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.

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

free food, though, right?

win, imo!

[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!

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

The latter is my impression from the post.

[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.

[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.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Most retail notebooks have incredible amounts of crapware shoved into them by the vendors. As long as you give Vista 2GB RAM and a decent HDD (read: not 4200rpm) it performs fine. I run Vista on my home PC (granted, it's a quad-core desktop with 4GB RAM) and it runs blazing fast. The only thing slow about it used to be file transfers over gigabit, and SP1 fixed that. Note, however, that Vista systems tend to be somewhat sluggish in the first few days after install, then speed up as the system finishes indexing files and adjusting itself to your usage patterns (SuperFetch caching frequently used files into RAM and such).

[the-hunter.livejournal.com]

Sorry? You helped a friend install wireless?
Oh, you mad fool! Do you know where this will lead? Do you not know that one, single, solitary attempt to help a friend with a computer problem leads, always, without fail, to the provision of a 24hour a day, 7 day a week, support service. For life. And for free!
Duno why...you bake someone a cake, they don't come around expecting free baguettes in perpetuity. Help fix their tyre (tire? Dunno, you may be from Elsewhere, and spell it differently (ie, wrongly :) )) (forgotten how many parentheses I used now! )and they don't take it as a lifetime Automobile Association membership. But help change the screen definition, just once, and...well, you're doomed, and thats an end to it...

[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.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

I do kind of object to anything that isn't WoW requiring 2GB of RAM :)

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

Don't take too much about Microsoft's end of things from my post as I have not personally heard directly from them. I was informed by my boss that we have this opportunity and any indication that it will be a chance to "tell engineers why they're wrong" may just be my skepticism. Of course, it may be correct. We'll see when we get there.

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Food on campus in crap. So's the coffee. but the beer was OK, which was why I was drunk for four days...

[gholam.livejournal.com]

At current RAM prices, who cares?

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

The IT administrator who has several hundred machines to upgrade and has to acquire the memory, get it installed, and catalog everything, just because some executive got a sales pitch saying how Vista would do so much better.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

It's the principle of the matter, I guess. My OS should exist to enable me to run my software on my hardware. My OS should not be the most taxing thing running on that hardware.

And that's why my OS isn't the most taxing thing running on that hardware :)

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

Which is why I only help very close friends with computers, and only if I'm visiting them anyway. My husband on the other hand... I think his parents think he's their personal tech support. (The funny thing is that I'm the one who actually works with IT - he just uses them for fun. Yet he's the one they call... go figure.)

Oh, and I'm from Denmark, so I spell it neither tyre nor tire but 'daek' ;-)

[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.

Re: this is not a constructive comment

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

That's a bummer :( I can go with eating lousy cafeteria/catering, but ya GOTTA have good coffee, or at least decent coffee. Once you break out the beer, you'd better be done with attempting to get anything productive done.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

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