Vista RC2: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect 217
jcatcw writes, "Scot Finnie continues his love — hate relationship with Windows Vista. He installed the latest beta, RC2, on three machines. First problem: drivers — too many of them that should be available just aren't. User Access Control remains annoying and Vista's Software Protection Platform puts antipiracy above user security. Software compatibility is still in need even at this late date. However, previous problems with the Media Center were absent." And turnitover writes to point us to PC Mag's RC2 review. Their bottom line is that they expect an RC2+ or even an RC3 before it goes final. Here is PC Mag's slide show.
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Perfect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second thing - This RC is more like a beta
And well, when was anything perfect?
There's always more work to be done for everything, including vista
Drivers... (Score:5, Insightful)
First problem: drivers (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Perfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sheesh.
Love? Hate? (Score:2, Insightful)
What matters if it delivers value. What matters if it meets the requirements. What matters if it is usable. What matters is if it delivers on the promise. What matters is support. And so on and so forth...
Re:So which is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all betas are RCs.
Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista (Score:1, Insightful)
No need to put yourself through pains when you can improve security, save money and achieve some level of vendor independence all at the same time.
Whats the point in look at RC's (Score:3, Insightful)
DivX Drivers... (Score:1, Insightful)
So did Circuit City.
Hate to love, love to hate (Score:3, Insightful)
Random thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Do translucent windows add anything to the use experience?
User: "Oh look, at the top of my window through a
But I will say it's coming bugs and all so you all might as well get used to it. Just think of how much money you'll make installing and fixing Vista? Just think of how little I'll be paying for Vista thanks to having MSDN via work...Big kisses to MS now!
Re:Who was expecting "perfect"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade?
Yes.
If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
Yes.
Of course there are always going to be "features" you'll want to upgrade for and there will be "features" (like DRM) that you will want to avoid. The question is how many people will hold out until the DRM "features" will force them to "upgrade" to the new OS because nothing else will work anymore.
Damned RAID (Score:2, Insightful)
I went to the vista install fair in mtn view (Score:4, Insightful)
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?fo
in short, these things didn't work for me:
- avira antivir (threat to MS on their own 'defender' ?)
- monaco optix xr pro (screen calibrator 'puck'; aka 'colorimeter'. pro photog guys NEED this)
- oem nero6 (I need that for lightscribe work. MS doesn't do LS, I don't think, and sadly neither does unix)
- cisco vpn (I use that to login to work remotely. this is a must-have for me.)
it also didn't like my epson scanner (1640su). a very standard and high quality flatbed scanner - not on the supported list.
it took 4 hours to do an upgrade (at the MS building, on sunday, yesterday) on an amd64 x2 3800 dualcore system. sigh.
its good that I cloned my disk before I brought my box over to them. that disk will get scrubbed and put back on the shelf and I'm back to using XP for pshop/cs2 work - where ALL my hardware and sw continues to work.
zero reason to upgrade to vista. zero. in fact, it brings me backwards and forces me to re-buy perfectly good hardware. that color puck was $300. I will NOT be re-buying THAT again - it works fine in xp and does what its supposed to.
vista is very close to shipping. and there are MAJOR failings. this does not bode well.
Re:Whats the point in look at RC's (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perfect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More refined guys, in SP1 :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps a subtle way of saying to your users: "Pssst. You can open up tabs." If they're hidden by default (as, for example, in Firefox), a user could go for months or even longer without even knowing they were there.
The cynic in me (see sig) wonders if it's actually because the rendering gets b0rked when you reduce the window height to display the tabs...
You basically get a choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically you get to choose how you want it. Now you are right in that normal users won't use the password option but you do have to be realistic here. You can't make security too arduous for people or they'll simply turn it off. We faced that problem with Tiny Personal Firewall back in the Win2000 days. We tried to get people to use it, but it was just too much of a pain. They'd turn it off because they got tired of the massive number of popups. Even though the most secure software firewall ruleset is to make extremely granular rules (TPF 2 make rules per application, port, protocol and direction so if any of those were different it would pop up for a new rule) it was just too much for normal users. What we had to do to make them use it was set it to permit all outbound, deny all inbound (what the MS firewall does by default). Then it didn't bother them so they'd leave it.
Re:Seriously, they must be joking (Score:1, Insightful)
What is funny/sad about that screenshot is that they finally solved the age-old Windows problem ("what's uhcrwj.exe do?"), and solved it in the age-old crappy Windows way (duct tape!).
The Mac uses human-readable names for applications, which means you can have single-icon apps that you can install or move or copy by hand, and also means the Activity Monitor [osu.edu] can show human-readable names. Imagine that.
Microsoft's solution? Keep the crappy filenames, and add a "Description" column. Oi. Really, what do those guys in Redmond have against naming things what they are? OK, maybe keep "cmd.exe" as a link for compatibility, but there's no reason to not use real names for new programs. It's not like anybody's going to be running Vista on a FAT12 filesystem. Call it "Desktop Window Manager.exe", and then drop the ".exe" from the Name column. Naming programs with 3-letter names made sense in 1970's Unix when you had to type them a bunch, but "dwm.exe" is just stupid.
