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Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 01, 2007 06:31 PM
from the six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other dept.
from the six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
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As an IT manager (Score:5, Interesting)
I see nothing that will make our employees more productive or save us money on IT. We'll be sticking with XP.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see how people can settle for "it's totally s
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
you actually believe him??? How do you know that he hasn't been forced to incorporate a back door and isn't allowed to tell anyone about it. Do you have the source code for filevault and can compile it to produce the same binary?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Also in some time you will see software or hardware(64 bit?) that is vista only or better supported on vista. (NOT YET), so a s a it manager you will have to migrate to it to be bette
Re:As an IT guy also (Score:5, Informative)
Real features like NTFS filesystem, properly done process separation, a more robust TCP/IP stack, better support for windows domain features etc made it worth upgrading 98 to XP.
I can't think of any such compelling features for business IT in moving to Vista from XP.
Parent
Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Staying with XPSP2 strongly advised.
Roll on 2009 and the next version, however in the meantime if you are going to have the hassle of nothing working anyway, you may as well take a look at switching to OSX or Linux.
Re:Me (Score:4, Informative)
i'm the first staff member in my place of business (with between 700 and 900 employees) that's using it. there is 1 issue that i see so far... group policy in AD. we have policies that force the user to use automatic updates (because too few computers were being updated). it prevented me from getting around that to install the optional updates (which include drivers and office 2003 updates as the policy did not allow me to install microsoft update). i had them exclude me from the policy though, that way i got all the updates i needed, mostly for office and drivers.
frankly, i think while the UAC is quite annoying to the power user who installs a lot of stuff (especially since i had to for my clean install), it won't be that bad for the user who buys a computer with vista pre-installed since the average user does not install a whole lot. i think it has the potential to make it more secure by making them think before they say "accept".
unless my computer literally blows up, i will not be reverting back to XP. and for the record, your comparison of vista with ME is completely off the mark. ME was just plain terrible and a completely different operating system altogether. vista was built practically from the ground up and has a lot of nice features (some purely superficial) and is 100x more stable than ME, perhaps the worst operating system ever made (at least by MS). i strongly recommend anyone buying a new computer to get it with vista, at least home premier.
my laptop is an HP nc8430 with a core duo 2.16 MHz, 1 GB RAM and ATI raedon x1600 with 256 MB, happily running vista.
Parent
Been using it for 3 days now (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement.
On thing I have noticed is that Vista has re-done the menu layout and prompts and it now closely resembles KDE, imo. Not a complaint or a compliment though I do imagine the layout change is going to confuse a lot of people. I can see why it was re-done though and I imagine once I've gotten used to it I will find it an improvement over XP.
Really I can't say much else as I've only just scratched the surface of what Vista can do. Is it better then XP? So far yes. Is it worth years of delayed devlopment and several hundred dollars? That remains to be seen.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
replacing it all is not easy, and many shops dont have the stomach for it, or the talent. and in some cases the shops have windows apps that can only run in windows. that all said:
when you really look at Vista objectiveily its a huge improvement over xp and 2k.
but sure it does have some things that are odd and different that annoy you, but in some and most cases that can be changed.
and some of the postive stuff like low rights framework that IE uses is exposed so other apps can use it. and
-Nex6
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like (Score:5, Funny)
Showstopper (Score:4, Funny)
What is missing here? (Score:5, Funny)
I can't tell if that is the setup or the punchline.
Vista is just fine for the masses (Score:4, Interesting)
For the masses its just fine, my parents recently bought a new laptop which has Vista. Other than finding a few items moved or renamed they just use it. The key is, its just a damn operating system. It doesn't mean DIDDLY to them. they don't care. they saw a laptop with features they wanted at a price they wanted to pay. OS be damned, it didn't matter. All they wanted was to get mail while on the road, connect to wireless, and use WORD.
As for AERO, fwiw, if you have a video card with 32mb of memory you might just see a performance boost with it turned on, especially with low system ram installations.
Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a huge number of so-called "IT Professionals" that just don't have a clue. Lots of middle-aged guys who managed to get a job running the FAX machines at some corporation 20 years ago, and eventually ended up being the "IT guy". But they don't know ANYTHING. They buy whatever new hardware they think is neat, and that the salesmen from their vendors tell them they need. And then they pay for all-encompassing support contracts, so that they don't have to configure anything, or troubleshoot anything, because they don't actually know how to do that stuff.
