Text 18983, 158 rader
Skriven 2007-06-23 09:39:28 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Vista: They took five years for this?
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>



http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13114/1090/1/0/

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Linux users can, at times, be the worst kind of ingrates, whining and
complaining about what they perceive as missing features in a free operating
system.

My advice to all such whingers: spend 10 days using the latest version of
Windows and you'll realise that you are living in a world of relative bliss.

I asked my editor, Stan Beer, if he had a Vista pack for a cursory look, out of
sheer curiosity. You hear so much about Vista on the net but there's a good
deal of truth yet in the old saying, "seeing is believing."

At times I could not believe what I saw during the 14-odd days that I played
around with both versions of Vista Ultimate - the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Microsoft has admittedly set the bar pretty low for this new avatar; the
marketing blurb on the pack says "the most secure Windows ever." I couldn't
help a snigger when I glimpsed this - the same slogan was used to try and sell
Windows XP.

There are certain names which come to mind when associates the word "security"
with XP, names like Sasser, Blaster, Sobig aand so on. Not to mention the fact
that there was a second service pack issued for XP in August 2004 - well over
three years after it was launched - which had 810 fixes and updates.

I was thus prepared for low-key peformance with lots of eye candy. I was
disappointed. At the end of the testing, when I gratefully used a CD of the
latest Ubuntu release (and I don't have a very high opinion of that as regular
readers of this column would know) to wipe Vista off my drive, I realised that
even those expectations had been too much.

But enough of generalisations, let's get down to some specifics. I had to build
a new box to install Vista (for which iTWire picked up the tab). I kept it
minimal but these days even the word minimal has been redefined - an AMD Athlon
64 X2 4600 and 2 Gig of DDR2-667 RAM isn't exactly low-spec in any dictionary.
I used an all-in-one motherboard with an nVidia geForce 6100 onboard. A 250-gig
Western Digital SATA drive and an LG DVD rewriter were the other components.

A note to the reader: I wasn't looking for special effects, bling or eye candy;
I was looking for genuine improvements.

Before I installed Vista, I checked the hardware by installing a Linux
distribution - that's something which I do with every box I build. This time I
used PCLinuxOS and incidentally noticed that it has much to recommend.

Back to the world of Windows. One improvement is actually present in Vista -
disk formatting takes much less time than it did in XP. The installation takes
a little longer than any modern Linux distribution - 64-bit was expectedly a
bit faster than the 32-bit version.

Any sensible person who reads the end user licence agreement accompanying Vista
would, I'm sure, prefer to opt for a cell in Guantanamo; you basically have to
spread your legs wide and bend over if you want to use the operating system. Of
course, the average user never sees the licence, let alone read it. Ignorance,
they say, is bliss.

I found it funny that the administrator account disappeared when one creates an
account for using Vista; this user is said to have administrative privileges
but anything and everything - installing software, even making minor changes -
can only be done after going through a nag screen. Ah, those nag screens, what
would Windows be without them? I guess people would be left with a sense of
emptiness in their lives if all these nag screens disappeared overnight.

But then on reflection, I realised that this hiding of the administrator
account is merely an extension of the thinking which has always prevailed in
some sections of the tech industry - security can only be achieved through
obscurity. You can get back the admin account if you wish but who among the
great unwashed would know how to do it?

It's easy to administer a system with an all-or-none approach and Microsoft has
taken the latter option; the days of permissiveness yielded nothing but
complaints so the company is now in Taliban mode. When will someone come up
with a happy middle road? But that would require intelligence and a bit of
thought and maybe that's too much to ask for.

Once you look around the Vista landscape, you realise that for all the sound
and bluster, there's precious little available for you, the average PC user, to
work with. There's no decent word processor, mail client (unless you are
prepared to apply that adjective to Microsoft Mail, the descendant of the
illustrious Outlook Express), or browser.

Internet Explorer 7 is every bit as sad as its predecessors; I downloaded
Opera, Firefox and Safari, the last-named fortuitously being released a few
days before my examination of Vista ended. Opera is about the fastest but
Firefox is more configurable and, for control freaks like me, it is the best
choice. Safari has too much advertising material thrown in to warrant a second
look from me.

IE7 has tabs - about three years and more after Firefox made them popular - but
the furniture has been moved around in a meaningless way. In both IE7 and the
entire layout of Vista I was reminded of one thing - the way my wife often
re-arranges our old furniture to provide the illusion that something has
changed.

One can understand change if it is logical but in the case of Vista, there is
often change for the sake of change. There is no point in renaming a utility or
changing the layout of a certain window if there is no productivity gain. It is
just plain silly. Colour it purple or pink if you want instead.

Stability-wise, Vista is much worse than XP with all its bandages. Security
fixes continue to be applied to Vista - I had a total of 15 applied during my
brief period of usage - but the stability leaves much to be desired. Each and
every time a security fix was applied, I had to reboot the machine.

There are times when the whole system seems to seize up for no apparent reason;
at others, it seems to take forever for a simple function to be performed. Is 2
gig of memory then too little? Sounds crazy when you consider that Vista is
produced by a company whose joint founder Bill Gates once decreed that nobody
would ever need more than 640k of RAM!

There is constant disk activity and it would appear that this is happening for
the purpose of indexing in order to make desktop search faster; at the rate the
disk is written to, I would suspect that its lifetime will be seriously
reduced. I did a few tweaks to reduce the activity as I need this machine to
test other software down the road.

I had a look at the Windows Media Centre and tried to make a CD but gave up
after a while; the interface is clunky, non-intuitive and anything but
user-friendly. I needed to make the CD in a hurry so I used my son's MacBook -
something I am rarely allowed to touch, as he is highly possessive about it -
and figured out how to make the disc in a matter of minutes. It was the first
time I had used the MacBook for that purpose.

In all, I had to download about 200 meg of software just to make Vista usable -
and a word processor wasn't among the lot. No, you need to get in AdAware,
Spybot, WinZip (or WinRar), Adobe Reader, a Torrent client, an SCP client (I
could only find a trial version), QuickTime player, VLC media player and a few
browsers. Vista had no drivers for my monitor (a 22-inch flat screen) or my
printer (a Samsung SCX-4200).

The funny thing is, Vista would not recognise the printer even though the
manufacturer has supplied drivers specifically for the O-S; it is a unique
printer in that it comes with drivers for Windows, Linux and the Mac! But Vista
doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

The same printer works fine with my daughter's XP laptop and my son's MacBook.
Life is full of such imponderables.

When it comes to media files, Windows Media Player wants to hog the show. Now I
wouldn't have minded if the app can handle all media types. Such, sadly, is not
the case. I downloaded an MP4 of a rugby game (it was shown on ABC 2, the
taxpayer-funded public broadcaster) but all I could get out of Media Player was
sound. (I copied the file over to my Debian AMD64 box and watched it -
excellent stuff, both in terms of video quality and the game itself).
Interesting to note that neither VLC media player nor QuickTime could play the
video stream on Vista either.

A similar thing happened with an .avi file; Media Player indicated that the
proper codec had been downloaded but once again there was only

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