Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista 377
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
As an IT manager (Score:5, Interesting)
I see nothing that will make our employees more productive or save us money on IT. We'll be sticking with XP.
Been using it for 3 days now (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement.
On thing I have noticed is that Vista has re-done the menu layout and prompts and it now closely resembles KDE, imo. Not a complaint or a compliment though I do imagine the layout change is going to confuse a lot of people. I can see why it was re-done though and I imagine once I've gotten used to it I will find it an improvement over XP.
Really I can't say much else as I've only just scratched the surface of what Vista can do. Is it better then XP? So far yes. Is it worth years of delayed devlopment and several hundred dollars? That remains to be seen.
Vista is just fine for the masses (Score:4, Interesting)
For the masses its just fine, my parents recently bought a new laptop which has Vista. Other than finding a few items moved or renamed they just use it. The key is, its just a damn operating system. It doesn't mean DIDDLY to them. they don't care. they saw a laptop with features they wanted at a price they wanted to pay. OS be damned, it didn't matter. All they wanted was to get mail while on the road, connect to wireless, and use WORD.
As for AERO, fwiw, if you have a video card with 32mb of memory you might just see a performance boost with it turned on, especially with low system ram installations.
Im sorry.... (Score:1, Interesting)
As an IT guy also (Score:1, Interesting)
I am finding though that a few people are opting for Linux Dells and then installing their prior version of XP to it. I have to say, that's a brilliant Idea!
Media Center (Score:1, Interesting)
And to top that off, the API's for coding extensions are just lovely as well.
As for the rest? Oh well...
Re:As an IT manager (Score:2, Interesting)
For Niels Ferguson's take on these conspiracy theories (he is one of the lead developers of BitLocker), see http://blogs.msdn.com/si_team/archive/2006/03/02/
Re:My Vista pros/cons (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously the built-in search is the biggest win. If you don't mention this in your pros, no wonder you don't like Vista
Vista search is an improvement to that in XP but it still sucks. Sorry to refer to OSX again, but Spotlight shows how to do search. I also find it inconsistent - for a while my procedure to find PuTTY was just to go Start --> type PuTTY into the search bar but now it doesn't find it and I haven't touched the settings.
Another thing that sucks about the search is it rearranges the list of results as it generates them. So this means that if I search for something and click on a hit, quite often the item I was intending to click on has moved and suddenly I've opened something completely different...
History is NOT repeating itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
But here we are, months after the business introduction of Vista and people still debating it's merits with no sign of commitment. New machines are still being sold w/ XP by default, with the "option" to upgrade to Vista. It turns out that a Mac running Parallels w/ XP can run more Windows software that a PC running Vista. Developers are still writing for XP and are just not pumping out the Vista apps.
Microsoft used to be criticized for being backward compatible to the stone age. Vista is different. Vista breaks lots of Windows software. Lots. '
I see this rollout as being a complete failure. Much worse than Windows ME, more like OS/2.
Re:As an IT manager (Score:3, Interesting)
you actually believe him??? How do you know that he hasn't been forced to incorporate a back door and isn't allowed to tell anyone about it. Do you have the source code for filevault and can compile it to produce the same binary?
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, this is the reason that windows sells at all as a server.
At the top enterprise end, little can beat a highly tuned linux server in most areas. However, for the smaller business, the idea of doing this is too frightening whilst a M$ box just seems easier.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
More expensive and slightly less good performance than a well tuned linux or BSD box, but with ease of use and stability that M$ struggles to deliver on.
Just my 2c worth
Michael
Two Weeks w/ Vista, From a Mac User. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was excited to hear that our Windows Vista (Business) Licenses had arrived via our MSDNAA account at work. So, I grabbed a license for testing and went at it. I wanted to leave my Mac alone and not try to force a Vista boot with Boot Camp + hacking. My original test box was:
Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.4 GHz, hyper-threading enabled.
1.25 GB DDR 400 RAM
80 GB HD (7200RPM/8MB Cache)
GeForce 4 MX 400 64MB Video Card (AGP 8x)
17" Flat Screen display
Install went perfect. After installation was complete, there were three or four Windows security updates awaiting me. After installing those, I started to play around. Unfortunately, my computer scored a 1.0 on the performance scale, mostly because of the video card. I was also disappointed that Aero was not supported on my video card as well, so all I had was the "Windows Vista Basic" theme available to me, without any of the new eye candy I was looking to see.