I sometimes wonder if those guys are the majority of the IT employees in the United Stats. Guys that use the company's money to hire other people to do their jobs. The only reason they get away with it is because their boss is even MORE clueless about how IT should work.
Sorry, kind of off-topic, but I just can't stand the attitude of rags like "Information Week".
Sounds like a joke to me (Score:5, Funny)
The Aristocrats !
My Vista pros/cons (Score:5, Informative)
Pros:
- Scheduled defrags without third party software
- Aero interface looks less dated
Cons:Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I keep seeing this complaint but the problem is not UAC itself, it's that by default they STILL make you the admin when you set up the computer. If you run as a regular user and have a seperate admin account that you don't log into -- it only prompts you when you try to change global settings or run software that needs to write to program files or some
My Experience with Vista has been great! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure if I actually bought and installed it, though, I'd have a different opinion...
Stupid questions (Score:4, Insightful)
You're joking, right?
I hope so. Otherwise, you're not real observant. Of *course* it'll gain traction among corporate users. Because they have not fucking choice! What part of "vendor lock-in" is hard to grasp?
See, too many companies have millions of dollars of infrastructure tied up in MS-Windows, and other Microsoftware. They are not going to replace it overnight. And, by the time they really start to feel the burn, the worst will be over (at least as far as up-front cost goes: the pain never truly ends, but that's true no matter what). New PCs will come with MS-Vista (the 'MS' is to distinguish it from the health-care package that's been around for 20 years). Corporations will soon not have a choice. It'll be MS-Vista or nothing.
How many times do we have to go through this? We had this same debate when MS-Windows XP came out. This isn't our year. Maybe next year, but not this year.
Microsoft might be dying (I believe it is), but it takes a long, long time for a giant to decompose.
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because in 6 months, you won't be able to buy a new computer without Vista on it. And in two years, you won't be able to get support for XP. And then in about 4 years, you won't be able to get software compatible with XP for love or money.
Corporate users never really saw a lot of value in XP either. Moreover, it took about that long for it to "gain traction", in both the consumer and corporate markets. I've been working in the ISP industry since 1994, and tech support has watched as every new OS Microsoft has produced in that time get snapped up by a small percentage of early adopters, followed by the rest of the computing population as they upgrade their computers over time.
Most people find installing an operating system too much work, too time consuming, too difficult, or they just don't think about it at all. It *came* with the computer after all. Isn't it just a part of the computer? IT departments in companies see it much the same way. You have to upgrade the computer to get the next version of windows, so why not just let Dell or IBM do the install when you do your next upgrade? To install a new OS across an existing network of any size is too disruptive to the users, and too time consuming. A user would have to do without a computer for the better part of a day at the very least if you upgrade an existing system.
History is NOT repeating itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
But here we are, months after the business introduction of Vista and people still debating it's merits with no sign of commitment. New machines are still being sold w/ XP by default, with the "option" to upgrade to Vista. It turns out that a Mac running Parallels w/ XP can run more Windows software that a PC running Vista. Developers are still writing for XP and are just not pumping out the Vista apps.
Microsoft used to be criticized for being backward compatible to the stone age. Vista is different. Vista breaks lots of Windows software. Lots. '
I see this rollout as being a complete failure. Much worse than Windows ME, more like OS/2.
Two Weeks w/ Vista, From a Mac User. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was excited to hear that our Windows Vista (Business) Licenses had arrived via our MSDNAA account at work. So, I grabbed a license for testing and went at it. I wanted to leave my Mac alone and not try to force a Vista boot with Boot Camp + hacking. My original test box was:
Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.4 GHz, hyper-threading enabled.
1.25 GB DDR 400 RAM
80 GB HD (7200RPM/8MB Cache)
GeForce 4 MX 400 64MB Video Card (AGP 8x)
17" Flat Screen display
Install went perfect. After installation was complete, there were three or four Windows security updates awaiting me. After installing those, I started to play around. Unfortunately, my computer scored a 1.0 on the performance scale, mostly because of the video card. I was also disappointed that Aero was not supported on my video card as well, so all I had was the "Windows Vista Basic" theme available to me, without any of the new eye candy I was looking to see.
