Is Vista any good? The market has spoken...
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Chris, the thing the guys here like about the start menu is that you can just start typing and find the program, rather than having to navigate through 4-5 levels of menus. IMO, that's an improvement.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: The Virginia Tech Shootings, Guns, and Politics The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
The search is great - a nice little addition. But the menu itself is a bad step backwards. What fundamentally annoys me is that there are tons of small (and big!) things that really make Vista great, but that is let down by so many niggling unnecessary and annoying things in the UI.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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I am not sure if the question about Vista should be in reference to its quality or how many may be purchasing it but rather how much is it really needed. I have been in the field clos eto 35 years. I have seen just about every imaginable fad and whim come and go along with the corresponding software tools. Most software today that the newer generation of technicians appears to promote is highly redundant and far less efficient than the software concepts which became the initial tools. Yes, Vista may be the new OS from Microsoft but do we really need a new OS? I can find little to complain about when it comes to Windows-2000 which close to 47% of the Windows community still uses. Less to complain about with WIndows-XP\SP2. DO we really need an OS that is primarily supposed to support a utilitarian base for business and other institutions that must perform similar functions. I think not. Though I agree with a technician who wrote a number of months ago that many will buy Vista simply becaus ethey are ignorant, lazy, or just want the latest glitz on their machines. However, there is absolutelky nothing you can do with Vista that you can'ta lready do with either of the mention Windows OSs or Linux or even UNIX. There is nothing about Vista that makes it unique except maybe for its gaming capabilities. And for that we should have been given an add-in module for the graphics and not an entirely new OS of which many such modules have been developed as third-party tools such as XNA Express. Vista and Office 2007 are simply tools to maintain Microsoft's dominance in the market place, not something that can provide unique computer experiences, most of which are highly overrated and nothing more than marketing hype. You want a unique compuer experience, trust me you are not going to find it in anything commercially available today. For that you will have to join the US Military and get to work with their many simulation tools. Vista, like so much else today, is a solution for a problem that has already been resolved. Had Microsoft made extensiblet OSs in the past, Windows would have been as it should have been, simply a standard by which we all work by much like UNIX has been a standard on the larger machines that support it. However, instead we get constant redundancy in this case because Microsoft can't cut its own umbilical chord to its current "gravy train". And for that reason much of the top technical talent is leaving the company... In 35 years or so, many of you will be saying and
Well this being a developer board all your points are a little beside the point. As a user I was happy with CPM when it was the os of choice for a pc back in the day. As a developer I find it amusing to see a lot of luddite developers on this board getting cranky about any new technology. It's not our job to judge os's it's our job to write the software that runs on the os that our end users are using. Increasingly that is becoming Vista; bitch all you want about it but your app better play nicely with it if you have any sort of average target demographic. I'm not sure why so many older developers are so resistant to change. I've been developing for 23+ years now, not as long as some I'm sure, but I've never felt like stopping at any point and saying "this is all I want or need to know". I got into this like of work because I *like* change, it boggles the mind that anyone can be a developer with any other kind of attitude.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Just to make a point or two ... POINT #1 Developers = Web_Programmers + DBA + Net_Programmers + App_Programmers + Game_Programers + ... etc Market = (10*Developers + 100000*Not_Developers); We_Say_Good_OS = Happy(Developers); If (Money != SalesTo(Developers)) { Money = SalesTo(Not_Developers); } If (Money == Good) { MS_Say_Good_OS = True; } else { PutMoreCrap = True; IsBeta = True; MS_Say_Good_OS = True; } POINT #2 I'm not changing to Vista yet. I deal with too many aspects of programming from web, net, db, apps, gui ... and i can't afford to fall into the pit against all known and unknown bugs out there. Vista is mostly a matter of visual preference for my clients and as a developer, i'm forced to create software that will run on a client machine (regardless of Windows version). As a developer however, it's my choice to work on a confortable and bug-free (if that's ever possible) enviroment and Vista are still miles away from that in both ease of use (and i mean for developers) and fast workflow. Vista-Team (i'm not blamming anyone) has focused too much on creating a visual impact on simple users, rather than providing a good OS for the devs. PS: Speaking purely as a Dev, i can only say that at this moment, the OS prompt seems more attactive (in terms of workflow and bug free enviroment) for my work than the entire Vista product series.
