private for Apple's own apps. Even if Apple doesn't reveal any other compelling end-user features (which I find an unlikely scenario), the ease Apple is making developers lives has already provoked some developers to say that the Leopard upgrade is a requirement for the next major upgrade of their apps. If Apple strikes out and offers no compelling end user features, then the blame will lie with developers as the bad guys who are forcing users to upgrade to Leopard. If Apple hits upon a compelling set of features for Mac users, the upgrade will be a no-brainer for everyone in the Mac community whose machines can run it.
If that's the case, why isn't Apple hyping Leopard up more like Microsoft did for Vista back in mid-2006? Time is getting short if the release is in the spring. My guess is that Apple is waiting for the Vista hype to die down before offering a more compelling set of end user features that will make even reticent Windows XP users want to switch platforms before Microsoft can copy the bullet list into a service pack release. Based on those banners at WWDC and MacWorld that everyone was talking about, I see Leopard as taking aim at Windows users rather than the Mac OS X Tiger community.
I guess we'll see in a few months.
Mostly I'm just kind of disappointed that we weren't able to release KDE 4.0 or a stable version of Debian etch before this day.
Otherwise, I can't see how the consumers who have bought into Vista so far will have much to cheer about. It'll be a lot slower than XP, since the recommended hardware requirements are so much higher than for XP. Aside from the new interface, its supposedly improved stability and security, Vista is really all about DRM: preventing people from playing protected content, including in cases of fair use. What they get back in return for these heinous constraints is the possibility of playing high definition content on their PCs.
However, that last part isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not legally. To play high definition content on Vista, your graphics card and your monitor both have to be HDCP compliant, but according to this article, which is less than a month old, only two monitors tested last year were HDCP compliant and not a single graphics card. When will HDCP compatibile hardware start to appear? According to the article, many monitor manufacturers haven't even heard of it and can't say anything about it, while the graphics card manufacturers (nVidia, ATI) could do it, but haven't seemed to have found the incentive yet to do so. For the latter it seems to a be a chicken and egg story: no content? no support. And even if the manufacturers do decide to start making their products HDCP compliant, remember what Peter Gutmann had to say about the ridiculous guidelines M$ gives them: they're "fundamentally impossible" to comply with.
The future is also looking increasingly bleak for DRM. Even if Vista does well, it's content protection will not make much difference to the content industry if people can buy super-cheap Chinese media players that play every known file format without any restrictions whatsoever. Hell, only last week we heard that the music companies seem to be thinking about ditching DRM. If so, then Vista will become rather uncool in this respect and M$ will start to play down the protected content issue as DRM begins to disappear from music and movies.
Of course, for M$, the MPAA and the RIAA were never what the DRM was about: they really only added it to Vista for their own benefit. M$ is always looking for ways to milk more money out of its stagnant share of the market. For years now they've had only two options: raising prices and fighting piracy. Of course, with Vista they're doing both. Now all they need is for it to catch on. However, I'm not so sure it'll be that easy. Their plan may backfire on them. Why? I know a lot of people who have remained satisfied with Windows over the years only because they've been able to run so much software on their PCs -- pirated software. If they're no longer able to do that, I'm not so sure they're just going to roll over and start paying for everything they'd like to continue to use. I figure we're about to see the arrival of a new wave of Linux newbies as a result. Perhaps not a flood, but I figure it'll be enough to offset any financial gains M$ planned on making. Most important of all for consumers, M$ will lose market share.
I can well believe you with respect to the linearity of RAM usage. I am not claiming anything in particular about the behavior of Windows in situations where it has to treat RAM as a scarce resource.
/., but if your eyes aren't looking at anything else there is no downside to maximizing. It is only when you try to do that and watch a compile and watch a news feed that you have to decide how to apportion display space.
What I am saying, is that so far as the O/S is concerned, there is no downside to using more RAM, up until the point where it runs out. If the system decides that it can benefit from having 1/2GB of disk cache, and no one else has asked for that RAM, why not let it have the cache? The RAM isn't being used for anything anyway.
My point was rather narrow - RAM that is not in use does nothing for you, and if by using it the system could prevent a page fault later, it may as well use it. Hence my contention that RAM usage in the idle state need not be a good predictor of O/S bloat or how memory constrained the system really is.
Once demand for RAM heats up and the system has to determine how to parcel it out to the running tasks is where things get interesting, and where a well designed memory manager will make a big difference.
It is kind of like screen real estate. You may not need your browser maximized to read