Since its release, the steady stream of updates have made Windows Vista noticeably less annoying to use. The biggest stride forward was the release of the operating system’s first service pack, back in March of this year. Neowin.net now claims that the second service pack is on its way, with the first beta being dropped on testers in the coming four weeks.
The final release of Vista’s second service pack will be delivered before Windows 7, so we can expect it to arrive somewhere next year. A beta will appear in the coming four weeks; invites have been sent out to beta testers, Neowin claims. SP2 for Server 2008 follows the same time table. In fact, a placeholder webpage is already available at Microsoft’s website.
The second service pack will include Windows Desktop Search 4.0, support for Bluetooth wireless (including BT 2.1 fixes), and additional application compatibility updates. Server 20008, “Microsoft will include backwards compatibility with Terminal Services licensing keys, improved manageability features with DFS/FRS console, and Storage Resource Manager, print server and spooler performance improvements for printers in Windows Vista and Server 2008 and improved error reporting in DFSR to help identify incorrectly configured deployments which lead to failed replication.”
SP2+Probably Monopoly Imposing Search Option to boost MSN. I was going to put a sarky comment about this, but seriously Vista is about forever and is still considered slow intrusive DRM riddled spyware/adware + Irremovable apps with eye candy at worst and at best badly marketed.
Its been 2 years since Vista was RTM and its still getting getting a kicking from just about everyone.
That being said where does this stand…Its not going to change market perception if that’s whats wrong and its not going to fix that its slow intrusive DRM riddled spyware/adware so from a market perspective its a waste of time.
Thats ignoring that Vista 2 is just around the corner and Microsoft if it has anything up its sleeve is going to put it in that.
The Only thing that could be interesting is if they decided to use this as launch for DirectX 11 and a IE8 exclusive.
On being slow, on my MBP 2.2/2GB it actually performs quite reasonably.
DRM riddled? I have NOT been troubled by this DRM thingy you’re talking about. How has Vista’s “ability” to play DRM’ed content burdened you?
Spyware? Adware?
Umm, what?
Irremovable apps
Like what? IE? It never bothered me, I use Firefox.
What else? Notepad?
Oh, I see we do agree on something.
Edited 2008-10-21 17:36 UTC
Vista is slow even on a high end laptop I expect my computers to start fast and respond, Vista is simply not up to the task and I assure you I do not skimp on hardware.
The second Vista does not record TV programs it is simply not functional.
As an OpenOffice and someone who doesn’t like to locked to a particular Office format, I’m disappointing that Vista comes with Crapware(their words not mine)for Office.
Irremovable apps…soon to be search, but why not add IM + Media Player + Virus Cleaner etc all of which have Superior alternatives. I do wish Microsoft would listen and create a modular OS Although I’m glad your not bothered but thankfully many Government agencies are.
I agree I am a troll, because my comment was less about Vista and more to do with its a bugfix+MSN.
Bring on Vista 2 already
Edited 2008-10-21 17:56 UTC
pirated copies of Vista are slow;
OEM copies of Vista are slow due massive presence of 3rd parties bloated software;
Buy a retail original copy of Vista and your low end laptop will fly!
Edited 2008-10-21 18:10 UTC
I’m not an user of Vista nor any edition of Windows.
But a pirated copy of windows vista isn’t in any way different from an original one.
You may say: but in the original copy you’ll have official support.
Yeah, right… Support will speedup windows vista installations.
I don’t think so.
Stop, my insides are hurting, please never post again. That is the funniest thing ever. Seriously that is the most retarded comment ever.
I don’t doubt it, Cyclops.
I more or less agree.
Quite possibly. I rather like it when we happen to be in agreement.
Pirated versions are slow? That’s BS. Whilst I myself use an OEM version of Vista x64 which is definatly not slow (it’s faster than XP! and not a bit) I know several people that use the bios hack to run an asus or dell oem Vista and their Vista installs aren’t slow either.
If you don’t know what your talking about, just shut up or get informed!
Do you spinkle magic pixie dust on it as well, or do you talk to it to make it go faster, BTW it would go a lot faster if you used XP/bought a bigger processor hell 2 quad cores why not!!
