Keith Combs' Blahg

Hello,

I've tried every patch, and SP for Vista and believe it cannot be fixed.   It is like a house infested from basement to attic with mold - it would be far better to burn it to the ground and start again - frankly I have no idea how it went through 5 years of testing without anyone noticing how incredibly slow file transfers, copies, moves, network throughput, network access, and gaming performance is.   The benchmarks already posted about the final SP show some mild improvement in a couple of areas but no real FIX.  

With all the new hardware that has been released since XP came out - I would think MS would be thinking - how can we make Vista perform even faster than XP with 64 bit, core 2 processors, 2 GIGs, gigabit nics, etc.   Instead they said if you have a Core2 processor, 2 GIgs of memory etc you can make Vista run as fast as XP on a P4, with 1 GIG of memory and a 10 Mbit nic.   I think if the developers were actually skilled they'd make Vista outperform XP on a P4, and blow the doors off XP on a Core 2 processor.

I'd like MS to do what most IT professionals have done and give up on Vista and concentrate on Windows 7.   Sure MS had the opportunity to realize how important performance is to businesses and make that the focus of Windows 7.  

On the plus side MS did stimulate the economy for IT consultants as many are making a pretty penny upgrading PCs from Vista to XP.

It's too late. People are already upset and anyone can download it from the torrents. Might as well save you effort as the damage is done. It's been a week. The process is just too slow at Microsoft.

Thank you for helping, but the people above you are apparently jsut too incompetent to understand what developers really are.

Keith Combs' Blahg : I got your back - Windows Vista SP1 coming sooner than you think: http://blogs

great news, thank god MS finally listened to us, cant believe you guys only just revealed the final build number in your blogs 1-2days ago, you should give the build number and md5 hash once you rtm a product as we all know releases will be leaked to torrents, no point having mass confusion and people possibly installing old builds or even viruses. Even though you dont support torrents you should still try to protect users.

Please give us build numbers and strings and md5 hashes in the future for other software releases.

thanks!

btw, will ms be updating the AIK so that we can slipstream sp1 as currently you cant and only people with technet/msdn etc can download the sp1 integrated iso, its inefficient have to format, put vista on then put sp1 on, especially with several computers every 3 months or so.

as for torrent sites you can download from private torrent sites which dont host fakes or viruses, just torrents from the scene, but yeah obv not advised. But i really want to have a sp1 integrated iso to burn, will prob have to download 1 from a torrent site that a tester leaked as MS seems to have dropped this to meet their arbitrary deadlines:((

People would rather wait than to have a non-complete release, just look at Vista RTM! most ppl wont touch it until sp1 is out.

hope you can reply about the integration.

thanks for your time!

Keith,

I understand the position you are in, having to answer to management decisions and not being privy to upper-management's reasoning for such decisions.  Its unfortunate for front line guys like you who work with your Partners that you have to bear the brunt of this debacle.  

Upper management is broken.  Decisions like this are one of many broken decisions that upper management has made over the years.  Decisions that defy common sense, logic, and reasoning.

I know that you need to be diplomatic when dealing with your boss and boss's boss.  However this inbreeding of stuffed-shirt management at Microsoft is poisoning the company and devalues the hard work that guys like you do in order to deliver a good product to your paying customers.  

This is hardly the forum for a referendum on boneheaded decisions Microsoft has made in the past 10 years, but it makes me wonder what Bill Gates would say to his senior management in light of the uproar that has come about with this debacle.   How many would still have jobs today?    

Believe me, I understand your position.  This failure to comprehend the real world implications of arbitrary "Senior Management" decisions is exactly the point of the uproar.  Gates had vision of things, but he also knew that his paying customers were what turned him into one of the richest men in the world.  Does Ballmer get that?   I don't think so.  I don't have confidence that he even comprehends what he says.  "Developers, I love those guys!"  ... Really?  If Ballmer really feels that way he should put his boot right in the rear-end of all the "Senior Management" behind this.  If he doesn't, perhaps its time for a regime change at the top of Microsoft.

Good luck fighting the system, you're going to need it.

Keith, I hope that Microsoft will also be providing assistance and/or utilities to help beta testers uninstall the release candidate versions of SP1 they have been testing. The one on my laptop refuses to go !

Thanks for the response - however as you said - you saw a 50% increase in performance in some cases - I've said it before and I'll say it again - in elementary school you learn 2 x 0 = 0   You can make Vista 4 times as fast in certain functions and it still won't compete with XP.

If you are serious about benchmarks, I'd suggest you do what I did -

Using identical machines try the following with any version of Vista with any patches - even with any items you want on or off.  Now with XP - don't even bother to patch it if you don't want to but make sure it doesn't have any additional overhead you don't have on the Vista machine - e.g. if you don't have AV or firewall on Vista - turn them off on XP just to be somewhat fair.   Don't turn on indexing - if you do - just to be fair don't use WINS3 - use google or a better indexing program.

File copies and moves to the same hard drive

- a folder with hundreds of files

- a large file 2GIG or more

File copies and moves to another drive on the same system

- a folder with hundreds of files

- a large file 2GIG or more

File copies and moves to the file server (windows 2003) - try in both directions

- a folder with hundreds of files

- a large file 2GIG or more

Gaming performance - use 3 of the most common and check FPS

Quake 4

FEAR - any version

World of Warcraft

I encourage you to run these tests both on an old system (P4) and a new system (core 2)

Perhaps you'll become our voice at MS and encourage them to throw in the towel on Vista and hopefully learn from their mistakes when building Windows 7

Keith, I'm with you on this one. Vista 64 on the right hardware flat out screams. I don't think people realize that software progress in terms of commercial value requires a financial commitment on the hardware. Vista has so many nice new features coupled with rock solid security and amazing application stability - i've not seen anything like it before. I have to give Microsoft credit for releasing an operating system that is apparently too advanced for the average I.T. user. Maybe they're all getting to old ... ;-)

If I were to ask for anything in a Microsoft OS, it would be easier navigation. Apple has it down and there would be no shame in designing similar navigation features into Windows.

Mike

"For those benchmarks to be good, they are going to need to pay attention to congestion control and other conditions to see if what has been engineered into SP1 is really worked as advertised, by us...If it isn't I'm sure we'll hear about it."

Keith,

Two comments. First, Vista may scream on your new hardware, but just for kicks you should try to load XP on another partition. I, for one, thought Vista performed phenomenally on my Centrino Duo laptop with 2GB. That is, until I loaded XP on to perform some Exchange 2007 testing (Vista 64 won't work with some of the Exchange toolsets). Oh my. The laptop just went into overdrive. Windows open with mere blinks. It's at least a 50-100% improvement in speed running XP versus Vista, even on higher-end hardware. It's really just a perception that Vista is faster because the hardware is faster. I'm convinced that XP running on identical hardware is much faster than Vista is and this is coming from someone who, over the past year, thought everyone else was nuts.

Second, we're already hearing about performance problems. Just scan computerworld, pcworld, and zdnn if you want. About half the reviews are positive, but about half the reviews are also mixed or negative.

I look forward to meeting you at future events, but really, you shouldn't try to defend the actions of upper management. I've tried for the past year and loading XP on my machine really opened my eyes to what is going on. The negative comments really do have some legitimacy.

Thanks.

Interesting. It appears the official Vista blog is being censored and a number of comments have disappeared.

For example, I remember one stating that Mike Nash was doing a bad job. That comment has now disappeared altogether. In fact, searching for "Nash" on the entire page reveals that all trace of anyone mentioning his name in the comments has been removed. I distinctly remember many comments with his name mentioned.

If you search the google cache you will see, indeed, that they are now gone from a few days ago. Thanks to Google we can see the deception that is already starting to occur. Wonder how long it will take for the press to pick up on this.

I was going to post something, but after reading sholloman's post, I think that kind of summarizes it.

What are these darn good reasons and why can nobody explain them to anyone? Why have these rogue developers not been outed? Why should all the other developers suffer due to a few bad apples? Why is Microosft protecting them?

Whew.

:)

Well, Keith, thank you for addressing this. I understand it's not quite in your arena, but we're all feeling abandoned to strange and arbitrary decisions and we'd love to understand exactly what the situation is with Vista if anyone could explain this in a way that isn't as vague and as obtuse as possible. RTM is just that. RTM. Apparently Mike Nash doesn't understand what RTM really means or something, because stepping back and looking at this, um, Vista SP1 isn't RTM. If it is, then what exactly is the new RTM acronym for Vista? Will it be the same for all Microsoft applications now? They'll all declare themselves RTM and then wait another 6 weeks to put out the RTM.01 versions?

:)

It's no use trying to pretend otherwise, we didn't do a great job on making Vista SP1 available. Some

Here we sit. Ignored still by Microsoft. Not a single explanation from anyone as to why this happened, nor a solution to the endless rebooting problem we're all dealing with now.

We MSDN users are treated like complete idiots. Who exactly has our back here? Nobody on the Vista team, that's for sure.

FIX THE PROBLEMS and COMMUNICATE. Microsoft is doing neither quite spectacularly at the moment. Frankly, I'll NEVER trust Microsoft again. Ever. And that's coming from a person who's bought their bread and butter from MS consulting for over 10 years.