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The "Mojave" Experiments - aka MS Fights back about Vista
ArcSyn
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/
What if you were invited to see the new version of Windows called "Mojave"? What if you were asked to describe what you have heard and did not like about Vista, despite having never used it? Then you tried out our new "Mojave" OS, and loved it, only to be told that it actually was Windows Vista.
MS seems to be starting a new marketing campaign to strike back at all the bad press and ads (silly Apple, those ads were old after the first one) about Vista to show real people's reactions to Vista.
Kudos to them. I have been using Vista since SP1 came out, and I have had no problems and I love it. The little things (as well as the pretty things) just make things simpler and better. Even UAC doesn't bother me. It will be interesting if we start to see adoption pick up after these start to air.
What if you were invited to see the new version of Windows called "Mojave"? What if you were asked to describe what you have heard and did not like about Vista, despite having never used it? Then you tried out our new "Mojave" OS, and loved it, only to be told that it actually was Windows Vista.
MS seems to be starting a new marketing campaign to strike back at all the bad press and ads (silly Apple, those ads were old after the first one) about Vista to show real people's reactions to Vista.
Kudos to them. I have been using Vista since SP1 came out, and I have had no problems and I love it. The little things (as well as the pretty things) just make things simpler and better. Even UAC doesn't bother me. It will be interesting if we start to see adoption pick up after these start to air.
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XP is probably microsoft's best OS since 95. Its stable as hell.
I run vista currently,though, and its not bad at all. I do get alot of crashes when I close games, but I'm closing them anyway so it doesn't matter.
If you have 1gb of memory and are a general purpose user, Windows Vista is a perfectly acceptable OS. If you're a speed freak or working at enterprise level, it's not exactly the step forward it should have been.
Edit: I have nothing against Vista, but after a few weeks of use I decided it wasn't for me - like I said, the "problems" people complain about shouldn't generally affect most users.
Other than compatability issues, it just feels like a new version of XP, though.
the first year of XP was pretty horrid. it took until SP2 to make it featured to where it should be.
as for the "experiment". man does microsoft have it tough. they've got a product that doesn't really have all that many problems, but there's just a strong aversion to anything branded with the name of it. apple sure has done a hell of an assassination job.
Every time it's from someone who hasn't tried Vista at all, or tried it once and didn't even try to actually use it, instead just complained about how it wasn't XP.
I fucking love Vista.
Thats pretty situational though. I never saw the blue screen once during my 4+ years using xp. I saw it all the time in 95.
Likely more an issue with the PC itself. Which, of course, could be the issue many people are having with Vista.
Try to talk with someone, but start it out with "You're being recorded"
Gee look unless they're a trained actor their reactions will almost always change and they will start appearing fake. Especially if you tell them they're being recorded for something that might be used for presentations of commercials.
EDIT: and yes i have used it, but i didnt buy it. I'll stick with XP 'til blackbird, the next real hardcore pc windows release.
As a mac user, and a person who used to build PCs and understands OSs and the promises Microsoft made with Vista Id give it a 75%, its functional, it works. FILE COPYING SUCKS A DICK, but besides that the rest of the issues are driver related and unfulfilled promises.
Or someone trying to look down on you for not being a Mac user.
Occasionally a Linux user. Yes I've used Ubuntu, yes it is awesome. No, it's still not ready for the mass market, no I don't consider Wine my gaming platform of choice.
Haha, yeah. It's the same thing I've encountered. Everyone I've seen complain has never actually tried it. I actually got Vista early after it's launch, and even though bugs are too be expected at the very start, I didn't have many problems. I still haven't had Vista crash because of Vista itself, and I can probably count how many times a bad driver has caused my system to crash on one hand. All in all, it's been a very smooth experience.
My GPU crashed a while back.
In XP I would've gotten a BSOD or just a black screen.
In Vista I got a flicker and a message that Vista detected the problem and restarted the card.
But yeah, totally less stable.
Well I also use Ubuntu, and have my Eee with Xandros, and even though I use windows for gaming I'm mostly a Linux user at heart.
I still fucking love Vista, and every time I think about adding Ubuntu on this machine and dual-booting I realize that there's really no point, because I don't have any problems with Vista that I need to fix with Ubuntu.
I've found Vista a LOT more stable than XP. Almost every time some crappily programmed software caused an issue, Vista was able to maintain control and allow me to shut it down. In XP, my system would just hang.
I'm not quite sure how it sacrifices usefulness and capability either.
