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Microsoft Extends XP To May 2009 For OEMs
beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."
unbelievable.
it would take a butt the size of mount everest for any company to take the plunge and trust anything from microsoft again, after the stunt they pulled with vista.
and what happens to the poor sods who DID trust microsoft and upgraded their entire office to vista, again ?
Read radical news here
Probably too late for me. I kept a Windows box to work from home but now that I've been using a spare Linux machine am deciding I can do without. Worst case I could create a dual boot and move on from all future Microsoft products.
I guess I'm tired of the hardware rat race and given the recent issue with DRM on Spore, it would seem I will stop looking at mega-commercial games and start checking out independent shops instead.
Is anyone surprised by this? Many customers told them time after time that they didn't want vista, and that they would rather use XP. Now I'm not a fan of M$, but I can say that XP Pro SP3 is absolutly amazing and stable I really really don't feel the need to upgrade to vista when I've finally got XP tuned so well that I hardly have to do any maintenance on it.
It's not uncommon for companies to skip OS's , so this works out great for our 40,000 users. So we can go from XP sp3 direct to Win7 , but we will probably wait for SP1 of Win7.
So Microsoft will just release Windows 7 and get away with forcing the average consumer to purchase new computers with Vista on it?
Unfortunately, yes, people will buy it, especially businesses which have held off the Vista upgrade cycle. That is why XP is still around. Just think what would happen if MS just dumped XP and FORCE-FED Vista on Business. Lots of work (evaluation for business usage) would go into alternatives, something MS does not want to see happen.
Conservative, mod down for violating
What do they care. Wonderful thing about still being a virtual desktop monopoly. Am I wrong?
Given that Server 2008 SP1 is the Server Version of Vista SP1 & MS will be releasing Server 2008 R2 in correspondence with Windows 7, isn't it fair to say that Windows 7 is essentially Vista R2?
Granted, some of the painful parts of Vista are being removed & some enhancements made, but the hardware requirements haven't gone down & it's still based on the same core code.
I guess I'll really care when they have a new OS that will run on an Atom based netbook.
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
I'm not old enough to remember all the promises of '95/'98, etc (More like I didn't care). But I'm already seeing the same XP/Vista/7 cycle start over..
Microsoft is setting themselves up for another round of the same old shit. Vista had favorable reviews from pre-releases and leaked alphas.... and then features started to drop to meet the continually moving release date.
Microsoft is going to have to sever all backwards compatibility at some point if they want a fresh start. Microsoft BOUGHT an Emulator/Virtualizer (Virtual PC), how hard would it be to make a seamless sandboxed XP install?
Not to sound to fanboyish, but Apple has done this TWICE in the last 10 years. First OS 9 -> OS X. Sandboxed everything in Classic. Not everything worked perfect, but it bridged the gap. Then again with the release on Intel If you already had your Apps in XCode all it took was 1 checkmark in a config. That's it. Complete new binary for a new architecture. And if that didn't work you still had Rosetta, which like classic, wasn't perfect but it works. On my laptop I seamlessly run PPC code on an Intel machine with less problems than most people have had with just trying to run Vista.
Not just GUI apps either. I can compile something like coreutils on a PPC machine and run it on an Intel machine, not ideal but it works.
Microsoft is supposedly the 800# gorilla in the corner but it can't figure out how to cut all ties to the past and move on.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest.
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
Similes are like metaphors
more like windows vista²
when i say WHOOOHOOOO! :D
I've been intentionally buying "XP downgrade" systems from lenovo to avoid vista, and I'm glad we'll have it for another 6 months!
Yay! :)
If they use the same security prompts/process as Vista then Windows 7 will be another one to skip. I have found it inconsistent and incomplete.
* If your account is a local admin then should you be prompted to do some things? Probably, but not more than once. I swear there is a minimum of two prompts by default.
* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?
* If the system is going to prompt me then make sure I will see it. Sometimes the security prompts pop-under. If I go off to another program while waiting for something to finish only to later find the unanswered prompt still waiting for my response.
* If a program requires admin access or "Run as admin" then clearly give the user direction to do so. Try pathping for instance and you get "0 No resources". Launch cmd "as admin" and it works fine.
The Vista security model is horrible IMHO. We are just getting started with Windows 2008 and it looks like it is going to be more of the same. If I am logged in as admin on a server I sure hope I don't get the same incomplete and inconsistent experience. If so, Windows 2008 will be the Server OS to skip from MS. (I'm sure some slashdotters will say they should all be skipped. :-) )
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
not already in use, you made my day by talking the inconvenient truth. Thank you. :)
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability. For example, what the hell was the justification for renaming "Add / Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features"? I've been a Windows user for over 15 years... there is no reason in hell I should spend 30 seconds scanning the Control Panel for a single icon.
This may sound like a petty rant, but I run across issues like this *all* the time! The mass storage driver is also flaky for my motherboard (I can't use any mass storage devices!) but that's more Asus's fault than MS.
All in all, Vista isn't terrible, and definitely usable but suffers from some very poor design decisions.
Here's the problem: Microsoft has used illegal tactics to maintain its monopoly gained from unethical practices.
Microsoft's monopoly is so entrenched, that the proto-typical "Sun Oil" case can't even compare.
In a real competitive environment, customers would have long ago abandoned Microsoft. The best analogy is WordStar vs WordPerfect. WordStar was first, but WordPerfect was better. Naturally WordStar lost and is now, no more.
Microsoft is so entrenched, and so anti-standards, that your data and business operations are held hostage. You can't escape the Widows lock-in without paying a lot of money and abandoning some of your core applications.
Furthermore, the monopoly level of Microsoft means that it is unrealistic for ISVs to develop for other platforms because Windows represents 80+% of the market and who can justify an the cost of development unless you can really identify a market. Virtually every notebook and P.C. sold at the consumer and "system" level has Windows installed.
In a real competitive environment, Windows ME, Microsoft BOB, Microsoft Dogs, or Vista would have killed any other company and we would be glad to see them go. But no, it is so bad that users CAN'T escape windows, so they are settling for an 8 year old operating system instead of modern alternatives.
If there was ever a time where clear proof existed that Microsoft needs to be broken up, this is it. Its insane.
I would disagree with you. I dual-boot Ubuntu 8.10 and Vista Ultimate 64bit at home, and I don't think either has an edge when it comes to stability. It's really hard to make that judgment, since in the three months or so I've had them, neither has crashed even once.
For me, Vista has certainly been more stable than WindowsXP, though. It's interesting though, that Ubuntu 8.10 was just as much of a stability improvement, compared to previous versions of Ubuntu.
I think Vista has a really bad rap, which may or may not be justified, and is probably largely reliant on the performance of the pre-SP1 32-bit version, which (even in my experience) was pretty atrocious.
But at the moment, Vista works just fine for me... and it's certainly worth the $66 I paid for the student version, which I consider a fair price. I certainly don't think I am somehow entitled to receiving good software for free (which is why I donate to various OSS projects, including Ubuntu).
if Windows 7 tanks, they can always ask for bailout money like all the other companies that make crappy products.
I have UAC and sidebar disabled in Vista, classic 9x start menu... and I can't understand what everyone's problem with it is.
I installed over 3000 copies of vista at a local OEM over my summer break. You wouldn't believe the shit I've seen. Integrated ethernet cards only being recognized every other boot, 15 minute startups, reboots required for every other damn driver install, random "could not connect to authentication server"s...
Yeah, I'ved used vista...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Lets see, 8 years to devolop win vista and only 2 years to develop win 7 Yea this will be good. I will stick to my custom built min install of Debian
Oh yeah, it's fine. As long as your usage pattern doesn't involve anything intricate like copying files...
I have both Ubuntu and Vista and I prefer dual booting into Vista... I actually like the apps more on Ubuntu (kdevelop/bash), but, Vista's start bar, control panel, and user interface just nails it for me. Makes ubuntu feel old fashioned.
Unix people can complain about Vista as much as the want, but the fact is, they screwed up as bad as MS did. Microsoft doesn't hand out opportunities to attack its desktop and certainly with some of the bad Vista buzz, they did. But, the linux community blew it.
Gnome is moving at a glacial pace, and KDE is in no man's land. It's almost like, had KDE either finished 4 or just polished 3.x, or Gnome just moved more quickly, either could have had a real Vista killer, but, both missed.
This is my sig.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest. Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
I've USED Vista and I've supported Vista. It has nasty security holes, upgrades from apps like anti-virus programs can easily make it unbootable (McAffee I'm looking at you), and it requires at least twice the hardware requirements of XP. Those are the least of the problems it has.
I am still recommending people stick with XP if they have it or buying a Mac if they are buying a new system.
You are the exception and not the rule. For most people Vista just doesn't work.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
It seems that many people really think there wasn't much recourse for Microsoft putting out such a terrible product in it's initial release of Vista.... This very much so isn't the case.
If we refer to the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems you can see how much of the market has started to diversify since Vista came out. I think it would be safe to assume that the market share of Vista is somewhat inflated due to the fact that Microsoft made it very difficult to get anything but Vista on a regular consumer machine for quite some time, and now most major builders charge a fee ($150 at some!) to "downgrade" Vista to XP.
Since Q1 of 2007, Microsoft has seen both of their largest competitors in the desktop operating system market (Apple & Linux) double their penetration. Will this possibly drive them to bring us a better product? On a side note, Microsoft Server 2008 as a workstation is definitely worth taking a look at. You can download and use it free for 60 days, and a quick look at http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ will give you some pointers on setting it up. There are definitely some things lacking, but it might give you hope that M$ will do something right in their next major release.
Yes, because people bought windows 2000 when they did not sort out the problems with windows ME.
W2K turned out to be their Best OS ever. (Yes even now compared to XP it's still better.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, sometimes you need to make changes to the UI that would be more friendly to new users, even if it might confuse old users for a little bit. Yeah, the Programs and Features was a pain in the ass, but after the first couple of times, I don't even think about it (and I still use XP at work).
You'd think that after install 3/3000 you would have fixed an install for that particular configuration.
But more likely you're full of shit.
I have been using vista since shortly before it was released and I am not very happy about it. I am one of few that think that UAC is a good idea, but it is a bad implementation. I am tired of waiting for vista when it goes grey, and I do not think it is better than XP. It is not anything that you want to pay a lot of money for, when you already have XP. From what I hear Windows 7 is not going to be any better. All our sysadmins has moved to Linux, our servers are moving to Linux, and when our users are ready, they will go to Linux as well. ;)
I have to second this. My PC at home is running Fedora 10, Vista, XP and OS X (ssh...don't tell anyone)
I've long used Vista as my day to day OS and still actually like using it. Fedora is taking over atm but still has issues that I am struggling to work around (4 monitor support for one).
XP really does feel like a downgrade from Vista and productivity is hit, it is for me anyway. I actually use XP to segregate my "games" environment away from my work environment. having a Performance edition of XP that uses ~70MB RAM on start helps with games as well.
I can forgive OS X for being a little unstable as it is a heavily hacked and poked install nowadays. But I havn't yet found a reason to favor it over Fedora or Vista.
All in all I am happy with Vista and don't really see what peoples problem with it is.
**ducks before the rocks come 'a flying**
Yes, and I've suffered from regular crashes on software (MATLAB and others) that works just fine in Windows XP - default installation and configurations. This sort of thing is pretty darn important for my job, so it's a deal-breaker. These aren't special Vista builds, either, just stuff that should work that simply doesn't.
Oh, and I use XP+OpenSUSE+Gentoo at home, and XP at work, and my Vista trials had by far the worst stability of them all for my applications.
So let me ask you - what's wrong with wanting something that WORKS and doesn't give me constant crashes and grief? I understand the OP complained in generalities about other people, but I just want my stuff to work. Since you're so enamored by Vista and its stability, give me your magic fixes.
At my office we have Vista, XP, OS X, and Linux. Anyone can use whatever OS they prefer, but all are needed for testing. All but one person uses OS X on their desktop. One uses Linux. No one uses Vista because no one likes it.
The desktops we have set up for testing with Vista are nothing but trouble from the second you sit down. Many things need to be constantly installed to get anything done; things that come native with OS X and Linux. Distracting windows and notifications pop up constantly requiring extra clicks. Debugging JavaScript is a breeze in Firefox but a nightmare with IE7. I could go on...
Your experience may be positive. But don't assume that everyone who complains about Vista is lying.
Developers: We can use your help.
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
This is my sig.
Yes, I use Vista. It came pre-installed on my laptop.
I don't like it. The interface has changed in annoying ways, like that program browser thing built into the start menu popup? Horrible! What the HELL were they thinking?
UAC is a TOTAL pain in the arse. Apparently some imaginary sysadmin is denying me the rights to do anything useful or have things I want run at startup. It helpfully (possibly even proudly) announces that it's stopped my ext2 driver from running due to a system policy. If anyone can find where the HELL you edit said policy...
And that's not to mention the pain of the user-specific virtual "program files" store. Intense, intense suckage.
With UAC turned off, it behaves ok, but, what exactly is the benefit of moving to Vista from XP? DX10? Bloat? Teh Shiny?
I use debian as my primary OS, don't talk me about your stability.... :)
Thank you! I always seem to be the person saying this. Vista is a pretty good OS. Sure, it has it's flaws. I hate the security prompts, but to be honest, after the initial setup where I install all my programs, I barely see anything now. I've been running Vista since Beta 2, and it's been pretty smooth since RC1. I installed the retail version, and it's the first time where I've had an OS on my machine that lasted almost 2 years without being formatted.
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
Win ME is not nearly half as disastrous as most people will tell you, provided that you configure it correctly. Most of the out-of-the-box default settings glitchy at best and system crashing at worst, though going menu by menu and rearranging everything manually will fix most of its glaring problems (notably the RAM management and ballooning system restore folder). I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly. When I mention how it will leap through hoops of fire if I ask it nicely, however, people always seem to recoil in fear and reach for their bible and holy water...
It seems to me that we are actually quite fond of remembering Windows ME here on Slashdot.
What are the unsorted problems with Vista?
I mean, it's not the greatest OS in the world, but it's not horrendous. Yeah, there was the crap with the 'Vista ready' BS when it came out, but at this point, most new PCs should have no problem running it with Aero.
There were tons of driver issues when it came out too (Just like when Win 2k was new, god that was a nightmare), but again, it's been a few years and the driver support seams pretty top notch at this point.
The UAV system is annoying, but easily disabled. Hopefully they will tweak it to run more like Ubuntu where I can log in as a power user with out admin rights, but perform admin tasks by providing admin credentials when attempting the task.
Other than that, I'm pleased with the system. It's a tad more bloated than my XP build, but the hardware is a bit more beefy, so the extra memory and clock cycles are negligible and it can perform all of the tasks I normally do faster than my older PC with XP.
If Windows 7 makes iterative improvements on Vista the way 98 did to 95, then I'm all for it. I'd shell out $90 for an upgrade version next time I build a PC.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though? Or will you have to buy the full retail for 7, in which case they've as good as sold you a vista upgrade (plus a windows 7 upgrade) even though you didn't want anything to do with vista?
I personally find it hilarious that they keep extending xp as the consumer mass keeps threatening to make a "true" upgrade to another os...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The justification? simple.
To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows. The test users here we switched to Vista were non productive for 1 week. WORSE than the linux trials we did last year, and they required more training.
that is the ONLY reason they pull that crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can actually run stuff from the search bar, and at the same time it will search ahead for what you are typing...actually my favorite feature in Vista and something I actually miss when in XP.
