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University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1
At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.
As has been said above; this was going to happen. I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach. I'm not that impressed with Vista either, but I don't think I've ever seen an update to an operating system in which all users had total confidence in the manufacturer and OS enough to all update, no questions asked.
Yes, I agree there are certain aspects of Vista which deserve to be slated, but this is more process related than product related.
The Mothership
CIO magazine also doesn't go so far as to call on Microsoft to club baby seals. Why is the summary reporting on shit that people didn't do?
For that matter, why is the CIO magazine article even included in the summary? Did Twitter just scour the internet for anti-Vista articles and throw them all into one stupid Slashdot submission?
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I have been a die-hard Microsoft user since MS-DOS on my ancient Heathkit XT clone. I currently use XP Pro and XP Media Center. I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system. I still, by habit, use command lines in a DOS window to do things that Windows can do via the GUI. I guess I'm showing my age...
This experience comes at a cost, namely supporting machines for my family and friends. Never mind what the media and professionals say about Vista, but when my friends and family BEG me to remove Vista and replace it with XP, you know something is bad wrong with this operating system.
These days, if someone is buying a new machine, and all they do is email, browsing, pictures and the like, I will always recommend a Mac. I don't have to support the damn thing - it just works. If they're intent on a PC or need one for certain software, I send them to the Dell Outlet where you can still get a fantastic Core 2 Duo Optiplex with a 3-year warranty and XP for a few hundred bucks.
If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac. Times change. Microsoft fucked up. I never thought I'd be advocating Macs, ever.
The MS logic seems to be "Let's make a pretty stable OS, and then let's release a really crummy one". XP was pretty good. I had no problems with XP. I liked XP. Then Vista comes out and nothing seems to work right. I've been using Vista on a few boxes for a year now, and wonder "What's the point? Why would anyone want Vista? A more fancy UI and some nifty media enhancements? Sorry, it just doesn't make sense".
Vista seems to be Windows ME part 2. A really crapy OS to replace a somewhat stable one. I don't see how a service pack could make things any worse.
The Internet is generally stupid
"At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1."
I wonder if by this you mean that they are ignorant enough to recommend against a service pack that, on the four systems I've installed on, works great and improves any troubles I've had with Vista. I still wonder just how few of the people who call Vista "deeply flawed" have actually tried it (my guess is four).
Weren't we supposed to "wait and see" UNTIL SP1 came out?
Let me guess.. you just browse and never really use it.
I used it from pre-launch until a few months ago.
1. Recursive file copy is broken - it'll copy a few files then crap out without an error.
2. Network file copy is broken - it has a max transfer rate of 2k/sec on a gigabit network (XP on the same hardware can saturate it).
3. Network settings worked for a couple of months then broke, giving 'permission denied' for every screen so you couldn't even tell if the cable was plugged in.
4. It would just reboot, randomly, with no warning. On known good hardware with 100% WHQL drivers.
5. The base OS uses 700mb minimum. On a 1.5GB machine that leaves too little for a decent development environment, so the whole thing slowed to a crawl with both the prefetch *and* swapping to disk driving the hard disk to distraction.
6. The DNS handling is utterly broken - if you try to connect to a local machine more often than not it'd pick something random on the internet and try to connect to that. You have to use FQDN all the time otherwise it's a major security problem (vista is currently banned at our company for precisely this reason).
7. On a laptop it fails to impress. Because it's hitting the hard drive 24/7 the battery life is less than 1/3 of what XP can manage on the same hardware.
8. Sometimes it would just forget its users... literally forgot they existed. You had to boot into safe mode and recover.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.