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Windows Vista - Still Fresh After 19 Months?
MyStuff writes "ZDNet blog Hardware 2.0 looks at the effect of having used Windows Vista for over 18 months. It Windows Vista the indispensable upgrade that Microsoft wants you to think it is? Writer Kingsley-Hughes says 'Having been using Vista for over 18 months I believe that it's a huge improvement over XP and even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers.' Just the same, he goes on, 'I wouldn't call any of the changes earth-shattering. When I'm using XP systems I miss some of the features but not so much that they push me to upgrade any faster.' He then goes on to give a feature-by-feature breakdown of all of the improvements Vista has over XP, and what long-term use of these features can net." A possibly useful guide for gamers or administrators thinking about upgrading sometime soon.
So, has he actually been able to run Windows for 19 months without reinstalling? That's amazing!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Not counting the "beta" versions given to special corporations and colleges, I don't think its fair to judge Vista just yet. Asking if Windows Vista is still "fresh" after 19 months is like asking if the PS3 is still "fresh" after 12 months.
This from a professional reviewer after 19 months on the job:
"Is Vista more stable that XP? Hard to tell as I don't have a lot of problems with XP but I do feel that Vista is on the whole more robust."
On the whole, ZDNET adheres presents a robust standard of informative journalism. But there are exceptions.
About 3 years old, but still strangely appropriate...
Dan (to Eminem's "Stan")
I'd repost the entire thing here but the filters won't allow for the short line lengths.
Choice quote:
Dear Mister-I'm-Too-Good-To-Fix-Or-Patch-My-Bugs,
this 'll be the last e-mail I ever send your ass
It's been so long and Word's still bork -- I don't deserve it?
I gotta upgrade to write letters?
I almost switched down to Wordperfect!
So this is my ogg file I'm sending you, I hope you hear it.
I'm running firefox on the information superhighway
Hey Bill, I clicked on Bonzi Buddy, will it install in my drive?
I can see it now...
Young Girl: Mom, do you ever have that not-so-fresh feeling?
Mom: Only when I use Windows Vista.
Fade to black...
Brought to you by Ubuntu douche.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Jeez, I didn't even think og RTFA with a freaking jumble of an abstract like that. It's maybe the worst I've seen as far as not making any sense.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Virus, malware, security is no longer a driving force away from Windows like it was pre XP SP2.
As a long time Mac and Linux user who despises Windows I can honestly say that I would be content to use Windows. Which is the complete opposite of two to three years ago when every single person I knew who ran Windows at home was under constant security and virus problems crippling their machines. Back then almost everyone was actively eyeing a Mac as their next machine.
Microsoft accomplished what they needed to do. So what if reviews or people on around the Net say such and such feature was copied or the UI isn't as refined as OS X. There is no longer a constant and compelling issue making users want to get the hell off the Windows platform. Shame on Microsoft for taking so damn long to get to this point but they have and that is the reality.
There will be no mass migration from Windows to OS X. But there will continue to be the constant trickle to Linux.
I installed Mandriva on my old laptop. And despite having nice and all-so-cool laptop from company I prefer to use Linux.
Vista? I have all those fancy effects on Mandriva with compiz, plus it runs bloody good on old hardware. I tried Vista on new hardware and was quite disappointed. There's really nothing new and exciting. And paying so much cash for a privilege of having XP SP3 with built in WindowsBlinds? No thanks.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
From the article:
Maybe it's just me, but I hardly use the Start Menu. I assign keyboard shortcuts to all my commonly used applications. I might go digging around in the Start Menu a couple times a week, but's hardly a reason to change operating systems.
Is that really a huge efficiency boost? I use Windows Search even less than I use the Start Menu. It's very rare that I don't know where to find something on my own machine. Does anyone else use the Search function that often? For what are you typically searching?
Yikes! Large icons are the first thing I usually turn off. What a waste of screen space. Once again, is this really a huge efficiency boost?
So in conclusion, "beats XP hands down" translates to two features I'd never use, and larger icons that I'll want to turn off. Think I'll wait a bit...
I read that article and no where in it did I see any evidence of what is so earth shattering about it. He did mention stability but only a gut feel that even that may be better than xp.
So what was MS working on all those years?
Got Code?
I only have an XP harddrive so that I can run Visual Studio and play games... and World of Warcraft is the only game I don't have running in Linux (very well). There is no doubt that I would drop XP all together and just use my Ubuntu install if I could get WoW working better (which I will tackle again this weekend). The only reason I have Visual Studio is for work and don't work at home on the projects any more so this may not be a sticking point any longer. From a professional stand point, there are a few things Linux lacks that I really wish I could carry over. Those programs would be Photoshop (I don't like GIMP as much), Dreamweaver, Visual Studio (It's like an STD, you don't want it, but sometimes you can't get rid of it), and simple installs in general.
