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Windows Vista Annoyances
stoolpigeon writes "It has been well documented that the reception for Microsoft's Windows Vista has not been all that warm. Yet, visiting the web site of many PC manufacturers or visiting a retail outlet selling computers will show that most new hardware is being offered with Vista as the primary if not only option. O'Reilly's newest in their Annoyances series, "Windows Vista Annoyances", by David A. Karp, seeks to alleviate some of the pain for new Vista users. For the Vista owner who is able to put the book's suggestion into place, the edge should be taken off. For the individual considering a purchase of Vista and wondering if it can really be that bad, this book seems to indicate that yes, it is that bad." Read below for the rest of JR's review.
Windows Vista Annoyances
author
David A. Karp
pages
641
publisher
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
rating
8
reviewer
JR Peck
ISBN
0-596-52762-4
summary
Tips, Secrets and Solutions.
I've read a decent number of O'Reilly titles over the years. My bookshelf for technical books is a rainbow of the various volumes, each with their wood carving style cover. I don't think in all those years I've ever read an introduction like the one in annoyances. O'Reilly authors tend to be enthusiastic about their topic and are often well known proponents of the technology discussed. I can only guess that Karp is not a huge fan of Vista. The preface begins with a section labeled "Why am I annoyed?" and that section concludes with the question, "Would Microsoft be making decisions like these if it had to compete fairly for your business?" The first sentence of the first chapter is, "Windows Vista is like a papaya: sleek on the outside, but a big mess on the inside." And Karp never lets up. Throughout the book, from start to finish, he never tries to gloss over the ugliness of Vista. This book may be hazardous to the health of Microsoft fanboys. I would imagine that too much time reading would lead to high blood pressure at the very least.
In view of the mess that is Vista, Karp informs the reader that, "Whether it goes down smoothly or gives you heartburn is up to you." The point of the book is to give the reader the information that they need to make Vista palatable. This may sound simple but it brings up what I thought was the most difficult issue for Karp. Vista Annoyances is written with a level of detail and explanation that marks it clearly for the user with casual knowledge of personal computers and how they work. Karp takes the time to explain things like what it means to zip a file, what happens when defrag is run on a hard drive, networking basics and so on. This is great for someone like me, who is sure to start getting a slew of calls from friends and family as some of them move to Vista. The problem is, many of the solutions revolve around steps that are not necessarily a good idea for the pc novice. A large portion of the solutions revolve around editing the registry. The third chapter of the book deals solely with the registry. How it works, how to navigate within it and how to alter it. For some people this could be a great route to take, for many it could lead to much more serious problems than they had in the first place.
For the technically proficient, this book will seem a bit bloated. They don't need all the explanation given for the beginner. Many of the books solutions are not just Vista specific. They give information and work arounds for Windows issues that have existed in XP and possibly back to 98. The saving grace is a thorough index. The person who buys this as a reference to help out others, or deal with some specific issue will find that the extensive index helps to not waste time working through what could feel like a lot of extra material.
I don't think this issue of complexity is necessarily the author's fault. Many of the changes users will want to make to Vista just can't be made any other way than through the registry. Where it is possible to use a programitic interface (gui or command line) Karp gives thorough and detailed instructions, with screen shots on how to do so. But for many options those tools don't exist or have been removed, leaving direct editing of the registry as the only solution left. Another issue, that is somewhat similar, is that for most home users, some of the better solutions wont be available as they wont have access to tools available in Vista Ultimate and Business editions. This isn't Karps fault again, but it means for many the book will have a lot of information that they just can't use.
Dealing with the various editions and their features is handled immediately in the first chapter. That chapter, "Get Started with Windows Vista", also covers installation. Karp goes over the various types of installs and gives tips on how to deal with failed installs, how to best set up prior to an install and how to deal with licensing. Throughout the book, Karp makes note when he is talking about a feature, choice or tool that is limited to a subset of the Vista family. Keeping track of it all can be a bit confusing. Once again, I don't really see this as a shortcoming on the part of the author. It's just the nature of the beast.
The title of the second chapter threw me at first. It is, "Shell Tweaks." When I hear the word shell my mind immediately brings up bash or ksh. In this case Karp is talking about Windows Explorer. As this is the primary interface for users working with the Vista file system, the chapter holds some vital information for attaining a sane and consistent user experience. Karp points out that many of the defaults are not going to endear themselves to many users and in many cases do not make much sense. When Karp discusses explorer he explains how to modify it when opened to various folders and also in the context of the desktop and taskbar.
Karp points out many third party tools that he feels will help the user. Many are free, some are not. The tools mentioned more than any other are Creative Element's Powertools. Powertools can be downloaded for a free 45 day trial period but costs $18 to license beyond that time frame. This is important as many of Karps solutions can be managed without this software but would be very cumbersome. This is especially true of all the editing done in the registry.
The registry chapter is thorough and offers a detailed explanation of what the registry is and how it works. This material could be useful for anyone using any version of windows. The issue of trying to make Vista useful for non-technical users rears its head here quite a bit, as I mentioned. I found myself reading explanations of hex and binary as well as reading how to create a patch file for the registry. This could be useful information for me, in helping others with Windows issues. But when I consider my parents, there is no way I would want them trying out half of what is in this chapter. They would in all likelihood need a complete reinstall in no time. What reading this said to me, more than anything was that most people are going to just have to settle for Vista the way Microsoft gives it to them.
The chapter on dealing with multimedia was interesting and could prove helpful for users with less experience. There are solid explanations on codecs, players and how to get the most out of media, especially video. There is very little said about Vista and DRM. There is no mention of possible problems with hardware due to DRM. In fact the discussion on DRM was primarily limited to a short mention of Tunebite and MyFair Tunes for DRM removal. I assume that this is because finding and explaining such issues would have required a lot more time, research and hardware. Vista annoyances pretty much sticks to the basics of media use.
I had to chuckle a bit as I read the chapter on performance as many of the recommendations involve turning off much of what differentiates Vista from XP. It is useful though, as Karp explains what the configurable options are and how much one can expect in gains. He does make it clear that the initial defaults are less than ideal and it is worth the time to dig in and make adjustments. The same can be said for security and in that regard the chapters on networking and users are indispensable. Once again, getting all the tools will involve having Ultimate/Business and installing third party tools to bring Vista into line.
I've rated the book 8 out of 10. This is due to two issues. The first negative I have explained quite a bit and that is the book speaks to the novice but requires someone with more experience in many cases. While this is may not be the fault of the author and a necessity brought on by the subject matter, it still makes the book less useful. The second is that quite often I found the author bringing up points only to say that he would explain more later in the same chapter or in another chapter. This is because the chapters themselves are built around topics like performance and troubleshooting. But when Karp is working his way through each option of a menu it branches out into other topics, as many options in Vista are spread all over the place. Once again, this seems to be more of a Vista issue, but hinders learning none the less.
After finishing this book, my first thought was that I am going to do all I can to make sure that no family or friends buy a machine with Vista if possible. Service Pack 1 will address just a few of the issues that Vista brings to the table. From what I've read about it fixing activation 'loopholes' it could make some things worse. Should I find myself approached by someone who already has Vista and wants help, I would recommend this book if they have some idea of what they are doing or can learn without getting into too much trouble. For that classic parent or grandparent always brought up as an example, I think I would just tell them Visa is the way it is and hope that they adjust. If I like them enough, I'll pull this book off the shelf and head on over to help them out.
You can purchase Windows Vista Annoyances from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
In view of the mess that is Vista, Karp informs the reader that, "Whether it goes down smoothly or gives you heartburn is up to you." The point of the book is to give the reader the information that they need to make Vista palatable. This may sound simple but it brings up what I thought was the most difficult issue for Karp. Vista Annoyances is written with a level of detail and explanation that marks it clearly for the user with casual knowledge of personal computers and how they work. Karp takes the time to explain things like what it means to zip a file, what happens when defrag is run on a hard drive, networking basics and so on. This is great for someone like me, who is sure to start getting a slew of calls from friends and family as some of them move to Vista. The problem is, many of the solutions revolve around steps that are not necessarily a good idea for the pc novice. A large portion of the solutions revolve around editing the registry. The third chapter of the book deals solely with the registry. How it works, how to navigate within it and how to alter it. For some people this could be a great route to take, for many it could lead to much more serious problems than they had in the first place.
For the technically proficient, this book will seem a bit bloated. They don't need all the explanation given for the beginner. Many of the books solutions are not just Vista specific. They give information and work arounds for Windows issues that have existed in XP and possibly back to 98. The saving grace is a thorough index. The person who buys this as a reference to help out others, or deal with some specific issue will find that the extensive index helps to not waste time working through what could feel like a lot of extra material.
I don't think this issue of complexity is necessarily the author's fault. Many of the changes users will want to make to Vista just can't be made any other way than through the registry. Where it is possible to use a programitic interface (gui or command line) Karp gives thorough and detailed instructions, with screen shots on how to do so. But for many options those tools don't exist or have been removed, leaving direct editing of the registry as the only solution left. Another issue, that is somewhat similar, is that for most home users, some of the better solutions wont be available as they wont have access to tools available in Vista Ultimate and Business editions. This isn't Karps fault again, but it means for many the book will have a lot of information that they just can't use.
Dealing with the various editions and their features is handled immediately in the first chapter. That chapter, "Get Started with Windows Vista", also covers installation. Karp goes over the various types of installs and gives tips on how to deal with failed installs, how to best set up prior to an install and how to deal with licensing. Throughout the book, Karp makes note when he is talking about a feature, choice or tool that is limited to a subset of the Vista family. Keeping track of it all can be a bit confusing. Once again, I don't really see this as a shortcoming on the part of the author. It's just the nature of the beast.
The title of the second chapter threw me at first. It is, "Shell Tweaks." When I hear the word shell my mind immediately brings up bash or ksh. In this case Karp is talking about Windows Explorer. As this is the primary interface for users working with the Vista file system, the chapter holds some vital information for attaining a sane and consistent user experience. Karp points out that many of the defaults are not going to endear themselves to many users and in many cases do not make much sense. When Karp discusses explorer he explains how to modify it when opened to various folders and also in the context of the desktop and taskbar.
