Poll: Are you going to Windows Vista

In My Humble Opinion
1

First, my apologies if this has been done. I looked as far back & July 06 and did not see this as a question.

I bought a new tower over the holidays & it came with an upgrade to Windows Vista. I finally got around to submitting the upgrade request online today. Now I am wondering what sort of bad things will come my way once I finally decide to try it. When I went to XP, I remember I had a printer that all of a sudden became a paper weight because there were no XP drivers for it. It makes me a little nervous even for the home PC.

So - is anyone else considering moving to Vista as an upgrade? Thoughts on what is gained / lost in the process?

2

I think we all will eventually. I have read a lot about Vista and it holds promise. It has much increased security and some improvements in game graphics although that one may take a will to hit stride. There are some other cool features as well like a slick new graphical interface. The problem is that desktop OS development isn’t at the same stage that it once was. XP is a pretty fine OS these days after the service packs fixed the big things and it still doesn’t look all that old. I can easily believe that most people will wait a year or three before moving up. My mega-corp hasn’t even mentioned it. I would guess that most people will only upgrade as they get a new computer because the pressing need isn’t that obvious.

3

I’ll wait until at least the first service pack. Maybe the second.

4

Even if I were thinking of upgrading, this is the least I’d do. Looking back on XP pre-SP1, it was horendous when compared to post-SP2. Yes, I know it’s been through a huge beta test - but I’ll stake my XP licence on there still being newsworthy problems.

5

I’m not going to upgrade until I get a new PC, and who knows when that’ll be

6

I’m just a software person, but basically, I would never do a major OS upgrade without a compelling reason. There is other software on your system that would probably break. At least wait until the secondary software has had a chance to write their own upgrades to play nicely with the new OS.

7

I’ve been porting one of my applications from prior versions of Windows to Vista for the past few months, and I can’t recommend strongly enough that nobody upgrade. It’s going to break a significiant portion of what you have installed, and it’s just going to be far less painful to start with a clean machine. Personally, I’m thinking that my next big change is going to be Ubuntu.

8

I’m a developer, so I’ve been running Vista for a while now (dual-booting with XP). You can get ready for Vista now, by hiring someone to follow you around, and ask you about fifteen times an hour: “Are you SURE you want to do that? It could be a security risk!” Seriously; there are so many security warnings you can’t get anything done–it’s like XP SP2 on steroids. Thankfully, you can turn this off (it warns you three times that it’s a security risk to do so, though!)

I’m running the 64-bit version, so basically nothing that needs to install a driver works. The nVidia video drivers are still pretty bad: games work now (since Jan 5th, when they released a new version), but frame rates are awful. Vista looks gorgeous, but I’ve got my second monitor turned off because it doesn’t get the rotation or resolution right.

The installer re-lettered all my hard drives in order to make it’s install drive “C:”, thus breaking every other OS installed on the machine. This won’t be a problem except for folks attempting to dual-boot.

Microsoft went WAY overboard on the driver thing: you can’t get a driver to install on the 64-bit version of Vista unless you get the driver certified, which many projects don’t have the resources to do. Unlike previous versions, there’s no way around this–the user isn’t even asked if they want to install anyway. A few programs I depend on install unsigned drivers, so those don’t work yet (and since some of them are open source, may never.)

Apparently the UI designers were on drugs: there are some blatantly stupid things in the UI now. For example, the programs on the start menu are now folders rather than context menus, and they close themselves every time the start menu closes. So everything that is at least one extra doiuble-click away, every time. Finding control panels is effectively impossible, they’ve been scrambled completely, and there are tons more of them, not all of which are in the control panels tab. Thankfully, you can turn this off, too, and go back to the older way. Almost all of the Vista UI changes seem to be just change for the sake of change – I can’t see an advantage to any of it. Even the aero glass they’re so proud of seems useless - it’s translucent, but not enough so that you can see what’s under things…so why bother?