Either you drink the kool-aid or die of dehydration.
"even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers."
I find this comment quite bizaare. After using Vista for nearly 2 months, my experience is exactly the opposite. I find Vista frustrating because many features from XP have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. There are no major problems with Vista, but dozens of minor annoyances. Each one by itself is no big deal, but together they add up to a major step backward.
"It Windows Vista the indispensable upgrade that Microsoft wants you to think it is?"
Did this pass the Word grammar checker?
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
For better try: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3118_7-6695272-1.html ?tag=cnetfd.mt/
Or for gamers: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2096940 ,00.asp/
They at least don't sound like they just dropped the M$ pom-poms to type their articles.
I don't get it.
Between work and home I have two Win2000 boxes and two XP boxes (and a Redhat as well). I remember still running NT when XP was introduced.
Unless you have an application that can't be run on an older system, and by then you usually need a newer computer anyway, is upgrading really worth the hassle? A workstation for me becomes like an old pet. You're used to it. You know how what its quirks are.
Personally, I've never felt a compelling reason to upgrade. I like shiny toys as well as the next person, but I have never upgraded a Windows OS in my life.
Best Windows Freeware
Looks like I'll stick it out with Win2k, nothing interesting here =)
Reboots: I reboot my 2k media PC once a month maybe
GUI: I still can't find a person that can point out why XP was so much better than 2000. If you can convince me, please do. There just aren't any productivity advances that I can see. The article author pointed out the vast productivity benefits from the start menu, but honestly, if you're spending more than 1% of your time in the start menu you're not being productive period.
I think everyone who upgrades and claims it substantially better are under self-hypnosis. The 'beautiful graphics' are deluding you into believing the OS is so much better. If Microsoft had updated their driver compatibility layer like they did in XP, I don't think there'd be a single justification to ever buy XP. But like I said, I dare the community to say differently. Give me a reason to enter graphics country!
Price: How much for media center edition? Ouch.
Bye!
Take off every 'sig' !!
I don't get this statement from page 2:
"Few and far between" means that he's experienced more than one lockup on his system since Vista was officially released. He does not have a lot of problems but frequently have crashes? It is quite sad to think that the author of the article is so used to having lockups/BSOD that he feels it is a normal thing to experience. Is this what every day operation will be like for most people?
As a comparison I will (I don't want to but I feel I need to) have to compare with Linux; Lockups happen when you screw up the system yourself and is not every day life. For example, when Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) was just released I installed it and it was stable using the stock Xorg drivers. Everything just worked and the system was stable. This on a stock install. Install 3rd party drivers and new features was introduced but made the system unstable. My own fault since the stock drivers worked fine. I went back to the official drivers again and had a stable OS to work with.
The Vista drivers are signed and is officially approved by MS so they should be stable and not crash the system.
Ok, I don't really know what point I am making with this post I just need to get this out. The mentality in the article just got to me. The system is either Robust or it isn't. I would not call an OS that lock up "Robust" (or "more robust than XP"). I would call it "not as fragile as XP" maybe...
Anyway, I liked the article. It seemed honest and brought up both positive and negative things. The author say he miss some features from Vista when he uses XP but does not say what features he miss. He say there are bugs but does not list a single one that he's encountered. I wished the author would have spent another page with details, otherwise I enjoyed reading it.
Vista is not ready and may never be due to DRM nonsense. Check out this review of both Mepis and Vista. DRM breaks what hardware they managed to get drivers working for.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No offence, but the whole article is based on utterly subjective opinions on both systems. No figures, benchmarks or whatever that might even give a clue that what is said is true.
Maybe i didnt got the point of the article, but it doesn't give any information that would make me consider using XP rather than Vista or Vista rather than XP. If it presented results of some kind of benchmark running on XP and Vista over a year and half, that would be totally different. But even in this case, Vista has changed so much till the beta (at least i hope so), that it would still be meaningless to compare it with windows XP.
Some small features an incremental improvement over previous versions. Will MS ever stop innovating?
Oh come on. A site called desktoplinux says that Linux is better? Wow, color me surprised.
That was sarcasm by the way. Don't you think theres a problem citing a Linux site as fact when it concerns a Microsoft OS?
I never really ran into DRM problems. But then again, I don't buy or play DRM media.
Young Girl: Mom, do you ever have that not-so-fresh feeling?
Mom: Only when I use Windows Vista.
Fade to black...
Brought to you by an Ubuntu douche.
It sounds like this 'feature' just moves the page file to a flash device. Am I missing something? This guy makes it sounds like it's some kind of big deal.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
... Oh, you mean Windows Vista, not Vista?
That must be why I was so confused about this new GUI stuff - our backend GUI hasn't changed in 4 years!
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Why bother with facts when you can write vague and frightening nonsense, say "DRM" a couple times, and link to a slanted research article?