Karp points out many third party tools that he feels will help the user. Many are free, some are not. The tools mentioned more than any other are Creative Element's Powertools. Powertools can be downloaded for a free 45 day trial period but costs $18 to license beyond that time frame. This is important as many of Karps solutions can be managed without this software but would be very cumbersome. This is especially true of all the editing done in the registry.
The registry chapter is thorough and offers a detailed explanation of what the registry is and how it works. This material could be useful for anyone using any version of windows. The issue of trying to make Vista useful for non-technical users rears its head here quite a bit, as I mentioned. I found myself reading explanations of hex and binary as well as reading how to create a patch file for the registry. This could be useful information for me, in helping others with Windows issues. But when I consider my parents, there is no way I would want them trying out half of what is in this chapter. They would in all likelihood need a complete reinstall in no time. What reading this said to me, more than anything was that most people are going to just have to settle for Vista the way Microsoft gives it to them.
The chapter on dealing with multimedia was interesting and could prove helpful for users with less experience. There are solid explanations on codecs, players and how to get the most out of media, especially video. There is very little said about Vista and DRM. There is no mention of possible problems with hardware due to DRM. In fact the discussion on DRM was primarily limited to a short mention of Tunebite and MyFair Tunes for DRM removal. I assume that this is because finding and explaining such issues would have required a lot more time, research and hardware. Vista annoyances pretty much sticks to the basics of media use.
I had to chuckle a bit as I read the chapter on performance as many of the recommendations involve turning off much of what differentiates Vista from XP. It is useful though, as Karp explains what the configurable options are and how much one can expect in gains. He does make it clear that the initial defaults are less than ideal and it is worth the time to dig in and make adjustments. The same can be said for security and in that regard the chapters on networking and users are indispensable. Once again, getting all the tools will involve having Ultimate/Business and installing third party tools to bring Vista into line.
I've rated the book 8 out of 10. This is due to two issues. The first negative I have explained quite a bit and that is the book speaks to the novice but requires someone with more experience in many cases. While this is may not be the fault of the author and a necessity brought on by the subject matter, it still makes the book less useful. The second is that quite often I found the author bringing up points only to say that he would explain more later in the same chapter or in another chapter. This is because the chapters themselves are built around topics like performance and troubleshooting. But when Karp is working his way through each option of a menu it branches out into other topics, as many options in Vista are spread all over the place. Once again, this seems to be more of a Vista issue, but hinders learning none the less.
After finishing this book, my first thought was that I am going to do all I can to make sure that no family or friends buy a machine with Vista if possible. Service Pack 1 will address just a few of the issues that Vista brings to the table. From what I've read about it fixing activation 'loopholes' it could make some things worse. Should I find myself approached by someone who already has Vista and wants help, I would recommend this book if they have some idea of what they are doing or can learn without getting into too much trouble. For that classic parent or grandparent always brought up as an example, I think I would just tell them Visa is the way it is and hope that they adjust. If I like them enough, I'll pull this book off the shelf and head on over to help them out.
You can purchase Windows Vista Annoyances from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Somebody actually wrote a book on the things they don't like about Vista? A subject that doesn't even make for an interesting blog entry has been padded out to 641 pages and is being sold for $20+? Unbelievable.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Off to Barnes and Noble I go. Can't wait to read and share with the local Microsoft fanboys.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
did he cover BLINKING CLOCKS?
NOTHING is worse than a BLINKING clock where an NIST unit should have been fitted.
anyone fitting an electronic device with a BLINKING clock should be re-assigned to cleaning out the hog pen.
If you want to alleviate Vista annoyances, and you MUST use Vista, use vLite and make a custom Vista install image with ONLY the stuff you want on it. I just did this yesterday and it works wonders. Vista doesn't feel like a slug anymore.
There are really only two options.
#1. Run a utility that makes the Registry changes for you. Where are you going to find that?
#2. Edit the Registry by hand. At least the option is there.
At least someone will be making some money from Vista.
Even if it's not Microsoft, memory chip makers or OEMs.
Other than that, there are a few things that annoy me but nothing that royally ticks me off like the printer issue. I should say, i'm a casual user. I use the system to read email, browse the web, play around with a few vmware images and burn home videos. Since I got my xbox 360 at xmas, I rarely play games, so even tho vista is a resource hog, I haven't noticed much.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
So, now my wife and I both say "I hate this f*cking computer" on a daily basis. First boot of the day often takes 5-10 minutes to simply stabilize and remain consistantly responsive with nothing but Firefox running. I am completely clueless as to what the hell this machine is doing on it's own that takes up all of its processing power that it can't handle simultaneously opening perezhilton.com. Additionally, the security package keeps annoying me over and over that my computer is not fully protected!!! because I turned off features that don't apply to our usage of it.
I would love to know a good resource to consult on how to tune the OS to get better performance w/o having to get into non-novice registry tweaks. I doubt this book could help me. Can anyone recommend a good resource for some more basic level Vista tweak advice?
In this particular case, how does the book, Vista Annoyances, not just duplicate the full contents of the equivalent title in the publisher's equally popular The Missing Manual series (also reviewed by Slashdot) which according to its official webpage "offers complete and comprehensive coverage of all five versions of Vista."
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
That a book like this would be written and actually published seems more evidence that Windows Vista is the next incarnation of Windows Me which proved to be a nasty little speed bump on the way to the next "good" version of Windows. It's a real shame to do this to the users. Microsoft is full of talented, bright people to whom Vista is giving a bad name. It's almost never a good idea to push an incomplete product out into the market.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
1. The classic login is gone - No more drop down allowing you to choose local or domain login
2. The spreading around of data that was generally kept in Documents and Settings
Thankfully I only have a limited number of machines to support, and my work is not going to migrate to Vista for the foreseable future.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
The two things I find annoying are UAC and enforced DRM. Yes, you can be affected by DRM even without buying any DRMed media--just try to load an unsigned driver in 64-bit.
Everything else is more disappointment than annoyance. With how much time they had to bake it, Vista could have come out amazing and full of great features. It was disappointing that it didn't live up to the hype.
It may not have been revolutionary, but it is still a solid improvement on XP. In my opinion.
Seriously, I'm surprised the book length is finite.
+0 Meh
I am a first time Mac buyer. I'm a big Linux fan, and use it for my home machine. At work, I'm stuck with Windows. My wife had a Windows XP box as well, but she wanted a laptop to use for scrapbooking. Over the years I have tried many times to deploy various Linux distros on laptops, with mixed results. I suppose I could lock down an exact configuration that someone else has already declared to be trouble-free and go buy the same thing. But as far as taking any old machine and putting Ubuntu on it, then educating my wife on the use of Linux, that's more time than I want to spend. Getting stuck with Vista is a non-option, so I bought her a Macbook.
I mention all of this because the Apple store was PACKED. I had never even visited an Apple store, but in past years I would walk by and see lots of empty space. Not anymore. When I see the pain of Vista (not even our MS-loving IT dept. will touch it), I can't imagine Steve Jobs scripting it any better. "Gee, I would like the market leader to squander their advantage by breaking compatibility with old hardware and software. Make things more complicated, add in some DRM, slow it all down, and let the poor customer sort out the mess." MS strategy with Vista is beyond Steve Jobs' wildest dreams.
If Linux can't make serious progress on desktop market share in this market, then it will never happen. Opportunities like Vista don't come along every day of the week.
It sucks because it just fucking sucks big hairy donkey balls.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost?
You feel like a troll so I'm going to answer this with a question. Why do you think OEM's have a serious choice?
To summarize:
.sig
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost? OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all, and it's not like Macs aren't selling either so it's clearly not just a Windows thing.
They don't? I thought that there were complex webs of marketing deals and licenses which Microsoft had utilized to cause the market penetration of XP to lessen.
Seriously - did I get the magic copy of Vista that works just fine or something? It runs smooth, starts up OK, I like the default sleep feature, the added security (oh no - i get a popup everytime I install something - the horror), the photo gallery, the built in firewall, etc.
Its not a giant leap forward or anything - but then again - I didn't think XP was a big advance over Win2K client either. Just another incremental advance of the NT Client OS.
So you pay a few hundred bucks for a shitty OS, and then you have to pay more for a book to get rid of at least the worst problems?
That's a weird business model, assuming that we're talking about the world outside the BDSM area.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I was thinking it would be more like 600 pounds if my experience was typical.
Don't sell Windows at all, and make most Linux PCs? That's got to be the best possible license price, right?
throw new NoSignatureException();
If Vista is so terrible, how come every single retail shop sells it first and foremost?
Umm, pretty much because Microsoft is forcing them to. And, yes, Microsoft does get to say when you can or can't sell something.
OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all, and it's not like Macs aren't selling either so it's clearly not just a Windows thing.
You have no idea of what an OEM agreement is, do you? Yes, OEMs are forced into buying Vista. Either that, or they forfeit all the nice marketing support, pricing, and other goodies that Microsoft gives - and that amounts to a lot of money. Think I'm kidding? Just try to buy an XP computer from Dell or HP after June 30'th. That's the cut-off date set by Microsoft for OEM sales.
First chapter would have to be the endless bashing of Windows by people who know nothing about it!
My biggest annoyance is the screen flickering when unlocking a laptop that has an external monitor plugged in. I found a way to get it to stop, but that disables the auto-detection of external monitors (http://comments.deviantart.com/18/976237/576101509).
If you do disable TMM, you will need to remember to disable the 2nd monitor before suspending your laptop to go somewhere. If you don't, you'll go to unlock your machine and be staring at a black screen. You'll then need to hit CTL-ALT-DEL, and select "Switch User", and re-login in order to use your machine again. Pretty freakin' annoying.
So, one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, huh?
OEMs don't get forced into buying Vista after all,
If you believe that, I'll sell you this nice pretty bridge I live under.
It looks like you are posting in support of Vista. Doing so may ruin your karma, causing you to leave Slashdot and get a life.
[Cancel] or [Allow]?