I've been developing (winform, asp.net mostly c#) on Vista now for months, there is about a 1 or 2 day learning curve, after that there is no issues whatsoever. Frankly I see a lot of people here talking out of their asses about Vista who have never used it for any length of time. It's pure and simple stubborness and resistance to change, an attitude which, in a professional developer surely makes them better cut out for another line of work entirely, perhaps gardening or applying gold film to religious statues or illuminating manuscripts or something. ;)
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Well this being a developer board all your points are a little beside the point. As a user I was happy with CPM when it was the os of choice for a pc back in the day. As a developer I find it amusing to see a lot of luddite developers on this board getting cranky about any new technology. It's not our job to judge os's it's our job to write the software that runs on the os that our end users are using. Increasingly that is becoming Vista; bitch all you want about it but your app better play nicely with it if you have any sort of average target demographic. I'm not sure why so many older developers are so resistant to change. I've been developing for 23+ years now, not as long as some I'm sure, but I've never felt like stopping at any point and saying "this is all I want or need to know". I got into this like of work because I *like* change, it boggles the mind that anyone can be a developer with any other kind of attitude.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
I am not adverse to change either but I prefer a stable OS which lets me concentrate on developing applications without the knowledge that the platform I will be developing for will be obsolete in 5 years. Operating systems are supposed to be transparent to us as developers not an additional headache so Microsoft can keep their revenue stream growing. I am not interested in Vista simply because it doesn't provide anything over what I already have in the OSs I use at home and at work. Name a single function in Vista that doesn't exist in some form or another in both WIndows-2000 or XP. So far no one has been able to do that including industry analysts. An operating system should also be designed so that it can be extensible rather easily for those that want to promote it as well as use it; not be a traumatic upheaval every time you consider such an upgrade. If you don't mind the constant changes with the Microsoft OSs then I believe your preference for change is slightly misguided. The OS is supposed to be invisible to us; not in our face from a technical perspective. And if you entered the IT field for the technological changes, that is a personal preference and not one that can be easily ascribed to all technicians. I entered the field because I like to create things, not because I want to be bothered every few years with changes to the underlying systems that are supposed to support my development efforts.
Steve Naidamast Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@ix.netcom.com
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I've been developing (winform, asp.net mostly c#) on Vista now for months, there is about a 1 or 2 day learning curve, after that there is no issues whatsoever. Frankly I see a lot of people here talking out of their asses about Vista who have never used it for any length of time. It's pure and simple stubborness and resistance to change, an attitude which, in a professional developer surely makes them better cut out for another line of work entirely, perhaps gardening or applying gold film to religious statues or illuminating manuscripts or something. ;)
"110%" - it's the new 70%
Operational costs in a business is not something to fidle with. When developing, especially within tight timeframes, every hour counts against you. We're not the mad programmers but we do work better and more efficient when we can run with 190 mph. I know that there maybe new things on vista, some of them can even make our lives a lot easier, but there is a very specific time of year (July-August) when we can spare a few days to test and try new technologies and (if any good can come out of it) turn our working procedures to engulf whatever new the market has to offer. Having said that, it's not stubborness !!! Furthermore, it depends on whether you're a developer or a software company. The developer needs to be on the cutting edge, thus dives in the deep all the time. The software company however, already has the clients and the software to sell. For them it takes a long time to turn the boat around, nomatter how much time will the learning curve takes. Learning something is easy but applying it to a company is a whole new different story. PS: I run a software company ... but i'm used on the term, "Developers".
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Operational costs in a business is not something to fidle with. When developing, especially within tight timeframes, every hour counts against you. We're not the mad programmers but we do work better and more efficient when we can run with 190 mph. I know that there maybe new things on vista, some of them can even make our lives a lot easier, but there is a very specific time of year (July-August) when we can spare a few days to test and try new technologies and (if any good can come out of it) turn our working procedures to engulf whatever new the market has to offer. Having said that, it's not stubborness !!! Furthermore, it depends on whether you're a developer or a software company. The developer needs to be on the cutting edge, thus dives in the deep all the time. The software company however, already has the clients and the software to sell. For them it takes a long time to turn the boat around, nomatter how much time will the learning curve takes. Learning something is easy but applying it to a company is a whole new different story. PS: I run a software company ... but i'm used on the term, "Developers".
