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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."
It's forced me to make it my last Microsoft Operating System ever.
After being forced on to Vista by Sony - after unwittingly buying a VAIO which is stuck with Vista. I am totally fed up with it.
So far, I have found 3 features which are cool, and hundreds of issues.
Took me around 2 hours one day to edit the TNSNAMES.ORA file on my Oracle (dev) installation... until I worked out the trick.
My next Laptop will be OSX, next Workstation will be Linux - and I already run Linux (CentOS) servers.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
- a happy Vista user, for the record
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I've been waiting for stable drivers on a number of fronts and waiting for support from vendors like tivo and kensington. I don't dare upgrade to 64 bit, 32 is headache enough. WMP freezes for any video I load- have to use Nero showtime. iTunes 7 video is broken too. Everything else works great and I love the eye candy, but I give up.
Vista has actually become usable for me over the last few months. I got a free evaluation copy a few days before the release, and it started out rather poorly. Sleep mode kinda worked, with the mouse, or networking, etc not coming back after it went to sleep. I got random reboots until ATI finally released a driver that didn't crash my whole system.
Now it's pretty smooth sailing.
With that said, I'm still considering just going to Ubuntu. Vista is OK I guess, but there's nothing in it that's terribly compelling. I like the look and feel of it, but I prefer all the software available a click away with Ubuntu. (I'm no newcomer to Linux, the Vista box is my last Windows machine). Whenever the next Ubuntu version comes out I'll try it out on the workstation and see if sleep mode actually works. Then just run vmware for the one or two remaining Windows apps I can't live without.
AccountKiller
And I love it. I've never been huge on Microsoft, ran OS/2 for several years, and Vista was just so annoying and slow, it made the decision to switch to a Mac easy. Is OS X perfect? No, but it is much better, and it didn't take more than a couple weeks to get fully comfortable in the new environment, although I still find myself hitting the ctrl key rather than the command key for some shortcuts.
The engineering computing* group at my company don't like Vista. I trust their opinion, thus I don't like vista.
-nB
* NOT IT, vastly different purposes in life. IT is about mainstream hardware, standard servers, only having to deploy 2-3 images across 90% of the company. Engineering Computing is about the other 10%. Almost as many images as users, custom hardware specs, support for *every* OS available, back to Win3.1 and across 17 different linux distros. If they say "no way" to Vista, then I'm sold on the opinion and won't touch it (incidentally, nor will IT for the same reason).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I understand people change their minds, but I'd be lying if I said I question whether or not his change of heart on Vista would be public if he wasn't leaving the magazine world (dependent heavily on MS for ad revenue and stories) for another field.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
By general users, i'm talking about every day non-computer-techy types ... like my wife, my parents, my in laws, and brother. All of them use computers, but for little more than looking up general info like movies and wikis, email, some gaming and word processing. My mother is the prime example, she is the least computer literate, and when things suddenly "change" on the screen, she freaks out thinking that she broke something. While i've convinced her that a random popups window are OK (for passwords) .. the fact that the whole screen in vista flickers and the background changes (the password overlay) really gets to her. My brother, wife and i can't get out games to play correctly (video drivers for my nvidia 7800gs play games like halo 2 with horrible graphic glitchs, and even some lag in games like oblivion that i didn't have in XP, Medieval II crashed on me at least once an hour...). That's not even mentioning how vista itself seems to take up more memory which slows down the games. My father who is a minister, couldn't get some of his old files to work properly (which he needs for work). The new office (2007) actually messed more things up for him than fixed, and i had to install open office for him just to get some of his old files to OPEN so that he could then use them in 2007.
In the end... It's not that i hate windows, it's that it looks like vista was not thought out to be easier on/for the user... instead it looks like it was just planned look better on paper (BETTER SECURITY! BETTER NETWORKING! BETTER ETC!). Now add in the fact that we have to pay a TON of money just to get this stuff on our computers and it still doesn't work properly? For my parents, i actually installed (k)ubuntu for them about a month ago (KDE). They went to linux because they told ME they didn't want Vista anymore, but they didn't have money to spend on another set of MS licenses just to go back to XP. Go figure... after showing my mom for an hour how to open a browser, and open up gaim to chat and how to go into her home folder.... i've actually heard her complain LESS than when she had XP.
Let me start by saying that I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I can't think of one good reason to run Windows on my servers (<3 freebsd), but I do prefer it over nix/bsd for desktop use; I'm a gamer, and virtual machines are enough to give me my linux fix. I tried Vista RC2 very briefly and hated it. After my display drivers became so problematic that I literally could not see anything properly enough to even log in, I gave up.
