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Is Vista a Trap?
logube writes "BBC has up an article about the trap of installing Vista in your existing desktop. Written by Tim Weber, a self-confessed 'sucker for technology,' this article is a good introduction to the pain and extra money required to get going with the newest version of Windows. See how you can spend an extra 130 british pounds, and still have no working webcam! Says Weber, 'It took me one day to get online. The detail is tedious and highly technical: reinstalling drivers and router firmware didn't work, but after many trial and error tweaks to Vista's TCP/IP settings, I had internet access. Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"
Focus your fire on that unsupported hardware!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Why do I get the feeling this was posted solely to let people use "itsatrap" as a tag?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Directx 10. They could have put out an XP version. (of course that doesnt sell CDs) You will need DX10 for upcoming games. Security updates (there still must be holes). Besides that I say wait as long as you can.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Burn the MSDN image, grab RAID drivers for my onboard RAID, put the drivers on my USB key, then boot the Vista install disk. Go through the usual setup with the drivers. Reboot. All hardware is auto-detected and drivers installed except for my Creative Audigy 2 sound card. Pull the drivers from their site and install. Update nVidia drivers while I'm at it. Works great, no problems.
Vista won't recognise my C64 tape drive either! Those MS bastards! It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
So, it's like moving to Linux but with the additional pleasures of both paying $200.00 and still not getting any useful bundled applications?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
win98 -> 2000, lots of problems with lack of drivers for older hardware
2000 -> XP still problems with lack of drivers for older hardware (although maybe not as many)
XP -> Vista well, what do you think?
-- the cake is a lie
Except that Linux has had practically universal network and soundcard support for years. Even if the network hardware only has Windows 2000 binary drivers, you could load them with the NDIS module...
It used to be that if you wanted all of your hardware to work, you ran Windows. Looks like the tables have turned.
Microsoft isn't completely blameless here. If Microsoft had adopted the same strategy for drivers as the OpenBSD project has (accepting either fully open drivers or no drivers), then somebody (even Microsoft) could make the drivers work on Vista.
This is yet another why open drivers built from publicly-available hardware documentation are better than binary-blob drivers.
http://outcampaign.org/
Considering that Microsoft says a 1 GHz PC with 512 MB RAM will run Vista, he probably expected a working system.
I think Vista uses more RAM to display a window than my OS/2 Warp system used to run half a dozen apps (I had 8 MB of RAM on an AMD 486/40).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
also, by that logic, linux is a trap
At least you get the satisfaction of spending a whole day (or more) putting the elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque trap together yourself first.
=Smidge=
Umm, at least a baseline support for that hardware? For a company so prided on backwards compatibility, Microsoft sure has given the finger hardcore to a lot of people when it comes to Vista.
For comparison: I have an Apple iMac G3 400MHz with 768MB RAM and a 40GB disk happily running OS X 10.4. This machine also has a (nonupgradeable) 8MB ATI video card. Note that this computer, at this moment, is almost 8 years old, and runs Tiger like a champ. Sure, I don't get all the cool effects, but the key is I didn't have to do a damn thing to make it work, it just did, and it doesn't even attempt the effects it can't handle. I can browse the internet, use iTunes, type in Word, Excel, Pages or Keynote, check my email, and even watch DVD's. And you know what? It runs 10.4 FASTER than it runs 10.3. Given, it's still a bit slower than OS 9, but given the added capabilities of it and it still being useable in OS X, that's a pretty damn good trade-off.
I hate sigs...
Linux as a whole might take some blame if an older version worked with the hardware (say in kernel 2.4) , but a newer version (say kernel 2.6) didn't. This does happen on occasion, but it is generally fixed-up by either an OSS developer that wants to use the hardware, or the vendor (such as the Nvidia binaries).
Remember, Vista is purported to be somewhat of an upgrade/improvement over XP. That means that people expect it to do what XP does, and more. It's still MS windows, just a newer, shinier, bulkier ones.
So if your winmodem worked in 2.4.x and not in 2.6.x, you might have a legitimate gripe at linux. Generally such things come out in the next-version bugfixes, but issues do happen where a particular newer version does not like certain hardware, or the source-code for modules doesn't compile and no newer-version source is available. If there never was support for your winmodem in the first place (note, WINmodem is a good giveway that it's not non-windows friendly), then the blame rests somewhat on the manufacturer for not providing a driver, or at least specs for such. In the case of winmodems, the software pretty much is most of the product, so the manufacturers guard it fairly closely.