I guess it depends on the size of the company, I'm a developer and I own a software company. We take pride in being responsive to the wishes of our customers. About November last year we started getting requests for our software to be run on Vista computers from our existing customers. We had already tested informally earlier and confirmed it would work with the exception of one third party component that went into our software, we hounded that 3rd party until they released a vista compliant update, tested and confirmed it would work here and released it with Vist compatibility in December. Seeing as how our customers were starting to use Vista it seemed irresponsible for us to not be familiar with it for support etc so I switched to vista on my main development system and have never looked back. A software company is nothing if they aren't supportive of the needs of their customers, if you feel comfortable that none of your customers is ever going to be using Vista then you have nothing to worry about I guess. :)
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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I am not adverse to change either but I prefer a stable OS which lets me concentrate on developing applications without the knowledge that the platform I will be developing for will be obsolete in 5 years. Operating systems are supposed to be transparent to us as developers not an additional headache so Microsoft can keep their revenue stream growing. I am not interested in Vista simply because it doesn't provide anything over what I already have in the OSs I use at home and at work. Name a single function in Vista that doesn't exist in some form or another in both WIndows-2000 or XP. So far no one has been able to do that including industry analysts. An operating system should also be designed so that it can be extensible rather easily for those that want to promote it as well as use it; not be a traumatic upheaval every time you consider such an upgrade. If you don't mind the constant changes with the Microsoft OSs then I believe your preference for change is slightly misguided. The OS is supposed to be invisible to us; not in our face from a technical perspective. And if you entered the IT field for the technological changes, that is a personal preference and not one that can be easily ascribed to all technicians. I entered the field because I like to create things, not because I want to be bothered every few years with changes to the underlying systems that are supposed to support my development efforts.
Steve Naidamast Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@ix.netcom.com
Just different scopes of work I guess. I run a small software company and we have to respond to what our customers are asking of us. We don't have the luxury of doing otherwise. They started asking for Vista support last November and we promptly gave it to them. You can rail at Microsoft all you want, but Microsoft isn't your end user (well in most cases they wouldn't be) so it's all a little irrelevant how I feel about Microsofts business practices.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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I guess it depends on the size of the company, I'm a developer and I own a software company. We take pride in being responsive to the wishes of our customers. About November last year we started getting requests for our software to be run on Vista computers from our existing customers. We had already tested informally earlier and confirmed it would work with the exception of one third party component that went into our software, we hounded that 3rd party until they released a vista compliant update, tested and confirmed it would work here and released it with Vist compatibility in December. Seeing as how our customers were starting to use Vista it seemed irresponsible for us to not be familiar with it for support etc so I switched to vista on my main development system and have never looked back. A software company is nothing if they aren't supportive of the needs of their customers, if you feel comfortable that none of your customers is ever going to be using Vista then you have nothing to worry about I guess. :)
"110%" - it's the new 70%
I believe that there are those that run behind the customer ... and those that have customers running behind them. Both are good, available and certainly needed in todays market. We develop business software for off-the-shelf solution and not a customized / request based work. It's not a clients request that gets us into developing. It's a decision based on market research. Now, if the client wants more, ..... wish is taken into account, BUT the time frame and the final decision is ours. Whatever the case, we'll try and accomodate the clients wishes but we're not going to do that just because some of our clients say 'I want it Yesterday !!!'. PS: If the reason you're bying a new computer is to work a business software, the first thing to ask is what computer and what OS should i put to run this software. That's a benefit we have with our customers so it's really less pressing for us to be in the cutting edge ... :cool:
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Chris, the thing the guys here like about the start menu is that you can just start typing and find the program, rather than having to navigate through 4-5 levels of menus. IMO, that's an improvement.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: The Virginia Tech Shootings, Guns, and Politics The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
Plenty of free apps out there that do this. Colibri, SmartStartMenu, the list goes on[^]
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Judah Himango wrote:
the redesigned start menu
Personally I can't stand it - one of my pet peeves with Vista. FWIW I've gone back to XP SP2. I've been running Vista long enough to feel that I know enough about it so that I should be able to use it fluidly, but I find the entire UI is just harder to use. More clicks, more hunting, more have to be careful about selecting items and dropping them (seems to be hard to drop files into a folder without inadvertantly dropping it onto another file or subfolder), more squinting at window headers to read the title. And UAC? Insane. The final straw was probably me spending an evening trying to work out why an application was failing only to realise that with UAC disabled the app would not work. No error message, no crash. Just a silent failure. If you're going to let me turn off UAC then turn it off and trust me. Don't cripple the functionality. So - in order to trust the the apps I have will run I need to enable UAC. And that constant, never ending "Are you sure you want to run this app" series of dialogs just kills me.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
At work (Flash/Web Developer/Designer) I would not move to Vista yet. There are too many hardware issues, bad drivers, and software incompatibilities to worry about. At home, I just upgraded to a Dell Inspiron E1705 with a Core 2 Duo T7400, 2Gb RAM, and an nVidia 7900 GS. I'm running Vista Home Premium with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on and not having a single problem. I understand the comments about navigating the UI, but I'm a firm believer in the fact that you have to go through some growing pains in the short term to see productivity gains in the long term. I think the nagging issues with the way Vista's UI works will slowly be worked out and in the long run Vista will be a very good OS. And regarding the sales numbers, there are two items to consider: 1. These numbers are solely accountable to PC Manufacturers putting Vista on all new PCs. They're not high because boxes of Vista are flying off the shelves of Best Buy and Costco. 2. For a home user, Vista is FANTASTIC. If you're not coding, wrestling with file transfers across a network, or trying to build 3D worlds using high-end graphics cards and powerhouse 3D rendering tools (and finding the right combo of equipment and drivers to do it), Vista is friggin great! For web browsing, listening to music, watching movies and videos, and editing your stupid MySpace page it's a two-fold improvement over XP.
