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HardOCP Spends 30 Days With Vista
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
Is there anything that Vista does right? It's not just that it's more resource intensive, and less stable than XP - it's also less usable. Check out this report, vista is less intuitive, has higher menu latency, and has more "friction" than XP/OS X. This is not just about the OS being "pretty." For a product that is used every day by millions of people this will substantially impact productivity.
Visualize the world of wine
you must be new here....
Nobody buys Vista because they want a stable operating system. What about the rest of it? The Rolodex windows have to more than make up for any little instability!
Remember: SAVE or GTFO.
Nice editor's note at the very end that says "Well, it's just this one guy's opinion, obviously Vista isn't unfit for any user like he thinks after EXTENDED REAL-LIFE TESTING. I'm not trying to appease our Masters in Redmond, really."
only people who have actually used Vista comment. These articles about operating systems are already boring enough without the same boring comments. At the very least I would like a few +5 funny comments.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I've been running the 64-bit version of Vista since it was released and it hasn't crashed on me once. This guy couldn't figure out which driver/piece of hardware was causing this instability in a MONTH?
Btw, chances are it was a sound card driver - this is a moderately common problem, but it sure isn't the end of the world.
This isn't 1994 anymore. The arguments against MS for making unstable operating systems ended when NT was released. Since Windows 2000, MS has made stable operating systems that really are usable by the average joe without difficulty.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
jesus CHRIST that is one annoying site! Flashes to the right, flashes to the left, animations everywhere. How in the hell can any one concentrate with all those God Damned advertisers, NONE of whom I actually looked at, as I was trying hard but unsucessfully to read the fucking article.
I got one paragraph into it before I left the site in disgust. If this is what the internet is coming to, I don't fucking like it.
Can anyone link to a plagairized copy without all the fucking assholishly intrusive advertising? Thanks in advance!
Even if Vista is the gold standard of operating systems, I use Linux and FOSS because once it's on my computer I own it. The data is mine, what I do with it (on my personal system) is mine. I don't have to ask permission from Apple or Microsoft to boot. It's my computer, my software, my content.
I use unix and I use windows.
I have used vista for about 45 days. I use it to log into unix machines and routers, and I use it to run Java client applications, and I use it to run Excel to track multi-million dollar capex, opex, and headcount budgets and spending.
I've been very pleased with Vista. It has never crashed on me.
It works well.
Which is it? Vista commonly crashing because of unstable drivers or the OS being stable and usable? It can't be both.
(Yes, I run Vista, and no it has never crashed on me... I have the minimum featureset enabled though.)
I have had Vista running on a machine for about a month and I haven't run into a single issue yet. I hear horror stories (mostly on Slashdot), and I can't claim that they're false, but it does make me wonder what other people are doing that I am not (or what I am doing that OTHERS are not). Maybe the user is unstable, or perhaps there are driver issues.
Love sees no species.
So he's telling everyone about his experiences so we can judge whether we want to try Vista or not based partly on that information.
What I've been trying to figure out is why anyone would use a Windows operating system in the first year of release to begin with? Yes, sometimes you have no choice but to use Windows. Especially if you're a gamer. But that doesn't mean you need to use the newest release. There have been fourteen or fifteen major Microsoft Windows releases and we haven't learned by now that it's unwise to step into the newest version within the first year - or even two years sometimes?
It takes time for software to catch up and for the operating system itself to have some of the crapification sucked out of it. I can't think of a single release since 3.11 that wasn't plagued with significant problems at release. So if you feel like running the latest bloated Microsoft stuff somehow makes you 31337, then go for it and enjoy your misguided self-perceptions. Otherwise, give it a couple years and perhaps your existing software and games will work on it, new games and software will be specifically developed for it and the general stability and security will be much improved over where it is today.
And for fuck's sake, if you move to a brand new OS that was just released and you lose your precious data on it - who's really the idiot there?
Didn't have Vista crash (at all) during the last 30, or slightly more, days in Vista. So, no data loss. Burned DVDs just fine. Most hardware worked fine too, just had to use drivers other than the latest version for my Zen. Now, it's possible that some drivers didn't work with Vista so I can't comment on that, but otherwise it looks like this guy's just upset that he didn't get his check (or is it a laptop now?).
I've been using Vista for over 2 months now, and i've got plenty of complaints, but unstable is not one of them.
It has never crashed, frozen or anything of that sort.
I think the author should look into his drivers and/or hardware.
It is however horribly, horribly slow.
The "so what" is that this is a quantified test. The methodology and happenings are described in detail. This is not a case of "some random guy doesn't like Vista". this is a case of "some guy who has been known to do this kind of test in the past has found that vista is unreliable, slow, and ineffective on mainstream hardware which is known good." Your misinterpretation of the situation suggests that you are, in fact, simply flamebaiting since that level of misdirection can only be deliberate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not surprised about the conclusion. Microsoft has spent years getting Vista ready for prime time.
Considering all the developpers and testers working to make Windows Vista the best operating system the world has ever seen, I think we should not judge Linux too harshly only because Vista is more stable and more secure. Linux will probably catch up anyway in maybe half a decade.
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
I evaluated Vista on a mild machine - Dual Core Pentium D, Intel 950 graphics, 1 GB memory. Surprisingly, 50% of my system memory was being used by Windows and Aero. That was pretty much all I needed to know that I was sticking with XP for a little while longer.
.... But to say that it is "dangerously unstable" seems a bit much. Perhaps this guy had hardware issues that were responsible for the OS being unstable?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Any software or hardware in its 1st release will have issues. Can you name me something that in its 1st release was perfect? As for the data I agree if you are going to try a 1st rev of something back up your data. THis logic applies to any OS. I've had friends go from OSX 10.2 to 10.3 and hose their system and lose their data. Ask them where the backups are and you get the blank stare.... Nothing perfect...plan for the worst
30 days and he wasn't able to get his HP 1020 printer to work. Considering even without a native 1020 driver from HP he could have used the included HP Laserjet family PCL5 driver included with Vista to have a working printer, It really throws an unfavorable shadow over the rest of his review for me.
Go back and you'll see the exact same comments when Windows 2000 came out, when Windows XP was released, when the first Xbox was released and when the Xbox 360 was released.
My experience has been that the 64bit version was dead stable (not a single hiccup) and once I got a non-nvidia sound driver so was the 32bit version. Before I downloaded a "generic" C-Media sound driver the nvidia one crashed at least every 20 minutes and had me very close to re-imaging my disk back to the 64bit version. My only gripe is that I cannot mount my EXT3 volumes from within Vista (was doing this in XP with the extIFS driver).
Windows update still tells me that they have an updated sound driver for me to install (the buggy nvidia one).
My triple boot (Ubuntu 6.06, XP-Pro, Vista-Ulti) now defaults to Vista (I know, I know but I'm currently working on a C# app in VS2005).
Cheers,
_GP_
I've been using the Business edition of Vista since November. At no time has the system crashed on me, or become overly unstable. When I first started using it, my "Vista Ready" laptop (HP nc6320) only had 512MB of ram, and most of the hardware devices were not recognized and HP did not have Vista drivers either. The first few weeks were a pain, but Vista was usable.
Slapping in an 1GB XD card that supported Vista Ready Boost really made a difference while I waited for the new memory chip to come in. Got the unit up to 1GB, and disabled non-recognized hardware until Vista drivers were available and I was good to go. Vista recognized the most important things to me, my wireless card and CD burner. It did not recognize my video chip set, but still gave me the option of 1024x768, so I was fine. I don't do gaming on this laptop, as it is a work one, so the features I needed were there. Eventually, sound drivers, proper video drivers, and the annoying finger print reader drivers were released.
Now, I will state that Vista should really be run with at least 2GB of ram, as it will use every bit it can get, but even with 1GB, my system has been very stable. Sure, I don't get the fancy Aero features, but I would likely turn them off anyways. On my work system, I like to run as much on the lean side as possible.
As for TFA, I'm not sure what to think. It's obvious that he has some hardware issues on his machine that he needs to look into, and he should have known better than running software like QuickTime that had known issues. I really wonder how much of his problems were caused by Vista, and how much were caused by trying to run legacy/non-updated software.
Normally, I'm all for bashing Microsoft, being a Linux/Mac OS X user normally, but even I can't agree with this article.
I had Vista installed on my PC at work for about a month, but in the end I had to go back to XP. It wasn't a performance issue - the PC wouldn't do Aero but it ran pretty well even with the default Vista interface - it wasn't even UAC (which was switched off on day one). The biggest problem I had by far was that nothing would run: Exchange 2003 tools won't install. The Landesk Management console won't install. The ELM management console won't install. NT User/Computer manager won't run (Yes, I know). Even our call logging software (Sunrise) had serious install issues that could only be resolved by installing it as a Domain Admin. Put bluntly, it got to the point where I couldn't do my job properly because none of the tools I use on a daily basis would install or run under Vista.
Now, some of this is down to the software manufacturers for not being on the ball, some of it is due to things like MS moving all the IIS stuff so that older apps can no longer find it. Not to mention the fact that the Exchange 2003 tools are a Microsoft Product and they're not intending to provide an installation method under Vista *at all*. Even the Exchange 2007 tools have been looking a bit flaky where Vista is concerned.
Lets face it your hard-drive gets cluttered with useless data. As a new (undocumented) feature the all new Vista OS will automatically clean your system without any nagging questions like do you really need it. This and many more undocumented features are sure to listed in many more forums just like this. Buy Vista Ultimate it is Pretty and it costs more so you may do less.
