University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1

At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.

Wait and See

[26199 (577806)]

Isn't that the standard advice for any major upgrade on any operating system ever?...

Re:

[cobaltnova (1188515)]

Yes, but when it's vista-bashing, it's news for nerds.

It's also a holiday... a slow news day.

Re:

[26199 (577806)]

Pfft. Kick an operating system when it's down...

Actually that's called rebooting, isn't it?

Re:Wait and See

[techno-vampire (666512)]

Nice operating systems don't go down.

Re:Wait and See

[The Ultimate Fartkno (756456)]

Leave it to a slashdotter to confuse operating systems and girls.

Re:

[backbyter (896397)]

It's that initial "O" that causes confusion.

Re:

[jonaskoelker (922170)]

I don't know about you, but I've actually had an operating system ;)

Re:Wait and See

[Culture20 (968837)]

I've used finger in an operating system, does that count?

Re:Wait and See

[Zeinfeld (263942)]

These stories get a little tiresome. What is the ultimate source of authority here? A bunch of nerds who read Slashdot. They think their lives will be easier if they persuade people not to change the configuration of their machines. Only on slashdot would that even be considered news.

IT support staff usually suggest what will make their lives easiest. Vista works just fine on the right hardware. As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.

Re:

[JayAEU (33022)]

Maybe in the Windows ecosystem it is, and rightfully so. On the other hand, I never had a doubt in my mind when installing or upgrading to the latest release of Debian, it just works every time.

Re:Don't do it!

[interstellar_donkey (200782)]

The MS logic seems to be "Let's make a pretty stable OS, and then let's release a really crummy one". XP was pretty good. I had no problems with XP. I liked XP. Then Vista comes out and nothing seems to work right. I've been using Vista on a few boxes for a year now, and wonder "What's the point? Why would anyone want Vista? A more fancy UI and some nifty media enhancements? Sorry, it just doesn't make sense".

Vista seems to be Windows ME part 2. A really crapy OS to replace a somewhat stable one. I don't see how a service pack could make things any worse.

Re:Don't do it!

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

now badly written 3rd party software breaks. And you guys blame Microsoft.

That's not why we blame Microsoft.

We blame Microsoft for making it irritating, DRM infested and slow when they fixed the security issues.

Liberal?

[conner_bw (120497)]

At least one university liberal enough...

Shouldn't that read conservative a.k.a reactionary a.k.a cautious about change?

Re:Liberal?

[RonnyJ (651856)]

It's a stupid statement anyway, demonstrating an obvious anti-Vista viewpoint - what exactly is meant by "one university liberal enough to accept ... Vista"?

The university would offer advice and support for the students own computers - any reasonable university is going to be "liberal enough" to let people use their own machines!

Re:

[Otter (3800)]

So, properly this would make Penn "neoconservative".

Huh?

[The Ancients (626689)]

As has been said above; this was going to happen. I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach. I'm not that impressed with Vista either, but I don't think I've ever seen an update to an operating system in which all users had total confidence in the manufacturer and OS enough to all update, no questions asked.

Yes, I agree there are certain aspects of Vista which deserve to be slated, but this is more process related than product related.

Re:Huh?

[webmaster404 (1148909)]

I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach.

Yes, but companies need much much more stability then college students. Most OS X upgrades are just fine and only usually break apps that modify the OS a lot, the same could be said though with adding random repositories to Ubuntu/Debian and the OS will break sometimes on installing the next version. But generally, I wouldn't recommend a Ubuntu user not upgrade to 8.04 when it comes out, nor would I recommend a Mac user not going to Leopard. However it seems that Vista SP1 is bad enough to warrent students not to upgrade, now that is saying something.

Re:Huh?

[Z_A_Commando (991404)]

I happen to be a college student who upgraded to Vista SP1 on Tuesday when it showed up on my Windows Update. I have had no problems whatsoever in the past 5 or so days since the upgrade and my machine hasn't been shut down since the upgrade. Your response appears to be more conjecture and, dare I say, fear mongering. If you haven't upgraded to SP1, which I suspect you haven't, then please stop making the entire OS sound absolutely horrible. The wait and see attitude works fine, just don't make it sound like you should never upgrade. Why would Penn's IT department, which provides end-user support for students and staff, advocate upgrading? They have to support many more boneheaded users across a much wider array of systems than any corporate IT staff ever will. The number of unknowns and unresolved issues at the release of any patch, however large, is the reason for the wait and see attitude. They would much rather have someone else deal with problems as a result of the upgrade than deal with it themselves. That's the main reason for "wait and see". Allow someone else to iron out the problems, and hopefully it's Microsoft and whoever made the application that's broken. So there's nothing new here, just more fodder for people to say Vista is such a bad OS without ever using it for more than 10 minutes at Best Buy.

