Windows Vista RC1 Impresses Critics 632
bradley fellows writes "Early feedback from testers already using Windows Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) report that the OS is more stable than expected, which bodes well for Microsoft's plan to have Vista out according to its current schedule." Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
pithy comment necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to bash Vista, bash it on something more interesting and true like for instance DRM issues. Windows bashing might be a past time on slashdot, but you would think by now people would have refined their techniques beyond "Windoze is teh crashering thing, shnarf!".
Ye, ready... (Score:2, Insightful)
Followed swiftly by:
By the same writer. Methinks he doesn't really understand the term "Release Candidate".
Taco, what are you smoking? ;) (Score:3, Insightful)
Overall I think a well-kept XP box is very stable indeed, and I'm not expecting a bit less than that from Vista.
just my 0.03(*)
(*) adjusted for inflation
What crashes? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, up until SuSE 10.1, Linux and its various programs have been far more unstable than Windows XP. Again, that's not counting viruses and security problems. Almost every Linux distribution I've ever installed ended up going down in flames because of silly bugs, unexplained SIGSEV 11 windows and hardware compatibility issues. Try relying on many of the communities built up around Linux and you're often met with the elitist attitude that quickly turns most people off.
I'm not trying to troll here (although I'm sure I'll be modded that way because I realize many of you just don't want to hear all of this), but the last line in this story provoked me. I'm trying to help the Linux community with this commentary, not flame it. I want to believe in Linux, but the issues on most distros boggles my mind... how can something so buggy earn a reputation of reliability?
Extra points for people who point out that the editor said "PC" and not "Windows" when talking about crashes. We all know what they really meant.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
The Emperor's Clothes (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, rather, it is more of a, "Microsoft will get it right in the end." No matter how many times a network goes down due to a minor piece of malware, no matter how many support calls are generated by spyware/adware -- so bad that it has reached the point that techs would rather re-image than try to repair, no matter how many crashes and instability issues, people blindly defend, support and believe in Microsoft. And I'm talking about veteran, senior, experiences IT folks.
Even though they know to keep the big money on a mainframe Unix box, even though they know that it makes more sense to run a hardened Cisco device instead of a Windows-based network node, they are devoted to the Windows workstation and the Windows mid-server solution.
And, if you dare promote open source -- firefox, linux, apache, sendmail -- solutions you are darn near ostracized. It has reached the point now that I follow, in-line, rather than risk the flames.
I'm not sure what to call it exactly, but people tolerate Microsoft like no other company. If any other vendor's products barely hiccups, there is talk, quickly, of replacing it -- and they do, but Windows is as fixed within the corporate world as Everest. Thoughts of removing it being akin to getting rid of desk chairs. It simply will not happen.
It has reached, IMO, a place where every big, corporate business wants to be -- embedded to the point of religion....
What's Expected (Score:3, Insightful)
So... all we had to do was ask? (Score:2, Insightful)
LeBlanc said Microsoft has made performance and stabilisation tweaks that testers requested after Beta 2.0, and the latest test version of the OS - which could be the final one before Vista is released to manufacturing - is solid enough for regular use.
I'm baffled. Does this mean that the performance and stability issues in earlier builds (and XP) were only there because we forgot to request them to be removed/fixed?
Looks like it's time to make a Christmas list of other things that MS should have done in Vista already, that I guess we all forgot to request! ;-)
Semantics (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't necessarily say a lot.
Now I don't use any MS Software any more but it'd be nice if rather than hype, speculation and derision there was some constructive discussion out there in the main stream media so that people could decide what to do when Vista is released, maybe not yet but just before or even after the release.. Oh except it will arrive on 90% of PC's pre installed so it will gain a dominant market share in 2-5 years regardless of reviews, hype, bugs, features, security or anything else..
What's the point. I use Linux, some use BSD, Windows, Mac OS or whatever (please add your own preference here). Regardless of how easy it is to install an OS, most people never will, so most people will stick to what their PC comes with, so all this talk will have a tiny effect on the general populate.
So at the end of the day its not important how stable, secure, feature packed, or "cool" this piece of kit is, is it?
The question is how do you change that?
Bah
Re:Grain of Salt (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting spin (Score:3, Insightful)
This is, of course, the default result of how Microsoft has designed their software over the past ten or twenty years. You could argue that this is 20/20 hindsight (which is probably somewhat true), or the fault of those thousands of hardware and software vendors who wrote for Microsoft.
