Vista upgrade: a waste of time?

Evidence has been growing around the net lately that the Vista upgrade program isn't exactly the panacea that it has been marketed as. Specifically, Arstechnica recently tried upgrading an almost-brand new Thinkpad to Vista...with awful results. To quote from the article:

"The results weren't pretty.

Startup and shutdown was horrendous: a cold boot would take slightly over 2 minutes, while a simple shut down could take as long as four minutes, or would simply stall. It became painful enough that I decided it made the most sense to use "hibernate" for a rapid shutdown and startup; this caused other problems that I will touch on later.

To make matters worse, using Vista on the ThinkPad was an exercise in frustration. Constant hard disk thrashing made life painful. 1GB of RAM was not enough to keep the paging system from staying busy constantly, but it's important to understand that the ThinkPad X41 is already handicapped in the hard drive performance department due to its 4200rpm drive. We tried using "ready boost" with the laptop, and it did give a slight boost. But it wasn't enough to make us forget our troubles, and we're beginning to see why Microsoft is eager to push solid state hard drives in notebooks."

A clean install helped to ameliorate all these problems, but that will not be of help to those who decide to follow the Vista upgrade path this holiday season.

PC World also warns users of some of the hidden costs of upgrading to Vista. First of all, they point out that Vista Basic's pricing is basically the same as XP Home, but offering nowhere near the same value proposition. How many Windows users who don't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the zillions of confusing little details that exist in the computer world will be disappointed to be paying $50 or $100 to upgrade to Vista Basic only to find that certain features like Aero Glass which have been heavily marketed by Microsoft are missing?

And secondly PC World reiterates that upgrading to Vista will be anything but a pain-free experience even for users who are well-versed in the mechanics of computers.

Acer's Vice President has actually come out and said straight out what everyone is thinking: the latest Vista release is simply a price increase in disguise. "Premium is the real Vista," he says. In an era of $200 desktops and $400 laptops, Vista Premium's $240 retail price actually exceeds the price of many fully-built systems!

It is quite clear to me what is going on here, Microsoft as the very definition of monopoly is simply continuing to exploit their monopolistic position to charge pretty much what ever price they choose. As they continue to rake in billions per quarter in profit, the words "free market" are probably the last to come to mind. A pair of words more likely to describe Microsoft's operations: software piracy.

 

Thank you for the good info.

 

I Agree with that acticle about Mircosoft's GREEDY plan!!!! And that Premium is the real Vista. Mircosofts tactics SUCK!!!

I also Agree that 1GB of RAM is NOT enough to keep Vista Smooth.

I Don't Agree about Startup and shutdown was horrendous. Running Vista RC2 on my laptop(sig), Startup & shutdown times are the fastest I have ever experienced in ANY OS.

I guess for the time being VISTA IS HIT OR MISS depending on the machine you install on.

For me it's a HIT

 

I will be participating in the Express Upgrade program just because it's cheaper than buying retail, but the disc will probably sit on my desk for a good while until a good number of updates come out and app compatibility is a little better. And I definitely have to agree with whoever wrote that article and with LIVEFRMNYC. All indications are that Basic is going to be horribly crippled. That line stating that it is "nowhere near the same value proposition" as XP Home is probably the best wording I've seen to date to sum that up.

 

I'm probably not going to bother with Vista for quite a while because I'm going to be upgrading to Leopard instead

 

Now does anyone know if the upgrade will have all the versions on the disc with just the corresponding CD KEY? I heard that all Vista Editions will come out on the same disc, it's just that you need a certain KEY to "unlock" the available OS setup.

 

Yeah, all editions will be on one disk, the key will unlock the version.

Supposedly it's so you can upgrade to a better version without needing to get another disk.

 

They do have differ Boxes tho. Maybe just for retail purposes.

 

Bingo. According to Paul Thurott you will be able to go online, pay a fee, and upgrade your current version at any time. I guess it all has to do with the license key telling it which image/features it will install.

