[EaglePC]

It's a lemon.
going to send it back to ms and get full refund.

Now, I like Microsoft as a company. They've put together impressive products and they can do some amazing things. I believe that while they've done both good and ill, the karmic scales of the company weigh more towards the good. I might get personally frustrated with their products and disapprove of certain business decisions, but I also believe that without Microsoft providing a de facto standard for operating systems on the desktop, it would have been harder to achieve the broad information age that we have today. Windows XP Service Pack 2 is a very good operating system because it is stable, works with most hardware, and is easy to use.


I say this to impart that this is not a thoughtless slam or heedless rant against Microsoft, which can often be an inviting target.


Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data. The 64-bit version is slightly better (which, frankly, surprised the hell out of us and makes us wonder if Microsoft didn't make a mistake in choosing to only distribute Home Premium 32-bit in the retail channel), but it still has stability problems.

Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.


When Microsoft moved from the DOS to the NT based architecture for its consumer products, they did so primarily because users were tired of operating systems that had poor stability. The move from Windows 98 to 2000 brought that stability to the masses. Now, users are tired of operating systems with poor security, and in an attempt to bring that security to them, Microsoft has undermined the operating system's stability and overall utility.


I can see what Microsoft was trying to do, but it may be that keeping Windows backwards compatible and making it more secure, all while trying to keep the OS stable may be an impossible task. I don't know if Vista will be improved with the next service pack, but the problems I found seem to stem not from flaws in code, but flaws in design.


I don't want to give into hyperbole, but at the end of the 30 days, I begged Managing Editor Jason Wall to let me reformat my computer and stop testing.


I really did want to like Vista. Yes, it is possible to enjoy both Windows and Linux - but unfortunately this product is unfit for any user. I still intend to keep a Windows XP partition on my computer for gaming and some multimedia editing, but as of the time of this publication, I have removed Vista entirely.


Editor-in-Chief's Note: The fact is that Vista is far from "unfit for any user," and this statement by the author is simply incorrect. If you read the discussion thread linked below you will find there are many Vista users that are having positive experiences. The author's experiences are his own and I think a great look into just some of the complications that can come with upgrading to Vista. Some have had worse experiences and some have had better. -EaglePC

Source: HardOCP

Next time give credit where credit is due or get banned.

This post has been edited by xper: 23 April 2007 - 04:26 PM

[gunsmokingman]

I have not had any problems using Vista, it been stable and fast. I do not play to many games but UT 2004 runs better then it did on the same machine using XP. Stability can be cause by programs or drivers not written for Vista, or are just written badly drivers or applications. Microsoft does try to include a compadibility mode to try and fix these problems. In the end it not Microsoft responsibilty to re-write other programs or drivers to make them work proper on Vista. Blame the software and hardware makers for the problems they may cause when using Vista.

[kartel]

I have been running vista since RC1 and then RC2 until a few days ago, then I purchased Vista Ultimate.
It works great, it's way more stable than XP by far, and if a application does crash, the whole OS doesn't go down with it.
Maybe you have some hardware that doesn't work good with it.

[nightthief]

I have been using Vista since it's Alpha stage. While early versions of the OS wee defiitely buggy and unstable, the same is not true of the retail release. Vista, as it stands today, is more mature and stable than Windows XP SP2 ever was.

If you are experiencing instability, the only reasons I can postulate are that you are using unstable device drivers (nVidia's graphics drivers are among the worst as they are not fully developed yet) or you are running older utilities which are incompatable with Vista. If you performed an upgrade install of Vista over your XP installation, you likely brought over a number of less than reliable drivers and older utilities - which will make the system unstable. If you perform a clean install of VIsta and install only reliable drivers written for Vista, your system will be as rock solid as Ubuntu is.

[mcrvdl]

Vista i think would be better if you had the tech support from MS...eaglePC why not check out technet...if offers all these support which stabilises your OS. You can check it from here:
http://www.microsoft...bscription.mspx

[Gary7]

I have been using Vista for over a year and never had a BSOD. It is very stable if run on the proper equipment. Good luck with trying to get a refund.

[amit_talkin]

i m running Vista as primary OS now....havent used XP since December 2006!

[Jaser]

I'm no computer geek and know little about Operating systems and whats different in each version. But, I will say this, I like Vista. I am only frustrated that Lexmark has not released drivers for my printer.

Well thats my 2cents worth

[jcarle]

Vista gives me motion sickness.

[XPerties]

Gary7, on Apr 13 2007, 02:00 PM, said:

It is very stable if run on the proper equipment.

