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.

Comments

woot

[Iceykitsune]

first!

Re:woot

[DJCacophony]

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?

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright -- this is the last straw!

If this site is going to accept journal entries from twitter as articles for the main page, why don't we just stop bothering with this moderation BS and pretending to be an unbiased site? It's not as if we haven't discussed this topic 100 times already..

Re:woot

[gad_zuki!]

>Did Twitter just scour the internet for anti-Vista articles and throw them all into one stupid Slashdot submission?

Hi, you must be new here.

We have a few vista boxes at work and have been running sp1 since the RTM and I dont see the difference between this OS and XP, but if all you read is slashdot youd think its like digital arsenic. Of course if all you read is slashdot you would also think that NT is just a unix wannabe, 2000 an expensive upgrade for those who already have 95 and dont need it, and that XP is just 2000 with fisher price colors, so you'd be coming from a biased place anyway. Its hilarious to hear the love some people have for XP now, especially when it was thoroughly trashed here just a few years ago. Oh I almost forgot XP SP2 'broke everything' so should be avoided.

Re:woot

[webmaster404]

I dont see the difference between this OS and XP

Except for say UAC, all the DRM and the fact that the thing runs slower on more powerful hardware then XP?

Of course if all you read is slashdot you would also think that NT is just a unix wannabe

It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X so in a way it is very similar to Unix. Now granted there are only a finite way of solving problems present in Windows 9X so making it more Unix like is one of the ways to make it more secure.

2000 an expensive upgrade for those who already have 95 and dont need it

2000 probably won't run on the same hardware that 95 ran on, so yes they don't need what they can't run.

and that XP is just 2000 with fisher price colors

It is, it is basically Windows 2K with a shiny theme on it much like how Vista is like XP with a bunch of crap thrown on it and a shiny GUI.

A bit off topic, but I can't help replying to such blatant lies.

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Twitter is reformed. The neo-Nazi thing was only a phase. Karma-whoring is twitter's new fad.

Re:woot

[Naughty Bob]

If this site is going to accept journal entries from twitter as articles for the main page....

I'd much rather we criticize people's arguments than the people themselves.

Re:woot

[StarvingSE]

Isn't the whole "wait until it's proven to upgrade" thing pretty much standard operating procedure for any major update to software as critical as on OS? I don't know of any organization of significant size that would go ahead and ship off an update without going through extensive testing and determining if the update makes sense. Hell, my unnamed organization just now is updating to SQL Server 2000 to 2005. We have an "if it works, don't fix it" attitude, which makes sense in my opinion. I don't see how this service pack would be any different.

Re:woot

[LarsG]

It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X

VMS, surely?

Re:woot

[lukas84]

It depends. I'm working for a Systems Integrator/ISV. All our internal prod stuff is Bleeding Edge. We've been running Vista since Nov 06, and have been using the IIS7 GO LIVE! License. With RTM out, i'll be upgrading all our other servers next month (as long as the software running on them is supported, of course).

No better way to gain experience and real world QA.

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea XP Was total crap before SP1 so i am reserving judgment on vista till this summer or so. the upgrade from OS 9 to OSX was a BITCH! and yes xp will run on windows 95 hardware because i made that leap when xp came out and i had a 1GHz P3 and 512 ram and a bitchin 32 or 64MB Ati graphics card cannot remember and that was state of the art and xp was slow as vista if not even slower and you could edit the xp code in note pad so you know all you xp lovers missed the fun before SP1 you are used to the 3+ year old refined xp that works well in 2 3 years vista will be in the same spot and i never owned 98 or ME and i more than likely won't upgrade till the next os because that is my way and linux is good and fast wine rocks and mac is great for media design they all have pluses and that is why i have one of each.

Re:woot

[Brian Gordon]

So we "wait and see". Well, SP1 has been out for a week or so now.. where's our news, slashdot?

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd much rather we criticize people's arguments than the people themselves. You must be new here.

Re:woot

[Daniel Phillips]

Did Twitter just scour the internet for anti-Vista articles It's not like you have to scour very hard.

Re:woot

[Tony Hoyle]

Yeah NT was VMS with its brains knocked out.

NT 3.1 was actually quite good. Stable as a rock. NT 3.5 wasn't bad either. NT4 it started to go downhill. 2000 started out a trainwreck and ended up quite good after enough service packs and fixes... as did XP (only took them 2 (arguably) or 3 service packs to do it too).

Vista is still at the trainwreck stage, but at least SP1 takes it out of beta.

Re:woot

[westlake]

why don't we just stop bothering with this moderation BS and pretending to be an unbiased site?

The unbiased site would have:

1 a seperate section for the family of operating systems to be found on 92% of the world's desktops and with a very significant presence in the server room and other markets.

Operating System Market Share for February, 2008

2 it would dispose of the stained glass window and Borg icons which set the tone for every posting

3 it would accept that Vista is showing sustained and healthy growth in the marketplace, while the *NIX platforms, other than OSX, appear stagnant.

Top Operating System Share Trend for April, 2007 to February, 2008
[Vista 13%. "The Other" 2%]
OS Platform Dtatistics February 2008
[Vista 8% Up from 0% in one year. Linux 4% Up from 2% in five years.]

Re:woot

[Tony Hoyle]

Wow.. that's risky.

In most companies we deal with even upgrading to 2003 or XP is considered a risk, and only done on noncritical machines run in parallel with the critical ones.

In Nov 06 you're talking about the RC I presume - the one that wouldn't run anything useful without falling over... in production? I wish I had the balls to try that.

Re:woot

[dedazo]

Except for say UAC, all the DRM and the fact that the thing runs slower on more powerful hardware then XP?

Um, I used to run XP on a dual Xeon with 4GB of RAM and installed Vista on it. After shutting down some of the services I don't really need, I can't see the difference. As for UAC, you can turn it off if you feel the need.

It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X so in a way it is very similar to Unix. Now granted there are only a finite way of solving problems present in Windows 9X so making it more Unix like is one of the ways to make it more secure.

Since KDE looks much like the Win32 shell and ACL-based security seems to be all the rage, I supposed that goes both ways.

2000 probably won't run on the same hardware that 95 ran on,

Maybe because it was released five years after Windows 95. Perhaps you can show me KDE 4.x running on a Pentium II 450. More importantly, W2K ran on the same hardware as NT4, which is what it was meant to replace. It also ran on the same hardware as Windows 98 SE.

It is, it is basically Windows 2K

It's not, there are thousands of improvements between XP and 2000, and claiming otherwise because you can make XP look like 2000 is right out of the armchair "evangelist" cookbook. New versions of MSMQ, IIS, COM+, improvements in DCOM, expanded group policy settings, QoS providers, better WMI coverage, better wireless support, a firewall, the security center, better multi-user support, etc. etc. Oh, and themes, yes.

A bit off topic, but I can't help replying to such blatant lies. Or opinions passed as facts.

Re:woot

[iceT]

Ok, Vista runs slower than XP. I don't debate that. But, XP ran slower than Windows 98, OR Windows 2000. How much of this is love-to-hate-microsoft, and how much of it is really truly bad?

I've been using Vista since October, and, where stuff is moved around, and a little different, it is NOT Satan personified. Turn of UAC, use Google Desktop instead of Windows Sidebar, Firefox instead of IE, and it's been very stable.

No. You shouldn't upgrade your old hardware. But, if it's new hardware, it will run just fine.

And, although fluff, Aero is actually COOL to play with. Useful? not really. but cool.

Re:woot

[cvas]

Ok, Vista runs slower than XP. I don't debate that. But, XP ran slower than Windows 98, OR Windows 2000. How much of this is love-to-hate-microsoft, and how much of it is really truly bad?

The "really truly bad" is that you just used a trend of new tech being slower than older tech to show why Vista isn't that bad. And you seem ok with that. For some reason did we all just decide to be morons? When did I say it was ok to make the upgrades worse?

I'm still just stunned by this. Vista is ok because brand new technology is supposed to be slower than the previous generation!

And for the record, this was posted from a Vista machine. Pre-installed. Soon to be not installed.

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

It always amazes me how many people advise the way to "fix" Vista is to start turning off all sorts of services, including UAC. Whereas I can run Linux with a services running with absolutely no problems. Where is the defense for Windows there? The fact that Windows seems to work fine until you actually try to run software on it is not much of an OS.

I know I'll be modded down, but I'll just say it: Vista is crap because the only way to make it decent is to practically cripple it and hope everything still works. Linux is very much superior to Windows that it really shouldn't be a surprise. UAC was supposed to be a security improvement, but it never carried out People turn it off or just blindly click "Allow" or "Continue" depending on the context of the UAC. And nobody I know who runs Vista/XP/2000 ever seems to run as anything other than an administrator. Security gradually improves, but its way too little of an improvement.

I'm just going to call it how it is: Windows is and always has been a piece of trash. Even under the NT model. Microsoft is far too motivated with bundling every last feature where it shouldn't be bundled, integrating everything, and making shit-poor security improvements. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Vista is just XP with a little more features pegged on in a hurry. XP was just Windows 2000 with a shitty interface, Windows 2000 was basically just Windows 98/ME with the NT kernel swapped in instead. Shit, most of the NT variants of Windows were mostly just the latest releases of the regular Windows with NT kernel being used instead.

In my opinion, Microsoft started sucking worse and worse when they decided to leave MS-DOS behind. (They always sucked, but they're seemingly worse now.) MS-DOS was at least remotely stable and never bloated in my experience. Sure, other DOSes wound up being much better, but in its heyday, DOS was not bad. Of course, I'd like to take a UNIX-style shell like BASH over DOS any day. I can do a hell of a lot more with BASH, and I can tap into the real potential of my computer.

That's my other beef with DOS and Windows (Both Kernel32 and NT kernel based.) is that it doesn't allow near the same level of control over every aspect of the computer the way UNIX and UNIX-likes do. UNIX ain't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than all th other shit out there. Mac OS suffers from hold-your-hand syndrome, Windows is an insecure, unstable POS, and the likes of Be OS, NEXT, and Amiga are far too obscure nowadays too be of much use. BSD is semi-decent, but it is beginning to show its age. Linux is at the best place right now. Its slowly but surely becoming prominent on the desktop. No, this is not the year of Linux on the desktop, but I'd take Linux on mine readily over any other.

I see nothing defensible in Windows. Unstable, insecure, bloated, and Microsoft has a nasty habit of just copying its biggest competitors for each release. (Most elements of Vista are blatant copies of Mac OS X and even Linux and UNIX. This isn't so bad except the fact that Microsoft is carrying on as if they created all these things themselves.

The GUI itself: Ripped from Mac OS (Which was taken from the PARC Interface.)
UAC: Pathetic failed attempt to copy sudo and gksudo.
Aero Glass: Taken from both Linux (Compiz + Beryl.) and Mac OS X (Aqua).
Internet Explorer: Stolen from Spyglass. (Classic backstabbing.)
DOS: Buyout from Seattle Computer Products for 50 Kilodollars.

I could go on and on and on. And I might on some obscure web page. But lets leave it at this, no aspect of Microsoft is defensible. Not. One. Thing.

Re:woot

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

It is, it is basically Windows 2K with a shiny theme on it much like how Vista is like XP with a bunch of crap thrown on it and a shiny GUI.

Isn't that what new versions of OS's are supposed to be? What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?

Of course theres plenty of things updated and redone at a low level, but thats not really stuff users notice. They notice things like the (vastly improved) start menu, or the useful but taxing 3d acceleration on the desktop. Yes it's wasteful. No I wouldn't run it on a laptop, or a low end machine, but just like firefox I accept the memory rape in exchange for useful features that justify it.

Not that I even run Vista at home, but I've tried it out for a while and would not object to it on a new PC.

Re:woot

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

And, although fluff, Aero is actually COOL to play with. Useful? not really. but cool.

I'd say parts of it are useful. I still like compiz better for its alttab animation, but having windows animate better makes it easier to keep track of what you're doing (i.e firefox pops up a dialog, you see it animate in then animate out when you close it) and also makes it more obvious to new users.

Re:woot

[Mistshadow2k4]

Since KDE looks much like the Win32 shell

The default KDE layout most *nix distroes ship with looks like Explorer. Just right-click the screen to get to the options menu and you can make it look like no other GUI on this planet is less than 30 seconds. Don't try to make it sound like KDE is just a copy of Explorer so that Windows looks better; the default layout was set like that to make newbies comfortable years ago.

Re:woot

[LwPhD]

Does market share have anything to do with SP1? Anyway, your argument sounds a bit like Bill O'Reilly. Whenever he's challenged on anything of substance, he just repeats that his show has the highest ratings. Doesn't argue much for the quality though.

Re:woot

[bonhomme_de_neige]

What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?

It's funny you should mention that.

TCP/IP over firewire support? Gone.

APIs for useful Explorer customisation? Gone. (That extension, which I found infinitely useful, not only doesn't work but has no hope of ever working thanks to an API change).

I'm sure I would have found more stuff I liked that they took out, but at this point I formatted my laptop and installed XP SP2. I actually didn't mind the UAC and other stuff people complain about (and it all ran quite smoothly despite many people who would convince you otherwise - albeit this was on a pretty decked out laptop). Having said that, XP not only runs faster but actually has the features that I care about and which I've become quite accustomed to. What used to be "upgrade to the latest OS and take the bugs and performance hit to have the latest features" is now "downgrade to the previous OS which is more stable and performs better to keep the *cough* latest features (which are 3 years old)".

Re:woot

[STrinity]

If you try all of Dan Brown's books and realize they're all crap, you can legitimately say Brown's a crappy author. Same with Twitter -- I've never seen a post of his that isn't reflexive Microsoft bashing.

Re:woot

[Naughty Bob]

I've never seen a post of his that isn't reflexive Microsoft bashing.

Just because it's reflexive MSFT bashing, doesn't mean it can't be funny, or insightful.

