Vista Review

Well, to everyone that was waiting for SP1 to come out – guess what, the “official release” that was initially posted on the web was full of errors that made machines reboot and reboot and reboot and reboot! And now they’re saying that it’s 40% slower than XP!

In other Vista news this week, turns out that almost no one is buying Vista Ultimate and 75% of all Vista shipments are Vista Home Premium. Redmond is sniffing out pirates in SP1, but for some reason only seems to be nagging them to death.

There is hope as Geekywood shows you how to speed up your Vista, and if that weren’t enough – I’ll cap it off with “How to install Vista in 2 minutes” (which is hilarious – lol)!

Did Microsoft lie about “Vista Capable” machines being able to upgrade from XP?

When I was reading this article today in Bit-Tech I suddenly remembered the problems that people had with their “Vista Capable” systems when Vista first came out. Apparently most of those systems were barely capable of running “Vista Basic” and most didn’t hard the processor or memory to run Aero, etc. So, of course there’s a “clasa action” suit against MS for it. The funny thing about it this time is that the lawyer seems to have done some pretty good (email) discovery, because he dug out some awesome things written in internal emails by Microsoft employees the public never heard about, like such gems as:

“Even a piece of junk will qualify”

“You guys have to do a better job with our customers”

I PERSONALLY got burnt. … Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? … I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine.

Now that’s why they say to watch what you type in an email!

If that isn’t enough in the original article Joseph Tartakoff was there first hand and heard during the court testimony that “Another e-mail chain presented in court showed that Wal-Mart was concerned about the impact the campaign could have, and Tilden hinted that other retailers had similar concerns.” So, even companies (selling systems with the “Vista Capable” sticker) were concerned about customer education (of what they were buying). Is all this surprising? I certainly don’t think so…

If you’re looking to remove optional components of Vista that you might not need, “the How-To geek” can tell you how to get that done. Actually, I was surprised by not only how easy it was, but by how many crazy unnecessary things were running all over the place.

Indexing Service, IIS, .NET framework, UNIX Subsystem, Windows Powershell, Windows Meeting Space – all garbage you may not need running (and much, much more on their list). It’s no wonder that you need 2GB to run Vista when all this garbage is running in the background!

The official release of Vista SP1 can’t be far off, because anyone can register and download the official SP1 release from Microsoft’s OEM site. There are so many improvements and to exising Vista features that I just can’t wait for this thing. I’m about to download that OEM version and install it and be done because it’s so damn slow when transfering files, even emptying the recycle bin is a pain. I have the display driver bug too, and anytime I login I have to wait 5 seconds for he screen to quit flickering before I can work. For the most part Windows Vista has been pretty “stable”, but as I’ve written before – for a system with 2GB of RAM you’d think it’d be a hell of a lot less sluggish than it is. I hope when I intstall SP1 it will be – you’ll be the first to read about my experiences with SP1 here.

ZDNet gives SP1 “7 out of 10″.

What are they highlighting in SP1?

- new windows Firewall
- improved Windows update
- preventive data loss when ejecting removable media
- improved sleep and wake-up times
- improved Readyboost
- smart card enhancements
- read/writing files is faster

Their advice? Wait until SP1 is offered through Windows “Automatic Updates” service. I think I might just do that.

It looks like Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1 isn’t much better at stopping pirates than the original release. Wired confirms that there are still several exploits available that bypass Vista activation that aren’t that complicated at all.