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PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista
MacNN caught this incredible defection and loss of faith by a former Vista booster, PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback, as he steps down from his position. "I've been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain't cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can't get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux."
Have you ever considered that it's not just memory state? You have to bring all devices to their previous state as well, which happens on a per-device basis. Please learn about what you're talking about before bitching. Thanks.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
If you'd bothered to read the article, it isn't all due to driver issues. He has problems also with the way they redesigned the network settings, how responsive the system is reconnecting to wireless after waking from sleep (if they do at all), as well as shared drives not being found by one computer on the network when a different one sees it just fine. His problems are with the UI, the networking protocols, as well as drivers. On brand new hardware, no less. It isn't like he was trying to support a P2 400 or something, brand new Dell workstations, which I'm sure had Vista Ready or even Vista Premium Ready stamped all over them. Vista has been out for more than 8 months now, and they still haven't worked out these annoyances and broken features. Vistas problems go well beyond drivers and into the realm of what others like to call here "defective by design".
today is spelling optional day.
I feel his pain. Vista has been a pretty big headache for me since I first installed it earlier this summer. I still can't get the machine to suspend properly, my Bluetooth dongle sort of works, sometimes the network adapters require a reboot before they will connect...
However, quite a few problems have been fixed in the past few months, at least for me. The slow file copy/move thing seems to have disappeared; after a few driver updates, no more BSOD or random restarts. Program compatibility is still an issue, and I'm going to need to keep updating drivers, because everything seems like it could use a little more work. Really, though, there isn't much advantage over XP. I'm mainly staying with Vista for the better multiple-monitor support, and the 64-bitness (including finally seeing all 4 GB RAM).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I have been an MS supporter and developer since before Win 3.1 but Vista has me very frustrated.
I bought a great new machine, an Acer E700 quad core with Vista. I try to use it for various purposes and it just doesn't work or has some subtle compatibility bug that I cannot work around. So I try to install a new $300 XP Pro on the machine... Kaboom, I cannot get around the blue screen even using SCSI disks and other PCI cards. SOOOOO I put Ubuntu on it and VMWare Server with XP in a VM and the machine is now usable.
If I had been given an option to buy the machine with XP, I would have taken it 100% and what really bugs me is that we are being forced to use Vista when there is no significant end user benefit to upgrading to the new OS. Simbuddha
"As bad as Windows is, it works."
Well, apparently, it just doesn't work for everybody. Isn't that what the PC Magazine editor is saying in TFA?
Well, consider that each "device" may have anywhere from dozens of 8 bit registers, to hundreds of 32 bit registers. In some of those registers, each and every bit controls a different function of the device. Throw into the mix some registers that are "read-only", and internal hardware states that can only be restored by cycling the device through some number of states which may approach the number of functions that the device has been through since the last power-on cycle, and you might start to see the problem. Now, most hardware devices are simple - you can read enough state out of them that the device driver can restore them to functionality fairly easily on wakeup. But, in a modern PC, you could easily have 50 or more "devices", some of which are not designed so nicely, and any one of which can torpedo the wakeup process. And this is assuming that all of the drivers in the world are well-written, and correctly handle the hibernate/wakeup process from every possible state that they might be in. Hell, 20 years after sound cards started showing up in PCs and it's still not possible to buy one off the shelf and that it's going to work 100% correctly when you get it home! And this is using the normal software path through the app/OS/driver! I really have to imagine that the push to trusted hardware and software is going to make this worse. Now, you have to bring down encrypted links between a whole bunch of different drivers/hardware/applications/OS in the PC, and then restore them. The number of states that are involved while the drivers/hardware/applications/OS are, for example, playing a streaming movie are astronomical; all the encryption keys and state only multiplies the problems. Does that help? /frank
And the worms ate into his brain.
Of course, like any new laptop, it comes with Windows Vista. Despite my misgivings about Vista, I decided to keep it for a few days before nuking it (and the 20GB of recovery partitions that Toshiba stuck on there).
Put simply, it is slow and inefficient, broken in a number of ways and seriously crash-prone. I booted it up; ran the first-time wizard; started Vista up and watched Explorer crash (and come up with the "Report to Microsoft" dialog). So, I rebooted the computer, thinking that maybe the Toshiba recovery needed a reboot to get things working. Explorer didn't crash after reboot, so I assumed everything was OK.
Later, I'm attempting to edit my network config for the static IP (DHCP is disabled on my router as I run a server, and the router lacks the "static DHCP" option). UAC comes up (about 6 times throughout this process), but on one instance manages to permanently hang the network settings window, requiring that I kill the process.
That's an annoyance, sure, especially as it is a new system with no additional software (except Toshiba's stuff). I eventually get the networking going good (though Vista still refuses to see the SMB shares on my Powerbook G4, even though it sees my PC's shares just fine, and my PC [running XP] sees my Powerbook's shares just fine). So, I go on the Internet and obtain Firefox (what, you think I was going to use IE7? You must be joking.), which installs smoothly and works flawlessly on Vista. I'm quite happy about this.
Later, I'm playing Warcraft over LAN with some friends over, and, in the middle of a game, Vista's firewall decides that it should start blocking Warcraft's communication. Keep in mind that I've been playing for, oh, 4 hours at this point, and Vista has given me no trouble. Suddenly, the firewall dialog appears in the middle of my screen, and requests that I block/unblock the program. Of course, I choose Unblock, and a minute later, Warcraft crashes (some kind of network failure in CNet.cpp I think). Odd, of course, as it had been working fine for 4+ hours, so I reboot Warcraft, and half an hour later, the same thing happens (firewall dialog, Warcraft crash, etc.). Evidently, Vista has forgotten that I wanted the program to be unblocked.