Seriously funny stuff
How so?
Wrong. Your low end won’t never make it.
Bullshit, they’re exactly the same.
If it’s slow then it’s slow. You can make up excuses all day but in the end the impression it leaves is “Vista is slow”.
I doubt it.
Stop trolling. Windows Vista runs fine on my Aspire One with 1.5GB of RAM, and x3100 Intel videocard. With full Aero.
“runs fine” is certainly a bit subjective. My high standards won’t classify “fine” as a real “fine”. Just happens people are getting too accustomed to slow software and lots of animations and bad performance. This comment is also too subjective.
Let’s make it real, then. Here are two videos I just shot and uploaded to YouTube. Quality is crappy because I’m using a digital photo camera here. Just to give you an idea.
Part I:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YR9GDNdgh5M
Part II:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fPAnuQzAnMo
Have fun.
lol That is the funniest thing I have ever watched.
The best bit is where you think search is broken and then it finally pops up. On a machine that by your own admission is fast.
I’ve give you that that start menu is awful fast, but precious little else is, and that’s the point, and comparatively slower than XP/BSD/Linux for anything else, and Vista has all these fancy caches everywhere.
Please show the startup time
Off-topic
=========
Why is gnome menu have the annoying little pause on it, no matter how fast the machine, I’m sure there are other things, but that annoys me the most.
What are you on about? I don’t think it’s broken, I just typed into the wrong box because I’m an idiot. I started typing in the location field, which opened my default browser. The actual search was instant.
What exactly is slow in the videos?
Well, for one thing in the first part the files or whatever you were viewing took ages to pop up. But this can be excused for a laptop drive (assuming they weren’t cached).
Then, a moment before you started talking about the ipod drive, you opened some dialogue which, again, took ages. I couldn’t really see what it was so there may or may not be a valid reason for this.
Last but not least, every window shows its border first, then the content appears. It is similar to when you minimize/maximize windows in GNOME but a lot slower. As with GNOME, I don’t know if this is some fancy animation or just plain slowness but in any case, it sucks ass. I find myself staring at a blank spot and waiting for the information to appear.
As you may have guessed, I’m not one of the most patient fellows – that’s why I use KDE which is not perfect either but a lot faster, imo
Don’t get me wrong, none of these issues really affect your productivity in any significant way but it’s not fast if you can still see the motion…
I’ve looked to your video. Yes, for a cached IE, etc. it works just fine for most user activities. Anyway, the feeling of instant I haven’t feel it till I had more than 1G RAM on desktop/server + dual-core on Vista. Anything less was too slow for most users that expect XP instant feeling of todayy. Yes an OS from 2002. Secondly as an user I see that you use only one application (give full amount of caching). For now I have at least one browser, one flash app (youtube
), one .NET application I work on, two Visual Studios, messenger on Vista Home Basic with disabled all effects. Ram usage: 1.87G. Putting that on your laptop (my laptop is somehow worse but have the same amount of RAM) will make your laptop to access more often the disk, and that on a laptop it hurts. Vista in my machine gets from scratch 500 M, and with most usage have take around 1.2 G and jumping to 1.5 limit is just a bit. Having XP, will mean the same thing minus 250 M, and the feeling will be a much more responsive system. That happen on games, any power user that open a multifile document (even a big book), Photoshop, etc.
So, I am agree, for your usage, probably you may say once that IPhone is a desktop replacement…
I am troll, because I a created an off-topic performance topic where people are intent on defending Vista.
…but your the problem
Check Vista arguments a before launch…It was going to be this and that…and it was well was garbage, and all the faithful are going SP1 will solve all the problems, and well its didn’t hence the Mojave+Rushed Vista 2. My point is muhhh, fix to the fundamentally broken that Microsoft will not provide a *REAL* fix for.
You can stick your head in the sand, but it doesn’t stop Vista being Garbage. Notice the Class action lawsuit anyone…Those are most people who own machines would call serious rigs.
Seriously put XP/MAC OS/Linux/BSD it don’t matter they are simply perform better on the same hardware in EVERY WAY anything else is a lie.
