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Time for a Vista Do-Over?
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jan 31, 2008 07:53 AM
from the better-luck-next-time dept.
from the better-luck-next-time dept.
DigitalDame2 writes "'There's nothing wrong with Vista,' PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year's CES. 'But you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.' He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?"
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Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
conclusion: "Completely rewrite Vista". Errm
was wrong
Belthize
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Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... (Score:5, Insightful)
These are the words of our Dear Leader and they apply just as well to Microsoft Windows Vista. It's not going to be my job to "give Vista another try" even if MS gives it a complete makeover. I'm gonna need a fair amount of greasing up before I lay out my money for a new Microsoft OS. Maybe dinner and a movie. Some flowers would be nice. Definitely, a deep price reduction.
"SP2"?? What, do I look like I just came in on the turnip truck? Like I just came down with the rain this morning?
Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?
I mean, I don't want to sound bitter or anything. I'm willing to let bygones be bygones.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
[deny] [allow]
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I was tryin' to say something nice about Vista! Honestly!
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things I hate most about living in a Windows World is that every program has a second program that installs as a system service that does nothing other than check for updates... and these programs load at boot and stay resident eating memory and occasional CPU cycles. You have the Adobe update, Java Update (JUSCHED.exe), iTunes Update, Antivirus update, etc. If windows actually had a common update notification API (you have version X software installed and registered with the computer and it checks website Y if there's a version newer than X), we could probably get rid of a dozen programes running on every computer. These update programs take memory and slow down boot time and they mainly exist because 99.9% of windows software ships so buggy you need autoupdates to be on.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, am I suggesting that if I'd had broadband available, I'd've downloaded Windows? Point is, I would never download Vista, but that's mainly because of the incredibly effective antipiracy measures. Namely that it's shit and I don't want it.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Let's be honest and give Microsoft credit where credit is due.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I'm intrigued. What is the missing word? This is the best Madlibs I've seen in a while.
monitor?
record?
upload?
fileshare?
Please toss us a bone and let us know exactly *what* you have that Eepc do to your family's logjams. Thanks in advance.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
All in all, I would say that Vista is not a better performer. But since when has a new Microsoft OS been faster than the old Microsoft OS that it intended to replace? Sure I am losing 1.5 to 2.5 FPS in games, but I feel that is acceptable given the newness of the OS.
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Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Informative)
1) Nothing works the same as previous operating systems. Finding the "dumb" default so I could disable them took hours (such as "hide files so you can't fix problems" and "don't show extension to give spyware a chance"). I don't want to have to relearn everything just to add one computer.
2) The new "alert" dialogs seem spiffy, until you realize that it make VNC stop working (it pauses all services) - while adding no real benefit, since the entire filesystem is writeable anyway. It doesn't help to disable the Microsoft way of doing things when the trojans can bypass it but the users can't. And don't tell me there's a way to disable it - I DON'T WANT TO LEARN A NEW SYSTEM FOR ONE NEW LAPTOP!
3) Then I installed Office 2007. Wow. That is bad. This is really bad. They did not improve a single part of it - instead they just moved everything around. Not only does it not provide any benefits, it requires 100% retraining! The file formats are, of course, not compatible - so moving one person to 2007 would require moving everyone. In addition, the one reason to use it for us was the ability to integrate with our intranet - but of course they broke compatibility with the file format. There isn't even an option to use the old format we needed, it is simply not there anymore.
So I wiped the machine. We will be using Linux running wine (and office 2000) for a short time, until we get all of our systems compatible with Open Office.
I run my companies IT departments, but I am the decision maker for three other companies in IT - and my friends that run other midsized companies are doing the same thing. Microsoft is simply to annoying to use in the modern business (at last mid-sized businesses).
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bah (Score:5, Insightful)
At any rate, Vista's bad image isn't due to perception, I have Vista Ultimate, running on a machine that can definitely handle it, it runs HORRIBLY, this great PC has become my secondary PC which I now rarely use. I'm not the only one like this, I know a couple other people with the exact same "perception" that they got by actually using the operating system.
Re:bah (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:bah (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:bah (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you can count that as captatio benevolentiae [wikipedia.org] of the author, just as a device to get MS to listen to him or to sound more balanced to some audience. As you can see he goes on to advice them to do a complete make over:
I think he actually says: Vista is completely flawed. I mean, come on: "starting with new code." He just wraps it into some rhetorics.
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Re:bah (Score:5, Interesting)
This one really gets me. Vista was supposed to be a complete rewrite with all new code. when MSFT bought virtual PC I became happy as I saw it as a sign that backward compatibility would be handled by VPC sandboxing XP. MSFT kept bragging about how new Vista would be I had hope.
