30 Days with Vista @ [H]

Gotta say that "editor addendum" feels like a pretty shitty thing to do to the reviewer, but maybe that's just me.

PS.
Looking forward to 30 days with Plan 9, especially the cries about how driver manufacturers have had FOREVER to get their shit together ;-)
 
Brian Boyko said:
The problem is we often went to the manufacturer's page to find out if any drivers existed. Problems in Linux were difficult to solve but a solution did exist. Here, it seems that we hit "brick walls" early and often.
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This along with many other reviews, will keep me in XP for a long time to come. I can't risk being one of the percentile that doesn't work from the get go. I keep seeing people in here saying performance is fast, with gaming working exactly the way it should, but I have yet to see a single review of this OS that shows an improvement in FPS in today's mainstream games.

The comment above ( as a Linux user ) is the only issue I have, as you fall back on this a few times, having compared the experience to troubleshooting on the Linux machine. The pool of information on Linux is so much more vast because of its age its unfair to knock a 3 month old OS for not having the same backbone of support. Over time it will get there, but for now, you have to stand it on its own, good or bad rather than comparing it to the support carried for Linux.

Solid review though.
 
Okay, next challenge.

Mepis 6.5 Final was just released ( http://www.mepis.org )

Lets see you run that for 30 days then compare it Vista.

I'd also encourage running certain Windows games under Cedega or W.I.N.E. and then compare the performance to Vista.
 
I wonder if the stability is from what version you used? I have been running the Vista Ultimate from MSDN since November and I have yet to encounter a BSOD or have a random reboot.

I also liked Flip3d, but then again I used it for getting back to the app I wanted quicker when I have multiple instances of the same program open, not for actually reading the text on them, so I can see where that would be an issue if that is what you were using it for.

Compatability mode worked wonders for me over XP. I was finally able to play the original Red Alert, MechWarrior3, and European Air War again without using using all sorts of odd unnofficial things to get them running.

On performance hits to both the OS and WMP I agree though.
 
Saist said:
Okay, next challenge.

Mepis 6.5 Final was just released ( http://www.mepis.org )

Lets see you run that for 30 days then compare it Vista.

I'd also encourage running certain Windows games under Cedega or W.I.N.E. and then compare the performance to Vista.
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uh....read the 30 days with Ubuntu article. linux has been done already...time to move on. :rolleyes:
 
But it's just another gnu/linux dist (basically, you can make any gnu/linux dist look and work like any other), better to pick off other OSes first and then loop back for encores.
 
eloj said:
But it's just another gnu/linux dist (basically, you can make any gnu/linux dist look and work like any other), better to pick off other OSes first and then loop back for encores.
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next would obviously be Mac OSX...but maybe they'll wait for leopard to come out before they do that.
 
I've noticed that any article that puts Vista in a bad light will get approved on slashdot ;)
 
MattyC said:
I wonder if the stability is from what version you used? I have been running the Vista Ultimate from MSDN since November and I have yet to encounter a BSOD or have a random reboot.
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You do know that Ultimate and Home Premium differ only in that Ultimate has some more features for business networking, backup features, and full drive encryption? Otherwise, they're the same.
 
xxaaqq said:
Dell seems to see no risk to their business loading it on just about every machine they sell
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Actually, i'm not so sure Dell (or any of the other big OEMs) have a choice...... in speccing out systems lately from 3 major OEMs i've been told in all 3 cases that XP is now a special order item that puts a delay on the build...... (this is for large orders of between 30-over 100 systems)...... and a coworker who recently ordered a system for home from Gateway was basically told the same thing, put it this way.......... she ordered it back in the beginning of March and still hasn't gotten it......... I believe the OEMs purchase their licenses in bulk, and the general public (read Mom and Pop) want Vista because MS basically tells them they need it............ so the OEMs need to order batches of Vista licenses, and they probably have to wait for a sufficient number of XP special orders before they can buy a batch of licenses..............
 
dark_reign said:
He doesn't have these problems under WinXP, so it's got to be driver/Vista related. If this is the case, Vista isn't ready for prime time.
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FWIW it is POSSIBLE for a hardware problem to show up under Vista that isn't appearant under XP as Vista is more resource-intensive...... however it is not LIKELY that this is what caused Brian's problems..............
 
