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Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product

Posted by kdawson on Mon Dec 17, 2007 11:03 PM
from the foregone-conclusion dept.
Operating Systems Software Windows
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
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Submission: Vista named year's most dissapointing product by Shadow7789 (1000101)
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  • I didn't find it disappointing (Score:5, Funny)

    by AuMatar (183847) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:04PM (#21734538)
    But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.

  • Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zymergy (803632) * on Monday December 17 2007, @11:04PM (#21734548)
    This was under discussion (again) just the other day... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206 [slashdot.org]

    Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html# [pcworld.com]

    *The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
    #1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
    #2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
    #3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
    #4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
    #5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
    #6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
    #7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
    #8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
    #9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
    #10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
    #11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
    #12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
    #13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
    #14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
    #15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox

    • Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brian Gordon (987471) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:46PM (#21734844)
      The instant pcworld bashes Vista it somehow gains credibility on slashdot I guess :)

    • Re:Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rebelgecko (893016) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @12:16AM (#21735090)
      I agree with John Gruber [daringfireball.net]. If Apple has a few more "disappointments" like the iPhone next year, it will make its shareholders very, very, happy.

      • That is fantastic news (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2007, @01:37AM (#21735754)
        to the 5 people who own a tablet pc

          • Re:Tablet PC (Score:5, Funny)

            by Snocone (158524) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @09:44AM (#21738428) Homepage
            In the sense of the word as it is actually used, agnostic means that God is unknowable, or more precisely, that one *believes* that God is unknowable.

            No, the word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.

            WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
            STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

            There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,

            WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
            STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.

            which is different again from weak theism.

            WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
            STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.

            An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is

            DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.

            And of course, theological Slashdotism,

            SOVIET RUSSIA: This shit fucks YOU up!

      • Timewarp 2001 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fwarren (579763) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @03:11AM (#21736298) Homepage
        I have never seen this before. Nope. Not ever.

        Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."

        I did a lot of computer repair work back when XP first came out AND handed out a lot of advice. I am also as uncomfortable with Microsoft as the next guy. When someone would buy XP back then. I had to admit, it was a step up from 98. Now I did not want to change from 98, it was plenty stable for me and used less resources.

        But I could understand why people upgraded. It was more stable for the average user who did not know how to tweak his machine. Some people even liked the fisher price interface. A good laptop or desktop ran XP decently.

        Of course spyware and drive by downloads made XP a disaster for the average lo-tech user. Since 2004, it takes less than 3 months to reduce XP to such a mess, that it has to be reloaded.

        Flash forward to today and I could not say the same thing. Anyone who is in the market for a computer I warn to not try vista, especially if they are comfortable with XP. It runs slower on hardware that would make XP fly. If you are an average lo-tech user, you will be confused by how everything you are used to has been moved around. Many new features are downright invasive.

        Being objective about things. I have gone from "upgrading from 98 to XP, well to each his own" to "upgrade from XP to Vista, you will regret it".

        We have one Vista laptop user left at work and he is begging to get back to XP. Lets face it. Vista is a dog no one wants to take for a walk.

        • I'm probably in the minority here, but I've been reasonably happy with Vista as an HTPC/mediacenter OS. Seems much more stable than any previous pre-sp windows release; I often see 30+ days of uptime which was previously something I only experienced on solaris/linux/bsd machines and I'm not talking 30 idle days, my htpc can record 2 HD streams and 2 analog streams while playing back another hd stream and/or playing civilizations 4. Some of the interface felt a little wonky at first but after giving it a few weeks it felt much more tightly put together than XP and certainly more so than gnome or kde. Truly the only problems I really have with vista are easily enumerated as such:

          No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.

          No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.

          The price.

          No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.

          No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.

          P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...

  • The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos.

    And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones

    Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be. The iPhone was, because prior to release, it bought a ray of hope to US cell-phone consumers that was cruelly dashed.

    (Yes, I know the iPhone is number 5 on the list, but it's there for the wrong reasons)

    • Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Space cowboy (13680) * on Monday December 17 2007, @11:10PM (#21734600) Journal

      The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos


      Show me a single claim from Apple that says that. Just one will do. Or are you talking about some know-nothing blogger trying to generate click-ads ? In any event, to make the claim, you have to cite your source, otherwise (given that this is slashdot, and you're a known anti-Apple troll) I call bullshit.

      Simon

    • Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dbIII (701233) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:25PM (#21734730)

      Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be

      I think since 2001 every major Apple or Linux annoucement was met by something along the lines of "Longhorn can already do that in a better way". I was hoping there would be something behind the hype and atleast one improvement over MS Server 2003 and a few more improvements over XP. People really do expect more than a hobby operating system now and a suprising number of people are already being hit by the rather stupid limit of around 3GB of memory in 32 bit Vista. They are upgrading to Vista in the first place to get suppport for new hardware to better run their software and in the same year as release there is a very narrow window between inadequate memory and the top limit with a very poor way of handling what is in resident memory unless it is a machine dedicated to a very small number off application. A kludge like superfetch actually makes sense when so little memory can be adressed and most of it would normally be filled after boot with a lot of applications that may not be used in that session.

      Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion. My opinion is coloured by having to deal with Vista installed on hardware that is completely inadequate - laptops with slow drives, low memory and sharing memory with graphics hardware that is not capable of handling the effects that got turned on by whoever does the installs.

      • Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by UnknowingFool (672806) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @12:51AM (#21735406)

        Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion.

        If I understand the whole 32/64 bit situation with Microsoft correctly, the 64bit model that MS chose (LLP64) may cause some issues beyond simple driver replacement. LLP64 creates a new integer type called long long which is 64bit and keeps long as 32bit. LP64 (Unix version) redefines long as 64bit. The advantage of LLP64 is that overflow will not occur since there are two distinct types but casting a pointer to a long will not work. The opposite would be true for LP64.

        The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment?

    • Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Osty (16825) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:35PM (#21734792) Homepage

      And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones

      Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:

      1. Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
      2. Import the mp3 into iTunes
      3. Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
      4. Rename the new .m4a file to .m4r
      5. Re-import the .m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone
      "Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).

      I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion :).

      • Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:5, Informative)

        by MidnightBrewer (97195) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @03:03AM (#21736258)
        If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.

        That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.

      • Re:iPhone is #5 on the list (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sparr0 (451780) <sparr0NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 18 2007, @01:26AM (#21735670) Homepage Journal
        The only thing keeping most companies using MS Office is inertia. It would be too much work to retrain people on a new interface with OpenOffice or KOffice or any other alternative. And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. The learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.

  • As a developer... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_banjomatic (1061614) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:11PM (#21734618)
    It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"

    • Re:As a developer... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mboverload (657893) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:25PM (#21734732) Journal
      > It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"

      The first heartfelt comment I've seen for a long time on Slashdot.

      Go forth, my brother, and touch more.

    • As another developer: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2007, @01:35AM (#21735736)
      If you know anything about developing software, you know that a product that spends 5 years in development before release is going to suck. Has nobody at Microsoft read The Mythical Man-Month? Vista is OS/360 all over again. (Look over the chapter titles again. It's uncanny.) I thought Microsoft was supposed to have tough interviews; maybe they should just ask "have you read TMMM?".

      Anybody at Microsoft who spent the last 5 years on Vista either already knew it would suck (before it was even released), or is at least finally learning a valuable lesson about software development. Nobody said life had to be easy; you don't win every time.

      If you're working on the flagship product of the world's biggest/richest software company, releasing a "lackluster" product years late, and making every mistake enumerated by a 30-year-old book which is essentially required reading in the industry, that *is* horrible. I mean, that's practically the definition of how to be horrible. Short of going out of business over the fiasco, I can't imagine how to be horribler.

      Alan Kay was right: "I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past". If they were a hardware engineering team and nobody happened to know how to apply Newton's results, would anybody be similarly apologetic?

      Or a mathematician -- practically everything they do is standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. If you start from first principles in mathematics (like, say, Peano's Axioms), you're pretty much guaranteed to never produce anything innovative. If a group of mathematicians said "well, no, nothing new to report, but look, the old stuff again with this pretty 3d effect!", they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.

      So no, sorry, as a developer, I don't have a lot of pity for those guys. When you're 2 guys in a garage, it's fine to make rookie mistakes. When you're a $50B company, people expect more than "lackluster" results and a rehash of the industry's greatest blunders from the 1970's.

  • Glass half full (Score:5, Funny)

    by edwardpickman (965122) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:11PM (#21734620)
    The chant at Microsoft, "We're number one, we're number one!"

  • Macbook Pro (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SquallStrife (669316) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:18PM (#21734676)
    "...and when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe." Why does that have anything to do with Vista? Isn't that just an indication that Apple make great computers?

  • Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink' (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cashman73 (855518) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:18PM (#21734680) Journal
    Probably going to get modded "-1 Troll" for this, but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. Granted, I still wouldn't want to try and run it on a system that only meets the "minimum specifications",... but seriously, who's going to recommend such a system anyway? True, the extra "confirmations" are a bit of a pain, but they're really not THAT bad. I honestly can't say I've seen a Windows Vista system crash any more or less than a Windows XP system (or a Mac, for that matter). Compared to Linux, on the other hand, well,... there's still no comparison,... ;-)

    As for all the extra "eye candy" ... yeah, it's probably a little over the top. But on that same coin, Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?

    Still, if you have Windows XP, there's still no reason to rush out and replace it with Vista (just not worth the hassle, really). But if you're buying a new PC, I wouldn't freak out if it has Vista,...

    • Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink (Score:5, Insightful)

      by teh moges (875080) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:30PM (#21734766) Homepage
      The big deal with Vista, yes it's not that bad, but even in its best possible light, its a minor improvement on XP. In its worst light, it is actually worse then the product that was released before it.

      Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.

