Off Topic - Request for Comment

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is a bit off topic but not a request for computer help.

Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has determined that one of the biggest reasons that Vista isn't being adopted is that IT professionals are advising their clients to hold off on upgrading. Apparently they believe that part of the issue is misinformation. My company is one they have asked to send engineers to Redmond to meet with some of the team that developed vista and discuss the reasons we are not advising clients to adopt vista.

I am quite sure that many of you have opinions on this issue, as do I, and I would love to get as many perspectives as I can so that this can be a very productive exchange of ideas.

Please note that "vista sucks" is not a productive comment. Why does it suck? What sucky experiences have you had? What could be improved to make it suck less? Who else is doing it better that they could take lessons from? (ie. UAC has been done in linux for much longer and they do it much better)

This is, in my opinion, a very good step for Microsoft and I want to make it as useful as possible for them so that they will continue to listen to the IT community and make greatly needed improvements to their systems.

EDIT: I will definitely be telling Microsoft's engineers that it doesn't matter whose fault a particular issue (third party software, etc) is because it's still something keeping people from adopting their technology and is thus their problem.

Comments

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Most of my vista experiences have been with retail notebooks. They all run with the speed of a stunned snail. Just how much of this is vistas fault and how much is due to the hoojullion and five different trial programs installed by default is hard to say.

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

Definitely. I feel like Microsoft is going to give a lot of "well, that's not actually vista's fault" kind of answers. Personally, I have every intention to tell them that it doesn't really matter whose fault it is because it's another reason your product is not being adopted, which makes it your problem.

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

Also my hope. I am very happy to go there and do everything I can to make it productive in improving the system. If they choose to make it otherwise.... Well, they'll just be losing out on more business that way.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

performance on laptops has been abysmal, as commenter above stated.

UAC is obnoxious, breaks too much to be useful.

the sandbox mode for IE7 breaks certain activex controls in weird ways under vista that it doesn't do under XP.

[the-hunter.livejournal.com]

I run a variety of OSs, and try to keep as modern as the system I install it on allows. I have an old HP server (4 processors, numerous fans, larger heat and noise output than my fanheater) running Win 95. One laptop runs Win 98. In swedish. (Don't ask). One runs XP. And this machine runs Vista. I have two niggles with Vista, both, for me, minor, but for the corporate word I would imagine damned frustrating.
1) Constant verification. *Did you mean to do that? I have to have your permission to do that! Are you really sure? Really? Wanna think about it? I can ask you again tomorrow. In fact I am going to ask you whether you like it or not. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next...Buahahaha!*
2) Just how long does it take a dual core 2 gig machine to boot? I had a Tandon 286 that would boot to DOS *and* windows 3.1 quicker than this damned thing!

Other than that...well, I *like* Vista. There, I said it!

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

YES! #1 is a huge annoyance to me too. And I don't even use Vista, I just helped a friend install wireless.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Full disclosure here: I am neither a tech support person, nor do I use Vista.

However, as a user, my main reason for not buying a new computer (which will have to have Vista on it) is that it's my understanding that Vista isn't backwards-compatible with programs that I use and love. And I realize that PSP8 and Wordperfect11 are probably dinosaurs, but I know how to use them and they do exactly what I need them to do. I don't much feel like forking out the extra dosh to "upgrade" to programs that work with Vista.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

<3 icon <3

[mousekinn.livejournal.com]

Most of my bugaboos have probably been fixed - I was a tester at M$ for awhile, working on Vista *eyetwich*

But yes, the Are you sure? Are you sure you're sure? really? Positive? what about now? hmmm now? still sure? will you be sure tomorrow? if you DIED TODAY, would you be sure FOREVER? - dear god. If you put that sort of confirmation into a workplace with not so sophisticated users, your call volume is going to explode.

It's bloated and it's slow. It's always been slow. I would install on clean machines and it was slow. The upgrade process? JESUS CHRIST. Rent 4movies, adn you'll still have time to write a novel.

