Windows VISTA Reviewed by CNET: "Warmed Over XP"

[Jerry Jones]

CNET reviewers say Windows Vista is just "warmed over XP."

Link to CNET review: http://tinyurl.com/2zfta6

The good: Windows Vista Ultimate does improve some features within Windows XP; fewer system crashes than Windows XP; Windows Vista offers better built-in support options.

The bad: Windows Vista Ultimate does not put search on the desktop (it's buried within applications, within the Start Menu); optimized only for the Microsoft Windows ecosystem (for example, RSS feeds from Internet Explorer 7 get preferential treatment); there's simply too much and not all of it is implemented properly; no new software yet written exclusively for Windows Vista; and there are too many editions of Windows Vista.

The bottom line: Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

"Microsoft admits Vista screwed - report"

Link to TheInquirer.Net brief: http://tinyurl.com/39m833

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

Link to APCMag.Com story: http://tinyurl.com/2dxf8a

Reckon you won't upgrade to Vista until the first service pack is released? That's looking likely to be the second half of this year, according to Microsoft's latest email blast.

The company has put out a call for "customers and partners (to) actively test and provide feedback on Windows Vista SP1 to help us prepare for its release in the second half of CY07 (calendar year 2007)."

Microsoft hasn't released details of exactly what changes will be wrought in Vista SP1, which has been assigned the codename 'Fiji' but some OS components which missed the RTM cut-off will almost certainly be rolled into the update.

One of the candidates for this better-late-than-never brigade would be the Windows PowerShell, previously Microsoft Shell -- a .NET-based command line shell with its own scripting language.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[DGhost]

PowerShell is a seperate product. It RTM'd last october and is available here
Remember, XP SP1 was released about a year after XP RTM'd. So far, this is looking like it is going to be on a similar time line.

[schmosef]

I guess the irony of this review is that Microsoft made an extra special effort to makes things look and feel "XP like" in Vista in spite of the fact that much behind the scenes has changed.

Several months ago I spoke to the head of Microsoft Live Canada at a .Net User Group meeting and he told me that Microsoft appreciated the fact that it was very difficult to innovate the user interface without isolating less adverturous users. He told me that they anticipated a huge response from their user base, that they knew it wasn't all going to be positive, and they were preparing processes to receive and evaluate feedback with a mind to rapidly implementing tweaks for the first Vista service release. As an example of this he mentioned several features that were changed based specifically on user feedback of the betas and CTPs.

[DGhost]

That is very true. Vista had a lot of features implemented that eventually got cut out. The two or three overhauls the sidebar has received is one of them. Originally the Sidebar had a System Tray gadget and a Task Pane gadget that entirely replaced the existing Taskbar. Then you had Virtual Folders.

There comes a point where if you make it too different it makes it easier for a customer to justify purchasing a Mac...

[Jerry Jones]

There comes a point where if you make it too different it makes it easier for a customer to justify purchasing a Mac...

Well, that's not the only reason someone might want to switch to a Mac.

I think the reason I plan to switch is that I perceive better functionality, more advanced features, and superior integration with hardware.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

I've said this before but XP is totally transparent to me. It does what it's supposed to and I really don't notice it. Just the way I like my operating system. Until Vista actually does something I need done that XP can't do I'm not moving.

Plus MS has just announced support of XP until April 2009.

XP Support

[DGhost]

I've said this before but XP is totally transparent to me. It does what it's supposed to and I really don't notice it. Just the way I like my operating system. Until Vista actually does something I need done that XP can't do I'm not moving.

Plus MS has just announced support of XP until April 2009.

XP Support

And after using Vista for a few days it became totally transparent to me. Much more so than XP ever was...

Personally, the learning curve of going from XP to Vista is a lot smaller than the curve of going between 98/ME and XP. It's far more in line with going from 98 to ME or 2K to XP. Unfortunately, most of the public only knows about the 9x to XP route (which was retardedly painful) and are not looking forward to this.

and as much shit as people give it, it is a far more polished product than XP ever was, and look where it wound up?

Jerrold Jones - Good on you. I can't bring myself to buy into Apples platform concept. I tend to view it in line with Sony's, just covered up by being a bit kinder and a lot trendier. But... thats just me... it's all about what works best for the consumer...

