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I remember making a comment when Vista was released after testing it for my company and basically said that IT sector will turn down Vista(not so politely), on basis what I have found about maintenance and number of critical bugs. Microsoft employee(Brandon_Live) jumped into discussion and said that he has no idea why would I said that and that IT industry simply loves or is in love with Vista.

We see now how big that love is, and for a reason.

Maybe it's just me, but for someone who's playing around with Active Directory and server services, you clearly have no idea what you're doing. DHCP assigns IP addresses out even if you're not on the domain, that's obvious and you should know that. What would be the point in assigning IP addresses to only computers on the domain? If a new computer joins it should have an IP address assigned from the pool to prevent conflicts. You seem to think because it's not on the domain that it shouldn't get an IP address, which would cause nothing but problems (Conflicting with computers actually part of the domain for example).

Dunno about others' experiences, but I eventually switched back to XP because I didn't like the UI. All the features are nice and driver support and performance was decent on my PC. But the Explorer UI (compulsory autosorting, compulsory full row select), Networking UI (connections far far away), removal of file types tab, not being able to search inside files which are not indexed etc all turned me mad. So it's XP till Windows 7 arrives hopefully with a UI as good as XP. By UI, I dont mean the theme colors and all, I mean the powerfullness vs the dumbing downness and unnecessary redesigns in many places, which take away minor features here and there.

Depends on how he has his LAN set up.

If everything is routing through his Windows 2003 Server box, then that box should control what client gets what IP and what net access they have. If you set up the Server box for Intranet-style access control, you can restrict certain MAC numbers (NIC controllers) or user accounts to certain limits on network access. For example, you can make only User A and User B (on whatever PC they log into) on that LAN have internet access while all the other users on the other machines only have access to the local Intranet (File server, database server, Intranet-only HTML pages, etc.) Or, you can set the Intranet so that any user that logs into a PC with a certain MAC address gets a certain level of net access. And you can do combinations of the above as well. It depends on what edition of Server 2003 you're running and what optional components you have installed.

I agree, I'll be damned if that site isn't getting weirder by the day than even The Register.

Anyway, sure, Vista without service packs isn't all too hot in all cases, and many prefer XP, while some have the hardware, software, and usage needs to make for a still pretty pleasant experience. This was also starting to become well-known at least 6 months ago.

Uhm... Not true, for what I am experiencing.
I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ desktop and a HP Pavilion dv2088ea notebook (AMD Turion 64 X2). The second one is running on Vista x64, while the desktop has both Vista x64 and XP x32.
I use Sony Vegas 7 to edit my personal movies and, when I have to render the final video file, due to lack of hard disk space in the desktop PC, I choose to render the file over the network, in a shared folder of the notebook (by selecting FIle > Render As... > "MYKYNBVideo". This action requires 3 hours, 1 less than the same action performed on the desktop machine.
I am using Vista x64 on a daily base and I am really satisfied with it. I really don't understand all these complaints: they are the same complaints raised in 2001, when XP was released.

Not really, XP suffered from none of these problems.

I wish I took a screenshot now, but earlier I transferred a 1.4gb file from the laptop onto a USB2 memory stick, and it barely touched 1mbps, absolutely stupid performance. Same as transferring over a network, doesn't go much faster.

Network transfers are a joke under an unpatched Vista, that's what you get when you want to play big and develop a brand new TCP/IP stack where it took over 10 years to stabilize and perfect the BSD stack everyone else is using

Yeah that was stupidly unfunny. They came out with some trash that they didn't want to put the effort into making new tools before the release of server 2008, instead they wanted customers to sit there either using workarounds to get the 2003 tools to work, even when they do there are many problems (i.e the icons not appearing in users and computers) or forcing us to RDC into machines which makes things take much longer.

If 2008 was out like a month after Vista then yea... but leaving us in the dry for a year was just stupid

They're looking at it from a system admins perspective, not as a home user. Vista is simply not ready for the enterprise environment, it's barely suitable for home.

