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Vista Service Pack One Almost Here
arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."
I believe there is/was a shadow volume copy problem with Vista that prevented complete backups. If shadow volume copy does not work you will not be able to back things up like the registry. Either way a complete disk image will work since you do it from outside of the OS. This can be done with "partimage" on knoppix for free or Acronis and various others for a nicer UI.
If a kernel upgrade makes your system unstable, rolling back is just a case of selecting the previous kernel from grub.
Infact there are few systems that would need a full restore, as long as you can get to a tty you can usually rollback any update you don't want (distros vary but it can be done in a debian system)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
XP has something similar to the "problem solutions centre" as well. Like the other respondent, it usually doesn't have anything relevant, and just gives you a generic message like "such and such a driver crashed, go to the vendor's site and see if there's a newer one". I think it comes up as an option in the error reporting wizard, if you choose to send the error report.
If your interested in downloading and installing a fresh copy of Vista with SP1 integrated, be sure to hunt down the ISO (provided by MSDN).
File Name: en_windows_vista_with_service_pack_1_x86_dvd_x14-29594.iso
File Size: 2943MB
MD5: b09267740ddd1a08d80b04ec6bbc232a
SHA1: bcd715a02739809e477c726ae4b5caa914156429
So far, I've noticed a fast improvement with Disk IO performance with SP1. I think I'm going to take Vista for another spin now that it feels "faster". It's still a memory hog however. I'd recommend 2GB or 1GB at the very least.
Life is not for the lazy.
New Vista laptop: let me list the woes...
1. Adobe Creative Suite install fails. Aparently not an uncommon problem. Finding a fix that works...far too long.
2. Internet Expoder crashes on start-up. Also not a unique issue. Fixed by full reinstall.
3. Blue screen of death (yes, it does exist!). Happens randomly while idle (twice so far).
4. Super slow copy to network folder from optical disk.
5. Enough random crashes when dealing with large files (no problem with similar hardware and XP, with less memory).
6. The much vaunted "Areo Glass" interface seems mostly bling and little substance. For example, if there is a single login dialouge box in the middle of the screen and no other windows open, it's REALLY difficult to tell at a glance if it has focus or not!
7. Too much window border in my windows and not enough window. Unmaximised windows seem to have a really deep top-bar.
Plenty of other gripes. Enough that the difference between this and XP SP2 is day and night, while OS X 10.4/5 is in a totally different league altogether.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
1. Good luck with CS3 on Leopard or Linux too. 2. Probably rare. I've instaled Vista on tons of machines, never saw it, so your case is very isolated. 3. Again, maybe you, but overall I've yet to BSOD on Vista. 4. Yessir, I'm hoping this is fixed in SP1 5. I deal with large files (well to me, as large as 20GB at a time), and Vista generally handles them better than Xp or any OS X, although about on par with most linux distros I've used. 6. BLING? I think it's just enough ellegance (spelling?), It's not the overkill that was OS X 10.0-10.3, and it sure as hell doesn't have as much useless "for show" garbage as compiz. 7. I'll give you that, although on my new widescreen, it's almost a moot point. Your last sentence proves you're just looking for every little issue, and are really a mac fanboy. I could pull a LONG list of still unfixed issues in leopard, and even tiger, but maybe I'm just able to realize every OS will have it's issues.
Ummm, were you off-world last month when enough people had trouble with Vista SP1 MS recalled it?
Caveat Utilitor
I'll ignore the fact that you are doing exactly what you accuse others by repeating hearsay and address the "it doesn't work on Linux either" remark. That would be valid if it ever did in the first place which it didn't. Let's compare apples to apples here. Vista's main competition isn't Linux or OS X even. It is XP. In that context, the program does work in XP and not in vista. It sure is a Vista issue. Say what you like, but that sounds like a Vista sale lost if that is the driving factor for switching for that user.
Umm....No! They were SOLD on the fact that the NEW machine they bought was "Vista capable" from the get-go when it wasn't. Hence the class action lawsuit. Bait and switch is still illegal in the US at least until the Microsoft lobbyists pay off, er, "contribute to" Congress to change it. There is a big difference between buying a new machine based on the word of the supplier that it will work fine with the new OS and buying an upgrade where it is anybody's guess. That is the difference here.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"The reason people slam it so much here is because they badly want it to fail. It is predominantly FUD."
