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Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP
erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."
I would have to agree with you. The comparable XP machines in our organization are considerably more responsive with UI basics as well as program operation.
To be perfectly honest, the one area I'd give Mac OS X a bit of a "thumbs down" is in the area of "mouse precision". No matter how fast the machine (and I own a new Mac Pro quad Xeon 2.66Ghz tower with ATI X1900XT video card), I've seen OS X exhibit what I can only describe as "touchiness/quirkiness" with selecting items or groups of items in the "Finder", and with its decision of whether you clicked or double-clicked on a particular icon.
On a fairly regular basis, I find, for example, that I wanted to drag a highlighted groups of files someplace, but OS X thinks I clicked in some manner to deselect the highlighted group as soon as I click and hold the mouse button to start the drag process.
I've also had the frustration of occasionally trying to double-click an icon to launch a program, but OS X decides I actually clicked, paused, and clicked again on it - giving me the blinking cursor on the name of the icon so I can rename it instead.
It would be easy to write this off as a cheap or defective mouse, except I've used many mice and many different OS X based Macs with similar behavior. I've got a Logitech MX Revolution laser mouse on my Mac Pro right now. (Arguably one of the most accurate mice out there), and it hasn't cured this behavior.
Playing around with the mouse settings in the preferences panel never cures it for me either. It almost seems like OS X just doesn't give quite high enough priority to polling the mouse activity, so the OS occasionally misses something you're trying to do with it? In XP, by contrast (even running on the same Mac Pro system!), I don't experience this.
It is there (pdf link).
If you have a desktop, getting a Mighty Mouse is worth every penny. I like it more than my Logitech cordless MX mouse. Expose with a mouse button is the best way of switching between windows that I have come across. It is almost as efficient as tabbed browsing.
Next time you have two Word documents open, try hitting apple+` (the key above tab). You may be pleasantly surprised, and it does conform to the OS X methodology of separating windows from applications quite nicely. I agree that Expose is overkill for such purposes.
Straight from the horse's mouth, without the childish Mac fanboy commentary given by "IT-Enquirer".
That said, I'd call the validity of the report itself is in question, given that they're not comparing apples to apples, but instead are running the tests on different machines. Perhaps even more importantly, they've failed to state the memory of the machines used, failed to take the opportunity to remove variables such as hard drive speed, etc. Their report attempts to sidestep these numerous issues by claiming that the tests aren't hardware dependent - but given that every single one of their tests gives a result based on length of time to complete tasks, it should be staggeringly obvious to anybody that a higher-specced machine will fare better.
I'd like to see a comparison between machines of the same cost, or machines specced to use identical (or near-identical) hardware. As is, this report is utterly useless.
I just got a new desktop system with Vista last week. To my surprise, the "Cancel or Allow" popup windows aren't nearly as annoying as I'd expected. You encounter them during every application install, but it's just one more click out of the many needed to install an application anyway. Not much of an issue, IMHO.
That's not to say there aren't other issues, though. Oblivion installed okay but wouldn't run until I tracked down a missing DLL to put into the windows/system folder. The Photoshop Elements 3.0 installer quit with an error message. Adobe says they're only supporting version 5.0 on Vista, but despite all this the application appears to work anyway (at least for now). Also, an auto-update from last night disabled my PCI-wireless card and I had to reinstall the drivers to get it working again. It's working, but at boot the Netgear app exits with a couple of error messages.
I can't comment on whether Vista is more or less productive since I try really hard not to be productive on my home system!
This is why I use CMD for some operations.
/s myfile*
For example Sometimes I do a search and XP can't find the file. and it took forever to tell me.
I know the file is there but its file type is not "registered" (tm) with Windows.
Solution: open CMD and type Dir
Results: I get my answer in fraction of the time and subsequent searches are *Quicker*!
I'm sure you can get the same benefits using CMD for large jobs.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Finder locks up, because it's a giant ball of shit, but other OS X applications shouldn't lock up enough to force a reboot. Are you 100% sure it's not a bad stick of RAM causing your problems?
Almost always, when people complain about bluescreens in Windows or lockups in OS X, it's bad hardware from my experience. Nearly 100% of the time.
Comment of the year
Vista's I/O subsystem can keep media streaming off the disk even while you are doing tasks like defragging. Vista's malloc is dramatically better (40%+ in my informal benchmarks). Vista's I/O operations can be canceled, so applications don't mysteriously become zombies because of I/O blocking. Vista's disk caching is significantly improved.
You can't expect to run Vista on a 512MB system and get XP-like performance. But if you have 1GB or more, Vista is often actually much faster than XP.
No, Vista can't make your virus scanner scan any faster. It's not going to make your XVID encoder encode faster. But, let's be honest - no OS can do that. It can, however, make launching applications, allocating memory, and disk I/O much more responsive. Which is exactly what it does.
But, hey, you don't actually need to use Vista to decide that it's "terrible".