Frustrated, I go to edit the settings for the firewall, but Warcraft is already listed as unblocked. We play some more, for maybe 2 hours, and it happens again. Annoying, sure, but I can't do anything about it anymore.
Well, OK, that might be the fault of Warcraft (III) not being updated for Vista or something.
There are other problems: Vista will not go to sleep when I close the lid (probably Toshiba's fault, but XP, which I recently installed, seems to handle that just fine); Vista randomly loses an Internet connection sometimes on a wired Ethernet link; Vista's window manager takes up a lot of RAM (300+MB private bytes) and a constant 3% CPU usage on both cores (on a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor); etc. etc. Even my old Sony VAIO (whose harddrive suffered a major crash after 3 years of service) with XP SP2 worked better and had fewer random bugs/crashes.
Summary: I am extremely displeased with Vista. Microsoft had 5 full years to improve their operating system, and instead, they have something that's less usable, less stable and more bloated (7+ GB for a fresh installation?) than their aging Windows XP system.
Personally, I'm almost inclined to think that Microsoft is trying to drive continued sales of XP from Vista. True, I haven't given Vista much time -- there are some things nice about it, like the revised Start Menu -- but in that short time it has utterly failed to please me.
- An unhappy Vista user, for the record.
What, exactly, is so difficult about dumping and reupping a memory state, I want to know?
Dumping and reloading memory state is fairly easy in a vacuum, it's just all those devices that get in the way.
Any current I/O must be either cancelled if possible without causing a failure, and the rest must be forced to complete ASAP. We cannot simply save and reload any state that depends on hardware (since it won't be in that same state on restore) and especially state that depends on an external state (such as a TCP connection or even IP address assignment). Any software that can't deal with that will just have to be terminated now or allowed to fail in nasty ways later. The drivers then need to close down except for the HD.
Now, the memory image can dump to HD and the system go fully to sleep.
On restart, the kernel must see that there is a restore context, reload and init drivers, then load up the image again.
All told, it's probably better to save each application context (except for network connections) and just forget about kernel context (meaning a full reboot except the apps miraculously resume from where they were.
Legacy can cause a lot of problems. Old drivers never worried about it, they init but don't really shut down, they just let system power off handle that for them. New drivers that are just old drivers warmed over will likely cause problems.
Apple does have a hibernate-like feature: it's called "Safe Sleep," and it's relatively new (circa 2005). It only came out in 10.4.3 and it only works on a limited number of new Power/MacBooks.* Admittedly, they did a better job on the UI than Windows does -- the computer just automatically goes into Standby (writing its memory configuration to disk just in case), and then after a while it goes into Safe Sleep / Hibernate. There's no separate option. You just close the lid and it does its thing.
So while I think Apple does do a good job on Sleep/Hibernate, they took their time coming out with a suspend-to-disk feature.
* Though you can hack it on some "unsupported" models, I think, via OpenFirmware.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That subject line should be sufficient to invalidate most of parent.
I recently went to a Harvey Norman Store (in Australia) to assist my work colleague buy a new laptop. He wanted a windows laptop. He picked a fairly high end HP with Vista Ultimate. Total cost was $A4,300. Given the problems with drivers, I asked the salesman if it worked with Telstra (ISP) 3g wireless network. He assured me it did.
When we took it back to the office, we tried to install the Telstra 3g software for the small hardware attachment. It didn't work. We rang Telstra and after a long delay, the techie asked if it was 64 bit Vista Ultimate. It was. "Ah, he said, it won't work!". The only solution was to get the 32 bit version.
I went back to Harvey Norman and explained the problem. He said we would have to buy the "32 bit Vista Ultimate" upgrade (for about $A550). I argued this was hardly an upgrade and remonstrated that the salesman had said it would work (we had grilled him closely on this). He said that the 64 bit OS came with THAT laptop and they would not exchange the OS. There were long discussions with the MS rep. In the end, after threatening consumer action, they backed down and came up with a free 32 bit "upgrade". I suspect they paid for it themselves.
There is another part to this story. My friend wanted MS office 2007 in the laptop. He was quoted about $A700. Being a hardened OOo user I just shook my head. However, quite quickly the salesman changed his tune. He asked my colleague if he had a child at school. He had a 21 yo daughter living in another city and working. He quickly found a way for this to be deemed (incorrectly) as eligibility for a Student version (for about $A195). I asked the salesman if anyone paid the full $A700. He said only businesses coming in with a sales order paid it. Individuals and small business were all paying the Student version. This is a dodgy system and shows there is clear buyer resistance to paying full price for MS software, in Australia, at least, and that the retailers seem to understand this. I woudl suggest that OOo is having some impact in the marketplace.
PS. My colleague regularly sends me mangled Office 2007 documents to have fixed up in OOo (like another poster from this article).
99% of the networking problems I see on a day-to-day basis are due to Norton. ...along with "slow systems" and a host of other "doesn't work" problems. Uninstalling Norton is like a breath of fresh air to most machines.
No sig today...
Vista users are unhappy because Yahoo Chat doesn't work. Really. YC works on W98, XP Home, and works great on Mac. You can't make voice work because of DRM.
I work for a nonprofit and end up fixing computers for a lot of volunteers. These volunteers bought a shiny Dell or Gateway to talk to their kids and grandkids over the internet and thought a new computer would help them do that better. HaHaHa.
With Vista, you log in, navigate through a heirachical menu with about 7 clicks to get to your group, check it, and get only text. The audio is disallowed because Yahoo didn't run it through MS DRM.
With the Mac (Mini), you log in, Yahoo lists your chat groups, click on one, and you're blabbing like it's a cell phone.
Ah, the Slashdot display system will trash this comment, but if you get it, ponder the design philosophy between W and Mac. And you won't come back because of it, so I'm just spitting (Slashdotting) in the wind.