First Vista experience

[LP]

For those who are interested, I've posted my first 4-hours of Vista experience in an internet cafe: http://www.afterwarp.net/forum/thread1063.html This is biased personal opinion based on the very first 4-hours of installing/using it, so don't throw any rocks please. :D

[czar]

Thanks for the Lifepower. Good article.

Yesterday I bought and installed Home Premium on my wife's machine ;). (OEM version NZ$160)

I am not usually an early adopter but in this case we needed to know that our software product works correctly.

Installation went fine it finished in 40 minutes. Activation went without a hitch.

Word of caution upgrading an existing computer is a pain in the butt. A clean install is the way to go.

FIrst major snag: There does not appear to be an easy way to get email messages to cross from Outlook Express to the new Windows Mail. If the old system and the new system are on the same machine. Windows mail also does not support adding in a hotmail account.

I tried to install Thunderbird but the installation does not work for me. I get a few windows popups and then it just stops. Great!

The desktop is very slick and for a office user it will work very nicely. However, I personally found it frustrating to set up Windows how I like my system to be. Lots of advanced stuff is there but it is hidden and tucked away.

In a few years we will all be using Vista and I am sure it will be ok. However, for the moment I found the whole process kind of underwhelming. Within 5 minutes I had the feeling of - this is just windows but with more hassles and popups.

The security pop-ups gets talked about quite a bit. Like most people I found myself not reading them and automatically clicking them away whenever they popped up. I feel the popups should have been reserved for very important events and not used as a standard event whenever Windows does not recognise the program or developer, which at the moment is about 99% of them.

All in all I would say this is a pretty poor effort for Microsoft. Lifepower mentions ME, while I don't think Vista is as bad as ME was it still feels like a "theme for XP" rather than a brand new OS. I don't feel Microsoft has made a product primarily for users. If in doubt I would avoid for the time being and check back in 8 months or so to see how things are then. As software is updated to take account of Vista things may become smoother. At the moment the early adopter is in for a frustrating ride.

[Robert Kosek]

As I posted jokingly in response:
Shooting yourself in the foot with Vista:
You double click the gun icon, and wait as your cursor temporarily locks. A dialog requesting confirmation reads "Wait, are you sure that you want to shoot yourself in the foot?" Obviously the answer is already yes, you wouldn't have double clicked the gun icon otherwise, so you click okay and wait. After a hour long period of hard drive grinding, flashy effects, and your computer seeming locked, an information dialog pops up: "You do not have adequate permissions to shoot yourself in the foot." You shoot yourself in the head instead to put yourself out of misery.

By me. :twisted:

Haven't tried Vista, and have no desire to. The most irritating thing about it that I have heard is the increase in clutter and the LUA, limited user accounts, that masquerade as security, rather than the frustrations they really are.

The main logic in my mind behind this decision is the fact that programming games is my hobby, as is playing them. No game requires only Vista, IE no XP, yet and until I find that it becomes truly necessary to change my OS I won't do so. Mainly because the glitz and bling I already own in the form of ObjectDesktop by Stardock, plus I payed only $40 for it whereas it costs about $150 for a Home Premium license over here. The most obnoxious thing that concerns me, is that Vista is a huge pig (from appearances at least) with the advanced functionality hidden and locked away. I am a poweruser who doesn't need coddling, and if I want to shoot myself in the foot, then I want it to let me make that mistake. Just my own two cents on the matter.

[pstudio]

I haven't tried the official release though I'm planning on downloading since I have an Academic License (When you can get it for free, you might as well get it :wink: )

However I tried the Beta 2 release and did enjoy it, if we don't count that it went down every 10 minute for no reason. I escpecially like the idea about searching in stead of using the typical treestructure for locating files.

However I will only install Vista on a partion of my harddisk in the beginning. It would be stupid to leave XP completely at this moment. I will look into Vista for 4-6 months and then see how things are looking.

[Nitrogen]

I expressed similar concerns to my friend who's been running the beta version for some time..

His response was that you can turn off all the extra security warnings and things and it's back to working like XP did.

[czar]

True it is possible to switch off. Although for joe-average I would suggest they leave it on.
For example when I installed FFDShow I got an unexpected piggyback from "save now" program. This adware was trying to install itself but because of the security pop up I was able to stop it.

[LP]

Actually there are also some quite positive stuff about Vista. For instance, the compatibility and gaming issue that has been discussed throughly on GameDev appeared to be a wild exaggeration. The games I tried ran fine as well as third-party applications. As I said, it felt "too much XP", that includes the compatibility.

The security warnings are good and bad. Bad because they get annoying, good because if you pay attention to them, you can prevent malware from being installed.

