Comments

1. djlosch

   
   Posted on: May 26, 2008 at 9:09AM  

   I just registered to let some of you Vista guys know my headaches.  I will keep the flaming to a minimum.

   I caught wind of this article through http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/19/vista_misunderstandings/ <-- they generally bashed Vista, and some was warranted but some was not.  I read through their friends' headaches with the Vaio.  I have an IBM X61s 1.6ghz core 2 duo, 1gb ram, intel integrated graphics.  It's not a ferrari, but it's not a sleeper either.  It's the tiny thinkpad that gets 11 hours on the extended + slice batteries.  I have Vista Business.  I try not to troll/flame, but I have many of the same sentiments as Tim Anderson and the Vaio guys.  I also have a headless server (2.6 core 2 duo, 8gb ram), and I've run the gamut of linux distros from Mandrake to Redhat (pre-enterprise) to Gentoo and now Ubuntu.  I've got a few years of software engineering under my belt, and a few more in IT, so my feet are at least wet.  Despite my linux background, I generally have held that the MS desktop experience was much better than the linux counterpart.  So for years, I stuck with linux on my home server (and work servers) and I had XP on my laptop, and XP on all our workstations.

   I bought my thinkpad in August, so I endured through the pre-SP1.  SP1 significantly improved many unresponsiveness issues, but this rant comprises of the remaining annoyances.  The "near instantaneous search" is a flat out misstatement of fact.  The dynamic start menu search is a nice idea, but it literally takes 5-10 seconds before ANYTHING shows up.  Sometimes, the start menu will just disappear while searching.  The search boxes in the top right of the file manager are not "near instantaneous" either.  I did not disable indexing, and would frequently leave my laptop plugged in overnight so that it could hopefully index at least my local files.  If it did index them, the response time was never "near instantaneous", and none of my email attachments or email contents in Outlook 2003 were ever detected.  I'm guessing that claimed feature only works in Outlook 2007, because otherwise, it's just broken.

   Booting would take a nice 15-20 seconds, but I'd still get trademark Windows-showing-desktop-but-things-still-loading-in-background... can't-do-anything-for-another-minute-or-so.  I disabled EVERYTHING in msconfig->startup, and I'd still get the wait time.  This has been in every Windows distro since at least Win95, so I'm not surprised.

   UAC is a trainwreck.  Whenever an admin level function was required, the screen would "spotlight" the UAC window, but after the screen dimmed, it would take anywhere from 10-30 seconds for the UAC dialog box to come up.  Then, for some ridiculous reason, I'd always get a second UAC dialog box (Ubuntu's sudo/gksudo/kdesu doesn't have this problem, why does UAC?), and the slow dialog box loading would repeat itself.  Some of the guys I know who are like myself (neither linux nor MS zealots) recommended a few tweaks which lightened the slowing, but it's still significantly slow.  To make it usable, I'd have to disable UAC.  Too many apps from big reputable software companies nag via UAC even for simply running the program.  I know that's not MS's fault that software companies can't operate without escalated privileges, but bugging the user because software companies violate specs is a ridiculous solution.

   Peripheral drivers are a joke.  Commercial grade Xerox printer/copier that works perfectly fine -- completely unusable for printing because Xerox isn't releasing Vista drivers.  HP scanner that works perfectly fine -- also unusable because HP isn't releasing Vista drivers.  Both work fine in linux and WinXP.  For once, linux device drivers are starting to cover more hardware than the MS install base, and it will only get worse for MS as more people migrate to Vista -- more people having perfectly working hardware that they can't use because the manufacturers don't want to write drivers for Vista, and Vista refuses to accept the old ones.  Add that into your TCO for Vista -- it's not there in WinXP or linux.

   IE7 is completely unusable, even when you ignore the vast superiority of FF2's feature set over IE.  IE7 literally takes over a minute to load the homepage.  Setting the homepage to about: blank didn't help, nor google, nor a local htm file that was completely empty.  Clicking the stop button when IE7 was loading so that it would stop trying to grab the homepage would lock up IE for another 2 minutes, and then I'd get an empty dialogue box with an OK button.  Opening a link in a new tab would lock up IE completely while IE was loading the new tab.  While FF2 has memory leaks, IE7 has wait times that render it unusable.  IE6 doesn't have any of these problems -- Why does IE7?

   Suspend awesomely only takes 5-10 seconds to get to the login screen, usually on the lower end.  HOWEVER, after coming out of suspend, the wireless card would fail to load frequently.  I check device manager, and the wireless card wouldn't be listed at all.  Running the thinkpad wifi manager wouldn't help.  The only remedy was a reboot.  Rebooting in itself takes for what seems like FOREVER.  The blue-green "Shutting down" screen frequently sat there for 30+ seconds before restarting.