I really wanted to see what Vista had to offer, so I didn't want to settle for the reduced package. This is significant though. Microsoft wonders why they haven't seen to many upgrades to Vista yet- well this is one of them. A large amount of users with existing computers will not see the biggest UI improvement that Aero has to offer. This is different in comparison to Mac OS X 10.4, where, except for not being able to run a few screen savers, and not getting a few fancy effects here and there, your experience is pretty much the same visually, from a G3 iBook, right on through to the newest Mac Pro. Sure, there are applications that need core image, but, for the basic OS X install set, your experience is pretty much the same right on down the line.
Getting back to Vista... I decided to upgrade the computer as much as I could to get the full Vista experience, so I bumped myself up to 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200/16MB Cache hard disk, and, a GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card (best I can get for a low profile card w/bracket for this Dell). This brought my performance rating up to a 2.5, again, with the video card being the weak point.
Now I was getting Aero in all of its glory. Despite my video card being the bottom of the barrel for Vista/Aero, I haven't had any performance issues with any of the special effects (all of them are turned on). The only thing I'm kind of peeved about is the lack of NVidia support for this class of video card. NVidia has newer drivers out, however, but I had to use beta drivers from November for this card, because it looks like NVidia is in the process of dropping support for it. Despite being beta drivers, I haven't had any BSOD's or issues with them, and they are still faster than the default Microsoft drivers.
As for applications on Vista, its a mixed bag. Most things installed and worked OK. All my typical Internet applications and plugins (Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Sun Java JRE, etc) worked without a hitch- even Gaim/GTK worked. Divx and RealPlayer are giving me issues where Windows has to switch out of Aero mode when they are running. It's kind of weird... the screen goes black for two seconds, and then comes back in Windows Vista "basic" mode. When you close the application, the reverse occurs, and you are back to Aero, with transparencies etc. VLC won't show most movies, just a bunch of changing colors in its window. iTunes worked OK for me, but I don't have my library saved on this computer. Office 2003 worked as well.
Five things stop me from using Vista (Score:4, Interesting)
(2) The 'advanced' GUI. I've been using Compiz and Beryl on Linux long enough to have played with eye candy and you know what? I switched it off. It slows my UI down, not because of computing power (plenty available) but because all that fancy stuff needs time to show itself. Opening a window that zooms or rolls or whatever takes longer than one that just appears on the screen, for example, and there's plenty of it. It gets in the way, period. The only thing I use in Beryl is a slightly transparent cube so I can see where things are because I can have quite a windows and desktops on the go.
(3) The licensing problems. I've been fighting the misnamed 'Genuine Advantage' on other systems which were as genuine as they come and, frankly, I've had enough. From what I've read Vista has even more of that nonsense in, and that, coupled with my unwillingness for any system to be allowed to 'phone home' without me knowing what details it sends is enough for me not to use it. I have client information I need to keep confidential and I have nil trust in systems that do things without me knowing. Apart from that, I get very little for the money - I rather spend it sponsoring an Open Source project that creates value for me and others.
(4) The eternal upgrade cycle, but that's more based on my experience with XP. I installed a couple of new systems 3 weeks ago, and I set it up so I have to authorise patches and updates. Well, it happens on a daily basis. Worse, one of the patches bluescreened one of the box to the point of me having to restore it from backup. I've only ever had that with Linux, 6 years ago, when a kernel patch went wrong - and that is easy to recover from.
(5) As with any version of Windows, the absolute dependency on the GUI for it to work. If there's a modal window somewhere hidden under the stack of others on your desktop it will stop the machine and actively prevent you from getting to the window. And you can't cancel the task because you need the GUI for that too. That leads me to another HUGE and related annoyance: if I say 'shut down' I want a machine to SHUT DOWN, no if, buts and maybes. It needs a shutdown that simply does what it says, no further questions asked.
And I don't buy into the 'hope cycle' that the next version will at last fix all the problems. Realistically, MS will NEVER willingly make such a version.
Who would buy the update?
Re:sounds like a good discussion (Score:5, Funny)
>
> Anyone with a job title like that is sure to be a Master Debater.
Parent
Re:sounds like a good discussion (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's hard posting to Slashdot from Vista... (Score:3, Funny)
[ Allow ] [ Cancel ]
Unfortunately (Score:5, Informative)
That's not the entire story though. You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design. And early design flaws. In my opinion the most frustrating one of these is the fact that the application itself handles window frame messages. That means if the application is poorly written and stops handling frame window commands at any point you can't even minimize the window until it gets done processing. Minimize, kill and move should pretty much never stop working for any given window, even if the application is displaying a goddamn modal dialog box (Another pet peeve of mine and Microsoft seems to encourage programming by modal dialog.)
Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes. I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Informative)
The SQL client I use at work has a modal dialog box pop up while executing a query, unfortunately because of the size of the data sets I'm working on some of my queries go for hours, the program itself also frequently crashes.
bada bing, without too much effort on the developers part I have an application that takes over my screen all the time.
GP is right, having the client process deal with window messages is right up there with Microsoft's worst bad design decisions.
Parent
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have stopped there. Windows is just a bad implementation of VMS + Unix + DOS that, due to Microsoft's successful violation of anti-trust law, is pretty much the only operating system you can buy pre-installed on commodity hardware. Because of that successful illegal behaviour, all the corporate apps (and games) run on Windows, hence all the corporate users are on Windows, adn all the gamers are on Windows. Vista offers exactly nothing to those users. But if you buy a new computer, Vista is what you are going to get because Microsoft wants it that way. It isn't exactly a surprise that nobody is buying Vista 'upgrades'.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe barely goes balls to the cubicle divider to bring flash for Linux and even then you only get a 32-bit version, tough shit if you run in a 64bit desktop environment.
They know us Linux users are cheap goofs who most are probably just going to pirate Photoshop anyway...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Fixed (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Unfortunately (Score:4, Informative)
You have no idea what you are talking about. I think you are confusing the 'single input queue of OS/2' with Windows, which since Win3.x has always had a multi-input queue.
Vista also has several changes that address this even futher. For example the composer can even redraw unresponsive applications without any I/O lock.
Anyone that has used Windows with an NT base like 2k/XP/Vista knows that 99% of the time you can still 'Close and sometimes Minimize/Move' a crashed application; and in Vista it is 100% of the time on all of the above.
Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes
You are kidding right? Have you ever even seen performance numbers comparing Windows 2003 server to OSX Server? Have you even seen deployments of remote RDP users on a Windows 2003 server with all the themes and UI glitz of XP active?
The scary thing is that Longhorn even takes this to the next level, letting remote users run the 3D Aero interface remotely, fully accelerated locally because the Vista/Longhorn composer is pusing Vector and 3D information over RDP. Lets see you run a 3D application on any other Server OS or even Desktop OS 4,000 miles away with hardware acceleration and with a 3D UI with all the glitz. And this is something Vista does today, and Longhorn Beta will do later this year. I have seen our techs easily using glass and accelerated 3D applications from a Vista or Longhorn server session on a 56K connection, which is past impressive to being a bit scary.
I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though
And maybe if you knew what you were talking about you would understand the NT kernel of Windows is considered to be one of the best OS foundations, even from critics in the OSS world, it is the Win32 subsystem that takes a beating and MS could very easily replace it at any point.
But then again, if you had any clue you wouldn't have made the irresponsible and inaccurate statements in your post.
Next time do a google or even ask the 10 year old computer nerd that lives next door before trying to add information on something you know nothing about.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If that is true, and it is as easy as you make it seem, then why DON'T THEY JUST DO IT?
"Gee, we can easily replace the part of our OS that makes everybody hate us... but nah."
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
This IS NOT the same. MS has also ported Win32 and the NT Kernel many times; however, replacing the fundamental OS API set is something different.
MS is actively moving developers to managed code, and with a long term reason, so they can drop Win32 as secondary subsystem on NT with a new main system API.
Apple did VERY LITTLE when it comes to transitions making life easier on users. Their idea of compatibility was basically using a System9 VM on OSX. This is not creative, nor easy on the end users. MS on the other hand back in 1992 implemented the Win16 subsytem for application compatibility with Win 3.x while developing Windows NT. This was NOT an emulation environment, but a seperate Win16 subsystem that runs on the desktop side by side Win32.
MS is already doing this to a certain extent with
NT's core is a client/server kernel technology and it is in the NT layers where what is kind of cool about Windows exists. NT's subsystem model allows for MS to move in or out any Subsystem that is equal to the main OS subsystem, this is also why a BSD *nix variant runs NATIVELY as another subsystem on NT, without EMULATION or VM.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to.
Again, this is simply not true. First, XP64 and Vista 64bit do NOT USE the Win32 subsystem as the main OS subsystem. So they have done this, not only 1992 with the Win16 subsystem, but today on the 64bit versions.
