Major admission made by me last week — that while I work for a frigging PC company I had yet to experience (for any extended period of time) Microsoft Vista. Having spent the early part of my geek career as a reporter covering Microsoft, I used to get semi-aroused by new operating systems, and indeed still own a copy of the first version of Windows as well as IBM’s failed bid for GUI dominance, TopView. However, given my decline into the ranks of management in the mid-90s, the last significant OS I cared about was Windows 95 (Rolling Stones, Start Me Up).
Vista just never made it on the radar. I never felt compelled to upgrade the home machines with it, and the company hasn’t made the switch. So I did. Last week, when I took delivery of this new X200, it configured with Vista Business. “I’m screwed,” I thought. “Must send this back to IT and get downgraded to XP.”
Ah, but what a shame to take the best piece of hardware I have used and stick ancient software on it. So I resolved to figure out how to get the three essentials of life at Lenovo installed and running — SameTime — our Lotus/IBM instant message client, the Cisco Web VPN for getting into the internal systems securely, and Lotus Notes, the productivity equivalent of the heartbreak of seborrhea and psorasis.
Well, one week later and Notes stirred itself, found its server, and replicated, making me and my X200 members of the corporate network via Vista.
Yes, imagine that. Instead of being a bad man and hacking Ubuntu or OS/X onto the hardware and then onto the network, I took our default OS that we ship to customers and got it to work ….. (end of irony).
First impressions of Vista:
1. It is paranoid. Anytime I do anything it wants permission. Not once. Not twice. But three times.
2. It is pretty. Aero is good eye candy. I like the animated windows, the transparency of the menu bars, the bling bling is good.
3. It is pretty stable. Not a lot of lockups to report.
4. It is incremental to XP — sure the kernel may be all new, who cares?, magic smoke as far as I am concerned — but the U/I is an improvement. (The window switcher-thingy is most cool). Vista may not tie my shoes and walk the dog, but I like it and I am not going back.
And I spent the day yesterday trying to configure my Vista machine to run openVPN, XAMPP, TortoiseSVN and generally get it configured for work from home mode…
A couple of annoying issues:
1. Compressed files a year later still take hours to open. Literally, a file I can open with 7-zip in under a minute will take 30 minutes in Vista. Supposedly fixed in SP1, but I have a driver conflict (see below)…
2. Many programs need to be set to “Run as Administrator” – Find it now, as it will be the solution to most program level problems you experience.
3. SP1 upgrade will not happen if you have a driver conflict, but it will not tell you which driver is conflicted. Chances are the driver isn’t even used, or isn’t critical, or might be updated, but you’ll never know.
4. The re-thought disk layout is a stretch for me. I was never a big user of “my documents” since my view is that they are all my documents, and preferred to use a logically laid out c: drive structure. In Vista it appears they have designed file management with the clear notion that all computers are shared. Mine generally are not…and I hate being forced into a user folder vs. just accessing the c drive.
5. Anything less than 2gig of memory is a waste of time in Vista. 4 would be better…(and by the way, a pox on the house of pc manufacturers who still ship machines with 500 meg of memory and vista…you know who you are, Mr. Rhymes with Hell…)
6. I am soooooooo tired of Vista asking me repeatedly the same question when I ask it to do something. It’s like my 9 yo. Can we please get a “Just Do It” mode?
I don’t think I’ll ever talk to you again after reading this post…
God I love Esteban.
I’ll still talk to you but I’ll just make fun of you.
I guess you haven’t done many network transfers. Vista makes a 100baseT network feel like a 14.4 modem
You’re a Vista puss. Sure, eye candy is nice but the performance hit is crazy.
And you’re stable because it is a new install. The born again Windows install always feels so fresh and clean. After six months, they bog down into a tar pit of hell.
Esteban has the right idea. You should be shunned. Sent out from the community to wander alone.
Vista sucks. Pure and simple. And Cahill is being a little funny with the 4GB of RAM for Vista (32 bit)…he knows better…(PAE)…
but I’ve got 12GB in my MacPro…
Bingo…the biggest and most undiscussed Vista issue – even though it requires copious amounts of memory, you can’t get more than a pittance in your machine without upgrading (for a hefty fee) to a 64 bit os, at a time when many chips are support 64 bit processing.
You can always turn off the security option where Vista is always asking you to confirm installs/actions. It’s called UAC (User Account Control) and it’s ensuring that only you (the administrator) are calling the shots, not other users on your computer or trojan horses etc. Go to “users” and turn it off if you don’t think you are under threat (which you probably aren’t). Everyone complained about XP security and the odds of hacking your computer, Vista goes and puts an extra layer of protection that CAN be disabled easily (check a box), and everyone’s still complaining. Go figure.
I actually have used OpenSUSE the new MAC OS and nearly every version of Windows as well as some original Flavours of Linux and DOS. Just a bit of background.
I use vista at work and home, and another OpenSUSE system as well. A mix of 64Bit and 32Bit systems. One of the Windows Vista systems is a Media Center PC.
OpenSUSE has a similar level of protection where when you run applications that “REQUIRE SYSTEM LEVEL PRIVELAGES” you must enter a root user and password. Of course in OpenSUSE you could just run as root all the time (NOT RECOMMENDED, but possible). OMG! You can just turn off the UAC stuff in Windows Vista too.
It really annoys me to no end how much people complain about stuff they don’t bother to investigate properly. Try converting to a Linux OS and see how much trouble you have as an XP user.
You’ll never get far in any OS, new or otherwise, if you don’t learn to RTFM.