On my Vista box at home I don't even go into Programs anymore, just start typing Far and it brings up Far Cry, Far Cry 2 etc...good stuff.
The change from Vista to 7 is more like 2000 to XP. There is very little being changed under the hood. For example (assuming version numbers still mean anything at MS) the kernel is going from 6.0 to 6.1. 2000 was kernel 5.0 and XP was 5.1. XP 64 and 2003 are kernel version 5.2.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I deny being Bill Gates.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, I know I do. For games only. And everytime it boots, especially after a software update, I am thankful to the chair-throwing dieties that it works again, and I can release some stress with a game as opposed to troubleshoot it.
My Vista is extremely customized. I have configured it just the way I want it, and I've trimmed it down ruthlessly. For what I need it (games), it works, and it's actually quite decent. Boots quickly too.
But the defaults that Vista comes with, which are the settings that 80+% of computer users will stick to, are horrible. It's dog slow. It's running stuff in the background that hammers the hard drive for minutes on every boot*. I don't even know what that is. In terms of usability, the defaults are fairly bad as well, in my opinion of one who has used extensively mostly everything other than MacOS.
Say what you will of Ubuntu, but it comes with sane defaults. Ones that I like with no or minimal change. I have yet to see another operating system that can say the same. That's why people who actually try it with an open mind** love it instantly.
Vista? Everyone around me hates it. They use it daily, some for days and others for a year or two, but they universally run back to XP eventually. But those people don't know anything else exists, and when I tell them, most are too scared to even consider switching for a split second.
* It's not indexing, because indexing was disabled in every way possible, and there were really no documents to index. It's gone now that I trimmed down the whole system big time, but I never found out what it was.
** As opposed to: "OMGOMG that's so not Windows. Therefore it must be shit."
Are are you the exception? A grand generalizer anyways.
that Microsoft will implement DRM features and such in Windows 7? To prevent piracy and whatnot?
Now, what Microsoft needs to do is:
(1) Offer free DOWNGRADES for anyone with a Vista license.
(2) Offer free UPGRADES to Windows Seven for anyone who buys a machine loaded with Vista.
Today I shall be installing a replacement IDE hard drive in a 6 year old system, a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, which I'd much rather upgrade but won't simply because anything I bought today would be running Vista.
Never underestimate the stupidly of a consumer or the marketing people who explot that stupidity.
They all surf as owner/administrator in XP, This makes them dependent on security software because that's the default right?
If your true to form Slashdotter you know better right? You surgf a limited user account right?
Well many consumers don't, and become the next victim of security issues .
Look at what happen with IE
Microsoft got all the Blame by the media .
That's plain wrong!
Websites had to FIRST let themselves be hackerd first BEFORE IE can get you infected and
the media never mentions that .
It's thousands of security inept webmasters who first let the hacker in to that company or private sites that allowed IE to potentially cause our problem .
Those who let their sits get hacked deserve just as much blame If not more. and I don't like Microsoft,but fair is fair and blaming them alone isn't fair at all.
Not on slashdot pal, it's in the Hall of Shame along with MS Bob forever.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Oh the booting thing pissed me off too.
Won't boot from a partition that's not aligned exactly to some arbitrary point it decides on. Just great.
I'm used to having OSs (XP, linux) that I can shuffle around my hard disk using gparted as and when I feel like I want to change things. Vista wouldn't boot after I moved its partition. WTF?
I've used Vista. The first time I used Vista, it was on a laptop and I had to set the wireless up for our house.
I went in the way I do it in XP, and set up Wireless SSID, encryption etc for the WAP and then .... nothing.
I spent almost three hours fiddling, deleting, adding, changing all the various options shown to me in the setup ... NOTHING
Some nearly three hours later, I fumbled upon something else that resembled wireless setup, and I found an whole OTHER wireless setup thing. And in one minute, I had wireless functioning.
My question is, why is the former even an option, if it doesn't work. WHY would you have a place that has all the things to make Wireless work, only to .... you know ... be utterly useless??!!!???!!!
Vista may work, and be "stable" and such, but it sucks a big one IMHO simply because it changed things it didn't need to change, legacy stuff is still around even if it doesn't work (see above), and well "Cancel or Allow".
And from what I've seen Windows 7 is actually Vista SP2. Hopefully it will have features that function when you try to use them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
...will be the name. By not being called "Vista", users won't associate it with all the horror stories they've heard about Vista, so they'll be willing to give it a chance.
It will have a handful of minor improvements, but otherwise I expect it to be mostly identical. Vista's biggest problem is third-party compatibility, which should mostly be worked out by the time Windows 7 ships.
Personally, I hate Vista a lot less than I hate XP. Most people can't understand how I would say that, but that's because they actually like XP. Blech.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I really like the benefits of Linux, and I think that given a little more time to mature, it could really take off with less-technical users. I wouldn't mind Windows 7 sucking just to give Linux a bit more of an incubation period.
(And, given the things MS has pulled in the past, I still think it's got a big karma deficit to work off. I'm still overwhelmed with a sense of schadenfreude against MS.)
The rationale is that there are chunks of Windows (such as every individual thing Windows Update has downloaded) in that list too. Those are features of Windows, not standalone programs, hence the name.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I could go on but for your sanity and mine I will not.
It goes to show, you can even make a turd smell like a rose with enough time and effort tweaking it.
Or more likely it was 3000 installs, but about 100 different configurations. We specialized in building and configuring machines for local school districts.
That's irrelevant though, my point is, we were CLONING good installs onto identical hardware and were experiencing all manner of rarely reproducible errors.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
W2K turned out to be their Best OS ever. (Yes even now compared to XP it's still better.)
Not what I've found. It's basically a tradeoff. XP sucks up more resources than 2k, but runs more stable. Choose your poison.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
As usual, after Vista's debacle, Microsoft communicates about their next generation OS, trying to keep the users focused on their software, to prevent them for looking for competition.
What has changed recently is that the economy crisis will force most of the companies to reduce their cost.
This will be done in two phases:
- the first one is reducing the number of employees.
- the second phase will be about reducing the cost of software.
Microsoft is as always very expensive, even though the cost of their development has been largely returned.
I think they will need to reduce the price of their software, or the next years will be difficult for them, especially when competing with free software.
All in all, Vista isn't terrible, and definitely usable but suffers from some very poor design decisions.
A couple remarks about this...
First, I do agree that Vista changed a lot of stuff (such as the renaming of things that people were familiar with). However, this does not signify bad usability design decisions, per se. It's just a change that you are not familiar with.
Secondly, many of the usability changes in Vista are excellent. For example, the ability to search your Start menu, rather than having to use the mouse and look around for a program you want to launch is probably the best change from a usability perspective. The ability to "click" through folders in the address bar is also a very nice upgrade to usability (although, I will admit that it took me a little bit to become used to it, given the change from XP).
Whether or not some of these changes were needed or not, I don't know. I wasn't part of the usability studies (and, unless you were, you can't really speak to whether the changes were necessary). But, there are times that change is definitely good, despite most people wanting to avoid it. For example, Apple redid their entire interface (pretty much) with the release of OSX. Was it needed? Maybe. Maybe not. Did it help them a lot in the long run? Definitely.
Or at least imaged one drive to another and change the activation number.
Windows 7 can run on a Netbook. Vista can't.
Until they release software that can compete with Linux on the netbook field (resource usage, anyway), they will *have* to keep Windows XP available.
After that however, Windows 7 looks poised to be a good netbook OS, since the beta specs run at 512 RAM quite well, and the ATOM processor runs Windows 7 just fine.
That said, Linux netbook return rates are very high (I guess largely due to misunderstanding about operating systems when purchasing), and MS is looking to capitalize on it.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Keep in mind that "cautiously favorable" simply means that "Windows 7 is not Vista."
I'm trying to find some official Microsoft link/story about this extension. Can anyone find it? I can't. I am wondering if this is fake?
I think the general consensus is that Vista is ME 2; Windows 7 is supposed to fix most of what was wrong with Vista. Reviewers make it sound as if this is the case, but I'll wait for it to RTM before I make any final judgments.
Why can't they just sell it in frickin stores? When you sell the copies to computer manufacturers, they end up bundling other useless crap with the OS.
When will they learn that some people just want a squeaky clean version of XP?
If I wanted to go through my system and customize all the settings manually, I'd install Linux. In a Windows OS, given its target market, having to go through it "menu by menu" and reconfigure it is disastrous.
In fact, as I recall, when WinME was out I did have Linux installed, and the default settings were mostly good enough, with only some tweaking required for one or two components (I think the audio cards weren't supported properly then). Clearly, ME was (for most users) a disaster.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
How is UAC different from sudo? Why do I never hear the need to enter a password for the graphical sudo box that pops up just as often as Vista's UAC box?
Similes are like metaphors
You don't read very well do you...
If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened
Except Vista already is stable. Maybe it's because I only use my PC for games and the Internet, but Vista (SP1) has been nearly flawless.
yeah, I second that - it is good once you've gotten used to it. Its a bitch if you don't have the search service running all the time though, it can lose installed apps and then you're bu**ered. In fact, I'd get rid of the list of installed apps as it seems to be pretty rubbish, no hierarchy or fly-out menus, just a simplified explorer listview in a not-intuitive default sort order.
If you do have the search service running, performance can be a bit awkward and your electricity bill is quite higher as the disk seems to grind away all the damn time, unless its one of the other 200 scheduled tasks they have in there.
In fact, that's my biggest issue with Vista - its way too complex now. Take a look at the scheduled tasks and see just what's in there! Take a look in your even log and see how many entries you get on boot, compare that to NT4. Take a look at the WinSxS directory and see how many Gb it takes up. (7Gb on my Vista box at the mo)
Oh and explorer is just pants for simple performance and responsiveness. As is Task Manager - which is pretty, but just a monitoring tool now, not the 'emergency' system button it used to be.
when you take it from my cold, dead hands.
For example, what the hell was the justification for renaming "Add / Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features"?
Possibly because no one has ever used "Add/Remove Programs" to actually add a program.
The main problem with ME wasn't that it was crap. (It *was* crap and you do need to configure the hell out of it to make it acceptable, but that's true for every Microsoft operating system.)
The problem with ME was that it was Windows 98 in disguise, with all the limitations of Windows 98 and perfume thrown on it just to make it look new. No matter how much they tried to hide it, Windows 95/98/ME were just graphical shells running on DOS.
Anyone who has been keeping up with the news sites knows that Vista is fundamentally broken in different ways. There was no support for DirectSound last I heard. You had to use OpenAL. There are driver issues with Vista, just like with XP in the early days. The newest service pack for Vista slows it down. There are certain games that run just fine in XP that do not run in Vista. Worse, there are subscription based services (like GameTap) that simply aren't compatible with it. And before you fling an accusation of Open Source junkie at me, you might want to consider that I've used M$ products since the MS-DOS days. I'd have been more impressed with Linux if it had recognized my Voodoo card back in the days when if you didn't have a Voodoo, you didn't have acceleration. I'd have been more impressed with ME if it hadn't crashed my virus scanner and hobbled some of my games -- that worked well in Win 98. A simple Google search for my issues with Vista will doubtless reveal even more issues that I have not mentioned.
On my Vista box at home I don't even go into Programs anymore, just start typing Far and it brings up Far Cry, Far Cry 2 etc...good stuff.
Far crying out loud man... Word is that Vista excels as a new outlook to open windows. Just keep passing them and you'll be fine!
[...] I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. [...]
Good for you. But actually you would be the first business user Id've encountered who has not run into an unsolvable problem caused by Vista, be it a technical or one regarding usability.
Vista was about MS standing up to OS X's fizzy design. Nothing more.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
It really is a bumpy ride. For various reasons: Microsoft didn't quite polish the turd enough, hardware vendors don't care enough, what have you.
Some issues I've had.
Vista version of the Nvidia Control Panel have the "Force TV Detection" checkbox grayed out. No idea why. Same card on XP works fine.
While installing Vista, gives mysterous error that a HDD doesn't meet your requirements- if it's not set as the first HDD in your boot order. You have to set it as first boot device for the install, then move it off your boot order to setup dualboot with somebody else's boot.ini. I had to figure this out myself, as the error was non-descript, vague, and useless.
Nvidia nforce chip on a motherboard (not in use, just there) causes regular blue screens until you get the correct driver installed. (on Vista 64). It's kind of a game. See how close you can get to downloading and installing before the blue screen. Eventually you'll get it, but it's a mighty challange that may take you a few restarts.
Service Pack 1 is enjoyable. I just did a fresh rebuild last weekend, and, of course, shortly after drivering the computer, it was time to install SP1. It got stuck on the first shutdown. Just sat there.
Vista on laptops has a bug- if closing the lid is set to put the machine to sleep, then closing the lid during a shutdown causes the machine to sleep during shutdown. Next time you turn on your computer, you can watch it finish shutting down.
Fresh install of vista, load taskmgr, see how much memory is in use. 1.5gb in use. Fantastic! Thank god I have 4 gb installed. But wait.. what? 1.5gb in use? What? Why? I was supposed to use that memory for ME!!! Sorry Photoshop, you'll have to settle for less.
Hahaha, were you using that program? WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH TIME!! I dread the whitescreen of death more than the blue screen. I'm afraid to multitask, that's when it strikes!
Internet explorer: Did you just open a new tab, or press STOP to loading MSN.com?
Me: Yes, but..
Internet Explorer: (White-faced) I'm not listening anymore. Go away!
"Video subsystem just recovered from a serious error." Oh, hey, there's a nice feature! Instead of a game locking up my machine and me having to restart- it resets the video adapter, and I'm good to go in minutes! Except, wait.. why can't I load my game? Oh- the game takes longer to initialize a screen than the video subsystem timeout? A quick registry tweak can turn down the threshold and fix this?
Yeah, no really, it's fine for the prime time. Hang on...
Yes, Vista, the program installed correctly, Thank you
As I was saying, this software is ready for prime time. It's really stepping up to the plate. Now, as soon as this 3kb file is done copying, I might head home. I started it a few hours back, so it should finish soon.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
"How is UAC different from sudo? Why do I never hear the need to enter a password for the graphical sudo box that pops up just as often as Vista's UAC box?"
Do you want to re-read my comment or am I going to have to repeat myself?
I didn't mention the box. I don't really care about the box. Some people hate the box, not me. There's more to UAC than the permission box, it's the other aspects that annoy me.
Have you tried KDE 4.2? Give it a go, I was pleasantly surprised. 4.0 and 4.1 were still a disappointment, but it's definitely better (my configuration is back!)
Yes I agree, the add/remove program thing annoys me. And I prefer the old UI from XP. But I preferred the old 98 UI until I forced myself to get used to the XP. Now I will force myself to learn the Vista UI. Eventually it will be something new. It used to be DOS to 95. People will always complain when they are forced to leave their comfort zone...all I can say is, adapt and get over it. There are other things worse then a change of location for something.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Shitty hardware sounds like to me. I am just saying, bad memory, noisy motherboard, bad power supply voltage rails...could be any of those. I ran into lots of those kinds of problems when we used to sell to school systems too, they always take the lowest bid, so you have to use the cheap hardware brands to even come out even (you are hoping for after the fact service calls to make your money), so I do feel your pain. Has nothing to do with the discussion at hand though, the rest of us are talking about the OS, not about inconsistency in bottom of the barrel hardware.
