MBReview.com reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: “Overall, my first impressions of Vista, and specifically Vista Ultimate, are quite good. I had few problems moving over hardware and software, other than issues of driver support by manufacturers. This is an extremely annoying issue and I’m sure I’m not alone in my distaste for such lack of driver support. The new Aero interface is gorgeous and is one of the big reasons I have moved over to Vista on my main system. It has it’s quirks like anything, but it is a big improvement from WindowsXP. Thus far, I’m impressed.”
I tried Vista myself, but it’s unusable for me. I actually “liked” the OS, it seemed pretty nice and all, but wow – talk about video issues. I tried it in a box with a 7900GT by EVGA, good quality card. Using the stock Vista drivers, display sleeps, but when you try to wake it – screen is garbled.
Sometimes switching resolutions in games causes screen to garble. Alt-F4ing out of the game then causes the screen to revert back. Etc, etc.
Happens with MS Vista-included drivers, Nvidia’s drivers from the site, and also their beta drivers. Irritates me to no end! This is a major bungle. Yes, reinstalled a few times, and yes – seen a gazillion reports of the same thing all over the net.
Vista == nono until fundamental issues like this are resolved, regardless if it’s MSs fault or the major manufacturers.
Why blame Microsoft? they don’t write the drivers; the fundamental problem in your scenario is Nvidia and their crap quality of their drivers; they had over 2 years to get their drivers up to snuff and the design of WDDM was known before the the betas were released publicly.
Me? I’m pissed off as well; I have a Nvidia go 7300 on my laptop, I have the latest beta driver installed (100.64) and it gives me chills the fact that I have to resort to running a beta driver, but at the same time, however, I don’t blame Microsoft for Nvidia’s laziness.
Then again, Ati is no better – it seems that hardware companies want to do the *least* amount of work necessary to get their hardware up and working with Windows or Linux; and when the whole system is taken down thanks to their crappy driver, they run off and blame Microsoft.
Why blame Microsoft? they don’t write the drivers
Maybe they did not write them, but Microsoft did sign the drivers.
Vista will not let you install any driver that has not been signed by Microsoft, and as they keep telling us, driver signing is a quality control process.
The drivers are signed by ATI and nVidia with their PICs. WHQL drivers are signed by microsoft, but those are the ones from Windows Update (and are not being released directly by the manufacturers).
Maybe they did not write them, but Microsoft did sign the drivers.
Vista will not let you install any driver that has not been signed by Microsoft, and as they keep telling us, driver signing is a quality control process.
1) I’m running the 32bit version of Windows Vista which doesn’t include patchguard.
2) Its a signed driver, not a WHQL certified; anyone can sign a driver, its just a matter of getting a certificate from any number of third party providers, sign your code, and voila, thats it.
All the signing does is verify that the driver is from the original company and that it hasn’t be modified by any other people; either via those who are redistributing it, or a possibly security issue at the driver distribution ends server.
If you read my post, and see the “regardless” comment. MS should have used their *enormous* pressure to make sure Nvidia/ATI got their stuff together. Otherwise, they should have just pushed launch back. It’s stupid to launch a product that’s supposed to introduce things like DX10 and so forth, and have even basic video acceleration problems.
So, yes, it’s not MS’s programming fault that the video drivers suck. It’s *still* MS’s problem.
“I don’t blame Microsoft for Nvidia’s laziness.”
I love that one, brings a smile to my face. Luckily for me Nvidia isn’t lazy on Linux 64bit drivers and they work really well.
I think there are more issues here than just lazy driver writing by both ATI and Nvidia, don’t you? The SATA drivers on Vista are a pile of crap as well which has made me stay clear of Vista with a barge pole.
SATA drivers? My SATA drive is running just fine. What problem are you facing>
He is probably get another complaing N-Force owner with a buggy as buggery chipset that ends up castrating the chipset speed to an attrocious 16mbps IIRC.
Again, if the chap wants someone to blame; blame Nvidia and their slow response to releaseing drivers for Windows Vista.
For me, I have SATA goodness no worries, and mine is just a standard Intel chipset – nothing fancy.