The deselection you describe is the fault of a spectacularly stupid decision on the part of the Finder's designers.
In List View, if your drag-click starts on the icon or text label of a file, it is interpreted as a drag-and-drop operation; if you start the drag on a blank area in the window, EVEN IF IT IS PART OF THE SELECTION, the Finder interprets it as the start of a new selection.
I can't figure out why they thought this was a good idea, but this is why some drag-and-drops turn into deselections; you have to start dragging a file's icon or name.
Menu latency at least is customizable via setting HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\menushowdelay. XP defaults to 400 (ms). I use a value of 1. Going to zero has wierd effects...
Cheers
To switch between applications on OS X: Cmd-Tab
To switch between windows in an application on OS X: Cmd-~
Frankly, I'm glad that they made the distinction between an application and a window, unlike the Windows world. It makes a lot more sense, IMO.
Actually, it's here: http://www.pfeifferreport.com/trends/UIF_Report.pd f
The bias of Pfeiffer is laughably absurd. They're nothing more than a shill consulting firm in business to do your lying for you. In this case, they are paid Mac liars. There are others happy to do your pro-PC lying for you. Employees like to employ outside consultants because their lies seem more convincing to management.
In 46 pages there was not one quantifiable, objective benchmark for anything they're attempting to convey nor one objective description of what they are measuring. Of the measured data, all is irrelevent because of their failure to compare hardware explicitly and their failure to define what is acceptable response and what is unacceptable. Finally, it's revealing to note that all of their positive examples were Apple ones while all their negative examples were Microsoft ones. Is there any doubt when they say that they are trying to quantify why Mac users consistently say that Macs are easier to use? Ridiculous.
One of the greatest jokes on the entire test is where two users, one Mac and one PC, are tasked to draw in Photoshop (yes, Photoshop!). The PC user is slower and more error-prone. Proof!
I refuse to believe that OS X inherently has more accurate mouse placement than Windows...not that they provided evidence to the contrary. It's simply one of their absurd claims.
I run IT for an ad agency with about 50 of those dual 2ghz, os x boxes, and well... That's not true.
In my experience, somethings are faster on one, or the other. The GUI feels faster on XP sometimes, but there are always more steps involved. And, to be honest, only have ever felt the OS feel slightly more sluggish on PPC systems, on the Intel systems, it's pretty much speed wise and even match.
Personally not for work, i have a AMD x2 tower (running XP and OSX 10.4.8 (titan drivers, semmex 8.8.1 kernel full core audio/video;) And a MacBookPro. As far as speed goes, they are the same, and the Macbook just ended up being the main controller of my media, on the Mac side.
from my experience here with 50 G5's (in the course of about 3 years since we moved to the 12th floor) I've had 2 OS reinstalls, one bad hard drive, and on bad processor. Anyone who says stability is an issue of the mac platform, either a)doesn't use a mac or b) doesn't know how, in which case... there's this thing called web TV i gotta tell you about.
fyi, nerds: windows is for games.
not like this matters, everyone on slashdot is already a fan boy.
but i honestly do triboot fedora, osx and xp on my macbook. so there.
A very subjective review with no hard facts about Vista... And featured on SlashDot, how could this be?
#1) What drivers were used? The optimized ones from NVidia or ATI? Vista has a new Video subsystem with a new driver model, and NVidia and ATI have had to write their drivers from scratch, something that maturity of the XP and other OS drivers just don't have.
#2) Was Aero left on to get the speed improvements? Turning off Aero reduces Vista video performance to XP levels, and turns off many of the accelerated features.
#3) Usability is addressed, but based on what grounds? MS spends millions on usability testing, are we all to be so stupid to conclude that their research in this area is not somewhat valid? Are they taking new users, old file manager type users, Mac users, or what? Facts please.
#4) File copy performance? Again based on what circumstances? Our internal tests show Vista can shove mass amounts of files in many settings several times faster than XP, also without exhausting the system RAM or cache as XP and prior NT bases would. I would like to see how these numbers were obtained.
#5) Menu lag? Again, was Aero turned off, how could they be showing numbers that are in direct contrast to our testing? If Aero is enabled, the UI is not only more responsive, but things like Menus and Windows opening are significantly faster than XP and especially OSX.
#6) Mouse precision? This has to be a joke right? The Windows Input model allows for extremely high resolution devices, and is SOLELY based on the input device used. If you pick up a high resolution mouse that obtains 10x the precision that a low end mouse provides in Vista it is very measurable and based upon the device. If you select another input device like a Wacom Tablet, your input resolution can be adjusted based on the device to scale in factors to several 1000 times the variances they use as examples in the article.
This can easily be demonstrated by a simple example, Ink Input in Vista is extremely high resolution, and captures at an extremely high rate.
Are they using a generic mouse and just hooking it up to the systems to get these numbers?
The mouse precision is the biggest joke of the article...
