Microsoft Admits Vista Has "High Impact Issues" 520
EggsAndSausage writes "Microsoft has granted, in a roundabout way, that Vista has 'high impact issues.' It has put out an email call for technical users to participate in testing Service Pack 1, due out later this year, which will address 'regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP, security, deployment blockers and other high impact issues.' It's hard to know whether to be reassured that Service Pack 1 is coming in the second half of 2007, and thus that there is a timeframe for considering deployment of Vista within businesses, or to be alarmed that Microsoft is unleashing an OS on the world with 'high impact issues' still remaining." In other news, one blogger believes that Vista is the first Microsoft OS since Windows 3.1 to have regressed in usability from its predecessor (he kindly forgives and dismisses Windows ME). And there's a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get Vista or not to get Vista.
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not to get Vista? (Score:2, Interesting)
2: Ubuntu. It's even free.
3: OSX was out in 2000, Vista is 6 years behind the state of the art.
4: Wired for DRM, your computer is no longer fully under your control... muses... Was it ever with Windows.
5: It costs money. See #2.
6: Massive monoculture bad juju. Perfect for virus/trojan/worm writers. Hell, even evolution produced sexuality to avoid monocultures, that's how good diversity is.
7: Retraining costs. See #2.
8: Bad for the environment. Requires another round of system purchases and junking of "old" systems.
Bill Gates: Profit!
I'm sure there are more.
Prepare for the fasted ever Service Pack (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that so much people are thinking just like us "I'll wait Vista mature a bit, at least until SP1, before I give it a try" is the exact reason why Microsoft is going to rush out the fastest Service Pack you're ever seen.
Not so much Vista, but 3rd party apps. (Score:4, Interesting)
-Novell has yet to set a timetable for a Novell client capable of installing on Vista.
-AutoCad 2007 no timetable yet
-Lotus Notes client 7.01 (no Official support from IBM, though seems to work fine)
-Symantec Antivirus (need to upgrade to version 10.0)
Those are the biggies for our campus (that we've found so far....)
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and basing your post on RC2 (a "release candidate" - not the final version, if that needs to be said) doesn't help, either.
Check out the below - im horrified (Score:5, Interesting)
5. Driver support -- Key hardware like video and sound is crippled at the moment -- while Nvidia is working furiously to get a stable driver for the 8800 out by the 30th, there's still no SLI support for any of the Nvidia range. And thanks to the removal of hardware accelerated 3D sound in Vista, Creative's popular DirectSound based EAX no longer works at all, muting this feature for just about all gaming titles on the market today. Creative is in the process of coding a layer for its drivers to translate EAX calls to the OpenAL API which is seperate from Vista, but going by past experience with Creative drivers we won't see these any time soon.
not only nvidia stuff, but eax too. horrible as i got a creative xtreme music card to listen to 500+ classic music pieces, not to mention quality gaming sound. what kind of lack of foresight is this on part of ms ?
"DRM -- And to a lesser degree TPM -- were made for the RIAAs and MPAAs of this world, and the even tighter integration of copy protection mechanisms and 'Windows Rights Management' into vista are nothing more than a liability to you, the user."
well, this was the main shit that vista was delayed a few years anyway. im happy with my current situation as it is.
"half the limit compared to XP for Home Basic and Premium on how many machines can connect to yours for sharing, printing and accessing the Internet;"
i can say that loads of small businesses in turkey will be yelling the hell outta ms representatives on this one.
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea is that you're supposed to type a few letters in the search box to find the program you're looking for. It just seems to me having to search with the keyboard for a program you want to open is counterintuitive.
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:3, Interesting)
The hardware is the main reason I upgraded-- that and i don't enjoy scratch building like i used to.
However, all my "real" processing is headed towards linux- the windows box is mainly for gaming. I just don't trust windows any more with my data. I think they will try to lock it in and they will control it for other people at my expense.
AE, Open GL (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about the DRM, you see. MS has to be seen to control the entire transport path, to reassure its media partners that they can safely release their wares for Vista. I think I even read a story here recently that a VAR wound up replacing the disc burning software they normally bundled with the default Vista program, because their regular software had such serious issues. What do you want to be MS made them a pretty good offer to stick with the MS solution?
number 1 reason people should stick to XP (Score:4, Interesting)
If we hijack the Windows bandwagon from Microsoft, then Microsoft will be like a BIOS vendor when it comes to Windows. Anyone remember "IBM compatible PC"?
