For any given release of Windows, there are companies that choose to skip it. But when the company is Intel, it’s a big deal. Intel’s IT department “found no compelling case” for upgrading to Windows Vista.
For any given release of Windows, there are companies that choose to skip it. But when the company is Intel, it’s a big deal. Intel’s IT department “found no compelling case” for upgrading to Windows Vista.
If everything works well, why upgrade latest version?
We are still running Ubuntu 7.04. And it works excellent.
Still the best version of Ubuntu I find.Everytime I upgrade to another I run back to Feisty.Its excellent.
Ubuntu 7.04 came out after Vista and 7.04 will be no longer be supported after next April. When XP came out I was running Mandrake 8.2. It is of course no longer supported with security patches. An Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release is supported for only 3 years for the desktop edition and five years for the server, a lot less than the seven year age of XP. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS desktop edition will lose support next June.
So XP is really ageing. Vista was just not the answer.
I don’t see us upgrading to Vista anytime soon. It unfortunately came pre-installed on the latest round of laptops and using it is about as pleasant as shaving with a cheese grater. Aside from that it doesn’t really offer anything business-wise that we need either.
No doubt we’ll upgrade at some point but I see no reason to do it anytime soon, perhaps not even until Windows 7 is here. XP will still be the company standard.
I was thinking about this today, comparing the ‘upgrade’ of XP to Vista from that of 98 to XP, and it seemed to me that with Vista, Microsoft set out to fix problems that didn’t really exist.
I am no fan of XP, but the reality is that for most, in fact, the vast majority of people, XP is ‘good enough’. Yeah, it has a few issues, but those can all be worked-around a few tweaks and some third-party apps, like virus-scanners.
And after 7 years of dealing with it, we’ve gotten -good- at working around XP’s problems. Vista only set out to solve problems we had largely already taken care of, and introduced new ones we didn’t know how to deal with. Of course Sys admins are reluctant to switch, they’re comfortable dealing with their handful of familiar issues, and don’t want to have to deal with a host of new, unfamiliar ones.
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” may be a fallacy, but it is insightful into human behaviour…
Microsoft did fix a lot of problems with Vista, but the problems were only problems of the Film and Music industry not of the potential customers.
I wonder if the music and film industry will pay Microsoft for the lost sales they got due to the inevitable spit hits their measures have caused on the average users desktop.
The problem was, with Vista Microsoft simply lost focus who their real customers are!
Also, I might add that obviously it costs a lot of money in testing, training, upgrading, etc, in order to move to Vista. Apparently it’s not worth the time and money when everything they need is already there and functioning, and especially since yet another version of Windows will be released in a few years time. It would make more sense for them to look into Windows 7 than Vista and risk doing the whole thing again a few years later.
That, or because Microsoft themselves admitted what a disgrace Vista is
Edited 2008-06-27 07:30 UTC
Microsoft should have included plus as default in XP and Ultimate and Buisiness should be the only Vista versions.
Furthermore MS should make the Vista successor completely modular and include One life care, a burning application equivalent to Nero and last but not least implement a filesystem that makes defragmentation something from the past.
Once the next OS from them is in fact modular there isn’t any reason why MS shouldn’t include a lot more functionality into their OS.
Sadly but true, MS can afford to make a complete mess out of their Vista successor and get away with it in terms of marketshare. Where has their pride gone if they had any?
I agree with this bundled software. I’d also include the student edition of Microsoft Office (Not the trial version that comes with vista.)
I upgraded from XP to OSX
iNTEL has put a lot into their cooperation with Apple after all, and they want a better more stable OS. It should be cheap for iNTEL to progress to Mac Pros and iMacs, it’s freakin’ iNTEL inside already 
this news is pure FUD !
Doesn’t run on their hardware anyway.
They ain’t going to buy 5 million Nvidia and AMD graphics cards to update all their PC’s.
They could have told their customers about that earlier though…
1) It is interesting that on the open source front, Intel seems to be working closely not only with Linux but also with Sun with their Solaris for Intel offerings as well. Are Intel hedging their bets on the future?
2) The need to move from Windows XP to Windows Vista is done on a case by case basis. All the study revealed is that right now, there is no justifiable case for them to upgrade. That study is based on the circumstances now, what the circumstances may be in 3-6 or even 9 months time, given the speed of how things move – they might have a report stating ‘this is the time to move’.