This is exactly the same argument used by people who claim Linux isn't "ready for the desktop": sound card configuration should "just work" without any intervention from the user!
BTW, just wondering: how easy is it to set up a printer in Vista?
Website is /.ed
I haven't used Vista at all yet, but for the sake of argument I will assume that this review is a good indication of Vista's quality: a bit less good than XP. Now I have used XP, extensively, and I have used Linux extensively, and in my judgment the quality of a distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu is about on par with the quality of XP. You get roughly the same number of annoyances, the same amount of flaky behavior, and the same number of breakages, some of which you can fix and some of which you can't.
With Vista, apparently I need to knock it down 10% or so from XP in terms of its quality. Plus (and this is a big one) it actively works against the user with intentional breakages. DVD burning tools that produce discs only readable on Vista? Come again? IE7 objects to downloads from Sourceforge? Nice. So I'll take off another 10% for these shenanigans. That means Vista is about 80% as good as Ubuntu.
Where did the billions of dollars and years of development go? Why can't Redmond put out an OS that is at least as good as the freebie alternative? They should be selling an OS that is dramatically better than anything else available. Why aren't they?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
that with Vista the security is baked right in!
I lost my sig...
But MAN that article was biased. In once section he says "This was not the only difficulty we had with hardware." and then promptly listed 5 things that worked flawlessly. WTF?
The article was 90% (it worked fine and I have no problems) and the rest was (I am annoyed by UAC and dont understand how it works)+ I had a single driver issue ZOMG. Id like to see a raise of hands of people who've installed Linux without a SINGLE driver/hardware issue (so I can chop it off because your a liar)
Power user indeed.
LIke someone said, this is XP and 2K all over again. Wait until SP1, and it will be fine. Early adopters, good luck.
Could he not find an activation crack or something?
Inevitably any discussion of stability will include anecdotes from people who've had a rock solid experience, and others from people who've had frequent problems. What's we need is statistics from a larger population. The disease exists, but what are the odds that a particular user is going to catch it if they visit Vistaland? If a corporation migrates 10,000 desktops to Vista, what percent will then be unstable systems? What percent was before the migration?
On the one hand, it should be so vanishingly small that reports like the article under discussion here just don't happen. Because if it's something like even 3% of systems going unstable after migration, that firm with 10,000 desktops now has 300 people - some of them in core functions - who've just had their productivity hobbled (presuming they had stable systems before). And those 300 people will require how many hours from how many support staff to get beyond their problems (or will they just silently accept it, perhaps as something that must be their own fault?). But if 97% of the systems are stable, in discussions like here there will be plenty of posters testifying to their rock solid experience. Those testimonies are almost pointless - certainly any operating system has some portion of hardware, peripherals and applications on which it will be about flawless. But whether that's the experience of 60% or 99.9% of users makes worlds of difference.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
OK: /. gleeful "let's bash vista" trolls need it ?.
- hardocp is slashdotted
- mirrordot is slashdotted too (!).
Where is mirrormirrordotdot, when the
[Pruneau
Some time back OSNews had a link to an article that demonstrates the inbuilt problem with Vista components. It seems if one of these vista components gets corrupted there is no way to fix/reinstall (other than reinstalling the entire OS) http://www.osnews.com/subthread.php?news_id=16937& comment_id=201408
2500+ PC's all slated for....Vista
Good bye Life....
I QUIT!
Job Vacancy - Help Desk
Yesterday I had the "pleasure" of using a laptop that came loaded with Vista as the master source for a full day of powerpoint presentations. One corrupted presentation brought up a nonsense error about "missing text attributes," but the best was the presentation that came on a DVD-r disk. The laptop spent 5 minutes reading the disk, then decided to hard freeze. Luckily, I had my MacBookPro sitting next to me, and in less than a minute I had the presentation off the DVD and onto a USB drive so that I could then load it onto the Vista machine. The presentation was fine. No telling what the laptop didn't like about the DVD. (Oh, and it was one of those silly Dell XPS laptops with more superfluous lighting than a dozen ricers on any Friday night. Highly-polished turd, that one is.)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
it was ATI's latest driver (release, not beta). i've had three confirmed reports of BSOD from this release. and it's not just ATI, Nvidia's drivers have been seriously lacking. what the hell is going on at ATI/Nvidia? the OS was in PUBLIC beta forever, and now it's two months in release, and the drivers are still screwed.
This computer dual boots XP, where this never happens. The RAID driver is exactly the same on both OS's so I blame Vista.
For me, the most striking feature of his review concerned burning DVDs. He claimed that Vista uses a new file format for DVDs that isn't backward compatible with earlier Windows versions, not to mention being incompatible with Linux, Mac, etc. I'm puzzled about why I haven't heard more about this problem if it's real. For those of you running Vista, have you had problems writing data DVDs that work with non-Vista systems? Did you have to choose specifically to use the traditional format when burning the DVD? Is it really non-obvious how to make the traditional format the default as he suggests?
This seems like a show-stopper to me for anyone wanting to exchange data with non-Vista users, especially if the default is to use the Vista-only format. The fact that I haven't heard this complaint before makes me suspicious that it's something unique to his setup, but not being a Windows user I have no basis to judge.
See my sig.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been running Vista as my desktop at work since the RTM and while I'm run in to plenty of app compatibility issues, and drivers that aren't up to snuff, I have not run in to any system instability or data loss. I certainly wouldn't tag Vista as revolutionary, nor do I think there is a major reason to upgrade (hence I still use XP at home) but it is a fine OS. As with you, perhaps I'm just lucky, but as far as I can tell Vista doesn't have any major problems. Mostly, it just needs time for compatibility issues to get worked out.
I don't know how we can get out of the vicious circle of declining expectations.
I know nobody believes it, but there was a time when beta versions were called betas, and Version 1.0 meant a product that was finally finished, SQA-ed, and working.
Users have a right to a version 1.0 that works. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "hey, what do you expect, it's version 1.0" wouldn't be tolerable in any other product.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
based on your criteria...
there can be only one -> Steve Ballmer, he (sort of) owns it and tells everyone (not necessarily the truth) that he likes it.
*scnr*
I'm quoting this article a lot today...
l
"WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Well, I've only been using Vista for about a week, but I haven't encountered any of the problems he complains about.
However, before I installed my Vista upgrade, I first wiped my laptop and decided, at the urging of a friend, to try Ubuntu 6.10. Oooooo, I thought, "Edgy". Sounds cool.
So, day one, I download the distro (on my desktop), make a cd and slap it into the drive. Rubbing my hands in glee, I watch the startup window appear, tell it I want to Start or Install Ubuntu, and then watch little green letters say "Loading", while nothing happens. Reboot ad nauseum. Very odd.
Go to web. Discover that Ubuntu apparently has a hard time recognizing some hard drives. WTF? Okay, so after some searching I discover that I have to modify the boot up instructions to include "pci=nomsi" at the end. Sounds like gibberish, but what the hell. I do it, and sure enough the loading takes place with no problem.
Installation goes smoothly. Update goes smoothly. I'm good to rock and roll. I plug in my ethernet cable and internet is up and running instantly. Awesome. Windows was never that easy. I play around a little. Hmmm, system doesn't recognize my wireless card or printer. Okay, fix wireless first.
Search internet. Discover 11,000 competing and contradictory sets of instructions on how to get wireless working with Ubuntu. All agree that the stock driver is useless and must be blacklisted. Odd, why is it the stock driver then? I actually finally find a web page of instructions of a guy setting up wireless on exactly my model of laptop (Dell 1501). Awesome!
I follow his instructions - I type 23 (TWENTY-THREE) separate commands into the terminal, rebooting twice along the way. Apparently good news, as the wifi light comes on, indicating the computer actually notices the card. No internet though. Lots of searching/learning about iwconfig, ifconfig, lshw, and a bunch of other commands. I screw around at the command line, following numerous instructions found on credible websites. Nada. After 4 hours, I'm out of free time, but I do notice that somehow by trying to fix wireless, I've fucked up my regular wired connection. No internet at all now (good thing about that desktop!).
Next morning, determined to succeed, I wipe the computer and start over with a fresh install, since I have no idea where I screwed up the network. Besides, now I'm more comfortable with Linux. Again I enter the several dozen command line codes, none of which I remotely understand (why tar -xvzf ndiswrapper? WTF is -xvzf?). Result? Another 3 hours and no working wireless.
Wipe drive, install Vista. 30 mins later, computer and all its devices and peripherals are humming along and I'm comfortably surfing and installing software on my couch in front of the TV.
Now tell me, which experience sounds most attractive to the average computer user? Linux's famed "stability" is useless as long as I can't do something as simple as install (ooops, HD not recognized) or get a critical piece of kit working (wireless is kind of important guys) without spending 7+ hours entering command line prompts and searching for info.
Oh, and I never even bothered trying to install that printer. Call me when you have a product that works out of the box.
Life needs more saving throws.
Interesting post, it shows quite well the difference between the attitude of two different communities. In the Windows community, if you can't get something to work you are stupid. In the LInux community, you'll get plenty of suggestions and help, and most of the time you will get a solution of your problem. In other words, it's a "I am smart, you are stupid" vs "Have you tried this?" that honestly doesn't make me wish to use ant MS product (not that I would wish per se anyway...).
When Windows BSODs, it will tell you the thing that caused it, if applicable. Look that up in Google, you have your answer. Also, when it recovers if you tell it that yes, it can send the info to MS, you'll often get the answer from that.
