Microsoft on Monday said it has released a beta version of the first service pack of Windows Vista to about 12000 testers. In another expected move, Microsoft said that it has completed its first near-final ‘release candidate’ version of Windows Server 2008. The ‘RC0’ version is slated to be available for download from Microsoft’s Web site within the next 24 hours.
I’m one of those beta testers. Hopefully this weekend, if husband and Dad duties allow, I’ll be installing this beta. First I have to find an easy way to back up my Windows partition. Man, how I hate restore discs!
Pete sends…<eom>
First I have to find an easy way to back up my Windows partition. Man, how I hate restore discs!
A Linux live cd with ntfsclone on it? Worked for me.
http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html
It sounds like people are really expecting this service pack to cure all of Vista’s ills. Hope it does. It’s going to be hell on MS if it doesn’t.
Edited 2007-09-24 22:47
First off how many people are actually using Vista in a ‘live’ workplace environment?
Second, most Enterprise Organizations will not even think about migrating towards Vista Professional until at least 1 or 2 more years.
Lastly, you can purchase a new machine with XP Pro installed from Dell, HP ect….
In two years or more you will see it rolling out in the Enterprise just like the amount of time it took for W2K to get wiped by XP Pro…..
What do you mean “Vista Professional”? As if it weren’t confusing enough for Microsoft to have three versions of XP: the useless Home Edition, Professional, and Media Center (basically Pro with the media center stuff pre-installed) Microsoft had to add five versions of Vista. We have Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate, Vista Business and Vista Enterprise. It remains to be seen if further editions will appear in the form of cripple ware for developing countries who pirate Vista now, or something akin to Windows Essentials for Legacy PC’s, (yet another variant of XP Pro.) And people say there are too many Linux distributions!!! This new service pack won’t fix Vista’s bigger problems which stem from the fact that the OS is bloated and unwieldy, requires far too much horsepower for an OS, and is still largely incompatible with legacy software (and hardware. People using Vista should seriously consider alternative operating systems and should demand that vendors provide hardware and software support for those alternatives.
The Home edition of Windows XP is used by millions of users and is definitely not useless. I’d argue that the vast majority of home users wouldn’t know the differences between Home and Professional edition and are not missing them either.
I know the difference between home and pro and I still bought XP Home because its cheaper (upgrade version too – i have a copy of win98 not in use so its all good).
I didn’t need pro because I only use it for games (opensuse does everything else i need).
And recently I tried looking for some shareware utilities for working on some 3d modelling and programming and managed to get some spyware on the way.
I’ve run about 4 spyware programs on it, managed to finally remove it after about 5 hours split over 3 or 4 days but its too late – my winxp is screwed. It takes ages for explorer windows to open and close and half my apps wont even run, producing weird errors when I try.
I use it about 2 or 3 times a month and I’m not illiterate by any means. I’ve been programming since I was 10 and used every version of windows since 3.11 enough to be intermediate/expert at it. Maybe I didn’t have the right tools running at the time but does everyone keep their antivirus and antispyware programs running while playing games?
So I’m a little annoyed since I cant find my windows disk and will need to spend more time looking for that and then about 2-3 hours reinstalling windows. Fortunately I dont use it for much so I dont need to spend the 50 hours it used to take to reinstall all my software that I use. Man I love linux, less than 1 hour and you have a fully functional system with all your programs installed. and if you keep your home directory you also have all your settings just as you left them.
If Vista can do better than xp at blocking spyware and viruses then it can only be a good thing. XP is great but you can guarantee you’ll get stung someday and then its reinstall time.
I don’t have any anti-spyware running at all. Before I install something new that I’ve never tried before, I go to Google and type in ‘appname + spyware’ .. if the app is spyware, it’ll just bout always show up in the search results. Pretty simple, really. I’ve not had any problems so far. Of course, it’s not as simple as Linux’s ‘click n install the whole f**king repository’, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.
