What's with everyone ragging on Vista? [ Edited ]

[Tim_Lenovo]

OK aside from it booting slower and nagging you to death with those "Are you sure" boxes constantly, I have to say Vista doesn't deserve all the bad press it gets. Or least that's my day 1 opinion. I also don't like that they moved all of the OS configuration sections into umpteen billion places. Sure you can choose "Classic" view/mode sometimes, but it is still a learning curve. I hope more novice users pick up the new navigation quickly, 'cuz it sure is a pain for me.

I got a new T61 box that is going to my mother in law, and while I'll be reloading XP since she can't handle a new OS, I've been getting some hands on experience with our Vista out-of-box-experience.

Sporting a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM and 60GB 7200rpm hard drive, this machine is plenty fast for normal usage in applications. IE, FF, instant message, etc - even with 1GB it is plenty peppy. I just loaded up the Office 2007 trial for the first time, and it was a bit slow.

Running IE7 with two tabs, System Update cranking away at all the patches, and Yahoo Messenger with webcam up - I have 18MB system memory free. But it's still pretty responsive. I wouldn't want to start working with PDF's or Photoshop though.

Anyway - I've experienced one hiccup with CSS and I need to reboot a few more times and see if it occurs. Also after TVSU finishes its job, should have some good before/after experience.

What about you? What does everyone think of Vista so far? Anyone played with our Vista preload out of box - what do you think?

Message Edited by Tim_Lenovo on 12-01-2007 06:11 PM

[JaneL Community SuperMod]

Once I turn off all the Fisher-Price, My First OS effects, XP and Vista work equally well for me.  I can't tell the difference between it on this tablet and the T60p or HP Compaq nc6220 that are both running XP.  I don't have any apps, though, that are incompatible.

I'd put another 1GB of memory in there, though.

[Tim_Lenovo]

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nonny wrote:

Once I turn off all the Fisher-Price, My First OS effects <snip>

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That is classic!

Yeah I've got a 1GB stick waiting to go in, I'm just giving it a go with 1GB total.

[JHEM]

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Tim_Lenovo wrote:

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nonny wrote:

Once I turn off all the Fisher-Price, My First OS effects

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That is classic!

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That's typical of our our Mama Jane Tim, like me she's not just another pretty face!

I hated the constant "are you sure?" prompts everytime I wanted to do anything.

I was a Beta tester and never really found any reason to make the "upgrade", even though I've got half a dozen legal copies lying around. The only machine I'm presently running Vista on is my T61 and that's only because it was the preload.

I haven't run into any important apps not playing well with Vista other than some iterations of AutoCAD which will only run in XP compatibility mode, but that's been the case since the initial Beta release. There were a number of MS Office/ vs. Vista problems initially (go figure), but they've been been laid to rest in the RTM product.

James

[goretsky Community Moderator]

Hello,

I think there are several reasons that Microsoft Windows Vista has been lambasted in the press and public.  First off, it did ship much later than expected, going through a re-write and hemorrhaging several high-profile features, such as WinFS, in order to meet its ship date. 

When Vista finally did ship, the new device driver model meant that quite a few pieces of hardware which had worked previously under Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows 2000 stopped working.  Likewise for Windows Vista's new security model and software.  This meant that many hardware and software vendors had to spend time and money re-writing—or at least, re-testing and re-certifying—their products for use for the new operating system, which lead to a smaller number of Windows Vista Ready and Windows Vista Capable products being available at launch time.  And, unlike in previous years, Microsoft's ability to play hardball, so to speak, with vendors over introducing support for new versions of their operating systems has diminished with the specter of antitrust lawsuits looming over them:  I believe Microsoft used to enforce a "clean Desktop" policy with OEMs, which resulted in all new computers looking the same and providing the same common experience when started for the first time.  These days, OEMs are no longer required to abide to such rules and now have the option of installing other shortcuts on the Desktop.  And they do.  While I do think it is a good idea to provide shortcuts on the Desktop to things like vendor-specific help, recovery disc manufacturing tools and so forth, I suspect that the number of actual end users who benefit from having a plethora of trial versions of applications provided to them is small.

