The Growth of Vista
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Is Vista worth upgrading to? What about the bugs and problems? Should a DBA or developer consider it?
I recently passed on upgrading my primary desktop. I had a new machine, an AMD 64 3800, 2GB of RAM, a nice new nVidia card, but I decided that as a primary machine it wasn't worth it. I'll probably drop it in a VM, but I couldn't chance that there are more issues with SQL Server 2005 or Visual Studio. Plus my old desktop is becoming the house server, so I lost the chance for two machines.
I've seen some reports of issues with upgrades. Apparently, installing Reporting Services is tricky and requires a few things to be turned on. Nothing major and I'm guessing that drivers account for most issues, but still for a Microsoft developer it seems that there would be fewer issues with the core products.
I pinged a few friends and none of their companies are even thinking about it, at least not until XP is closer to the end of support. Since I tend to ask those guys what's wrong when I have OS issues, I'm unlikely to upgrade until they do 🙂
I'm not sure that Vista is worth the upgrade for most of us, but I'm tempering that with the idea that I didn't think W2K or XP were worth the upgrades when they were first released.
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Hi,
We're just trialling Vista now, as in one of the IT lads installed it on Friday, I had a quick look but my 1st impression is yeah, it looks very good appearance wise, it installed on a new powerful PC with 2Gb of ram, so it runs smoothly but it would interesting to see how it runs on a less powerful PC. As for testing out any apps, not got that far yet so I can't comment, but I'll post anything I find not to work.
Could be digging a large hole for myself there!
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I definitely have no plans to upgrade.
Having had a pretty thorough time playing around with it, all it really has going for it is... it's pretty.
Great. I really don't care what my OS looks like - I like to spend as little time as possible interacting with it, and as much time as possible interacting with my PROGRAMS.
That prettiness comes at a hefty price, too - 14GB install, 512MB of RAM utilised on a continuing basis, and realistically very little security improvement. To clarify - it seems much more secure, but that's because of the security implementations which are immediately visible to the casual user. The deeper potential security exploits are what any serious hacker will be interested, and have thus far proven about as solid as swiss cheese. On top of that, MS OneCare recently placed last in a test of 17 anti-virus suites, so you'll definitely be looking for a third party AV application... but the Vista kernel has not been made available to AV companies, so they are being restricted in their ability to develop optimal AV cover.
Oh, and on top of that, a veritable truckload of programs don't run, and most of those which do run (even ones supposedly optimised for Vista) actually run slower on it than XP, no doubt partly due the Vista's ridiculously high system load.
So I'm pretty glad that MS decided to extend XP Pro support until 2014, 'cos I don't see myself 'downgrading' to Vista for a while yet...
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C8H10N4O2
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I just ran the Visa Upgrade Adviser and it scared me:-)
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I just upgraded to SQL Server 2005, Vista is way to bleeding edge for me.
Scott
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At least for now, Vista sucks! I've been using it at work since the beginning of December and there are many times I wish I were back with XP. I think the main problem is that device drivers and programs aren't yet fully compatible with it yet and the big issue there is Vista's User Access Control (UAC). I tried leaving it on just to try it out but all the prompts that kept coming up made me find a program to silence them. Eventually I had to just turn it off completely because I was getting annoyed that I, as an administrator on my own machine, couldn't edit files outside my home directory. Yeah, Vista prompts you when it needs elevated permissions, but some programs, like Notepad, don't; they just tell you access is denied after you edit some config file.
As a plus, once I turned off UAC the IntelliPoint drivers for my keyboard started working correctly and the scrollwheel on it started to scroll again! Yay, my system is beginning to be as useful as it was under XP... Given that I turned off one of the highly touted features of Vista I don't see how Vista is significantly better than XP, other than looking cool.
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A user came to me the other day and said that he had installed Vista on his home computer, and that he could no longer reply to emails using Outlook Web Access (OWA). According to this kb article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829 Vista's version of IE 7 no longer includes support for the ActiveX control that is used for HTML editing in Outlook Web Access (OWA).
In order for OWA to work in Vista, we would have to install a patch on our exchange server....No Thank You!
Instead of installing this patch on our exchange server, I had the user try using firefox instead of Internet Explorer, and it works fine....Go Figure!
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We are in a cut expenses mode so going to Vista is not even a thought. About 1/3 of the companies PC's are still Win2000. We will probably be one of the last on Vista due to the hardware requirements.
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I did a clean install of Vista Business on a bare-minimum config: 1 GHz Celeron with 512 RAM and 20 GB disk. It runs OK. I changed all the settings to revert to the Windows Classic menus etc and turned off UAC and that darned Defender which was thrashing the disk almost non-stop. Vista did not like the Intel 815 graphics chipset, so I get no Aero; I tried upgrading the drivers from Intel's site but received the Vista BSOD (surprise!) but it was smart enough to tell me that those new drivers were the problem, and easily reverted them.
When I installed Office 2007 Enterprise and Office Accounting, that went OK too except that Accounting uses SQL Server 2005 Express, which is NOT compatible with Vista until you install SP2 for SQL 2005. Major "oops" on somebody's part at MS.