When Vista RC1 was released and immediately hit with a virus in an image library that had been directly ported from XP I knew Vista was doomed to be crap. The rewrite never actually happened they just ported the code and added yet another layer of crap on top.
Windows 7 will have a really awesome mini kernel, and then they will shove everything into the kernel so it runs as fast as possible.
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Re:bah (Score:4, Funny)
When Se7en RC1 was released and immediately hit with a virus in an image library that had been directly ported from Vista I knew Se7en was doomed to be crap. The rewrite never actually happened they just ported the code and added yet another layer of crap on top.
Windows 8 will have a really awesome mini kernel, and then they will shove everything into the kernel so it runs as fast as possible.
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Re:bah (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:bah (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:bah (Score:5, Funny)
Take a look around my friend, you're already deep in enemy territory and you don't even know it.
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Perception = Reality? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, Lance, many of us have first-hand experience with the "reality" of Vista. To argue that "perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud", in the same sentence as "there's nothing wrong with Vista" gives the impression that our perceptions are not based on reality (to put it mildly). To put it not so mildly, you're calling us either deluded, or liars. Is that really what you want to say, Lance?
Re:Perception = Reality? (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to ask people who utter it the following question: "If a tree falls in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it ever fail to make a sound?"
Reality exists despite perception. Vista isn't a great product. Vista isn't a horrible product, and I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released. And that should be the real comparison. XP was a pile of excrement until SP1. Even then, it wasn't secure until SP2. Vista is stable and secure, although the performance needs help in some places. I've been running it since March, and the only problem I've had was with the stupid mp3/network thing.
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Re:Perception = Reality? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you argue that a bloated piece of shit that takes up literally ten times the disk space and 3 to 4 times the RAM of its predecessor, while offering absolutely nothing new in the way of end-user features, is better than a significant improvement on a smashing success that Windows 2000 was, with lots of UI and performance/reliability improvements (even if a couple of them looked so awful they had to be disabled)?
Sorry, XP - with or without SP2 - was way better in terms of user value than Vista can ever hope to be. Vista may incorporate a lot of good work in the libraries and APIs that might be used in the future for significant improvements, but that is very well hidden behind the mountain of shit that the rest of Vista is.
I recall actually waiting for Windows 2000 and XP with interest and anticipation. Those products fit their install image into 300 MB of space and packed new features by the hundreds. What happened to that?
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Soooo. (Score:5, Insightful)
And he wants them to sell a version that doesn't play music out of the box.
Is it me or are these both _really stupid_ ideas?
Re:Soooo. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft could solve this conundrum by taking a page from Apple's playbook. To make the transition to a unix environment practical for its users, Apple designed a "transition system" that allowed applications for its old OS to run in a virturalized environment. Now, Apple has a completely redesigned, rock-solid, relatively secure OS, and they did it without abandoning their customer base.
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All this does not matter, Labels love it (Score:5, Insightful)
Labels love it and they are happy with it and its top-to-bottom DRM. This is what MSFT wanted, this is what it got. Now they will happily shovel it down our throats do we like it or not.
It a repeat of the sad story of Media Center Edition of Microcrapware. If you deliberately remove all functionality that users are interested in you should not expect something to sell. Pick up a MCE Remote and look. It is missing "My Videos", "My Music" and any hint of fetching existing content from the hard disk. Yep. Right, We peones are not supposed to have content that has not been approved and blessed for distribution by a label ya know. Only recorded content for ya. Dumb, idiotic, no-seller from day one, but labels are happy.
Microsoft is not doing pesky Apple (or Hauppage) things and offering the users what they actually want. That is good ya know.
Vista is the same, just on a bigger scale. An OS made to order for the labels. No wonder it is crap.
What's the problem, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. (I have a Pentium D CPU, so I'm nowhere near state of the art, but I have 2 GB RAM).
Re:What's the problem, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you have done all the "technical bits", wait and see how much legacy software that is mostly out of your control just stops working, or requires workarounds, or slows down (despite the computer upgrades). Watch your network graphs dip in correlation to the playing of music/video files on the PC's (although in a properly managed network, that shouldn't be a concern). Oh, and then you have the minor, obviously-we-should-be-there-by-now-anyway, of DVD-sized installation disks (and therefore network-shares, etc.), the fact that virtually everything you were running on XP runs with no difference or gets worse and that you have nothing really "new" to show for all that hard work and hassle. It's still an OS, it still just runs Word, it still just prints and saves on network shares. But for some reason you've had to change everything along the way to get to that point and the only thing you'll see difference is a dip in your client performance graphs. Oh, and to turn off all the whizzy new features to stop your users playing with them, you're really talking about waiting for Server 2008 with all the upgrade costs that involves.
