Slashdot Mirror
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."
Now to see how many "I'll wait for SP1 before moving to Vista" people actually follow through.
Seriously, they sure took their time didn't they? I might have thought that with the poor reception of Vista they would be quick to push service packs, but apparently something held them up, even some quick fixes would be nice (though at least they still have updates coming through Windows Update). Personally though I'm scared to pirate it from BitTorrent, not because of viruses but I'm afraid it will break compatibility with stuff; one patch earlier this year prevented me from booting into Windows, and it was one of the "Recommended" patches that would automatically update.
Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.
Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.
So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).
It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.
throw new NoSignatureException();
One thing is for certain..
..after the initial release then pull, the bricked PCs, the host of security issues and the whole general fuck up that MS have done over vista so far I predict a cautious, "if I must", approach from sys admins with every possible protection and back-up in place. This is not going to be a stampede for the latest secure patches. Truly MS has been a shot in the foot release for them.
Second the poster higher up: it will sure be interested to see how many of the wait for SP1 adopters now follow through and adopt.
Given the general widely held feeling about the the superiority of XP over Vista I cannot see many people clamoring to do so. But on the flip argument MS will withdraw XP soon to try and force adoption of Vista - this would leave many potential customers between a brick and a hard place.
No bother to me - I've been linux only at home for ~8 years (so I guess I'm biased) - but we sure live in interesting times.
No, it's more like ordering your meal. Then the restaurant takes 5 years to prepare it, all the time exclaiming that it's going to be the best meal ever. Then, when you get it, you find out it's complete crap, and it takes them another year just to get around to fixing it. Even after they fix it, it still isn't as good as the tried and true hamburger, which you could have got without even waiting the intial 5 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Was only the first 2 months for me. After Creative released the driver for my soundcard, all was and has remained well since then. I did buy a 2nd GB of RAM though, because I noticed that things opened slower than in XP, but mainly because I was utilizing over 70% of my RAM with Firefox and Foobar open. The biggest problem I experienced with Vista post the good, strike that, working Creative drivers was getting Star Wars KotOR II and Grim Fandango to run.
Continually, I find myself defending Vista in my circle of peers in class (ironically we use MS Virtual Machine through Vista for our various OS and Network learning needs). In my opinion it's the best OS MS has released yet; and more people I meet seem to dislike it because it's interface is more different than MS has done since the move to 95 from 3.11. XP and Vista do everything pretty much identically, Vista does it more intuitively though, and it does it looking good (which was my primary reason for upgrading, I began using Linux when I learned about Compiz/Beryl and it became commonly stable because I like eye candy).
There are indeed many horror stories on the net but I've got 3 machines in this house that have been running more stable than XP did for either me or my roommate. And all of the machines in the labs at school have never had a problem yet either. So I continue to wonder what exactly is causing these problems for people. Obviously all the machines at school are identical, but the 2 desktops and single laptop at home all have different hardware and software configurations. *shrug* Guess I'm a lucky one, but I'm glad to read that it's been smooth for you too. Hopefully this will become common as people give it another shot with SP1 coming.
OK, I recently decided not to bash Vista until I see it doing something wrong "in action". I do not own a computer that is powerful enough to run Vista so I had to wait until I can play around with it on someone else's machine.
:< He's a great guy but he has sold his soul, and became a MS Student Partner (or whatever they call them). He always hyped MS products, etc. He also used to have Vista on his laptop. =)
:P I'm not surprised - as of what I've heard from him, he had to reinstall the Vista thing almost weekly.
:> and defended Vista with his teeth and claws, but finally admitted that MS screwed up Vista's internals totally, and that they've lost a great opportunity to evolve the system and make it a Great Thing (tm). He's a Windows 2003 user :P
Then, one of my friends had Vista on her laptop, and she said she was satisfied with it. I thought, OK, let's see how good it really is.
The very first thing she was trying to do with her laptop that afternoon: playing a movie. She fired up Explorer, browsed to the right directory, tried to open the file, and... Vista simply pretended that no icon was clicked. My friend explained to me: "oh, it's always like that when there's no internet connection..."...
Are people getting used to such things in the same way they got used to crashes, unreliability and restarts?... Do they consider it "normal"?... If yes, then we're doomed.
---
A year ago it used to be cool and pr0 and so on to have Linux running Beryl with some Aero theme. I do not know how much these Aero themes resemble the "real" Aero thing, but they were all shitty. I've found translucent borders very distracting, often I stared at them instead of doing work, and it was so until I've switched to something Mac-like (OTOH Mac themes are great). The less transparency you use, the better (but *some* transparency is ok). Look at the Mac, with every major revision of their OS there's a little less transparency here and there...
---
My other friend is a microsoftie
Until he himself switched back to XP
By contrast, my Debian box is withstanding all my experiments since December 2006 without trouble (ok, without REAL trouble until *I* make some real trouble, but then, I'm always able to recover without reinstalling).
---
I've recently had an argument with yet another friend, about OS design and stuff. He also was a microsoftie
---
Summing all that up, no, I'm not downgrading to Vista anytime soon.