Windows Vista Mini-review

[nikster]

Background: I had to install Vista on my laptop for work. I installed on the second HD partition of my Acer TM 8204 laptop. All hardware was found except Bluetooth, which I installed with Vista drivers from the WIDCOMM website. So far so good - Vista running with all bells and whistles and an WEI of 4.5.

I played with Vista over the weekend to figure out whether I should just drop XP and use Vista full time. Conclusion: No. I will wait for Vista SP2 and by that time hopefully have my Santa Rosa MacBook with leopard.

Big No-Nos:

- Vista loves giant dialog boxes with two pages of text in each option. You don't click on a button - you click on a whole paragraph. It's horrible.

- They have also hidden the network settings which I need all the time. And Vista makes me decide for each new connection whether it's business, private or public. Particularly funny when using the laptop in many different internet cafes / cafes with Wifi, the hotel, etc - a large dialog (see above) each time.

- I had already disabled UAC (too annoying) but then the "security center" started nagging me that UAC was disabled. Duh!

I guess all of these complaints really boil down to one thing: I can't use an OS that requires constant attention. I would rather never notice the OS.

Vista seems to want much more attention than XP. With UAC enabled, it's in your face all the time with modal dialogs, interrupting your workflow with nonsensical questions "Process UAkS.DLL wants to modify system resources! Did you initiate this process and do you want it to continue Y/N". How the hel_l should I know?

But even with UAC disabled, Vista continues to nag and wants decisions all the time.

The shiny windows don't make up for that, neither does the excellent Aurora"screen-saver. Not that I use screen savers but Aurora is nice.

I think the graphics and sound effects of Vista are way better than in XP. Not as sublime as OS X but then, no one expected that, and an improvement is an improvement and should be applauded.

My prediction is that MS will receive literally millions of complaints about the constant in-your-face-ness of the OS and will fix some with SP1 and fix more with SP2 by which time it will have nag-parity with XP.

Edited January 15, 2007 by nikster

[percy2]

My prediction is that MS will receive literally millions of complaints about the constant in-your-face-ness of the OS and will fix some with SP1 and fix more with SP2 by which time it will have nag-parity with XP.

By which time we should all be happily using OS XI.

Cheers nice review.

[cdnvic]

My prediction is that MS will receive literally millions of complaints about the constant in-your-face-ness of the OS and will fix some with SP1 and fix more with SP2 by which time it will have nag-parity with XP.

By which time we should all be happily using OS XI.

Cheers nice review.

That's a few years away. Even Leopard looks like a summer release at the earliest now.

[bendix]

I read an interesting review comparing it less than favourably with Tiger the other day.

It must be very disheartening for Microsoft to constantly come second to Apple these days.

[chingching]

I think it's Ubuntu for me after my win98 dies. I used windows 3.1 until 98 came out, skipping win95. My friends used to ask me; doesn't it crash a lot? . Yes , I'd answer but takes only 6 seconds literally to restart. Of course it was a bother finding those 7 floppy disks if you had to reinstall.

[nikster]

I think it's Ubuntu for me after my win98 dies. I used windows 3.1 until 98 came out, skipping win95. My friends used to ask me; doesn't it crash a lot? . Yes , I'd answer but takes only 6 seconds literally to restart. Of course it was a bother finding those 7 floppy disks if you had to reinstall.

To me, Win 2000 was the best MS OS. But then, Win 2000 had horrific support for modern technologies such as WiFi. My first PC laptop had Win 2000 and I bought a DLink WiFi card for it and the Win2k software was completely insane.

First, you had to know the "SSD" of the WiFi network you wanted to connect to - the SSD is what is commonly referred to as the name of a WiFi network. So if you are in some cafe, you can't see the networks around you, you have to somehow figure out the name first!

But it got worse: Then, you have to enter the name in hex code! I am not kidding. Meanwhile, on my Powerbook, the network name would just show up and clicking on it would connect.

So I had to use Windows XP. I don't mind XP - it almost never crashes. It has its little issues but not more so than other OSs. It's ugly and a bit backwards, but by and large, it works. Vista release 1.0 is definitely a step back from that.

[chingching]

My worst OS was IBM's OS2. It came on 30 or 40 floppy disks. and you didn't just install one disk and that was it, you might have to install one disk 2 times. In the beginning of the install you were asked how many MB you wanted to set aside for the OS. After about disk 10 it would tell you that you hadn't enough space set aside and you had to start over. If you called tech support you would be put on hold and work your way thru a lot of menus. After about 20 minutes the automated telephone would give you a 6 character alpha numeric code - just once - not repeated. Then a human would pick up the phone and ask you what is your code.

[Khleerm]

Good writing etiquette calls for the writer to inform the audience what an acronym stands for prior to throwing one about.

As reader, I'm left guessing what UAC is....

[nikster]

Good writing etiquette calls for the writer to inform the audience what an acronym stands for prior to throwing one about.

As reader, I'm left guessing what UAC is....

Indeed, sorry.

UAC stands for User Account Control - it's Vista's big idea to make Windows safer.

On that topic, a friend of mine just pointed out why this is so wrong in Vista, I quote: "I don't understand why it pops the UAC dialogs for user-initiated actions. That doesn't make me feel safe--the software should know that I just did something, right?"

Let me explain this on an example where such a scheme works:

In OS X, whenever a critical system file is modified or a critical directory accessed, the OS pops up a dialog asking for authorization. You need to type in an admin password to do certain things.

This is good because it prevents malware from installing itself in the system and the check happens at a very deep level where it can't be turned off, at least in theory.

On OS X, I have never had any complaints with this functionality - it happens once in a blue moon, and when it does, I usually know exactly why. For example, it happens when I am trying to change user account settings - makes sense.

In addition, software which simulates mouse clicks or other user entry can't crack it because I need to enter the password. The password is not stored on the system in unencrypted form so software can't enter the password for me.

This protection scheme comes straight out of Unix and has been around for 30 years - OS X just put a nice graphical user interface on it without compromising the underlying constraints.

The idea on Vista was to do the same thing that OS X does. There are a few differences that compromise the scheme on Vista though:

- Does not ask for password - much less secure as software can simulate an OK click

- Greys out the entire screen and abruptly stops work-flow with a modal dialog

- Happens very frequently

- Happens for no apparent reason - 99 times out of 100 as a direct result of starting an application or something like that.

Especially the first point, not asking for a password, is strange.

Either Vista can distinguish a real user click from a simulated software click - then it would not need to pop up any UAC dialogs for user-initiated actions. Or it can't distinguish these and is worthless. Either way, it appears deeply flawed to me.

[cdnvic]

Good writing etiquette calls for the writer to inform the audience what an acronym stands for prior to throwing one about.

As reader, I'm left guessing what UAC is....

User Account Control - Requires all software installations to be approved by the user.

[bubba]

Just curious about how screen text appears in Vista. I have a core duo Intel Mac and am forced to run Windows on it sometimes because of some Windows only company software that we use. I'm using Parallels so Windows in running on my OSX desktop. One of the things that gives me a headache when working all day with windows is the rough, jaggy screen text. Put it next to some text in OSX and it looks really awful. Has Visa done anything to anti-alias screen text to make it easier to look at?

Anyway, from what I've read, I think I would be happy staying with OSX and away from Vista. And don't listen to any of those people who say that the Redmond Copy Machine got all their ideas from Apple. :-)

http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?n...52.735347325328