Why blame Microsoft? they don’t write the drivers;
You and I know that, and I’m sure that ormandj knows this, too. But the primary purpose of an OS is to provide applications with access to the hardware. If it can’t do this reliably, than from the user’s perspective, the OS is faulty.
For comparison’s sake, people always say that “Linux doesn’t support my graphics card by default, and the proprietary drivers suck.” In theory, this is really the graphics vendor’s fault for not adequately supporting Linux. But in reality, it’s Linux that isn’t providing the hardware support that the user needs.
Place the blame one whomever you wish, but for the user, the buck stops at the OS vendor.
I agree that Microsoft has some blame for the lack of drivers. It should be noted that nVidia and ATI had hands in the design of the WDDM and that they have access to Microsoft’s kernel code (AFAIK, they actually have people on MS’s campus who have offices in MS buildings and develop the code there). Graphics drivers are complex beasts, though… Someone said, though I’m not sure I can believe it, that there’s more code in the nVidia binary blob than in the core of the linux kernel not counting driver modules. It takes time to write such a driver from scratch, which is what these folks have been doing.
And there’s also the chicken-egg problem. They don’t have the financial incentive to push hard on the Vista drivers until they have hardware in Vista customers’ hands. This issue will improve steadily as more feedback comes in from the early adopters and crashes are fixed through Dr. Watson. There’s probably nothing to be done but wait.
I blame Nvidia in both cases! when there are problems with Linux, I don’t blame Linux because of the lack of graphics support, I blame Nvidia and their lack of drive to provide a decent quality driver.
I blame Nvidia for not properly taking advantage of DRM and other modules, but instead creating their own frankenstein monstrocity simply to get around licencing requirements.
With that being said, when I blame Linux vendors for the lack of commercial software like Adobe Creative Suite on Linux, I get blamed for blaming the wrong party – interesting double standards we have here.
It’s hardly a double-standard!
The situation as I see it, is that Nvidia have developed and sold a product with working software.
A third party company (MS) with enough market clout to be able to just ignore any complaints/boycotts from the industry arbitrarily turn around and tell them to develop new software because they have decided to change the interfaces that their product should use.
NVidia have no incentive to spend lots of money developing drivers for older hardware OR developing dual drivers for newer hardware.
Failing to do so will drive H/W sales in new products anyway.
The situation is much simpler and bi-polar in Linux. Linux have provided a system and the commercial vendors have refused to support it. There’s not much that Linux has done wrong in this situation.
If Microsoft got it wrong with Nvidia, did they get it right with ATI?
“From day one, ATI played a key role in helping us design and validate the new driver model at the heart of Windows Vista and ATI has since developed extremely robust and performant drivers that highlight the capabilities of our new operating system.”
http://ati.amd.com/technology/windowsvista/index.html
This is why this site is so annoying. YES it’s Microsofts fault. They changed the rules, they required hardware and software DRM, they changed the way the bus and cards work on the computer. They want to control content, and therefore a requiring a massive re-write from the vendors. MS changed direct X to 10 and forced a crippled wrapper. Why don’t you people pay attention? Vista doesnt trust you, forces more work for the hardware suppliers, and ultimately the costs are passed to the consumer. They have gone so far as to force vendors to obfuscate the drivers. They want nothing out in the open. No one in their right mind should be buying Vista.
Why blame Microsoft?
Because if you are a serious technology company, and you are going to release a piece of software that breaks 3rd party product functionality while relying on those products to function properly, you had better make sure that you have the support of those third parties to get updated drivers out BEFORE you release this flagship product.
it seemed pretty nice and all, but wow – talk about video issues.
They warned you about the “wow.” Didn’t you read the ads?
lacked “advanced features liks stereo” =P no drivers for one of the most common hardware in years, only dx9 capable lol. Overall “My” expereince does not arrive out of a commercial, and its definitly not WOW! =)
Edited 2007-02-16 22:28
lacked “advanced features liks stereo” =P no drivers for one of the most common hardware in years, only dx9 capable lol. Overall “My” expereince does not arrive out of a commercial, and its definitly not WOW! =)
You misunderstand. He said “lacked advanced features like stereo surround“, meaning using the card’s DSP to create 4+ channel sound from 2 channel stereo
Nonetheless I’m pretty miffed that many companies are refusing to write Vista drivers for their older products.