I would've thought Linux would be even cheaper right? I mean, you've got to support an OS anyway, why Windows?
throw new NoSignatureException();
OEMs love Vista so much because its probably slightly cheaper and has a longer 'supported' lifetime compared to XP Home. If I were building OEM machines (I do sometimes), I would sell Vista Home Premium (~$110 from newegg) instead of XP Pro (~$140 from newegg), both of which would be supported and have bugs patched for a longer period of time. XP Home has always sucked and with its end of life, I wouldn't be caught dead supporting something that has been dropped by Microsoft.
Bottom Line: It's because XP support is being dropped by Microsoft in the near future.
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
I will assume that you are new to this because things have been this way since the Pentiums first rolled out. There is nothing illegal, immoral or anything else wrong. It has nothing to do with liking or even if the OS is useful to their customers. It all comes down to availability and profit. It is not even limited to the computer industry as Games Workshop does the same thing.
Shops will sell what has the highest profit margin and what they can get their hands on. The two computer shops near my house could not get access to retail WinXP licenses after Vista shipped. There was nothing to be had as Microsoft stopped selling them through their channel. They had no choice but to put Vista on the shelves. The second company (much bigger than the first) actually got a nice sized "advertising" cost offset from Microsoft channels to display/sell Vista. The limitation was that they had to remove XP from the shelves and really push Vista to make up the numbers, thus giving them more offsets.
OEMs love it because they are paid to love it. For the same reason there is that the Intel Inside sticker was put on everything. Microsoft pays them in advertising dollars for each time they run something with the Vista logo.
Good or bad has nothing to do with why companies place Vista so highly. Companies could care less about Vista except that it has the capability to drive more expensive purchases. Its all about the money.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
Agreed
ITs not an unstable crappy mess such as WindowsME ever was despite what the naysayers tell everyone about it.
I am typing this on a machine with Vista and yes for people who do not like change it can be a hair pulling experience for the first month. Toshiba did not have any XP drivers for my notebook as I wanted to downgrade fast.
However Vista works, areo takes a while to get used and after I discoved how to put the file menu's back into windows explorer a few weeks of being fustrated I felt alot better. I had to use the classic Windows explorer for awhile before I discovered VistaGlazz and finally getting used to the new gui.
Its not perfect and has slow i/o in which crapware loaded with most OEM computers such as McAfee anti virus can ground a $5,000 machine to a halt as a result. The hard disk can spin randomly and suck battery life out if its idle.
But it does have cool features such as speech recongition, the ability to load Windows updates withotu installing them, windows Media player 11 with flashdrive features, and my favorite which is resource monitor that has been added in the NT task manager. WIth the resource monitor you can find out exactly what the computer is doing and can find things like how many megs are being written to the disk from which program. Its like Solaris ptrace in alot of ways. Nice if you want to save battery power and something is using i/o and you want to find out what.
Writing a book on how much Vista sucks is a waste of time. ITs not the end of the world but I would not mind Windows 7 and would tell others happy on XP to stay.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm addressing all the posts that go along the lines of "Windows Suxxors" here. Linux can be technically superior to Windows in every way and that is still not enough. It's a Windows world and it's going to stay that way for the forseeable future. The reason for this - and pointing out that comparing Windows to Linux alone is myopic - is that people don't really buy Windows, they buy compatibility with software. Or what Ballmer refers to as the "ecosystem". Linux is great but I can't walk into a BestBuy and buy anything software wise for it. How to go about getting around this feedback loop? Well, virtualization at the application level is the single approach that can actually break the loop. Things like Thinstall which was just purchased by VMWare or the ubiquitous Wine project. Weaning people off of the Windows dependence does not begin with Windows, it begins with it's applications.
Shh.
it's sad when an operating system is so horrible it severely hinders even writing about it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
All the shops sell computers with Vista pre-installed simply because that's what the OEMs offer. OEMs aren't forced into installing Vista on all machines they sell. But they are heavily encouraged by Microsoft to sell Vista on every machine, in the same way a small business may be encouraged by a couple heavies to buy "insurance" without getting a receipt.
On second thought, the OEMs probably like Vista because it makes them more money. Not because of any value Vista brings, but because the customer needs to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, and get a faster CPU, to make it run smoothly. Ever priced out memory upgrades from Dell or HP? The markup is ridiculous.
The same probably goes for the retailers--I know a few people who have had to upgrade the RAM on their computers. They take their computer to Best Buy or Circuit City, pay triple the cost of the RAM to get it installed, and go on their merry way. The retailers are making bank on this sort of business.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
If you have specific annoyances, you search for them on the Internet and find solutions. That's like having a giant constantly-updated index at your fingertips.
Microsoft will have released a new operating system, with new flaws and workarounds and fixes, before such a paper book becomes worn.
So why spend the money, unless you are a collector of books?
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
After a while vista got to a point where it would only boot 1 out of every 10 times the PC was rebooted. Not a big deal because I never reboot the machine. The other 9 times it would bluescreen. Now, on the XP cd, if something like core windows files were corrupted, you could just repair. Not vista. They have removed many of the tools from vista and replaced them with a "automagically fix all" button. Unsurprisingly this doesnt do anything. If I remember correctly, you cannot even reinstall over top, a tried and true troubleshooting technique all the way back to win95. So I had a broken vista for months, and anytime it was restarted it would bluescreen 9 times and then the 10th time boot up flawlessly. I suspected a bad driver or failed software install (both being in abundance on this platform) but I was never able to track down exactly what was going on.
I have since reinstalled, but its a PITA to get all the stupid little vista tweaks re applied. Just so I can for instance, copy files from one drive to another without horrible lag. After using vista for aprox 1 year, my opinion is its still not ready for the desktop.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
It took them +-5 years to rewrite the whole OS and it's only an incremental advance over the last release? I've never worked at a software company where something like that wouldn't get a few teams fired. At least if they argued that the changes were necessary to make future versions more stable, secure, and easier to add new functionality to then I could see it as a justification for only incremental advancement. But they're writing a new version of Windows for the next release too (MinWin or WinMin or whatever their codename for the kernel is--personally I don't know why they don't just call it DarWin and be honest for once about who they've been copying on-and-off for the past 20 years).
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
Not at all. My wife needed a laptop to run a certain industry-specific application, so we bought a Compaq that we later discovered to be XP-incompatible. That is, there are no XP drivers for the chipset or graphics card, so unless we want to give up USB, Wi-Fi, DMA, and resolutions above 800x600, we pretty much have to leave Vista on it.
Know what? You're right. It's a nice OS that boots quickly and smoothly with plenty of nice eye candy. Never mind that none of our printers worked any more, or that it used up so much RAM that we can barely load any applications without swapping, and that it's somewhat incompatible with the application we bought it to run but not in any well-defined or deterministic ways that we can readily pin down. No, Vista itself is just fine. It's only when we have to actually load applications or print that we despise it and want to throw the laptop through a plate glass window.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This was the first thing I thought of:
The reason why it [the Hitchhiker's Guide] was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I dunno - there's at least three magic copies, then, because I'm running a pain-free one at home (Ultimate), and at work (Business), which I use heavily, and I haven't run into any big annoyances at all.
Oh, and to all you UAC haters, I actually like it. You all probably surfed the net with admin privileges on XP and thought you were secure because you use firefox. Not so, pineapple man! UAC works well, and is not intrusive. I only get prompts with (un)installs and serious configuration changes, but not in my daily use.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
I'm not griping about Vista just to gripe, the proof is right in front of me.
I have a laptop with an AMD 64 dual core processor, and 2 gigs of ram. It takes Vista at least 2 full minutes to boot from the time I type my password to the time I get a usable desktop. This is out of the box. With major tweaks, I was able to improve this, but it is just sloppy to have this kind of performance by default. Vista is geared towards your average joe who won't/can't tinker with the OS.
The shiny stuff is nice, I like the photo gallery, I like the customizable folders in explorer. However, all of these items I can get in any operating system with 3rd party software. They aren't the kind of things that it would take a the top talent at Microsoft to produce.
I agree that XP is an incremental advance of the NT client OS... However, why are we getting charged so much for an incremental advance?
I got nothin'
No, I got the magic working copy too. As do some other people I know. The only things they have in common are that they all have the 64 bit version with recent hardware that has had driver updates.
Nothing breaks Vista faster then crappy drivers, and when it first came out there were tons of those around.
(The 32 bit version should never have existed, IMO. Microsoft should have used that as the dividing line. "Want a computer with less resources? Use XP. Want to use 4GB of RAM? Use Vista." Its not like Vista on a 1GB Laptop is going to work worth a damn anyway.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well, based on my own experience and reports from others, you do seem to be a statistical outlier. Our machine (Dell C510 upgraded to 1GB RAM) was unbearably slow with Vista Home Basic (no Aero), even with several CPU and RAM-hungry options disabled. It couldn't even play its own boot-up sound without skipping. I put XP on there and it's actually usable now.
Perhaps with a higher-end machine Vista runs better, but for just running Office 2K and no visual effects, shouldn't 1GB RAM be enough?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
hmmm... I'm running it in 32 bit mode (I don't see any major benefit going to 64 bit yet), with 2 gigs of ram. But it is brand spanking new hardware/drivers (with a few exceptions - I have an old printer/scanner that I hooked up).
The notion that Vista took ~5 years is a fallacy. During those first few years, much of the Windows team was focused on the security push and XP SP2. What few teams were left on Longhorn (as it was called at the time) were mostly without direction. Once XP SP2 shipped and teams started focusing back on Longhorn, it was clear that things had gotten out of hand and they implemented the famous Longhorn Reset. That brought the codebase back to Windows Server 2003 as the base and essentially started Vista over from scratch. That was in mid-2004, which means Vista actually only took 2.5-3 years to write and was definitely not a complete rewrite of the whole OS (though portions did get a full rewrite, like the driver model).
You don't think they didn't? It's been argued that Jim Allchin's departure from Microsoft was a direct consequence of the Vista debacle. Otherwise, the firing or re-purposing of lower level employees isn't something that really makes the news. From the external point of view, of course it looks like everything's the same.
