interesting Vista review

http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/77/

I found this review exceptional not only because it is very down-to-earth and written by a critic who has used all the operating systems out there, but it also includes recommendations on what MS needs to do to produce a great OS. Take a look!

 

You're right, that review is unique because most reviews only point out flaws, not offer solutions. Thanks for the link, I appreciate it.

Matt

 

Despite the number of recommendations, I find it VERY scary there are so many major flaws...

I had massive issues with Vista, and it looks like I was only at the tip of the iceberg.

 

A lot of folks undoubtedly have had no problems - and they usually don't post. Folks come to forums for help, much of the time. Still, I found this paragraph from the review to sum it up nicely (from an upgrade perspective):

He does balance things by pointing out the positives (easier installation, Windows Mobility Center, etc.). Then there is the whole integration of DRM which I don't trust.

One point he made about the OS was the pricing and the multiple varieties - paying more just to unlock additional features/functionality that's already included on the CD you bought. Hadn't realized that bugged me until reading the article. I understand it, but it seems kind of, uh, greedy, I guess.

 

A very through review by him, i enjoyed reading it.

 

Well, I for one thought it was fairly horrible "review"..

It had quite a few mistakes/inaccuracies like blaming bad gaming performance on Vista rather than display drivers, confusing Sidebar with SideShow and generic FUD about product activation. Also, is he really trying to claim that Vista doesn't run properly on a C2D with 2GB+ RAM?

*****ing about software backwards compatibility was pretty interesting too, traditionally Microsoft is one of the few companies that bother with fairly extensive backwards compatibility.

 

this is how i found out that even with a top end sound card in my pc Vista would not let me use my cinema 7.1 sound system.
http://http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#functionality
ttol:
do you work for microsoft

 

Rather than display drivers? Have you seen what's required by Vista to go into display drivers? (Actually, read the whole article, not just that highlighted section). A TON of DRM checks that don't add ANY functionality, slow things down by taking extra CPU cycles and basically make it much more complex to write a driver, for absolutely NO performance or functionality gain as far as the user sees. I place the blame SQUARELY on Vista.

And product activation isn't FUD. If only 1% of users experience problems with WGA while having a valid license (and that's been documented by Microsoft as true), and they have, say 100 million copies out (conservative, including XP and Vista together), that's 1 million people who are FALSELY accused of being pirates or otherwise unable to use their legally acquired software. Even my mom has had problems with that, had to call MS to activate the software.

And the Sidebar/SideShow confusion is really excusable, I'd think. I don't call you a moron if you can't tell the difference between Kopete and Konqueror, do I?

 

Thats it, I am not upgrading to Vista until SP3 is released for it.

 

So many so-called flaws on Paper, but I don't see Vista as being bad at all. It's faster, smoother, nicer(eye-candy) and safer than XP. Also has alot of minor features that XP lacks. It has a better Ease of use, although some might disagree with me on that.

Vista's main problem is compatibility with some Drivers and Software thats already out. Anything new or Upgraded should work with Vista.

Higher hardware requirements are not favored either, but Vista runs Flawlessly on my HP desktop 2.0GHZ, 1GB RAM. RC2 struggled with 1GB, but the realease version does just fine.

I've only used Vista on two machines, my HP desktop and Acer Notebook .....so I imagine on differ machines Vista can be more or less a problem or not.

MS sure made a huge mistake by releasing Vista too early IMO. They should have waited until things caught up.

 

"It had quite a few mistakes/inaccuracies like blaming bad gaming performance on Vista rather than display drivers, confusing Sidebar with SideShow and generic FUD about product activation. Also, is he really trying to claim that Vista doesn't run properly on a C2D with 2GB+ RAM? *****ing about software backwards compatibility was pretty interesting too, traditionally Microsoft is one of the few companies that bother with fairly extensive backwards compatibility."

You missed a part of the review, that is, the writer's recommendations for MS OS developers. Like I said, that's why the review is so good. It even introduces a nice list of everything new in the OS.
From the article:

"Consider hardware deployments before designing new features. Windows Vista was built with unrealistic hardware goals in mind. It was not built for today's computers, let alone yesterday's, and even tomorrow's machines will have some performance problems with Vista. Microsoft's developers need to start thinking in terms of the computers that people have today, not the ones they might have in 5 years."