Re:

[DrEldarion (114072)]

My place of employment has a very healthy mix of Windows, Ubuntu, and OSx computers. Twice since I've started there, OSx updates have broken critical functionality of the computers (like wireless capability), and there have been no problems with updates to any other operating systems. I've gotten to experience these firsthand as an at-work Mac user (by choice, mind you).

Vista isn't a bad piece of software. You can criticize it on its high system requirements or the fact that there isn't really a hugely comp

Re:

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

So vista has no problems - it's all due to poorly made drivers and programs... even when the programs are Microsoft software (VS2003 & 2005, SQL Server 2000...) and WHQL drivers.

But OSX upgrade problems are all the OS's fault!

Sorry, that won't wash.

Vista has major issues, and should never have been released in the state it was. SP1 fixes most but not all of them... but it's still way below the usability of XP.

Re:Huh?

[erroneus (253617)]

That hasn't always been the case. There are still people who happily swallow anything dished out by Apple. And truly, Microsoft once had a fan base that had people standing in line for Windows 9X for days! Actually, as OS updates go, people have been begging for Vista SP1 because Vista in its original form was abysmal for many users... the people had been hoping that SP1 would provide what the original release failed to deliver. For some people SP1 actually made things worse.

And while CIO doesn't come out and say "Microsoft, dump Vista!" they 'explore the idea' in such a way that it's pretty much what they are saying without using expletives and they certainly seem to be recommending it.

What I find amusing is that force ONCE my predictions on something have come true. Before Vista was released, I believed it would be as popular as WindowsME. Well, I wasn't entirely correct--I think WindowsME had a stronger following. But as far as OS successes go, Vista ranks right in ME's neighborhood.

In the past, the next version of Windows might have been hailed as a 'triumphant come back' or some such thing... WindowsME did not cause the public to doubt Microsoft in the slightest. They just counted WindowsME to mean "Windows MistakE." But Microsoft has saved its real mistake for Vista. Vista has been FORCED onto a public through OEM channels resulting in a public that actually refused to buy hardware based on the fact that there was no WindowsXP option quite frequently. Microsoft back-peddled by allowing "downgrade rights" but I'm not sure how many people actually got that memo because the practice of avoiding machines "sold with Vista" is still going on.

Microsoft may choose not to listen to its users, but they're damned stupid for not listening to their OEMs. Apple's popularity is only growing because of it and while there may be some out there, I have yet to actually hear about people switching back from Mac once they've committed to the move.

*Facepalm*

[Bertie (87778)]

Why are they letting Twitter back on his soapbox?

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Well, you've got to fit in the daily two minutes hate somehow.

Why stop here?

[PhasmatisApparatus (1086395)]

Why not take it a step further and recommend against Vista?

Yawn...

[Jugalator (259273)]

This article felt so worthy of a "slownewsday" tag... We are also waiting a bit with upgrading the few Vista computers we have running over here. It's just common sense, and has nothing to do with Vista, by the way.

The news here has to be those companies that jumps to SP1 without checking up on any risks with that. You'll have a harder time finding stories about those.

I throw Vista away all the time

[Radi-0-head (261712)]

I have been a die-hard Microsoft user since MS-DOS on my ancient Heathkit XT clone. I currently use XP Pro and XP Media Center. I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system. I still, by habit, use command lines in a DOS window to do things that Windows can do via the GUI. I guess I'm showing my age...

This experience comes at a cost, namely supporting machines for my family and friends. Never mind what the media and professionals say about Vista, but when my friends and family BEG me to remove Vista and replace it with XP, you know something is bad wrong with this operating system.

These days, if someone is buying a new machine, and all they do is email, browsing, pictures and the like, I will always recommend a Mac. I don't have to support the damn thing - it just works. If they're intent on a PC or need one for certain software, I send them to the Dell Outlet where you can still get a fantastic Core 2 Duo Optiplex with a 3-year warranty and XP for a few hundred bucks.

If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac. Times change. Microsoft fucked up. I never thought I'd be advocating Macs, ever.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[bzipitidoo (647217)]

My brother uses Vista. He likes to think of himself as relentlessly practical on computer decisions. I built a 64 bit PC for him, and made it triple boot: 64 bit Windows XP, 32 bit Windows XP (just in case), and 64 bit Xubuntu Linux. And he threw it away for a computer with Vista. Why? He wanted to keep using an old Canon laser printer he had. Canon wasn't going to make a 64 bit Windows XP driver for it, they weren't going to help the Linux people make a driver, but they did make drivers for Vista. He said the machine with Vista preinstalled "just worked", and mentioned some other software (VPN stuff I think) that gave him troubles. Also was afraid to use OpenOffice to create doc and xls files. Afraid that they might not work in MS office, and creating them in OpenOffice then switching to MS to check was too much bother. I suggested his email recipients also switch to OpenOffice, but that of course was a non-starter.