 

One thing that should be noted about the linked article is that they were upgrading in place to either Vista RC1 (build 5600) or RC2 (build 5744), not the RTM. I've heard that upgrading should be much better with the final release, as this is one of the final fit-and-finish aspects of Windows Vista. But we'll know for sure when it is finally released to the masses.

And yeah, that whole Vista Home Basic thing is ridiculous. It's unfortunately what most people ordering Vista Home are going to get, and they're going to be pretty upset, as it's really crippled. Sad really. They should have omitted Vista Home Basic and simply had Vista Home, Vista Business, and Vista Ultimate (plus the other N editions, K editions, blah blah blah...).

 

I'm downloading RTM now. I hope my bluetooth USB dongle drivers work with this version.

I think the word "Home" in Vista Home edition will mislead so many people.

I think there is a home with & without aero. Ofcourse the average consumer will go for the cheapest not realizing what they receive.

 

You're downloading RTM? Legally? I would like to know how.

 

me too ^^^^

 

if you know how to search around you'll find it free..........LOL

 

I don't know about the guy who was downloading it earlier in this thread, but it's been available for a few days to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers. I grabbed it yesterday (technet) and installed it today on a spare PC...P4 2.4 ghz with 2 GB ram. Easy, uneventful install.

 

There's Vista Home Basic, whch is basically (hehe basic again) XP Home edition, and it doesn't have Aero.

Then there's Vista Home Premium, which is XP Media Center in Vista, with Aero.

Get Home Premium!

And LIVEFRMNYC you still haven't told me who you are in real life...

 

Hopefully, store emplyees will be more knowledgeable than you give them credit for, and will direct people to Home Premium. Even if they don't, Windows "Anytime Upgrade" will allow users who mistakenly purchased Home Basic to upgrade to Home Premium. Unfortunately, the "Anytime Upgrade" system isn't obvious to most users, and doesn't automatically tell you if your video drivers support aero, but at least it is available within the control panel as a less expensive option to acquire the version of Vista you should have purchased to begin with.

 

I'll spend the $10 S/H for Home Premium then put it away for a while. My laptop coming Wednesday has MCE on it and I see no reason to jump into Vista until it's been out for a while. Also going to wait until some of my favorite software titles release updates. My friend has been a tester since it went to Beta and I really do like the OS but I'll give it until March before I throw it on my new laptop.

 

I tried RC1 on P4 3.6(oc),2GB DDR,new 200GB 7200HDD but...my boot time was about 3 minutes. 3DMark05 can't be run as well....LOL, RC1 is not worth trying.

 

I don't think that's typical. I used RC1, RC2, and now RTM on a P4 2.4 GHZ with 2 GB RAM and never saw load times like that. I just timed RTM. From a powered-off state, it took 52 seconds to present the login screen, and most of that was the POST process. After entering my credentials it took only 9 seconds to present a fully loaded desktop. And this is a domain-joined machine.

There's a lot to complain about in Vista, but start-up and shutdown speed isn't one of them.

 

What I'm curious about is if the Vista Premium upgrade I'm supposed to get for my 1 month old HP dv9000 is going to be loaded with all the bloatware I spent hours removing or if it will simply be a "clean" vista cd/dvd from microsoft.

I also have to finish getting the update service hp is using to finish fixing the COA errors I kept gettings when trying to fill out thieir "simple" online forms to get my upgrade to vista premium. It takes about 4 days per email response from them thus far so maybe I'll get my update cd by the time service pack 1 is out for vista, lol.

 

Well I think Vista will be great after Microsoft have smoothed out the issues in their New. Unless you've got a DX 10 Graphics Card, I dont see any point in switching to Vista, and, at the moment, with the current Mobile Hardware, Vista is pretty useless on the Mobile Platform...

