swaussie

What are the initial reactions from the peeps on Windows Vista? or

I must say my first impressions after 2 weeks of use are shocking (I am using the RTM version). I think its the biggest, buggiest piece of rubbish ever written . I fail to see how this is more user friendly, useful, faster, or even a worthy successor to XP

I have it freshly installed on a high end PC but the performance is woeful. I have switched off Aero, side bar and that damned annoying user account control as well as most other of the perrty stuff. My specs are an AMD 4800+, 2Gb RAM, X1900XTX and a Raptor 76Gb.

Let me start off with a list of gripes which is bound to get longer

Where is the stability? What has taken 5 years to write? I have had numerous crashes with Vista, IE7, M$ Office etc (actually this is the second time I have written this thread. I went to do a spell check on the first one and IE crashed). I had Outlook 2007 open last night and a few web pages, I did a search for a config file and whilst that was happening I thought I would put on some music. When I opened media player the whole thing went **** up and died. I had to do a hard reset (second time in 2 weeks)

- Where is my shutdown button? After about 2 days it up and disappeared off the start|programs list. If I hover my mouse over where it should be I still see the options to switch user, log off, etc, but the button is gone

- Network performance is miserable. If I boot to XP I can copy files from my server at about 70-80% network usage (100mb Ethernet). With Vista its unusable at between 0.4 -1.25% (I have disabled IPV6, network sense or whatever that crap is and anything else not needed) but no difference. Its going to take 5 hours and 52 minutes to copy over one 172Mb file

- It can take forever to shutdown (slowest yet was just over 9 minutes). It can also take a lifetime to shut programs. I was using the photo gallery and opened my photos in the slideshow program. I went to close that and waited over 30 seconds for the slideshow to close.

- The screensaver can also take a month of Sundays to close and give you a log in screen (maybe only if you are using your pictures as the screensaver) ??

- It uses an exorbitant amount of RAM. A clean boot with nothing running will use over 700mb of ram. I have outlook, 2 internet windows, computer manager and Avast antivirus and its using a paltry 1.03Gb RAM

- How many services? Last count was a total of 142 of which 71 are running by default

- What’s with those damn small arrows in explorer? If I clicked on my computer in XP it would automatically open everything up underneath. With Vista its double click or use those stupid arrows.

- If you do a search for photos and then click on a photo in the result, nothing happens. I would think that double clicking would open the photo to view?? What is it with all this searching stuff anyway? Does anyone use it?

- just how many event viewer logs does M$ think we need? Surely you should be able to turn them on and off if you want to debug something??

I could go on for days about small stuff that seems stupid. Why in slideshow cant I configure it to make larger my smaller photos? What is the point of having a photo album in both Vista and Media player of which neither seem particularly useful? Why there is no easy way of going back up a level when in explorer and and and...

But

I love the chess game

mike1210

Swaussie, is this the RTM version you were testing?

KiwiGTI

You mean the one they copied off Mac OS X?

Ian Cook

I had the RC2 version installed a few weeks ago, before it went RTM, on my paltry P4 2.8 with 1gb ram, 256 graphics and it ran fine, was as fast if not faster than XP, and that was with everything switched on, aero etc, never blue screened once or had any programs crash that i remember ! The only reason i went back to XP was that release wasnt very good with Call Of Duty 2 (ie it wouldnt run) lol

Is Office 2007 the release or the beta still ? (sorry am out of touch with release dates for that !)

KiwiGTI

Office 2007 is released and it is really good, however I think it will cause MS to lose significant market share.

It is too different from their previous incarnations and too expensive. Corporates with 20,000 office staff of average IQ are not going to want to have to retrain all their staff. Would not surprise me if many places retained Office 2003 or went to OpenOffice (It's a very good package these days)

Iain Young

From my experience, big companies are very nervous about using open source software. They prefer to pay someone for it because then they can have support contracts in place etc, and there are no possible issues with copyright etc (which can be a problem with open source stuff if someone adds something a little dodgy).

We sell software to some very large companies with thousands of employees(some of largest banks / financial institutions in the world), and you would not believe the number of assurances we had to provide them with when we incorporated some Apache open source stuff in one of our products...

Neanderthal

iTrader: (6)

My company still uses Windows 2000 and Office 2000.
It's not a small comapny either (international house builder).

Last month there was a big announcement saying everyone will be getting new PC's early next year with.... WinXP on it!
Strangely the last 2 PC's I've had whilst working here have all had the 'Genuine Windows XP' serial tag stuck on them, so they must format each PC to put W2k on it! Not that I'm complaining cause both my home PCs have benefitted with fully working CD-Keys

KiwiGTI

I think that will change over time, but you will obviously have things like Sun with StarOffice.

Iain Young

It possibly will change, but when you have a very large company, it's a big gamble to base your forward going strategy on software which has no support contract and possible legal implications. Big corporates get very nervous about that sort of thing, and I don't think that will ever change.

Nobbie

Snap!
Its Windows XP with a new skin!
Its rubbish, aero doesn't work for me as i don't have a funky graphics card on my laptop. When you add the memory and cpu to the sidebar 'Mmm funny, Mac OSX Widgets', you can see how much cpu and memory its caining when idle. I'll stick with Mac 10.4 and W2k at the moment thanks!

PeteBrant

I am playing with the MSDN release of Vista Ultimate and Office 2007, and colour me impressed - From the intial post I can only assume it was a previous release candidate and not the final version. Shut down is almost instant, and performance once up and running is fine - slightly clunky - but bear in mind this is on an old P4 2.6GHz with 768MB ram and an old FX5200 64MB gfx card that I have rebuilt for someone.