Brian Boyko said:
That "theoretically" is what had me particularly worried. No doubt that it locks out other programs, but they could have done this and required a password, creating a layered system of security. As you said, if the system was fully compromised by one piece of malware, this would be a problem, because then it could install other pieces of malware. And we've seen (.ani vulnerability) that this is possible.
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That is true, Brian, but with full OS access a password wouldn't do much good either.
 
Just wondering how the reviewer came up with the term Windows Smart Start and how it got past the editor. I know it might be a minor thing but it casts doubt on how well-researched the article is.

It may be that the pool of information is small in Vista but I don't really think that it is a factor in this case. The description of the problems are just too vague. IE7 suddenly using up 100% of the cpu. Random reboots. Vista cpu utilization inexplicably ramping up to 100% (could be the indexing service?). How hard is it to open up the task manager(which is more detailed btw) to find out which services is hogging the cpu? As for XP not being able to access data in Vista-burned DVD. There was a screenshot of the DVD burning window but wouldn't a screenshot of the error received in XP be more useful?

Alot of people are waiting to see how Vista SP1 would help improve the OS but I don't really see how this review would help Microsoft address this major problems given the vague description and its seemingly random nature. I know it's supposed to be from an average user's perspective but perhaps there should be a separate section where there is an effort made to analyze some of these problems. It could be as simple as opening up the Event Viewer to read the error message that caused the reboots. There is also the Reliability and Performance Monitor and the Generate system health report features that are new to Vista.
 
I ran Vista Business on my Acer Travelmate 4672 notebook for about 6 weeks, but I have just gone back to Windows XP due to a number of issues. I was really happy with Vista at first mainly because it finally suppported proper sleep like OS X has for years but i soon discovered it didn't work some of the time.

Some issues i had with Vista:

1. When telling Vista to sleep it would lock up about 20% of the time requiring me to power off and restart.
2. The wireless network card would sometime stop working and i would have to reboot to get it to work again.
3. Copying files both locally and across the network was sometimes very very slow.
4. during my 6 week stint Vista froze (no BSOD) 5 - 10 times while i was just surfing the web requring me to turn the power off and restart.
5. When doing a backup to either of my two Firewire harddrives, they suddenly dissapeared after copying a large 100GB+ ammount of data, and when I reconnected them
Windows said they were an unformated RAW partition, which meant DATA LOSS. This is the main issue which pushed me back to XP.

I had a few more issues but these are the most annoying ones. I can accept that some people have had no issues at all but lots of have and i think Vista is still very much BETA software. I may take another look when Service Pack 1 arrives.

Mike
 
I really don't see where the Author gets off with saying "It crashed under prime" but didn't actually research WHY it crashed. That's doing a VERY 1/2 ass job.

Ninja Edit: BTW Alot of Software Developers are releasing Vista Compatible software now, so uh yeah... and while I'm thinking about it, I recall WinXP having the exact same issues or at least similar issues. I wonder why WinXP is such a great OS, oh wait I think it has something to do with that 6 years of constant user use and development.
 
Just tossing my .02 YPU's worth in here...

The article is the opinion and experiences of the author. He stated what he did, what the OS did to him, and he stated his findings clearly. Good article in that regard. Calling it a "lemon" was a touch harsh, but I'll call it a clean hit.

You see, my experiences with RC2 and the Vista RTM are about the same, which is why my .sig hasn't changed. For something that is supposedly more evolutionary than revolutionary, Vista fails in both regards. There is nothing new in Vista that Microsoft hasn't poorly ripped off from other OS' ("Flip3D" looks like a misdirected steal of OS X's Dock). The driver support is shabby. Period, end of line. SHABBY. I mean worse than the support for XP-64.

