back to article Microsoft promises less-annoying Vista OS early next year

A less-annoying version of Windows Vista is still several months away. This morning, with a post to the official Windows Vista blog, Microsoft said that the first Vista Service Pack will likely arrive at the beginning of the year, after the usual far-flung beta test. As SP1 betas continue to turn up on file-sharing sites across …

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  1. Danny Thompson

    I beg your pardon????

    "but as always, we're first and foremost focused on delivering a high-quality release,"

    So how come Vista came out when it did, and in the condition that it did, requiring no end of online updates to get it anywhere near stable (but not entirely)? If M$ were truly as "focussed on...." as they suggest Vista would still not be released to the public.

    Roll on XP SP3 - I'll have some of that.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You kidding right ?

    "Microsoft encourages organizations not to wait for SP1 but instead [to] deploy Windows Vista today in order to benefit from improved security, management, and deployment benefits,"

    Yeah right, if they think all IT managers are idiots. I have been using Windows from the first release, and I must say 2000 were the most stable, still I waited until 2003 before I moved to XP due to more and more software required XP.

    Vista is by far, the most annoying, unproductive and the slowest of all, even with dual-core and 2GB of RAM, its still slow, slow and slow. My advice is not to wait for Vista SP1, but roll back to XP, at the end of teh day, the whole idea of computing is to get your work done, fast, and enjoy it while you do that.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New Vista edition is even better?

    Microsoft promises less-annoying Vista OS early next year

    You mean..... Windows Vista ME'08!?!?!? At long last, and to think I never heard a thing about it till now!!!! :-o

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh, joy. To trust Microshaft or not...

    "Microsoft will be releasing Windows XP SP3 to customers and partners in the next few weeks and is targeting the first half of 2008 for an RTM release,"

    I'll be watching to see how much blood flows on this last XP update. How much ya wanta bet they'll be pushing Vista shortly after.

  5. wim wauters

    yearning for the good old days of windows 2000...

    my favourite quote is "additional improvements to the IT administration experience."

    Will that mean a change towards windows2000-like minimalism & efficiency? I live in hope...

    Maybe Vista's quirks might distract me enough from seriously playing with *nix for another few months after all...

    ----------------

    Happy Daze,

    stock keeper of Windows-XP and Office-2003

  6. Matt

    man

    only a retard would upgrade their network to vista.

    Hell we're only just replacing the last of our win 2k developer boxes (man what a nice clean uncluttered release 2k was, I only upgraded my machine last month and I was sad to see the old girl go.) XP is bareable once you cut out all the cancerous bloat. But this Vista is the new ME and the only person I've met who likes Vista also liked ME. Funny that.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    UAC

    Hopefully without a UAC click requirement to perform a backup...

  8. Tom

    They want to make admins happy?

    "additional improvements to the IT administration experience"

    They are going to remove activation? :P

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Job Security

    As a LAN Administrator, I use XP and Win 2K at work, and XP and Linux at home. All of the OSes I use have varying pros and cons, but I have to admit that MS products are both fraught with more problems, but easier to fix. However I thank the folks at Redmond for their often not-entirely-thought-out or perfected products, as I know I will always be in demand to fix their ills.

  10. Oisin McGuigan

    Vista POO

    Lets face it, M$ have a long running history of mistakes and just when everyone began to love XP SP2 and have a little confidence in M$ they blew it on a biblical scale. Yet, we run into their little mistakes eager and willing to be the tasters of modern computing. Well M$, you got it so so wrong and now were happy with XP SP2 and we are used to computers that simply work and do all the things they want it to do. Vista is more secure but hey, ask yourself this? How many Virus outbreaks have been out for SP2 in the last 12 months? 'Hardly any', Is it unstable? 'No', hows Hardware compatibility doing? 'Bloody Great for XP users!!!'.

    This goes to show that newer is not necessarily better and straight jacket style security is not what modern computing is about. What have they learned from XP? 'Not very much in my opinion'.

  11. mommadillo

    Vista is definitely the new ME

    I broke down and bought a Vista machine a couple of months ago - users were starting to drive me nuts asking questions about it, and I figured that was cheaper than taking a class.

