30 Days with Vista @ [H]

[ikjadoon]

I've had minor problems with Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

~Ibrahim~

 

[oneandonlysuperman]

I am not going to upgrade to vista until ATI releases a Multimedia Center for Windows Vista on their All-in-Wonder series cards. I will stick with Windows XP Pro until that is released and at least a Service Pack 1 for Vista. I have tried many versions of Vista but I stand behind HardOCP standing on that it is a Lemon due to backwards compatibility issues with hardware and Software at this point. I believe that is was written specifically for the 64 bit platform and will always be more stable on the 64 bit platform. The next thing is until games catch up with the current technologies, I will not upgrade. I am doing just fine with those.

my 2 cents worth.

Supe

 

[MagnusDredd]

why? because this is an enthusiast website, where the majority of hardware, games and everything else runs on Windows?

No... And it's ignorant to suggest that being an "Enthusiast" makes you a Windows fan. While there is much that runs on Windows, and the standard (L)user may think that MS is the only game in town, it's simply untrue. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of hardware from embedded computers to mainframes, and millions of pieces of software beyond that. Freshmeat.net alone lists 29,000+ pieces of software for *nix, 3000+ for OSX, and 300+ for embedded OSes. (http://freshmeat.net/browse/199/) Most of serious "Enthusiasts" I know are big *nix fans, some of whom have multiple MS certs.

If instead of "Enthusiast" you meant "PC Gamer", you'd be right. PC Games are almost entirely Windows only. This is where the term "Wintendo" comes from.

There are multiple reasons I suggested that HardOCP was Windows-centric. I could point out dozens of posts that have nothing at all to do with the topic and are simply there to trash on Linux, *nix in general, Apple, whatever... These posts on other sites would be relegated to whatever forum was for flaming and/or other stupidity... Instead on HardOCP, they're common in any topic that is about Linux/Apple/BSD/anything seen as anti-M$. It's also quite common that any time someone has issues with anything Microsoft that at least a dozen (apologist) posts crop up to point out how the original poster is incorrect about their own issues and that it's really not an issue for anyone but a few people anyway, etc, etc. For example, UAC annoyed the crap out of me and when I turned it off, I was treated to incessant bitching about it being turned off. I turned the damned thing off because I want it off, and constantly whining that I've exercised my prerogative as the owner of the computer is obnoxious. Basically I want the machine to do what I say and STFU. So, for me this is a big issue. It interrupts my train of thought and makes it harder to get things done (similarly to the way the background apps can pop dialogs up in front of what you're working on in XP). So instead of stating; a)a reason why this might be good, b)a way to make Vista STFU, c)anything else useful... People post messages stating that the behavior is not that bad and I should just get used to it, and write off lost productivity because we must all bow to MS, and it's inevitable anyway. Other people post messages stating that I was not as annoyed as I thought I was, or state that because I don't like interruptions that something is wrong with me or whatever (interruptions build character, yah know). Other posts may follow suggesting that I'm somehow I didn't give MS a fair break or whatever.

On Slashdot, which you'd be retarded to argue is not a enthusiast site, it's a bit more rabid but pointed in the other direction. Articles that have anything to do with Microsoft/DRM/RIAA/MPAA/etc are full of pointless posts full of inaccuracies, lame tirades, and some outright lies about whatever the topic is. The previous rant regarding the apologists defending MS, is the exact same but with the tables reversed.

Lastly to be completely blunt, Steve (the guy behind HardOCP) has outright stated that he's a "Windows guy" and that he has no love for either Apple or Linux.

EDIT: I stand corrected at least somewhat. Many of the more off-topic posts have been purged.

 

[Brian Boyko]

Everytime I think about this, i laugh. I kinda wish I could re-create it, lol.

The interesting thing about Oblivion is that the characters are so lifelike that even the -bugs- have entertainment value. I don't think we would have found it as funny if Septim wasn't voiced by Patrick Stewart and acted "human."

 

[Modred189]

The interesting thing about Oblivion is that the characters are so lifelike that even the -bugs- have entertainment value. I don't think we would have found it as funny if Septim wasn't voiced by Patrick Stewart and acted "human."

agreed. I was really freaked out last night (I'm playing through for my first time), and after killing one skeleton, a random villager in Bruma picked up it's axe and helped me against a second, instead of his fists which he had been using before. This ad-hoc AI behavior has really impressed me, and is rather scary.
Totally off topic though sorry.

I think a good way to prevent future threads filled with [H] got it wrong! [H] is biased! etc, maybe an 'editorial' stamp should be added on an article that is filled with much opinion. I thought it was a great article, despite some issues I had with it (mentioned earlier, and addressed by Brian, thx btw), and I don't think the poor author deserves the flak. Adding such a stamp may help. It may not, this IS the interweb after all (Citing PennyArcade's greater internet f-wad theory).

 

[Brian Boyko]

Okay.

I'm going to probably bow out of this thread because it's obvious that people are fired up about this.

I just want to make five clear points.

1) We had problems on two different computers, we're not the only people reporting these problems. While Vista might be rock-solid on other hardware configs, the two we tested on weren't, and those rigs were Whakataruna, my personal system which wasn't built with Vista in mind - it was built with XP in mind - and represented the person with a "year old" computer who would have to decide to upgrade. The other system was Pugetina, and this represented a "brand new mid-range" computer, with custom component configuration chosen clearly to work in Vista, by a third party who is a generally competent builder. We thought this was enough data points to track down common Vista problems, but we never said our experiences would be the be-all and end-all of what happens with this operating systems. Furthermore, while I was testing, other [H] staff was trying out Vista for themselves, and when the testing period was over and we were discussing how to write up and edit the story, we were told that they they experienced similar problems.