3) This is neither a win for open source or a loss for Microsoft. Intel is a large and diverse company, the petty politics of operating system religions play little in the grand scheme of things.
Intel puts money into anything that could conceivably involve more sales of Intel chips =)
At work, we have Fedora (fc2 I believe) hooked up to our hvac systems, and have not upgraded, because it works very well, and it took some time to get there, win95 is used on many of our Branson ultrasonic welding systems to monitor energy outputs, because it works well and always has. win2k for workstations etc.. And surprising to me even, Vista is running our continuum building controls systems, and has been extremely reliable. Intel is staying where they are because they can, shaking things up for no gain is foolish, and not necessarily because the newer product is bad, but because it isn’t needed.
My company won’t be using Vista. We are primarily XP, with a couple Macs for our graphics guys. My newest personal laptop came with Vista, and I really gave it a genuine shot. I tried it out at work for 3 months to test Vista it out. It was pathetically slow on the network, and performing ordinary tasks, even though I have 2 GB of memory in it. I tossed XP on there, and it was blazing fast performing all of the tasks. Of course, I put Ubuntu on it after my testing. But, after my experience with Vista, I mandated no Vista at my office. :o)
We upgraded to vista business x64 a few months ago. Apart from a few process things in the development team, there haven’t been any real issues.
The whole company is on Dell Optiplex GX620s though (or equivilent), and that isn’t normal in most places (3ghz dual core pentium D, 4 gigs dual channel DDR2 ram, 250 gig SATAII drives)
OK. Stupid question.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd, that you need a -very- powerful machine just to run a OS? (with almost zero functionality by itself?)
Should I really point out that I’m (still) running CentOS 5.1 on a 10 year old Laptop with a 366Mhz CPU and 256MB of memory? (Plus development tools, etc)
I understand it when my private 8C Xeon chokes when I run far too many Virtual machines or compile something huge on it; I can live with DOOM3/Linux or ETQW/Linux choking down my private workstation at home at HD resolutions.
Heck, I just saw Crysis kill a brand new C2Q/9800X2 machine and I can understand why.
But please tell, why do I need to spend money on new hardware… just to run a bare metal OS?!?!? *
– Gilboa
* Before someone starts, I -am- using Vista [sadly, at work] for testing purposes; It does run nicely (?) on a QX9650 machine w/ nVidia 7600 GPU; I just don’t understand why [unlike Linux and XP] it is allowed (!) to crawl on 2-3 year old desktops and for what reason!
Edited 2008-06-27 22:46 UTC
Actually, nowadays these machines would be low to mid range at best. You can get an Optiplex 755 from the dell site that is half again as good in every category for under 500$.
What makes my company not ordinary is we actually upgrade our PCs very regularly, which is why the machine I am on is only mid range from a year or two ago.
You shouldn’t. However, when you do upgrade your machine, vista will run fine on it.
… you are still missing the main point.
The CPU and memory should be used to run -applications- and not the bare OS. (… And I’m not even talking about DRM and friends)
-Even- if I should only spend 1000$ on a Vista compatible hardware, shouldn’t -I- be better served by having to spend only 500$ on Linux/XP compatible hardware instead? What exactly am I getting for the additional money? (In terms of actual features)
– Gilboa
I misunderstood what you were trying to say
The thing is, if you buy a modern machine, you need an os that will take advantage of the power. What use is your NVidia 9600 GTX card, or 8 gigs of ram if you are browsing the web?
Vista have very aggressive caching to make the apps you use more responsive. It has self diagnostic processes, and indexers. All three of these mean fairly consistent disc I/O. If you have a fast HD, chances are you wont notice it. If you have an old IDE HD, Vista will slow to a crawl.
Ditto with the video card. You are actually saving CPU with Aero, because you are using a computer resource that typically goes almost idle when you aren’t gaming or doing graphics work. Sure, if you have a shoddy vid card, Aero will just slow everything down. If you have modern hardware though, you aren’t really getting penalized for the improved experience.
I have installed XP on my home machine for testing purposes, and honestly, I only noticed the slightest of differences overall. For me personally, the only time I feel a noticeable lag from vista is when i am using Visual Studio, which is probably the most I/O intensive app on the planet. Because of that I tone down the indexers on my dev machine (only indexes the start menu). I am planning on getting a new rig soon though, and my number one requirement is RAID-0 SATAIII 7200rpm configuration, which I am pretty sure will make studio fly.