    What a piece of crap. I lasted a couple of days before turning off UAC - got real tired real fast of clicking through six or eight "Are you SURE?" prompts every time I wanted to copy a file. Without that, it's almost usable.

    But then, a company with a special webpage to show you how to open the f'ing box doesn't really get the whole "user-friendly" concept if you ask me.

    http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/2e680b8d-211e-41c5-a0bf-9ccc6d7e62a21033.mspx

  12. Andy Enderby

    My first encounter with Vista.....

    .... A friends retired mother recently asked advice from me regarding the purchase of a PC. She bought her laptop from Dell with Vista regardless. In her own words, "it would have cost another £130 quid for a Windows XP license buying from Dell".

    Between Dell's, "value added software" (ie crap like the Google desktop, amongst others), and Vista itself, it took an estimated 5 minutes to + to finish starting up even after a spot of what can only be termed as decrapification in an attempt to make the beast usable. Despite a dual core processor, and goodly amount of RAM, it ran like a crippled pig in comparison to my full fat P4 (none of your crappy mobility processors for me thanks) 3.2 Mz, 768 MB RAM Amilo D 1845, a machine I have now owned for more than two years.

    The overwhelming impression is that Vista as I saw it yesterday, despite all of the appropriate updates being applied is borderline unusable. It reminded me strongly of beta releases of Windows I have tested in the past in terms of stability. Tools that Windows users rely, such as display properties appear to have been hidden away under new applets purely in order to drive training revenues. Basic tools fail to start, despite running under what passes for admin rights. The control panel regularly took 3 minutes or so to finish loading......

    Less annoying Windows next year ? Upgrade now.....

    ..... Let's see, we pay MS in order to be annoyed, increase our hardware and training costs and piss off users when stuff that should "just work" doesn't...... Thank god my buddies mother doesn't want to do much more than browse the web and send emails. Who knows what would happen if she wanted to watch a hi def DVD, or heaven forbid work for instance.

    Laughable.

    The thing about Linux, FreeBSD et al, is that it's free. In the main however it works as advertised. Vista, in its current condition can only aspire to such quality.

    What kind of brain damaged corporate IT department would order Vista as the O/S of choice in the condition it os in right now ?

    I do hope I understand correctly that MS bloggers are talking about fixing this mess of MS making, rather than, as is implied by comments above they are thinking about a new Vista edition and leaving existing users to their fate.

  13. Cyfaill

    Return of the thing

    I remember this scene from the movie “The Thing”... The thing was a cloning life form the tried to simulate the sibilance of the real life form by displacement of real cells with a cheap knockoff... it didn't even have DNA.

    Sometimes it didn't quite work out, if what it was cloning was sick or contaminated.

    ...So out from under a table came a variation of a failed clone of a person. It has the legs of a crab or big spider and the upside down head of a man. It steps out hoping that no one will notice.

    One of the real people (Palmer) turns around and with an astonished look says “you've got to be F**king kidding... R.J. MacReady spins around with the flamethrower that he has strapped to his back and just looks at it for a second. He snarls with disgust and makes the thing all warm and toasty with the flamethrower...

    Kind of reminds me of Vista... and maybe the solution does too.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I Like Windows Vista

    This is to all of the un-educated Computer Users. Learn how to use Windows Vista, it's great. Grow up & quit knocking a good product.

  15. John Kirkham

    Yeah it's sys admin's who hate it but...

    What the hell are so called tech trained/savvy types here on about when it come's to home use for Vista. The first thing you do with any OS from M$ is find out what it is that needs to be taken down/de-cluttered !

    Before I started with Vista Ultimate for home use, I already had a list of over 150 things that can done to speed up Vista & sort out the ordinary behaviour of some very lame features.

    Vista Ultimate now is so cut down it resembles XP more than Vista. Vlite anyone ?

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  17. Chris Harden

    @mommadillo

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    words fail me! A howto for opening a box?!

    Reminds me of...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

  18. Walter Brown

    RE: Job Security

    I'm with you on the job security, i'm a self employed independent consultant, and day after day i sit back and watch all these people bitch and complain about vista this and vista that, pissing and moaning about Microsoft releasing an OS before it was ready.