It could very well be that our experiences were more on the "fluke" side than on the "average experience" side, but even so, these problems did not occur in a vaccuum, and it's not like we're the only ones having them. Given the data we had, what other conclusion could we have drawn?

2) It's true that I didn't spend as much time in troubleshooting these problems as I did with Ubuntu. But with Vista, I didn't find the solutions. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place - that's a possibility. I just didn't know - and maybe that is my fault.

3) My conclusion comes off as harsh and perhaps a bit blunt. But it's true - I really did beg managing editor Jason Wall to let me reformat the computer (with Ubuntu we kept it on for a while afterwards) because, you have to understand, it was 30 days plagued with bugs, reboots, data loss, etc. This wasn't just a "review" - I lived with Vista for 30 days. If the problems I had drove me to frustration - and that showed in the evaluation - I consider that valid. Ultimately, my experiences made me miserable. Whether it's MS or a driver problem or whatever doesn't matter. I had a miserable experience. That's where the comments like "begged Jason" - which actually did happen - come from. It drove me near to tears at times.

4) Those random reboots, as I now know, are likely BSOD errors without none of the B and all of the D. In either case, this frustrated my efforts to diagnose the problem - especially since I got "real" blue-screens when using Quicktime. Because the system went through the trouble of going through Windows Shutdown instead of just halting, I didn't think it was a "BSOD" at all but some sort of buggy programmed Windows behavior. Coming from an XP world, I know that Blue Screens are often caused by bad drivers, bad data, and bad RAM - had I known that's what I was experiencing, I'd probably start troubleshooting there. Not knowing it was a "blue screen" I really had nothing to work with - and no idea to check the data dump.

5) Revisiting Vista after it's had a chance to "mature" is a good idea and we probably will in the future. But here's the rub... Microsoft has put out a product which is already shipping on new PCs and they're making it hard for OEMs to provide people with the old XP system if they prefer it. They're also making this available in retail channels. This product should be in a ready-for-market condition when it's put out on the market, not six months to a year later. That's what we judged. If Microsoft is ready to sell it, it's ready for reviewers to evaluate it.

 

[beowulf7]

Windows Vista got OWNED! And this review was written before the big security flaw that MS hurriedly patched this past Tues.

I will wait at least one (1) year before I even consider "upgrading" from Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista. By then, hopefully a service pack or 2 will have been released addressing the noted stability and compatibility problems.

 

[Devistater]

Windows Vista got OWNED! And this review was written before the big security flaw that MS hurriedly patched this past Tues.

I will wait at least one (1) year before I even consider "upgrading" from Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista. By then, hopefully a service pack or 2 will have been released addressing the noted stability and compatibility problems.

And patched it sloppily at that. Theres a number of reports of problems.
For instance, a big one is realtek HD audio. Majority of people with that are likely to have problems, unless they go directly to the realtek site and update. And even sadder is the fact that MS knew about this issue ahead of time (they posted a knowledge base article on it the same day they released the patch), and still released it in that state.

I also will wait to upgrade, until I see a dx10 game come out thats SIGNIFICANTLY differant than the same game under dx9, and even then I'll install vista only on a dual boot.

 

[fifthgear]

what they should really do with this article is compare vista, with the initial release of XP. yes there are alot of areas where microsoft f'ed up majorly. but there were also these same kinds of problems when xp was released. Give vista 5-6 years and then see how it stacks up against xp. It was released only a short time ago, give it some time people.

The point is that the lack of being able to quickly use "run...", "cmd", "ipconfig", etc is not a big deal for him; whereas for me it's a serious pain.

instead of hitting the windows key and then R, you have to hold down the windows key and press r, slight annoyance, but not hard to learn

 

[Modred189]

instead of hitting the windows key and then R, you have to hold down the windows key and press r, slight annoyance, but not hard to learn

Plus, alof of commands that I use a lot (tech support at BB) like dxdiag can be run right from the search bar. Type them in and hit enter.

 

[markt435]

If instead of "Enthusiast" you meant "PC Gamer", you'd be right. PC Games are almost entirely Windows only. This is where the term "Wintendo" comes from.

thats really what i was getting at.

 

[Seiuchi]

This is all a repeat of xp launch when many said "stick with win 2k" because 98 and me suck and xp still needs much work. Time is our friend and vista will prefered just like xp is now.

My biggest complaint is the lack of a new service pack for xp so I dont have to download the million+ updates they have now even with a clean sp2 install. I hate downloading all those little files one at a time.

 

[Vermillion]

Brian makes some good points with his article and it was an interesting read. It's too bad his experience wasn't as great as it has been for some of us, myself included.

I have a few issues with his article though. First this is an article for enthusiasts. As an enthusiast I believe that many of us, if not nearly ALL of us, wouldn't just jump straight into Vista without researching first. However, to me it feels like that's exactly what was done here. Jump head first into the shallow end.

It's no secret that nVidia can't write a solid driver for Vista to save their life right now. As an enthusiast with that knowledge why would you even attempt going to Vista right now? That right there would be enough for me to say, "Nope going to wait on Vista for the moment." To me that's how an enthusiast would think, yet BOTH PCs used here have nVidia hardware. Wasn't that the first nail in the coffin even before anything started?

I built my current PC with Vista in mind but I was running XP Pro for about a month. XP was great. Drivers for all my hardware was very solid. When Vista came out I did my research. I found all my drivers for my hardware before hand. I read up on any issues with the hardware under Vista. Without seeing too much wrong I dual-booted XP and Vista for about a week. I knew that I was diving into uncharted territory by going to a new OS so quickly. I figured that by dual-booting if I ran into any issues I could just boot back into XP and do my work. I didn't have any problems so I did away with the dual-boot and I couldn't be happier.