However, I was building a new rig a few months ago and decided to give it another shot, only for DX10. In months of very heavy use (running games + movies + several virtual machines at the same time), I've been pleasantly surprised how decent it has turned out to be. The only problem I've had is widescreen not working in one game (which was achieved through an unsupported hack in the first place). The UI is significantly better, and I really do miss the improvements when I use my XP laptop for anything productive. Stability has been great, I haven't had any sort of entire-os crash at all. Drivers were exactly as they were in XP: visit site, download, click next a few times, reboot, done.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I think the amount of criticism Vista gets is unwarranted; in particular, it really bothers me when people bash it when their experience with Vista comes from nothing but /. comments by users with equal Vista experience. Is it the best thing since sliced bread? No. Could Microsoft have done better? Very much so. Is it better than XP? Definitely.
I am currently involved in the preparations for founding a new startup company. Since this is a new company, there isn't a currently-existing base of Windows computers to replace. We are making decisions about what to use without regard for migrating from anywhere. So that is one respect in which 'Windows is good enough to not be replaced' fails - at least for new companies.
Furthermore, when deciding what to use, we see the following. Linux on the server - that is a done deal. No discussion even. Now, what about desktops for the developers writing code for those servers? Well, in the past they would use Windows, since it's a desktop, and to develop for Linux they would use Cygwin, virtualization or (sadly) networking. But nowadays we are very seriously considering giving them Fedora or Ubuntu desktops - why not have them run the same type of OS as the target platform, especially since it can do everything else they need, with Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.? So, you have here a case of success in the server room bleeding over to the desktop (the reverse of Windows' historical battle plan).
What about other desktops, for secretaries, business development, etc.? Well, it isn't my area, so I haven't argued as strongly for Linux there. Perhaps it does make sense to have Windows PCs for them. But even so, because of the Linux desktops for the developers, we will in all likelihood standardize on Firefox and OpenOffice internally, since they can be run everywhere. (We might end up getting a few licenses of MS Office for people that exchange documents with external entities.)
So sure, it isn't the 'year of the Linux desktop'. Maybe it never will be. But it still isn't the same as it was before.
People so much in love and applauding vista forget about xp's beginnings which were fare more rocky. Then it was going from a non nt to nt kernel, a fare more radical step. Things took even longer to iron out drivers and all, from what I recall. Vists ahould take less time since they aren't moving that far up the tech ladder I agree, but this is the way it is. My frustration with vista is not having a good way to report bugs and see they have been reported. I like sun, I report java bugs and can easily find out if they exists already and read comments. I think if ms had an open bug system like sun it would do a world of good, especially if we could see what bugs they are targeting for releases. Maybe it exists somewhere but I don't know about it.
I bought 3 laptops for my family, two of them were Turion X2's one by acer, one by gateway, and a basic dual core pentium m system by everex. Anyway, the gateway had vista home premium, and the others had home basic. I upgraded the home premium system from 1GB ram to 2.5GB, and got the home basic systems up to a respectable 1.5GB of ram each.
Anyway, after hours of tweaking my gateway I still could not get the damn thing under 210MB Idle at startup with no startup programs running and all useless services turned off (and with XPSP2 I generally like it to be somewhere around 77MB usage max on a clean restart on mem usage considering no other programs are launched ar startup), and the interface, even though it resembled windows 2000 after I was done with it, was still very slow and unresponsive. The networking was a nightmare and didn't work 1/2 of the time, and NONE OF THE SYSTEMS WOULD SLEEP RIGHT! heck, 2 of the systems wouldn't even hibernate for me, and this is a preloaded system. Tech support at gateway, acer, and everex all assured me that it was a driver problem and that all of it was resolved in new drivers....which they hadn't been.... I got excuses stemming from microsoft, themselves, their vendors, driver writers, you name it, excuses, but no solutions.
So I went through updating driver and patch hell, sometimes installing modified xp drivers in attempt to get things working, got called a liar and many other nasty things on some unofficial vista support forums after suggesting I was displeased with the performance and suggesting that this cannot be just the driver's fault alone,
after about 3 hours of dicking around with things so far buried into the operating system I was beginning to think that it was like trying to get Xfree86 running in Red Hat 5 with a ATI radeon back in the day, and several system recovery's later after I screwed up the OS so badly it wouldn't boot anymore, so I threw in the towel and loaded XP on the two laptops that were going to my family members, and left vista on mine. I finally got it running almost decently, and ran it for two weeks and noticed that it tended to slow down at random times.
I found vista required the most work out of the box to make it even slightly functional-
I mean on other OS's, I don't have to surgically remove useless services, ei the windows "nanny", or interfaces which chew up ram to make something look pretty, or find odd versions of drivers which are broken in one regard, but possibly not another, drivers that weren't even made for the device I am using, but perhaps another made by a different vendor with the same chipset. Also it doesn't help that there are stumbling blocks built right into it because they assume that the user is completely useless, or the fact that they re-arranged all the important control panels, and replaced quite a few of them with useless counterparts. I finally gave up on my laptop and loaded XP onto it.
