


HardOCP Spends 30 Days With Vista 662
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:1, Informative)
The menu latency is total bullshit though. Whatever else they have done in Vista, the interface is much more responsive and smooth. The author of your cited article must have had some lousy video drivers. The Aero interface is very fast on well supported hardware.
Re:Some random guy doesn't like Vista (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest thing I've liked about Vista is a graphical installer (which, admittedly, you should only have to use once), good support for hardware driver updates (not the drivers themselves, necessarily, just going to find updates), etc. Of course, I've been using OSX as my primary machine for almost three years, so I got used to those things while using XP only to play WoW with a much better graphics card than my PB G4.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My experience (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.
Re:Sorry, couldn't RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. First, get this [mozilla.com] and this [mozilla.org]. Then try this URL [hardocp.com] to read it ad-free.
Re:Yeah whatever (Score:5, Informative)
There's a checkbox to turn that feature off, if you want to see BSODs, in the System control panel I believe. Or just check your Event Viewer when you have a mysterious reboot.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:3, Informative)
DVD compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
This seems like a show-stopper to me for anyone wanting to exchange data with non-Vista users, especially if the default is to use the Vista-only format. The fact that I haven't heard this complaint before makes me suspicious that it's something unique to his setup, but not being a Windows user I have no basis to judge.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:5, Informative)
If the machine is sitting still and doing nothing, it shouldn't matter if the OS uses 100% of available memory, maybe for pre-caching the next chunks of data it think you'll ask for, or running a background index process against your filesystem.
The issue is when you start to add application load to the machine -- does the OS release memory it's using for those "idle" tasks so that apps can use it, or is it greedy?
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:5, Informative)
I've never found a use for the indexing and search functions that people are happily touting with Vista, Google Desktop, and others... Instead, I use a logical directory naming convention that makes looking for what I need a simple matter of choosing the directory that has what I need.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with his interpretation (and yours) is that most of the time when a desktop system is being used at 100%, it's being used that way by a single application. Rendering an image, playing a game, something like that. So the assertion is basically that Vista, which is not a server OS, is only slower when you need the speed the most.
You can make any kind of declarations you want if you forget the way the system will be used. This is precisely Microsoft's game and I am dismayed to see so many slashdotters joining in. It reminds me of Sony's PS2 specifications. Not only could the system not push as many triangles as they said it could, but it definitely couldn't do it during a game.
Not only is Vista not able to be secure or stable, but it can't deliver superior performance either.
Beware latest XP updates (Score:4, Informative)
Vista is not worth it. (Score:3, Informative)
On a new Compaq machine straight from Best Buy (purchased by someone else, not me), Microsoft Windows Vista felt slower to me in all respects: it took much longer to boot up, took far more time to do things than I could do on free software OSes, and it had far higher resource requirements than other operating systems (again, in particular free software OSes). I checked email, browsed the web, and watched a few videos with the machine and the machine was consistently sluggish to do everything. The UI (left on the default settings, of course) asked me if I really wanted to start some program which was constantly annoying. Installing a Linksys wireless card (WMP54G) was a huge hassle and ultimately required going back to the store to buy another wireless device that would work out of the box (I don't remember the make or model, but it was a USB-based device).
And all of this to lose one's software freedom in the process? No thanks.
Re:Yeah whatever (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft realized that since maybe 1/10,000 people actually can act on the BSOD data that shows, there's really no reason to show it to everybody else.
Actually, what Microsoft realised was that they could cure their reputation for BSODs by hiding the BSOD. And it worked. Every time I see somebody on Slashdot mention the BSOD, there's always somebody popping up to say "I haven't seen a BSOD in years", and they usually get modded up.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah whatever (Score:2, Informative)
Minix 3?
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay you boot up some generic desktop OS and the OS has loaded and is functional. Would you rather it:
Re:Beware latest XP updates (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah whatever (Score:3, Informative)
That said, a customized XP is also a useable desktop, especially given all the FOSS software out there that runs on Windows. It may not be my favorite choise of OS, but it can be made to work with some effort. But for me, why would I put in the effort of customizing XP and installing a bunch of 3rd party stuff just to get the most insecure desktop on the market? It would work, but why bother? The only reason to do so would be software that only runs on Windows; and for me, there is nothing there that I can't live without.
Re:DVD compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
I always click advanced options on things but your right, most people wouldn't.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think this is true actually - in a lot of ways Vista is quicker. For instance when I turned on my Vista machine today it was ready to go in literally seconds.
You didnt TURN ON your Vista machine today - not in the normal sense... you had it resume from something akin to hibernation (S3/S4, hibernate, etc). A feature (that's old) that has problems on various systems, while oddly working flawlessly on others. Next time, select "Turn Off" from the menu and then restart... it is excruciatingly slow on every machine I have tried it on.
Low priority I/O makes it so a lot of tasks like backup, indexing and optimizing the disk can be done in the background with little to no impact to foreground apps.
And as has been posted on /. before, slows down disk I/O to a crawl.
As far as application performance, you can dumb down vista's ui, but even with Aero on I really honestly don't notice any performance difference between Vista and XP.
Depends on the app and the hardware. I've seen it range from "a lot slower" to "barely slower"
Keep in mind that like previous releases of Windows, MS spent a lot of time on making Vista appear to be faster... It is a lot like the WinXP "faster" start times... the GUI comes up faster, but the machine is still starting things making the system virtually unusable for quite some time after the GUI looks like it is ready. Vista is no different in this respect, just different in it's implementation of apparent speed "increase" through tricks like that.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is people always have been used to running as admin or equiv ANYWAY. So a sudden difference bothers them. Also it fairly blindly assumes that you need admin for any installer, which is not true.
It is compared to WinXP on similar hardware.
Vista sucks for gaming if you have better things to do than buy a highend system. I've had no real pressing reason to upgrade my desktop, particularly in the "gaming" direction. But even fairly recent games run playably in WinXP on my aging desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB PC133 RAM, and a GeForce FX5200 128MB PCI. On Vista this was decidedly not the case, Empire Earth 2 ran pitifully, whereas I could actually play and enjoy it on WinXP.
I agree there's a huge FUD machine pounding on Vista, but a lot of it is the same kind of Linux FUD I see spread... isolated, very real gripes by a small but noisy population blown out of proportion into generalities. It happens with introducing any new tech, this is hardly shocking.
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a quote from 1998 abou this issue:
"Use buffered or retained mode windows. Users will perceive better performance than non-retained windows.
This will also improve virtual memory performance. When a non retained window is uncovered, the application that owns it must be swapped into memory in order to redraw the window. If there are many applications running but idle and there are many overlapping windows, this can become a serious performance hit. Retained and buffered windows have a "backing store" owned by the window server. The window server can then draw the uncovered window without any help from the window's owning application.
As a cool example of this, use a Windows 95 or Windows NT machine with relatively low RAM and run Microsoft Word and some other application like Corel Draw. Open many documents in both applications. Maximize both applications. Then minimize the application that is on top. You can wait minutes while the virtual memory system thrashes the hard disk while repainting all of those windows, and all you did was minimize an application!"
It only took Microsoft 15 years to catch up.
Re:Not to pile on, but... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.flyingnerd.com/intel-raid-problem-unde
Specifically, Vista does power management for desktop drives. This is good. XP did not. Unfortunately the drives are buggy and don't support it properly. You can disable it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/dell_vist
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does Vista do anything right? (Score:2, Informative)
Vista has reported problems with copy/move/delete. That's a deal killer. I'm already on the command line in XP to accomplish any of those items.