I've heard so many people at work (IT, no less!) call Vista the new Windows ME...and I keep telling them, ME was riddled with problems, bugs, crashes. Vista may be slow depending on your setup, but even with the little I've used it, it's easy to see that it is not utter trash. It's XP with more stuff, and it's gotten a bad rap.
The Vista PC runs my games phenomenally well in DirectX 10. In the realm of stability it's the equal of XP in my experience. I blue-screened last night but it was the first time in nearly half a year.
That said, my iMac has never kernel panicked.
Does Vista suck? No. It's a brilliant front end for my games. Would I use it for work? No thanks, I've got something else that I prefer.
I've heard that one too. Pure BULL. Either those guys have never used ME or they've never used Vista.
I had to make use of ME. For four frigging years. It was an absolute pain to run. By the end it would be considered a good run if I managed to log off successfully 5 times without having a complete system crash or reset.
It's also great management-wise. I set up a domain at home and the management features of Vista are just a cut above XP (Administrative templates for MAPPING DRIVE? Finally!!). Vista is VERY MUCH designed with the enterprise in mind on the networking side - but that's because I think the Servers and Tools team at Microsoft are the real geniuses at that company. They do great work!
But it doesn't play well with my professional audio hardware, and it's a bit too much of a system hog for my liking so my desktop remains XP.
But it's not worth $300. Holy jesus, who thought that was a good idea? MS operating systems are usually really over-priced, but this has to take the cake.
Vista was also completely broken until SP1 (30 minutes to copy a couple of gigs of locals file to another directory on my hard drive? what is this, the stone age?), and I still can't believe they won't push SP1 through Windows Update.
Now Server 2008 - THAT'S an amazing operating system. If the consumer OS team took a cue from their Servers and Tools counterparts, Apple would have some SERIOUS trouble. Server 2008 is absolutely worth the $1000 or so price of admission, and it runs fantastically on ancient hardware.
I actually hadn't seen a blue screen since the ME days, and I get one almost daily now with Vista. It looks fine, and the upfront features are all well and good, but when I buy a computer and programs won't even open after three months, about three error messages pop up every time I bring it back from standby, and every boot-up it tells me I shut it down incorrectly and must choose how to start Windows (regardless of how I actually shut it down), it tends to upset me.
Vista is not as bad as people say, and it is better than ME, but it is still, in general, shitty.
Some of the new networking stuff (like allowing you to use wifi while directly connected to another machine) is quite nice; I still don't know how to do that in Linux yet. But try and configure your network? Why are there like seven or eight different control panels? Why are some of them non-obvious to get to?
Back on topic, Wil Shipley didn't like this "experiment" or marketing campaign.
Who did you buy it from and how much extra shit did they put on?
Because what you're describing is not at all what is to be expected from Vista.
So something else is messing with your computer.
Just curious, how did you start using it? Just out of the box, right?
Take a look at this article here:
Fixing Vista, one machine at a time
From an IT standpoint (my team is currently working on deciding if it's worth supporting Vista) Vista is a real bitch for a lot of reasons:
1. Hardware requirements are insane
2. Rewriting things like the audio stack have caused a lot of compatibility issues with legacy equipment
3. UAC scares the shit out of people
4. MSFT has already announced that Windows 7 will be out fairly shortly
5. Some old management tools (like SMS 2003) don't seem to work right in Vista
6. Vista treats security VERY differently than XP - this is a good thing in most way, as it's more flexible and more granular, but different means diverting thinly stretched IT resources to learning about new technology
That being said, I agree with some of the posters above: anyone who compares Vista to ME is full of shit. Vista may be more of a stepping stone OS, but it does introduce some fairly radically different security paradigms at least. ME was just a buggy, shitty version of Windows 98. Vista is just a slow, bloated version of a good operating system.
A few of my gripes:
- UAC is stupid. Yes, I know what it actually does, and yes, I know it's a good idea in theory. In practice, it's fucking retarded on an astronomical scale. I mean, seriously: sometimes you'll finish an install and it will pop up a message saying that it thinks that didn't work and wants your permission to RUN THE INSTALL AGAIN. No explanation, no information on how it didn't work and if installing it a second time might fix the problem or indeed be creating a second copy eating disk space on the machine; nothing. Meanwhile, it breaks every other older game or mod I try to install. I turned it off an never looked back, but the fact that I can turn it off doesn't make it any less brain-dead of an implementation.
- When I open windows, it sometimes randomly decides to be fancy and customize it in some random, frustrating way. I was moving files to my mp3 player this morning and it turned some of my music collection into a music-type folder, meaning I couldn't see the fucking file sizes! Turning it back is confusing and frustrating, and I've yet to discover its criteria for when to pull this little trick out of its ass. One directory full of nothing but MP3s stays in detail view, while another full of nothing but MP3s is suddenly shittacular and useless.