However the real point isn't should Joe Schmoe be able to fix it, but should someone on HardOCP? I mean if you are going to do a tech review of something, you shouldn't be an idiot about it. You'd be "rightfully" railing on someone who was railing on Linux because there was a rather simple problem they had. No different here. If you are trying to evaluate Vista, you need to make sure you have stable drivers. Otherwise it is useless.
Is something merely intuitive if things are where you expect them to be? If so, then intuitive is simply a synonym for "familiar" and progress stops in the name of keeping things "intuitive". There has to be some measure of usability that takes out the abstract human factor of previous experience. Has a test ever been done where you take 2 computer illiterate people and give them a task to determine which can figure it out faster?
I think a better measure of the effectiveness of the UI would be that given 2-3 weeks to familiarize yourself with the interface, can you perform the same tasks you used to in less time. ie, is it efficient once you overcome the learning curve?
(On a tangent, I think the Gnome dev team has been wrestling with this problem. Trying to follow a design process which they believe is more efficient once you commit to using in the way they intended instead of allowing rampant customization. Obviously, that attitude doesn't work for everybody.)
I have Vista Home on my new Dell desktop. I don't like it one bit. No additional functionality, and all they did was move things around for no apparent reason. It takes me about 3x longer to find the stuff that I used to be able to do on XP in a jiffy. It's really stupid and indulgent changes on their part.
But dangerous? Fucking ridiculous. This is a computer program, not a gun. There is no perceived threat from Vista. I have had problems with some software, but they are shitty, shitty software (Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, don't buy it, it sucks even though it says it was made for Vista). But for the most part, it has been very stable.
Of course, I bought 2 GB of RAM which really is the sweet spot, especially for games like Supreme Commander. I had 1 G before, but it just wasn't enough. With 2 GB of RAM it ran well, and I haven't had any problems with Vista.
Well, if it runs stable under XP and crashes under Vista, you can't blame the hardware. If Vista is that much more picky about the hardware -- (which it is, in a stupid effort to enforce internal DRM) -- it's Vista's fault! The hardware shouldn't have to be superior to XP compatable hardware to go to Vista.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hah! I'd agree except for the fact that I don't know him :)
..is alone reason to use Vista. In nutshell, superfetch pre-fetches to RAM commonly used data from disk at idle time, so response is stellar for commonly used applications. It is a shame that Microsoft hasn't implemented such feature earlier. Yeah, there was some bland effort in XP that was limited to small executable files.
Because 1GB of app/user data (assuming you have more than 1GB of RAM) is always ready in RAM, is being read from disk just once; the Vista does feel faster.
You've summed up 10,000 words in less than 25. As the "random guy" in question, I salute you without sarcasm.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Any software or hardware in its 1st release will have issues
Vista is not a first-release product, though. It is Windows NT Version 6.0.
After 15+ years of development, I would hope that the issues that surface with each new release would be relatively few and mild, even for major revisions like Vista.
You obviously didn't have the "pleasure" of running Windows ME.
OS instability is almost always a case of drivers, and in anycase can be expected shortly after a major release. In that context this review is being really quite unfair. He's found himself a nice little excuse to be negative about Vista that really isn't inherent to Vista but to any OS that is open to 3rd party drivers, nor will it be true for more than a little while.
Even if one points to win32 'event' based synchronization objects as a source of instability Microsoft have introduced support for condition variables, effectively addressing that problem. So the longer term looks quite a bit brighter for windows developers: especially server developers. Windows server software could now actually become dangerous to other manufacturers (IBM/Sun etc)
Ironically the only OS that I know of that is genuinely unstable - independent of drivers and 3rd party causes - is Linux 2.6 (at least until recently), and has been for several years. That perhaps explains why webhosts have been so reluctant to upgrade from 2.4 even despite the scalability advantages which should be a big advantage to shared hosts. Even my recent taiwanese adsl-router is based on a 2.4 kernel. And no amount of moaning from the masses seems to have changed that situation possibly indicating a flaw in the open-source model.
> Yes, sometimes you have no choice but to use Windows. Especially if you're a gamer.
Sucks that Crysis and Age of Conan are Vista only. Guess I won't be buying or playing them....
True you would hope after 15 years they could get a lot right. But how many times have you gone from one rev to another (major or minor) and something gets fucked up?
Not making an excuse for it, it shouldn't happen but it always will.
I'd have thought a linux fan would have loved Vista.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Ever since I installed them, I've been getting Blue Screens Of Death multiple times per day on both my work computer and my laptop computer. It could be something with the SQL Server 2005 update or the "critical" vulnerability fix, I don't know. It was always stop 0x00000050, with the third number 0x89E773DE. I would think my memory was going bad or that it was a driver issue, but the only change on my computers was installing those updates, and it has happened on both consistently. It doesn't matter what I'm doing on the computers, it usually happens when I'm away from them. A friend of mine had just started getting BSODs too and hadn't made the connection, but he just performed the updates before it started happening also...
Your misinterpretation of the situation suggests that you are, in fact, simply flamebaiting since that level of misdirection can only be deliberate.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity" as the saying goes.
The question is, do you consider deliberate stupidity to be a form of malice?
You could make a case that it is.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Your misinterpretation of the situation suggests that you are, in fact, simply flamebaiting since that level of misdirection can only be deliberate."
I'm impressed. You're drawing conclusions from your unsupported statements. Most people stop at the first level.
I use they grey-silver theme, or recently, a black one.
Yes the blue is awful, but the grey one looks better than Win95-2k.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I've had Vista 32-bit installed since October on my laptop (with RC2 at first) and Vista 64-bit on a desktop since January, and I have not had a single crash. I can't read the article as it's slashdotted at the moment, but I'm curious as to what could have provoked it. Very few things can actually crash Vista as nearly everything is done in user land. I'd guess a bad driver, but I'll wait and read the article to find out I suppose.
That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to RAM. If you have one bad chip, it might not crash in one OS under typical use, but a different OS might crash before it has even finished booting.
Linux is actually smart enough now to patch around bad ram.
I've been using Vista for a month and I agree the OS is quite annoying and application compatibility is a serious drawback for Vista, But I think saying it's unstable is a lot biased since it never crashed on my home desktop.
I guess Vista would be better without all those annoying security dialog boxes and FXXX slow indexing service. I want something very small and elegant for my home computer. When it comes to UI, I like it. It's beautiful and very cmofortable to my eyes.
Your ego is Matrix!
Despite being the allegedly stupid guy, stupidity is a more reasonable conclusion to a statement that starts with "Your misinterpretation of the situation suggests.." than drawing conclusions about flamebaiting and misdirection.
has been no trouble at all. I have been running it on an older Toshiba A10-S169 laptop. It installed all drivers without the slightest problem. Out of a gig, it runs with about 350 to 400 megs of ram used by the OS. Some old software has not worked at all and some has worked flawlessly. I run it in basic due to integrated 3 year old crappy graphics. It has locked up a few times. It has not totally crashed once. It seems to come back from errors much quicker than XP ever has. It works very well for a new OS. I can not say the same for XP in it's first six months. I might start recomending it to friends and customers soon. I have yet to encounter the DRM boogyman. I am using it to type this post. If you haven't tried it yet, don't discount it because you really don't know what you are talking about. Some problems are bound to occur with some hardware this early in it's life. Thats how it is with something new. Not everything in the world will work perfectly, but many problems that people are having now will be worked out in the next year. It's probably not for everyone and thats OK. My Vista rant.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
For as long as I've been in the IT industry, the rule of thumb has been never to buy a .0 release and never, never, never buy a 1.0 release. Look at the most respected versions of OS/2: 1.2, 2.1 and Warp Connect (which ought to have been 3.1). Look at the most stable versions of Windows (3.1.1, 95 OSR2, NT 3.5.1). Consider the 1.0 releases of Netscape Navigator, Word Perfect, Quatro Pro and more. It's always been rare (at least in the PC world) that the initial release has been stable.
That's quite a heavy qualification when ordinary users buying a brand new computer will expect the OS that comes with it to run at least as quickly as their previous computer did running Microsoft Windows XP. By all the standards thrown in the face of free software activists (all the while ignoring software freedom), Vista simply isn't worth it. These users won't know or care what "well supported hardware" is, they'll make the logical assumption that whatever they were sold should be "well supported".
On a new Compaq machine straight from Best Buy (purchased by someone else, not me), Microsoft Windows Vista felt slower to me in all respects: it took much longer to boot up, took far more time to do things than I could do on free software OSes, and it had far higher resource requirements than other operating systems (again, in particular free software OSes). I checked email, browsed the web, and watched a few videos with the machine and the machine was consistently sluggish to do everything. The UI (left on the default settings, of course) asked me if I really wanted to start some program which was constantly annoying. Installing a Linksys wireless card (WMP54G) was a huge hassle and ultimately required going back to the store to buy another wireless device that would work out of the box (I don't remember the make or model, but it was a USB-based device).
And all of this to lose one's software freedom in the process? No thanks.
Digital Citizen
I find it funny and telling that reading these articles is so reminescent of the ones that came out when XP was released that it's hilarious.
I bet that if I tried hard enough I could even find one titled "XXX spends 30 days with Windows XP", where they decry that it is just "not worth the upgrade from Windows 2000", etc.
Personally I use Ubuntu so I don't care about any of this; I just find it humerous how easily people in IT forget the past. OF COURSE it is not as good right now, but OF COURSE it will be better in 6 months when everyone has upgraded. Change takes time.
>> Searches. Windows Vista beats the pants off my Windows XP with Google Desktop
That's because GDS sucks ass. Try something decent, like Copernic. You'll then uninstall Vista and return back to XP, because Vista search also sucks ass.