 

Meh. You can get everything Vista offers and more elsewhere, without it injecting all kinds of DRM and other limitations on what you're allowed to do with your machine. WMA, Zune, all the other things that Microsoft does scream contempt for their customers. Screw supporting a company that treats me like a criminal by default. If they treat me like a criminal, I'll behave like one. If they give me a fair product at a fair price, I'll pay it. Vista isn't either.

 

The only thing worthwhile that vista has is directx10, and their monopoly on gaming.

 

have you tried vista rtm yet?

 

That's like saying "Have you tried being mugged yet?" I haven't, and I don't have any interest in it because it has too many things wrong with it to make it even remotely worthwhile.

 

Vista is available for download to MSDN subscribers.

Using Vista for a while now and it feels like a dumbed-down consumer version of XP (with all the fancy graphics of course). The one thing I dislike is the UI changes from menu to banners. It's not conventional to any other OS.

 

WOO! Go Microsoft!

 

Can you give me a link to that page, as I can't seem to find it. Also, what is the difference between RTM and RC2? Can you use RTM indefinitely?

 

Iv been running Vista Business on my desktop and my Gateway for the past 2 weeks. So far its been pretty good. Im dualbooting on my desktop for games. Some parts of Vista was rather annoying however I opted for a more classical look. There is a driver for my laptop that wasnt released yet so I had to substitute an unsigned one in and use the test mode to coax the driver in. Other than that the upgrade was very smooth. The driver support is much better than XP's (as in provided by Microsoft). RAM usage is alot higher but it doesnt feel sluggish at all. I ran SuperPi and my score was the same. Stability is an issue especially running older software. Iv had a couple installs crash on me but Vista seem to recover better than XP. Alot of this is due to me trying to force install some software (X-Fi Console Launcher etc) thats not released yet. All-in-all it works pretty well. I game on XP and work on Vista.

p.s. One major pain in the butt for Vista is that it is nearly impossible to modify system files. Whether its good or bad is up to the user oppinion. I like to tweak my computer so its a bad for me. Also INSTALL VISTA LAST if you want to multi-boot. Trust me Vista does not like its partiton altered. I had to reinstall 2 OSes (learned it the hard way).

 

Yes you can use RTM indefinitely.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/default.aspx

 

Lixuelai

How is Vista Business for viewing photos and multimedia (mp3 / mpeg / wmv etc). I'm a little confused as to what comes with it ( the sideshow options etc ).

Problem is the laptop I'm considering getting comes with XP Pro ...with the free upgrade to Vista Business not Home Premium.

Cheers

 

It seems that notebook users are disadvantaged for using Vista, since unless you have a DTR, the requirements for Vista will likely render using it on a notebook unpractical. Also, if you game, then XP would be a better choice as it requires less graphics power in the background. Its a pretty bad sign for Microsoft when their new OS hasn't even been released and there's already negative reviews of it. And I do agree with whoever said Microsoft treats their customers like criminals. That Windows verification thing is the computer equivalent of the Patriot Act and I feel like at any time they'll shine a light on my face and ask me where I was last Friday at 5:43 pm.

 

Will Vista Business contain all the features of Business Home since its more expensive? I wonder if its possible to downgrade to Home Premium once you have Business =X

 

I am getting a NX9420, i get to upgrade to Business but I think I will wait as well, I am definitely curious about vista but i will put that curiosity on hold

 

I believe Business comes with everything in Home Premium. It lacks the Movie Maker and some other minor stuff. Personally I like it better. I have Ultimate RC2 installed for awhile and I felt it came with too much I dont want. Business is right on the sweet spot. It is basically XP Pro vs XP Home. Ultimate is like Media Center.

 

I'm not upgrading anytime soon. I'm just not seeing any advantage over XP. Even MS's alleged improved security is already being hacked, per this NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/technology/25vista.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

XP has been very stable and fine for me.

 

I will be honnest I only read the first post. I have been around of all of the major microsoft operating system releases and have not seen a smooth release todate.

