And if you are using a less optimal system (say 2-years or older with a gig or less of RAM), XP will run better even when all the kinks will be worked out of Vista.
Vista by design hogs CPU time, memory usage and hard drive activity.
Normally I'd agree with you, Dean, but my experience is ringing little alarm bells. Vista is not 'buggy'. Vista is broken. The list of issues is long and storied and easily available to any who care to search.
At my company we have steadfastly refused to deploy it. Normally I would wait for SP1 before even considering it, but by Microsoft's own admission SP1 for Vista fixes nothing- it is just a roll-up of patches already provided.
Should Microsoft stop selling XP before it finishes fixing Vista the results would likely be less than pretty for all concerned.
For those who feel they just have to have it (Gamers needing Direct X 10, for instance) I recommend staying away from the Home or Home Premium editions- they are crippled. Go for the Business or Ultimate editions. They are broken as well, but you can get underneath the hood to fix things. Home and Home premium assume all home users are idiots. It's a position I understand, but if you like to tweak your machine it pretty difficult to deal with.
Well some releases have more problems than others, no question. I'm just remembering vividly the complaints about Win95, Win98, and so on. There always seems to be roughly a 2 year adjustment period. Indeed, it seems to me we got spoiled a bit by XP--it had remarkably fewer problems than any previous release I can remember. XP was "surprisingly non-sucky" in my friend Jerry Kindall's phrasing.
I have to stay with XP due to my work. I can't (and won't) go to Vista and definitely cannot use Linux or even Mac because of the strong hold MS has on big institutionalized computer programs (word processing, medical records, chart tracking, etc) at hospitals and clinics.
I like XP. I'm staying with XP for as long as possible. I also have a 486 with DOS6.2 &GeoWorks and that's a NICE machine and system.
It all boils down to what you need your computer to do. I want to play my old DOS games, and write and edit my work. I need the XP and a higher speed for my music recording and publishing. I don't need it to watch movies or videos beyond youtube. I need it to surf and read the blogs and news sites. XP works fine for all of that.
Yeah, I've been doing this stuff professionally since, honest to God, Windows 1.0, OS/2 2.0, DOS 3.3 days. Been playing with 'em since TRS-80 days, worked up through Apple ][, Commodore 64, etc.
Vista is no worse or no better than any other major OS release. Except ME, which truly was horrible.
It was about 16 months before I gave up my Win2k boxes to move to XP which was all "eye candy" and not as stable as 2k.
Very little in Vista is actually broken. Lots of it is new and different. Might not work the way you are used to or think it should, but that does not mean its broken.
I've been using it at home for doing development for over a year now. At work (a major telecom) I use it for development along with a Win2k3 system. I barely touch the Win2k3 anymore, except to compile CAB files for Windows Mobile devices because of the one very obscure error I've found. Of course that error doesn't happen on my home Vista box, so more than likely it is the way it was installed at the office (weird GPO or something....)
MS is using the same strategy with Vista that has brought them to dominance. They bet that storage, memory, and cpu speeds will continue to increase steadily and thus negate bloat in their software within a short time.
Bugs seldom affect sales. There are usually ways to work around a problem. And each individual user encounters only a few even though the entire software set contains many.
The unsophisticated user (a vast majority) assumes software and the PC will misbehave at times, concludes (falsely) that it must be so because it always has been so, and lives with it.
I run XP with something called media center. It stays up for weeks w/o a crash. The two problems I occasionally see is with screen refresh when multiple applications are open, on difficulty in an application.
I'm not really qualified to opine, but I remember
Martin commenting to the effect that vista's main innovation is in what programmers can now do. I believe he explained his voice controlled music box app as an example. he said something like "what would have once taken me months to do, I can now do in a matter of hours".
I've never seen the claim disputed and I have grown to trust Martin's judgment, especially in his field of expertise. Accordingly, it seems to me that the world would be better off with an improved vista than it would be sticking with a smoothly functioning XP. New and cheaply engineered programs
trump short term functionality in my view.
My old laptop was slow, so I bought a new one Vista pre-installed. And it ran even SLOWER than my old one, even with twice with CPU power. WTF? I was extremely pissed off, and "upgraded" to XP. Now I have a screaming fast laptop.
My laptop also got scorching hot when running Vista after only fifteen minutes, hot enough that I worried it would physically destroy my computer. I certainly couldn't stand to have it on my lap. But I can run XP all day and it will not overheat.
