2007 review of photos – International Herald Tribune
It’s been almost 11 months, now, since the release of Vista. Uh, how well is it performing for you?
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I write code that has to run on Vista, so I installed it on a second hard drive. Outside of my development work, I only boot Vista when I feel my applications are running too fast on XP. I have ‘only’ 1 GB which is fine for everything I need to do – except running Vista. But I hear that if you give it 2 GB, Vista does a great job of – well, running Vista.
Here is how I see it: imagine General Motors hadn’t release a new car for 7 years. And when they finally did, you found out it was heavier, slower, and got lousier gas mileage than their previous models. Oh, and a new security system that re-incarnated Clippy and honked whenever you made a left turn.
My Vista is performing well, has not crashed or anything. It is still in it’s original box and I will install it, if there is any need. It came with iMac just in case I didn’t like the Leopard.
Honestly, Vista has surprised me. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but after installing it on my desktop machine to get the Media Center functionality I found that I liked a lot of the new features. I haven’t had one program that won’t run on Vista, and I even ended up installing it on my Thinkpad. This backlash against Vista is really pretty similar to the pre-service-pack reaction to XP, (unless you ran Window ME in which case anything was better) people don’t like change.
Well, I still think of it as “XP ME”, but I rather like it….
The User Account Controls are driving me nuts, but for now (about a month and a half), I’ve left ’em on. Some combination of masochism and wanting to see who will complain about what.
One major plus – I had a BSOD (I’ve had about a dozen!) that, when I re-started, said “you’ve got a problem with a video driver; click here to find a new one” that actually worked…. XP never quite got that far in the few cases where it crashed.
Overall, I would have preferred XP on this new machine, but after “rebuilding” the last one twice (I’m a developer) due to major crashes, I wasn’t in the mood to take this box down to bare metal…. (I have a retail XP here I could have used.) Also, it’s not always possible to find drivers for some of the newer hardware. I’m still not sure WHAT the CD/DVD burner is, and the motherboard is anybody’s guess.
Silly as it sounds, I love the “aero” interface – especially the little windows that pop up when you mouse-over a button on the “Start” bar. I tend to have a lot of open windows, and this is useful.
One bit of craziness. Some very old software was giving me a message to the effect of “Can’t update Registry. Please use Regedit” at every start. They all stopped doing that…. Reminded me of nagware – some shareware authors were kind enough to count the number of times they asked you to register, and shut the beg screens off at some point…. The shareware, like my old programs, though, all continued to work….
Overall, I doubt if I’d ever bother upgrading an existing XP installation (or Win98SE, for that matter), but if I get stuck with it again, I won’t mind….
That said, it still a little silly at times to be running a monster like this to do stuff that would happily run (and let me develop in) Win3.x on a 386. ‘Course, I couldn’t run a movie in the background, either….
Regards,
Stu.
So, Paul. The take-away from your comment comes out to this:
Those hordes of people who reported encountering deal-breaking problems with Vista on their computers, running their apps – are all obviously mistaken and just resistant to change, since Vista works fine for ME.
Fascinating insight. Thanks.
And a little plug for XP….
The kid (she moved out of town to go to College a few years ago) had a nice Win98SE box in her bedroom. I never quite got the video to behave, and a couple of programs she really wanted to run just didn’t….
I put XP on my “big” machine, and it found and fixed a minor video glitch on mine, and prompted me to keep the “right” settings. Decided to try it on hers, just for the heck of it, ’cause I could revert. It worked! I went out and bought another package so she’d be legal….
Anyway, the kid was at camp someplace in Cheese Country when I did this. She came home, and piled back into AOL and, well, just AOL…. (Other than Word Perfect, that was about it….) About a month later, I had to re-boot her machine for some reason, and she was in the room. “WHAT IS THAT?!” as the screen scrolled gibberish….
Turns out that while Win98SE had needed a boot every couple of days, she had never seen XP boot….
