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Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
That's not the entire story though. You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design. And early design flaws. In my opinion the most frustrating one of these is the fact that the application itself handles window frame messages. That means if the application is poorly written and stops handling frame window commands at any point you can't even minimize the window until it gets done processing. Minimize, kill and move should pretty much never stop working for any given window, even if the application is displaying a goddamn modal dialog box (Another pet peeve of mine and Microsoft seems to encourage programming by modal dialog.)
Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes. I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You could also use truecrypt. I like that one... The corporation I work for shelled out quite some money to get their laptops encrypted.... *sigh*
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
one word:
"cache"
Vista will pre-load stuff it thinks you might need next. It's using your RAM to speed up your computer, which shockingly, is the idea of RAM.
Genius idea if you ask me; and I believe UNIX has been doing it for a while too - or at least something similar?
throw new NoSignatureException();
It's called SuperFetch and it puts your RAM to good use when it's not needed for anything else. You can disable it if you'd like.
The difference between 98 and XP was huge in comparison though. The whole architecture was different - and thus XP (and indeed its predecessors 2000 and NT4) is a lot more secure than 98.
Real features like NTFS filesystem, properly done process separation, a more robust TCP/IP stack, better support for windows domain features etc made it worth upgrading 98 to XP.
I can't think of any such compelling features for business IT in moving to Vista from XP.
After checking out Vista at the local Best Buy & Circuit City (for hours...), I decided that I didn't want M$'s latest & 'greatest'. If running Aero the machines all acted like XP with a 600Mhz Celery processor. Boy, only 20 days after Vista was released & all the retail stores are on the Vista bandwagon, no 'mo XP in sight. Wonder where all the old gear went ?
I wanted a hot laptop, AMD TL-56 64bit DP, 1GB memory, DVD+-, good screen, Nvidia graphic card, etc. Best Buy had one that was everything I wanted but it was Vista. Ugh ugh. So I started cruising the web & found the XP version of the same machine, $100 cheaper too ! At Best Buys web site. Quick, they only have a few left... And SuSE 10.2 installed just fine...
try playing a game, or doing something else, I have a system with 2gb of ram, running nothing but Windows Messenger I use 1.02GB of ram at idle. The weird thing is if I open HL2 I'm only using 1.14gb of ram, right now I have a ton of applications open and am only using 1.09gb. Vista's memory allocation is quite a bit superior to XP's I think in part its because so much is loaded into memory that most applications don't need to load much and so load much faster. Oh and some other ancedotal evidence
Until Uru (predessor to Myst Online: Uru Live) could use upto 1.5gb of memory before refusing to load anything else. On this system with XP That meant I was using 1.83gb of Ram, running it on Vista first I was only using 1.89gb of ram. Its something that has been annoying me for sometime just how does an OS with a much larger memory requirement not use that much more memory for gaming than Xp?
Pros:
- Scheduled defrags without third party software
- Aero interface looks less dated
Cons:From what I've read so far though, microsoft maintains a master key that can open any bitlocker-locked home. Any truth to this? On OS X for example, they have had filevault for what, two years now. When you make a vault, you have to set up a master password, and with that you can get in and reset a password, but if you lose the master password or it is deleted from the computer, and you lose your password, not even Steve himself can get your data back.
I don't see how people can settle for "it's totally secure. unless WE want in".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That was fixed in Vista (for Minimize and move, anyway), but only while running Glass. It's because the actual application is no more than a texture thrown onto a frame (the glass). Killing an app is also a tad easier than before: if an app isn't responding and you try to kill it, Windows asks you if you'd like to wait for it to come back to the light or if you'd like to hack it to bits. I haven't had an issue with it so far.
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I've seen it. It looks OK, but here's my story.
I was over at my friends house, he's all excited "I just got this new Vista Ultimate! Check out the Media Center". He turns on his TV, grabs the remote and starts up media center... goes to his recorded TV shows, hits play on a show from a couple days ago... we watch it for a couple minutes, then he goes back hits play on another show and.... Crash "Do you want to send a message to Microsoft?", no, start media center back up, hit play again on a different show, plays for about 3 seconds, crash again.
Then he says "Yeah, I can't get it to play more than one show per reboot... I don't know why, once you hit play on a show you have to watch that show all the way through, if you stop it or try to play another show it crashes. Once that show is done, it crashes, and you have to reboot to get it to play again"
His is just set up on a whitebox that he built and I don't know the stats or hardware he's got in it... but seriously, after seeing that and my other friend had it on his laptop (uninstalled and went back to XP after 2 weeks, couldn't get his development environment working under vista, also HATED UAC) watched him work for about 30 minutes one day, he had to have 15-20 UAC warnings in those 30 minutes, all for very normal things to do (like joining a wifi network) I'm never installing Vista, I'm glad I've got a non-OEM copy of XP that I can install on new hardware.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Yeh, I guess Wireless, VERY useful GPOs, Remote Assitance, IPSec, Remote Desktop, Firewall, improved event logs...etc means nothing to you.
I currently support networks with both XP and 2000, 2000 are by far much more difficult to manange them XP. By your statement I have to assume that you either don't manage multiple XP and 2000 workstations or you don't know about the added feature in Xp to make your life easier.