Athlon64 X2 4400+ and 2 gig of RAM. Nice amount of power, excellent candidate for upgrading to Vista, right? Wrong, according to the results I get. Video drivers crap out each and every time. Oh yeah, so sorry, Nforce-3 with ATI GPU isn't supported, thanks for playing. A three ton bullshit souffle to Nvidia for that ongoing debacle.

My brand-spanking new Dell Optiplex showed up for side-by-side work with my older Opti/XP combination. Vista Ultimate, backed by a Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2 gig DDR2, versus a P4 2.8ghz / 1 gig DDR running XP Pro SP2. The XP machine doesn't feel all that much slower, despite a 3 year old OS load and all the dreck that entails.

Running the menu structure to get an inexperienced customer up and running on cable modem is a God-damned nightmare in Vista. I haven't counted the steps yet, feels like running an idiot's marathon to get a customer far enough through the labyrinth to verify DHCP IP address assignment. Five clicks in XP, three if the NIC icon is in the system tray. For Vista? Battle the UAE pop-ups, deal with the "Network Type?" craplet pops (FOUR TIMES, for Thor's sake, when a cable modem is firing up OOB: first for private IP while ranging, second for public IP just before firmware update, private again after reboot, public again after ranging complete), and then the silly shit configuring an account in Outlook 2007 to top off the steaming manure buffet.

Oh yeah. Try bringing up Telnet to check out why the POP server isn't responding from the user's end of the pipe. Now, explain to the irritated new Vista owner that the tool needed isn't installed by default anymore, and we'll now spend another 10 minute's time to get that configured before we can press on.

No, I do not like Vista.

The article author was dead-on with his assessment. The Inquirer's new moniker for Microsoft's new cash bovine is also dead-on: "Windows Vista ME II".
 
Strikemaster said:
The Inquirer's new moniker for Microsoft's new cash bovine is also dead-on: "Windows Vista ME II".
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Ok, that made me laugh. The article might be overstating things for most people, but even before the reviews were in, I knew I wouldn't touch this OS until at least the first full service pack. I wouldn't touch any new MS OS until it was patched and everything else from 3rd parties was caught up. I only upgraded from win2k to XP last year.

You really have to have too much time on your hands to join the extended vista beta unless you get it with a new computer, even then I would consider XP.

There really isn't a compelling reason for anyone to actually upgrade their computer that already has XP on it.
 
Max Mike said:
An intentional irresponsible and inflammatory review… smacks of a reviewer trying to create buzz more than an objective review.

I have been using Vista on three of my computers with various configurations for two plus months without a single crash… I have installed it on quite a few other with very few problems, a few software incompatibility issues and lack printer drivers but nothing major or crippling.

This reviewer set out to fail and succeeded.

A real fair in depth review was needed, warts and good… and we got inflammatory hyperbole instead.
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Don't like what this particular article had to say? Google Vista reviews and they'll pretty much say the same thing. Sorry to hear that your Vista is a lame upgrade to XP. :p
 
markt435 said:
regardless if it was intentional or not...we got slashdotted. lol sigh.
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Lol, that's not hard to do. Post an article that says nothing other than "Micro$oft Sucks" and it will get slashdotted. They love anything anti-Microsoft over there.
 
I mirror those with no problems. I run Vista on 3 different machines, all of which have no crashes, no performance issues (well, a bit slow on one, but it's old), and are very stable, usable, et.al. Even my wife likes it (and she doesn't find UAC to be a problem, and she is NOT a computer expert).