I speak as someone who was goaded into a flame war with one of Twitter's alter-egos*, Mactrope, just the other day (I was making a point about how Apple's decision to foist Safari on iTunes-updaters sucked).

*A user named Macthorpe gave me this info, having apparently had run-ins with Twitter over this supposed name-copying. It's all a bit soap-opera like for me, which is why I judge the content, not the commenter.

If you try all of Dan Brown's books and realize they're all crap, you can legitimately say Brown's a crappy author.

And if (the awful) Brown's next tome was the greatest work of literature since Shakespeare, what then?

I'd be highly suspicious that he was behind it, but that wouldn't alter the quality of the prose.

Re:woot

[Gr8Apes]

It is, it is basically Windows 2K

It's not, there are thousands of improvements between XP and 2000, and claiming otherwise because you can make XP look like 2000 is right out of the armchair "evangelist" cookbook. New versions of MSMQ, IIS, COM+, improvements in DCOM, expanded group policy settings, QoS providers, better WMI coverage, better wireless support, a firewall, the security center, better multi-user support, etc. etc. Oh, and themes, yes.

MSMQ, IIS, group policy settings, QoS, WMI, firewall and security center are all don't cares. Those things only pertain to a small fraction of the PC using public.

multi-user support is as well, but it's relatively flaky at times and a resource hog, so it's turned off as well.

So, when you get down to what 99% of the populace uses a PC for: checking email, browsing the web, writing documents etc, Win2K and XP are effectively the same.

And, if you remove all those new services from XP, you'll get a system that's almost as fast and stable as a properly configured Win2K system.

Re:woot

[cbiltcliffe]

whatcouldyourepeatthatpleaseimnotsureigotthemiddlepartwhereyouhadthecomma

Oh...that's right, you didn't have a comma.

I do, however, find it humorous that after that insanely long, head-asploding run on sentence, with not so much as a breath, you did find the time to end it with a period. Good job.

Re:woot

[Macthorpe]

I can understand your point of view on it being soap-opera like, but there is a reason.

I am quite happy for Twitter to post on Slashdot. I generally ignore him because I think he's a liar, and did so quite successfully for a number of months when I thought he only posted under the two pseudonyms. That's gone up to at least 4 now, though, and I feel that if he's going to continue pretending he's different people, then others should know which people they are so they can talk to him with all of the information.

That's all I have to say on it, really.

Re:woot

[Naughty Bob]

And I appreciate your calling it to the collective attention. He might be a liar, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day (that's still plenty of wrong, sure).

Re:woot

[Guspaz]

There was a five year gap between XP and Vista. That's 60 months, or about 3 Moore's Law doublings.

Vista should therefore reasonably expect to be able to use up to 4x more resources to perform OS duties. It would be nice if the OS were to become relatively more efficient, and I'd argue that it has. Vista does not use four times more resources than XP did. Heck, does anybody else remember the days when we'd have to reboot a Win95 box in DOS mode to play certain games because there just wasn't enough memory to run both Windows and a single demanding application?

Re:woot

[westlake]

Whenever he's challenged on anything of substance, he just repeats that his show has the highest ratings.

The Slashdot take on Vista is that it is a failure in the marketplace. Post numbers that suggest otherwise and the geek shifts his ground.

Re:woot

[dickswiveler]

While we're swerving off-topic to correct innaccuracies:

>> I dont see the difference between this OS and XP

> Except for say UAC, all the DRM and the fact that the thing runs slower on more powerful hardware then XP?

and the totally re-written kernel?

>> Of course if all you read is slashdot you would also think that NT is just a unix wannabe

> It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X so in a way it is very similar to Unix. Now granted there are only a finite way of solving problems present in Windows 9X so making it more Unix like is one of the ways to make it more secure.

About the only Unix-like feature in NT (compared to 9x anyway) is pre-emptive process scheduling. In fact NT 3.51 was the bastard offspring of VAX/VMS, although I suppose VMS has some common heritage with Unix way back in the mists. And then NT4.0 went all monolithic and thready, so moving even further from Unix.

>> and that XP is just 2000 with fisher price colors

> It is, it is basically Windows 2K with a shiny theme on it much like how Vista is like XP with a bunch of crap thrown on it and a shiny GUI.

No doubt the big 'selling point' of Vista is the eye-candy, but it sure ain't NT6.0 (in the way that 2000 is NT5.0, and XP is NT5.1). Actually I believe Vista is a whole new bloodline: like DOS -> 95 -> 98 -> ME (-> extinct); then (VMS ->) NT -> 2000 -> XP; now Vista (sine prole).

Wait and See

[26199]

Isn't that the standard advice for any major upgrade on any operating system ever?...

Re:Wait and See

[cobaltnova]

Yes, but when it's vista-bashing, it's news for nerds.

It's also a holiday... a slow news day.

Re:Wait and See

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I'm not entirely sure what the big deal is. My tech department gave the same advice for XP SP1. It may be a little bit different for Vista since the release version (and I use that term very loosely) was so awful. What's the term...once bitten twice shy? It's not that we don't trust Microsoft...oh wait, that's exactly it.

Re:Wait and See

[26199]

Pfft. Kick an operating system when it's down...

Actually that's called rebooting, isn't it?

Re:Wait and See

[techno-vampire]

Nice operating systems don't go down.

Re:Wait and See

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Leave it to a slashdotter to confuse operating systems and girls.

Re:Wait and See

[oledoody]

yes..and the advice you'll get from most university tech support. At least that's what my people are saying. I didn't upgrade to Leopard either. :))) Do I really need a new printer and a new scanner??

Re:Wait and See

[backbyter]

It's that initial "O" that causes confusion.

Re:Wait and See

[Mogster]

IIRC it's been standard advice for any Windows Service Pack since NT SP6.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

So it should be "perating" systems? I'm even more confused without the initial "O".

Re:Wait and See

[Zeinfeld]

These stories get a little tiresome. What is the ultimate source of authority here? A bunch of nerds who read Slashdot. They think their lives will be easier if they persuade people not to change the configuration of their machines. Only on slashdot would that even be considered news.

IT support staff usually suggest what will make their lives easiest. Vista works just fine on the right hardware. As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.

Re:Wait and See

[jhoegl]

Notice how the release of the OS stimulates the hardware economy? Think on that for a bit. By the way Linux works just fine on systems 5 years older than anything Vista runs on. Know what thats called? Smart.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it to a snide commenter to prove they don't know anything about blowjobs or girls.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it to an angry, defensive nerd to completely miss what is commonly known in most circles as a "joke."

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's what you do when the operating system is a stable one that does critical stuff (servers, etc). In that case you don't touch it, updates included, unless you have a damn good reason to do so, and usually this involves a lot of paperwork.
Unfortunately for Microsoft fanboys and shills, Vista is a toy that has no relation both with critical tasks and stability.

Re:Wait and See

[kc2keo]

I have not really worked in the IT industry much yet as I'm completing my degree but in my personal experience I always like to wait until others have tried newly released things such as service packs, new releases of Linux, whatever... Thats standard practice for me. I don't want to install an Operating system or something critical like that should it start deleting my files from some kind of bug or something. I want it to be stable and tested before I install. I like to wait a few months before I install something that is released stable. Thats just the way I see it and I know others do this to.

With that stated I think its not a bad idea that Penn State is taking the "wait and see" approach. They are running a business and want to see how the service pack handles in the wild before they deploy. I'm not a Vista fan but this kind of "wait and see" approach makes logical sense/business sense.

Just my 2 cents...

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also called "big frickin deal" outside of the basement dwelling set. The vast majority of people don't collect old hardware so the can waste electricity proving they can use a 386 to serve their music.

Re:Wait and See

[QRDeNameland]

With that stated I think its not a bad idea that Penn State is taking the "wait and see" approach.

Not to be overly pedantic, but it was

University of Pennsylvania, not Penn State.

Re:Wait and See

[jonaskoelker]

I don't know about you, but I've actually had an operating system ;)

Re:Wait and See

[Culture20]

I've used finger in an operating system, does that count?

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is what does the University actually know about SP1 and what valid concerns does it have with SP1 and it's own network having problems.

Other than that, universities really should stay out of their students computer hardware/software choices.

The amount of bloatware some universities force on their students make getting a cellular connection well worth having your system run like crap and not want to connect to other networks.

Ask your this. When was the last time the IT staff at a university was held to any standards. The fact is, if you want competent security and flexibility, you have to pay for it and most university IT's are underpaid.

These guys just don't want to take on the extra headache of the upgrade, but good luck because MS is pushing it anyway so users are going to get it. You may as well let MS decide what patches their product needs, not the IT staff that has no idea whats really in the patch nor any access to the source code of the patch.

It's only THEIR network in the sense that they keep it running for the students and professors. Beyond that IT needs to stay out of people's computers. The security of some college network simply isn't that important and many of these places run it as if it were. This is joke since anyone with malicious intent could just WALK ON CAMPUS and plug in a USB stick with a virus to a computer that ALREADY HAS ACCESS.

The idea of locking your network down with all this MAC filtering and special access software is just stupid and it's not necessary nor is demanding what OS and upgrades the students use. The University network just doesn't contain information of a level that important NOR does the network security protocols match the total lack of physical security protocols.

Homeless people can go to most universities campuses and sleep in the libraries. Do you really think the network is safe ? How hard is it to hack into an ad-hoc network adapter and be right there on the network ? Or just give away free USB keys, mp3 players, or CDs with trojans on them.

When I worked in IT I pretty much never wanted to upgrade anything that was already working. Why cause myself the trouble ? Just for the users... bah. BUT. an automatic update is different. Many kids have laptops and as an IT guy your really not an authority enough to tell them if SP1 is good for them or not. Likely it is, but you as the IT guy view the clients on your network as yours, when in fact this is not a corporate network and those clients are individually owned. Many of them connected to several network, not just yours.

That being the case, it's a pretty big statement to tell people not to get a service pack upgrade. These aren't corporate clients and the IT's policy must be formed around that.
Telling people not to get SP1 is just them being lazy and not having done their homework ahead of time.

They must know they will wind up with sp1 computers either way. Why create a situation where you have half sp1 and half sp0. You'd rather have as many clients on the same version.

I think the MAIN problem with Vista is user failure, including IT departments. They expected small tweaks and get major OS overhaul and many of them just don't feel like dealing with it.
Overall I find it much more secure and on dual core and quad core test you pretty much have to have Vista or your losing major performance in many apps.

Just check out the anandtech.com benchmarks.

If you have a new system with any decently large amount of ram it's pretty stupid to run XP on it. If you have an older system with under a gig of ram and one core.. like most people.. you're pretty dumb to run Vista on it when the requirements are obviously much higher.

Vista is clearly more secure, it's cache features work, it boots up faster then Mac or Linux, it's just not that bad if you have the PC horsepower to run it. If not then it's not hard to disable themes and poof you pretty much have a more secure version of XP with a network throttlin

Re:Wait and See

[KGIII]

Too bad you posted as AC... That'd be worthy of a rating.

Re:Wait and See

[JayAEU]

Maybe in the Windows ecosystem it is, and rightfully so. On the other hand, I never had a doubt in my mind when installing or upgrading to the latest release of Debian, it just works every time.

Re:Wait and See

[stephanruby]

As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.

Are you suggesting that the Vista-ready machine I just bought last month is now a legacy machine? Because that's what the article is about, it's describing the effect of a Service Pack upgrade on a Vista machine -- NOT the effect of a full OS upgrade on an XP machine.

Re:Wait and See

[STrinity]

No, nice girls do go down. That's what makes them nice. Duh.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually got SP1 installed the other day. If you've been downloading the Windows Updates then you'll only have about 110MB of extra patches, of which the only noticable change is that copying files happens a LOT faster. With my two Seagate SATA hard drives, copying a ~350MB episode of Stargate from one drive to another would take about 10 seconds (pre-SP1). Now it's pretty much instantaneous.

Only thing I'm still upset about is that SP1 STILL didn't give me back my defrag visualization.

Re:Wait and See

[electrictroy]

That post should be modded "insightful".

Many Vista lovers (whether they interface with the female or male port - it matters not) constantly act as if Vista is 100% good. They claim it's the hardware's fault because it's an "old" machine and "duh stoopid" of course Vista will not work. Well. ----- If the machine was *designed for* Vista, and it still runs like a snail on tranquilizers, then it's clearly not the hardware at fault, but Microsoft for creating such a resource-hungry hog (oink oink).

I used a Commodore 64 OS for almost ten years.
Then an AmigaOS for another ten.

I'll probably continue using my XP OS for ten as well. I see no reason to "fix" something that isn't broke. If what you have gets the job done, than anything else is just a huge waste of money (like Vista and the $5000 hardware it requires to run decently).

Re:Wait and See

[PNutts]

No, unless it was something other than Windows ME.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

A service pack isn't supposed to be a "major upgrade". It's supposed to fix bugs and increase stability, not introduce new bugs and reduce stability.

Re:Wait and See

[Zeinfeld]

I'll probably continue using my XP OS for ten as well. I see no reason to "fix" something that isn't broke. If what you have gets the job done, than anything else is just a huge waste of money (like Vista and the $5000 hardware it requires to run decently).

Thats not true, it runs just great on a MacBook Pro which only costs $2K. Not too sure how it will go on my Air under VMWare but thats OK as there is only one program (IE) that I want to run thats Windows only in any case.

I don't see the problem here. By the time slashdoters are ready to run Vista the $2K rig you currently need to make it run really nice is going to be $500 bargain basement.

In order to spend $5000 on a PC today you have to go for an overclocked gamer box with a huge nVidia graphics card. But the reason we do that is to run games like Oblivion which pull vast 3D models in real time on 30" displays. You do not need anything like that power to run vista nicely. I bought a box for the younger kid that runs Vista just fine and cost $800 a year ago. And quite a bit of that was for the monitor.

The most common reason a box is not going to run Vista well is that it does not have enough RAM or someone has been silly enough to put six anti-virus packages on it and suck up all the CPU.

