Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

Gerrard Shaw — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:32:06 GMT

Thing you may have just hit the nail on the head there James, first impressions make all the difference...

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

James ONeill — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:31:20 GMT

Jonathan, I understand the need to keep an old OS running for support reasons and some of the pain of old apps.

Vista did not discontinue support for parallel ports. If you'd installed Vista you'd know you can go to Add Printers, choose "Add a Local Printer" - which tells you USB ones are auto-detected, choose your COM or LPT port (which show up in Device manager as well), and add your printer. It may be we don't auto detect printers but I've just told my Machine it had an Epson FX 80 on LPT1.

The Outlook thing is something I hit from time to time as well. As I understand it, threading in Outlook isn't as clever as it might be. When I had a 50MB mailbox this didn't matter, with a 1GB mailbox... it does stutter from time to time.

Willwander.

No need to convince myself. The first time I tagged a bunch of photos I knew there was no going back. Vista does have a bigger memory footprint than XP so if there is too little RAM it will page more, when you first use it it will index everything - more disk activity, make shadow copies - more disk activity and when you run applications for the first time it figures out how to pre-cache them - which also has an overhead

It doesn't make a good first impression. But once it settled in I found I can get work done more quickly than I could with XP.

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

willwander — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:10:01 GMT

I think your trying to convince yourself. I have a high spec machine, Im an experienced developer. When I upgraded from XP to vista my hard disk thrashed constantly and my machine seemed much slower and less stable. That was my perception, that was my first impression, that was my experience. sorry.

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

Jonathan B — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:30:13 GMT

Personally, I have a copy of Vista Ultimate sitting on my shelf, which was won at a Microsoft event. It's still sitting on my shelf. I'm intrigued by Glass and DX10, but I have to use this computer for my livelihood as a self-employed developer. So Vista will sit on my shelf till I've got a second PC to put it on, because I still have to support old VB6 apps with ocx controls from companies that don't even exist anymore. Not typical, I know, just my situation.

I have a customer who can't put Vista on their machines because they're dependent on a parallel port printer, and Vista discontinued support for parallel ports. I presume it fell under security holes, but still. That's their situation. And they're not the only ones I know with legacy apps and hardware who aren't upgrading because of it. I suspect even some of the large corporations that are slow to adopt Vista are in similar boats. Enough legacy equipment, software, or processes to make upgrading to Vista a very expensive proposition with a new version of the OS now perhaps a year away.

As for Office 2007, I like it alright, with one huge exception. Outlook 2007 is a pain for those of us with large mailboxes, because it slows down the whole computer, sometimes to a full halt for several seconds (even on my 4GB RAM machine) whenever it starts pulling in email and often when opening up a mail message. So far, everything I've seen says Microsoft's solution is to tell you to empty your mailbox and it won't run slow and that the new file system for Outlook is causing massive numbers of reads and writes when it deals with mail. The necessity of starting and stopping the Word engine to render the HTML emails is also slowing it down. Fix these speed issues without making me delete my email and I'd be quite happy with it.

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

m2iCodeJockey — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:31:33 GMT

BTW, DOS was better than Win 3.1 and then 95 if your thing was playing games. Just ask Rational Systems, the people that sold DOS4GW to developers at about $10K US back then.

Then a REAL innovation, Windows Game API which later became DirectX with Direct3D, caused people to move forward. Between DX and OpenGL, by the time 98 came along, people had already forgotten what that "SET BLASTER thingy" had been for.

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

m2iCodeJockey — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:03:55 GMT

Any program that assumes an NT OS is preemptive will be one that is seen as consuming "99%" processor in taskman. Only console loops are sliced by default. Even services must at least call "Sleep" to relieve processor load up.

I challenge you to whip out a C++ compiler and try it.

Intel announced that it would not upgrade to Vista from XP because of the additional system requirements. *Don't they manufacture/sell the needed components?

A group of hardware mans lead by Dell and HP invoked a "Downgrade to XP by Request" campaign when they realized that a significant number of people were not buying PC's from them altogether when XP and XP marked drivers were not an option.

I come from the world of SCADA. I live and work in Detroit.

Large machines are no longer primarily controlled and monitored by panels with knobs and gauges. We use PC's. I can tell you that I have written systems for processes on which a plain old "E-Stop" button is not safe to use.

While a compiled one-file OS may not be the best option for Joe-Tweaker who has a new video card every month, as an OPTION, it may just save some electricity, making a positive impact on the planet vs. the previous OS and, in my town, save someone's life. To understand what I mean and how my clients use your OS, lookup the origin of DDE.

You brought up timesavings, in particular "Search" and I'm guessing you mean the new indexing. Probably works nicely if you have a "Surf and doc edit" setup, about 15000 to 20000 total files in system. It hurts if you are a developer - 215000 files in MS DevStudio alone. Got rid of that right after UAC…

2000 was a definite improvement over NT4. Relating XP to 2000, I have never seen a BSoD under XP that did not have to do my debugging someone else’s kernel mode driver but, by bringing up this succession, you are underlining my argument: We accepted these migrations because of a high level of compatibility and a measurable IMPROVEMENT in the PC as a utility.

