University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1 286
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.
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
As has been said above; this was going to happen. I know of companies running OS X, companies running Linux servers, who all adopt the wait-and-see approach. I'm not that impressed with Vista either, but I don't think I've ever seen an update to an operating system in which all users had total confidence in the manufacturer and OS enough to all update, no questions asked.
Yes, I agree there are certain aspects of Vista which deserve to be slated, but this is more process related than product related.
Re:woot (Score:4, Interesting)
For that matter, why is the CIO magazine article even included in the summary? Did Twitter just scour the internet for anti-Vista articles and throw them all into one stupid Slashdot submission?
Re:Liberal? (Score:1, Interesting)
I throw Vista away all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
This experience comes at a cost, namely supporting machines for my family and friends. Never mind what the media and professionals say about Vista, but when my friends and family BEG me to remove Vista and replace it with XP, you know something is bad wrong with this operating system.
These days, if someone is buying a new machine, and all they do is email, browsing, pictures and the like, I will always recommend a Mac. I don't have to support the damn thing - it just works. If they're intent on a PC or need one for certain software, I send them to the Dell Outlet where you can still get a fantastic Core 2 Duo Optiplex with a 3-year warranty and XP for a few hundred bucks.
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.
Re:Liberal? (Score:1, Interesting)
Journal (Score:3, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/177855 [slashdot.org]
Shame it's not updated for SP1, contains links to lists of links of things that are out of date (e.g. iPod problems), has silly claims, contains inaccurate/biased 'studies' like this [slashdot.org] highly scientific study of five games (highly debunked in the comments).
For what it's worth, I'd highly recommend that Vista users install SP1.
Re:Liberal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't do it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista seems to be Windows ME part 2. A really crapy OS to replace a somewhat stable one. I don't see how a service pack could make things any worse.
Re:I throw Vista away all the time (Score:2, Interesting)
I get the allure of Linux, I understand its stability and security, I buy devices that use it whenever possible... I just don't have the time or desire to contribute to its care and feeding...
Horrible recommendation (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if by this you mean that they are ignorant enough to recommend against a service pack that, on the four systems I've installed on, works great and improves any troubles I've had with Vista. I still wonder just how few of the people who call Vista "deeply flawed" have actually tried it (my guess is four).
Wait a sec. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:woot (Score:3, Interesting)
VMS, surely?
Re:Does anyone actually use Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used it from pre-launch until a few months ago.
1. Recursive file copy is broken - it'll copy a few files then crap out without an error.
2. Network file copy is broken - it has a max transfer rate of 2k/sec on a gigabit network (XP on the same hardware can saturate it).
3. Network settings worked for a couple of months then broke, giving 'permission denied' for every screen so you couldn't even tell if the cable was plugged in.
4. It would just reboot, randomly, with no warning. On known good hardware with 100% WHQL drivers.
5. The base OS uses 700mb minimum. On a 1.5GB machine that leaves too little for a decent development environment, so the whole thing slowed to a crawl with both the prefetch *and* swapping to disk driving the hard disk to distraction.
6. The DNS handling is utterly broken - if you try to connect to a local machine more often than not it'd pick something random on the internet and try to connect to that. You have to use FQDN all the time otherwise it's a major security problem (vista is currently banned at our company for precisely this reason).
7. On a laptop it fails to impress. Because it's hitting the hard drive 24/7 the battery life is less than 1/3 of what XP can manage on the same hardware.
8. Sometimes it would just forget its users... literally forgot they existed. You had to boot into safe mode and recover.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Re:I throw Vista away all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
So you won't go to Vista because "you enjoy a certain degree of control", but you *would* buy a Mac ?
The thing is, this is showing the affect of Vista on this person. They dislike it so much they just want something non-Microsoft.
What do you think Vista is going to stop you doing ?
Maybe they feel that using Vista is getting them further entrenched into Microsoft's vision and not necessarily their own idea proper of what they want to do with their computer. They just know someone else is in the driver's seat and this time it's clear Microsoft don't have the user's interests in mind.
Re:Wait and See (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:woot (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny you should mention that.
TCP/IP over firewire support? Gone. [microsoft.com]
APIs for useful Explorer customisation? Gone. [sourceforge.net] (That extension, which I found infinitely useful, not only doesn't work but has no hope of ever working thanks to an API change).
I'm sure I would have found more stuff I liked that they took out, but at this point I formatted my laptop and installed XP SP2. I actually didn't mind the UAC and other stuff people complain about (and it all ran quite smoothly despite many people who would convince you otherwise - albeit this was on a pretty decked out laptop). Having said that, XP not only runs faster but actually has the features that I care about and which I've become quite accustomed to. What used to be "upgrade to the latest OS and take the bugs and performance hit to have the latest features" is now "downgrade to the previous OS which is more stable and performs better to keep the *cough* latest features (which are 3 years old)".