I wouldn't re-install Vista on that laptop of you paid me 1000 dollars. Nor will I bother with service packs. Service packs can't fix those problems.
I do remember the problems with earlier releases, but I also remember the lines outside stores for Windows 95. This has been their worst launch ever; they just haven't delivered a product that consumers wanted.
I'm actually putting off buying another PC because Dell doesn't offer XP on a machine with a 512MB video card. I expect Vista will be less buggy by summer or so, and better supported re drivers, and computers will be a bit faster... but I want a PC now. Decisions, decisions.
Martin, Dean and Michael are all right to some extent; Vista is a gigantic application that never stops spinning the hard drive but makes development a lot easier, and in a couple years it will probably supplant XP because better apps can be written in it.
I think they've fallen into the PS3 trap: they have a great platform for making shiny new apps, but its too expensive (esp. in terms of system resources) and as yet there are too few Vista-only apps out there to make people say "ooh I have to get Vista," and the new platform itself doesn't drive demand (unlike, say, Win95 or the Wii).
I've been dealing with Microsoft products since DOS 3.0. I build my own PCs, most recently upgrading a box from an Athlon processor to an overclocked Core2Duo.
I am a MS agnostic. I recognize the steamroller aspect of the firm, but eventually they get it right and I think overall the tech world is better for it.
But I disagree with posters above who state that this release has been typical of Microsoft. No it hasn't. The buzz about Vista has been bad from techs since it was in beta. You've got smart people stating that the OS brings their machines to their knees, and for what? For Aeroglass? I don't recall things being this bad a year after a release since ME or possibly even DOS 4.
Each release over the past 20 years has brought benefits to the user (with the possible exceptions of Dos 4 and ME). Windows 3.0 had the GUI, 95 had 32 bit computing. XP offered escape from DLL hell and more plug and less pray for average users.
Vista offers 64 bit computing (not in the base version though)- which is critical to memory addressing of over 3 gb barrier (see this link for a technical explanation about this). Microsoft thought Vista would be the first OS to attack this barrier.
However it has clearly been engineered by committee: it has waaay too many features that slow current generation hardware significantly.
What does it offer users? It takes more than a pretty interface, especially since Apple has that locked up PLUS is considered to be idiot proof. Beyond that, and the fact the 3gb barrier remains a barrier for most Vista users using the 32 bit version, and the result is failure in the marketplace.
Microsoft isn't perfect; it has and will continue to make mistakes. The question becomes: how will it rectify this mistake? How will it fix Vista?
I'm aware that many of the fundamental changes in Vista are very good changes. Many of the software incompatibilities are the fault of the software companies not following microsoft's guidelines, guidelines which Vista now enforces.
However, Microsoft should of delayed Vista until it was ready, and suffered from those problems rather than suffer from the existing problems.
They changed too much for one release. The driver architecture has been redesigned, thus the drivers need to be rewritten, thus stability problems have returned.
NT 4.0 usually crashed because of device drivers much more so than microsoft's bugs. Once the driver writers got the bugs ironed out, stability occurred.
I won't be recommending server 2008 until I can be certain the drivers are relaible. Hopefully Vista will get the driver problems sorted out so 2008 is good stuff. I'm looking forward to the newest terminal server, it might finally deliver on the promises microsoft made with terminal server 4.0 (what a piece of crap).
You've got smart people stating that the OS brings their machines to their knees, and for what? For Aeroglass?
Aero does not slow Vista down, it speeds it up, and turning Aero off will slow your system down. One of the reasons Vista Home basic runs slower is because the basic version doesn't have Aero.
The reason you need much more ram with Vista is because the OS uses over 490meg without running any programs.
You can get rid of the hard drive activity by turning indexing and readyboost off. Of course that will slow your system down even more.
If you have a new hot high end gaming system Vista will probably run faster than XP. An older, or less than optimum newer system will run faster with XP.
Vista and XP are not built for the same environment. I explain it to people by comparing race tracks needed for different cars. An inferior stock car will blow the doors off of an Indy car on a quarter mile, or even a half mile oval. But in the right environment, a track made for speed like Indianapolis, the superior Indy car will always be faster.
Vista and XP are not built for the same environment.
Sandi
What environment is Vista built for? High-end gaming? None of the hardcore gaming enthusiast sites I follow have embraced Vista. DX10 offers better graphics than DX9, but the sites I just googled recommend tweaking the latter without suffering the horsepower loss by upgrading to Vista. Power users? XP is faster on most benchmarks than Vista. Businesses? They tend to be the most conservative of all, and won't consider switching for at least 2 years after any OS release. Home users?