Main desktop:
e6600
abit AW9D-Max (975X Chipset)
ATi X800XL
2GB DDR2-667
RAID 0 (2x250GB WD SATA2)
Lite-on 16x DVD+/-RW (DL)
Hauppage WinTV PVR 150MCE
2 additional HDDS for storage internally, 1 external HDD (all WD)
9-in-1 card reader
Canon S750 Printer
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Note - on this machine, the only driver not auto picked up was abit's uguru processor, but Vista provided me a link to abit's download of the driver install file. I did, of course, update all drivers. The system plays WoW and LOTRO just fine. Everything is responsive and fast. No software issues, even with the pre-vista-supported itunes. I use nero 7 for burning.

Laptop (Compal EL80):
T7200
945GM chipset
2GB DDR2 667
80GB Seagate SATA
DVD+/-RW w/ DL
nvidia 7600 Go
fingerprint reader
built in webcam
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Note - Pretty much the same as my desktop - no issues. Stable, fast, reliable. Plays WoW and LOTRO just fine. Using Nero 7 for burning.

Wife's Desktop:
P4 3.0 (775)
Abit Fatality AA8XE (925XE)
1GB DDR2 533
eVGA 7600GT
WD 120GB SATA
Vista Home Premium x86
Note - Vista runs a bit slower on this - boot up, especially. However, still rock solid stable, plays WoW just fine (wife does play a bit). Never crashes, never fails.

Dunno what the problem is, since I have both nvidia and ATi setups. Granted, I don't use Firefox or Open Office. I love Vista, my wife loves Vista. My employees love Vista (I manager a computer store). None of us have ANY issues with it whatsoever.
 
Brian Boyko said:
That "theoretically" is what had me particularly worried. No doubt that it locks out other programs, but they could have done this and required a password, creating a layered system of security. As you said, if the system was fully compromised by one piece of malware, this would be a problem, because then it could install other pieces of malware. And we've seen (.ani vulnerability) that this is possible.
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It is running on a protected Desktop. For a malware to do what you are describing, it would all ready have to be running as System, and if that's true, all bets are off. (And why does it need to ask for permission then?)

And if a malware could monitor on protected desktop, you think asking for a password would be any different? It can just catch your password and auto elevate that way.

The password is irrelevant to the barrier. Note, if you run as a user and not as an admin, Windows does ask for an admin password.

And I am a security researcher, but some might call me biased. ;)


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 
Ranma_Sao said:
It is running on a protected Desktop. For a malware to do what you are describing, it would all ready have to be running as System, and if that's true, all bets are off. (And why does it need to ask for permission then?)

And if a malware could monitor on protected desktop, you think asking for a password would be any different? It can just catch your password and auto elevate that way.

The password is irrelevant to the barrier. Note, if you run as a user and not as an admin, Windows does ask for an admin password.

And I am a security researcher, but some might call me biased. ;)


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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Are you telling me people usually uses the Admin account!? *face palms*.

No seriously, anyone who does that and isn't like extremely software/hardware suave, is retarded.
 
Ugh I think some of you folks love your operating system too much, and because some one writes a poor review on an operating system you spent $$$$ on, you get your panties in a knot, then its time to bash slashdot (because the article is now slashdotted), then the author skewered the review from the beginning. etc etc

Guess what, not everything works for everyone and as such if they write a review that says its bad well its their experience with it.

My personal experience with vista has been a mixed one, while I love the flash, it took about a week of trouble shooting to discover the cause of BSODs about <5mins running the operating system. After a 'good bsod' I was able to trace the problem to the Nforce Audio Driver via windows update. Now I could of done the all to common response linux receives with its drivers, 'omgz this os suxorz to the maxorz, drivers are teh crap'. I couldn't really blame Microsoft on this, so after some googling I made my way to the Vista Site and found newer drivers.

Not everyone got a pleasant experience...... if vista is great for you (is now for me), then what does it matter if a review sheds in bad light. It lemon'd on the author and thats what he wrote about.