Jesus. Just installed it, and made a few video captures because it really deserves it.
Fresh install, Dual Core, 8800 GTX.
It just *does not work properly*, in my opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=astrofra
You’ve got some major video driver issues. Or broken hardware. I’d check it out if I were you.
Yeah, definately a graphics driver problem.
Well that certainly is odd. I just tried to repro everyone of the issues illustrated in the linked videos with Vista x64 Ultimate running on a Core2Duo E6400 with a GF8800GTX (100.64 drivers). Not one single repro. And yes, I would be happy to post videos.
Definately a graphics driver problem there. Looks like there is no acceleration enabled. The give-away, is the video from the media centre, which goes from 2d view to 3d view, that part should be smooth, without the black screens.
Right, there is a potential graphics driver problem, as the driver for the 8800 is quite new to Vista.
However, the graphic driver should not crash Explorer. This is one of Vista’s improvement : graphic drivers cannot make the system collaspe.
All in all, I was quite confident in Vista’s stability, that’s why I installed it on my office workstation. Issues began to arise when I started to make it more productive, and once I had installed all I needed to work, it began to produce the problems mentionned in the videos.
The clip of Media Center doesn’t render it as it deserves. It run smoothly (thanks godness) on my PC. The trick is just the final BUG where Vista get confused with the screens and send me the wrong app in foreground
I sincerely hope to see huge improvements in Vista’s stability in the months to come, but it is not suitable for CG production, so far.
Right, there is a potential graphics driver problem, as the driver for the 8800 is quite new to Vista.
However, the graphic driver should not crash Explorer. This is one of Vista’s improvement : graphic drivers cannot make the system collaspe.
This is not true. The bulk of the display driver code was moved to user mode, however, there is still a kernel mode component (miniport) that talks to the hardware. A fault in this component can bring down the system, and NVIDIA definitely has unresolved issues in their kernel component (nvlddmkm) in various driver sets. Though Vista usually does a good job of catching and resetting it. When this happens, it is usually accompanied by a notification like, “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered”. You can check your event log for evidence of this.
Other than drivers, if you have any third-party codecs or shell extensions installed, those could also lead to issues with Explorer if they either aren’t totally compatible, or they try to access a corrupted file and can’t handle that situation.
The first positive post about Vista for a while…
Oh, I liked some of the videos astrofra posted. Didn’t get what was wrong all of them, not sure what was wrong with some of the refresh ones (other than the flicker).
I’m guessing your experience is pretty unique (I hope for MS’s sake)…
Who would have thought that Vista Ultimate (aka MCE) would be a pile of steaming poo? I mean, really it’s only based on Vista, which we already know has problems, so who would have thought?? Maybe we should just do the intelligent thing and stick with XP and MCE 2005 on X86 hardware and gradually move to Linux and MythTV?
Why would you support a vendor who doesn’t support YOU?
–bornagainpenguin
Why would you support a vendor who doesn’t support YOU?
Why would anyone take you seriously? LOL
What does your personal attack have to do with this discussion? I stated my opinion, one backed up from years of using MS Windows, from Windows 3.0 all the way through Vista RC 1 (yes I know the RC2 and RTM are supposed to be worlds better but I was unable to get a copy of RC2 and I’m not about to pirate Vista) and your response is to what? Ad hominem? Maybe I should give it a shot…
That’s a great way to argue! Surely the amount of money you’re being paid to astroturf is not nearly enough! You simply must demand more!
–bornagainpenguin
Nah, they pay good money for astroturfing, but they only pay it for good shills.
His attempt was plain amateurish, and lets face it, embarrassing.
What does your personal attack have to do with this discussion?
What does your spam have to do with this discussion? Poo? lol
Spam?
I’m beginning to see what raver31 meant–your amateur fanboyism borderlines trolling, not astroturfing. My apologies to the real astroturfers who have to work hard to avoid the stigma of your attacks.