I posted a long rant in the Off Topic section about my experience with Vista on someone else's computer, and it is largely of a negative opinion. This person was running Vista with Aero on a laptop with a Celeron M and an Intel GMA 950, and it was... traumatic for me. Some people might step in by saying that one needs more powerful hardware to run such software, but I beg to differ. I run Ubuntu w/ all of the glory of Beryl enabled on hardware that, according to MS, is supposed to be outdated for running Vista (see my sig). This tells me one of two things:
- either Microsoft's competition is doing something right, or
- Microsoft is doing something wrong.
When I tried running Vista on my laptop, there was no video driver for it, and the system was slow slow slow.

The fact is that most budget laptops, which form the majority of laptops, are underpowered (or should we say the OS is too demanding since they run XP well), and the hardware requirement argument is, in my opinion, a very valid one, especially for laptops, which take bigger performance hits for running such a system intensive OS. Just running Vista acceptably means paying additional costs for the necessary hardware to enjoy its new features, and this is another big hit for corporate users, where economic usage of resources (both financial and computational resources) are crucial to doing well in the world.

Unfortunately Vista does not satisfy the needs of budget or corporate users for those reasons, and for that MS may experience heavy losses b/c they make up most of the software consumer market.

 

What, so NVidia and ATI, who have had decades of practice in writing display drivers, suddenly became incompetents?
The gaming performance in Vista is partly due to the OS itself requiring more processing power, leaving less to the game (that is Vista's fault, exclusively, and has nothing to do with drivers), and partly to do with the display drivers, yes.

And if we dig deeper into the display driver part, we find that:
1: The display drivers are now required by Microsoft to do a bunch of new things that can slow things down.
2: The reason why they're not yet as optimized as they're going to be is that Microsoft changed the driver model at the last moment. (Remember how RC1 drivers suddenly didn't work with RC2?)

So yes, while the performance is definitely going to improve over what it is now, there's still a performance loss introduced by Microsoft that ATI or NVidia can do nothing about.

And this makes the author's points less valid? Regardless of what you call a feature, it still works the same way, no? And if he finds flaws with it, those flaws exist regardless of the name, right?

What?
We're talking about this snippet, right?

How, exactly, is this "generic FUD"?
Are you saying it is not true?
If so, you are calling more than a few forum members here liars.
Are you saying that the problems many of us encountered were made up? Perhaps we'd actually been lulled to sleep by Vista's beautiful installer, and dreamed that the stupid thing suddenly decided that we must be evil software pirates, and telling us to PLEASE BUY A NEW COPY OF VISTA or in very small print, that we might, if we really think we know better than the holy Microsoft, call this number to beg for our license to be reactivated
Are you saying that this didn't happen? How, exactly, do you know this?
I'm sorry, but I find this kind of blind ignorant fanboyism offensive. I think that what I have seen Vista do is a much more accurate description of what Vista does, than your little dreamworld based on nothing more than "This hasn't happened to me, therefore it can not happen".
The article is not "FUD". Your post is. (from the definition, "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt". You are the one trying to spread those things about a fairly accurate Vista review. Accurate because the problems it describe actually exist, as many here can tell you from first-hand experience.

It's pretty well known that Vista's activation scheme is every bit as bad as the article describes. The fact that you didn't have problems with it doesn't mean it works in all cases. Which it doesn't.

Traditionally? And so what? We're not talking about tradition, we're talking about now.
Are you, once again, saying that what Vista actually does isn't important?
The fact that it does have a lot of flaws in its backwards compatibility doesn't matter because of "tradition"?
This is a review of Vista, not of "Microsoft's traditions".

I don't think this was an awful review. I think fanboys who can't cope with facts that contradict their little fanboy dreamworld are awful.

 

DRM checks don't do anything unless you are actually playing DRM enabled media, they have no effect whatsoever to, say, gaming performance.

Vista changed quite a few things regarding hardware devices, for example Creative is still ways off from providing a fully fuctional driver package for Vista. Same goes for display drivers, both nvidia and amd are slowly getting there but I'd be surprised if we won't see significant speed boosts in the future.

And DRM offers no functionality? Uh, enables playing DRM protected media?

 

Your average computer user never has to bother with activation, average joes buy Dells and other OEM machines that come with Windows preinstalled and preactivated.

I have called Microsoft quite a few times to activate either XP or Vista, the article implies that things are worse with Vista than they were with XP.. but XP required calling Microsoft just like Vista does after you have activated it one time too many.

Of course he has to go further and say silly things like 'one has to beg Microsoft'. I have called them 6 times and not once have I had to explain why I'm activating the same key again. I very much doubt that there is a single case where Microsoft has refused to activate someone's install just because the cd key had been used too many times.