Vista SP2 to land in April 2009-ish?

Overthinking

Remember MS has an obligation to support and OS for x years, this service pack is for those unfortunate enough to own a copy of Vista. I'm confident MS have their devs focused on Windows 7, as we all agree they should do.

Windows 7 + SSD + Triple Channel DDR3 + Core i7 = WIN (in a year or two)

SP?

Too little, too late.

Unless it's just an XP disc set to install over the top, in which case, it's just 6 months too late.

Trying to think of a good title...

1, Please, please, please - No comments regarding/related to the Monty Python 'Dead Parrot' sketch.

2, Slapping on a new coat of paint and a few sheets of MDF does not make an old semi-detached house into a Palace.

3, Yes, it might be more secure and have more features, but if it is barely usable getting to them, it's barely worth the effort. Patching it, at best, will probably end up a papering-over-the cracks exercise - after all, they won't want to make it too good now they're tying their flag to Windows 7.

4, The only way you'll make Vista run faster will be to attach a brick to the disk and throw it from a great height.

I'll wait for Windows 7, unless my patience runs out, in which case OSX with an XP dual boot.

huh? something wrong with a company selling product now?

I use Vista, it does what I want with a few tweaks and I've had no problems at all since SP1 was loaded on the machine. Looking forward to SP2 and in fact tried the beta SP2 after taking a backup of my machine and rollect back later ... it was fine, no BSOD or other nastiness - just didnt like the idea of running long term on something that was marketed as "beta".

To all the haters, DX10 is gorgeous.

But..but

I use Vista. I don't mind it, to be honest. I'm just a litle man with a laptop, who finds Vista and the funky windows switcheroony thing quite impressive.

Now I don't play games on line, or download music, so as a normal everyday basic user, Vista does its job..

All I can see coming for Windows7 is, erm, the Ribbon being introuced to Paint. WOW, there be progress...

Quality?

"The launch of SP2 will depend on quality"

So it'll never launch then.

Paris, because she launched 1000 ships, but even she would not launch this shite

RE: the usual install XP, etc. comments

I see the standard responses are out there again. (cue my mate's mate's mate's cat got Vista story) I'm using Vista and YES, there were some issues, a few BSOD, some learning of the differences in there too, but after SP1 got installed the problems have been few and far between. Now, it doesn't do that much more than the XP machines I have, apart from the gaming support, but at the same time I remember all the folk saying XP was rubbish, 2000 ftw back then, until SP2 and SP3 revealed what a mature OS can do...

Similarly, look to the main contenders - OSX has gone through its iterations and added to the base with improvements in every one, as has Linux (compare Hardy Heron to Drunken Donkey and see how it has evolved). These systems take time to get better! Users need to feed back to the company and the company takes those suggestions and develop them into the next release. Fair enough, MS make a big hoo ha with their "SP" point releases but it is equivalent to the bi-annual Ubuntu release with its fanfare (and sometimes shaky backwards compatibility I might add) and the much quieter Apple releases. Those people seem to be allowed to fix problems rather than be castigated for having a problem in the first place!

And lastly, for you guys who have slagged off a particular OS and said they replaced it with another, how much did you use it to form your opinion? I installed Ubuntu, didn't use it much and didn't like what I used much before I replaced it with OpenSUSE which I do like, but I realise since I never used Ubuntu much I won't make a comment that it wasn't any good - it just didn't suit me at the time and since I never got into the guts of it I'll refrain from talking out my backside about it. If you got Vista and replaced it with XP after a short time then well done you, but did you really get enough experience to give your "expert" opinions?

AC so the Anti Vista League of Ninjas don't hunt me down.

Does every article...

... about Vista have to have a bunch of comments telling us how carp Vista is ? Ok we get it... some of you have a problem with Vista... fine. now please give it a rest it became tedious months ago...

For the record, I don't work for MS BUT my Vista 64bit has proved to be solid and reliable.

I use my vista based machine for all of the following tasks...

Dev stuff (my day job)...

I play games both off and online...

I do my officey type stuff...

I do my internety type stuff...

Its all done with more than adequate performance and as previously noted with rock solid reliability; the only problem I have is with dodgy ATI HD drivers, can't really blame MS for that.

So will someone PLEASE explain to me EXACTLY what problem I'm supposed to be having... or just Shut The F*** Up the lot of you because I've heard this bollocks every time MS have released an OS and its getting pretty boring now.

Thank you.

@AC & Justabloke

The reason for a lot of anti-MS feeling with lots of people isn't just because they're think that Vista is crap, it's because of everything surrounding MS and its behaviour.

- Killing standards

- Strong arming competitors out of business

- Pushing DRM on users

- Customer lock in with proprietary file formats

- Intentionally breaking technology so competitors are not able to compete.

- Steve Ballmer's monkey dance

- Overinflated prices for buggy beta quality software (usually servicepack 2 should have been the first stable release).

- Falsely accusing customers of having a pirated Windows copy (WGA)

- Forcing unwanted software 'updates' or disguising it as a critical patch (WGA).