I have had Vista running on a machine for about a month and I haven't run into a single issue yet. I hear horror stories (mostly on Slashdot), and I can't claim that they're false, but it does make me wonder what other people are doing that I am not (or what I am doing that OTHERS are not). Maybe the user is unstable, or perhaps there are driver issues.
You know, I think the same thing about WinME.
Now, don't go modding me funny just yet. I bought a Sony Vaio laptop that came with WinME preinstalled. I never had it crash (same with Win98 really, but on a different computer). I was dual booting with Linux, so maybe the mere presence of a real OS triggered it to behave better. But overall, I never had any of the problems with WinME that other people had.
The Sony Vaio on the otherhand... never again. It leached battery power like nothing I've ever seen before. Linux or WinME.
But in any event, I run no MS OS on my PC's anymore.
You probably don't have a TV tuner or any other problematic bit of hardware. Especially not if you built it yourself with known-good Vista drivers.
However, the brand new Dells I've serviced have had nothing but trouble. Even when the drivers work, we're getting degraded audio and video, probably due to DRM, but plausibly due to bad drivers.
And even when you ignore obvious crashes, the "missing" file menu in Word (it's the Windows logo thingy now) and UAC are total pains in the ass.
God help you if you install ITunes, BTW. It all but totally hosed one of the machines. We had Explorer (Windows Explorer, not IE) endlessly complaining about being "corrupt" and having to restart. The machine gave us only a few seconds to reach the Windows Backup & Restore, which was hard to find in the start menu, by which we finally fixed the machine.
In short? VISTA IS A PIECE OF CRAP. I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to put up with stuff like this in what's supposed to be an "upgrade". If you need Windows, stick with XP until you have to upgrade, there are VERY few good reasons to go with Vista unless you're developing for it or something.
Look, I don't love Vista. I've actually decided they'll have to drag my dead body to a system running Vista before I touch it; nor do I have any love for Mister Softie.
But his claim of data loss is completely unsupported by even anecdotal evidence. He says the 'stability issues' (two allegedly spontaneous reboots) caused 'loss of data' but doesn't provide (that I saw) any clue as to what is was he was doing. Was 'lost data' a lost Quake match? Was he working in Word? If the latter, I doubt his claims; I think autorecovery would handle that kind of situation. Furthermore, his very claim of unprompted reboots strikes me as suspicious. If it were simply recycling (ala a reset switch), I could buy it, but he claims that the system "went into shutdown mode" without giving him the chance to save his data; I understand this to mean that it was as if the 'Reboot' action were invoked. This seems unlikely to me. Perhaps the auto-updating he mentioned got something that required a reboot, and he simply was too quick on the trigger, hitting 'yes' to a reboot prompt. Perhaps it really did reboot of its own accord and - as a result - lost him some of that thar' data stuff; it is not my intention to cast aspersions on the character of the reviewer. But by leaving out some rather crucial bits of info, he opens himself up to credibility attacks.
His claims of this happening on both systems could also be explained by possible use of his USB key. He says he lost data: if I were actually working on something (data) and all my 'stuff' was on a USB key (he says this was the case), I'd probably have it plugged into the system I was working on. Maybe it's bad; maybe doing certain things cause the USB subsystem to freak out; maybe it takes the system down with it. Maybe it had an accident and sleeps with the fishes. Uh... what were we talking about?
Speak for yourself, I've been running GNU/Linux OSes and keeping up with upgrades for years on the same dual Pentium III 500MHz 768MB RAM system I built roughly a decade ago. The hardware is not impressive by today's standards, but it still works so I keep using it. Some things take a while (audio editing large audio files in Audacity, for instance), but this machine can do plenty at a perfectly reasonable clip: read/write email, browse the web, burn CD/DVDs, and watch videos (with VLC or Flash, if I installed a Flash player). I get perfectly functional OSes, I get my software freedom, and I can do what I believe most people want to do most of the time with their home computers.
Digital Citizen
and use it if you're curious. Sure. The net is full of wankers, but listening *and* complaining about doing so is...well, wankerish. Sounds like you learned a solid lesson. I use Vista (at work, so I should say I manage Vista). Its different then XP and that itself has caused problems.
I'd also say it's a little immature (which stands to reason, they are implementing quite a few changes) right now. But I wouldn't recommend against it based on that. Pretty much anything you decide to be an early adopter with will have the kinds of glitches you'll hear people complaining about. Truly conservative people will avoid it. Sounds good to me.
Quack, quack.
You've summed up 10,000 words in less than 25. As the "random guy" in question, I salute you without sarcasm.
You'd be surprised how badly that impacts page views and ad hits.
I am under the impression that everyone that's ever reported on Vista's performance (and basically everyone here also) is a complete moron. I upgraded to vista (small business - just to see because I got it free.) I have no unnecessary usage of ram while my pc is idle. The OS hasn't crashed once... no program has crashed within the OS once... it's never frozen and even hardware with drivers that aren't "vista certified" still continue to work without so much as a hitch and all the annoying security notifications took all of 30s to disable. I was only the anti Vi$ta bandwagon too and I'm no M$ lover... but seriously I did nothing special and I'd venture to say my system runs better than it did with XP. I think the problems people are having are self imposed and everyone else just buys into the bs.
An OS which is supposed to protect the user against bad driver, sign them, and has got a new novel system where the driver are not anymore on the ekrnel level, should not be taken down by a fucking sound card driver, whether this is a fucking common problem or not. I can accept that from Me, 2000k, XP BUT NOT FROM FREAKING VISTA.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Wait for the SP1 to be release and then purchase only with a new computer.
I still don't understand why that logic is still valid today. XP is basically stable and fit for use. It has quirks but they are manageable. Here comes Vista and we are back to square one with a whole new host of problems! I don't understand why these issues are not resolve in the beta phase. By definition, the upgrade is suppose to be better than the current version and not potentially better.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
oh wow... another 'your OS sucks and here's why' thread?
...where's my abacus.
or is it the 'my OS is great - you suck' thread?
'every OS is okay as long as you aren't an idiot?'
'dirver support sucks for your sucky OS.'
'My OS beat up your OS.'.'
Has the lone OS/2 ranger made his rant yet?
Hey, I still have a DOS 6.22 box in operation to play my old DOS games (yes I still play those things occasionally). Alot of people I know that upgrade to a new machine end up keeping the old one (or giving it to the kids, etc). Most just keep the original OS (since it's a legal copy) instead of buying YET another copy of XP (or VISTA) which the older hardware probably could not run anyway (VISTA on 120mhz anyone?).
So don't scorn people too much when they say they are still using Win95 (or whatever).
Since I've had a few months of uninterrupted happiness on Vista, I do suspect that others' disk corruption complaints are due to something like this, especially when they mention that they are dual booting.
As for drivers, I put in an express card with a dodgy driver and my PC froze. I pulled it out, and it unfroze.
Vista 64bit. Two months: 0 crashes.
My desktop which I use every day, all day ( I work from home)
2.8GHz Pentium D
2GB
ATI x700 PCI-Express graphics
total of 450GB usable of SATA RAID
My test bench
3GHz Dual Core Pentium D
4GB
Onboard ATI 1250 Express
total of 600GB of RAID 0+1
Both systems are using standard memory timings, I'm no tweaker and are on UPS, the only time they get rebooted is when MS issues a patch that requires a reboot (like the ANI patch last night)
I would go read the article in question, unfortunately it's been slashdotted :-)
The biggest instability issue is that spontaneous rebooting. Since this guy had it on two different computers running the same applications, it's probably an application issue.
And if it is, Vista is absolutely, unacceptably unstable. It should simply not be possible for an application to cause a spontaneous reboot without prompting the user. And in that context, your more positive experience is pretty meaningless: you don't have any applications that cause this problem now. But Murphy's Law says that you will eventually install a new application, or update an old one, that triggers this problem. Or some other buried problem.
Here's the bottom line: MS spent two extra years swatting bugs in Vista, and it still has a beta-level product. (Maybe even alpha.) This OS is a nasty, useless failure.
Those articles from five years ago were correct. Unless you are a gamer (maybe), it really is not worth upgrading from win2k to XP.
I dual boot Debian and Win2K. Win2k is fast and stable, works with all my hardware, and runs all of my windows apps. The default interface is less cartoonish, and IMO more logical and functional. Win2K does not have that annoying authentication crappola. With Win2K, I don't have to learn a new interface.
I have no idea why people want to bother with XP, much less Vista. I assume everybody has just learned to jump when msft snaps their fingers. I have been using the same PC for over 5 years, I just have no reason to upgrade.
And for the 1% of all computer users who never need to use industry-standard applications or platforms, your comments are relevant. To the rest of us, they're a big yawn.
I think you are being a bit harsh. I understand what you are saying, however I think you have to understant that most people using Vista are not "Upgrading" to it, they have little choice in the matter. Try buying a new computer somewhere... Unless you build your own, you are stuck with a really premature Vista OS. Its like forced Beta or something. Even if you build your own (which I am in the process) you are faced with the decision of buying the old technology in XP or try and ride the wave into Vista, not a easy choice. I know in the buisness world we are looking at upgrading harware in like 3 years, and it scares the shit out of everyone as probably the only viable option for desktops will be Vista by that point. Companies are already making re-developmenmt plans and risk assesments on coporate and custom software that may or may not run on Vista now (as they need at least that lead time to try and do anything about it)...
It's not a first-release product, no... but a lot of hardware and software advances has been made since XP came out, haven't they? Which means that Vista has a lot of ground to cover.
