The Truth About Vista

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"So what makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it's as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn't matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don't: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we've been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it's worth using again now - this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts. What this article doesn't do: it doesn't try to make you believe that Vista is the greatest (or worst) thing since sliced bread. It doesn't try to force you to think a certain way by taking liberties with the truth just to prove a point. It doesn't try to highlight how witty and incisively sarcastic I can be. And most certainly this article doesn't try to dazzle you with technical jargon."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1220405271.usr10.jpg" /></p><p>This article is really a great look at Vista.&nbsp; It hits nicely on a lot of the supposed "facts" about the problems with Vista and points out how many of the same things were said about XP when it was released.&nbsp; Make sure you read through to get some solutions for common problems as well as a look ahead to Windows 7.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

[jeffd]

I found the default directory view to be most helpful. It was a nuscence that I more or less ignored, but now its nice to be confident that opening up documents dosnt produces thumbnails of some risque picture I saved the other day. ;)

Ive been running vista 32 and 64 bit (64 on my big game rig with a quad core cpu, many many hours of late night WoW raids burned into that one) with nairy an issue. Performance has been good and all my fav programs run fine. Well, I did need to fall back onto media player classic as my main player because zoom player crashes when seeking sometimes, and GOM player seems to have a tough time keeping the frame rate flawless when subtitles are used.

[txa1265]

I don't know why there is all this revisionist history at work to try to 'debunk' issues that MS themselves have admitted?

WinXP marked the convergence of consumer and business operating systems for MS, and therefore there were loads of issues associated with that transition. If you were running Win2k it wasn't such a big deal, but if you were running loads of legacy code on Win98 / ME, then it was a nightmare. Gamers had to keep dual-boot systems or dedicated Win98 machines for a while (until recently I had this one laptop around as it was the only one that would play a certain game).

But even for folks with fairly high-end systems Vista was a major performance hit from day one, which was one thing. The problem is that so many of the touted under-the-hood stuff really wasn't all that great at first, with loads upon loads of bugs and security holes and lousy basic driver support. Driver support is a really difficult thing but also critical to the OS functioning, and while I think many were unrealistic with expectations, it has taken entirely too long to come along. Again, OS transitions are tough, and I don't ever anticipate them being easy - which is why I'd never put a brand new OS on a 'mission critical' PC.

But regardless of those nifty graphs (which seem sort of funky at best given some of the underpinnings on the site they were linked from), one thing is certain: businesses are holding off Vista adoption much more vigorously than they did with XP. The market share progression is widely tied to new PC sales, as you can barely get XP copies now if you wanted them. Business roll-outs are always slow, which makes sense. But when XP came out I was hearing from my IT friends playing with it in adoption scenarios, now they are figuring out when they will *have to* move to Vista. For the majority of them, they see little upside and tremendous downside - having to replace PC's before XP would have obsoleted them, added support and retraining costs, and so on.

I have no problem with Vista - other than on netbooks - but don't think that ignoring the mistakes made is of benefit to anyone.

[Outlaw94]

I see the delay in business adoption two fold. Yes there is the normal response of waiting because Vista is buggy, etc, etc, etc. You know the excuses we have all heard before.

But has anyone stopped to think of another reason why Vista is not being adopted aggresively by businesses? Well lets take a look at the economy, the stock market, the rising prices of goods, and gasoline etc. In todays economy most companies are in money saving mode. I am an accountant for a publically traded comapny being hit hard by the economic downturn and we have slashed budget accross the board including what we deem as unnecessary expenses and projects in IT. I know this because I support the IT finance function. We are not permited to spend any money not deemed extremely necessary and all projects that were ongoing (except two) have been stopped until further notice.

I personally think this is a major reason we haven't seen wide spread vista adoption. The cost for the licenses would not be a small amount.

[Jason Dunn]

I don't know why there is all this revisionist history at work to try to 'debunk' issues that MS themselves have admitted?

I didn't read the entire article (it was far too long), but I didn't get the sense of revisionist history so much as the author simply wanted to hit the reset button on people's opinion of Vista. As the Windows Mojave experiment has shown, there are a lot of people who carry around negative impressions of Vista, and quite often they're unwarranted. That article was tech-heavy and aimed at a certain type of geek, because I find a great degree of ignorance about Vista even among the people that should know better. My local computer store is typical of this: some of the salespeople seem appalled and surprised when I tell them I'm using Vista. There's this quite ridiculous perception that Vista is a complete dog and only people that don't any better would use it, but now that the ecosystem of drivers, software, and hardware have caught up, it's a great operating system. I find using XP to be like using Windows 95 - it seems unoptimized for real-world use.

