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Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.
Is it worth installing?
Does it run Windows?
"According to Microsoft, when Vista SP1 is offered to users normally through Windows Update, the prerequisite steps will have already taken place automatically over several nights. Microsoft has not set a definitive release date for SP1, other than to promise that it will launch sometime in the first three months of 2008. " So the question I have to this statement is why does it need to reboot the computer now if later it will be able to do the prerequisite steps automatically for the offical release. Why couldn't they impliment that into a RC? Also "The SP1 release candidate will have to be uninstalled before applying the final code in 2008, Microsoft warned as it also issued an odd caution on the subject. "After you uninstall Service Pack for Windows (KB936330), we recommend that you wait at least one hour before you try to install the final release of Windows Vista SP1," another support document read." What the heck happens in one hour of waiting? That one really baffels me. However I use vista myself and don't mind the OS but I will not be trying this RC. It scares me to think of the bugs that might come with it. Ill just wait for the Offical Release.
There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...
Are you planning on installing it on a production machine?
Are you planning on installing it on your home machine?
The answer is: Don't!. But, if you do, don't come complaining that it broke your system and that's why MS sucks. It's a release candidate.
Are you planning on installing it on a test system and documenting any issues to see how things go so you can plan on how the install will go when it is in RTM?
O.k., go ahead, that's what a release candidate is for. Especially if you plan on providing the feedback on major issues.
Anyone who installs "beta", "community technology preview", or "release candidate" software on their systems and then complains about the experience and how it sucks should be branded with a big ol' "D U M B A S S" on their short-bus-riding-tuckus.
Now, if you install the RC on your test system, provide feedback on you major error, and then the RTM has the same problem, you can complain.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It would be the same old same old if the SP1 solved the most obvious flaws of the OS. But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista. So, not bussiness as usual, but bussiness even worse than usual. Cool.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
AnandTech says an RC of XP SP3 is also released. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9987 Although I don't understand why "download directly from microsoft" on that page links to http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Microsoft_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_3/1197391546/1
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
That's not true. Sp1 has never solved the glaring flaws of Microsoft OS's. They get solid around SP2 or SP3. But that doesnt stop adoption.
Oh yeah, sure. MSFT dissed Linux with the Total Cost of Ownership BS. The cost of migrating applications to Linux was what had boosted the cost for Linux column. Now will Gartner re run the Total Cost of Ownership studies including the cost of migrating "XP to Vista"?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm actually not trolling, but if anything, stating the obvious. Windows NT's setup was a good-enough architecture back when "the company LAN" was just a bunch of computers strung together on a hub or in a ring. The Internet changed that, and just as it almost left Microsoft behind back in 1995 at the apps level, it's almost about to leave them behind right now at the OS level. It's becoming apparent that the thing simply cannot keep up with what's required.
If SP1 actually improved speed and performance, as well as add a better legacy/compatibility mode, they might have been able to eke by without people (outside of /. and the Mac community) questioning it.
Not anymore.
I think we're going to start seeing the decline of Microsoft. It won't crash overnight, but I suspect that, barring a miracle on their part, things will only start falling from here for them. Between Macs at home and Linux at the server room, MSFT's market share loss will be slow at first, then start accelerating. It'll take about a decade, but by then Microsoft's OS will be about as popular as Amiga's was in 1998-2000 (roughly), but will perhaps a larger base of holdouts, depending on developer mindshare and markets.
I've never really said that (at least and meant it) before... now it's moved from being a personal guesstimation to becoming my professional opinion.
Glad I went full *nix a long time ago...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You miss the fact that fortune 500 companies usually either lease their hardware, or budget for a full hardware refresh every 3 years. That's just how business works.
What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?
This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?
The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.
The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
FTFA: "Not everything planned for the final version of SP1 has made it into the release candidate"
So much for a release candidate...
I have heard phone support script humanoid robots demand that I turn off the modem and router and wait for 30 seconds before switching them on. Kind of made sense, something like make sure all capacitors are fully discharged and the machines are really truly off.
In India there is a popular belief that if an AirConditioner is turned off one must wait for three minutes before turning it on. One technician hand waved about the compressor might be at some odd point in the cycle and suddenly making it run would "break" the shaft. Did not believe him. But in the last trip I find that all the A/C are connected to the grid through "voltage stabilizers" that have a delay timer to prevent the machine from being turned on too soon!