Argue features; compatibility even even Direct X 10 but don’t talk nonsense.
You are a troll because you are intent on turning anything resembling intelligent discourse on anything even remotely related to windows into a boring flamewar.
X
@cyclops and all the other freetards out there:
Please … stick with your candy-ass useless desktop OS/distro of choice. The rest of us will get work done using Vista on our 4-year-old P4 2.8 Ghz machine with 3 GB RAM. A measly $40 upgrade, and Vista sings on my old box.
You, sir, are a fud-ified dipshit.
Why does someone always need to result to personal attacks? Come on everyone, calm down already. If you’ve got something intelligent to say, say it. If not, and a personal attack is all you have, don’t even bother as it only makes you look like a fool.
That aside, if *your* experience with Vista was great, good for you. Mine for instance was less than stellar on quite good hardware, and are you going to flame me for that? Experience and opinions are subjective. Vista has flopped for me in every scenario I put it through, that’s just a fact, and I personally despise the extra bloat that ms put in when they could have really used this chance to streamline the os instead. I don’t like Vista. You’re not obligated to dislike it because some of us do. By the same stretch, we’re not obligated to love Vista because it works for you, and calling someone a dipshit because they don’t like it is far from an intelligent addition to this discussion.
Or I could just upgrade my 3hard drives for raid/hdmi motherbaord motherboard/case/ram/mid-range graphics card, and get stuff done using on OS that makes better use of that hardware.
Worst like for like comparison ever…not really making a big impact there are you, and Linux well it boots real fast if only one of these freebios project got enough hardware support.
No, and yes I also have the advantage of choosing my own hardware without reactivation, and very nice it it too
. I do still compile my own kernel, but to be fair its a wasted effort from a booting perspective. It seems no faster to Ubuntu’s stock. I have no services I don’t need they don’t even reside on my machince but thats more a security effort on my part than a perfomance thing as 100’s of Millions of Windows users have learnt to their cost.
Edited 2008-10-21 20:55 UTC
The definition of “fine” is rather subjective.
I’m doing porting work on a C2-Quad/2.66/4GB machine; this machine has W2K3, Vista, CentOS 5.2/64 and Fedora 8/64. (W2K8 will be added shortly and replace Vista)
While I don’t have numbers of back this claim, subjectively Vista is by far slower than the rest of the lot – and I’ve disabled all the useless bells and whistles (Aero/Compiz/etc) on all platforms.
Vista also has the highest memory usage (~700MB idle) almost twice the CentOS5 machine. (<400MB, ~1GB with 2 VMs)
– Gilboa
It ran like ass on my 1.7Ghz, 1Gb RAM Compaq Presario, with or without Aero.
My experience contradicts your statement. I have a 2Ghz AMD X2 with 2G of RAM, and it runs great. We have a bunch at work, 2.4Ghz Centrinos, and they are FAST.
Uh, what crapware? you can’t blame MS for what OEMs put on laptops. My Laptop came with nothing but Vista and Roxio.
Then using an alternative OS would make them faster
I’m glad you talk about install. The machines I see with Vista come as 32-bit, with a trialware copy of Microsoft Office as standard. Oh and you can create a restore of the current working machine onto DVD’s, well I suppose it beats typing in a 30alphanumenric code when you have to install and a 42digit number into the phone and a different one into your computer to active it, and going to the web-site and downloading the latest copy of the drivers, the installing then rebooting and the getting the latest software again and reregistration the programs you bought…oh know you have to do hours of updating through Microsoft Update…and thats XP too…and you need to be computer savvy, and I mean that way computer savvy.
…but yes trailware Office 2007
Excuse me?
Are we talking about the same company that set the hardware limits [1] on -all- netbooks to 2GB/80GB (now 160GB)? Are we talking about the same company that got convicted for strong arming OEM’s to force IE down client’s throat?
You may claim that MS rather not get into a fight with their biggest clients about OEM software installation (let alone getting in the DOJ’s face) – but please don’t insult our intelligence by claiming that MS is actually a big scared cat that’s incapable of controlling OEM installations.
