University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1

At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.

Wait and See

[26199]

Isn't that the standard advice for any major upgrade on any operating system ever?...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Wait and See

[cobaltnova]

Yes, but when it's vista-bashing, it's news for nerds.

It's also a holiday... a slow news day.

Re:Wait and See

[26199]

Pfft. Kick an operating system when it's down...

Actually that's called rebooting, isn't it?

*Facepalm*

[Bertie]

Why are they letting Twitter back on his soapbox?

Re:woot

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright -- this is the last straw!

If this site is going to accept journal entries from twitter as articles for the main page, why don't we just stop bothering with this moderation BS and pretending to be an unbiased site? It's not as if we haven't discussed this topic 100 times already..

Yawn...

[Jugalator]

This article felt so worthy of a "slownewsday" tag... We are also waiting a bit with upgrading the few Vista computers we have running over here. It's just common sense, and has nothing to do with Vista, by the way.

The news here has to be those companies that jumps to SP1 without checking up on any risks with that. You'll have a harder time finding stories about those.

Re:Huh?

[webmaster404]

I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach.

Yes, but companies need much much more stability then college students. Most OS X upgrades are just fine and only usually break apps that modify the OS a lot, the same could be said though with adding random repositories to Ubuntu/Debian and the OS will break sometimes on installing the next version. But generally, I wouldn't recommend a Ubuntu user not upgrade to 8.04 when it comes out, nor would I recommend a Mac user not going to Leopard. However it seems that Vista SP1 is bad enough to warrent students not to upgrade, now that is saying something.

Re:Wait and See

[oledoody]

yes..and the advice you'll get from most university tech support. At least that's what my people are saying. I didn't upgrade to Leopard either. :))) Do I really need a new printer and a new scanner??

Re:Why stop here?

[webmaster404]

Because if the university runs on Windows, eventually they guess they will have to either migrate to OS X/Linux or accept Vista. Vista will eventually be accepted when 3-4 gigs of RAM becomes common and 3.0 GHZ CPUs are common also. It was the same with XP except that XP was an upgrade from ME while Vista is a downgrade from XP.

Re:Huh?

[erroneus]

That hasn't always been the case. There are still people who happily swallow anything dished out by Apple. And truly, Microsoft once had a fan base that had people standing in line for Windows 9X for days! Actually, as OS updates go, people have been begging for Vista SP1 because Vista in its original form was abysmal for many users... the people had been hoping that SP1 would provide what the original release failed to deliver. For some people SP1 actually made things worse.

And while CIO doesn't come out and say "Microsoft, dump Vista!" they 'explore the idea' in such a way that it's pretty much what they are saying without using expletives and they certainly seem to be recommending it.

What I find amusing is that force ONCE my predictions on something have come true. Before Vista was released, I believed it would be as popular as WindowsME. Well, I wasn't entirely correct--I think WindowsME had a stronger following. But as far as OS successes go, Vista ranks right in ME's neighborhood.

In the past, the next version of Windows might have been hailed as a 'triumphant come back' or some such thing... WindowsME did not cause the public to doubt Microsoft in the slightest. They just counted WindowsME to mean "Windows MistakE." But Microsoft has saved its real mistake for Vista. Vista has been FORCED onto a public through OEM channels resulting in a public that actually refused to buy hardware based on the fact that there was no WindowsXP option quite frequently. Microsoft back-peddled by allowing "downgrade rights" but I'm not sure how many people actually got that memo because the practice of avoiding machines "sold with Vista" is still going on.

Microsoft may choose not to listen to its users, but they're damned stupid for not listening to their OEMs. Apple's popularity is only growing because of it and while there may be some out there, I have yet to actually hear about people switching back from Mac once they've committed to the move.

Re:woot

[Naughty Bob]

If this site is going to accept journal entries from twitter as articles for the main page....

I'd much rather we criticize people's arguments than the people themselves.

Re:Liberal?

[RonnyJ]

It's a stupid statement anyway, demonstrating an obvious anti-Vista viewpoint - what exactly is meant by "one university liberal enough to accept ... Vista"?

The university would offer advice and support for the students own computers - any reasonable university is going to be "liberal enough" to let people use their own machines!

Re:Huh?

[Z_A_Commando]

I happen to be a college student who upgraded to Vista SP1 on Tuesday when it showed up on my Windows Update. I have had no problems whatsoever in the past 5 or so days since the upgrade and my machine hasn't been shut down since the upgrade. Your response appears to be more conjecture and, dare I say, fear mongering. If you haven't upgraded to SP1, which I suspect you haven't, then please stop making the entire OS sound absolutely horrible. The wait and see attitude works fine, just don't make it sound like you should never upgrade. Why would Penn's IT department, which provides end-user support for students and staff, advocate upgrading? They have to support many more boneheaded users across a much wider array of systems than any corporate IT staff ever will. The number of unknowns and unresolved issues at the release of any patch, however large, is the reason for the wait and see attitude. They would much rather have someone else deal with problems as a result of the upgrade than deal with it themselves. That's the main reason for "wait and see". Allow someone else to iron out the problems, and hopefully it's Microsoft and whoever made the application that's broken. So there's nothing new here, just more fodder for people to say Vista is such a bad OS without ever using it for more than 10 minutes at Best Buy.