Re:Wait and See

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting this anon for obvious reasons, but due to the way the Uni I go to creates usernames on our email server there was a girl who printed out some stuff at one of the labs the other day with the unfortunate username asmallho. I couldn't figure out how they came up with the name, so I fingered asmallho on our server :-p.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

from-the-twitter-is-a-troll-dep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop posting troll stories by Twitter, thank you.

Don't do it!

[ScreamingCactus]

Vista SP1 breaks things. Important things. Like important programs.

Re:Don't do it!

[urbanriot]

... such as?

Re:Don't do it!

[interstellar_donkey]

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.

Re:Don't do it!

[lukas84]

Microsoft decided to fix some glaring security architecture issues that previous operating systems had, and now badly written 3rd party software breaks.

And you guys blame Microsoft. If one developed software against the recommendations for Windows XP, there wouldn't have been much breakage. Of course the one or other thing could still go wrong, but it's the 3rd parties fault for not providing a fix at the time Vista was officially released.

Re:Don't do it!

[Computershack]

Vista SP1 breaks things. Important things. Like important programs. 12 out of tens of thousands - a handful of those being shitty second rate security applications that would never ever grace the HDD of a computer I own.

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, have you even installed it? I'm running SP1 on three different Vista machines, and it hasn't broken anything yet. In fact the systems run better in a general performance sense.

I'm no MS fanboy -- if anything I'm a Linux bigot -- but all the Vista bashing is just getting ridiculous. My job requires that I work in MS operating systems, plus I'm a gamer, so I'm stuck with them. And I'm accustomed to how Vista works now, and really dislike it when I have to use XP. If people just gave it a chance and learned to work with it, I think they'd be surprised.

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista introduces some good stuff. For example, the new graphics system is more stable. When a video driver crashes it reinstantiates itself. Also, look at the MSDN documentation of the Win32 API. They've added some good stuff. Like, for example, some synchronization primitives that Win32 has lacked for a long time: condition variables and RW-locks.

Re:Don't do it!

[ozmanjusri]

now badly written 3rd party software breaks. And you guys blame Microsoft.

That's not why we blame Microsoft.

We blame Microsoft for making it irritating, DRM infested and slow when they fixed the security issues.

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no MS fanboy

Every MS fanboy on Slashdot says that.

It's because Microsoft is an inherently dishonest company.

Re:Don't do it!

[ScreamingCactus]

Well for starters, several programs that run in BOINC will no longer run. My ATI software doesn't work right and it crashes, and I no longer can use extended desktop. The internet is undoubtedly slower (and now my max d/l speed is about 5x faster when I boot to Linux) and I've been experiencing strange issues (and a few crashes) in Visual Studio. After all the trouble Vista has caused, I was hoping for some relief with SP1. The only difference I've seen so far is slower internet and less compatibility.

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me see if I follow your logic:

Because Microsoft is dishonest, all Microsoft fanboys are dishonest. Since all MS fanboys disclaim their fanboy status, anyone disclaming MS fanboy status is a fanboy. Since the GP claimed not to be an MS fanboy, he is therefore an MS fanboy. Since he is a fanboy, his opinion on the subject is meaningless and we can dismiss it out of hand.

Perfectly reasonable! No fallacies there at all! Great argument!

Re:Don't do it!

[kuzb]

Ask yourself: How much did you like XP before SP1? How about before SP2?

Re:Don't do it!

[hackiavelli]

The MS logic seems to be "Let's make a pretty stable OS, and then let's release a really crummy one".

Wait, are we talking about XP to Vista or Windows 2000 to XP?

Re:Don't do it!

[Cro Magnon]

Wait, are we talking about XP to Vista or Windows 2000 to XP?

Yes.

Re:Don't do it!

[initialE]

We blame Microsoft for changing the operating system at the very last minute, even after the last release candidate, causing maybe well written 3rd party software to become badly written 3rd party software.

Re:Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft needs this type of product cycle or we would never upgrade. Assume that they put out the perfect operating system. Properly manages all resources and can handle hardware and software changes flawlessly. You may have to REALLY use your imagination on this one...

If this were the case, why would you ever buy another operating system? Short Answer: Most people wouldn't need to.

Instead they release a pretty good OS like XP. People use it, like it and generally get along with it. Well Microsoft doesn't want to offer XP forever because they want you to upgrade. So they release Vista, which is kind of like XP, but a lot worse. Eventually when XP Support goes out for good, that will be about the same time as the new OS after Vista, which will probably be a lot like Vista, except better at managing resources and hardware. Time for MS to make some money selling that new OS.

Re:Don't do it!

[gad_zuki!]

>"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".

That's what they said about XP on this very board. Just 2000 with fisher price colors, now everyone is in admiration of it. Funny how that works.

Re:Liberal?

[DJCacophony]

If they were cautious about change then they would not have accepted Vista, which is a change. Accepting the change to Vista would be liberal, not conservative.

Huh?

[The Ancients]

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.

Re:Huh?

[webmaster404]

I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach.

Yes, but companies need much much more stability then college students. Most OS X upgrades are just fine and only usually break apps that modify the OS a lot, the same could be said though with adding random repositories to Ubuntu/Debian and the OS will break sometimes on installing the next version. But generally, I wouldn't recommend a Ubuntu user not upgrade to 8.04 when it comes out, nor would I recommend a Mac user not going to Leopard. However it seems that Vista SP1 is bad enough to warrent students not to upgrade, now that is saying something.

Re:Huh?

[erroneus]

That hasn't always been the case. There are still people who happily swallow anything dished out by Apple. And truly, Microsoft once had a fan base that had people standing in line for Windows 9X for days! Actually, as OS updates go, people have been begging for Vista SP1 because Vista in its original form was abysmal for many users... the people had been hoping that SP1 would provide what the original release failed to deliver. For some people SP1 actually made things worse.

And while CIO doesn't come out and say "Microsoft, dump Vista!" they 'explore the idea' in such a way that it's pretty much what they are saying without using expletives and they certainly seem to be recommending it.

What I find amusing is that force ONCE my predictions on something have come true. Before Vista was released, I believed it would be as popular as WindowsME. Well, I wasn't entirely correct--I think WindowsME had a stronger following. But as far as OS successes go, Vista ranks right in ME's neighborhood.

In the past, the next version of Windows might have been hailed as a 'triumphant come back' or some such thing... WindowsME did not cause the public to doubt Microsoft in the slightest. They just counted WindowsME to mean "Windows MistakE." But Microsoft has saved its real mistake for Vista. Vista has been FORCED onto a public through OEM channels resulting in a public that actually refused to buy hardware based on the fact that there was no WindowsXP option quite frequently. Microsoft back-peddled by allowing "downgrade rights" but I'm not sure how many people actually got that memo because the practice of avoiding machines "sold with Vista" is still going on.

Microsoft may choose not to listen to its users, but they're damned stupid for not listening to their OEMs. Apple's popularity is only growing because of it and while there may be some out there, I have yet to actually hear about people switching back from Mac once they've committed to the move.

Re:Huh?

[Z_A_Commando]

I happen to be a college student who upgraded to Vista SP1 on Tuesday when it showed up on my Windows Update. I have had no problems whatsoever in the past 5 or so days since the upgrade and my machine hasn't been shut down since the upgrade. Your response appears to be more conjecture and, dare I say, fear mongering. If you haven't upgraded to SP1, which I suspect you haven't, then please stop making the entire OS sound absolutely horrible. The wait and see attitude works fine, just don't make it sound like you should never upgrade. Why would Penn's IT department, which provides end-user support for students and staff, advocate upgrading? They have to support many more boneheaded users across a much wider array of systems than any corporate IT staff ever will. The number of unknowns and unresolved issues at the release of any patch, however large, is the reason for the wait and see attitude. They would much rather have someone else deal with problems as a result of the upgrade than deal with it themselves. That's the main reason for "wait and see". Allow someone else to iron out the problems, and hopefully it's Microsoft and whoever made the application that's broken. So there's nothing new here, just more fodder for people to say Vista is such a bad OS without ever using it for more than 10 minutes at Best Buy.

Re:Huh?

[webmaster404]

I am going off the article, where usually if a college doesn't recommend their students to upgrade usually the service pack isn't that stable or for some reason they are a MS hater. I myself don't have a Vista machine however I do lots of troubleshooting/repair on them and I have to say its about the worst OS, haven't seen any with the new SP though.

Re:Huh?

[cbart387]

My college usually will push the MS updates to all their computers about a week later then they're available, just so IT can check that everything is kosher. I would imagine that a SP would be given an even longer testing time. That's probably not the whole story but it could very well be a factor. Just throwing that out since each 'side' seems to take the side of 'black or white'. I think there's plenty of the grey palette we can use as well ;)

Re:Huh?

[DrEldarion]

My place of employment has a very healthy mix of Windows, Ubuntu, and OSx computers. Twice since I've started there, OSx updates have broken critical functionality of the computers (like wireless capability), and there have been no problems with updates to any other operating systems. I've gotten to experience these firsthand as an at-work Mac user (by choice, mind you).

Vista isn't a bad piece of software. You can criticize it on its high system requirements or the fact that there isn't really a hugely compelling reason to upgrade, but that's about it. The problems come about because of poorly-made drivers and third-party programs which don't like the new and beneficial improvements that Vista has introduced (security, etc).

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you agree it's OK for Microsoft to force OEMs to ship new machines only with Vista, and to withdraw support for XP ?

Or do you think consumers should be given a choice ?

Re:Huh?

[Tony Hoyle]

So vista has no problems - it's all due to poorly made drivers and programs... even when the programs are Microsoft software (VS2003 & 2005, SQL Server 2000...) and WHQL drivers.

But OSX upgrade problems are all the OS's fault!

Sorry, that won't wash.

Vista has major issues, and should never have been released in the state it was. SP1 fixes most but not all of them... but it's still way below the usability of XP.

Re:Huh?

[The Great Pretender]

I totally would recommend a user going to Leopard! Using Leopard (laptop-work), Vista (desktop - Home), XP (Latop-Home) and Unbuntu (desktop-home) Leopard is by far the least stable, that includes Vista! Leopard crashes, or refuses to respond with at least one core program, at least once every couple of days, Vista seems to run fine for 2-3 weeks (and it's being used on a 4 year old Dell 8300). I have Mac fanboy friends who've rolled back to Tiger because of the Leopard poor stability. Now I'm not an IT person, I don't run fancy tests, I just use the computers to get things done in my life. I would be so happy if my work dumped Mac for either Windows or Unbuntu. Sorry for being a operating system neutral dissenting voice against Mac.

Re:Huh?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

But OSX upgrade problems are all the OS's fault!

No, they are all Apple's fault. When you make the hardware and you make the software, people expect compatibility. Apple even advertises this as an advantage.

Re:Huh?

[KGIII]

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I really LIKED Windows ME. Six other people and myself had no troubles running it. :D

Re:Huh?

[HouseArrest420]

Below the usability of xp? sorry that won't was. I haven't had a single issue with vista 64 sp1(besides it auto hiding folders which have no reason to be hidden). I can do anything and everything I did with xp....and faster, thanks to vistas "high" system req's.

I see a lot of fanboyism in most of these posts here. Mosst is completely unfounded (being jsut an opinion), and most come from inexperienced users. Sorry to tell you folks, you can't properly test (for the purpose of giving your personal opinion on it)an OS in less than 1 week. At teh most all you'll be able to talk about are the issues you had. Why? Because you never took the time to work around them. But I'm sure you all work around issues with your os of choice from time to time. The difference? You do it by choice. Anything done by choice usually doesn't get bitched and complained about (hence the obvious fanboyism prevailing here), because it was done by choice.

Re:Huh?

[thebonafortuna]

Apple's popularity is only growing because of it and while there may be some out there, I have yet to actually hear about people switching back from Mac once they've committed to the move. While I agree this is somewhat uncommon, just to put into perspective I have seen people make the switch back numerous times.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Vista huh?

Look - I really tried to like Vista, but the moment I wanted to play games on it (an that's about the only reason I use MS-Windows for) everything crawls or just plain crashes. And that was only one of the many annoying things. So - it was back to XP within a few days...

Sure - there are people that never have any problem with Vista. The question is - what are they doing with it? If they are just using it to browse the internet it should work fine. But don't try to play games or something - then you are in for a bad experience. And yes - I know some expensive high-grade machines will play games fluid with Vista, but I bought my system 1.5 years ago - and I don't want to buy a completely new system so soon just to play games the present machine plays happily with XP!

By the way... If you are using the machine just to browse a bit, you can just as well use something inexpensive like Linux. Why pay a lot of money for something you don't really need?

*Facepalm*

[Bertie]

Why are they letting Twitter back on his soapbox?

Re:*Facepalm*

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you've got to fit in the daily two minutes hate somehow.

Re:*Facepalm*

[Anonymous Coward]

/. was starting to make sense, so emergency action was taken. Tomorrow: Erris reports on how M$ killed his puppy.

Re:*Facepalm*

[twitter]

Because your journal is empty. Put up or shut up.

Re:*Facepalm*

[Shimmer]

This isn't actually funny, but it is insightful.

Re:*Facepalm*

[Toreo asesino]

Twitter, you are actually capable of posting interesting coherent comments. How about using your brain cycles to talk up the good points of FOSS software, rather than bash Microsoft software mindlessly? Believe me, you'll be doing everyone a favour.

You never know, you might even have the same karma as an AC if you do. Maybe more; imagine that!

Re:*Facepalm*

[STrinity]

He has incriminating pictures showing how Commander Taco got his name.

Re:*Facepalm*

[Reziac]

Agreed... Twitter is a smart guy, if only he'd get past his anti-M$ prejudice and off his ubergeek high-horse. Lots of knowledge going to waste there. (And I say that as someone he foe'd a long time ago, because gods forbid that anyone can make a Windoze box stable if HE can't; they must be a M$ shill!)

