Comment Feed for Vista is great or it sucks? (Perimeter on TechNet Edge)

Re: Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

alice1 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:45:47 GMT

I think its good but a litle for new users t should be more user friendly..

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

David Tesar — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:20:50 GMT

I was curios what boot times I would get after installing Win7 RC on this same laptop. It shaved ~21 seconds off of boot time (~ 39 seconds to control-alt-delete). Also, it was only about 5 seconds from login to accessible desktop (everything loaded)! Although the login time is not exactly the same because I do not have all of the same programs loaded, shaving off 1 minute 25 seconds is huge!

Re: Re: Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

David Tesar — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:53:58 GMT

Response only almost a year later... but yes I did try the sysinternals tool autoruns. I had already done most of this work manually via startup-start menu, removing registry entries, etc, so it had negligible impact.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

PFM — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:42:41 GMT

I am truly enjoying Vista and can't wait for Windows 7. Anyone who hates Vista for no reason other than stupid maac ad's is missing out. I tried the switch before trying Vista and it sucked horribly,, the alternitive is not even such, it's endless limitations and app hunting.

Windows Vista is the best windows release for me thus far, and I have been a proud Windows user since 3.1

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Nyamej — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:56:58 GMT

I like to think Vista is to computing as electronic ignition, fuel injection, traction control, and/or side-impact airbags is to automotive industry (stay with me on this!). It may not make your car rabbit off the light faster or improve the note out the tailpipe of your high-flow exhaust, but it is a smarter long-term strategy. Folks who roll their ’73 Pintos into the shop and say, “Trick me out with Vista!” are in for a surprise; it’s just not a good use of pimp-my-ride effort. Similarly, there are other folks who covet the latest and greatest model but stand over the engine bay and slander the electronic fuel injection because it’s not carbureted.

Bottom-line, most of us compute to get something done. We get in the car to go somewhere; we don’t take drives in the country for the sake of it. Truly, those days of novelty computing are over, but we can still commute or run errands in style. Indeed, the new body style (Aero) is a matter of taste, but we in the shop (IT) look past the body panels. And although Vista relocated the radio knobs, glove box, fuses, most of our folks like the redesign but still want to glue on cheap tailfins, fuzzy dice, and curb feelers (free stuff off the Internet). I like to think of Vista as one of those shiny new pickup trucks that look like a Rolls on the inside but can still haul 15 bales of hay and a trailer full of hogs.

Unfortunately, I have heard not just yahoos on the Internet and drunks at the local ice house refer to Vista with their finest derogatory names, but a couple well-respected industry leaders shun Vista as well. One even said to a room full of knowledge management experts, “Vista is Microsoft’s gift to Apple.” Like those commentators, I feel Microsoft probably did too much too fast and underestimated the short-term market impact. I have been in the IT business for over 20 years now and have seen (and used intimately) a dozen or so OSes come and go. The tech/IT commerce highway is littered with good ideas and technology that ran out of (financial) gas, were run off the road by Mad Max (aggressive marketing), or were simply abandoned due to a lack qualified drivers (ahead of its time).

I direct a global IT organization spread across several languages/cultures, and I see Microsoft, with its deep pockets and thick resources (financial, marketing, technical expertise), as the best - or what we affectionately term “sucks less” - overall global choice. The “sucks less” metric is measured in utility per money: will it meet our requirements (not wants) over the long-term for a reasonable TCO (total cost of ownership) without running out of gas, getting run off the road and is drivable without sending the army of drivers back to school. Vista does just that and more, especially if you’re managing a couple thousand PCs across the globe with GPOs and other IT management systems. Furthermore, Vista tends to provide me more horsepower for the same amount of fuel (I can go faster more quickly and reliably on the same battery life).

Re. device drivers and ISV relations, it took some time to for the parts and accessory manufacturers to get their ducks in a row for Vista, esp. VPN, anti-virus/end-point protection and the more esoteric utility vendors. I happened to know and experienced that Microsoft did not develop Vista in a vacuum, rather they engaged ISVs in a fairly typical-for-Microsoft (gorilla-like but oozing with resources) manner. The ISVs who played the game well did well. A few ISVs whined about losing control of parts of the architecture, but it was for the long-term betterment of customers in the end. And our mechanics (IT techs and developers) have picked it up quickly, thanks to the copious and free resources from Microsoft, and we’ll be that much more ready for Windows 7 for the long haul. When it’s all mixed together, we see Vista as the most compelling, sucks-less, multi-cultural, shiny pickup, enabling all of our users to do better, faster, longer and more securely.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

E Town — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:35:06 GMT

I use XP 64-bit and prefer it. Its too bad that Microsoft chose to abandon this product because its what most people need.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Aaron — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:42:44 GMT

Vista will be remembered in history like Windows 3, Windows Me or Copland to the MAC. All failed to deliver what they intended or promised. Regardless of the number of band aids (Service packs) or field dressing that you put on it.