Of course, Microsoft could have gone the closed route that Apple used, but it seems that would have cost a whole bunch of money that they wanted for other purposes. So they decided to do it on the cheap, and brilliantly decided to let their vendor partners shoulder the cost of development of a lot of the incidental hardware and software widgets. This naturally leads to conflicts.
Now it has come back to bite them. They tried to cheat the piper, and now it is costing them extra. I'm sure that people have heard of the old adage "measure twice, cut once". Microsoft sometimes seems like a company that "measures twice, and cuts twice"
Admittedly, pursuing perfection in software development is an infinite money pit. But you can go too far the other way, as seen by the apparent evidence of their results. How many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC?
Re:Grain of Salt (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here, and I've had my computer on practically 24/7 (some nights turning it off when there's nothing to torrent). Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Re:Interesting spin (Score:5, Insightful)
I would tend to agree with you - mostly. On a properly maintained machine I'd agree - except for NTFS file system errors (often caused by the bundled third party drive management utils like the "MS" defrag tool).
Now, on an "improperly" maintained machine, I find an equal amount of bluescreens and crashes to be due to virii and spyware that's corrupted an XP install/taken over critical services/etc.
The question is, should we not count those in the total because the end-users should be "properly" maintaining their machines (ie: patches, AV and AS software, a real firewall, etc) - or do we count those towards the total # of crashes/BSODs and hold MS responsible because they released an OS that had so many unresolved issues (after all, many of the buffer overflow/underrun issues have existed in the code since the NT4/2000 days)?
The unfortunate thing about this debate is that depending on what you believe the end-user/MS is responsible for, no matter what you assert, you are correct (based off your assertations).
I'm not arguing either side, btw. I'm just pointing out that either answer is "right" depending on the base premise behind it - which many here and elsewhere differ on (and is yet another debate in it's own right).
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What crashes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because, of course, God knows 3rd party apps cannot run in kernel mode.
I've seen a lot of machines run XP, and all the bluescreens I've encountered have been due to a bad wifi card driver written by a company that had gone bust, and an IT department sniffer app (Centennial's Discovery) that would run once a day and invariably blue-screen if a virtual PC was running at the same time.
(And these things are pretty easy to troubleshoot if you bother to look at the crash log files, heck there's even a tool for it [microsoft.com] these days.)
Re:Interesting spin (Score:2, Insightful)
B
Comparisons to XP... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting spin (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll grant you that well enough - the problem is, with the average user, that would happen on just about any system that became sufficiently popular.
I'd say that these are issues, but what other OS is popular enough that it's been tested by the malevolents of the world to the extent of Windows? Linux for a while was over Windows a few years ago, in the server market, and if memory serves, hand more successful hack-ins too. Were it a user OS, I would expect that to lead to the issues mentioned in Windows if it ever became sufficiently popular.
So you are saying we are all right, but just in our own minds? I like that. Shame I can't give you good karma for that one (haven't quite figured out how to turn it on). I've found an OSs security and stability are inversly proportional to it's popularity, all other things being approximately within an order of magnitude of eachother.
Re:Interesting spin (Score:3, Insightful)
Since I have been using XP I do not regard frequent crashes as a normal operation and everytime it has occured it was due to hardware such as bad RAM. XP has been rock solid in my experience, I actually have only had to reinstall the whole OS once since I first installed it when it was released 5 years ago, and the reason I had to reinstall was because the hard disk I had it on went bad. As long as you have half a brain and take reasonable security precautions there is no reason that anybody could not have the same experience that I have had.
You will probably get modded up for being a MS basher even though not all of what you say is true. Sure, not everything they make works great or is brilliantly designed but I do not think that is a result of them specifically planning it that way which is what you seemed to be saying. They have come a long way in the last few years and occurances such as daily crashes are a thing of the past, so people need to stop bringing them up.
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also I very rarely have to reboot because of 3rd party app problems, I generally just ctrl+alt+del to sysinternals excellent free process explorer and kill the offending program.
Before replying, read what someone says before putting words in their mouth.
Please Stop These Windows Vistas Posts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shitty 3D drivers and hardware is not MS's fault. I dont call Linus a bastard because tux racer doesnt work on my old HP box. In fact, MS has done a surprisingly decent job of helping push out stable drivers with their signed drivers program. Their NT based products are actually pretty nice. The Dos/Win95 stuff, not so much. Most crashes nowadays can be traced to poor drivers or failing hardware.