I have no problem with Vista - other than on netbooks - but don't think that ignoring the mistakes made is of benefit to anyone.

Yeah, I agree that on Netbooks XP still makes sense. I wish Microsoft had made a version of Vista optimized for small devices like that. Light, and super fast. Although I wouldn't want yet another version of Vista sold at retail, so maybe just some way to let the Netbook OEMs tweak Windows Vista Home Premium to be light and fast...

[Jason Dunn]

But has anyone stopped to think of another reason why Vista is not being adopted aggresively by businesses? Well lets take a look at the economy, the stock market, the rising prices of goods, and gasoline etc.

An excellent point - and one that I think the Vista-haters try to ignore. Most companies are in belt-tightening mode, so it wouldn't matter if Vista was AMAZING, they still wouldn't be in a rush to deploy a new OS because of the costs.

It's for that reason that I wish Microsoft would have focused on putting more killer consumer-focused features into Vista - features for the people that do tend to upgrade every couple of years.

[EscapePod]

If I had one dollar for every person who said to me, "You like Vista? I HEARD that it was no good!", I would be able to buy a new PC <img src="http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/images/smilies/smile.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Smile" class="inlineimg" />

[Rob Alexander]

As I mentioned in another thread about a month ago, I just moved to Vista with a new Dell XPS 420 desktop system. Admittedly, it is a very nicely spec'd system so it's not surprising that Vista runs very well on it. But it's not just about the hardware; Vista really is quite good.

I think Outlaw is right about the recession theory. While it's may not apply to every company, it must have a significant collective impact. However, my brief experience brings to mind another reason that enterprises may not be ready to move to Vista. It's one thing for me, as an experienced computer user, to deal with Vista's beefed-up security model with existing applications, but another entirely for the support department of a big business.

I'm talking about how some of my applications won't start in Vista initially. Why? The application requires administrator access without checking to see if it has it while Vista doesn't give any program that access without user intervention. Again, for me it's no big deal to go find the executable and set its properties to 'run as administrator', but if you had that problem in a business, you'd have a support nightmare. There were several programs I had to tweak around a bit, put into compatibility mode, etc. to get them working. (Luckily, only one that I couldn't get to run at all.) I fully expected that and so I'm not really bothered, but if I were running an IT department, I'd try to wait until all of my company's applications had a version that was written for Vista. That hasn't happened yet for my College and so I see why they're still putting new systems on XP.

While I do understand many reasons that businesses would stick with XP for now, there is no reason for an individual buying a new system to avoid Vista. I see nothing about Vista not to like in its current form and on new hardware. It's plenty fast, it's stable, it has nice features. It's multitasking is much, much smoother than on XP. I compared it to a brand new Dell desktop at the College that is only a bit less spec'd than mine, but running XP. The XP system starts up quite a bit faster than the Vista system, seems virtually identical in responsiveness to a single application, but bogs down significantly more than Vista when multitasking.

In fact, the Vista system doesn't bog down at all when running multiple applications. There seems to be no detectable difference in the foreground application no matter what the background is doing. For example, with XP I could barely work with a virus scan going on in the background (and so I didn't). With Vista, I wouldn't even know it was running if I hadn't started it.

I do have a few issues with decisions the development team made, but I'm finding ways around those and the same web site that the article is on also has free .pdf guides for tweaking both Vista and XP. They're kind of long-winded, like the article, but they contain a lot of useful information... also like the article.

[inteller]

i read the entire article. WOW, what a good article.

[Jason Dunn]

I'm talking about how some of my applications won't start in Vista initially. Why? The application requires administrator access without checking to see if it has it while Vista doesn't give any program that access without user intervention.

Indeed, Vista's security model is much, much stricter than any previous version of Windows. The reality is that there's a whole generation of programmers who, frankly, were allowed by Windows to be sloppy - to allow their programs to do anything without regard to security. On Windows XP, the best way to secure your PC from problems was to run as a standard-level account...but almost no one did that. Admin-level powers for applications was, by far, the #1 reason why the Windows platform has had so many virus and spyware problems. Vista puts the smackdown on many of the problems, but it means developers can't make assumptions about permissions - and they have to create their applications thinking about security.

In fact, the Vista system doesn't bog down at all when running multiple applications. There seems to be no detectable difference in the foreground application no matter what the background is doing.

I'm glad you noticed that. :D I find Vista to be much more responsive and more efficient-feeling than XP. It's not perfect - there's always room for improvement - but it's light years beyond XP in so many ways it's not even funny. Yet so few people realize that...

I'm glad I didn't steer you wrong with my encouragement to give Vista a try.