Last week we wanted to know which game system you played the most, or wish you owned. There are a variety of systems available, so which are your favorites? Well, in first place was Xbox 360 with 28% of the votes, and in second was the Nintendo Wii with 20%. Not far behind was the Playstation 3 with 15% of the votes, and ’None of the Above’ with 14% of the votes.
This week, we’re wondering when or if you plan to upgrade to Windows Vista:
- Within the next few months
- After Service Pack 1
- After Service Pack 2
- When it’s time for a new computer
- Never
You can vote and see the results to the Poll in the left column. With that… when will you upgrade, if ever?
The way Vista currently looks, it is not a good idea to upgrade on a production system. This is due to many issues – including but not limited to – horrible software computability, driver issues, performance, bloat-wareness and crappy DRM polling.
Performance review:
[tomshardware.com]
Due to these reasons, I’m going to hold off until I get reports of these issues being resolved. For the bloat, perf, and DRM, I’ll wait for vLite to mature so I can run what I want.
But there is no way I can avoid not upgrading within the next year for gaming reasons. Not just because DX10 will be cool, but because if I am going to run Windows, I want all the things that make Vista lightyears ahead of XP technologically. Among them things like better threading support, improved driver model, etc. XP is outdated for modern hardware.
Also, some of the Vista apps are pretty sweet – like their Media Center (using ATI’s given software SUCKS!) among other things.
I actually haven’t had any driver issues with Vista surprisingly. When you first install it I could see how it would feel bloated because it does come with a lot of new applications that a lot of people won’t use. There has to be like 15 applications now that all start with the word “Windows.” They are more geared for the consumers who are looking for a great out-of-the-box experience…since it has more games, a contact manager, calendar, and more. These are all things that people love about Macs so I think Microsoft is trying to go that route.
I think the performance issues with Vista and applications is not because of Vista itself, but rather because of applications. When I used applications that were said to be Vista compatible they ran either the same speed as XP or faster. The ones that weren’t said to be Vista compatible (like iTunes) either ran terribly slow or constantly crashed. So software compatibility is a huge issue and in my opinion is what directly affects Vista’s performance.
That’s how I look at it at least from my months of Vista testing.
I am happy with Win XP Pro for my desktop, it’s solid and works for me. On my laptop I have Ubuntu 6.10 working and it’s also solid, clean, very customizable, and work very well for me. So I am not going to upgrade, don’t plan on it and I am not a PC gamer so I don’t really need DX10. I have been using Ubuntu for the past 2 years and I love it. So it looks like bye to Microsoft for me, and when I build my new desktop this year it’s going to be Ubuntu with XGL.
My opinion is that if you have XP, you really don’t have to ever upgrade to Vista, or at least not for a while. XP SP2 will last me for years to come, even though I will be sacrificing DX10 (which means no Halo 2 for me
). Owners of Windows 2000 should really consider upgrading to Vista (even if they decide to wait till after SPX. If you have ME or older, though, you should have upgraded a long time ago. GET VISTA NOW!
As for the performance, Windows will only continue to steadily decline in that area. It is a twenty-year-old OS that has never had any major revisions to it’s underlying systems. Windows will just continue to get more convoluted and complex as MS tries to patch the system up without sacrificing any compatibility, the end result usually being that neither goal is accomplished. It is only a matter of time until it becomes completely unusable. Until then, though, [en.wikipedia.org]!
Ryan:
Vista doesn’t support OpenGL!!! How’s that for driver issues? Plus, I’ve been hearing a lot about graphics drivers having issues, and Logitech doesn’t even have their stuff for Vista.
When I said bloated, I was more referring to all the useless services running that
waste memory and cpu cycles.
If an application doesn’t even work, it does not get performance analyzed. Try reading that article I linked to.
Metaman:
.
As to the reason for performance issues, it mainly has to do with the huge number of running ’services,’ and the DRM polling every millisecond. Slight perf was taken away due to some stability and security concerns, but these were minor compared to the enhancements to the kernel that should make it faster with modern hardware. To name a few: multi-core cpus, 64-bit cpus, machines with more memory, modern graphics cards. The Vista kernel IS a major revision over its ancestors and please don’t claim there have not been in the past. Before Windows 95, there wasn’t even multi-tasking. Windows 95 had the crappiest networking support (I’m not just talking about drivers, but the whole networking stack). Before Vista, threading services were badly designed, which caused deadlocks and sometimes huge performance loss. …I could continue on for hours and then go into the technical details, but based on the statement you made, I doubt you’d understand most of it. But if you really want to know about all the cool stuff going on in the Vista kernel, check this out: [microsoft.com] Although….you might want to take an Intro to OS class first
You know I am not alone in my opinions that Windows is a terrible operating system, with sloppy code left to stagnation for many years and missing many of the features of other, alternative operating systems. I do not like many of the ways Windows operates, and I know many people who think that Microsoft should go “screw compatibility, let’s re-write the OS from scratch”. That’s what I was trying to get at in my previous post, though I now realize that it was very poorly phrased.