Barely suitable for home? I've had absolutely nothing but a pleasant time with it.

the guy who claims he prevented over 1000 vista sales to businesses did them one hell of a favor yes

as a sysadmin, I tried it, even rolled it out to a few power users, we rolled back to XP within 3 weeks of testing
- no adminpak, installation workarounds for that are messy as hell
- TCP/IP Auto Tuning ****s around with everything, can't even have a stable RDP session to my servers to get around the loss of the adminpak tools
- no group policy updates will be available until Server 2008 is out to administer vista specific settings
- want to remote control a workstation running vista to troubleshoot an user? no 3rd party tools will work thanks to the DWM, only RDP works
- UI selection bugs leading to accidental deletion of whole folder trees, that one went through beta reported several times and unpatched
the list is friggin' long trust me

regarding home users, it's another story, given driver support is there, which is the case with most recent components, and the system is sized accordingly, the OS behaves correctly and within the bounds of what a home user would expect (except the selection bugs, many will be bitten by that one)

Funny, several of your bugs don't exists or have been patched since long ago, Quality sysadmin work you'e doing there.

Agreed.

Also to change OS means overtime for the sysadmins (and a lot of headache). And for a corporate level, every extra acquisition must be justified (usually related with production), vista in this aspect give NOTHING, users are not more productive in vista rather in XP and hardware manufactured there still are giving support to XP and 2K.

Coming as part of SP1 in the form of Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). Whilst this should have been right from day one, I have no problem with Remote Desktop, which leads me to



You have some kind of funky setup problem. Neither on my home domain, nor on my work domain do I have dramas with RDP sessions. This must be a mis-configuration.



Wrong, Group Policy can be managed from any Vista Business, Enterprise or Ultimate machine. Simply install GPMC and connect to your domain.



Only RDP works? What exactly is the limitation of Remote Desktop here. Furthermore, I believe the current beta of UltraVNC has significantly improved Vista support.



This is a relatively minor UI bug, and whilst it is a bug, in Microsofts defense, it will pop up confirming you to delete the folder, just like when you delete anything else. If you're not reading the messages that popup in front of you, then you have more to worry about then UI bugs.

Overall, UAC has made administrating Windows in a corporate environment significantly easier as now hundreds (if not thousands) of applications work fine without Admin privileges, making the corporate environment much safer. There is also a significant number of new (and useful) group policy settings. Two I can think of off the top of my head are greatly increased folder redirection options, and polices relating to removable USB drives.

Last edited by kl33per on 06 Oct 2007 - 05:24

I agree 100% and it works fine in most of the companies that I have installed vista with few switches back to xp
several with xp on virtual machines for printers.......

Please re-read the article. It is about corporate users, who require things like admin packs for remote administration and so forth.

No one is doubting that you, personally, as a home user aren't happy with your Vista.

It's just providing an information as I see it. Would You like to buy a car that will break down after 5km, or would You like that someone with similar expirience told You about the problems that Your new car suffers?

So you want NeoWin to stick its head in the sand because you don't want to hear what the rest of the world says about Vista? NeoWin normally doesn't write articles, you know, it provides pointers to /excerpts from articles written by others and right now there are a lot of people that are unhappy with Vista (rightly so or not, it doesn't matter) so that is reflected here. Just be patient and it will all die down (the negative articles or the OS, one of the two )

If you take issue with the articles then why don't you write a blog entry outlining the flaws in the articles that have been linked recently?

Then there are severe issues with *that particular old PC*.

I am running Vista Ultimate *today* on an *old PC*; in fact, a three-year-old PC that I built myself, in 2004. Other than upgrades driven by increased storage (larger SATA HD in 2005), versatility (dual-layer DVD burner over Christmas 2005), or gaming performance (replaced AIW 9700PRO AGO with X1650PRO AGP mid-July of this year), the core system is identical to what it was when I built it. Not one upgrade was driven by Vista, or to replace a product unsupported by Vista. In fact, only the graphics card upgrade took place since I switched to Vista full-time (and it was an upgrade I would have made anyway, Vista or no Vista); even more telling, I didn't even change graphics drivers when doing the upgrade (for a very simple reason: the same graphics driver suite supported both the old and new cards). Old PC, not just old, but mostly *dead* hardware, yet Vista (Ultimate x86) has zero issues supporting said hardware. This is, in fact, one of two *old PCs* running Vista Ultimate (the other my my Mom's relatively newer Dell Dimension 2400C). She had *one* Vista-related driver issue (the Lexmark inkjet printer that came with the Dell; replacing it with an HP Deskjet solved the problem). The driver issue was a *Lexmark* problem, not a Dell problem (or a Microsoft problem). I have an (even older) HP Deskjet 940C (the Deskjet isn't merely older than Vista, it's older than Mom's Dell) which Vista supported via included drivers (however, every operating system I have thrown at that particular printer supports it, including every Linux distribution and even Solaris for x86 and OS X 10.4.10); that sort of absolutely worry-free (and largely idiotproof) support is why I have never hesitated to recommend HP's non-AIO inkjet USB printers.