I would hate to disagree but I have to. I purposely built a new system just for Vista with all the latest hardware and speed:

- Intel Duo Core 2 e6600 cooled by Sunbeam Tuniq Tower 120
- Asus p4B Premium Vista Edition
- 4 gigs of Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 DDR2-800 XMS2-6400 Xtreme Performance Memory
- 2 Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD 150GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer running in Raid 0
- 1 Western Digital Raptor 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
- BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Video Card
- Powered by Thermaltake W0117RU Toughpower 750W Power Supply w/Active PFC


I ran Vista for about a week and gave me nothing but issues. Sure the OS itself is stable but with constant disk searching it was screaming my drives every second for hours and yes I tweaked it and turned a lot of crap off. No software works on it such as dreamweaver, photoshop and Office 2007 outlook locks up during mail checking. Software may not be Vista problem but it's unwilling to adapt to how things run makes it an overall POS. I went back to XP and just been screaming along on my new pc.

The fact is out of the box vista isn't all the great for the normal end user. Gaming, don't get me started on that.

[amit_talkin]

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 07:56 PM, said:

Gary7, on Apr 13 2007, 02:00 PM, said:

It is very stable if run on the proper equipment.

I would hate to disagree but I have to. I purposely built a new system just for Vista with all the latest hardware and speed:

- Intel Duo Core 2 e6600 cooled by Sunbeam Tuniq Tower 120
- Asus p4B Premium Vista Edition
- 4 gigs of Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 DDR2-800 XMS2-6400 Xtreme Performance Memory
- 2 Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD 150GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer running in Raid 0
- 1 Western Digital Raptor 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
- BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Video Card
- Powered by Thermaltake W0117RU Toughpower 750W Power Supply w/Active PFC


I ran Vista for about a week and gave me nothing but issues. Sure the OS itself is stable but with constant disk searching it was screaming my drives every second for hours and yes I tweaked it and turned a lot of crap off. No software works on it such as dreamweaver, photoshop and Office 2007 outlook locks up during mail checking. Software may not be Vista problem but it's unwilling to adapt to how things run makes it an overall POS. I went back to XP and just been screaming along on my new pc.

The fact is out of the box vista isn't all the great for the normal end user. Gaming, don't get me started on that.

i m not agree with you.
i have following configuration

>Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 GHz @ 3.01 GHz( OClocked) + Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro + Arctic Silver 5 Thermal paste applied
>ASUS P5B Deluxe Motherboard Rev 1.xx and bios 1101
>2 GB OCZ EL Platinum XTC DDR2- 1000 Mhz @1076 Mhz 5-5-5-8 RAM
>250 GB Seagate SATA2 HDD + 250 GB USB External HDD
>ATI X1800XT 512 MB @702/1604 ( Core/memory )
> 400 W iBall PSU



i m running vista for last 3 months without any error or any compatibility issue with games like counter strike, Black Hawk Down, Company of heroes, warhammer 40k, etc.. and applications like autocad, 3dsmax, office 2007, photoshop, etc....i havent even used XP since i have installed Vista. i m a hardcore overclocker...so while playing with hardwares to overclock, vista had rebooted many times with BSODs caz of overclocking...though it never failed to start again with next reboot and without any performance decrease!

yes...nvidia having crappy driver issue with vista, so beware of it...its not fault of vista.....anyways i m not telling u to use vista...just clarifying tht vista is not bad at all!

This post has been edited by amit_talkin: 19 April 2007 - 12:50 AM

[nightthief]

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 09:26 AM, said:

I ran Vista for about a week and gave me nothing but issues. Sure the OS itself is stable but with constant disk searching it was screaming my drives every second for hours

When I fist installed Vista, the indexing service began indexing my drives and files. The process took a few hours and ran in the background, providing me with somewhat sluggish performance while it was going on. Once that indexing was complete, however, Vista only indexes files as I add or change them - making it service completely unoticable. In exchange for putting up with it for a little bit of time, I now have instantaneous virtually searches across over a half a terabyte of data, much of it within compressed archives. Quite frankly, performing a single search across my entire system would have taken almostas long as the indexing service took, and would have made my use of the computer unbearable until it was done. The tradeoff of giving up some resources at the beginning for unlimited, instantaneous searches which annot only be saved, but which automatically track new additions and changes to my files is more than worth it.,

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 09:26 AM, said:

No software works on it such as dreamweaver, photoshop and Office 2007

Strange... I am running Photoshop CS2 and Outlook 2007 without the slightest problem.

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 09:26 AM, said:

Gaming, don't get me started on that.

Some gaming problems do exist - and most of those are caused by poor quality graphics drivers from nVidia and ATI. (Although, to be fair, ATI's sem to be somewhat better than their competitor's are.) Very few gaming problems are a result of Vista itself, with the notable exception of incompatability with the Creative Lab's proprietary EAX sound system which some earlier games relied upon. (Using Creative Lab's ALchemy project will fix many of those, even on non-Creative cards - although the latter is not documented.)

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 09:26 AM, said:

yes I tweaked it and turned a lot of crap off.