I was not trying to suggest that the kernel has never been upgraded, but rather that it is old and has never been redone, like many Unix-like OSs. You will also remember that Apple has already left their old “classic” OS in favor of the more modern OSX.
On another note, your right, the “services”, DRM, and lack of support for competing standards sickens me.
[quote comment="87223"]Ryan:
Vista doesn’t support OpenGL!!! How’s that for driver issues? Plus, I’ve been hearing a lot about graphics drivers having issues, and Logitech doesn’t even have their stuff for Vista. [EDIT: Logitech just added support this afternoon!]
When I said bloated, I was more referring to all the useless services running that
waste memory and cpu cycles.
If an application doesn’t even work, it does not get performance analyzed. Try reading that article I linked to.
Metaman:
.[/quote]
As to the reason for performance issues, it mainly has to do with the huge number of running ’services,’ and the DRM polling every millisecond. Slight perf was taken away due to some stability and security concerns, but these were minor compared to the enhancements to the kernel that should make it faster with modern hardware. To name a few: multi-core cpus, 64-bit cpus, machines with more memory, modern graphics cards. The Vista kernel IS a major revision over its ancestors and please don’t claim there have not been in the past. Before Windows 95, there wasn’t even multi-tasking. Windows 95 had the crappiest networking support (I’m not just talking about drivers, but the whole networking stack). Before Vista, threading services were badly designed, which caused deadlocks and sometimes huge performance loss. …I could continue on for hours and then go into the technical details, but based on the statement you made, I doubt you’d understand most of it. But if you really want to know about all the cool stuff going on in the Vista kernel, check this out: [microsoft.com] Although….you might want to take an Intro to OS class first
Crap, I thought I was editing…now I can’t delete this one either? I was just trying to say Logitech just added Vista support this afternoon!
Agreeing with a lot of other people, certainly doesn’t make it true, especially when those people are ill-informed. I do agree that Microsoft has a tendency to try to “retain its assets” (paraphrased from a Microsoft interviewer) – i.e., never do a complete rewrite. However, most software companies do the same thing, and I can’t think of one proprietary software company that doesn’t (maybe a small one might). When you’re stuff is proprietary, it really makes you view it as an asset. Whereas open source projects get to do all the great innovating and renovating because of the intense Darwinian battle-field they live in. But even then, larger projects tend to retain most of themselves – only being replaced if they were poorly designed not to scale anyway. (A good software project – as does any technical project – knows what is coming and makes is able to scale through time well.) A good example of a poorly designed system that was eventually replaced in the Darwinian OSS world is CVS. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say it’s a giant load of HACK.
Now, Apple did do something as dramatic as you suggested – they ditched their old, inherently crappy and outdated OS for a new Unix-based one. But those were much different circumstances. First, since Jobs was fired shortly after releasing the Macintosh, Apple slowly evolved their OS – allowing Microsoft to shoot ahead drastically technologically. (Instance: they did not even have time-share multitasking until OSX!) Second, OSX wasn’t really a complete rewrite, but really similar to the OSS model of replacement – when Jobs was fired he founded NeXT, a company that made an OS based on BSD. 1997 rolls around, Apple is dying, and what do they do? Buy NeXT and rehire Stevie to save them! A little changes here and there, and BAM OSX joins the rest of the world in the 90s. Even if you consider NeXT – it was not built from scratch but off another unix system! So no rewrites there, just replacement. And when you consider where Apple was at the time, their current OS wasn’t really an asset anyway.
Now, is Vista a complete rewrite? No, of course not. But I’d say they got dirtier than they ever had before – that combined with the size of the project is really what lead to the delays. For the next OS, Microsoft might need to re-think its current model of development so the law of diminishing returns doesn’t catch up to them and force them into a humility lock again. (Last one was IE)
We’ll see where they go now…although from what I hear, the NEXT Windows will just be all the features that didn’t make it into Vista, so dramatic stuff won’t happen until after.