MS often does not fully test. Given it is a big project and hard to isolate all of the problems. A company the size of MS should put more effort into development.

Will I upgrade yes. When in a few years. Why, because I do not want to spend the time resolving issues.

 

Just came across this today: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt It's a long read, but paints a frightening image of the future of multimedia under Vista. Here's more from the article:

"In addition there have been quite a few writeups on this (although not going
into as much detail as this document) in magazines both online and in print,
one example being PC World's feature article "Will your PC run Windows
Vista?", http://www.pcw.co.uk/articles/print/2154785, which covers this in the
appropriately-titled section "Multimedia in chains". Audience reactions at
WinHEC are covered in "Longhorn: tough trail to PC digital media" published in
EE Times ( http://www.eetimes.com/issue/fp/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162100180),
unfortunately you need to be a subscriber to read this but you may be able to
find accessible cached copies using your favourite search engine."

It'd stick with XP for the time being (and probably even afterwards).

 

Ditig's first article really hit the nail on the head. To summarize, it points out Vista's many faults and inefficient designs. Let me just list a few:

1) Vista takes many measures to protect its content, including the use of third-party licensing of software which the end-user will have to pay for.

2) Vista eliminates open-source hardware support altogether by "fingerprinting" hardware devices and their drivers (M$ may or may not choose to acknowledge certain hardware/software). In order to prevent someone from getting around this Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS), Vista keeps the hardware specifications confidential.

3) Elimination of Unified Drivers: "Since HFS requires unique identification and handling of not just each device type (for example each graphics chip) but each variant of each device type (for example each stepping of each graphics chip) to handle the situation where a problem is found with one variation of a device, it's no longer possible to create one-size-fits-all drivers for an entire range of devices like the current Catalyst/Detonator/ForceWare drivers."

4) Denial of Service to Drivers with known security flaws:Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it, along with the hardware, will cease to function.

5) Decreased OS reliability: Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual. This means that if there is an unusual voltage fluctuation in the system, or an unexpected value turned out by a process, a tilt-bit will be tripped and Vista will consider this as a hack attack and treat it as such. These tilt-bits also have implications with the denial of service to flawed drivers.

6)CPU consumption: "In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content to video cards has to be encrypted with AES-128."

"In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the
underlying hardware every 30ms to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen."

"On-board graphics create an additional problem in that blocks of precious
content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged to disk. In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and decrypted again after being paged in. Vista doesn't provide any other pagefile encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card
details, private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in plaintext. The content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in Microsoft's eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user's medical records or their banking PIN."

7) Vista content protection:The high-end graphics and audio market are dominated entirely by gamers, who will do anything to gain the tiniest bit of extra performance, like buying Bigfoot Networks' $250 "Killer NIC" ethernet card in the hope that it'll help reduce their network latency by a few milliseconds. These are people buying $500-$1000 graphics and sound cards for which one single sale brings the device vendors more than the few cents they get from the video/audio portion of an entire roomful of integrated-graphics-and-sound PCs. I wonder how this market segment will react to knowing that their top-of-the-line hardware is being hamstrung by all of the content-protection "features" that Vista hogties it with?

8) Unnecessary Resource Consumption: "As part of the bus-protection scheme, devices are required to implement AES-128 encryption in order to receive content from Vista. This has to be done via a hardware decryption engine on the graphics chip, which would typically be implemented by throwing away a rendering pipeline or two to make room for the AES engine.

Establishing the AES key with the device hardware requires further
cryptographic overhead, in this case a 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
In programmable devices this can be done (with considerable effort) in the
device (for example in programmable shader hardware), or more simply by
throwing out a few more rendering pipelines and implementing a public-key-
cryptography engine in the freed-up space."

 

Well, i will definately buy Vista someday.
I would like to have and test 64bit operating system.
(it's a pity for my 64bit proc. to use 32 bit OS )


Have you all guys seen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8&eurl=
(this)
Watch it first. LOL!
Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J-i44eKEcc TOO!
LOL!LOL!