Now onto other issues:

The part of CD burning. While there are some legitimate complaints here that MS needs to address how many enthusiasts are going to use the crappy built in burning ability (it's crappy in XP as well) over something like Nero or Roxio or CDRwin or any other burning software out there? As enthusiasts we'll be damn sure to make sure we can burn CDs and DVDs without issues. I bought the new Nero specifically for that reason the same day I installed Vista.

It turns out that Flip 3D is a poor UI.

What makes this a poor UI? The fact that you can't read everything in every window as if it was crystal clear or the fact that there's a learning curve with a new OS? Windows Key + TAB acts just like the ever present ALT+TAB except you get the Flip3D look.

But Microsoft has made it harder for power users - the group of readers most likely to read this article - to do the more complex work that they need to do.

I really dislike this comment for two reasons. As a "power user" I personally find that I can find things faster and do more things in a shorter amount of time using this new interface but that won't be the case for everybody. So that means that this is totally personal preference so making a statement like that is wrong.

The other reason I dislike that comment is that if the group of readers most likely to read the article are power users like us, why are consumer level mistakes being made? Things like the use of nVidia hardware even knowing the state of their drivers. Burning a CD using the drag and drop. Even with a pre-built PC like Dell or HP you're going to be getting some type of Burning software to aid the user. It's just feels like these are normal consumer mistakes.

People may disagree with me but I just don't see enthusiasts making mistakes like that or making some of the choices that were made.

It will be interesting to see a follow up article in the future when drivers are more mature though.

-V

 

[Devistater]

Threadcrap

I object to that title. I'm in no way a mac fan, I dont even have one. I could give you all the reasons why I dislike apple, but that would just be more off topic thread crapping.

I've written several long replies (at least one of them is longer than any other post I've seen in this thread to date) and I dont even think I mention mac in the longest one.

I personally love XP. Its the best most stable OS I've ever used. And so far Vista is not impressing me. Heck, MS had to rip out some of the biggest features just to ship it within 3 years of its initial expected ship date of 2003!
But this has nothing to do with my like or dislike of Macs (for me personally its more of a dislike).

 

[evildre]

It's always interesting to hear about other peoples' experiences with Windows Vista. I, for one, have been running Windows Vista Business x86 since the day after it hit MSDN (working for a Microsoft Gold Partner has its perks). The CTO of the company also upgraded to Vista (though it isn't an approved development platform, so he isn't doing any programming on his workstation), and the only problem he had was that he didn't get Aero to work with his GeForce 6200LE ... situation was rectified by getting rid of the GeForce and feeding the system a Radeon X1600 Pro.

I'm not exactly running it on the best hardware out there, but Vista runs:

IBM Thinkpad T43
1.73GHz Pentium M
1.0GB DDR2 (upgraded to 1.5GB last week)
60GB HD
Mobility Radeon X300 w/HyperMemory driving two 1280x1024 displays (one DVI, one VGA, connected via docking station)

Yes, it gets a 2.0 Windows Experience rating, but it runs, and it's been very good to me. Since I loaded Vista, I have only had two blue screens: one related to the Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle I plugged into the docking station, and another related to the 30GB external hard drive I use for listening to tunes. I use the machine pretty much non-stop for at least 10 hours a day, 5 days week, and if Vista wasn't stable enough, I would have ditched it for XP Pro a long time ago. To be honest, UAC was almost the nail in Vista's coffin, but as soon as I turned it off and stopped getting those obnoxious messages, it was smoove as buttah.

Furthermore, I loaded Office 2007 upon successful Vista load, and have been using it problem-free as well. I'm in Outlook all day long, connected to an Exchange 2003 server, and find that I am able to stay more organized and on top of things with Outlook 2007 than Outlook 2003. I haven't explored the rest of Office 2007 extensively enough (other than an Excel sheet or Word document here and there) to see how it would make my job easier, but Outlook's been good to me.

One of my co-workers had actually upgraded to Office 2007 on his workstation back in mid-January, but was forced to roll back to 2003 (his manager got pissy because the colors in his calendar were incorrect ... no shens), and he has been having a hard time re-adjusting to what he had been used to for some time.

If this wasn't enough, I snagged a copy of Vista Ultimate for my home computer. I loaded the x64 version. Almost all of my hardware worked ... the only thing that didn't go was a Promise FastTrak S150 TX2 card, which didn't have Vista driver support at the time, let alone 64-bit Vista driver support; I ditched the card in favor of a Highpoint RocketRaid 2300, which has been doing well. Not everything worked out of the box, but that's to be expected, as Microsoft can't possibly include every single driver ever written. I only needed drivers for the chipset (nForce 4 SLI), audio (whatever is on the A8N-SLI), TV tuner (nVidia DualTV), and Highpoint card, and all of these drivers were right there, ready to be downloaded. I think it's been a month now, and apart from some intermittent issues with recorded TV shows (most likely due to the fact that the TV tuner drivers are beta ... freakin' nVidia), the thing is unbreakable.

Bit of a side note ... Flip3D isn't that bad. I grabbed a Logitech MX Revolution to use at work and I find that the side scroll wheel is absolutely perfect for this purpose -- simply flip though the apps using the side scroll and you're golden. I find it immensely useful, especially when I have eleventy bajillion windows open (okay ... realistically, 15 or more).

Eh, a bit of random rambling ... spent 12 hours at the bloody desk today, that's my excuse, but all 12 hours were spent on Vista Business without any complaints at all.

