What is wrong with Vista?

[Syntax42]

It seems like so many people complain about Vista without giving details as to why it is bad. I figure they either don't want to pay M$ so they can upgrade to the new OS standard or they are angry because they can't pirate it like XP.

So, would someone please tell me what is wrong with Vista? Please do not use features that can be turned off as your supporting evidence. Many of the features that are on by default are there to protect the not-so-savvy user from messing up their machines (User Account Control!).

[MrNovi]

The problem with the Features that are there to protect the not so savvy user from messing up their machines (User Account Control) is that the very users it is supposed to protect are the ones it actually WON'T protect. I know that doesn't sound right, but think about if for a moment. All it does is prompt the person if they want to allow something or not. The not so savvy user won't have any idea if they should or shouldn't so it's basically useless. The people who are tech savvy enough to know whether they should allow or not know enough to not need it. It's just like most home firewalls. You have to know enough to be able to make knowledgeable decisions as to whether to allow the incoming or outgoing traffic. If you don't have that knowledge that firewall doesn't do anything for you as you will more than likely click okay. That's why UAC does absolutely nothing useful.

Add to that even after you disable all of the Eye Candy and useless clutter that Vista installs and tries to run your system will still run slower and be less responsive than it is with XP. Vista brings nothing of value to the table that XP doesn't already have and does better, faster, and with less resources.

Don

[Gator650]

Originally Posted by Syntax42

It seems like so many people complain about Vista without giving details as to why it is bad. I figure they either don't want to pay M$ so they can upgrade to the new OS standard or they are angry because they can't pirate it like XP.

First off, how is Vista the new OS standard? Some of the reasons people don't like or are disapointed with Vista are as follows... XP had pretty mature drivers, a pretty mature code base, and a wealth of information on how to fix things. When someone pays 3X the cost of XP for Vista Ultimate... they didn't expect things like printers to not work, their games to run slower, their network copy's to be vastly slower, to not be able to find drivers, to have their computer go to 'sleep mode' but never wake up, to have a computer that was 'Vista Capable' yet could barely run the OS, a UAC mechanism that any program can invoke to get Administrator rights, to get a UAC mechanism that invokes itself to run as Administrator for non administrative tasks, a renaming of interface that seems to be done just for the sake of renaming rather than to bring better usability to the table, failures of the WGA service causing lots of issues.

Really dude, the list goes on and on. Although SP1 and Vista's 1 year birthday have helped with many of the above issues, that doesn't discard the fact that for the first year, a lot of the above did affect users and many people were very disappointed that an OS 5+ years in the making didn't bring a very noticeable advancement.

To make matters worse, you have the rise of Ubuntu and Apple's Leopard that do bring noticeable gains at a fraction of the cost of Vista Ultimate, a fraction of the incredibly bloated Vista, in a fraction of the time.

I hope that helps answer your question, and I believe those were all issues outside of the users control.

[Gator650]

On a personal level, 3 of the things that bugged me about Vista are: as a Microsoft Partner one of the main points in my promotional material from Microsoft was to get my clients on Vista as soon as possible so I could generate more revenue from the increase in support costs. Sorry, but that is not a motivator for me. I want my clients to have something that just works without them bothering me. It just gave me a really slimey feeling from them.

2) The complete dishonesty of the Vista Capable campaign.

3) Issues as a developer that I won't go into because it doesn't relate your typical users. It essentially deals with Microsoft development tools not initially working in Vista.

[LouTheBlueGuru]

I will be a strange person who thinks Vista is great. I have had none of the problems most of those trying Vista complain about. I specifically did research and designed my machines to run Vista. I have been running my main machine 24/7 since 08/2007 without a single glitch. I have two other Vista machines that run flawlessly. I should note I do not play any games and I do use a lot of statistical software. I have been able to get programs that are claimed to not run in Vista to run just fine, including SAS 9.1 and S+2000. Furthermore, the UAC rap is a joke if you know how to run Vista without it. I still have five XP Pro machines but almost never use them. They work fine by the way. My opinion is that the first problem users of Vista have is with hardware and the second problem is with non Vista ready software (they may not know how to get it to run or it simply will not run under Vista). I have had no problems.
size=-2]____________________________________________
DFI NF570-M2/G (VC-RE)|AMD 64 X2 5600+ @ (14x200) with Cooler Master Hyper TX|4x1024 GSkill PC2 6400 @ 4-4-3-5(1.9v), 2T|Corsair 520 PS|XFX 8600 GT Video|WD3200AAKS 320 Gig, LiteOn DVDRW(SATA)|Emu 0404 Sound|Abit AirPace Wireless Nic|Roswell R6AR6-BK Case (2x120mm, 1 92mm fans)|Samsung 216BW|OS - Vista Home Premium, 32Bit

DFI NF570-M2/G (VC-RE)|AMD 64 X2 5600+ @ (14x200) with Cooler Master Hyper TX|4x1024 Corsair XMS PC2 6400 @ 4-4-4-12(2v), 2T|Corsair 520 PS|XFX 8600 GT Video|WD3200AAKS 320 Gig, LiteOn DVDRW(SATA)|Emu 0404 Sound|Abit AirPace Wireless Nic|Rosewill R6AR6-BK Case (2x120mm, 1 92mm fans)|Samsung 245BW|OS - Vista Business, 32Bit


DFI NF570-M2/G (VC-RE)|AMD 64 X2 5600+ @ (14x200) with Rosewill RCX-Z940|4x1024 AData PC2 6400 @ 4-4-4-12(2v), 2T|Rosewill 550(pfc) PS|XFX 8600 GT Video|WD3200AAKS 320 Gig, Samsung DVDRW(SATA)|M-Audio 2496 Sound|Abit AirPace Wireless Nic|Rosewill R6AR6-BK Case (2x120mm, 1 92mm fans)|Samsung 216BW|OS - Vista Home Premium, 32 bit[/size]

[alex666]

At home, I have two XP systems (one now with SP3, it's finally official) and one with Vista. I agree with some of what Don (MrNovi) said. That said, in no particular order, (1) the memory caching features of Vista totally outshines XP,a terrific feature that I'm also experiencing on the work computers at my new job (prior job was all XP). It works very well; (2) UAC was a great concept, but they left it too dumb. It's an all or nothing sort of feature. If they had allowed more user control, it would have been an awesome feature; (3) the roll out of Vista was disingenuous to say the least, what with underpowered systems being labeled as "vista ready". What a crock; (5) Vista has run older games of mine much better than I ever thought it would; (6) My Vista system has been rock solid.

I bought Vista Home Premium because I got a very good price (and fully legit) for an upgrade version. I was really planning just to use it as an experiment, but I found I liked it a lot, so it became the primary OS on my DS3. That said, in many ways I prefer XP. It is less bloated, a much much smaller OS, and it works very well.

In summary, Vista is not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be, but other than a few features, it brings little to the table that XP didn't already bring.

Finally, I just installed SP3 on one of my XP systems, and I swear it's a bit zippier. Time will tell. Good night gracie.

marty

[jbalcius]

Originally Posted by MrNovi

The problem with the Features that are there to protect the not so savvy user from messing up their machines (User Account Control) is that the very users it is supposed to protect are the ones it actually WON'T protect. I know that doesn't sound right, but think about if for a moment. All it does is prompt the person if they want to allow something or not. The not so savvy user won't have any idea if they should or shouldn't so it's basically useless. The people who are tech savvy enough to know whether they should allow or not know enough to not need it. It's just like most home firewalls. You have to know enough to be able to make knowledgeable decisions as to whether to allow the incoming or outgoing traffic. If you don't have that knowledge that firewall doesn't do anything for you as you will more than likely click okay. That's why UAC does absolutely nothing useful.

That's not how UAC works. It's not merely a prompt, and those that are tech savvy enough to know enough still get benefits from running it. specifically the sandboxing of the browser.

Add to that even after you disable all of the Eye Candy and useless clutter that Vista installs and tries to run your system will still run slower and be less responsive than it is with XP. Vista brings nothing of value to the table that XP doesn't already have and does better, faster, and with less resources.

Don

This is kind of subjective. I personally have found Vista with or without Aero to be every bit as responsive as XP. In some cases, such as heavy system load, more responsive. I'm not sure what you mean about clutter though. I find XP had far more and using the start search to run applications is much less cluttered than the older win9x, 2k, and XP methods.

Vista definitely brings stuff to the table that XP doesn't too. The problem is that most of them aren't immediately noticeable to the casual user. Then again, What did XP bring to the table that wasn't already in 2000?

[jbalcius]

Originally Posted by Gator650

Really dude, the list goes on and on. Although SP1 and Vista's 1 year birthday have helped with many of the above issues, that doesn't discard the fact that for the first year, a lot of the above did affect users and many people were very disappointed that an OS 5+ years in the making didn't bring a very noticeable advancement.

Other than the time between release, which was mostly caused by MS redeploying resources to develop SP2 for XP, can't the same things be said for XP? Hell, XP prior to SP1 was an absolute security disaster, and it wasn't until SP2 that security was finally more reasonable.

[Syntax42]

Thanks for the well-informed replies. It sounds like Vista is exactly the same to many people as XP was when it was first released. Computers that were designed to run XP are probably as old as the operating system. Most users will have to upgrade their system to run a new OS.

That said, my system was designed to be a gaming machine. I wanted to take advantage of DX10 and my 64-bit CPU, so Vista seemed like the logical choice. I can not say I am disappointed in any way. The way it manages resources and memory makes the system seem more responsive, especially when gaming. I do have 4GB of RAM to support Superfetch and whatever other things are going on in the background.