- Certain actions can still grind the entire, quad-core system to a halt. Accidentally tried to open a shortcut to a folder on a server you have turned off? Enjoy waiting for 10 seconds, unable to click on anything!
- I hate the Games Explorer with a passion. For those unfamiliar with the idea, it's a special application that some newer games install their icon to instead of to the (perfectly functional) programs menu. So now, instead of a selection of program-specific options and links in an easily accessible little list on your start menu, you have to run a separate program and look for it there. The installers never tell you if it's going to stick the game in the explorer or the programs menu, so I always end up having to check both places the first time I boot up the game. To make things worse, these icons, despite essentially being glorified shortcuts, are missing several important features of shortcuts: you can't jump to the location they point to, and you can't modify their command line options. What's more, unlike most program menu entries, there's never a link to uninstall. And, to top it all off, trying to copy these shortcuts into a universal "games" directory makes a shortcut to the shortcut, rather than to the original.
Meanwhile, things that have needed to be fixed since Win 3.1 still suck:
- File copying remains an archaic and annoying procedure wherein you can leave the PC to do a large copy and return to find it's 10% done and waiting for a yes/no prompt.
- Starting a second copy still attempts to do both copies simultaneously instead of just queuing it after the transfer already being completed. Unless the two procedures are dealing with completely independent drives and/or network locations, file copying is NOT an area where you want to be multitasking!
- Windows still don't have a little box at the top to issue a command-line command. Five or six times a week I find myself typing "win-R, cmd" to do any of the hundreds of tasks that are unwieldy or impossible to accomplish with a mouse. Want to rename *.rar to old_*.rar? Sucks to be you, bitch; better get typin'!
- I still can't assign "sticky" processor affinity to applications without either a 3rd party program or an ugly CMD shortcut hack (and for those paying attention, the shortcut hack will of course not work for games that installed themselves in the games explorer). Given that older games freak right the fuck out in a multi-processor environment (SimCity 4 takes the whole PC with it when it crashes), this oversight for a gaming OS is unacceptable.
I could keep going, but it's all variations on a theme: pretty visuals, brain-dead design. I feel I should note that in terms of performance I've never really had any problems, but on a brand new Falcon a responsive OS isn't really surprising.
Navigating the Control Panel seems super redundant, and I end up going in circles a lot. Basic configuration is difficult because everything wants to be automated. Advanced configuration is difficult because it's all hidden behind annoying "Are you sure you want to do this" check boxes. It's prettier than XP though.
Overall, I find it annoying and unnecessary. I don't know why anyone would use it over XP, except, I guess DX10, which I have never seen in person.
I remember when XP was criticized exactly like Vista is now. unstable, bug ridden. 'hey guys, stick with 98 it's all you ever need'.
In a couple of years we will move to Vista, noone will remember the troubled launch.
Heck, is it even troubled? last I heard Ms sold 100 million.
You can get it stop doing the security check pop-ups you know. Just disable UAC.
http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm
use method #4 for ease.
I don't see why it wouldn't become the standard, especially when store bought computers ship with it, do they not? Those of us who build our computers are actually a minority in comparison to the whole. Of course, if we're talking about Vista becoming the standard, then perhaps it should be within that enthusiast minority.
Honestly? It just works. If I want to play a game, or write a paper, or surf the net, or install some programs to perform some specific function, I can just get in there and do it and Vista will have pretty much no issue with it whatsoever. Sure, there are a few things that are a bit off-putting (especially for a former XP user) like the new control panal layout and the like, but I can skirt around those and get the settings to where I need it and get things done.
That sounds more like you got a machine from an extrordinarily shitty manufacturer than anything else. My notebook is an HP job but I did a crapload of research on the model before buying and it's served me faithfully.
About three months into owning the machine it decided to join two networks on every bootup - mine and some phantom non-network. This made both unusable until the adapter was disabled then re-enabled.
In accordance to the strategy for solving an MM I just left it alone until it stopped doing it roughly three weeks later.
The only issue I have currently is that when I try to launch a game or program, it screams at me that a .dll file is missing but then runs fine after that. I can go and download the missing .dll files and stick them in the system folder my self, so its not that big of a deal - annoying but that's about it.
So yea, don't really have any problems with Vista. I would consider it and XP as my two favorite OS's, but the only thing I can suggest is don't get the 64bit versions unless you really need them.
But yeah, it was the same problems MS had when introduing XP if I remember correctly.
But I liked everything else Vista brought to the table.