Is Vista Unusable?
We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users.
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft group vice president
Is Windows Vista unusable?
There is some debate regarding Windows Vista, Microsoft's flagship that is supposed to be the answer to Apple's MacOSX. After trying it out for a couple of days now I can only come to the conclusion that OMG it's bad. It not only looses by a wide margin to MacOSX, it stands no chance against its supposedly older sibling Windows XP. There are a lot of nice features that I do like, foremost the proper support for running as multiple users smoothly, running as a non root user and then installing programs as root. Nice. Now we've caught up with UNIX who had it, ah 1970 or so...
My biggest gripe with Vista though is performance. The windows system is ... well, dog slow. I routinely see the new hourglass icon (oh, they copied OSX and made a little spinning circle now, they don't fool me though, it's still a hourglass) for the simplest occasions, like clicking on a menu item or dragging windows around. Now, I don't have that slow of computer and to add insult to the injury windows tells me that my experience should be fine. The windows experience index is apparently from 0 to 5.9 (ok, who made up that scale, someone?). Ok, somewhat slow harddrive it seems. I can live with that. But I can not live with the fact that my old computer that was an old 3.2GHz P4 was soo much faster than this machine and it ran a bogged down Windows XP Media Center.
Ok. I get that I have the lowest of the low of Vista versions, although with all the variations out there, there is such a thing as consumer confusion. But is it too much to ask of my OS to not crash, hang or be dog slow with minimal load when running on a computer that should according to their specs fly? I'm really pissed here and not the good kind, you know after several bottles of wine.
Somewhat is also up with the memory consumption, I routinely go above the 2GB I have in the machine and then everything starts to lock up. Ok, I like the new nice sidebar which is a copy of the OSX little applets (even though Apple's are nicer, again) but the little sidebar app takes away 60MB of mine. Not that much loaded in there after all, weather, time, notepad and the currency (whoho, the dollar went up after falling through the basement floor several times now).
In closing
I'm definitely regretting thinking "how bad could it be" and going with Vista now (think your worst nightmare, square that and multiply with a googoplex). Added with the fact that it seems to be hard to find apps that run on Vista as well as drivers, I can't see why anyone would want to run this instead of XP. If this continues, I might just have to wipe my harddrive and install XP on the thing though. But I hate installing OS's. It takes a ridiculous amount of time for no reason.
Despite the fact that MS said that OpenGL would be supported, it doesn't seem like it. For the few OpenGL applications I had, they woefully exhibited a lot of bugs (like deciding to fill the entire viewport with grey when I switched focus away from it) making them unusable. I guess this is the nail in the coffin for OpenGL, although I would much rather see it be the nail for Vista.
Now, I've heard that Windows Vista 64 is actually more stable and faster than the 32 bit version, why I couldn't begin to guess (less bad legacy drivers?) but after the experience with the 32 bit version I'm not happy. The final nail in my coffin is that my Windows XP installation on my laptop has started to act very weird with a constant load of 100% in some hardware interrupt. Oh great. Now it's time to re-install that one as well. Anyone who know where I can buy a couple of copies of Windows 2000? Seems to be the last OS out there that ran decently...
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Hi,
100% agree with your comments, when using Vista I find myself constantly wondering if anybody at Microsoft even actually tried to 'use' it before shipping. I think Microsoft are well known by now for adding bloat to Operating Systems and applications, but they have gone and bested all their previous records for unnecessarily bloating and slowing down a product by a wide margin.
There are serious problems in Vista copying files, I mean, shouldn't copying files be classified as a solved problem by now!?
It is a sad day when a 6 or 7 year old product (XP) is superior to a new product. Unfortunately they don't seem to be giving up either, it will continue to be rammed further and further down our throats (only option for new computers, hardware created with drivers ONLY for Vista and other 'tactics').
The worst part is that all we (the consumers) can do is wait it out, and hope that somebody high enough up at Microsoft gets some sense in their head soon!
I think their strategy is to:
a) force you to buy Vista with your new PC.
b) force you to buy a separate copy of XP to replace Vista.
and double the sales!
I totally agree on the sentiment about Windows 2000. I've just switched to Vista after my Windows 2000 finally gave up after nearly 8 years of service! I'd have stuck with it, but so much now needs at least XP that I've decided to go straight to Vista and I'm regretting it.
For me the biggest issue is the lack of support for Visual Studio 2003 and SourceSafe 6.0d.
On my work pc I was forcibly upgraded to Vista back in April. While it was serviceable for me it was a definite performance hit compared to XP, with no noticeable value added. The decrease in productivity was certainly noticeable.
Fortunately when I finally got a new machine at work recently, I had my big-boss executive specifically request XP, and I haven't looked back since.
Anyone remember just how crummy XP seemed when it first came out? Probably not, because we've all been running on SP2 for so long now. Anyway, Microsoft seemed to actually take folks' complaints to heart, and SP1 resolved a lot of those problems, and SP2 certainly did away with a lot more. The corporate culture at Microsoft seems to have changed over the years though... they don't seem nearly as eager to try to address the complaints over Vista and make it a better product. Perhaps at MS the marketers and people with MBAs have finally won and have beaten all the programmers into submission.
As for support for old software, I'm surprised that you actually have to look for "Vista" in the compatible section for the software. If it's not there, or if it was developed pre-vista, chances are it won't work. Which is really surprising and makes me wonder what the heck they did. It's also brilliant in terms of making the wheels spin, an innocent upgrade of the OS turns into a buying spree of *all* your software packages to the "latest and greatest" version.
The problem with going back to XP is that already hardware is starting to appear without XP drivers.
Recently a mate of mine bought a new Sony Viao laptop (I forget the exact model) that came with Vista. He tried to work with Vista for a while and quite quickly gave up due to frustration so grabbed a copy of XP. Problem was there weren't XP drivers for the hardware, they just didn't exist. So he ended up selling it and buying a Mac Book Pro.
IMO, Vista does more to help Apple than it does Microsoft. Unfortunitly, like many people I can't switch since Microsoft have played their 'platform lock-in' game very well for quite a while now. So, all I can do is attempt to hold out XP until the release of XP.
http://www.theirishpenguin.com/2007/09/29/microsoft-to-release-windows-xp-as-upgrade-to-vista-in-2010/
:).