is Vista falling flat?

[Bill McGonigle]

On Apr 27, 2007, at 13:40, <bmcculley at rcn.com> <bmcculley at rcn.com>  
wrote:

> John Quarterman (you may remember he worked on ARPANET software at  
> BBN and was co-author of The Design and Implementation of the  
> 4.2BSD UNIX Operating System) thinks so:  <http:// 
> riskman.typepad.com/perilocity/2007/04/abandoning_the_.html>
>
> food for thought...

I picked up a NFR copy of Windows Vista Business at a WUG meeting  
yesterday and installed it on VMWare during the meeting, and, while  
not being a Windows fan, it's a damn sight better than XP from a  
user's perspective.  No noticeable pregnant pauses while opening  
windows without feedback, the control panel is more useful for  
frequent tasks, update seems to work more intelligently, I understand  
the wireless setup is less maddening.  I configured my VM for 512MB  
of RAM and 1 CPU (C2D laptop) and performance was acceptable running  
Open Office 2.1, using the Windows Classic theme.  I installed AVG  
Free easily (with an API now, so there should be less nastiness in  
AV), and as I understand it the sandbox is slightly better, and the  
stack is harder to smash (address randomization).  Apparently it has  
symlinks now too and upgrades between 'editions' can be done with  
just a new ($) license key.

I also have W2K3 in another VM on the machine and that performs much  
more poorly.

Now, it did give me three copies of the dialog to restart after  
software update, I found it blindly sends your password to any drive  
share without asking, and the annoying security box is just going to  
habituate folks to click 'yes'.  This was just in an hour of playing  
- I expect the defect list would continue to grow at that rate as I  
tried other things, but I have more fun things to play with at home.

It's still Windows - it's amazing how little polish five years of  
development resulted in.  I find Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X, and  
WindowMaker much better UI's than Vista, but I can't understand why  
somebody buying a new Windows machine would favor XP over Vista,  
especially if they're getting new peripherals and are running  
mainstream hardware.  Upgraders and Enterprise integration clients  
have a different set of concerns, but I wouldn't be surprised to see  
some who are on W2K skip XP altogether, if they can get by for  
another year or so.

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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