<edit> Oh yes, how can I forget the Sidebar? I own and use two Macs, but I don't consider myself an expert by any means. I don't think Sidebar is a Dashboard ripoff, mainly because Dashboard completely obscures the underlying OS when invoked ... at least, that's how I see it, as I've got Dashboard bound to F12. I've got "Always on top" turned off on the Sidebar, so I still have to "invoke" it by clicking on its tray icon, but the Sidebar and Dashboard paradigms seem quite different in that Sidebar is meant to be something to work with, while Dashboard is a separate full-screen application in and of itself. The Remote Desktop sidebar gadget is the shiz-nite, for the record

 

[bsoft]

No... And it's ignorant to suggest that being an "Enthusiast" makes you a Windows fan. While there is much that runs on Windows, and the standard (L)user may think that MS is the only game in town, it's simply untrue. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of hardware from embedded computers to mainframes, and millions of pieces of software beyond that. Freshmeat.net alone lists 29,000+ pieces of software for *nix, 3000+ for OSX, and 300+ for embedded OSes. (http://freshmeat.net/browse/199/)

Debian has 29,000 pieces of software in the Universe repository. Hell, BeOS, an OS which has been effectively dead for the last seven years (and was never really all that popular), has over 30,000 applications (over 7000 are listed on BeBits alone). What's your point?

Sure, there are millions of pieces of software out there. My TV has software. So does my printer, my clock, and my MP3 player. This, of course, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what I can do with my desktop. You can argue that I should use Linux/Cross-platform alternatives, and in many cases I do (Gaim, Thunderbird, Firefox, GIMP, etc.), but the alternatives are far too often a far cry from their Windows counterparts.

Most of serious "Enthusiasts" I know are big *nix fans, some of whom have multiple MS certs.

I am what you would call an "Enthusiast". I spent about 5 hours today logged into various Linux boxes (servers, development workstations), but my desktop and notebook run Windows. So does my DVR box.

I also have multiple MCP certifications.



I am sick and tired of the crapping on Vista. I stopped reading Slashdot because of it. Vista is here, it's here to stay, and it's probably going to be the dominant OS in 5 years. No one is forcing you to like it. No one is forcing you to use it.

There's a difference between a review and a barrage. Two months after Vista has shipped, we're still hearing about how much it apparently sucks. I run Vista on my three boxes every day. I'm typing on Vista now. UAC is enabled on all of my boxes.

My boxes have both NVIDIA and ATI hardware, and both AMD and Intel CPUs. They range from a 2.66GHz P4 with 786MB of memory and a GeForce 6200 to my regular desktop, which has a 1.8GHz Athlon 64, 1GB of memory and a Radeon X1600.

Have there been problems? Yes.

SpeedStep didn't work on my notebook until I installed RMClock (not that it worked under XP without RMClock). You have to run RMClock elevated. It's a bit annoying, but I deal with it.

PDFCreator doesn't work. I found a free alternative.

Thunderbird 1.5 has screwed up scrollbars. So I run Thunderbird 2.0 beta.

WOW needs to elevate to patch. So I do it manually.


Don't like Vista? Don't use it. But don't waste your and my time by telling me why I should hate an OS that I think is pretty damn good.

 

[AIW Guru]

4) Those random reboots, as I now know, are likely BSOD errors without none of the B and all of the D. In either case, this frustrated my efforts to diagnose the problem - especially since I got "real" blue-screens when using Quicktime. Because the system went through the trouble of going through Windows Shutdown instead of just halting, I didn't think it was a "BSOD" at all but some sort of buggy programmed Windows behavior. Coming from an XP world, I know that Blue Screens are often caused by bad drivers, bad data, and bad RAM - had I known that's what I was experiencing, I'd probably start troubleshooting there. Not knowing it was a "blue screen" I really had nothing to work with - and no idea to check the data dump.

Are you kidding? Here I have to SERIOUSLY doubt your cedibility. You didn't know that system reboots were BSODs? Are you kidding? You had absolutely NO IDEA as someone in your position that Windows XP and Windows Vista automatically reboot when faced with a BSOD whenever possible unless you tell it not to?

That's just...I don't believe you're qualified to write this piece. Sounds like maybe some of your RAM has suffered mild ESD damage which manifests itself under different usage. Vista definitely uses RAM differently than XP. I remember when XP came out and people made the upgrade from 98, many learned that they had bad ram. They weren't affected by the fault in 98 though as 98 didn't use ram the same way.

I'm guessing that RAM gets swapped around a lot at some point at [H]. Always in perfectly static safe conditions?

Also, your experience reeks of PEBKAC. I've been running Vista without a single problem of any kind. It's a 100&#37; rock solid stable OS. Sounds like you're using completely incompatible hardware/software/drivers and or have a hardware problem.

I'd love to see a review written by someone who knows WTF they're doing in Windows. It sounds like you're lacking even XP system knowledge that can be gained through reading a technical review that was written in 2001 about Windows XP's features! I don't think you have any XP or Vista troubleshooting experience AT ALL and thus would not even be a user qualified to upgrade their machine. A user with your level of knowledge should be buying an OEM machine with Vista pre-installed and have NO problems.

You know, I've only made 4 other posts in the SEVEN YEARS I've been registered but really - this is too much. This and the ridiculous article/editorial posted on OSX and Vista originality have moved me to speak out. WTF is happening at [H]?

 

[TheRapture]

Wow......^


...but reeking of some truth....the author did not know that the reboots were BSOD's? Or how to even set it not to automatically reboot? Ouch....never been on a beta since before win2k came out eh?

 

[AIW Guru]

Author: please click the windows pearl. Type "reliability monitor"
<ENTER>
This will give you a complete breakdown of application failures, windows failures, and hardware failures. I've seen reports from flakey machines and you'll find that the windows failures tend to correlate strikingly with the hardware failures.
You can even select each incident on the timeline for details if you don't know how to look in event viewer or force windows to display a BSOD.