He doesn't care why. When something doesn't work, he doesn't care whether it's MS's fault. He wants to use computers, not screw with them. I keep wondering how long this can last before something bites him in a tender spot and Vista (fairly or unfairly) gets blamed or excused.

Re:

[drsmithy (35869)]

I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system.

What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?

If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac. Times change. Microsoft fucked up. I never thought I'd be advocating Macs, ever.

So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?

Re:

[HalAtWork (926717)]

Guess I'll play devil's advocate...

So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?

The thing is, this is showing the affect of Vista on this person. They dislike it so much they just want something non-Microsoft.

What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?

Maybe they feel that using Vista is getting them further entrenched into Microsoft's vision and not necessarily their own idea proper of what they want to do with their computer. They j

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[techno-vampire (666512)]

Showing my age again...

That you are. And, unless I miss my guess, showing how long it's been since you took a good look at Linux. It now comes with drivers for most common peripherals, and almost every mainstream distro (except Gentoo, of course, but that's a special case) provides precompiled kernels. If you need to work with MS Office files, OpenOffice reads, edits and saves in that format if you need it to, and I've never had the slightest compatibility issues. Linux is much easier to work with now than it was ten years ago, and for somebody with your computer experience, it's more than ready for Prime Time. Again, I'm not saying you must or even should switch, just making sure you understand that it's a viable option now.

Journal

[RonnyJ (651856)]

'Interesting' journal by twitter linked to in the summary:

http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/177855 [slashdot.org]

Shame it's not updated for SP1, contains links to lists of links of things that are out of date (e.g. iPod problems), has silly claims, contains inaccurate/biased 'studies' like this [slashdot.org] highly scientific study of five games (highly debunked in the comments).

For what it's worth, I'd highly recommend that Vista users install SP1.

Penn State is not the University of Pennsylvania

[tietack (982580)]

I know it's important only to alumni and friends of these schools, but Penn State (Twitter's Firehose title) is different from the University of Pennsylvania.

Re:Penn State is not the University of Pennsylvani

[insertwackynamehere (891357)]

I know, this bothered me too. I'm NYU anyway but I grew up in Philly and now UPenn's campus and its the mark of a foreigner to mix up Penn State and Upenn because UPenn is in Philly and is Ivy. Penn State, however, is a great school (even if these days "state" in a school name is looked down upon for some dumb reason). Tag !pennstate if it bothers you.

The Slashdot Trifecta

[westlake (615356)]

1 It bashes Vista

2 It's a post from Twitter.

3 It got the green light from kdawson.

Horrible recommendation

[wicka (985217)]

"At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1."

I wonder if by this you mean that they are ignorant enough to recommend against a service pack that, on the four systems I've installed on, works great and improves any troubles I've had with Vista. I still wonder just how few of the people who call Vista "deeply flawed" have actually tried it (my guess is four).

Wait a sec.

[T23M (705682)]

Weren't we supposed to "wait and see" UNTIL SP1 came out?

Uh, not Penn State

[Tickenest (544722)]

It's saying "Penn State" in a couple of places on Slashdot, but this story is from the University of Pennsylvania, which is not the same school. Penn State is in Happy Valley, PA, while the University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia, PA.

Re:

[Vegeta99 (219501)]

And here at Penn State, we have our 5-minute logon times for Windows Vista Business, and WE LIKE IT!!!

Well, that is, unless you don't drink coffee. I can go to the lab, type in my U/P, hit log in, go grab a coffee and the paper, and be back just in time for the desktop to pop up.

Vista is it the new Microsoft Bob ?

[EEPROMS (889169)]

Im the company IT guy and recently one of our female staffers purchased a brand new dual core Compaq laptop to replace her ageing P4 model. What she found is two of the USB ports refuse to work and her wireless modem would not work even though they were all certified by Microsoft. She took it to an IT "Windows" specialist and and he was stumped and said the laptop must be faulty. Out of curiosity I had a look at the machine booted up both my XP live and Ubuntu Live CD and everything worked. The fix was simple just install XP and recommend she find a new Windows support shop. PS on a side note she said the new laptop running Vista was way slower than her old machine running XP.

I'm advising my clients to ignore Vista

[Master of Transhuman (597628)]

The consensus appears to be developing that Windows Vista is the latest version of Windows ME. I'm advising my clients to skip Vista and wait for Windows 7 - since by that time, you'll have no choice but to upgrade to it - or switch to Linux (which may still not be an option for some people by 2009 or whenever "7" comes out.) Just make sure you can access enough Windows XP licenses to cover new purchases of machines for the next couple of years. This PC World article [pcworld.com] shows you how.

I'm getting a kick out of these replies

[by Anonymous Coward]

I actually work for one of the many IT departments at Upenn, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

Saying "don't install this the day it comes out" is officially not news, okay? We've got plenty of custom research and buisiness systems all over the university, and getting everything to work is a bitch. I'm sure ISC will recommend installing it later after they are done testing all their systems.