Windows XP is all the 32 bit OS anyone should ever need. It's fast, and pretty much scales as far as 32 bit will go. Windows 7 better have an option to be as sleek and unobtrusive as Windows XP. They lost me 2 years ago when I switched to Linux, but I spent 5 years learning the ins and outs of XP so it's almost as comfortable as my custom Fluxbox configuration (which took me all of a week to get to a reasonably functional level.)
Anyway, even if it does, $150+ is way to much to pay for an OS that has regressions in functionality (whether coming from XP or Linux, this is definitely the case on Vista, and I'd expect it for 7.)
An OS is worth about $50. Don't get me wrong, I understand the energy that goes into optimizing it. But it's unnecessary. I've used new Macs running quad cores, I've run new Fedora machines running the same, I've used Vista... sparingly, and I have to say, the performance gains of the past 4 years over my single-core integrated graphics machine are negligible. If I'm paying, I'm paying for security fixes and continued driver support plain and simple. I have yet to see anyone give me something that so blows away Windows XP that it really sounds like it's worth more than $50.
More like Windows ME 2
How original! YAWN!
My experiences with Vista are similar to yours. But when I hear about Windows 7, those aren't the things they seem to be addressing. What I read is about it being cooler, having new features, etc. It doesn't sound like they are addressing the big issue: stability.
Fix the broken mixer, the performance and memory problems, the crashes in explorer, the video playback bugs, the unnecessary UAC messages, the driver installation issues... I haven't heard Microsoft even admit those problems exist, so I'm not sure they will fix them.
I sense a future cartoon. Guy brings home a pretty young thing wearing a W7 shirt. He sits down, gets cozy with her, but then what's this? Her face is starting to peel in the corner. She reaches up, grabs the flap of skin and pulls it away to reveal the snarling lizard face of Ann Coulter below it! "HISSSS!" she says. "Not Coulter! Vista!" Aiyeee!
If Microsoft can't get ahead of the "lipstick on a pig" bad press, W7 will go the way of Vista. And I don't think anybody's really being fooled at this point.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I never found anything wrong with Windows ME other than it didn't offer anything different that 98 didn't already have. In all reality Windows ME was nothing more than 98 SP4. I think it got a bad rap to be honest. Windows XP was a great leap forward from 98 & ME though. We should give MS some credit here that they realized Vista wasn't going to be successful, and quickly moved on to the next project.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
So everyone will be screwed again?
When's the last time MS shipped an OS on the date it announced that it would?
So instead of one problem ("migrate to Vista or stick with XP?") IT departments will now have a second question to answer ("skip Vista and wait for W7 or not?"). I'm sure they'll be happy like it were christmas. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why? hmm, lets see...
Maybe because it was still using Qt3? If you are that upset about it then just use KDE 3.5.x still and wait for the 4.x line to mature as much.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
In fact, I'd get rid of the list of installed apps as it seems to be pretty rubbish, no hierarchy or fly-out menus, just a simplified explorer listview in a not-intuitive default sort order.
There's a hierarchy, that's why you can click on folders and expand them. Also, I'd say that alphabetical order is pretty intuitive... There are no flyouts because those just got ridiculous in XP.
As is Task Manager - which is pretty, but just a monitoring tool now, not the 'emergency' system button it used to be.
You've lost me here, how is Task Manager no longer effective at doing what it did before? You can still kill processes and you can actually find the process associated with an application - which is nice. You can still run new programs from the Task Manager. They just added enhanced monitoring tools on top of the existing functionality.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Why? Why should an increasing number of computer literate people have to cater to the needs of an increasingly small group of utterly non technical users. Why not make them catch up, instead of the rest of us slow down.
Good interface design is not synonymous with "The user is stupid, make the interface for stupid people."
I basically agree with your point, but simply renaming 20 year old cruft to something a little less nerdy is not an improvement, it's a very cheap and ultimately damaging hack.
What really ticks me off is the way options relating to one thing have been broken up and cluttered across a myriad of places. Think display settings and desktop themes. It's even worse than GNOME.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I haven't forgotten Windows ME (or Vista). That's why I don't use Windows. However, 7 will be an improvement over vista. If they re-released vista today, the same code, calling it a new version, it would be an improvement, if only because hardware has caught up.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Since Windows 7 is mostly changes in the upper layers of the gui in Vista wouldnt bet it wont suck. The crappy drivers for Vista will most certainly crap out just as much on Win 7 as they do on Vista. Last i heard where supposed to use Vista drivers in Win 7.
Also, since the underlying issues arent solved performance gains will be small and the whole DRM crap is still in there slowing everything down. Any fixes arent really fixes but rather all sorts of ways of hiding performance problems from the user.
In short, Windows 7 is very, very close to being Windows Vista SP2.
HTTP/1.1 400
It's the "rarely reproducible" part that I'm complaining about. Generally it was painfully obvious when it was a hardware issue because reimaging, activating and configuring it wouldn't help. In those cases we'd just ship the crap hardware back to Intel and not worry about it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
BURN IT!! By the holiest of books and enchanted water send it back to the hell from whence it came!
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
well i don't know if you can make it smell any better, but mythbusters proved that you can polish turds to a pretty nice shine.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest. Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
No I don't use it I use Kubuntu. I have tried it and after figuring out where everything was and getting over the whole password every few minutes thing I liked it fine. However, because I am the computer guy in my family I support my families PC's. I have been working with my father and helping him get by. He used XP at work and he has Vista on his home PC. I have been trying to give vista a chance through people who have no reason to be prejudiced. I just found out from my sister that he hates his home PC and doesn't use it because of Vista. It was the same story for my Mother in law and my friends parents.
This is anecdotal for you but for me this is everyone I know who has tried Vista.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
You could have installed Linux and just told the customer it was an early release of Windows 7 and much more stable. Just tell them Wine is for backward compatibility with existing Windows programs. Slap a on flying toaster screen saver and a Windows desktop image and they'd never suspect a thing.
The problem here was that the interface item itself was designed incorrectly in the first place. As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs, my first inclination would be to look for Programs, or Uninstall Programs or Remove Programs. Why was it called Add/Remove Programs? For the life of me, in god knows how many years I've used Windows, I've never used that to add programs. Plus, Add/Remove Programs didn't indicate that you could also change/remove/add the features of Windows itself, hence, 'Programs and Features' makes more sense.
There's lots to hate about Vista, sure, but renaming Add/Remove Programs to Programs and Features isn't one of them. It'll take an old user all of 30 seconds to find it, and after a couple of times, you've retrained yourself easily. It's not about being friendly to utterly non technical users, it's about being friendly to new users. You know, there are new babies born, and kids grow up to use computers. What's wrong with making sure things make sense?
Were you at the downtime library this morning by any chance?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm not a fan of vista by ne means, but I do use server 2008 on my laptop (Damn sony with no xp drivers for ne thing)... (yes ubuntu is also on the computer and works great) any ways server is vista with out much of vista enabled.
Install server 2008, enable what you want to use (sound, wifi, stuff you need) get a copy from Microsoft website (there is no reason to pirate it, you get 240 day trial (can rearm it 3 times) and if you search Google, there is a power point out there with some "tips" to make it last longer then the 240 days.
btw (I used all my vista drivers and worked great, because again it is vista with out the crap enabled)
I normally do a wipe every 6 months anyways just because I install ton o crap ne ways and always like to do a fresh install of the latest and greatest of ubuntu :) might as well add a fresh copy of server
Why doesn't apple step up and sell OS-X lisences to bussiness and OEM manufactures? They could be killing MS in the market right now.
When ME came out, consumers still had Windows 98SE and only had to wait 1 year before XP. Business users for the most part used Windows 2000 until XP. Unfortunately MS put all their eggs into the Vista basket, and it will be a minimum of 2 years before Win7. Maybe 3 if there are issues. In the most optimistic view, it is ME v2.0. In the realistic case, it may be much worse.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Cloning installs has always been a partial train wreck... even with XP. For some reason some hardware just "doesn't like it". I've rarely seen it work. I don't really see it as a Vista problem.
My work recently gave me a cloned XP machine and SQL Server would not install. I've installed SQL Server countless times and I'd never seen the errors I was getting before. Before that I had tried running Windows Update and I got a warning saying that some of my OS files weren't right. Finally I just gave up and rebuilt the machine with a fresh XP install and SQL installed the first time and windows update worked perfectly.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I am no 'fanboi' and I do think microsoft may be a monopoly de facto, but that is not in itself illegal.
what a monopoly de jure chooses to do with it's powerful position in the marketplace can be found illegal in some countries- not all.
However your argument sucks.
Microsoft is so entrenched, and so anti-standards, that your data and business operations are held hostage. You can't escape the Widows lock-in without paying a lot of money and abandoning some of your core applications.
so spend the goddamn money.. it's only a monopoly as long as your mindset of 'paying a lot of money' is the barrier.
just because something is "very fucking expensive" is not a reason to legislate it out of existence- it is a reason to accept or reject it.
FREE MARKET
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This isn't so wonderful if XP costs you an additional $150 (hello, Dell) over the Vista that you don't even want, but are forced to take as well. The previous $50 downgrade was just about palatable, but forcing you to virtually buy 2 OSs when you're only running one has got to be a Microsoft wetdream.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah, I constantly ran into little things like that when I started using Vista, and even now that I know where everything is, there are lots of things that take longer / more clicks than in XP, for no good reason that I can discern.
The ones that gets me the most are things I used to be able to do very quickly with just the keyboard that now are difficult or impossible without reaching for the mouse, like shutdown / restart, opening network connections, or starting task manager.
Unpleasantries.
If I remember Win ME correctly, it was Win98 with a different look and more instability as a feature. Windows 98 worked well enough. I don't know what they did to ME but it was very unstable compared to 98. I talked to an former MS employee. ME was a project that had great goals but was doomed by the decisions of bad management. XP and ME were competing projects but no one in charge wanted to admit that ME was clearly inferior and a shoddy product. MS wanted to milk out every penny from their ME development when they should have just killed it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
i liked windows 2000. they switched to xp within like a year and no one remembers the jewel of microsoft.
within a week my mouse cursor disapeared. the mouse worked and was plugged in, and the next step in the windows me help system was "reinstall the OS".
My favorite usability change in Vista is probably the way that start menu folders are automatically and by default sorted alphabetically, instead of just appended to the end as they're added.
Unpleasantries.
Right-click on the start menu, and click "Properties", then click on the "Customize" button in the dialog that pops up.
Scroll down almost all the way to the bottom of the list that pops up. Select the checkbox called "Run command". Click "Ok", then "Ok".
Boom! Run command in the start menu.
I don't see how going from "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features" is going to make it easier for new users to figure out how to add or remove a program.
that's true, but it's the stupid people who are running around buying a new computer every three years.
your default image was bad from start or your hardware suck.
I think I was actually complaining about something else, now I re-read my post...
Basically, I was moaning about an increasing trend toward fisher-pricing every software product I get my hands on and calling it "usability", when it's no such damn thing, and Vista seems, with it's over protective (yet insecure) security model, and search bar for *everything* (At the expense of HD life) to be the poster child for this trend.
Along with OS-X... I once spent an afternoon screaming at a laptop that wouldn't connect to a wifi network with the error message "Error connecting to network.". At least windows gives you some idea of what the problem is.
Windows vista does that.
If you install the EXACT same install onto 5 identical machines. You will end up with 5 slightly diffrent end results. I've tested it over and over.
It's fucking retarded it does that. But it does.
XP does that too. but to a far far smaller degree.
The same applys to installing one copy of vista onto a single machine 5 times. You'll get slightly diffrent results every damm time.
Sounds stupid. You assume you made a mistake. But nope. Triple check everything all the way and you'll see it still happens.
Now do it for 1000 machines company wide... haha... fuck that shit. you'll have plenty to do.
vista is instant job security. unless you get fired for reccomending it or something.
task manager is just another app - if your CPU hits 100%, it can take ages for Task manager to appear, if at all. On an unstable system it doesn't get the priority it used to.
what new users? windows already has a 90+% market share.
In September I bought a laptop with Vista on it; it wasn't that bad. I decided come the time to wipe XP again (somethin' I do every 6-9 months to regain performance) I might throw a copy of Vista on that work gave me (having decided not to upgrade our the office machines).
It was an older image and didn't have SP1 on it. After getting it installed Windows updates notifies me there are updates (obviously). I click download/install and walk away. I come back a few minutes later to an error saying it couldn't install anything. I try to rerun. Nada. I download SP1 and the updates that failed and try to install them manually. All it tells me is they don't apply to my version of Windows.
All this time Windows is telling me I have updates that were installed, I need to reboot. I do. Again Windows tells me there are updates. It fails to download/install them. None of the manual updates work. Windows again says I have installed updates I should reboot. I do...
I Googled and found nada on the error codes in the event log that helped. After a solid afternoon of monkeying and reading I installed Ubuntu. I have WoW working, Steam games load though performance is a bit poopy (thanks to Codeweavers free giveaway) AND I can update my machine if there is a potential hole.
I went to work and relayed my experiences to my boss. Fortunately we're already a mixed Linux/Mac/WinXP environment. However departments can buy whatever they want and IT is eventual suppose to support Vista. However now we're trying to delay that at least until Windows 7.
No sig for you!!
Nah, those arrogant sons of bitches will never learn respect for anyone or anything.
Time will inevitably bring change, even to Microsoft. Their monopoly can't last forever. /platitude
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I live and die by disk imaging.
Our shop does not have any of these problems. We even have some images that go across HALs without issue.
The old saw applies: the plural of anecdote is not data.
I was unfortunate enough to use it from its launch at my previous job. It was buggy and ugly.
Now it's not as buggy but it still looks like OSX's ugly kid sister.
I personally avoided XP until SP2, I'm looking forward to Vista SP2, or 7, or whatever as long as it fixes the last of the glaring problems(network file transfer speeds).
I already know how to disable the myriad of useless services and features, it's a very popular trick/service.
When I turn off someone's gluttonous Aero features, they didn't care about eye candy enough to notice a difference, besides how much faster it now does what they WANT it to do.
I'm yet to find a non-tech customer that doesn't hate Vista's file organization, as well.(where's the other download folder? Do I need all those folders in MY Documents? Are they not MYne anymore? How to find anything in the start-menu? And as always: can you turn off this annoying(overly-persistent) UAC?(Universal Accept Conditioner)
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
This is more or less useless trivia for most of you, but when using the "Add / Remove Programs" cpl, it actually puts the machine in "Install" mode. This is extremely important for Terminal Server environments for a variety of painful registry related reasons. You can accomplish the same thing by typing "change user /install" in a cmd prompt, but the cpl applet is more convenient.
You weren't at PDC then. One of the keynote demos of W7 showed off the fact that it is blisteringly fast on a 1ghz, 1gb RAM netbook; UAC is fixed/gone, and hardware compatibility is top priority early-game, instead of after the fact.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You are me and I claim the seven different "Wireless" configuration dialogs I had to negotiate to set up WiFi for a neighbours Vista laptop.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I can't mod this up, but somebody should. This is way more convenient and MUCH faster than using the search bar. I was a happy man when I discovered how to do this.
To hell with it. I want to go back to DEC-10s and microcode. At least then you've got half an excuse for being confused...