You guys remember its an operating system not a religion.....

ps If you are wondering my setup
2.6GHz AMD X2
DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D
2Gb OCZ DDR 520 RAM @ 3-4-4-8
1 TB of hdd space
7800GT
pioner DVR-109
LG 16x DVD Rom
 
I have to agree with the sentiment that this review wasn't quite as thorough as the Ubuntu one. I've been running Vista on a Asus A8JS laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, Geforce Go 7700) for about a month now, and while I've certainly had my share of problems, I haven't found them to be any more troublesome than issues I've had with XP over the years. I don't really consider myself more of a power user than anyone else here, so I guess I'm just a little surprised that you ran into brick walls where so many others did not.

First and foremost, the first thing to try any time you have any sort of problem with application compatibility in Vista is to run it as an administrator. I'd be willing to bet this is the cause of the Photoshop problem. Even a cursory Google search of Vista problems would reveal this as one of the most common solutions. The other major solution is -- of course -- disabling User Account Control. I have yet to meet anyone who likes it.

The home/work/etc.question in the installation process refers to network profiles, a new Vista feature that is primarily for mobile PCs. Admittedly, the installation doesn't explain it very well, but the network setup wizard does a much better job. Whenever you connect to a new network, you can create a profile for that network with customized settings regarding file sharing, network discovery and other security options. The next time you connect to that network, Vista will automatically restore those settings. In fact, Vista can even maintain the profiles for two seperate networks (i.e: wired and wi-fi) simultaneously, being open to one and closed off to the other. Upon connecting to an unencrypted wireless network, the OS warns you and defaults to the most secure profile.

I'm not really sure I understand how accessing your hard drive the old-fashioned way is any more difficult in Vista. The new user-centric folders are in addition to -- not in place of -- the old directory browsing. In any explorer window, clicking "Computer" is the same as "My Computer" in XP, I tend to use the run prompt a lot though, so perhaps I'm overlooking something. One nice thing about the Start Menu versions of these new folders is that you can change the directory they point to, so if you have your music in a location other than "Music," you don't have to move anything.

I am also a former GAIM user, but I installed Vista knowing that some applications might not work. A quick Google search revealed Miranda IM as a Vista-compatible alternative, and I've even grown to prefer it over GAIM.

Another feature you don't touch on is the Windows Photo Gallery. It includes the usual features you would expect, such as image tags, ratings, EXIF data and all that, but another nice feature I discovered recently is the ability to extend the Windows Photo Gallery file support through codecs. Vista notified me of this the first time I connected my Canon EOS 400D and directed me to Canon's website, where I downloaded a codec, allowing Windows Photo Gallery to transfer and view the camera's RAW format (.CR2). This is in addition to already having superior format compatibility to XP, such as support for TIFF files. Even on these extremely large, slow-loading files (10.1mp), Vista generates a thumbnail in a split-second and loads the full image progressively, showing a slightly lower-quality version until the file is completely loaded. Indeed, thumbnail generation is one of Vista's best improvements. Previously, if I wanted to browse through images that didn't have native thumbnail support in XP (Targa, for instance) I had to either use Photoshop or some other image-viewing app like ACDSee, neither of which are particularly fast at generating thumbnails for files that are typically several megabytes in size. Vista is extremely fast at it. The same goes for thumbnails of video files as well.

The only consistent problem I have had with Vista is that when copying files over the network, I often have to hit Paste twice. Regardless of whether I use Ctrl+V or the right-click context menu, for some reason it doesn't seem to register the command the first time. I think this probably has something to do with UAC being disabled, as if it were enabled it would probably be presenting me with a permissions dialogue. It is worth noting, however, that my laptop is not my gaming machine, and I have no intention of installing Vista on my gaming machine until DX10 forces me to do so or its gaming performance equals XP's.
 
Keep the threadcrapping out of this thread.
No off-topic posting, no griping about stuff that has nothing to do with the article, none of that stuff. You guys know better.

From here on out, I'm just going to give infractions. No more warnings.
 
Strikemaster said:
Just tossing my .02 YPU's worth in here...