Re:Liberal?

[cobaltnova]

No, because big business is "conservative" and anything else is "liberal" in this strange age of ours.

Why stop here?

[PhasmatisApparatus]

Why not take it a step further and recommend against Vista?

Re:Why stop here?

[webmaster404]

Because if the university runs on Windows, eventually they guess they will have to either migrate to OS X/Linux or accept Vista. Vista will eventually be accepted when 3-4 gigs of RAM becomes common and 3.0 GHZ CPUs are common also. It was the same with XP except that XP was an upgrade from ME while Vista is a downgrade from XP.

Re:Why stop here?

[Anonymous Coward]

3GHZ PC were common back in 2005! And i'm running the OS with 1.5GB of RAM.

Re:Why stop here?

[lukas84]

Well, if you don't like Vista you have to switch platforms. XP support will run out, period. You have to move on or Switch.

Re:Why stop here?

[webmaster404]

The 3 GHZ Pentium 4s were common, today though its hard to get 3 GHZ dual/quad core CPUs.

Yawn...

[Jugalator]

This article felt so worthy of a "slownewsday" tag... We are also waiting a bit with upgrading the few Vista computers we have running over here. It's just common sense, and has nothing to do with Vista, by the way.

The news here has to be those companies that jumps to SP1 without checking up on any risks with that. You'll have a harder time finding stories about those.

Re:Yawn...

[webmaster404]

The news here has to be those companies that jumps to SP1 without checking up on any risks with that.

Most companies are not using Vista. Most are still using XP or Windows 2K. The companies that are using Vista generally are smaller companies that aren't tech-based.

At least we still have XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

XP works just fine for me. I don't care about eye candy in my OS that much anyway.

Interestingly, most people still choose 6 year old XP over a brand new OS X.

Nice summary Twitter...

[Anonymous Coward]

And good decision to accept it, kdawson. You two are some of the best sources of unbiased information out there. Keep fighting the good fight!

Maybe...

[vigmeister]

These guys pulled some strings?

http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/upenn/

The shirts make these guys look bought - not funded.

Cheers!

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I shouldn't respond to what is obviously trolling, but if anyone truly believes that people who are obviously researchers have any major say in overall (not specific to them) IT strategy... I feel sorry for them.

Re:Maybe...

[vigmeister]

I wonder if this epidemic of accusing me of trolling is due to this. In any case, I meant no disrespect to anyone involved. Just thought it was funny to see 4 people in matching Apple shirts in a university that just dissed Vista

Cheers!

Re:Liberal?

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't read liberal or conservative. It should read sucky. That is the adjective that fits UPenn best. Sucky.

I throw Vista away all the time

[Radi-0-head]

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.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Stormwatch]

Macs now have a command line now too. Have fun.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[techno-vampire]

If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac.

Why? That means buying a new computer whether you need it or not. Why not just move over to Linux? That way you can use your existing computer. Not only that, Linux isn't as resource intensive as Windows (especially Windows iCandy) so you'll find your current box working faster than ever. Not saying you must chose Linux, or that you'd be stupid not to, just asking why you don't consider it a viable option.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Radi-0-head]

Showing my age again... I want something mainstream, that's widely supported without reading wikis and compiling kernels and chasing down drivers for my Bluetooth chipset. I unfortunately need to run Microsoft Office in a stable, proven platform. And, for the moment, I support the mainstream OSes for all of my clients, so it helps to be running the same software they use.

I get the allure of Linux, I understand its stability and security, I buy devices that use it whenever possible... I just don't have the time or desire to contribute to its care and feeding...

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Swizec]

Macs have had a command line since the dawn of time ...

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[rolfwind]

If you read into that properly, it probably means at the time of purchasing a new computer. Why would he be forced into Vista otherwise on his existing computer?

Microsoft won't let XP be offered forever on new computers (but maybe until the next major OS release, we see how it goes). But it will undoubtedly be supported for at least the greater part of another decade (regardless of MS's current projections).

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[techno-vampire]

Showing my age again...

That you are. And, unless I miss my guess, showing how long it's been since you took a good look at Linux. It now comes with drivers for most common peripherals, and almost every mainstream distro (except Gentoo, of course, but that's a special case) provides precompiled kernels. If you need to work with MS Office files, OpenOffice reads, edits and saves in that format if you need it to, and I've never had the slightest compatibility issues. Linux is much easier to work with now than it was ten years ago, and for somebody with your computer experience, it's more than ready for Prime Time. Again, I'm not saying you must or even should switch, just making sure you understand that it's a viable option now.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[cobaltnova]

What's the time frame you are talking about?

If you aren't buying a computer for a couple years there's a very good chance that all your present software will be perfectly supported under Wine (or, at least better than the alternatives for that same software).

Office 2000 and Photoshop 7 work pretty well darn well under Wine for me today (granted not perfectly, though).

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Stormwatch]

As far as I know, Macs didn't have a CLI before OS X. Well, except if you had a debugger installed, but that doesn't count. I mean a CLI that comes with the system.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[bzipitidoo]

My brother uses Vista. He likes to think of himself as relentlessly practical on computer decisions. I built a 64 bit PC for him, and made it triple boot: 64 bit Windows XP, 32 bit Windows XP (just in case), and 64 bit Xubuntu Linux. And he threw it away for a computer with Vista. Why? He wanted to keep using an old Canon laser printer he had. Canon wasn't going to make a 64 bit Windows XP driver for it, they weren't going to help the Linux people make a driver, but they did make drivers for Vista. He said the machine with Vista preinstalled "just worked", and mentioned some other software (VPN stuff I think) that gave him troubles. Also was afraid to use OpenOffice to create doc and xls files. Afraid that they might not work in MS office, and creating them in OpenOffice then switching to MS to check was too much bother. I suggested his email recipients also switch to OpenOffice, but that of course was a non-starter.

He doesn't care why. When something doesn't work, he doesn't care whether it's MS's fault. He wants to use computers, not screw with them. I keep wondering how long this can last before something bites him in a tender spot and Vista (fairly or unfairly) gets blamed or excused.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[techno-vampire]

Just do what I do then: buy bits and pieces and assemble them into the computer you want instead of buying what some company decides is right for you. You don't even need to be a hardware guru to do this, just know one. That's what I do, I have a friend do all my hardware work because he's much better at it than I'd be. Build your own box and either move the hard drive over, clone it, or start off fresh with whatever OS you want.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Cannelloni]

You have a point actually. I am a happy Mac user myself and see no reason to switch to any other platform. However, if there were no Macs, or if Apple had died back in '97 (if it hadn't been for Steve Jobs and the guys from NeXT, Apple WOULD have died for sure, and the Mac would not be such a very successful platform as it is now), I would be using Linux by now, probably Debian or Ubuntu, which is Debian-based and is a decent OS all around. I would probably NOT use Window sin any form, not even XP. I recently installed XP on my MacBook Pro just to check it out, but soon realized I had no use for it. Admittedly, XP and Vista are USABLE in the sense that you can use ut for everyday tasks, but in a very annoying and cloying way. If Apple made iTunes for Linux, that would be sweet.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Keen Anthony]

He might have been talking about Apple ][ which was CLI driven. The Macintosh didn't get a CLI until OS X; the absence of which made for some fun Apple ][ and DOS vs Macintosh arguments on Usenet. As I remember, I preferred the CLI because I could do batch operations like renaming with wildcards. Fun times. :D

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[aesiamun]

He said stable and supported platform.

WINE is neither.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Wizard Drongo]

I too had this issue to address; with me the straw that broke the camels back was XP, not Vista. I "upgraded" to Mac about 4 years ago now. Before that I was on Win2k, and I was playing with linux. Sure, linux was nice, and, as technovampire says in his reply to the parent of my post, linux has come on a long way, but it still doesn't cut that mustard, certainly not for me. Mac does. It's not windows, I'm not locked into an insecure system anymore, but at the same time I'm not totally out of the loop when it comes to the "big" programs. Technovampire makes the point about OpenOffice. Last time I tried it, sure, it could save files that M$ Office can open. But opening M$ Office files was appalling; tables? Forget about it. Rich document layout (which I know shouldn't be done in Word; it's not a DTP)? Mangled... It just plain doesn't cut it. Now, I don't need nor even really care about Office; I see about 5 office documents a year, and I always ship out stuff in PDF format. But I can well understand where others would consider not being able to use the genuine, bloated, rubbish and insecure M$ Office as a deal-breaker. For me, the del breaker is the graphics programs that make my job (allbeit I'm an out-of-work artist at the mo). Photoshop..nope, and don't even try and give me GIMP, it just doesn't compare. Wish it did, but it don't. Lightwave..nope, and Wine doesn't do it very well either. You can get it running, but not with the dongle it needs, and that either makes it useless or illegal, either of which are deal-breakers in the industry. Final Cut..nope. Mac only. And Premiere on windows is so awful it was one of the reasons I switched, to get away from it. The day Adobe starts supporting Linux is the day I'd consider maybe going back. But since my machines are Mac now, and I'm happy on the mac support/upgrade cycle, and I'm starting to learn how to program in Objective-C, I doubt it. As the parent says, Mac "just works". No dealing with x-conf files (installed Ubuntu on a firends machine for them not last month, had to go editing that, so linux has a ways to get yet), no having to immediately anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-adware like with windows. It just works.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Apple's Mac Programmer's Workshop have a command line?

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Keen Anthony]

I bet you'll be able to sustain your XP system for a long time barring the need to run Vista-only software. I've owned many copies of Windows 98, but I never ran that OS. I did a pretty good job of holding on to MSDOS and Windows 95 and then NT 4.0 while everyone else was moving through '98, ME, and 2000. I was a big fan of XP when it first came out.

If it helps you, don't think about the Mac just as an OS in a pretty box. Macintosh is a very finely designed machine with excellent components and build quality, and it will reliably operate years after you've bought it. Part of the Macintosh computing experience lies in the quality craftsmanship Apple puts into these computers. Then you have the integration of the hardware with the system software. I came back to Apple after years of bland and then derivatively design PCs that always required some immediate upgrade, or which never lasted more than two years because the cheap electronics or shoddy assembly.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[drsmithy]

I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system.

What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?

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.

So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Saint Stephen]

I just upgraded to Server 2008 Enterprise this weekend. It's very much like XP (most of the "crap" isn't on). It's nice! Give it a try.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Alpha830RulZ]

Look into Crossover. http://www.codeweavers.com/ They provide a good distro of WINE that has been quite reliable in my limited experience with it, as well as a support path, albeit a limited one.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[HalAtWork]

Guess I'll play devil's advocate...

So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?

The thing is, this is showing the affect of Vista on this person. They dislike it so much they just want something non-Microsoft.

What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?

Maybe they feel that using Vista is getting them further entrenched into Microsoft's vision and not necessarily their own idea proper of what they want to do with their computer. They just know someone else is in the driver's seat and this time it's clear Microsoft don't have the user's interests in mind.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[shlashdot]

OpenOffice is really quite amazing, but the compatibility issues with Office are significant in my experience. 95% compatible just doesn't work in the business world. We really wanted to use it and did use it for an extended time before coming to that conclusion. Again, it is great software. I wonder if compatibility will improve with oo v3 and the new MS formats? It very well could.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[jo42]

friends and family BEG me to remove Vista and replace it with XP I spent half an hour the other day in a computer store listening to a store employee try and find a top spec laptop that didn't come with Vista for a customer. So it isn't just the /. crowd, but people off of the street that want their XP.

I wonder how much of a business one could make upgrading Vista-polluted machines to XP for people...

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[pandrijeczko]

I have no problem with anything you've said but please don't base your view of Linux on anything someone else has written but what you see for yourself.

There are countless bootable "live" CD/DVD images that you can just boot a PC from (without installing) that will immediately give you a good idea as to how well your hardware works with it.

Sure, there could well be some issues with some of your hardware that make it an OS you're not prepared to use, but at least then you have seen it for yourself. The fact is that the hardware support in Linux has improved exponentially over the past few years, Ubuntu and Knoppix do an excellent job at detecting all manner of hardware from bootup and I even know of diehard Windows people who use bootable Knoppix or Ubuntu to get an idea what Windows driver they'd need for an odd piece of hardware they're trying to get working in Windows.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[jaavaaguru]

I still, by habit, use command lines in a DOS window to do things that Windows can do via the GUI.

I do it because all too often, Explorer decides that it going to go slow. So slow that I can type faster when wanting to copy or move a file, or add a directory to a ZIP archive.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[BlackSnake112]

How about wine or that cross over thing? Once configured they let you install office 2003 (and office 2000 I haven't tried office 2007). Then word, excel runs as word and excel. The biggest issues I have seen are access and publisher. Publisher works when creating a new project. Opening old publisher files can be a problem. No idea why, unless publisher 98 is so old that it doesn't work. And access, I just wish it would die. Sorry access drive me crazy. For word, excel, the slide show thing, and outlook. Yes outlook 2003 works for me (even hooked to an exchange server). The biggest problem was fonts. I needed to install a bunch of fonts. Which really wasn't the end of the world.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[BlackSnake112]

Just remember to unplug the hard drive first. Just in case you click the install icon. Had this happen when I was letting a friend try out a distro. They called me after they had accepted,committed, and formatted the hard drive.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[shlashdot]

Well, now that I own a bunch of copies of Office I will give that a try.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[Keen Anthony]

Yes, it did. However, what MPW offered was really just a programming environment. It did have some extensions that allowed you to control the Mac OS GUI, but as never meant to be 1:1 with the DOS Prompt or sh (although it was based loosely around csh). You wouldn't have used the command line to run a zip utility, or move files around, or telnet over to another system to check your email. Also, MPW was expensive at its height. Most Mac users wouldn't have had it. Now, there *might* have been a third party terminal type app which came with a full area of utilities so that you could effectively give Mac OS a command line, but OS X was the first to get one officially.

