Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available

Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.

So...

[Gigiya]

Is it worth installing?

Re:

[blake1]

./ should make an article about this guy - "Elusive single Vista user tracked down to this very website".

Re:So...

[Hank Scorpio]

Of course he's single. He's posting on Slashdot. Duh.

It's a Release Candidate

[WED Fan]

Is it worth installing?

Are you planning on installing it on a production machine?

Are you planning on installing it on your home machine?

The answer is: Don't!. But, if you do, don't come complaining that it broke your system and that's why MS sucks. It's a release candidate.

Are you planning on installing it on a test system and documenting any issues to see how things go so you can plan on how the install will go when it is in RTM?

O.k., go ahead, that's what a release candidate is for. Especially if you plan on providing the feedback on major issues.

Anyone who installs "beta", "community technology preview", or "release candidate" software on their systems and then complains about the experience and how it sucks should be branded with a big ol' "D U M B A S S" on their short-bus-riding-tuckus.

Now, if you install the RC on your test system, provide feedback on you major error, and then the RTM has the same problem, you can complain.

Re:It's a Release Candidate

[Mongoose Disciple]

Why would anyone bother installing beta software before writing giant posts criticizing it and proclaiming the imminent death of Microsoft, when it's so much easier to farm mod points by cutting out the installing step? Heh.

Re:It's a Release Candidate

[Opportunist]

I don't need to drop a hammer on my toe to know that it hurts. It's (un)common sense.

Re:It's a Release Candidate

[PolyDwarf]

Meh... My company nominated me to be the Vista guinea pig, to test whether the software we produce was compatible with Vista, and to make changes if it wasn't. Given that I didn't have a choice in the matter (Other than to quit... And quitting over that seems a bit dumb), I've got every right to complain.

Vista's shell sucks. I hate it with the burning rage that could only otherwise be produced by 35 angry chihuahuas.

Luckily, geoshell works on it, so I don't have to put up with it.

Re:

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

As for angry chihuahuas, are there any other kind?

Yes, there are the amorous ones trying to hump your ankle.

Re:It's a Release Candidate

[Luke Dawson]

Anyone who installs "beta", "community technology preview", or "release candidate" software on their systems and then complains about the experience and how it sucks should be branded with a big ol' "D U M B A S S" on their short-bus-riding-tuckus.

Sorry, gunna have to disagree with you there. A release candidate is just that - a candidate for release. Just because Microsoft has warped the term to mean "late beta", doesn't mean that's what it is. In many cases a release candidate becomes the final release.

RC's aren't meant to have major errors. RC's are designed to be feature-complete and stable. If a release candidate has major bugs, then it isn't release quality and thus should never have been labeled as such in the first place.

Note: I'm not condoning putting RC's on mission-critical equipment, but I fundamentally disagree that an RC should be inherently considered unstable.

Re:It's a Release Candidate

[Cro Magnon]

I have confidence in Microsoft. I'm sure their RC is just as good as the final version will be.

Re:

[rrhal]

The Release Candidates are only for those who need to be ready for the service pack on the day it arrives. This lets you test with the prerelease version so you are almost ready when the real thing is released.

Release candidates are often a pain in the butt to uninstall - and they usually need to be uninstalled completely to install the actual released software. I'd wait for the actual RTM SP1 unless you like rebuilding your system.

Re:So...

[JebusIsLord]

I've noticed that shutting down seems to be more reliable (as an aside, why is this a problem with EVERY SINGLE NEW OS Microsoft releases, for at least the first year? How hard is shutting down???).

File copies are faster (as in, they work properly now. Yay?).

My Hauppauge TV tuner still doesn't work with 4 GB of RAM (x64 edition). I have to set it to 3GB max in msconfig. Hauppauge says this is a vista driver model issue, but clearly it still isn't fixed.

Still slow as molasses.

I bought a Macbook back in the spring, and find myself pretty much only using the Vista box now as a media center server (Media center is still pretty damn cool). I'm usually pretty patient with MS, but Vista is clearly a useless upgrade thus far - I can't even use the 4GB of RAM! Might as well roll back to Media Center 2005.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run Windows?

Re:

[richie2000]

In Soviet Russia, Windows runs SP1!