I don't really care what you think of MS, as they both suck and do things well depending on what you look at. However to try to use Apple as a 'shining' example when it comes to OS architecture or API implementation it is VERY laughable.
Even Quartz2D continues to fall on its face with no default hardware accleration, pushing developers to use the very old QuickDraw API to maintain performance in applications.
Even 10.5 hasn't delivered an accelerated version of Quartz2D, yet Vista REPLACED their entire video subsystem while adding in WPF and other technologies. And Vista's new video subsystem is SO TRANSPARENT to users and even nerds, that people don't think Vista is any different than XP.
So with regard to the video, MS did too good of a job of creating a new video foundation/system, as most people don't even get all of it is NEW and think Vista is just like XP because all the applications look and run just fine.
Parent
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile OSX[...]
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Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
Compared to XP, Vista is a mixed bag. There are some user experience improvements, and way the menus work on the start menu is an improvement. Aside from the initial disorientation, the UI is closer to what XP's should have been.
However, there are many complaints I have about Vista. UAC is the biggest one, and this can result in corrupted installs of some software (including Apache), and it is simply way too tempting to turn off every security improvement that Vista offers. Whatever Vista does, it will *not* make Windows that much more secure-- it just allows Microsoft to blame the users.
I also find Vista to be surprisingly slow (granted I only have 512MB RAM in this system) and some settings like UAC are hard to find. I think that Vista is going to be a support headache for everyone, and I do not recommend that people upgrade.
Parent
Re:Im sorry.... (Score:5, Informative)
"cache"
Vista will pre-load stuff it thinks you might need next. It's using your RAM to speed up your computer, which shockingly, is the idea of RAM.
Genius idea if you ask me; and I believe UNIX has been doing it for a while too - or at least something similar?
Parent
Re:Im sorry.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm running my knoppix remaster, kernel 2.4, and "top" shows:
Cpu(s): 0.5% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 97.6% idle
Mem: 256268k total, 251592k used, 4676k free, 3856k buffers
Swap: 1405648k total, 2156k used, 1403492k free, 159616k cached
As you can see, this is only a 256 MB of RAM machine, and quite a bit is "used", also the Swap is being used. I'm running Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2, and using IceWM for "X". (See screenshots, below
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?:
1. Too slow
2. Distracting visuals
3. Limited screen limits (2 monitors limits me to 1024x768)
4. Less stable - I've seen creeping little things that just aren't right
Basically I like to poke around with it and eventually a 'plain' version of them may win me over, but as it stands today, I won't use any of them for when I code.
Re:Media Center (Score:5, Informative)
I was over at my friends house, he's all excited "I just got this new Vista Ultimate! Check out the Media Center". He turns on his TV, grabs the remote and starts up media center... goes to his recorded TV shows, hits play on a show from a couple days ago... we watch it for a couple minutes, then he goes back hits play on another show and.... Crash "Do you want to send a message to Microsoft?", no, start media center back up, hit play again on a different show, plays for about 3 seconds, crash again.
Then he says "Yeah, I can't get it to play more than one show per reboot... I don't know why, once you hit play on a show you have to watch that show all the way through, if you stop it or try to play another show it crashes. Once that show is done, it crashes, and you have to reboot to get it to play again"
His is just set up on a whitebox that he built and I don't know the stats or hardware he's got in it... but seriously, after seeing that and my other friend had it on his laptop (uninstalled and went back to XP after 2 weeks, couldn't get his development environment working under vista, also HATED UAC) watched him work for about 30 minutes one day, he had to have 15-20 UAC warnings in those 30 minutes, all for very normal things to do (like joining a wifi network) I'm never installing Vista, I'm glad I've got a non-OEM copy of XP that I can install on new hardware.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
95% of people buy computers, not operating systems.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Untrue. On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster because they are updated and tuned to make better use of that higher end hardware (which probably didn't even exist when the previous version was released).
Vista on, say, an 8-core machine will be substantially faster - especially under load - than XP or 2k on that same machine.
With OSX this is just the opposite.
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, this is the reason that windows sells at all as a server.
At the top enterprise end, little can beat a highly tuned linux server in most areas. However, for the smaller business, the idea of doing this is too frightening whilst a M$ box just seems easier.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
More expensive and slightly less good performance than a well tuned linux or BSD box, but with ease of use and stability that M$ struggles to deliver on.
Just my 2c worth
Michael
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)