The article is the opinion and experiences of the author. He stated what he did, what the OS did to him, and he stated his findings clearly. Good article in that regard. Calling it a "lemon" was a touch harsh, but I'll call it a clean hit.

You see, my experiences with RC2 and the Vista RTM are about the same, which is why my .sig hasn't changed. For something that is supposedly more evolutionary than revolutionary, Vista fails in both regards. There is nothing new in Vista that Microsoft hasn't poorly ripped off from other OS' ("Flip3D" looks like a misdirected steal of OS X's Dock). The driver support is shabby. Period, end of line. SHABBY. I mean worse than the support for XP-64.

Athlon64 X2 4400+ and 2 gig of RAM. Nice amount of power, excellent candidate for upgrading to Vista, right? Wrong, according to the results I get. Video drivers crap out each and every time. Oh yeah, so sorry, Nforce-3 with ATI GPU isn't supported, thanks for playing. A three ton bullshit souffle to Nvidia for that ongoing debacle.

My brand-spanking new Dell Optiplex showed up for side-by-side work with my older Opti/XP combination. Vista Ultimate, backed by a Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2 gig DDR2, versus a P4 2.8ghz / 1 gig DDR running XP Pro SP2. The XP machine doesn't feel all that much slower, despite a 3 year old OS load and all the dreck that entails.

Running the menu structure to get an inexperienced customer up and running on cable modem is a God-damned nightmare in Vista. I haven't counted the steps yet, feels like running an idiot's marathon to get a customer far enough through the labyrinth to verify DHCP IP address assignment. Five clicks in XP, three if the NIC icon is in the system tray. For Vista? Battle the UAE pop-ups, deal with the "Network Type?" craplet pops (FOUR TIMES, for Thor's sake, when a cable modem is firing up OOB: first for private IP while ranging, second for public IP just before firmware update, private again after reboot, public again after ranging complete), and then the silly shit configuring an account in Outlook 2007 to top off the steaming manure buffet.

Oh yeah. Try bringing up Telnet to check out why the POP server isn't responding from the user's end of the pipe. Now, explain to the irritated new Vista owner that the tool needed isn't installed by default anymore, and we'll now spend another 10 minute's time to get that configured before we can press on.

No, I do not like Vista.

The article author was dead-on with his assessment. The Inquirer's new moniker for Microsoft's new cash bovine is also dead-on: "Windows Vista ME II".
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I laughed, this is an excellent opinion that validates the article.
I personally found the article spot on as to some of the issue people experience. He shouldn't have "edited it" IMO.
I also don't understand why people expect a new OS to have "new os" problems from Vista that mimic minor problems from XP nearly 6 years ago. You would think by new those "new OS" issues would have been ironed out by now!
The fact of the matter is simple:
-BSOD
-lack of 3rd party driver support
-etc
is really making people think twice before they buy vista. I know I do and, I am not alone here. Sure there is something to be said about "early adapters" but with problems as blatant as these I am not sure anything can be done. Like the author advised its more of a design flaw more so in the anything else. Honestly, I agree with that statement.
 
I run Vista on my work computer. I don't run it on my home computer yet because I'm waiting for other poor saps to run into the incompatibility issues and work out the fixes before I have to deal with them.

Vista, on its own, is a very good OS, definitely better than pre-SP1 XP was.

The problem is that hardware vendors are lazy fuckers.

Most of the hassles I've seen people having with Vista involve broken or non-existent drivers, because the people making the hardware couldn't be bothered to put out and debug drivers for their stuff. In one case, I had a customer with a Linksys wireless card without a driver. Linksys's support site showed no driver for it. Only, after a bit of googling, I found that the Linksys card was a rebranded card from another manufacturer, and the original manufacturer DID have Vista drivers for the card. The driver worked perfectly. All Linksys had to do is POST THE DRIVER ON THEIR WEBSITE, and that was apparently too much work for them.