Edited 2007-09-25 04:17
Amen to that. I cannot recall the last time I’ve had spyware installed or been bitten by a virus. It doesn’t take much to remain safe.
All it takes is a little bit of cognitive motion and you’re safe.
I gave opensuse 10.2 a serious go but after three re-installs (one due to nvidia driver f–k up, two others due to crazy repository issues which froze the machine even when there was no repositories defined nor would it use my dvd as a source) and I had enough.
“I cannot recall the last time I’ve had spyware installed or been bitten by a virus.”
Once I had a guy next door claiming the same. The invited me to check is PC, so I did run nmap (a simple TCP / UDP port scanner) and ethereal (a packet monitoring program) on his box. Surprise surprise. And few minutes later, I could copy files from and to his box.
“It doesn’t take much to remain safe.”
I like to disagree and to explain.
“All it takes is a little bit of cognitive motion and you’re safe.””
All? No. The problem: Next to the attacking possibilites that require user interaction (spoofing software) for install or confirmation, there are attacks that do work in the background, so the user does not notice. While I won’t deny the essential need of cognitive motion, it does not fully protect. And don’t forget that sometimes dangerous crapware is included as “demo” software on systems distributed along with an “extended software package”.
As it has been mentioned at another place. 100% security is impossible. Security is a process, not a state. The best means of security are useless if they’re bypassed, usually due to users’ requirements of individual comfortablility and easyness of use.
The difficulty to tell about infestation by viruses, trojans or malware is that you cannot tell without proper knowledge and means of diagnostic. Most of the average users don’t want the first one, and don’t have the second one.
I’d like to see the “Windows” type OSes to get more secure by default. Everyone on the Internet would benefit from it. Maybe, some years in the future, spam won’t be more than 90% of the mail amount transfered. 🙂
I cannot remember the last time I got any spyware on my computer. All I run is anti-virus, a solid firewall, nat’d router set up and firefox.. in fact I cannot recall when I’ve had malware, spyware or a virus in the past 10+ years.
That’s all on a Windows environment. Dunno, but for me it just requires a bit of common sense and it all comes into place quite nicely.
I’ve had more driver issues in Windows, which is a problem of the hardware vendors, than I have any of the above.
seriously ?
ok, can you open a command prompt and type
netstat -a
and post the output here please….
Same here. Sandboxing software (Sandboxie is free) and network monitoring (MS nee Sysinternal’s TCPDump and a software firewall) help, too, to make it painless.
“The Home edition of Windows XP is used by millions of users and is definitely not useless. I’d argue that the vast majority of home users wouldn’t know the differences between Home and Professional edition and are not missing them either.”
Which is exactly why XP Home is perfect for Home users. They don’t realize that networking has been crippled and advanced security is missing. These are just a couple of ways that XP Home differs significantly from the Pro version, which is far more useful.
“I’d argue that the vast majority of home users wouldn’t know the differences between Home and Professional edition and are not missing them either.”
That is until they tried having a little network and found out they couldn’t get it to work. More and more people have more than one computer at home.
Tell me, how many home users have a PDC at there house?
That’s about all the major networking that has been stripped out of home; it can’t join a domain… big whoop.
*raises hand*
We develop on the platform we’re programming for…
In other words, like my math professor used to say
“GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT”
Enterprise customers don’t use OEM versions – they purchase machines and load their ‘Select Licence’ enterprise software onto the machines. Select licencing also can be used on the computers of the employee’s own home computers – so for many out there running Windows, they’re running it by virtue of the ‘Select Licence’.
Back on topic; service pack 1 will be Microsofts last attempt at a reprieve against the initial balls-up that was Windows Vista. A lot of people here hated it straight off the bat, but for me, it took months.
I added software and found that the wheels started to fall off. My cd/dvd burner stopped working (and yet worked perfect for a while), software stopped working properly.
Will I move back to Windows Vista? no. I’m running Solaris, StarOffice 8, my 60gig iPod works beautifully with gtkpod, my cd’s are burned without issue. I find it confusing how a company (Microsoft) who has over $40billion under their belt and still pushing out products with the quality equal to that of a small, underfunded and resourced startup.