–bornagainpenguin
I’ll be honest with you. I picked up Vista Ultimate a couple of days after it came out and I like it quite a bit. I mainly use OS X (I installed it on an intel iMac), with Fedora 6 on my laptop for travel, but Vista is definetly in the right direction. The main issue is the video drivers. I have an ATI card, but while functional and without any of the problems I’ve seen mentioned here, there are some issues. First, and most important, I can’t full screen a dos prompt. I am told this is a driver issue and it drives me insance. The other issue is opengl is not optimized at all. Nothing specific really stands out to me on Vista, but all the little improvements together make me prefer it over XP (though not OS X, which I still consider the top dog). Little things like profiles going in c:users instead of c:documents and settings, readyboost, the enchanced speed of of going to sleep and waking up, the improved gui, etc etc. One really nice feature is the Windows Presentation Framework (or whatever its called) allows programs designed for it to resize windows properly. For example, if you resize IE 7 it resizes the page inside to fit that width (something Opera has been doing for a while). This is built into the GUI now, so any program written for it can take advantage, like Times Reader.
There are two things I have seen improve over OS X though, and those are the accesibility features with the zooming in and voice commands. The voice recognition works signifigantly better then Dragon Natural Speaking 8, if the command suite is smaller. My wife helps train people with disabilities and has a client she is helping learn Dragon. It is a joke as far as the recognition goes compared to how well Vista understands you. The zooming feature is almost professional quality software, not quite Zoomtext, but pretty good nonetheless. Both features are a bit better then OS X at this point from what my wife says.
Right now I spend about a quarter of my computer time in Vista to learn it, and I would say it’s an improvement. It has its faults, whether it’s the drivers or some compatability issues, but it is definetly better then XP. I see a lot of generalization and complaints about video drivers but I’ll be honest. The drivers on linux aren’t exactly top notch at the moment and have led me to more problems then my Vista ones.
Is Vista better then linux? No, but I wouldn’t say it’s worse either. It really depends on your needs and what you do. I would definetly recomend an upgrade for people who have the hardware, though if you’re a gamer, wait 6 months or untill you buy a computer that comes with it. OpenGL does take a 20-30% hit from what I can tell, and sometimes slows down to a complete halt even with games like Quake1.
[quote]The voice recognition works signifigantly better then Dragon Natural Speaking 8, if the command suite is smaller. My wife helps train people with disabilities and has a client she is helping learn Dragon. It is a joke as far as the recognition goes compared to how well Vista understands you.[/quote]
This is way off-topic and my apologies to everyone, but I’m curious … since you seem interested in speech, for the Firefox Foxyvoice/Speakit extension, do you know where to download voices from (even if they cost $$) to make it work as well as the text-to-speech capabilities in Opera? I really, really like Firefox, but having Stephen Hawking read web pages to me keeps me in Opera
I don’t think Microsoft Sam would be tolerable as a default.
Why would you support a vendor who doesn’t support YOU?
Since when do companies support people? You must be new to Earth.
“Since when do companies support people? You must be new to Earth.”
Since I’m a customer and customers pay their wagers, If I don’t get good support then my money goes to pay some other companies wagers. I think thats how it works here on earth don’t it?
Vista is 10 steps backwards, having a prompt to ask you do perform basic functions is annoying to say the least. Trying to add permissions to a Operating System that was a free for all is a nightmare. To me Windows Vista should be renamed ‘Windows Vista ME Edition’ then it would be complete.
The memory consuption, slow boot up times and I actually blue screened it in the store! With the famous IRQ is not equal to zero and that is stability???
I am installing FC6 (Fedora Core 6) clean install from FC5 and it is so much easier to install, configure and maintain.
Vista ‘ME’ Edition it boggles my mind how they could have spent 5 + years on Vista and it is horrible!
Edited 2007-02-17 04:18
..I wanted to like Vista, but beta testing RC’s gave me some chills. RTM came out and thankfully to my company MSDN subscription I dl’ed Vista RTM in hope that RC problems have gone and system has been speeded up.
WOW, what a dissapointment. Performance hasn’t improved a dime since RCs.