The problem with the new mac ads is it doesn't show the OS, the system or anything useful. Even worse most of what they say is blantantly false. Yeah a Windows machine is a full work system and has no entertainment value, that's why 90 percent of computer games are still available on the PC. When mom and pa see the commercial and see "mac is fun, PC is work" they think about their system and realize it's not that much work. Adopting a mac would be more expensive to them, be more work and they don't want to spend 1000-2000 for a mid level system.
...." Stop. Realize that people don't use dos based systems any more because they don't want to do that, running 1-2 programs just to get a third working isn't cool, and won't work for most people unless Microsoft disappears, and from the look of it Microsoft is going to be here to stay.
You can lie your ass off to a consumer but the minute they realize what you said isn't the whole truth you're screwed. What Mac has said in their last round of commercials has hurt it because people started smelling the BS, and because people looked into it and see the problems.
Hell their switch ads tried to bandwagon people on with famous faces. However looking back at them I can tell you. I only knew one or two of them. Bandwagoning commercials slowly faded away in the 90s. There's a reason for that, it stopped working so well... except in politics of course, when you're forced to choose if you're going to vote.
As for Linux the steady trickle I've seen going to Linux won't matter, it's still too small, and I still see people returning to windows, most people will continue to use XP. I'm all for using Linux as a back bone to coporate systems, but it's still not good enough to be a platform for business/work, nor one for productivity. People still don't want to do everything by hand, they want the comfort of Windows, and XP has given them a perfect surrounding. The minute you can't run program X from linux, it fails in people's minds. You can start by saying "well you can just run it under
What can I say? They learned from the best - Microsoft.
Complaints:
For some reason they fucked up the defragmenter and now it's just a big "defrag my hard drive now!" button with no progress indicator or something to show how fragmented your disk is (this *really* pisses me off). Startup/shutdown time is better, but hibernate/sleep is a problem - when I come out of them it doesn't remember I have a second monitor, and I have to reboot to get it back. Thus, they're mostly pointless.
Surprisingly it runs a little faster on my notebook than XP did, I assume because of the caching (2GB RAM) and Aero offloading stuff to the GPU.
All in all, I wouldn't want to go back, but I don't know it's worth the hassle of upgrading for everyone. Especially since not all software works quite right yet. YMMV.
Is roadkill still fresh after 19 months?
The more I read about Vista the happier I am with Win 2000. It has a handful of features that were somewhat improved but at a cost of it being slower than XP and a security system that depends on you manually authorizing things that you shouldn't have to. I have a couple of PCs and one Mac and the only time the mac bugs me is when I'm installing something or doing a monthly update. Try rebooting a windows machine and you are prompted to update something every time. Yes a lot of things can be turned off if you go digging but with my XP machine when I turned off some of the annoying stuff I got even more prompts. The biggest hesitation I have with Vista is the Microsoft fanatics aren't finding a lot of good to say about it. Leopard got a lot of flack from the PC community but personally I can't wait. I'll give it a month to make sure the upgrades are going smoothly but I can't wait to upgrade. That's a massive difference between the two systems. Most people in the PC community look at upgrading to Vista like they were looking at a snake and they aren't sure if it's poisonous or not. The Mac community can't wait for Leopard. Like I say the best sales promotion Mac Leopard has ever gotten was Vista. The difference between the two is fighting with the OS in Vista and not noticing the OS in Leopard. I use computers for the software not to get my rocks off configuring OSs. The more Microsoft "fixes" Windows the more interested in Mac I get. Funny how Mac is never trying to fix their security. I leave a Mac logged onto the net for days or weeks at a time without one problem. No need for firewalls and antivirus software. Macs aren't completely virus free but they tend to be more like urban legends. I've heard of them but I've never seen one.
One often over looked "benefit" of Vista is that it's Control Panel is completely redesigned and made much more confusing. So confusing in fact that my mother (after having upgraded and I don't know why) is unable to break her PC anymore by messing with the Control Panel. Under XP she knew where things were and would adjust them. Now she can't find anything, so I get fewer calls.
On the flip side of the coin, the poor guys in my IT department are also lost as to where the hell the controls they need have gone in the new Control Panel.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
As is typical for tech related queries Wikipedia is chock full of information on what changed with Windows Vista. I recommend people take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista if you're interested.
So what was MS working on all those years?
DRM, funded by all those suckers who bought into code assurance plans thinking they would get an upgrade to Vista ... three or four years ago. Vista outright obsoletes half of the world's computers and won't work well on 94% of them. Promising upgrades to newer software for hardware three years ago has to be one of the biggest scams ever. The magnitude of that scam will only be fully apparent as people realize how bad the DRM is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Try selecting more than 15 txt or image files in explorer and opening them at once. MS knows what's best for you.
Don't you think theres a problem citing a Linux site as fact when it concerns a Microsoft OS?