Sorry, that's not quite right. I have a negative view about Vista because, having had to install it on a laptop so I can support some of my user base that have Vista, I have had:
1) The laptop screen saver not waking up *sometimes* and so I have to toggle the laptop in and out of standby to carry on working.
2) A wifi driver that blue screens *sometimes* on resuming from standby so if 1) happens I may lose my work in progress.
3) A damn stupid box that pops up every time I run notepad++ warning me about the program.
4) Mysterious periods of disk thrashing.
5) Mysterious periods of wifi not connecting.
6) A need to buy 1GB more RAM to make the thing stop plodding.
7) RDP sessions mysteriously failing and needing a registry key deleted to get things going again
Now, I am sure some of these things are fixable with some tweaking or with some patching, and perhaps the wifi issue is down to the chipset company, but the number of hoops my users I have had to go through to make simple things work is extraordinary and timewasting. Unlike XP (or 2000 or NT), rarely has Vista been an 'out of the box' solution to a new install.
I am very pragmatic when it comes to Vista, but quite simply if you put identical machines running Vista and XP side by side (OK, let's give Vista some more RAM to start) and use them both for a short while, my money's on Vista being more of a PITA to use and less easy to navigate: things that took a few clicks to get to are now buried and we have had to wait for revised or new beta versions of some apps just to get some things going. Some users were on Office 2002 - but Outlook has problems with that so we have had to pay to upgrade some, while others have been moved to a Scalix pilot system.
Sure, Vista is not a train wreck, but it's a bloody big detour on the road to efficient computing with many rough edges and a cost loading. I know it will get better over time, but when it hit the ground running it was still getting dressed and keeps tripping over its pants.
AT&ROFLMAO
A simple example is the new explorer thing. It no longer has a drop down box with all the parent directories, it shows some kind of history.
This is one of those things that you really have to spend time with and adust too, because in actual fact, Vista really improved on this.
If you click on the 'location bar' or whatever its called, it shows you the current path, eg. c:\users\documents\whatver... and has a history drop down of the last several folders. I agree this is sort of lame. There is also a back/forward button which behaves as it would in a browser; and the back/forward buttons aren't all that bad.
But the real magic is when you have a folder/file in one of the lower panes (left or right) selected, then the location bar displayes a sort of breadcrumb view.
eg: [myname] > documents > whatever >
clicking on the myname / documents / whatever will take you directly to that folder. So that's our up button. Not only is there a button that goes 'up one level', but you can also usually go up 2 or 3 or more levels directly.
On top of that clicking on the '>' bring drop down lists of the folders within that folder... so if I'm in 'whatever', and I click the '>' next to 'myname' I get a list of the subfolders of myname... so without leaving where I am, with 2 clicks I can navigate directly to an 'uncle folder' (alternate child of the parent of the parent). You gotta admit that's pretty slick.
So we've got easy navigation up one, two, three, or even more levels, as well as directly into the children of any those levels.
Backspace no longer goes to the parent directory.
Its now: alt-uparrow
That's not so bad.
Frankly, compared to most file explorers I've used including Mac OSX's finder and Windows XP, Vista's is pretty good - once you take the time to learn its quirks and shortcuts.
it doesn't allow be to customize the layout and remove all useless elements. Like the favorite folders, I don't need it, just show be the directory tree.
Under [username]/favorites/links you can easily customize / remove any links you find useless, or replace them with ones you'd find useful (as I've done). Unfortunately if you remove all of them its not smart enough to suppress the section entirely; I imagine there's a registry hack for that, but really, in my case a link to documents, desktop, and a couple project folders is actually pretty useful are actually really useful, so I'm actually glad to have them there. And I got rid of the searches, music, and pictures crud.
I also needed to hack the registry just so that explorer will keep using list view for all explorer windows (dumb directory profiles).
Actually, there is a checkbox under Tools -> Folder Options -> Remember Each Folders View Settings
If you uncheck that, it pretty much disables the 'directory profiles' you are talking about, if I understood you right. You shouldn't need to 'hack the registry'.
But it all boils down to a single question: why would you exchange your XP for Vista?
So far I haven't found anything.
I think for most people that's a fair assessment. But when you buy new hardware, unless there is a specific compatibility reason to get XP I'd recommend vista over xp nearly any day.
though at least they still have updates coming through Windows Update
I applied one of the updates (KB944533) and it killed http. Internet explorer would not open up web pages, but would give the "server could not be reached" error. I was able to ping just fine, and I could reach the page from another computer on the same network. The kicker was that the patch not only knocked out IE, but Firefox as well. Things worked fine after uninstalling the patch. Of course, the patch got re-installed the very next day.
