Vista Service Pack One Almost Here

arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."

Moment of truth...

[FoolsGold]

Now to see how many "I'll wait for SP1 before moving to Vista" people actually follow through.

Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

[idiotwithastick]

Seriously, they sure took their time didn't they? I might have thought that with the poor reception of Vista they would be quick to push service packs, but apparently something held them up, even some quick fixes would be nice (though at least they still have updates coming through Windows Update). Personally though I'm scared to pirate it from BitTorrent, not because of viruses but I'm afraid it will break compatibility with stuff; one patch earlier this year prevented me from booting into Windows, and it was one of the "Recommended" patches that would automatically update.

Re:Moment of truth...

[Sheen]

I am probably the only one on slashdot who uses Vista AND likes it. I have had exactly 1 issue with vista since I got it in Jan. 2007, that was a missing driver, which appeared on vendor site Feb. 2007 (webcam). So personally I can't see why everyone is slamming it so much. I will never go back to XP. ( this is not ment as a troll post, im just saying what i think of it.)

Re:Moment of truth...

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I don't have any issues with Vista. It and other programs crash just as often in Vista as they did in XP. But my problem with Vista is not that it has issues, its that I have to completely overhaul my workflow which I've been using since Windows 95 (and improved it ever since). A simple example is the new explorer thing. It no longer has a drop down box with all the parent directories, it shows some kind of history. Backspace no longer goes to the parent directory. In fact, there isn't even an "up" button, just a "back" button. It's more like a webbrowser than a file explorer. I never browse backwards, only forwards. Besides that it's much like a webbrowser, it doesn't allow be to customize the layout and remove all useless elements. Like the favorite folders, I don't need it, just show be the directory tree. I also needed to hack the registry just so that explorer will keep using list view for all explorer windows (dumb directory profiles).
And that's just one of my annoyances with Vista compared to XP, others include: wasting memory using seriously heavy weight services (Mobile Device Center (aka. ActiveSync) uses 50MB in total while idle), windows search (it's not that great unless you index everything), slow file operations, even more useless eye candy (including stuff you can't turn off), ...

But it all boils down to a single question: why would you exchange your XP for Vista?
So far I haven't found anything.

It's faster

[Toreo asesino]

Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.

Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.

So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).

It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.

Rock and hard place.

[apodyopsis]

One thing is for certain..

..after the initial release then pull, the bricked PCs, the host of security issues and the whole general fuck up that MS have done over vista so far I predict a cautious, "if I must", approach from sys admins with every possible protection and back-up in place. This is not going to be a stampede for the latest secure patches. Truly MS has been a shot in the foot release for them.

Second the poster higher up: it will sure be interested to see how many of the wait for SP1 adopters now follow through and adopt.

Given the general widely held feeling about the the superiority of XP over Vista I cannot see many people clamoring to do so. But on the flip argument MS will withdraw XP soon to try and force adoption of Vista - this would leave many potential customers between a brick and a hard place.

No bother to me - I've been linux only at home for ~8 years (so I guess I'm biased) - but we sure live in interesting times.

Re:It's faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista may be able to explain why it crashes, but I prefer an OS which is more stable from the start, i.e. Linux.

And as for programs changing system settings; that's hard to do in linux when you run programs from a user account rather than root. It's not Microsoft's fault that in the Windows software ecosystem, programs tend to do things which affect the whole system, not just their own settings. In linux, programs co-operate a lot more and they have individual settings (per program, per user) unless something is specifically system-wide.

UAC is a bit of a botch. Unable to implement the notion of Least Privilege in their operating system, Microsoft punts the decision to the end user, who is typically unqualified to decide.

Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

[CastrTroy]

No, it's more like ordering your meal. Then the restaurant takes 5 years to prepare it, all the time exclaiming that it's going to be the best meal ever. Then, when you get it, you find out it's complete crap, and it takes them another year just to get around to fixing it. Even after they fix it, it still isn't as good as the tried and true hamburger, which you could have got without even waiting the intial 5 years.

Re:Early Adopters Suffer.

[Ahrel]

Was only the first 2 months for me. After Creative released the driver for my soundcard, all was and has remained well since then. I did buy a 2nd GB of RAM though, because I noticed that things opened slower than in XP, but mainly because I was utilizing over 70% of my RAM with Firefox and Foobar open. The biggest problem I experienced with Vista post the good, strike that, working Creative drivers was getting Star Wars KotOR II and Grim Fandango to run.

Continually, I find myself defending Vista in my circle of peers in class (ironically we use MS Virtual Machine through Vista for our various OS and Network learning needs). In my opinion it's the best OS MS has released yet; and more people I meet seem to dislike it because it's interface is more different than MS has done since the move to 95 from 3.11. XP and Vista do everything pretty much identically, Vista does it more intuitively though, and it does it looking good (which was my primary reason for upgrading, I began using Linux when I learned about Compiz/Beryl and it became commonly stable because I like eye candy).

There are indeed many horror stories on the net but I've got 3 machines in this house that have been running more stable than XP did for either me or my roommate. And all of the machines in the labs at school have never had a problem yet either. So I continue to wonder what exactly is causing these problems for people. Obviously all the machines at school are identical, but the 2 desktops and single laptop at home all have different hardware and software configurations. *shrug* Guess I'm a lucky one, but I'm glad to read that it's been smooth for you too. Hopefully this will become common as people give it another shot with SP1 coming.