Another thing Windows Vista did when it shipped was introduced new security technologies to their consumer operating systems.  Some of these were things which were not particularly visible to the end user, like Address Space Layout Randomization, the low-rights mode under which Internet Explorer is run, path and registry virtualization technologies and so forth. Even these "behind the scenes" changes were not without their share of controversy:  PatchGuard, Microsoft's implementation of kernel patch protection which has been in use for several years in the 64-bit versions of their server operating systems, was introduced into all 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, which drew some rather strong comments from McAfee and Symantec.  Other, more visible changes, like Microsoft's implementation of a least privilege model, called User Account Control have drawn the ire of many so-called "power users" for various reasons:  "I know how to protect my system to I don't need it", "it takes control of my system away from me" and "it's always popping up" are the three most common complaints I see about it.  My personal feeling is that the implementation is somewhat ungainly and Microsoft could have spent more time refining the user experience with UAC—perhaps this is something which will be fixed in a service pack—but at the same time, I happen to realize the reason it is there and, frankly, I do want my operating system to notify me when a program wants to run with the equivalent of root access on my system.  Right now, there are two programs I run which prompt me:  A backup program and an old circa-2000 video game.  I can live with that.

As for the complaints about Windows Vista's performance being lacking, I think that is more of an issue with the complainer.  Of course, it's going to be slower!  When Microsoft Windows XP was released in 2001, people had the same grumblings that it wasn't as fast as Windows 2000, that it didn't have as many drivers available, there was no software which took advantage of the new features and so forth.  It took a generation or two of CPU releases (and corresponding new bus architectures and drops in memory prices) before systems could be built with inexpensive "value-oriented" components that provided decent performance (e.g., the only types of systems most of complainers could afford).

One of the things which I had done prior to Windows Vista coming out was to research the operating system as thoroughly as I could and then plan my hardware upgrades and new purchases out, accordingly.  As the system requirements began to finalize, I began to research which types of computers and components were likely to work well with Windows Vista.  One of the things which I am very glad I did was to buy the highest-end notebook computer I could find, a Lenovo ThinkPad T43p (FRU: 2668-H7U).  While very expensive at the time, In retrospect it turned out to be a great investment for me:  The notebook ran Windows XP, and with modest upgrades (an additional 1GB of RAM, replacement of the 60GB hard disk drive with a Seagate 160GB model, an IBM FireWire (IEEE-1394) CardBus adapter and a 4GB Lexar SSD in the ExpressCard port for ReadyDrive) runs the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition quite well.  After a decade of ThinkPad ownership, I knew I could expect device drivers and firmware updates to appear if not at launch time then shortly, thereafter, and Lenovo did not disappoint.

I installed Microsoft Windows Vista in November 2006 when it was released on MSDN to developers.  I did a clean install and then proceeded to install all the updates and patches from Microsoft and files Lenovo as they were released.  I did make a few small changes to the system, such as to disable some of the 3-D effects of the GUI to reduce the load (and thus the temperature) on the GPU, disabled some unneeded services, and performed some other favorite registry tweaks.  So far, the system has held up quite well and while it does not perform every operation with the elan of my desktop, it is more than adequate for productivity applications, watching video and DVDs and even some casual gaming.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Message Edited by goretsky on 05-30-2008 11:42 PM

[billbolton Community Moderator]

Having now struggled with Vista for several months and finally found a level of accommodation where I can get most things to work satisfactorily on new hardware with 3GB of memory and 7200rpm disks, including getting the SP1 beta installed, its now reached the stage of a workable system for me.

I have recently installed Vista 64 on one ThinkPad with 4GB of memory, and apart from some system peculiarities (like the splitting of "Program Files" into two directories) it is overall much more of what I expected Vista to be like from a performance point of view.

Vista 32 has proved to be totally unworkable on a 2 year old T43 Thinkpad (typical business configuration) with 2GB of memory, which is very disappointing.  While I anticipated that it would be sub-optimal I did expect that it would be usable at some level.