While there was some polish to it RTM was too close to RC2. I wasn’t able to change default apps for multimedia and internet browsing…I did changed it but Vista ignored settings completely. UAC…talk about bad bad implementation…in one moment after UAC complained I thought some game started in background from all the flashing desktop has seen while UAC activated.
Several big UI bugs and general problems with dial-up(ADSL) aswell as random BSOD’s during network activity quickly made me turn my back on it.
Indexing was pretty bad too…what was worse defrag launched during drive indexing and made everything stop to stand still. I read on some boards that indexing in Vista has no i/o overhead… i must have used different Vista.
I can’t use Vista for anything other than checking it out in current state. I’m still struggling why was Vista launched 6-12 months prematurely.
The really bad thing, is that everyone in corporate-land is waiting for SP1/2. So I notice that Vista SP1 is scheduled for June and I guess that SP2 will arrive in Jan ’08. This isn’t enough time to do the same level of debugging and ‘feature’ fixing that went into XP SP1 (Took 1 year to develop) or SP2 (arrived 2yrs after SP1)
… since my computer doesn’t have these problems with Vista.
I’m seeing about a 10% drop in overall frame rate on DirectX games (comparable to the WinXP upgrade many years ago), but otherwise stable.
amd64 x2 3800+
GeForce 7600GT (100.59 drivers from 1/30/2007)
nforce4 SLI chipset
running Vista Enterprise 32 bit
This box also boots WinXP and Ubuntu.
I did run into an issue early on where the virus scanner (McAfee 8.5) silently blocked *part* of the NVidia driver install, resulting in a hideously unstable system. Turning off a/v, removing the old driver, and reinstalling the new one fixed that, however.
I am *not* a fan of microsoft, nor am I an astroturfer (Which apparently means “Disagrees with me” these days– I guess it’s easier to slap a label on someone you don’t know, rather than deal with the possibility you’re wrong), but most of the anti-vista posts I’ve seen have been incredibly biased and inaccurate.
most of the anti-vista posts I’ve seen have been incredibly biased and inaccurate.
Most of the pro-vista posts I’ve seen have been incredibly biased and inaccurate.
Most of the pro-vista posts I’ve seen have been incredibly biased and inaccurate.
So, care to provide examples?
Or can you only communicate via clever cut and paste quotes?
I also think it was launched prematurely. Especially as some Microsoft product (even the most recent version/service pack) are not even compatible with Vista. UAC is very annoying (Apple Ads is right on the target!) and would have require a lot more tuning to get out of the way (and efficient as I predict user will just click OK to everything).
It was a (poor) marketing decision to have it launch prematurely. Vista will get a bad reputation. Sales are already not as strong as “expected”. Hoping to gain 6 month now of revenues, Microsoft will pay for years that poor reptuation on Vista.
Edited 2007-02-17 14:55
I’ve been following the Vista pieces here for the past few weeks and am frankly surprised that most of the comments are just plain FUD.
For the record, I’m currently running OS X, Ubuntu, XP, and Vista on various work or home machines. All have their upsides and downsides. I prefer linux for programing, and mostly use XP for office work.
So far I’ve upgraded two boxes from XPSP2 to Vista with very few problems–had to download a bios patch prior to installing on one box, a graphics driver post-install to take advantage of Aero on another. Symantec antivirus needed to be upgraded on both boxes to work. All in all these things took me ~10 minutes. I’m very impressed with Vista so far, interface is slick, and security changes are good for the most part (hilarious Mac commercial notwithstanding). Given the enormity of the task of getting Vista to market, I tip my hat the people from Redmond (and Apple, and the Debian/Ubuntu crowd).
Just because your experiences are good, doesn’t mean that everyones’ are.
I installed Vista on a machine that, on average, doubled the MS minimum requirements. My machine got an experience index of >3.
On the whole, Vista was OK, It ran fine, general application performance was the same as with XP, but:
* instead of having ~600MB of ram free for apps, I had 300MB (700MB taken up by the OS).