I've been using PCs for almost 20 years and do not believe they have gotten any easier to use.(/blanket statement). What has happened is that a large number of us have become more technically skilled.
I am not a Mac person. I don't like the Mac's image, and find their commercials slamming the PC annoying. However for a non-technical person I wouldn't hesitate recommending a Mac to them. For browsing the internet, sending email, watching online videos - even some gaming (Mac's weak spot)- the Mac is much easier to use and is intuitive.
As John Dvorak writes, "What if Microsoft is in over its head and is now unable to provide a usable OS ever again?"
I don't see hardware saving this OS. Maybe I'll be wrong and eating these words in 2 years, but from the vantage point of the last day of 2007, Vista is a disaster.
I post a lot about Linux, but I've been using PCs since IBM launched its dual floppy drive, 16k memory machine back in 1981, with PC DOS 1.0, I believe, installed. Much as I like to bash Microsoft for the problems that they seem to create on a regular basis (security flaws in IE since 4.x), I give MS credit for helping to make PCs become ubitquitous via use of a GUI driven system. And I think that Vista is a turd. To be fair, I thought XP was somewhat flawed until SP1 and SP2 came. Since then, I've found XP to be quite robust. I'm not convinced that Vista will improve as dramatically by the time SP2 comes out for it.
I have no dog in this fight, but it's a little annoying to hear people resolutely defend Vista in the face of all its evident issues.
FWIW, I have a friend who worked on several pre-released versions of Vista. His comment was that they left some of the better stuff undone. In his opinion, if they had finished everything that they were working on, it would be a great product. He just thinks its an incomplete system. Full disclosure: he still likes Vista, but his OS of choice is Ubuntu.
What environment is Vista built for? High-end gaming? None of the hardcore gaming enthusiast sites I follow have embraced Vista.
Scott,
I'm talking about the hardware and driver environment. I'm also aware that many hardcore gamers are not fond of Vista. OTOH gamers are not necessarily literate on the reasons why they don't like Vista, and blame MS more than their share of the problem. There are two issues here that you have to consider. Are the games written for vista, or tweaked to also run on Vista? Are they written for DX9 OR DX10?
Like Vista DX10 has a lot of eye candy in it. And everything that is in DX9 is also in DX10. Aside from graphics card (driver) considerations, programs have to be written for DX10 to run faster with that DirectX version installed. Otherwise DX10 used what ever DirectX mode the software was written in (for). The way I understand it, uninstalling DX10 and installing DX9 won't make a lick of difference to a program written for DX9.
If the programs are written for DX9, they run in DX9, even if you have installed DX10, because of backward compatibility. Games written for XP and DX9 are just not going to do as well on a fast Vista gaming machine with DX10.
However I don't care for Vista or XP much. I'm not a gamer either, and most of the time I prefer to use Ubuntu. My XP and Ubuntu machines sit side by side using the same hotkey switched monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Well, I will probably upgrade to Vista eventually, but not until it is at least as stable and responsive as XP. I had to twist Dell's arm to sell me XP on my latest PC purchase, but they did it.
One more thing:
Sandi
Vista should not be put on laptops. It might work on high end machines, but laptops have way too many drivers. I'm tapping on one right now - a so-called Vista ready machine that I've kept XP loaded on. The thing is slow enough without Vista. I couldn't imagine Vista on it.
12.31.2007 11:28pm
Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.
Thankfully (most of) my clients follow my recommendations, so vista has been avoided like the plague.
"Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do you want to spend money and get no return on your 'investment'? "
Gee, sounds like expensive advice, don't it?
Jesus Christ.
Made me laugh.
Out loud.
I suspect he sure didn't have much to do with Vista. Maybe more like Paul Lynde.
Happens with every new Microsoft OS release. The same way every time.
Yes, very funny.
And if you are using a less optimal system (say 2-years or older with a gig or less of RAM), XP will run better even when all the kinks will be worked out of Vista.
Vista by design hogs CPU time, memory usage and hard drive activity.
At my company we have steadfastly refused to deploy it. Normally I would wait for SP1 before even considering it, but by Microsoft's own admission SP1 for Vista fixes nothing- it is just a roll-up of patches already provided.
Should Microsoft stop selling XP before it finishes fixing Vista the results would likely be less than pretty for all concerned.