For those who are curious, I did go through a few headaches tracking down drivers for everything in XP, but i found that more often than not the XP drivers were bundled with the vista drivers, or at least the vista drivers somehow worked under XP. I have already loaded XP on 11 of my customer's laptops which came with one form of vista or another, and I have already run out of my little stockpile of XP Pro OEM liscenses I bought a years back... Perhaps I should snag a few more before they disappear.
Well, the famous one is A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Guttman; which goes into great detail.
Its not really the DRM, so much, as it is all the "features" (cough cough) that supports the DRM, especially how Vista encrypts alot of traffic crossing the system busses...and how Vista checks the "tilt bits" many many many times per second. All this needless "housekeeping" slows the system down.
You should see how long Vista takes to boot up and run on a Sempron 3100+ with 512mb of ram...
Ye Gods, it's so damned sloooowwwww...
Thanks for all the great comments. I'm even happy that someone remembers something I said on ZDTV five years ago, now that's the memory of an elephant.
Why care about networking and wireless? Because it's the lifeblood of my computers. I share tons of stuff with my other computers at home, and I like to see them actually working together. Music, video, files, etc, all run off the network. The XP machines are up automatically, while Vista takes forever. And the made for Vista notebook I've been using is the worst of all of them.
As to the Mac... I didn't have space to get into the sleep problems that our 20" iMac suffers through - like why doesn't it actually go to sleep reliably, and why is the fan so loud. Guess I shouldn't have purchased one of the last PPC iMacs, or maybe I should just buy a new Mac every year...
FWIW, I didn't leave because I was sick of pandering to Windows, or any of those other suggestions. PCMag has always been, and will continue to be independent. The editors there make the best decisions about products based on their voluminous knowledge and experience, not because of advertisers. Witness the strong Mac-based reviews recently, for example.
jim
I bought a new laptop because my existing one needed to go into service. I'm naturally disinclined to use something unproven but I was given no choice (I reckoned that the hardware mattered more to me so I went ahead).
Anyway, to cut a long story short - I will *never* use Vista again. I had Vista "for business" but it is better named "AGAINST business" for the following reasons:
It doesn't work. This was on a Sony VAIO SZ4, so-called "Vista ready". Well, it wasn't. Frequent lockups, a gazillion popups ("you have moved your mouse - allow/deny?"), running like a slug, taking forever to boot up, I could go on. If I hadn't used Beryl on Linux I could have suffered under the delusion that Vista is just heavy on the machine because of graphics but Beryl proves it can be FAST and pretty if you code properly.
It is extremely chatty on the Net. I logged traffic emanating from this machine that I most certainly did not authorise. I spend a good hour or so disabling all the phone-home features that somehow default to the suppliers' preference and there was still plenty going on in the background. Sorry, not in my backyard, not with IT *I* paid for and not with bandwidth that is under *my* contract. If you want to hire my computer, go ahead and sign a contract, otherwise it's simply theft (that's what spam is as well).
DRM IS A MAJOR, REPEAT, MAJOR THREAT TO BUSINESS STABILITY AND RESILIENCE. Analyse how DRM works: the chain from origin to output has to be 100% functional for you to reach your information (that's why the word "chain" is so appropriate here). That has a few obvious implications and I can't believe that so little is made of it. Tell me where I'm wrong here:
- if any component in the chain fails, access to any DRM "protected" resource is impossible. I may be wrong here, but AFAIK that means the MTBF of such a chain is the lowest MTBF of the components involved, divided by the number of components. That makes failure not a probability, it makes it a certainty.
- it puts serious barriers in the way to fast recovery from problems.
- NONE of the components in this chain is of a long and trusted heritage. I would be very interested to meet the person who is willing to entrust his entire corporate infrastructure to a Microsoft + hardware vendors beta test. As it happens, it appears many are prepared to do so - it's going to be interesting to see anyone claim off insurance when it goes wrong.
As for that laptop, I solved the problem with installing Ubuntu, VMWare and an as yet unused OEM copy of Windows XP (I don't use unlicensed software). Works for me, stable, and less of a worry re viruses (I have been using Openoffice.org for a year now as it works under Linux AND Windows).
Vista? No way. From what I hear from others it has proved quite a sales push, but for Windows XP licenses, Macs and Linux. Given the amount of talent MS has hired I take that as the lowest return on investment ever.
They can keep it.
Insert
Well, the famous one is A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Guttman; which goes into great detail.
And is mostly FUD, resulting in people believing things like this:
Its not really the DRM, so much, as it is all the "features" (cough cough) that supports the DRM, especially how Vista encrypts alot of traffic crossing the system busses...and how Vista checks the "tilt bits" many many many times per second. All this needless "housekeeping" slows the system down.
Vista only does this when you are using DRM-encumbered media. It does not do it at other times.