– Gilboa
[1] http://digitimes.com/systems/a20080903PD217.html
“You may claim that MS rather not get into a fight with their biggest clients about OEM software installation (let alone getting in the DOJ’s face) – but please don’t insult our intelligence by claiming that MS is actually a big scared cat that’s incapable of controlling OEM installation”
I never said they were scared, and I never said they did not want to get into a fight, don’t put words in my mouth. I said you can’t blame them for it, blame the OEM’s. Please, learn to read.
Why is it MS’s problem if OEM’s put crap on their computers? They still get the profit from Windows. I bought a laptop from Dell, and all it had on it was Windows and Roxio. That’s one of the reasons I bought it.
Because they should shop putting Windows Office trialware on it.
…and we now have full circle and you have made the same point several times, with several good responces to it.
I find it trivial to remove the adware installed on PC’s I find it impossible to remove the applications and their frameworks from Microsoft. I think and re-installation is painful
Sorry. You can’t have it both ways.
If, as you claim, MS shouldn’t care about what OEM’s put on their OS *, please stop using the old “Vista is fine; it’s just the OEM’s fault” argument every time someone claims that Vista is slow and/or full of crap ware.
… Then again, if, as you claim, it’s just an OEM problem, what stops MS from exercising the same brute force it uses when it comes to selling XP licenses to netbooks and/or the same marketing power it used in the “Vista ready” program in-order to give their users the best OS they can possibly give… Unless:
A. MS has a vested interest in letting OEM’s install this junkware.
B. You are not MS’ client – the OEMs are; hence, MS doesn’t really care about what you think.
… As you do not strike me as being stupid, I’m left to wonder why you fail to understand the problematic nature of your argument.
– Gilboa
I don’t claim that. I never claimed that. Read the whole thread.
I did.
You can’t claim this:
“Uh, what crapware? you can’t blame MS for what OEMs put on laptops.”
… and then claim this:
“Apple gets to bundle all sorts of things, Linux comes with everything but the kitchen sink(tm), why can’t MS bundle apps? It’s not like you have to use them.”
(Especially given the OP)
– Gilboa
Boy, you sure can take things out of context. I was discussing 2 different things, one about “crapware” and one about bundling. The two are not the same thing. To differentiate the two:
Crapware is crappy software, installed by the OEM. It can be just crappy software, like Norton, stupid toolbars, or crippled versions of Roxio or it can be time limited demos, like 60 day versions of office.
Bundling is having the OS installed with various applications and utilities, like Windows has IE, WMP, Windows Messenger, and notepad, OS X has Mail, Safari and ichat.
I was saying that you can’t blame MS for OEMs installing crap on a PC. You can blame (thank/curse) MS for bundling IE/Notepad/paint/WMP/WMM/Media Center.
See the difference
Irremovable apps is a genuine problem though. You cannot uninstall Windows Photo Gallery / Media Player / Movie Maker / DVD Maker and so on. You have to vLite the disc to get that space back.
Despite the anti-trust requirements about bundling, Vista is worse than XP for tying software into the OS! Of what has been said, Windows 7 will [may] rectify this.
Why in 2 what Microsoft rectify this? What would be in for Microsoft’s best interest.
I also find it strange when Power Users suggest complicated and time consuming workarounds to something that should be trivial
Apple gets to bundle all sorts of things, Linux comes with everything but the kitchen sink(tm), why can’t MS bundle apps? It’s not like you have to use them.
In both Mac OS and Linux any included software can be binned easily. Let me re-iterate: there is no built in way to remove Windows Photo Gallery / Media Player / Movie Maker / DVD Maker and so on.
On Mac OS X, you can move Quick Time & Safari to the bin and empty it. Done, they’re gone (their frameworks remain of course, but then Webkit and QT is used everywhere in OS X) – I’m talking about bundled front-end apps. Frameworks are parts of the OS and cannot be “bundled” as it were.
Oh well, you still don’t have to use them. If you install the ports system in freebsd, unless you delete a port you don’t want, ALL the apps are there. Every one.