For those who feel they just have to have it (Gamers needing Direct X 10, for instance) I recommend staying away from the Home or Home Premium editions- they are crippled. Go for the Business or Ultimate editions. They are broken as well, but you can get underneath the hood to fix things. Home and Home premium assume all home users are idiots. It's a position I understand, but if you like to tweak your machine it pretty difficult to deal with.
I have to stay with XP due to my work. I can't (and won't) go to Vista and definitely cannot use Linux or even Mac because of the strong hold MS has on big institutionalized computer programs (word processing, medical records, chart tracking, etc) at hospitals and clinics.
I like XP. I'm staying with XP for as long as possible. I also have a 486 with DOS6.2 &GeoWorks and that's a NICE machine and system.
It all boils down to what you need your computer to do. I want to play my old DOS games, and write and edit my work. I need the XP and a higher speed for my music recording and publishing. I don't need it to watch movies or videos beyond youtube. I need it to surf and read the blogs and news sites. XP works fine for all of that.
respects,
His system runs far better than it did under XP.
Vista is no worse or no better than any other major OS release. Except ME, which truly was horrible.
It was about 16 months before I gave up my Win2k boxes to move to XP which was all "eye candy" and not as stable as 2k.
Very little in Vista is actually broken. Lots of it is new and different. Might not work the way you are used to or think it should, but that does not mean its broken.
I've been using it at home for doing development for over a year now. At work (a major telecom) I use it for development along with a Win2k3 system. I barely touch the Win2k3 anymore, except to compile CAB files for Windows Mobile devices because of the one very obscure error I've found. Of course that error doesn't happen on my home Vista box, so more than likely it is the way it was installed at the office (weird GPO or something....)
Bugs seldom affect sales. There are usually ways to work around a problem. And each individual user encounters only a few even though the entire software set contains many.
The unsophisticated user (a vast majority) assumes software and the PC will misbehave at times, concludes (falsely) that it must be so because it always has been so, and lives with it.
I run XP with something called media center. It stays up for weeks w/o a crash. The two problems I occasionally see is with screen refresh when multiple applications are open, on difficulty in an application.
Martin commenting to the effect that vista's main innovation is in what programmers can now do. I believe he explained his voice controlled music box app as an example. he said something like "what would have once taken me months to do, I can now do in a matter of hours".
I've never seen the claim disputed and I have grown to trust Martin's judgment, especially in his field of expertise. Accordingly, it seems to me that the world would be better off with an improved vista than it would be sticking with a smoothly functioning XP. New and cheaply engineered programs
trump short term functionality in my view.
My laptop also got scorching hot when running Vista after only fifteen minutes, hot enough that I worried it would physically destroy my computer. I certainly couldn't stand to have it on my lap. But I can run XP all day and it will not overheat.
I wouldn't re-install Vista on that laptop of you paid me 1000 dollars. Nor will I bother with service packs. Service packs can't fix those problems.
I'm actually putting off buying another PC because Dell doesn't offer XP on a machine with a 512MB video card. I expect Vista will be less buggy by summer or so, and better supported re drivers, and computers will be a bit faster... but I want a PC now. Decisions, decisions.
Martin, Dean and Michael are all right to some extent; Vista is a gigantic application that never stops spinning the hard drive but makes development a lot easier, and in a couple years it will probably supplant XP because better apps can be written in it.
I am a MS agnostic. I recognize the steamroller aspect of the firm, but eventually they get it right and I think overall the tech world is better for it.
But I disagree with posters above who state that this release has been typical of Microsoft. No it hasn't. The buzz about Vista has been bad from techs since it was in beta. You've got smart people stating that the OS brings their machines to their knees, and for what? For Aeroglass? I don't recall things being this bad a year after a release since ME or possibly even DOS 4.
Each release over the past 20 years has brought benefits to the user (with the possible exceptions of Dos 4 and ME). Windows 3.0 had the GUI, 95 had 32 bit computing. XP offered escape from DLL hell and more plug and less pray for average users.
Vista offers 64 bit computing (not in the base version though)- which is critical to memory addressing of over 3 gb barrier (see this link for a technical explanation about this). Microsoft thought Vista would be the first OS to attack this barrier.
However it has clearly been engineered by committee: it has waaay too many features that slow current generation hardware significantly.
What does it offer users? It takes more than a pretty interface, especially since Apple has that locked up PLUS is considered to be idiot proof. Beyond that, and the fact the 3gb barrier remains a barrier for most Vista users using the 32 bit version, and the result is failure in the marketplace.