James, it may not be correct but my perception is that you work for MS and your jobs is to travel to companies and show them the neat new stuff in MS' lineup. I don't expect you to say, "Yeah, you're right. Our new OS is crap."

I'm telling you, as an outsider that is nonbiased:

- SLI does not work on Vista out of box, needs MS patch. Patch came months after V-Launch.

- Game frame rates are lower in DX10 until a patch. The patch came more than 6 months after V-Launch.

Many game enthusiasts stayed with XP to keep the frustration level down. After a long bout with OS generated messages "system low on virtual memory" when it wasn't and "this program is hung and will be shutdown" when it wasn't (CoD4 in particular while in a league match) I had to review what I was getting from this OS.

The ability to play games that a console is not capable is a large selling point of PC's. The things we used to wow our customers perform visibly slower than what this OS replaced. This is why when someone says in public "Vista aint so bad" they get jumped.

What I will take on speculation is that it's probably having a negative impact on the market, PC games in particular. The EA's and Activisions can tell you if I'm correct.

Ltr...

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

Gerrard Shaw — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:12:36 GMT

Haven't had to work on many Vista PCs yet but the few times I have I seem to turn into Kevin the suly teeanger shouting "whaaaateverrr" at the UAC prompts... quite funny in a way but incredibly annoying!

Think the 32-bit OS need junking for the next version of Windows and start on a clean base, Vista seems like it's carrying too much weight for want of a better phrase...

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

James ONeill — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:48:15 GMT

Looks like you and I are never going to agree on the productivity aspect. Vista saves me tons of time, from quicker finding programs, search, better explorer, protecting me from myself with Shadow copies etc.

I'm pretty certain that all the NT derived OSes are pre-emptive (only the DOS and 9X ones were co-operative).

You don't like UAC... well it does two things one is it makes people aware when they are running things which change the system. And I think that is a good thing - usually: it's a pain in the neck when building a system.

Leaner isn't better. DOS was not better than Windows 1,2 3.x or 9x. Windows 9x was not better than NT. 2000 was not better than XP. On the one hand you complain about changes on the other you suggest that we change the OS to be a single compiled file - which presumably means a reboot for each driver change and earth shaking changes which affect compatibility.

As for "Dell, Intel, IBM and HP" doing private tests which you know the answer to... does that even deserve and answer.

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

m2iCodeJockey — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 11:57:52 GMT

"Most violations of good programming practice."

James, the people that are here venting, and well in majority, are telling you something that you, as a company, should already know: If you replace a utility device with another that costs more, the new device should be equal or better as a functioning utility.

Putting XP and Vista side by side, Vista looks better, hands down.

Trying to use a PC as a component of workflow, XP crushes Vista to powder even when it's installed from scratch, UAC disabled, network tweaked and SP1 slipstreamed.

At your suggestion, I looked up Mr. Russinovich's writings (I remember him from 95 or so, big in TCP tuning and later involved in breaking a Sony scandal) and, after reading more than one, took the time to write a "plain old open a file for read and open another for write" copy routine just to get a base line for judging an improvement.

Again, using an actual hard test and not speculation or hearsay, the XP with Symantec AV disk to same disk copy was just above the speed of the Vista with no AV disk on bus 0 to other disk on bus 1 transfer rate. Vista's disk to same disk time was 1/3 that of XP's. Reading Mr. Russinovich's articles on file copy and interrupt cadence now says to me that the speed and heat problems ARE in the Vista kernel, itself. Drive manufacturers are bragging on box with "SATA300, 3Gb/s (375MB/sec.)" It's clear to me that the chances an MS OS was used to test this are very low...

You will not get an argument out of me when it comes to OEM's and crappy trialware (time limited MS Works does fall in there, though.

;-))

But as a professional, doing his best to make decisions and recommendations on hard evidence, "Where MS went wrong with Vista" was in releasing it with so many changes that weigh more than their XP equivalent.

But don't take my word; Ask Intel or Dell or IBM or HP. They each did private tests for office use and in their products and each concluded that their productivity and their sales were being hurt by "Vista only" policy.

Something MS can do to keep from going wrong with the next OS product: Go full preemptive multitasking and put the IO interrupt cadence back where it was in XP. Falling back to cooperative should be boot option away. The opposite default and switch should be an optional Vista update. Things like UAC should have a big, conspicuous switch during first boot.

UAC; I wonder how many man-hours across the planet are being lost through people answering the same question twice…

Over all, leaner is better. Do things like trying to get a file copy faster than 200MB/sec. Make a system a compiled, one file boot in less than 10 sec. That's the kind of thing we were expecting.

If you want to be the undisputed Masters of the Universe, you have have to truely move ahead of the others again, else, you'll hear things like "Mac sales soared!" and "Linux downloads higher than 10K per day!" Oh, wait...

re: Where Microsoft went wrong with Vista

James ONeill — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:59:35 GMT

I think you misunderstood what I said there. We have a bunch of OEMs who fill their machines up with crap-ware and we just smile and say "these are our loyal partners". If it were left to me I'd dish out prizes for "Worst written driver", "Worst configured PC", "Sloppiest installation routing", "Most violations of good programming practice". There was a time when Microsoft was too rough. These days I think we're too soft. When drivers crash and users opt to send the crash dump in we get to see which are the culprits, and we have a gentle chat with the writers.