If you think about it, Windows ME had only *one* real purpose... As a stop-gap, because MS had made the business decision to *not* create what they really should have created: "Windows 2000 Home".
Thus, most users didn't discover the significantly less-sucky NT-based OS until it got a new clown-suit, product activation gunk, and was called "Windows XP".
Actually, the ME disaster was a plus for MS.
They couldn't get people off the 9x platform.
Windows ME forced people to go to Windows 2000.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
My biggest gripe with Vista was it absolutely broke most of the apps I use in my job (helping the disabled). Eye trackers, voice, software, all non functional. I can't give these computers out. Now, I know some of this falls on vendors (Hello, Nuance) but the fact remains we need Windows XP for everything we have in our office to work., We aren't made out of money (We are a non profit); we can't just purchase Vista compatible stuff or upgrades.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
All the Ui concept overhaul did add to the time to learn vista a new, AND it did not simplify functionality. Example : the detail display of names in explorer. The name , date and size were always in neat column. Wanna see more character ? just draw the column "line" to the right. And when you come back to the directory, the lsit is there as you left it. With Vista the column are not aligned. Leaving the directory and coming back i have again to go into "detaiL" and half assed vista sometimes do not propose me "size" and "date" immediately. Heck even when I open a file and in the open-dialogue I ask for detail, I can't draw the name column properly to enlarge names.
It might be that I missed some setup somewhere, but to have it suck that badly... I wish tehre would be a way to say "I want to have an XP UI".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
if MS just dumped XP and FORCE-FED Vista on Business
Then we'd move to full volume licensing for all machines that require Windows, and use our downgrade rights for XP (unless Windows Seven is actually worth using).
I've been running Ubuntu at work partially as a test to see how easy it would be to move people over to it if necessary. Things are working pretty nicely so far, I'm thinking everyone but our engineering design department could do their jobs fine with free software. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software than the OmniForm crap that they're using at the moment. Sure, Evolution's Exchange integration isn't perfect - the unread messages number for each folder isn't updating like it should - but apart from that it works great. If MS try to force any shit onto us I'd be happy to move all our general office workers over to Linux, and yes I'd provide full support for them - it's part of what I get paid for after all ;)
which is totally what she said
Ditto about stability, although I can get it to blue screen when playing full screen videos. Damn HP and their driver bastardisation, blah, blah, blah.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
The justification? [...] To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows.
The thing is, that doesn't make sense. Microsoft make almost all of their money on exactly two product lines: Windows and Office. Everything else is just window dressing (no pun intended) to try to boost sales of Windows and Office. For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it. Ditto for all the back office stuff. I haven't checked the figures for the gaming and Internet stuff recently, but they were lucky not to make a substantial loss lass time I looked, so I very much doubt they are more than a drop in the ocean either.
In this context, forcing people to retrain and recertify doesn't help Microsoft, because it makes their key products less attractive. It just doesn't fit into their business plan. When they've reached the unique position of having near 100% market penetration in their two primary markets, the only thing they can do to keep the serious money coming in is provide upgrades that people are willing to pay for, and Vista was so far off-target that substantial chunks of the market actively chose to go for Windows XP instead. If Windows 7 is another cock-up on that scale, then we could realistically be looking at the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
These days, it's pretty much guaranteed that any PC you buy at retail will have Vista on it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of addressing Vista performance concerns. I hear the newest service pack is pretty good.
However, how many IT people out there are dealing with a large number of older systems? For us, it really comes down to this -- we can potentially run Vista on a fair number of our systems. Others are right in the middle of the XP system requirements (P4, 512 MB RAM.) So which do we choose?
We're just small enough to not really have a formal hardware refresh cycle, so this is a major concern for us. Windows 7 will probably have the same problems regarding hardware resources. Do you put up with lousy performance on some of your machines, or stick with good performance overall?
the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does
Just because it's disabled by default, it doesn't mean it's not there.
- right click "Start" and choose "Properties"
- go to the "Start menu" tab, click "Customize"
- check "Run command"
Signature has left the building.
I earn my living supporting a few Vista laptops used by some impatient execs so I know of what I speak.
I have had absolutely no issue with it.
Well, then I'm not sure you do much with either then. There are user issues and oh there are plenty. I'll hit the highlights for you.
1. Copying large files. Why so slow? Execs want to check email while opening the latest *large* spreadsheet off the network. The dual-core 2GB RAM equipped nice laptop grinding to a halt is an issue.
2. UAC. After the first complaint I disabled it. Nevermind that UAC isn't sudo. Security is NOT shifting the responsibility of security onto the user. "Are you sure?" is not security. It's a blame-shifting mechanism and they paid handsomely for it.
3. Why is it **so** slow and suck **so** much battery power doing nothing? The disk thrashing is annoying to me, but they don't seem to notice it. The execs had way more battery time on their old XP's and they know the difference.
Vista has been far more stable than both of these,
That is a lie. Or, maybe you are using some kind of special Bill-Clinton-legal-gymnastical definition of "stable." It's one thing to prefer Vista over a Mac or Linux distro. It is another thing entirely to lie about the other OS's you do not prefer. At this point you have lost all credibility and believability.
and the support is no contest.
Another Clintonian definition of the word support perhaps? Is it the *fabulous* phone support from script readers to configure your printer? Mac users get that too. Most on slashdot have moved way, way beyond phone CSR.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You're going to need contain yourself here :)
[windows key] + R
The "R" is for Run.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs,
Really? All the new users I've ever worked with think that the logical thing to do with a program you don't want any more is to delete it, same as you might delete a file.
You'd be amazed how many Windows users have deleted the icon from their desktop (and maybe even their start menu) and consider the application is therefore gone.
Thanks for the comment, Bill. That helps clear things up.
Say hi to Jerry for me, will ya?
Later,
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I'm using mojave.....
[...] or starting task manager.
Huh ? Starting Task Manager is Ctrl+Shift+Esc in Vista, just like it's been since (at least) Windows NT 4.0. I see the right-click Taskbar -> Task Manager item is also still there.
How did you used to do it in XP ?
The problem is, that Microsoft ended up doing this in XP as well. And it alienated its existing user base. I still know people that want the "Classic" start menu set first thing when XP is installed. It's change for the sake of change. Except I notice that Vista's UI is a much more redical change for a much more negligible benefit than 2000 -> XP was.
If it was really better, it wouldn't need to be designed from scratch again every release. Even if the excuse is to make it easier for new users, how many new users are you going to pick up in a market that's so saturated and that you have such a large market share of? And how many of them are really going to make their decision based on what's new in the latest release of a product that they don't know anything about in the first place?
It makes me feel all warm inside. Merry Christmas Slashdot.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked,
Just because you like it doesn't mean ALL of the contributors to KDE should stick with 3.x. KDE is an open source project where many of the contributors do it for pleasure/fun/whatever. They want to keep it interesting and they cannot be blamed for that. It is Free after all.
If you are so committed to it, maintain KDE 3.x. Building is not that difficult. Time consuming, but not difficult. There are supporters of the Linux 2.4.xx kernel still out there for the same reason. And no, you cannot complain and then do nothing about it. At least show some gratitude.
Plasma might wind up being cool
It already is. It's running beautifully on my old Thinkpad t42. You cannot say that about Vista. It's a departure from the old KDE 3.x way of doing things and so it will take some time for applications to migrate, programmers to learn it.
Microsoft won this round, again.
You know, many using/writing Free software don't really care. There is no win/lose. It's "this GUI/app works for me." It's not the opposite of a win/lose mentality. It's the absence of it.
If you *insist* on casting the matter as a win/lose then the average Linux desktop will always lose because Microsoft and Apple's marketing simply out-shouts Linux and will for the forseeable future. As I said earlier KDE users like myself don't care.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it. Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective.
Nothing at all... but KDE3 had hit the end of the road, if they ever wanted to use any of the Qt4 features it had to be ported. No matter how you try to do that it's not "polish" by any definition of the word, polish would be to just keep going with the 3.x series. It is the same people who would have been responsible for porting the kdesktop/kicker/superkaramba code that came up with Plasma, while it might have further to the finish line than expected clearly they chose that over trying a porting attempt. If it was trivial to replace the library calls they would have done it while developing Plasma on the side, not coupling those together. I guess you can say that about the whole "K-verse" not just the desktop itself, almost all the KDE4 applications are making huge breaking changes bordering on rewrites for KDE4. Hopefully it all pays off.
At any rate, while it's not very actively developed it's supported and I'm happily running KDE3.5 on Kubuntu 8.04, which is supported for another ten months or so (Kubuntu 8.04 isn't a LTS even if Ubuntu 8.04 is). With certain features and fixes going into KDE4.2, I'm presumably going to switch to KDE4 with the 9.04 release already. I think the KDE team did what needed to be done to enable KDE to reach the next level, what I do think is that they made some lousy PR moves at a time when people were exploring alternatives to Vista. Anyone who tested KDE4.0.0 as an alternative to Windows would be quite disappointed. Hopefully it hasn't scared away too many for good while KDE4 hit the real "for general use" marker.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked
Nothing was so terrible, and that's why they continue to support 3.5 while 4.x continues to mature. Nothing was "junked". I'm still using 3.5 myself, and I'm quite happy with it.
The only mistake KDE made was releasing 4.0 before it was ready. But with 4.2 due out next month, that's old news.
Honest question: did you actually do any investigation into why they decided to break compatibility? They didn't just flip a coin you know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really, it's stable on my hardware, it boots in about 20 seconds, it takes any media i can toss at it, works with all my new and old software and peripherals. The only thing "bad" I can say about it is the interface looks a bit dated compared to OSX or KDE4... All it needs is some polishing and Mythbusters have already shown one can polish a turd, so get polishing Microsoft.
Run is where you type in what you want to run. The text box. That's run. No need to click extra stuff, just type what you want and it will
1. search for it, and or
2. run it
Still a turd.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I'd say that it needs to as good as WinXP.
Otherwise Microsoft is going to be facing another wave of people demanding that sales of WinXP be extended again.
And from their perspective, why not? Why should they be forced to "license" (not purchase) a product that they see as inferior to the last product they "licensed" from that vendor? Particularly since there will, once again, be all kinds of "legacy" compatibility problems that enterprise customers love so much.
That menu feature has been around for a long while. It doesn't need a search service running all of the time for it either on Linux.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Wait, so a company is not allowed to make any changes to anything because it might alienate existing users? By your logic, we'd still be doing everything by a command prompt, because hey, this UI wizbangery and windows and icons and mouse! They confused all them users!
And I don't recall the start menu being redesigned from scratch. The changes from 2000 to XP to Vista were iterative, and some people actually like em, even old users, like me.
You know all them babies born today? Plenty of new users in the future from those. All those untapped third world markets out there? Plenty of new users right there.
My work recently gave me a cloned XP machine and SQL Server would not install.
Uhhh. Maybe because installing SQL Server is forbidden on XP? Or maybe you use those low-end crack pipe versions of SQL server. I have to keep a server-version of the OS running in the office for just this reason. What a PITA.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
2. UAC. After the first complaint I disabled it. Nevermind that UAC isn't sudo. Security is NOT shifting the responsibility of security onto the user. "Are you sure?" is not security. It's a blame-shifting mechanism and they paid handsomely for it.
UAC is essentially identical in concept and implementation to sudo (albeit somewhat more automated and intelligent). Why do you think it's different ?
boy, i cant understand why and how you americans use 'suck tit' as a swear word.
i mean, if you dont want to suck tits, im ALL up for it, outsource it to me. in fact, i can cater to all the tit suckin needs of entire world, if its needed.
how many tits you have sucked lately that you are despising the 'tit sucking' process ?
Read radical news here
back in dos4, me days, computers were not this entrenched in daily lives of everyone, and every business. and it was not this kind of hassle to upgrade them, for there werent many stuff running on them already. most of the info processing and database processing stuff were running on old terminals like as400 and whatnot.
today its a huge deal. you cant just forget.
Read radical news here
.. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software ..
It's nice to see companies, such as yours, naming their departments correctly and honestly. Most other companies would call it "Legal department".
You can safely skip every other one in the series.
Or decompressing large .zip files in Explorer. Granted, I like a lot of what they've done with the UI in Vista, but this was enough to drive me crazy. Per their support site, they've acknowledged the bug but have yet to do much about it.
As far as UI's go, I seem to like openSUSE's version of GNOME. I much prefer Vista's file manager to Nautilus, though. Especially when it comes to the address/hierarchy "bar". Don't even get me started on XP's file manager...
Vista > Dolphin > Nautilus > XP
How is UAC different from sudo?
Well, UAC is not sudo. Sudo is a discreet boundary between privileges. The default config in Mac and Ubuntu are very permissive. The reality is that you can (and should) make single applications available via sudo. Even then, you can force the user password or let the applications run without entering a password.
UAC is a gui to shift the blame of running a priviledged application onto the user. It is permeable and far less configurable. The OS needs access from the Userland into privileged processes in order to run many Microsoft applications.
Why do I never hear the need to enter a password for the graphical sudo box
Because the NOPASSWD option is used in the sudo config. As root, run visudo and you can see/edit the configuration as you please.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No. Maybe the geek community won't "trust" MS, but then again that is not news (though plenty geeks use MS products regularly). Businesses will use WIndows 7 without any questions. Their only concern is the money spent.
they didnt use vista without any questions. in fact, many of them didnt use it at all.
Read radical news here
God damned, and I have 9 points to give too, but not on this conversation because I blabbed already.
I would follow this user and mod him up on something else, because that comment is so great, but he logged in as A/C... so I guess he missed out, or she... as if there were any women on slashdot.
This is my sig.
Vista isn't any less stable than XP, if you ask me. By that I mean that for as long as it has existed, the number of crashes or other instabilities (not counting third-party application bugs) I've seen in Vista is exactly the same as in XP: zero equals zero.
The only negative thing that can be said about it, is that it requires a ton of resources - but that was to be expected. Win2000 needed more than NT4, XP more than 2000, Vista more than XP. Each of those times, what was decent hardware for one OS became the bare minimum for the next.
I think the reason why people hate it the most is UAC with its extra dialogs, and I can easily imagine someone confusing that with instability - because I've seen it happen.
Someone at work (who calls himself a software engineer nonetheless, writes small device firmware in assembler, but at PC level knows nothing but VB, and even that only half-assed) saw an UAC pop-up on my machine shortly after I installed the first Vista in the company. He immediately went out to tell everyone (behind my back, as usual for him) that he had seen "Vista crash" and that I was a moron for wanting to use it. That while he himself refuses to even look at Linux because it's too difficult, and still runs Windows 95 on one of his own boxes because he's afraid some DOS-based programs he wrote in Clipper 15 years ago will stop working if he upgrades.
I mean, if even a professional - be it one I wouldn't hire - thinks an UAC popup is an error message, calls it a crash, what must non-IT professionals think?
You could have just slipstreamed the service pack with VLite.
considering that Mythbusters successfully polished turds...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You'd be amazed at the number of Mac users who do the same thing. Of course, that's been how you uninstall Mac software since 1984, and NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP software for almost as long...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Changes to user interfaces are nearly always negative. Even if you make a new UI that is objectively better, it will usually require relearning. Because of this, UI changes should be introduced gradually, and should require a difficult approval process to ensure that they are not made gratuitously.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
astro
turfer
UAC is essentially identical in concept and implementation to sudo
No. It's not. UAC is expressly designed to shift the responsibility for security onto the user. "Are you sure?" User clicks yes and Microsoft has shifted accountability to the user. It is brilliant in an evil way.
(albeit somewhat more automated and intelligent).
helloworld.c is automated and intelligent too. That doesn't make it equivalent to sudo. Please stop trolling.
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/sudoers.html
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I have NEVER had XP run more stable than W2K.
E-V-A-R-!-!-!
Server 2000 is the most stable server release, W2K workstation kicks the ever living crud out of XP in speed. and stability is great IF you dont let users run as admin. Most corperations had users set to admin or power user. This is the most retarded policy E-V-A-R
For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it.
It is amazing how long it took them to realise this. Back in the late 90s when I was at University, Microsoft lost huge numbers of student developers and student engineers to Linux simply because Linux was easier to get ahold of and it shipped with all the heavy duty developer and server software for free. It didn't hurt either that you could poke around in the Linux kernel source code, which you can't do with Windows and that made Linux a popular choice for various software development classes. It wasn't until much later that they started shoving student editions of Windows and their development tools down people's throats. At least that was the case at my school, other people's milage may have varied.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It's not the fact that Vista is or isn't stable for me and people I know. It's that Microsoft went and changed EVERYTHING. Just the other day at work one of the guys in accounting was trying to find his bookmarks in IE. To the savvy person, they'd right click and add the file menu back in... but to the normal user, this is a feature that was removed. "I can't use bookmarks anymore? This sucks!"
Not only that, but everything is hidden and tucked away in further menus making it harder to get to if needed and you don't know what you're looking for. The simplicity in Windows was that you could poke around a few menus and find exactly what you wanted.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
No. It's not. UAC is expressly designed to shift the responsibility for security onto the user. "Are you sure?" User clicks yes and Microsoft has shifted accountability to the user. It is brilliant in an evil way.
Please explain how this is any different to a sudo prompt that pops up in OS X when, say, an installer is run.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shift the responsibility for security onto the user", etc. The responsibility for security (in this context) is *always* on the end user, and always has been. UAC (along with sudo, and similar tools) just make it easier for them.
helloworld.c is automated and intelligent too. That doesn't make it equivalent to sudo. Please stop trolling.
I've done more than enough large-scale sudo implementations to know what it is and how it works (and how it doesn't work).
You weren't at PDC then. One of the keynote demos of W7 showed off the fact that it is blisteringly fast on a 1ghz, 1gb RAM netbook; UAC is fixed/gone, and hardware compatibility is top priority early-game, instead of after the fact.
But have marketing got at it yet?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Every major corporation who would be willing to buy new volume licenses usually make it a policy to wait until the first service pack of any OS to do a full upgrade. No one is going to jump to 7 just because Microsoft says it's solid. I worked with a guy who evaluated Vista for one of their biggest partners, and he flat out told me that Vista didn't meet their basic security requirements (no matter how much the MS shills say it's secure). I can't imagine that 7 is going to be secure enough from the get go, either.
Then you explain the Incredibly stupid task of renaming and rearranging everything.
It started with XP, oh let's move things HERE, let's change it HERE, etc...
it's like some interior designer got on the programming team and said, "users is too angry of a word, let's call it 'experience prefrences' as that has more fung-schway in it."
you say it does not make any sense, then you tell us WHY they do the stupid move of rearranging and renaming things in the UI?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Windows key + R will open the run command on Vista.
It's not pre-marital if you don't get married.
What about the hiding of the file menu in IE making people think that IE doesn't support things like bookmarks and all the features they had before?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Everyone knows the plural of anecdote is anecdoti.
Agreed. We image machines with BartPE and UBCD4Win with Norton Ghost on it. We've never had any problems. The only "issue" is that our Windows Logo testing thing doesn't work, though that could be a problem with our source disks. It's rather funny to see Windows Updates fail Windows Logo testing ("Are you sure you want to install? This could be potentially dangerous to your system.")
> More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Well, maybe. To use your analogy, they never did sort out the problems with ME, but XP eventually turned out ok.
Right, I understand that analogy is a little broken because XP was an entirely different code base, and it sounds like Windows 7 will not be. So who the hell knows?
I was about to say that Microsoft has to hit a home run this time or they're in real trouble, but who are we kidding? There's only so long the majority of businesses can hold out before they make the jump. With Windows 7, Microsoft can bunt and still sell 20 million copies. Sure, a Windows 7 disappointment is additional motivation to seek alternatives, but who actually believes that'll amount to more than a percentage point? Two at most?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I didn't say I liked every UI change. I think they brought back the File menu in IE8 (at least it's there when I booted up my beta).
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
You can add it back in the start menu preferences. The Run option is better than the search bar sometimes because it has history in it and the search bar doesn't complete system .exes (like mstsc), just program names.
This space for rent.
I'd take a hard look at accounting as well. They're one of our problem children for migration. First there were the linked spreadsheets, then we still had to set up a Windows kiosk for them.
We ditched Exchange by switching to corporate Gmail. The transition was a little rocky, but since things settled down, support calls have dropped to near zero. A good number of our people we're already using Gmail to manage their work mail anyway.
I'd have a plan to deal with Access db's scattered everywhere, too. Those are annoying but if you can corral them, it's better for everyone.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Not necessarily.
You don't go and move the drivers seat to the front of the car because it allows the driver to see better.
You don't swap pedals because you find that the average person's right foot has a better response time, stronger muscles and is therefore better suited for braking.
You don't sell cars in the US with metric only readings on the dashboard because it's a better system.
(non-car)
You don't replace all your chairs at work because you read that employees work better sitting in bean bags.
You don't go swap everyone's keyboard to an alternate layout because you saw research that said it's less stressing to the hand and faster.
There are some things that people are used to and changing it would invalidate all things a person learned. It also invalidates all help features on the web that have been compiled for the novice users. Even though it's a different OS, doesn't mean you need to take the familiarity and throw it out the window.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Recently I've been trying Ubuntu. After spending days attempting and failing with Kubuntu and trying to get my video card set up correctly, I switched to an Ubuntu install. With a little less headache I got the install working fine with my graphics card. The OS said I had updates available. I went ahead and installed the updates. It updated to a version that no longer boots. I have to choose the previous version from the boot menu every time I start up (haven't figured out yet how to roll back the update or find out which specific update caused the error).
As sad as both these scenarios are, a failure to update that fixes itself is a bit more convenient than an update that kills the OS.
And on every build since Windows 2000.
When they've reached the unique position of having near 100% market penetration in their two primary markets, the only thing they can do to keep the serious money coming in is provide upgrades that people are willing to pay for, and Vista was so far off-target that substantial chunks of the market actively chose to go for Windows XP instead. If Windows 7 is another cock-up on that scale, then we could realistically be looking at the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
Do people pay in Monopoly plastic money for XP which MS cannot use and hence will kill it?
This space for rent.
The 6.1 version number is to keep the core tenet of "if it works on Vista, it works on 7." Many software developers aren't very good about their version checks, and only use the OS Major Version Number to determine compatibility. Changing it to a 7 would be a disaster in terms of the shims that would need to be added for app compat reasons. Hence, we get 6.1 (which isn't as funny as 6.2: twice as good as 3.1).
Did they ask someone to bring in a retail Vista and install it or was this computer preset by the engineers that wrote the system?
I can see it now:
"Hey, this ___ feature is slowing things down a bit."
"Ok... here's a compiled version of the DLL without that feature. Just don't do ___ in the presentation."
"Cool. We weren't planning on it anyway."
I know lots of demonstrations I've been to that tweak the product a bit to make sure it works fast and flawless during the sell.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I think if you type a command in the search bar it works the same way as the run menu item.
It *is* ignorant slashdot drivel.
I also use Vista at home (x64) & work (x86), with SP1. Works great, no performance issues whatsoever on a plain old Core 2.
All my apps work perfectly. The CS4 works wonders, VMWare works great, dev tools, games, you name it.
Don't worry, they'll be saying the exact same thing about Windows 7 a year from now, and praising Vista.
It's also what you did on RISC OS, on the Amiga... in fact, on virtually every other major desktop computing platform I can think of.
The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
You can add "run" to the vista start menu by selecting it from start menu properties.
Here's my experience.
I'm running what I consider higher end hardware.
Intel quad core Xeon 2.13ghz cpu
6 gigs of Crucial ram (1gigx2 + 2gigx2)
2 Samsung 7200rpm hard drives in a Raid 0
2 PNY 9600gt video cards in SLI
Asus P5n-e SLI motherboard
While I have a system score of 5.9, it constantly crashes.
It was quite some time ago I decided to give Vista a try, to end up just re-installing XP. I've been hearing of a lot of Vista improvements so I decided to give it a try again over the weekend.
So I went ahead and went from my completely stable XP-64bit to Vista Ultimate 64bit.
I can't even get my system to boot if the memory is in Dual-Channel. Putting it in Single channel will get it to boot, but it won't go more than a few hours without a blue screen. Plus, that's not counting the fact that I can't have the computer go into sleep mode, because it wont wake up unless I pull the power cable.
Now I suppose it could be an issue with the hardware. But if it's completely stable under XP, what's the deal?
Now at the same time I upgraded my girlfriend's computer, which sits next to mine, to Vista. (Intel Dual core 2ghz, 2gigs of ram, 7300gt, Asus motherboard)
Not a single issue. Hasn't blue screened once.
Point of my rant is, if you're lucky enough to have hardware that is stable in Vista, then good for you. If not, then Vista blows.
that by the end of June we'll have new Mac commercials? I love those, they're funny!
XP is slower, uses more system resources, does stupid things with directories (for instance, if any media is present, switches to a media view), autoplays everything, and requires Activation.
I really wish MS would live and let live and stop trying to wean users off 2K by doing things like making .net 2.0 XP compatible only.
I'm running Windows XP SP3 MUI in qemu on FreeBSD/amd64 7.1-PRERELEASE, and it runs flawlessly.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I never had a problem with 2K stability. In fact, I hacked that thing to pieces bypassing "XP only" checks that programs tended to do to. I also had a stable file server running at my parents house for years on 2K. I eventually switched it over to a dedicated Linux build, but when it was a 2K server it just worked.
I have no complaints over 2K as much as I dislike Microsoft.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it.
...and I use it on my new Dell XPS laptop, and it's NOT stable for me. Wireless is freaking awful too. Yay anecdotes?
Vista has been completely stable for me too, as long as I don't try to do too many things at once. For example, launching the MediaPlayer and browsing at the same time can lead to a crash. I also try not to open up any Explorer windows to remote shares, especially when I'm connecting via wireless, or else it becomes unstable.
In Vista's defense, I thought that my machine had locked because any keypress would return a beep. It turns out that a share was unreachable to some dialog box had popped up. Unfortunately the dialog box was behind everything else. So my screen had greyed and I could not confirm the dialog. But luckily I was able to CTL-ALT-DEL and bring up the task manager to kill the explorer process.
You also don't want to do anything else when you're burning CDs.
Also, if you're used to closing your laptop before disconnecting from an external monitor, stop doing that. It's better to go into the Settings panel, disable the second head, then go close the laptop if you want to make sure that it wakes up properly. Though you could just close the lid with XP, it's not that big a deal.
Also, wireless disconnects in Vista quite often. If you search Google you'll find thousands of hits about it. It's not that big a deal, because I just connect via the wired Gigabit interface. I don't really need to be in bed when I'm browsing anyway.
I really like the Vista security too. Not only will it prompt for the initial launch of, say, an installer application, but it will also prompt for every child process. So installing new software from a web page will lead to a confirm on saving the exe, a confirm on launching the exe, a confirm on running the exe, a confirm on running the uninstaller for the previous, and if it's a stub installer, a confirm when the actual installer runs.
Vista memory management is awesome too. I also enjoy that it will kick of superfetch and other optimization programs in the afternoon. I used to try just working through it, but because the disk gets pegged, I find that I just take a 15 minute break at those time anyway.
There's so much I love about Vista.
Enough people have asked loudly and clearly enough for XP that you can still buy a new system with it:
example : http://www.dell.com/vostro
Google Launchy
Signed, an XP user
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Um, except that Vista is NOT completely stable. Everybody in my office was forced to "upgrade" to HP laptops with Vista. There is at least one blue screen in the office on a good week...more like 6-10 on a typical week. Productivity has gone in the toilet but we are pretty much stuck for now.
A friend of mine just bought a new Dell laptop and it's almost unusable with all the crashes and freezes. The hardware checks out...it's just some weirdness with Vista and the particular networking settings he has. Yes, the network stack in Vista sucks monkey ass. It works for me pretty good most of the time, but other times DNS will not work for no reason and other times it completely ignores it's routing table for no reason.
Pretty much all these things probably can be traced back to driver issues. Microsoft likes to point the finger at the vendors for putting out bad drivers, but as most of us know, there is a reason that the driver framework was completely re-done in Windows 7.
Finally, where are these reviews of windows 7 that are "cautiously optimistic"? I have only seen one review so far and it said that except for the driver framework possibly being more stable (wait and see), it looked like mostly the same Vista crap. I guess you could call that cautiously optimistic, but that seems like a bit of a stretch...
If it takes fifteen minutes to boot and ten to shut down (Pentium Dual Core, 2Gb RAM, with the usual array of HP OEM bundleware bullshit), I don't care how "stable" or "supported" it is, it's a piece of shit. Of course you haven't had an issue with it, I bet you're still waiting for the mouse to respond.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Hear, hear!
The main problem with Vista was the lack of compatibility with third-party devices and software. That has not been an issue for some time, and LINUX users, of all people, should bite their tongues when griping about the inconvenience of operating systems that don't work readily with all kinds of software and peripheral devices. OS X users, on the other hand, should think twice when grumping about being asked to re-authenticate for every little thing. Come on, folks. MS sucks in enough ways to make hyperbole unnecessary!
I like to believe that they were embarrassed that Ubuntu's "Add/Remove Programs" could actually add AND remove programs, so they had to rename it.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Don't be a troll. Seriously.
Assuming you're not just trolling ("Vista sucks so I installed Linux and it's better"), I'll post a batch file I use at work. It solves most any windows update-related problem. I kept adding to it as I encountered more and more strangely broken computers, and as of now it works fairly well.
/s /q C:\windows\SoftwareDistribution
@echo off
echo Starting Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)...
net start bits
echo Registering DLLs...
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
echo Killing Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net stop wuauserv
echo Destroying Update Cache...
rmdir
echo Re-enabling Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net start wuauserv
echo Magic!
DATABASE WOW WOW
On OS X, we know this as Time Machine.
Gerry
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
That's impossible. Windows 7 is not adding any of the features previously promised for Vista, and subsequently axed.
There's an optional update to XP that puts the Desktop search bar in. I haven't tested it to see if it'll do what you're talking about (the only XP box I have is my wife's laptop), but it seems likely. Sadly I'm not an administrator on my work XP box, because that seems like a useful time saver.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
" That isn't astroturfing, it is contributing." Only if you haven't swallowed a Microsoft Marketing Executive whole. You didn't do that, right?
Gerry
Unimpressive. The free desktop has had that for years.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Good for you, Mr. "I have identical hardware for all my OS installs." I'd imagine this guy who installed Vista 3000 times was NOT working with the same computer specs every time, which is exactly what's wrong with Vista. This issue isn't entirely Vista's fault, since a lot of problems have risen from driver issues, but you can certainly wag your finger at MS.