However, fully expect the "ADOPT IT!!!" pep talk versus fixing anything. M$ internally is a bunch of crackpots that don't think there's anything wrong with their products. I had to argue with a developer for over a week before i had to walk across campus to his office adn sit him down to show him the problem that was as easy to repro as setting a ticky box - but he couldn't seem to do that. *eyetwitch* That's going back into the morgue of my memory now.


eta: oh right, then there's the complete and utter failure of backwards compat and driver issues. holy hell.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

For a business setting, I think the benefits of upgrading often don't justify the cost of the new software plus the new kit needed to run it. What can Vista do for the average user that XP cannot?

Obviously there are exceptions, but generally speaking I think Vista offers few improvements over XP that would be necessary for everyday business.

EDIT: My husband is the IT professional in the family, and he tells me that his department started rolling out XP in '03 and finished the last upgrades this past winter. Now, he works at a college where the business department keeps an excessively tight hold on the financial reins, so his experience probably isn't typical, but I also don't think it's unique. Folks who haven't had XP for long aren't really interested in yet another upgrade.

[the-reda.livejournal.com]

What can it do? Hide all the functions in new and shiny places. ;-)
I lost a lot of hair trying to find things when customizing a friend's computer. Tis not a VISTA but a Windows problem. Every effing time they come out with a new OS they just have to screw with what is where. GRRRR

[firon.livejournal.com]

Pretty cool that you've been invited to Redmond! And I agree, it's a good step for them. Though it might have been better advised to take this step PRIOR to launching the product. But there you go.

So, reasons I don't like vista. Primarily there is no compelling reason to move to it. In my experience, XP has been an excellent OS and is by far the best of the MS operating systems I have used. It's taken time to get to that point though, as all OSes take time to smooth out the wrinkles.

When I moved to XP it was largely to get the benefit of the NT stability, while keeping the majority of the 9x compatibility and gaming support. XP did an excellent job of bringing those two key features together. So it seems silly, to me, to move from an OS I am generally happy with to an OS that constantly reported to be more cumbersome, slower, and full of incompatibilities, often even with newer hardware. All the vaunted killer features for Vista were largely missing from the final release and many reviews simply stated that one of the only features that made it through was DRM, something I'm really not interested in having in my machine in any case.

Though I haven't really used Vista much myself (thankfully my domain is XP users/2003 servers) when I have assisted users with their home machines, I have been constantly frustrated by how MS have once again moved all the key control panel apps, settings etc for no discernible reason. If it's going to provide some sort of benefit, fine, move things around, but only if it's really going to help. Making it more complicated and take longer to set things up is NOT helpful! I understand making it somewhat harder for the average user to get to things that can screw up their computer, but I just don't think it's the way to go. If they want to really do something useful, add something like a system wide undo feature. Having something where you could actually see a history of things you've recently changed and being able to roll back (a la photoshop) would be great (and I don't mean System Restore, something similar but more basic), just recording settings changed in a given period and allowing you to see the setting affected in the list and roll back to a specific change.

That's probably just the tip of the iceberg, but it's a start.

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

I've had a couple backwards compatibility problems with vista as opposed to win2003. In many cases, a new version of the program in question existed, but would require a separate project to modify scripts and q/a porting functions to a new scripting language.

Performance has been an issue on desktop machines in small business environments.

A number of the customers I'm working with aren't buying any, or many new machines. Their windows 2003 servers has enough performance capacity, disk capacity, and are stable enough that moves to vista feels like alot of work for little gain, to the end user.

