Microsoft Vista: The post I thought I'd never write
Welcome to the post I never thought I'd write. I'll just come right out and say it out loud;I Love Microsoft Vista.
There. I said it, and I'm not being sarcastic at all. After running Vista Business on my Lenovo T60, and Vista Ultimate on my old home built desktop I never thought I would be writing this post at all. My initial experience with those two installs left me with a very poor taste in my mouth and after a couple of months I returned to running Windows XP on the laptop.
I really thought the Lenovo T60 would be able to handle Vista properly. It has a fancy Windows Vista sticker on it, it came preinstalled with Vista and the system specifications seemed to be adequate. Sadly that wasn't the case, and XP does a much better job on that particular piece of hardware.
As for the home desktop, a home built box sporting an old Pentium 4 3.0Ghz HT CPU and 3GB ram and a ATI x1900 GPU, Vista was a real drag. That box ran sluggishly and was pretty much just annoying. I tried sticking to Vista on it though, if for nothing else to get to know it properly. Then faith, karma, or whatever other system you might place your trust in, stepped in and that box silently died one afternoon when I was at work.
I promptly started looking for new components and to start rebuilding the desktop at home. I ended up with the following:
- ABIT IP35 PRO, P35, Socket-775, ATX, Silent Otes2, 2xGbLAN, DDR2, 2xPCI-Ex16
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz Socket LGA775, 8MB
- Corsair TWIN2X 6400C4DHX DDR2, 2048MB - Kit w/two CL4 1GB Dimm's, E.P.P and DHX
- Antec Performance One P180 Miditower, Black Aluminum
I've been using the newly built system now for about a week and so far I'm loving it. It is extremely responsive and I couldn't be more happy with it. I have yet to try out some of the heavy duty things I want to use the system for, like running VMware Server to test Gallery on IIS7/IIS8 and so on, but by the looks of it this won't be much of a problem at all.
As for deciding to run both 64bit and Vista, I have yet to experience any driver issues at all. The only software issue I've had so far was that Virtual Clonedrive doesn't run on 64bit Vista, but there are alternatives for it available that does work. All drivers that I have had a use for are available for Vista x64, no problems there at all.
Now, I'm sure a lot of the Vista skeptics out there will come at me saying "If Vista runs smoothly on that system, just imagine what Windows XP or Linux would do on the same hardware". Well, sure. I'm sure that both would run great, but that is not my point. Vista runs so well on now that there is no way I am moving back. to XP. And as far as I'm concerned, running Linux on my desktop is a non-issue. I use Linux servers every day, even manage a few, but in my view it's just not ready to be a desktop OS. It might be some day, but now? No way (Sorry Ubuntu).
As for all the Vista eyecandy, well, I love that too now. Now that my hardware is good enough it works really well. On the old setup it was really annoying, now it's great. It's quick, stable and I've yet to have any issues with it at all.
My conclusion has to be that Vista is excellent, as long as you have the hardware to support it. Never mind the minimum requirements, those are not to be even considered. Go flat our and spend some real money on your setup if you want to use Vista. If you do have a hardware setup similar to the one I have, your Vista experience will be something completely different than what you might be experienced before. For home usage, it's just about perfect. At least for me, now that I have the hardware to support it.
There is of course still issues with Vista. Corporations looking to roll it out on a mass scale in their enterprise are facing huge issues with it. I know that there is no way the company I work for will be able to do a rollout of Vista any time soon. When we buy hardware for our users, we don't buy top of the line items. As everyone else we are looking to minimize cost, and lots of our desktop computers run on Celeron D CPUs with mainboard integrated graphics and a small amount of RAM. After all, the sole purpose of these machines is to enable our users to do their job. Most of the time that consists of running Office, Lotus Notes and various other applications that doesn't put that much of a strain on the local CPU. We are looking for manageability, stability and and basically "getting the job done" features. Vista doesn't give us much in that department, nor does the hardware requirements it sports.
If it was up to me, Microsoft would go the same route with desktop OS' as they are doing with Windows Server 2008. They should provide a full "bells and whistles" version for the Home market and a stripped down low hardware requirement version for the enterprise. Base them on the same kernel and stability/security model, but remove all non-essential features and let the enterprises build their own versions based on their particular needs. I am not suggesting the current model of Home, Business and Ultimate in various incarnations, but rather a much more modular setup that provides a very basic set of OS functionality that can be modified to include other modules depending on need.
I would love to be able to roll out a Vista version that was customized to actually do what I need, in a corporate environment but the versions available to be at this moment in time will not let me be able to do that. Given that the trend seems to be going towards a virtualization of the desktop in corporate environments, I think Microsoft needs to take a long hard look at the monolithic model they currently use. Perhaps they are even thinking like this already, by implementing virtualization in the core of Server 2008, thus enabling running former kernel level services in their own virtualized layer that could be dynamically started as needed. I don't know what the future of desktop operating system holds, but I do think that the time for monolithic releases has passed. It's time to start rethinking the desktop operating system and how we install, maintain and customize it. Especially in an enterprise environment.
So, to summarize this whole post in two simple statements;
- Vista at Home: Excellent if you have the hardware.
- Vista in the Enterprise: Not there yet, nor will it be for a very long time.