Re:Liberal?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were liberal enough to try Vista despite it coming from Microsoft. However, if one wants to argue whether supporting Microsoft is a liberal or conservative position in the United States, look back to what happened to the case the people of the United States had against Microsoft once George Bush entered the White House.

Journal

[RonnyJ]

'Interesting' journal by twitter linked to in the summary:

http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/177855

Shame it's not updated for SP1, contains links to lists of links of things that are out of date (e.g. iPod problems), has silly claims, contains inaccurate/biased 'studies' like this highly scientific study of five games (highly debunked in the comments).

For what it's worth, I'd highly recommend that Vista users install SP1.

Re:Liberal?

[Otter]

So, properly this would make Penn "neoconservative".

mod do3n

[Anonymous Coward]

Case you want to MOST PEOPLE INTO A me if you'd like, Ass until I hit my the most vibrant with any sort interest in having If you do not Gone Romeo and to keep up as , a proud member AAl know we want. Of the founders of = 36400 FreeBSD

Re:Liberal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed, nice one.

I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista Business and aero on a 30$ ati x300, and 1GB of ram.

No crashes so far.

Able to run eclipse and visual studio 2008.

People seem to want to portray vista as the coming of the anti-crist, but so I'm very happy with it.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[VampireByte]

Vista Ultimate on 2.4 Northwood & 1 GB memory, Radeon 9700 w/ 2 monitors. Always have Visual Studio 2008, SQL Mgt Studio and several remote desktop connections to test servers open. Never had a problem, it works great. All the problems being reported remind me of the early days of XP... everybody hated that OS back then, now they love it.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Tony Hoyle]

Vista Ultimate on 1GB?? You shittin' me right?

For a dev machine running that combination even on XP I wouldn't go with less than 2GB... given Vista's memory footprint you'd probably want 4GB for that.

btw. Have they fixed JIT in 2008 (is that out of beta yet?). Certainly on VS2003 and VS2005 UAC simply hoses any attempt at debugging, because it blocks it.

Also btw. this is *nothing* like the early days of XP. In those days only the devs hated it because of its stupid interface and they way they moved everything around. Now you've got ordinary non-technical people literally calling their techie friends and begging them to install XP on their new machines because nothing works.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[VampireByte]

4GB, that's precious! Thanks for the laugh.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Kalriath]

Actually, VS2008 has been out of beta for... about 3 months now. It debugs perfectly fine too (even as a non-admin, though I assume that you do need to be an admin still to debug programs other than ones you're developing)

I also run Vista on two machines. One with 1GB RAM, one with 1.5GB RAM. Under high loads obviously the machine with 1.5GB is faster, but that's it. All this "you need 4GB to run it" crap is basically bullshit, propogated by the likes of Twitter (who apparently searches Google every couple of days for "Microsoft Vista" just so he can dig up more unsubstantiated crap to post in his "fail log")

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[aaron.axvig]

I run Vista on 1GB also, and it plays HL2 just fine with a Radeon X600 (and AMD X2 3800). No problem there.

Oh yes, I also do dev work on a 1.5GB 1.6GHz P-M machine. In Visual Studio 2008, which if you actually used you would know has been released for quite some time now. It runs fine.

Also, if you had actually used VS2005 on Vista you would have seen a dialogue box that pops up everytime you launch the program recommending that you run it as an administrator for maximum functionality. It took me all of 2 minutes to find this out way back when Vista was still in RC1. And yes, I would hope Vista blocks debugging for non-admin apps. I'm not a security expert, but this sounds like a good way to keep processes out of what they are not supposed to have their noses in. BTW, this dialogue box is also featured in VS2008!

I was not reading slashdot so much in the XP release days, so I can't compare this to then, but I CAN tell you that the only people I hear complaining in real life about Vista are people who wouldn't know the answer if you asked whether they use web-based e-mail or an application. Not the kind of people I listen to for opinions on cutting edge OSes which, surprise, contain CHANGES.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Shemmie]

With the greatest respect: wtf?

• Vista Ultimate, 1 gig DDR, Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz.
• VS 2005 SP1 (plus Vista patch) with debugging working fine.
• VS 2008 works fine.
• CS 3 Studio. (Not the fastest, but perfectly do-able)

4 gig? Did you also spec a Core 2 Quad and DirectX 10.1 card with a gig of on-board RAM?

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[W2k]

I've got a dev box with Vista Business on 1 GB RAM (and a Thunderbird 2GHz CPU). No performance issues and no real compat issues either. It doesn't exactly play today's hot games, but it IS a five year old box, and performance is certainly no worse than with XP. I play a lot of old games (like GTA:SA) on it.

Way too much Vista talk here on /. is just hearsay, anti-MS trolling and ignorant fools passing on rumours as facts. Just like you wouldn't take Linux advice from someone who thinks Linux is garbage and doesn't use it himself, don't listen to MS haters if you want informed opinions about Vista.

This is just so dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight - a bunch of SAs basically got together and said, "Don't do anything to your PCs that you might have to call me for?" And this is news?

Vista SP1 Helped Me

[BountyX]

Vista SP1 helped me. When I installed it and recieved more driver errors than before, I decided it was time to venture beyond the mac/windows/linux world and into the world of BSD's. I'm so torn between FreeBsd and OpenBsd....now I have both on my server :)

Re:Vista SP1 Helped Me

[jayp00001]

Did you get it from windows update?

So..

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to get the articles highlighting the benefits of SP1 here on /.? The positive comments posted as 'articles'? I've installed it on 3 machines already and it certainly has improved the system a lot, it feels far more responsive and I didn't have any problems during the install either. By browsing the comments on the previous SP1 'story' (some negative blog comments) here on SlashDot I am not alone in this. Looking around the web I can find many having a similar positive experience with SP1 yet /. continues to fail to report this.

Penn State is not the University of Pennsylvania

[tietack]

I know it's important only to alumni and friends of these schools, but Penn State (Twitter's Firehose title) is different from the University of Pennsylvania.

Re:Liberal?

[Stormwatch]

Accepting the change to Vista would be liberal, not conservative.

Then call me a Mac fascist.

Re:Liberal?

[RonnyJ]

It's a stupid statement anyway, demonstrating an obvious anti-Vista viewpoint - what exactly is meant by "one university liberal enough to accept ... Vista"?

The university would offer advice and support for the students own computers - any reasonable university is going to be "liberal enough" to let people use their own machines!

Penn Support

[Anonymous Coward]

It's most likely because Penn's financial program relies on IE6 and barely supports IE7. Of course, it could be because they haven't got their incentive check from Microsoft yet.

The Slashdot Trifecta

[westlake]

1 It bashes Vista

2 It's a post from Twitter.

3 It got the green light from kdawson.

Re:Liberal?

[perlchild]

Why do we have to confuse a technically-charged "business" decision with politics anyways?
I swear I wish we could keep those conservative vs liberal arguments for the goverment's spending.

Oh wait you think because it's public money, it becomes a governmental issue? Then why isn't the CIO of a university elected?

Sheesh it's gvmt or it's not, but it can't be halfway.

Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Es Esmu Adams]

Just curious, who out there actually uses vista and enjoy's it? I have an upgrade from XP to Vista from my university sitting in a drawer, but I won't touch it, not until I start hearing good things about Vista, but I guess its just going to sit there. Do you think maybe Microsoft thinks it has too many customers?

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[lantastik]

I run it on several systems. Most of this crap is total FUD.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[TheIndifferentiate]

I bought a Dell Inspiron 530 in January to put Kubuntu on it as I had been running it on my then current PC. Much to my dismay, I found that I really liked Vista, and I kept it and am now using it full time instead of Kubuntu. You can check my old posts here, I have been a harsh critic of Microsoft in the past, but I haven't had any problems with Vista. Probably because the hardware is new and built for it. Now, I liked Kubuntu a lot too, but I cannot say the same thing about it it. I always had one thing or another that I had to fix on it. The last thing was when I moved the PC it's on to a different table so my wife and son can use it, I switched its network cable to a different port on my router. After that, Kubuntu fails to retain the DNS IP for more than a day or so. I found a handful of others who had the same problem, but none who found a way to fix it. That's just an example, I'm not slamming Kubuntu for it, but if it was occuring on Vista, you can bet there'd be an outcry and rebellion over it.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[BountyX]

I have it on two machines. SP1 did toast my drviers but I'm using very unique hardware (neither of which work on linux or mac).

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[VampireByte]

I like it a lot as mentioned in my post above. I really like aero and as time goes by it becomes less a matter of "eye candy" and more something that makes you productive.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using it since December, and all I can say is I love it and it's getting better and better. It seems that most people don't like Vista based on initial impressions from Jan 07, which consisted of app incompatibility and driver issues. Today, most of the compatibility, driver, and performance issues have been ironed out. I use Vista on a 1.8 GHz Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB RAM, Gefroce 6600GT. This 4 year old computer is by no means a powerhouse, but it runs Vista flawlessly.

So I know some people have been burned by application incompatibility and driver issues, but my personal experience with Vista has been it performs great, supports all my hardware, supports all my applications, and offers me great new features like superfetch, improved networking stack, improved windows photo gallery, etc.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[lsproc]

I do. I am writing this post on a Vista machine, which I find a lot more stable and better built than XP used to be on this box (XP feels like a empty shell in comparison, metaphorically)

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Computershack]

I love it. Tried going back to XP and missed the little tweaks as well as getting completely fucked off trying to get network browsing working - something that's still broke on XP half a decade after its release.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[networkzombie]

I have deployed SP1 and have had no problems on over twenty computers. That's the good thing about Microsoft having a huge customer base; you don't have to wait very long to find out if a patch or service pack is going to cause problems. The only problems I had before the service pack were some annoyances on laptops, like slight (two seconds) hesitation before transferring files. The laptops seem very snappy after applying SP1, but like I said, Vista was working very well on all systems before. The systems are Dell 745s, 755s, D620s, D630s, and some home made P4s (2.8 GHz or higher, socket 478s) on Asus boards. I only use XP if I have to. Vista works much better than XP, especially the Ultimate version compared to MCE. Watching TV on a third DVI monitor to the left of your primary monitor is a pain in the ass to setup in Linux (I never could get it on the left and some forum users simply told me to watch TV on my right monitor - Debian and Fedora) and XP forgets settings between reboots. In Vista it takes a couple of seconds to setup and has always worked perfectly. It does everything I want to do in a couple of seconds. More Group Policy settings, egress filtering firewall, better power management, and better resource monitoring utilities built in. I can finally see what app or service is hammering the disk without installing a third party application. I find it troubling when users have trouble with Vista on one system yet I have had none on over twenty in a production environment (think HIPAA and YOUR medical info on my Vista systems). Hell, some companies have deployed thousands.

Here is your answer; if your computer is a piece of shit (Celeron), do not install Vista! If it has specs like a Mac (Duo or Quad), you will be fine.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Dude McDude]

I've been using it since launch day without any problems. It runs well; no driver issues, no program incompatibilities, and no BSOD/crashes in over 12 months of use.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Charcharodon]

Running new hardware? Not running antique software? Then upgrade, otherwise leave it in the drawer.

All the crying and moaning is just MS bashing. Vista works just fine on both my machines.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Tony Hoyle]

Huh? It's *more* broke in Vista - in fact it simply doesn't work. Every machine on this network, mac, linux, XP, 2000 even NT4 can view every other machine. Vista can't.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Tony Hoyle]

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.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[headkase]

Of course since you stopped using it a few months ago you wouldn't have noticed that Service Pack 1 addresses most or all of these issues. And it's only going to get better.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I highly doubt he's just browsing. I've had my Vista machine since August 2007 and have not had ANY of the problems you list. I also have a file server on my network and frequently move data to and fro during normal usage. I've done everything from video editing, copied DVDs, running WinUAE (Amiga emulator) and VirtualBox running a copy of Ubuntu just to screw around with it. I frequently play Day of Defeat Source and have been enjoying other games like Doom3 and a few classics like Quake1, which actually runs in OpenGL mode with no tweaks or modifications.

I also use my machine for business, as I'm a website designer. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Inkscape, and OpenOffice all work with no problem.

I had once issue with 3d graphics or overlay corruption that would appear after the machine had awaken from sleep mode. That was later fixed by an automatically driver update for my Nvidia card. Only through ignorance and jealousy could you ever assume that a fully functional vista machine has never really been used.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but point 5 is just plain stupid. When was the last time you saw a machine running with a 1.5 GB drive. If you still have a machine with under a 5 GB drive, you such as heck shouldn't try to install Vista on it. Because if you still have a hard drive that small, the rest of the machine (Processor, RAM, etc) definitely wont handle Vista.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[blackcat77]

I've got it on all three of our computers at home. I've also installed SP1 and IE8b1 on all three with no problems. It ain't perfect but no OS is. In my case, it's just as good as XP if not better. My wife's computer needed a re-installation about a month after I put on Vista the day it as released. Since then, virtually no problems at all. Her reliability score is always above 9. Mine isn't that high but certainly no worse than anything else I've used and I've been using Windows since 3.1. All I can figure is that some people will always complain about anything MS just because...

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[DigitalisAkujin]

Every problem you described can be bad hardware too. How are you so sure?

Evidence please!!!!

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Dude McDude]

I've never experienced issues #1, #3, #4, #5, #6, or #8.

You have a point with #2, slow network transfers, but that's been addressed in SP1.

I don't use a laptop so I can't comment on #7.

As for using my PC for "just browsing", I do lots of things with it, including gaming (mostly Valve's games) which can be fairly demanding. One thing I'll say about that is that I find gaming performance in XP better than it is in Vista.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[__aagmrb7289]

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. You mean make up off the top of your head, don't you? This list is ridiculous, and clearly has NOTHING to do with the operating system. Have you even USED it?