Vista’s not that stable, yet, but the possibility is probably there. Someday….
Regards,
Stu.
Cat:
I have to agree with Paul….
It’s a YMMV, and there are some interesting pitfalls hanging around thus far, but I think it’ll turn into a nice (if overweight) XP upgrade soon enough if MS keeps it’s act together.
Regards,
Stu.
I’ve been using 64-bit Vista for gaming since February. I haven’t had any software or hardware compatibility problems, and I haven’t seen any of this instability people talk about. I have a couple of old 16-bit games that won’t run natively, but they run fine with DOSBox.
It did take Creative a few months to get decent drivers out for the X-Fi sound cards.
I’m running an Athlon X2 4200/Radeon X1900 XT/2 GB RAM.
In the meantime on the Leopard front………lots of problems. Last week one of my techs upgraded to Leopard, running Apples benchmark software, his performance had degraded by 60%. Downgrading to OSX returned it to normal, his Macbook Pro is 6 months old. So…………
Perfectly, now that I’ve reformatted and reinstalled XP.
#9 – McCullough
“Last week one of my techs upgraded to Leopard, running Apples benchmark software, his performance had degraded by 60%. Downgrading to OSX returned it to normal, his Macbook Pro is 6 months old. So…………”
[clears throat] Ah, ahem. Er,… Excuse me.
Leopard IS OS X.
Some find it better to use version #s than the ‘Cat’ names to avoid such confusion.
OS X
10.0.x = Cheetah
10.1.x = Puma
10.2.x = Jaguar
10.3.x = Panther
10.4.x = Tiger
10.5.x = Leopard
#11. You are CORRECT sir, my bad. It was Tiger.
Ed McMahon
I bought a “new”computer and went with a refurb from T.D.because it came with XP.They have to make this stuff easier.When T.V. first came out only the techno nerds had one because they were a pain.By 1955 anyone could buy one and plug it in.We have to get to that point with computing.
I know what you’re saying, Stu, but he did say that – it works for him, so others are just resisting change. It’s a familiar social-psych phenomenon, but it doesn’t irritate any less for its ubiquity.
Take an item with a 1-in-10000 failure rate, and the guy who gets the one that fails irrationally proclaims them ALL to be lemons – and on the flip side, you always get the guy like Paul, who has unusual good luck with something well known for not working right for a huge segment of buyers, and incorrectly “reasons” that the unusual experience he had is not unusual – since he experienced it – therefore contrary reports from others have to be invalid, therefore those others have a motive (resistance to change) for finding fault where it obviously (to him!) doesn’t exist.
If it seems like I’m nitpicking, well, sobeit. But that kind of egocentric thinking is one of those common things people tend to do that, if people would consider it – and stop doing it – all of society would improve, admittedly to a microscopic degree, but when that’s multiplied by billions of times a day, all over the world, it makes a definite improvement for all humanity.
Believe it or not, it’s not the big, hot-button issues that determine quality of life, but thousands and thousands of tee-tiny everyday invisible ones like that that make up most of the things that people do and misdo. If we took the time to just try to avoid these tiny but universal errors, the lot of everyone would improve – and the bigger issues would also be a lot easier to deal with. These little problems are the building blocks of humanity’s biggest ones. Destroy them and it becomes harder to make big problems.
There. That’s enough philosophizing for an Xmas morning. 😉
Vista is working fine for me. While I don’t love it, I AM impressed with it’s stability. Using it on a 2xT60 with 1 Gig each and my desktop (custom build, natch) with 2 g. With 2 G it’s MUCH snappier, but on my T60’s I really can’t complain. It handled all my hardware and I have no issues with performance.
Also very pleased with error handling as Stu alluded too. Great work on that front too.
It will get better. XP came out like crap and by SP2 it was the best OS MS released since Windows 2000 SP4.
Well you can’t go by me.
I have not even gotten into XP and will not until SP3 is released.
I have learned my lesson years ago.
