So a couple of months ago I triumphed over my fear and installed a year's worth of Vista patches, including SP1. That also included a year's worth of patches to IE.

As to Vista, frankly I haven't really noticed any difference. Whatever they were doing, it was under the hood. The IE patches didn't seem to add any features, either, but now IE tends to behave strangely some of the time.

There are two failure modes. In one of them, it locks up and goes completely CPU bound. This is a dual-CPU system, so I can still interact, but it's still a bit creepy when suddenly the CPU cooling fan shifts up and starts running as fast as it can.

The other mode is more common but just as annoying. IE locks up cold, again, and ignores all input including mouse clicks, but the CPU doesn't get hammered. The only way I've found to kill it is to use the task manager. This happens to me several times per week, and it's really a pain. And it doesn't correlate to visits to particular sites. (Nor, please, do I need any suggestions or advice on this subject.)

On balance I've found Vista to be serviceable. I suspect that XP would consume less CPU and less HD space, but I've got both to spare and it hasn't been so piggy as to be unpleasant.

So it hasn't really been substantially worse than XP. And it hasn't really been better, either. there are things they added in Vista, but I don't use any of them, and I've got most of them shut down. The Macified OS graphic gimcracks, for example.

Based on my experience, Vista doesn't deserve the bad rep it's got in some circles. But it isn't anything special, either. If you have XP on your system and it works, there's no compelling case to be made for upgrading.

I've been reading a bit about Windows 7, and everything I've seen makes it sound even less appealing to me. Microsoft's biggest competition has always been older versions of their own products, and when it comes to operating systems they've pretty much run out of worthwhile additions, and have taken to adding crap and frippery just to differentiate the new ones from the old.

We've reached the "tail fins and chrome" stage.

UPDATE: Originally it was planned that the big deal in Vista was going to be the new filesystem, which used a relational database for its file index. But they ended up postponing that. Is it expected to be in Windows 7, or was it postponed again? Or did they scrap it entirely?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 05:46 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 445 words, total size 3 kb.

1 No, no sign of WinFS (or whatever it's being called now) in Windows 7.  And it's only been in development for 18 years...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 09, 2009 06:24 PM (PiXy!)

2

Vista works for me.  But I usually have low demands on my systems anyway.

Anyone downloaded the Framework SP/update to Vista that came out the last couple weeks?  Should I be worried it will freeze my rig?

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 09, 2009 06:27 PM (ypRP3)

3 I downloaded that one and haven't noticed anything. On the other hand, I'm not sure I ever use that part of the code.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2009 06:30 PM (+rSRq)

4

What I had heard about Vista that concerned me most was stories about end-to-end OS-enforced DRM. If they'd been true it would have been a deal breaker for me. But the rumors turned out to be false.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2009 06:35 PM (+rSRq)

5

I just had IE lock up again, and somehow I also managed to lock up the task manager. Ended up having to hold the power button down for six seconds to force a hard shutdown.

It was only a half-crash; the mouse still worked, and I could bring up the main windows menu. But choosing "shut down" there didn't do anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2009 10:08 PM (+rSRq)

6 Looking at it from the other side... I have a bug in RHEL 3 (2003), which is two years younger than XP (2001). Apparently, EHCI driver can crash sometimes while processing the so-called "done list". Looking at it now, I have no clue what may be wrong, the code looks perfect (well, I wrote it ). There are no systems to reproduce it, it's a 2.4 kernel, it happens very infrequently at customer system, and the diagnostic capabilities of 2.4 are nil in that area (one of the reasons I created usbmon for 2.6.11+). Practically speaking, there's no way to fix it. In theory, if someone were willing to furnish an exact copy of the failing box which I could test... and it would take a while. Last time I had a bug like that, it took months (also EHCI on Sun x4100, turned out it was reading the new address at the end of the frame instead of the start -- who knew!, and so it would drive one transaction with stale (zero) address). And that was 2003. The idea to go back to Windows XP and fix something in its 2001 vintage internals just scares me. NO FRIKKING WAI.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 11, 2009 09:48 AM (/ppBw)

7 We aren't going to support the older product any longer has long been one of Microsoft's key ways of "encouraging" customers to upgrade, but when it comes to XP and Vista, the customers pushed back. Microsoft has been forced to reschedule sunset on XP twice now, pushing it back a long way. Last I heard it was scheduled for mid 2009, but I won't be surprised if it's pushed back again.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 11, 2009 10:04 AM (+rSRq)

8 I finally got Vista because I was interested in seeing the marginal difference with DirectX 10.  I agree that Vista is no big improvement on XP.  My IE has locked up a few times lately (the kind of lockup with no cpu activity) and each time it was me trying to go to Facebook, so go figure.  I'm slowly switching to using Google Chrome for my standard browsing - the main improvement being that if a website did lock up, it would only affect that particular tab and wouldn't drag the rest of my tabs down with it.

Posted by: peolesdru at February 13, 2009 06:18 AM (jawYe)

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