Having worked with several windows OS upgrades, I wasnt willing to recommend any customer use one before the first or second major service pack came out. This was pretty much a unilateral position of all the windows IT people I know, so there hasnt been much conversation of successes using vista to generate excitement about moving forward.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

It runs like a narcoleptic three legged dog, it nags more than my boss, and the one machine I've put it on is dead and the helldesk are insisting it's software. Because even though the first thing I did when I got it was slipstream the SATA drivers into an XP CD and nuke the bugger, and had exactly the same problems under that, they are *insistent* that the issue is software. Because it boots, so therefore it can't be hardware. And XP is not admissible evidence because it's not what was supplied. Service like that is why I mostly buy mac.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Seconded about the constant nagging. It's a total bitch to administer and locks the system down to a ridiculous degree unless you've gone through the trouble to rewrite the policies. Really, I don't think Vista is a business OS - from a usability standpoint it's much like WinME, although I'm not sure which one was more useless.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

In a home environment, it's excellent (on new hardware). In a business environment... way too many legacy apps that are barely supported - or not at all. We still support several hundred Windows 98 PCs, and some Windows 95, because they're running Access 2.0 based ERP software that doesn't work under 2K/XP. The vendor of that software is in the finishing stages of porting their solution to Access 97, which sort of works under XP.

[tovasshi.livejournal.com]

Massive resource hog.

Remember when 512MB was considered a lot of RAM and 64MB was the minimum requirement for XP?

What the hell did they shove in Vista that makes its slow as a drunk snail on 1GB of RAM?

Too many redundant programs, services, etc. running in the background. Most of it is completely unnecissary.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Remember when 32KB was a freaking LOT?

[digitalraven]

It's slow. We can't upgrade most of our machines and expect Vista to run at any speed, and we're not about to run a mixed-environment show. And upgrading 400 machines? We're lucky if we can do fifty in a year.

It's naggy. Just putting pupil laptops onto our network is a bastard. "Are you sure? Are you sure you have rights?" Linux does this better. OS X does this right. Stop fucking around and learn what makes your competitors not suck.

It's not got any tangible improvements. XP provided improvements over 2000, but only in SP2 (the firewall and security stuff). There's no reason for us to spend a metric fuckton of cash on upgrading to something that's slower and provides no benefit. When's Vista's SP2 equivalent? When does it start being better?

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Fairly exhaustive article on Vista's "content security" mechanism demands here.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

dang - just posted that in my rant... ;-)

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

System resources - It eats them for breakfast. It's pretty and all, but there's no reason for pretty to take up that much
File system - What the heck!?! NTFS worked fine, why are you mucking with it and making it take a minute to delete a LOCAL file!
Puppy dog syndrome - You do not need my permission to do something I told you to do. Stop bugging me and just go ahead. Yea, I know you can shut it off, but it's either off or on, no middle ground.
Cost Vs Value - There's no killer app, no real reason to upgrade to Vista. XP does a great job after 2 service packs it's probably Microsoft's most stable OS. There has to be something REALLY good about upgrading to make me want it. It's pretty and all. File encryption is nice but I already have that on the machines that need it.
Why so complicated - We have the other end of the puppy dog syndrome. Why does it take so many steps to setup a wireless network. Why do I feel like I'm always fighting the OS to get things done.

I know some of these are being fixed in SP 1, but that even bugs me. We had to wait for a service pack to fix some major issues?

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Here are my reasons specifically for not liking Vista. These are in addition to not liking MS in general.

(1) Insane hardware requirements for all the new shiny bits.

(2) MS can blacklist my hardware if some 4aX0r finds a sploit which allows them to snag some DRM-ed material. This means that my computer is no longer my computer.. it is my computer to which a third party arbitrates my use.

#2 is the real issue here. It is completely unacceptable, and causes me to often descend into merely uttering a stream of epithets.

[jecook]

+ 98726492836493286429875640842309 on both, actually.

At my last place, we had a few machines that technically were spec'd to run XP. (P3, 700 Mhz, 256 MB ram) I ended up putting 98 back on them, because the machine ran too damn slow for my end users to do anything acceptable on it.

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

Lack of support for our more esoteric hardware and software packages. See also "academic environment".

