Guess who's installing Vista

I'd love to say to those who took it as a personal affront that I dared to ask people for reasons to install Vista, that the open discussion they managed to spoil actually convinced me to give it a shot... (And it almost did. It certainly made me more curious about trying out Vista, at least)

But actually, the truth is a bit more pragmatic... For some reason my brand new laptop no longer likes XP. Can't boot it, can't boot from XP install cd's. So I'm downloading Vista now to see if that works better. (If it doesn't, I guess I'll have to RMA the **** thing or something )

So yeah, just thought I'd tell you that hell has officially frozen over, and I'm grabbing Vista.

Edit: Oh right, I should probably just mention that this is a legit version of Vista I'm downloading.

 

Yeah, well, I don't fault you. As much as I hate it and will put it off as long as possible, there are some nice features that I would love to be incorporated into Ubuntu or XP. And I'll probably end up installing it sooner or later. I just hope the EU can finally get MS on all the DRM and monopolistic stuff they've been trying for years.

 

Care to name some, I'm still really struggling to see why so many people seem to be leaping up and down with glee for a slightly nicer UI and a slightly advanced firewall (from what I gather from the MAC vs PC adverts).

 

My predictions are going as planned.

 

Hey congrats, they say necessity is the mother of motivation. Hopefully you will post some things you like and some things you don't once you get the OS up and running. What version are you downloading?

 

Well, congrats Jalf.

Hopefully you'll enjoy Vista now.

Remember to tell us what you like and what you still don't like about it .

 

Ok, a little update.

(I've been using Vista Business edition, btw. It's the only one I have a license for, and it seems ideal to me, since I don't particularly want the MCE functionality)

First, yes, Vista worked great. It let me install!
And now that I've got Vista installed, I'm able to boot an XP install CD as well, so whatever was wrong seems to have been fixed by Vista. That's nice.

So... The installer: Improved a lot. I'd still like to get a lot more control over what is installed, how and to where. (And maybe, just maybe, the option to control the MBR myself). But it's smooth and reasonably fast, I'll give them that. (Didn't seem much faster than XP, but not slower either, at least)

First impressions: Oooh, it looks like a Mac. All smooth and transparent and pastel colors.

At a closer glance: Certainly doesn't *feel* like a Mac. Looks smooth, but feels mostly like XP with the front end ripped off, and replaced with a quick Mac OS paint job. For example, all control panels and options menus have been moved, shuffled around, hidden under new names. But once you open them? They are *exactly* the same as under XP.
If you go into appearance settings, you first get a nice color picker. If you click advanced? You get the usual dialog from XP. And it *is* the one from XP. It still uses the old-style close/maximize/minimize buttons, even.

I think that describes Vista pretty well. Take XP, add a new layer of dialogs and a new shell and GUI on top of it, and you have Vista. Looks nice, and for some common tasks, it's nice and easy. But for everything else? Well, now you have to *first* go through one or two Vista dialogs. And then you get to the old XP ones, which you *still* have to click through.

Unlike Mac OS, which looks *and* feels like a whole that's actually designed to work together, Vista gives me the impression that a lot of GUI features have simply been copied from Mac, without first considering why they are there, what they're supposed to achieve, or what assumptions they make about the rest of the OS.

The good:
- Well, it looks better.
- The integrated search in the start menu is nice as a quick run dialog (but why not let me put it in the taskbar instead, where it's easier to access?)
- Explorer's address bar is less obsolete. It's still not perfect, but instead of treating the entire address as one black-box text string, it's automatically split into directories.
- Autorun on CD's: Small thing, but I like that it pops up with a dialog asking you if you want to run autorun.exe, or open the disc in explorer. Always annoyed me when I inserted a CD, and some autorun app took up the entire screen.
- Requires fewer reboots. I installed Daemon-tools without having to reboot. That's nice.
- It is possible to get the classic control panel layout. Nice, that one actually gives me the option to open the precise control panel window I want, instead of relying on 1) blind guesses and 2) a search function to find anything.

The bad:
- Explorer has no "up" button. I simply can't get to the parent directory easily. What... the... hell?
- Everything has been shuffled (and yes, I think shuffled in the winamp playlist sense is the appropriate word). It really seems like names, menu items and control panels have been randomly renamed and moved around, just to make sure people didn't accidentally notice the XP layer below. What exactly is a "welcome center" doing in the control panel, for example?
- I liked the old start menu better. Don't like the idea that submenus open in-place, and its not exactly obvious how to get back to the parent level.
- The big one. I installed drivers, daemon-tools and hamachi, and it went "Ohnoes, your hardware has changed! You must reactivate or we will make your Windows explode".
And when I tried to do so? "Your Vista key is already in use, you evil pirate! Do you want to buy another license?"