Yesterday I decided to install some more patches, hoping that they would remedy the bug in KB944533. Nope! In fact, the DHCP client stopped working. I could no longer get anything but APIPA addresses. I uninstalled those patches, hoping to recover, but no dice. I decided to roll back the machine about two weeks, and now it blue screens.
Now Microsoft isn't the only culprit. A language pack update in Ubuntu is killing a number of my KDE apps (k3b in particular). So I have two machines that I have to run unpatched operating systems on, because patching them causes them to not work. At least I have a choice to ignore the patch with Ubuntu. Windows applies the patches without asking.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And all the palava about Areo grinding systems down is rubbish too; it's all 3d accelerated (read: using hardware features otherwise doing nowt), so that too has no effect of performance. Feels very snappy in fact, especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped.
There are some things i don't like about Vista of course; the dumbed down explorer for one, and the higher memory requirements for another, but it does load stuff faster than XP, no doubt.
throw new NoSignatureException();
My favorite Vista travesty is that it takes several minutes to move a folder containing several gigabytes of files.
/scannow' which tells me there's some sort of corruption in a system file and that I should look at cbs.log, which I do, and it contains several thousands of lines of messages I can't understand, much less figure out whether they're errors. Near as I can figure, the culprit is that the SP1 installer can't delete a file named windir\ehome\ehres.dll, so I try moving that out of the way by hand, but no combination of things I try can get it to move - Windows keeps telling me I don't have permission to move it, even if I try renaming it from a command shell run as administrator, even if I boot into safe mode.
Let me reiterate: I'm dragging one folder icon into a different folder. An operation which, for Mac or Linux, merely involves rewriting an inode. But for Windows Vista, a dialog box comes up which shows the computer recursively going through every file and directory in the folder I'm moving, as if a file or folder somehow needs its location updated independently of the folder it's in. Several minutes later, my drag has finished being processed.
I've heard that Vista SP1 improves file handling, so two weeks ago I obtained Vista Service Pack 1 through the MSDN membership at my workplace. But a few minutes into the install, it fails with error 0x8007000d and points me to a tech note which advises me to turn off antivirus (done), run a disk check (done), and then run 'sfc
I have a feeling, come tomorrow when Vista SP1 is released to the masses, there's going to be more headscratching than celebrating.
Sorry to prick your balloon, but you walked right into it. Leopard, in fact, does have file transfer speed issues. Which are often fixed by a simple run into terminal. Which is what I'm finding (relatively) refreshing about OS X. It seems to be easier to fix than Windows. But the issues are, indeed, present.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Granted it does seem somewhat useful; I was able to roll back an instillation when a vpn client gave me a BSOD. However, what am I supposed to do if I CAN'T BOOT TO WINDOWS?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Um, did you read the content of that link? It says exactly what I said, but with the addition of a poorly worded headline.
To quote the article (with some of my own emphasis added):
Microsoft has stopped automatically distributing a prerequisite piece of software for Vista Service Pack 1, following some customer complaints that it had caused system problems.And, to quote my previous post (with similar emphasis):
A handful of people had a problem with a patch that happens to be a prerequisite to SP1, so Microsoft stopped releasing that patch via automatic update...Ignore the headline. Read the article. Start with the first paragraph. It explains that, despite what the headline says, SP1 was not recalled. What was removed from automatic update, but still otherwise available, was KB937287. SP1 itself wasn't actually publicly available yet, although it was available to MSDN subscribers, most of whom had no problem at all with either KB937287 or SP1.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Yeah. Sometimes you just luck out. I've had the reverse problems before. Machines that XP throws a hissy fit at, but linux works great on.
Maybe you need to try a more conventional debian, and manually configure it. Its possible the autodetection just isn't having a fun time.
Conversely , kick back a bit and try it later. It could be a driver situation thats just-not-there-yet. Sometimes linux just takes a bit longer.
Good luck tho. Linux is worth it.
Now, as for vista. I'm *DAMN* hoping this service pack makes my laptop more same because god damn it this things got some unpleasant quirks sometimes. 1-2 minute epileptic fits when I plug in a monitor? XP never did THAT.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.