   After shutting down virtually all user level processes and aero, I'd be lucky to get below 700 MB of RAM.  Add in any combination of FF, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, MS Word, or Excel, and the machine slows significantly.  Add a third app and the machine slows more.  Turn on aero and there goes another 40-60 MB of ram, and the machine slows to a crawl.  WMP slows the machine to a crawl just to play some mp3s, whereas WinXP had no problem doing the same.  And the SearchIndexer executable has a nasty habit of loading when I'm doing a lot of things -- not idling, and every time it loads, the machine slows to a crawl.  And when the machine slows to a crawl, I check resources via the ctrl+alt+del security panel -> taskman, and killing processes (from the 60+ of them) is a chore.  When I want to end task, I don't want Vista to pat me on the head and coddle me while it tidy's up and tries to recover the task or figure out what went on.  WinXP did this too.  Ctrl-clicking end-task should be like ctrl-clicking the shutdown button -- instant shutdown.  Linux has force quit and kill -9.  Why is this so difficult?

   Now, I'm the guy who's always defending MS on certain linux forums -- I have little allegiance to either OS.  I just want the best one for the task that I'm trying to perform.  I frequently defend some of MS's shortcomings in that MS can't "innovate" because every time you guys do, you get hit with another anti-trust lawsuit (I'm surprised OneCare hasn't drawn lawsuits yet), and when you don't, you're playing catchup (aero to OSX and arguably compiz, IE to FF).  This week, I just got fed up with Vista's sluggishness.  I decided to dual boot ubuntu 8.10 (almost everything works out of the box, and getting the rest was just a few conf mods).  Of course, Vista's bootloader, the IBM recovery bootloader, and grub were all fighting for control over the MBR.  I find out that to fix this, I have to chainload IBM->Vista->grub.  Of course, to make the necessary mods, I have to do this in Vista... which I could no longer boot into because IBM's R/R was fighting with Vista's bootloader still.  But the problem here stems from the deals that MS has with the manufacturers -- I only received recovery CDs, and only after specifically asking for them.  If I want to "recover" my system, I have to wipe the whole system.  Vista won't let me chainload a partition that doesn't yet exist, installing Vista wipes my entire system, and once I install linux, I can't get back into Vista.  In other words, to dual boot Vista and linux, I either have to buy a Vista DVD (even though I already have a legitimate license), pirate one, or just give up on Vista.  Option 1 is ridiculous.  I'm not paying for the same product twice, especially when I'm not happy about it.  Option 2 is not legal, which is especially improper because I'm in the process of getting sworn into the bar to practice IP law.  Thus, the only option is 3, and that's why I'm posting from a Ubuntu install.  I now run MS Office 2003 and Photoshop through qemu with seamless-rdesktop as I need them.

   Now, the worst part about all of these performance issues is that it's all after a fresh install of SP1 with all crapware disabled, behind a firewall, and this is the only windows machine behind the firewall.  If you go back up through this rant and replace all MS wording (Microsoft, IE, Vista) with "Ford" (or any other car manufacturer), the Ford buyer would have returned the Ford and never bought another Ford ever again (or sued under lemon laws).  There are some "tweaks" to get some of these ridiculous wait times cut down (particularly the UAC "spotlighting").  However, I expect to have problems requiring tweaks out of the box with a linux install -- I don't expect to have these kinds of problems in an OS that I paid $150+ for (or whatever the OEM licensing fee turns out to be).  So when someone makes a post claiming that these kinds of MS statements are just marketspeak and twisted exaggerations of the truth, I know exactly what they're talking about.  I've been through it.  When MS releases these statements which are completely opposite to my experiences, how am I supposed to feel as a Microsoft customer?  Do you understand what it feels like to explain to my parents, "Don't break your computer, and if you buy a new one, make sure you return Vista"?  It's embarassing.

   -- awaiting Windows 7.
2. SEADOT

   
   Posted on: May 28, 2008 at 3:50PM  

   I use VISTA Biz and HomePremium on my laptop.  I am concerned how my disk space is dropping due to VISTA updates.  Does anyone know WHERE the KB updates reside?  I want to delete them.  Once they have updated the O/S they are merely .txt files taking up space.  In XP I could delete them and $UtUninstall files also.  This save allot of disk space.  If anyone knows where these files reside in the VISTA enviornment It would be helpful.  What I fear is a system up to date with VISTA and no room to do intended applications such as MS OFFICE 2007 and my yacht design software.

   Thanks  
3. happyandyk

   
   Posted on: June 01, 2008 at 11:11PM  

   New download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=34f40386-9661-49b1-87ce-6d4a39e83747&displaylang=en&tm