No, the author is honest. Don't project M$ "get the facts" type reports onto the free software world where there's little incentive to do more than report what you see. The results surprised the author as much as anyone else.
Crying, "It's not fair, they are all out to get Microsoft" and sticking your head in the sand is not going to teach you anything new.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah i want to buy more ram and a dvd player for a new laptop to use vista no thanks.
You left out nicer fonts!
But almost everything he said could have as easily been done in XP- better fonts, faster startup, improved search... all this could have just as easily been in SP2, or at least SP3, if MS hadn't been expending all that money and energy on Vista.
Here's my favorite quote: ``Some programs still have problems with Vista but the blame for this really falls on the vendor and not Microsoft.''
I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement.
On the flip side, an employee here just bought a laptop with Vista on it. Another admin has spent at least a day working on the stupid thing over the past week or so, just trying to get it to work properly on a network that has been supporting several versions of Windows as well as OSX, Linux and Solaris for years. Granted, he hasn't used Vista before, but he knows Microsoft OSes prior to Vista just fine. (One of the things that pisses me off about MS is that with every release you have to learn where things are all over again.)
And there is NO excuse for scrolling something like a start menu using standard sized fonts. None. Ever. Morons.
After all the media that has been published on Vista and comparing it to XP - this article seems to offer very little. For someone who has used this 19 months,I was unimpressed with the writing and the lack of detail. Very little true insight was offered. Also, quotes like, 'Some programs still have problems with Vista but the blame for this really falls on the vendor and not Microsoft' really, really turned me off. It's nonsense. Who says it's not Microsoft's fault? Some of the largest software vendors in the world have products missing from the Vista compatible list, are they all bad programmers? Part of the problem is Microsoft. This really seems like teen rant - I've had it and used it forever (and you haven't) and it's better than what you've got. There are better Vista reviews/articles out there.
thinks they can have a blog and thinks their opinion is worthwhile or insightful.
This has to be one of the worst reviews I've ever seen. Can anyone enlighten me to this guy's credentials and why he's an authority on the subject? This sentence I loved: "What I can say quite honestly is that there seem to be far fewer bugs in Vista then there were in XP when it was released". This is not a review, this is a poorly worded opinion. No facts, no bug reports, not even specific personal experiences, just like a whimsical sentence. Or the ever duplicitous: "If your PC is having a hard time running XP, it's not a good idea to upgrade. If your PC is running XP but it's sluggish then steer clear of Vista."
Ridiculous, we're slumping into a mediocre state of communication. Slashdot editors, don't indulge this crap, lazy language and fluffy blogs should be smitten into the lowest depths of the internet not pushed to the front page.
Here's a quick review of Vista that I believe conveys more than TFA. Windows 2003 is much faster on hardware with less than 4GB ram based on my own simple tests (browsing the hard drive, the network neighborhood, performing compilations, program startup times, etc.). Windows Vista has poor compatibility with any weird hardware. For example, my bluetooth drivers didn't work on my dell d820, the fingerprint device was impossible for me to configure. Games (like warcraft 3) and certain software installed but would not function. I had none of these problems with Windows 2003 on the same laptop (yes, that's a weird OS to run on a laptop). I was almost disappointed with the dual core machine until I put a slimmer OS on it and realized it was just the software making it slow.
Interface. It adds Windows Key + Tab 3d window switching. Let me tell you why this is horrible compared to OS X's expose or Linux' similar features. One reason is you can't see the window content while you're switching between tabs. The second is because it seems to completely consume all the graphics power of a GeForce 7400!! How can this simple feature that I can run in Linux on my Ti 4200 64MB graphics card be so much slower on such a much faster machine? Poor quality code and optimization is my only explanation. No thought was given to performance, this OS simply requires next-next gen hardware and will suck on anything else. Vista seems to have no other interface improvements. The close window, maximize and minimize window buttons on the window bar are smaller and harder to click. There is less space for window content based on the new window bar layout. The transparent window title bars add nothing to the experience and have been available in Linux for a few years.
Security. Every time you want to do something that takes administrative access Vista throws two popup boxes in your face. One to elevate your access to Admin and one to make sure you initiated the action. 1.) This is not security, this is blaming the user if he makes a mistake after being driven batty by this annoying feature. 2.) There should be only one popup box that handles both of these questions, user interface design 101. Disable the popups and you lose the whole "security"
Please, correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above. But don't speak up if you have never used other operating systems or if you're just shouting opinion.
How dare you sir! This article is for bashing on Microsoft ONLY! You must wait until the next iPhone article to bash Apple. So, about 15 minutes...
...was it ever fresh?
--
Franklin Brauner
"Photoshop is 'cmd-space+p+h+enter' and it is open." Actually, it's cmd-space+p+h+[down arrow]+enter. I'm waiting for Leopard when it will finally just select the top item for me.
I would recommend waiting until SP1 for any MS OS.