You might want to use Vista first. It does not do that in my experience. They fixed any issues partially through a file delete/copy/move causing the entire process to bomb. I love the features in Vista as far as that goes. VAST improvement over XP in that area.
Being an ex-Amiga user this unfriendly behaviour completely boggles me -- why not offer a "try again" option here? I could delete some files in the mean time and then let the operation continue could I not? Windows does pretend to be a multitasking system right? A user might magically switch to another explorer and delete some files magically making more space available...
Get with the times they changed that in Vista. :) It has nice skip/retry buttons when things like that happen. It also shows lots of file detail when it asks if you want to overwrite something. You can even keep both versions and it changes the name of one of them. That is but one of the possibly hundreds of "about damn time" features in vista.
Yes, yes, I use a Mac, too.
But the point here is that you can't really make a fair judgement, given you don't seem to even know how to use Windows in the first place. If I had a Mac in front of me and I didn't know how to eject a disk, then you handed me a Windows computer and I learned how to eject a disk on it, then yes I'd think the Windows computer was better.
It's kind of hard to answer your numerous questions without knowing what icon, exactly, you're clicking on. If you click the icon in the System Tray that looks like a PCMCIA card sliding out of a slot and has a tooltip to the effect of "Eject Removable Devices", it will pop up a menu of all the removable devices on your computer including USB disks. You select the one you want to eject, and you're done. It disappears, then a little speech bubble appears and says "your device is safely removed" and you can pull it out. At least as easily as OS X, PLUS you get graphical feedback when it's actually OK to physically remove the device.
There's no right-clicking involved... if you're right-clicking at all, you're doing something wrong.
If you're clicking on the icon of the USB disk in "My Computer" you're probably doing something wrong. (Although maybe that is a way to do it also; I've actually never tried.)
The point is, I use and (generally) like Mac OS X also, but you can't spout out shit about Windows if you don't KNOW Windows. I could as easily say that Mac OS X sucks ass because there's no way to format a disk, which displays about the same level of ignorance about Mac OS as you did about Windows.
If you use both systems, you realize that both do a lot of right and a lot of wrong. Windows Explorer is excellent at handling a folder with 10,000+ files in it, when that same directory will crash Finder. Meanwhile, OS X has the Expose window-switching method which is far superior than any equivalent method in Windows. Meanwhile, Windows handles network resources about 30,000 times smarter than OS X and won't freeze or choke if you put your computer to sleep, then wake it in a different wifi network. Meanwhile, Mail.app is a better email client than Outlook, meanwhile Outlook has a much better calendar than iCal, etc etc etc.
Comment of the year
You can run multiple commands in a for loop by using brackets after the do. Here is a stupid example. It will rename each file to "hi" and then rename it back again. See footnote 1 for information on the && and || operators.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
You are not limited to doing it on a single line either. Try the following: (do not type in the "More?")
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (
More? ren "%i" hi
More? if not exist "%i" echo it worked
More? ren hi "%i"
More? )
To make things less messy, you can add a @ before the ( to turn echo off. This will prevent each line of script from displaying while running.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do @(ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
The bracket blocks can also be used with if statements, can be embedded and can have the output piped to another program. For example:
C:\> if exist file.txt @(
More? for %i in (*.txt) do @(
More? echo hi
More? echo %i
More? )
More? echo Done
More? ) | sort
It is well worth having a look at the help of the for command using "for /?". It is amazing what it can do, even if the interface is a bit clunky. It would even help with your problem of parsing of the output of other programs. In this example, the for command iterates over the output of at, and if it finds an entry that will run today, then it stores the ID of the entry into the environment variable TODAYID. You can then use this to delete the entry.
C:\> for /F "skip=2 tokens=1,2" %i in ('at') do @if "%j"=="Today" set TODAYID=%i
/delete
C:\> at %TODAYID%
Of course, in this situation the variable in not required to delete the at entry. You would normally just do it on the for line itself.
Finally, have a look at the help for the set command with "set /?". There is some interesting stuff there, including text substitution of variables with %MYVAR:oldtext=newtext%. More importantly, it talks about the limitations of using variables inside blocks. Variables are processed at the parsing stage, so a command line of: set myvar=fish && echo %myvar% will display the old value of myvar because the substitution happens before the set command is run. The help text tells you how to get around this.
** Footnotes **
Footnote 1. The && and || operators work the same as they do in bash. && will call the next command if the previous one succeeded while || calls the next command if the previous one failed. They are shortcuts for doing "if errorlevel" statements. EG. Assume that you have a file called file.txt
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It worked
Now do it again, but now file.txt no longer exists:
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It failed
Footnote 2. If you want to rename all the files in the current directory to another name and then immediately rename them back again to exactly as they were (as my example code does), you can use the special "rename multiple" command, or REM command. Once again it uses some magic operators, but the usage would be:
C:\> REM (*.txt ;-)
Run this, and you will be amazed to find that your files are exactly as they were to begin with.