Of course this ignores drm, wga, licensing, costs, bundled apps, etc.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows crashes. Macs crash. I've seen Windows machines without problems and those with plenty. Macs lock up and crash too. Does mine? It did, till I got the logic board repaired. Did my PC? No. Did my parents' PC? Yes. Every system will have different results depending on it's users and enviornment. That's it.
*is tired of spin-doctoring and blind loyalty*
Re:Interesting spin (Score:3, Insightful)
Being that new stuff gets bought all the time, I guess there are many kids/adults who had parents that did not teach them this vital lesson in life.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every computer I've ever had, whether running windows, mac os, linux or freebsd has crashed periodically. On the other hand, a crash every couple of weeks isn't the end of the world for most people. I'll gladly take a nice OS that lets me be productive over one that never crashes.
And for what it's worth, what counts as a 'crash' for slashdot folk is not what counts as a 'crash' for most people. My mom probably has to restart her computer all the time to fix problems, whereas you and I might be savvy enough to restart the Finder/Explorer and keep on doing our thing.
Re:Interesting spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprise, surprise. Despite being a big name in the anti-malware business, Symantec seems to put out CPU hogging, slow, virus-insensitive crap. I tend to replace Norton with Avast! on most computers that I work with, since Avast! is faster and actually seems to detect viruses better than Norton.
-b.
Re:Interesting spin (Score:3, Insightful)
It's ridiculous when I can't write a file from OSX to my friend's NTFS external HDD. The filesystem could be fantastic, a joy to use and full of useful features, but if there's not full interoperability with all platforms, then I don't consider it very good.
Note: I'm not just pointing the finger at NTFS, other filesystems have problems on the interoperability front (yes HFS, I mean you). It's just that NTFS is much more widely used.
Re:Windows bashing is old, even for Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed: BSoD's are pretty rare now. It's the *other* problems that suck, like Windows allowing 3rd party programs to grab 99% of CPU by default and slow the machine to a crawl, and the fact that Windows installs older than 6 months are often slow as molasses until you remove all of the malware, defrag, and figure out what else is slowing them down.
-b.
Re:pithy comment necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
For anybody to be arguing that the number of updates you get to an operating system is how you should be judging it, is completely stupid, really, really dumb. The linux 2.6 kernel has had 94 released patches against it since December 03 (goto kernel.org if you don't believe me), or getting close to an average of 3x per month (1x every 10-11 days). Using your logic, I should be rediculing linux because it's releasing kernel patches averaging ~3x a month for something so core to the OS (and you don't get that much part of the Operating System than that), heck just last month August alone there were 2.6.17.8, 2.6.17.9, 2.6.17.10 & 2.6.17.11 releases (3x of the 4x in august deal with some pretty serious issues, kernel oops, memory corruption, panics, etc not trivial things we are talking about). Patches in reality don't really mean much, it's simply a way of life and anyone who has been in the computer industry for *any* length of time knows this, only somone who hasn't been in the real world with computers has ignorance of this.
And nice little try at a dig, you failed miserably as I would actually have to care about what you think to be concerned (and you showed me that I should laugh at you rather than respect you).
Who the hell are these users??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is hardware never faulty under Linux? (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, all those people who claim "XP is rock-solid for me" are quick to add "the only problems I've had were due to faulty hardware" or "the only problems were due to third-party device drivers".
I use Linux, except for a couple of games that don't run under Wine. And I have *NEVER* had any crash under Linux that I could claim to be caused by faulty hardware. If the hardware is faulty, the computer will not turn on, or will not boot, will not find the hard disk or keyboard, etc. Detecting faulty hardware is done by the BIOS, not by system crashes. Some times, with very cheap fans, the fan bearings will stick and the CPU will overheat, that's true. But in those cases, rebooting will do you no good, the CPU won't start working again until it cools down.
As for third party device drivers, the only one I have in Linux is for the NVidia card. It has given me some trouble a few times, after I did kernel upgrades. Then I have to reinstall the driver, but the system will never freeze when running normally.
Defective hardware or device drivers don't cause the system to crash; they may not let the system start up but they will not kick in while the system is running and cause it to freeze. Not under Linux.
Defective hardware causes problems like the ones you get in a car. If the ignition breaks down, your car will stop working. Getting out of the car and then getting back in will not make your car work again. Hardware faults are like that. When XP crashes, if you turn off the power, turn it back on, reboot and the system starts working again, then it was certainly not a hardware failure.
Then, if not a hardware failure, what caused it? Why is it that one gets more XP crashes on cheap hardware than in better systems? Answer: because it has race conditions that are better handled by faster CPUs. It's not that you get less crashes on "better" hardware under XP, you get less crashes on faster hardware, which is generally considered "better".