Re:

[the_fat_kid]

I think that you ment:
"in Soviet Russia, Vista updates you"

Obligatory

[Archangel Michael]

Never Mind

Re:But...

[ultranova]

No, but Linux runs Windows applications [winehq.org].

The question, then, is which has netter application compatibility: Wine or Windows Vista ? In my experience Wine bugs mostly cause slightly corrupted graphics, while Vista causes applications to crash randomly.

Cue pointy-haired boss

[Opportunist]

In this case, we'll stick with Windows. A distorted appearance is inacceptable. Imagine a client comes in and sees that our computers are unable to display the software, imagine the message this gives him!

Re:

[jandrese]

You have much better experiences with Wine than I do then. Usually Wine errors result in the application crashing for me.

Same Old SP1

[JeremyGNJ]

This will be the same as all the other Service Pack 1's for Microsoft OS's.

It's the mile-marker where the new OS stops feeling "foreign" as the details are refined, and developers have some reason to fully embrace it. Corporate deployments will pick up, as software vendors of TRUE business applications release their "real" Vista products. etc etc etc

It's the same old pattern that has been going on since Windows NT. Business as usual.

Re:Same Old SP1

[Slashidiot]

It would be the same old same old if the SP1 solved the most obvious flaws of the OS. But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista. So, not bussiness as usual, but bussiness even worse than usual. Cool.

Re:

[JeremyGNJ]

That's not true. Sp1 has never solved the glaring flaws of Microsoft OS's. They get solid around SP2 or SP3. But that doesnt stop adoption.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

That's not true. XP SP1 solved a glaring flaw in some IDE chipset drivers that caused machines to boot into a BSOD and sometimes even caused massive filesystem corruption.

Re:

[framauro13]

But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista.

I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit since the release candidate was released last year. I've never had any software compatibility issues what-so-ever. The only thing I've ever run into is VPN support on the x64 system, and even then, that's the fault of the company that developed the software, not Microsoft. The x86 version has always been solid. I've ran everything from games to development tools to database servers and java containers. I'm wondering how many people complaining about soft

Re:

[Abreu]

There is no software to sync my Palm PDA in Vista... only a BETA release that's not even recommended for my model.

That one incompatibility was enough for me to avoid Vista.

Re:

[Joe U]

Anecdote (n): a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident
Data (n): factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation
Empirical (adj): originating in or based on observation or experience.

Source: Merriam-Webster

Sorry, what you're looking at is emperical data with a comment. Now if he were telling a story about the time he installed Vista on his computer, that would be an anecdote.

Thank you for calling! Thank you for

Re:

[Tim C]

So... are you agreeing with him (that all the tales of incompatibilities are not hard data) or disagreeing with him (that his tale of compatibility is not hard data)?

Besides, as someone else has already pointed out that's not an anecdote, that's empirical data. "I heard that Vista breaks compatibility with loads of software" is an anecdote. "I installed Vista and had no issues with compatibility" or "I installed Vista and had issues with the following apps..." are not.

Re:

[Pr0xY]

The problem is that the application compatibility problem is really a double edged sword. Microsoft bit themselves in the ass by pretty much forcing the habit of always running as admin when using windows. This led to programmers doing things like writing to there install dir and using system wide registry keys when a local one is more appropriate.

The real problem is poorly written applications for the most part. The fact the microsoft had to add file system and registry virtualization to vista is just a de

Re:

[vtcodger]

***can't recall more than 5 problems upgrading from 95 to 98 back in the days***

That's probably because there wasn't that much difference between Win98 and Win95 OSR2. And there were no DRM issues. And the systems were simpler back then.

As I recall the only major issue with Window 98 relative to 95 was mediocre performance (due to IE integration) and that 98 would often hang during shutdown because of what turned out to be about five dozen separate and distinct configuration specific bugs. But those

Re:

[Opportunist]

It does affect Linux, but to a lesser degree. Of course, with added complexity comes added overhead. You have to take more things into consideration. Linux, though, managed to stay mostly modular (read that mostly again before you complain). The system is fairly monolithic by now (and even there you have a good deal of modular design that allows to cut crap you don't want without having too much of its baggage still lingering about), but everything outside the "main" system can be added or subtracted with l

49.7

[rajafarian]

***can't recall more than 5 problems upgrading from 95 to 98 back in the days***

Speaking of Windows 95, or is Windows 9x? Do you know what's a real good way to get me ROTFLMAO???? Check this out: Try 49.7 [microsoft.com]

Winders would crash, JUST SITTING THERE. ha hahahahahahahahahah Is that effing funny or what?

