Vista has not exactly been a massive market success. Sales numbers might be satisfactory due to OEM agreements, but press and public reception have been terrible, and there are several recurring themes in the complaints from people. Microsoft took five of these recurring themes, and addressed them in a document called ‘Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista‘.Without further ado, here are the five features in Vista Microsoft believes are misunderstood by the public and ‘IT pros’:
- User Account Control
- Image Management
- Display Driver Model
- Windows Search
- 64 bit architecture
Number one, user account control, is a fairly obvious one. People have been complaining about it loudly, saying it prompts you too often, and for insignificant things – desensitising the user for the actual warnings they contain. Microsoft explains in the document that UAC makes Windows a lot safer because malicious code cannot wreak as much havoc in a limited user account as it can do in an administrator account. In addition, UAC enables filesystem and registry virtualisation, which “redirects many writes to Program Files to per-user locations automatically, to help ensure legacy applications will run as standard user”. Microsoft also reiterates that a key goal of UAC is to ‘nudge’ ISVs into designing applications that operate properly in standard user mode.
Number two, about image management, is mostly interesting to people deploying large numbers of Vista installations among users.
Numbers three and four are interesting as despite their names, Microsoft mostly talks about performance here. The new display driver model enables UAC, which in turn requires a fairly hefty videocard. Windows Search, according to Microsoft, is more or less a resource hog. They explain that it needs the processor to continually monitor the file system, and this of course eats processor power.
The document goes on to say that these five misunderstood features affect two issues hindering adoption of Windows Vista: application compatibility and performance. The paragraph on performance is most interesting:
We’ve heard some of you say that Windows Vista runs slower than Windows XP on a given PC. So what’s really happening here? First, we need to avoid comparing apples to oranges – Windows Vista is doing a lot more than Windows XP, and it requires resources to conduct these tasks. That said, it is important to make sure a PC running Windows
Vista has enough horsepower to function properly, especially for older PCs running a minimal amount of RAM, since the Windows Vista footprint is larger, bottlenecks will occur.
And they mean that, too. They state that “many organisation have found that 2 or more GB of RAM, 2Ghz or faster processors, and compatible graphics adapters yield good results”. To me, that sounds like one killer machine, and if I look around my own home, there’s not even one machine that comes even close to those specifications. They say it as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, but I’m sure many agree with me that needing 2GB of RAM just to run an operating system properly feels rather ridiculous.
We haven’t misunderstood anything.
Vista is fat, slow and annoying. It may be a duck on the water with lots of activity happening under the bonnet. But who cares?
It actually has really good features. They’re just poorly written.
completely agree with you there.
Vista does everything you want it to 50% of the time and the other 50% is your system catching up on background processes that you have no control over.
It’s not slow or annoying for me. Fat, probably. But with RAM and hard drive space cheaper than ever, that’s not a major concern for me.
I’ve grown to find the overall Vista experience better than XP. It’s just easier to get stuff done. YMMV.
Problem is, it’s not really doing anything more that I actually care about. Of course, once you turn off windows search, UAC, and all the other crap they threw on to idiot-proof the OS, I bet it’s gonna scream. On the other hand, what are you left with when all this stuff has been gutted? Windows XP v1.5?
Personally, I would rather have had tabbed folders in Explorer than 90% of the stuff they threw in. And I know there’s a billion Explorer replacements (many of them free), but that’s not much help when you have to remote into a client machine who only has the barebones stuff.
Windows has some really awesome software written for it (which is the main reason I use it), but damn… they really dropped the ball with Vista.
Not just you, but many other users don’t care about; its quite funny that not only does Windows XP do what everything what people want – Windows Vista is not only bloated but a let down.
Remember Windows Vista Ultimate Extras – or there lack of those extras actually being available. Anyone remember the big push by Microsoft not only to get Windows Vista loaded by default, but trying to get OEM’s to sell the highest possible version of Windows Vista?
There isn’t a single thing that Windows Vista visibly provides to an end user something of benefit over and above Windows XP. Heck, I’d go so far that if you grabbed Ubuntu 8.04, installed it over their Windows XP computer, the end user would keep working as usual without any problems.
Nope, even with all that turned off, it still limps along. People purchasing the latest Core 2 processors, it should scream. Heck, I’ve got a 2.4Ghz laptop here and Windows Vista Basic ran like a slug when compared to OpenSolaris I’m running right now.
I’d go further. I’d prefer to have no added features – just refine the whole interface instead of the mishmash of different toolkits. When I refer to toolkits, I’m not talking about the look and feel, but the actual underlying toolkit itself. Apply any theme off the Microsoft website (such as Bliss) and see the anomalies when the theme is applied – in reference to the various applications bundled with Windows.
The ‘awesome software’ provided by third parties (and Microsoft) make Windows a must. If these applications were also available on a *NIX of some flavour, dropping the ball with Windows Vista would not be just an annoyance (like it is now), it would be a catastrophe. it would be a catastrophe because the lock in by virtue of software availability (and in turn file format support) would end. People would move, their applications would be available, and the end user would just pick up where they left off.
Prison rape isn’t a drawback, it’s a feature of the penal system!
from the Microsoft point of view, “killer” features like desktop search or security make vista so slow. Then, who can explain to me how OSX or linux live with the same features, and are still responsive on less powerful machines?
The answer is simple: someone cares about Linux and Mac OS X and BSD and no one at Microsoft cares about great software, they only care about getting to the weekend.
Perhaps, if Microsoft used someone else’s development tools, Vista would be somewhat leaner.
from the Microsoft point of view, “killer” features like desktop search or security make vista so slow. Then, who can explain to me how OSX or linux live with the same features, and are still responsive on less powerful machines?