    Just as they keep bitching louder and louder, they keep writing those checks bigger and bigger. I personally want to thank Microsoft for releasing Vista as they did... I think Vista is great! I run it, it doesnt give me too many problems, and thanks to it and M$ i'm on the retire by 40 plan!

  19. Robin Traylor

    Am I using the same Vista?

    I've been using Vista Ultimate for the last four months, apart from the minor glitch of it being a bit slow to copy stuff I've had absolutely no problems with it whatsoever. I'm not saying it's bug free, it obviously isn't but I've not experienced any issues at all.

    It was time for me to build a new PC and I built one with Vista in mind, a Core 2 CPU, 8800 graphics and 4Gb of RAM and it runs Vista like a train.

    I loved Windows 2000, I absolutely hated XP and it's 'Fisher Price' front end, otherwise known as 'My First Windows' with it's Tellytubby wallpaper and when I was forced to use XP I made it look and work as much like Windows 2000 as I could. I was prepared to do the same with Vista but decided to leave it as it was for a few days to see how well Aero worked. Aero worked well and I left the default Vista theme in place.

    With a good system, specced and built for the purpose, I love Vista. It's quick, it's clean, it just feels a lot smoother than any previous OS Microsoft has given us. I had a memory fault so had to RMA 2Gb of the 4Gb I had and while I was running with just 2Gb I noticed no real drop in performance.

    People at work knock Vista because it's fashionable to not like Microsoft. I'm not a 'brand' fanboi, I use what I like and am not afraid to try new technology. I've seen Vista running on woefully underspecced PCs (512Mb RAM, crappy video cards) and it looks and runs like a dog.

    My bottom line is that I'm fed up with people knocking Vista who haven't even tried it just because it's the thing to do. Get a decent spec system, load it, give it a try. You might well be surprised.

  20. Ned Fowden

    are they as bad as apple beaters ?

    Vista is great, it's that simple

    i've been using it alon with my new Tosh laptop for a good few months now and i've had only 1 issue with it and that was only with an application that needed the vista compatibility patch applying to it.

    Vista is, for me, the perfected version of XP.....xp annoyed the crap out of me for years with it's instability.

    Vista is good, there's no better description for it.

    i'm happy with all my applications running on it, i'm happy with the security that it provides alongside the additional security i've always relied upon.

    i haven't been this happy with an OS since i got my first Win95 machine.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    wtf?

    "We didn't design SP1 as a vehicle for releasing new features; however, some existing components do gain enhanced functionality in SP1."

    Does this mean they are going to fix it?

    "but as always, we're first and foremost focused on delivering a high-quality release, so we'll determine the exact release date of SP1 after we have reached that quality bar."

    So, it's never going to be released?

    "Microsoft encourages organizations not to wait for SP1 but instead [to] deploy Windows Vista today in order to benefit from improved security, management, and deployment benefits,"

    Yeah, right.... do they think IT departments are that stupid?

    IT departments will wait for SP1 before evaluating Vista to see if it will be usable in a corporate environment.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft in it's declining years

    Sad to say that for some time Microsoft has been run by sales people, accountants and lawyers for the sole benefit of sales people, accountants and lawyers.

    These people are the top of the bureaucratic hegemony in Microsoft. Bureaucracies are the cancerous killers of civilisations and companies alike.

    And engineering.

  23. harreh

    bah!

    Anyone remember what spec the original version of XP ran on and what it takes now to run at the same efficiency with sp2?

    vista does have some serious issues like bugger all wireless card support..

    as for wherer or not you should deploy? see if it works on your system first, then decide if you acctually want it

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The End Is Nigh!

    "Windows XP SP3 is a roll-up of previously released updates for Windows XP including security updates, out-of-band releases, and hotfixes. It will also contain a small number of new updates." ...Including an update to BREAK XP AND INTRODUCE A VISTA ADVERT EVERY 5 SECONDS. you have been warned people! this patch will be the end of windows as you know it!

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    more of the same.