Re:

[deniable]

Nope, not like NT. NT service packs didn't get good until 2 and behaved like Star Trek movies. IIRC, it was odd ones were OK for 3.51 and even ones were good for 4.0. 4.0 SP3 and 5 weren't bad, they just didn't deliver a lot. Windows 2000 SPs weren't that bad at all.

I like the bit in the article that said that when this thing hits the masses it will reboot your machine three nights in a row to handle the update. So much for long running tasks. I guess it's the visit of service pack past, present and future.

Re:

[MadMidnightBomber]

NT SP4 trashed disk performance, and SP6 killed Lotus Notes[1]. Windows 2000 SP4 killed our domain controllers. Beware of even numbered service packs.

[1] Ok, some would see this as a feature.

Seems weird to me

[DeeQ]

"According to Microsoft, when Vista SP1 is offered to users normally through Windows Update, the prerequisite steps will have already taken place automatically over several nights. Microsoft has not set a definitive release date for SP1, other than to promise that it will launch sometime in the first three months of 2008. " So the question I have to this statement is why does it need to reboot the computer now if later it will be able to do the prerequisite steps automatically for the offical release. Why c

Re:Seems weird to me

[tbuddy23]

What the heck happens in one hour of waiting?

Stomach cramping.

Re:Seems weird to me

[QuickFox]

What the heck happens in one hour of waiting?

There is more evil than usual in it, so the exorcism takes longer.

Prereqs still require reboot.

[splutty]

So the question I have to this statement is why does it need to reboot the computer now if later it will be able to do the prerequisite steps automatically for the offical release. Why couldn't they impliment that into a RC?

During those 'nights' the updates that are being made will still require you to reboot. Only now you just reboot it 3 times in a month, instead of 3 times in succession.

Re:

[Mateo_LeFou]

If you want a serious answer, I imagine it phones home and tells MS eveything it can about your machine. If you interrupt it, MS maybe thinks you're a pirate, etc. The usual.

Will still be able to slipstream it or will need..

[Joe The Dragon]

Will still be able to slipstream it or will need to add that prerequisite by hand to the install disk?

Re:Will still be able to slipstream it or will nee

[Tony Hoyle]

Already done... just download from MSDN pre-slipstreamed.

I suspect the usual slipstream methods work if you want to do it by hand.

Re:

[Tony Hoyle]

The article is crap... you don't have to go through that at all.

I installed SP1 on top of a clean vista install just the other day.. it works fine (it's a bit wierd though.. it goes through 3 'stages' each requiring a reboot).

Of course I wiped it as soon as I'd done testing - the less Vista I have to endure the better :p

MSDN users can also download a Vista DVD with SP1 already applied.

MSFT continues to be the King of the Hill.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Quite sad actually. Despite all the negative reports about Vista, the new machines will ship with Vista as OEM, usually without compatibility issues or driver issues because the vendors take care of it, the juggernaut will roll inexorably and gain market share.

There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.

Re:

[dave420]

Not everyone is mistreated or abused by Microsoft. Many people have a great experience, and many businesses would be greatly harmed if Windows was not an option.

Re:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just think. Why do replacement carafe for you coffee make costs 12.99 + shipping and handling and three weeks of wait time, while a new coffee maker costs only 14.99? vendor lock.

Why does the replacement battery for iPod was once priced at 79$? vendor lock.

Have you compared the cost of replacement battery, cable, charger, bulb of anything proprietary with standard compliant versions of the same thing?

There could be a million businesses, happy with MSFT experience, happy with the price MSFT is chargin

Re:

[Stradivarius]

many businesses would be greatly harmed if Windows was not an option.

That depends on whether the alternative options are comparable or better, and what the switching costs are. Nobody buys their operating system for its own sake. They buy it because they need it to run the applications they want. If every application in the world were available on every operating system, there would be little reason for anyone to use Windows, given the regular infestations of viruses, spyware, etc that plague it and its relatively high cost compared to the alternatives.