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Dude McDude]

He's talking about RAM, not hard-drive size. ;-)

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Stevecrox]

I like Vista as a x64 user its great to finally see large amounts of x64 drivers being written. Since the last Nvidia driver I get the same FPS in games that I did in Xp. Some of the UI changes while annoying at first do work once your used to them and some can be really usefull (the Games folder on the start menu for instance.) The new networking stack has actually made home network shares easy to set up. Vista on a network does strange things too I used to have a Dell machine that would refuse access to any machine despite permissions being given, put a Vista machine on the network and you can access its shared folders, take that Vista machine off and you have the old problem comes back. Its as stable as Xp and I honestly think many of the drivers written for it are of a higher quality than XP's (Creative I'm looking at you.)

Vista has three main issues, the first is the higher resource requirements you can get it to run on a low spec machine but you end up turning so much off the difference between it and Xp is minimal. The second is the amount of updates released for windows through windows update, when you include SP1 I've probably downloaded close to 2GB's of updates for my machine over the last 14/15 months. Lastly its been the target of the biggest FUD campaign ever invented which is probably why it will never gain the market acceptance of XP.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[RowD1]

Yes. The main problem with Vista is that much of it is unncessarily different. This won't bother novice or new users so much, but it drives XP experts (e.g. most slashdotters who use XP, tech support people, and other former MS experts) absolutely crackers. So, there is great amount of hostility from people with much time vested in previous MS systems. What expert actually wants to have to Google how to edit the hosts file, fer chris' sake? It's the same thing with office 2007. New user? No problem. Expert officexp/2003 user? Prepare for much wall-beating with your head, with your head losing. How could Microsoft have misjudged the user's willingness to abandon previous knowledge without a damn good reason? It's too bad. There is very much in the new software that is very worthwhile and a significant improvement. I guess MS is betting we'll all just get used to it. We'll see.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had XP and decided to try Vista to see how 'bad' it was after hearing these kind of complaints all the time here. Guess what, I will not be going back to XP as I have never experienced a single problem with either Vista or SP1 on my laptop (Dell XPS M1210). My battery life has actually *increased* over xp, the system is just as responsive, and any 3d application from games to cad run far better.

The problem is that people are trying vista on standard XP business machines and/or with minimal requirements. If you have ever tried playing a game on a minimal system requirements pc, you know it is not the best experience. Vista requires a gaming or cad system with a good amount of ram and at least a dual core processor to run decently. Otherwise, your better off with XP.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Start Menu, Network, then "Network and Sharing Center"

Click "Customize", Change your Location Type.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[aaron.axvig]

I found that the subscript and superscript functionality alone made Office 2007 "worth it." Maybe there were keyboard shortcuts in Office 2003, but I never found them. In Office 2007 I don't have to click Format -> Font -> Check the little box -> click OK, I can just click the superscript button which is always right there. Or even better, it had a tooltip that told me the keyboard shortcut for it, so now I always use that. Also, the formatting of headings, adding a cover page, etc. are all excellent features that I never found in Word 2003. And the bibliography stuff absolutely kicks ass. It is so good that after I saw a video demo of it I actually wanted to write a paper for school again just so I could use it.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[aaron.axvig]

I use it every day. On two computers. I find it to be a very functional OS. I have a dual core desktop with 1GB of RAM, Radeon X600, which runs fine even for gaming up to the HL2 class of games (meaning HL2 works fine). No surprise there. I also have it on my Toshiba R15 tablet. It is a 1.6GHz P-M with 1.5GB of RAM, and Vista runs VERY well on this system. Admittedly I have the graphics dropped down to W2000 style, but it was still snappy with Aero Basic (Intel chipset won't run Glass). Battery life is maybe slightly shorter than in XP, but still ~3 hours average use. I use XP every day at work. It works fine. I have been using only Vista on my computers since RC1 came out, it also works fine, and I DO recommend it.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Recursive file copy is not broken on this Vista install, I just used it.
2. Network file copy is not broken on this Vista install, I get a max transfer rate of 10 megabyte a second (on 100 megabit Ethernet) between XP/Vista and between 2 vista machines.
3. Network settings have worked since install.
4. My system would reboot randomly... but then again it did this under Ubuntu as well. It turned out the motherboard was incompatible with the memory sticks in a 4 stick configuration. A new set of sticks, dead stable.
5. The base OS uses 700mb minimum if you include caching. This system uses about 500 megabytes total for the kernel + running OS components, including all the high resolution icons. Most of that sits in Virtual memory anyway.
6. The DNS handling is utterly perfect on this Vista install; I do development on this machine and connect to "localhost" for testing all the time. It never fails. However, this kind of thing can happen if some nasty spy-ware has replaced your WinSock DLL with one that redirects your DNS requests. It usually happens if you've installed some damn shoddy software that involves naked girls and your desktop.
7. On a laptop it works about the same as XP does. Have a Dell Vista laptop here, it's got the same battery as a slightly older XP laptop and it lasts slightly longer (but in fairness, has a more efficient back-light.
8. Can't say I ever had that problem with the 4 Vista systems I've had here on a daily basis for ~a year.

Really, you must've done some weird voodoo shit to get your system to behave like that. I develop for corporate customers who've deployed Vista widely and most of the problems they see are just the fact that things aren't in the same place as they were on XP and that scares the Luddites who can't cope with a change up from 800x600, let alone a change in the start menu. I'm not saying Vista doesn't have problems or that I don't miss things from Unix while using it, but it is a lot more stable and usable than people here make out. If you're having the kind of problems the user above is, you've done something seriously wrong to your system, you've installed some kind of shoddy Trojan or there is something seriously wrong with your configuration (i.e. incompatible memory modules).

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Kalriath]

I do use a laptop, and I don't see #7 at all. One has to wonder what weird stuff he's running. Now, I do have an issue where the laptop cannot enter sleep mode (which wreaks havok on the battery) but I think that might be some of the other software (like Multiplcity).

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[networkzombie]

Recursive file copy is broken - it'll copy a few files then crap out without an error.

Robocopy is standard in Vista. All my Robocopy scripts work except with the Users folder. It hits a permissions error when recursively copying files from the users folder that has more than 20 characters. I changed the Deny All permissions to explicit and it works fine.

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).

I copy 9 GB DVD (ISO and VOB) files to and from vista on GB Ethernet with no slowdowns.

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.

And nothing changed during those two months? I call this User Error. I haven't had any network permission errors that were not my fault.

It would just reboot, randomly, with no warning. On known good hardware with 100% WHQL drivers.

I've never had any of my Vista systems randomly reboot. Sounds like a hardware issue.

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.

I run quite a few systems with 512 MB RAM that run local databases. Oracle, Parodox, and C-side. They run great if I turn off the sidebar.

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).

I use home made certificates and non FQDNs (simple host name) on over twenty systems and I do not have any problems. More often than not it'd pick something random... sounds like a made up statistic. If I'd said that to my electrical engineer he'd think I was a dolt.

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.

I have only seen this when the Google search toolbar crap is installed. Did you open the System Monitor to see what was hitting the drive? What was it? Also, I'm getting better battery life. All my deployed laptops are.

Sometimes it would just forget its users... literally forgot they existed. You had to boot into safe mode and recover.

Has anyone else ever seen anything like this? You would think that would be a major problem if it happened to more people than just you.

I'm sure you have 20 years of experience and you are Microsoft certified, but this really sound a bit far fetched considering that I know of hundreds of Vista deployments that have not seen any problems like these. Are you aware of how many businesses are actually using Vista without any problems?

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm noticing a pattern here:
1. Network driver problem. This is certainly NOT the case for EVERY Vista system in production.
2. Network driver problem.
3. Network driver problem.
4. Could be a lot of things, but BSODs and random reboots are almost always either driver problems or failing hardware. I know this is all starting to sound familiar, but it could be your network card driver.
5. 512 MB of decent DDR2 RAM is $11. 2 GB of RAM costs about $33.
6. Network driver problem.
7. I would only suggest reading some reviews of Vista on laptops. Generally you'll find Vista's battery life to be a few percent worse than XP. My guess is that your laptop doesn't have the right power management driver, so it's running at 100% all the time. This is fixable.
8. This could be corruption caused by your spontaneous reboots.

In short, 4 of your 8 problems are clearly due to a bad network card driver. Sure, Vista should have picked the right driver, but it didn't. Your power management and reboot issues are very likely also due to bad drivers. I'm not trying to be a shill here. I'm saying that I believe ALMOST ALL of your problems may be traceable to a single bad driver, which is generally easy to fix.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[lyml]

More people use it than all the unix versions combined. All this vista bashing is mostly slashfud.

I use it, I have no issues with it. Not a single one.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[lyml]

Or well strictly speaking that is not true, I have the following issues with Vista:

  * XCOM doesn't work natively, I have to play it in dosbox
  * VLC does for some reason not start up several instances when you double-click on a file, I have to start up new instances manually.
  * Vista takes up about 10 gigs more harddisk space to install than XP did.

They are all minor nuisances at worst. I wouldn't beleive it if my only experience of vista was slashdot stories, but as I said, they are just slashfud.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[dreamchaser]

I have it on a few machines. For what it's worth I like it just fine. I seem to be one of the few people here though who don't treat their OS of choice as a religion. I have Macs, PC's with Linux, PC's with various Windows verisons. I like them all for various different reasons.

Vista is fine on a modern machine with good system resources. Don't buy into all the FUD. Compared to when it was first released it's gotten far better even for gaming as drivers have matured.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a unix/mac user, and have been for years. I had to buy a Windows machine for a specific project, so I went with an Acer laptop (~500 USD). I bought it last week, it came with Windows Vista, and everything worked just fine. Sure, the UI sucks, but it's easy to go back to a "productive" look and feel. I noticed file copying was painfully slow. I applied SP1 the night it camed out, and the machine works just fine -- and file copying is way faster.

I strongly suspect that machines "born" with Vista in them work just fine. I think MS screwed up with forcing people to upgrade to an OS that clearly needs different hardware. But going from these observation to saying that Vista should die, is a bit of a stretch. They should not market it as an upgrade, but target it only to new machines with the "right" hardware. Plus, new features that may be marketed as an upgrade should be available, such as .NET 3.5 and DirectX 10...

I never thought I'd be defending MS, but come on, stop missinforming people. Vista is not the devil, it actually works, and it is a clear improvement over other versions (granted, last one I used was NT 4)

Common Sense vs. Sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

"Journal written by twitter (104583) and posted by kdawson"

'nuff sed...

Horrible recommendation

[wicka]

"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).

Re:Horrible recommendation

[DavidD_CA]

I agree. Does the same university also recommend users NOT install patches, especially critical updates?

What they should be recommending is that users check the list of known incompatibilities and then, if they don't see any conflicts in that list, that they go ahead and update.

Remember that they're talking about machines outside of their own control.. mainly student machines and possibly some faculty/staff personal machines.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[jwsmith00]

I also have Vista SP1 installed and I've had no problems. It has fixed a number of issues in Vista. I cannot recommend Vista without SP1 installed. I can also not recommend this story as it comes across very vindictive.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[urbanriot]

Recommending Vista SP1 won't make the front page of Slashdot.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just had to do a system restore to get rid of SP1.

About 1 boot in 3 caused a total lockup within the first minute or so after booting. No idea why. No-one else on the net seems to have the same symptoms.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do when SP1 gets forced on me in a month's time.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[Chabil Ha']

This blog post summarizes the problems I have with it. Excerpt:

I installed the Ultimate version of Vista, but one of the biggest things that I can't understand is it's 10GB installation footprint. It really bothers me that the base installation is bloated. I really wish that I could turn off and uninstall a lot of features that I know that I won't use on my workstation. For example, let's get rid of Media Center. I don't have a tuner card installed, so I won't watch TV. I don't watch DVDs on my computer, that's what my entertainment center is for. I don't need x. Don't need y. Why won't you let me remove them?! I want to be able to have just in case I want to use them, but please! I want to have a little bit greater control than you're giving me!

Re:Horrible recommendation

[wicka]

I think the idea is that if you don't want that stuff, buy a different version. You also may be able to uninstall some features (but I don't know about Media Center). I completely agree though, just removing unneeded features doesn't seem like something that could ever harm Microsoft, but who knows, they don't seem to want you to uninstall IE - which reminds me of one major Vista problem. Firefox will NOT set as default browser. I set it constantly and it always has to do it again on FF startup; in addition, the Default Programs area is incredibly useless.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[Chabil Ha']

If you take a look at Windows Server 2008, it is pretty lean. It doesn't come with anything but the most basic of features installed. You can then install the packages/features that you want and it only installs the dependencies to run it. They could have made Vista the same way. In fact, when I went to the release of Vista last year, this was one of the features that purported to exist in Vista. That 'like Linux you can install only the packages that you want'--what a crock.

Re:Horrible recommendation

[Vegeta99]

Mine works fine set as default browser.

What DID bork it was trying to install one of the 64-bit builds of Firefox. You didn't try that, did you?

Wait a sec.

[T23M]

Weren't we supposed to "wait and see" UNTIL SP1 came out?

Re:Wait a sec.

[EarlW]

SP1 was released to the public this week. I'm tired of fixing these problems myself, so I called Microsoft to help me install SP1 after Windows Update failed to install it 4 times. They offer free support for SP1 problems. I made sure to have a complete system backup and spare computer before calling. We're up to about 6 hours of chat/telephone support time now and it still doesn't install.

Re:Wait a sec.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was windows 95, then it was windows 98, then it was windows me, then it was XP, then it was XP SP 1, then it was vista, and THEN it was vista sp1.

Just upgrade once to linux and be done with it.

What an odd summary

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is this submitter on? First of all, somebody explain to me how using Vista makes you a "liberal". Second, if students, faculty, or staff want to use Vista, what the hell kind of university is going to forbid them from it, as the submitter seems to suggest? The university's IT people are paid to enable these users to get their work done, not punish them for their choice of software like a bunch of petty morons. Nobody forbids me from using Linux on my university's network, nor would I expect them to do so for people using Mac or Windows. This guy's really got it backwards.