    A number of years ago I used to run a music studio and as you can image the recording machine can't fall over (ever!) so I built a Windows 98SE ( the OS of the time) machine and tweeked it for a few weeks. It ran dam fast, never crashed , could record 24 tracks of 24bit audio without breaking into a sweat. All on a AMD Athallon 1Ghz with 512 MB of RAM.

    I would now be lucky to do that on a Quad Core, 4GB of RAM. Exactly where is the progress?!?!?

    I only moved to XP last year and have bugger all intention of moving to anything else for at least 5 years.

    /Moan off

    Also I wouldn't hold your breath for SP3 for XP as that was meant to come out just before the Vista release and then was 'put on hold to get Vista out on time' and if they think for one minute that SP3 will effect Vista sales then you can kiss it goodbye. i

  26. Cameron Colley

    I am so glad...

    ...that I decided to go with preloaded XP when I bought a Dell laptop recently. I actually went with XP as I heard that some games (one of the only reasons I went with Windows at all) didn't work properly under Vista. Reading the comments above -- I'm glad I chose XP.

    I agree with those above who comment that W2K was the best version of Windows so far -- with XP being second if you remove some of the junk.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Do the problems really matter?

    The size of the existing installed base of Microsoft products means that Vista won't fail. Microsoft will fix most of the problems in the service packs just like they did with XP -- all of the arguments above about Vista you could apply to XP in 2001, word for word. There are a lot of problems with Vista but such is the profit motive behind it and the fear of losing any traction to another OS, Microsoft will fix them. The number of times Microsoft products are written off could fill volumes. All things being equal given the supposedly intractable problems with Vista shouldn't we all expect the numbers of Linux and Mac desktops to grow? If they grow by 1% because people are switching from Vista I'll give a hundred quid to the Dog's Trust. I reckon my 100 quid is safe.

  28. Jarrah Mckenzie

    Whats in the Box?

    Instructions on how to open a box? Even in todays world of litigation gone mad, never should have this been made...thinking on why some one made this or need it is making my brain hurt.

  29. James Bassett

    slag off Ms blah blah blah...we're all so clever

    Ho ho ho. How smart and self congratulatory we all are with our witicisms and criticisms. Particularly such well thought out comments such as "I refuse to switch to vista....it's the worst yet". Que? Quick tip. Think, then type!

    I've been using Vista since the end of January. I've never had a crash (okay, once. I didn't fit a new heat-sink correctly and the CPU went to 86C!), the machine flies (E6400, 2GB RAM), the search facility is lightening fast and saves me hours etc. etc. Okay, I'd prefer if it didn't ask me to enter the admin password every time I update a driver or add/remove a new piece of software, but I'm an advanced user so do this stuff often. For your average drone who runs an £800 PC to browse the internet, read email and type out letters, they aren't going to get the nag-box.

    But, of course, it's trendy to criticise the big guy and we wouldn't wish to accidentally set off the independant thought alarm by straying from the pack now would we?

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SP Now!?

    Why can't they bring out some kind of service pack now? Can they really wait over a year from initial release to first Service Pack?

    As a developer Service Packs are good because they represent a baseline OS build, I dread to think how many combinations of applied patches there are out there. And that's before you start tracking the five editions of Vista you have to target now.

    I ran Vista for 6months before getting fed up with lock-ups and slow-downs and reverting back to XP SP2. The UI is a lesson on How NOT to produce a GUI, as another poster already mentioned why move the display properties after over 10years of it being in the same place? What have they done with the network connections window - why is it modal?

    This isn't progress!!!!

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Are you using the same Vista that I am? ;)

    I've been using Vista pretty much since it came out (I got a free copy after attending a developer event - whether I'd actually pay for a retail pack/upgrade it is another matter - although I'd be happy for a new machine to come with Vista).

    I have a 2GHz Athlon XP machine at home with 1GB RAM (with 2GB ReadyBoost) which is now a few years old. Putting Vista Ultimate on it made no significant difference to performance compared to how it used to run XP. Stability wise, never had a blue screen or other hang/crash etc of the OS. Previously on XP I had a number of issues, particularly with removing USB devices. Probably a driver issue (Vista had built in drivers, vs NVidia ones on XP) but still, it works perfectly for me, and gaming performance is just as good.

