Vista, 7 - same piece of crap.

I have several PCs and servers at home (I like to tinker) and only *one* of these uses Vista. The others run either XP or a flavour of Linux. And I dislike Vista with a vengeance.

One reason? I regularly move large files around the network. I recently did a test using three PCs: A (using XP) and B (using Vista - it came pre-installed) would both be sending the same set of files (not at the same time, to avoid network collision) to C (using Linux).

In every case, the Vista PC took 3 to 4 times longer to transfer the files. Since C was running Ubuntu Linux, I tried it on D which ran XP. Same kind of numbers. And to make matters worse, there were a couple of times when Vista stopped the file transfer because it had supposedly "lost contact" with the target PC. Never mind that the transfers could be re-started almost immediately without any problems.

I dislike Vista, and as soon as I have time to arrange it, it will be gone from my network.

@The Original Steve

Don't compare Windows to a Porsche. Comparing Vista to anything fast is ridiculous, I must agree the changes they made sounded good on paper but the result was awful. I give Microsoft credit for taking the bloated sack that was Vista and speeding things up for 7, the changes were indeed minor but they changed what they had to to speed it up. I still will never use it (I've been all-Linux for years) but have to give credit where it's due.

Win7 = Vista Xp3

No wonder it's polished and finally usable - it's SP3 for crying out loud! Does anyone at MS actually deny that? The Vista buyers got doubled fk'd - they bought crap Vista, and got tricked into buying the latest SP, as well.

Corporate???

The last two companies I've worked for were solid on Windows XP SP2. Luckily I had rights on my own laptop to upgrade to SP3 and was able to get away from all the blue screens, contrary to policy. I've been able able to use IE7 without incident. I'm almost ready to try IE8. Incredibly, both companies have requirements to use Internet Explorer, because some applications demand ActiveX. Apparently management doesn't read the news, except to see where the stock price is. How stupid they are?! The tech staff don't give a damn about news, or information, or apparently knowledge, unless management tells them to. Why should they give a damn? We underlings get paid to do what we're told and to get tasks done, not to tell other people what (or if) they should think. That's what management is for. Incompetent management surrounds us.

Where's an icon of me frying burgers on the beach for a living?

Win 2000 dying

Isn't it actually just down to the fact that a lot of companies never did the jump from 2000 to Vista because by the time they started planning things the shit had hit the fan over Vista so they just didn't do the move.

Now their hardware is starting to fall apart and new hardware doesn't come with W2K drivers so they are left with no choice

High Fives

Microsoft must be congratulating themselves heartily on pulling the wool over people's eyes and convincing them Windows 7 is something new, a must have.

But given so many held back from upgrading to Vista and were becoming increasingly desperate to have something better than XP ( as everyone knows Microsoft has had its coffin ready for quite some time ) it's not really surprising they have latched on to a 'finally fixed Vista' albeit in a new guise.

The real story isn't about the success of Windows 7, it remains the failure of Vista. Who'd have thought Microsoft would spin it any other way though.

I am suprised at el reg

Yes, you should all know, just as we do that 7 is actually Vista SP3 with a new explorer shell, so of course there's no point waiting for another SP.

Vista was a mangled mess when it first arrived. Admitedly, it was a massive re-write from the core up, fixing most of the legacy issues in audio, graphics and driver architecture, but a mangled mess, nonetheless.

As a sysadmin I've been champing at the bit to shrug off XP. Yes, it was pretty damn good in its' heyday, but the worlds moved on.

We finally have a complete HAL, so I no longer have to build OS images for each HW build we deploy, simply add the drivers to the SCCM database, and it installs them automatically. Printer deployment is a peice of p*ss, group policy management has fully matured, ACL and AD integration allows for infinately more secure networking, and bitlocker finally means we can kick out that black-hole of manhours turdspurt BeCrypt.

Most users on my network won't notice a great many direct "benefits", and I know some will even question the move (though not to my face). What they will notice, is that I won't be spending anywhere near as much time stooped over their terminal, scratching my head.

Two important things...

Windows 7, as far as I'm aware, fixes two of the most crippling things that Vista had.

The DRM checks on file transfer meant that file transfers were effectively crippled; I've heard it's still not perfect in 7 but I can't really complain at the 100MB/sec I'm transferring over Gigabit Ethernet.

The Graphics Manager was only single threaded so basically if any display task hung your whole system hung until it was resolved. This meant you could have the world's best CPU, GPU, etc and your system would still regularly hang for a second or two.

Fixing these two issues makes 7 usable.

Actually it's Vista SP3...

..so, there's no need to wait for another service pack. And no, Vista wasn't that bad anyway, at least after SP2.

That's an interesting "if" in there.

"...if they were to switch to a non-Windows platform...."

So when asked to consider the possibility of making a switch, those that would consider the Mac a candidate if they were to take the plunge have gone up from 27 to 32%. Since we're talking about going non-Windows, which is/are the non-Windows desktop OS(s) that have had 5% of their potential takeup go all wobbly on them?

Likewise, of the Windows shops polled what percentage were actively evaluating this option (i.e. what percentage of the total does the Mac stand a chance of picking up 32% of)?