As for the content of the article... I can't speak for the UPenn IT people or whatever issues they've encountered with it, but my own personal experience is that sp1 works better than the initial release. For me (I dual boot linux and vista), it's been fewer bugs, fewer crashes, faster performance. Your mileage may vary.

At least it makes a change...

[Shturmovik]

...from all the Australian stories usually posted by kdawson and Zonk.

Vista rocks.

[headkase]

I use it and it works great. I also have hardware that suits it: Dual core 3.0ghz, 2gb ram, hd2600xt video. If you have old hardware (e.g. what came with XP) then I wouldn't recommened using Vista but if your computer doesn't contain parts made of stone then Vista works good. SP1 makes it even better. And some people complain that it's a RAM hog, it is *but* the reason RAM utilization is high is because Vista takes unused RAM and dynamically uses it as a cache. When Vista does it it's considered a pig but the other day when an article talking about doing the same thing for Linux came up of course it was a giant leap for computing kind. Check your bias around here I guess.

Get Over Yourself

[mp3LM]

Everyone really needs to start getting over themselves. XP is an old OS and is not nearly as secure as Vista. The quirks people complain about in Vista are usually because of the software development company not adherring to the SDK for Vista. I've seen very few legitimate complaints about Vista. As has already been stated by many users this is not an arguement about the quality of Vista this is an arguement about the quality of IT/Sys Admin Professionals. I for one salute the IT/Sys Admin Professionals at whatever school this is (UPenn...Penn State...who know, who cares :P). As for people who've installed Vista SP1 and have had multiple driver issues this is no ones fault but your own. SP1 is not pushed as a critical update on all machines and yours was probably one of them. This means that your computer doesn't meet the requirements (in this case proper drivers) of SP1. You should have checked everything before installing it.

Re:Get Over Yourself

[Tony Hoyle]

XP is more secure than vista in fact, due to its tried and tested codebase and all the major bugs have been found by now.

Your SDK argument doesn't wash - microsoft moved the goalposts and somehow this is the developers fault? I personally know of several APIs that simply behave differently on Vista.. and a program which adheres 100% to the documentation will likely fail if it uses them.

SP1 craps out peoples computers and it's their own fault.. I've heard that from MS fanboys with every update and it's *really* old - MS should do testing. Their OS should *not* fail simply because a piece of 3rd party software does something odd - it should report the error and carry on.

Re:Get Over Yourself

[BountyX]

I mentioned that I had specific hardware that was very particular to my machine in another post (don't know if you saw that), which is why I did anticipate errors. Vista does have more network stability in terms of Network Discovery and you cannot overlook Ipv6 support either.

Vista is very premature still compared to orginal Microsoft ambitions. If you read those leaked MS emails about Vista on wikileaks.org you will see how desperate the execs really were.

Let's just say intel really hurt Vistas image by pushing a chipset that Microsoft didn't agree with and changed at the last minute. Ever since they first shipped machines with the low standard chipsets Vistas image just got hammered out of proportion.

Re:Get Over Yourself

[T-Bone-T]

XP had more security problems since Vista's release than Vista did. That is a fact that was probably even posted here.

The SDK argument is perfectly valid. Microsoft indeed moved the goalposts and provided documentation on their new positions and it is up to the developers to figure out how to make it work. If a developer can't keep up with the changes, that developer should consider a new line of work.

Re:Get Over Yourself

[pandrijeczko]

XP is an old OS and is not nearly as secure as Vista.

With all respect, this one statement alone shows how little you know about security and I would suggest that you are taking security for granted which ultimately means you're more open to an attack from vulnerabilities as a result.

Standard security techniques involve deploying external NAT/firewall routers, shutting down unnecessary service, applying OS and application updates as quickly as possible, using strong passwords, not using administrator (root) level access unless necessary, and identifying applications prone to certain vulnerabilities which can be replaced by more secure alternatives.

All of the above are equally relevant whether you use Windows, Linux, UNIX, *BSD, OS X, etc. etc. and if you've done all the above, you can pretty much consider yourself relatively secure. Additional virus and malware checkers are also a good idea for Windows, for the other OSes it's probably debatable whether they're needed but if they're cheap, it's not a great issue putting them on also.

So please do not make such blanket statements as they are not true and may lead to some people opening their PCs up to more malware as a result of your over-confidence and lack of understanding.

Uh, not Penn State

[Tickenest]

It's saying "Penn State" in a couple of places on Slashdot, but this story is from the University of Pennsylvania, which is not the same school. Penn State is in Happy Valley, PA, while the University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia, PA.

Re:Uh, not Penn State

[Vegeta99]

And here at Penn State, we have our 5-minute logon times for Windows Vista Business, and WE LIKE IT!!!

Well, that is, unless you don't drink coffee. I can go to the lab, type in my U/P, hit log in, go grab a coffee and the paper, and be back just in time for the desktop to pop up.

We have seen this, before, right?

[Borommakot_15]

Ah, Windows Vista...

Why didn't they just call it "Windows ME, the next generation"?

Re:We have seen this, before, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score: -1, Unoriginal)

Re:We have seen this, before, right?

[Terrasque]

And the obvious witty remark:

"Hey, no need to diss Windows ME like that"

Re:We have seen this, before, right?

[kaizokuace]

or Windows ME, The New Class!

Temple University Recommends Against Vista Too

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome: A Message from Timothy O'Rourke,
Vice President of Computer and Information Services

Microsoft Vista coming soon
For the past few months, Computer Services has been preparing for the release of Vista. This preparation has included testing the system with University critical applications and Web sites, working with vendors, consulting with representatives from Microsoft, and researching and determining the most effective methods for delivering the product to the University community.

Our aggressive research and testing of Vista have identified a number of applications and sites that do not work and some that function less than optimally with Vista. Currently, we are waiting for vendors to release updated software that is compatible with Vista. As we receive software updates, we will continue our extensive and thorough testing to ensure that each package complies with our high standards and expectations.

It's time for some affirmative action on Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fire kdawson and replace him with an African American.

and toot, to you.

[twitter]

This is not all my work. The CIO bit is old and I may have submitted it separately but you can look at my journal to find that out for yourself. Someone else on the firehose pulled it up again and people seem to have liked it when someone else put it forward. The article, as I recall, does say some good things about Vista - like what a fucking disaster it is.

Oh and no, I don't really scour the internet to find bad things about Vista. I just go to Google News and type "Microsoft Vista" from time to time. Stories about what a mess SP1 are were right on top when I looked, so I submitted it and .... people seem to have liked it.

I think it's a valuable story. It's good to have this kind of experience from the field when real systems are on the line. Microsoft has been hyping it as a great improvement but that does not seem to be true. There are some people who have moved to Vista and those people should be aware of the problems SP1 has. SP1 might be free, but their time is not and they will probably want to turn off auto update to prevent these problems. There are even more people out there who thought they would wait for SP1 to make the move. For one reason or another they think that such a move is inevitable. More than anyone else, they need to know that Vista is not ready.

Vista critism from MS advocates

[edxwelch]

It's one thing slashdotters slagging off Vista but what about when its critised by MS advocates?
Codeproject is a stong MS technology site funded by MS themseleves. One of the founding members has voiced his critisim of the OS and said that he would rather use a Mac than Vista.

huh?

[Vexorian]

"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.

Does this mean they actually recommended or supported vista? yiuck...

Vista is it the new Microsoft Bob ?

[EEPROMS]

Im the company IT guy and recently one of our female staffers purchased a brand new dual core Compaq laptop to replace her ageing P4 model. What she found is two of the USB ports refuse to work and her wireless modem would not work even though they were all certified by Microsoft. She took it to an IT "Windows" specialist and and he was stumped and said the laptop must be faulty. Out of curiosity I had a look at the machine booted up both my XP live and Ubuntu Live CD and everything worked. The fix was simple just install XP and recommend she find a new Windows support shop. PS on a side note she said the new laptop running Vista was way slower than her old machine running XP.

Re:Liberal?

[BitterAndDrunk]

Hi.

Liberal had a meaning prior to politics - specifically - lacking moral restraint.

It's sort of funny that liberal is seen as a pejorative. Or at least a "high reaction" type of word. . .

I'm advising my clients to ignore Vista

[Master of Transhuman]

The consensus appears to be developing that Windows Vista is the latest version of Windows ME. I'm advising my clients to skip Vista and wait for Windows 7 - since by that time, you'll have no choice but to upgrade to it - or switch to Linux (which may still not be an option for some people by 2009 or whenever "7" comes out.) Just make sure you can access enough Windows XP licenses to cover new purchases of machines for the next couple of years. This PC World article shows you how.

Vista upgrade to SP1

[shel10]

Try turining off the automatic update feature, or efusing to install the automatically downloaded update file. Vista will bug you, and it won't stop. U of P should never have allowed VIsta into any of its computers, and should have provided students with an "upgrade" to XP Pro. They should be telling Microsoft to keep Win XP alive until a better alternative to Vista is available. One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to create an OS that treats all users as unknowing computer novices.

Re:Vista upgrade to SP1

[Shados]

You can extremely easily tell Vista to stop bogging you about particular updates, or to the extreme, you can (if you have a lot of computers to manage) push a tool over a domain that will prevent SP1 from installing. So big freagin deal.

You had me going until

[twitter]

you said I'd highly recommend that Vista users install SP1. That's commendably honest of you. You have to be high to recommend Vista and SP1 has not helped. If you have anything useful to add to the Vista failure log, I'd be happy to hear it but I can wait until you sober up. Enjoy the rest of your Easter weekend.

Re:You had me going until

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. We all know you haven't even used Vista. You just like trolling against anything MS. That's been proven time and again by your own words.

Re:You had me going until

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be high... I can wait until you sober up. Enjoy the rest of your Easter weekend.

You're a fucking prick, you know that? Morally and ethically bankrupt, not to mention socially incompetent. Now go make another sockpuppet.

This is great!

[kilodelta]

I have steered many people away from Vista simply because of system requirements. I also make it a policy of my business to recommend open source as opposed to Microsoft products.

Wait for the next patch of the patch?

[Danathar]

So I guess this means we should wait for SP1 of SP1 before applying the first SP1?

Wait and See

[BSDetector]

So now - "wait and see" means "stay away from". Interesting interpretation.

I'm not Tony but

[twitter]

when Tony says that he gave up Vista a few months ago and, "XP on the same hardware can saturate [his 2Gb network]" we can safely assume he has no hardware problems.

It's going to matter soon.

[Erris]

The news is that SP1 is a disaster that's slated to auto install itself. Thankfully, most people have avoided Vista and SP1 will seal the deal. People who have been patient enough to have used Vista for more than two days are going to give up M$ forever if SP1 screws their computer.

As for the slow news day sneer, put up or shut up. You write enough to complain about posting limits. Why don't you submit some more worthy news? Vista stories bore me too but not as much as the Opera stories that fill your journal.

Re:It's going to matter soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista stories bore me too That's hilarious considering you wrote this story Twitter. Or are you so dissociated that you are starting to believe all your sockpuppets are different people?

And to respond to Jugalator's slow news day remark, you link to a journal article of his from 2005 complaining about posting limits? Why do you even bother wasting your precious few posts per day on such nonsense?

Vista is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who knows anything about comps knows vista is a waste of time,money,resources...

I'm getting a kick out of these replies

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually work for one of the many IT departments at Upenn, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

Saying "don't install this the day it comes out" is officially not news, okay? We've got plenty of custom research and buisiness systems all over the university, and getting everything to work is a bitch. I'm sure ISC will recommend installing it later after they are done testing all their systems.

Slow news day I guess?

Re:Penn State is not the University of Pennsylvani

[insertwackynamehere]

I know, this bothered me too. I'm NYU anyway but I grew up in Philly and now UPenn's campus and its the mark of a foreigner to mix up Penn State and Upenn because UPenn is in Philly and is Ivy. Penn State, however, is a great school (even if these days "state" in a school name is looked down upon for some dumb reason). Tag !pennstate if it bothers you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Geeksquad Repairman

[fireheadca]

Perhaps this guy has some vested interest in suggesting not to upgrade.

Service packs (while should be installed with caution) usually fix things. Oh and this one does.. not great but vista is better.


If you're using vista - update it. Duh.

rc production

[ancientt]

It all depends on what you need to accomplish and what tools you have to accomplish it. We have MS 2005 Virtual server machines and a "Microsoft Shop" mandate so we're stuck with it. We're getting ready to migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2007 and the Exchange server is a virtual machine. (Take a deep breath, as abhorrent as the idea was to me, it made sense with the resources available at the time.)

I was asked how we should proceed and I took a look at available hardware, budgeting and requirements and we're going to be putting in Server 2008 with HyperV virtualized Exchange 2007. Hundreds of nagging doubts assail my nightmares about the project, but the fact is that I'm stuck with MS, need to move to Ex2007, need the mobility and resource redistribution of a virtual machine and I shudder at the thought of further crippling a resource hog like Ex2007 with the problems VS2005 will never overcome. HyperV is being better tested than most things MS releases and it won't be a downtime project.

In most companies the need is balanced against the options available and upgrades are done based on the value of the transition. Sometimes that means bleeding edge, sometimes (like where I worked last year) that means DOS and NT4 systems running on some machines and Vista on others.

Oh yeah, then there is AIX (despite the MS shop mandate) like a rock of stability, much as I loathe trying to do things with it, I've been impressed with how easy it is to keep up to date without worrying about stability.

Re:rc production

[Anonymous Coward]

We have MS 2005 Virtual server machines and a "Microsoft Shop" mandate so we're stuck with it. We're getting ready to migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2007 and the Exchange server is a virtual machine.

I never get that attitude. Why would anyone in their right mind want to tie all of their technology to a single company? My personal view is "best tool for the job".

Did anyone notice...