I am also disappointed that Vista broke a number of specific purpose professional applications that worked well under XP Pro.  It is only now that the developers of those applications are getting their Vista version out into the field.  Overall my cost of upgrading various piece of perfectly adequately performing sofrware to version sthat will execute satisfactorily under Vista has run to close on a $1000, and that just the "bits and piece" utility software, not the significant application suites.

My concern is that cost and pain of Vista is going to be too great for many business users who require longitudinal continuity in terms of their use of PC platforms and software.  This may well impact the ability of the Vista platform to build real critical mass in the business market place within any resonable time frame.

Some of the major corporate clients I work with have already postponed their initial grand plans for migrating their SOEs to Vista back for an idefinite period.

Cheers,

Bill

Message Edited by billbolton on 12-03-2007 11:09 AM

[Snife]

I love Vista, but i'm a big fan of all the cosmetic bells and whistles; I know its not really important but if i'm going to be looking at a screen for 14+ hours a day, then all the cosmetic niceties help.  I also think everything is slightly more intuative than XP (if not for the fact you already know where everything is) and the fact that I have a Chess game built in is great for filling in some down time.  I'm a big fan of the improved speech and handwriting recognition as well which has

The speed thing is an issue for older hardware, but XP had the same issue when it came out, on like-for-like hardware, Windows 2000 was faster.  But on a recent system with a decent (4GB) of RAM, there is no speed difference (in fact, I think the 64 bit edition is actually quicker) so I think its more an OS for most peoples next system than their current one.   I dont understand all the backlash though, if your happy with Vista then simply dont change from it but if you want all the new bells and whistles of Vista then be prepared to upgrade your system to cope with it.

CSS under Vista, I am not a fan of though, it seemed buggy as hell when I first tried it so i've just not bothered with it since.

[ajkula66 Guru]

Snife wrote:

The speed thing is an issue for older hardware, but XP had the same issue when it came out, on like-for-like hardware, Windows 2000 was faster. 

.I'd beg to differ. There has been a similar issue at the time, but it's a LOT worse now. Notably, the first ThinkPad that I've upgraded to XP has been a 700Mhz A20m. With 256Mb RAM it left a lot to be desired in XP when it came to speed. Once "maxed out" to 512Mb, it performed decently.

My T42p with 2.0 processor and 2Gb RAM absolutely HATED Vista, and that was on a brand new 100Gb/7200rpm HDD bought for purposes of testing that particular OS. This machine is nowhere near old enough (still under original factory warranty) to be considered obsolete, and I still couldn't get it to perform "decently" under my standards. So back to XP it went, and quickly so.

On the other hand, I've configured two brand new non-ThinkPads with C2D processors and both of them reacted to OS much better, not that I was impressed by it on these either, but performance was tolerable.

My modest opinion is that any Vista package should have a warning stating "do not install on a machine with a single core processor". But we can't expect that to happen, can we now?

Just my $0.02. BTW, I'm staying with XP and Linux until further notice.

[TrueBlue]

In my case I've encountered the following issues installing Vista Business on a T42p:

1) Intel PRO 2100 3B Wireless card - unable to turn on/off using Fn-F5.  Default Vista driver was installed.  Driver download from Intel did not help.  No updated driver from Lenovo.  Can turn on/off under Device Manager and does seem to function however.

2) ATI Catalyst drivers - had to use Mobility Modder to get it to install finally.

For the most part though I'm impressed at how well Vista runs on this system.  Sleep, bluetooth and aero all work great and I love the sidebar!  I've also haven't experienced any odd crashes or BSODs yet.  I look forward to SP1!

[Tglerge2]

Greetings, goretsky:  In your post you said,

"disabled some unneeded services, and performed some other favorite registry tweaks."

I'm wondering just which services you disabled, and which registry tweaks you carried out.  I'm always looking for ways to speed things up on my T43p and R50p.  Both are now running Vista SP1 with no problems.

Thanks!

Message Edited by Tglerge2 on 12-09-2007 04:28 PM