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I am waiting for 1 more gig of ram for my personal laptop and my work laptop needs more than 1 gig and we have to wait for our team to upgrade. Here is the Express with SP2 download.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie -
I have a laptop which is basically serving as an expensive iPod... I think I'm gonna put Vista on that, just to see if it comes crashing to a halt. This is a machine that is not up to spec, but I need to get XP Pro off it so I can use the serial number for my server. I'm not as interested in performance (I know it's slow), but I am very concerned with reliability. Servers are left at home alone, and they can't be whining for human assistance all the time. When I install Vista, I expect to configure a few things and then have it run, for years on end with no problem. If it doesn't, we won't be using it at any companies where I have a say. We are supporting it for our end users, but that's because our end-users are not computer-savvy people, and some of them have already been screwed by the Vista-pushers at the computer store.
Is Microsoft giving incentives to sell Vista? Cuz I basically went into Best Buy and found a knowledgeable person (yeah I know, surprised me too), but they wanted to sell me a new Vista PC, even though I told them flat-out that Vista is crap... then they almost started to defend it, saying the rumors are all lies, etc. I informed them who they were speaking to and they backed off a little bit, but I wonder, if I ran into this guy off-work, would he tell me the truth or would he still spout sales-bs... That is, is this guy brainwashed by the hype, or does he have a monetary motivation to lie?
As far as SQL Server goes... I have full confidence in the SQL Server line of products... but I have no confidence in the Vista OS, so I'm not even going to worry about it, we're just going to run XP for a while.
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RE: Steve... I think the key words you're looking for are in your last sentence. Those being... "when they were first released". In time Vista adoption will advance and the hardware manufactures will catch up and everything will be great and wonderful again. It'll just take some time. Personally I don't think I'll upgrade until I buy a new machine and even then I might try to put it off a bit.
RE: Jasmine D. Adamson... More than likely he does have a monetary motivation. He works in sales, thus the more he sells the better he looks to his bosses. Even if there are no specific incentives for him to sell Vista by Microsoft, just the selling more than the next guy motivation comes in. In the end whether it's sanctioned by MS, Best Buy or just his own want for a bigger raise next review money is a big motivator.
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Well that's what I'm asking... is there an incentive to sell Vista, cuz this guy was pushing Vista PCs, not just trying to sell me something. As in "How's this XP Toshiba right here? Oh no, what you really want is this Vista Toshiba..." In fact, it seemed as if he didn't want me to buy something else... if it was just a matter of his commission, I would think he'd want me to find what I want, so I'll buy something rather than nothing. We are not talking about a price difference here either. I'm totally baffled and I'm tempted to simply go back and ask the guy WTF he's thinkin.
I guess the question I'm asking is why are retailers jumping on the Vista bandwagon, when all the reviews say to avoid it? I wouldn't carry a product that wasn't what my customers wanted. Which brings up another issue... do people really want Vista? Maybe they do. If they do, why? Are they that ignorant of what the experts are saying? What is going on here? It seems weird that a company can release a product that everyone is saying is crappy, and people still go out to buy it. Something other than general consumer ignorance is going on... like MS is paying people to use it and to sell it.
So, there's two things going on in the market that don't seem to make sense. For some reason, people want Vista even though it will hurt them, and for some reason, retailers are selling something that will hurt their customers, even though they know it will. "How Bad Vista Sucks" has been on the 5-o'clock and 10-o'clock news here in Denver on multiple channels and on multiple occasions. There is no excuse for not knowing that it sucks... and I'm sure some of the people buying Vista know full well that it's going to suck, but think they need it for some reason. Why do people do that? Drives me nuts.
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I love to live on the bleeding edge. I'm one of those people who learn by their mistakes and living on the bleeding edge you make a lot of mistakes. I "grew up" as a sysadmin and am very comfortable installing and configuring OS's and troubleshooting their problem. I've had Vista installed as my main work OS since shortly after Vista RC2 came out in the August or September. Since I work for a software developer I wanted to get a jump on my customers that will be running the application I support on their computers. I've had very few problems with either the RC2 and really no problems with the later GA. It just works. My main issues have been video cards and getting GA support (I ended up using a beta driver for my video card as it was supported in Beta but not in GA - go figure). I have a two-year old IBM T42 with a 1.7 GHz processor and 1.5 GB of RAM. Everything works well. I don't have the Aero experience as the laptop video card isn't supported but it really hasn't made any difference. It is definitely a different interface but I wouldn't go back now. The major change was Office 2007 - now I could go on for reams about that...
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I'm looking to buy a new laptop and am really leary about getting one with VISTA... and which version of VISTA should I get anyway? XP was easy... home and pro... so I got pro. But Vista has many versions and I don't know anyone that has upgraded yet. Vista Ulimate does come with 'Windows Hold’em, a poker game for players of all skill levels'... so maybe I need that version.
I will probably end up getting an XP pro laptop or installing xp pro on whatever I buy, so this discussion may be irrelevant... but I would be interested to know if Ultimate is the equivalent of XP PRO... I plan on using mainly as a home computer but would like to run a DBA toolset on it too...
Lynda Rab
www.sqlpass.org
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