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How Hard Does Vista Suck?
Posted: 7:30 am
September 17th, 2007
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Microsoft

I have been involved with Vista from the earliest Connect builds to the latest SP1 tests and I must admit that I love it. I appear to be alone at that. Over the weekend, one of my Dallas neighbors (we literally look directly at the American Airlines arena) wrote a post entitled Once you go Mac in which he explained a switch to a Mac – now this guy is not a n00b or unfamiliar with computers by a long shot. Earlier this weekend New York Times took endless jabs at Vista in an article that was actually bashing Apple’s retail quagmire.. Which leads me to the following questions:

Does Vista really suck that hard?

Is it your fault (poor system specs) or your computers fault? (poor choice of software)

Is it the software (Office 2007, McAfee) or the operating system (Indexing Service) that is causing the problem?

What have you done so far…

I am not a workstation guy, I’m a server/network guy. I’ll admit that ignorance right away so you can just laugh me off when I say I really like Vista. But the questions themselves are valid, and something we as “computer support” people ought to be able to answer fully.

I have written before, as Mark has written today, that Outlook sucks. We have had to roll back our Office 2007 deployments because of it, I have gone to OWA on my work computers, etc. The Dip, you know. I gave up on Outlook before it ruined me.

But Vista? Crashing? Hanging? Really?

I’m prepared to share some Vista tips with all’y’all but I wanted to extend two invitations to my tech-savvy audience. First – am I really ignorant here about Vista? (about Vista, not other things – vladville.com doesn’t have the disk/network capacity to address other issues) and Second – Help a brother out (blog a tip about performance tuning Vista) – just one tip a day and link it to this post.

At the end of the week I’ll put up a big splash page with all you can do to make Vista not suck. One guideline: Provide a con/pro of the change being made. For example:

Tip: Turn off UAC

Description of how to do it…. { }

Pro: Work effectively without dismissing endless access priviledge escalation warnings.

Con: Disables most of the security advantages Vista offers.

As with all IT consulting, the tip doesn’t have to be good (consulting = prolonging the problem) it just has to have an immediate impact (even if its bullet to the head in terms of functionality, security, productivity).

12 Comments

Pablo |

I’ve written about this already. When my coworkers started switching to Macs there was no end to my derision. At a recent department planning session I counted. There were about 30-40 people in the room (across all types of roles - biz and tech). Mac: 12, PC: 14

I prefer macs but I’m not out to convince people. All I’m saying is I see a clear trend.



Karlp |

I’ll jump in.

We are running almost all-Vista in our office. Love it.

Aside from a full 3GB RAM, here’s a tip if your system has sudden unexplained slowness after you’ve used a vpn (even if now disconnected):

See hotfix in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934202

Basically, the machine gets set to slow/offline connection type for synchronizing offline folders.

Stays slow with intermittent trips to la-la land until you reboot. Then fine until you make the fateful vpn connection.



wattersbill72 |

My only tip, really is, don’t expect Nirvana. It’s an OS, placed into production for profit. It is very good, and reflects increasing levels of quality from 3.x through 2000 pro and XP pro. People rave about XP sp2 Pro, but please remember it was Service Pack 2 before it was production quality for many organizations. Keep your expectations realistic.
As for performance disable sidebar crap, if you are not using it. Great feature, if you have the horsepower, but system hog if the machine isn’t built for it!



vlad |

Bill,

Love it how to optimize the OS we need to turn off all the features it brings as a reason to upgrade.

Without UAC, Aero, Sidebar what is left in Vista?

-Vlad



wattersbill72 |

Agreed.
But, if you have the horsepower run the extras. My Tablet has no gaming graphics so gets a 1 rating, ergo no aero (HUGE SAD FACE 4 THAT!!!), but other than that I run on 2 GB RAM and it does fine. Best feature: Handwriting and speech recognition built in, better than it was on XP. I rarely have performance issues, but perhaps I have learned to work around them, dk. I do know I don’t do much dev work, and rarely add/remove apps, so UAC rarely pings me! I get it a couple of times a week at most!



Greener Pastures : Will it(fill in the blank) ever be perfect? |

[...] on, you’ll never have to upgrade again!” Then, as it turns out, Vlad is asking a similar question: How Hard Does Vista Suck? While I feel the pain of upgrades, believe me, they are never the consultants dream, they are a [...]



briwlls |

Outside of the clock/calendar in the upper right corner of my second monitor Vista hasn’t added one item of value to my day to work. No productivity value and very little WOW factor.

My Vista performance tip is for laptops.

Problem: Laptop hard drive always seems to be churning.

Issue: Vista has auto defrag turned ON by default causing defrag to run when in use, when on battery, just plain whenever.

Resolution: Disable auto defrag and get Diskeeper’s defrag program it will do a better job at knowing when to defrag i.e. when disk is idle or when laptop is plugged in etc.



mdalligood |

Like Vlad, I have been running some form of Vista since the beginning. I have a HP dv5030 laptop with 2 gigs of RAM and a 2 GHz AMD 64 Turion. I did upgrade my factory 4200 rpm hard drive to a 7200. With that said, I have not had one issue with Vista. No lockups, no crashing, no BSOD. This is a highly used production laptop. AND… I run it as a standard user with UAC enabled. I also have Office 2007 Enterprise with Outlook that collects all my email, RSS feeds and newsgroup post (using Newshound). My PST file is over 3 gigs, and Outlook opens in les than 5 secs ready to go. So what have I done to tweak the system? Absolutely nothing. As I am typing this post, I have Outlook, Word, IE7 open. Along with AVG, LogMeIn Backup and other background processes enabled. My CPU is right at 1-10% and I am using 55% of my physical memory. Oh, did I mention that I have ALL Vista features enabled. Unlike Vlad, I am a desktop guy. I have been providing desktop support for 13 years and to me, Vista passes my test.



"I've heard" - E-Bitz - SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS "Diva" |

[...] http://www.vladville.com/2007/09/how-hard-does-vista-suck.html [...]



stash |

“Issue: Vista has auto defrag turned ON by default causing defrag to run when in use, when on battery, just plain whenever.”

The defrag task does NOT run when on battery. If you look at the task, it has the “Start the task only if the computer is on AC power” and “Stop if the computer switches to battery power” options turned on.



stash |

Also, Defrag FAQ: https://blogs.technet.com/filecab/articles/440717.aspx

The built-in defrag is much smarter than the above post gives it credit for. The task does not run unless the machine is idle, and when it does run, it runs at low priority. It does not simply run “whenever”.



Petras |

Petras…

There\’s more stuff to say about this…



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