I still have an NT 4 box that controls a specialized $30k camera, because no drivers were released for 2k and XP...let alone Vista.

[tallanvor.livejournal.com]

1. UAC
2. UAC
3. UAC - Yes, you can turn it off, but it's incredibly annoying even if you try to do it right away.
4. Compatibility. So many programs have issues with Vista. It's incredibly annoying when it switches graphic settings just for a damn message box.
5. It's a pain to find things. --The only machine I have running Vista at home is my media center. And it took quite a while to find the settings that would stop it from shutting off the video output whenever it felt like it.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

I don't want to use 1/3 of my CPU to prevent me from doing stuff.

No Repair Install

[davetheinverted]

One I haven't seen mentioned is that, for all that it has a multitude of recovery options, it doesn't have anything equivalent to XP's Repair Install.

We had a Vista laptop come in last week with Internet issues. It could get an IP address, it saw DNS, I could ping sites by IP and by name...but neither IE nor Firefox could browse. Doing the netsh resets on winsock and TCP/IP didn't help. In XP, we would have done a repair install, which would have almost certainly fixed the problem. Since this was Vista, we had no real choice but to back up the customer's data and do a full format and reinstall. Twice as much work for us, and an order of magnitude more pain for the customer. Not cool.

Dav2.718

[bitterfun.livejournal.com]

VISTA IS GREAT EVERYBODY SHOULD LOVE MICROSOFT!!!

(*in a whisper* I'm only 12 miles from the MS campus, I can't comment. Balmer hears all and knows all!!! Oh dear god, what's that? They're coming!! Sweet jesus tell my wife I love her!)

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

BWAHAAHAAHAAHAA!!!!

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

I compiled this list of links to explain to a friend why I would never "upgrade" to Vista. (I plan to move to either Mac or Linux after XP EOL.) The list is from Feb 07, but I bet a number of these issues persist. (Example: DRM crap.)

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-6689143-1.html?tag=nl.e497

http://www.tomcoyote.org/tech/vista-upgrade-invalidates-your-xp-key/74/

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5932

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070128-8717.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070124-8690.html

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/01/24/microsoft.wikipedia.ap/index.html

http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/5-sins-of-vista.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2536050,00.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/27/windows_drm_monstered/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/vista_drm_analysis/

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36570

And just for fun:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/02/windows-vista-upgrade-decision-flowchart.html

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Just how much FUD can you fit into a single post?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=304
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309

And, just for fun...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=349

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Well.... let me list my Vista experiences...

Work laptop - Dell 620 w/ dock & secondary (primary) display
- scrounged another module to get it to 1.5g so it would at least pretend to run
- It forgets its video config if:
--- ANY M$ updates are applied
--- I plug it into another dock
--- I use it outside the dock without shutting it all the way down before and after
--- I use it outside the dock at all when it feels cranky
- takes forever to boot or shut down
- still haven't figured out how to replicate the setting I have on my XP laptop -- right click on My Documents, redirect to H:/MyDocs, click, done and available offline. Where the heck is that in Vista? I'm told it's there. I've just never been able to find the right secret combination of menus, checkboxes, and sacrificial virgins to make it work.

Home box - Core 2 Quad, 4g
- 'minor' change to final Vista64 code makes a critical 4x500g Raid5 array eat itself
- ipod locks up on sync if internal USB card reader is plugged into certain USB headers
- Clean install of Vista64 w/ slipstreamed SP1
--- IE craps out after a handful of pages with a "this app has closed unexpectedly" error - had to install Firefox to do anything
--- The same error pops up when I close ANYTHING
--- Adobe Bridge CS3 will not even launch before the error pops up