Same deal with software. I sincerely wish I could punch Adobe's software engineers right in the face, those good for nothing lazy bastards won't even support their own software. While Ahead on the other hand was very helpful with providing updates to get Nero working correctly with the system when I called about it.

Moral of the story, the OS is no better than the hardware and software running on it, and until the hardware and software vendors get on the ball, Vista will continue to have issues. It isn't the OS's fault.
 
Jason, I love you and I've read a lot of your work. This time I think your wrong, Vista is quite stable, solid and mature.

I'm sorry you had problems with it, but you should have tested it on more than two pieces of hardware. I've got it running on more than 15 systems I've yet to see the problems your describing.

Anyway, a well written, if misguided piece.

I look forward to your next article.
 
Had Vista running since October 06. Shut down everything that didn't have to be running, took about a week. I found Office 2007 loaded faster on the first startup, then once in memory about the same as xp. Tried it and enjoyed using Vista, but I just couldn't get my gaming up to the same level as xp, I finally went back to xp about 2 weeks ago. If MS can get the gaming portion of the OS up to snuff I'd go back to Vista without a second thought. Some programs just run faster under Vista.I really have no inclination for duel booting.
 
Deusfaux said:
scathing!

naw, nothing suprising. what little benefits there might be to upgrading (now) are clearly not worth all the pitfalls associated with a brand new and unrefined product
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If you been testing Vista for almost 2 years, you would think differently. Have YOU tried it?

...and the article was rather poorly written IMO. Well, it was written well, but poorly researched as far as actually trying to fix the issues. I think I speak for many others that are greatly enjoying Vista...I have a very current and modern rig, and other than the first driver issues with the 8800 series video cards, my rig has been, well, great.

Vista is not ready just yet for the average joe blow with some older hardware. If you are going to run it, it is a pretty simple task to do a bit of hardware research and find out what hardware (such as printers) WILL work with Vista. This is no different than when Windows 2000 came out or Windows XP for that matter. Driver issues are just that, MANUFACTURER problems, not Microsoft's fault. It isn't as if Vista popped up overnight....


The author trash canned Vista as a lemon, which is very poor journalism to me, as it was sorely lacking in depth of research and problem solving. Still it sounds like a hardware issue with the reboots, or something totally gone wrong in the software.


Quake4 runs great on my rig. Adobe CS2 does as well. CS:Source runs great and has NO issue whatsoever connecting to a populated server, ever. As far as that goes, GLQuake1, Quake2, Quake3, CoD2, FS2004 and FSX all work fine.
 
Give it 3-6 months and these Vista haters will be eating crow and will disappear until the next MS release.................LOL! I just especially love these people who haven't even used Vista and they jump on the "Vista Sucks bandwagon"!
No problems here except with crappy NV drivers and certain games that dont play well, BF2142 as such. That one still doesnt work right on XP...............LOL!;)

and terrible article by the way, reminds me of the Salem Witch Hunt.
 
your review sucks, i'm a little disappointed at the OCP letting such an uneducated person perform the review, however i guess it coud be quite representative of a typical luser experience.

time for the clue bat
 
How come no one is cares about the CD/DVD file incompatibility issue ? To me that is a serious problem as most folks I know back up files to those formats. Can you read a CD/DVD written with older OS's with Vista? or is it broken both ways? Also we tried Vista on a 4 work machines and ended up going back to XP due to the same problems with blue screens and random crashes, but it was pretty when it was working... maybe we'll give it another shot after SP1.... :(
 
ittech said:
your review sucks, i'm a little disappointed at the OCP letting such an uneducated person perform the review, however i guess it coud be quite representative of a typical luser experience.

time for the clue bat
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uh....what was wrong with the review then?
 
Before we go further, I did get one email from a guy who works at Microsoft and he's interested in fixing the problems we encountered - or at least the one in his department anyway.

Love or hate this article, I'd like to point out that I want every product I evaluate to be perfect. That means it's a great product that people are going to love, that will make people happy.

I don't want Microsoft to "fail." What I want is for Microsoft to create a better product.
 