If almost everybody stays with XP and DirectX 9 and doesn't move on to Vista, then Windows XP+DX9 could become a defacto standard that even Microsoft can't get rid of! Just like Intel can't get rid of x86 - they tried and failed with their Itanic, and when IBM tried to switch to MCA.
Then the jobs of people doing Wine, Crossover office, Cedega and more become a lot easier - they have a fixed target instead of multiple moving targets.
Be realistic and ignore the fanboys out there, there are many valid reasons for wanting Windows. XP will continue to make a good substitute for Vista, unless more and more people start switching to Vista.
There really is no Linux substitute for Windows yet, BUT if enough people stick to XP, it becomes far more likely for there to eventually be one.
Just a look at Vista will tell you that Microsoft is no longer improving things significantly or meaningfully, so we might as well freeze Windows, and be able to spend more time and resources on innovating elsewhere.
So everyone, start telling Dell, HP et all to preload and sell XP instead of Vista, and tell your friends to insist on XP instead of Vista.
There are already other valid reasons to prefer XP to Vista, for example: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
Re:number 1 reason people should stick to XP (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what most of businesses are going to do for a long time; the reason is that XP works well enough, is already customized to the specifics of the business, supports tons of essential apps, and is very well provided with drivers. There is simply no business reason to downgrade to Vista. If anyone starts talking "Aero", it's not going to work on business machines because of many reasons, in particular because IT departments don't buy screaming hot video GPUs to run Excel.
Vista may be glittering enough to lure a clueless home user who listens to sirens at Best Buy, but IT departments are very conservative, and for a good reason - their purchasing decisions are expensive and they can't be done or undone just like that. Most companies have paid already for their software, and it's hard to come up with a reason to spend some more cash and to retrain people and to suffer compatibility problems to do exactly the same work as before, with no gain whatsoever. Even a medium size engineering company with 100 computer users can easily look at $1,000,000 cost of the switch, considering forced upgrades of related software (that won't work on Vista) and also considering becoming beta testers of said software and of Vista itself. Training costs, with these GUI changes, will be also extreme: in this thread a geek complains that Vista is unwieldly to him; just imagine how hordes of non-geeks will react to the same!
Mandatory DRM and WPA and WGA stuff does not help either. Currently if XP is activated it stays activated; but when you have hundreds, or thousands of boxes and they randomly want to reactivate themselves - and can't, because of one reason or another - how much live, personal support will it take to resolve? Or even worse, what if the user of the computer disregards reactivation warnings until the box is done for, and then he needs some files or some work done on it right now at the latest? It easily might be a notebook outside of sysadmin's reach, with some business-critical files of a PHB. Show me a business that can be OK with that; even your typical neighbourhood business of brothers - car mechanics can't afford to have their main (and the only) accounting computer to go out, they can't bill anyone and they can't release cars to owners, and they can't do business any more! So why would any business, from the smallest to the largest, want to have *anything* to do with Vista?
So businesses will be running XP for a long, long time - unless MS removes all this non-stop WPA/WGA/DRM stuff from business computers, completely, along with new themes and new menus and new file manager, and new ... but that makes it XP then. Well, software does not get obsolete on its own, so as long as ISVs keep supporting their business products on XP the XP will be alive and well. It does not even matter if MS decides to EOL it - businesses will make their displeasure heard; Microsoft may be large, but it is not larger than the rest of the US industry, not even mentioning the rest of the world. It was put on notice before.
Right now MS plans to obsolete XP "12 to 24 months after release of Vista". We shall see how that plays out. If they want to stop selling XP licenses, does it entitle current licensees of XP to deploy more XP seats for free, since MS does not want the money? We'll find out.
Re:These lists are generating a lot of discussion. (Score:3, Interesting)
Once again MS has copied everyone else out there but thinks they have done something new and has succeeded in convincing a lot of people that their rehash of old ideas is new and worth paying for even when other systems that have been able to do most of those things for years are free.