This is why I always tell people not to bother buying a new machine for vista, but when they do get a new machine that it will be a nice upgrade. This is the first version of windows I find has an acceptable level of polish, and while it is far from my favorite operating system out there, I really don’t mind using it to make my living.
Edited 2008-06-28 00:36 UTC
Problem might have been on my side
Simple:
-Don’t- buy a 2000$, 600w-peak machine.
Buy a 300$, 80w-idle machine instead.
… The baby seals will thank you!
The self indexing might have been called a beneficial feature if it didn’t have such hideous counter-intuitive interface. (Most Vista users that I know simply disable it)
As it stands, it just eats away IO and CPU time.
Gaah. I know what you mean… but… Nope.
Power-wise, even a low-end GPU will spend far more power on the 3D interface then the CPU cycles required by XP/Linux/etc to draw their 2D interface.
I wouldn’t call VS I/O intensive – unless you’re building huge projects 24×7 (And if you are, you should consider switching to a GNU Makefile instead of using project files – distributing the builds to multiple concurrent jobs.)
Try testing the same application on 6 different VM guests on the same host and you’ll see what I/O intensive means…
Then again, having the CPU spent on building your code is better then having it spent on Vista tasks, don’t you agree?
My advise to Windows-using-friends (As I said, I’m a Linux users and I use Windows [XP/Vista/2K3] just to test my software) is more-or-less the same:
Don’t upgrade unless you have to, but buy Vista compatible hardware once you do. (Even-though I recommend against using Vista as long as XP is alive and well)
Even though I’m far from being a tree-hugging-environmentalist (Especially given the fact that I’m currently building a dual Xeon as my next home workstation…) I still dislike the idea of spending money and electricity just to run a bare OS. To each its own, I guess…
– Gilboa
Edited 2008-06-28 01:48 UTC
Not gonna respond to the other stuff, since we seem to sort of be going in circles, but I have to call you on this. VS is constantly doing partial compilation of classes, almost after every line. I also use a plugin from jetbrains called Resharper, which only adds to the problem since it makes the whole thing more aggressive.
Fire up procmon and look at what studio does some time, even when it is just idling. It is right up there in resource usage.
I’m writing C code on VS 2K3, and I usually disable browse information (and the rest of the junk) – so at least in my case, VS is far from being a resource hog. (Though I still prefer using VIM with ctags)
You might be using newer versions the behave differently. (I see no reason to upgrade – especially given the changes to the CRT in VS 2K5 and 2K8)
– Gilboa
Yes, we are running around in circles: I keep asking the same question while you keep claiming that the question is irrelevant. (Hardware is now cheap; Future machines will be Vista compatible to begin with; etc)
Never the less, it does not change the basic fact that I have yet to hear a simple answer to the following question:
What are we, as clients, are getting in return to the insane hardware requirements (let alone DRM and friends), that cannot be achieved on alternative platforms (XP/Linux/MAC) with minimal (if any) effort?
– Gilboa
Not enough to justify hardware upgrades. I’ll admit that easily, as I said before, whenever people ask for my opinion, I tell them to wait till they would normally buy a new machine.
I also contest that the hardware requirements are insane. A year ago you needed a 1000$ machine to run vista properly, which is the beginning of high end. Nowadays, a 400$ machine will run it just as well, which is the beginning of mid range.
As a side note, I would never recommend anybody get a computer for any reason other then a toy for their children that is under 600$, and something they actually want to do work on for under 800$. Cheap parts will come back to plague you again and again, and chances are something is going to die in a 400$ machine in a year or two. If you are not a gamer, an 800$ machine will get you something very nice that will last you at least five years.
Oh, OK.
Sounds reasonable enough.
– Gilboa
dude,
you are missing the point… the machine is not just barely running the OS. and BTW, the OS IS an application.
What magic land do you live in that your OS does not take up resources from the computer?
Can vista run on an older machine? no, but it was not designed for older machines. I twas designed to run on a computer that had the resources that a modern low and mid range computer can offer. If you want a OS that will run in the memory, then you better be using DSL or Peanut linux, otherwise… gasp!.. the OS is using a lot of system resources!
Why should it eat a lot of system resources?
In the case of Vista vs Win2K/XP/2K3/2K8 (let alone Linux), what exactly am I getting in return?