I think that was good idea with NT, 2000 and Windows XP and the more complex they get the more bugs they have.
I think most people will see little reason to upgrade yet, there is hardly anything that Vista has that XP does not.
From TFA: ... Crashes and lockups on Vista are few and far between. ... Is Vista more stable that XP? Hard to tell as I don't have a lot of problems with XP
From a stability point of view I've found Vista to be very good from the start.
Damnit, man! Microsoft is the very company that defined the concept that an OS has to crash once in a while! Why do you simply accept this?
That was enough for me; I quit reading. This is simply the same shit in a newer, shinier wrapper!
If my program worked flawlessly in XP, then why is it the vendors fault that it doesn't work in Vista? BTW, I upgraded (read - bought a new computer) to Vista last month, and ended up formatting the disk and installing XP because...some of my games and communications applications do not work with Vista.
Infact, 2 of the pieces of software that fail to work on Vista are: MSN, and Visual Studio....you can't get much more pathetic than that.
I wonder how much MS paid him to write the article (or did they ship him a new computer?)
yep
This guy (or his company) are sponsored by MS. So he comes out and says nothing too bad about Vista.
I have an MSDN Universal account and have had access to Vista for a long time. It has been a beast. I need to run VS 2003 and VS 2005, both suck on Vista. I need to run a local copy of SQL Server 2000, it sucks on Vista. I need to run a local copy of MySQL, it sucks on Vista. etc. There is a lot to not like about "Vista". MS shills don't need to reply.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
But how do you simulate UAC?
..."
Program Clippy to pop up every two minutes?
"I see you're trying to badmouth Microsoft. Would you like to:
A) Read the MS Agent EULA which strictly forbids this.
B) Report yourself to Microsoft.
C)
I don't understand. He didn't compare Vista to Win2k at all. Now how will i know if i have to upgrade?!
Seriously though, it will be a sad day when new apps cant be run on Win2k anymore.
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
"In a few weeks I hope that all the main rigs here at the PC Doc HQ will be running Vista and that XP (along with Windows 2000 will be relegated to test machines and VMware installs)."
If this person can't even keep his sentence context straight, why the hell would I take anything he has to say about high technology seriously?
It's been a long time.
If I am replacing my harddrive, I have to do a cmoplete reinstall and get a new activation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This has to have been the easiest MS install, even with all the "Are you sure" and "Are you really, really sure" boxes (they vanished with a few checkboxes) I've ever had to deal with. It installed the OS, connected itself to the LAN and internet, and managed to install or go online and find all but one driver all by it's little lonesome. No lock-ups, no crashes, no driver disks. Color me impressed.
Gamewise I ran up Lost Coast (Half-Life 2) and ran the stress test. It only lost 7fps (130fps vs 137fps) over the game installed on XP PRO. Not too bad since all the sound and video drivers available are beta drivers at the moment. The manufacturers need to get off their collective butts.
....and ghost the drive first.
Who the fuck re-installs everything just to replace a HD anymore?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I like the search isntead of run. I can type in gpedit and press enter and it will run. ON xp if you type in gpedit and press enter you will get an error message. That and the intergrated dvd burning/picture slide show burning./ amd media center burning applications make it so I really dont want to go back to xp.
I don't really get people who say that this approach is "not security" and then advocate Linux instead: I have Ubuntu Dapper, and it's 'graphical sudo' approach is almost identical to Vista's
That's an authentication dialog. It's making sure you're you and not someone who has walked up to your keyboard while you're getting a cup of coffee.
It's the approval dialogs in Windows that are insane.
The functional design between Vista and XP is inconsistent. I can not perform the same tasks as easily as I could with XP. I LIKE my buttons sometimes in Windows Explorer now I ONLY can use the keyboard short cuts. That might be fine for normal use but what about when I am laying down casually editing my website? It hogs resources and where does 680 megabytes of my ram go? (still no explanation from those who posted replies) The GUI is a complete mess and while there are plenty of improvements in Vista over XP it's a compromise on every level. Hell I can't set my media folder on an non-OS media hard drive as my My Documents folder! The registry is actually WORSE then XP's! What a waste of money. I've already been looking in to various Linux distros but I hear Wine can be painful to use. We'll see...
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
While I still use Google Desktop Search on occasion because it is faster, it is no match for the full OS integration of the Vista search. Also it allows full boolean expressions making queries like "(Profit OR Overlord) OR (soviet AND russia) AND NOT Beowulf" possible. You navigate the file system in a much more efficient way.
The ultimate search feature however is in the start menu. No more futile visual search for an app in a menu that takes up half your screen. If you want to start word, you just press the windows key on the keyboard and type "wo" + enter. Being forced to use XP's "All Programs.." is plain torture compared to this. Of course, one can wonder how they managed to spend $10 billion on such minor usability features - but they are still useful. I could go on a while about the stuff I really disapprove of (like the cursed UAC) but I think that has been adequately covered in other posts.