Wow, completely missed the section of the article where he clearly says he *ran* said Upgrade adviser (which is what led to a Graphics card update among a few other things) but that he later still had problems with unsupported/non-functional hardware the adviser didn't give a peep about, huh? Give you a hint... second part of the article after "A blunt message"... starts with "But this was probably not enough, so I downloaded Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor."
Sheesh.
Yes.
Except, certain things in Vista still work better than under (say) Ubuntu, or a lot of other Linux distributions.
Like, say, 802.11 configuration.
Or perhaps, volume controls. I've given up on getting a proper working fucking volume control on my SB Live-equipped Ubuntu desktop machine.
Or Bluetooth. Such pain and trauma to configure a Bluetooth mouse with Linux, but it was straight-forward with Vista.
Or video drivers. Neither Vista nor XP has ever trashed my video drivers with an automatic update. Meanwhile, every time Ubuntu switches to a new nvidia-legacy driver, my desktop machine needs to be tickled again before X will work. (I know - I should just stick with the free nv driver, since there's no fucking games for Linux to make 3D worth caring about, anyway. But I like xscreensaver's GL hacks.)
Vista's not perfect, though. It killed support for DirectSound3D and EAX, making games less enjoyable to play (for me, anyway). However, EAX never worked at all in Linux, so I guess I don't feel "trapped" anymore than I do with Linux.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yes unfortunately I tend to forget how different /. is when it comes to vague posts or ranting.
I have used Vista, I do not like it, it's intrusive and annoying to me (yes I do want to run that exe), I personally don't care about eye candy, I am into performance which vista does not have unless you are running a state of the art proc, 4 gig's of RAM and a high end graphics card (which none have decent drivers as of yet)
I'm not going to get into the DRM portion of Vista.
You're a sucker to buy it and a fool to run it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...
... dc++ client ...
... office suite ...
... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...
Gwenview, Picasa...
Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.
I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.
In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.
In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
So, what you're saying it's kind of like installing an oddball wi-fi card on Linux. Except without the option of reading hundreds of pages of obscure documentation until you've transformed yourself into a mutant linux hotplugging guru.
In a nutshell, the differnce between getting things working in Linux and Windows seems to be this. Linux is like being parachuted into the wilderness with a hammer, forge, and load of pig iron. Windows is like being parachuted into the wilderness with an impressive looking knife that snaps in two if you don't use it very, very carefully.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sure, so what hardware and software did you have to replace?
Amount I've had to spend in addition to purchasing Vista: $0. I built my AMD Athlon 2700+, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro in 2003 (hardly new). All my software and scenarios work, including:
I'd love to hear other people's experiences, but please include details.
From the article:Uhm, no it isn't, not really. As the author later discovers (but still doesn't realize), getting hardware to work often involves hardware, drivers and OS (and sometimes other software). While we all wish it were that easy, us "expensive PC helpers" have the skills to deal with those cases when it isn't.
For example:Wizards? This suggests that the author does not know how to get to the properties of whatever network protocol (I'm assuming TCP/IP) he's using and configure them directly.You can find out by following the instructions at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298837.
I'm not defending Vista, but I also bristle when people devalue and disrespect people in IT/IS. We make things look easy because we're good at what we do.
I'm not sure what lies you've been reading about UAC, but it conditions users to always say "Yes" to security prompts. This is a very terrible idea and in this situation the criticism is well deserved.
"You are about to open the Control Panel -- allow or deny?"
"You are about to open the Program Files folder -- allow or deny?"
"You are about to modify user preferences -- allow or deny?
"You are about to open attachment pzxyTrojan.exe -- allow or deny?"
Allow.. allow.. allow.. allow.. allow..
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
For every anecdote, there's a counter anecdote:
802.11 works fine for me. Try network-manager/knetworkmanager. All clicky-clicky, and even better than XP's network support IMHO
Volume controls? You mean like the Fn+F6/F7 on my laptop that actually change the volume of my machine? Automatically, with no configuration, in Linux, on my laptop?
Bluetooth seems to work fine for me, too.
Video drives, I just did apt-get install nvidia-glx, and they've worked since then. With Beryl, I get 3D screensavers, everything I could want.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Not supporting DX9 makes no business sense. DX10-only games will be games by Microsoft, or games for which Microsoft paid the developer their expected DX9 profits to be DX10-only.
I was reading an article recently where people were looking for ways to explain what the problems are with digital rights management technology to non technically minded people.
Examples given tended to be along the lines of "I can't watch foreign released films, they were never released locally so I have no legal option, and I need this for my book report." and "You shouldn't have to pay for that song again, you already paid for it."
These are, quite frankly, not the most pressing examples I could think of.
Here's some examples you can show your mom and dad:
1) Broadcast news will be all be digitally signed by the big media companies.
The same technology used to cause your saved version of American Idol to self-destruct can be used after the fact to erase news right off your home electronics. It will also prevent it from being transferred to unprotected permanent media, or played back from any backup.
2) Medical software and data will all be digitally signed by the rights owners.
The same technology used to stop software piracy could be used after the fact to switch off hospitals and clinics that don't pay their bills. There is massive financial incentive to design this to happen automatically. Anyone who doubts the realism of this scenario need only look as far as the behavior of the existing drug companies.
3) Company files will all be digitally signed.
If you are being screwed over by your employer or any company you have business dealings with, they will be able to ensure that you don't make anyone else aware of it.
Anyone who thinks this technology is about protecting Britney Spears from Bluebeard the Pirate is missing the point. This is about totalitarianism.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Remember, Microsoft said exactly the same thing about XP and 2000 that they do about Vista, and that they have about every single version of Windows except pehaps 1.0: "Faster, more secure, more personalized, better than ever before!"
And we say exactly the same thing we've always said: "Bloated, incompatible, too invasive, look at that WGA!" XP has the same privacy issues, 2000 had worse (if possible) compatibility issues.
But around SP1 or SP2, XP became livable, arguably better than 2000. And probably around SP1, 2000 became stable enough, and was obviously a HUGE upgrade compared to 98 -- so huge that if they hadn't done it when they did, Linux probably would've taken over.
So, we're going to have the same thing happen here. I predict that in roughly 2 years, around SP1 or SP2, Vista will actually be better than XP. But it isn't yet -- too much stuff isn't compatible, and the "beta" was a laugh; if you buy it now, you are their gamma testers.
Smart people stick with XP, and let the rest of the world test and debug Vista for us.
Me? I'll keep dual-booting XP and Linux (Ubuntu here, Gentoo at home).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
FPSs, MMORPGs and RTSs all suck on consoles. Considering that I'm only interested in those genres and that online play with a fast control scheme (ie. keyboard and mouse) is a requirement for me to even consider playing, I think I'll stick with my PC.
I can set the volume using alsa-mixer, sure, but that's not the point: I can also route air traffic, compute particle physics, and map oil fields using alsa-mixer on an emu10k1. It's beyond complicated with this chipset, to the point that it borders on pedantically stupid.
Which is why I'd like to use the volume control on the Ubuntu desktop or taskbar or whatever-it-is. I think it may have worked at one point, but updates to something-or-other broke it. My situation is almost certainly complicated somewhat by the fact that I'm using the card's digital output for all audio, but that doesn't seem to present any particular complication to Certain Other operating systems.
But it doesn't matter, really. I gave up on it long ago. I've lost enough hours to making desktop Linux work completely, only to have largely unwanted software updates hose up the whole thing.
I don't even bother trying to run Linux on my laptop bare-metal anymore (the first time I closed the lid and the backlight stupidly stayed on, I could see where things were headed) though I do have a pretty functional install of Ubuntu working on VMWare under Vista.
And I'm not about to abandon my Gentoo mail and off-site backup servers for anything. But desktop Linux pretty much blows, these days.
I had a more consistant Linux desktop with Slackware and FVWM2, over a decade ago. One used to configure things, and they stayed configured: I used to tell people that the coolest part about Linux was that sometimes it was hard to make something work, but once you finally figured it out it would stay working indefinately.
But that's not the case anymore. It shames me to say that Windows is less of a moving target than a typical Linux desktop.
And all I wanted was a volume control.
Kid-proof tablet..