I love Linux and run SuSE 10.2 on my laptop and use it far more often than I use XP on it, now. But, and I'm pretty sure everyone would have to agree, Linux is an operating system that does not support every piece of hardware out there. Same with a Mac. Windows took a different approach - Windows works phenomenally well for being an operating system that you can plug almost ANY piece of hardware into and have it work.
So... let's take Win2k. Would you like to have no hardware supported since Win2k came out on Vista? It would make it a lot more stable if MS only had to worry about supporting hardware that existed 7 years ago.
But when you are expected to support basically anything any random user wants stick into the case... and be able to work with it and work with it efficiently... well, I have to say that Windows does a pretty good job of it.
There's a lot of talk about it not being easy to use and everything. Try having your grandma even try to PICK a distro of linux, let alone try to install it on who knows what hardware, and then figure out how to use it. I'm pretty sure Windows has a really good edge on usability.
I wonder if these same arguments occur when new cars come out... maybe, like, when the first automatic transmission came around. What will people DO with their left foot and right hand?!
I'm pissed off by all the comments being modded +5 for saying: "it's always the same, when a new Windows version comes out everybody says bad thing about it, then adopt it".
.ANI exploit was working for Vista too (denial of service).
I'm sorry, I don't buy that. I considered XP when it came out to be very bad software and I still consider it is. When was the last time there was a root-exploit for XP SP2 allowing attacker full access to the system by simply viewing a web page? Oh, right, it was one week ago.
The sheer number of root-exploit (insert here comments about where the term "root" comes from to get modded +5 by MS paid astroturfers) that has plagued XP / IE / MS Office during XP's lifetime is pathetically high.
Vista starts as a slow, unstable, piece of unproductive junk. It won't change, it will only get worse. And the exploits will keep coming. Remember that MS already had to modify their patch-tuesday (what a concept!), for the
So, please, in five years, when the next piece of excrement comes from MS don't come saying "you said bad things about Vista when it came out then stopped saying bad things about it". This is 100% wrong. XP was an insecure piece of sh*t when it came out and it still is an insecure piece of sh*t. Remember, last XP root-exploit was one week ago.
Oh, and something I forgot to mention... there are two sides against Microsoft on the service pack updates discussion. One says that Microsoft never releases updates fast enough, as opposed to Linux kernels or something like that. The other side seems to think that Microsoft's software should be perfect at release (because, as we all know, Mac and Linux boxes never have to updated for security or stability or any other reason).
Please note the sarcasm.
This weekend I was at my Mother in law's house for dinner with my wife. Her computer was very old, PII running windows 2K. She was sick of it, and wanted a newer, faster computer. So being the computer expert in the family I went to Best Buy after dinner and picked out a nice little laptop, (Basic Celeron, 1 Gig of Ram) She loved it, it was small, compared to her old CRT and CPU. I pressed the power button to start what i figured would be a brief setup session.
It took 45 minutes to get past the 'Starting windows for the first time' (Rebooted 3 times) to a usable desktop.
45 Minutes with Vista pre installed. Give me a break.
My 2 Vista Ultimate installs work like a dream. You know they say about opinions...
Technically it's NT 4.0, since they started NT's versioning with 3.1 to match with contemporary consumer Windows.
Thus: 3.1==1.0; 3.5==1.5; 4.0==2.0; 2K==3.0; XP==3.1; Vista==4.0
But your point still stands.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I guess El Vole did not like HardOCP talking smack about it and unleashed a Russian bot net on em. That's one way of doing business I guess. XP while not much better than the excellent 2k was a nice change for me when I installed it the first month it came out. I had read all the reviews and decided to put off upgrading to XP. Well that lasted a month and I got a copy from a friend to test out on a secondary drive. Well I was really impressed even though there was the occasional program that didn't work. In the end the next day I got my copy and haven't looked back. I got a free copy of Vista from a post on HardOCP strangely enough for some MS dev thing. Well I really didn't want to bother but I finally installed it on a secondary drive after people kept calling me with odd vista problems. Someone couldn't get on a site that had an invalid security certificate, as there was no way to get rid of the message she said. Well it isn't any better than XP. It is worse in many parts and for games it is horrid. Just look at a review for Supreme Commander on HardOCP. My network card isn't supported so that pretty much stopped me from using it, and I really don't care to get a new network card or whatever to run vista. Vista seemed pretty stable that wasn't one of the problems I had with it, with my although very short time with it. I was really hoping for a speed upgrade with the new OS. Vista seems very pokey going from a XP system to it. And that is with a ton of Yahoo! Widgets and other assorted apps running. Don't get me started on the Speed of the Aero interface with a NVIDIA 6800 card. The thing is that with 3rd party apps you can make your very stable and nimble XP system just like Vista. You can change the way the desktop looks and feels for free with the free theme changer avaiable at neowin.net. Yahoo! Widgets are amazing and even people with macs like the way I have my computer set up. You could do most of these things if you had 2k and were thinking of moving to XP but those addons didn't work as well as these to emulate Vista in XP. They all feel like they were made from the ground up to run smoothly on XP and don't slow anything down. There were a lot of useful features in XP not offered in 2k like the handy system restore that saved me many many times when fooling around were I shouldn't with my system. I really only wish that MS would support XP with DX10, hell I'd pay for that crap and I am the biggest cheapskate. I really do hate thinking of having to move on to vista when games start to only support Vista. MS coming out with Halo2 for vista and shadorun only make me laugh, I am talking about most of the 3rd parties.
I've been using it a couple of weeks. Developing Ruby on Rails & DJ'ing with Live & Reason. Much more stable than XP - why is it so hard for you guys to say so?
Toronto should sue HardOCP for having its good name sullied buy comparing it to Vista.
better. Simply put, XP and earlier are total disasters. The fact that you MUST run large amounts of extra security software says it all. Now, I know that I will be blasted here by all the Windows lover, but it comes down to stats. All of the CCs are stolen via Windows systems. The vast majority (interestingly, not as high as the stolen CC) of spam is from Windows. Just about all virus are written for Windows (it has to do with ease of doing so, not numbers of spreading). The simple fact is that XP and earlier are very dangerous OSs. Vista is still new. In typical MS fashion, they released it too early. I would not wait for the first service pack, I would wait for the first 2. But I suspect that Linux may finally be having future issues. Once Windows is more secured than OS-X and Linux, then the virus writers will come after us. Of course, this is MS that we are talking about.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For years Linux has been blamed every single time some user couldn't get their soundcard or whatever to run, and that was Linux's fault. Now windows has the same problem and all of sudden that is acceptable.
Your argument sounds a lot like the "ie crashes on a site, must be a bad site. Firefox crashes on a site, bad firefox" crap.
Face it, MS screwed over the soundcard user for no other reason then to enforce their DRM onto the world. This from the same company that NEVER has bothered to include drivers for the creative soundblaster card.
This is indeed not 1994 anymore and why in 2007 linux live cd's get all my hardware right on my machines and windows can't even include drivers for basic intel network cards I will never understand.
In 2007, you get crashes because of a soundcard, in an OS that does almost all of its sound in software to enable drm and you find that acceptable? God, can you be any more of a tool?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since when do editors do that kind of shit? When was the last time you saw a halfway-critical review of Linux which had a note tacked on to the end saying, "oh, wait, no, really, a lot of people like it, please don't sue us"? I suppose the last bit says it all. Or maybe one of those hit pieces on Wikipedia saying, "a lot of people work really hard on it and it's actually not as bad as the author makes it sound"? What a damned tool.
I had no idea people (and here I speak of people who stand to lose their review-copy privileges, not anonymous Slashtards) were this afraid to criticize Microsoft. How can anyone take a professionally-written review of their software seriously if they know there's this much of a chilling effect going on?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A client called me several weeks ago to come setup his home with 802.11n. He bought a new Dell inspiron that came with Vista Home Basic edition. I had the router configured, the WEP keys, etc, everything was ready to go. After saying "Yes. I want to allow this" about 2 million times, I finally had the option of entering in my WPA security key, and select my preferred network. When I was done, and I asked it to connect. I got a BSOD and it dumped all the physical memory and restarted.
After 3 attempts at trying to get the WPA key to stick, and set the default Wireless network to his own, it finally worked and got connected. I told him if he has anymore problems, to return it to Dell and make sure he tells them it was because of Vista that he was returning it. The poor guy couldn't even get his Bluetooth wireless mouse to work.
Vista is horrible, and its aggravating that they will probably soon announce that they will discontinue support for Windows XP and force everyone to use their crappy OS, unless someone else steps up to the plate.
At this point, I don't care if its Linux, Mac OS X, or any of the BSD's that is able to do it... but someone needs to step up and grab this market.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
It was like beep beep beep...
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I got a new PC, just before the new year (so I got the express upgrade). I do not have an XBox, and Halo 2 (which I am excited about) will only work on Vista.
Everything worked pretty well, although it was disk thrashing the pagefile pretty hard for about two hours (btw, the installer is sweet). Then, it seemed to run pretty well, until I got to my sound card. I have a Creative SB Live! External, and I'd heard bad things about Creative's Vista support in general. They barely worked. I installed them, and rebooted (for about the 15th time... wtf?). My computer crashed right after login with a BSOD. So, I rebooted but unplugged my sound card first. It worked, and I even was able to plug it in. Then, CMSS (surround upmix) wouldn't work, because Creative's drivers couldn't access the soundcard.