And in DOS.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
That little "search" textbox at the bottom will also run programs with the same context as the run dialog (which is still available via Winkey+R), try doing `ping` or `cmd` to see.
Really? I had Win98SE installed for about 2-3 years, and I'm coming up on three years for my latest install of XP (only reinstalled because I upgraded the hardware and built a new box. Before that it was installed for another two years in its previous hardware incarnation).
The only time I really see any instability with any OS is if I'm:
A) changing the hardware around (messing with drivers CAN count)
B) adding or removing large amount of software that "touch" the drivers (mostly games that include/require updated drivers or updated core libraries)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I don't get it. Why do you need the RUN command? If you type "Start -> Run -> Notepad.exe", you get the exact same result as if you used the Start and typed notepad.exe in the search dialogue. They function exactly the same except you probably don't need to type all of notepad.exe to get it to run. What is the benefit? Besides, you can use the keyboard shortcut without cluttering up your Start menu (Windows + R).
My primary desktop is a CentOS 5.2 machine. My secondary desktop is XP and sometimes Vista.
I agree somewhat with your comment, but oddly enough, I actually like some of the changes that Vista is making. In general it is cleaner and I can understand some of the design decisions as far as the user interface is concerned.
My biggest gripe is their implementation. No matter how well designed the interface is, if it doesn't perform well then it will get in the way of using the machine.
For example, I like the fact that Vista takes steps to power down the power-hungry wireless card. But I hate the fact that it powers it down WHILE I'M USING WIRELESS. That's just dumb.
I like that executables require confirmation on launch. I hate that the confirm dialogs take over the machine. I hate the number of confirms required.
I like that it will try to optimize shared library access. I hate that it does it at seemingly random intervals.
It also seems bizarrely disjointed in some security measures. For example, if I try to drag and drop multiple MP3s from a network share to a local application (e.g., foobar2000 or MediaPlayer) it will often return an error about permission denied. However, dragging them two at a time will work fine.
If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened,
And maybe Lucy won't pull the ball away this time.
The best way to deal with Microsoft is to not hope anything. Instead, when they talk up a future product, the best response is "show me," and leave it at that.
Since the very foundation of the company, MS's tactic has been to lie about features of upcoming products. That's how they got the DOS deal with IBM. That's how they got the software deal with Apple, which lead to them writing Windows. That's how they got the OS/2 deal with IBM, which lead to NT.
They are liars, and they've lied up to their most recent OS (Vista). Is there any reason to believe they're not lying this time?
Windows 7 is little more than a re-skinned Vista. Definitely a handful of neat UI features, but still Vista, through-and-through. If you like Vista, you'll probably like Windows 7 even more. If you hate Vista, you're going to find Windows 7 is little more than Vista SP4.
True, but I have been doing both A and B in my Vista install. It still seems to work fine, and quite stable.
Actually Vista does have the Run box...you can type anything you used to type in Run right into the "Search" box and it will behave (exactly) the same. ()'s because I'm sure there are some edge cases. If those really bother you, try WindowsKey+R
Didn't you read this! It's a hardware problem, not Vista.
There is also the fact that they dropped DirectX support for Win2K (was it anything besides half-hearted?)
Sorta pushed you to XP for gaming, kinda like MS is trying to do with DirectX 10.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Windows 95/98/ME were just graphical shells running on DOS.
Will that myth never die? Just because you booted to DOS doesn't mean Win95 was a DOS app. Win95 was a 32-bit OS with a protected memory model. It was also the most amazing piece of backwards compatibility I've seen: it could run 16-bit drivers that expected a shared memory model.
Of course, this backwards compatibility made it Hell for those stuck supporting it, as it had all the unreliability of the old crap drivers, but it was certainly the right business decision for MS, and a heck of an engineering feat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I too use it on my Mac Mini and it's very stable and everything works fine.
Oh no, wait, that's OS X.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
What were people doing with their operating system that is so complicated? What was the previous operating system?
Yes. I wondered if someone would comment on this. What sort of registry changes are made, as we had a terrible time getting and app to work over RDP and thought this may have been a ossibiilty, but turned out jut to be a poorly written app.
Vista's biggest (and IMO, only) problem is the huge decrease in performance from XP. If you're a gamer, DirectX 10 can mitigate some of that, as can the increase in support for 64bit compatibility that Vista ushered in (64bit = more ram = potentially better performance), but it's still disappointing that Vista is so sluggish by comparison.
The good news is that, even with some of the new features in Windows 7 (I really love the new task bar and aero peak, for example), it's supposedly outperforming Vista at the same time in a variety of benchmarks. I see the switch from XP->Vista->Win7 as an analog more to the switch from 3.1->95->98. 3.1 was stable and fast and well supported at the time. Windows 95 was buggy, and the performance was poor, and since the major change was largely cosmetic, I know a lot of people who skipped 95 altogether. 98 was essentially a reskin of 95, but it did a lot of things better and went on to be one of the more stable and long lived OSes in MS' history. Only time will tell if Win7 follows in it's footsteps.
he isnt talking about tits but he is using the metaphor for it. so, 'sucks tit' being a negative statement in america is one of the most appalling things about america in my perspective in the first place.
Read radical news here
actually, that search box on the start menu doubles as run, which is actually one of the best UI changes Vista made
It is not forbidden. SQL Server Dev edition is arguably designed for this enviroment.
That sounds like a pain in the ass. To contrast, my Debian server has gone through four motherboards and several HDD swaps. cp works for me.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Agreed. When we put OpenSuSE 11 on our machines, we initially installed KDE 4. We tried it out for about a week and it was universally loathed around here. When we switched over all the boxes KDE 3.5 was the default desktop.
I've downloaded OpenSuSE 11.1 and KDE 4.1 is even worse and KDE 3.5 is no longer an option.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
So what you're saying here is that they took most of a decade and billions of dollars to deliver features that the free desktop has had since roughly the turn of the century. Color me unimpressed.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
The search function is noticeably slower (perhaps my huge start menu has something to do with it) and if you're a typical IT user, half a second can seem like an eternity.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Except it won't be. None of the features that were promised to be in Vista but were dropped to keep from sliding the release even further will be in Windows 7. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any new important features in Windows 7. It's a new OS in name only (and bit of spit polish and debugging) and unfortunately that might just be enough.
And that's on top of Vista having few new important features. They did of course manage to cram in all the protected path DRM crap. Guess we know their priorities.
Hit the Windows button on the keyboard, type appwiz.cpl, hit enter. Add/Remove programs is open, and it took about a second and a half.
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
Bare with me, as this will seem somewhat like a rant, but it is a valid list of concerns I'd like to see addressed in Windows 7.
On the bright side, Vista wasn't all bad. The search bar is a great feature. Unfortunately I can't really think of any other really great features that I liked in Vista that you didn't get with XP. I actually did use it for over a year on 4 home machines (3 laptops and one desktop). I now have it on a single laptop for support for my family, so I've been using it since it released
As to what I hated, the list is a bit longer:
Can't customize the explorer bar like you could with XP (I really miss having the Delete button on there, or the ability to add it). Why did they remove that functionality?
Hard drive thrashes constantly. I HATE that, and it's all just in case I might use a program. Most people use 3-4 apps tops. We don't need 2 gigs of ram filled up with useless data. I also don't like the fact that it's putting all of that wear on my home PC. If it was a server, I wouldn't be overly concerned, but cheapo (read: non-server) store bought hard drives DO fail, and this certainly can't help.
My home desktop WD's failed within 2 years. Whether this is related to the Vista install or something else I don't know, but Western Digital drives have typically been problem free for me over the years. It was the first time I'd had one fail so young. I had repeated failures on the same desktop a year later.
I hate the networking config. It takes far to many levels just to get to a network connection properties. It's very unintuitive. I can only assume that the person who designed that part of the UI never actually needed it. XP was easy. Right click 'network' icon and select needed area from properties. If your a heavy wireless user on a laptop, this is important and it's key for me considering the wireless glitchiness I continue to experience under SP1
My Vista installs constantly create multiple copies of the wireless config I use, and those often refuse to connect, causing me to constantly have to go in and clean them up and recreate the needed profile. Sometimes it just refuses to connect all together for seemingly no reason. Could be driver related, but then again, the profile issue wouldn't seem to be since I'm using Vista to manage my connections. It shouldn't be so problematic.
Wireless transfers in general is still very flakey, even post SP1. I can put a vista machine on my wireless and if I connect it using 54n at 240Mb, it will crash my router within a few minutes on any big transfer (I'm talking 1GB+ of data). This doesn't happen with XP, OS X, or Kubuntu. I regularly transfer large video's over wireless. This is a real show stopper. I am not the only one with this issue. Over a year of looking for a fix and high hopes for SP1 and still no resolution.
Permissions Issues - Ok, so this one is more of a vendor issue, but if MS had stood up to the vendors and forced them to properly code their apps for a multiuser environment, it wouldn't be such an issue. I can't name the number of times apps didn't work, wouldn't install, wouldn't uninstall, etc because permissions were set improperly.
Slow Boot Times - Vista starts out great, for the first few weeks. They tweaked it so that it appears to boot the desktop in 20-30 seconds. That doesnt' make the desktop usable however. It quickly degenerates into a mind numbingly slow boot, even with the startup services trimmed to bare minimum using MSCONFIG or CCleaner. It boots up the desktop pretty fast, although I wouldn't call it 'useable' until 30-40 seconds after that. Throw in a virus scanner, firewall, and adware/spyware blocker and it's hosed for a good minute. Totally unacceptable considering what you can get with Linux or Leopard.
Windows Update Issues - I also had (and still have) endless update issues where they simply start failing, requiring me to google for some obscure 'failure' code only to find out that there is no immediate
Meh. Getting DX 9 for win2k was a trivial problem.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You should consider cleaning out your start menu. Most people rarely use most of the items on there. Why leave them there "just in case" when you can always access them via the search bar?
I got a Sony Vaoi for my wifes business, and it seemed to work fine. It has Vista Business pre-installed. I joined it to my network, tried to logon using my network logon and blue screen.
After some fighting, I figured out it was only network logons causing the issue. I grabbed my retail cd and reformatted and installed Vista again. Since I used the product key on the laptop, i got vista business back. Everything has been fine from that point on.
I suspect its all the pre-loaded garbage that every OEM stuffs onto your computers causing the issue.
Task manager doesn't get the priority it used to? If this is the case, then I'd venture to guess that this would be a serious problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had an unresponsive Windows environment when I've been able to hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc or in worse cases Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the task manager and take care of whatever is wrong.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Alternatively, the people whose experience is positive may not have used OS X and/or Linux and only be comparing Vista to XP and/or Win98 :)
The responsibility for security (in this context) is *always* on the end user, and always has been.
Erm. No. This is the point where you and I agree to disagree. That kind of disasterous thinking is the epitome of the broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
UAC (along with sudo, and similar tools)
Please stop comparing sudo and UAC as being somehow alike. Retelling this lie is disingenuous and dangerously misleads consumers and employers.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Well if someone can explain me, why if most people hate so much vista and for matters everything related, they try really really really REALLY hard to make xp looks and works like vista ?.
Vista on laptops has a bug- if closing the lid is set to put the machine to sleep, then closing the lid during a shutdown causes the machine to sleep during shutdown. Next time you turn on your computer, you can watch it finish shutting down.
Nope, that's not new in Vista. That was there in XP too.
I saw XP complete a shutdown after opening the lid hours after initiating a shutdown WAY before Vista was even a gleam in Bill Gates' eyes.
I've been a Windows user for over 15 years... there is no reason in hell I should spend 30 seconds scanning the Control Panel for a single icon.
That is true, since there's a search box right there. ;-)
Programs & Features isn't as annoying as when Find was changed to Search in the start menu. Someone please justify breaking consistency for that crap! I understand in ME when they combined control panel components and made it Sounds AND multimedia, but what was the freaking justification for renaming it to Sounds and Audio Devices? How about telling someone to OK something. Oh wait, I don't have an OK button, I have a yes button or a go button or some other ridiculous BS. The list goes on for me not just with Windows, but with Windows software.. The issue I have is not that Microsoft and vendors decide to change conventions, but it seems that they just seem to change things sometimes just to spite people who have to support it and deal with the inconsistencies. Honestly, I think this is the point the real Microsoft development team needs to come in dressed up like counterstrike, just shoot everybody and take command.
No, they pay nothing for XP if they already have a license for it, which is what they'll have if they're buying a new computer to replace an old one.
I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly.
This is like saying you're getting "as close to good performance as I can" out of a Pinto or a Yugo.
Win ME is not nearly half as disastrous as most people will tell you, provided that you configure it correctly. Most of the out-of-the-box default settings glitchy at best and system crashing at worst, though going menu by menu and rearranging everything manually will fix most of its glaring problems (notably the RAM management and ballooning system restore folder).
Or you can just install 2000/XP, drop 98SE either into a separate partition or a virtual machine somewhere, and be plenty happy. And if we could get a virtual machine that emulated a proper video board (nothing fancy, just something reasonably above a freaking S3 Virge 3D decelerator like VMWare and VirtualPC do, even a basic GeForce would be good for most of the older titles that ask for Win98) I'd happily be able to load up pretty much any game and simply enjoy.
Yes, we reimage all our company laptops with Vista Enterprise (Thanks to SA!) in order to use BitLocker, and then install the necessary vendor tools (in our case: Lenovo).
This has proven to be stable, and the users have learned to work with it (we've configured UAC to always prompt u:pw, which is even more annoying, but it actually makes you stop and think instead of cancel/allow).
By now, 3/4 of our staff is running on Vista. We've migrated to Office 2007 earlier.
Deployment in Vista has definitivly become better, and with the other infrastructure improvements we got from upgrading our servers to Windows Server 2008, productivity has come up.
One of the most undervalued features IMO is SMB 2.0: VPN Access to file shares is now as quick as local browsing, and downloading files can actually max out our internet uplink.
No, Vista isn't as good as i hoped it to be, but it is an improvement over XP in many aspects, especially deployment.
I had the Ubuntu update problem before- a quick edit to your grub should fix which one is the default: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubuntu-help/69651-grub-edit.html
Just change the "default X" setting (where X represents a number in the list) to the one that you want!
Hot damn, that's the best idea I've heard in a long time!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I feel that this move is a good one and that somehow relates to the Win ME lifecycle, even if there's people ranting about the comparison, I know there is a lot of people here that actually likes vista, but I also know people that Actually likes Win ME, that goes as far as saying that it is the best OS that they have used and even I have a computer that runs beautifully with Windows ME, just like if the machine was meant for that OS, that doesn't mean its a great OS. Lets face it.. a computer with windows XP does the same thing a vista one does but with much less memory and processing power, and if you upgrade the memory so it matches the Vista requirements then you can have a blazing fast XP machine. I remember my first encounter with Vista, trying to make a new laptop work with the networked printer in the office, should be as easy or even easier than in windows xp isn't it? well.. the fact is that it was not, I finally had to get into google and look for a similar problem, the solution? adding the printer as a local one even if it wasn't and then changing the port to a network route, WTF? that is the behavior of a sucking ass OS and you can't convince me it is not I can add network printers in any win32 system from win95 to winxp flawlessly and then vista can't? Then I have to add that it is annoying to have it asking for absolutely everything, from opening a damn website to changing the desktop theme, I know they say its a way to keep the system safe but it doesn't solve anything, making a good rootkit or trojan leaves all the annoying questions to the user, the malware will bypass it anyway. I hope that Windows 7 is as good as XP has been, because Vista has never been my cup of tea, and from Microsoft's move I can see it isn't a lot of people's either. That doesn't mean that Vista can't run wonderfully in your hardware, congratulations, I also have a PC that runs with Windows ME better than with any other OS you could put on it.