None of that will affect my un-encumbered media files, right?
Seems to me the Vista DRM "support", is only for files that, um, use DRM.
Am I missing something?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancement s/Vista-Transformation-Pack.shtml
Vista Transformation Pack will give to your Windows XP system the new and cool look of Microsoft's future operating system: Windows Vista. The pack changes most of the system icons, skins and toolbars and also adds new enhancements to your desktop such as a dock bar or a different system tray clock
If you just like the look, then get this... it has some vista features too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Because at this point, for most people changing to Linux isn't really a 'facts' issue. The facts are that any competent computer user is likely using a bunch of apps whose birthplace was Linux anyway, driver support in Linux is such that for the majority of users it would be amazing if they had to get a single driver, and a modern, free distribution works just fine for regular users. The reasons not to change are fairly irrational, such as an irrational hatred of change.
It's been a long time.
Microsoft has released Vista and it's not selling well for two reasons:
- it's not a significant upgrade from Windows XP sp2
- it's anti-piracy measures are killing the one reason why Windows became popular in the first place
This is a failure. Microsoft is a big predator and needs big kills.
So what will Microsoft do? Will they
a) admit the worst public failure in their corporate history, clean out the senior management deadwood, and try again with another Windows version?
b) try to divert attention to their loss of face by threatening Linux and Apple with patent litigation?
c) upgrade Vista significantly through service packs?
d) find ways to undermine Windows XP?
I'd say a), b), and d). They are simply too lost to know what to do for c).
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Where was the item by item? I suppose it was in the article but there wasn't anything that would interest me in the slightest to spend $$$. Bugs, drivers that don't work but are getting better, it is pretty stable, doesn't know if it is faster (it's not).
Sounds like a winner to me!!! I don't all that and more. Geez, running Windows XP under VMWare (which I do) sounds better then this.
...if you asserted you were a citizen of the *state* you live in.
Citizen of the US is a downgrade from citizen of a state.
*Insisting* you're a citizen of the US is insisting that you get a downgrade.
As is typical with Windoze the announce a new product that is really a BETA, i.e.AutoCAD will not work with VISTA many apps are either not recognized or will not work because VISTA is not complete. Doesn't Microstuff have what it take to put out a fully compatible product just once, every patch has problems every "NEW" OS it produces doesn't produce until we pay to have the bugs worked out. fuzmorten
I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement.
It's an accurate statement because a massive proportion of developers don't write their applications to the documented APIs or using recommended best practices. So they write their applications with things like hard-coded directory paths (eg: C:\Program Files), try to write data to places they should (dumping errors to something like c:\error.log is a common favourite), reverse-engineer some API (rather than actually reading the documentation) or rely on buggy behaviour (rather that reading the documentation and doing it properly).
For example: no Windows application written since about 1998 has any excuse for needlessly requiring Administrator privileges to run. Yet many - probably most - of them do. That is 100% the fault of the software developers and there's only so much that can be done to retain compatibility without making too many sacrifices in other areas.
It's like he really wants to say something nice about Vista, but can not actually think of anything.
> From an efficiency point of view, Vista beats XP hands down . . . the improved Start Menu . . . improved search, the larger, more detailed icons.
The total time I spend in a day launching programs from my start menu is less than two minutes, and I use my PC all day long. So how many seconds per day will that save me? And for the supposedly improved start menu, I would have to buy a new PC, learn a new OS, fight with all that WGA and DRM, and fight with all the new security cr@p. You gotta be kidding.
The author is coming to a sad realization.
Will somebody please tell Microsoft to STOP WASTING MY F****** SCREEN SPACE!!!!!! I want smaller icons... MUCH smaller, not bigger ones.
First thing I did in XP is convert everything to windows classic mode due to slightly smaller icons on screen, start menus & control panel, same with fonts. On a side rant, I am also not impressed at all with LCD screens that run at very lame fixed resolutions.
Due to all of this, I had to recently spend $1,000 on a Samsung 24" LCD screen that would run 1920x1200 just so I could recover some of the screen space I used to have back in Windows 95 running on a 19" CRT at 1600x1200. My CRT finally died after 7 long years and no computer store was selling 21" CRTs anymore *cry*
My recent forced upgrade at work from Outlook 2001 to 2003 also kind of ticked me off as Microsoft loves to waste my screen space and make just about every row FATTER than ever before.
The control panel in windows XP even in classic mode is a complete waste of screen space. Also run the Services icon and you can see what I am talking about.
Yo Microsoft, make your graphic shit smaller, not bigger. Or fine make it bigger, but also give us 20/20 vision people the option to use smaller icons, fonts etc - MUCH smaller.
Thanks, and asta-la-vista.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
NFS Client.