I really don't think you understand what MinWin is. The ability to strip down the OS to its bare essentials has been available in various forms at least since Windows XP Embedded (if not earlier), and I'd be very surprised if MinWin is not working from that base. It's not a rewrite so much as it's a re-restructuring of the Windows architecture to facilitate more modular uses of the core platform.
And Apple's copied just as much from Microsoft. Many of the features in OS X were directly lifted from early plans and betas of Vista/Longhorn. The only difference was that Apple was able to execute quickly and ship product while Microsoft floundered. Only time will tell if the same will happen with Windows 7, but I think Microsoft may have learned its lesson the hard way this time around and will really surprise everybody with Win7.
Personally I've been an OS junkie since the DOS 6.0 days / slackware 1.0 (can't even remember how long ago that was) and I've more or less tried every OS for the x86 platform (hell I even tried OS/2 and BeOS!!)
The one thing about Vista that has been DRIVING ME INSANE, is the fact my vista clock keeps going forward by 4 - 6hrs (it's random but at a minimum of 4hrs). I've tried everything to correct this issue and have even come across users who have the same issue and still no avail. fix. I've tried new drivers, confirmed the time zone, checked in other OS's, etc etc but Vista will not remember the time for the life of it. It's a huge nuissance and is about to force me to go back to XP. I can't believe I've lived with Vista this long (bought it on the day it came out. . . yes I paid real $$$ for it). There is a bunch of other random issues but I won't bore anyone with the details as I'm sure it's already been beaten to death with the "I hate Vista stick"
When I find the time to reinstall all of the windows apps on XP I'm throwing Vista out.
I wouldn't know, I switched to Mac as soon as I saw that "bloatfest" coming.
Seriously - did I get the magic copy of Vista that works just fine or something?
Well, only about a third of Europe died as a result of the Bubonic Plague. And only about 60%-75% of the Jews who lived in territories controlled by the Nazis died in the Holocaust.
So I guess no matter how horrifying something is, there are always going to be people who dont see what the big deal is.
(I am not saying that Vista is as horrible as the Holocaust, I am saying that just because a few hundred thousand people might like Vista doesnt mean it isnt a horrible operating system that is worth complaining about)
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
When I bought my laptop last summer, I was dreading having to deal with Vista. To the point I was researching how to wipe Vista and install XP. (What I found is the newer hard drives do not have driver on XP natively so XP might not recognize the drive and so you have to load those first....) Anyway, I decided to try Vista first to see if it was really worth going through a major headache of wiping the drive and starting over.
I was, in fact, pleasantly surprised...mostly. I don't know if it was the manufacturer (HP) doing a great install configuration or the version (Home Premium) or the fact it was built for Vista vs. just slapping an upgrade on a current computer, but I've had very few problems. Only thing I've done was upgrade the memory from 1 to 2 GB. I also turned off UAC which I found beyond annoying. The computer is used mostly at home and behind a firewall--not to mention that UAC can be foiled--and chances are most people are going to automatically approve something when they're installing a program (which is usually when a person gets a virus), so the UAC becomes useless.
If you're into voice recognition, the voice recognition that comes with Vista works surprisingly well--better than Dragon Naturally Speaking and with less training. (Just be sure and have a good microphone.) However you won't be able to use it with Open Office--you'll have to stick with MS Office, notepad, etc. Also I'm able to play even ancient DOS games with DOSBox and I've found very few programs I've had a problem running. Networking with my wireless router was a breeze.
Vista IS a Mac rip-off with eye candy--stick a few new screensavers and Yahoo! Widgets on your XP and you're 2/3s there. The most annoying thing is once again having to FIND where they hid the settings again--almost none of it is helpful or makes things smoother--especially if you want to just view ALL the programs. It's not as great as the fan boys praise, but it's not as horrible as the nay Sayers make out either. Personally I wouldn't upgrade from XP as long as possible, but if you're getting a computer with it installed, you might find it isn't as bad as you think.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
How much d'you think I can get for it on ebay? There's gotta be a ton of folks who want Vista with the hidden "Work OK" setting enabled by default.
Slashdot needs a moderating system to identify possible paid shills. This guy hits way too many marketing points to be a real user. Vista has SPEECH RECOGNITION? He must have gotten that from the glossy brochure. Nobody uses speech recognition but it's a great advertising gimmick.
I don't understand how this book would really annoy a fanboy because it tells them how to fix their broken toy. They will either be happy and follow the books recommendations or give up and go back to XP. Normal people are going to ignore Vista until it gets better reviews than "Worst Product of the Year" and "Just use Ubuntu". Anyone still suffering Vista must be a fanboy, this little book will do good things for their blood pressure. They will thank you.
Of course, by the time you finish reading it yourself you might say, "I am going to do all I can to make sure that no family or friends buy a machine with Vista if possible. Service Pack 1 will address just a few of the issues that Vista brings to the table." That's just a hunch and has nothing to do with what you said.
So you're saying I _did_ get the magic copy of Vista.
How much d'you think I can get for it on ebay? There's gotta be a ton of folks who want Vista with the hidden "Work OK" setting enabled by default.
Yep, I guess so. But you will also probably have to sell your computer so they have the exact same hardware that worked well for you. You will also have to sell your computer usage tendencies since your computer needs must align perfectly with what actually works in Vista. You will probably have to make sure that the buyer has a similar level of patience as you do when all those pop ups start going off. (you might know what they are asking, but my dad thinks he has done something wrong every time it happens) Otherwise the person you sell it to might want their money back.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yesterday I was in a computer lab at my college when I overheard two people talking. They were complaining about how confusing windows vista was, how lost they were, etc. "This new operating system is really hard to use. I'll have to spend a solid weekend getting use to it." I then realized that the snowball effect of people bashing vista had gotten to the point that even these two [normal people] hated vista... yet the computers in the lab were not even running Vista!!! In fact, they were talking about the new version of office, which I admit, does have a very unique UI. I just find it interesting that people do not even know what vista IS, yet they then continue to spread the word about how bad and hard to use it is.
Books like this are now using this out of control snowball effect as a MARKETING strategy (note the book's title). Very interesting.
Why Windows: The Windows monopoly.
Why Windows Vista: The OEM agreement.
Got it now?
The enemies of Democracy are
See - thats EXACTLY why I must have the magic copy of Vista. I never get any popups - and I have UAC fully enabled. I run plenty of legacy software that predate XP, let alone Vista, so before I installed it I figured I'd see it all the time. About the only time I ever see the popup is when I launch Visual Studio...
What speed of hard drive is your laptop using? My Asus G1s-B2 loads Vista ultimate in about 35 seconds from cold - but I'm using a 7,200 rpm drive and built in 1gb turboboost cache. It runs circles around most desktops. If you complaining about boot times, and you're using a 4,200 rpm drive, don't blame Vista.
I don't know whether you are in the majority or I am, but having used Vista for 3 months (Oh the horror!)I recently downgraded to XP. With Vista I got at least one error message every time I booted up, then another one every couple of hours. And random blue screens of doom followed by Vista deciding my copy was no longer valid (I swear it was probably the only legal copy of Windows I've ever used so the irony was not lost on me). Also games either wouldn't run or would run but with much lower graphics than they do now that I'm using XP. Having spent 3 months dealing with problem after problem with Vista before I finally gave up, you'll forgive me if I occasionally badmouth it.
In the words of Basil Fawlty, "A satisfied customer- we should have him bronzed."
Food for thought: Firewalls on the box are a bit like putting the moat inside the castle walls.
In all honesty, I had a similiar problem my first day with Vista - till I tossed the beta Nvidia driver's that were installed, and back revved to the latest release version.
So there's a number of factors at play here for the whining:
/. is because there's a large contingent of people here who don't want to see MS succeed. So they bitch about Vista, post things other have written, sometimes outright make shit up, etc.
1) People who want Vista to fail. That's why there's os much on
2) Because it is different. Any time anything changes with a computer, some people are going to whine about it. Also, any time something changes, some people automatically blame all problems on that. So they may have a problem not really related to Vista, but since Vista is the change they perceive, the problems get blamed on it.
3) People with old hardware that want new stuff to run perfect. I don't know why, but there are plenty of people out there who assume that new versions should run just as well as old versions on old hardware. In the case of Vista, RAM is the thing I most often see people cheapskating out on. Never mind that it is $50-100 for 2GB of RAM depending on kinds (DDR2 is $50, DDR is $100), people aren't willing to spend the money to get more.
So because of this, you are going to get a lot of whining. You take any of the new product whining and then multiply it by the fact that some people want MS to fail and you are going to get some extreme bitching going on.
I think we know which is the majority. I searched Amazon, there are no "The Joy of Vista" books.
Run a utility that makes the Registry changes for you. Where are you going to find that? [or] Edit the Registry by hand. At least the option is there.
Wow, thanks Microsfot for the great options. Somehow Apple, KDE, Gnome, BeOS, Windows pre registry all manage to provide a way for users to change settings on their computer without typing Hex into some crummy database manager that might brick the computer. I'll take a well commented text file over that mess. Text configuration files are the reasonable third option that's sadly missing in Windows.
I have 4 words about Vista. It doesn't totally suck (compared to XP). There are some things I liked better than XP, and some things that were worse. Overall, I like Vista slightly better than XP. Now, compare the latest version of OSX with what they were shipping in 2001. Compare modern Linux distros to the state of the art in 2001. Those haven't just improved slightly in the last half-decade. They've improved dramatically. After 5 years, I'd like to see better than "it doesn't totally suck".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Password entry from the login screen or from the bios? The latter is a little more believable.
From a cold boot, my Pentium M 1.86 laptop with 2 GB RAM will be at a workable Vista Ultimate desktop in under one and half minutes. And that's a Gateway on top of matters! LOL
Actually, it boots faster under Vista than it did with XP. The WiFi card/driver for some reason lags on startup. On XP this caused the boot to a workable desktop to take at times a ridiculously long time -- definitely over two minutes. Under Vista, the WiFi can still take a while at times to become ready, but it doesn't lock up the machine.