      I have found a great use for it though. I have officially taken the stance that I will "never buy Vista" and will also "not support Vista", which frees me from the usual role of having to do tech support for anyone that knows I am in IT. I will happily support a Linux distro and most XP problems have solutions on the net by now, so my "personal favours" workload has reduced dramatically.

    • Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuasiEvil (74356) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @12:00AM (#21734968)
      If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.

      So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.

      The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.

      Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.

  • It is the price that is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flyingfsck (986395) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:22PM (#21734714)
    Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.

  • No surprise here, but ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sk999 (846068) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:26PM (#21734744)
    ... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine [pcmag.com], which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World [pcworld.com] which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html [pcworld.com]

  • For those of you who like Vista (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pembo13 (770295) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:29PM (#21734760) Homepage
    And I suspect you are many. How do you address the following issues?
    • increased support for DRM which inherently decreases my freedom, especially when applied to broadly
    • continuation of Microsoft's dominance which I have found through experience indirectly hinders my ability to choose the software and hardware that I can make use of
    • the artificially high cost attributed to this operating system
    • the continuation of apparent willful vendor independent standards
    • the continued use as leveraging tool to push Microsoft specific, and often closed psuedo-standards

    • Re:For those of you who like Vista (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JebusIsLord (566856) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:53PM (#21734908) Homepage
      Well I can't say I like it, but I do use it, so i'll bite:

      This DRM complaint thing - what's the deal? Vista doesn't prevent you from doing anything XP will let you do. They added the ability to play restricted formats, which simply isn't included at all in XP. If you don't like HD-DVD playback, then don't use it! It's not like MS could have offered it without DRM (and not been sued to high hell). I can still rip DVDs and CDs with aplomb.

      Its true, but as an IT professional I need to stay current on MS technology, or risk unemployment. At home I use Linux and OSX primarily, though I do play the occasional game on Vista. Hardware though? I don't think Windows restricts your hardware options too much... most stuff works on other OSes too.

      Yeah Windows is pricey at retail, but OEM copies aren't that bad (similar to OSX pricing). I agree, though. I got my copy through our MSDN subscription of course so it doesn't apply to me.

      Their standards (un-) support is extremely frustrating, probably my #1 complaint. Also why I have to keep a Windows machine around - to find out how to get everything else to work with it. Did you know they broke CIFS again in Vista/Server 2008? Yup.

      I use Linux because it's so functional, OSX because its enjoyable, and Windows because I have to.

  • BFD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2007, @11:31PM (#21734772)
    Seems every OS and gadget from 2007 is listed here, including the media darling, the iPhone.

    Leopard is listed, which came as a bit of a surprise until I read this:

    Adding insult to injury, some upgraders even reported a Windows-like Blue Screen of Death when upgrading from previous Mac OSs.

    There's nothing Windows-like about it. There's a big difference between a kernel panic and simply stalling during the boot process on a screen which happens to be a shade of blue.

    In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple's reputation, however, may take slightly longer.

    It speaks volumes that Apple fixed some problems 2 weeks after the OS was initially released. Their reputation is OK with me.

    I don't think anything would please the author of this article unless it wiped his ass or gave him a spontaneous orgasm.

    (sorry for the sort of off-topic-ish post)

  • Not to rain on your parade (Score:5, Interesting)

    by westlake (615356) on Monday December 17 2007, @11:53PM (#21734916)
    The w3Schools OS Platform stats [w3schools.com] for November:

    Vista 6.3%
    Growing at slightly under 1% a month.
    This train may have been slow leaving the station, but it is building up momentum.

    XP 72.8%
    XP's loss is Vista's gain?
    The so-called "upgrade" migration to XP is beginning to look like just another Geek fantasy.

    W2K 5.1%
    Some good news for the die-hards.

    Linux 3.3%
    Slow erosion all year, and not much to show for four years of "The Year of Linux"

    OSX 3.9%

    A healthy niche, but ending the year where it began.

  • what didn't make the list? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pavera (320634) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @12:19AM (#21735118) Journal
    Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?

    This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?

  • Tasteful, Muted Applause (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hyades1 (1149581) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Tuesday December 18 2007, @12:37AM (#21735290)

    And to those who claim Vista has been treated unfairly at /. by a bunch of snobby, anti-Microsoft uber-nerds, there is is in black and white. One of Microsoft's major sources of free publicity has just offered to speak at the funeral.

    It takes one back. The sneaky-peaky buzz about something called, gasp, "Longhorn". The breathless, it's almost-just-about-nearly-any-day-now blurbs.

    And now, this. The honeymoon is truly over, and the groom is sporting a frying-pan-sized lump on his forehead.

  • teh irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by derelict_monkey (847833) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @01:47AM (#21735850)
    http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1267/vistanokx6.jpg [imageshack.us]

  • Sysadmin hell (Score:5, Informative)

    by theolein (316044) on Tuesday December 18 2007, @07:28AM (#21737358) Journal
    I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.

    One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.

    Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.

    Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.

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