I'm running Vista on three computers at home.

Media PC: Athlon 3000 XP w/2GB RAM, GeForce 6200, nForce2 chipset
Notebook: Toshiba Satellite A135-2306 w/1GB RAM (128MB sucked up by integrated gfx)
Tower: Athlon X2 3800 w/3GB RAM, Radeon x1900xt, 150GB raptor, data on RAID, etc

All three systems have been running solid, though the first two both required RAM upgrades to run at their full potential. The serious issues have been driver-related, and there's only been a couple of those. NVidia doesn't support nForce 1 or 2 chipsets under Vista, and AMD's Catalyst 7.3 drivers (but not 7.1) caused blue screens at system log-on.

There's a noticable difference in performance perception across the three systems. I say perception because each one is used for very different tasks. The media PC is forced to record programs throughout the day and occasionally stream them to a media extender. It's a workhorse, but doesn't even qualify for a 'Vista Capable' sticker. The system felt more responsive when it was running Media Center Edition 2005, but Vista's Media Center functionality is much improved. So...it's something of a wash there.

The notebook is used for email, Internet, and as a dumb terminal into our desktop computers (wireless network). It was nearly unusable with the factory default configuration of 512MB RAM. After adding a matching 512MB DDR stick, it works fine.

The tower is my main system, and it's where I've come to appreciate Vista's good and bad points. On the plus side, the machine is beefy enough to squeeze all the features out of Vista. After using Vista on this machine for a week, I couldn't bring myself to boot into my XP partition. On the negative side, the machine is beefy enough to show where some of Vista's features fall short. One of those is the UAC nanny. I'm really hoping that one gets toned down in SP1 (if not sooner). Another issue is file operations performance, which seems to suffer because of the new UI and metadata-related features. If they don't fix that one in the service pack, I swear I'm going to start using a command prompt to do all of my file operations. Everyday tasks, including photo editing and gaming, have been pain-free.

On the whole though, I tell my friends and family to wait before upgrading an existing system to Vista. Machines older than 2 or 3 years should stick with what they've got. Buying a new, fully-specced machine though? Go for it.
 
Brian Boyko said:
Before we go further, I did get one email from a guy who works at Microsoft and he's interested in fixing the problems we encountered - or at least the one in his department anyway.

Love or hate this article, I'd like to point out that I want every product I evaluate to be perfect. That means it's a great product that people are going to love, that will make people happy.

I don't want Microsoft to "fail." What I want is for Microsoft to create a better product.
Click to expand...

Can you say what that one dept is?
 
Thanks for all of your comments on the article, especially this one:

dekard said:
Jason, I love you and I've read a lot of your work.
Click to expand...

:D Yes, I know I ninja-snipped the hell out of that.

Anyway, back to business. We stated it in the introduction - some people have no problems with Vista, others have many. If you look at this thread, that observation is spot-on. We had problems - period. We had to judge the operating system based on our own cloistered experience, not take what we experienced then blend it with everyone else's thoughts. Our commitment to that approach did not come through clearly in the article, and that's my fault.

The criticism that we didn't trek down the same troubleshooting paths as we did in our Linux article is good feedback. Honestly, we really would have liked to have done that with Vista - I think we could have learned a hell of a lot about the OS that way. But the fact that we were trying to fix these problems in the first month that Vista was released, while Ubuntu already had a very well-established support community, helps explain things a bit.

The suggestion that we should revisit Vista at some point is an excellent thought, and is essentially necessitated by an article such as this one. It's hard to look at a calendar and point at a date that we should start testing again, but giving Vista another run will definitely be something we'll look into.

I've gotten a LOT of feedback from this article from all sorts of folks. The more interesting comments have been from system integrators, who were either surprised or incredulous about our findings. One said, "If we had all the problems you had, we'd be out of business." Others have written frantic emails wanting details on our problems because they're currently shipping similar configurations to customers.
 
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