Vista at Risk of Being Bypassed by Businesses

narramissic writes "With Windows 7 due in late 2009 or 2010, many businesses may choose to wait it out rather than make the switch to Vista. According to some analysts, Vista uptake at this point really depends on how good Vista SP1 (due in Q1, 2008) is. If it doesn't smooth over all the problems, companies are much more likely to stick with XP. And that holds especially true for those businesses that follow the every-other-release rule." Note for Microsoft: Allow us to natively disable trackpads.

Hey why not just bypass WINDOWS?

[toby]

It's not as if spectacularly better alternatives don't exist.

Some entities are going to Vista eventually...

[LinDVD]

For example, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) is moving to Windows Vista on all their workstations in 2008, even though they don't NEED it. Part of this is due to a federal mandate, and part of it is because Microsoft has it as part of their service agreement. Service pack 1 for Windows Vista has nothing to do with the USCG's standard workstation operating system policy.

Re:disable trackpads?

[ion.simon.c]

If you take a break from typing, and rest your palm on the portion of the laptop closest to you, you'll move the mouse cursor. Maybe you'll even click a button!

Re:Linux

[NeverVotedBush]

I think you'll see a lot more switching to Linux. Anyone who hasn't tried Linux is probably in for a shock when they do. They'll be kicking themselves for not trying it sooner.

Linux is good. Damn good. For most people it will do everything they could ever want to do and more.

True, there are a few apps that won't run under Crossover or Wine and you have to run under Windows. But the OpenOffice suite is great... and free. Browsing and e-mail are wonderful. The whole multiple desktop thing makes working on multiple applications at once easy and productive. Probably that in itself is the biggest thing I miss whenever I have to do anything on a Windows box.

But again, anyone that hasn't at least tried Linux owes it to themselves to download a "live" CD image so they can try it out without disturbing their Windows installation at all. Just boot from the live CD and check it out. You might even have fun and discover a whole new world and certainly at a lot lower cost (i.e. 100% free) than you would ever spend on Windows and Office.

Re:Better question...

[Anonymous Coward]

IF you honestly do not know this, you should actually go look.
It "DOES" a lot of things that XP doesn't.
The list includes some things that are more geared towards "the look and feel" of it, as well as many, many security related "things".

From the finally implemented userspace/kernelspace ideas for user programs, to the fact that even if you (moronically) log in as the administrator all the time (as most windows users do), you still get warned that something is trying to install outside of normal userspace, or you are trying to access "system" space that should only be done with the knowledge you might fuck something up.

This is no different than any secure multi-user OS should do, even if the actual implementation leaves something to be desired.

the biggest drawbacks to vista so far seem to be based around poor network transfer speeds, and poor performance when running single threaded applications which are coded for previous versions of the Windows OS.

As for reliability, its much more reliable than Windows XP was pre SP1, and will probably be more so after SP1.

mostly, the "problem" with Vista is that it forces a fundamental change in how many programs are coded as it no longer allows random applications to access what it considers "system" space but rather forces these applications to run in userspace instead.

I would expect someone familiar with the idea's of a *nix based system and it's security model to understand this concept.

However i find more and more that the people on slashdot really have no clue.

The same things that're bad with XP

[Tony]

Let's see--

0. DRM throughout the system.

1. If a dialog box pops up, you can't move or resize the parent window. WHY ISN'T THIS FIXED YET?

2. It's slow and bloated, even on modern hardware.

3. Its user interface is inconsistent. (OK, KDE and Gnome are pretty bad this way, too, but OS-X isn't, for instance.)

4. DRM.

5. Intrusive security model.

6. Requires re-training of end-users, which is expensive. (Had to add this one, as it's always used as a "reason" to not move to Linux or OpenOffice.)

7. Invasive anti-piracy model.

8. DRM.

9. No compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

As you can see, there are lots of reasons MS-Windows Vista is not good, even on modern hardware. However, if it floats your boat, continue using it.

Unfortunately...

[Anonymous Coward]

...all the hardware comes, OEM, with Vista. At my current business, we are constantly delayed by having to order the downgrade back to XP professional.

Re:This is a grate time for apple make osX for all

[laffer1]

You haven't used Leopard then. Leopard = Vista. Both require at least 1.5GB of RAM to run with useful applications. Both require fairly fast hardware. Vista and Leopard don't run on 5 year old laptops at all. Apple's tradition of making it faster isn't true here. There are countless bugs in Leopard. The firewall is actually worse than Microsoft's now. Software applications were broken on both platforms. I actually prefer vista to leopard. I've used Leopard on a 3 month old iMac, a Mac Pro bought in February, and iBook and a PowerMac G4. It's slow on all of these. The Mac Pro shipped with 1GB of RAM which is the problem on that unit.