    My work laptop is a 2GHz Core 2 with 2GB RAM and came with Vista Business. This again works perfectly. Other machines of the same model had XP put on them (we're evaluating Vista for our developers at the moment) and appear to be just as fast as the Vista machine.

    UAC? I don't see that normally. Yes I saw a lot in the first few days - installing drivers, apps etc - but now I've had it for a few weeks, installs are few and the machine just works.

    The only problem I had with my new laptop was after a day or so I started getting Explorer crashing a few times a day. It always restarted gracefully with nothing other than my File Explorer windows being lost. I was impressed at that - but not at Explorer crashing. After some help on the MS newsgroups I traced it to a shell extension added by an application I installed (HHD Software's Free Hex Editor). Whenever it crashed, WinDbg showed that Explorer was calling into the Hex Editor shell extension. When I checked HHD's website, it didn't specify it was Vista compatible. Uninstalled the Hex Editor and the problem went away and now have had a crash free PC for a week or so now.

    In this case the problem was caused by a bad piece of 3rd party software - but what I was pleased with was how Explorer restarted without any problem, loss of functionality etc. In XP, whenever Explorer crashed, I usually had to manually restart it via Task Manager, and all my tray icons were lost when it restarted.

    So, personally, I'm happy with Vista. In my experience, it's better than XP, and UAC etc has not been an issue for me. I'll happily bash Microsoft when it's due - but I cannot agree (from my experience) that Vista wasn't fit for launch, is worse than XP (or is comparable to ME!!!) and cannot be used in the enterprise.

  32. David

    win 2k

    I miss that OS. After SP4 It was stable, maintainable and always worked.

    I got a new Acer laptop last week with Vista on it. The bundled NAV won’t even update as im not logged in with an admin user account. Weird because its the only account on the machine.

    The aero crap sucks 20 meg of RAM (looks nice tho) and the wireless is the most annoying b*****d to configure. My house has 5 (yes 5) unsecured networks around it. Trying to configure Vista to not connect to the nearest open network, and connect to my secured one was a nightmare. It just keeps reconnecting to the unsecured ones. I even had a prompt open up advising me to goto Mshit website and learn about wireless security, and how not broadcasting a SSID is more of a security risk.

    Apparently connecting to open networks is against the law, yet the operating system takes serious configuring to stop it doing so. At one point I had accessed my neighbours router and added my MAC address to the deny list. Its was the only way I could stop it connecting long enough so I could connect to my own. What a load of crap.

    The worst thing is there are no disks with the machine. Vista install is on a hidden partition of the machine. So if I repartition and install another OS I lose Vista source, perhaps not a bad thing but I bloody paid for it. Some day Vista might be worth installing, after SP100 perhaps.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    XP SP3, will it be safe?

    As it appears there is going to be some resistance to upgrading to Vista (and rightly so), you got to wonder if MS are going to pull the trick of making XP SP3 degrade the performance of the OS and make Vista look more attractive.

    I've already see this happen with one of their fixes for XP, so I would not put it past them.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ...works fine - stop complaining

    I'm sure I'll probably be alone here, but I've been running Vista Ultimate for a couple months now. Granted I make sure that it's up to date and my drivers are too, but that would be the same with XP. Vista works nicely once you turn off the User Account Control that asks you if you sure you want to do everything you just asked it to do. Performance is quick, games work well (hotfixes installed), GUI is very nice and startup and shutdown are a LOT quicker that XP was for me. Media Player seems vastly improved and the whole system is more than stable. As a matter of fact, I've seen more crashes with XP that I have Vista.

    When I first installed XP before it's SP1, I remember it being unstable, buggy and just "not as good" as Win2000. Now... I wouldn't dream of using 2000 at home and XP is nice and stable. Considering this, Vista is a lot lot better than XP was at the same age.

    Rather than spend your time and effort slating Microsoft for "vista this and vista that", either use a Linux distro or something or upgrade your hardware and run an update. It works fine people!!