The greatest disadvantage that MS has over Apple. They have to cater for a World of legacy parts and computers with oddball components. Therefore Vista has to come in several versions to work.

Whose fault is this? MS spent too long trying to develop Longhorn/Vista and it was done in secrecy. This meant computer manufacturers didnt begin to future-proof the market until it was too late. (Had seven years!)

Apple has its OS running on its own proprietary Hardware and has the advantage of things. "Just working". They dont usually use the latest graphics card but they tend to use the one that is well tested and stable. Its interesting since the advent of OSX on the power PC the backup plan was already in place for intel. (As it eventuated) The G5 chip now runs xboxes and MacOS is on Intel.

Linux is a peculiar animal. Its development is transparent and being open source manufacturers can tune their hardware for it. This is particularly evident with the Low cost mini PC projects. MS completely missed this market all together and hastily bundled XP-Home for these. But really XP is like lining your grandmother up Olympic 100 metres race in comparison to the new offerings from linux. Apple chose development of the iphone OS (Which is the same as its fully featured bigger brother.)

Unfortunately in the case of MS comparing it to Apple. They don't have the lifeboat called NXT. They have to win their customers confidence back with windows 7.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Rich Gibbons — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:24:44 GMT

I'm more than happy with Vista and I'm glad to see that more and more people are coming round to deploying Vista.

Yes, it did/does some slightly annoying things that I can't fathom and I wish it would stop..but so does XP! I run Vista @ home and XP Pro @ work and my office machine is full of quirks and oddities..

@ this year's WPC, The Ballmernator gave a host of quotes slating the OS "Not ready for the Enterprise", "Poor driver support" etc and they were all relating to XP from it's release..

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

wisemx — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:22:38 GMT

Hands down Vista rocks.
VS2008, Camtasia Studio, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 all running at the same time with no problems.
(Intel Dual, nVidia SLI)
The biggest change I made is a 4GB ReadyBoost. (Data Traveler, ReadyBoost version.)
Spent less than $30 for it on Amazon and it smoothed out all the bumps.
I've got this baby singing, with all the bells and whisltes and none of the Vista hacks.

Re: Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Andrew — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:57:55 GMT

Bootup time will probably not get any better. The reason it's so long compared to Windows XP is that Vista is attempting to preload your commonly used apps into memory, thus making access faster. Whether this really works or not, I don't really know.

As for my own use of Vista, I run Vista Ultimate x64 on my desktop and Vista Home Premium x86 on my Dell Laptop. I can tell you this, Vista x86 (32-bit) is a joke compared to x64. System response on my desktop us much faster than it ever was with XP on the same hardware. The 32-bit version can be flaky on my laptop.

Is Vista perfect? Not by any means. I do however think it's a step in the right direction for MS. Here's to Windows 7!

Re: Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Michael Sainz — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:35:37 GMT

Have you tried Autoruns from MS's Sysinternals? I often find that helpful to my login experience. As for the boot-up time, what I do is set some more non-essential services to a delayed startup or manual.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

David Tesar — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:34:14 GMT

Ok, it's time to revive this thread and finally put in my own response.

I've been running 32 bit Vista since November 2006 (right when it RTM'ed internally on my laptop) and overall I've had a good experience. My laptop is a Toshiba M5 w/ a 1.7Ghz Core Duo proc & 2 GB of RAM. I also run Vista on two desktops and another laptop.

One issue I had which has been fixed:
Other than the boot up time, I had a very infrequent issue with my laptop randomly having a BSOD. This, however, was fixed after I upgraded my BIOS and installed the beta of SP1. The beta of SP1 took 4-6 hours to install whereas the RTM of SP1 was only around an hour.

Something I'd like to see improved - boot up time:
When I first did the install, everything went smoothly and the system booted up quickly on the 1st install. Over the course of time, the boot up time increased which I believe is in part due to the corporate login & profile stuff which loads up. Even to this day if I login as a local user it is a much faster login. SP1 also felt like it helped a little bit with this although I didn't measure it. Today my boot time is 1:00 min from hitting the power button to the login screen and another ~1:30 to finish loading all my programs. It would be great to see a 30 second or lower boot up in the future. Using sleep is much faster than this, which is what I typically use.