[Gator650]

Yes. I would agree that those issues plagued XP which turns people off even more. Not learning from ones mistakes can be costly. Also, if Vista is in fact an improvement, it should be held to a higher standard than an OS created with the development tools nearly a decade old.

Excuses don't negate that problems exist.

By the way, there are many good and incredibly implemented parts of Vista. However, it also has some serious flaws, and in many peoples minds, failed to meet it's potential. That potential was founded with the fact that Vista had an unlimited budget and essentially unlimited time(18 months to pick the opening 4 second wave file... come-on), MS only delivered an Average to Good product.

In our society today, more times than not, focus is drawn to the very poorly implemented parts which fuels the negative image.

[supercat]

One heck of a lot, 2000 was garbage frought with poor driver support, not user friendly, almost paranoid security issues, the list goes on. Windows XP is the best OS they put out to date. The next should be much like it, lite and easy to use. It should be free, and you should be able to select components you want in order to reduce the services running and the need for rediculous amount of system resources.

/rant

Originally Posted by jbalcius

Then again, What did XP bring to the table that wasn't already in 2000?

[John C]

Interesting take on W2K. I ran it for almost 6 years, and had zero problems with it. I found it very stable, I had no driver issues, until the very end when some programs were written expressly for XP. In fact, there was NT 5.0, W2K was NT 5.1, and XP was NT 5.2. Under the Fisher-Price GUI, XP was basically W2K. If I hadnt lost my W2K disc in a move, I would probably still be running it as my main OS. Instead I have XP with all the eye-candy and extra stuff turned off, so that it is as fast and stable as W2K was for me!
Note that I am not a hard-core gamer, and I think game incompatibilities were one of the main issues with W2K.
As always, YMMV!

[supercat]

Yeah it is stable, but it was not designed for the average user from what I can tell. The first time I saw a 2000 cd was whan I bought a copy from a gamer who said he was going back to 98. It was really meant for business and academic use, best suited for those environments.

ps Just finished repairing a 2000 install that went bonkers for no apparent reason. Services.exe could not start, and the OS decided it knew what was best and would not boot to desktop, safe mode, last known configuration. I repaired it, found no viruses, no problem with the drive, memory. Have not seen that with XP, ever. Granted the user is not computer savy, he may have trashed the install but we have no way of knowing. He did have the computer updated properly from what I can tell.

Originally Posted by John C

Note that I am not a hard-core gamer, and I think game incompatibilities were one of the main issues with W2K.
As always, YMMV!

[richardd43]

I am a huge Vista fan and use it on all of my personal computers but still use XP on my work computer because of some dedicated software we use.

I too did my homework and built a gamer that works absolutely great with Vista 64. I was lucky in the fact that all of my external goodies (printers, cameras) were plug and play.

I would never advocate upgrading from XP just for the sake of upgrading. But if you are building a new rig with new parts, why not the latest software for it also.

[MrNovi]

Originally Posted by Syntax42

Thanks for the well-informed replies. It sounds like Vista is exactly the same to many people as XP was when it was first released.

To some degree. The difference is that with XP the majority of the major flaws were dealt with by SP1 while with Vista many are still there.

And the push for XP wasn't nearly as bad nor was the XP Capable as far from reality as Vista's is.

Originally Posted by supercat

One heck of a lot, 2000 was garbage frought with poor driver support, not user friendly, almost paranoid security issues, the list goes on. Windows XP is the best OS they put out to date. The next should be much like it, lite and easy to use. It should be free, and you should be able to select components you want in order to reduce the services running and the need for rediculous amount of system resources.

/rant

I have to disagree there. Win 2k was NEVER meant as a HOME OS. It was a BUSINESS OS like Windows NT4. It wasn't a direct replacement for Windows 9x and was never marketed as such. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and did it extremely well (and still does today). If I could run a Quad core CPU on it I would still be using it on all of my systems. It's faster, quicker, more reliable, and less of a resource hog than XP. That said, XP is also a very good OS overall, especially for Gaming (something W2K was never intended to be). If W2K had been able to become the Home OS that MS had wanted it to be we never would have had Windows ME, which was only a stop gap release to hold the home user over until XP Home came out. But they weren't able to make W2K the single OS to merge 9x and NT into one in time so we had to wait for XP for that.

Does W2K have some flaws and issues? Of course. Every OS does. But at least it worked right out of the gate and ran on a larger percentage of the existing computer base than XP did when it was first released and considerably higher percentage than Vista does now. W2K ran acceptable with 128 megs or ram (although more was better) which a large number of computers had at the time it was released. Vista can barely run at all with 10 times that amount, and needs 20 times as much to even be close to running at an acceptable level. Vista really needs at least 4 gigs or ram to run well and you can't even load that much into the main release which has a limit of 3.5. Add a high end video card and the person who needs the extra ram the most is now limited to 2.5 gig or less. What a crock. At least W2K and XP have reasonable hardware requirements.

Don