– Gilboa
My point was that every OS designed to use the hardware available to it will use that hardware. Besides that fact, try naming one resource that vista is using in competition with you, the end user? What resource is being chewed up that could be better utilized by you and causing you pain and to lower your productivity.
if you want raw power of your system ran by something that will not use the system’s resources almost at all, then try http://www.menuetos.net. Otherwise, live with the fact that an OS is designed to use the hardware to provide the end user with the full capabilities of that hardware.
Edited 2008-06-28 17:03 UTC
Sigh. I’m still waiting for an answer to my previous question. (And no, “OS has hardware; OS uses hardware; That’s life” is not an answer.)
– Gilboa
Answer: it does NOT eat a lot of resources. It manages the resources.
your argument is that it uses power… guess what… big freaking deal. That in no way impacts the user experience.
Applications are responsive in vista, the UI is more responsive in vista than XP or Linux(without Compiz). My applications get the proper resources to run maximally.
Try looking at the processes in vista. you get blips of 2-3 % CPU usage and the memory is managed to provide as much as possible to your applications so they are not starved when they need it. I fail to see where the problem with vista is. 99% of the bloat talk for any OS is garbage.
Edited 2008-06-29 16:01 UTC
Given you closing statement, I doubt that there’s much use in answering, is it?
– Gilboa
If you did answer you would simply reinforce my closing statement.
In your view there is no performance issue with Vista. (And if there is ‘guess what… big freaking deal’)
Call me crazy, but given the fact that your argument (?) goes against the combined experience of the people around me (myself include) and given your rather finite (reinforce? “99% of the bloat talk”?) statements I see little reason to waste time on trying to persuade you otherwise…
– Gilboa
Edit: P.S. You do understand that if I took the time to prove that only 98% of the so called “bloat talk” is false, the rest of arguments (true or false) will be going down the drain, right?
Edited 2008-06-29 22:08 UTC
My argument is not “if there is so what”
it is that there is not a performance issue other than “it won’t run well on old hardware”.
and, no, if you proved that 98% of the bloat talk is false, my argument does not go down the drain, I would have simply been inaccurate.
An operating system does not exist to chew many system resources itself, it exists to allow applications to run on it and use those resources. The main reason Vista uses the amount of resources that it does is because of the massive amount of code it has to run for every seemingly simple thing you do because of the Trusted(Treacherous) Computing Model that Vista was designed for. Everything you or any application does is scrutinized and prevented from doing things in a straight line in order to keep the machine safe for premium content that you may be trying to pirate.
There are various forms of encryption engines loaded and running at all times, this eats up ram and processor power needlessly the vast majority of the time, but they need to stay there because at any time you may access a website or run software that wants to show or play something for you it does not want you to record. This sounds really bad, but this is honestly what Vista is designed for. Microsoft calls this policy system Palladium. Look it up.
But to answer the second part of your question, you are getting very little in return honestly. The UI looks very nice, and they finally did a good job of memory management…of course GNU/Linux and Apple’s OSX had already been doing it for years.
If you want to upgrade, think about what about your machine you want to upgrade, and look into that. Likely you just want a faster machine, and a processor upgrade or more ram may bee what you really need instead of new software.
Aside from Windows Media Player on Vista x64, where is this “tin foil hat” BS DRM you speak of? Show the documentation that points out that Vista is utilising resources on your computer for tyhis so called “Trusted Computing”!
The only app that MS has bundled with Vista that has any content monitoring on it is Windows Media Player and that my friend can be replaced by 3rd party apps that are not the whore of the RIAA and MPIA.
I have not in over a year of Vista support and use found DRM/TRusted computing to be an issue on my system in any form of media handling or document creation. I do not use WMP for any of my media handling and there is nothing there phoning home about my usage and documents either.
Piss off with your FUD and show us anything different with Vista that is not a part of everyones DRM’d OS-X.
Piss off with my FUD? Wow, that is amazing! Thanks! I have not been accused of that particular offense before. The tin-foil hat reference, yes, but never FUD.
So here I go with my FUD. A simple google of “microsoft premium content” brought up an array of good info. Plenty of documentation, even from Microsoft themselves admitting that this does indeed take place. Plus, to save you time and provide me with some more typing I will pick up the bat and beat the horse a little more to list a few of the better ones here for you. Most of these were written at the launch of Vista.
