Re: How workable is Vista?

MC wrote:
Notice that although almost everybody is saying Vista is awful, they
don't agree at all about what's awful about it.


There are just so many things to choose from, that's all. People won't agree on what's the nicest colour - but they'll mostly agree that colour is nice to have.

I think Vista-bashing has become a fad. If you know anything about
OS architecture, read up on it. You'll see that Vista corrects some
of the main problems with XP, including inability to prioritize I/O.


Prioritizing I/O is a good thing (Linux has had it for years), if you have multiple tasks that are all bottlenecked on I/O speed. It's a useful feature for servers, but of little use for the average user on a desktop.


One thing I really like is that Vista is ready to respond to mouse
clicks almost the moment it boots up; I don't have to wait for all
the startup applications to finish before I can get responses to
anything I do. XP was notorious for sitting around 2 or 3 minutes
with little things still starting up, not letting you do anything.
With Vista, the startup apps may take the same 2 or 3 minutes but you
can go ahead and get started doing your work.


That's why Bill Gates invented morning coffee!

Vista has a really major security improvement. Even when running as
administrator, you have to give explicit permission to change the
system configuration. This is like "sudo" in UNIX. It protects you
from malware. Contrary to those Mac ads, it is NOT a pest. If you
see those prompts every day, something is wrong. I see them about
once a month.


Avoiding Internet Explorer and Outlook Express (and Outlook) is the most important step to avoiding malware on Windows. The other important method is to *think* a little about what you are doing. These techniques work on all versions of Windows (and are even easier on non-Windows machines :-)

UAC is definitely a step towards avoiding accidental installation of malware or otherwise seriously messing up your machine, so it's a good idea (note that "sudo" on *nix is nearly 30 years old - three cheers for Microsoft's innovation!). I can't really judge whether it is too much of a pest to be useful in normal usage - since I've only use Vista for testing purposes, I wanted to install a lot of stuff, and therefore found UAC a pain. Certainly there is the risk that people will turn it off just to stop it bugging them - that happens to a great many firewalls on windows.

I do not think Vista should be judged by how well it runs the
software of 10 years ago. Programs written for Windows NT, 2000, and
XP all run just fine. Programs written for Windows 95 require
compatibility mode. Unfortunately, lots of programmers have been
writing Windows 95 software and selling it to XP users.

Of course, the embedded systems community is atavistic. There are
things in Microchip MPLAB, for instance, that aren't fully compatible
with Windows 95 file naming, much less anything later.

Welcome to the real world.

For people using a home PC mainly for web and email, cataloguing their digital photographs, playing music, and some light office apps, they are faster, safer and cheaper using Linux.

For people using a PC for common business tasks, OpenOffice, FireFox, and Thunderbird or Evolution on any platform will cover most needs - Linux or XP are smaller, faster and cheaper than Vista.

For people using a PC for games, XP is currently the best platform.

For people doing more specialised work, compatibility with a range of software and/or hardware is critical. Whether XP or Linux is the best choice will depend on the details of the work - but Vista is out.

Vista can and should be judged by how well it runs software that people need to run, and how well it supports hardware that people need to use. That includes old programs and old hardware (and new hardware - Vista has had more than a few problems with lack of drivers for newer hardware).
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: List of Applications Not Compatible with Leopard
    ... If there is an equal on Windows I truly would love to know about ... program on the Plasq frontpage was clearly taken on Vista. ... the product is on both Windows and Mac. ... hardware than Vista works on PC hardware is hardly "silly". ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Subject: Re: Linux sucks?
    ... > the applications I run in my field do not run on Linux. ... I have cygwin on Windows ... so Windows users only hit this rarely at install. ... XP users hit this when they add hardware and the 'automatic ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Need tutorials, guides... However...
    ... performance loss you'll get from an OS like Windows or Linux. ... machines out there have gone off in many different directions. ... expect to find certain hardware at certain addressess. ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: OT: Spiegel-Online bei Heise
    ... Aber, wie schon gesagt, so simpel ist die Hardware heute ja nicht mehr, daß es mal eben mit ein paar inb/outb-Befehlen getan ist. ... Java ist in gewissen Bereichen etabliert, ... Wer Word/Excel/Powerpoint haben will, braucht Windows. ... und ein Linux für DSP von Freescale ...
    (de.comp.os.unix.linux.misc)
  • Re: Linux-Notebook gesucht
    ... Gibts aber nur bei MacOS und Windows. ... dann wäre auch Linux proprietär. ... Und es funktioniert bei allen Geräten wirklich die komplette Hardware ...
    (de.comp.sys.notebooks)