Summary:
In complete honesty I have been happy with Vista overall and have no desire to go back to XP. From a purely personal standpoint, I like having the integrated search/IE7/gadgets/Defender out of the box, bitlocker for my sensitive files, and improved file copy performance. I also don't mind UAC and the overall performance has been good on all of my machines.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Riz — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:37:41 GMT

Simply SUCKS!

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Mike Sampson — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:54:30 GMT

I have x64 Vista on the new beast under my desk and it rocks :)

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Will Craddock — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:57:33 GMT

My experiences are with a Lenovo X41 Tablet PC. I have been running Vista on the tablet since early Beta releases through RTM. While the additional hardware requirements forced me to upgrade the tablet as the memory needs alone were tough to get use to it has proved to be a great tool.

The UI is better than XP, the tablet features are better, IE 7 is better (but it is on XP as well) but the time to login is longer, the sleep and hibernate function as buggy sometimes.

While I continue to use it and won't switch back, even if those MAC ads want me to. As a MAC user, I still like the OS X interface and Jaguar in general. Can't wait for Office 2008 to arrive to see what the improvements have been

Will

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Michael Sainz — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:07:27 GMT

This is in reply to mjulson's post. I field alot of these questions every week and I do understand the frustration it can bring. Technology should work better than this. But it's also important to give credit where credit is due.

Drivers will always be an issue as people don't want to release/support drivers for older hardware. They really don't get the ROI on it than say a new piece of hardware. What I am going to do though is turn the blame not to MS, but give that credit to the 3rd party ISVs. Why should MS be responsible for other ISV's software? Yes, they need to make an enjoyable experience for the Windows platform. But at the same time, the ISV's aren't doing enough to help facilitate this push, as they are also uniquely connected to this paradigm.

A perfect example is Nvidia. Why don't their drivers work? Sure, they have become much better but for the first 6 months...wow. I would completely understand the level of frustration I was seeing...because I was feeling it as well! But when a driver crashes, the general conclusion is that MS is at fault. I don't see it that way. When Nvidia has access to code and documentation to create a driver for what...1.5/2 years before the product is released, and they release a semi-stable one 4-6 months after it's released to customers that is wrong.

That is wrong in so many ways.

As for UAC, frankly I don't see it that often and I'm in IT. It helps with security, provides a safer environment, and will also improve user satisfaction in the long run as it helps with malware not messing up your PC. We're talking about the greater good, and that was an excellent design decision. I wish it wouldn't need to be there, but really the blame needs to be put on the ISV's who design their software to need admin privs. A good example of someone not following through with this is Intuit with QuickBooks. People, this rule has been in place for years...not something new.

The performance is an issue and you're right about this. I think it will improve as there is more optimization and better hardware, but I wish it would hurry. The boot time is pretty bad...what happened to the x second boot up???

Ultimate really isn't worth the money. MS marketing made a bad move there. What happened to the Extra's?

Again, credit where credit is due. I could vent some more...but I'll give it a rest.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Giovanni Marchetti — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:03:00 GMT

Well, I must say that I work for Microsoft, so I've had access to early builds and time to experiment.

I've had several issues with lack of drivers too, especially because I have to run x64 edition for my work. What was worse, though, was that some of the available drivers were not reliable at all. One even fried my motherboard, as it would prevent my laptop from hibernating.

Speed - or lack thereof - is definitely an issue. I/O in particular seems to follow some crazy patterns, thanks to indexing, a/v, malware protection, superfetching and some pernicious tasks scheduled by our friendly IT dept.

Another bugbear of mine is the amazingly confusing number of versions we seem to have. I have even found an application that will work on enterprise but not on ultimate.

The good - if late - news is that those problems are being resolved. Driver stability has greatly improved, so has speed in my modest opinion. No, I have not got benchmark results, just my own usability impressions.

I have found some features I really like too ;-) Here are some of them, in no particular order:

- The new UI: a definite improvement from Fisher-Price XP, even if it takes some time getting used to. I know, this is subjective.

- Symbolic links and extendable / shrinkable volumes: it may be the old Unix admin in me, but I like those

- Integrated search: a boon for disorganized or over-organized people like me

- The control panel: it now seems to be more logically organized. In particular, I like not having to fire up internet explorer in order to download updates.

- The security improvements. Yes, UAC is annoying - but it works. It must be improved, but the concept is good. So is the new re-architecting of service security levels.

- IE7: tabbed browsing at last

- The new TCP/IP stack: the performance is much better, especially in combination with server 2008.

- Modern hardware support: no more F6 - insert floppy (which floppy? who's got one of those left?). SATA, wireless and new tcp-offload-capable cards in particular. Video is still a pain point for some...

