Vista gets a date: November 30th (and January 30th, 2007)
By Ryan Block 
posted November 2nd 2006 4:11AM
posted November 2nd 2006 4:11AM
[Via Slashdot, thanks Jonathan]
posted November 2nd 2006 4:11AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
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When Windows 95 came out I didn't want to upgrade because it would lag my PC and 3.1 was stable for me. I did and never went back.
When 98 came out I was reluctant again, but after using it for a few weeks I didn't want to go back to 95.
When XP came out I didn't want to upgrade again. Usual reasons: 98 was working for me and XP seemed bloated. I added some RAM and a new harddisk and away I went. Looking back I don't know how I ever did without XP.
Now that Vista is coming I decided to keep an open mind. After actually using and living with it for a couple of weeks I didn't want to switch back to XP. My absolute only complaint is that I wasn't able to get my laptop which runs debian to detect the file shares on the Vista box. This is likely my own fault and I didn't really mess around with it too much since I was just playing with a beta anyway.
Everything "Just Worked" out of the box, so to speak. It connected with my 360 in seconds, the media center extensions all worked quite well and it even detected and utilized my, now legacy, external sound card.
I like glass: the entire experience of using the OS is much nicer than XP could dream of without shell replacements. As a home user that means something to me.
The performance was snappy on my older system. The only things I had issue with were related to not having current video drivers and I blame that squarely on ATI since... well it's ATI.
It was really the little things that won me over though. The per program volume control is a bloody fantastic idea. The disk manager now supports resizing partitions, something which I could certainly do with in XP.
The built in disk manager now supports more options for managing partitions. Specifically the ability to resize a disk was a breath of fresh air basically obsoleting partition magic.
The new start menu is more organized and the indexed search works fairly well.
There were others just not off the top of my head.
It's funny though, having played with various OSX versions they seem to be more like a service pack to the previous version than the latest MS releases have been yet no one complains about that to apple.
Sure Vista is the first major release for redmond in 5 years, but it really hasn't taken 5 years to code. About 2.5-3 years ago they scrapped EVERYTHING they had written and started over from the server 2003 architecture. I think I remember something about it was to fragile? And if you look at the tangents microsoft has made, the 64 bit version (sure not a different look but it was pretty much a rewrite of the XP code), the tablet version, and the Media Center Edition they are just as much of an upgrade as apple's +.1 upgrades to Mac OSX
And you can't bitch about how windows has stability problems. Most of those problems are created not by bad coding of the OS but of the program or the low quality of the hardware. Should the OS be able to handle the problems yes it should but it can't handle everything, it does a good job handling most of it.
Plus, Vista is a major upgrade most of the promised functionality is there just done about in a different manner, instead of WinFS it has an improved indexing with tech from its search engine to make it go faster. Google doesn't have WinFS but it can still search terabytes of info in less then a second. And being based on server 2003 it is more secure and faster. Even though the minimum system requirements are higher it can still run on a very limited system, pretty much if you buy the cheapest system you can find it will still run Vista. On my desktop it increased FPS on some of my games by 5%-10% with RC2. DX10 will also add a nice improvement in gaming performance.
I Have Windows Vista RC1 It Works Great!!
Yeah, I don't understand why people hate XP and Windows so much. I barely had any crashes on 2000, let alone XP, which pretty much never crashes and if it does it's usually because of another application's problem.
I have Linux installed on my system and have used it quite a bit in a variety of ways - development, media, etc. And I can say that it's gonna be a looooooooooong while, if ever, before it will become most people's main OS. The user-friendliness difference is just too big. I don't care that it's open source and that it's l33t to use Linux. If I have to type console commands and install linux kernel's source in order to install nVidia drivers (personal experience on Mandriva) while I can do it with a few clicks in Windows, I choose Windows.
And the arguments that Windows and MS apps are so insecure are getting old. When are people going to assasinate you more likely - if you're a president or a tribesman?
Sure, MS makes mistakes and buggy stuff but I don't think it deserves the bashing it recently gets. It often looks as if people are just more pissed off at the giant's size and position on the market and the fact that it's got so much influence, rather than at the software itself. Popular and mainstream stuff gets boring after a while and people like to look somewhere else, for something new, find a new idol.
Chances are that in a few years or decades people will be saying the same stuff about Google they are saying about MS now and Google will become the stale.
Cheers.
I'm using linux, and I love it, it is far superior to windows, yet not user friendly, which is why windows prevails. As for me, I could care less when vista comes out, I'm not using it, buying it, or lusting over it!
I programm computer for a living and have tried the Rc1 beta.It is very stable and well secured and the final release could only get better.
But
I must say most of its interface was stolen from Susie Linux