What I wonder, though, is why you boot your laptop so often? Why not use sleep or hibernate?
Removing menus from IE7, Search, and Explorer by default was a horrible idea. Yes you can modify these programs but it is not intuitive and must surely frustrate average users.
Windows Media Player 11 also comes with Vista with the menus hidden by default. Also WMP 11 seems to have regressed when it comes to features like playlists. Microsoft needs some new design blood.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
The workrounds for Vista are actually considerably simpler.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Is the colophon a turd?
Vista is as horrible as the Holocaust
You jerk!
The enemies of Democracy are
Editing the registry is pretty easy if you have a guide for what you're doing. The only real trick is being told which hex code means 'drives' and the like.
Just wish microsoft would republish the registry spec, only complete doc for it is for windows 2000.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I think I saw something about this on PBS/NOVA: "Quest for Absolute Zero"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Oh, also, the search function *sucks* badly. You pretty much do need a tool just for that operation.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
...unless, of course you have 3 gigs of ram or more. With enough RAM Vista could be a nice security bonus compared to earlier NT versions, but personally I think the GUI changes stink.
It's like having my own personal nazi living inside my computer. At least Vista lets me do a little bit more than Bob did, but could anyone point me to where I might upgrade this thing to ME? That would be better than Vista. I wish I hadn't lost my Win2k sp4 disc. Makes me sad that the best OS MS has to offer is almost a decade old. At least I still have a modern OS on my desktop. Ubuntu has been a much better experience than Vista so far - I've been using Vista and Ubuntu for about the same amount of time, would've put Ubuntu on the laptop already if the drivers/software for all the new gizmos for it were easier to get and worked properly. Experience tells me that even if I'm not bright enough to roll my own, I can just wait a few more months and some smarter geek(s) will have come up with what I need.
Thanks, MS, for finally making me ditch you for Something Better.
And thank you, Geeks of the World for making Something Better free for everyone.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
You apparently haven't tried Leopard yet. WTF is with the "new" spotlight search results window? In Tiger everything was neatly organized and offered a clear way to find what you want. In Leopard everything is put into a single Finder window. I was hoping Finder would have learned a thing or two about file organization from Tiger's Spotlight search results and Windows XP. Instead Leopard's search results picked up some bad habits from Finder.
you get a pop-up every time you run an application on your computer and that's ok with you? Does it make you feel safer to know that even though you are running an application you have run a hundred times before, Windows is still going to ask you if you "Are sure you want to do that? It could be unsafe!"
Do you find that you read the warnings or do you just click OK as soon as you see them (thus rendering the warnings pointless)?
UAC is a joke. And so are many of the other strange "security" measures they have taken (Disabling and HIDING the Administrator account? Making Program Files & ProgramData protected, read-only folders?)
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Oh, so I guess nobody else's shit stinks, right?
About a week ago, I build a new pc and decided to give Vista (Ultimate x64) a try. I have been able to work through most of the problems/annoyances, such as disabling UAC and various other services that significantly slow the system down, but there is one small one that gets on my nerves that I can't find a fix for...
I like to use the 'Details' view when browsing folders in Windows Explorer - I'm not a fan of all those giant icons. Whenever I perform copy/move operations by dragging a file/folder into the detail view, the sorting gets removed. For instance, when I have the folder contents listed alphabetically (by the 'Name' column), if I drag a file into this view, it drops it exactly where I let off the mouse button and removes the 'Name' sorting instead of organizing that file to where it should be in the list. I have to click on the 'Name' column header to sort the contents again.
I have yet to find a way to disable this behavior and return it to the way every previous version of Windows worked. If anyone else has run into this and has a fix, I'd love to hear it!
Why has there not been a successful anti-trust suite against Microsoft dealing with their extremely unfair OEM scheme? I would love to see legislation forcing Microsoft to charge both consumers and dealers exactly the same price for OEM and non-OEM versions of windows. When I was recently driven to the verge of tears trying to sort out Vista on my laptop I promised myself to never ever buy a Windows machine again. Then I started thinking about what the implications of this decision would be. I have not seen a vendor in my country willing to sell Laptops without any pre-installed OS. Granted, I haven't looked that hard yet, but why should I have to look that hard? So if I want to buy a non-Apple laptop and replace the pre-installed Windows OS with say for example Ubuntu (and please don't mention Dell! I don't want a Dell!), I will in essence pay a lot of money for a Windows license I'm not going to use. And giving any money to Microsoft irks me, never mind WASTED money. Then there's the matter of alternatives: My first choice non-Windows laptop would be some uber Apple Macbook Pro, but unfortunately I do not fall within that market bracket that Apple loves and I'm just not willing to pay the -in my opinion- HUGE premium Apple charges on hardware in a system that "just works". Vista is however pushing me hard in the direction of being willing to pay that premium. Linux is unfortunately not even an option for me as I spend most of my time on Adobe software which simply isn't available on Linux.......yet? (pweaaaaase Mark Shuttleworth talk to Adobe!) .....And please don't bother arguing along the lines of "but Gimp is better than Photoshop".
So, I'm stuck with Microsoft, unless I decide I'm willing to spend a huge amount on an Apple or give Microsoft money for free. That's how Microsoft makes a $Gazillion OS "affordable" and my only viable option. And every day my frustration grows.
I realize it's no help now,
The Dell small business laptops mostly have XP as a option. Their pricing is not that different, and they really don't need to be for a business.
Kind of backwards though, many business have OEM XP, and thus just need drivers to adapt. Home users will have to go to ebay, to pick up a $90 XP disk to do the same (or thepiratebay.org I guess.)
If you go that route, go to dell.com and findout first if they have XP drivers for your laptop, if not, a linux disk would be much easier.
Vista is as horrible as the Holocaust
:-)
You jerk!
Damn, for some reason that little joke actually had me laughing out loud. Nice one.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Nope. My install has been rock solid for months. Performance is fine. Etc...
99% of the negative crap you read on here about Vista is FUD.
I mean, look at this story. There's a freaking Mac version of this book. It's a series they do for OS's. OMG nooz!
I agree 100% I have had zero problems with Vista - maybe we both got the two "good" copies of Vista. Usually it's because morons are trying to run the latest OS with way outdated hardware and it just won't work. I just read about a guy complaining he couldn't use his 12 year old printer with vista! 12 years? Printers are like $40... go buy a new one.
Check how many Eee's that Asus has shipped versus the number of "normal" PC's that they've shipped, complete with Vista, etc. Asus has a good thing going, but they aren't completely free of Vista's grip with just one little 7" screen computer.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
There was a guy a last year in West Virginia who got shot in the head and didn't notice it for hours.
I'm just sayin'
I worked at Dell from the period of time beginning with Windows 95 and thru Windows 98.
What you describe is a well established business principle in high-tech. It wasn't just Microsoft doing it. It was Intel too.
You see, AMD is - quite literally - right down the highway from Dell. Dell Engineers know/hang out with/went to school with AMD engineers. But was there ever an AMD machine? No. It was a decade and a half before the first Dell/AMD machine came out. Was it technically possible? Of course it was. I saw the prototypes. The Fab (literally, the people who MAKE the CPU's) was in Austin at the time and engineers were readily available to help since they wanted to sell as many CPU's as possible. But again, it never happened. (sidenote: the fab has since been shutdown and moved)
Do you know why? It has nothing to do with technology. It's because if Dell sold a single AMD processor, it's prices on ALL Intel processors went up (significantly). Since Dell runs on thin margins, that was a pretty big incentive NOT to sell AMD. So we never did. This was back in the day of Pentium 66 and Pentium 90 thru 100's and ultimately into the P233 and PII CPU's.
It's only recently that Dell has begun selling AMD. And even then, you'll notice it's not the full lineup. This post isn't to whine or say it's unfair. It just is. But it's very important to understand this goes on a lot, rightfully or wrongly.
So according to this review, the book spends most of its time on three things : (1) expression general judgements about the overall quality of Windows Vista (2) explaining simple, generic computer notions to the clueless out there (3) Describing annoyances of Windows operation systems that have been out there, along with their workarounds, in many of the previous versions of Windows.
So where is the part that says why you shouldn't upgrade to Vista ?
At work I've been forced to upgrade to Vista after a hardware crash. With my old PC, I replaced the crashed hard disc and installed Ubuntu. I now have the two machines switchable via KVM. I've been using Vista day-to-day for quite a few months now and it doesn't improve when you're used to it.
In theory, the Ubuntu machine is mainly a server running Apache / MySQL / Oracle / FTP etc. to keep my main work PC clean and quick. For a lot of purposes though, the 5 year old Ubuntu machine (1.6GHz P4, 512MB, Intel 815 graphics) is still more responsive than the newish dual core Vista machine (Dual Core 2.2GHz, 4GB, NF6100? integrated graphics).
Not only is it more responsive, but most jobs can be done with a lot fewer clicks. The primary annoyance for me with Vista is that MS appear to have tried to simplify all their screens to look more like Apple. Apple have clearly spent a lot of time working out the use-cases and managed a simple screen with all the common settings ready and waiting just a click away. Ubuntu has the settings you want the same number of clicks away but the screens are more complex with more options. Its easy enough for me but I think most users would prefer OS X here.
Vista is just a nightmare - changing any setting I'd ever want to change is a big job requiring lots more clicking and searching than it should. Worst of all is networking. Almost every decision in how to change the dialogs from how they were in XP is just completely inexplicable. The networking dialogs are just atrocious - it's really genuinely hard to understand how bad they are given that XP was kinda OK.
We have a huge business mission-critical application that runs on Oracle Application Server and uses the JInitiator browser java plugin. According to Oracle, there will never be any Vista support for this, EVAR! . Basically we invested a huge effort, all for naught, and it went all down the drain. We're stuck with Windows XP to even keep this application working, at all, period. It's all going to have to be re-written completely, using a completely different database middleware platform, because at the sudden stroke of a pen, without warning, both our platform suppliers (MS and Oracle) f*cked us over at the same time with regards to continued viability of the very platform we based this system on.