I also question whether they’ve fixed up the memory hogging issues of Windows Vista; I’ve got 2gigs of memory, hardly a ‘small amount’ and yet Windows Vista ran terribly – and it was worse under a heavy load. Throw any other operating system on this computer and it is lightening fast; Fedora 7, Solaris, Ubuntu; all running incredibly fast and reliable.
The most unstable OS I’ve tried to run on my home computer in the last 2 years was Kubuntu 6.10. By comparison, Vista has been rock solid. For that matter, even in comparison with XP, Vista has been very solid for me.
For the record, I consider the kubuntu experience to be an aberration– Adding kubuntu-desktop to Ubuntu worked fine.
As for Win2k, I’ve got a user who’s trying to get us to fix his Windows 2000 box that’s required to run a WinNT 4.0 application for a $30,000 instrument. The company that sold him the instrument (Smallish company… “GE”) doesn’t offer updates, but they’ll sell him a new machine with new software… all he has to do is fork over $45k for the new instrument.
I totally agree with you on the Kubuntu bug-fest. I too added kubuntu-desktop to Ubuntu, and have added kubuntu-desktop to xubuntu.
In the end I gave up, stuck with Ubuntu, and ran
sudo aptitude install k3b amarok konqueror
And then added /usr/bin/kdeinit to the start session.
My 3 favourite KDE programs then ran sweet form inside Gnome.
Just out of curiosity, what is the instrument? could he look for an alternative supplier – I’m sure there are other companies who make the said equipment.
Just out of curiosity, what is the instrument? could he look for an alternative supplier – I’m sure there are other companies who make the said equipment.
I don’t know specifics, other than it’s some control software for a fairly high end piece of lab equipment. I’m sure others make similar hardware, but they have similar pricetags. Replacing $30k worth of (functional) hardware to get a rewrite of your software is just insane.
GE isn’t the only company– Another big-name vendor has a piece of software that requires the Microsoft Java VM to function. Many of their “web applications” are actually custom-written activeX plugins that require local admin to install, and update– and no, they don’t make it easy to distribute/update via GPO or SMS.
Even more entertaining, Vista has removed some of the underlying activeX controls because they’re too dangerous– result… “Stay on IE6 under Windows XP”.
I hear ya.
Part of my job is to configure new laptops for my clients.
All the machines from local “big” electronics-computer stores come preloaded with Vista Home Premium.
So in last few months I’ve had the displeasure to work with Vista frequently.
HP, Acer, Toshiba – they all preload all sorts of crap.
Today I was cleaning up a new Toshiba laptop with a trial version of Microsoft Office 2007 preloaded.
It took about 10 minutes to uninstall this crap.
I was just shaking my head in disbelief.
And that’s on a dual core brand new laptop.
And don’t talk to me about UAC, I’ve never clicked a stupid dialog box so many times in my life.
After couple hours of that I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining (don’t mind my spelling), if I had an axe I’d start swinging it.
Vista is a steaming pile of shit.
And Microsoft’s brain damaged developers have made every design decision they could a bad decision.
I got an HP here; loaded with crap; I mean, sure, I can understand having trials and companies who pay HP, but why not provide it on a seperate cd to allow me the user to decide whether or not to install those extra’s.
In the end, I’ve given up; Microsoft has only themselves to blame; their products expense has forced many vendors to load crap onto their machines to offset the cost of Windows. The fact that these vendors are at the mercy of Microsoft rather than being partners.
Once I moved to OpenSolaris, I knew why I don’t run Windows. Depending on how things go, I might move to Apple Mac but given Apple’s approach to ‘customers’ by way of their iPod, iPhone and others, I’ll sooner stick with the current setup; oh, and leopard has been one giant disappointment.
Apple’s computer strategy is not the same as their gadget strategy, for now. If Apple made computers as playskool as the iPhone and iPod touch then they just wouldn’t be used in the pro-scene (where they can outweigh PCs as workstations), and Apple’s market would fall through.