New TCP/IP stack that won't overrun or lock up for interminable periods anymore.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"I wouldn't call any of the changes earth-shattering. When I'm using XP systems I miss some of the features but not so much that they push me to upgrade any faster.'" Funny that's exactly how I feel when using Windows 2000 (which at work I still do) over XP. Most of XP's work was done 2 years prior with Windows 2000. The fundamentals of Windows XP are 7 years not 5 years old.
In Vista:
If you Pull up the Start Menu, All Programs, right click on Computer, Select Properties, Then Advanced Features, then Performance, Selecting Optimize for Best Performance, and Hit Apply:
All the 'Vista' stuff gets turned off,
You get normal square windows aka - Windows 3.1 type windows.
All Vista & Windows XP eye candy is turned off.
So, You too, in order to get maximum performance,
can buy a new Windows Vista computer,
and optimize it for a personal Windows 3.1 experience!
This Baffles Retail Store PC people,
they think you reinstalled a different Windows.
The more interesting question is: Will Vista feel fresh in 19 months from now?
Current versions of Linux and MacOS is very close to Vista with respect to usability and look & feel. It is really only the top models of Vista that can compete in these respects.
In 19 monts from now 3 more Gnome releases will have passed, KDE will have released its version 4 and probably one or two point releases. Apple will have released their next version too.
Vista on the other hand, will most likely still look like what it looks now.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Hey, it worked for Mac OS X.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
For some reason they fucked up the defragmenter and now it's just a big "defrag my hard drive now!" button with no progress indicator or something to show how fragmented your disk is (this *really* pisses me off).
Apple has said they intentionally didn't ship a defragmenter because they didn't want users to play the "make all the blocks line up" game, which doesn't necessarily have a big correlation to performance.
I've been using computers since my C=64, and I've written my own filesystem, but really, I couldn't tell you how the pretty colored blocks and actual I/O performance were related. Do big blocks make it faster, because it can read an entire file it one place? Or do I tend to read only the starts of files, so smaller blocks mean it never has to go to a particular part of the disk? Or maybe some libraries I only ever use some functions from, so it would be most efficient to have parts of them at the start, and the rest off at the end.
I think having the pretty colored blocks just makes PC geeks think they're smarter than they really are.
Having been using Vista for over 18 months I believe that it's a huge improvement over XP and even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers.
:-p
Like automatic punctuation and an active-voice filter?
Bloggers, sheesh.
"I wonder how he arrives at that? If the program already existed, and Vista didn't, and MS wrote Vista with backward compatibility in mind (did they?) it's hardly the app vendor's fault. But even if MS didn't care about backward compatibility, that's not the app vendor's fault. They can't write programs to an OS that hasn't been written! So this was just a goofy statement."
Here's how it's the vendor's fault. You see, Microsoft has been working on Vista for years now. They've been constantly changing, releasing betas, refining, etc. The vendors failed to properly track a moving target. I mean, it's one thing if the target is just shifting, but another thing altogether when your _competitor_ is moving the target.
It sounds like this guy would prefer the Netscape 4.71 route of software engineering. Guess at what the specs and requirements will be, then start coding. Don't worry if the customer decides on a totally different solution.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Most of us like change.
... and an iPhone(tm) to go with it.
... however you spell it ... minutes after it hits the mirrors.
The MacOS X types will be lined up around the block and across the street to buy Leopard
The Linux people will install their version of Umbu... um
Unfortunately, the Microsoft people have learned from bitter experience that a Microsoft upgrade means misery. And most Microsoft people are pragmatic; they use it for their job, and know upgrades will interfere with things while they get up to speed.
So Microsoft people don't act like computer enthusiasts, because they are not enthusiasts and think the WOW! will turn into WAHHH! faster than you can count.
D
I don't agree that most of the applications I use are products of Linux, but I do agree that alternative software has usually popped up at the same time and in either direction. It may surprise you to hear that I enjoy my Windows desktop and the applications that run on it. That said, I own UNIX computers as well and typically have a terminal going to them and occasionally an X session too. I used linux (debian then ubuntu) as a desktop for almost 2 years before I went back to Windows. The simple fact is that the applications I use most and do what I want most effectively are Windows applications, and I didn't have to ditch the UNIX ones because of the remote access. I agree that driver support in Linux is no longer the issue it once was, and my problems in that regard were minimal. Honestly Linux can be more fun to use because of all the control you can exercise over every detail of it. Still though, I never lost that, because I can just login remotely. It's not fear of change, just that change didn't make sense.
You do realize that in Vista you just hit the Windows key, start typing the first 3-4 letters of the application and hit Enter? On my DESKTOP I never take my hands off the keys.
Search is hands down the best feature of Vista - especially the default search when you open the start menu. It is absolutely as good as Spotlight on Mac now.
