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?
Thank you, brave gamma testers for being bold enough to put this OS on your computer now so that at least some of the more glaring bugs can be worked out by the time some software company puts out a "must have" app that only runs on Vista at which point I'll have to upgrade.
Since XP support is due to last until 2011, I'll let you know how it is in about four years.
-JWR
I drove by the local Best Buy and Circuit City and didn't see any lines.
I prefer the Internet Explorer to the Vista. And If I have to buy a new Vista then I hope the fucking drinkholder doesn't break on the first day I use it.
We got a business copy to play with, and I decided we aren't going to deploy it until 2008. Untested, not significantly better than XP and as such, not worth the time and money to retrain techs and users.
Wait, I've been hearing about Vista on Slashdot twice a day for the last six months (at least that's how it feels) and it only just now launched?
I cringe at the thought of the barrage of Slashdot articles that will inevitably ensue!
Feb 1st, 5am: Vista failing to meet sales targets?
Feb 1st, 9am: Vista crash ruins breakfast for millions
Feb 1st, 6pm: Vista's first day: an in-depth analysis on some blog-type thing
Feb 2nd, 1:30am: Vista! Vista! Vista!
Feb 2nd, 8am: Vista still available after several days
Feb 3rd, 1pm: Vista 'ate my hair' claims Sacramento teen
Feb 3rd, 5pm: What's wrong with Vista? Six beardy Unix guys have their say
Feb 3rd, 11:30pm: Vista vs MacOSX -- a Mac fan comments
Feb 4th, 8:15am: Vista a flop already, say pundits
Feb 4th, 9am: Poll: Is Vista inadequately covered on Slashdot?
Feb 4th, 9:45am: Ten things fatally wrong with the Vista shutdown menu
*panic panic*
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Sounds like there is a lot of "overhead", and by overhead I mean fairly useless crap to support eye candy. I am a software engineer. I need my PC to run applications, with the machines resources dedicated to my compiles, debug session, code searches, CASE tools, etc. I don't need a search agent running, a little animated doggie, crazy OS graphics, monitoring software for unauthorized content playing out of my audio port, or any of the other "features" of Vista.
In my opinion, M$ should dumb down Vista. It sounds like they spent a lot of time revamping their kernel and they should have released (or should release) a lean version with, as the Nissan Xterra commercial says, "everything you need, nothing you don't".
I just wish more of my development apps ran under Linux.
Sort of like all the colors are in HiDef, slightly oversaturated.
....)
and everthing looks slightly puffy
like it's bloated, or slightly over-inflated
Almost like the world has been redone in the Microsoft Cute Theme.
Can Steve Ballmer look Cute? (Now that's an image
Will let you know when I see more....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Well I have been using it for about 2 months. I am a developer and have it on my laptop, so I got it from MSDN.
:)
It's pretty good. Nothing too wrong with it, I have had some issues with drives and a few program not working but that is to be expected. I guess I would say it you get it for free or if you get a new computer it's worth it. The instant search is the coolest "New" feature. It is prettier to look at. One thing I do have to say, I bring my laptop home, my wife, who is a non-technical person like it a lot. She likes the pretty interface, and instant search.
It does have a few annoying prompt screens, and they changed the control panel again, so I can't find anything again
I give it a good 7/10. I would not actively avoid it or pursue it. Is it better than Xp, probably, worth spending money on, probably not yet.
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.
This space intentionally left blank.
If by cute you mean "slightly puffy like it's bloated, or slightly over-inflated" then, yes, yes he can look cute.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You're in a bind. Drivers and speed issues with games are a mess for Vista right now, but a decent bit of that might be sorted out by year's end. And while there are no current DX10 games, they'll be coming within the year. So the answer is: XP for games now, Vista by the year's end.
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.
I waited several hours in line on the night before release to be one of the first to use Windows Vista. I must say that Vista is an amazing operating system. It is hands-down the best product that Microsoft has ever put out, and probably the best operating system that the world has ever seen.
Why upgrade from XP? There's so much new in Vista that your head will just boggle. From new Internet Explorer 7 to desktop search features to a virus / spyware scan utility that eliminates the need for Norton, Vista is on the cutting edge of technology. Another thing that impressed me is the improvements Microsoft made to the little games that come with the OS. Solitaire, Minesweeper, and all your favorites are back with improved graphics and game play along with newcomers like Chess and Hold'Em. Did I mention the the Aero desktop environment is the worlds first 3D desktop?
Windows Vista is more than just an incremental upgrade, it's on a whole new level compared to XP. Congratulations to Microsoft for releasing an amazing product. They spent $6 billion and five years on this operating system and it really shows.
I love when Microsoft comes out with a resource hog OS.
It just means that when I buy my next low-end PC, the hardware will be incredible just so it can run Vista, and FreeBSD will run like a dream on it.
I think we all owe MS a great deal of gratitude for pushing the envelope so that decent OS's can make use of commodity hardware that ten years ago was unimaginably fast.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The problem isn't the EULA, although that is a problem of course, the problem is with the technical measures implemented in the software to enforce the EULA.
Unless medical organizations can be 100% assured that installing Vista will not put them at risk of violating the law with regards to patient confidentially (and proper maintenance of medical data for that matter) they cannot install vista.
Having your data sent to MS is a stretch, but having Vista accidentally deleting your app with important medical data stored in the program folder (bad practise but it does happen) because it thinks it is "bad" is a distinct possibility. Heck, doesn't the EULA specifically mention technical measures to delete "illegal" "non-licensed" media? What if the measures incorrectly identify a very high res movie of an echo exam as an illegal movie and deletes it? Who has to pay for the re-exam at that point? the patient? the hospital?
anywho, no enterprise in their right mind will "upgrade" to vista before 2010, if ever...
l4h
Built-in firewall is too confusing and gives a green light to the OS components (god knows what communication takes place between my computer and microsoft).
A firewall that you can't block IE with is completely useless, as any program on your system can use IE to do its dirty work for it.
Call me when you can uninstall that crap and replace it with ZoneAlarm.
GUI is beautiful. OSX pales in comparison
OSX has bash, and Vista still has the crappy ass DOS CLI. Game over.
Or maybe it's possible that, among a group where the prevailing opinion is anti-Bush, or anti-Windows, individuals will be able to engage in rational discussion - and even if they've already formed the opinion you expect of them they may have very good, logical reasons for having done so.
Or maybe they're all just sheep. Baaaa! I think what I think because a man on TV told me to!
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
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!
Some people say it sucks...others say it blows.