Apple and Microsoft think a lot alike these days. My pre-order Leopard disk was damaged and after an hour on the phone with Apple, I was sent to the nearest Apple store who bitched me out for not having a receipt. Now consider that they only give you a packing slip with the shipment and my Mac would not boot to print it! I didn't notice it right away and skipped the disc check the first time. I realize that part is my fault but I didn't appreciate the terrible customer service from the Briarwood Apple store (Ann Arbor, MI).

At work we've decided not to upgrade to Leopard until Parallels actually works with it and we can buy more RAM. We have labs full of iMacs bought over the summer!

Lastly, the advantage with OS X in the past was the control over hardware. Do you really think OS X would run well on a beater Dell? I don't.

The failure with vista was the marketing. Microsoft can't come up with one reason to get people to upgrade. Perhaps if they only shipped x64 vista it might have been an incentive for some. It worked with Windows 95. Most people are running 32bit vista. I've been using it since January and it's not too bad for a new Windows release. You must feed it RAM, but that's true of Macs or some of the bigger Linux distros too.

Re:disable trackpads?

[pionzypher]

Sure, for many the intellipoint is much less intrusive and more accurate. Some laptops have both. While typing the palm can brush the trackpad, inadvertently clicking and shifting the cursor (a pain while typing) of activating gui elements such as a back button. Most 3rd party driver/control apps allow this to be disabled. I've never seen a way to do that in vista natively.

Re:and then....

[reezle]

You can go into BIOS on the HP laptops, and set SATA up for standard mode. Then XP install will see it.
3 second fix.

Re:The problem with waiting for MS

[SEE]

As long as OS X doesn't run on white boxes, nobody has to worry about OS X.

Re:and then....

[ashridah]

The DVD application did not close, but it did stop the movie.

My guess is that the dvd app paused when it lost focus, or got minimized?

The reality is, this feature is easily turned off, even if you want to leave UAC on.

Type 'secpol.msc' into the start menu's "search/run" text area, go to
Local Policies->Security options and change
User Account Control: Switch to secure desktop when prompting for elevation to be disabled.

That way, there's no jarring thud of the screenshot being taken, and the switch to the darkened version that almost feels like it's trying to induce an epileptic attack, but you still get some of the benefits of UAC. Of course, this is less secure, since, in theory, an application can snoop this or try to click on it itself, but the reality is, apps like that are more likely to assume that you'd turned of UAC anyway.

It's security by obscurity (and thus, security by stupidity), but it's less annoying :)

ash

(PS, Zune: Surprisingly less sucky than ipod)

Re:disable trackpads?

[Cairnarvon]

It's about Zonk for some reason considering the fact that out-of-the-box Vista won't let you disable trackpads on laptops to be more important than its millions of other failures, as if people are switching away from Windows just because of that feature.

Re:and then....

[maxwells_deamon]

If you set the power mode in Vista to presentation mode, it should have blocked all pop ups.

did you do this?

Some won't switch90

[regular_gonzalez]

I'll be surprised if the larger companies switch to Vista. A general rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the slower any software transition. Many reasons for this, from testing compatibility of your apps with the new software, to layers of bureaucracy to go through. As an example, General Electric is roughly 60% WinXP and 40% Win2K, at least in Europe -- I can't speak for other territories. Office 2000 is deployed on appoximately 80% of systems, Office XP on another 15%, and only 5% or so having moved to the 'modern' Office 2003 -- this despite known errors in Excel 2000 with workbooks containing lots of pivot tables and formulae running into the 'out of memory' issue. Given that they are the world's second largest company [wikipedia.org], and that there's no way they will be upgrading to any new OS without having, say, 3-4 years to test it and get it approved by the powers that be, that's a huge number of sales Microsoft will miss out on. I can only assume that other comperably large companies have similar behavior.

Re:What is so bad about Vista?

[pamar]

Most Mac users accept that each new OS X release will require more RAM to run than the last.


I have two "old" Macs. An Imac (end of 2005) and an iBook (April 2005). Both using PPC. Neither of them had max RAM (iBook is 768 Mb for example).
I installed Leopard on both 2 weeks ago. They work as before or even slightly better.

In my (admittedly limited experience) MacOSX does not requires extra RAM or more powerful CPUs to give acceptable performance when a new OS version is released.

Re:and then....

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. Buying for a copy of windows doesn't entitle you to any kind of support. Here's the kind of support [microsoft.com] that microsoft makes available. After that, you're left scrounging newsgroups, websites, or paying through the nose.