Re:No there's plenty

[harry666t]

OK, I recently decided not to bash Vista until I see it doing something wrong "in action". I do not own a computer that is powerful enough to run Vista so I had to wait until I can play around with it on someone else's machine.

Then, one of my friends had Vista on her laptop, and she said she was satisfied with it. I thought, OK, let's see how good it really is.

The very first thing she was trying to do with her laptop that afternoon: playing a movie. She fired up Explorer, browsed to the right directory, tried to open the file, and... Vista simply pretended that no icon was clicked. My friend explained to me: "oh, it's always like that when there's no internet connection..."...

Are people getting used to such things in the same way they got used to crashes, unreliability and restarts?... Do they consider it "normal"?... If yes, then we're doomed.

---

A year ago it used to be cool and pr0 and so on to have Linux running Beryl with some Aero theme. I do not know how much these Aero themes resemble the "real" Aero thing, but they were all shitty. I've found translucent borders very distracting, often I stared at them instead of doing work, and it was so until I've switched to something Mac-like (OTOH Mac themes are great). The less transparency you use, the better (but *some* transparency is ok). Look at the Mac, with every major revision of their OS there's a little less transparency here and there...

---

My other friend is a microsoftie :< He's a great guy but he has sold his soul, and became a MS Student Partner (or whatever they call them). He always hyped MS products, etc. He also used to have Vista on his laptop. =)

Until he himself switched back to XP :P I'm not surprised - as of what I've heard from him, he had to reinstall the Vista thing almost weekly.

By contrast, my Debian box is withstanding all my experiments since December 2006 without trouble (ok, without REAL trouble until *I* make some real trouble, but then, I'm always able to recover without reinstalling).

---

I've recently had an argument with yet another friend, about OS design and stuff. He also was a microsoftie :> and defended Vista with his teeth and claws, but finally admitted that MS screwed up Vista's internals totally, and that they've lost a great opportunity to evolve the system and make it a Great Thing (tm). He's a Windows 2003 user :P

---

Summing all that up, no, I'm not downgrading to Vista anytime soon.

Re:First

[mandark1967]

My first 3 experiences with Windows Vista (In the form of Vista Home Premium upgrade) were disasters.

First time it wouldn't install due to me either having 4 DIMMS present or the fact they totaled 4GB (not sure which caused the issue)

Second time wiped a RAID 0 array and took out my Windows XP Pro 64bit install

Third time, I had a hard drive crash.

Since persistance tends to pay off, I decided to throw it on another system. This time, the experience was far more enjoyable.

The system I installed it on is comprised of:

Biostar GeForce 6100 M9 motherboard
AMD Athlon64 4000+
1.25GB RAM (which I will be upgrading this week)
Integrated GeForce 6100
Integrated Sound
Integrated Network Card
Memorex DVD+-RW
(4) Seagate 500GB HDDs
Hauppauge Win-TV card (1600 model with QCAM and all that crap)

For those interested, this used to be my SAMBA Box. I used to have Ubuntu 7.10 on it and I used this system as my File Server to store my MP3s and Movies and stuff...

I originally wanted to use Ubuntu and MythTV, but I couldn't get any of the distros to boot up and install.

I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10, 8 (alpha), Mythbuntu 7.10 and Mythbuntu 8, and none of these would load up for some reason...

I can replace the current Windows Vista drive with the one containing my old Ubuntu install, and the system no longer boots up into Ubuntu.

Mythbuntu 7.10 will not boot the LiveCD unless I use safe mode graphics, and then the desktop display is distorted.

Mythbuntu 8 sits at the main menu and I am unable to even choose anything (like it isn't detecting my USB keyboard)

I replaced my USB keyboard with a PS2 IBM and there is no difference. The only configuration change between my working Ubuntu install and this Live CD was the addition of my TV Card.

It would seem to me that there is some sort of resource conflict between the TV Card but I can't see it using lspci

With Vista Home Premium, install went smooth, to a point.

Since my last install of this software was on my main gaming system I couldn't automatically activate it because it had been previously activated on another system.

I called the toll-free number, talked to the nice Indian woman (Manu, who spoke surprisingly good english) explained that I had to move the install to another hardware platform, and she gave me the numbers to activate it.

It's been working for the better part of 10 days now and Vista Media Center actually works better than the Hauppauge software did under Windows XP Home.

Previously, I could record any TV program I wanted but, when I clicked the STOP button, the software would lock up and I had to end the process.

In Vista Media Center it was easy to set up the Channel Guide and TV Listings, and it all works quite well.

I'm hoping SP1 doesn't cause more problems than it resolves, and will give it a shot when its released.

Note to any Linux gurus out there...

I'd still like to run MythTV on Ubuntu 7.10 so if you have any suggestions how to get rid of the conflict that prevents me from booting the new or old versions correctly, lemme know.

Re:It's faster

[plague3106]

UAC is a stepping stone to least privledge. Technically, it is least privledge. If the user you're running as is a member of Adminstrators, you get the Continue Cancel dialog when an app really needs to run as admin. If you were NOT a member, you'd be prompted for a username / password that is. It looks like an attempt to get people used to doing SOMETHING when they are about to change the whole system. Which is better than doing nothing and continuing as is.