When I stick it on a fast machine I am sure it will fly.

KiwiGTI

Of course, but I can't see them spending the money on Office 2007 because of the far reaching implications. Not only is it expensive (although I'm sure there will be cheaper licensing options) but as I've mentioned it requires a complete retraining of all users.

The other big barrier is the use of .docx instead of .doc. That sort of transition for a company will millions of documents and existing document managing and indexing systems would be painful.

Iain Young

Agreed on that one. I suspect most corporates will just keep using Office 2003 for at least the next year, (likewise most of them will continue to use XP instead of migrating to vista). We've got customers who are still using NT3.51

djuk

I would also assume the original poster is running an early release from some of the comments. I've been running Vista on some fairly modest hardware since pre-beta2 and it's been a bit flakey along the way. However, the RTM version of Vista Enterprise I'm running now is absolutely spot on - faster, prettier and more efficient than XP.. I'm never going back

PeteBrant

Not sure I would go that far - The interface is different, yes, but If you know how to use Office applications, you'll know how to use Office 2007 applications. If anything it's easier, the new menu bar driven stuff with its graphical interface shows you exactly what you are going to get, for example rather than getting a dialogue box with number of rows and columns when inserting a table, it actually shows you the table and you drag it in - Adding pretty colours etc is also much, much more user freindly.

The whole thing has changed from you having to input what you want in text form, to actually drawing what you want on screen - much quicker and easier.

djuk

I would agree that it's now easier - the interface change was driven by 10,000+ user feedbacks asking for new features in office 2007 - 90% of which were already in Office 2003 but hidden deep in the menu system. The new ribbon system is a much more natural way to locate features.

swaussie

I am using the full Vista RTM release (Technet member). I was maybe a bit harsh but I still think all it is is a worked over version of XP with lots of pretty stuff added in. I want an OS that is useful and stable and not for its pretty looks

and the new version of office does seem nice. Takes a bit of time to get used to it but it seems a bit more thought went into it than Vista.

I get a score of 5 in the windows experience thingy so my PC is no slouch but it all just seems to take so long to do anything. Its nice to see some peeps getting good experiences but I struggle to find it as a worthy upgrade?

JackClark

http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main...608.3636472971

Graphite

works great on both my machines AMD XP2400 and X2 4200... I like it - but am only on the RC1 version - don't bother using it too much since no updates get downloaded - and I can't believe there aren't any LOL - and it's due to be canned in July next year so I don't want all my system setup in Vista and then be forced to buy a copy or lose my entitlement to log in to my system!

No fancy graphics cards either FX5200 and FX5900 but everything works fine except AVG

I installed free office software OpenOffice OpenOffice.org: Home & that seems fine too...

I won't be paying silly money for it though... - Looking at Linux now

G

Iain Young

Erm am I missing something obvious, or what has a video clip abou the battle of Iwo Jima got to do with Windows Vista?

cottonfoo

Heh, most of the largest banks in the City run thousands of lines of Perl, Python, Ruby etc, have worldwide Apache deployments, and hundreds of Tomcat installs running Java applications. Perl is used heavily to glue it all together. They're not as **** as one might think, and proprietary code _extremely_ _rarely_ ever finds its way into an open source product.

JackClark

Hmm, it worked earlier! Oh well.

Iain Young

We deal with banks such as Deutsche Bank, American Express, Mellon bank etc, plus several large insurance companies, ticketing services, big shopping chains etc. All their main business logic code is written in COBOL and hosted on mainframes. Not a bit of open source software in sight in their main code. Perl and stuff only come into play in the customer facing stuff (atm machines, web sites etc), and that is kept very seperate from the main business logic. Most of them would have kittens if you suggested allowing open source software anywhere near their business critical systems...

cottonfoo

Then we'll agree to disagree, since I've done this first hand, myself, with Deutsche. They have a lot of open source products in use, and they are very, very far away from customer-facing services. Granted, they use Sybase instead of PostgreSQL, Websphere MQ instead of WSMQ, horrible outdated mainframes and legacy code written in COBOL (which is just hard to replace), but saying they'd have "kittens" is quite incorrect

ATM machines run embedded systems or Windows anyway, and those don't even have anything to do with the bank, they come from people like NCR and are totally separate entities, and don't even connect to banking systems directly.

swaussie

I should add that I am using the 64bit version and have just found that my Creative X-Fi sound blaster drivers are causing my slow shutdowns. Still, the DVD maker just crashed on me

Iain Young

Interesting. Perhaps we have dealt with different divisions then, (it is quite a large company). They certainly were most nervous when we suggested using things like tomcat.

Iain Young

Sounds like the problems you are having are more to do with the device drivers rather than vista itself. Like others on this thread, I've run the final release candidiate and found it to be as quick (if not quicker) than xp, and also impressively stable.

cottonfoo

Well all banks are massive, good mate of mine worked for DB a few years ago and they put him up in a hotel in New York for a year (!) whilst he rolled out a bunch of Apache instances with some monitoring software he'd written for it. I can't remember what that was used for though. They certainly will never use MySQL for their transactional data though.

Edit to add, I'm in FX at the moment (not in a bank), which will be ATM based, and it's all open source (except what's inside the ATMs)

KiwiGTI

That's not because it's open source though, it is missing quite a few features that would make it not suitable for an enterprise datacentre.

cottonfoo

I'm well aware of that, having worked in mainly enterprise-class environments, it's the mentality I was getting at.