Incidentally, on this machine, since it was first turned on more than two months ago, there's not a single windows or hardware failure. Not surprising as they seem to go hand in hand.

 

[Hypernova]

I think the reviewer simply set out to bash Vista from the start. By the time of official launch it was well known (for months) that nVedia drivers were having major issues yet he intentionally chose to use them on both of the machines.

 

[MagnusDredd]

Brian makes some good points with his article and it was an interesting read. It's too bad his experience wasn't as great as it has been for some of us, myself included.

The part of CD burning. While there are some legitimate complaints here that MS needs to address how many enthusiasts are going to use the crappy built in burning ability (it's crappy in XP as well) over something like Nero or Roxio or CDRwin or any other burning software out there? As enthusiasts we'll be damn sure to make sure we can burn CDs and DVDs without issues. I bought the new Nero specifically for that reason the same day I installed Vista.

And of course noone at all is going to use the built in disc burning feature, and then show up at my desk asking why the disc they burned at home does not work in the machines at work... Bullcrap. This is going to cost me hours of my life, just like many of their other mistakes have. It's simply inexcusable. MS screwed up big time here. First, I don't generally go on shopping sprees and spend even more of my hard earned money to make up for incompatibilities/broken functionality in a new OS, nor do most people. The only exceptions to this that I make are for anti-virus and anti-spyware apps and then only on Windows. While I do have to admit that I did not run into this issue under Vista it's because I already had a fairly new copy of Nero that I bought for completely different reasons. The truly pathetic thing is that even OSX's built in disc burning can be read by XP, and Vista's cannot. MS really needs to explain how the new format is beneficial to anyone other than them.

The real question here is: How many enthusiasts work in IT/tech support?

What makes this a poor UI? The fact that you can't read everything in every window as if it was crystal clear or the fact that there's a learning curve with a new OS?

Because it's not especially useful at the task it was designed for. That task is to enable a user to quickly and precisely get to the window they are looking for. It's not very good at that. Alt-Tab is simply better for this for every single person I've asked about this as well as in every single study and review I've read that covered flip3d. I've also used better task switchers in Windows, Linux and OSX:
http://www.ntwind.com/assets/images/taskswitchxp/tsxp_default.png
http://www.cyber-knowledge.net/blog/images/thumbs/pics/alt_tab.jpg
http://lunapark6.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Application Window Switcher-02.jpg
http://lunapark6.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/scale.jpg
http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~rpicha/personal/mac/expose1.jpg

If the task was to add useless eye-candy, it great. Linux also has some ueless eye candy:
http://lunapark6.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/outsidecube-transparentcube.jpg

I really dislike this comment for two reasons. As a "power user" I personally find that I can find things faster and do more things in a shorter amount of time using this new interface but that won't be the case for everybody. So that means that this is totally personal preference so making a statement like that is wrong.

Interestingly, you're one of a very few people I've heard state that Vista is faster for you. Most simply shrug and suggest they "have to get used to it" some more to judge, which is a fair point. The following is not an opinion, like yours; a large firm that does usability studies has concluded that Vista has higher "Interface friction", meaning that it takes more time to get the same things done for most people.

http://www.pfeifferreport.com/trends/trend_vistauif.html

The other reason I dislike that comment is that if the group of readers most likely to read the article are power users like us, why are consumer level mistakes being made? Things like the use of nVidia hardware even knowing the state of their drivers. Burning a CD using the drag and drop. Even with a pre-built PC like Dell or HP you're going to be getting some type of Burning software to aid the user. It's just feels like these are normal consumer mistakes.

So according to you, if I spent $500 on a GeForce 8800 GTX a few months ago (basically the #1 gamer card), then I should either a) consider Vista unworkable, or b) shell out $400 for a slower Radeon X1950XTX???? How much money a year do you make????

As for me, hell no, like the reviewers I' tried Vista out on what I already own. Everyone else I know did the same except for one person who bought a new laptop.

It's lame as hell to suggest that because most enthusiasts use Nero or another 3rd party package, that it's fine that drag and drop burning in Vista is deeply flawed. It's broken, quit making lame excuses for it.

 

[MagnusDredd]

instead of hitting the windows key and then R, you have to hold down the windows key and press r, slight annoyance, but not hard to learn

Cool, thanks for the tip... I just wish more responses were as useful as yours.

 

[AIW Guru]

...or just hit the windows key, start typing and hit enter. The search box is also a run box.

Incidentally, I just did a quick google search for 'random windows restarts' and came up with at least a dozen articles from OEMs, MICROSOFT, sites not dissimlar from this one, and forums of people who all give the same advice:
Disable automatic restart
Check event viewer
Check reliability monitor which has a very easy to understand and access GUI.
The interesting thing is that most of these forum posts/articles are about this happening on Windows XP not vista and address the first two points. It seems that anyone with even the vaguest interest who put forth the slightest ammount of effort would have been able to learn these steps as they seem to be the default first steps for troubleshooting the author's problem.

Accordingly, I can only conclude that the author did in fact make no effort whatsoever and had no interest in even trying to understand the cause of the problem. The author must have assumed it was a fundamentally unstable OS. No explanation needed.

I just did a search in Vista's 'Help and Support' and the results should be extremely embarrassing for the author. When Vista is asked about random restarts it gives us topics such as:
"System recovery and reliability for IT Pros"
Reading this help article would have told the author all he needed to identify the source of the BSODs be they drivers, bad memory (there's even a ram diagnostic tool). I'm sure the author had no idea about that tool either as, again, he made no effort.

 

[MagnusDredd]

What's your point?

The point was simply that there's more to being a computer enthusiast than Windows.

This was in response to:
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1030868673&postcount=203
"everything else runs on Windows?"