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Published January 20, 2008 23:01
11 comments
Tagged with enterprise, microsoft, system management, virtualization and vista
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January 21, 2008 7:28am
“If Vista runs smoothly on that system, just imagine what [MS-DOS] would do on the same hardware!” ;) Seriously though, when we get bigger monitors, we go to higher resolutions, we don’t sit there and drool over 640x480 looking HUGE on a 32 inch LCD TV monitor. I see upgrading to Vista the same way.
I’ve been happy with Vista since day one. I had a couple monitor issues but overall, I don’t even think twice about the Vista hater posts. They are missing out and I’m not.
You are right about Vista in the Enterprise too; I can’t see my company using Vista anytime soon. Hell, we switched to XP in late 2003 haha. Unfortunately, the same can be said about Win2k8 and SQL2k8.
January 21, 2008 12:32pm
Chrissy, I think adoptation of Windows Server 2008 will be much quicker than the implementation of Vista. What we “freaks” do on the server side doesn’t really affect our users directly in the same way, which makes it much easier to implement new servers on a new platform. There is a huge difference between server and desktop implementation.
As far as I’m concerned, Vista is a home OS not a corporate one. At least not in the current incarnation.
January 21, 2008 3:18pm
The bottom line of the article seems to be: Windows Vista is great because it runs smoothly on my (fast) system.
The article reads like a strawman argument. Being slow / hardware hungry is just one of the massive drawbacks of Windows Vista. It’s easy to refute that argument by throwing more hardware/money at the box.
Changing the operating system to Windows Vista comes with a lot of costs: Windows Vista itself, the time it takes to accomodate yourself with all the changes since Windows XP, the time it takes to check software and driver compatibility and to evaluate alternative solutions, the money for a faster machine, etc. I’m sure there are papers about these costs. :)
Your article seems to take it for granted that everyone seems to agree that Windows Vista can easily offset all those costs with all the improvements and advantages it has over Windows XP (or other operating systems). But if that were the case, Windows Vista wouldn’t get all the bad press / opinion pieces it gets.
I guess most agree that the new eye candy is nice. And there are some new wizards that are nice too. But the big features of Vista are all pretty controversial: DRM is where a lot of engineering effort went in Vista. And DRM isn’t for the users, it’s for the digital content distributors. Vista security may have excellent improvements below the surface, but what the end user sees is “Allow/Deny” for everything and how that ends up being used in the real world has been discussed in other places. Etc.
So, you love Windows Vista because it works and because of the eye candy? Great for you. :)
Maybe I missed an earlier article of yours that explains how great Vista is because of all the useful new features and improvements if it wasn’t just for the sluggish performance on your hardware. Then I could kinda see where you’re coming from. But not this way, if it’s just because it works. :)
PS: Don’t tell me you didn’t expect emotional replies to such an article. ;)
Offtopic: @Habari/theme: It would be nice if there was a link near the comment submission form that explained what kind of markup (bbcode, subset of HTML, …)is allowed.
January 21, 2008 9:37pm
Andy: As I said above, with the proper hardware Vista runs great. I don’t think Microsoft will sell all that many upgrade licenses for existing XP users though, but since Vista comes bundled with new hardware they will get market penetration that way.
I also state that I think that enterprise level rollouts on a mass scale is not something we will see shortly anyway, but I guess Microsoft counts OSL Licenses as upgrades anyway. My employer has Vista licenses for all our desktops, we still won’t use them any time soon.
My love for Vista is simply that on proper hardware it runs extremely well. The real hardware requirements might very well be ridiculous, but if you got it you got it. If not, run XP.
I don’t mention money/cost above at all, just because it has not been a factor for me when installing it. I have a free pass for this stuff, at least right now. :-)
January 21, 2008 10:10pm
Vista runs fine on my Core 2 Duo, 2mb Cache, 2Ghz with 2GB RAM and nVidia 8600 laptop.
No away near as high spec as your system, and it runs perfectly.
I’ve also ran it without issue on an AMD Turion 1.6Ghz 1MB cache and it was still fine.
My only issue was with 1GB RAM and a Celeron…
January 22, 2008 8:42am
Marc: Good for you! I might give it another spin on my T60 as it seems like others have better experience with that than I’ve had.
January 22, 2008 2:46pm
I run my laptop with 1 GB RAM and a Intel Core Duo 1,73 GHz but I have many problems! In my opinion you need at least 2 GB RAM that vista will run without problems!
January 22, 2008 8:51pm
h0bbel, you’ve given me hope for Vista. I’ve got a dual core 4G RAM box for my desktop that I really want to switch to 64 bit, but I’ve been afraid of the Vista horror. It looks likes I’ve got the all clear to blow this thing and go home. Excellent.
January 22, 2008 9:57pm
Jesse: On my setup it’s great, particularly Adobe Lightroom. :-)
January 23, 2008 6:10pm
I’m still getting used to Vista. Unfortunately I’ll need to upgrade my laptop before there’s any chance of it working properly there, but I’ve been having a go on a desktop, and I have to say, I like what I see so far!
February 10, 2008 9:10am
I never had so much difficulty deleting and managing files I can’t stand Vista and will go back to XP. I wasted so much time trying to get things to work its obsurd. I did a clean install on a new PC but like many people I had old data I wanted to keep
I suppose if you never had a PC before you might be ok with Vista
cheers, Kevin D.