Well, there you have it... Without knowing nada about how Vista works, you took it upon yourself to tinker under the hood to "tweak and turn things off." And then you wonder why your performance was poor and incompatability was introduced.

XPerties, on Apr 18 2007, 09:26 AM, said:

The fact is out of the box vista isn't all the great for the normal end user.

How could you even make that claim when you never even attempted to use Vista as a 'normal end user'?

[[deXter]]

Aren't you guys being too harsh? Why don't you wait till SP1 and see how it turns out? Every new OS is bound to have bugs. Especially more so with Vista with all the big changes. By the time SP1 is out (november?) the hardware manufacturers, software makers, users, Microsoft.. everyone would have enough time to iron out the bugs.

My point is, its too early to pass any harsh judgement on Vista.

[amocanu]

Windows [Whatever] RTM= Alpha quality Software
Windows [Whatever] SP1 = Beta Quality Software
Windows [Whatever] SP2 = Finished product (RTM quality)

so..every Microsoft operating system will run at an acceptable rate only after it's second service pack

This post has been edited by amocanu: 20 April 2007 - 09:50 AM

[jcarle]

I saved myself the pain. I just refuse to buy it.

Anyways, XP will continue to be supported officially (which means windows updates as well) until April 8th, 2014. They have 7 years to get Vista fixed and I'm not in a hurry to switch.

[DonDamm]

@nightthief - Yes, Office 2007 works okay under Vista, but try sharing tasks over a network with other machines such as you might have in a real office. Ooops! Notifications don't show on the Vista machine! And that's using MS own software like XP with Office 2003 on the other machines. Intuit now tell their customers not to use QuickBooks, a widely used program by SMBs across the country, on Vista as it just doesn't work! I'm sure MS is working on it as I heard they finally bought Quicken which the justice department disallowed years ago. Oh well.

And basic Photoshop works fine as well, but try some of the more intricate things, stress the program a bit and you'll run into glitches. I'm sure these will be worked out in time, too.

However, if you were a business, you'd be foolish to adopt this platform right now. It costs a fair amount and delivers less, and quite a bit in many cases.

I haven't even touched on the embedded and enmeshed DRM fandangle. To work it must monitor every file on your machine and what you do with it. This has to and does affect the overall performance. You can mask this with better hardware and tricks like SuperFetch and ReadyBoost and whatnot, but the bottom line is that Redmond has decided for you what you can and can't do with your machine in many cases. And it's only going to get worse. The whole video sub system is intentionally crippled if you don't have what they deem as "secure" connections all the way through. To date, o monitor on the general market complies! Or graphics card. That mfeans all that HD content you want to watch is intentionally crippled by your system whether you want it or not just because you might make a copy of something on your hard disk!

Do you really want to support this nonsense? Yes, Vista will be a fact of life as it is sold with new machines and we'll have to keep up with it vagaries if that is our business, but personally I'm looking to install Ubuntu as my server and only run Vista or XP in a VM. The new VMware v6.0, though still in beta, is really really fast under Linux. It will blow you away. I'm running Vista with 1GB in a VM right now under 2003 Server and it is pig slow. But under Linux there is hardly a hesitation.

The driver situation will only get better for Vista as it did for XP, but Vista really gets in your face, and sooner or later you're going to cuss at it. It is pretty though! :^) (Is that the only reason to adopt it?)

[kartel]

There is no vista sp1, its a rumour

[[deXter]]

kartel, on Apr 20 2007, 10:43 PM, said:

There is no vista sp1, its a rumour

It's not exactly a rumor, its just unofficial news. Unofficial because Microsoft hasn't formely announced it yet. But the Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, accidently did.

[nightthief]

DonDamm, on Apr 20 2007, 04:46 PM, said:

Yes, Office 2007 works okay under Vista, but try sharing tasks over a network with other machines...

And basic Photoshop works fine as well, but try some of the more intricate things...

The whole video sub system is intentionally crippled...

I haven't even touched on the embedded and enmeshed DRM fandangle. To work it must monitor every file...

I have been working with computers since the early 70's, having cut my teeth on an old PDP-11 and the Altair. I am a hardware engineer by trade, a programmer by necessity, and a hacker by choice. There are very few applications that I have not put my computer system to. As such, try to refrain from talking to me as if I were a neophyte.

My own network consists of seven systems. Three are running Vista Ultimate (two with Office 2k7 and one with 2k3), three are running XP (one with Office 2007 and two with 2k3), and the final one - my server - is running Win-2k3. I use a variety of applications on my network, including the Office Suite with Exchange on my server. The compatability issue you mention has nothing to do with Vista, but is a result of mixing and matching Office 2003 and 2007.

