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?"

Comments

Unfortunately

[Greyfox]

I'm frequently subjected to Windows at work. I'm under the impression that it kind of sucks for automated building. Various debugging and other popups frequently hang our build system. If we could just rip the goddamn UI out of that thing and run it text mode only it might actually almost not suck for our needs.

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.

Re:Unfortunately

[fabs64]

You're right of course, and it does work (in a very cluggy and unresponsive kind of way), however they don't have to go to great lengths to stop it. As the GP pointed out, goddamned fucking modal dialogs stop this working.
The SQL client I use at work has a modal dialog box pop up while executing a query, unfortunately because of the size of the data sets I'm working on some of my queries go for hours, the program itself also frequently crashes.
bada bing, without too much effort on the developers part I have an application that takes over my screen all the time.

GP is right, having the client process deal with window messages is right up there with Microsoft's worst bad design decisions.

Re:Unfortunately

[TheNetAvenger]

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.)

You have no idea what you are talking about. I think you are confusing the 'single input queue of OS/2' with Windows, which since Win3.x has always had a multi-input queue.

Vista also has several changes that address this even futher. For example the composer can even redraw unresponsive applications without any I/O lock.

Anyone that has used Windows with an NT base like 2k/XP/Vista knows that 99% of the time you can still 'Close and sometimes Minimize/Move' a crashed application; and in Vista it is 100% of the time on all of the above.

Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes

You are kidding right? Have you ever even seen performance numbers comparing Windows 2003 server to OSX Server? Have you even seen deployments of remote RDP users on a Windows 2003 server with all the themes and UI glitz of XP active?

The scary thing is that Longhorn even takes this to the next level, letting remote users run the 3D Aero interface remotely, fully accelerated locally because the Vista/Longhorn composer is pusing Vector and 3D information over RDP. Lets see you run a 3D application on any other Server OS or even Desktop OS 4,000 miles away with hardware acceleration and with a 3D UI with all the glitz. And this is something Vista does today, and Longhorn Beta will do later this year. I have seen our techs easily using glass and accelerated 3D applications from a Vista or Longhorn server session on a 56K connection, which is past impressive to being a bit scary.

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

And maybe if you knew what you were talking about you would understand the NT kernel of Windows is considered to be one of the best OS foundations, even from critics in the OSS world, it is the Win32 subsystem that takes a beating and MS could very easily replace it at any point.

But then again, if you had any clue you wouldn't have made the irresponsible and inaccurate statements in your post.

Next time do a google or even ask the 10 year old computer nerd that lives next door before trying to add information on something you know nothing about.

Re:Unfortunately

[Mr2001]

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[...]

Meanwhile OSX[...] Er... when an OSX app stops responding, the window can also become impossible to move, minimize, or close. I see it all the time. The best part is when cmd-opt-Esc brings up the Force Quit dialog box behind a frozen window, where you can't get at it. (Unless you remember to use Expose.)

Re:Im sorry....

[Toreo asesino]

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?

Re:Im sorry....

[MeanMF]

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.

Re:As an IT guy also

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My Vista pros/cons

[daybot]

Pros:

• Scheduled defrags without third party software
• Aero interface looks less dated

Cons:

• Regardless of memory usage, it's slower than XP. Games are slower (see Tom's Hardware), CAD/CAM apps are slower (same again)...
• A great deal of Windows software doesn't work on it yet. PGP has just reached beta, iTunes is having trouble, I can't get Cygwin to work properly, VMWare server doesn't have a released version that allows it to work as a host OS. That's most of the programs I run!
• UAC is broken. It slows down your system, bothers you far too often. If you've seen the Mac advert slagging off Vista security - well, it really is that bad.
• Games are slower
• It's DRM crippled to the extreme
• Aero doesn't run smoothly on mid-range Quadro cards...
• That stupid Windows-Tab animation keeps getting shown in the media when they talk about Vista's innovative new features - sorry, it's a very slow tool to use; press F9 on OSX to see how it should work (someone's done a hack to make this work in Vista, but it's bloody slow on Quadro).

Re:As an IT manager

[v1]

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".

Fixed

[gcnaddict]

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.

Re:Media Center

[pavera]

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.

Not quite

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:Me

[rizzo420]

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.