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."
Great news, but it doesn't matter to me anymore. I already pirated it from bittorrent. Read that again. I was so desperate to make it work I had to STEAL FIXES for an operating system I LEGALLY BOUGHT. Says a lot about Vista, doesn't it.
Service Pack One is almost ready for release!! That makes it what, three more packs before its ready for release?? Not sure..
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Now to see how many "I'll wait for SP1 before moving to Vista" people actually follow through.
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.
... I can't help but pity those poor Vista users. What should be simply the release of a patch has become a major "event" which people actually have to prepare for and which, from what I hear, is even causing something quite similar to mild panic. But then again, you do get great DRM for your troubles.
Download the Vista Loader (also known as a softmod):
:)
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/03/10/vista-loader-20-oem-bios-emu-crack-softmod-update/
I know it would be the Slashdot way to convince you to move to Linux instead, but fuck that - you wanna use Windows, this will help you continue to do so.
Gentoo 2008.0 was schedulled to be released on that same day...
Onda Technology Institute
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.
I've been using Vista 64-bit since not long after it was released and I'm quite satisfied (I'd have moved back to XP if I wasn't).
/. and other sites like it for some time. I also expect that it won't matter. Most people will get Vista as they get new computers, and it'll slowly become the dominant Windows since it'll work just fine for those that get it.
The reason people slam it so much here is because they badly want it to fail. It is predominantly FUD.
The echo chamber effect is a big reason you hear so much. Someone has a bad experience with Vista, or perhaps just makes one up, and writes/talks about it. Thsi then gets repeated by people who hate MS and want to see Vista do poorly. You discover that these people have never actually used Vista, they are just repeating something they heard somewhere. So it sounds like there are more people having problems than there is.
Of the people I know that have mostly bad things to say about Vista, I'd say at least 90% have never actually used it. They "Read about it somewhere," or "Some guy they know told them," and so on. They have no experience with it, other than perhaps having seen it on a computer. They are simply repeating stories. Of those that have used it and dislike it, almost all of them actually have an issue with something else, that they are blaming on Vista. For example a coworker was pissed because his DJ hardware/software combo didn't work. Ok, well check compatibility first, and that isn't a Vista issue. It doesn't support Linux either.
Another problem is people who try to run it on insufficient hardware. This happens with basically every Windows release that I can remember. I remember all the complaints that Windows 95 didn't run well on 4MB of RAM, even though that was the minimum. The response was, of course, yes that's the MINIMUM, not the "gets good performance" amount. Same deal with Vista, people have old systems with insufficient hardware, particularly RAM (since not that long ago RAM was real pricey). They install Vista and find it doesn't perform well, and thus get angry.
All in all, you can just expect to see continued Vista hate on
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.
Be glad you didn't buy Vista on day 1. The first six months sucked royally I've read and it's only recently become better. For myself, I bought Vista the day that Service Pack 1 was announced so I missed most of the ... joy ... I got on ship when it was reasonably nice. And about 3 weeks ago ZDNet was kind enough to publish MD5's of the final release MS sent them to evangalize about so I was able to acquire a copy, the MD5's matched so the worst it could be was a key collision and the installer wasn't corrupted so it was legit. It even shows the correct build number in System Information. Now since I didn't jump on ship until after they bailed some of the water out its been a fairly smooth ride for me. And since I installed SP1 I guess it's better - some things like alt-tabbing out of games don't wonk (thats a technical term) the system anymore so all in all its an incremental improvement. And it's definitely a lot less of a shock transitioning from XP to Vista than it was from 98 to XP headache wise.
Shh.
It did once claim to have found a solution to system crash, pointing to a Lenovo page that did not exists. 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). That is the one thing I like about Vista. I think of it as the Microsoft answer to "sudo". It was annoying at the beginning, where you had to press yes so many times. Makes me worry about whether it will have the intended affect, or simply teach people to press "yes" whenever they see a pop-up. It's an upgrade without a doubt. Most people at my work who have "accidentally" ordered new PC's with Vista have ended up asking the it support guys "downgrade" them to XP. I have been stubborn though, waiting to see if it gets better with time. It does, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the initial drop in productivity.
I won't respond to your comment, but DRM is BUILT-IN to the Operating System. How much more serious can it get?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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!
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.
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
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.