No, thank you. I think I'll just reinstall XP. (At least that was my initial reaction. See the edit below)

So, conclusion for now?
Compared to XP it's been streamlined a lot *as long as you go with the current*
If you're a casual user who *only* does ordinary actions like changing background and writing in MS Word, I'd imagine it's a brilliant improvement.
If you're someone who actually wants to customize a few things in the OS?
Well, you can do that as much as you could in XP. It just takes more work, because as I said above, you now have to dig through *both* the Vista and XP guis for most "advanced" tasks.

But there is no way in hell I'm going to use an OS that is even worse than XP when it comes to treating customers as criminals.

Edit: Well, after thinking it over for half an hour, I'm going to give it anoher chance. It gives me all of three days before I have to reactivate, so I guess I'll leave it until then. Partly because I want to give it a fair chance, and partly (mostly) because I need my laptop the next couple of days, so I'm not going to reformat again until the weekend.

Well, I'm probably forgetting a few good/bad points, but I suppose this is better than nothing. If you have any comments, fire away.

 

Ouch, so Daemon tools (presumably you use these to simulate a DVD/CD drive from an ISO image of such) causes Vista to demand that you buy a new license (you pirate you!!!!)

That would seriously suck, I used Daemon images all the time because I travel a lot and it's a hell of a lot easier to carry a "backup" drive rather than 300 backup CD's with my various tools on them.

 

Well, technically, Vista only flips out like this if it detects "too many" hardware changes. And I guess Daemon tools counts as one hardware change (because it emulates a dvd drive). Drivers can also trigger it (by making more hardware become visible to Windows)
Installing DT alone (probably) won't cause any problems, but if you do it at about the same time as you install drivers, and maybe even *gasp* install actual new hardware (I didn't do that though), it might sum up to "you must be using Vista on a new computer, you evil pirate!"

XP does the same, but it's more lenient with the number of hardware changes allowed, and it gives you 30 days instead of 3 before you have to reactivate.

 

Well, the only thing I would add to Ubuntu would be the Windows compatibility with games. I would have said the UI, but beryl actually does the trick better.

But there are a few things I would add to XP. One would be UAC (yes, it is annoying, but it is safer, and that's what I care about). It's nowhere near as comfortable as Linux, but it's better than previous Windows where you always run as an administrator. And believe it or not, it does seem to be more secure *right now* than XP, though not bullet proof. I also wouldn't mind seeing the search feature in XP, and MAYBE the UI, but that's about it. Oh, and DX10 would be nice. To be honest, if I could get DX10 in XP I would probably never upgrade, but I'll probably just drop PC gaming in a few years altogether.

 

OpenGL supports all the DX10 features under XP. Of course, we have to wait and see to find out whether games are going to take advantage of it, but it would seem logical to me.

(Where would you rather develop your game? On the platform that allows you to reach XP gamers as well as Vista, or the one that forces you to cripple your game for the XP gamers?)

Coupled with the recent invigoration of OpenGL, I'm optimistic...

Edit:
Ok, another little update.
The UAC is driving me nuts. Not having to press 'ok' whenever I do anything. I can live with that. But it blocks *any* program from running at startup that requires admin privileges. And there is no way to make exceptions for individual programs!
So there goes UAC. Good bye, was fun knowing ya'.
But I'd quite like to be able to specify which programs should launch at startup.

 

Hah. I ran into the exact same problem Jalf... I had a couple programs that I wanted to keep around, that required administrative privileges. I don't think I wanted to launch them on login, but rather I just opened them up several times a day, and it got too annoying to click "yes, yes" every time I wanted to launch a small program like that.

UAC really needs a whitelist. Maybe one's immpossible for some architectural reason? It's such an obvious feature that I can't imagine they left it out because they didn't think of it.

While we're complaining, I'm kinda annoyed by the lack of driver support for graphics hardware in Vista. Video in is still missing on my ATI card, and older games seem to have lots of problems running, just speaking generally. I hear the NVIDIA customers got screwed even worse with regards to SLI. I guess gamers stick with XP.

I do take ... whatever that word was... to two of your "bad" items though. I think that the start menu search is easier than taskbar searching would be, since you can get to it straight from the keyboard with either the windows key (or in my case) Ctrl+Escape. It's no clicks, vs 1 click.

The up button in explorer is obsolete given the new mechanism, as you can just click the parent folder in the address string thingy and you go right to it.

 

About the search dialog in the start menu vs taskbar, my point was that it could automatically have focus. So if you type anything on the keyboard, and no other window is active, it'd go into the taskbar search automatically, which would mean *zero* key presses required, rather than having to press the windows key first. Of course, you could still give it focus by pressing the windows key, but in most cases it would then be zero clicks and zero key presses.

And no, the up button is not obsolete. Its handy for letting me click up through a hierarchy of folders one level at a time. It's easier to hit than a specific word on the address bar (partly because it's bigger, and partly because it stays in the same place)
Not everyone uses it, true, but why not give me an option to keep it?

