Vista - One year later

[shuntphl]

Headline today:

Microsoft’s Windows Vista one year later: The chrome has worn off the turd

One year after Charlie Demerjian called Microsoft's Windows Vista a "chrome plated turd," he's back to take another look.

Link is here

Comments

[shuntphl]

First of all, the article was only cross-posted on MacDailyNews. The original article was posted in the "Inquirer".

I have been pretty much working with computers professionally for most of my life and have been working with Windows since v3.1 and beta tested Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Vista and worked on large 20000+ OS deployments and in Fortune-500 IT departments, so I think that makes me a little bit qualified to talk about the issue. Vista has been by far the most disappointing release so far. Mind me, I was standing in line at midnight at CompUSA, exactly a year ago, to pick up a release version of Vista. I didn't buy Vista just to bash it, because I knew it was a turd long before the media picked up on it (during the beta testing about a year earlier), but I thought, meh, it just beta code; i am sure that they'll get their act together until release. Well, that never happened.

What am I looking in a OS. Ease-of-use. I can give you a laundry list of common day-to-day tasks that were easier to accomplish in XP. Mapping drives, UAC, connecting to Linux Samba shares, copying files, installing anything, backwards compatibility, just to name a few. Performance. Performance is absolutely absymal. I had Vista installed on 2 machines (desktop/laptop) at home and on both machines the HDD would spin continuously without ANY reason. It's not indexing, it's not a defrag, but some sort of automated tasks that completely clogs any HDD activity. I ran some very specialized low-level tools to try to find what those processes are and what files are being accessed and up to this day I still don't know what it is. DX10 was supposed to be the holy grail for gaming and it turns out that it doesn't even come close to the widely announced performance enhancements. The Aero desktop is still rendered in DX9 - MS promised an DX10 update in spring/summer last year. Where is it? ANY simple operation of copying, extracting files is significantly faster in XP. Vista Ultimate was supposed to feature a variety of unique enhancements that never surfaced. Even the MS Vista product manager apologized, because MS didn't deliver any content to make the Ultimate version stand out. I could go on and on and on. Is Vista more secure than XP? I don't know. Based on the number of security updates within this past year, I would say not. Is it more reliable than XP? No, because a lot of the drivers have not matured yet, which cause a lot of instability on a large number of machines.