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Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems

Posted by samzenpus on from the who's-to-blame dept.

notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft's 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista's early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)."

14 of 594 comments (clear)

  1. The RAM error by yelvington · · Score: 5, Informative

    TFA misses a major misstep. Microsoft allowed Vista to be shipped on hardware that just wasn't up to the task. Vista is unusable with less than a gig of memory, but chain stores were flooded with laptops equipped with "only" 512MB. This gave new users a terrible experience. "First boot" of a new laptop took half an hour. No application, not even Solitaire, would run without freezing.

    Two of my family members had Vista laptops ... for a few hours, anyway, until I installed Ubuntu. Performance problems all went away after that.

  2. Top of the line? by Ralish · · Score: 3, Informative

    The systems they used in the Mojave advertisements were HP Pavilion DV 2000 machines with 2GB of RAM.

    http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/07/31/windows-mojave-advertisements-start-to-appear-in-the-wild

    Not really top of the line...

    1. Re:Top of the line? by AndyCR · · Score: 5, Informative

      Perhaps not "top of the line", but they are certainly more powerful than the average $500 laptop sold at CompUSA - and let's face it, when faced with a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop people will buy the $500 one. If it says it runs Vista, it should run it well - it may not be an excellent machine, but an operating system shouldn't be the most demanding thing people use. Said $500 laptop probably contains 1GB of ram if you're lucky.

      I speak from experience, as someone who owns a DV9000. I ordered it with 1GB of ram to max out the CPU specs, knowing I would upgrade the ram later. Vista ran very very slowly. I upped it to 1.5GB and it runs just fine. Ram makes all the difference with Vista, even though it shouldn't. Say all you want about all the ram usage being pre-caching - if it were just pre-caching, it wouldn't have been slow with twice the ram it "needs", and it wouldn't have sped up dramatically just by adding half a gig more space used only for precaching. If that's their idea of speeding up applicaiton loading with pre-caching, I'd rather go back to the XP way of things.

      The "Mojave Experiment" method is simple: get a person who says Vista is slow (because it is, on their machine), sit them in front of a computer with twice the ram theirs has, and get them to do a recorded double-take at how fast said machine is running Vista. Then they go home filled with excitement ready to prove themselves wrong on how slow Vista is and realize their copy of Vista isn't as fast as the Vista they used and wonder what the heck the testers did (remember, these are the kinds of people who read "Word for Dummies" - any person with a clue about technology would be filtered out in a screening process or have his response never aired).

      I say all this as someone who uses Windows for daily development without much issue. I don't hate Windows. I do, however, hate dishonesty, whether express or implied, as the lawyers would say.

      --
      If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
  3. Appe Doesn't Annoy Its Customers? by Unoti · · Score: 5, Informative

    Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)

    AT&T. Locked iPhones. Can't do anything not officially blessed with your iPhone unless you unlock it. Can't register your iPhone with anyone other than AT&T. iTunes is loaded with DRM, and QuickTime is pretty annoying... I do love Apple, but seriously, they constantly flirt with annoying their customers far more than most companies.

    1. Re:Appe Doesn't Annoy Its Customers? by Tim+C · · Score: 5, Informative

      iTunes is loaded with DRM

      On Windows at least, it also installs:

      1) an auto-start AppleMobileDeviceService service
      2) an auto-start iPodService service
      3) an auto-start iTunesHelper application
      4) Bonjour as an auto-start service
      5) MobileMe

      Additionally, it defaults to installing the AppleUpdate service, which - when it finds updates - defaults to installing Safari alongside the updates.

      Just to listen to music?

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
  4. Re:Don't you dare blame the GPU/Printer companies! by figleaf · · Score: 4, Informative

    hardly gave them any time

    Manufacturers had more than full year before the release date.
    But some manufacturers (Creative comes to mind) didn't ship proper Vista drivers for an additional eight months after Vista Business Final was released.
     

  5. Re:First Godwin! by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not well known, but the officers uniforms were actually designed by Hugo Boss, that's why they look sharp.

  6. Re:So...... by JebusIsLord · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm gonna agree, with the additional statement that Vista is wonderful AFTER I upgrade my RAM from 2GB to 4GB. Vista Ultimate (x64) is a pretty decent upgrade from XP, and I wouldn't consider going back.

    (disclaimer: I also have a macbook and a linux server. All have their drawbacks, all have their strengths. I'm just comparing Vista to XP here.)

    --
    Jeremy
  7. Re:They're playing the vista commerical now.. by Firehed · · Score: 3, Informative

    As someone who primarily works off of a Mac Pro with 10GB of RAM, I'll call BS on that one. With the exception of the completely broken nVidia drivers, Vista runs fine performance-wise on my old faithful desktop with about a fifth of the specs (now those drivers forced the system in question to go back to XP, but they were causing crashes, not slowdowns).

    I'll agree that the ads suck (and I can't imagine why Hulu thinks that I'd switch from OS X to Windows... it just doesn't happen), but not because they're giving the people an unfair representation of Vista.

    The UAC needs improvement; other than that and the above-mentioned driver issue, I'd run it on all of my vaguely-current non-Apple hardware.

    --
    How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  8. Re:So...... by bernywork · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am not usually one for hacking into MS, I have worked with a number of businesses that have been quite successful using their software. On this occasion though, I have to call bullshit. The fact of the matter remains that a number of these drivers did pass WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) testing. The fact that MS *SIGNED* the steaming brown stuff de-values the program considerably.

    Going back to NT4 and previous versions, there was MAJOR issues with quality of drivers, I know certain Xircom cards which would only work with very specific driver configurations as we found out places where the driver was hard coded to use specific ports and IRQs. This all changed with Windows 2000 and signed drivers.

    Microsoft should have been harder in their WHQL driver certification for Vista. I know Microsoft only has a finite amount of resources, but they should have known that people were having trouble getting drivers signed and my outsider (un-informed) view is that they should have made more of an effort to work with the OEMs for drivers to work on day 1.

    --
    Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
  9. Re:They DO have some control... by BronsCon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Read the whole post, please.

    I clearly state that I used the included Anytime Upgrade DVD to perform a full, clean install. No OEM disc, I can use that same disc to reinstall Vista Ultimate on my desktop, by simply entering the correct license key.

    Yes, I've tried it. Yes, it worked.

    Another case of HUAS.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  10. Re:So...... by BronsCon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I... just... don't know where to begin...

    Microsoft did, in fact, dump their entire driver model and replace it with something better, with support for full user-mode drivers for certain classes of devices (such as printers, eh?). Hardware vendors responded by wrapping their existing drivers in a compatibility layer.

    The same thing could happen on a Mac.

    I will admit that Apple has stricter certification standards. This is a Good Thing(TM).

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  11. Re:First Godwin! by frosty_tsm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because I wanted to be certain, I looked on Wikipedia.

    Specifically, it says the SS uniforms and the Hitler Youth uniforms.

  12. Re:So...... by Yunzil · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except this is mostly untrue untrue for Windows and occasionally untrue for Linux.

    There's been very few times on Windows when I couldn't get to the taskmasker to kill something, and there have been times on Linux where I had to power cycle the machine because some combination of make or g++ put it into a catatonic state.

    And why the hell were you modded to +5?