[kuzb]

The dozens and dozens of positive comments posted on the article's site? The comments seem to fall in to one of two categories. People who installed SP1 and had no issues, and people trying to convert the masses to Linux. It makes me wonder if there is any actual credibility to these claims. I think I have to call kdawsonfud on this one. The article seems to imply that SP1 could be detrimental, or dangerous to people, but it fails to actually outline what those things might actually be. Instead, they quote completely random and anonymous sources who haven't actually provided any real information or details about the problems they may or may not be having. If someone on some blog said "THE SKY IS FALLING" would you accept that on faith, or would you want a little more to go on?

Re:Did anyone notice...

[pandrijeczko]

The comments seem to fall in to one of two categories. People who installed SP1 and had no issues, and people trying to convert the masses to Linux.

Ahem! Please add a third category - "People who are happy with the functionality of XP and see no advantages Vista would bring them".

I admit I'm an 80%/20% Linux/XP user in that order. However, two weeks ago my niece gave me her XP laptop to fix because of countless malware and viruses. Three days later she got it back - no, I did give it back to her with Ubuntu, it had a nice clean XP rebuild on it with Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG Antivirus Free and other free/OSS applications that allow her to continue to use XP and to actually make her whole XP experience better for her. This is much the same as I've done for all Windows-using friends and relatives over the past 10 years or so when they need their PCs fixed.

Please do not assume everyone who uses Linux is a zealot - if someone comes and asks me about it, I'll happily tell them what they want to know or even help them install it. Otherwise they have as much right to choice about their computing experience as I do and I give a lot of my free time to building XP boxes that are as safe to use and virus proof as possible for those around me.

Your comments are therefore insulting, baseless and sound like those of a spoilt child.

Re:Did anyone notice...

[kuzb]

I don't believe I called anyone a zealot, but I will admit you're coming off like one. At no point did I suggest you, or anyone else run any particular operating system.

Your comments are insulting, baseless and you sound like someone who doesn't take the time to read anything. Like my comment for example.

The article names "people" by "handles" who complain about non-specific problems and provide no real details. My only point is that 1) a lot of people who commented on the article referred to here had no problems, and 2) The rest want to advocate other operating systems. Not that advocacy is bad or wrong, but where are all the horror stories from people who had uncorrectable problems? You're trying to tell me that with all the vast amounts of traffic from slashdot, nobody had an issue with vista that had some documented substance to it?

Slashdot mods, do us all a favour

[Toreo asesino]

...and stop posting twitter journals on the FP.

Twitter is a troll, Eris too. They both shamelessly bash Microsoft, and especially Vista at all costs, with lies or heavily distorted facts like a raving madman foaming at the mouth, blindly screaming murder.

They represent the absolute worst of FOSS people - complete fanatics motivated by pure hatred of Microsoft, and with zero professional intent.

They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.

Re:Slashdot mods, do us all a favour

[pandrijeczko]

They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.

OpenOffice, TheGimp, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Vim, Audacity, Wireshark - off the top of my head, just a few of the countless FOSS packages that run on Windows.

If you choose not to investigate FOSS applications for yourself, that's your problem - nobody else's.

Re:Slashdot mods, do us all a favour

[Toreo asesino]

You missed my point...everyone here knows there's plenty of very good FOSS projects out there, but idiots like twitter that promote FOSS by spreading pure FUD unashamedly do these projects (and the FOSS philosophy) more damage than good.

He reminds me in fact of the Christian preachers you get that try and convert you by shouting at you how you're going to hell for living in sin. Just about everyone's reaction to these people is "go preach in the traffic" with even more determination not to even try it.

Let me guess; you've never used it either

[Toreo asesino]

1. Fixed in SP1
2. Either driver error or fixed in SP1. The network/audio bug went into SP1 I know.
3. Bullshit. It says in the status bar whether it's plugged in. Sounds like something is seriously wrong with your machine if it start forgetting stuff.
4. BSOD. Will probablly be for driver reasons too, possibly hardware.
5. Look up SuperFetch. Did you want your RAM doing nothing?
6. No idea. If DNS was utterly broken do you think you'd be the first person we hear complaining? I see no evidence of this
7. Turn off indexing (you can specify only to index on AC); turn off Aero (3 clicks).
8. No idea.

In conclusion, I'd say your computer is fucked and you're blaming it on vista as it's a soft target. Get newer drivers, get better hardware.
In fairness though the first waves of drivers for Vista were utterly shoddy, so this is a common complaint for early adopters.

Re:Let me guess; you've never used it either

[Anonymous Coward]

I have got to respond to this one!

1. Fixed in SP1? The OP said that he'd been using it for a year with no problems. Sp1 hasn't been out a year.
2. Either driver error or fixed in SP1? Bullshit! Testing by others with good drivers shows minimal improvement with SP1 (Google it OR look at prvious posts on /.) Certainly nothing like being able to staurate a gigabit ethernet as XP could do.
3. No experience with this one.
4. BSOD. Will probablly be for driver reasons too, possibly hardware? He specifically states: "On known good hardware with 100% WHQL drivers." Who's at fault here? Microsoft passed on this driver. It is still their problem.
5. Look up SuperFetch. Did you want your RAM doing nothing? No, I want MY RAM doing MY apps, not maintaining a bloated OS!
6. If DNS was utterly broken do you think you'd be the first person we hear complaining?I see no evidence of this. Google FQDN, AD and Vista. This has been discussed on boards for months now. Vista is banned at my workplace for the same reason.
7. Turn off indexing (you can specify only to index on AC); turn off Aero (3 clicks). This does not cure disk thrashing - even on a Toshiba laptop with 2G of memory!
8. No idea. That's right - should have been stated for most of your replies!

I have similar experiences with most of the issues that previous poster mentioned. I suggest that:
Let me guess; you've never used it either

Re:Let me guess; you've never used it either

[BlackSnake112]

The wrong network card driver WHQL approved or not is still the wrong network card driver. Also did you check to see if the speed was correct for your network? I have been at places where either the computers nics were set to auto detect or the switches were set to auto detect but not both. If both were set on auto detect speed issues happened all day long. I didn't control the switches and hubs but that is the way it was. So finally got the network guys to set the speed on the switches and hubs and let the PCs use auto detect. Worked out better that way. They couldn't complain that we were using too much bandwidth that way.

In short check your drivers then check what your network thinks the speed is. maybe manually setting the speed on the PCs or hubs/switches would help. They make a 2GB network? I have seen 1GB never 2GB. Or is 1GB full duplex == 2GB?

Re:Liberal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"liberal" and "conservative" have well understood English meanings, which have nothing at all to do with American politics. The original poster was correctly criticising the use of the English words, not making a political comment.

Big fucking deal

[cliffski]

How about we have 22,487 other articles from all the major establishments that are very happy to toll out SP1 on release day?
Why not just call the site Slashdot - news for linux fanboys.
Face it, the vast majority of vista users are very happy. Sorry if that makes a few people fume, but its the truth. if you don't want to install vista, don't, but do something constructive with your lie rather than just whining at people who are happy with vista FFS.

Re:Big fucking deal

[pandrijeczko]

How about we have 22,487 other articles from all the major establishments that are very happy to toll out SP1 on release day?

Very few major establishments will have rolled out Vista as of yet. This was the same with Windows XP, no corporate starts rollouts of this type until after the first service pack. Additional the difference in hardware requirements between XP and Vista is much more that it was with 2000 and XP - therefore, since a lot of hardware upgrades will likely be involved, it's safe to assume rollout will probably be slower.

Why not just call the site Slashdot - news for linux fanboys.

You are the first person to mention Linux in this topic, as far as I can see. The creator of the article does not like Vista - yes, he could be a Linux fanboy but he could also be a satisfied XP user as well.

Face it, the vast majority of vista users are very happy.

If previous postings on Slashdot is anything to go by, I would say that it's about half-and-half, slightly in favour of those who are unhappy with it and/or are staying with XP as long as possible.

Sorry if that makes a few people fume, but its the truth. if you don't want to install vista, don't, but do something constructive with your lie rather than just whining at people who are happy with vista FFS.

A lot of people feel short-changed by Microsoft because they have had Vista forced upon them, rather than being given the option of choice. I myself tried to buy a Dell XPS laptop with XP on it just before Christmas but Dell would only sell it with Vista (even though the NVidia graphics card inside in only designed for DirectX 9). As it happened, I sourced a new one from an Ebay seller who sells off Dell's cancelled orders - it was brand new, better spec than I originally looked for but cost me £500 than from Dell directly, plus it had XP Professional on it. I got what I wanted at a better price than expected, Dell lost a sale for being unable to provide what a customer requested - I'm certainly not fuming about it.

I think you will find that a lot of people just accept Vista as being what came with their new PC rather than having a love of it - if anything, as a person who fixes a lot of PCs for friends and relatives, the handful that do run Vista accept it but are not particularly enthused by it.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely like it, others who say they like it but don't really and don't want to admit it, and some who don't. But the facts are that even I've noticed that the enthusiasm there was for XP at the time of SP1 was much more than it is for Vista SP1 at the moment.

And I'd also be happier if you didn't automatically bring Linux into this argument just because you yourself are frustrated - people should use Linux purely because it fills some requirements they need from an OS or because they are genuinely interested in seeing what it can do and learning something about it.

People that use it as a political weapon because they don't like Microsoft or because they want to batter someone else over the head with it for not liking Microsoft are fools.

Re:Big fucking deal

[cliffski]

"If previous postings on Slashdot is anything to go by"

No. They are not. that is my point.

Re:Big fucking deal

[kuzb]

Very few major establishments will have rolled out Vista as of yet.

How do you know this? Do you carry a crystal ball around that tells you who rolled what out?

If previous postings on Slashdot is anything to go by, I would say that it's about half-and-half, slightly in favour of those who are unhappy with it and/or are staying with XP as long as possible.

Slashdot is not a good metric for anything other than mob mentality, which is at it's very best, predictable. People swoon over the mac articles, cheer at the linux articles, and spit on the microsoft ones. This is the way it is here. It might not always be right, but what isÉ

And I'd also be happier if you didn't automatically bring Linux into this argument

Thankfully, your happiness is the least of our worries here.

Re:Liberal?

[BrentH]

Prior to politics? Like, never?

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more because controversial statements mean page hits, means ad revenue. They gladly use your vapid, ill supported rantings because it sells; just like tabloids sell.

University of MO

[Anonymous Coward]

U of MO IT still recommends all staff and faculty stay on IE 6 since a lot of apps used depend on it. No upgrades anytime in the near future. What's scary - suppossedly the U has a contract has a contract with MS....

New software generally slower.

[Junta]

It's a matter of tradeoffs generally. Take even a modern Linux distribution, with full default desktop, and try to run it on a system from 1998 (approximate 200 mhz, 32 MB of ram). I'd wager the live desktop that Ubuntu uses for install wouldn't even work. Sure, you can use alternate install and select packages enough so you just have blackbox and basic apps, but the overall experience won't be appreciably better than linux distributions of 10 years ago. I remember back in 1999-2000 the enlightenment people doing efm with some of the 'neat' effects that recommended at least a PII-400 or so, and people were up in arms. Now effects of those class are commonplace. In any event, as hardware advances, software gets to try things that they couldn't do before. Full-text search becomes more ubiquitous as disk space and io capacity allow for storing and reasonable maintenance of an index, as memory increases, applications use more to be more responsive live, as the number of applications a general system can run increases, so does typical usage and process schedulers change to accomodate that, the overhead of Virtualization is now considered reasonable, and the list goes on.

My problem with Vista is it seems to have little actual substance to justify the increase. MS jumped the shark as of Windows 2000. 2000 was followed by ME, and then XP. XP wasn't too horribly bad ultimately, but to this day I don't see the justification of it as a platform over 2000 other than the artificial support/maintenance drop of 2000. It feels like a forced update from MS. It wasn't significantly different under the covers, it pretty much acted like Win2000 with a goofy default theme. Now comes Vista, with mind-numbingly bad behavior with little payoff. The whole networking/audio interaction is a ludicrous hack, and shouldn't be remotely necessary on any decent kernel with sane scheduling. They moved 'direct'sound to userspace and suddenly this occurs. The file copy, despite all the apologists pointing to a MS guy explaining *why* file copies were so bad, is a horrible thing to have to explain away. Sure, XP fibbed a bit and that should be corrected (never should have been that way in the first place), but MS's pursuit of a 'fix' was so convoluted that it bit them in the ass. They say 'file copying is harder than you think', but a lot of the difficulty from that article seemed self-imposed.

I focus on those two points because it indicates how sloppy MS's approach to the core bits of the OS is, while they try to justify the value through a new theme and shiny, useless visual effects (Apple's expose is useful, and compiz under linux provides a number of useful mechanisms that take advantage of the power of windows as textures, Vista on the other hand...).

Re:I'm running vista and I'm happy

[DonDiego256]

Windows Vista Home Premium on an HP dv2617s laptop with Centrino 1.5 Ghz dual-core, 2 GB memory, Intel X3100 graphics. I was skeptical at first, too, but Vista works great. I needed a machine for internet browsing and school-work (college), and this has performed very well (my desktop, for comparison, runs Windows XP MEdia Center). I also get about 4 -5 hours on a battery charge, and idling, Vista uses about 600 - 700 MB of memory. If Vista doesn't work for you, don't buy it. That's what free enterprise is all about. There many for whom it works just fine!

When Leoptards Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had adopted a "wait and see" approach to Leoptard. Would have saved me from having to wipe my Mac.

The real irony of it was I actually had to PAY for Leoptard, whereas Microsoft's service packs are always free. At this point, I'm wishing I had just purchased another Dell.

what shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Twitter quit posting on Slashdot, you would have no life. All you do is troll him with your obnoxious bullshit. I've never seen anyone more obsessed.

Re:what shit.

[Macthorpe]

On the contrary, Twitter! Seeing as debunking your shit takes me about 5 minutes a day, it leaves me plenty of time for other pursuits.

SP1 aint the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the fact that people are using vista. Thats what he should really be recomending people not to use.