Re:woot

[StarvingSE]

Isn't the whole "wait until it's proven to upgrade" thing pretty much standard operating procedure for any major update to software as critical as on OS? I don't know of any organization of significant size that would go ahead and ship off an update without going through extensive testing and determining if the update makes sense. Hell, my unnamed organization just now is updating to SQL Server 2000 to 2005. We have an "if it works, don't fix it" attitude, which makes sense in my opinion. I don't see how this service pack would be any different.

Common Sense vs. Sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

"Journal written by twitter (104583) and posted by kdawson"

'nuff sed...

Re:Wait and See

[Zeinfeld]

These stories get a little tiresome. What is the ultimate source of authority here? A bunch of nerds who read Slashdot. They think their lives will be easier if they persuade people not to change the configuration of their machines. Only on slashdot would that even be considered news.

IT support staff usually suggest what will make their lives easiest. Vista works just fine on the right hardware. As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.

Re:Huh?

[Tony Hoyle]

So vista has no problems - it's all due to poorly made drivers and programs... even when the programs are Microsoft software (VS2003 & 2005, SQL Server 2000...) and WHQL drivers.

But OSX upgrade problems are all the OS's fault!

Sorry, that won't wash.

Vista has major issues, and should never have been released in the state it was. SP1 fixes most but not all of them... but it's still way below the usability of XP.

Re:woot

[westlake]

why don't we just stop bothering with this moderation BS and pretending to be an unbiased site?

The unbiased site would have:

1 a seperate section for the family of operating systems to be found on 92% of the world's desktops and with a very significant presence in the server room and other markets.

Operating System Market Share for February, 2008 [hitslink.com]

2 it would dispose of the stained glass window and Borg icons which set the tone for every posting

3 it would accept that Vista is showing sustained and healthy growth in the marketplace, while the *NIX platforms, other than OSX, appear stagnant.

Top Operating System Share Trend for April, 2007 to February, 2008 [hitslink.com]
[Vista 13%. "The Other" 2%]
OS Platform Dtatistics February 2008 [w3schools.com]
[Vista 8% Up from 0% in one year. Linux 4% Up from 2% in five years.]

Re:I'm running vista business and I'm happy

[Tony Hoyle]

Vista Ultimate on 1GB?? You shittin' me right?

For a dev machine running that combination even on XP I wouldn't go with less than 2GB... given Vista's memory footprint you'd probably want 4GB for that.

btw. Have they fixed JIT in 2008 (is that out of beta yet?). Certainly on VS2003 and VS2005 UAC simply hoses any attempt at debugging, because it blocks it.

Also btw. this is *nothing* like the early days of XP. In those days only the devs hated it because of its stupid interface and they way they moved everything around. Now you've got ordinary non-technical people literally calling their techie friends and begging them to install XP on their new machines because nothing works.

I'm advising my clients to ignore Vista

[Master of Transhuman]

The consensus appears to be developing that Windows Vista is the latest version of Windows ME. I'm advising my clients to skip Vista and wait for Windows 7 - since by that time, you'll have no choice but to upgrade to it - or switch to Linux (which may still not be an option for some people by 2009 or whenever "7" comes out.) Just make sure you can access enough Windows XP licenses to cover new purchases of machines for the next couple of years. This PC World article [pcworld.com] shows you how.

Re:I throw Vista away all the time

[drsmithy]

I refuse to install Vista, as I enjoy a certain degree of control over my operating system.

What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?

If by chance I'm forced into Vista, I too am moving to Mac. Times change. Microsoft fucked up. I never thought I'd be advocating Macs, ever.

So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?

Re:Don't do it!

[ozmanjusri]

now badly written 3rd party software breaks. And you guys blame Microsoft.

That's not why we blame Microsoft.

We blame Microsoft for making it irritating, DRM infested and slow when they fixed the security issues.

Re:Penn State is not the University of Pennsylvani

[insertwackynamehere]

I know, this bothered me too. I'm NYU anyway but I grew up in Philly and now UPenn's campus and its the mark of a foreigner to mix up Penn State and Upenn because UPenn is in Philly and is Ivy. Penn State, however, is a great school (even if these days "state" in a school name is looked down upon for some dumb reason). Tag !pennstate if it bothers you.

Slashdot mods, do us all a favour

[Toreo asesino]

...and stop posting twitter journals on the FP.

Twitter is a troll, Eris too. They both shamelessly bash Microsoft, and especially Vista at all costs, with lies or heavily distorted facts like a raving madman foaming at the mouth, blindly screaming murder.

They represent the absolute worst of FOSS people - complete fanatics motivated by pure hatred of Microsoft, and with zero professional intent.

They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.

Re:Wait and See

[stephanruby]

As with most O/S you are in for some misery if you attempt to upgrade a legacy machine.

Are you suggesting that the Vista-ready machine I just bought last month is now a legacy machine? Because that's what the article is about, it's describing the effect of a Service Pack upgrade on a Vista machine -- NOT the effect of a full OS upgrade on an XP machine.