As for Photoshop, I am far from being a regular user I regularly use multiple layers, alpha channel composition, numerous filters, channel substitution, masking, custom brushes, color correction & normalization, and much more. I have never encountered any "glitches" as you claim I would have.

Your comments about the Video system are just as innacurate. While metadata specifying permissions and security have to be accessed for every file, there is virtually no difference between how they are implemented in Vista and how they were in XP & 2003. On all three systems (and even older version of NT such as 4.0 and 3.51), the security metadata associated with every single file on the computer must be accessed every time the file is. The "burden" you claim DRM to be is a myth. Likewise, you are in error when you claim that DRM exists because Microsoft wants to control what you do. While the latter may or may not be true, the implementation of DRM was imposed by the content providers. Microsoft had a choice of either implementing it as the license for interoperability with their media requires, or simply refusing to support it at all - and thus locking all of the Vista users out of being able to use such titles. Quite frankly, Microsoft would have been foolish to take the latter route.

As for your claims of a complete dearth of hardware support for DRM, you really need to check your facts. Both the Radeon x1650xt graphics card in the box I am currently typing on and the Ben-Q monitor attached to it are fully HDMI/HDCP compliant. With the exception of some minor bugs in the current ATI Catalyst video driver, HD video plays without a problem. Not only is this hardware compliant, but so are my 8800GTS card and the Dell monitor it is running. In fact, there are both a handful of cards and displays which support HDCP. Even more, those people who don't have such hardware, can simply bypass the DRM requirements using the current release of AnyDVD.

The one place I will give you credit is in your statement that most Businesses should not adopt Vista & Office 2007.

I do agree with you on the conclusion, but find your reasoning grossly innacurate. Vista offers a considerable boost in productivity for those who have learned how to use it. (And, yes, I have been using Vista for quite a long while - having played with the Alphas and then converting my primary machine to run Vista exclusively starting with Public Beta 1.) Among Vista's many improvements are the streamlined user interface, intelligent use of rendering hardware, instantaneous searches, AI guided cache and memory management (Readyboost, Superfetch, ReadyDrive), and a very robust security subsystem that protects the system against crashes and malicious code. As for stability, my current uptime is now at 187 days, 14 hours, and 22 minutes.

The only reason I agree with your conclusion is because of the economic equation. Due to the newness of Vista and Office 2007, all current schooling is still focused on the XP/O2k3 system. As such, neither employees currently working for a company nor the potential employes they might hire are going to have the skills for the new paradigm. This necessitates retraining on a mass scale, a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. Moreover, until users become proficient with the newer sysems, productivity losses would be guaranteed. Businesses are far wiser to avoid a switch at this point, leveraging the expertise they already possess for XP/O2k3, and wait on switching until such time as the home & enthusiast markets (and any formalized training which arises) provide a reasonable level of proficient users.

This post has been edited by nightthief: 21 April 2007 - 04:17 PM

[DonDamm]

Well, excyooose me! I wasn't talking down to you and apologize if you felt so. Thank you for the bio. It's clear you have more experience than I do, but I stand by my post within the context of what I was saying. Of course, the issue with Office is because of mixing and matching 2003 and 2007. But that is the point. This wasn't my client but a friend in West Virginia, but it was a real world problem that caused many headaches. Tasks are an aspect of Office many never delve into.

As for the hardware, I live in Austria and while there may be one or two out there, none of the main online electronics outlets or computer stores here sell monitors with HDMI conectors, and even the LCD TVs which claim to be HD-ready just aren't. Most people I know don't have the spare cash to spring for an 8800GS card either. And it would be well to mention that nVidia are having great problems getting their drivers to be fully compatible and they've now decided to charge money for them! That's good or bad depending what side of the fence you're on. The fact is that most of the HD content will be constricted on a Vista system with most of the hardware that folks have now. That means to access it, they'll have to invest in new hardware beyond just more RAM and a heftier chip. Many buying a new machine won't realize this until later. They'll be shut out until they spend more money. At least if they want to use Vista, because as I said, Vista will constrict the video stream. Using AnyDVD is only a partial solution and certainly not the most desirable one. People like you know about it, but most of my customers don't and they are the ones who end up paying.

Yes, I've known about the security descriptors and file access for quite a while, but DRM goes far beyond the Hollywood content providers. The TCP neé Platinum is slowly but surely putting the pieces in place that will severly hamper the use of your own machine. I have nothing against the concept of protecting content per se, but I do have great misgivings about the overall concept based on copyright laws which need to be revisited to restore some of the original intent. That is another issue entirely, but it does play into it.

Again, I meant no offense to you in anyway and only wanted to comment on my own experience in relation to what you said. I also said that most of the problems with drivers and such will be ironed out over time. You might glean from that that I'm not an MS basher by trade or hobby. I'm glad your system is stable for you and that it has not caused any of the problems others seem to have had. We benefit from your input.