Let me reiterate, you don’t have to use the bundled apps. On my Windows computers, I use pidgin, thunderbird, firefox, openoffice, blah blah. I know that Windows messenger, OE, IE and whatever else is still on the harddrive, but I just can’t bring myself to care. It’s not like they are eating up 50G of space.
I’ve always thought that this particular argument against MS is just complaining for the sake of complaining.
Clearly you are a security expert
Never claimed to be. I am however rational enough to know that if an app isn’t run, or not allowed to run because of Group policy, then it is probably not a threat.
I don’t see any clear security ramifications for Windows Movie Maker, mspaint, or notepad. IE and WMP, sure, but if they aren’t run, then there is no problem.
There are lots of other, more valid reasons to complain about Windows, I don’t need to invent more.
lol
easy
a) Because everything can be removed replaced or choose an alternative, all at the touch of an add/remove button.
b) Interesting there is none(must be some) Greyware/Spyware/Adware/Malware/Scumware/Junkware/Suspectware simply by the nature of the software
c) Also Interestingly most of it is lock-in free using open standards and the like rather than proprietary ones which is often toted by those shackled by it as a positive.
But you know this your just playing ignorant.
Actually, I’m not, those bundled apps don’t bother me, I use other software, and I never see them. I don’t care that they are there, and anyone, anywhere can replace them with apps they choose.
The only bundled apps I use on a regular basis is WMP, the rest, I replace with OSS apps. It’s not that big of a deal.
I have to uninstall and remove a bunch of crap from my KDE installs too, like koffice, kopete, a multitude of crappy media players, because I prefer different apps. I also have to install firefox, as I prefer it over konqueror, but you can’t remove that from KDE. Boo Hoo. I don’t care.
I just don’t see the problem.
Isnt it possible to use regsvr32/64 and unregister that perticular part, then delete it? It works in win2k and it works on XP.
I for instance every time i use XP i remove the fax and image previewer and loads of other stuff like media previewing in the explorer that way. After unregistering its usually just go into the particular folder and delete the responsible exe/dll. (might have to shut down system restore first though for the last part to work properly)
But on the other hand, its a new release compared to the xp and 2k ones, so it might differ. But i seriously doubt it.
But why?
Why should you have to fight that hard against your OS?
Would you buy a car that in order to change the radio, instead of just sliding it out and sliding a new one in, you had to haul the engine out and take the radio out from behind?
There is no justification for it.
“Quite reasonably” is not fast enough. After all, you’re just running an OS which, itself, is completely useless, on a very modern machine. I would expect a machine like that would make *any* peace of software fly. Too much software today has the same problems. They basically don’t do shit (oh, they do visual effects) and still requiere inmense ammounts of power.
I was horrified by Vista (pre-SP1) which came with my Samsung Q70 laptop (C2D, 2.xGHz, 2GB RAM). It felt really sluggish and had a lot of UI annoyances (e. g. related to network) that used to make me crazy. For a short time, I escaped to XP which ran well but for some reason had issues with graphics drivers.
Then came the SP1, and suddenly the performance became reasonable, and many UI problems that bothered me were resolved. I also tamed the beast by setting it to Classic mode, turning off all the useless eye candy, indexing, auto-defragmentation, restore points etc. Now I can safely say that Vista runs as snappily as XP on his laptop. I do get about 0.5hrs less of battery life than with XP though.
The resume is, you can get Vista to run virtually as fast as XP on a modern PC, you just have to set it up that way (and it’s in no way straightforward for a newbie.) And you will get less battery life in any case.
Again, this word “reasonable”.
It’s not really acceptable when you think of it. You have computing power available at your fingertips that the world has never known before. You could crack the enigma code in an afternoon.
“Reasonable” is unacceptable. XP is twice as “snappy” as Vista on the same hardware and SP1 or not, if you find Vista’s performance ‘reasonable’ then your expectations have been beaten down so low, by years of Microsoft abuse.
I expect, in this day and age, my computer to be rediculously fast; and whilst there is room for improvement, I generally find that I am continually impressed by OS X.
“Reasonable” was after SP1 and before the tweaks. After the tweaks, it became “good” – as in “like XP” (except battery life.) It may not be the case on your PC, but this is my data point. So in the end, I’m satisfied and don’t plan to go back to XP.