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My Encounters with Vista

    I use Vista both on my work PC and at home on my main PC. The work PC is stable, so apparently Vista's definately usable enough to write documents and code on. The home PC is less stable, but then there's a large amount of crap on there that doesn't help. My laptop will forever remain an XP machine until I get a new one - I know it's just not going to be able to handle Vista.

    So Vista, as it stands, is usable if the PC is of a decent spec (more to do with RAM than processor from my experience). My worry is that SP1 will do what XP SP2 did - cause more compatibility issues and require a much higher spec machine again. Other than that, I look forward to installing the SP1 Beta on my home PC when it comes out. Anything that brings more stability and better performance is a good thing.

  36. Corrine

    IT departments and Vista...

    <quote>What kind of brain damaged corporate IT department would order Vista as the O/S of choice in the condition it is in right now ?</quote>

    Mine, around November, the day before I quit.

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So Steve Ballmer was lying then

    Asked about the timeline for Vista service packs, Ballmer quipped that as it is the highest-quality, most secure and reliable Windows operating system ever, there should be no need for a service pack.

    I assume that's gone into the stupid Microsoft Quotes book along with "No-one will need more than 640K of memory"

  38. Thomas Schulze

    I might be alone here...

    ... but I don't think Vista is all that bad. I'm running it at home and have also just joined the first Vista machine to our network and after a bit of a learning curve it seems to be running pretty smoothly. There are a few glitches running more than one monitor and adding network printers, and of course it's pretty damn slow for the spec of the two laptops I'm using (Sony FZ11S and HP dv2350) but in general I'm fairly happy.

    Then again I used to work for MSFT and I'm used to dealing with their betas ;)

  39. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    The inevitable finally happens

    So, XP SP3 is finally on its way. How are the odds that DX10 will be in it ? I wonder.

  40. Trevor Hannah

    1gb Service Pack

    Taken from the Blog

    "The standalone package will be large (1 GB for x86)."

    Crikey!

  41. James Summerson

    Vista numbers

    From the site reports I use, based on around 1,400 visitors yesterday, 9.5 to 10% of users use Vista, about the same overall percentage of those that use Firefox. Is this a case of a well balanced system?

    The vast majority of visitors use XP and IE [1], of course, so I can see how the lower than expected take-up might be a worry, even though 10% of a big pile of cash is still a big pile of cash, IMHO.

    [1] 90% of these users still have their default language set to en-us, so go figure their want or need for easy tweaking of the OS.

  42. Bobak Fakhraee

    you guys moan faaaar too much

    You guys really do moan too much. "my old system worked better". "it's totally unusable". "High Def DVDs don't work". "Why do they need updates". "Linux is free and better"

    Right... keep your old system then, its more usable than ever, high def DVDs work absolutely fine on my system - what are you doing wrong. they need updates because its an enormous piece of software and nobody's perfect... and finally. GO USE LINUX THEN. No-one cares if you do or not.

    I think you guys that spend vast amounts of time on here complaining about how bad Vista is either a) don't know how to work a computer b) so set in your ways that a small change totally throws you c) don't have a computer that is good enough for Vista and are too tight to upgrade or d) (and i think d is definitely the case) expect the world on a plate and don't want to move a muscle to adapt.

  43. Colin Millar

    The off switch....

    ....is the only not annoying thing about Vista. Even with UAC off it wouldn't let me create a BIOS disk (permission denied when run as admin), download updates to Ad-Aware (the download couldn't trigger the 'do you want to run this' dialog) or run my firewall. Kept switching off my email scanner.

    It blocked AVG and Adwatch at every startup without offering a 'trust this forever' option so you have to activate the blocked programs every time.

    Wouldn't run my Graphics card (GEForce 7800) no matter what driver I tried - and what a time I had changing drivers. You know the routine - uninstall old driver, restart, install new driver, restart. Except on the first restart Vista goes all smartass and reinstalls the Windows bundled default driver (without asking if this is what I wanted) - took an age to work out how to stop that happening.

    Defender scanned and happily reported no threats, Ad-Aware (unupdated) found about 300 data miners and trackers.

    For some reason Vista kept dropping my wireless connection - never did fathom that one out.

    Clean install of XP Pro - everything works just fine almost straightaway.