MS doesn't care, they're being dragged kicking and screaming...
Now there's an insightful question if ever there was one. Sorry I don't have mod points for it.
Yeah, I keep getting this from the KDE crowd. Just stay with KDE 3.5 until 4 comes around. The trouble is distributions have been setting 4 as the default practically since it attained RC status.
Everyone yelled at KDE developers, the developers yelled back at the distros for pushing it out so soon. Lots of flames all around. End user gets left with the "WTF KDE4=Vista I guess" impression.
What I'm waiting for is the KDE development team to come out and say "We're releasing KDE 4.?? and it's ready for users, finally." Apparently the rest have been tagged "Stick with KDE 3.5 if you have problems don't complain to me."
Don't get me wrong. The KDE folks are doing some great things, but their delivery sucks balls. Troll me up, but they could have done much more to save face.
The good stuff is coming. This I have faith in (all software choices are religious after all).
I want this account deleted.
Let's wait for windows 7 and see if it gets delieverd on time. The lets see how much people want to use it. If windows 7 also fails, they better extends the support a couple of years extra...
So, what you're telling us is that Windows Vista is the Rocky V or Highlander II of the computer operating system world. :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
So basically Ultimate (or Vista in general) is worth the extra cash because it allows people to indiscriminately overwrite important files without regard to their accuracy, importance or completeness.... And another of your Vista's highlight is the fact that it also allows people to spread their files and folders around the filesystem without any sensible concern about where a particular document should be saved.
That's both lazy and sloppy.
Call me Old School, but if one needs this much babysitting when using a PC, one should go back to the ease of pencil and paper and save some serious cash.
WinXP (and even Win2K) is fine!
Typing something into the search bar on the start menu and hitting enter works essentially like Run...
Seriously, that search bar is the reason I won't go back to XP.
what's so confusing about add/remove programs? If you don't understand what that's saying, then you shouldn't be using it anyway.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yeah Vista is great!
It came on my new laptop. My old laptop had XP and 1ghx cpu, 512mb ram, and a 20gb ata drive. It was just zippy. Now with my new laptop with 2xAMD64 2ghz, sata disk, 4048mb ram, a much faster system in general... it takes soo long to do anything that I get much more billable hours than I used to.
And who doesn't love a latop that is constantly accessing the harddrive? Sure, you'd think that after 30min just sitting there with no apps running it would have cached what ever it was looking for but NOPE, it still seeking the drive atleast once per second.
I tried linux on the new laptop, but it hardly kept the disk busy at all! And everything was much too fast. Not nearly as many billable hours. But luckily after I switched back to Vista the video driver puked and I spent a whole work day just getting it going again. It's a gold mine.
all i hope about w7 is that they don't rush it like they did with vista/me, etc. they need a long, long time to get 7 out, and i'd personally rather wait for something good than have complete crap now.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
A lot of really interesting new Vista features are under the hood and only visible for developers. For example, how about a true transacted file system & registry - so you can start a transaction, create directories and move files around, write into those files, maybe delete some - and then just roll it all back with a single API call or on a system crash, with guaranteed atomicity, while no other process in the system sees any of your changes until you commit them? I'm not aware of anything even remotely similar in previous versions of Windows (or any Linux-supported FS, for that matter). And the utility of this feature should be pretty obvious to most developers - finally, you won't need a full-featured journalled database (on top of an already journalled FS) for small-scale data storage just because you happen to need atomic updates!
I tried to change the Power option settings on my sisters Vaio yeterday. It had only been booted that morning. It froze, and after leaving if for 5 minutes, we had to do a hard reboot. This machine was designed for Vista, and sure it is a shitty Sony, but still it shouldn't be that hard.
Yes, this is one example, but since you are spouting nonsense about Mac OS somehow being less stable than Vista, I had to put in. This is from a guy who started out on programming dos interrupts on MS-Dos v3.3, and been developing on Windows until 3 months ago when I was given a Mac for work. There is no way I will go back.
If KDE4 was just a rewrite of the existing KDE3 functionality and general approach in Qt4, there wouldn't be a controversy.
The problem is that KDE4 guys have decided to "reinvent" their desktop, breaking a lot of stuff in the process, and generally changing things for the sake of changing them (claiming that the new way is better, which may hold true in some or even most cases, but resulted in alienating a lot of the existing user base).
Yes, in that way, it is directly comparable to the XP/Vista difference.
Except that doesn't work most of the time and leaves things behind. Hence the invention of things like AppZapper.
For one thing, MS certainly isn't giving the developer tools away - yes, you have the "Express" editions, but those have pretty heavy limitations which really only make them useful for a student and low-profile hobbyist writing simple freeware or shareware stuff. For any serious development, you're going to need VS Pro, and that still costs quite a bit.
That said, in practice, all shops that are in the business of producing software for MS platforms (even those that make it cross-platform, e.g. using Qt, but target Windows as one of the platforms), don't buy Visual Studio and other development tools directly, but have an MSDN subscription of the desired level instead. This may not always be cheaper compared to buying the boxed versions (especially if you don't update to new versions immediately), but it greatly simplifies license management when dealing with a lot of PCs; and, really, the ability to just grab a distro for some obscure Microsoft server solution (BizTalk, SharePoint) for which you suddenly have a customer is handy. So most Windows shops go for it, and I'd imagine it's also a pretty steady revenue stream for MS - at least last I heard about this, Microsoft DevDiv (Developer Division) is fully self-sufficient.
It's not a lie (well, alright, it may or may not be a lie) - it mostly depends on the hardware the GP used.
See, the thing with Vista is that it does indeed run great - on the right hardware. And die horribly on the wrong kind. The "right" kind tends to be recently released high-end PCs and laptops that come with Vista preinstalled (I'm not saying that all of them work fine, just that the chance of getting it work is higher in that category). The biggest chunk of the "wrong" kind is hardware from before, or shortly after, the Vista release.
I have both kinds: 1 PC and 2 laptops; the 1 laptop that came with Vista preinstalled really works great, no complaints there; the other laptop, an old Thinkpad for which Lenovo had nonetheless released a full set official Vista drivers, had problems with video card, and generally ran Vista very slow even once upgraded to on 1.5Gb RAM; the desktop with a mix of "old" and "new" hardware, mostly works fine, but has problems with sleep & hibernate (presumably because of the motherboard, which is "old").
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please explain how they are not alike, then. I've read this entire thread, and, despite been asked to explain twice, you haven't done so, instead repeating the claim that the other poster is "trolling". He isn't - he is politely asking you to explain the difference, which you profusely refuse to do. I'm inclined to believe that you, in fact, are the one trolling here, but I'll reserve my judgement in hope of ultimately seeing a detailed, argumentative response as to how Vista UAC is different from sudo as used in e.g Linux and OS X.
Isn't that precisely how it works if you move your user account from the "Administrators" group to the "Power Users" group - i.e., giving you the password prompt for elevation, instead of a plain Allow/Deny prompt?
umm linux?
*ducks from the impending mod attack*
Sent from my desktop computer
Omg! I installed Vista on my Core Duo MacBook with 1 gig of RAM, and you know? I noticed absolutely no difference in the time it takes me to do things from XP!
Anecdotal evidence is just that: anecdotal.
ctrl-alt-del, t
I might be able to get used to ctrl-shift-esc (never knew about that), but since I use ctrl-alt-del all the time anyways (log on / lock / log off / shutdown), it's the fastest-by-muscle-memory way to do it, for me. *shrug*
Unpleasantries.
And by the way, the method I mentioned in the other post (ctrl-alt-del, t) is how I've done it since NT 4.0 as well, hehe, so it's deep ingrained muscle memory.
Unpleasantries.
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
Win ME is not nearly half as disastrous as most people will tell you, provided that you configure it correctly. Most of the out-of-the-box default settings glitchy at best and system crashing at worst, though going menu by menu and rearranging everything manually will fix most of its glaring problems (notably the RAM management and ballooning system restore folder). I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly. When I mention how it will leap through hoops of fire if I ask it nicely, however, people always seem to recoil in fear and reach for their bible and holy water...
I never had any problems either, don't ask me why I installed it (a cheap Lebanese copy) but ran perfect on my old PII. It didn't crash any more than win95 did on that pc.
Good Grief, Man, how long of an 'Incubation Period' does Linux need?? I've been using it on and off for over 15 years!
MacOS X.x.x users have been using a derived version of FreeBSD for over 5 years. How much more maturation does it need??
The only things a typical Mac application leaves behind when you remove it from your /Applications/ folder are configuration files. These are mere text files that define how you want the program to operate. They dont clog up your hard drive, they dont slow down your system. They do absolutely nothing, besides re-enabling your settings if you decide to reinstall the application.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Right... unless of course there's a setting that was causing the application not to start, or to trigger a bug. In which case the user removes the app, and tries to re-install it to "start fresh", only to find out they aren't starting fresh at all.
To say it's not a big deal to leave behind config files is absolute crap, and the sort of response I'd expect from a fanboi.
Erm. No.
Yes, it is. Or are you somehow trying to argue the responsibility for running 'sudo rm -rf /' does NOT fall on the user doing it ?
Please stop comparing sudo and UAC as being somehow alike. Retelling this lie is disingenuous and dangerously misleads consumers and employers.
Then explain how they're different, if you're so sure they are.
Yes. It helps to keep in mind that Unix was basically invented as the first integrated development environment. Language, editor, compiler, all there on the command line! And Linux came with all the GNU tools you needed to write your own apps. And then later, MacOS X came with the developer tools included for free. Microsoft had to get its tools into order. I'm surprised they hadn't started giving them away earlier, but they did start out as a compiler and interpreter company.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
A lot of what Microsoft does involves staying a moving target, so competitors are always playing catch-up. XP is a stable target, so Wine can catch up to it (and is doing rather well).
http://rocknerd.co.uk
ctrl-alt-del, t
Ah. Well from the looks of it, now it's Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+T.
I suspect the need for Alt+T is related to the setting that disables the underlining of shortcut keys, but I can't seem to find the toggle that turns that on and off.
Tilt bits?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That reasoning sounds like bull to me. So, a software company should not release new advanced versions so that it will stagnate and competitors will catch up? Also, Vista took 5 years to finish.
This space for rent.
If you think this is because customers like XP over Vista, you're fooling yourself. This is because Netbooks have become a very valuable commodity. Vista runs horribly on netbooks; Microsoft would rather keep selling XP than risk losing that market share to an OS like Ubuntu. Once their newer, more responsive Windows comes out, and dual-core Atoms are available, they'll stop selling XP immediately.
No, I mean that Microsoft doesn't want to have a non-moving target out there, because they know that when their competitors do that the other term for "non-moving target" is "sitting duck."
Microsoft are very good at competing with actual better products when they have to. It just seems they don't know how to compete with themselves.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
i'd buy it if it was ME 2, that was the best game ever.
all you had to do was see how long you could last before a BSOD.
i once got close to a minite
But Windows ME was the last gasp of the Windows-on-DOS tree. XP was the solid-as-a-rock Windows 2000 (based on NT) with improved GUI functionality and updated hardware support.
Vista-to-WIndows 7 will be comparable to 95-to-98 (or, shudder, 98-to-ME). I'm not saying it 7 will be another ME, but it can't be the kind of transition the DOS-based Windows to the NT-based Windows was.
Frankly, after seeing Vista, I honestly can't imagine what they could do to make 7 something I would want. Vista didn't do anything _I_ found to be an improvement over XP. I understand the new security improvements, but I don't care. I got a virus once... in 1989, and never suffered any security problems with Windows. I finally switched to Linux full-time early this year because I prefer using it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Copying files to where, though. If it's on the same disk, that sounds more like a filesystem problem than an OS problem (except insofar as the OS has a default filesystem)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
or you can type the name of the program in the search bar ala spotlight on Mac.
Considering that Vista is a beta version of Windows 7, I wreckon that Vista->Windows 7 should be a free upgrade...
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Windows ME can run well, with the correct hardware. It is quite finicky and finding the correct drivers is a nightmare. Even then it tended to be quite unstable. Personally it was the first OS from M$ I actually bought and it was the last.
You my friend, must have some good luck... Go buy a lotto ticket!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Add/Remove Programs can be used to install programs that come with Windows but are not installed by default. There were some interesting and useful programs there that often weren't installed on OEM versions, especially in Windows 9X, though most of them have either been eliminated or are now automatically installed on newer versions.
Since there is no hyphen between "virtual" and "desktop", the "virtual" modifies "monopoly".
Wouldn't this kind of errors with identical software indicate crappy hardware?
It's even worse than GNOME.
Hey now, let's not say things we can't take back
Exactly how I felt about Windows 2000 when XP was released...
That's where the key difference lies. /.ers and other IT geeks feel that the whole situation is copy pasted from latest time :
Most
An old, considered good, version of Windows (back then : Windows 2k SP4, now : Windows XP Pro SP3) getting replaced by something in which everyone fails to see one single advantage (back then : Win XP Pro, now : Windows Vista).
Well, what we have to keep in mind is that was only the situation for IT geeks.
Back then what Joe 6-pack had to endure was ... Windows ME ! (gasp)
For most of the general population, Windows XP Home - no matter if lacking interesting features over Win2k - was replacing what was considered the worst ever OS produced by Microsoft.
People had an incentive to switch to XP (even if geeks didn't have): it was a saviour after the latest home version of the OS.
Whereas today, NOBODY (except a few DX10-addicted hardcore gamers) really needs to switch. The situation for Vista acceptance is even worse.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Considering that we are still waiting for the promises of Chicago to eventuate...
Fair point. Our current banking software is all Windows specific, but there's a chance it would work under WINE. Not so sure if the smartcard stuff for one of the apps would though.
which is totally what she said
When I got my newest machine, it came pre-installed with Vista, and would crash every hour or so for some reason. Updating all the drivers didn't initially work, but finally I downgraded a video driver and turned off all sleep settings (it's not a laptop) and got the machine in a stable state. I blame the manufacturer more than MS for that, though. They shouldn't be shipping anything out that's that unstable.
Now that things are working, I don't have any real complaints.
If the major problem with the OS is driver stability, I don't see how waiting for Windows 7 is going to fix anything. Windows 7 will have the exact same problems with drivers that Vista does.
You should really take a look at dial-a-fix. It's one of the most extensive, yet simple to use repair tools for common Windows glitches. I've never seen it fail to resuscitate Windows Update.
For one thing, MS certainly isn't giving the developer tools away - yes, you have the "Express" editions, but those have pretty heavy limitations which really only make them useful for a student and low-profile hobbyist writing simple freeware or shareware stuff. For any serious development, you're going to need VS Pro, and that still costs quite a bit.
Well, you say that, but I can't think of a single thing I've ever done at any of the places I've worked professionally that the Express editions don't cover. Maybe if you're working on really huge projects or using the latest MS tools for something like architecture or source control the Pro version is useful, but again everywhere I've worked had found other approaches to those problems long before Microsoft's latest round of tools started incorporating them, so there was no particular reason to switch. As you say, though, pretty much everywhere just gets an MSDN subscription anyway, so this is something of a moot point.