To be honest though, while I do like Vista's interface and it's obvious MS has done a lot of usability research in creating it, there's nothing in it that would make me recommend anyone buys an upgrade. Sure - get it with a new system, avoid DRM infested media, and have fun but don't go spending good money to upgrade XP. That's just stupid.
Quick aside: best feature Vista has that should have been in XP or 2000 - you can now map a https WebDAV path to a drive letter (previously you were restricted to http). Of course, drive letters themselves are stupid, but that's another argument.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Something that I rarely see in these Vista discussions is the fact that Vista introduces this pretty neat file versioning system. Yes, you can run your entire home directory off CVS if you want. What's nice about the whole way it's done in Vista is that it is neatly integrated into the entire system and you can quickly and easily move between versions of files. Why isn't this a more highly touted feature? Is it somehow not interesting to typical consumers?
As seven people have now pointed out, the parent is just wrong; you can do exactly the same thing in Vista. How it got to +4 insightful, I don't know...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
At my workplace people started to talk about upgrading to Vista, so I showed them my Ubuntu box with Beryl and some nice (and useful) effects, and they're happyly running Linux now.
You may not take in huge consideration eye candy and graphical effects, but modern Linux desktops beat Windows (XP, Vista, whatever) hands down in all respects.
Vista over XP ranks somewhere between "huge improvement" and "earth-shattering".
Le français vous intéresse?
Vista is not fresh, as it is just another version of Windows (start menu, task bar, tray, the registry, drive letters, etc are all there).
Vista is not even ready, because of lack of drivers and many things to iron out.
Eventually, though, most of us (that use Windows) will run Vista in a year or two, because that's where the market goes.
Why is that amazing? I ran Windows 2000 from November 1999 to November 2006, when the harddisk failed. I may have had at most a dozen blue screen of deaths, in total, despite near daily use. I use XP at work and never had many BSODs there either; except for my laptop where it is more frequent, as in every two months or so.
...
I use Linux at home since late 1998 and have no real complaints there either; it may stall once in a while, but no real crashes. I haven't touched a Mac since 1993, and have no real incentives of doing that either; but I do recall a cartoon bomb when the machine stalled.
I would like to buy 64-bit Vista, but will wait until there is DirectX 10 supported SLI(nVidia) or CrossFire(AMD/ATi) configurations. I don't expect it crash any more frequently than the others, but maybe I'm wrong and should expect that.
Microsoft will never create an operating system with the one improvement I think all of us here on /. want to see:
Faster performance using fewer CPU cycles and less memory. Personally, if it weren't for certain games, I'd still be running Windows 2000 instead of that bloated mess called XP! As for Vista, that's so fat and ugly it makes XP look like one of those anorexic European models by comparison.
What features does Vista have that's so great, anyway?
Search? Every piece of data has a specific home on my machine. I don't store anything at random, so I have no need to search for stuff. I already know where everything is. A little discipline goes a long way, guys.
Easier to use? I'm still trying to find where they moved all the functions on me. Arrrgh! What's this, an operating system or an ad for a "Dummies" book?
More secure? This is Microsoft we're talking about. 'Nuff said!
More stable? Yeah, tell that to the blue screens I get periodically. Granted, this might partially be nVidia's fault, but how much you want to bet that the DRM "features" added to Vista have made it more difficult to write a stable driver?
Nicer look and feel? Bah! I have the same look and feel in XP using third-party tools, and they don't consume half the CPU time or memory that the Vista stuff does.
The Vista sweet spot: a 64-core processor with at least 512 GB memory and 1TB disk space. Oh, wait. Those are the specs for Vista SP1. Nevermind.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
...because he used the word 'rig' to describe his computer.
Move along.
FTA:
The system takes about 12 seconds to boot up and 3 to 5 seconds to shutdown - a huge improvement over XP. It remains to be seen if this effect will last though. As more software gets installed and the detritus starts to build I expect these times to increase (I'll be surprised if they don't).I thought he'd been running it for 19 months? Did he not install any software in that time?
One of the reasons I don't use the MS search indexing (fast find) is the fact it's a resource hog. Simply put, there is absolutely no reason for the damn app to consume 100 percent CPU and thrash the drive for 30 minutes before I kill it. Instead I'll stick to using the Google Desktop w/search and a few other plug-ins because they make sense to me and in regards to Spotlight on a Mac, I've never used one but it appears that Apple actually got the damn search feature correct unlike MS.
qz
I use Nutch It's free as in speech, it crawls my intranet filesystem and server.
"think of it as evolution in action"
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html
have nice day
[Vista] only lost 7fps (130fps vs 137fps) over the game installed on XP PRO.
The Idea of a newer operating system is that it would work Better, not worse.
You shouldn't lose 7fps, you should be gaining 10~20 fps.
A Real New OS: Smaller, Better, Faster. (See OS X, or Linux)
BLOATWARE: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista.
Windows NT and 2000 were the only decent Windows Microsoft ever produced,
and generally they sucked at games.