Microsoft Windows Vista review by me...

[kakaroto]

hello,
This thread is basically for mtz4life who asked me what I think about windows Vista and I didn't want to answer him on the other forum to avoid an off topic, since this is the perfect place for off topic subjects, I'll talk about it here...
ok, well, as I said, windows vista build 5308 (the one I tried) is not yet ready to be used.. at least not for me! I've spent one whole day just trying to install it!!! here's the thing, I have SATA drives, which means I need to load my SATA driver before I can access my drives.. in windows XP it works without problems, on install, I press F6, I put the floppy in the drive, it finds my sii3112 driver, loads it, finds my drives, partition/format/install without problems.. for vista... ouch, it's a whole other story, it finds the driver, but it can't load it.. whenever I try to load the driver, it takes all the time it needs to load it and finally says that it couldn't load the files, make sure they aren't corrupted or whatever!! and the same happens whether I try it by booting on the CD or by launching the install from my current Win XP installation..
Oh yeah, when I launch it from my current win XP install I can see my drives, and that's because the driver is already loaded in my windows XP installation so it can access it, but you know what, it seems it's not working correctly yet, because I only see the drives, not the partitions, and when I click on a drive it shows an error 'couldn't get the size of the partition' or somethng like that... I wasted so much time on this... in the end, I realized I couldn't do it.. so I have the second option.. instead of 'install vista', I wanted to 'upgrade to vista'.. which means it would upgrade my current windows XP into vista.. oh no, I won't destroy my OS for this, so I created a new partition and installed a fresh copy of windows XP in it so that I could upgrade THAT windows... ok, windows installed, I try to upgrade.. oups, I can't even get to the screen where I need to choose upgrade/install.. I enter the serial number and it crashes saying it couldn't find a DecodeSomething function entry point in kernel32.dll!!! it couldn't work until I installed ALLL windows updates... so I had to go to SP2 and isntall all the other security upgrades... which takes ALOT of time.. once all that is done, it was able to check my serial number... how stupid is that? it decrypts my serial number by using a function from kernel32.dll from the installed system, not from the DVD
anyways, once I got paste that, I tried 'upgrade', it showed me a "compatibility check" screen in which it stayed for maybe 30 minutes without any change... it just hangs here into an infinite loop or whatever... I tried many times, and no way I can get past the compatibility check... I almost gave up until I had a little idea...
I was using a 'server' serial key, now I tried with a 'client' serial key, and the compatibility check worked, it takes less than a second!! it showed me some errors, some updates I had to do or whatever.. but since the installation is not yet complete, there was so little text that I didn't know what they wanted me to do, so I just pressed next... and there goes the installation, no messages, a pseudo-progressbar and it takes A LONG TIME.. I left it there installing and had to go out, it said it would install automatically and reboot, when I came back home later that night, I found a nice little BSOD (blue screen of death), the famous blue screen of windows... too bad, I reboot the PC and yeahhh, windows vista was installed.. I have no idea in which stage that BSOD appeared, but anyways, I could take a look at vista, so I was happy.. and no way I would 'retry' (would need to reformat, install XP, do all the upgrades and then install vista), so it works, yes, but it's a bit weird, I have to 'unknown devices' for which I'm unable to find the drivers and for which I have no idea what the device is... the desktop/explorer.exe keeps crashing and restarting from time to time.. everything is pretty slow, opening a directory is really slow because of the fancy way it wants to display its content.. a huge directory defaults to showing the files in 'details' mode which seems to be not working because I see no files at all... I was tired, so I just had time to 'install drivers', which didn't always install..
it seems the requirement for vista is a Pentium 1.8GHz with 2GB of RAM and at least a gforce fx 5900 or something like that... at least, that's what I heard... and seeing it, it's great, and it probably needs such a huge machine..
all I can say is that vista really looks great but it needs to be 100 times more stable before I'll ever use it.
I didn't get time to use it yet, because I just installed it yesterday night, and I just woke up, but the installation was horrible and the little time I spent using it was a pain since it kept restarting the desktop and rebooting...
It's very user friendly, so easy to use, soooo eye candy... so much nice features... and the new toolkit looks nice althought I think it's a bit too big... (menus especially)
I think that's it! if others also tried windows vista and have comments, here's the forum!

[Phil]

Hi,
I didn't tried Vista but I am surprised that your review is so objective :p
By the way I want to precise ( I installed FC5 today for the second time on a PC with SATA) all was done automatically no need of the special disk without you can't do anything and by the way for once all my devices were recognized perfectly !! :d

For Vista, well, I would say that a Pentium 1.8Ghz it's so huge for installing an OS...

Well it's the troll of this topic !! :d

[mtz4life]

..wow, that must have been frustrating ...cant help it but wonder what if everyone was required to install windows like what most linux users do ..i am sure if it was some linux distro, you would have given up a long time ago ..

[NoWhereMan]

ARGH! Please, Kakaroto add some blank lines between paragraphs :lol:
btw, keep away that drm crap from my pc!