Unfortunately, we d

Re:

[Dan Ost]

Maybe I'm being unreasonably optimistic, but it seems to me that Microsoft's market share can only decline.

They've saturated their market and that market is no longer growing like it once was. Vista doesn't offer any perceived value to business users (who resent spending money on their machines just to run the newer OS) and home users, especially gamers, perceive Vista as a step backwards in performance over what they are already running.

Expect to see Apple's market share grow faster than the market. Expect

Re:

[GregPK]

I am sorry to tell you this. But you are rather bit in the minority. The new office is quite good. However, have you tried it on an Apple? There is a reason that 50 percent of Mac buyers are first time Mac owners. Plus, Mac sales have increased double digits for the last 12 quarters. Go long on apple stocks if you wish to increase your fortunes.

Re:MSFT continues to be the King of the Hill.

[Mongoose Disciple]

If you'd said:

I am sorry to tell you this. But you are rather bit in the minority on Slashdot

I'd agree with that.

Most people just don't think that hard or care that much about their computers and don't feel like they're being oppressed by Microsoft or anyone else who makes the crap they buy.

Re:

[GregPK]

Point taken, Sorry to say, you are in the minority on UC Campuses where they teach the up and coming business users.

Re:

[ozmanjusri]

You're doing it wrong. The 8710w is a Novell certified [novell.com] machine.

Microsoft problem solution

[QuickFox]

SP1 [...] in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista.

Clearly Microsoft is releasing this to solve the problem with Vista being too popular.

Re:

[SEMW]

As a matter of fact, kdawson appears to have made that part of the summary up, since it's flatly contradicted by the actual article (which actually says "all applications that currently run properly on Windows Vista will continue to work on Vista SP1").

SP3

[Corporate Troll]

I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...

Re:SP3

[Fast Thick Pants]

I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...

Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010 [microsoft.com]. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.

(Of course, you can make your own SP5 [hfslip.org] and use third [intelliadmin.com] party [mdgx.com] time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)

Re:

[Tony Hoyle]

If your XP is up to date you basically have SP3 already - it's really just a rollup of patches so far. It's in RC too so should be available publically soon I expect (or just get it from MSDN if you have access to it.. if you work in software you probably do).

64 bit XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...

Just go with SP2 for XP64 for x86.. you'll be happier. Seriously, the win2k3 based kernel in that thing is fabulous, and I've been running everything from compilers to first person shooters without a problem. Just be sure that there are 64 bit drivers available for your hardware.

And before anybody ask "why" as opposed to XP 32bit: XP64 has been more stable for me as well as smoother, along with none of the Vista bullshit. I wish they'd take the "XP" monik

Also.. XP SP3 RC1

[SD-Arcadia]

AnandTech says an RC of XP SP3 is also released. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9987 [dailytech.com] Although I don't understand why "download directly from microsoft" on that page links to http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Microsoft_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_3/1197391546/1 [betanews.com]

Re:

[Hanners1979]

You can actually grab it directly from Microsoft here too:

http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3-19990518/cabpool/windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu_a2ca583dedcd86837796111a632efa29a23f4cc0.exe [windowsupdate.com]

Business users of Vista ?

[supersnail]

" Informationweek advices business users ".

How badly informed is this magazine? The Fortune 500 companies (probably the fortune 5,000,000 companies) wont touch Vista with a bargepole. They have spent millions of man hours writing testing and deploying thousands of apps Windows XP.

Does Information week think they are going to risk this investment by deploying evferything on an untested operating System after upgrading/replacing millions of working XP PCs with "Vista unready" hardware.

Windows NT was a common

Re:

[JeremyGNJ]

You miss the fact that fortune 500 companies usually either lease their hardware, or budget for a full hardware refresh every 3 years. That's just how business works.

Re:Business users of Vista ?

[Dan Ost]

When we get new machines, the machines come with a corporate image already loaded. Our current corporate image is XP, not Vista. If a machine comes with Vista, it'll get wiped and replaced with the corporate image.

This is in a Fortune 100 company. I expect that this is typical of the other Fortune 100 companies.

Out of curiosity, anyone know what Microsoft's corporate image looks like? Specifically, is it XP or Vista based?