That is exactly what I was wondering about..There is several background search utilities in Linux, like f.ex Beagle which of course does use some CPU time but it doesn’t seem to need even nearly as much as the Microsoft implementation. And it’s easy to turn Beagle off. What I don’t know if Windows Search allows you to select which folders to index either.
Desktop bling and effects? Linux (I talk about Linux only cos I haven’t tried BSDs or such) atleast does allow those effects with really good performance even on my aging 1.4ghz P4-mobile laptop with 512MB RAM.
So, on that laptop I have restricted user-accounts, high-performance desktop bling and background search with Linux, but Vista fails to run on it even sufficiently well even if I disable background search and bling effects? I just don’t know what it is that makes Vista such a resource hog. I mean, I like XP, it is nowadays really stable and fast and work really well in most situations, Vista seems such a huge step backwards compared to it..
…and there are background search tools available for WinXP that do the job just fine and don’t hog cpu/hdd. (and I’d argue that restricted user accounts are in fact available
. OK, with desktop bling there’s a lot of trial and error, I’ll give you that ;P )
If you have to explain it, then you did it wrong.
The biggest annoyances for me regarding Vista are:
1) It is big and slow
2) Graphics kind of suck. For example, overlays are done poorly. On my machine (which is modern and has a 512MB Nvidia card in it), all the UAC dialogs cause the screen to go completely blank for about 2 seconds and then the dialog will finally show up. This kind of graphics performance is completely unacceptable.
3) The desktop sidebar thing disappears when you click “Show Desktop”, which is dumb.
4) The Rotating Blue Circle of Wait doesn’t rotate on my machine anymore and the screen saver doesn’t work anymore. This has actually been my biggest complain with all versions of Windows. Things just randomly stop working (or at least stop working quickly) until the whole system sucks and has to be reinstalled. I’ve never had that problem with OS X, BSD, or Linux.
//all the UAC dialogs cause the screen to go completely blank for about 2 seconds and then the dialog will finally show up. // That’s gotta be something screwed up on your system. I have a 9600 GT, and the UAC dialogs show up instantly.
I got that two seconds of pause after I let update use MS drivers for my nVidia card. Go back to the nvidia drivers and it should work fine.
1. user rights
2. openness
3. standards-compliance
4. interoperability
5. flexibility
Features Microsoft misunderstood, that is.
draconian EULAs, DRM/Content ‘protection’, OOOXML, synchronization, closed and badly/not documented protocols and document formats, restraints on virtualization, …
hey no company is perfect (and MS certainly is not) but as a conscious and demanding user those points are definitely important to me.
Edited 2008-05-21 06:46 UTC
There are a lot of new things in Vista, just as there should be in any new operating system, most people understand that. This is how it should be, this is what we pay for.
The thing people don’t understand is how the new things in Vista helps them to make more money. This is the misunderstanding Microsoft needs to address.
When business realizes how much more money they can make on upgrading they will upgrade, or is the ugly truth that there is no money to be made?
Please explain how upgrading to Vista will “make companies money”?
The difference between Windows and Linux is that former stacks crap on top of older crap and everything must be integrated with everything, while latter keeps everything modular, breaks compatibility instead of crap stacking and uses well defined interfaces where possible (i.e. via DBus).
At some point Microsoft just has to go f–k Compatibility and start gutting the codebase. What’s the point of all the virtualization hype they’re doing and yet make not use of it.
That’s what they did, and that’s why a lot of people are complaining. All kinds of apps no longer work that worked fine in XP. SP1 may have helped somewhat (printers and scanners??), but it’s still not nearly ideal. I’d be mad if I thought they did that on purpose (more likely because Vista is easier to maintain, else why would they push it so hard and why did XP SP3 take so long to come out??).
That’s not true at all. Sure, XP does most things, but Vista does improve some of it. They are not the same. (Still, Vista is probably overpriced, especially if it breaks compatibility. Sure, “it’s secure” because it won’t actually run your apps!!) Besides, if your hardware doesn’t have good (or any) XP drivers, you’re stuck.
I’ve definitely got a wimpier video card (Nvidia 6100 SE??) than you on my Vista setup, and it’s true, upgrading the driver made it from instantaneous UAC popup to 5 sec. blank-screen delay (very very annoying). The other day I finally went and disabled “desktop composition” under Visual Settings, and it’s back to normal. Maybe not the perfect solution (disables taskbar window preview), but it’s good enough for now. I’ll admit, the extra bling isn’t worth the higher requirements at all, IMO (but I’m no gfx whore, I still like the cmdline, heh).
Straight from the horse’s mouth, eh.
They are not misunderstood features, MS simply failed at implementing them and/or delivering on promises.
They won’t convince anyone as long as Vista feels like it’s slow and unstable compared to XP, nobody will give a damn about said “features” if said features don’t work, crash your computer for no apparent reason, make brand new hardware feel like old stuff, etc.
It’s all about impressions, an area where Vista fails miserably.
Edited 2008-05-22 02:53 UTC
What a crock. I don’t misunderstand the features. The average 10-year-old can figure out better ways to handle the user interface. And that bold-faced lie about the Search feature being slow because it searches everything on your hard drive. The first time I ran Search in Vista, it managed to miss every single one of the 60,000 mp3s I had on the hard drive at that time, because they weren’t in indexed locations. Search CAN find them, if it’s properly set up, but it runs slow whether they’re indexed or not. And it sometimes takes minutes to copy individual files from one folder to another.
If those features are so misunderstood by Windows users, why don’t Mac and Linux users misunderstand the same features on their OSes? Hint: because they were better-designed.