- the reliability and availability monitor: a nifty little utility to see where you're having problems.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

VistaUser — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:41:06 GMT

I have no idea what's goin on.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

VistaUser — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:35:39 GMT

Don't forget to bring a towel. You never know where Hotel towels have been.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

mjulson — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:55:50 GMT

Overall, the product is poor and doesn't provide enough value to justify the cost. Main problems I see...

Driver support on desktops for me has been so-so, but driver support on my Dell laptop is terrible. Dell doesn't support vista on it period depite it meeting the requirements just fine. So I haven't been able to get an Nvidia video driver without going out and downloading a hacked version. Above, someone commented that this isn't Microsoft's fault. I totally disagree. It is absolutely MS's fault as they didn't get out and force vendors to support their products with drivers early enough. The fact that they dropped OpenGL support and NVidia and ATI didn't have drivers for months after GA release? It was pathetic. On my third vista machine which is a desktop, it crashes each time I use the DVD burner because of a RAID driver and I don't use the RAID features. Worked fine in XP.

The UAC was/is a complete joke. Asking the user to validate that you want the computer to do something every 30 seconds? Someone had to question that in the design phase. Whoever overruled that guy should be fired.

Performance is substandard, even with great hardware. System pauses are common. Game performance is lacking.

Lots of misc. services added to startup that you don't need.

Boot time is much longer.

On the positive side, I got much improved search. Beyond that I can't think of anything else I value.

Vista Ultimate only makes me feel worse. For the extra money, I received bitlocker, texas holdem, and language packs.

I would have switched back to XP, but I'm just too lazy to do it on three machines.

Microsoft has had two major screw ups in the last couple years. First was product management of Vista. Second was betting so much on DRM.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Josh Bolling — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:05:29 GMT

I too have been running Vista since the early days (Beta 1, 2 and finally RTM) and couldn’t be happier! Sadly, however, my sentiments aren’t echoed by others in some cases. I’ve spoken to individuals both in the IT industry and out and received what can only be categorized as a mixed bag of reactions. Some, like me, love Vista and make every effort to evangelize the product, but others seem to avoid the product (and sometimes the very subject) like the Plague. Over the course of my push to gather feedback (actionable or otherwise) I’ve gathered that some pain points certainly exist for the IT Professional and the average user alike. Some of these include:

1. Increased hardware requirements-Many times I’ll ask someone whether they’ve made the jump to Vista and I’m greeted with the response of “Well, I’d love to deploy Vista, but I just don’t have the hardware to run it.” This is especially true for IT Pros who would like to deploy Vista in a managed environment, but are deploying to older machines that may not be quite “up to snuff”. I’m hopeful, however, that this will soon change as most times an IT shop will deploy a new OS in concert with a hardware refresh cycle (at least that’s how I do it). Now for the average user who is a COMPLETELY different story. Most times an average user with hardware that can’t handle Vista aren’t well versed in the process of building a PC and are therefore stuck with their current machine unless they’d like to purchase a new machine. Thankfully, we will soon begin to see a change in this as most end users will at some time purchase a new PC with Vista pre-installed.

2. Hardware incompatibilities-Another pain point I hear often is the fact that some older (or even new hardware in some cases) like scanners, printers, etc won’t work with Vista due to driver incompatibilities. At this point I try to educate the user and let them know that it’s not the fault of Microsoft that their particular hardware won’t function. Rather, it’s the fault of the device manufacturer as they have yet to implement a Vista compatible driver. Microsoft, unlike Apple, doesn’t manufacture the hardware on which Windows is installed and therefore cannot possibly prepare for every possible device that comes to market.

3. Miscellaneous performance issues/bugs-This is the final major pain point I’ve come across and it’s a pretty large one at that. Many times end users will make it quite apparent that Vista has bugs and performs badly in their view. I make every effort to assure the user that Vista, as with any OS, will have bugs that will be fixed over time with Windows update as will the larger performance issues. Vista SP1 has already proven my point to some degree.

Even with all the negatives I’ve seen when it comes to Vista, I’ve also encountered a good number of positive reactions. Most are reactions to Kernel Protection, Aero, DX10, and other miscellaneous improvements. In summary, the biggest Pain Point I’ve seen has to be Application Compatibility with LoB (Line of Business) Applications.

Just my thoughts….

+Josh

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Warwick7th — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:08:43 GMT

All sizzle no steak as far as I'm concerned. Looks pretty but seems to cause me more trouble than, frankly, it's worth. I run a government network with 150 users so I have a small shop but still. I'm not moving to Vista anytime soon.

Re: Vista is great or it sucks?

Neil Hutson — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:17:01 GMT

Are we allowed to comment on the Apple adverts?