I maintain one Vista machine for testing purposes. I do as little work as possible on it because quite frankly I prefer Linux. In particular, I make sure that LedgerSMB runs on Vista. LedgerSMB in turn depends on PostgreSQL, Vanilla Perl, and Apache.
Compared to XP, Vista is a mixed bag. There are some user experience improvements, and way the menus work on the start menu is an improvement. Aside from the initial disorientation, the UI is closer to what XP's should have been.
However, there are many complaints I have about Vista. UAC is the biggest one, and this can result in corrupted installs of some software (including Apache), and it is simply way too tempting to turn off every security improvement that Vista offers. Whatever Vista does, it will *not* make Windows that much more secure-- it just allows Microsoft to blame the users.
I also find Vista to be surprisingly slow (granted I only have 512MB RAM in this system) and some settings like UAC are hard to find. I think that Vista is going to be a support headache for everyone, and I do not recommend that people upgrade.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm running my knoppix remaster, kernel 2.4, and "top" shows:
Cpu(s): 0.5% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 97.6% idle
Mem: 256268k total, 251592k used, 4676k free, 3856k buffers
Swap: 1405648k total, 2156k used, 1403492k free, 159616k cached
As you can see, this is only a 256 MB of RAM machine, and quite a bit is "used", also the Swap is being used. I'm running Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2, and using IceWM for "X". (See screenshots, below)
I know from experience, that if I now want to fire up GIMP, I can work on a bunch of images if I want to, and this setup will have no problems with that. I use a HD partition for a gimp-swap. I suppose that Vista can do the same thing, but requiring a dual core, and 2 GB of RAM, the norm for a lot of machines Dell has for sale now. I have seen one of these machines, but with XP, and was amazed at the number of apts that can be opened at once and run successfully for hours, without any problems. There are a lot of applications available for XP, and I have noted that the users tend to load up their desktops with a ton of icons for the apts, very impressive indeed to someone who maintains a livecd linux, with a defined set of applications, not very expandable, but do-able with the "persistent home" hard drive partition. If I can get ahold of an application in a tarball, such as a new, or perhaps a nightly build of Firefox, for instance, then I can add that to the running linux system, and have it come back the next time the box is booted. OK for a livecd linux such as mine, but not in the same league as XP or Vista. I'm thinking the world would be a much duller place without them, sorry to see so much bad press about the expensive Vista OS, and the powerful machines that run it.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
funny... i just put vista on my work laptop. well, i did it twice. first was an in place upgrade, which worked fine until i decided to put another stick of memory in it that wasn't 100% compatible with my computer and destroyed my install. so i formatted and reinstalled and had the same problem until i installed without that other stick of memory in there and it went fine. i have no plans on reverting back to XP. i like vista better. all the apps i need run on it perfectly, even some that i thought i might have an issue with (macromedia suite mx 2004, for example). there's a few things that won't work (pdfcreator and the version of nero that we've got at work, although that's really not supposed to be installed on the laptops we have because it's OEM with the dvd-rw's that come with our desktop machines).
i'm the first staff member in my place of business (with between 700 and 900 employees) that's using it. there is 1 issue that i see so far... group policy in AD. we have policies that force the user to use automatic updates (because too few computers were being updated). it prevented me from getting around that to install the optional updates (which include drivers and office 2003 updates as the policy did not allow me to install microsoft update). i had them exclude me from the policy though, that way i got all the updates i needed, mostly for office and drivers.
frankly, i think while the UAC is quite annoying to the power user who installs a lot of stuff (especially since i had to for my clean install), it won't be that bad for the user who buys a computer with vista pre-installed since the average user does not install a whole lot. i think it has the potential to make it more secure by making them think before they say "accept".
unless my computer literally blows up, i will not be reverting back to XP. and for the record, your comparison of vista with ME is completely off the mark. ME was just plain terrible and a completely different operating system altogether. vista was built practically from the ground up and has a lot of nice features (some purely superficial) and is 100x more stable than ME, perhaps the worst operating system ever made (at least by MS). i strongly recommend anyone buying a new computer to get it with vista, at least home premier.
my laptop is an HP nc8430 with a core duo 2.16 MHz, 1 GB RAM and ATI raedon x1600 with 256 MB, happily running vista.
please me, have no regrets.
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Untrue. On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster because they are updated and tuned to make better use of that higher end hardware (which probably didn't even exist when the previous version was released).
Vista on, say, an 8-core machine will be substantially faster - especially under load - than XP or 2k on that same machine.
With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before.
Well, when you start of with the abominably bad performance that OS X had on release, there's nowhere to go but up. Windows can't really follow that lead.
Don't expect this to conitnue, by the way - eventually (probably after 10.5) Apple are going to run out of those "easy" optimisations that Microsoft were doing to NT back in the early-mid '90s and those "free upgrades" you get with each release are going to stop.
Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes.
But don't forget to compare the _new_ prices those computers were 7 years ago, and their relative performance.
The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy.
No, it won't, because Macs that old don't have the video hardware to handle Quartz Extreme.
Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age.
Done it. I've got an 800Mhz, 1GB RAM P3 running Vista just fine. Only upgrade was a $30 video card.
You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take.
Ah, as is typical with Mac Zealots you apply a ludicriously arbitrary restriction so your "argument" works.
Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
No, they're not.