Microsoft have announced that service pack 1 for Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing. Microsoft claim “great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility”. SP1 will be rolled out through Windows update from mid-March.
My own stats show that Vista has been slowly increasing market share at 1% per month. At this rate it will take it another 5 years to reach the 75% share currently held by XP. But perhaps a lot of people have been wisely waiting for SP1 before committing?
I have been using Vista on my main development machine for the last few months. It is OK once you turn the deeply annoying UAC off. But it is still hard to see any compelling reason to upgrade from XP.
Successful Software 
Hello
Just wondered what’s so annoying about UAC?
By turning UAC you lose one of the biggest security advantages Vista has over XP
Internet Explorer Protected Mode
Have a look here for a decent analogy
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/02/08/keep-your-bikini-on.aspx
That’s supposed to read
“by turning UAC OFF”
oops
Vista will roll out more when people get new PCs.
At the moment though, the number of compelling reasons for most people to get new PCs is pretty small. Most PCs are adequate for the tasks and software they run.
I started an experiment last summer when I bought each of my kids (16, 14, 11 and 6) a laptop, pre-installed with Vista (Basic).
When my kids were young, they had a Windows 98 computer, which was later upgraded to Windows XP home. As they started school, they were introduced to Apple computers (probably starting around Mac OS 8 or so). They’ve also always had access to whatever Linux desktop was installed on the servers in the basement (Redhat, Gentoo, Ubuntu). I should also add that my 11 -year old son is mentally handicapped, but learns technology amazingly well by watching others and through experimentation. Basically I’m trying to say that I’ve brought my kids up to be comfortable with computers in general, as opposed to any specific flavor (the same goes with applications: Word, OpenOffice … who cares, just write something)
So the experiment was to set-up the laptops both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. I gave them approximately the same permissions on both systems and set up the network filtering and time controls (time-of-day and number of hours total) about the same. Then I watched what they did. They started off almost entirely in the Vista partition, since that was the default boot option, but have gradually switched to using Ubuntu almost exclusively. In fact, last night my eldest daughter was trying to use the photo manager on Vista with my wife and they ended up just quitting.
In any case, the point that I’m trying to make is that for someone that’s been brought up with computers, the most two most important behaviors (or should I say behaviours;) are to perform their BACKGROUND functions and to stay out of the user’s way.
My kids were perfectly happy with Windows XP … and they’ve done school work on Linux and Mac OS, but now they can’t tolerate Vista? Why is that? Because it doesn’t stay out of the way. Turning off the UAC does eliminate most of Vista’s advantages over XP, so for anyone who absolutely needs to use Windows, I’d recommend downgrading to XP.
P.S. – The scary part is that this is the first version of Windows that being tested by the general consumer. The previous versions were generally accepted by the IT departments in major corporations, and by the time Dell switched over completely, SP1 was already out. We may be truly dismayed to see what problems Vista has once corporate users are forced to use it.
By the way … I happily use Windows XP at my day job (I hope IT doesn’t switch!), and I’m not generally a Microsoft hater … well, I absolutely dispise Microsoft Project, since it does many things I’m not expecting (never ask it to level a project, you’ll never recover).
>well, I absolutely dispise Microsoft Project
I’m glad it is not just me. MSProject is the closest I have ever come to throwing a computer through a window. That was quite a few years ago though.
Way OT!
Even if MSProject worked as designed, it has a fundamental flaw … it requires me to aggregate information. Why should I have people send me data on task status and then have to re-enter the data.
Another JoS regular (KC), has been working on the dotProject web application for several years and has recently forked a new version called web2projects. Check it out on his site if you need a collaborative scheduling environment: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/web2project-while-no-one-was-looking
If you want to know what’s so scary about UAC check out my Windows Vista Read Only post here: http://www.followsteph.com/2007/06/17/windows-vista-read-only/
If you look at the comments you’ll see it’s quite a large issue.
I have a feeling that people who complain on UAC annoyance are probably working in “Administrator” account without password, so it really looks stupid clicking OK everytime you’re trying to do something. Personally I use the schema I used for years with XP: Administrator’s account has password and I work under LUA account. In this case I see the prompt for password only when installing some software. In XP I had to right-click-RunAs, Vista’s UAC is a real godsend for me.
Use TweakUAC. It leaves UAC on and all but eliminates the need to click ok every 5 secs.
We recently got a new HP laptop for my husband. It came with Vista. Then we found that the software we use regularly would not work in Vista. Unless it was made in 2007 it is too old for Vista it seems.
So our options were to downgrade or return the laptop. We both are computer people so we chose to downgrade back to XP. That was not so simple. First you need a legal copy of XP. Then getting all the drivers reinstalled took some time but it has been worth it.
We are being shoved by microsoft into the poor preforming Vista. Good news if you have a high end version of Vista you can downgrade for free. See your License, it is a text file on your system.
“Downgrade rights for desktop PC operating systems apply to Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate as stated in the License Terms.”
Bad news is that “there are no downgrade rights granted for Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows Vista Home Premium.”
We let HP know that we downgraded. There were many posts in their forum about this issue. So let your computer manufacturer know if you downgrade. They are the ones who got the special downgrades for their highend users.
I bought a computer pre-loaded with Windows Vista Home.
And then came SP1 a few months later.
After reading the new additions to the licensing agreement, I decided I could not agree to the new requirement; they want to limit the number of network connections to my computer to 5! And
they want to be more intrusive, go on my machine and look at the contents of my HD and delete anything that they deem to violate their licensing agreement; fine but if the have a dispute with Open Office or any other competing products over licensing are they going to delete it even before they file the legal papers?