Try doing this in vista – check out the subversion repository of some project with say 5000 files in it. around 1-2 mb of source code. Copying this folder should take under a second given current machines. Now see how long it takes on Vista. Moving files around and organizing stuff is one of the basic features of an OS. In this regard vista fails with epic proportions. (If you actually tried this, vista would probably take 2-3 mins before even beginning the copy).
And call me paranoid, but I do think this has to do with protected paths and the OS trying to determine if youre allowed to copy those files or not.
Edited 2008-10-21 20:20 UTC
On hardware like a MBP 2.2/2GB it can’t afford to perform “quite reasonably”, on that hardware it has to fly… but it doesn’t, at least not compared to OS X and Linux.
“DRM riddled? I have NOT been troubled by this DRM thingy you’re talking about. How has Vista’s “ability” to play DRM’ed content burdened you?”
Oh, so you did get a Vista *with* hardware accelerated Audio? Funny, the rest of us didn’t and why didn’t we? Because that was the price to pay for encrypted audio paths for CrapRay HD Video.
I wouldn’t use that horrible os if i would get it for free… and i actually could get it legally for free through my universities partner program.
Agreed. Totally agreed.
Vista bashing is the new “in thing” it seems. I’ve had less issues with Vista in 3-4 months of usage than any other operating system other than OS X. Linux is a nightmare by comparison (and I honestly mean that, as much as I love the ideals of Linux).
Dave
Yeah.. you are a troll.
Is it really DRM that causes the problem? It’s never caused me a problem on Vista and the only place I see bitching and moaning about it is on sites like this where techo people lurk.
I think the problem with Vista is that it has a bad name for performance, even though it’s probably a misguided perception.
Its a fact that’s been proved in benchmark after benchmark. Vista has poor performance, you can argue DRM bad programming, additional security or pixies its still slower in every way. The fact that Vista is heavily DRMed and Vista 2 will probably be worse is just a sign of Microsoft wanting a slice from the media market.
Well let me put it to you this way, I dropped Vista cos I was sick of my games being slower than XP, but for overall every day use, I found Vista to be a fine performer.
Having said that, I never sat there with a stopwatch.
*shrugs*
So, no improvements for UAC, (boot) speed, RAM usage, and so on…
But a few more features. I don’t want more features. I want a feature freeze and a leaner, faster, more responsible computer.
Still sticking to XP
Agreed. I wish Microsoft would stop trying to include everything and the kitchen sink in Windows. I’d rather have a base system that I build on. In particular, did they have to include windows search 4.0? I hate that thing, it’s a resource hog at least on XP even though it’s not supposed to be, makes the hard drives go nuts, and replaces the standard windows find with a bloated and ugly cludge. Some of these complaints may not apply to Vista, it might run better there, but judgin by personal experience nothing runs well on Vista. I’ll probably get called a troll for saying these things, but you know what? That’s my experience with Vista and Windows Search.
To be fair, though, XP was hardly lean and mean in its first release, nor with sp1. I’ll probably always consider win2k to be the best Windows release–it was lean, stable, and blazing fast. Of course, gamers probably won’t agree, but hey I’m no gamer.
What new features are there? This is basically a patch rollup sp
Boot speed? Vista boots 10-20 sec faster than XP on my box. Of course, it’s self-built with quality parts, so YMMV.
I envy your system, from my experience, it would take lot longer than that, even with a system of 1.8GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB ram.
However, our personal experiences would have very little impact in convincing anyone, besides ourselves.
Absolutely. I could care less if my PC has support for Bluetooth at any rev. WiFi is enough of a PITA, I don’t need to add yet another wireless protocol on top of it.
Fix the OS, and you’ll fix it’s perception.
While I’m still leery of installing Vista in a network environment (mostly due to training new users) I’ve found Vista to be great on the desktop. It runs like a top. All I did was disable Aero (now the GUI looks like my familiar Windows XP desktop) and disabled services I didn’t need (Google “BlackViper”). I haven’t had a single issue on the 64-bit version and I’d argue it’s a great upgrade from Windows XP x64.