I am sick and tired of the crapping on Vista. I stopped reading Slashdot because of it. Vista is here, it's here to stay, and it's probably going to be the dominant OS in 5 years. No one is forcing you to like it. No one is forcing you to use it.

Everything has flaws, including Vista. It's not crapping when those flaws are pointed out, or an article is written about someone's personal experience with something. It amazes me how on /. the fanatics all make excuses about how Linux only requires a few times that you have to edit a config file, and how Joe Consumer will be ok doing this. It likewise amazes me how people make excuses for Vista's poor gaming performance (which some people swore was as good as XPs), useless things like Flip3d, and completely inexcusable things like the incompatibilities in the built in disc burning software.

There's a difference between a review and a barrage. Two months after Vista has shipped, we're still hearing about how much it apparently sucks.

So if the reviews that were coming out were heaping praise on Vista (Like many were before it shipped), then you'd have no problems with them? I read those blindly praising reviews myself, and then I installed the RCs, and boy was I surprised. What's funny is that before it shipped the articles I came across/read were overwhelmingly positive. Now that people are actually trying to use it, the tables seem to have turned...

Personally I'm a big fan of heavy metal which is often crapped on. Get used to it, everyone is not going to like what you like, and if people who write articles hate something, they're going to write accordingly.

Don't like Vista? Don't use it. But don't waste your and my time by telling me why I should hate an OS that I think is pretty damn good.

Cannot deal with criticism of things you like? Stop reading forums, especially ones discussing the merits of something you've apparently already invested yourself into.

Personally I've found quite a bit of the discussion useful, as I have to deal with the fallout of the changes that are made. As it's been decades since I was new to computers, one of the ways I figure out what is going to trip up the people I have to support is to read forums and see what people are bitching about and then try to figure out how to deal with the issue.

 

[eloj]

why? because this is an enthusiast website, where the majority of hardware, games and everything else runs on Windows?

Which is the reason it's doubly important to get some linux testing in there. After all, we already know that it'll run on Windows. We DON'T know about linux. It's really frustrating going through a review and not getting the single piece of most important information there is about the hardware in question.

Reviews are there to _add_ information, right?

Reviews of graphics cards, for instance, are a dime a dozen. I can go anywhere and get graphs of Product Series N versus Product Series N-1. In an information theoretic sense, they provide close to zero entropy. My only explanation for why you don't even get the barest of alternative-OS information from a typical HardOCP review, is that it requires skills not in evidence, which is pretty sad since there's an implication of not wanting to learn something different lurking in there.

If some editor want to present other reasons, I'd appreciate it. However, I'd like to note that the popularity of the 30DO Ubuntu in itself invalidates arguments based on "small audience", IMHO.

 

[Devistater]

Author: please click the windows pearl. Type "reliability monitor"
<ENTER>
This will give you a complete breakdown of application failures, windows failures, and hardware failures. I've seen reports from flakey machines and you'll find that the windows failures tend to correlate strikingly with the hardware failures.
You can even select each incident on the timeline for details if you don't know how to look in event viewer or force windows to display a BSOD.

Now THAT sounds like an incredibly useful tool. It would have been interesting to know what that tool showed on the machines in the article.

 

[Zardoz]

Wanted to put my opinion in on this. I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate x64 about 1 week ago, My initial experience with Vista has been very good. however I do find that drivers are still ruff around the edges, and some are still not even available, but this was to be expected with something so new. this is why I even waited this long to install Vista. When Microsoft had there open beta I did take a look at Vista at that time and I have definitely seen much improvement from then. As for calling Vista a lemon or not fit for ANY user is just wrong. However I can understand that you had problems, and that your experience with Vista have been bad.

My conclusion is that at this time Vista is not for everyone. I still think drivers and support need to mature a little more. but this is getting better all the time. I feel I have a small advantage in that I waited a little longer to install Vista then most others. My advise to others thinking about installing Vista is know what you are getting into, make backups of you data, and check the support of you hardware under the new system. I do hope HardOCP will revisit Vista in about 4 to 6 months, I feel in this time frame things will be much better and even more stable and compatible.

Thanks much for the article, but I have to say I disagree with much of it, and do not like the conclusion at all.

 

[markt435]

Which is the reason it's doubly important to get some linux testing in there. After all, we already know that it'll run on Windows. We DON'T know about linux. It's really frustrating going through a review and not getting the single piece of most important information there is about the hardware in question.

Reviews are there to _add_ information, right?

Reviews of graphics cards, for instance, are a dime a dozen. I can go anywhere and get graphs of Product Series N versus Product Series N-1. In an information theoretic sense, they provide close to zero entropy. My only explanation for why you don't even get the barest of alternative-OS information from a typical HardOCP review, is that it requires skills not in evidence, which is pretty sad since there's an implication of not wanting to learn something different lurking in there.

If some editor want to present other reasons, I'd appreciate it. However, I'd like to note that the popularity of the 30DO Ubuntu in itself invalidates arguments based on "small audience", IMHO.

as I said in a post above...I was getting at that this website is more geared towards PC gaming. And 95% of PC gaming is done on Windows. If you're looking for more reviews or info on Linux, I would suggest looking somewhere else. thats just my opinion on that. but if you REALLY want them to do more linux stuff...email them and ask.

and as for the popularity of the linux article, well, just as the vista article, both were slashdotted and digged (or dug ) in addition to the normal readership.

 

[amar]

maybe i'm bit late to this but

We didn't test ReadyBoost. Perhaps we should have, but I've only got one USB flash drive and I was actually using it for data (and it's rather full!)

what??..

if you not used/test this feature how do you come with this conclusion??