Re:Why not to get Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Vista is a nightmare to get to work on quite a few laptops, desktops, workstations, and everything else. Something about a total lack of useable drivers for a large amount of hardware. Ubuntu, on the other hand, just worked for everything I threw it on, but definitely had rough edges on a few laptops. I made sure that it worked on my hardware before any of it was purchased. I won't waste money on ATI hardware, so Vista is right out, for example.
4. My Linux install only implements the DRM on DVDs so far as to completely circumvent it. Seeing as to how Vista would attempt to disable my hardware instead, they don't seem equivalent. Most of the non-US world doesn't really give a damn about how the RIAA/MPAA wants to control all of the computers in the solar system, but would still like to watch movies and listen to music. MS just made it easier for all of those rotten groups to gain ownership over *your* computer, and they didn't have to do that. They certainly could have skipped *paying* for the "privilege". I know that I won't.
5. I have spent an order of magnitude more time fixing/working around Windows than I spent learning everything I know about UNIX and its derivatives. I would absolutely *love* to bill Microsoft for the time that I have wasted on their software.
7. The GP point was that if you have to retrain for Vista (and you certainly would have to), why not just save the money and migrate to Ubuntu. If you didn't notice, Vista is a lot different than Win2000 or WinXP.
As potentially good as security enhancements, such as UAC could be, Microsoft managed to screw such a simple thing up. There are far too many mundane things that trigger UAC, and MS implemented the entire feature in a complete half-assed fashion. Most users are going to turn it off, and it is useless in corporate deployments. Something like PatchGuard is also a great idea, if you didn't end up needing AV, add-in firewalls, and spyware scanners anyway.
For what it's worth, people like you are *why* we get stuck with the status quo. Quit being a short-sighted fool and put some effort into the day after tomorrow. MS is going to collapse eventually, just as every other monopoly has. Either their software will become completely unusable, or a better competitor will take the market, or perhaps the die through regulation. Whatever it is, it will happen eventually. Your mindset will put you, and whoever depends on you, firmly behind everyone else, hemmoraging cash.
Vista is a clusterfuck - from _my_ blog (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a diligent sort of bloke I downloaded a release candidate version of Vista Business edition from the usual sources and proceeded to test it on the main box.
The "main box" is currently an AMD 64 bit jobbie, A-bit mobo, 2 gig of Mushkin, WD raptor HD, so not the absolute latest and greatest, but no slouch either.
In common with all versions of Windows this install (XP SP2) picks up "cruft" and after about 6 months the only real cure is a reinstall of Windows.
Knowing it was a dying install I thought I'd play with AutoPatcher, which patched everything sure enough, but made things around the edges even more flaky, and in particular made the ethernet connection unstable, this then was the candidate for Vista.
Installation / Upgrading was NOT straightforward, I had to manually uninstall Kaspersky anti virus, Spybot S&D, and two MS windows updates, one was powershell, I forget now what the other one was.
I tried a virgin install as opposed to an upgrade, rather than uninstall all the above, and got a BSOD at the first installer reboot, clearly a hardware / driver issue.
Nota Bene, this is hardly exotic or just released hardware, nor is it obsolete hardware, so immediately the tables are turned between Windows and Linux, Debian will simply install, Vista will not. Don't even ask about trying to get hardware drivers for Vista
So I went back to the upgrade path, uninstalled the software that Vista was moaning about, and tried again.
Well, it worked, but.......
This installer very clearly said on the splash screens two extremely worrying sentences.
During install your computer will restart several times - it did.
Installation may take several hours - it took about 2.
This is NOT Linux, so taking the upgrade path and the multiple reboots mean you cannot use the computer for anything during the upgrade process. I am not a coder, but the fact that Vista STILL requires several reboots during installation speaks volumes about the fundamental workings of Vista, this is not a "professional" Operating System.
The astonishingly slow upgrade times, bear in mind this is a 64 bit AMD CPU on a good A-bit mobo with 2 gig of Mushkin (best memory money can buy) and 10k RPM Western Digital Raptor hard disks, beggars belief, XP SP2 will install on this box in 25 minutes, Debian + about 1000 applications will install in about 15 minutes, Vista took TWO BLOODY HOURS, and I must say again, unlike Linux, totally rendered the box unusable in the interim.