Not just that, but their attitude to users; sure, I can understand wanting to keep MacOS X for just their computers, I can understand not allowing third parties to licence their DRM technology – but it went right off the deep end when they started locking their phones, refusing to sell their iPhone internationally at the same time it became available in the US, their refusal to work with third parties to allow people to easily syncronise their new iPod and alternative operating systems.
I mean, sure, I and alot of people don’t ask for a ‘hand out’ or ‘special treatment’ by Apple but they could atleast stick to atleast one protocol or adopt something like mtp which is at least documented and in wide use. Sure, the others were made out of commercial interests, the whole protocol change was nothing more than a royal ‘screw you’ to the end user.
HP, Acer, Toshiba – they all preload all sorts of crap.
Today I was cleaning up a new Toshiba laptop with a trial version of Microsoft Office 2007 preloaded.
It took about 10 minutes to uninstall this crap.
I was just shaking my head in disbelief.
And that’s on a dual core brand new laptop.
So, what you’re really saying is that much like XP, the crap that the hardware vendors wedge into Vista is a pain. This is not news.
Vista installed on a clean system, from unbranded media, is a pretty damned good system in my experience.
I think the mistake Microsoft is making is not taking the same hardball approach Jobs and Apple took with OSX. When OSX first shipped, no one liked it, everyone hated it, it was too complicated, buggy, slow, annoying, etc…. Now everyone loves it.
I find it confusing how a company (Microsoft) who has over $40billion under their belt and still pushing out products with the quality equal to that of a small, underfunded and resourced startup.
If there is something that I learned from my grandmother;
It’s not the amount of resources, it is the skill in utilizing what resources you have. I know people that make six figure incomes and have trouble making the rent.
I also question whether they’ve fixed up the memory hogging issues of Windows Vista; I’ve got 2gigs of memory, hardly a ‘small amount’ and yet Windows Vista ran terribly – and it was worse under a heavy load.
That is rather strange.
I have AMD X2 4200+ with 2GB of RAM and I really can’t complain. Visual Studio 2005 SP1, NetBeans 5.5.1, IIS, Firefox, IE7, Office (Outlook 2003, Visio 2002, Word 2007), Paint.NET, SQL Server 2005.. and a few of smaller utilities – all works fine (and at the same time, of course) on my Vista. I don’t see any problems.. What exactly is happening?
We are using it for our recruiters, and it could be better. I’m really hoping SP1 makes Vista what it should be
… since I’m using Vista Ult. since 6 months without any hassle, except for old h/w not having good drivers.
Yesterday (for first time in 6 months) I *had* to reboot because of system instability but this is first time I did it since Vista was installed.
Using this notebook (yes, notebook) for anything, including development: no problems at all.
Had a couple of blue screens in 6 months because of faulty smartcard driver. For a couple of weeks, had problems with IE crashing because of RoboForm which I upgraded to latest version and everything turned out to work fine.
Using Virtual PC 2007 to run VMs to host other OSes like WinXP and Win2003 both for development and testing purposes. No problems. Ever.
According to all complains I hear, I should consider myself lucky then.
But are there chances about me getting back to XP? No way. Not in a million years.
You say you have used Vista for 6 months without hassle…. then go on to list the various hassles you have encountered.
Have you ever considered a career in politics ?
Or maybe those issues didn’t bother him since he was able to fix them.
Just because someone has issues with something, does not make it a hassle.
Indeed… Except a forced reboot is always a hassle… Without exception.
Maybe for you. Don’t speak for other people.
ask anyone if a FORCED REBOOT is a hassle or an issue…
I don’t know anyone who does not think it is a hassle
Apparently the guy you replied to doesn’t think it is.
Agreed…
Still Wont Make Me Reinstall Vista even when this Service Pack goes final,
Wonder if they’ll test this Service pack longer than they Tested the final Release of Vista,