in limited beta last week, prompting Doug to ask readers what
they've thought so far about SP1. From your responses, it looks like it's faring
better than expected:
I use Vista Business Edition SP1 at work, and Vista Home Premium Edition
SP1 at home. I have no problems at all with either of them. I can do all of
my work just fine on the work system, and I play all kinds of graphics-intensive
games on my home system. Vista works great for me, so I don't know what everyone
is complaining about.
-Kyle
Don't be afraid of Vista! I am running all Vista boxes in my office, and
have been for a year. I run both 32- and 64-bit machines without any problems.
I do have to admit, however, that there are more issues with 64-bit boxes
regarding driver functionality, but they're workable. SP1 was smooth as silk
with 32-bit systems, but there were a couple of hangs in installing the correct
64-bit patch. Some of my customers for whom I've recently built new Vista
systems are well over 65 and run Vista flawlessly. I receive very few help
calls!
With Microsoft getting ready to retire XP soon, we are all feeling the
pinch to switch over. If we were to wait for Windows 7, we would still be
in the same "wait and see" boat, because I don't think Microsoft
is ever going to have one OS hang around that long again (as in NT, for instance).
-Dan
I've been on Vista since day one, on a machine that was labeled as Vista-ready
and that shipped with XP installed. And it's a x64 machine. I should have
more problems than anyone, but I've been virtually problem-free. I think you
guys all give Vista a very undeserved bad rap. -Anonymous
To be honest, I have no idea what the fuss is all about with Vista being
deployed from an IT perspective. I'm currently working for a good sizeed corporation
(800-plus employees) that owns a large base of financial institutions. We
have a mixture of Windows XP and Vista Business Edition 32-bit SP1 deployed
at the majority of our banks. Vista is working great with our bank applications
and a majority of the older bank apps have been made to work with little effort.
We in IT have welcomed the additional security added to Vista, like a more
robust Group Policy that allows even better control over our users.
We are not waiting for Windows 7 as an answer to what's wrong in Vista
(and we have yet to see many issues at all), as those will be fixed like anything.
I would like to see Vista stop being treated like the ill-fated stepchild
of Windows ME.
-Bill
We had been holding back on Vista rollout internally as our early experience
with Vista was pretty discouraging. The net assessment was the gains from
Vista were pretty even with the downsides, so why move from XP? But we recently
acquired an HP laptop machine and discovered that it would not be easy to
do with it what we usually do with a new machine, i.e., wipe what the manufacturer
loaded on the hard drive and reload with an RTM version of XP SP3. The RTM
version of XP did include disk drivers for the type of hard drive controller
built into the laptop. We would need to locate the right disk drivers and
hope they would integrate correctly into the XP installer.
It had been a while since we had looked at Vista, and we also were curious
about 64-bit performance, so we elected instead to replace the Vista Home
64-bit version shipped with the laptop with an RTM Vista 64 Ultimate version.
The Vista shipped from HP included all sorts of add-on "crapware"
programs that killed its performance during boot-up. Replacing this with RTM
Vista 64 Ultimate SP1 eliminated the add-on programs and their negative effect
on performance. We were amazed at the high performance of RTM Vista 64 SP1
on this laptop. The hardware choices and Vista seemed tuned for each other.
Vista 64 performed noticeably faster on this laptop than Vista 32 on desktop
machines with faster hardware.
Our take is that Vista's bad reputation comes from insufficient hardware
performance, operating in 32-bit rather than 64-bit mode, manufacturer-installed
applications, and the many pre-SP1 compatibility issues. It is a shame that
this OS is not more appreciated!
-Charles
I have run Vista since it was first released and have been pleased with
it, although it's not without issues. The thing I noticed, though, is that
most of the issues were application/driver-based and not with the core. Once
the problem applications/drivers were updated, the issues went away and I
can honestly say that Vista has run fine since then. The amazing thing is
that my laptop in not a high-end machine like most Vista "haters"
state you have to have, and I still have no real major issues.
SP1 has really helped with compatibility and performance and I really
hope that MS improves the performance even more with SP2. The start up time
is still too slow. I'd also like to see the SP2 include all the latest versions
of the .NET Framework. This is important to me as a developer, since it helps
make deploying applications I write.
-Shawn