Microsoft isn't perfect; it has and will continue to make mistakes. The question becomes: how will it rectify this mistake? How will it fix Vista?
However, Microsoft should of delayed Vista until it was ready, and suffered from those problems rather than suffer from the existing problems.
They changed too much for one release. The driver architecture has been redesigned, thus the drivers need to be rewritten, thus stability problems have returned.
NT 4.0 usually crashed because of device drivers much more so than microsoft's bugs. Once the driver writers got the bugs ironed out, stability occurred.
I won't be recommending server 2008 until I can be certain the drivers are relaible. Hopefully Vista will get the driver problems sorted out so 2008 is good stuff. I'm looking forward to the newest terminal server, it might finally deliver on the promises microsoft made with terminal server 4.0 (what a piece of crap).
Aero does not slow Vista down, it speeds it up, and turning Aero off will slow your system down. One of the reasons Vista Home basic runs slower is because the basic version doesn't have Aero.
The reason you need much more ram with Vista is because the OS uses over 490meg without running any programs.
You can get rid of the hard drive activity by turning indexing and readyboost off. Of course that will slow your system down even more.
If you have a new hot high end gaming system Vista will probably run faster than XP. An older, or less than optimum newer system will run faster with XP.
Vista and XP are not built for the same environment. I explain it to people by comparing race tracks needed for different cars. An inferior stock car will blow the doors off of an Indy car on a quarter mile, or even a half mile oval. But in the right environment, a track made for speed like Indianapolis, the superior Indy car will always be faster.
Sandi
What environment is Vista built for? High-end gaming? None of the hardcore gaming enthusiast sites I follow have embraced Vista. DX10 offers better graphics than DX9, but the sites I just googled recommend tweaking the latter without suffering the horsepower loss by upgrading to Vista. Power users? XP is faster on most benchmarks than Vista. Businesses? They tend to be the most conservative of all, and won't consider switching for at least 2 years after any OS release. Home users?
I've been using PCs for almost 20 years and do not believe they have gotten any easier to use.(/blanket statement). What has happened is that a large number of us have become more technically skilled.
I am not a Mac person. I don't like the Mac's image, and find their commercials slamming the PC annoying. However for a non-technical person I wouldn't hesitate recommending a Mac to them. For browsing the internet, sending email, watching online videos - even some gaming (Mac's weak spot)- the Mac is much easier to use and is intuitive.
As John Dvorak writes, "What if Microsoft is in over its head and is now unable to provide a usable OS ever again?"
I don't see hardware saving this OS. Maybe I'll be wrong and eating these words in 2 years, but from the vantage point of the last day of 2007, Vista is a disaster.
I have no dog in this fight, but it's a little annoying to hear people resolutely defend Vista in the face of all its evident issues.
FWIW, I have a friend who worked on several pre-released versions of Vista. His comment was that they left some of the better stuff undone. In his opinion, if they had finished everything that they were working on, it would be a great product. He just thinks its an incomplete system. Full disclosure: he still likes Vista, but his OS of choice is Ubuntu.
Scott,
I'm talking about the hardware and driver environment. I'm also aware that many hardcore gamers are not fond of Vista. OTOH gamers are not necessarily literate on the reasons why they don't like Vista, and blame MS more than their share of the problem. There are two issues here that you have to consider. Are the games written for vista, or tweaked to also run on Vista? Are they written for DX9 OR DX10?
Like Vista DX10 has a lot of eye candy in it. And everything that is in DX9 is also in DX10. Aside from graphics card (driver) considerations, programs have to be written for DX10 to run faster with that DirectX version installed. Otherwise DX10 used what ever DirectX mode the software was written in (for). The way I understand it, uninstalling DX10 and installing DX9 won't make a lick of difference to a program written for DX9.
If the programs are written for DX9, they run in DX9, even if you have installed DX10, because of backward compatibility. Games written for XP and DX9 are just not going to do as well on a fast Vista gaming machine with DX10.
However I don't care for Vista or XP much. I'm not a gamer either, and most of the time I prefer to use Ubuntu. My XP and Ubuntu machines sit side by side using the same hotkey switched monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Thanks for the perspective.
Sandi
Vista should not be put on laptops. It might work on high end machines, but laptops have way too many drivers. I'm tapping on one right now - a so-called Vista ready machine that I've kept XP loaded on. The thing is slow enough without Vista. I couldn't imagine Vista on it.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.