Total Cost Ownership study needs updating

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The biggest challenge, according to independent software vendors and Microsoft, is getting apps to work with Vista's advanced security features, such as the User Account Control. It's designed to prevent desktop users from making changes to their system images without approval from an IT administrator. The feature operates at the kernel level and can affect the way third-party applications, including antivirus software, work.

Oh yeah, sure. MSFT dissed Linux with the Total Cost of Ownership BS. The cost of migrating applications to Linux was what had boosted the cost for Linux column. Now will Gartner re run the Total Cost of Ownership studies including the cost of migrating "XP to Vista"?

Re:Total Cost Ownership study needs updating

[rkanodia]

Gartner's raison d'être is to promote Microsoft and proprietary software in general, regardless of the real advantages and disadvantages. Bill Gates could start shipping big boxes full of venomous snakes, and Gartner would have an article explaining how black mambas and hooded cobras add significant shareholder value, especially when compared to Ubuntu, which only ships with Python and not an actual python.

If it's too much of a hassle

[techpawn]

I'm not going to install it for people. It's the entire reason I'm still running XP on my box. Just too much of a hassle and I see no reason to spend the time and take the aspirin just to be in line with Microsoft's latest wishes. Then again, wasn't it an install of Active Directory that didn't let you really do anything useful till SP1 and then you could actually see the value of it?

Re:

[CXI]

This story has a lot of FUD. This is not the official release, it's still the Beta testing. When it goes full release it'll be a simple Windows Update.

That's gonna hurt...

[Penguinisto]

I'm thinking that folks Out There(tm) are going to start realizing that you simply cannot make a flawed architecture run any better by adding more duct tape to it.

I'm actually not trolling, but if anything, stating the obvious. Windows NT's setup was a good-enough architecture back when "the company LAN" was just a bunch of computers strung together on a hub or in a ring. The Internet changed that, and just as it almost left Microsoft behind back in 1995 at the apps level, it's almost about to leave them behind right now at the OS level. It's becoming apparent that the thing simply cannot keep up with what's required.

If SP1 actually improved speed and performance, as well as add a better legacy/compatibility mode, they might have been able to eke by without people (outside of /. and the Mac community) questioning it.

Not anymore.

I think we're going to start seeing the decline of Microsoft. It won't crash overnight, but I suspect that, barring a miracle on their part, things will only start falling from here for them. Between Macs at home and Linux at the server room, MSFT's market share loss will be slow at first, then start accelerating. It'll take about a decade, but by then Microsoft's OS will be about as popular as Amiga's was in 1998-2000 (roughly), but will perhaps a larger base of holdouts, depending on developer mindshare and markets.

I've never really said that (at least and meant it) before... now it's moved from being a personal guesstimation to becoming my professional opinion.

Glad I went full *nix a long time ago...

/P

Re:

[Junta]

are going to start realizing that you simply cannot make a flawed architecture run any better by adding more duct tape to it.

I dunno, some of the 'problems' described sound like maybe, to some extent, MS was attempting to go beyond duct tape with respect to their atrocious security situation, where if you have an account on a system, you can alter entirely too much about it. The problem with doing that is applications that designed themselves with that (and they hit the same sort of breakage in a coarser way when people were moved from the 9x architecture to XP, for certain account setups, which is why to this day most users gi

Re:

[Penguinisto]

>> Glad I went full *nix a long time ago...

Why are you glad ? If your prediction is right, you took the pain too early, too much.

On the home front, maybe - but at work? Not necessarily... compare the typical MCSE salary with the typical *nix admin salary. (I do quite well in that comparison, IMHO).

By the time world+dog starts scrambling for *nix admins (it's already begun), I'll be (well, I pretty much already am) in the right position to take maximum advantage of it.

Come to think of it... even on the home front, OSX is BSD *nix under-the-hood, and I've been able to make it do some really cool things that most Mac users don't

Thank God for small mercies!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The upside, according to Microsoft, is that all applications that currently run properly on Windows Vista will continue to work on Vista SP1.

What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?

This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?

The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.

The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.

Open standards

[huckamania]

Open standards are great, but I don't think it will be a panacea for all that ills us on the intertubes. Given any reasonably complex standard, you will find enough wiggle room to make item A not work right on application B. If A is > 50% of the market, it's going to be A's way or the highway.