Part of being a sysadmin *includes* doing due dilligence regarding driver support for your existing hardware (this is critical when planning an operating system upgrade, whether minor or major, as part of the cost of the upgrade will include any necessary hardware changeouts); if you don't do your due-dilligence in this area, you didn't do the whole job! Also, whatever you do, don't take the IHV's word for it; check in with the users of the hardware (both within and outside your organization); brand-neutral forums (such as Neowin's own Hardware Hangout and HardForum) are good places to check experiences outside your company with particular hardware configurations.

Software: if you have a custom application (especially a line-of-business application) this is where you are most likely to have OS-migration issues. Worse, the ISV may be well aware of it, and will use the issue to put you further behind the figurative *eight ball*. Data point: in 2000, I was working for a then-large cable-TV provider that also provided broadband-Internet service to a major percentage of their customer footprint; I was an employee in one of their call centers handling sales and support for that service. We were in the middle of migrating all the desktops in all the call centers from Windows NT Workstation 4.x to Windows 2000 Professional. Problem: we were *held hostage* by one particular version of one particular line-of-business application. (We ran three particular versions of this application, dpending on what area needed coverage; only one was incompatible with Windows 2000 Professional.) The issue came down to one DLL. However, the ISV had us behind the eight ball in terms of licensing provisions, and they knew it. The ISV wanted increased deployment of the application at the same pricing per seat. Naturally, the bean-counters screamed. (When we in the call-centers found out, *we* screamed, but for a far different reason: the particular application is *not* easy to learn, and is completely unlike the major line-of-business application we use to perform the same tasks in most of our markets. In short, there was no real bennies, even for us.) The end result: the ISV settled for a lower cost per seat, and helped us reduce the *version hell* we had been dealing with (the new development let us reduce the number of versions of the application we had to deploy from three to two). If your ISVs are doing this to you, start looking seriously at new ISVs: is it really worth the pain?

Yep, I work imaging PCs for the Navy and USMC, the navy is just now 95% XP, and the Marines are about 50% into the switch to XP, everything else we use is 2K, Vista isn't even on the radar yet, not even in preliminary testing.

Unfortunately the military would always be hellbent on security and against the innovations, accepting new things last. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" in its entirety. No offence, thats just the way the cookie crumbles.

My company where I am a Regional System Engineer, will deploy Vista AND Office 2007 on all new computers starting November in Europe.

Sorry, but that's stupid. They will never support Vista on the university WiFi network?

In our network all Windows OSes are supported; they just need to pass a security check. (Side note: before August Vista didn't require this check, yet this did not in any way prevent Vista machines from using the network.) MacBooks and laptops with Linux can also connect to the WiFi network without such security checks. Everyone gets access to the network regardless of OS choice. Is there a particular reason why your university blocks out Vista laptops?

Last edited by rm20010 on 05 Oct 2007 - 20:02

Not sure how you are correlating Vista on WiFi, nor what Hillbillie University you are referring to...

However, if look at almost 'every' University in the nation, the recommended Laptop/Promoted Laptops for students are all running Vista...

Seriously, go look at schools, start with Duke.

That's right. I still see TONS of business use W2k, hell just a few years ago, I installed W2k on a PC I built for a friend. He's still using it 4 years later. My roomies computer crashed out with XP. For some reason XP wouldn't load because of a conflict with the SATA controller....installed W2k. It's still a great OS, I don't like the color scheme one bit, but after a little tweaking, it'll look fine.

How many businesses used XP right out of the gate?

Enterprises (and even midsized to large businesses) are often among the *last* to migrate to a new operating system usually because of line-of-business application-compatibility concerns, or hardware-compatibility concerns. (Government agencies, including the military, can be considered *enterprises* for the purpose of this comparison; in fact, that is indeed how they approach IT today.) Further exacerbating the issues for both sorts of enterprises are:

1. Determining what hardware is incompatible with the upgrade, and the disposition of said hardware.
2. Acquisition costs of replacement hardware.
3. Training costs.

All three issues are the responsibility of the system administrator; it is how the sysadmin deals with these issues that determines how successful an OS migration will be within an enterprise.