Of course, if I even think of trying to remind our upper management that if we had instead chosen to develop all our stuff in-house on Open Source platforms like PostgreSQL and Apache with PHP, Perl, etc, that we'd not only NOT be in this predicament, we'd have saved tons of money wasted on expensive database licenses and be able to run everything cross platform with impunity including Linux, Apple, Windows XP, Vista and all the browsers Firefox, IE6 and IE7, Opera, Konquerer, whatever, it would all work. But all that bringing up the subject with them would do would be to get my head chopped off since management always has, and still does, summarily discount Open Source stuff as a bunch of "college kid's toy nonsense software that's not supportable in a commercial environment".
Grrrrrrrrrr.
I have a laptop with an AMD 64 dual core processor, and 2 gigs of ram. It takes Vista at least 2 full minutes to boot from the time I type my password to the time I get a usable desktop. This is out of the box.
How much crapware was in the box? Vista took that long to book with all the crap HP loaded my laptop up with. Once I reformatted it and re-installed, it has boot times in line with XP. Not that I'm saying you're lying, but you should know that there's Vista installs out there that boot much quicker, and so the problem might be related to something other than Vista itself. (Perhaps crummy drivers?)
Of course the other question is, why are you even rebooting it? You shouldn't ever need to, unless you're installing new software... just sleep it, or hibernate if you're really low on battery juice.
Comment of the year
But it does have cool features such as ... the ability to load Windows updates withotu installing them, ...
XP (at least SP2 forward) had this feature. I know because I used it constantly.
With Vista I got at least one error message every time I booted up, then another one every couple of hours.
What was the error?
I'm just curious. I had a friend who did the "upgrade install" for Vista, and he experienced error messages every couple of hours, just like you're describing. I think they were related to the registry, but I don't remember the exact text. In any case, he just re-installed from scratch instead of doing an upgrade and now everything works fine.
Comment of the year
1. Tried to in-place-upgrade XP to Vista, bringing along malware infections they didn't know they had and device drivers that are incompatible with Vista (since when have in-place windows upgrades _ever_ worked?), or
2. have way too little RAM (1GB or less) when you need at least 2GB to get "normal" performance out of Vista.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I'm with you. I like Vista just fine. I have one annoyance with it, but then I had some with XP too. My XP installation was starting to feel it's age and that's when I replaced it with Vista.
Don't get me started with Linux annoyances, which I noticed there is no book for BTW. Funny that. NAAAAAW! No annoyances with Linux or any other unix, they all work just perfectly and never ever have a problem or lack of functionality. Excuse me while I sneeze -- b*llsh!t!
Go ahead, call me fanboy or whatever, but in the end Linux still disappoints me more than Windows does. I still get more done with my Vista box than I ever did with Linux on my desktop. (Oooo, Slashdot blasphemy!)
(The 32 bit version should never have existed, IMO. Microsoft should have used that as the dividing line. "Want a computer with less resources? Use XP. Want to use 4GB of RAM? Use Vista." Its not like Vista on a 1GB Laptop is going to work worth a damn anyway.)
This isn't a bad idea. The other thing it touches on is the fact that the 32-bit editions of XP and Vista don't support PAE (at least officially), so are limited to 4 GB of RAM. (And really, 4 GB minus your PCI address space, which includes all of your video card RAM. So for someone who would have that much system RAM, we're talking under 3.5 GB.)
Well, guess what: we're rapidly approaching the point where that limit is getting reached. And a lot of people aren't going to be happy to find that if they have a computer with 2 GB and decide to do a 2 GB upgrade, suddenly they have to upgrade to the 64 bit version to access all of it.
I see the presence of a 32-bit Vista without PAE support to be a pretty big error on the part of MS, especially if most of the retail computers are shipping with the 32-bit version. (I don't actually know if that's typical or not.)
I don't know if it would change your conclusion or not, but remember that if you are comparing to 2001 you need to be comparing to XP before SP2. There's a ton of improvement just to SP2, probably the equivalent of one OS X version change.
That said, I do agree that the time elapsed since last version makes the improvements in Vista disappointing.
You forgot to mention that this is Microsoft we're talking about. There's clearly no way to fix something wrong with a Microsoft product...
How many quarters does Microsoft have to show record growth and earnings in Windows sales before the Geek admits that Vista is taking hold in the market?
OS Platform Stats [December 2007]
Vista 7% [up from 0% in January O7]
OSX 4% [up from 3% in November 04]
Linux 4% [up from 3% in December 03]
It's not the absolute numbers in the W3Schoola stats that interest me, but the exposure of long-term trends. For all the talk here about Vista's "failure," it is the only client OS that has shown significant growth in years.
That growth has has to be rooted in Vista's success in the consumer market. In the OEM system sale with Vista Premium and Ultimate. The media PC. The gamer's special. The road warrior's Lenovo laptop,
Systems with much higher specs and more generous profit margins than the generic Linux econo-box.
The biggest Windows Vista annoyance was its release.
And... if you're buying a new system nowadays, do yourself a favor and buy a Mac. Point.
It was in the MS Agent EULA, not the MS Office EULA.
They _may_ have removed it in more recent versions, but they definitely used to have the clause in there saying you couldn't use the agents (including, but not limited to Clippy) to "disparage" Microsoft.
I _know_ that it was in there, though. I saw it.
Honestly anyone who bitches about vista over Xp is just TRYING to make a stink about it for their own reasons (mac/linux fanboys, xp users who cant muster up the 2 brain cells and adapt to change)... its not really different than xp... I use Server 2008 on a Athlon xp 1700 (1.47 ghz) with only 512mb of ram and a ATI 128 mb 9600 ( WITH AERO ON) and still find windows explorer (shell) uses HALF of the memory that explorer uses in xp... I run adobe photoshop CS3 and all is well even on such sub par hardware.. this is with nothing running on startup other than IM and utorrent... the fact is if vista/2008 is so bad on your system its because you dont know what the hell your doing and don't know the basics of managing your windows machine (like dont have 50 things run on startup and 8 3rd party toolbars load.... If you pull your head out of your ass you will realize its the same damn operating system... things are all in the same place, and the only difference in configuring anything is usually 1-2 clicks more... and not even that if you just turn off the stupid UAC security feature in the "user accounts" control panel app. but honestly anyone who knows shit about windows always turns off the security center service and disables crap like that, since thats there for grandma who doesn't understand what shes really clicking on when web adds spring up... and has anyone ever heard of group policy editor? anything you don't like about vista/2008 can be changed to your likening... seriously people get with the times... THINGS WILL CHANGE WITH TIME... GET USED TO THEM... now Im going to go back to my horse drawn buggy because cars are new and scary and Type away uselessly at my 30 year old lame command prompt when I could configure everything in a few short mouse clicks. ( I just dont feel like it because then I dont feel like some elite hacker thats going to hack the fucking planet) seriously people let it go an embrace progress.. someday your going to have to dump the mouse too and use touchscreens or voice commands... move with the times.
Isn't it sad that the new OS needs a how to de-suckify it book?
MS- More $
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
It looks like the experience of the user of one Vista machine versus the experience of those resposible for many. It's a nice anecdote but has all the value of somebody that has never edited the MS Windows registry telling an IT professional how simple MS Windows is.
I'm using a 5200, it shouldn't make that big of a difference. Like I said, i'm sure I need to tweak settings. I only bought the thing so that I have something to work on when I'm on the road. Other than that I don't have any other vista installs so I don't use it enough to care about looking under the hood.
I got nothin'
I took most of the HP crapware off, but there are still bits and pieces. I also de-nortoned the machine as well. It actually looks like it's hanging on something running at startup, so a crappy driver might be the culprit.
I boot instead of hibernate because I only use the laptop for about 10% of my computing needs (on the road or a trip to the coffee shop). The rest of the time I'm on the desktop, happily switching between XP for games, and Ubuntu for everything else.
I got nothin'
My girlfriend recently got me a laptop from Dell, and of course it had Vista. I have had almost no problems with it. All I use it for is the Office 2007 Suite and browsing the Internet with Firefox. Bootup time is comparable to my desktop, and I even leave it running for weeks on end (usually it goes into standby for a few hours a day, and the only slow part is the laptop takes a moment to turn the NIC back on). I've yet to plug an Ethernet cable in it as the wireless works great.
So I have no idea what issues you are having. It sounds to me more of a problem with the actual laptop than the OS. The laptop sure can't play games (NwN had a horrible frame rate on the lowest settings) but it does everything else great.
As to the security center, just have an AV installed and it won't bug you by default. I use AvG Free and the only questions I get from Vista are either that UAC popup (rarely since I don't install much) or letting me know there is an update. Just like in XP, you can click on the very obviously places options for 'self monitoring' if you don't want an AV installed and get it to stop bugging you.
To be perfectly honest, it sounds like you either don't know what you are talking about or are 'tweaking' it for more performance than you need. I don't mean that to be a flame, it just sounds like you are trying to do more than 'just browse the internet and use e-mail'. The default settings of Vista would be plenty fast enough for such low key tasks. Even a cheap Dell laptop toting Vista can do that without noticeable sluggishness. I know, because that's all I do with mine and it is perfectly fine.
I dread the day I need Vista to game. Luckily Dx10 seems so bad developers are still making Dx9 games. I hope it stays that way, because having XP64 fully tweaked took a few hours. Not a lot of work, but very tedious and you better have a checklist.
I still don't get why you boot instead of hibernate. Why not save the boot time? Unless you have like 4 GB of RAM in that sucker, hibernate's going to be a lot quicker than booting it.
Comment of the year
Okay, so I don't think it was *called* Windows File Protection. And it was hidden where no one could easily find it (boot.ini? it was something like that), but Win 98 SE had a crude form of file protection.
I know because I found it myself and used it to prevent constant reinstalls because before I started using it, I had to reinstall dozens of times.
My biggest annoyance with Vista, is Vista.
:p
I never installed Big Brother OS... oh, I mean Vista. I go for Linux.
I'm glad so many of you got the magic copies of Vista. Unfortunately the Vista I bought on release day takes 10-15 minutes after boot up to finish prefetching applications from the disk.