* My DTV card was recognised by vista, and given a generic Driver. One that only works with Media Center. Becuase I hadn’t paid MS lb700 for ‘Vista Premium Ultimate CashCow’, I couldn’t use the driver. The Vendor shows no sign of writing new drivers (Why should they?). And there aren’t any 3rd party apps that work with my card. So no TV for me.
* Try unzipping a moderately sized ZIP file. or copying files across drives. The performance of Shell actions SUCKS. (I was averaging 250 B/s which, for an unzip operation is appalling)
* Damn UAC!!!!
^ ^ Now all these issues have been raised by the various articles that I’ve read. AND they mirror MY experiences. So I can only conclude that YOU are trying to spread FUD by denying them.
Always reflect on the OS so does this mean they cannot code right or is Vista driver model just a arse?. Nvidia said it would be a year before Vista gets good optimized drivers, thats pretty pathetic and the driver model seems not friendly.
You can make good drivers but it depends on how the OS deals with them, Nvidia’s response is ‘it will take some time to get to know the OS’. Well thats true but the fact that Microsoft’s driver model should have been finalized in beta would have helped. To me there is no other reason why Nvidia drivers are pretty crap, ATI seem much better but maybe they started on them much sooner.
Even Windows2000 was not this bad and yes Vista is more complicated but for five years of work Vista’s “WOW” factor is pretty poor.
vista isn’t ready. Specifically video drivers and even DRM! DVD’s won’t play at all in Windows Media Player (I get an annoying “downgrade your resolution” message) whereas in XP it was flawless. iTunes wouldn’t play it’s DRM’d items until some searching on the net revealed a program from apple they say “might work”, in my case it did after 2 tries and a couple reboots (I have no idea why), Movielink movies refuse to play- it gives me a “can’t connect to the web” type message, then clicking on help tells me its a sound driver issue /boggle, Dell’s site declares my drivers as good for XP & Vista. It makes my laptops video card fan run at full speed non-stop destroying any chance of using the battery, this despite the fact I’m using Windows Vista. It constantly tells me software won’t work with Vista yet when I bypass the annoying message it works anyway except Sonic burning program which isn’t necessary now anyway as it seems Vista has full burning support built-in now instead of the half-way XP was. Maybe the Vista interface for burning is better or more intuitive? I can’t put my finger on it but I give them credit for it whatever they did.
It seems that the real problem is similar to what the 9x to XP upgrade was like in that the problem really isn’t Windows but the 3rd party drivers and software. But I can’t let MSFT get away with that answer either because I have no issues at all with hardware and software working when I change Linux kernels so why does Windows have to be so different? I’d really like to know, that’s not just intended to be a snide comment. Is it the programming method differences or because Linux upgrades itself far more often and more gradually (point releases leading up to a full) thereby making the progression for the software and drivers smoother so much that it’s practically un-noticable?
Good points though: (keep in mind this is re: Vista Home), the start menu – I love how they ripped off Spotlight, google desktop search, and beagle here. Also eliminating the annoying second wait time for menus to cascade in the start button. Yes I know how to hack the registry in xp to make that faster; but why is that needed to do in the fast place? I actually like Windows widgets, there’s no fear of yahoo taking over your browser or implanting spyware/adware, and it seems more intuitive than Google’s equivalent, but I don’t like how it decides what news to give me, Google is far smarter in that respect for its web clips picking up my surfing habits for news. So while i prefer Google’s, Vista’s was easier for my wife to grasp. I suspect the same would happen if she were on a mac (mac’s would be easier than a 3rd parties). It boots faster and even has better sleep and hibernate states although I don’t like it taking over my Dell functions, Dell’s worked far better for adjusting sound, I’m torn about which I like better for an interface for power management though, Dell’s XP one or Vista’s.
I dont believe how fast some comments are called FUD.
Just because one person does not have problems with
vista does’nt mean i won’t. Now i do have xp on other
computers, but this is a win98se computer and it is set
up properly, and works just fine, no vista needed here
Look on the web, many computers ARE having problems
with vista and it is not FUD!!!
I’ve been using Vista (Ultimate) for a week now fulltime and my feeling is that it’s a good system that has some very rough edges; primarily because of drivers.
I really hope that Creative sort out the X-Fi drivers soon because that is a big miss the 5.1 suddenly becoming 2.0 near enough.
