[Cialug] Microsoft's attempts to overcome Vista preconceptions

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Brandon Griffis
<brandongriffis at gmail.com> wrote:
> So here is the short list of things I do think Vista is good for.
>
> UAC - I realize I'll probably get some flack on this one, but I think this
> is a great thing.  Administrative actions *should* need to be confirmed.

Good idea, bad implementation. I've used vista for about 10 hours
total so maybe this is easier once you become an expert... but my
first encounter with this was needing to isntall a program I'd
downloaded. I clicked the icon and nothing happened. I clicked it
again and nothing happened. I did some inspection and right clicked it
to be sure it was an exe or msi file, it was. Finally after I deleted
and redownloaded it I happened to notice an option in the right click
menu to run it with administrative privs (or however its worded).
Voila! it worked.

> Start Menu Search -

I've found it takes me longer to find items in my start menu than it
did in Win 2k/XP. Maybe this becomes less so as you use it more.

> As for the problems:

> Memory hog - No idea why.  (perhaps someone could enlighten me).  But 70% of
> 2GB used up without a single program running is just insane.  (note: that's
> un-tweaked).
>
> Missing 3D Interaction - Why on earth develop a desktop capable of 3D and
> then do *literally* nothing with it?  For the resources it takes up it
> should at least offer something.

I was under the impression that the 3d acceleration meant that the OS
offloaded some/most/all of the screen drawing to the video hardware
(alpha blending for example). I'm not really sure the world is ready
for a 3d desktop. Regarding the mem usage, I wonder if it's like Linux
how it accounts fs buffers in that number and mem usage is actually
lower. I installed Vista when my laptop had 1G of ram and didn't feel
like I was resource starved.

My friend who's job involves doing a lot of graphic design work found
that copying files (sometimes large numbers of files, sometimes only a
few very large files) was incredibly slow. As in it took an hour or
more to copy files from one folder to another (both local). He
earnestly tried to adopt Vista (it came pre-installed on his laptop)
but finally formatted the drive and re-installed XP where the same
operations took 1 min. (I'm working on him to switch to Ubuntu)
Admittedly this was before Vista SP1, maybe its improved now.

For those that must use Windows I have to say, "suck it up, Vista is
the future, XP is dead." Really, your choice is to buy into Vista or
switch to Mac or Linux. If you're not making plans to migrate away
from XP then you're asking for pain. Another friend is having trouble
with a software vendor (a donor management tool - basically ERP for
non-profits) who refuses to support their product on Vista (only win
98/2k/xp). I just can't put into words how idiotic this is.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode