Data centres to off-centre opinion

This video sums up the negatives quite nicely: too many friends requests, too many applications, too many interruptions to getting on with life!

I remember when I first saw this video a few years back; excellent!

You’ll need Silverlight to watch it (Silverlight is Microsoft video-streaming software), you’ll be prompted to install it if you’ve not already got it.

Enjoy

I don’t know about you, but when I work for a company who gets bad press about its products it can be difficult not to take it personally.

I still hear and read comments from people who have had a bad experience with Windows Vista. Admittedly, far fewer in the last 6 months or so, but there is still a groundswell of bad opinion. Some of this is absolutely deserved: I have personally had both a very good and very bad experiences with Vista. Others are simply bigotry from those who often haven’t even tried Vista or at best tried it 1 year ago and haven’t since.

So why write this post? Simple: to share my experiences. Is this objective? Reasonably see the first line of this post

Extremely bad:

When I first started with the Vista beta builds (mid ’06) my work laptop was a Toshiba Tecra M4. To be frank, I nearly threw this on the floor any number of times. It was extremely slow, I got bluescreens several times a month, it would not stay hibernated resulting in the “flaming rucksack” phenomenon. It wouldn’t reliably connect to an external monitor and after the second motherboard replacement it simply froze at least once a day needing power and battery to be removed to reset. Most (not all) of the problems were down to drivers and poor hardware. Apparently Tosh modify the nVidia graphics chipset which means the standard nVidia drivers don’t work – and the Tosh drivers were terrible. I also heard that there was a fault with many of the M4 motherboards which caused the hibernation and freezing problems (relatved to overheating). Vista was a complete dog on this box: too slow to be useable. But most of the problems were driver related.

How did this get resolved? I got a new HP laptop and put XP back on the Tosh.

Pretty good:

Both my HP nc8430 and Dell D830 laptops run Vista flawlessly. Admitedly, the first thing I did was blow away the Vista build installed by HP and Dell respectively. I installed my own copy of Vista and they’ve both been reliable. No bluescreens, no lockups, no more application failures than normal (application failures are not often caused by the OS). My Alienware box at home also runs Vista as reliably as the laptops (once I replcaed the Soundblaster card with a SoundMax card: Soundblaster drivers were late and crap). As does Carols Dell XPS1710 (which she plays WoW on – so its definitely being pushed) and Stephanies Sony Vaio laptop.

Why not Extremely good?

I think this is the crux: the way Vista does some things I simply don’t like. The new explorer interface is less clear than the old XP interface IMO. Its slower than XP on the same hardware. I don’t like the new Network Management user interface. Normally I like change; IE7 is a great improvement (and there is room for more), I like the Sidebar (but some sidebar gadgets are unreliable ) and I really like the improvements in elevated permissions compared to XP; being prompted for admin username/password (or Cancel/Allow if you’re logged on as admin) is much better than simply “access is denied” under XP.

Our Media Centre machine seems to corrupt recordings.xml a few times a year resulting in the box bogging down. About once per year something else causes it to slow to a halt but I’ve not worked out what yet. A rebuild fixes the latter issue and re-creating recordings.xml fixed the former.

So, is Vista extremely good or extremely bad? Well that depends on how good the drivers are and how well the hardware vendor (HP, Dell etc) have setup Vista on your machine. My recommendation: always install Vista yourself, use Microsoft drivers if you can (they will have undergone a ton of testing) and only install vendor-supplied drivers if the Microsoft ones don’t work or are missing a feature you need (e.g. colour management in the nVidia drivers).