ANY OS, wait until the third version or third service pack.
Cursor_
Sadly, the Leopard problems are apparently not near as universal as with Vista, but for too many, they’re still pret-ty bad.
I’m not budging off 10.4.11 on my machines ’til 10.5.3 – MAYBE. I can certainly handle whatever problem upgrading might bring, but I just don’t feel like stepping into that particular pool of quicksand. And why should I have to?
Apple is fucking up more and more as time passes and they get complacent over their recent successes. This does not bode well. At times I suspect their beta seeding consists of leaving a couple dozen discs on a table in the breakroom every so often and collecting slips from the Suggestion Box (that someone lost the key to)… and don’t even get me started on what an abortion iTunes is transmogrifying into… ;(
#17. Thank you. We move forward when we stop making our computer platforms a religious experience. Both Apple and Microsoft certainly have some work to do. I work in both and see problems in both. Vista has performed very well for me on newer hardware, and thats OK with me. I keep XP on my older systems. And since we started upgrading clients to Leopard, I see a cross section of problems there. And your point about iTunes is the ONLY thing keeping me from buying the iTouch player, I will not use iTunes. Apple, open it up, and I’ll buy.
Vista Enterprise Pro is working great now, thanks, that I have the SP1 beta installed. All drivers function, Aero looks nice, even the sound now works. Seems snappier than a couple of months ago. My new 4GB Kingston thumb drive boosts it’s speed. Still a Mac jock, always will be I guess, but Vista is now on the menu.
Vista works just fine. The only people whining are the ones not using it. It didn’t change the world. It’s successors will not change the world. It’s just a computer program.
[No, it’s an Operating System. – ed.]
I have had Vista on a laptop for almost a year and its been pretty stable, no huge problems, Im okay keeping it on the laptop and happy with it so far.
Been running Leopard on a new iMac I bought a month ago. It’s been running great without a glitch. Also, been running Vista for some dev work and it seems to run well on my Macs (Bootcamp, VMWare, etc).
My advice to all the people having problems with both – run new OS’s on new hardware if you can. Also, do a clean install. Upgrading any OS is fraught with peril. One strange thing, I had a bum DIMM in my iMac which Tiger and XP tolerated but Leopard, Vista, and Longhorn all choked on. Once it was swapped, everything ran without a problem.
The main thing is user experience for me – Vista runs fine but I don’t find the overall usability as pleasant as Leopard. It’s just a lot of little things that all add up.
P.S. Get a whack of RAM. It’s cheap get over it…
I installed it early then went back to XP for a while. I have reinstalled it on a Dell 3.0ghz p4 and it runs just fine!. Its actually doing a lot better the Leopard on my MacBook right now. I guess everyone is having problems even Apple. I can understand how Vista would be bad on a older system.
But even so I have had a copy of Vista Basic running on a older Laptop and it does fine without the Aero.
#14 –
I completely agree with your philosophizing, it’s just that, as I’m kinda nitpicky myself and a bit of an absurdist when I know how, I just gotta ask if you feel “needful things” ? Merry to you. I’m an sbo and a believer so, Merry Christmas from me to you as well !!
I plugged 2 identical USB HDD into my vista machine at work. One was detected and installed fine. Vista tells me the other requires a driver OR tells me to eject the media. Nothing I did would fix it.
Works fine first time on XP.
I love vista. It has ran great for me. Only a few problems here and there.
Apparently all the people on the planet that use Vista have responded here, wonderful.
The consensus I seem to be hearing is: buy another GB of RAM, turn off UAC and it’s really not that bad, it will run your existing programs and probably most of your peripherals.
So that’s what we get from MS, after 7 years and about a gazillion dollars in R&D?
In all the comments above, I don’t see a reason to spend one dollar for Vista, unless I just like keeping a whole lot of DRAM chips warm.
I had completely fogotten that Vista(tm) was promoted by the Teletubbies.
They must be feeling pretty used by now.