I think we are going to have to rely on our own intelligence and less on the latest buzzword which promises to level the field.

Biggest reason for not upgrading to Vista

[xirtam_work]

One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.

If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?

Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!

Re:

[Penguinisto]

Re: VirtualPC: So, err... why should I , as a business user, have to run a Windows emulation suite inside of Windows just to get my app running, when I can eschew that and simply run the older OS on bare metal (suitably walled-in security-wise, of course)? Alternately, I cna just whomp out a VM and run that if it's on the server (though that'll depend on how Microsoft's latest server iteration does when that comes out).

FWIW, Windows does have legacy modules already in place for 16-bit apps (WoW, I believ

Re:

[MMC Monster]

Re: VirtualPC: So, err... why should I , as a business user, have to run a Windows emulation suite inside of Windows just to get my app running, when I can eschew that and simply run the older OS on bare metal (suitably walled-in security-wise, of course)?

Sandboxing. It's not a big deal if the administrator knows what he is doing, but in all those small offices where end users have internet access, it has it's uses.

I had a secretary come up to me the other day with a trojan that was written as if it came from the federal government, with an attached .zip file containing a .doc.src file. Fortunately her computer was running Win98 and doesn't have an unzip application installed. Otherwise the whole network would have been infected.

(It wasn't until a few da

Re:

[wattrlz]

...If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?

Because they don't want to. It's so much more profitable to just force people to buy more licenses.

RC?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA: "Not everything planned for the final version of SP1 has made it into the release candidate"

So much for a release candidate...

Oddest warning

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The SP1 release candidate will have to be uninstalled before applying the final code in 2008, Microsoft warned as it also issued an odd caution on the subject. "After you uninstall Service Pack for Windows (KB936330), we recommend that you wait at least one hour before you try to install the final release of Windows Vista SP1," another support document read.

I have heard phone support script humanoid robots demand that I turn off the modem and router and wait for 30 seconds before switching them on. Kind of made sense, something like make sure all capacitors are fully discharged and the machines are really truly off.

In India there is a popular belief that if an AirConditioner is turned off one must wait for three minutes before turning it on. One technician hand waved about the compressor might be at some odd point in the cycle and suddenly making it run would "break" the shaft. Did not believe him. But in the last trip I find that all the A/C are connected to the grid through "voltage stabilizers" that have a delay timer to prevent the machine from being turned on too soon!

Now MSFT takes the cake! Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why? The pagefile is still thinking SP1 is running? The MSFT DRM software has to call in and tell Redmond that SP1 has been really uninstalled and get a confirmation back? Or uninstalled bits of SP1 is considered to be an radioactive waste and they must be beamed to Jupiter to be buried?

Re:

[gid]

God if I would have given up Debian years ago if I had to uninstall every beta or prerelease package I installed from sid. Why in God's name I don't give up Vista is beyond me. Oh... I know... games. And wine just isn't quite there yet.

Re:Oddest warning

[slackmaster2000]

"Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why?"

To calm down, that's why. Attempting to perform too many consecutive installations of Microsoft software, without proper breaks, has been linked to the recent upsurge in general anxiety disorder.

Re:

[slackmaster2000]

Ok ok, one more...I can't help it.

"Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why?"

Because it requires a reboot!!

Re:

[Locklin]

Any condenser/evaporator based refrigeration system (air conditioner, refrigerator, freezer) should not be turned off and on in quick succession. A running compressor has significant back pressure because it is pumping against the pressure gradient. It not designed to *start* with this gradient already in place. After a few minutes the pressure between high and low sides balance, and it can start as usual.

Re:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Thanks, so looks like that technician was right, and this engineer is wrong. Not the first time this happened. Thanks for the info.

Re:

[noidentity]

In India there is a popular belief that if an AirConditioner is turned off one must wait for three minutes before turning it on. One technician hand waved about the compressor might be at some odd point in the cycle and suddenly making it run would "break" the shaft. Did not believe him. But in the last trip I find that all the A/C are connected to the grid through "voltage stabilizers" that have a delay timer to prevent the machine from being turned on too soon!

From a page about condensers [warmair.com]:

A brown-out ti

Re:Oddest warning

[SL Baur]

Wait for one hour after uninstalling software!