I have the perfect fix. Format your disk, get rid of vista and upgrade to XP, or better still if your end user is too dumb, throw out the PC and get her/him a mac.
Comparing Vista to Linux is like comparing Linux 2.6 to Microsoft Operating Systems.
paintball
Sooo... I guess the "spell checker" feature missed the shipping deadline yet again, then?
Ah well, there's always SP2...
Caution: May contain nuts.
Apparently you did. Not a single application compatibility problem? Lucky you. Lack of decent Anti-Virus/Firewall solutions available. Turn off a single "security" feature and the system nags you non-stop. UAC is retarded. I'm quite capable of using my system without it, but I can't turn it off without the nagging. It's simply not able to be configured at a fine-grained level, and the system complains if you turn it off outright.
It runs smooth,As does every other modern OS on the planet. This one will only run smoothly if you either a) have a very modern system, which many can't afford yet, or b) change back to the Windows 2000 look and turn off all the bells and whistles (why would you do that?)
starts up OK,Yeah, the hard drive only grinds needlessly for 5 minutes before allowing me to use it. This on a Core-Duo with SATA drives. What the hell is it doing?
I like the default sleep feature,...which some random update causes it to remain asleep. Again, no exotic hardware, just a standard ASUS motherboard with a Core-Duo.
the added securitywhich explains that even with AVG professional I got no less than 5 adware registry entries within 3 months? (no, not browsing pr0n) My Windows XP box has never received even 1 (same AV engine). Oh yes, and making you click "Confirm"/"Deny" is really security? Why the hell did you execute the program, etc. if you didn't intend to? Idiot-proofing != security. You're stuck with Windows Firewall (which sucks) as opposed to being able to install (say) AVG Professional Firewall, which works well. There's no default AV program, and no free solutions were/are available, so there's another $60 to the price tag.
the photo gallerySo you bought a $500 OS and a $60 Anti-Virus program to get a photo gallery? Either you've got money to burn or you just bought the most expensive slide-show program on Earth? Apparently you need Vista's idiot-proofing features...
Maybe the fact that you don't actually use your computer explains why it works for you. As a desktop ornament it's great and has lots of eye-candy. So does Ubuntu, and I can do stuff with it too.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Well, if those prices are authentic, Apple looks pretty good. You can get an 8-core Mac Pro for $2,799 and it's a pretty usable machine (including 2GB RAM) but not including the huge disk space your system has). It has a lovely, easily expandable case and of course a great OS that pretty much everyone loves.
But if you want enough computing horsepower to run Vista on a brand new machine, how about this? It has a quad core processor, 2gb RAM and a 500gb hard drive for $709.99. It does have an integrated video card but you could always buy that $60 card you mentioned and deactivate the onboard video. And amazingly enough, a whole bunch of people (see the reviews) got it for $550. What's not to like?
This certainly confirms your idea of buying Vista with a new computer - Vista Home Premium is about $200, right? Why buy that when for $350-500 more you can have a new, bang-up to date computer? You'd spend more trying to upgrade your old machine.
However, one of the reviewers mentioned the achilles heel of this computer. I have to quote it:
"Outside of hating Vista,this is the best computer purchase I've ever made !"
I'll stick with Apple. Yep, they're expensive. But their hardware and software combination is the best there is.
D
...because I'm running Vista on 4 machines in my house and I have yet to come across any significant issues. Two of these installations are 64-bit. I've only gotten a BSOD once on any one of them and that was because my memory timings were a bit too tight.
Seriously. Am I God? Because according to all the PR out there, you have to be in order to get Vista to work.
If anyone remembers (and how quickly we tend to forget in the world of technology), much of the same thing happened when XP launched. People that were running 9x kernels absolutely hated XP at first. Why? Because it was different and required you to "relearn" some stuff, most of which ultimately will make you far more productive (which I think everyone can agree XP did over any 9x version).
Working in retail I hear it all the time: "I hate this new Vista." When I ask why, the reply is always the same, "It's too different from XP." Not "it crashes all the time" or "won't let me do anything." I even had one lady tell me she hated Vista because it automatically made her monitor's resolution 1280x1024 instead of 800x600 which she wasn't used to. You wouldn't believe how difficult it was to even explain what the heck resolution was to her.
There's this overwhelming impression out there that Vista is utter garbage. And while I won't doubt that some people are having massive issues with Vista, I would wager that, for the most part if 1) they actually did more than 5 minutes of research they'd realize that Vista isn't the culprit and stop assuming it is, or 2) stop being so computer illiterate and learn to adapt to the changing technology industry.
Oh how quickly we forget about how horrible Windows 95 or ME actually was. I can't even get ME running properly in a virtual machine. Windows 95 keeps barking about system files missing. Comparing Vista to THAT is completely and utterly uncalled for and absolute ignorance to the true situation.
I'm a Windows Vista x64 user. And I have been since Beta 2. And I've not had a single issue. Call me lucky or call me a God, but I'd rather call myself educated in technology.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
So, I've gone from DOS -> Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> therapy -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP and reluctantly to Vista on a new laptop. What I noticed from 95 to XP was about a decade of improvements. 95 introduced a new concept, 98 added some flare to it in the form of BSDs. 2000 (I skipped ME) made a great OS and fixed a lot of instability, yet where 98 would crash Windows 2000 would slow to a crawl.
Windows XP is a beautiful OS from Microsoft. Vista seems to be repeating the cycle, but more in the backend of things. Sure old hardware and software is a bastard on Vista, but think about the hell you'll go through with that when you finally switch to a 64-bit processor for any OS.
They're already working on the next version, so I'm keeping an open mind. For the most part, I have few problems with Vista... mostly annoyances. In fact, one application I use refused to work in Vista, but an upgrade fixed it. As far as annoyance: Why the hell do I have to go through so many clicks to find my IP address? Why such a costly indexing service now? Did this interface really need such a radical change?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I have one of the magic copies of Vista, too.
Beware of Microsoft operating systems that have clever names instead of "Windows" + qualifier. It's clear they were driven by marketing flacks marking the hydrant instead of engineers. Vista, Bob, Me, were there any others?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
(** Peter Norton used to have relivence in the (ahem) Art scene too. He ceased being anything but a dork in the L.A. Modern Art shovelware decades ago. )
Another thing I discovered about Vista is if you use it abroad to watch foreign CD's. While visiting South Africa, I rented a couple of DVD to played my new Dell XPS M1330. One was in US format the other was in South AFrican format. It automatically changed the settings without telling me, using up one of the "changes" M$ limits it users to just to watch a DVD. I had planned to watch one with another machine already in that the foreign format, but it didn't even give me a chance to do so. Just one more slimy marketing trick M$ uses to sell more operating systems. Really not necessary, as all in all, otherwise I really don't mind Vista (now that I have [ALMOST] gotten various XP programs to work on it (by essentially gutting all the new security features so older programs will run.
Maybe the fact that you don't actually use your computer explains why it works for you. As a desktop ornament it's great and has lots of eye-candy. So does Ubuntu, and I can do stuff with it too. You would spend 560$ to setup Vista, and I'm the idiot? Its 100$ for the premium on newegg, and AVG works fine on Vista and is still free. I'm probably not doing all I can do to really bring my single copy of a client OS to its full potential. I could move my company's database onto it, or host a website or something else - but what the hell do I know? I just spent a 100$ on a consumer OS to surf the web, host files for my other computers, play games, view and edit multimedia crap, connect remotely to the office, write software, or whatever
It was some sort of host services stopped working error. I fixed it in the end by deleting (I think) the prefetch file. Funnily enough this worked for a few days and then was replaced by a new error message, that's right about when I switched to XP
1. if a process uses 100% cpu for more than 5 seconds and is not the primary app that has focus in its window.. then...
.net
change its process priority to below normal until the user stops moving the mouse for 30 seconds or no kb activity for 2mins.
2. hire some real programmers that have >15 yrs experience, not some jocks that learned java in 2002 and now call them selves "professionals"
3. stop outsourcing to cheap lands, hire some linux coders at $100/ph to fix your dumb apps that use 18 layers of OO and
4. fix task manager to show the damn last Event Log item for that application.
5. FIRE all your product managers that obviously are clueless, let the engineers make something cool, and give a finger to marketing.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you have Core Duo's with Sata drives and they churn for 5 minutes before loading Vista you're an idiot. That's just a fact. You've done something wrong.
But come on. Let's be call a spade a spade here. You're making shit up.
Let's look at more proof of you being an idiot liar.
You got 5 adware registry entries in 5 months. To write to the registry requires an act of god. Meaning YOU clicked ALLOW for it to happen. Idiot or liar? I think liar once again.
You wrote: "UAC is retarded. I'm quite capable of using my system without it, but I can't turn it off without the nagging."
Obviously NOT. $500 OS? Liar or an idiot? I again vote for an liar.
People that write crap like you do need to be modded into oblivion. Your posts add no value here. You're just another prick with a bias making up crap to support that bias. I hope your internet connection dies.
My copy of Vista also works well but due to only having a paltry 1 gb of ram I had to disable many graphic features to get reasonable response times. My first few hours with the OS I was just about ready to rip it off the machine I was so mad at the poor performance and ridiculous wait times while the OS figured out what to do.
When an OS sends you a message "Determining amount of time to copy file" and it takes the OS 20 seconds to figure out it only needs a second to copy a 300 byte file, well, I have to conclude the OS is a pile of crap. I had to revert to using the command line to copy files it got so bad, especially copying from a CD. Eventually things sorted themselves out. I don't know whether it was because I turned off some features or the OS "learned" how to copy files in a reasonable time. I don't know.
My latest annoyance with the OS is that Vista rebooted itself to install an update it auto-downloaded hours before. The reboot occurred without informing me so I was knocked out of the app I was using and I lost all current data. Luckily, it wasn't important data but still, I don't trust this OS at all and won't be using it to do important stuff. I got a Vista machine mainly for use as a gaming console so I'll keep using an older PC running openBSD for email/web/documents. Later, I'll probably make the Vista machine dual-boot.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
"Some people prefer the printed page."