Slow news day I guess?

Slashdot mods, do us all a favour

[Toreo asesino (951231)]

...and stop posting twitter journals on the FP.

Twitter is a troll, Eris too. They both shamelessly bash Microsoft, and especially Vista at all costs, with lies or heavily distorted facts like a raving madman foaming at the mouth, blindly screaming murder.

They represent the absolute worst of FOSS people - complete fanatics motivated by pure hatred of Microsoft, and with zero professional intent.

They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.

Re:woot

[DJCacophony (832334)]

CIO magazine also doesn't go so far as to call on Microsoft to club baby seals. Why is the summary reporting on shit that people didn't do?
For that matter, why is the CIO magazine article even included in the summary? Did Twitter just scour the internet for anti-Vista articles and throw them all into one stupid Slashdot submission?

Re:

[StarvingSE (875139)]

Isn't the whole "wait until it's proven to upgrade" thing pretty much standard operating procedure for any major update to software as critical as on OS? I don't know of any organization of significant size that would go ahead and ship off an update without going through extensive testing and determining if the update makes sense. Hell, my unnamed organization just now is updating to SQL Server 2000 to 2005. We have an "if it works, don't fix it" attitude, which makes sense in my opinion. I don't see ho

Re:woot

[webmaster404 (1148909)]

I dont see the difference between this OS and XP

Except for say UAC, all the DRM and the fact that the thing runs slower on more powerful hardware then XP?

Of course if all you read is slashdot you would also think that NT is just a unix wannabe

It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X so in a way it is very similar to Unix. Now granted there are only a finite way of solving problems present in Windows 9X so making it more Unix like is one of the ways to make it more secure.

2000 an expensive upgrade for those who already have 95 and dont need it

2000 probably won't run on the same hardware that 95 ran on, so yes they don't need what they can't run.

and that XP is just 2000 with fisher price colors

It is, it is basically Windows 2K with a shiny theme on it much like how Vista is like XP with a bunch of crap thrown on it and a shiny GUI.

A bit off topic, but I can't help replying to such blatant lies.

Re:

[LarsG (31008)]

It employs many design concepts from *Nix that weren't present in 9X

VMS, surely?

Re:

[bonhomme_de_neige (711691)]

What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?

It's funny you should mention that.

TCP/IP over firewire support? Gone. [microsoft.com]

APIs for useful Explorer customisation? Gone. [sourceforge.net] (That extension, which I found infinitely useful, not only doesn't work but has no hope of ever working thanks to an API change).

I'm sure I would have found more stuff I liked that they took out, but at this point I formatted my laptop and installed XP SP2. I actually didn't mind the UAC and other stuff people complain about (and it a

Re:woot

[Naughty Bob (1004174)]

If this site is going to accept journal entries from twitter as articles for the main page....

I'd much rather we criticize people's arguments than the people themselves.

Re:Does anyone actually use Vista?

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

Let me guess.. you just browse and never really use it.

I used it from pre-launch until a few months ago.

1. Recursive file copy is broken - it'll copy a few files then crap out without an error.
2. Network file copy is broken - it has a max transfer rate of 2k/sec on a gigabit network (XP on the same hardware can saturate it).
3. Network settings worked for a couple of months then broke, giving 'permission denied' for every screen so you couldn't even tell if the cable was plugged in.
4. It would just reboot, randomly, with no warning. On known good hardware with 100% WHQL drivers.
5. The base OS uses 700mb minimum. On a 1.5GB machine that leaves too little for a decent development environment, so the whole thing slowed to a crawl with both the prefetch *and* swapping to disk driving the hard disk to distraction.
6. The DNS handling is utterly broken - if you try to connect to a local machine more often than not it'd pick something random on the internet and try to connect to that. You have to use FQDN all the time otherwise it's a major security problem (vista is currently banned at our company for precisely this reason).
7. On a laptop it fails to impress. Because it's hitting the hard drive 24/7 the battery life is less than 1/3 of what XP can manage on the same hardware.
8. Sometimes it would just forget its users... literally forgot they existed. You had to boot into safe mode and recover.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

Vista Ultimate on 1GB?? You shittin' me right?

For a dev machine running that combination even on XP I wouldn't go with less than 2GB... given Vista's memory footprint you'd probably want 4GB for that.

btw. Have they fixed JIT in 2008 (is that out of beta yet?). Certainly on VS2003 and VS2005 UAC simply hoses any attempt at debugging, because it blocks it.

Also btw. this is *nothing* like the early days of XP. In those days only the devs hated it because of its stupid interface and they way they moved everything around. Now you've got ordinary non-technical people literally calling their techie friends and begging them to install XP on their new machines because nothing works.