"Dare I say it's Mac-like? In fact, it is. Microsoft has always stolen from the best. Key to a lot of what's new in Vista is the much-anticipated Aero interface--but to use it, you'll need adequate hardware and one of the pricier versions of the OS." ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12...n/article.html)

To me (right now) Vista is like the NEW UPGRADED XP with lots of new features in it.
Features like :
- "AERO" (new looks)
- "SEARCH" (faster, smarter)
- "NETWORK MAP" (new Network and Sharing Center)
- "WIRELESS NETWORKING: Connecting to multiple wireless networks and hotspots is a simple affair."
- "SECURITY" (better protection i hope)
source- http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12...n/article.html
- DX 10 (new gaming engine)
- Perfect (i hope) 64bit
- etc (other extra features. You know)

I would like to try all of it.
I'll not erase XP though. Instead, i'll use both .

So,
I've stated it clear.
To me (right now) Vista is like the NEW UPGRADED XP with lots of new features in it. and i want to try ALL the NEW features!
And also, 64bit too!

XP-Vista is not as big jump as Dos-Windows or Windows 95-XP.

To me, it's still worth buying the 64bit ver.

 

I will get vista if and when there is some software I need/want enough that will work only on vista and not xp.

 

I had bigtime issues with both IE7 and the newer Windefender, had to uninstall both. What has happened to microsoft?

 

LOL! Excellent question. If we ever have the answer, it will be a miracle!

 

All my computers run Vista now. The install was impressive. The only snags you will hit is if you are upgrading from 32bit to 64bit. You cant just upgrade you have to do a full wipe.

On my desktop which I custom built I got all the drivers fairly easily. The basic driver support for Vista is very good. I had a completely functional computer right after installation. Before I needed to download driver for some essential functions. I only installed the ATI drivers and Creative X-Fi drivers since I wasnt getting the resolution I could and the X-Fi wasnt installed. Other than that it was very smooth.

Then I did the install on my Gateway MX7515. It was very smooth as well. All essential functions where available right away. I did however hit a big snag with the modem (which i didnt really care about) and the audio (which I did care about). The audio is a Conexant AC97 thats fairly common on ATI based systems. There is currently no "working" drivers for it. I did manage to get it to work however by using an unsigned ATI Southbridge Audio driver and running Vista in Test Mode.

Finally I installed it on my Dell D420. I didnt need to install ANY drivers.

 

lixuelai, i apologize if you've posted this information elsewhere, but how much ram and cpu is being used with aero and everything enabled on your machines with moderate usage?

 

Im running IE7 (which I dont think is that bad. I used to use Opera which IMO is better but IE7 is close enough so doesnt really make much difference), JetAudio (a multimedia player), AIM, BitComet 8.0. Anyway my ram usage with Aero Glass is around 600mb-700mb. Remember that the memory manager is totally reworked. The system is more responsive than when I was running XP since the D420 is horribly hard drive limited. With Vista if you got more ram it will actually use it. Iv tried to remove a 512mb stick and Vista still worked fine. I would say 1gb to be the minimum though. When I tried to run even more programs the system performance went down quite a bit.

p.s. The main ram hog atm is IE7 at nearly 200mb.

 

Hey, thanks for the info. I'm looking forward to early Feb. already.

 

Why did they make IE7 use so much ram? IE 6 was not like that.

 

I've been playing with Vista on my Dell 6400 the last few days (Duo T2050, 1gb ram, ATI x1400) and am really quite impressed. Install was painless (dual booting with XP).

My system runs vista great. The way Vista manages the Memory is a huge improvement in my opinion (somewhat similar to linux). The result is the system is much "snappier" than xp on the same machine. I am far from being an expert, but I'm actually quite impressed with what Microsoft has done. I was not planning to upgrade until some time had passed after release, but seems very, very, stable to me right now.

of course, others opinions and mileage will vary