vista
(^) revisited
Stability
According to now-public internal Microsoft
memos, 18 percent of all Vista crashes
reported during the months immediately
following its launch were due to unstable
Nvidia graphics card drivers.
Microsoft has never issued any public
comment concerning who’s to blame for
the driver crashes, but during our back-
ground conversation, our source conceded
that hardware OEMs were writing WDDM
(Windows Display Driver Model) drivers
for a moving target during Vista’s beta and
release-candidate periods. Our source told
us that because of low-level OS changes,
hardware vendors didn’t have sufficient
time to develop and test their drivers. This
mirrors what Steven Sinofsky, the head of
the Windows team, said in an interview
with Cnet earlier this year: “The schedule
challenges that we had, and the informa-
tion disclosure weren’t consistent with the
realities of the project, which made it all
a much trickier end point when we got to
general availability in January.”
Launch problems aside, once Vista is
updated with SP1, it seems much more reli-
able than it was early on. The Maximum PC
Lab isn’t equipped for long-term stability
testing, but in our anecdotal experience,
Vista’s stability problems are largely fixed,
even on somewhat exotic hardware.
Whether Vista is more stable than WinXP
really depends on the actual hardware
configuration you’re using more than
anything else.
Compatibility
While discussing this story on back-
ground, Microsoft placed blame for
incompatible software and hardware on
its third-party partners. However, during
our on-the-record chat, Lustig simply
said, “I honestly don’t have the exact
numbers for that,” in reference to the
ratio of crashes attributed to Microsoft
versus third-party entities.
Regardless, we’re well aware that
Microsoft had been talking to hard-
ware and software developers about
Vista compatibility issues since the 2005
Meltdown, Microsoft’s annual gaming
conference. At that conference, Microsoft
informed game developers that they
needed to write apps that behaved well,
or they would face problems with Vista.
The requirements were, for the most part,
simple—caveats like not writing to C:/
Program Files/ or C:/Windows/.
It’s also important to note a shameful
truth that everyone in the PC industry is
aware of but rarely discusses: When a new
OS comes out, third-party vendors will
often withhold compatibility support in
order to drive sales of new units, turning
the cost of supporting a new OS from a
liability into a source of revenue. The same
goes for software like antivirus utilities
and some CD/DVD burning apps, both of
which hook into the OS very closely.
SeCurity
The statistics on Vista’s security record
are clear: Vista is the most secure
version of Windows to date. Nonethe-
less, Lustig said that Microsoft made
“changes that have had some short-
term ramifications that we’ve worked
very hard the last year and a half, and
through Service Pack 1, to address.”
Some of these changes may have had
unintended negative consequences, but
Vista has suffered fewer security defects
than any previous version of Windows.
In short, sometimes you just have to
give up flexibility for security. As Lustig
told us, “I believe that those changes are
going to be a fundamental basis for the
integrity of the platform.” We agree.
GaminG performanCe
During our initial June interview, Mi-
crosoft blamed unoptimized videocard
drivers for poor gaming performance. To
confirm this, we tested both the launch
version of Vista and the post-SP1 ver-
sion of Vista with current Nvidia drivers.
Our gaming tests showed only the most
negligible performance differences
between the two OS builds, confirming
that Vista itself was not to blame for
early game performance issues. Rather,
those earliest Vista videocard driv-
ers were the culprits. Indeed, now 18
months after its launch, Vista’s perfor-
mance is within striking distance of
WinXP’s in almost every test we ran.
the impaCt of Sp
Because Vista’s first Service Pack signifi-
cantly improved the struggling OS, we
were surprised that Microsoft didn’t tack
a Second Edition label on it, a la Windows
- Providing measurable improvements
in performance and stability, Service Pack
1 should have been Vista’s saving grace.
No? Lustig told us that despite significant
improvements in most of Vista’s deficient
areas, “there is a lot of leftover concern
[about Vista] based on information folks
have heard anecdotally.”
Quite an admission. Lustig contin-
ued, “The challenge for Microsoft isn’t
necessarily continuing to take the feed-
back and improving the product—we’ve
been doing that since launch and will
continue to. The challenge is getting the
message out that we’ve listened, we’ve
made very positive changes, we’re
seeing very positive results from the
changes we’ve made, and there’s enough
value in the product.”
36 q MAXIMUMPC | oct 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
the upshotMaximum pC’s Final Word on Vista
After spending the last six weeks getting down and dirty with the os—on
multiple hardware configurations, in both 64-bit and 32-bit flavors, and on
mobile and desktop systems—we’re willing to give it a second chance. there
are still tons of things about the os we’re not happy with—starting with the
now-$350 ultimate sKu and working down from there—but from a perfor-
mance, stability, and security standpoint, we’re satisfied with where Vista is
today. You no longer need to sacrifice performance or stability if you want to
run the latest version of Windows.
If you already have Vista, there’s no reason not to use it, but should you go
out and buy Vista today? probably not. With Windows 7’s launch scheduled for
early 2010, we’re actually closer to that date than we are to Vista’s launch. If
you’ve ridden out the storm on Xp so far, it probably isn’t worth investing in
Vista for just a year and a half of use.