All I seem to be able to find is links that tell me what it will break, and a general “This will fix bugs and add improvements” type statement.
Where can I find out what the improvements are?
So…has anyone been brave enough to install it yet?
You mean i wasn’t supposed too? oh boy, so what did i break by doing it?
I’m holding off because SP1 is supposed to cause problems with Trend Micro.
When TM gets that fixed, then I’ll make the jump.
I installed it yesterday based on advise from another geek board I belong to. So far no issues. PM me if you would like the name of the other message board, or mods am I allowed to post the addy of the board?
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1186881 has a pretty good summary. If you’re not a guru, most of the improvements will be waay too deep in the innards for you to understand what they might mean up at the surface you can see/touch.
I installed it (x64 version) a couple days ago. The only change I noticed is that there’s an X through my network activity icon, despite the actual connection working fine. I wouldn’t call that an IMPROVEMENT.
Also, I had to install it twice. The first time it failed…I tried it again the next night and it went through.
There is one absolute reason why you should install it: when you ring up the helpline for one of your programs, you will be asked if Windows is fully patched. And you will be able to say, “Yes.”
I actually only started using Vista full time about a month ago. I upgraded my system to 4GB of RAM, which XP 32-bit will not support, and I needed that extra memory support for the more and more complicated Adobe Illustrator documents I’ve been working on. Strangely enough, even though the system eats resources like crazy (although 2GB should be plenty to handle it) files which were maxing out my 2GB config before were now only using about 300MB of RAM, so apparently Vista is doing SOMETHING right when it comes to memory management. You just need to have a lot of it!
I was an official beta tester for Vista, and it caused nothing but frustration, especially seeing features (or lack of features) which were present in beta mode but turned out to remain in the RTM, which is why when Microsoft sent me a copy of Ultimate as compensation for the beta testing, I said no thanks and went back to XP. Some of these features include the way that explorer likes to ignore your viewing preferences and seemingly randomly changes the view mode between List, Details, Thumbs or the “filename, artist, album, rating” details, INCLUDING in the Ctrl+O windows. Also, gotta love how my Centro phone, which was released in October 2007 (over 6 months after Vista was on shelves), STILL doesn’t have Vista drivers!!!
Everybody kept saying “wait for SP1…all will be fixed”…well, here’s to hoping SP2 is more like XP SP2 was.
>Where can I find out what the improvements are?
Why would there be improvements?
The Big Thing about the Web and interconnectedness is that it provides a hook for software companies to give you compatibility problems. One day you have a computer that does everything you hoped it would. The next day, some product you have been using becomes obsolete - not because you changed something, but because someone else out there changed something. So you have to upgrade the product, which breaks something else, and the effect ripples outward. You will have to spend $500 in cash outlays and $1000 in wasted time trying to iron out all the little screwups. The software companies get the $500 - well, they get to keep the $490 they didn’t spend mailing you a DVD or supporting their shopping cart software while you download the Beta version - well, they didn’t admit it was the Beta version.
How many of us are getting something useful out of our computers that was not available 10 years ago? Offhand, I can’t think of anything I am.
Now, the one thing that I could see would be useful would be the .NET framework and the way it supports “managed” safe code and unsafe code. All sorts of security leaks and just plain dumb possibilities for crashing seem to be guarded against, if products are built out of safe code.
I installed it - in fact it’s one of the few times I’ve booted into Vista after dual-booting XP on the same machine.
It seems to have sped up the transfer of large files, (which was plain ludicruous before)
I’m sure that there are a host of small improvements hidden away that increase performance, security and stability, but frankly it’s still Vista and going back to XP on the same machine still feels like a major upgrade
[/Must Resist Yet Another Anti-Vista Rant]
Look! Kittens! Ignore the ever-growing WinSxS folder Shiny things!
[/MRYAAVR]
.Net is the only Microsoft thing I’ve ever found innovative and actually exciting in it’s possibilities (yes, I get excited by strange things) – other MS stuff can be useful, impressive even (like the Office stuff) but there’s a terrible greyness about it all (even when they’re spreading tubs of Candy-Chrome on top, like Vista)
I installed it on our Vista test machine. File operations on large numbers of files seem faster, although still not as fast as I’d like to see. Other than that I don’t see much difference, the slow file operations were the main thing bothering me with Vista.
I’ll have to do it when I get home tonight.
Yo, Phart, .NET is quite impressive, isn’t it? Plus, the tidiness of C# and the power of Windows Forms and the whole Visual Studio environment, the four of them taken together as the integrated thing that they are, well, that’s really something.
Trouble is, while having a development environment based on managed code should be able to do computer users a lot of good, it’s not really in the bag until all the other software companies have done a serious port from Win32API to .NET - I mean, a real rewrite, to take advantage of managed code. And it’s not really, really in the bag until every last program is redone. Having even one unmanaged code app still leaves you vulnerable to various security leaks and various crashes. Which could take a long time.
Or which couldn’t. I mean, we’re doing pretty well these days with the 640K barrier, aren’t we?
By the way, you better devote at least an hour to SP1 installation, maybe more.
For some reason SP1 installation reboots several times, and during one of the reboots it decided to do a CHKDSK on a 1TB USB drive. Which took overnight. So disconnect any external drives you don’t want CHKDSK’ed.
On the plus side, once you started it off the installation didn’t require any user intervention.