Re:Who was expecting "perfect"? (Score:1, Insightful)
When the time comes, Microsoft will make you want to upgrade by stopping support for XP.
Re:I overlooked it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Crackers concentrate on the weakest link, not on the toughest. Old (and unpatched) Windows releases are what they target, Vista will be targeted only if it's significantly easy to exploit (which, if we believe the features, won't be the case).
They also attack where the greatest number of targets will be. If there's a significant number of vista machines on the net they'll be toiling away trying to break in, I have no doubt they will succede.
Re:Perfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm... Like support for firewire?
Re:Who was expecting "perfect"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista will not be 100% perfect on every machine. It will have less driver support and optimization than XP at first. This is a known fact, since so much of the internal of the OS has been rewritten.
XP had an advantage with drivers, because the win98/win2k driver generation worked flawlessly on XP for the most part. Vista is is only 'partially' true, because if the drivers are poorly written or try to do unsecure things, Vista won't let them do it.
There is also the massive Video changes in Vista. I know a lot of people think it is just pretty stuff, but it is far deeper than this. Not only has most of the Video drivers been moved back to User mode with even hot plug capability, but they also are doing things that NO video drivers have ever even attempted in the history of consumer OSes. Things like multitasking GPU functions, virtualizing GPU RAM to system RAM, as well as the implementation of a true Vector layer acceleration and Compoer layer. (To put this into context, think of OSX, it is basically Windows GDI+ with a bitmap composer, Vista goes far deeper by not only being a Vector composer, but only adds in a new level of GPU and application interaction.)
Ok, so there are going to be some issues with 'unsecure' software and bad older drivers. Hardware vendors will eventually get their crap together and this will not be a long term problem.
Vista does gain in the areas of user productivity in many areas, areas that most GEEKS haven't even tested or realize is there.
Let's take the Video driver changes for a quick example. Since the WDDM driver model in Vista can virtualize GPU RAM, you can run several high end games and 3d Applications that would consume your GPUs RAM, and Vista will just swap out memory from the GPU that is not speed needed, so these applicaitons will run side by side without failing because your Video card doesn't have enough RAM. In a way, it is like giving your Video Card a RAM boost.
The second part of the WDDM that is more productive, is because of the Vector acceleration and Vector composer that sits between the applications and what you see on the screen, a lot of BUSINESS applications see a tremendous boost in performance. I could give ya the standard answers that obscured Windows don't have to repaint themselves which should be obvious, but there are also applicaitons like CorelDraw and AI, where the illustration drawing is 10-20x faster in Vista because of the vector acceleration along with the less frequent application redraw messages. (For example, not only will Corel draw the images on the screen faster, but it won't have to repaint the image if you open your Browser in front of it.)
So in the long run, just for people that are doing graphic design and Video editing Vista is SEVERAL times faster than XP and OSX, and worth the change over, even on current hardware.
Other business applications also get these speed improvements, but they are less noticeable since they are not all about drawing complex vector or bitmpa images.
The other myth is that you need to upgrade your system. If you want to have the Glass effects in Vista, you going to need a very basic Video card. A GeforceFX 5200 with 128mb of RAM will more than cover the needed requirements. I think you can even get by with a 64mb version of the card for the 'glass'. These are REALLY OLD Cards in the cycle of a computer.
The other thing you are going to want is 'extra' RAM for Vista, as it does a lot more prefetch caching and will run faster with more RAM, that is why you need a system with 512mb of RAM. (And again, this is NOT a major upgrade)
So you if your computer has an AGP Video card with PS2 that was produced 3 years ago and 512mb of RAM, you are going to have a great Vista experience.
If you computer is above these specifications, then you will have a 'better than XP' experience in almost everything you do.
There are a few rough edges in Vista, and I'm not here to say it i
Re:Perfect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Another day, another RC (Score:2, Insightful)
The funny thing is I have yet to see a Linux distribution release come out bug-free either. In fact, in the 12 years I've been playing with Linux, I've seen at least a handful of releases that, a month later, had hundreds of megs of "bug fixes". And I remember at least one distribution that, upon its final release, destroyed certain CD recorders. I won't even bring up the fact that I have PCs that Ubuntu won't even install on, much less run correctly on, but both XP and Vista install and run on all the machines without a hitch.
But I guess that's okay, since its Linux and we love Linux even when it fucks up.
Re:I went to the vista install fair in mtn view (Score:3, Insightful)
- avira antivir (threat to MS on their own 'defender' ?)
- monaco optix xr pro (screen calibrator 'puck'; aka 'colorimeter'. pro photog guys NEED this)
- oem nero6 (I need that for lightscribe work. MS doesn't do LS, I don't think, and sadly neither does unix)
- cisco vpn (I use that to login to work remotely. this is a must-have for me.)
This kind of software almost NEVER works with a new OS.
vista is very close to shipping. and there are MAJOR failings. this does not bode well.
Come on. We've had 12 years of major OS releases where people have experienced the same problem as you. Guess what. Things were fine. These are not major failings. You're just being alarmist.