... Hudey123 ...
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Just different scopes of work I guess. I run a small software company and we have to respond to what our customers are asking of us. We don't have the luxury of doing otherwise. They started asking for Vista support last November and we promptly gave it to them. You can rail at Microsoft all you want, but Microsoft isn't your end user (well in most cases they wouldn't be) so it's all a little irrelevant how I feel about Microsofts business practices.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
John: I wasn't railing at Microsoft. I believe I was stating the obvious. I have been working with MS technologies full-time since 1991. I have no problem with their development environments, databases, or ancillary servers such as SharePoint. I enjoy and like working with them all. However, I do have a problem with the MS OSs and their Office products. I don't like the activation processes or the increasing bloat in both. However, I am not ready to jump ship to Linux even though I am very interested in that community and the possibilities. Your reason for working with Vista is a valid one. I was not inferring that it wasn't from the standpoint that you are taking with your customer base. However, if you look at Vista from a technical perspective as I am doing, there is no compelling reason to upgrade to it and this even the majority of industry analysts are stating. This holds true for Office as well. I have been working in my spare time to build my own software company which is very hard to do when you have to work full time as well. That is basically working in programming 7 days a week which I have been doing for the last 6 months or so without a break. However, my target is technicians with easy to use tools for their applications which do not rely on the OS for anything other than hosting. My first product though is for remoting which now MS has incorporated into Windows Communications Foundation (WFC)forcing the obsolescence of remoting eventually when it was a perfectly good distributed model. If you look at the specifications for WFC it is hardly easier than remoting since selecting any combination of attributes can be a nightmare. Further, since it is primarily based on web-services it provides a text-based infrastructure which is not nearly as efficient as binary-based calls. This is not to say that you don't have access to remoting; you do directly as well as indirectly through WFC. However, was there really a requirement to change a decent infrastructure for something completely new and "improved"? I don't think so. Yes, it has made my product of little value now but for what purpose? Simply change for change's sake which will come at a high cost for those involved in the development of web-services and binary-based distributed applications since neither current remoting and WSE are compatible with WFC. There is a point where change is simply of no advantage to anyone and in my view Microsoft Vista is a good example...
Steve Naidamast
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At work (Flash/Web Developer/Designer) I would not move to Vista yet. There are too many hardware issues, bad drivers, and software incompatibilities to worry about. At home, I just upgraded to a Dell Inspiron E1705 with a Core 2 Duo T7400, 2Gb RAM, and an nVidia 7900 GS. I'm running Vista Home Premium with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on and not having a single problem. I understand the comments about navigating the UI, but I'm a firm believer in the fact that you have to go through some growing pains in the short term to see productivity gains in the long term. I think the nagging issues with the way Vista's UI works will slowly be worked out and in the long run Vista will be a very good OS. And regarding the sales numbers, there are two items to consider: 1. These numbers are solely accountable to PC Manufacturers putting Vista on all new PCs. They're not high because boxes of Vista are flying off the shelves of Best Buy and Costco. 2. For a home user, Vista is FANTASTIC. If you're not coding, wrestling with file transfers across a network, or trying to build 3D worlds using high-end graphics cards and powerhouse 3D rendering tools (and finding the right combo of equipment and drivers to do it), Vista is friggin great! For web browsing, listening to music, watching movies and videos, and editing your stupid MySpace page it's a two-fold improvement over XP.
... Hudey123 ...
hudey123 wrote:
1. These numbers are solely accountable to PC Manufacturers putting Vista on all new PCs. They're not high because boxes of Vista are flying off the shelves of Best Buy and Costco.