There were some features that, in retrospect, didn't seem to do much. Flip 3D is a gimmick, not something that will really add to productivity like Mac OSX's Expose. Windows SmartStart and ReadyBoost were non-starters as I couldn't see any performance improvement related to RAM utilization or general usage

 

[Jason_Wall]

I find this experiment to be quite flawed in that nVedia was used. It was know since Beta 2 that they have driver problems. No attempt with ATI hardware makes this a very biased experiment.

I think the reviewer simply set out to bash Vista from the start. By the time of official launch it was well known (for months) that nVedia drivers were having major issues yet he intentionally chose to use them on both of the machines.

Are you going to find another way to state the same thing?

I think it's an extremely reductionist view to blame all of the problems we had on NVIDIA. ATI is just now coming out with bona fide Vista drivers. At least NVIDIA was decent enough to throw some betas at us early on (undoubtedly from Kyle's probing of the issue). Even if we did have an ATI card in our system, there weren't any stable ATI drivers during the test period. Your comments make it seem like ATI wasn't having driver problems - not sure anything could be further from reality.

That said, NVIDIA was not "intentionally chosen" for the purposes of this article. Whakataruna has been Brian's computer for over a year. The Puget was initially built to test Linux.

True, it would have been a more complete experiment to test ATI hardware as well, but that would mean we would also have to test an AMD chip, different motherboard chipsets, RAM brands, sound cards, etc. We were looking at the overall performance of the operating system, not the performance of graphics solutions within the confines of an operating system.

 

[Jason_Wall]

maybe i'm bit late to this but

what??..

if you not used/test this feature how do you come with this conclusion??

I actually tested ReadyBoost myself, which is why it's in the article. Sorry for Brian's comments - I think he meant to say that HE did not test ReadyBoost, so he couldn't comment on it personally.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

The problem with ReadyBoost at this point in the game is that there's really no way to test it reliably. Some people, like myself, have used it and noticed a marked jump in the overall responsiveness of our machines in day-to-day usage; other people seem to expect big HUGE HUMONGOUS FUCKIN' MASSIVE INCREDIBLE FUCKIN' SPEEDBOOSTS and that's not what it does. ReadyBoost makes the day-to-day activity and file management on the machine work better than without it by using the Flash-RAM based device in conjunction with the normal Windows virtual memory subsystem and SuperFetch as well.

It's one piece of the puzzle, just like the pagefile is just a piece of the virtual memory subsystem. People equate pagefile = virtual memory and that's just not the case: it's just one component of all of it.

ReadyBoost is just one component of the SuperFetch and virtual memory subsystems now that can help with the small random paging activity by using the much faster accessed Flash-RAM storage over the slower mechanical hard drive. Even Raptors with low access times in the sub-10 ms range can't compete with Flash-RAM based products in the sub-100th of a millisecond range (roughly 100x faster on average). The faster you can find the file, the faster you can use it - and Flash-RAM beats a physical hard drive hands down in that respect.

So, the problem is: there's no way to test ReadyBoost that anyone has come up with yet - we're still all waiting to see if such a thing is even measurable in some respects.

All I know is that when I use Vista and I pop in a 1GB Cruzer USB thumbdrive, once the ReadyBoost cache on the Cruzer is populated (that usually takes a few minutes) the system responds a lot more favorably to a lot of heavy disk activity and program usage. That's my experience, and I'm not alone.

Hope this helps...

 

[Vermillion]

And of course noone at all is going to use the built in disc burning feature, and then show up at my desk asking why the disc they burned at home does not work in the machines at work... Bullcrap.

I never said no one. I said enthusiasts as that is who the author stated this article was for. Now if you start talking normal everyday consumers who won't do their research then yes you're absolutely right thus why I said it does have have issues that MS needs to address.

Because it's not especially useful at the task it was designed for. That task is to enable a user to quickly and precisely get to the window they are looking for. It's not very good at that. Alt-Tab is simply better for this for every single person I've asked about this as well as in every single study and review I've read that covered flip3d. I've also used better task switchers in Windows, Linux and OSX:

Now this is a better argument. I don't wholly agree but your point is well taken and I agree there are better task switches out there.

Interestingly, you're one of a very few people I've heard state that Vista is faster for you. Most simply shrug and suggest they "have to get used to it" some more to judge, which is a fair point. The following is not an opinion, like yours; a large firm that does usability studies has concluded that Vista has higher "Interface friction", meaning that it takes more time to get the same things done for most people.

Interesting read. But everybody out there goes at their own pace when using a PC. According to that article they did the testing in house with those few systems and are basing all their facts off that. They didn't take Vista to a company of say 100 or more users and take information from that. Instead they loaded 4-5 machines ran normal "everyday" applications and drew conclusions from that. While that gives some insight to potential problems it does not have enough samples to be final say. They don't even tell us what driver versions or hardware is being used other then CPU speed. So how do we know problems they endured aren't related to something hardware or driver related?

So according to you, if I spent $500 on a GeForce 8800 GTX a few months ago (basically the #1 gamer card), then I should either a) consider Vista unworkable, or b) shell out $400 for a slower Radeon X1950XTX????

Yes you should because of the sorry state that nVidia's drivers are in and as an enthusiast you would know that. However, that isn't a fault of Vista. NV had PLENTY of time to get their drivers ready. It's nVidia's fault that their cards aren't Vista ready. ATI seems to be on the ball so why isn't NV? So you can't hate Vista for nVidia's craptastic drivers you can only hate nVidia.

It's lame as hell to suggest that because most enthusiasts use Nero or another 3rd party package, that it's fine that drag and drop burning in Vista is deeply flawed. It's broken, quit making lame excuses for it.