When the time comes, packet sniff everything coming out of the box and watch everything that's running. If I cared, which I don't, I'd bet you that you will see nothing at all.

A one hour delay sounds like propagation time through a distributed data base. So all that it probably is waiting for is whatever implements Microsoft Windows registration to fully recognize that the machine in question is legal to switch to Microsoft Vista SP1. I.e. it's perfectly normal and there's nothing to see here, move along.

Is it too late to talk about Vista?

[kuactet]

Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I love Microsoft. I love it more than I love my family. This ought not come as a surprise to any that know me: a long line of jaded ex girlfriends will laugh bitterly and recall the passion they could never share in, and those few that can call themselves my friends accept that, on Patch Tuesday, their lives are nothing to me.

But above even my love for Bill Gates' corporate loin product is my love for my work. It is a sacred task that has been assigned to me, and I dare not let friends, nor family, nor even software allegiances stand in the way of the fairness and impartiality that is my trademark.

But why do I tell you this? Why do I bare my soul in such a vulgar fashion? It is that you may understand: even now, I will not let my love blind me; I do not write from the perspective of an enamored lover, nor a too-faithful user. No, it is as a Genuine Microsoft User hungry for the Next Best Thing that I pen this, my review of Windows Vista.

Part I: Making the Switch

"Aha," you are saying, having been inundated by countless negative reviews, "He will surely realize that Vista is in every way a downgrade from previous Microsoft products; he will slowly become disillusioned with its clunkiness, bloat, and arbitrary changes made only for the sake of justifying an overzealous Vice President's salary. Over the course of many painful pages, he will finally renounce his love for the Monopolist, and end with an impassioned plea for the adoption of the obviously superior Apple OSX [slashdot.org] while a swelling orchestral piece rises in the background."

Alas, no. Such a review, while undoubtedly entertaining, would be as far from the truth as, say, religion. No, this is most assuredly a glowingly positive testimonial: Windows Vista is easily the best operating system on the market today. Such an assertion, I realize, may offend some of my readers' base sensibilities; if that is the case, kindly allow me to show you to the exit [kuactet.com].

But I have, once again, gotten ahead of myself. Firstly, why I choose to review the Vistas now, rather than immediately following the January launch, bears explaining.

It was a cloudy Monday morning, some two months back, when my erstwhile laptop, a venerable old Compaq, gave up the ghost. The screen, which had been flaky for a number of weeks, finally quit altogether.

After a brief mourning period, I began scouring the print classifieds, searching for a replacement. I soon found one, a dual-core offering from Hewlett Packard. The $600 price tag--considerably less than my weekly escort--made its purchase, and my subsequent review, a foregone conclusion. It arrived the following Thursday, in the hands of a perky blonde UPS driver; I christened it Alex, turned it on, transferred my data (a breeze thanks to Microsoft's new Streaming Automatic External Backup Restore technology), configured it to suit my needs, and resumed my work.

I have been using it, very happily, ever since and, today, shall pass judgment.

Part II: New Features (and what they mean for you)

Aero:

This brand new DirectX-based desktop rendering engine was the focus of Microsoft's Vista promotional materials. It is easy to see why: Vista with Aero is stunning; it puts, in this writer's humble opinion, all other human achievements to shame.

I have been to the Louvre; I have seen the works of the masters, of Monet and Michaelangelo. My heart swelled, and I nearly wept at the sight. But the feeling I get when I gaze at Aero... even that cannot compare. It is more than my simple words can express. My screenshots [kuactet.com] are but pale reflections of its splendor.

You must experience it yourself: study the subtle interplay between light and shadow, feel the cool ephemer

Re:Is it too late to talk about Vista?

[GregPK]

Dude, share the drugs... Even when I worked for Microsoft selling Vista I didn't push that hard. Yea, I would've sold about double the product off the bat. However, My reasons why... -I would've pissed off customers and lost thier trust. -I would have pissed of stores -I wouldn't have sold as much Office. -I wouldn't have sold as much Windows XP -Would have decreased overall Microsoft Sales Even the sales I did make came back to the store screaming about Vista breaking this or that. Do you know what it's like dealing with hysterical customers? Do you? For every great feature Visa brings, it ads 3 other counter-intuitive ones.

Re:

[yakumo.unr]

How is that any different to when XP was released, other than they've had a few more years to get rooted into their old OS's ways?