It borrowed heavily from Mac OS X, but as usual borrowed the “glitzy” stuff rather than the “ease of use” stuff – so you get a sidebar that partially covers the desktop, making whatever’s under it inaccessible, and that redraws over the top of some fullscreen games. Or a “My Documents” folder subdivided into tons of subfolders with nearly identical icons.

But for all my whining, it’s going to become the defacto OS; new systems will come with it by default shortly. Almost all of my non-game applications work fine in it, and the games will as soon as the video drivers catch up. It’s too early to judge it on the rough edges and third-party compatibility (although I’d have thought decent video drivers from the largest video chipset manufacturer would have been a priority). Give it a couple of months, and there won’t be much compelling reason not to take it on new machines. And the 64-bit stuff is necessary if I ever want to put more than 2-3 GB of memory in my system (and I do).

9

The Vista guys gave me a link to a free copy - that had no specified expiration date.
But I didn’t use if for a week, and when I was ready to try it the link went to a “Tough luck, offer over” page.

I suppose I got on the list in the first place because I had tried the IE7 in Beta mode

10

So when will Vista be released?

11

If I upgrade to Vista, it won’t be for a while. I have several pieces of hardware that will break from lack of driver support, mostly due to their age–a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard and a Hauppauge Win TV Radio card are the big two. So I’d have to spend at least a couple hundred more on hardware and even more if I replace my speakers to a set that will work better with a different card. Also, I would want to get the 64-bit version of the OS, and I’ve already got a perfectly good copy of Win XP 64-bit lying around that I have yet to install because of the same driver issues. And with that I don’t have to worry about the enforced DRM issues if I ever stop using CRT monitors, among other DRM problems.

12

I upgraded my old computer to XP and it ran like a dream compared to that fucking abortion that was ME.

I’m pretty happy with XP SP-2 and see no reason to change based on my computer usage. I guess that I’ll end up with Vista when I get a new PC which I don’t see happening for a while.

13

Sometime in early to mid-February.

14

Will it be OEM in new machines before February?

15

My Windows machines use XP sp2. They seem to work just fine. I have no reason to upgrade.

Now, in the future, if I end up supporting a bunch of Vista machines, then I’ll install it on one of my workstations at home.

16

I think it was released to the OEMs late last year, but I don’t know how long it’ll take them to put their new images together.

17

Upgrade, hell, I’m still using Microsoft Windows version 3.0. Wish someone had told me about XP.

Sgt Schwartz

18

Of what year?

19

I would rather shove shards of broken fluorescent light bulbs up my ass than install Vista.

The ‘premium content’ crap is just another in a long line of reasons I don’t want it. All the other reasons boil down to basically ‘I installed beta versions and uninstalled them as fast as I could.’

Don’t forget that they require high quality sound and video interfaces and adapters to deliberately destroy signal quality whenever ‘premium content’ is playing and that all of this ‘premium content’ has to be encrypted/decrypted whenever it’s paged in and out of VM. There is also the threat of driver license revocation for hardware manufacturers who do not comply with these specs, and Microsoft’s statement that they want the vendors to go beyond the letter of the spec. There’s the fact that video cares like the TNT2 won’t run under Vista at all, which will cause headaches for a ton of IT departments, since there’s no point in spending the money on thousands of video cards that have more graphics processing ability and video RAM for users who are going to be using Office and not gaming.

Their ‘craplet’ defense will mean some nasty things for the company I work for, as now our prices have to go up since we’ll have to get a MS certificate for every custom applet we ship to customers, and our software is quite expensive enough. We don’t do end user, buy it at Staples kind of software. The software I work on designing will cost one of our medium size customers around a half million dollars to customize, ship, install and support, and that’s before we write them anything more than what comes OOTB. Some of them will be spending 100K$ merely to migrate their existing data into our software. They will not be happy if every applet they want from us on the fly (a service we currently do offer) costs more because of MS’s craplet protection.

Vista is … a pile of shit.

20

It’s already released for corporate customers (Nov 30, 2006), which is why we developers can talk about it. Microsoft’s site still claims Jan 30 as the “widely available” date.

If you’re planning to buy it at midnight on release day, start lining up now!