Ummm no. Total revenue is up 1/3rd from a year ago. Vista and office07 are not 1/3rd more expensive*, so either sales of new PCs are up by a third or MS is selling alot more retail copies to people who want to upgrade. * ultimate edition is, but since 95% of retail buyers go into bestboxmax and buy the cheapest pos machine they can find on the shelves ultimate is never going to be a large share of retail oem sales.
-- CleaKO The sad part about this instance is that none of the users ever said anything [about the problem]. Pete O`Hanlon Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about users?
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The search is great - a nice little addition. But the menu itself is a bad step backwards. What fundamentally annoys me is that there are tons of small (and big!) things that really make Vista great, but that is let down by so many niggling unnecessary and annoying things in the UI.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
What fundamentally annoys me is that there are tons of small (and big!) things that really make Vista great, but that is let down by so many niggling unnecessary and annoying things in the UI.
Well, that seems to be the trend with MS apps. Many usability improvements combined with a number of irritating usability regressions. Applies to Visual Studio for example.
Kevin
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well at 1st the new design of explorer can be a little annoying, but after few weeks it appears faster than the old one, i got vista since beta 2, now running ultimate final 64 bits, i m very stable ( 0 crash in 4 months already )
Well my windows XP doesn't crash either and ive used it for a while already... My point is quite simple... Why upgrading something that already works? Especially if it just use more memory and add more restriction to the user. I might be wrong but ive a feeling that Vista is only good for Marketing.
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The UAC is a blessing in disguise when compared to the damaging effects of virus, adware, malware, spyware, trojans and other various techniques of software assaults on previous operating systems. "One should never trust when considering a seatbelt or a condom." "Security is inversely proportional to convenience." Have you ever had to fix a computer for a friend or family member? I rest my case.
Dwayne J. Baldwin
That would be a valid statement if ever I had to deal with any of that. But I don't. Haven't had any malware, spyware, virus, or adware on my machine. So, the nuisance of UAC is just that.
This statement was never false.
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Well my windows XP doesn't crash either and ive used it for a while already... My point is quite simple... Why upgrading something that already works? Especially if it just use more memory and add more restriction to the user. I might be wrong but ive a feeling that Vista is only good for Marketing.
Takes too much resources, and runs very slow even in duel core, 1GB ram. It is Pig in performance. Hey, we are seeling it.
Tapas Shome System Software Engineer Keen Computer Solutions 1408 Erin Street Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3E 2S8 http://www.keencomputer.com
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Just to add my two cents on the Vista issue, I am normally fairly neutral to partial towards Microsoft programs, but I hate Vista to the point I have decided to install Gentoo with a VMware XP partition over the summer because I have been soured so by my experience.I have a 2GHtz core duo P4 Dell laptop with 100MB hard drive, a great NVidia video card and 2GB of ram, and the performance of my machine has dropped to the point of disbelief. I have happily upgraded from Windows to Windows since the 3.1 days, but this is the first time I have upgraded and found my system performed WORSE than it did before the upgrade. Who was the person that decided an OS should open EVERY program you have installed and leave them stopped for absolutely no reason? I would rather take an extra second to open a program than to sit and watch my performance monitor tell me that 35% to 55% of my 2 GB of ram is in use just surfing the net! That is insane! NVidia can't make a driver for my awesome video card because there is no OpenGL support? Who's brain child was that? Playing music on my super laptop is shaky and struggling at best. Open more than 10 images for editing and all my ram is in use from such poor memory usage?! It is utter garbage, and not worth the huge asking price, glad I got it for free from school as I am a computer science major. Sure makes ditching it easier to take.
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Well my windows XP doesn't crash either and ive used it for a while already... My point is quite simple... Why upgrading something that already works? Especially if it just use more memory and add more restriction to the user. I might be wrong but ive a feeling that Vista is only good for Marketing.
...so Vista requires : 1) a muscular PC 2) some online foraging for drivers / workarounds .....and it's still likely to be slower than XP and have niggly issues. ...not surprising is it? Come on, XP was seen as resource-heavy once. Here's my prediction of the bloody obvious : Vista will come into its own in about 12 months when developers/software/tasks/manufacturers get accustomed to it, and exploit its strengths, etc. The pattern is the same for all new tech. Get over it. Or live in the past like me. I ran Mame on Win98 on my 2.1Ghz machine and turned throttling off. Bloody hell, my machine's fast. True happiness.
'no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no there's no lyrics, no no.....etc'