It doesn't really matter what you use at home. You could use anything from MythTV to Windows Vista, Windows ME to MacOS. Nobody really cares so long as it gets their work done. What matters is what do you choose when you need to change. You try justifying Vista upgrades in a business environment, or to a little old granny who types up the minutes of the church council meetings. The problem is not "Why are people slating Vista?" but more "What does Vista actually DO that it didn't before for the average user?". 64-bit? Who cares. All that means is that drivers are harder to come by and some older stuff might not work. More than 4Gb RAM? So what? Doesn't crash any more than XP? Why did I have to move off XP then? UAC? Ha. The mental equivalent of "Yes to All" defeats that quite quickly.
Really, there's not much left. Home use, because it came with the computer? Fine. Use it. Home use upgrade? You can find a million reasons not to bother but we'd start with cost and what advantages it brings. Business use? Not until it's a de-facto standard. And there's not much chance of that happening while XP Pro disks and Vista->XP downgrade rights still exist.
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Re:What's the problem, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should this be an expectation? I would expect that a modern OS would use less CPU and RAM (due to optimization) than one released several years ago, unless it is providing significantly improved functionality. I think this is why people are so down on Vista. It asks for much more, but only gives marginally more, than XP.
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New Code (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait...
Another common mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if MSFT can show that it plug the "digital hole" and tell the media giants that "Windows is the delivery platform for digital content that cant be pirated" then all of them will provide content only in MSFT approved format, and they will achieve a vendor-lock in the media sphere similar to the vendor-lock they got in the corporate world. So the thinking goes in Redmond. So they add layers and layers of stuff, signed drivers, protected video path, protected audio path etc etc. MSFT is trying to sell vista to media companies. Not to the poor dolts who own/buy the PCs.
Some of his suggestions look quaint. "Start all over, and forget 100% backward compatibility!" he urges. Vista has already given up on compatibility. So much of old software, libraries and drivers don't work in Vista. Active X is dead. OpenGL support is being eviscerated to supplant it with MSFT owned rendering schema. Office2005 SP3 just announced it is going to stop importing Office97 files due to "security concerns". (Just when OpenOffice started rendering and saving Office97 format files better than MSFT itself. coincidence?). No. It is a myth that the backward compatibility makes MSFT code slow.
MSFT never had long term focus. It flits about from this latest thing to the next latest thing in a desultory manner. As long as the vendor-lock in Office product keeps pumping money into its coffers it does not have any real incentive to find the managers who manage the projects well and those who build empires under them. Right now the bee in the bonnet of MSFT is to get a lock on entertainment somehow. It compromises everything else for that goal. And that is why Vista sucks as a computing platform.
It's pretty dang nice, actually. (Score:4, Interesting)
I also expected that the first thing I would do is turn off all of Vista's "pretty" including Aero, and make it look as much as 9x/2k as possible. That's what I'd done with XP (Blue...ugh!) and I figured Microsoft's latest UI-gloss would be the same. Based on what the media had told me, I thought the DRM would be horribly intrusive, the security ever-present and annoying, but useless.
Ehm... whoops! I was a bit surprised. Vista runs quite well on this new but definitely not top-end laptop. It's a bit slow to fall into sleep mode or wake up, but not bad considering the 2GB of ram it has to deal with every time I close the lid. Bootup isn't too slow, and although shutdown is a bit laggy, I shut the system down rarely so that's not much of an issue.
As for DRM... what DRM? I have MP3 files, DivX, MPEG-video, watch DVDs and listen to (and rip) CDs quite often, and have not had it bother me yet. I don't use the frankly horrific Windows Media Player or it's associated store, nor do I use iTunes. Using either of those will of course result in DRM and associated DRM-related issues, but that's YOUR problem, not mine. My CD-quality ripped MP3 files have no DRM, thank you very much.
The security screen that darkens the window when you are installing, uninstalling, updating, changing, or even just copying files into the Program Files directory is a bit overused, but the implementation is great- as far as I can tell, it does a system "stop" and holds everything until you make a decision, possibly stopping malware from auto-installing as easily as in the past. I wish I could select when I want it to happen more specifically then "on" or "off" but maybe in a future patch that'll happen. "Run as Administrator" is a bit vexing in that you can't log in as "Administrator" (AKA root) but you can make shortcuts automatically run specific programs as administrator (Netstumbler requires this as it needs low-level access to the wireless NIC).
The wireless and network connection screens take a little getting used to, as they are new since XP, but the ease-of-use and controllability are still present, and I do prefer it a great deal over Apple's over-simplified system.
Oh, and Aero? Shiney! I actually rather enjoy the transparencies, and most of the transitions are quite unobtrusive. The new start menu is nice in some ways, although I wish it responded faster to opening folders, which is perhaps more an issue with the laptops slow drive speed. Making the task bar 2 level tall works very well, and the start icon expands slightly to fill it's area better.
My major annoyances have mostly to do with the aformentioned wireless connectivity, and with IE7. For some reason, when I load media-rich websites sometimes that window will crash. This doesn't happen on any of the other Vista or XP systems I run IE7 on, so it may be a driver issue. The wireless has problems connecting to open APs sometimes, and for some vague reason doesn't like the occaisonal brand of AP (SonicWall seems to be the worst). I think both of these issues will be fixed shortly, and neither are hugely problematic for me.
Overall, I rather like Vista, for all of it's shortcomings. I wish I had it installed on a powerful-enough system to play games on, though. DirectX 10, anyone? I AM looking forward to Windows 7 though, if Microsoft pulls off most of what it wants to do for that OS, it should be quite the system.
Reality is Perception (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a statement like "Vista is slow." There is no single thing that is "speed" when it comes to operating systems. Vista isn't
"slow" in the sense of failing to do many units of computational work per unit time on average. It's "slow" in the sense that you can't rely upon it to respond to input in a consistent amount of time. Serious work has a rhythm to it; you can adapt yourself to a tool that is slow, but effective, but you can't to a tool that doesn't behave in exactly the same way every single time you use it. Using Vista is like dancing with a partner who has a lot of fancy moves, but can't hear the music.
Most of Vista's faults you can adapt to, like it's unnecessarily complicated and cluttered file dialog box. But you can't adjust to the fact that it really needs far more memory than its claimed minimum if you don't want to deal with a user interface that freezes every so often because of swapping. I know swapping is the case because I'm writing this on a laptop with 2GB of RAM that is almost unbearable to use without 2GB of ReadyBoost flash. I'm running pretty much the same workload as was acceptable under 1GB on XP or Linux but as I type this, I can see the access light on the flash drive almost continually blinking as the OS goes for cached pages.
Microsoft probably could make Vista a viable platform if they simply made 4GB the minimum required RAM. Or if they could make it possible to use Vista with the rated minimum RAM requirements. I had an open mind, because people always complain when Microsoft changes things, excepting maybe Windows 2000 where they were ready to try anything after the stability nightmare that was NT 4. And maybe Windows 7 will be that kind of improvement over Vista. But for now I can say I started with an expectation that Vista would be at least OK once I got to use it, but after almost a year I have to say it's the first operating system I've ever used whose performance is a serious problem for my productivity. These are greatly alleviated by ReadyBoost, but even so it's a relief to boot into Linux and not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system. In fact, I've begun to boot into Linux and do my work in an XP virtual machine, which feels faster than running the same user tasks directly on Vista.
Bucking the Slashdot trend (Score:5, Insightful)
The other major complaint, UAC, really ceases to be a problem once the system is configured. Sure, when you first set it up, you get a lot of pop-ups when trying to change settings, but once things are pretty much the way you want them, you rarely see a UAC pop-up anymore. About the only time I see them is when installing a new program.
Re:Universal interface table? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, the problems are much deeper (and higher) than simply being POSIX compliant. (I'm fighting the urge to say "look at Gnome".)
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Re:Universal interface table? (Score:5, Funny)
give fishing rod to gnome
sleep
take fish from gnome
eat fish
Don't mind me, I'm also fighting the urge to use Multi User Dungeons. I was a fool to think that rehab was the end of it.
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Re:New Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Widely-used software is usually paradigm shifting and has feature sets that people not only want but feel they need. Word 6 made a splash because you could open/edit/save in either Word or WordPerfect format - something the folks in Orem scoffed at. Excel had the ability to use either Lotus or Excel keystroke commands while the 1-2-3 folks were wondering whether mouse support was that important.
I tell folks that if they get a Mac they don't have to buy DVD burning software, picture management software, music tools, backup software, etc. and they say, "Wow - that's hundreds of dollars of software I don't have to buy." Plus they hear how stable OS X is and that seals the deal.
It's perceptions and paradigm shifts.
And like it or not, Vista was started from scratch and went the wrong way. Monolithic kernels ain't the answer hence MinWin.
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Re:New Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:New Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:New Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux is only FREE if your time is worthless. With some distros like Ubuntu, you can install faster and easier than you can with XP, and still use the computer while it's working. So, not only is the software free, but it uses less of your precious time to install it.
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Re:New Code? (Score:5, Funny)
...I think it's quite reasonable to describe the Vista kernel (when loaded in memory) as a "giant black box that drives primates into a murderous rage."
(With apologies to Kubrick and Clarke)
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Re:They can't, they don't want to, it would kill t (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't that XP? The last OS to use the 9x kernel was windows ME, 8 years ago.
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