Random article on this stuff: [informationweek.com]
Man, that was some informative reading! I didn’t realize all of that stuff with Macs (I’ve never been too familiar with them) but it was surely an interesting read.
Judging by the quick responses in the comments I almost thought you guys were going at it, but it looks like you kept it civilized. I really appreciate it because it’s nice having a community here that can learn from each other considering I just learned nearly all of that Mac info.
Considering the length my posts are getting…maybe I should just start blogging this stuff and put links to it. What do you guys think? I was never really good at writing about random stuff – response is more of my thing.
i’ll be upgrading whenever Dell sends it. my laptop came with a free upgrade to Vista.
Whatever works best for you, I’m sure I’ll end up reading about it either way if you provide a link. It’s just nice to see real conversations as opposed to what goes on with some blogs.
I must not be having a good day. What I’m trying to say does not seem to be coming out right. First things first, though, I am more informed than you seem to think. I knew all of that stuff about Apple. I was not trying to say that they had re-written the OS themselves, but had rather replaced an old OS with a newer, better one.
Alright, now on to clarifications. I did not mean to say that Microsoft should smash every hard drive that has ever had Windows source code on it and re-write from scratch. What I meant was that they should re-work the code they already have into a better product, even if that means breaking compatibility. While Windows at heart is a good operating system (yet with a few major flaws that could easily be fixed in a re-work, such as how the registry currently works), it is plagued with old bits of code that are not accomplishing anything. In fact, some of this code only serves to bloat the OS, slow it down sometimes, and occasionally cause security problems. Cleaning up Windows would not only improve the OS, but also make it easier for Microsoft to maintain and improve upon it, seeing as the source would be more streamlined.
One more thing. Thank you for the article. I enjoyed it.
@Ryan – I always try to be civilized. I see no purpose in having pointless flame-wars over every minor disagreement. Community is very important for a blog.
Hrm, now you’re delving into the realm of the subjective. I mean, Vista was certainly reworked a lot, but maybe you think they should rework other parts they didn’t? I can’t say I understand the entire OS (no one really does…), but to really know which parts needs reworking requires a lot of study in those respective parts. Microsoft is big enough that I am sure they have people looking into almost all aspects of the OS – and they are smart people – so this suggests to me that prioritization was an issue and some things were just more important to the PMs than others. And again, we’re back what subjectivity – what SHOULD the priorities be.
With regard to compatibility, Vista did break quite a bit of this, so I wouldn’t say they’re not taking the route you suggested – although maybe not to the degree you would like. But from a business perspective, I think they have broken just the right amount, so they don’t abandon their software base, which is their greatest strength.
If you look at other technological markets, you might think Vista’s rather progressive with regard to breaking compatibility. I mean, we’ve been stuck with the crappy x86 ISA for way too long. Everyone knows it’s a hacked up piece of crap, but we stick with it because of the software all built for it. Heck, Intel made a whole hunk of hardware to translate x86 instructions into better micro-ops because it sucks so much.
Anyway, I think my point here is that although Vista certainly isn’t perfect, I believe with regards to the kernel that it is a step in the right direction, and probably as far a step as can be expected at this time.
I upgraded my fully loaded XP system to Vista a few months back to try it out. Suffice it to say it was a NIGHTMARE!
I’ve read several reviews and articles on Vista but I can’t recall a single significant thing it’ll do for me that I can’t do with right now with XP and some third party software without sacrificing oodles of resources just to have their glass UI. The Vista hype is completely unjustified . Someone commented above that it doesn’t support OpenGL… this whole thing is not even funny anymore.
I am sure Vista will some day justifiably oust XP from the top spot but that’s a LONG way off.
@natmaster
Interesting idea, that Microsoft should gradually break compatibility in stages, allowing software developers to just issue patches that let their existing software work with the new OS, while still gradually improving security and performance. If Microsoft could do this at a rapid pace (as in, breaking a similar chunk of compatibility with every release), then they quite possibly could fix most of their problems, saving Windows in the long run. The only problem is, I don’t know if Microsoft was intending to break this level of compatibility, and if they didn’t, would they be willing to do it again? Still, I’ll hold off on making any more comments about Windows until the Vista optimized software comes out (it might take a while for truly optimized software). There are still some things that I don’t like about Windows that they couldn’t get rid of without completely breaking compatibility (cough the registry cough), but significant improvements over the next few years would be satisfactory.
I’ve already upgraded, but I need to install a new Hard Disk to make it faster.