Vista SP1 Guides for IT Professionals Released

wilkinism writes "Microsoft released several detailed documents explaining just about everything you ever wanted to know about Vista SP1. Highlights include a Deployment Guide, list of included hotfixes, and a 17-page list of 'Notable Changes'. In reviewing the Notable Changes document, it seems the company focused on improving reliability & performance in really specific scenarios, so it's no wonder that most reviewers are reporting no noticeable gains."

Comments

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[headkase]

Bucking the slant around here, I bought Vista the very same day that SP1 RC1 became available exactly because of that. In a short while SP1 will be final and Vista will get incrementally better. It's been a pleasant experience for me so far, all of my software works but about 1 in 15 needs to have XP compatibility checked. UAC doesn't annoy me very often as well - maybe that's because I don't go into OS configuration screens or run XP ticked programs all that often. Now, with all that said: the day Linux runs all my games and all games are released for Linux is the day I say: "Vista? Yeah I used to use that.". Linux has everything but entertainment and for me entertainment is the primary use of my computer.

So long, Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using vista almost for a year now. At first, I was quite happy about it, it is supposed to have exiting new features like IO priority, readyboost, superfetch and all that. And I liked Aero at first. And better security (I must say, I like UAC, it's really no greater pain than sudo).

But it's SLOW. And while I could live with that, I just couldn't stand it hijacking my desktop. How many times did the system start doing some heavy disk IO, without ANY option to stop it. Even task manager didn't respond so I could check what was going on.

As time passed, I upgraded from a 3 year old laptop to a new one (Acer 5920G, a fine machine I must say). The only problem is, Vista is not any faster than on a 3 year old system!? Wtf??

So, the other day I was doing some linux stuff and installed Ubuntu to an external USB disk.

OH MY GOD (spoken in that-lady's-voice-from-friends-series).

It's fast. It's nice. And it's fast. And it uses only so little of my 2 gb ram. And did I tell you it was fast? Oh, and file copy is a snap!

So I've been using it for a week or so and I love it. But then... yesterday I came across this "compiz fussion" thing.

OH MY FSCUKING GOD THAT'S AWESOME!

So guess what. About an hour ago I've "cp -a /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda1". Yup. Vista no more (well, it is saved as an image on external drive, just in case).

I do a lot of .Net programming and I've set up a vmware XP box for development and virtualized XP is waaayyy faster than vista ever was.

Since SP1 doesn't solve any performance issues, I probably won't use that beast ever again. When I have to use Windows, I'll use XP.

So... Is Linux winning the desktop in 2008?

Totally!

Re:Specific scenarios?

[ccguy]

The move operation itself might be as simple as that. The problem is that vista has a tendency to open files for no good reason. For example you can flag 40 files, press shift-del to delete them forever, and have the operation fail because one of the was opened by explorer to display a thumbnail. It's really hard to believe that MS can't put a couple of interns to work on explorer and get rid of these incredible annoying things forever. Or fuck, buy someone else's replacement.

Re:Specific scenarios?

[ccguy]

It's not Explorer's fault. From what I recall, you can't delete a file off an NTFS volume if a program has opened it with exclusive (ie not shared) access.

How it's not Explorer's fault if it's explorer the program that opens the file I just told to delete? If it really really needs to open it so it can show a thumbnail or display the dimensions etc for a few milliseconds before it's deleted, at least it should implement a 'panic close', or 'delete queue', or any other dumb solution they can come up with... anything is better than displaying an error message saying that the file is open (which it's not true by the time the message comes up, btw).

While they are at it, they could ALSO try to not to cancel long operations just because of an error in a specific file...i.e. copy 500 files from one place to another, file number 219 fails and the operation is cancelled? 218 files copied, 287 files that COULD have been copied not copied, WTF?

Ah, and a final suggestion... if the user asks to copy 50 Gb to a drive with 40 Gb free space, fucking start doing it if the users really wants to, instead of completely refusing to even try...you don't know if the remote is making space at the same time, or compressing, or just reporting an invalid free space number for whatever reason.

OK, just needed to vent a little :-) Feel free to defend explorer at any time.

Re:Specific scenarios?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Thats why I wrote my own copy program for windows. It copies and or moves each file individually, taking into account exactly what I intended it to do if the operation failed. Sure it *might* take a little longer, but I only use it in cases where I'm copying/moving hundreds of files and don't want to stand in from on the computer for the entire operation.