Microsoft: We’re Sorry For Vista

[ignis]

Microsoft: We’re Sorry, but We’ll Make it Up to You

October 28, 2008 by Dave in The Pit Blog When Steve Sinofsky took the stage on Tuesday at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, the senior vice president was willing to confess some past sins with Vista. His presentation was the first public demonstration of the new Windows 7 user interface, and showed how Microsoft intends to change Windows 7 to fix the problems that exist in Vista, and indeed in earlier versions of Windows.

Even Microsoft can’t hide or ignore the cold reception that Vista has received. Sinofsky identified a few key things that caused problems. First, the Windows “ecosystem”, the third-party software, hardware, and user training, wasn’t ready for the extensive changes that came in Vista. The driver model changed, which caused lots of hardware headaches at launch. The User Account Control (UAC) feature broke applications and frustrated users who hadn’t seen the behavior in XP. Windows 7 doesn’t make any changes to the ecosystem, and provides additional ways that users can reduce the number of UAC prompts without turning it off completely.

Sinofsky introduced Julie Larson-Green, who demonstrated some of the most visible changes in the Windows 7 user interface. There’s a new taskbar that combines icons for running programs, non-running programs, and recently-used programs. It’s similar in some ways to the Apple dock, but has a few other features such as window preview. The taskbar now lets you drag and drop icons to reorder them to suit your taste, rather than being grouped by type or in left-to-right order based on when you started them. Users now have a lot more control over the notification area, those annoying little icons next to the clock at the right side of the tray. You can now select not only whether the icon itself appears, but how and whether its message balloons pop up.

Vista got a reputation for being bloated and slow. Sinofsky says Microsoft is addressing that by focusing on fundamentals. The development group is working to decrease memory usage, disk I/O, and power consumption, and to increase boot speed, responsiveness, and CPU scalability. He held up a tiny netbook with a 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, and said that the current Windows 7 beta runs well on that hardware using only about half the available RAM.

At this point, Microsoft still can’t be nailed down on release dates. A pre-beta will be handed out to PDC attendees, but Sinofsky wouldn’t go any further than to say that the feature-complete public beta will be available “early next year” and the final product will be shipped “approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista.” That would put the ship date in late 2009 or early 2010, although a ship date any later than about September of this year would mean Microsoft would again miss the critical holiday sales season, just like they did with Vista.

[JSixpack]

Another vindication for those of us who wisely skipped Vista in anticipation of Windows 7, which looks finally to be worth an upgrade from XP. Much of what M'soft admits here and will address is what I and others had pointed out in this forum.

[sjaak327]

Too bad Microsoft finally gave in to the negative publicity. As I always pointed out, vista runs fine on all machines I have installed it on, and surely there is no doubt that the upgrade was worht it. More functionality and a better user interface. Server 2008, which runs the same Vista kernel, is an even better OS and really blows past server OS's from Microsoft out of the water.

Of course Windows 7 will be based on Vista, not on XP, hence applications that will not play nicely with Vista, will also not run under windows 7, the same goes with outdated hardware that will not run correctly under Vista, these will not all of sudden work on Windows 7.

Of course Windows 7 willl benefit from all the work that has been done with Vista, the driver model for instance, will not cause the same problems as they did almost two years ago, simply because Vista laid the groundwork for compatibliby. Therefore the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, will not be as big as XP to Vista.

Good to see, that the GUI will be even more configurable.

[stumonster]

Vista sux sav's

I dread everytime I am asked to fix something on a vista box.

UAC is no problem - I can handle allowing stuff I ask the machine to do , but trying to get the networking working correctly - fark that for fun.

XP/2K/98/95 were no where near the headache vista is.

[Guest Reimar]

Vista sux sav's

I dread everytime I am asked to fix something on a vista box.

UAC is no problem - I can handle allowing stuff I ask the machine to do , but trying to get the networking working correctly - fark that for fun.

XP/2K/98/95 were no where near the headache vista is.

Don't know what the problem you've with networking?! Running Vista not on my own network only but by most of my customers right now without a single problem with networking!

Maybe you've a problem with the Server Management and the Server Rules?! It's even depend what kind of Server OS you running! Or you running a serverless networking?!

There many questions open and you need to address all of them if you've any problem within the network.

And after the SP1 all problems we had were User related, except a very few Driver problem for very old devices.

Cheers.

[ignis]

I have had very few problems with Vista, because of ‘all the problems’ when I rebuilt my PC about a year ago I dual booted Vista - XP, cannot remember when I last booted in XP, Vista runs much faster then XP Pro ever did.

Yes the SP sorted out the few problems, I am on Auto updates, and there appears to be 2 or 3 updates/patches every week.. The odd problem I did have appears to have sorted themselves out.

