[plug] [OT] Vista is a serious mess?

[Adam Hewitt]

On 14/03/2007, at 11:34 PM, Jonathan Young wrote:

> caston at arach.net.au wrote:
>> I quoted a customer for a new system recently being careful to  
>> quote them for XP instead of Vista yet on advice from their  
>> accountant they decided to flexi-rent a HP Media centre PC from  
>> Harvey Normans running Vista retailed for more than double my  
>> quote. The setup was terrible. IE kept failing to respond and had  
>> to be shutdown sometimes taking nearly 5 minutes. The system was  
>> utterly sluggish. Took a lot of tweaking to get it to play right  
>> with Telstra NextG USB wireless device. The system was behaving  
>> like most OS's behave when they have bad RAM but I ran memtest86  
>> over it and found no problems. In the end I sold them a OEM copy  
>> of XP, nuked the Vista install and put XP on. The XP installed  
>> worked fine. SO to try and bring this ontopic I don't think Linux  
>> is going to have much trouble competing with Vista. They have  
>> really laid a turd with this one. However I admit I am yet to try  
>> Vista on a PC with more than 1gb of RAM. With Vista 1gb RAM could  
>> be the new 256 or even 128mb. I have yet to meet a customer that  
>> is happy with Vista even when it does seem to run OK. As one  
>> customer said "it slows everything down". best regards, Chris
> I have to reply to this if only to say that all my initial  
> encounters are coming back the same with most people claiming 2Gb  
> or even 4Gb is required and generally being disappointed with their  
> purchase.
>
> To quote a friend of mine who has a knack for summing things up  
> nicely, I recently heard him say, "Microsoft Windows Vista:   
> Putting the 'meh' in 'wow' since 2007."
>
> Personally I'm going to try and avoid it for at least the next six  
> months... and then some.
> <SNIP>

I have to say that I have been trialing Vista since it was in Alpha  
stages all the way through to the final release and I have had a very  
different experience than those that have been described here.

My system is an AMD64 3000+, 1.5GB RAM, Radeon X700SE and an nVidia  
nForce3 motherboard with SATA and IDE RAID. The installation of  
*every* version worked flawlessly and the user experience has been  
awesome. My computer came in at a ranking of 3.5/5 (from memory) and  
all the Aero goodness was turned on by default. I ran a few 3DMark05  
tests under Windows XP and Vista and the results were within 20  
points on either OS...Strangely enough I also tried running the test  
with all the Aero goodness turned off and the scores were lower. Some  
of the new UI took a little while to get used to but I find it much  
more functional than with XP or before. I also found it to be very  
snappy as far as speed is concerned.

On the other hand I installed Ubuntu on my laptop thinking that it  
had come time for me to switch back to Linux as my primary desktop  
for work (I am lucky enough to work at a company where desktop linux  
is not only encouraged it is practically a requirement) and I was  
highly disappointed. The main killer for me was that syncing my o2  
XDA II Mini was simply not possible. I spent a good few hours getting  
all of the components working as they should and I could "sync"  
however I had the same problem that apparently a large number of  
other people had where the sync would apparently work but not  
actually sync anything. I also had to go through a lengthy process to  
get Beryl and XGL to work and despite being cool there were a lot of  
options which were totally useless such as the wobbly windows (yes I  
am aware that these options are all configurable), and others that  
were just stupid such as the transparent window borders. While Vista  
keeps a translucent outline around the window title, beryl makes the  
entire window border transparent (if you have selected it) which  
makes the title unreadable if you have the title over the top of  
other writing or windows.

So after spending a day or so trying to get everything working as I  
needed it in Ubuntu, I removed it. In my experience I would say that  
Vista is an excellent update to the windows family, very stable and  
usable, and Linux (at least Ubuntu) still has a very long way to go.

Before you pass judgements on potential bias, I have the Linux  
Certified Administrator and RHCE certs and have worked with Linux in  
a professional capacity for over 6 years. I also had Debian as my  
desktop at home for a couple of years which I used to play games with  
Winex....The fact is that my requirements have changed and desktop  
linux seems to have stagnated.

Adam.