Also it is the very first public release of Vista. I recall Windows XP was no more stable back when it was first released - it took them two service packs to make it okay, so most likely we'll be all using Vista in several years, as Czar said. ;)

[savage]

Also it is the very first public release of Vista. I recall Windows XP was no more stable back when it was first released - it took them two service packs to make it okay, so most likely we'll be all using Vista in several years, as Czar said. ;)

Why do we continue to accept that first release software should be buggy?

We don't expect it from car manufacturers so why software? Release it when it's ready not when the shareholders want the share price to go up so they can see their net worth has increased.

There has to be a better way of writing less buggy software, be they operating systems, games or db applications.

[Nitrogen]

Why do we continue to accept that first release software should be buggy?

Would you prefer having to wait another 4 years for Vista?

By which time technology has moved on, and the shiny new interface is dull and crusty.

[savage]

Would you prefer having to wait another 4 years for Vista?

By which time technology has moved on, and the shiny new interface is dull and crusty.

I would actually if it is going to be more stable more what every the other marketing speal that they proclaim. User Interfaces can be changed at the drop of a hat, it's the internals that will determine if it's usefull or not once you get over the eye candy.

Same goes for cars. Porsches may look very sexy, but it's when using them day to day that will determine whether you should stick with it or trade it in.

[LP]

Why do we continue to accept that first release software should be buggy?

We don't expect it from car manufacturers so why software?
You actually do have a point! It has become a tradition to expect Windows to break after the initial release.

I myself remember installing WinXP with fingers crossed and it failed to install multiple times - I managed to install it properly by avoiding to change locale and keyboard layout, leaving default options. I can recall similar experience with Windows 98 too.

The difference is: upgrading to new OS was almost necessary back then, while now it's not needed. [1] (http://www.dailytech.com/John+Carmack+Speaks+on+DX10+Vista+Xbox+360+PS3+Wii/article5665.htm)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I have been running Vista Final for about a month now (Got it though my job). I havent had any problems installing it. I run some beta drivers for my geforce 6800 and havent had any problems. For my old soundblaster live card I had to install some third party drivers which took me an hour to find but now its running great. All my other software except my virusscanner installed and runs fine.

Performance of my graphics apps is lower windowed but in fullscreen it makes no difference. This is the same for al my opengl based games. DirectX games seem to run a bit slower.

The interface looks nice, but its nothing I havent seen before on the my minimac with OSX before for the last few years. There is indeed a LOT of stuff (menu`s,buttons and other options) that in my opinion are not needed and slow down your productivity. Also a lot of config stuff has been "hidden" and can be hard to find. I probebly just have to get used to it just like the new office. Once you know it it works great. Been workin with XP for 5 or 6 years now:).

I am not going to say anything about the security of vista , simply because I havent had a virus, trojan or any kind of that stuff for years! I think most of these things can be avoided easily without any kind of security. I think with a bit of clear thinkin even regular people can avoid most these things. You dont open mail from strangers, dont click links you dont trust, dont download stuff that could be infected and always scan before opening.

I think overal Vista is a nice OS but for now I only use it to test compatibily for the software that I make for work or hobby. I know most things about XP and I dont see much new stuff about Vista that wants to make me switch completely at the moment. There probebly is some great new stuff in vista, but nothing I need for now.

[cronodragon]

Great article. It makes my think of Vista as the Windows ME... just a fancy version of a previous succesful version (like 98, and now XP). Like that system it will probably be overrided by the following Windows. Isn't Microsoft working on the next Windows now? :D

[Mirage]

Interesting article:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

[Setharian]

Isn't Microsoft working on the next Windows now? :D

not that I know of, but it has a research team working on a new, managed OS called Singularity....

[jasonf]

I actually used Vista for the first time this weekend.. a mate's got it on his spanking new ninja beast PC..

It runs my Guns Demo perfectly.. including the music, which oddly enough, doesn't work properly under XP.

But, I really don't like how it hides everything. I couldn't find anything. I'm sure it's a getting used to it thing, but I really struggled to find where the Guns installer had unzipped the setup files.

I wasn't overly impressed with the performance of the old DelphiX demo.. for such a monster PC, it didn't zip the way I thought it would. That could be because it's designed for hardware accellerated games and Guns is not..

I'll have to see how it copes with Guns Reloaded.

[Raskolnikov]

It looks nice and all, but i don't fancy having to upgrade my machine just to look at some pretty GUI effects; As a student i find the price is *very* inhibitive - $190 for an academic upgrade..i don't make that in a week. I'd much rather just buy a copy of APC for $10 and install the Linux distro on the cover DVD.

Maybe when i graduate and i can actually afford to buy a new machine i'll look at it..but until then..It's Linux all the way for me.

[Raskolnikov]

What's monad like? please tell me it's better than the version of command prompt that comes with Win2K; I'm using it at the moment and it's sooooo ssslloooowwww :cry: