InstabIlIty
At launch, we complained that Vista was
significantly less stable than its predecessor.
We experienced more hard locks, crashes,
and blue screens in the first weeks of use
than we had in the entire year prior using
XP. Sadly for Microsoft, our experience was
shared by many early Vista users.
The problems weren’t limited to
high-end, bleeding-edge hardware, either.
People with pedestrian, nonexotic hard-
ware configs reported crashes, instability,
and general wonkiness with Vista on
laptops and desktops, in homebuilt rigs and
OEM machines, and in PCs that origi-
nally shipped with XP. Considering that
improved stability was one of the biggest
promises Microsoft made for Vista, users
were understandably upset.IncompatIbIlIty
Microsoft didn’t make any big promises
about application compatibility, and it’s a
damn good thing. If a desktop application
didn’t follow Vista’s rules for behavior,
Vista wouldn’t let it run. The program
would fail to load, crash on use, or eat the
user’s data, depending on the develop-
ment infraction. And to be clear, we’re
not talking about shareware apps created
by some dude in his basement, we’re
talking about Acrobat Reader, iTunes,
Trillian, and dozens of other programs,
not even counting the antivirus programs
that are rarely compatible with a new OS.
Getting hardware working could
be just as challenging. If you had one
of the millions of perfectly serviceable,
but suddenly incompatible printers or
scanners, you probably felt pretty raw.
We know we did.
Additionally, if you needed to con-
nect to a VPN (virtual private network)
that isn’t supported by Vista’s built-in
client, you were probably out of luck.
Vista shipped without support from
major VPN manufacturers, including
Cisco, leaving work-at-home types out
in the cold.The massive number of compatibility
problems ensured that every user would be
touched by at least one disappointment.performance
We would expect a new version of
Windows to be slower than the previous
one, given immature drivers and new
features that drain CPU cycles and absorb
memory. However, the performance
differential has always been less than
10 percent in the past and only really
evident in hardware-intensive apps, such
as games.
At Vista’s launch, our tests revealed
worse-than-expected performance in
many different tasks and applications.
Gaming performance suffered notably;
using drivers from the launch time frame,
our tests showed as much as a 20 percent
performance difference between Vista
and XP on the same machine. But that
wasn’t the worst of it.
Even common tasks suffered. Large
network file transfers took a ludicrous
amount of time, even on systems
hardwired to gigabit networks. On af-
fected machines, Vista could take days to
transfer a full gigabyte of data! While thatwas a worst-case scenario, many users
complained that file transfers took twice
as long to complete in Vista as in XP.User accoUnt control
Vista brought marked improvements to the
overall security of Windows, one of the few
areas in which the OS actually lived up to
Microsoft’s promises. Unfortunately, one
of the mechanisms that helps enable that
security comes at a high cost—it’s incred-
ibly annoying.
That’s right, we’re talking about User
Account Control, aka UAC. Even if you don’t
know what it’s called, if you’ve used Vista,
you’re undoubtedly aware that you need
to prepare your clicking finger when the
desktop darkens and your trusty PC starts
asking whether you really meant to install
that application you just double-clicked.
UAC prompts you whenever an app tries to
write to an area of your hard disk or registry
that Windows finds suspicious. This seems
like a good thing, right? It would be, except
UAC prompts every time the installer does
something suspicious. We’ve had Vista
prompt us no fewer than five times before
completing installs it questioned.
The problem is compounded byvista
(^) revisited
the problem reports and solution wizard
finds lots of problems but few solutions.
30 q MAXIMUMPC | oct 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
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