Further complicating the issue of operating-system migration in the enterprise are external (to the sysadmin, not to the enterprise) issues such as the migration budget (large enterprises, more often than not, tend to buy IT on the lowest-bidder system). The issue with the government agency/enterprise is that the procedures are actually written into law and regulation, and there are conflicts between them depending on the contracting vehicle used to acquire the existing and new equipment (there are still disputes that govern how older equipment is disposed of, depending on how it was originallyu acquired, that are still wending their way through the courts). And that is just *hardware*. In terms of *application software*, the issue is far worse.

Sounds like you have lazy or stupid IT department at your company, any reasonable IT people are at least testing Vista deployments, even if the company roll over period is a couple of years off.

But seriously, hanging on to NT 4.0 until 2004, that is not only a security nightmare, but just poor IT...

Didn't you know? Vista's nick name IS "Pain in the Ass". j/k, sorta

It's because this sort of news sell. I bet you haven't seen the awesome quantities of comments in other articles, it's just made of pure win!

Seriously, if you just bought something about 600$, and people starts telling you that the awesome piece of fashion you just bought is seriously flawed, won't you strike back? Yeah it's hard for them, they won't tell anyone that they've made a big mistake, like some sort of religion.

Anyways, it could work SOMEDAY for Home use... but for Enterprise use? You're kidding me, right? There's a bunch of Linux servers right here, including Astaro (security gateway), and judging by the problem that happened in Sweden not a long time ago, do you THINK I am going to allow people in here migrate to that OS? PLEASE.

#6.3 has a long list of other things that are broken. Take a while and read them.

See this is where the 'Vista Myth' just gets plain stupid...

You do realize that Microsoft's #1 beta and consulting teams are from large corporate IT departments? This is why 'Business' gets access to OSes and product updates before EVEN the top tier end-user beta people.

So with 90% of the top companies and corporations involved in 'testing' and providing feedback to Microsoft, you honestly think 'your' experience with 'business' trumps all the other 'business testing' done by far more competent IT departments and 'corporate' end-user testing?

The problem with Vista... People like to hate MS and IT people tend to stick with what they know and if they remain ignorant about a technology or product, they will hate it, instead of taking the time to invest intellectually so they know it as well as previous technologies. This is a common theme, and if you watch even 'good' IT people you will find them using techniques that are considered outdated or cumbersome on modern OS technologies, just because they 'learned' to do things the old way, and only have evolved the 'old ways' instead of learning the changes in technology. Watch IT people, even on basic things, they browse folders like they are using File Manager or a DOS GUI instead of using the GUI in a more productive manner as current UI concepts allow.

Forget the eye candy and transparent windows, they are not even enabled on Optiplex GX280 and the likes

The actual reasons are much deeper, BitLocker, fantastic network diagnostic, sidebar (no 3rd party ****), search built-in everywhere, great compatibility with Office 2007, protection (which you can turn off easily in case you hate it) - that would be the first reasons for me to migrate my users.

No, you in a corporate environment should NOT be listening to home/consumer based marketing, and should understand the massive architectual differences in Vista and how these changes do directly relate to improving your corporate infrastructure as well as the business focused UI and feature improvements.

Strap Vista to a Windows 2008 server, and people will get the 'reasons' and the magic behind the technologies.

Even a secretary searching for a document on a 1tb share and getting an instant result from millions of files will 'increase' productivity, and this is just one 'tiny' example that most 'corporate' IT do understand and are 'excited' about with Vista.

It is strange that a lot of bashing here is from people 'claiming' to be from corporate environments, but like I mention above, MS's testing of both the OS architectually and from a UI perspective is done almost exclusively by 90% of the top corporations. Windows specifically is designed by working with these companies, and the non-business consumer experience is a secondary aspect to development.

Even the top tier beta testers do not get access to products or provide feedback until most corporations have signed off on the product. This is a known fact, and no I'm not talking about MSDN or Technet betas either.

For Vista to be successful, Admins gotta teach people not to revert to "classic" interfaces, but use Vista in new ways.
Then you get some good effect. Nobody should try to work on Vista as they did on XP - find new ways, and yes that requires time.

In my company, I started offering Vista to selected few people (Starting with myself), so the others could see that Vista is not scary, outright cool and along with Office 2007 can increase your productivity - if you choose to spend 2-4 hours to master it.

Now the public interest has grown and we plan to deploy Vista and Office 2007 on all new laptops and desktops (compulsory). The reason is that the first people who get the new hardware are developers and high level support guys, who are computer professionals and will in theory have less problems in learning new. Then the word of mouth will do it for the rest. One year later I intend to have 90% on Vista (except those few who are bound by stupid policies about their OSes).