  44. James

    RE: My first encounter with Vista.....

    I don't understand this bit:

    "She bought her laptop from Dell with Vista regardless. In her own words, "it would have cost another £130 quid for a Windows XP license buying from Dell"."

    I have just double checked on the Dell website and they charge the same for Vista or XP installed on their systems. What's this £130 extra all about!?

  45. Mat

    massage my buttocks

    "additional improvements to the IT administration experience."

    That would be the buttock massagers then.

    "...the whole idea of computing is to get your work done, fast, and enjoy it while you do that."

    Not sure if it could be said Microsoft ever really got that concept but it's lost I think irredeemably at this stage - they have gone too far and beyond that now for sure where it cannot be spotted anywhere on the vista at all.

  46. D. M

    You will find many

    brain dead IT managers around. the bigger the org, the easier they can be located. It is simple because the one who make decision usually knows next to nothing about IT.

    At my work place (a big place), we finally changed from win98/win2k to XP about 3 years ago. It is still now a bad decision. The best option would be a full Linux desktop environment, the second best would be staying with win2k. Moving to XP offer nothing but trouble over "existing win2k".

  47. LW

    Upgrade advice from Microsoft

    "deployment benefits", they say?

    What exactly are the benefits of deploying an OS that doesn't work over one that does?

  48. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Really given a chance....?

    I'm posting anonymously because i'm sure if I don't i'll get a load of abuse and/or hatemail but I really have to question whether people have actually sat down and tried to used Vista for more than 10 minutes before jumping on the internet and posting a load of screaming abuse about it. Either that or they have never used it and are attempting to exceed m$'s level of FUD with their own.

    I'm no m$ fanboy, in fact if anything i'd say I was a bit of a linux fanboy, but I installed Vista on a new machine a little over six months ago and have been using it every day since. At first I found it hard to use and it didn't seem intuitive and I wasn't really blown away by the new look but I can't say that I found anything inherently broken or unusable, it was just different.

    Fast forward 6 months and i'm a big fan, I love the new style and I would say that my productivity whilst using Vista is approximately double that of using XP. I couldn't put my finger on any one thing that makes the experience of using Vista better than xp but it really is such an upgrade over xp, I can't believe that I didn't see it straight away. In comparison, xp now feels clunky, slow and old and when I have use it, I really miss my shiny new Vista.

    I never thought i'd say it, but i'm really starting to get sick of people jumping on the band wagon just to bash m$ over this....really, just give Vista a chance...in my opinion, it's the best O/S i've ever used

  49. Euan Brodie

    Rubbish!

    Vista just peed me off from the moment I let its sorry underdeveloped ass on to my computer. Now I upgraded from XP to Vista 64 bit (1st Mistake), then I tried to watch a .avi file using media centre on my TV (2nd mistake). How can an OS thats advertised as being better for the media performance and ease of use expect me to go and look on the internet for a set of codecs from a random dodgy site and then have to also apply a x64 patch to make them work. Granted now I still get the occasional hiccup but at least it works. Simply put, why wasn't it in the first release?

    I'm not going to even go in to talking about trying to copy a few gigs back and forth. After much gnashing of teeth and the like I installed vmware and use that or duel boot back to a small XP footprint on the other drive to do essential maintenance and the like.

    Pain in the proverbial!

  50. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Used it, its still rubbish...

    >I'm fed up with people knocking Vista who haven't even tried

    >it just because it's the thing to do.

    >load it, give it a try. You might well be surprised.

    Er, been there, done that. Its total cack. items: I needed to run as an Admin account to allow my aged father do even trivial stuff, the super-annoying UAC feature is worse than useless (it pops up so often people will simply click "ok" every time to shut it up) and Windows defender wins prizes for annoyingness ( why is it impossible for an Admin to trust a new app?). And how anyone who hated XP can like the UI is beyond me - its like a wittle googoo baby fwend of XP. Stop wasting my screen realestate with enormous icons and useless 'taskbars', please !!

    >Get a decent spec system, .

    Pardon? I'm expected to spend more money and generate more landfill, just to enjoy Vista? Hmm, who benefits most from that I wonder?

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