So most Windows shops go for it, and I'd imagine it's also a pretty steady revenue stream for MS - at least last I heard about this, Microsoft DevDiv (Developer Division) is fully self-sufficient.
Well, not being loss-making is always a plus of course, but I don't think Microsoft's interest in DevDiv has anything to do with how much money it makes. In itself, its revenue is line noise, but as a strategic asset, it's invaluable.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's part of the reason why ME was probably so unstable. With Windows XP taking so long to get done, Microsoft took a bunch of features that were going into XP (or were already in 2000) like System Restore, UPnP, Windows Movie Maker, the new TCP/IP stack, Automatic Updates, and attempted to bolt them onto the Windows 9x codebase. Though my experience is that eventually Microsoft got ME to the point where it was relatively stable (perhaps not quite as good as 98SE though), but by that point, most people had given up on it.
"WIndows + R" brings up the standard run box, same as in XP. I do remote tech support and that key command is a godsend some days.
Did you ensure that you changed the SID from the original machine?
You weren't at PDC then. One of the keynote demos of W7 showed off the fact that it is blisteringly fast on a 1ghz, 1gb RAM netbook; UAC is fixed/gone, and hardware compatibility is top priority early-game, instead of after the fact.
And you weren't at PDC (or WinHEC) 2004 then ;-)
Longhorn was blisteringly fast on all the demo machines, UAC wasn't there, and hardware compatibility was the top priority....
Can you share your cdkey?
I'll take vulnerabilities in the new API for $200, Alex.
That feature sounds neat. Let's hope they manage to get that to ship instead of laying off the team. It sounds like getting definitive testing of that feature would require quite a long time to do right. It would be a drag if a lot of work got lost because the system lost track of a commit or something like that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
and yet they have not moved to Firefox...
On OS X, we know this as Time Machine.
Are "you" implying that Microsoft ripped off Time Machine and renamed it Previous Versions?
Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
Short version: when people say "intuitive" they really mean "familiar", as in, they've seen something similar before or they've grown used to the UI over time. His main argument was a linguistic one; that we should not use the word "intuitive" like that because it gives everyone the wrong idea. I don't think he goes so far as to say that maintaining the status quo doesn't have its benefits, but he does lament over some instances where what he thought was a better UI was turned down because it wasn't as immediately familiar.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, but I think that in design you can have a "backwards compatibility" problem too. Even if in the short term it's better to retain it, in the long term people's initial annoyance is not so much of a factor, but the cruft will be.
My big problem with the control panel in Vista is that there's just too many icons. They're really past the point where having an icon for each dialog is useful. I wouldn't stumble every time I look for "Programs and Features" if there weren't so many of them (of course, if I had to use Vista every day I'm sure I'd get used to the control panel pretty fast).
Gotta use the terminal, it's all there though :)
There's an app called "network utility" that will show a lot of information, but there's ifconfig and probably some other utilities.
Actually I can't think of a situation on my Mac where, in the absence of a good link, I'd know exactly what was up from the dialogs. It seems like Windows and Mac just give you one error if there's no link and another if there's no IP address. Actually there's one: I don't think Macs will try to detect an IP conflict, but I could be wrong.
What I absolutely cannot freakin' stand is the way networking is done in Vista. I have set up networking on countless Vista machines for people (granted, usually simple stuff) and I still have no clue if there's any logic to the dialogs. All I want is a list of the interfaces. I do not care about pictures of park benches :D
And given that 99% of the time the network wasn't working because of Norton, I have to consider the automatic diagnostic wizard a spectacular failure as well, since instead of saying "uninstall Norton" it would say things like "I don't know, maybe the internet's broken today".
You can also actually add programs if you're in a domain and they've been made available to you. The admin can assign MSIs or ZAP files to a policy object and if you have XP Pro you use the "Add" button. I'm guessing with Vista it's the same (that is, no add feature on the home version, unless they've replaced that with that new software store).
Most Windows software doesn't bother to remove all traces from the registry, either. So we can say that in most cases the best way to uninstall software on a Mac is to drag the app folder to the trash. I have used Windows far longer than I have used a Mac, and you do not have to defend Windows' honor from me. Seriously, deleting (and usually installing) apps is 10x easier on a Mac and it's one of the nice things about the platform. Windows has its strong points, but worrying about whether or not something is in "All Users > Programs" or "Joe > Programs", as well as being at the mercy of uninstall scripts that can leave behind files and registry keys is just not one of them.
It's also used to actually add software in a domain setting. I don't think the button shows up in XP home or an install of pro that's in a workgroup. And I don't know how it looks in Vista.
But in XP Pro on a domain on a there is an add button which will have software if your admin has set you up for that, and a remove button that will remove software, so it makes sense that way.
Also, I'd imagine that they changed it for Vista because of all of the overly clever folks saying for the thousandth time, "why is it called add/remove if i can only remove?", much like the whole "press start to shutdown" thing. Hilarious stuff, if you're Andy Rooney, that is.
and the problem with Windows 7 is that it's going to be vista in disguise.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Seriously...many folks just can't be arsed to take five minutes to learn a new way of doing something, even when it can be shown to be unambiguously better. They'd rather click 20 different places like there's some sort of secret handshake to get at files and programs. The repetitive motions make them feel calm. But I have better things to do with my time.
I love the search box on Vista. This may be because I evaluate things objectively, refrain from whining, and do not (far as I know) exhibit symptoms of OCD. Some of my users, and certainly some members of my family, will get frustrated at something as small as an icon moving. I can chalk this up to a lack of confidence with the system and taking whatever permanence you can get, even if it's the location of an icon. But it just annoys me to come here, where I expect people not to exhibit such behavior, and see that they do, and it gets modded to the heavens.
Vista's main search bar is IMO not yet as good as Spotlight. There, you just hit cmd+space, type a few letters, and be it program, file, email, phone number, or whatever, you have it in less than a second in most cases. OTOH, Vista's built-in folder searching seems much better to me than Finder's.
Anyway, Vista is improved in a number of places, and people are picking the wrong things to complain about. I feel like the old Run box uses your stress level to determine whether or not it should auto-complete. The completion in cmd.exe is better. The run box sucks.
Of course, UAC is complete crap if you do *anything at all* on your computer other than leave it unplugged. Oh well.
That's impossible. Windows 7 is not adding any of the features previously promised for Vista, and subsequently axed.
What are these features, that were "axed" from Vista, that every gets into such a tizzy about ?
Hopefully they will tweak it to run more like Ubuntu where I can log in as a power user with out admin rights, but perform admin tasks by providing admin credentials when attempting the task.
That's exactly how it works already (only you get a "Continue" button by default instead of a "password" box - if you really want to type a password instead of clicking a button, you can make it do that).
I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly. This is like saying you're getting "as close to good performance as I can" out of a Pinto or a Yugo.
This is exactly what I'm saying, I didn't realize I was being too subtle.
Except Vista already is stable. Maybe it's because I only use my PC for games and the Internet, but Vista (SP1) has been nearly flawless.
No, really it is not. I have Vista on my laptop, it shipped with it. It came shipped with a bunch of useless software like ANY store bought Windows machine does. I went to remove some of it and it caused severe problems to the system. An example of this would be when I went to remove the 90 day Norton trial. Vista wouldn't even boot. I had to boot safe mode and restore my machine to before the uninstall for it to boot again. THAT does not show me STABILITY.
FROM BELOW:
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista?
I actually use on a regular basis GNU/Linux(various distributions), Vista, XP, and OSX (i don't keep up with versions, but I know it is the latest). I haven't done much to try and break OSX but it seems to me to be more stable than Vista, but XP and every GNU/Linux I've ever tried I have put through the ringers and are many times more stable than Vista.
Now you may be asking me, if I've used (and do use on a regular basis) all of these Operating Systems, where do my loyalties lie? The answer to that is actually with GNU/Linux. I don't need to state the reasons, every other GNU/Linux user has said them a million times already.
just because something is "very fucking expensive" is not a reason to legislate it out of existence- it is a reason to accept or reject it.
It is if it it makes competition virtually impossible. That's why we have the laws that we do.
I disagree in the strongest of terms- expense to market entry/exit is not itself a actionable reason to look to anti-monopoly law
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I have to use VISTA at work for support reasons, and my problem is with it's UI, it is horrible and requires more clicks to get anything done. And someone please tell me why there has to be so many icons in the control pannel? And don't tell me just turn off clasic mode, that is no better and just leads to miles of menus to get one thing done! Those who keep saying that I use vista and like must never have to make any changes to the system.
As for the UAC, i actually like it, when it works. This is comment is not related to Vista but to 2008 which is based on vista. There are certain things you simply can not do as a domain admin any more because they forgot the run as admin, and it does not automaticaly prompty you. That is the problem with UAC, not that it requires your permision to do thigns, but there are cases when it doesn't ask for permision and simply fails to do something!
Try this on a Server 2008 system, add a file to the SYSVOL as someone other than the built in administrator account.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175
Here's just one of many salient quotes "Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access."
Sadly, I'm modded troll for decimating the perception of security in Vista when it's out there for all to see.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The thing is XP also stank, and ME stank before that. Plus people were gouged with "Software Assurance" or "Licensing 6.0" or whatever you want to call it. People are really fed up with Microsoft! People are starting to code to standards and targeting multiple platforms and are ignoring MS's extensions. The next time companies upgrade it will be to something non-MS.
Not only that, your average computer tinkerer is no longer interested in MS as it only means removing viruses or helping them figure out how to email their photos, it's just not interesting to your average geek anymore. Power users interested in learning and tweaking are going to Linux, they're just not interested in helping Windows users anymore, and MS's tech support is not going to satisfy these people. Things are just snowballing in a way MS cannot control anymore.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=175
Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.
Please explain to me how, *exactly*, malware can execute and then control the system in user mode in OSX or Linux.
Until you accept the incontrovertible fact, as they are, out there for all to see, that UAC IS NOT sudo.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
A major limitation is inability to install plugins - and for serious .NET development, most people I know use either JetBrains ReSharper or DevExpress Refactor. Other than that, most annoyances are in the area of debugging - IIRC, it has one of those debugging tool windows missing entirely (was it "Locals" in 2008?), and I recall there were some limitations on breakpoints as well.
And, of course, if you drink the MS kool-aid to the bottom and start using TFS (and associated tools - SharePoint, MSProject etc) for project management / source control / build environment / testing, you're going to need at least VSPro.
Well with the way MS is Forcing Vista down everyones throats that buy a new PC (Downgrade rights.. Are a joke.. we all know when the average person buys a PC the way its installed is the way it stays.. Case and Point.. is Why Firefox isn't more widely used.. very few Average users will download a new web browser case the one they have seem to meet their browsing needs.)
I am sure that MS is behind the OEM's pulling strings to make it difficult for OEMs to offer XP instead of Vista..(Dell having a extra charge or OEMS just not having an option available to Home users).
If OEM's offered XP and Vista for the same price and but no road blocks up on buying a new PC with XP.. MS would have to put more effort into "Innovation" and stability for OS releases..
Right now the number MS is pushing out to everyone is the number of Vista licenes sold.. it does not show how many people have downgraded or opted for the XP downgrade (when they fgoind a way to do it).. and any home user getting a new PC without any type of Vista licence.. I think its a Urban Legend.
Their sales model should reflect what they are supporting.. and they should not force licensing on anyone of something they will not use.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Transacted files manipulation has been available in *userland* Java for years in commons-transaction project -> http://commons.apache.org/transaction/file/index.html
Even then, few people use it, because transactions make sense mainly when they are both concurrent and serializable. Both those attributes do not make much sense for a filesystem. You are better off locking files, instead of trying to impose database semantics on byte streams.
Don't see transactional read-write as a hammer.
Yes, of course you can do transactions without FS support - all databases are doing it already, for another example. However, on FS level, you already have a mechanism that is needed - the FS journal. Adding a transaction level on top of that means adding another journal (and a lot of extra code).
Actually, I'd argue that the most useful scenario is "snapshot" mode (even if it's read-only) - and transacted NTFS does that.
Of course, it all depends on the task at hand. But I've seen many cases where elaborate file locking schemes were devised to essentially do the same job a transaction manager would do much easier.
Windows + E = Explorer Window
Windows + D = Show Desktop
Windows + S = Search
Windows + L = Lock Screen (Very Useful for work)
All sorts of fun commands =)
I wouldn't expect this sort of major features to appear in Win7 now - it's really more of an incremental release.
And this major feature is used in MS apps outside of the core OS, then I'm sure it's well documented somewhere, so competing developers can apply it, right?
Right? Because otherwise that's a continuing antitrust issue.
Thanks for confirming that Win7 is an incremental release from Vista. That's probably not going to help the product's marketing any, but at least you can be forthright about that. For a while there I was afraid MS might have gone with a marketing strategy more like "this thing is NOTHING like that other one that you hate so much." Now that we know it's Vista++, we know ahead of time how to feel about it. The other strategy might have had a chance, even if it was less honest.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Heh, it wasn't my mac, it was only the third time I've ever used one, and knowing that it's just an overpriced unix box, spent twenty minutes looking for a way into /var. Could I find it?
Could I bollox. Must be 'usability' again...
Real men use "Model M" keyboards. You know, the clicky beasts that don't have those stupid Windows keys. I swear to god, the only thing that key has ever done is pull me out of a game when I pressed it instead of CTRL.
Vista is in a constant state of sucking:
0) Useless clicking... the same task compared to XP your are going to get double the clicks and prompts.
1) What ever you do on the HDD it asks you for admin... you can elevate your program to admin, but that is of limited help. What ever you do is going to take you longer than on XP. Copy/remove operations are down to a crawl compared to XP. And yes the system is up to date with sp1.
2) Want to unrar something with a third party program that calls a rar.dll no luck... is going to ask you for admin rights to write on C:\ you give it, it's ok... but if there is another directory in that file, you are out with a prompt telling you the program has no right to write a subdir. Not Vistas fault you'll say.. but is annoying as hell.
And there are more...
Like vista deciding that my XP partion needs a chkdsk at start up... and at the next reboot good bye MBR you will be missed.
So vista compared to XP sucks big time.
And why do you feel the need to cover your arse from all directions saying that you use Ubuntu, used OS X. But you call us fanboys...
My gripe with Vista is that is not an improvement on XP.
The billing/time-tracking software in use at my office looks like it is running in WINE when running in XP. I don't believe its interface or icons have been updated since Windows 3.1. It does not, however run in WINE in reality; poorly-written single-task software is awful stuff.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
If you read up on the discussions leading up to the switch then you'd know that exactly what you propose was considered. Ultimately a complete rewrite was done because the old codebase had become convulted and unmaintainable.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
This is an ages-old excuse used by developers every time they want to break things (I know, I'm one, too, and I've used it myself). Whether it actually holds true is another matter.
However, if it is indeed true, then the correspondence to Vista is even stronger. A lot of breaking changes in Vista are also results of similar cleanups of long-entrenched "Wrong Things".
what's so confusing about add/remove programs?
Generally, it doesn't add programs. From a user interface point of view that would be a negative. Yeah, it can be configured, SMS, yadda yadda. For the vast majority of real situations you can't add programs with add/remove programs.
Help stamp out iliturcy.