Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now
SlinkySausage writes "Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that 'some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.' The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a 'fact rich' program to try to convince them to 'proceed with confidence'. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement."
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
After using Vista for about 4-5 months now I actively hate it.
/renew' is a user command. 'ipconfig /release' is an admin only command. Great thinking there chaps.
Aside from being slow as molasses and able to burn through a laptop battery at twice the rate that XP did, it's recently
decided that I don't have permissions to see the network status.. so all I get is 'connection status: unknown access is denied'.. also making it impossible to see whether I'm actually connected to anything without going to the command line and using ipconfig.
Oh and the wonderfully inconsistent permissions don't stop there. 'ipconfig
Oh and there's the utterly broken file copy. Try copying a directory from one place to another when it requires elevation. It'll do one of two things:
1. Ask for elevation, then when you confirm do absolutely nothing.
2. Ask for elevation, copy about 10% of the files then silently stop.
I could go on for hours... Advice for anyone thinking of installing it before SP1 comes out.. don't bother.
I've been on Vista for 3 months now. When I bought my new Thinkpad I made the leap, thinking that it would be better to be slightly ahead of the curve than to have to upgrade my OS at a later point. Big mistake. Don't do it. Below is a quick summary of the hassles I have endured since day one, and continue to endure. Anyone else see this shit?
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I h
You are so right! I recently bought a Compaq laptop that had Vista Home Premium on it. I found Aero to be a massive resource hog, even with the latest system and video drivers. Even listening to WinAmp with no visualization turned on would result in 25% CPU utilization! So, I shut off Aero after which the CPU utilization when listening to WinAmp dropped to about 5-10%. All right. Great. One hurdle overcome.
The big kicker for me was that I was completely unable to use Ulead's Media Studio Pro, which is my video editing software. The laptop has a Firewire port, so that made it a big plus for me to be able to do some editing on the laptop when I'm not at home. Thanks to the new way that Vista talks to the hardware, MSP was useless for all but basic editing. The Preview window didn't work and the audio didn't work, which made it impossible to be able to sync up audio and splice video segments together. Changing the compatibility mode in Vista made no difference.
On top of that, I needed to download a Vista-compatible DVD of Stuido 10 Titanium from Pinnacle's site. It was a free download and it worked fine as far as I could tell, but I'm glad that I have FTTH/FIOS because it was a 1.4 GB download!
There are also a number of other issues with Vista that cumulatively made me decide that enough was enough, like the initial issue that I had where my account would work fine but my wife's account, which I set up as an administrator-level account, couldn't log on stating that she didn't have the rights to log on. (!!!) I bought a 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg, threw it into the laptop, and installed XP. All of my hardware and software are working just fine. And now Microsoft is trying to push me to go back to Vista? They can kiss my ass. It's not happening.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I ran a couple of Vista betas and RC1. Vista's UI (sans Aero) is definitely an improvement over XP but that isn't saying a lot. Out of the box XP's desktop looked like a bag of M&Ms.
What Microsoft has yet to fix is all of the clutter. Yes Vista, I know a new USB device has been plugged in, I'm the one who plugged it in. Great, you have determined that its name is OEM CARD RDR 4-in-1. Now you've installed a drive. Now another. And then two more. Now you are notifying me that my hardware is ready to use. And if there are files on the card in the reader it keeps going. And if the files happen to be photos it is best to just unplug the machine as fast as possible.
Even with a 21" widescreen, desktop real estate (not to mention my attention) is too precious to waste by continuously blitting little messages at me from the system tray. And I'm trying to work up here, I don't want to read about participating in the User Experience Improvement Program.
Don't even get me started about managing focus stealing in any kind of intelligent way.
For my desktop purposes, OSX is well ahead of everything else. Ubuntu's latest release is quite nice, and it finally seems to be improving at a faster pace than the competition. But Windows seems to have stalled out. I haven't enjoyed using a Windows machine since the early Win2K days.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
(I'm a programmer whose code ships on lots of OEM machines -- and got to be one of the ones to make all of our code Vista compatible by the end of last April (yay!)
The most braindead part of Vista copying? You can't copy from a network share to a local subdirectory -- you first get an elevation, and then it's refused. But you CAN copy from a network share to the desktop, and then from the desktop to the local subdirectory without an elevation. As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
DEC: all your network are belong to us
SUN: the network is the computer
Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL!
Want a sig like mine? Join ACM's SigSig today!
I've wasted several weekends and evenings now purging both Vista off of peoples brand new computers and moving them back to XP or wasting hours trying to turn off every single UI effect in order to eep out a 1% performance increase to make the computer usable trying to put off the reinstall until I have the time to deal with it.
One of my friends calls me every other day begging me to put XP on his computer because nothing works in Vista, and I've told him he needs to atleast wait until his 30-day warranty period expires, and I don't think he's going to make it. He bought a brand new HP desktop with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce 6150. He only runs two progams, WoW and Picture Publisher Pro 10. Both of them failed right off!
I've wasted two evenings now trying to get PP10 to work correctly including setting the app to run in XP compatibility mode. No good, cursors get corrupted, screen refresh fails, no end of problems. Since this is what he uses for his secondary income, this has to be resolved. The program does everything he wants so "get him to buy a new paint program" is not on the table. He was also loosing his mind to get back into WoW so he's already bought an extra GB of RAM and upgraded the system to a GeForce 73xx series card just to get a barely tolerable frame rate.
Contrast this with my wife who bought the exact same systems spec but with XP preinstalled and the system screams. Games run great, 3-D apps run great. It's like night and day. MS can go screw themselves. They want people to run Vista, they better start sending out some major checks to us "family and friends technicians" to put up with this BS, I don't have time for it and 100% of the time I'm slicking Vista off every computer that comes to me. The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
Grumble grumble grumble