I really wanted to see what Vista had to offer, so I didn't want to settle for the reduced package. This is significant though. Microsoft wonders why they haven't seen to many upgrades to Vista yet- well this is one of them. A large amount of users with existing computers will not see the biggest UI improvement that Aero has to offer. This is different in comparison to Mac OS X 10.4, where, except for not being able to run a few screen savers, and not getting a few fancy effects here and there, your experience is pretty much the same visually, from a G3 iBook, right on through to the newest Mac Pro. Sure, there are applications that need core image, but, for the basic OS X install set, your experience is pretty much the same right on down the line.
Getting back to Vista... I decided to upgrade the computer as much as I could to get the full Vista experience, so I bumped myself up to 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200/16MB Cache hard disk, and, a GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card (best I can get for a low profile card w/bracket for this Dell). This brought my performance rating up to a 2.5, again, with the video card being the weak point.
Now I was getting Aero in all of its glory. Despite my video card being the bottom of the barrel for Vista/Aero, I haven't had any performance issues with any of the special effects (all of them are turned on). The only thing I'm kind of peeved about is the lack of NVidia support for this class of video card. NVidia has newer drivers out, however, but I had to use beta drivers from November for this card, because it looks like NVidia is in the process of dropping support for it. Despite being beta drivers, I haven't had any BSOD's or issues with them, and they are still faster than the default Microsoft drivers.
As for applications on Vista, its a mixed bag. Most things installed and worked OK. All my typical Internet applications and plugins (Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Sun Java JRE, etc) worked without a hitch- even Gaim/GTK worked. Divx and RealPlayer are giving me issues where Windows has to switch out of Aero mode when they are running. It's kind of weird... the screen goes black for two seconds, and then comes back in Windows Vista "basic" mode. When you close the application, the reverse occurs, and you are back to Aero, with transparencies etc. VLC won't show most movies, just a bunch of changing colors in its window. iTunes worked OK for me, but I don't have my library saved on this computer. Office 2003 worked as well.
Re:Why do I need Vista? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did enjoy the "be firm in their believe that their proprietary OS is just the only way to go" comment. Talk about irony. Replace 'proprietary OS' with 'free OS' then look in a mirror.
Then replace 'believe' with 'belief' so that it makes sense.
Five things stop me from using Vista (Score:4, Interesting)
(2) The 'advanced' GUI. I've been using Compiz and Beryl on Linux long enough to have played with eye candy and you know what? I switched it off. It slows my UI down, not because of computing power (plenty available) but because all that fancy stuff needs time to show itself. Opening a window that zooms or rolls or whatever takes longer than one that just appears on the screen, for example, and there's plenty of it. It gets in the way, period. The only thing I use in Beryl is a slightly transparent cube so I can see where things are because I can have quite a windows and desktops on the go.
(3) The licensing problems. I've been fighting the misnamed 'Genuine Advantage' on other systems which were as genuine as they come and, frankly, I've had enough. From what I've read Vista has even more of that nonsense in, and that, coupled with my unwillingness for any system to be allowed to 'phone home' without me knowing what details it sends is enough for me not to use it. I have client information I need to keep confidential and I have nil trust in systems that do things without me knowing. Apart from that, I get very little for the money - I rather spend it sponsoring an Open Source project that creates value for me and others.
(4) The eternal upgrade cycle, but that's more based on my experience with XP. I installed a couple of new systems 3 weeks ago, and I set it up so I have to authorise patches and updates. Well, it happens on a daily basis. Worse, one of the patches bluescreened one of the box to the point of me having to restore it from backup. I've only ever had that with Linux, 6 years ago, when a kernel patch went wrong - and that is easy to recover from.
(5) As with any version of Windows, the absolute dependency on the GUI for it to work. If there's a modal window somewhere hidden under the stack of others on your desktop it will stop the machine and actively prevent you from getting to the window. And you can't cancel the task because you need the GUI for that too. That leads me to another HUGE and related annoyance: if I say 'shut down' I want a machine to SHUT DOWN, no if, buts and maybes. It needs a shutdown that simply does what it says, no further questions asked.
And I don't buy into the 'hope cycle' that the next version will at last fix all the problems. Realistically, MS will NEVER willingly make such a version.
Who would buy the update?
Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Interesting)
C|N->K! Vista can't even manage to bring up the *task manager* half the time when an application freaks out (so much so, I've rolled my one Windows system back to XP Pro). Even without the eye candy on, it not stable. If if ever accidentally click "Windows Media Center" it would just up and die and prevent me from being able to quit it to regain control about 50% of the time, and that's from a fresh install (on a system with known, and solid components).
XP is a far more usable desktop with regard to stability alone (even once you've disabled all more 'unreliable' features in Vista).
Now, let's see YOU use Windows to bring up another window (just the Window, not the whole desktop any OS can do that!) over a secure tunnel from another Windows desktop (so that the application appears to be running locally). Mmm challengy.