Vista SP1 a disaster
March 21, 2008
I did a quick search before installing the Vista SP1 upgrade and I’m glad I did it. It sounds like there are some major, major problems. I spent several hours last week re-installing Vista and I don’t want to do that again soon. I had to disable most of the security settings to make the system even usable on a daily basis — that doesn’t seem to have been fixed by SP1. A lot of people’s drivers are getting invalidated and there aren’t replacements yet. And after all that? According to PC World the greatest improvement in SP1 vs. Vista performance is Vista decompresses files slightly faster.
Of all the operating systems I’ve used (and use currently) Vista is the second worst I’ve ever used. (The worst was “Windows XP Professional x64,” an oubliette of an OS and the only reason Vista was an “upgrade” for me.)
I have stopped trying to do much more than play Warcraft, read and write weblog entries, and sync my iPod on my venerable desktop PC. I write, design, and program on the Mac. I keep all my notes on the Mac. Maybe in the near future I’ll get a
Passport USB Drive
Microsoft’s application and OS divisions long ago passed the point where company size and dominance made it feel like it didn’t have to respond to consumer needs, that it was too big to fail. We’ve been limping along for a decade or more with increasingly disastrous, productivity-sucking operating systems, security crises, and back-door information gathering. If they push this much further, though, and continue with plans to force everyone to Vista, perhaps we’ll have finally reached the point where the hassle and expense of changing operating systems begins to look better than the alternative.
Posted in Technology
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March 21st, 2008 at 7:13 am
I don’t have much experience with Vista and none with XP x64, but if they’re as bad as my personal OS disaster favorite, I feel real empathy for you this morning. I was stuck with Windows ME on a laptop I bought before heading back to Polska in ‘01. It had problems booting. Big problems. As it, it wouldn’t, at random times. I put Win 2k on it and it stabilized things, but there was once I had to start my computer somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 times before it finally came to life.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I am tech support for may companies and Vista is really a nightmare. Combine that with M$ low blow tactic with their stupid and supposedly “Open” DocX (which it is REALLY NOT) and you have at best a big loss of productivity. Not to mention interoperability problems with workers with other companies which are starting to send you dumbly those Infamous DocX (Office$ 2007) files that you’ll have a lot of problems dealing with.
M$ did it again. You call support, they told you “just install the Office 2007 compatibility pack on you Office 2003, XP, etc.”. We did it but it permits opening crap DocX files but you end up loosing page layout, graphics rendering all messed up, etc. You install the other “compatibility pack” on Office 2007 and result is the same…
So, M$ in its purest tradition uses the fact that most people don’t know about software and file types in general to annoy people who use previous versions, all that to force them the latest version of their “lockware”.
The worst part of all that is that ordinary people won’t learn and that M$ FUD tactics just work again & again…
There is an OpenDoc plugin for Office but people are afraid to use it. They prefer to have tons of problems with M$ LockWare…
At least, China made the bright decision to develop their own OS based on Linux. They just don’t trust M$ and USA… neither do i!