Update from an early adopter
Vista ,
Maybe the biggest boondoggle since millenium so far.
Just read that they were releasing service pack 1 in beta next month.
From my experience in the last 8 months it is still beta.
The only saving grace is that this is my home system and I am willing to tinker.
System is a
AMD64 x2 4600
2 gig ram
Asus A8N SLI
2x 7800 GT in SLI 163.44 beta drivers
Creative Audigy 4 card
3 Sata Disks of 150,250,400 gb
I am struck today reading a mickey soft blog about the release of this sp and the amusing fact that it is to correct problems that have occured.
The listing includes drivers ,software and a few other items .
I will list some of the things that I see,
Not to beat around the bush but for the last month to start this machine I would see the BSOD 3 times and bounce back to bios before something would click. In many cases there wasn't even a reference as to what has caused the problem.
After another auto update last week I saw that the error message was coming from an ata driver. When I checked the last ,drivers installed must have come from MS since they were dated late june.These are system drivers from the looks and the nvidia chipset drivers seem to hook into them.Go figure.This week another update a lo and behold no more crashing.
That is a simple example,other issues briefly seem to come from device drivers.Support? The answer is in a word is None
You can see that I am up to a beta driver 164 from Nvidia, this number started at 50 something. Still they have what appears to most of the kinks out,more on this a bit later.It does look good though sometimes and that some of the vaunted features are still dead ie AA
Creative......a big Foxtrot Union is what I seem to be getting from both CL and MS .According to creative most functions that were working on XP are now DNF. I am tempted to pull the card out and run my onboard realtek chip onboard.From what I understand it may mean that my machine might run faster. AS for CL they just released their ? driver which is supposed to give back certain functionality under specific games . BTW they will charge you $10 for this as well.
Other misses , I have a Sony DVD camera which will not function in USB connection to my PC Sony says it will not work.My pinnacle editing package is now onto another Verison since their version freakin 10 never worked and now I need version 11 for Vista and please pay $90 for the update and they do not support my older pinnacle pctv usb in Vista
(As I side note people I wince when I hear complaints about AH updates , my dear readers these are a spring morning breeze compared the hurricanes and tornado's I have seen.)
The only bright point driver wise seems to be Saitek and TIR where they did put something out that worked, and if not they explained why the item wasn't working.
On to the software ,it is nice,and there are a lot of bells and whistles that make it seem like it is nice and behaved and that MS does care what things work and don't .That being said I will relate 1 problem of a few
I have window ultimate which had the Media center function built in.
When I first installed it last January it didn't work ,I could not connect my xbox 360 to it and it would shell out after 10 seconds .About 2 weeks later I received a notice that the problem was due to something in the Nvdia driver set and that an upgrade of the driver should solve the problem.
Presto it works .
This june my original 360 went RROD (red ring o death) so I went through the entire rma proceedure etc ,the replacement RROD'd after 3 hours of use and yet another showed up 3 weeks ago.
Guess what? The media center program shells out after 30 seconds.
Here is the rub nowhere on any MS website have I found anything other than phone technical support to see what is causing this.I have even posted on the microsoft forums and I see others have had and are listing the same problem with the same error codes .
Now admittedly these MS sites are user run, but to be ignored as I see others posting the same as well strikes me as almost a conspiracy of silence.
Further reading elsewhere seems to indicate that it may be a problem again with Nvidia drivers ,or it may be some warped DRM function checking my files, or it maybe the security of net frame or MS's own net defender that maybe causing it.
The real issue though is the total silence from MS on the issue .
MS provides a problem reports and solution menu for software bugs and it seems to me after a time that it is only there to delay me from going ballistic.
This is the exact opposite of the experience that I had with MS over XP,98,95 or dos 6.2 or 5.0. It seemed that they were more open on info than they are now.
Vista will I keep it ?
I think that I have gone this far I will .The above may seem critical and it is for reason , but there are something it seems to do well.
Is it really production ,no this is really beta even SP1 will still be beta.
Snivly
ps please excuse any typos since I an freehanding this .
