steve clayton: geek in disguise

yeah, we're running a vista machine here. it's stressful verging on dissapointing.  usually if there's any cussing in the office, it'll be because of the vista machine.

networking is erratic, everything runs slower, can't print at all etc.

biggest problem is development. visual studio only caught up this week, as did the infragistics suite. other 3rd party controls are further behind.

we've had to recommmend customers don't consider vista for the time being.

it's not all bad though, the ability to create HUGE high-res icons has kept the graphics guys happy :)

Hah. Of course it's drivers. I'm deeply amused you link to Toshiba who are pitiful in addressing consumer laptops. My laptop is 12 months old. They provide *no* drivers at all for Vista.

Now that SQL and VS is patched my main apps will be fine; but until I get hardware support for even the simple stuff, like FN hotkeys to switch to an external display there is no point.

Even internally (and we're a Gold Partner for a bunch of stuff) you don't see any developers using it because of lack of drivers. And customers won't adopt it for the same reasoning. If we can't run it, why should we recommend it?

It is slower than XP. There are much more support problems. Drivers...of course. All enterprise customers I talked to will wait for SP1 + new hardware.

Developers steadily complain that VS 2005 is slow as hell (SP1 helped a lot but not enough: VS is faster and doesn't crash as often). 3-4 minutes (with VS SP1) to compile a solution on a new dual core with 2gigs of ram does not improve productivity. Since it is even slower with Vista, none of us are in a hurry to switch. Maybe if Orcas fixes these problems but I doubt it since it is not a maintenance release but a new version with loads of other features (and bugs and new performance problems that will be fixed later in a new SP).

What are the advantages again? How will Vista improve productivity? From a technological stand point, Vista is exciting, but from an enterprise stand point the ROI is a large red figure.

After reading your post (and while I realise it wasn't directly necessarily at end users) I thought I'd take a moment, eat a few grains of sale and see what Vista Hardware Assessment tool had to say about my lowly Win XP box; a rather old (but still very functional) dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz workstation with 1GB of RAM.

And guess what, the tool won't run because I don't use MS Word, or MS Excel (it goes so far as to require the most recent versions to boot). So on top of being required to buy Windows at egregious prices, I'm also obliged to buy Productivity software that's, well, let's say not-cheap? I have used Open Office since its Star Office days (and it didn't even run on Windows then) and it's a fully adequate replacement.

Look, I dig your style Steve. I even dig most of your insight, most of the time (almost all really) but when it comes to the products in question there are still serious problems with the way the Microsoft ship attempts to force itself into every harbour and then complains when there aren't people there waiting to welcome it with open arms.

Since you're a big fan of the whole "Change the world or go home" thingy, remember this"

"We tried to change the world and all we ended up doing was changing ourselves." (Actually from a rock fiction film)

You see, it actually works the other way around.

can't print because hp haven't released any flippin' drivers yet. there's not a lot you can do, but it kills productivity stone dead moving files via memory stick.

no idea on the network front. sometimes vista can see other xp machines most of the time it can't. either way it always takes an age to display anything. no idea where to begin debugging, but xp is fine, always has been.

wifi (via usb stick) is patchy, 50% of the time it won't connect and requires a reboot. probably a driver issue, but it's the one that vista found on install.

things are just slower at every level. browsing folders, previewing images. opening outlook.  you name it, it runs slower than before.  doesn't appear to be a performance thing though, processor usage isn't that high.

it's a difficult OS to recommend, especially at the moment.

I'm usually an early adopter but have no vista drivers for my raid cards.

I say cards because I have gone through three seperate cards trying to get one that has drivers.  The closest I've come is a beta version driver that doesn't officially work with one of the cards but does actually work.  I had expected vista to include support for the particular Sil card I tried at first, then I was sorely disappointed when the more expensive ones were worse off.

I think Microsoft should make it a contractual obligation of providing a signed driver for the current version of windows that the next version will be supported by that manufacturer.