[quote=EastExpert said,#26.1]For Vista to be successful, Admins gotta teach people not to revert to "classic" interfaces,[quote]

No... Admins should first learn the 'benefits' of the new UI and teach the users how to increase productivity based on the UI constructs.

MS works with a lot of corporations and their users to design the UI to be faster and richer, so flipping the UI to classic and telling users to work with the OS like it is File Manager or a DOS GUI, is freaking insane.

I see 'IT' people still using concepts that were obsolete with the 'document centric' Win95 interface, and the productivity difference is astounding when using the new UI as designed.

PS.
In Vista, if you turn the UI to 'classic' or even 'basic' when the Hardware supports Aero, you reduce display performance from 2x to 10x.

With Aero off, only DX7 techniques are used when accelerating GDI/GDI+/WPF drawing, with Aero on, the full scale of the acceleration enhancements are turned on, which means even a legacy application drawing a bitmap will get accelerated by using 3D acceleration of the GPU.

Vista also uses a non-double buffered Vector/Bitmap composer when running Aero. And this reduces how often an application 'has' to redraw and does away with 'tearing' again speeding up even old applications.

Vista users, do a test yourself. Open AutoCad, AI, CorelDraw, Photoshop, etc... Open a complex drawing, and time the drawing(on screen rendering) time of the complex drawing/document. Then turn Aero 'off' and time it. You will find a 2x to 10x speed difference, and also notice the screen draws 'cleaner' with Aero ON.

Hey douchebag, if you've used MS OS'es for 25 years you would remeber how XP was when it came out, and Win 95. You are a disease

I beg to differ. I gave two Linux distros (openSuSE 10.2 and Ubuntu 7) a honest chance on my machines. I get turned away from them for various reasons: for Ubuntu it kept freezing at the login screen for my desktop. For openSuSE it likes to shut off window decorations without warning if XGL was enabled. Yes, I know XGL is still not 100% stable, but wasn't this supposed to rival Aero? And I thought Vista's Windows Update took forever... it takes literally a century for updating Linux distros.

In any case, I don't go around ****ing on Linux-related threads all the time about how I disagree with people having a better experience with Linux distros than Vista. But apparently because Vista is made by the world's Big Brother it automatically grants users the right to flame on threads with the protection of their fellow flamers. And yes, this also gives OSS-related sites to bleep out pro-Vista comments, no matter how reasonable they are, on sites that promote anti-Vista drivel.

Just as I had said, M$ apologists don't have a clue. They're really full of themselves.

Ubuntu gets a major update every 6 months, in fact 7.10 is due out later this month, Windows every few years or so. I tried many different versions of Linux as well, and was turned off on most of them, but Ubuntu turned out to be the best of them all. If it locks at startup just reboot. Windows did the same thing every now and then as well.



Hardly. As I had said, I've used M$ OSes for around 25 years. It took Vista to turn me off of it. I'm not the only one either, but a quickly growing number. For every one who hasn't had any problems there seems to be several more who have had nothing but trouble with Vista.

Thanks for proving my point.

You wanna explain (in enough details) why Vista is crap? If you say Vista is so unstable and unreliable, I think there are quite a few people on here who beg to differ. I do agree that Vista SUCKS on hardwares that DO NOT have 100% working drivers for it.

I agree with you that most Apple fanboys are pretty close minded, no doubt in that.

For Linux, if you have an ATI graphics card, life will be a living hell but that's just ATI not liking Linux. I remembered trying to find a linux driver for a network printer at my old company, boy did that sucked. I don't know about the higher learning curve on linux, it's just how much time do you have on your hand.

UAC pop-ups, either turn it OFF or set that file/folder to let EVERYONE have full control and it won't pop up again FOR that folder/file. Is it annoying? Nah just takes time to config just like Linux.

Last edited by kouhii00 on 06 Oct 2007 - 02:14

the reason there is well the view we have in vista for all programs is because it is more efficient and explorer style veiw and works well. i mean if you have 100+ programs on your system like some people do it gets frustrating to pan over to the right to find the programs and if they have extended menus within the program on the start menu then it expands more and so with vista they did a much better job something alot easier to handle such issues

They don't even need that, remember the good old days of standalone computerized word processors? I got a few to be dusted off and good as new and some ink cartridges and proprietary disks to boot.