Five starts to you too!

[RoverDaddy]

Alas if only I had mod points today...

Re:

[symbolset]

Very nice. Well done!

Re:

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>I have been to the Louvre; I have seen the works of the masters, of Monet and Michaelangelo.

Dude, you're a bit off. All of the Monet paintings are in the Musée d'Orsay on the other side of the river. While there are a couple of Michelangelo sculptures and a few drawings in the Louvre, If you want to see Michelangelo Buonarroti's work, you need to go to Italy, Rome and Florence.

For my money, the most impressive sculptures in the Louvre are the Winged Bulls of Sargon II.

Hoops? What hoops?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.

OK, this is just getting to be sad. Slashdot can't announce anything about a Microsoft product without resorting to needless hyperbole.

Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:

1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the .CMD file.
3. Done!

Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.

So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.

Re:

[Tony Hoyle]

Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days

s/days/minutes/

The update runs in 3 stages, with a reboot after each. One of those stages will be downloading and applying updates.

There is absolutely no difference applying this and applying any other service pack, other than it reboots 3 times rather than once.

Just the other day I installed the bare vista and SP1 right after each other with no delay, special handling or anything else.

Re:

[stewbacca]

Well it isn't hyperbole when you do your three steps, then you get to the "Vista will automatically download all updates you need" part, something goes awry like it always seems to with MS products, leaving your system in limbo right in the middle of some random install. Bring in the hoops, start jumpin'.

Only Apple will threaten MSFT

[mcolom]

I've been using Linux from the beginning of my IT career, that was 12 years ago. At that time ppl were installing mainly slakware 3.0 with the mythic 1.2.13 kernel.

I remember when I setup a local ISP with 128 kbits of bandwidth and 300 email users using just one server, with kernel 2.0.0, with a motherboard sporting a chipset Triton and a whopping 128 MBytes of RAM.

Later I went to a medium size company where I ended as the IT manager. Through the years we migrated all our Sun servers to Suse Linux. Right no

Re:

[RightSaidFred99]

Oooh, yeah, I'm sure he's a "shill". Actually, I tend to call everyone who disagrees with me on _anything_ a shill, just like you. My grandma and I got into an argument about Ron Paul, I claimed he wanted out of Iraq, she said we should stay. I called her a fucking George Bush shill and donkey punched her.

Wow

[Tom]

From what it sounds like, they actually managed to make a fundamentally broken product even more broken!

Can we still nominate them for the Engineering Award of 2007? Making Vista any worse is not exactly a small feat.

Betas for pathes

[misleb]

Am I the one one who finds it amusing that we have betas and release candidates for service packs? And then we often get patches to fix service packs after they finally do release it.

Future tech support calls:

Tech: "What version are you running?"

User "Lemme check. Looks like version '2007 SP1b Build 3567 Patch Level 3'"

Tech: "Sir, you should be at version 2007 SP1b Build 3768 Patch Level 2"

User: "Wait, is that newer or older than what I have now?"

Tech: "It is a newer build of an older patch. You can download it from our web site, but if you do install it, you will not be able to install older builds of newer patches."

User: "Uh, OK?"

Tech: "You may also want to try running the beta version 2008 which I hear from our dev tech is just awesome after you apply all the prerelease sub patches."

User: "Uh..."

Re:

[misleb]

Err, that should have been "Am I the only one.."

So what does Vista SP1 do exactly?

[jbeaupre]

For one answer, lets look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb972745.aspx [microsoft.com]
Next to nothing there. No surprise. They talk about updates offering improvements, then say SP1 is another mechanism. Meaning not the same as the updates? Recent reports say performance and compatibility aren't part of the mix, so we can hope it's reliability. Oh yeah, and hardware. Ok, they address customer feedback, but they don't say they made improvements, just addressed them. "Yes, I understand your pain. But we're a

Submission accepted?

[Devistater]

Odd, it says my submission for this story was accepted, but it doesn't mention my name in the summary. Of course, the editors did rewrite my submission, and it looks better this way. My original submission was a bit awkwardly phrased with quotes. Probably a bit dry.
But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1" :)

Re:

[Nullav]

I wouldn't call the dev team playing Duke Nukem Forever for six years 'rushing it out to market'.