So, eventually, the Vista upgrade / install is complete, and it boots into the OS.
Before I go any further, I must give this some perspectiive, I have been using computers since whenever, punched card on mainframes, 8 bit DIY stuff at home, not quite Altair but damn close, and I've used most operating systems too, the various DOSes, the odd bit of CP/M and OS2, Sinclair speccies, Tandy TRS 80, Commodore PET, Apple ][, the 16 bit NMS machines from the likes of Philips, Atari, BBC and Acorn RISC, MIPS based Cobalt servers when they came out, DEC, etc etc etc.
The point of this comment is to reassure the reader than the mere sight of something different does not give rise to "oh noes! this is the suxxor!" shit, different is "OK, let's see what you've got." and of course assuming that whoever wrote this OS will, like me, have some idea of what went before and therefore have a good idea about what are good ideas, what works, what doesn't, etc etc etc.
In 1995 the Acorn RISCOS 3.5 had full screen font anti-aliasing so you could read 8 point text on a 14 inch CRT, it had a Pause and Resume dialogue button on the file copy / move function, and would not fall over as soon as it encountered a file that could not be copied or moved, and would simply get on with moving or copying the rest
Pfft GUIs - you can keep 'em (Score:4, Interesting)
rm
echo eject >
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/cdfs [bell-labs.com]
Re:Vista is a clusterfuck - from _my_ blog (Score:3, Interesting)
High-end graphics cards are a fool's game (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with that. The rest of us will be buying a better card for 1/4 the price in two years, and still have it installed well before the number of published games that really take advantage of DX10 hits double figures. And our drivers won't crash the whole PC at random intervals, either.
Seriously, buying the latest and greatest graphics card is a fool's game, and has been for probably five years or more now. Lack of game requirements and poor quality early drivers mean that you won't get the best out of such a card for several years after you get it. By that time, the rest of your system spec will be struggling to keep up, and even the budget graphics cards will support the same API standards.
Point for comparison: I last built a PC around 4 years ago. At the time, I went for high-end pretty much throughout. For the processor, RAM, and hard drive it was well worth the extra: they gave a direct advantage in things I could do with the PC at the time. However, my Radeon 9700 Pro (replaced after 6 months with a 9800 Pro because of the power supply issues) that was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time has never been used to its full potential. The games I bought it for, which would really benefit from DX9, weren't released for another year or two in reality. Today it's actually that then-high-end graphics card that is the biggest limiting factor in running more recent games (along with, ironically, simple things like not installing a DVD drive, which was a luxury item back then). I might as well have bought a cheap 'n' cheerful Radeon 9500 or then-mid-range nVidia card, and used the significant financial savings to upgrade the graphics card a couple of years later when the games could use it, spending less money overall, winding up with better kit, and suffering no practical loss of functionality in between.
In any case, in the time frame we're talking about, it's quite possible that the whole DRM house-of-cards will be crashing down around poor Microsoft's quivering OS dept. and execs will be running around trying to distance themselves from the mistakes underlying Vista. That's likely to require a significant reworking of the whole multimedia framework within the OS, which in turn is likely to do weird stuff to DX. There's still a lot of potential in DX9 that most new releases don't tap, and a lot of the PC gamer market will be on XP rather than Vista for some time to come. With this sort of environment, I would think DX10 is a pretty unappealing target for game developers right now, so I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade things just to support it.
Re:Using Vista for a bit (Score:2, Interesting)
When Microsoft brings out a major renovation to Windows, you can choose to ignore it for a year or two, but then the device drivers start drying up for older versions of Windows, your friends start asking questions about their new PC that you can't answer, and even if you use Linux, you'll inevitably need familiarity with Microsoft's latest interoperability blockers. Face it: your arse belongs to Redmond.
This? This is the your final reason for upgrading? I wish all Microsoft shills were this honest about their reasons for being Windows junkies. "Buy this product, because if you don't they're going to use their monopoly to cause you problems." Hell, I'm a libertarian and this sentiment even makes me cringe.