Vista prevents application access to the soundcard. Apparently, this is because of DRM, but I can't confirm it. What the hell is this? So I restarted to XP (which is only my primary OS because of games). Although the eyecandy was nice, I was completely unimpressed with it, as Beryl can do the same thing on much worse hardware. So, I left it on my machine, but have no intention of using it until H2 comes out, when hopefully the drivers would be fixed.
PS. I've read that Creative plans on emulating the CMSS in the driver software, with a big CPU performance hit (even though the hardware does it "for free", so it seems like a waste)
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I just bought a new laptop that came with Vista (Home Premium). I really don't care, as I'm quite comfortable with XP (or Linux for that matter), as long as I have all the right drivers and the software I want to use works (and I intend to do a lot of things via emulation/virtualization anyway).
In the last few days since I've been using it, thus far everything I've tried runs properly (mostly Cygwin-based, though).
My biggest annoyances are the little things - the most annoying being they've renamed "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features" (in "Classic View") in the Control Panel - but kept other things named the same, such as "Add New Hardware". As it performs the same function it did in XP and lower, it just seems arbitrary and useless.
Otherwise, the UAC prompts are just about as annoying as the Mac ad indicates - they even come up for system things like Task Manager or Network Connections, which is just aggravating.
So, we'll see...
Misinterpretation can be deliberate, and I was making the now-apparently-mistaken assumption that you simply couldn't be that stupid ("that level of misdirection can only be deliberate".) I hereby withdraw my assumption - it is entirely possible that you are in fact that moronic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As I write this, I'm running Windows Vista Business. This alone gives me more leverage in a Vista argument than perhaps the majority of people commenting on this article, because I'm willing to bet most of you haven't used Vista and are just ragging on it based on the bullcrap about it being spread on the internet thanks to the excessively anti-MS bias on /., which none of you can honestly argue doesn't exist.
Backwards compatibility isn't horrible. Firefox, Photoshop, WinRAR, X-Chat, FL Studio, VLC, Gaim, DAEMON Tools, Nero 7, Quicktime, LimeWire, VS2005, uTorrent, Skype, Steam, Project64, and damn near anything you want to run will work. Nero will burn DVDs that work on anything capable of reading DVDs. DAEMON Tools mounts disc images without a hitch. Photoshop works flawlessly. Any movies or music you might piraI MEAN PURCHASE will not spontaneously explode from all the DRM in Vista, like you guys tend to give the impression will happen - hell, I haven't had an issue with DRM.
Hate the UAC dialogs? I do too, but you can turn it off in the control panel easily. Vista isn't so "defective by design" as to expect everyone to like popups appearing whenever they open an application.
People hate on Vista for sucking up RAM, but it's using all the RAM to index your hard drive for the search and to preload commonly used applications, which actually *saves* time, and you can even turn that off if you want, which will save resources but slow program loading times.
It's not unstable in the slightest. I have not had Vista crash on me at any point in time. Programs run just as well as they did on XP, with a few terribly minor exceptions.
The only hardware problem I have had is with my high-definition audio card. Thanks to the new audio stack in Vista, I'll be damned if Cakewalk Sonar works right, and FL Studio has to fall back to default settings to work right. Media players, however, still work fine. Like many of you, I use VLC, and it works great (video is buggy, admittedly, thanks to changes in DirectX - changing to OpenGL rendering solves this though).
Any more problems I ought to address?
I can make XP or W2K work with all of my hardware. Of course, I have to install drivers for a lot of it, but it will still work. MS could have released update revisions of their OS that included the additional hardware support, but without all the new gimmicks. This is likely to work without any new bugs being introduced, since you're just essentially adding new drivers. While they were at it, they could update to include the patches that were out and tested at that time.
Linux supports a lot more hardware out of box than Windows XP does. I'd imagine that it supports more than Vista does, too, because Linux still works with older hardware. In some cases, I find Linux is even more convenient to use with random hardware.
Also, a vehicle with a manual transmission has *many* advantages over a vehicle with an automatic one. You get better gas mileage, a lower weight vehicle, your brakes last longer, and you can drive more safely in poor weather by slowing down without braking, just to name a few. As far as I'm concerned, the auto is arguably more convenient, but I don't see it as such for me.
I don't know how we can get out of the vicious circle of declining expectations.
I know nobody believes it, but there was a time when beta versions were called betas, and Version 1.0 meant a product that was finally finished, SQA-ed, and working.
Users have a right to a version 1.0 that works. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "hey, what do you expect, it's version 1.0" wouldn't be tolerable in any other product.
Maybe it's true in some other industry, but shoddiness is business as usual in the PC market. QDOS was a quick 6 week hack job knocking off CP/M before Bill Gates bought it and turned it into MS-DOS.
If you don't prioritise time to market (first mover advantage) over nearly everything else you are dead in the mass market software industry.
To put a more favorable spin on this, the computer industry spent most of its first few decades in a race to the bottom (cost-wise). Each "revolutionary" new paradigm can be viewed as an 20%/80% tradeoff approximation of the previous generation. 80% of the functionality, 20% of the cost. Mainframes were smacked by minicomputers, workstations smacked minicomputers, PCs gutted workstations. PCs ruled for a long time, but now they're under threat from a new type of computer which is "Anything-with-a-browser-and-net-access" (AWABANA) and it's much cheaper even than a pc - it comes built into your phone, your games console, perhaps your TV, car etc. Sure there are still some apps that don't work in an AWABANA, but if you ignore the rest and stick to those you are back in expensive niche computing. So the bits of Office, Outlook etc that free browser based apps DON'T do will shortly seem about as relevant as mainframes.
Chris (some straying off-topic acknowledged)
You can't properly review an OS or indeed most software. Reviews of any product are going to be already biased by nothing more then the simple differences between people in their physical build. Obviously a tall person will find space in car slightly more important then a small person, hell, to small a reviewer might even mark a car as bad if they can't see over the steering wheel.
But at least they are all driving on the same road, using more or less the same fuel and gravity is pretty much the same for all car reviewers.
Computer configurations are just too different to be accurate for everyone. For instance there is a marked difference between Windows on a dual CPU setup and a single CPU even back with W2K. Stability skyrockets with a dual rig because windows well known run away processes can no longer freeze the entire OS. The difference was so staggering that for a long time I refused point blank to have my dual P3 upgraded to a newer P4 simply because with the P4 you could no longer get dual on the cheap. Check old office P3's and you might be suprised just how many were dual ready.
Another huge difference is going to be memory. Swap sucks and windows LOVES to swap. So does linux but at least with the proper software and setup you can at least make it behave. Sometimes. To a degree, for instance I can get my current setup to stay swapless IF don't open to many tabs in opera and stay out of java. E17 can still provide all the eyecandy with lots of stuff running and stay under 512MB of use.
Try the same with Windows XP sometimes. As for Vista, 2GB or don't even bother.
But even that is going to depend heavily on the user. Just what does a reviewer consider a slow/fast response.
Simple fact. Windows is buggy as hell and needs constant patches, just re-installed XP and it seems the machine has rebooted more because of patches then because I shut it down for making to much noise. This makes it FAR more important for me that XP boots fast then Linux wich reboots ONLY if they there is significant reason to do so. My linux box boots significantly slower then my windows machine BUT I spend far less time waiting for linux to finish booting. So how do I rate this in a review honestly?
A car reviewed from a travelling sales person view is going to be different then a review from a city dweller making short journeys on occasion. Who cares if the car has to get "warm" for a few minutes if you are going to be driving it all day. If on the other hand your average journey is a few secs, it is going to suck donkey balls.
My linux on a laptop I would have to shutdown and powerup constantly would absoluty be the pits. On the other hand, if sleep/suspend works on laptop X my linux setup would be far better (lesser demands, means less power needed, means more battery life and less hassle with updates)
Vista has a new sound system, possibly because of DRM needs, so soundcard users are going to be pissed off. Totally different from those who think sound is something that comes with the mobo.
OS reviews are therefore ALWAYS going to be a case of "it crashes for me" vs "it never crashes for me".
Just as there are people who NEVER have problems with linux and printing there are still others who never ever get it to work. I never have problems but that could very easily be because I got the right (combination of) hardware, if another user doesn't, their experience is going to be different.
One thing that keeps popping up is windows activation. For X percentage of people this goes smoothly, for the rest it doesn't. Neither group can understand the others experience. It is as simple as the fact that I don't like beer because I don't like the bitter taste of hops. Don't like bitter tastes period. Nonetheless every single beer drinker tries to sell me on beer X because they claim that it ain't as bitter. People who like bitter tastes cannot crasp the fact that others do not.
If for you activation went smoothly you cannot understand the experience someone
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, didn't need to. Online forums are all I need. Google is my friend. My experience is limited to that.
There are advantages, yes... there are advantages to Linux, and there are also (gasp) advantages to Windows.
I've used windows for a long time. I've never run into a network card or a sound card or a video card that Windows didn't support (yes, with a driver download, but drivers are really easy to install in Windows).
I've used Linux for a while, too. I've run into at least two wireless network cards and one soundcard, just in my own personal installations, that Linux did not support "out of the box" (well, out of the cd/dvd image...), and in fact, I was never able to get the sound and network card to work properly. There are lists of "incompatible" hardware online (and compatible) for linux. I don't usually hear about lists of incompatible hardware for Windows. Of course, I've never had to look for one, but I've still never really heard of one.
They could have designed a dynamic prioritized engine for XP to make sure GUIs immediately recieve faster
responses during high cpu load.
As all product managers decide, "no new features, bug fixes only" and tell marketing to give excuses that its impossible to enhance old code.