Overall opinions:
- some nice features - pretty much all bling, no substance though
- no reason or excuse for rearranging every menu item and folder
- Pretty is Nice - Pretty means less than nothing when it comes at the expense of performance, usability or compatibility.
- no reason or excuse for rearranging every menu item and folder
- UAC is a joke, and not a very funny one
- no reason or excuse for rearranging every menu item and folder
- It does nothing better than XP from the user perspective
- no reason or excuse for .. are you seeing a pattern yet? Ditto x2 for Office 2007...
- Crippling it with DRM reduces compatibility
--- C'mon - it's a PC. Trying to put artificial barriers between a user and their content is just plain stupid.
--- DRM is inherently flawed as a concept - you give a user both the locked media and the key to open it.
--- one more complication if I want to get a fancy monitor that uses HDMI
--- The DRM lockdown requirement makes driver development more difficult
--- http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html)

I still recommend people to get their computers from vendors like Dell who still let you get XP on certain boxes. Unless you're a gamer that just has to have Halo 3, there's no compelling reason to put up with Vista.

Between select agreements, MSDN memberships, etc, I can lay hands on just about any OS I want for the new Core 2 Quad box referenced above. I'm going to go ahead and nuke the current Vista64 Ultimate it has and 'upgrade' it to XP Pro. Sure, I'll loose 3/4 a gig of RAM, but I'm going to make most of it back in reduced bloat and the rest in performance and piece of mind. Who knows... if M$ gives Vista the ME treatment and shuffles it into the dumpster as quickly as it can, maybe the replacement can regain our trust and desire?

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

My XP-running work PC did the video config stuff too. (We had a lot of trouble with those notebooks, actually.)

;)

[crazdgamer.livejournal.com]

When my side-job needed a new system for scanning and storage, Vista had just come out a few weeks prior. Because there was very little (if any) third-party support for Vista at that time, we found that all the notebooks which came pre-loaded with Vista would not work with our scanner (HP LaserJet 3055; printing was ok, scanning was not.)

If the third party support was there, we would've stuck with the Vista laptop instead of searching for an XP laptop.

[kathygnome.livejournal.com]

I've just had nothing but problems with it. It broke my login scripts. My printer drivers have reduced functionality. In one case there wasn't one and I had to switch to a generic PS driver. I have a lot of programs that aren't compatible with it -- some of these are obscure, some because I'm a small town government IT critter and we are still using 8 or 9 year old versions, but still.

I also found that as someone running a small installation with 40 PCs in our main location and another 20 scattered around other offices, it just offered me nothing but irritation. The security is overkill. UAC wasn't a solution, it was a problem in and of itself that drove my users crazy. Everything ran slower. When we dumped 98 for 2000 & XP it was glorious. Crashes disappeared. It was so stable in comparison. Like night and day. Vista? Nothing but problems.

So we took the few Vista PCs we had and downgraded them to XP.

Forward to the release of SP1. At the same time it was coming out, I just finally had my hear old XP install reach the end point at home. Vista SP1 had just come out and I am playing Lord of the Rings Online, which is a DX10 game, so I figured why not give it a try. Start with the disks with SP1 included and all that.

I tried Vista 64 and quickly found Rhapsody didn't work with 64 bit OSes from Microsoft. Well, my mp3 player is based on Rhapsody. That was a deal killer.

So I tried Vista 32. I got everything up and running. This time I got constant crashes on the ICH9 controller on my motherboard. Vista kept helpfully pointing me at the driver to fix the problem -- the exact ICH9 driver that was already installed. (I installed all the most recent manufacturers drivers.)

Without the crashes, I will say that all my games ran not just slower, but significantly slower. One didn't run at all, until I went to their support and found I had to set one to run as admin because it wouldn't patch otherwise. And by slow, I mean really slow. So slow that LOTRO ended up looking worse under Vista DX10 than it did with XP DX9 because I had to turn down the settings so much to reach a playable framerate. I turned off the sidebar junk. I turned off Aero. I even turned off the memory optimization because it supposedly interferes with program requests for additional memory while gaming. No real change in speed from all the tweaking. The OS is just plain slow.

Every time I try the OS, it gives me a list of reasons not to use it.