Try it, you’ll be impressed. I know I was.
so…. you disable stuff to make it faster?
make sense, no really.
enter a new vista sku … Vista crapware less edition aka Windows XP SP4
So … on a linux box, you *DON’T* disable services you don’t need to make it faster?
If not, you’re a dipshit. Actually, judging from your post …. you’re a dipshit anyway.
no, I just dont install them to begin with
Keep the personal attacks to yourself, thanks.
The personal attack was unneeded, but even so, if you know all the services you need to enable to have a working machine on linux, then it isnt a stretch to disable things you dont need in windows. Default installs of linux come with TONS of things you dont need, and while removable, or avoidable, you still need some kind of working knowledge of your system to know what you can safely remove. Most pc users do not fall into either the custom linux install or advanced windows service configuration, and would be dealing with “bloat” either way they went. Only thing is… when services, etc. are written right, and not actually being used, the overhead is negligible, ive run windows vista with the very minimum of services, and all default and didn’t notice any difference. pretty much the same with linux, except for boot time suffers with a distros defaults. Bottom line, people see more as bloat, when in many cases the real world difference is not there unless you are riding on the lowest possible amount of ram.
Oddly enough, all of the derisive hyperbole aimed at Vista online has had an anti-hype effect: once it reached meme-hood, my own gut assumption was “There’s no way any OS can actually be bad enough to live up to Vista’s anti-hype.” Kind of the anti-Microsoft equivalent of crying “wolf!”
When I first used Vista, I was genuinely surprised at how bad it actually was. Compared to XP, it seems like 2 or 3 steps forward – and dozens of steps backward. It’s the “changes for the sake of change” that I find most annoying.
A few examples:
1) Changes to networking settings – I can understand what they were trying to do, namely create an interface to network settings that abstracts away the need to deal with individual NICs. The problem is that when you actually do need to change settings for a specific NIC (which has been frequent, at least in my experience), the settings are buried two or three levels deeper than they were in XP.
2) Is there any good reason why “My Network Places” is now effectively hidden? It’s still there, but you have to right-click the “My Computer” window and select “Add Network Place.”
3) The “Alt-Tab” pop-up seriously needs to be put on a diet. The little thumbnail preview of each window is slick and everything, but it actually takes me longer to find a specific Window than the old icon-with-text-label method.
4) UAC. Yes, it’s as dead as a dead horse gets. But my personal favourite UAC quirk is one that I haven’t seen mentioned before: if you try to run “ipconfig /flushdns” (to clear the DNS cache), you get a “The requested operation requires elevation” error – with no other information. Great, more graduates of the “give the user just enough information that they might be able to find an actual *solution* by resorting to Google” school of usability.
Absolutely as well as being slow, the overly Wizard driven interface is vile making finding setting difficult (why do you need to click status to change an IP address?). I’d say without the search tool the interface is close to unusable.
The on/off menu is a bad joke (personally when I click OFF I want the PC OFF). And why when you go to your network does it have to search for the computers every time a process that takes Vista 2-3 minutes?
Amen. Even the hideous network prefs from Win9x were less frustrating to deal with.
Heh, I’m embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t find the shut down option at first until I noticed the “mystery meat” widget that opens the shutdown sub-menu.
And even just re-connecting to a network share after waking up from sleep mode takes a good 30 seconds (even on wired ethernet).
Vista is Microsoft’s Ford Edsel – although some have argued that failed because it looked like a vagina – Well there’s a thought.
Not the best analogy, though. Vaginas tend to be quite popular among those who don’t have them.
The Edsel probably failed because it was too ugly, too expensive and vastly overhyped – sound familar? The Edsel wasn’t slow like Vista but the grill looked like a….
I did and I was really unimpressed. Then again, I didnt have a monster 64-bit box, just the 1,7Ghz Coreduo laptop that came with Vista. No, disabling Aero and disabling services did not help at all.
I will admit i wasn’t overly impressed with the RTM of Vista, however SP1 and other updates later it’s actually a good OS. The boot up could do with a little tweaking but nothing too different to Windows XP.