I, for one, have a much easier time with data in a dead-tree format. I haven't yet had to deal with Vista, But have got a David Karp book for each of the other Windows versions that I have dealt with. Some of the stuff IS a bit obvious, but certainly necessary for some users. In my experience, his past books have been very useful for neutering some of the more egregious features of the Windows experience. (As Karp himself points out, egregious features are the hallmark of MS products.) If I have to start running Vista, I will probably be looking for the Karp book before doing the first install, as I have in the past. It sounds like it might be even more rigueur than before, if it could prevent buying an overly-crippled version of the OS.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Assuming that you were being serious, and not really a troll (I'm getting somewhat frustrated with the moderators here). The OEMs don't love it. At least I don't. MS does not make it very easy for OEMs to just offer whatever they want. There is usually an incentive for them to push Vista (like the language in their partner agreement requiring them to install Vista). Customers who want XP have to explicitly request it. Vista really is terrible IMNSHO. It's much slower than XP, the nagging prompts are obnoxious (yes I know you can turn them off - but then that defeats the intended security benefit), and the tangible benefits are just not there. It's all eye candy primarily. Not only that I've had several users complain of problems with the Wireless drivers, printers that come and go, and stuff like that. It's not very stable. Think Windows ME, and you won't be far off.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Yes you did get the only copy that doesn't have problems. I sure wish you'd send it to all of my users that have nothing but problems.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
I somewhat agree. I've been using Vista for about 6 months. It was very painful to begin with, and I have had stability issues. But I haven't had some of the seemingly random problems that I see complained about here and elsewhere. Over time, I have come to enjoy some of the better features (search is pretty good), and I've been able to fix some of the stability headaches (which seem to have been driver related). There are things that still bother me, features that are useless (Flip 3D for example), and myriad improvements MS should make. They could have done much better, but it's not the unbelievably disgusting pig that I hear complaints about. I have to think that had MS packaged some of the improvements into a shinier release of XP, and let things bake a little more on some of the more controversial features, we'd all be pretty happy right now.
I think a fair evaluation of Vista would say it's not as bad as the anti-MS crowd would have you believe, nor as good as MS would have you believe. The truth is somewhere in between, and in 4-5 years when the next MS OS comes out and Vista is more mature, everyone will be saying, "Why couldn't they have just stuck with Vista?"
I actually rather like Vista, suprisingly. Yes, even the UAC (it prevents my kids from installing random crap they found online while I'm at work).
However, there is one "feature" of Vista that would have been a deal-breaker for me, had I known about it ahead of time. I *still* haven't seen anyone talking about it publicly. So I'm here to warn you all that if you upgrade to Vista, you will loose multi-monitor span. As a gamer who loves the extra peripheral vision provided by using two monitors, I will *not* go back to one.
For those unfamiliar with multi-monitor setups, I don't want you to get me wrong: Vista supports multiple monitors just fine. However, most games don't. I think there are internal DirectX problems with making objects that have parts on two different display devices at once. "Span" mode is where your video driver internally combines the monitors itself, and presents the OS with what looks like one large monitor. This shows up in nearly every game as one extra wide resolution.
Apparently, allowing users to install device drivers which present the OS with a "virtual" display device like this could potentially allow a digial way around Vista's DRM, so its not allowed. In plain english, you can't play games multi-monitor because of Vista's retarded DRM!
The only way I found around this is with one of these nifty Matrox devices. They are kinda expensive though. The full digital model will run you about $300. The semi-digital two head model is more like $200. So if you are a multi-monitor gamer, plan on adding about $300 to the cost of any planned upgrade that includes Vista.
"I'm just getting annoyed at Vista Whiners."
amen! I know the interface has changed so that probably creates a ton of stress for like 80% of the users but imo it seems light-years better than xp or 2k. also, ms office 2007 is the best yet but it also changed the interface so it must not be acceptable.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
The page you link to says that the Sun Java 1.5 plugin will be certified on Vista in the upcoming patch set.
Why do you need to use the Java 1.3-based JInitiator?
My friend is going for an MLA and considering getting a laptop she can tote around with her. We talked about the possibility of her getting a Mac. When it came down to it she'd have to pay twice as much and wouldn't get much benefit out of it. Macbooks start at $1099, hardware-comparable Vista machine $550. Additionally her school will be running Windows. She's not too computer savy and wouldn't be using it for much more than papers, spreadsheets, and the internet. These things she could easily do, despite the bloat, on Vista. It seems the only benefit she'd get out of it is knowing she didn't support Vista. Does anyone else have any other suggestions to tilt the scales in this debate?
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
While I have no deep knowledge of Vista's technical features, I have had the misfortune of helping a friend setting it up at the first run on a brand new, reasonably expensive and powerful laptop.
She called me primarily to get help with networking and such, but also wondered why it was so damn sluggish. She thought that she must have received faulty or under-specced hardware.
How could she "do something wrong" with a pure default install?
No, it was just Vista doing fuck-knows. Response times in the GUI like I haven't seen since... well, never. All sorts of problems getting extremely simple third-party software (utorrent, Pidgin) to run. It could play very little of her varied media library. Networking was unstable, and disk operations had so poor performance I could hardly believe it. Frankly, it was horrible.
Needless to say Ubuntu had excellent performance, and did everything she needed the computer for after installing codecs, which is a breeze. She preferred to leave Vista on the hard drive just in case she needed service for it sometime.
I might have torn my hair out getting Vista to run properly, I'm a CS engineer, but why the hell bother? Vista is the worst of several alternatives.
I have previously run Win2kPro, which is decent. At work I use XP, also decent combined with access to a Linux server for scripting. When someone asks me about Vista, I can but recommend that they go with XP which they know, or try Ubuntu which I know, though they rarely require assistance with Ubuntu other than "In which menu is X".
Nevertheless, if you're happy with the huge load of crap that is Vista, good for you
May your internet connection live happily ever after.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
So every time a POS laptop gets sold it's Vista's fault. Dell doesn't screw things up?
/. though.
Here's a thought. There aren't magic copies out there that don't suck. So obviously there was a problem with the laptop or the install. I'm just sure they bought a new and powerful laptop that has a DEFAULT install. Because we all know dell install's are just defaults. Nothing else there on it! No way.
You don't really come off as being honest. You're talking about a bought laptop that you set up? WTF is that? You then go into bullcrap like it couldn't play what? Fucking media files? Come on. Varied library. I'm not sure if you mean Vista hates Jazz, or that by default it doesn't play certain audio types.
Networking was unstable? Come on. More bullshit. Yeah, the BSD stack in Vista in crap. Whatever. Linux fixed your lose cable/made up story. Whatever. And sure, the disk IO just sucked. Those read/writes you clocked were just horrid.
Quite honestly, I'd just like to see one person have actual complaints about it that isn't obviously making crap up. I know there are there. Not on
Where I live computers sold with Vista on them tend to be fairly high spec, because you need it to RUN THE FUCKING OS. "Vista approved" means that a computer meets the outrageous hardware requirements for the OS, or something.
An engineer would attack a problem by eliminating probable causes. When the machine works fine with other OSes, I tend to suspect Vista. Obviously the computer is OK.
My experience with Vista sucks. NO ONE has managed to show me an install that didn't run slow as molasses. Why should I give it another go because Liquidrage tells me I'm an idiot and a liar?
You're only attacking persons anyway, I don't see constructive information in neither of your two posts.
This is going nowhere. Don't bother to reply, I won't.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Save this engineer stuff dipass. I've been paying my mortgage for years as one.
I'm sure they need to run high spec. Like the Athlon XP 1800 I ran it on when I first installed it just fine. Uber.
Dell and the like throw crap on machines all the time that screw them up. I've never run a dell installed version of Vista so I can't comment on it. But if you can't get Vista to run just fine on something as old as an xp1800 with a gig of ram, then you're the problem or there is a hardware issue. Period. Point. Blank.
There was no magic running in my CPU and RAM. My Vista DVD was the same as anyone elses (with home premium).
Use xplorer2 lite, its free and cool, dual pane, with tabs. kicks ass over MSs
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Drag a file to a samba share that you have no write permission to (thats another story) and bang, your cpu usage goes up to 100% and it just sits there.
Seriously, did MS just hire 1st year grads from mexico to make vista? Utter, utter sub standard testing and programming. If you have vista programmer at MS in your resume, consider
your prospects poor.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I just replied to remind you that I wouldn't reply :)
What's your gripe with Dells, anyway? With a decent OS, they're great value for money. Oh, I forgot, you're not running a decent OS.
This is fun.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
You're not getting the point. Let's tackle this from another angle; what problems do Vista solve that should make an XP user want to upgrade? In spite of, oh, all the issues I mentioned in my earliest post? (If you seriously blame those on me being a liar, you're delusional, and should seek professional counsel.)
It's a simple question, now I want a straight answer. I do suspect that you're not able to provide it.
Contrary to you, I'm not interested in bending backwards to make Vista work for any price. I use what's best, and it's not Vista. Vista as it is now represents the opposite of both quality and value.
Tell me once more why I should bother to try this OS again? Oh, you never did. And you won't.
I'm starting to reconsider my blessing of your internet connection.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
No, you're not getting the point. I'm not interested in convincing consumers to buy something. I'm not interested in getting anyone to bend over backwards to get anything to work.
/. then you should know that MS OS's are typically bloated. And if you buy one from Dell (or almost anyone major hardware vendor targeting the home market) it's 10x so. So while I don't care if you ever try Vista again, this is a discussion board. If you installed the Vista OS and you couldn't getting working decently then it's hardware or you. And if you got one from Dell that didn't run, try bitching that THEM for what they've done wrong. Not the OS because I can assure you it runs just fine on older hardware.
I don't care if you ever try anything again.
But the fact remains, and it is a fact, that if I do a plan jane install of Vista on 5 year old hardware that runs fine. Then anyone can. You got a laptop from Dell that blew and instantly assumed it's the OS that's defective. How nice! Next time I pick up some bad RAM I'll write a letter to MS blaming XP.
If you're posting on