Where did I make any excuse for the drag and drop burning? In fact I said the following:

While there are some legitimate complaints here that MS needs to address how many enthusiasts are going to use the crappy built in burning ability

I will agree though that I should have worded it better because it did come off sounding more like an excuse then what I meant. My apologies for that.

However, being an enthusiast I know how crappy XPs drag and drop burning was so I haven't even bothered with Vista's for that reason. Being an enthusiast I know that there are better ways to burn CDs and DVDs. A simple "hey i ran into these problems with drag and drop burning and MS should fix them but such and such software allows me to burn data or author DVDs just fine" is what I expected from an article aimed at enthusiasts because that's the type of information enthusiasts would want.

-V

 

[djellison]

30 days is longer than I lasted. I managed 3. Adobe stuff basically broken, 3ds max 9 doesn't work (yet), and the whole OS seems designed to simply annoy me. The ONLY benefit - and I mean the ONLY benefit I can find, is that it looks kind of shiny.

Back to XP - for the forseable future, quite probably for a year (hopefully more) - I won't be touching Vista. I am more likely to be using OSX before I use Vista again

Doug

 

[RagingSamster]

First off, here - take this pair of asbestos shorts, hopefully I'm not too late!

I had much the same experience as the OP with Vista - I am thinking that as an upgrade we will need to wait for significant patching activity in order to curb the issues with Vista. from an upgrader's perspective Vista is not ready for prime time - more so than any other OS that I can think of.

However I have not been exposed to OEM installs on new machines. I'd like to see that data to make a more complete decision - after all I would expect the majors to test and fix the builds before sending them out to consumers.

A "detail" question the review. With WoW on my machine listed below, I noticed that while I could run WoW in a window and my TV tuner simultaneously, I noticed that while running WoW exclusively that my FPS were down considerably. Did you notice this at all (especially during times with lots of characters on the screen.

 

[jzodda]

This whole thread is becoming funny. I never thought people would get so worked up and emotional over an operating system. The plain fact is Vista works for some and not for others. If your a gamer with a $500+ 8800 GTX then you are not a happy camper right now when it comes to Vista. Is that MS's fault? No way! But as a consumer you have no choice but to take that into account when thinking about Vista. I have read some silly comments too in this thread. "Vista runs Office 2007" and I leave my system on 24/7 type of comments. Does that make Vista ready then for everybody else? If the reviewer had a hard time running it then so be it. People are either so ready to come to the defense of MS or to come and attack that it gets tiresome.

I am going to take what seems to be a controversial opinion in this thread and defend the reviewer. I am not going to question his testing methodology and if you read his article and his comments in this thread I think we should give the guy a break. At least he came here to respond to peoples comments. His experience was a negative one for now but I am sure this site will return to have a look at Vista down the line a bit. Vista is not a short term project like a piece of hardware to be outdated in 6 months. It should be reviewed more like a MMORPG as its a long term investment.

The most important thing about this site is its honesty. That honesty sometimes gets people angry it would seem but I would rather come here then go to 90% of the other hardware sites where the reviews are all glowing so they can keep receiving samples. I like this place the way it is and have since the late 90s.

 

[Guspaz]

The section about Windows Media Player/VLC is a tad misinformed. WMP wasn't "upsampling", and VLC wasn't "just playing back".

WMP was using the hardware overlay. This serves to perform a bilinear filtering operation on the video in hardware, and has been done at least as long as we've had DirectShow. Well, actually, Win98 used the overlay. XP switched to using DirectDraw7 for this with a fallback to overlay, and I assume that Vista uses DX9.

VLC normally also uses the same thing. The fact that you were seeing nearest neighbour filtering would indicate that something was wrong with VLC. If WMP was running slowly, it's not because it was using overlay (which is all done in hardware anyhow), but becuase something else was wrong.

As an interesting note, I use Media Player Classic; a GPL'd clone of the original Windows Media Player 6 interface. MPC uses some of it's own codecs, but is most commonly paired with ffdshow, which itself uses the same libavcodec library that VLC does.

MPC supports the ability to choose how it displays the output You have the option of using the overlay, DX7 2D surfaces, DX7 3D surfaces (essentially render to texture and display on two triangles forming a square), and ditto for DX9. When you run it in DX9 mode, you can have it use a pixel shader for the scaling operation... including the higher quality bicubic transform. So if you've got a reasonably powerful DX9+ card, you can get a higher quality "upsample" by using pixel shaders to do the scaling operation

Downside is that this means the GPU gets hot like it would running an intensive 3D game, so on a laptop it can be a bit unpleasant for watching a video

 

[AIW Guru]

You're defending a position that the author himself did not take. He calls Vista a lemon and unfit for ANYONE. This kind of absolute is at best ignorant and TROLL. I'm sure if someone started a thread in this forum calling Vista a lemon and unfit for anyone it would be labelled a Troll. There's no other word for it. Why should we chaulk it up to one user's experience (or inexperience ) when the author is not willing to do the same?

 

[jzodda]

You're defending a position that the author himself did not take. He calls Vista a lemon and unfit for ANYONE. This kind of absolute is at best ignorant and TROLL. I'm sure if someone started a thread in this forum calling Vista a lemon and unfit for anyone it would be labelled a Troll. There's no other word for it. Why should we chaulk it up to one user's experience (or inexperience ) when the author is not willing to do the same?

I have to agree with you on the statement of calling it a lemon. Thats editorializing the review far more then needed.

 

[dark_reign]

He calls Vista a lemon and unfit for ANYONE.

What he really meant is that it is a lemon and unfit for anyone in its CURRENT STATE, based upon his own personal experience. This is how I interpreted it. There's nothing to get angry about because it's just his opinion based on the experience HE had. I don't recall anywhere in the article where he told people that they should not upgrade to it under any circumstance.