I am OS agonistic and just really use what OS suits the job. I use mac’s at home, Windows at work and Linux for servers and single purpose workstations. So a lot of my experience of Windows Vista will be work related (although this is not a cut and shut case as the OS’s blend i.e. i will use the mac for some work etc..)
The work machine is certainly no modern machine a P4 HT 3.4GHZ 2GB RAM SATA HDDs and a Geforce 7600GT.
I used to dual boot between windows XP and Vista but in september have removed the XP partition. I run a lot of Virtual Machines, Professional applications such as Adobe products, Quark and also do development (borland Delphi, v6 so no codegears yet
with database dev (Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and MySQL). I find that when utilising all the RAM and then returning it, i.e. running a VM using 1.5GB RAM and then switching it off, Windows Vista will utilise and put that memory back into the cache, i find windows XP acts as if the RAM is still missing and will thrash the hard disks.
I would really recommend anyone who had tried vista before Aug/Sept to give it another whirl and see what you think of it.
I still say that Vista is a little heavier on resources than other OS’s but not as much.
As for Service Packs, these really were meant only to help IT Administrators to distribute large 100MB (Hey they were large at the time, especially on 33.6/56.k modems) across business NT Workstations. However SP2 for Windows XP really changed this perception. Now this really is common knowledge, however i think this is a perfect opportunity for Microsoft. Why doesn’t Microsoft use this to not only distribute patches but to also introduce a couple of small new free features, similar to the IMO failed Ultimate extra’s thing but to all vista users.
I know Windows 7 is around the corner and Microsoft needs to keep vista competitive with 7, however i think this is an excellent way to thank people who have stuck with them.
Personally i would love to see something like the Mac’s time machine ported to windows. Something so easy to use but so very useful. (Previous Versions or Volume Shadow Service is clever but definitely not a backup system as the data is kept on the same volume).
lol, are you serious.
Every OS does more with less than Vista, anything else is living in denial.
The funny thing is Vista is a major performance hit, and a major resource hit. The only sensible argument is that the Features/Functionality/Security Improvements/Bundled Applications made the difference…but apparently they didn’t.
So the answer is just to lie about performance
Be nice.
Whether Vista is a lot or a little more heavy than other OS’es depends a lot on configuration and User Behaviour. It isn’t hard to get a Gnome system on GNU/Linux which is way harder on your system than Vista. And it isn’t hard to make Vista run smoother (forget the fancy look, though).
Really, it’s all in the comparison.
well to be fair it is. That’s the point.
One thing about Microsoft is that they’ve done a lot with introducing new features in Service Packs.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 included Network Access Protection and Dead Gateway Detection (ported from Windows Server 2003). It also has a new RDP client (6.1) which was silently introduced that did away with the /console command line switch in favor of /admin .
My source is:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/7/687484ed-8174-496d-8db…
Windows XP Service Pack 2 was literally another operating system, and it is what Microsoft should have released in the first place.
Vista Service Pack 1 included the ability to boot off of EFI-equipped x86-64 machines (which the Itanium versions of Windows always had), and a lot of under the hood improvements (exFAT, SD Advanced DMA, Direct3D 10.1).
Even the Exchange service packs introduce new features (Direct Push Email came in Exchange 2003 SP2).
Say what you want about their products, however, they do introduce new features with each SP, and sometimes even re-do the OS so much that its literally a new OS when you’re done (XP Service Pack 2, Vista SP1, NT 4.0 Service Packs 3, 5, and 6a).
XP SP2 was a major exception (basically the whole Windows product team worked on it). All of the other recent SPs have been significantly smaller, largely consisting of bug fixes.
I was called over to my mother’s house to fix her Vista HP PC with SP1. This is just a stock factory install with MS Office on it. Her browser window was set to yahoo.com and it was frozen. I tried to access the task manager to kill the process. Then warning dialogs were popped by Vista saying there was a problem with “explorer.” After failing to kill the errant processes I tried to logout. It just hung there. I let it go for 6 minutes. Nothing. I tried to restart and it failed, just hung for 6 minutes. I ended up having to hold down the power button. People’s problematic experiences with Vista are real I concluded.