THats because as someone else claimed before, MS rotates the new features coders onto new products, and dumps the current
editing code onto 'code maintainers' that do nothing but fix bugs/errors, and are not allowed to enhance, even if its simple enhancements, that opensource will do
any way, any time (unless theres a maintainer nazi).
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I just spent 30 days with Vista, too! My conclusions:
Inferior OpenGL and D3D support.
Slower boot up, shut down.
Slower performance while running.
More bullshit to disable/turn off.
Ugly half assed 3d interface.
Poor speech recognition.
Lousy default theme.
Other than the last one, Feisty Fawn pretty much delivers a knock out punch, so I doubt I'll be spending ANOTHER 30 days with any version of Windows.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The same kind of things happen with cars too. My first car was a 1987 Mitsubishi Starion ESi-R turbo. It was the first generation of ESi-R model. The 1987 version was plagued with all sorts of electrical gremlins that were sorted out by the 1988-89 model year. The later version also ran 1psi more boost because the retuned ECU could handle it better.
I suggest that anyone looking for a new OS to try out that's as simple as Windows XP - they should try Xandros.
Yes, it's not free. But it's exactly the Linux flavor/distro to give to your average home user/client. $40 of the price is for a copy of CodeWeavers(commercial version of WINE made to run mostly Windows Office and other business apps), so it's worth the price. Plus free tech support by humans and so on, which is critical for an installer/consultant, since you can pass warranty/support/liability issues up the chain. $50 and does all of the stuff the average home user wants other than hardcore games. given that 90% of my clients don't do anything more advanced than solitaire on their windows box, it's a no-brainer instead of Vista.
And no need to upgrade any of their hardware.
Between DOS and Vista, I've never seen this many bad tech publication reviews of a MS OS. People expect minor driver issues (and occasionally, not so minor) during an upgrade from one OS to a later version, and this is true no matter who makes it. I recently had to change Linux distros from FC6 to Debian Etch over a video driver issue.
However, lots of experienced people are screaming their heads off... and if somebody's actually being paid to write at a tech site, you can assume he's got experience.
MS just put out an emergency patch to cover 6 serious security vulns.
Is all really well in the world of Vista, or have you just been lucky so far?
DISCLAIMER: I'm posting from a Debian Etch box running W98SE in a VMware Server VM... I'd guess I have about 15 minutes worth of "issues" to deal with a week.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The thing is, some people can get away with that.
But, if everyone waited a year, or until SP1, all we'd do is time-shift when the majority of the bugs were actually found.
It's real easy to test a few dozen, a few hundred, sometimes even a few thousand machines.
But releasing to the public is releasing to millions of machines. Each, ostensibly, with it's own unique configuration and configuration issues.
Even if Microsoft shipped Vista on two HD-DVDs, they still couldn't encompass EVERYTHING.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Cancel or Allow?
Allow....
poot_rootbeer attempts to justify bloat:
If the machine is sitting still and doing nothing, it shouldn't matter if the OS uses 100% of available memory, maybe for pre-caching the next chunks of data it think you'll ask for ... The issue is when you start to add application load to the machine -- does the OS release memory it's using for those "idle" tasks so that apps can use it, or is it greedy?
I'd rather my computer do what I told it to, than try to read my mind. Session management is about me telling the computer what I want to run and it works just fine in KDE, Gnome and others. Loading up a bunch of stuff I did not ask for is the surest way to run into disk thrashing when you want to do something. Modern systems have two to four gigs of RAM these days, enough to fit entire gnu/linux distributions in, there's no excuse to fill half of that memory with a window manager and a browser!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
From another perspective, the Editor is technically correct: what might be unacceptable to one user might be perfectly acceptable to another user. For casual users who just want to play games or surf the web, occasional mysterious reboots or data loss might be perfectly fine. For users working on mission critical projects, though, I'd be willing to bet that none would tolerate data loss -- no matter how infrequent.
What ever happened to the notion that system crashes and bad system behavior are exceptional circumstances, rather than business as usual? I don't just blame Microsoft for this -- it seems the whole computer industry is complicit.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?ar t=MTMxOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I've been using vista for awhile now (since January). No major problems on my somewhat dated machine which is a 2.6GHz A64 Dual Core with an x1900xtx and 2 GiB of system memory.
iTunes has proved problematic and Ultramon has yet to come around (though the new beta definitely improves the situation). I don't think I've lost any data but the system has crashed a few times and seems to have intermittent issues with standby (to be fair it didn't work at all in Windows XP), so I just use hibernate.
None of the games I play run noticably slower so I don't really mind the insignificant performance penalty. For the most part I do the exact same things I did with Windows XP only some things are nicer, such as the well integrated search (which does lack some features I would like, however) and the significantly improved file browser (which is still lacking compared to something like Directory Opus but that can be forgiven as the experience is more cohesive).
I don't know if I'd rush out and buy a copy today (I recieved mine for free through the ms academic program) but I certainly think it is an improvement.
He said he only bought one copy, so I hope he uninstalled it from one machine before putting it on his second test machine.
Remember, the first part of the "Vista Experience" is paying hundreds of dollars for it.
$8.95/mo web hosting
First MS moves to this subscription licensing model, Software Assurance. Incenting companies to it by jacking the 'old' license model, threatening huge increases on the pending new versions.
/. about how MS releases beta product to save their now-standard licensing model, aka stock price.
Then, they fall behind on the next version, Vista. Companies howl since now they paid 'Assurance' for nothing. Stock market blinks, MS is seen in new light, suddenly fallible.
MS does indeed push out Vista after internal shake-ups and turmoil, pats itself on back.
World is shocked---just shocked!---that Vista seems half-baked. Almost like they rushed it out or something. Conspiracy theorists post to
Did I get everything?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all enough said.
http://wstewart.php0h.com - the sugarbuzz project blog
Linux/Solaris/BSD as a foundation + Firefox + StarOffice/OpenOffice.org + GIMP is actually a very capable setup that I've used to *interoperate well* with Windows users at my school. It's ironic that the Windows/Office users have more problems than I do, if only due to the Works/Office incompatibility debacle. I submit PDFs!
It simply works for me and is adequate for my needs. I have family members using OpenOffice.org and Firefox...and they like it. I recommended OpenOffice.org to a classmate who wanted to work with Word files, and she was excited about it...and it won't cost her $100.
Microsoft is well established and popular, but they've run most of their course, in my opinion.
I think him calling it dangerously unstable is perfectly justified. Anybody that does any kind of important work, or even writes important e-mails NEVER wants to lose data. The review. Programs crashing is one thing but to have the OS reboot without warning? Reminds me of the hell of pre-OS X days with your fingers permanently planted on the Save shortcut. It's 2007. OS X has journalling and never crashes, nearly never does ANYTHING wrong. Out of the box, Linux is nearly as good. Vista is only getting slack because most people run Windows. If there were two choices of OSes, each with 50% market share and one was solid as a rock and the other was Vista, which would be the overwhelming favourite?
The TV tuners my friends have don't work at all, even though they came with brand new Dells. So I think there's a lot of driver trouble right now, at least for some devices.
Please note that, when you get transferred to Bangalore for tech support, they can't really help you if they don't have fixed drivers. Believe me, we've been there, we've done that. It sucks.
I "like" the editor's note in the end. CHICKEN!! Come on, if it had been a review of some Linux distribution or what ever, no one would have been so forgiving. Vista isn't free, you pay a good deal of money for it. We have this big company that the suits on the golf course trusts to no end and so "we" are ready to accept these things? It is not a beta product or even a release candidate, it is the product on the shelves that they expect that you pay a lot of money for. If I have hardware that has worked running XP, Ubuntu etc, I expect it to run with Vista. I can forgive Ubuntu for not working on my pc(but it did) :) I realize that they have tons of hardware to deal with compared to fx. Apple. I have been running SUSE and Ubuntu on my pc for some time and I have just bought a Macbook pro(my first mac, which isn't perfect either, I hate the Dock). I seem to have problems finding the right OS for me. :) After I decided that I would have to do without most games on my pc, I could throw XP out the window. Some of the few old games I play for nostalgia, runs under Ubuntu so it's not quitting cold turkey, but 15 years with Microsoft products takes a bit of time to forget. :D
Ok, I must admit that I am not a die hard fan.
Of course, you're right. Every rinky-dink hardware manufacturer writes a driver for Windows. A lot of those drivers are complete garbages, but they do exist, at least.
I *have* run into hardware that just wouldn't work in Windows. That hardware has always been older hardware, with one exception to date. I have had a terrible amount of trouble getting my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 PVR to work right in Windows. Every time I reboot the damn system, I have to reinstall the drivers, on three different machines.
I also do have hardware that doesn't work on my Linux box. The IR blaster on my IR dongle won't work, for example. I've had occasional trouble with the extra keys on keyboards, especially on laptops, and such.
I'm a little surprised about those network and sound cards never working. I'd be curious to know whether they work now, or, at least what they were, so that I can avoid them. I am generally careful to not buy hardware without Linux support, and that's for two reasons. The first is that I like Linux more than Windows, and the second is that the unsupported hardware tends to be pretty crappy stuff.
I have a USB webcam, a scanner, a few video boards, a sound card, a couple of network cards, and a *lot* of Windows software, that won't work in any version of Windows based on NT. With the exception of the scanner, it will all work in Linux. The scanner *might* work, but I haven't bothered to look. It's some half software based cheap thing anyway.
There are lists of incompatible hardware for Windows, too. Vista breaks a *lot* of old hardware. This was the case for W2k and XP, as well. In just about every case, this is because MS realized that their driver model was still horrid, and went to something new. It's a real pain in the butt, though they do eventually manage to come up with something that at least works, most of the time.