[kakaroto]

lol@nowhereman, next time
hi all, sorry for not answering thread for so long. I didn't get to play with vista much more since then and I've been a bit busy...
Yes, it WAS frustrating, and I hope they fix it. I'm willing to switch to vista when it gets out, at the one condition that we can disable all that fancy eye candiness and themeing, etc.. I think it's "nice" but it's so ugly for an everyday's use.. it's only nice for a "demo pc" in a shop or something... anyways, it should be more stable. I think it was already pretty much stable for a windows "to be released in 1 year" imho, if they work on it hard enough and they keep fixing incoming bugs for another year, I think it will be one of the most stable OSs M$ ever made (I wonder how was XP 1 year before the release).. I mean, no BSOD for a while! come on! :p
but it is slow... it seems they want everyone to be using latest pcs with 64bits CPUs... I've read on wikipedia that originally vista was supposed to be released *only* for 64bits platforms.. then I guess they realized they would loose too much money. The base edition of vista though seems will be for 64bits only though..
anyways, SATA drives.. the nightmare.. I had so much problems with them.. couldn't install linux, elive wouldn't recognize sata drives.. and when I FINALLY made it work, the disk crashed, lost all my data, and I had to mail the drive to maxtor and they sent me a new one (but I think it was already full of bad sectors.. modifying the partition only made it crash definitely). Then I got paranoid, I don't want to try anything else :p
but hey, if it was linux, I would have done the same, for Vista, I was just curious to see how it looks and how the install will go, once I saw its looks, I never booted it again :p if it was linux, I'm sure I would have used it.. also, i was installing linux maybe 7 years ago, and trust me, it wouldn't install smoothly (especially if your graphics card driver didn't exist in the kernels of most linux distros back then)

[Phil]

Linux tends to democratize now...
I use Linux since only March 2004 and I always found it's clear... But it's my opinion and a newbie will be lost :p
Phil

[kakaroto]

Well, you have two things,
first, a newbie will be lost IF he wants to do anything 'unusual', like for example installing a new driver, installing a new window manager, changing xfree to xorg, etc.. but if he gets a 'newbie' distro, with kde or gnome, and only uses the mouse to start/install/use his programs, then he's good.. linux is a unix platform, mac os x is a unix platform, they are both more or less the same, only mac has an excelent and intuitive (or so they say ) interface.. most mac users never even knew they can launch a terminal window. Newbie linux users.. the same, as long as the distro packages all for them.
anyways, I was going to say, a newbie will be lost in linux if he wants to do something unusual, the thing is that a geek will be lost if he wants to do something unusual in windows because it's not possible at all :p

p.s.: download MS powershell (RC1) from here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2b0bbfcd-0797-4083-a817-5e6a054a85c9&DisplayLang=en
and look at http://www.reskit.net/monad/samplescripts.htm for some sample scripts (I like the diskfree script, especially when launched manually and you keep playing with the variables)..
monad was it's codename before powershell..
I think this M$ shell is more powerfull than bash what do you think ?

[Elias]

sounds more like a vb  style bash copycat...

bash already offer a very very large amount of possibilities, in fact i don't really se what i couldn't do in a bash script that i could do with powershell...

[kakaroto]

well, it's a kind of .NET shell, an object oriented shell... not vb...
when you do 'ls', you get one object, which is a list of all the files, each list element is another object with many fields, if you want for example all files that have a .zip extension with more than 10MB of filesize, and last accessed on whatever date, you could (probably, didn't test) do something like this :
ls | where $_.Extension -eq .zip | where $_.Filesize >= 10000000 | where $_.LastAccessed > 2005 | select Filename
What I like the best is the get-WMIObject (aliased as gwo), with this, you can query any .NET object, so you can do a
$var=gwo Win32_LogicalDisk -computer localhost
There, you get a pointer to information on each disk, you can query the volume name, the disk space, if it's a CDROM, an FDD or an HDD, an NFS, etc...
Here's a sample script on how you could have something similar to 'rpm -q' (was it -q to list all installed software?)
http://www.reskit.net/monad/SampleScripts/Show-Installedsoftware.ps1
Something nice also is that you don't have a PS1 and PS2 variables like in bash in order to set your prompt, you don't use "prompt $text" either anymore.. to change your prompt, you create prompt function in which you can do whatever you want, for example, see here : http://www.reskit.net/monad/SampleScripts/Set-PowerShellPrompt2.ps1
so you could even create a prompt that would fetch the latest RSS news on slashdot for example.. can it be done with bash ?
But what I like best is that your variables are objects, and they have a pretty print, which is nice I think, you can do a
$files=ls
$files.name
to show only the filenames of your current dir, with bash, you can do an FILES=`ls` but you can't sort by filesize, sort by filename, show only the filename, the extension, and the attributes (nothing else), etc... you can indeed do a FILES=`ls -t` or `ls -la`, or `ls --sort=size`, etc.. but it's not the same as doing it on the fly with the same variable instead of executing the command each time for the different outputs (ls is not time consuming but think of something else), and also, you it's not as customizable as :
ls | select Filename,Extension,Filesize,Attributes
So, in this case, it is indeed more powerfull.. and if the unix 'ls' didn't give you the --sort option or the -t, -l options, etc.. you couldn't be able to sort or show the information you want, it's not bash that allows you to do it, it's ls, while in powershell's case, it's the shell that allows you to do it, not the command itself.

I'm not bashing bash (lol), I'm not praising M$ either, I'm just saying that I like the idea and the power it gives!

[NoWhereMan]

I think it actually looks a little like tclsh

[kakaroto]

tcl isn't object oriented, and tcl doesn't support fancy stuff like get the list of all HDDs
but yes, I do understand what you mean, but I'd rather say that it looks like C# .. I don't know C# but I know java and they say it's similar...
the pretty print ressembles the toString() call.. and if you supply an invalid argument, you might get a :

Error, Expected System.String

or something like that (you can also see those System.String in the man pages), which reminds me of java.lang.String and System.String is probably the equivalent in C# ... you'll probably find some text about that.. I know wikipedia has an article about it

[Elias]

cat /proc/partitions ?

that one (text) is pretty complete : http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars/1

[NoWhereMan]

it's all in the "philosophy" of .net, like vb.net or c#, they share the same runtime