Now MSFT takes the cake! Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why? The pagefile is still thinking SP1 is running? The MSFT DRM software has to call in and tell Redmond that SP1 has been really uninstalled and get a confirmation back? Or uninstalled bits of SP1 is considered to be an radioactive waste and they must be beamed to Jupiter to be buried?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I love Microsoft. I love it more than I love my family. This ought not come as a surprise to any that know me: a long line of jaded ex girlfriends will laugh bitterly and recall the passion they could never share in, and those few that can call themselves my friends accept that, on Patch Tuesday, their lives are nothing to me.
But above even my love for Bill Gates' corporate loin product is my love for my work. It is a sacred task that has been assigned to me, and I dare not let friends, nor family, nor even software allegiances stand in the way of the fairness and impartiality that is my trademark.
But why do I tell you this? Why do I bare my soul in such a vulgar fashion? It is that you may understand: even now, I will not let my love blind me; I do not write from the perspective of an enamored lover, nor a too-faithful user. No, it is as a Genuine Microsoft User hungry for the Next Best Thing that I pen this, my review of Windows Vista.
Part I: Making the Switch
"Aha," you are saying, having been inundated by countless negative reviews, "He will surely realize that Vista is in every way a downgrade from previous Microsoft products; he will slowly become disillusioned with its clunkiness, bloat, and arbitrary changes made only for the sake of justifying an overzealous Vice President's salary. Over the course of many painful pages, he will finally renounce his love for the Monopolist, and end with an impassioned plea for the adoption of the obviously superior Apple OSX while a swelling orchestral piece rises in the background."
Alas, no. Such a review, while undoubtedly entertaining, would be as far from the truth as, say, religion. No, this is most assuredly a glowingly positive testimonial: Windows Vista is easily the best operating system on the market today. Such an assertion, I realize, may offend some of my readers' base sensibilities; if that is the case, kindly allow me to show you to the exit.
But I have, once again, gotten ahead of myself. Firstly, why I choose to review the Vistas now, rather than immediately following the January launch, bears explaining.
It was a cloudy Monday morning, some two months back, when my erstwhile laptop, a venerable old Compaq, gave up the ghost. The screen, which had been flaky for a number of weeks, finally quit altogether.
After a brief mourning period, I began scouring the print classifieds, searching for a replacement. I soon found one, a dual-core offering from Hewlett Packard. The $600 price tag--considerably less than my weekly escort--made its purchase, and my subsequent review, a foregone conclusion. It arrived the following Thursday, in the hands of a perky blonde UPS driver; I christened it Alex, turned it on, transferred my data (a breeze thanks to Microsoft's new Streaming Automatic External Backup Restore technology), configured it to suit my needs, and resumed my work.
I have been using it, very happily, ever since and, today, shall pass judgment.
Part II: New Features (and what they mean for you)
Aero:
This brand new DirectX-based desktop rendering engine was the focus of Microsoft's Vista promotional materials. It is easy to see why: Vista with Aero is stunning; it puts, in this writer's humble opinion, all other human achievements to shame.
I have been to the Louvre; I have seen the works of the masters, of Monet and Michaelangelo. My heart swelled, and I nearly wept at the sight. But the feeling I get when I gaze at Aero... even that cannot compare. It is more than my simple words can express. My screenshots are but pale reflections of its splendor.
You must experience it yourself: study the subtle interplay between light and shadow, feel the cool ephemer
That's probably because there wasn't that much difference between Win98 and Win95 OSR2. And there were no DRM issues. And the systems were simpler back then.
As I recall the only major issue with Window 98 relative to 95 was mediocre performance (due to IE integration) and that 98 would often hang during shutdown because of what turned out to be about five dozen separate and distinct configuration specific bugs. But those didn't matter all that much.
The procedure for installing Vista SP1 sounds byzantine. I wonder how bad it will be in practice. Is this sort of creeping paralysis from too much complexity (if that's really the problem) going to get worse? Is it going to affect Apple and Linux also eventually as they add capabilities?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
And besides, as many people have mentioned, this is a release candidate, not the final revision. The final version will have more fixes / features, and can only help. Once that's out, then feel free to knock it.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the
3. Done!
Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.
So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I've been using Linux from the beginning of my IT career, that was 12 years ago. At that time ppl were installing mainly slakware 3.0 with the mythic 1.2.13 kernel.
.NET is a development platform which is very well designed, easy to use and cheap (compared to the Java/Oracle combo), so you can expect .NET gaining market share at great speed.