- Holding back technology for 20 years to make a buck.

- Having to reboot your windows box if you fart.

- Somehow needing a GUI, 12GB of diskspace and same amount of RAM on a box that only run a webserver.

- Not being able to produce a native SSH service (for free).

- Not understanding basic computer security, but somehow slapping it on top of the OS as an afterthought.

- Not being able to play nice with any non-MS technology and standards.

and that's just off the top of my head.

So actually the 'Vista is crap', is just another argument to show disgruntlement with MS as a whole for a large part of the anti-MS crowd (which includes me as well). This doesn't mean that it's not crap, it's just one more floater on the pile of dung.

Justablock + Vista

Here I am using Vista x64 for some development work as well; and it is not great, even given the reasonable spec laptop (Intel 8100 processor & 3GB) I use. I do use it every day so can say it really is a backwards step compared with Server 2008 or XP SP3 which I also use fairly frequently.

Not that it is unusable or anything, but I have had a couple of BSOD (almost never had that on XP). The Intel 965 drivers are brain dead - everytime I wake the laptop at home/work or without an external monitor, I have to manually configure the extended monitor set-up - maybe not a MS problem specifically but MS/ Intel seem to have not sorted this even post SP1.

In day to day use, I still find little niggly problems like with Explorer choosing random columns to display in detail view, or the right hand panel and left hand panel of Explorer getting out of sync, strange permission problems and UAC getting in the way on safe activities (yes, I have UAC still switched on through shear bloody-mindlessness. Search is pretty bad when searching source code etc.

There are some small improvements over XP - trivial features, but I like the search list in the Start Menu (though why isn't this available on all folders?) and editing file-names, it automatically selects the stem name. Given this is expensive (I brought the ultimate edition to get 64-bit support), it really is not good enough.

Roll on SP2 for Vista, but I am not impressed; and MS typical solution - rename and relaunch shows that they know it is not good.

Search 4.0

Can they release it without that horrible search 4.0? I tried it a couple of times and couldn't find what I wanted.

Actually forget about all that, I don't use vista anyway.

This title is pro MS

All you haters, a lovely pic of Bill smiling.. To the guy who has BSODs with Vista, but never with XP: Yea, no, sorry, I don't believe you. I have Vista SP1 on my gaming (Bioshock, Fallout3, Oblivion, Crysis etc), video watching desktop at home (plugged into HDTV), and on my office based laptop (basic websurfing, email, 3D creation / rendering, video editing etc) and have yet to encounter a BSOD since SP1 (course, Fallout3 and Oblivion crash sometimes, but I think that's more to do with the games - a quick reboot and all is well again).

As for:

- Killing standards (Apple has one, Unix a million)

- Strong arming competitors out of business (Apple has one - Unix... see above)

- Pushing DRM on users (yea, it's bad, lucky Apple don't do it)

- Customer lock in with proprietary file formats (uh, like Apple)

- Intentionally breaking technology so competitors are not able to compete. (lucky Apple, no competitors)

- Steve Ballmer's monkey dance (Steve Jobs is fugly - /jk)

- Overinflated prices for buggy beta quality software (usually servicepack 2 should have been the first stable release). (Apple = overinflated prices for buggy hardware, luckily their buggy software is free)

- Falsely accusing customers of having a pirated Windows copy (WGA) (+1)

- Forcing unwanted software 'updates' or disguising it as a critical patch (WGA). (yea, bastards! trying to sort their software out post release)

- Holding back technology for 20 years to make a buck. (ok, not sure what you mean here)

- Having to reboot your windows box if you fart. (an exaggeration, +1 FTW)

- Somehow needing a GUI, 12GB of diskspace and same amount of RAM on a box that only run a webserver. (or, you know, decent games)

- Not being able to produce a native SSH service (for free). (+1)

- Not understanding basic computer security, but somehow slapping it on top of the OS as an afterthought. (+1)

- Not being able to play nice with any non-MS technology and standards. (so what you're saying: Unix and all its many, many variants are for techtards, Macs are for fashiontards, windows are for everyone else. You win 4 points.

Have a nice day. Please don't take offense at the above comments. I actually partially agree, and think Win7 is actually what Vista was supposed to be but they ran out of time.

MS and Quality

It's been said before and I'll say it again M$ wouldn't know a quality product if it hit them in the face or at least one that's fully backword compatibly with previous releases.

I mean sure Visat looks sexy and nice but I don't want that I just want Functional, that and the UAC can be a bit tedious at times...

Are you sure you want to do that?(y/N)

Are you REALLY sure you want to?(y/N)

Now think about this, are you Absolutly SURE that you want to this?(y/N)

I personally don't care how great DX 10 looks, it's just a framework of function translational calls so programmers just make calls to those "api functions" and they are translated down I can remember when you had to tell a game what graphics card type and sound card type you had so it could load the appropriate "driver" to run it, mind you back then they could actually write code. I wonder how "optimised" DX10 is and how hard it would really be to put some of it in DX9