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)!

PC World has reported that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or SP1 will be officially available to everyone on February 15th, 2008! Or will it? That date has been reported by Taiwanese news agency, and some sources close to Microsoft say that’s a “target date”, but Microsoft won’t comment. Some believe that SP1 will bring a new wave of adoption to Vista, espcially businesses. I just want my “blackout screen glitch” to go away everytime I log in. I read last year that this (among other video drivers fixes) should be fixed by installing SP1.

As many look for SP1 to make their Vista experience better, IBM is preying on the fact that so many people are having difficulty with Vista and businesses that are dragging their feet to upgrade from Windows XP. The are starting to swing the Linux hammer in an attempt to get people out of “Vista Hell”. They announced that they will offer an “Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu”. What is Ubuntu? Ubuntu is the most mainstream version of Linux I’ve ever seen, and IBM touts it as “personal computing software that is based on open standards, providing businesses with a cost-effective and security-rich alternative to Microsoft desktops”.

The timing is good for IBM, because Vista has a poor reputation among many. Can they re-brand themselves? I don’t know, being an IT person myself I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, anyone support open source standards and Ubuntu has got my attention. But we all know IBM is self-serving, and the proof in the pudding is that their “Open Collaboration Client” software manifest nothing but proprietary IBM apps based on Lotus Notes and Websphere. When you first read “Ubuntu” you expect to see things like “Open Office” on the list.

If you were doubtful about the fact that not only does Windows Vista have a poor reputation – but that Microsoft knows it and is worried about it, read this article announcing that Windows 7 may be released next year. Windows 7 is the next version of Windows, and Microsoft now has on it’s roadmap a release date in mid-2009. What will an early (3 year) release of Windows do to their 5 year release cycle? Will it make people angry (having to upgrade so soon), or will it placate all those who Vista pissed off? It’s a real catch-22 for business who may have been putting off a Vista upgrade, and now many surely put off until Windows 7. The only thing we can be sure of are Microsoft’s claims that Windows 7 will be the last 32 bit version of Windows. From that point forward, all versions of Windows will be 64 bit. What does that mean? It means that millions and millions of old PC’s will live on for years and years on Linux once older versions of Microsoft are no longer supported. It means (in my opinion) that Ubuntu will become even more popular among those with older or dontated hardware.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or SP1 is now available to the general public (Release Candidate 1 or RC1), and Microsoft has prepared a 17 page document describing the changes that Vista SP1 will include. Looks like one of the biggest bug fixed we can look forward to is support for “exFAT” which will greatly speed up file transfers to flash drives (much needed!). These tidbits were courtesy Internet News. Meanwhile, many people may decide to remain on Windows XP – because Service Pack 3 or SP3 for XP is coming…and the exo-blog posted benchmark results that show Windows XP3 update gaining 10% performance gain over Windows Vista and Vista SP1.

I’ve been very surprised that the “performance improvements” listed in that 17 page MS RC1 document don’t seem to be posted in any of the articles I read announcing Vista SP1 RC1 at all. Is it Microsoft propaganda – or are these numbers real? I can only hope that one of you installing RC1 will comment back and let us all know. Here are the ones that intrigued me:

• Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder
• Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath
• 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
• 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
• 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system
• Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%
• Removes the delay that sometimes occurs when a user unlocks their PC
• Improves overall media performance by reducing many glitches

Ready to download and install Windows Vista Release Candidate 1? Here’s you go…

Vista SP1 RC1 links you need

Offical MS Doc: Notable changes in Vista SP1 RC1
Instructions to install Vista SP1
Microsoft Official download link to Vista SP1

Oh, and for your “Vista Sucks” fix of the day, just read The Vista is not so Grand. My favorite quote from that article is:

As innovative as Apple is and as free as open source is, Microsoft still commands about 90 percent plus of the desktop computer market. The question that analysts, commentators and our own software pioneer Mark Shuttleworth keep asking is: for how long?

If you just love Windows Vista so far – I guess you should go and read Windows Vista: Official Magazine.

Well, according to this PC World article, once you get Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or SP1 – your PC will be just as slow as the original version of Vista. That kinda sucks, like I wrote in other posts here on Vista Review – this OS was touted as being “snappy, responsive, and fast”, and it’s been slow, buggy, and sluggish. I think we were all expecting to get some kind of performance boost with SP1 – but it doesn’t really look like that’s going to happen.

Microsoft has announced it will disengage the kill switch. You remember the kill switch don’t you? When you have a Windows Vista system you have to validate you have a legal copy with Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). If you don’t or WGA fails – after a certain period of time Windows Vista activates it’s “Kill Switch” and turns off nearly everything except very limited browsing (probably only to activate Windows). Is that good? Yes, I suppose that it is. Because we all know that Windows (and Vista) can and will mistakenly identify you (a person with a legal license to use Windows) as a criminal at some point. Get a new hard drive? You’re a pirate. Have to reformat and reinstall and activate Windows more than 4 times? You’re a pirate. Like the article I linked to reads – disabling the kill switch is a good start, but they have a long ways to go before you don’t feel like a criminal every time you need to reinstall Windows.

Do you live in or near the Microsoft campus in Mountain View California? If so, take advantage of the Vista SP1 Deployment Team’s “Install Fair” December 8th and 9th, 2007. Take your desktop or laptop (registration in advance required) and they’ll upgrade (trial and error at your expense) your system to “BETA” Vista Service Pack 1. You get snacks and beverages (while they fry your PC) – and just to keep the complainers at bay – you’ll get a free copy of MS Office 2007 just for playing nicey-nice!

Here’s an interesting article over at ExtremeTech about The Five Broken Promises of Windows Vista. Are you using Windows Vista? Do you feel it’s performed to your expectations based on what Microsoft promised before it came out? I sure don’t. And neither does Loyd Case. He believe that 5 key things MS promised are not even in Windows Vista at the moment: Font Compositing, Easier Networking, Faster Startup (booting), Improved Stability, and Longer time between Reboots. Read the article…….I also seem to remember Microsoft touting “RSS Everywhere” in Vista, and they had some meetings with Dave Winer (*pretty much the inventor of RSS) about it – but then I never saw ANYTHING more about it. In fact, other than the smidgen in IE7 – I really don’t see any operating level support anywhere for RSS at all. Then again, they scrapped their mini-MSSQL version file system as well I believe. You would think that in 5 years – they would have had plenty of time to get this all right. Thoughts? Please, comment now!