.dot rise and fall will understand me.
.NET and windows server management, as I think that we'll see in the next years lots of company migrating their linux systems to windows.
I remember when I setup a local ISP with 128 kbits of bandwidth and 300 email users using just one server, with kernel 2.0.0, with a motherboard sporting a chipset Triton and a whopping 128 MBytes of RAM.
Later I went to a medium size company where I ended as the IT manager. Through the years we migrated all our Sun servers to Suse Linux. Right now this company online sales system is based on linux, and things are going great.
I consider myself a linux expert after all these years using different versions of linux kernels and setting up an IT infrastructure which is mission crytical and moves more than 2000 million dollars. I've been a great linux supporter, and I'm still very proficient managing it.
But as succesful as a server system linux has been, at the desktop the community has failed miserably to produce a simple consistent desktop solution to reach the masses. KDE and gnome should have merged years ago and psch together. X should have been abandoned for a new and more efficient graphics system, years ago too. Anyone remmeber the GGI project? That one offered hope for some time, then failed. We were in need of a Linus Torvald leading a common desktop effort. It did not happen
In the meantime, the windows server system has become much more stable. In the late 90s linux was incredibly more stable than windows. Now the difference is very narrow, and you can already run a mission crytical business on linux, without much an effort.
To make things worse,
You can check it if you want at www.netcraft.com. Never the difference in market share between apache and IIS was so slim.
Very dangerous too for the OOS movement is also the fact that all the managers seem to think now that OOS will be the solution to their company and IT problems. Those who saw the
So I'm just beginning to invest heavily my spare time in learning
That's not true. XP SP1 solved a glaring flaw in some IDE chipset drivers that caused machines to boot into a BSOD and sometimes even caused massive filesystem corruption.
My blog
Just go with SP2 for XP64 for x86.. you'll be happier. Seriously, the win2k3 based kernel in that thing is fabulous, and I've been running everything from compilers to first person shooters without a problem. Just be sure that there are 64 bit drivers available for your hardware.
And before anybody ask "why" as opposed to XP 32bit: XP64 has been more stable for me as well as smoother, along with none of the Vista bullshit. I wish they'd take the "XP" moniker off of it and just call it "Windows Workstation Professional".
Am I the one one who finds it amusing that we have betas and release candidates for service packs? And then we often get patches to fix service packs after they finally do release it.
Future tech support calls:
Tech: "What version are you running?"
User "Lemme check. Looks like version '2007 SP1b Build 3567 Patch Level 3'"
Tech: "Sir, you should be at version 2007 SP1b Build 3768 Patch Level 2"
User: "Wait, is that newer or older than what I have now?"
Tech: "It is a newer build of an older patch. You can download it from our web site, but if you do install it, you will not be able to install older builds of newer patches."
User: "Uh, OK?"
Tech: "You may also want to try running the beta version 2008 which I hear from our dev tech is just awesome after you apply all the prerelease sub patches."
User: "Uh..."
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
When we get new machines, the machines come with a corporate image already loaded. Our current corporate image is XP, not Vista. If a machine comes with Vista, it'll get wiped and replaced with the corporate image.
This is in a Fortune 100 company. I expect that this is typical of the other Fortune 100 companies.
Out of curiosity, anyone know what Microsoft's corporate image looks like? Specifically, is it XP or Vista based?
*sigh* back to work...
The problem is that the application compatibility problem is really a double edged sword. Microsoft bit themselves in the ass by pretty much forcing the habit of always running as admin when using windows. This led to programmers doing things like writing to there install dir and using system wide registry keys when a local one is more appropriate.
The real problem is poorly written applications for the most part. The fact the microsoft had to add file system and registry virtualization to vista is just a demonstration of this.
So the question comes...do we make easier to write bad software and install malware as a normal user? or do we tighten up security and break backwards compatibility? In all fairness the answer isn't obvious, because it depends on your needs.
There are other issues as well for compatibility. Unfortunately there is no win-win here. If they make it more compatible, it will be just as much of a security cluster fuck as previous versions.
Odd, it says my submission for this story was accepted, but it doesn't mention my name in the summary. Of course, the editors did rewrite my submission, and it looks better this way. My original submission was a bit awkwardly phrased with quotes. Probably a bit dry. :)
But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1"
You're doing it wrong. The 8710w is a Novell certified machine.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."