[Jerry Jones]

Microsoft Windows Vista "GOTCHAS" by PC World: http://tinyurl.com/2avgky

Drivers are critical to your PC; they are the files that let your OS communicate with devices such as graphics cards, printers, or storage devices. All drivers have to be rewritten for Vista, but not all may be ready at launch, and some older peripherals may never get an updated driver.

The lack of Vista drivers for some peripherals could be a major issue for many users. For example, with the beta drivers in our tests, games ran significantly slower under Vista than under Windows XP. In earlier testing of the Dell XPS 710 running XP, this system ran at 143 frames per second in the game Far Cry at 1024 by 768 resolution. An identical system using the same settings with Vista managed a frame rate of just 108 fps--some 24 percent slower.

Our other test game, Doom 3, didn't run at all on the Vista systems that used ATI graphics cards; at this writing, ATI's beta drivers for Vista don't support the OpenGL graphics system that this game requires. nVidia's beta driver, however, did support OpenGL graphics. ATI and nVidia both claim that they will have full versions of their drivers ready by the time Vista ships.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[schmosef]

This is the same FUD that gets published with every Windows release. I specifically remember a backlash against Microsoft because ME supposedly didn't bundle enough third part NIC drivers.

ATI does seem to be dragging ther feet with their video card drivers. Not sure why that is.

I know that nVidia was a big contributor to the WPF rendering engine and that early internal builds of Vista required nVidia hardware. I saw a Vista "concept demo" once (years ago) that was a skinned install of XP with nVidia drivers that enabled transparent windows, etc.

Maybe ATI is sulking, or maybe nVidia worked things to keep ATI out of the loop as much as possible.

[DGhost]

wrong, actually. most of the early Aero Glass demos used ATI hardware. In fact, the early demos were run on Radeon 9700 Pro's (before anyone considered using XT as a product model).

ATI has so far led the way as far as getting basic support working. Their drivers have been consistantly better than NVidias until this last month. Of course, their lack of OpenGL is not suprising. ATI's OpenGL layer has *always* been horrendous and it wouldn't suprise me if they have to write one from scratch for Vista.

Keep in mind that Windows XP did not include any OpenGL drivers in box either. It had an OpenGL abstraction layer just like Vista has. It used to be that the only way you could get OpenGL support was to download the drivers from the manufacturer. They used to strip it out for the Windows Update releases. Not sure if they still do though.

Anyways, Longhorn Beta 1 had a Supplemental Driver Pack that they released with it. It contained a bunch of XP drivers that had been validated to provide minimal functionality in Longhorn. Last I checked it weighed in at about 1GB in size. Pretty hefty when you think about the fact that the total size was about 3.5gb, and it accounted for almost 1/3rd of the download. So yeah, they do make an effort to include driver support for things.

And they have pushed quite a few driver updates down via Windows Update in this last month. Just about every driver I have found straight from a manufacturer has wound up there. For those that are unsupported, there are actually quite a few drivers that will still work with Vista. It's just a matter of getting them installed...

[schmosef]

So you're saying that I didn't see the demo that I saw?

Maybe ATI was more involved than I realised, but I saw what I saw. The demo was part of a .Net User Group meeting held at Microsoft's Canadian headquarters. Part of it was in PowerPoint. And part of it was on a skinned copy of XP. The presenter specifically talked about nVidia's contribution. He said something (I don't remember it all--it was a while ago) about playing with some of nVidia's APIs (or maybe there was some API we could download but it only worked on nVidia) if we wanted early experience with WPF (it wasn't called WPF at the time; I think it was called Avalon).

Come to think of it, part of the PowerPoint presentation showed a new visual paradigm for managing peripherials. It was pretty neat. The device manager was a like a 3D carousel. I guess they dropped it.

[DGhost]

Hehe... perhaps...

was it anything like this demo?

I can't seem to find any of the notes on the demonstration. At the time the ATI hardware was the oldest and most mature DX9 technology. I remember it was pretty backwards just because of the fact that NVidia had been MS's partner for a bit (XBox, led the way for XP support, etc etc) and it just was a "what the hell?" sorta thing.

Annnyyywayyyss... details...

other news... NVidia released a beta 100 Series driver to partners for testing... supposedly it brings 3d acceleration back up to par with XP in everything except OpenGL... should be interesting when it gets released to the public later this month...

[schmosef]

The images on those slides are too low rez for me to be sure but the one captioned "Windows Longhorn Hardware & Devices" is very similar to what I remember.