 

I agree, the up button is a very missed exclusion. Vista had the problem back in beta (not sure if it does now) where some stuff would be placed in a heirarchy all by themselves rather than the way they were in traditional XP, so when you clicked something in Explorer, it would work kinda like a link rather than going on in the file tree. Which was okay, cause it was sometimes an easy way to get to things. But at the same time, if I wanted to go to the origin of that option (for instance the main hard drive), I couldn't. It was in it's own little place, so I could either go back, or open a new explorer window. I just sorely missed the up button.

 

Cool.

I plan on buying Vista Home Premium once Service Pack 1 is released for it, that way the drivers have matured and its stability and performance have been better optimized.

 

Yes, Vista's constant administration questions made me want to take a shotgun and blow my laptop to hell.

 

Yeah, I read about that.

But eventually once Vista gets to know your preferences your good to go I think, at least I hope so!

That is, until you decide to reinstall.

 

No, it might be able to remember the permissions you set (Although this is the first I've heard of that), but my problem is that it will *always* block any programs from running at startup, if they need admin privileges. Always, no exception, no whitelist, nothing. The only workaround I've found is to disable UAC entirely! Argh...

Anyway, I just checked in to whine some more... I can't install Acrobat Reader! It keeps saying the temp folder is inaccessible. Is this a common problem?

 

From Adobe's Acrobat Reader website:

Isn't that vague? It sounds like Reader 8 did not work with Vista beta. But they "expect" a subsequent version to support the "shipping version"?

Not being able to use Acrobat would be a major issue for me.

 

Foxit Reader works fine with Vista. I haven't tried Adobe Reader 8, but with the grievous injuries inflicted by earlier versions, I'm not going to give it a chance. Point about the up button well taken.

 

like leet suggested, use Foxit Reader. it works great in XP and less of a system hog as Acrobat.

 

Foxit + vista = FINE - latest version 2.0.1414 flies within vista

like l33t_c0w said, it has a much smaller footprint comparing to adobe

although i did run into one (so far) issue so far that only adobe can read a certain pdf created file, must dig it up again to see if foxit has resolved it

cheers ...

 

Well, I've found Adobe Reader 7 to be a huge improvement over 6 (it's actually worth using. Been slimmed down a lot so it actually has an acceptable footprint, and doesn't take 10 minutes to load).

I haven't really tried Foxit, and while that may be a solution, I still think it's a major problem for the OS if such common and high-profile software doesn't work with it. I don't care whether it's Adobe or Microsoft's fault, all I care about is that it's a major reason not to use Vista.

Oh, and another issue popped up... Seems 50% of the time when I view a page in Firefox, the contents "bounce" a few pixels up and down constantly... Again, might be a problem in Vista, in Firefox, or in one of the FF extensions I use. I don't care whose fault it is, but it's another major annoyance...

Anyone else run into that? Know a simple fix?

 

Yeah, add a bookmark.

 

hmmm, adobe would be the one that is worrying that its software cannot work under vista, looking at this from a business/financial point of view

simple thinking/mind, simple execution - the k.i.s.s. factor - cool

for many end.users out there, it is not such a major issue since they will be looking for work.arounds - i still remembers that a while back adobe finally got its act together and released a version to work under linux. Now, does any ones considered that linux had then a major problem "if such common and high-profile software doesn't work with it"

cheers ...

 

Er, when was that? They've supported linux at least the last 5 years.

But yes, since Adobe pretty much defines the PDF format, if it's not readable with their software, I'd consider that a major problem. At least to anyone who actually uses it for more than reading the occasional PDF they download.

And for an OS that tries to be taken seriously as a mainstream OS, it's also a problem. Linux, especially back then, was only really used by people who knew plenty of alternatives. But today? And on a Microsoft OS? Blame it on who you like, but it's hard not to see it as a reason not to use Vista *currently*

 

Oh... and i thought it was Steve Job tat is installing vista... bogus!

 

well, he might be too
You never know

 

Well, I switched back to XP last night. And man, what a relief. Everything works a lot better. Applications run as expected, I can decide which apps to launch automatically at startup, drivers are much more robust and performant, and the OS is just so much easier to get things done in.

Guess I'll (have to) try Vista again when SP1 comes out. But SP2 might be a more realistic bet for when it actually becomes comparable to XP... Well, I'm not in a hurry.

 

Jalf,

Thanks for the updates in the process, been interesting to read and has prompted me to now install Ubuntu onto my PC for my "play OS" to try to work out what I'm going to end up using, XP will still exist for some things because I do need certain windows apps, but I might start switching to Ubuntu for most things.

 

I really don't want to switch to VISTA. I have dropped laptop purchase due to vista till it get stable.