I have 1x PC, 2x Laptops and 2x Dreamboxes running on mine, now it appear that if I install/download something not for Vista then I get a pop up asking to ‘reinstall by clicking here’ = the programs then installs with the correct drivers… there is a few programs without Vista drivers and it will tell you ‘no Vista/beta driver found’

[nikster]

Another vindication for those of us who wisely skipped Vista in anticipation of Windows 7, which looks finally to be worth an upgrade from XP. Much of what M'soft admits here and will address is what I and others had pointed out in this forum.

Yes, looks like they are on the right track. A functioning Dock would be great in Windows, and making it run well on small devices can only be good for overall performance..

[sjaak327]

Another vindication for those of us who wisely skipped Vista in anticipation of Windows 7, which looks finally to be worth an upgrade from XP. Much of what M'soft admits here and will address is what I and others had pointed out in this forum.

Yes, looks like they are on the right track. A functioning Dock would be great in Windows, and making it run well on small devices can only be good for overall performance..

I'm not sure about the dock though, always thought that being one of the less needed/desireable features of OSX, now looks Microsoft is going to do a similar thing with Windows 7, here's hoping that we have the option to disable it, and go right back to the much more logical windows taskbar.

[wpcoe]

Of course Windows 7 will be based on Vista, not on XP, hence applications that will not play nicely with Vista, will also not run under windows 7, the same goes with outdated hardware that will not run correctly under Vista, these will not all of sudden work on Windows 7.

I agree with you about Vista. People also groused about Windows XP when it first arrived and it wasn't well-accepted until SP1. For those apps that don't "play nicely with Vista" (and won't with Windows 7), there's always Virtual PC.

People who perform an in-place upgrade on their system from Windows XP to Vista should consider a clean install instead, and will find things smoother running, although with significant effort devoted to reinstalling all programs. Clean installs almost always are better than OS upgrades, IMHO.

[wpcoe]

Yes, looks like they are on the right track. A functioning Dock would be great in Windows, and making it run well on small devices can only be good for overall performance..

I'm not sure about the dock though, always thought that being one of the less needed/desireable features of OSX, now looks Microsoft is going to do a similar thing with Windows 7, here's hoping that we have the option to disable it, and go right back to the much more logical windows taskbar.

I'm always mildly amused when I see The Dock on a Mac. I developed my own equivalent many years ago by creating a directory (sorry: "folder") with shortcuts to all my frequently used apps. Then I create a shortcut on the desktop to the directory and drag the shortcut to the top of my screen and release it: voila! a new taskbar with all my shortcuts. I chose large icons, removed the text and the title, and chose "auto-hide" -- now all I do is mouse to the top of my screen and out pops a taskbar with my most used apps -- my own version of The Dock.

I did that for many years, with the only icons on my desktop being shortcuts to Restart, Shutdown and Standby, and to my notebook computer's shares. A couple months ago, I got the bright idea to move all those shortcuts to another folder, dragged it to the left edge of the display and now have a pop-up taskbar there for those functions. (The taskbar at the top doesn't have enough room any more.) The *only* icon on my desktop now is the Recycle Bin, and occasional downloaded files temporarily.

[OxfordWill]

Too bad Microsoft finally gave in to the negative publicity. As I always pointed out, vista runs fine on all machines I have installed it on, and surely there is no doubt that the upgrade was worht it. More functionality and a better user interface. Server 2008, which runs the same Vista kernel, is an even better OS and really blows past server OS's from Microsoft out of the water.

That was never the problem- the issue was developers writing apps which expected admin privs and lack of adequate drivers due to security changes. This has not been improved in win 7 either, as the security changes are essentially important for the overall health of the OS- anything which works in Vista will work in win7, just like anything which worked in xp works with vista.

[JetsetBkk]

...A couple months ago, I got the bright idea to move all those shortcuts to another folder, dragged it to the left edge of the display and now have a pop-up taskbar there for those functions...

EXACTLY what I do! [but I did it years ago :D]

And on the right side I have another pop-up taskbar containing toolbars of 16 directories (sorry - "folders" ) of all my commonly used data on my several drives. After clicking on the ">>" icon under the folder name, the toolbar expands automatically on mouse-rollover so I can go down all levels of nesting without any more clicking until I get where I want.

I hope that still works in Vista SP4 Windows 7.

(I also wonder if people know these simple tricks that make PC use much easier. Should we have - is there already? - a "tips and tricks" thread?)

Edit: get the nomenclature right!

Edited November 3, 2008 by JetsetBkk

[Khun Jack]

Can anyone explain me why Vista can't remember if the wireless AP is home or business?

Every time pops this stupid question up with several notebooks.

And yes Vista absolute sucks with network access.