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University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1
At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.
Isn't that the standard advice for any major upgrade on any operating system ever?...
I have been a die-hard Microsoft user since MS-DOS on my ancient Heathkit XT clone. I currently use XP Pro and XP Media Center. I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system. I still, by habit, use command lines in a DOS window to do things that Windows can do via the GUI. I guess I'm showing my age...
This experience comes at a cost, namely supporting machines for my family and friends. Never mind what the media and professionals say about Vista, but when my friends and family BEG me to remove Vista and replace it with XP, you know something is bad wrong with this operating system.
These days, if someone is buying a new machine, and all they do is email, browsing, pictures and the like, I will always recommend a Mac. I don't have to support the damn thing - it just works. If they're intent on a PC or need one for certain software, I send them to the Dell Outlet where you can still get a fantastic Core 2 Duo Optiplex with a 3-year warranty and XP for a few hundred bucks.
If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac. Times change. Microsoft fucked up. I never thought I'd be advocating Macs, ever.
The 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!
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.
Weren't we supposed to "wait and see" UNTIL SP1 came out?
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.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
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.