Unfortunately, you can't apply the same quality expectations to software that are applied to most other consumer products.
Why not, you ask? Because software is massively, MASSIVELY more complicated than most other consumer products.
Imagine for just a moment, that your television (or your PVR, or your cellular telephone, or whatever) was made out of 500,000 moving parts! Thats the kind of complexity you're talking about when you talk about a piece of software as large and complex as Vista. (whether an OS should *be* that big and complex is a slightly different question). Its even worse because software doesn't have the kind of constraints that physical devices have (things like euclidean space and gravity and tensile strength). In some ways, this lack of constraints makes it *harder* to manage that complexity.
Ask any software developer---even though we get better at building software, the complexity is increasing faster than our improved practices can handle. The software we build nowadays is hugely complicated. Suppose a programmer can generate 50 to 100 lines of working, debugged program code per day. Thats the equivalent of *designing and manufacturing* 5 to 10 moving parts and fitting them somewhere into that 500,000-piece technogizmo. Now imagine a thousand software developers all doing that for like 5 years, and eventually you get Vista.
New driver model.
...New issues.
New drivers.
It may have 15+ years of development in the stable parts.
In the parts that now cause problems... probably 2 years.
If this is true and it can't be read on XP I'm going to have to go out and buy Vista some time before a client of my workplaces comes in with media burnt on the thing. I suppose it's expected with MS behaviour around standards - this is the company that couldn't even get ping right.
I've been running Vista x64 Ultimate for almost a month now. The only problem I've encountered in all my applications has been that the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer doesn't work properly. This isn't even that big of a deal since there are open source alternatives. My system hasn't crashed once and hasn't even been unresponsive since I've installed it. The applications he listed as having problems with, I installed flawlessly on my system. After using the new UI for a few days, I think most people will find that it's really a lot more user-friendly. One point he mentioned is that "power users will feel crippled." He didn't really provide any evidence of this, and I completely disagree. Previous settings that were hidden are easily exposed through the control panel (think start-up manager!) and there's even a search feature to find settings in it! I think that this guy wanted to hate Vista and convinced himself that it was bad.
I don't want "Anything with a browser". For me, my uses are modest, but I do want a *computer*.
I had tremendous patience with the "limitations of the day". My poor old Free-Gift P133 from June 1999 with the Then-New Win98 was my introduction to Windows. "Poor thing, it's trying, but it can't play music while calculating anything".
I'll be putting together a stripped DarkBox with an Intel Yorkfield Quad and WinXP next year. I plan to use all that CPU power running apps I never could previously. I refuse to waste all that power on an OS playing solitaire with itself.
(Why do people keep raving about Desktop Search? I agree with the guy who said "put it where you want it.")
This configuration will be a critical mass point. No reason to upgrade ever, until a next-generation killer-app flips the switch.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Come on, MS, you know you want to copy Spotlight! Just do it!
so by your logic, there's only the one distro of linux too, right? and it should run steady as a rock no matter how old or new the hardware/software/user is? the changes, both internal and external, are greater between nt 6.0 and vista than they are between most distros of linux.
Lesson learned: Stay AWAY from Toronto !!!
Pretty low-grade hardware used by [H]. Yes, the guy says it works fine in Xp but...a 380W PSU for all that hardware? Talk about your weak link. Did he test memory? Did he say he used FAT32? Adobe CS2 needs to be installed in admin mode, then it won't prompt each time to re-register (this is OLD news). Sample set of 2? And talk about over-inflacted "current market value" prices. Hardly right. It sounds to me that this guy from [H] planned to failed.
Vista does not "blindly" assume that all installers need Admin rights.
Vista -always- brings up a UAC prompt when it detects that an Installer is being executed (by scanning the EXE to look for the telltale signs of an installer), to ensure that the user knows that the file that was just executed, which he may have thought was some stupid fireworks display, is actually attempting to install something.
"I don't usually hear about lists of incompatible hardware for Windows. Of course, I've never had to look for one, but I've still never really heard of one."
How many do you want? Actually it's a list of compatible hardware, it's much easier to do. And shorter.
I've, in paper, "Supported hardware compability list" for NT and it's quite short, just few pages.
Have you ever tried to run even 2000 on relatively old hardware, like ISA-cards? No, of course not. 'No drivers' is the norm and not the exception. Try sometime google for 'windows driver wanted' and give yourself a surprise. Just 1.5M hits, not too many, eh?
So it's obvious you've had a pre-installed windows and current hardware (relatively to that release) and only those.
Where's 98-support for modern display cards? As you might remember, 98 was officially supported until last year. No drivers, though.
How about Aureal Vortex?
If you haven't heard, it's just because you've had flaps on your ears.
On the contrary, Linux happily supports almost everything. Not always out of the box, but supports anyway. In spite of the fact that hardware manufacturers in many case try to prevent them for supporting their hardware.
I personally haven't had any major issues that I'd attribute to Vista itself. Here is the short laundry list of problems I have run into:
--Driver unavailability from Creative Labs (audio) and HP (scanner). These have been resolved by the manufacturers. I don't hold any OS manufacturer responsible for writing a hardware manufacturer's code for them, especially when the hardware company is as big as Creative Labs or HP. MS is off the hook for that one.
--Slow startup. XP is a hard act to follow for cold-boot startup times, but I really expected more (less?) from Vista. Round-trip times for reboots were agonizingly slow, as shutdowns could take up to a full minute. MS takes the full blame for this one, as even a clean install is simply slow as hell during reboots. ReadyBoost didn't make a noticeable difference.
--Transcode360 doesn't work well with Vista. This is practically a showstopper for me, as it kept me from having to dedicate a system for HTPC usage. I could just use my Xbox 360 to stream any video regardless of codec. Again, I don't blame MS for this, especially since T360 is a closed-source beta.
--System instability after installing recent ATI Vista drivers. This was the final straw that sent me back to XP, simply because I don't think everyone else is ready for Vista yet, not the other way around.
--AVG antivirus became horribly broken after a system restore.
My system was rock-solid until that ATI driver install, which started an endless BSOD-on-startup cycle. After trying System Restore, AVG would neither run nor allow reinstall so I decided to nuke the site from orbit. It was the only way to be sure. I've gone back to XP MCE for now to let the Vista software world mature a little more. Still, I think Vista is a good OS, even if it's a bit slow, and doesn't deserve all this hate. The author's statement of "unfit for any user" is way off the mark. In my experience, it's perfect for most users, and only seems to run into problems when you start using untested software.
Internally, Microsoft refers to Vista as "Vista ME". This to indicate the stability of the whole.
"Everything is slower on Vista."
He said that.
So did you miss it, or are you wrong on purpose?
In the future if you're going to be a douche, at least try to be a correct douche.
Not me. You're right on. I am moving over to Linux as well, probably Kubuntu. I tried Vista RC2 for awhile and it was pretty, but when all I hear about Vista is that it still has the same driver availability problems it had back then and is still that unstable, I decided my next upgrade would be to go all GNU/Linux. I'd delayed because of gaming, but Wine now supports most, if not all, of the games I want to play and I figure someone will have figured out DX10 in a few years when there's actually a decent catalog of DX10 games out. If not, there's always dual-booting.
I'm running it on a homebrew box that I just built with the AMD 64-bit X2 chipset and I've gotten several freezes, display driver crashes and even a repeating BSOD! I just recently upgraded my display driver, so hopefully that will help some, but I'm left with quite a distaste in my mouth from my experiences.
See if you can BSOD your computer:
1) get iTunes 7.1.1.5
2) import your mondo library
3) notice your music isn't being found b/c M$ has changed the "Documents and Settings/MPATH "directory to "Users/MPATH"
3.5) shutdown iTunes
4) backup your iTunes library.itl and XML file
5) open your iTunes library.itl in a text editor, wipe out all text and save
6) find & replace all bad paths to good paths in the XML file and save
7) start iTunes
8) it will import from your XML file and after a minute or two, voila! BSOD!
When I was buying the parts, I was looking at Win XP for 64-bit vs. Vista for 64-bit and it was a price difference ($140 vs. $150), so I went with Vista. Now I'm gonna play around with Ubuntu.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Links keep dissapearing from my posts! Here is teh link that goes with the parent post: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220. aspx
But I do know that I didn't want to find out. Let's face it - XP has done a good job for us, so when the release of Vista was close I started looking for new Hardware. End result - we bought 5 brand new laptops, 4 Gateways and an ACER, all of which came with XP.
Now Vista may be the greatest thing ever. It may be the worst thing ever. But we are used to XP, all of us can run it in our sleep, and I didn't see any advantage to changing. So we have 6 laptops with XP, and 3 desktops with XP, shared by my wife and three children (two of which are legal adults now).
So we don't need to worry about it for a couple of years now.
In common with many corporate users, we have had a look at these products.We have treated Vista in only a cursory way, as we have no need to change from XP and it conveys no clear advantages to us. Frankly, it seems to be a consumer product: good luck to it.
n uity.html/
Office is a different issue. We generate a great deal of PowerPoint, and this is showing its age. The Open Office equivalent does not yet cut the mustard. So, we had a very frustrating encounter with Office 2007. We shall not be using it.
Several hundred million office workers use MS Office, and it is a major part of the MS cash stream. The Office 2007 UI is a major discontinuity for the work practices of this (impatient) community. However, in our evaluation, the product offers no meaningful improvement in what is on offer.
Our take on the strategic implications of this for MS can be found at:
http://www.chforum.org/library/ms_office_disconti