Flip3D is useless imo; I’d have been happy if they had just copied Expose instead of trying to prettify ALT-TAB. Multiple unknown keypresses to get to any particular window is crappy. (MyExpose for Vista helps there)
I also had a slight cringe when I went into the Windows directory and saw these glaring anomalies amongst the shiny new icons; Downloaded Program Files, Offline Web Pages… yuck. Someone really wasn’t paying attention.
Those issues aside, I think it’s a good upgrade. The breadcrumb navigation in Explorer is a far better way of doing things even if it takes a little getting used to.
The integrated search is better than any of the bolt-on searches for XP including the MS Desktop Search. The stuff in Explorer like the favourites is really good once you get ‘into’ it.
The Help seems to have had a hell of a lot of work too, with it now actually being *useful*. Crazy.
My feeling is that it’s not an upgrade that people should rush out and get but it’ll be a good upgrade when they get there. I think the majority of people should – as the old adage goes – wait for SP1 to get it because there are a fair amount of rough edges just now that need dulled.
Certainly Vista doesn’t deserve the denigration it has had quite widely, but it equally doesn’t deserve a huge amount of plaudits. It’s a worthwhile next step for Windows but nothing more than that; certainly not the jump there was from 3.1 to 95 (as was being touted by some Microsoft types pre-release)
I have been running Vista x64 Ultimate via an OEM license for a few weeks now. I have encountered minor issues with Firefox and PC Tools AV. I also note that the nVidia drivers (for my 7900 GTO) do need work.
Permissions with regards to editing the Start Menu for a mixture of %username% and ‘All Users’ are insane and quite awkward. I should note that now my Menu is organised, I like the new look and feel for the ‘Start Menu’.
Despite these (for me _personally_) minor issues, everything else is OK. I’m actually enjoying Vista and have been impressed with compatibility. I installed Pro Pinball – Timeshock (32 bit – DirectX 3a) and it worked! I can also switch to and from the desktop with the few games I play. These are mainly RTS + FPS games. Far Cry, Doom III and Diablo II spring to mind.
I’m a console gamer these days BTW!
I would not pay more than lb200 for this OS and feel that on the surface at least, Vista could be better. UI inconsistency is far more of an issue than with Gnome or KDE. I expect that OS X is the same, but cannot test this.
In summary, worth it if you are an enthusiast Windows user and get the OEM license. It certainly won’t pry you away from your alternative OS of choice, nor can any case be made for a business upgrade at this time.
IMHO of course.
BTW, I have a CPU that supports VT. Vista seems to ‘Virtualize’ processes. A Virtualize ‘tick’ is shown next to certain running applications when viewed in Task Manager. Diablo II, Clone CD Tray and SetPoint32 are all examples. I wonder if it sandboxes certain 32-bit apps???
Dreamscape uses very little CPU for a 1920 x 1200 desktop (5% ish playing the bundled .MPG) Shame I haven’t got any nice video clips…
Oh, and PowerShell also looks to be very useful. Anyone who has ever tried to get meaningful information regarding ACL + ACE’s for a file or folder purely within WSH will know what I mean! Scripting folks should be looking at this!
Sorry for the rambling post folks…
…but not yet! Remember when XP came out there were the usual problems, exactly the same as the problems that Vista is having now. When SP1 comes out it will be far more stable than what it is now. At the moment there are very few drivers for hardware simply because MS did not make this available to the hardware manufacturers in time. Not the manufacturers fault at all. All the blame lies on MS doorstep. Don’t get me wrong, I like Vista, it really is a pretty good OS, but I am unable to port all my software over to it at the moment so I am sticking with XP until SP1 does arrive.
Except that MS know that many people are waiting for SP1, so they are going to push it out the door as soon as possible (Currently June, 6 months ahead of the XP SP1 release). You’ll end up having to wait for Vista SP2, or later.
I see these sorts of reviews for Linux distros all the time. Somebody installs it, takes a quick look at it, and that’s it. The review is simply inadequate, all of these types of reviews are inadequate.
Please note: I am not bashing Vista here.