One of the most common causes of crashes is when two different kernel routines which are incompatible with each other try to run at the same time. With a fast CPU, there is a higher probability that the first one will finish before the other one kicks in. If you look into the Linux kernel discussions, you'll notice how much talk there is about avoiding race conditions and deadlocks. When there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people working together, there is a higher chance that some very obscure race condition that occurs rarely will be detected by someone looking over the code. That's why Linux can use older hardware that will not run under XP, not because Linux is leaner or XP is bloated, but because the Linux kernel has been carefully combed with a fine tooth comb by many people.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the other evidence:
Constant mentions of "Clippy", which has been turned off by default for ages. (Yes, you can still turn on "Clippy" in Office 2003... you know why? A lot of people LIKE it! God-forbid Microsoft keep a feature people like!)
Mentions of Microsoft Bob. If I posted about how much Red Hat sucked in 1994, you'd get turned into -1 Flamebait instantly here. If you post about how much Microsoft Bob sucked, you'll get a +5 Informative.
Mentions of things that no regular Windows user would deal with, for instance: auto-correct and auto-format in Word. If you used Windows for longer than 20 seconds, you'd realize you can TURN OFF those features if you don't like them. (And again, a lot of people DO like them, that's why Microsoft keeps them on.)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is you OS "fragging" your storage. I always thought "frag" was a bad thing when it happened to you, but for some reason Windows users find it acceptable that there OS is "fragging" them regularly. I just chose to use a OS that either does not "frag" my system, or is stable enough that being "fragged" doesn't have any noticeable effect.
Yes I know what fragmentation is, but haven't had a fragmentation problem since I stopped using Windows (specifically FAT, though NTFS isn't that much better).
What is an OS again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about that for a moment. Consider exactly how software should ever be capable of crashing the operating system, the very platform on which it is running. If poorly-written (or malicious) applications can crash the entire operating system, the operating system is quite simply not doing its job.
Why do I need to defrag? (Score:5, Insightful)
But recently we got an industrial control system from an outside supplier that runs in XP. The manufacturer has given very strict instructions on how to operate that system, such as definitely no connections to outside networks, defragment the drive regularly, and reboot at least once every week. I asked them why the reboots and they answered Because. Or Else. The only official answer I got was that XP needs regular defrags and a reboot at least once a week to work reliably.
Why? Why reboot? Why defrag? Why doesn't Linux need defrags? As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to defrag a Linux drive. I don't know how to defrag a VAX/VMS drive. What have I been missing?
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is an OS again? (Score:5, Insightful)
True. Try this [wikipedia.org] on a standard Linux install, but not on someone else's box, or where you mind the box being brought to its knees. You don't have to be root.
Re:What is an OS again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why do I need to defrag? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No expensive hardware needed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
A patch a while back drove me to the brink. One to three times a day explorer would shut itself down when I opened my music folder in order to protect me against something (maybe a buffer overrun attempt in the metadata? of course I can't replicate it will typing this...). On my last computer, explorer would effectively crash when I opened a folder with a lot of movies; it would use 99% of the cpu and 100+MB of ram trying to generate thumbnails and wouldn't stop. It's a known problem apparently. Simply opening a folder would force me to restart explorer! A folder with say 100 files in it or less.
EXPLORER.EXE is a real piece of shit sometimes, but I still love it.
Why is Linux software never "Buggy"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see. Then let me ask another question: why is the software running in any Microsoft OS always so "buggy", if the OS is not to blame? How is it that I can download and install random applications from Sourceforge and run it in Linux without problem, yet XP seems to have so many problems in running applications from one of the leading aerospace companies in the world, which is the case in my company?
In VAX/VMS I ran open source applications that weren't always so kosher, at first they came from DECUS (Digital Equipment Co. User Society) and later from other sources in the internet. Never had any problem. In our Linux server, the users run every sort of applications they download from who knows where. Our policy is to let them do it, we never had any problem with that. But XP must be kept locked into a strictly maintained configuration. Why didn't our VMS software vendors ever warn us against installing third party software in our machines?
From all these discussions, one conclusion is obvious: either developers who write applications for Linux and VMS are incredibly superior, or XP is an inferior OS. In any case, I have deep misgivings about this use of XP in mission critical applications. I have warned my managers, in writing, about this. The fact is, it doesn't matter if it's the applications or the underlying OS which is at fault, from the experience I have had so far, XP is inferior to either Linux or VMS when one needs reliability.