Before Vista officially launched Sam Varghese was pointing out some obvious issues with hardware that would have to be purchased to prevent Vista’s use from degrading content due to the DRM.
” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
An opinion piece that goes through some of the things in the paper linked to above. It points out some of the juicier things in case the main paper is too long to read.
” rel=”nofollow”>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6286245.stm
A good piece here that drew some conclusions about the effects of the DRM policies in Vista.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080907-vista-high-def.html
Care to read the whitepaper from Microsoft themselves? Here ya go!
” rel=”nofollow”>http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista
I could likely find more, but this horse is really starting to stink.
Sorry, the code is Vista is not bloated. features != bloat.
The OS exists to run applications, it is not _the_ application, it should be nearly invisible to the user, and should have a very minor impact on the hardware on it’s own.
If the machine spec doubled or better from XP that is a damn good indicator that it is 2 to 3 times less efficient. How busy is the proc when the computer is idle, and how much memory is used by the always resident portions of the OS is how to judge bloat. Vista is full of it.
You would indeed be better off buying a lower cost machine and putting a more efficient system onto it. I recommend GNU/Linux, the Ubuntu distribution if this is your first time thinking of using it.
Negative, Ghostrider….the pattern is full.
My company’s personal computing department also made a statement that after evaluation of vista, they decided not to upgrade our desktop and laptop windows builds do vista. They didn’t explain thoroughly why, they only mentioned that they’ll be waiting for windows 7. That’s kinda stupid to be waiting for something that can be as crappy as vista – it’s not there yet, guys, come on.
But to the point, in my company, I can trust the guys that made this decission that it’s cost-effective to keep xp. We have over 2000 windows applications that need to be running fine worldwide. If we were to choose vista, it would generate additional cost due to application compatibility testing of all those apps and due to making workarounds in the system build. Maybe people would have to be hired just to perform the upgrade.
But I image if they wait for windows7, they’ll have the same problems, but less of a position to still stay with xp. It’s a bad situation for a company like mine.
On the server side though, things look a lot better. A tested and fully tailored W2K8 build is going to be introduced in some time. And for me, that’s more important as I’m more of an infrastructure guy
Anyway it’s a tough case with vista.
Besides is fancy look and annoying pop-up dialog box, I don’t feel any obvious improvement. The hardware has been advance from 486x33MHz (well I don’t start it from 8086 or even earlier) to now what ever GHZ, it is more than 1000 times faster, but what we feel is still the same/slower OS experience. Where’s the valuable resources gone? To me, Vista’s new fancy look is a total waste of resources of the computer, waste of power energy, waste what ever man months of developing it.
With today’s shortage of energy world wide, Vista is committing energy wasting crime.
You are right. Especially this is suspicious when you know that Vista’s kernel is doing things that should make the performance better:
– it does not waste unused process time slices (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162494.aspx)
– it has I/O prioritized, so you can run things like windows defender in low priority I/O so it doesn’t monopolize
– I think it has also memory access priorities
– cancallabe I/O
But maybe these things are consumed by things like: windows defender, sidebar, visual fx, leaky gadgets.
Maybe not, because if you turn those off, you still have feel slow.
I think we should have detective Monk and Columbo on this case
You are right. Especially this is suspicious when you know that Vista’s kernel is doing things that should make the performance better:
– it does not waste unused process time slices (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162494.aspx)
– it has I/O prioritized, so you can run things like windows defender in low priority I/O so it doesn’t monopolize
– I think it has also memory access priorities
– cancallabe I/O
But maybe these things are consumed by things like: windows defender, sidebar, visual fx, leaky gadgets.
Maybe not, because if you turn those off, you still have feel slow.
I think we should have detective Monk and Columbo on this case
I heavily dislike Microsoft. But something does not seem right here. ZDnet reported that the New York Times reported that the Inquirer found evidence that Intel won’t upgrade to Vista. This all sounds fine but if you read the Inquirer it says.
“ACCORDING TO A memo circulating a few weeks ago, it looks like Intel is taking a wise decision and avoiding the Broken OS entirely. Yes, Intel is not going to use Vista on its corporate machines… ever.”
I don’t really think that is a reliable source of information. If you read further into the Times article you come across a proper quote from Intel.
“An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.”
Which doesn’t mean they are going to skip Vista just that they are not using it widely yet. A common thing for large corporations to do.