Ron Schenone

Windows Vista SP1 beta – Windows XP SP3 beta & Firefox 3 Alpha 8

Posted by on Oct 29, 2007 | One Comment

After returning from vacation I participated in beta testing Windows Vista SP1 and also Windows XP SP3 which I have been running on my test system. On or about Wednesday of this week, I received a strange message from the beta team stating some thing to the affect that they didn’t want people downloading the beta’s if they were in fact not going to test the releases and report back any ‘bugs’ that they found.

Which made me think to myself, ‘wonder if I have nothing to report?’ You see both beta’s are working just fine. I haven’t noticed any problems nor any glitches. No blue screens, errors of any kind nor system malfunctions. The way the beta program works is that you are supplied with a reporting procedure that incorporates not only a written account of a problem, but also a way to attach log files and such to document problems. The beta team than attempts to replicate the problem and follows up with a written communication advising the user of their results.

Which made me recall an incident while testing one of the original beta releases of Windows Vista back in August. of last year. The only problem I had was that upon boot, my floppy disk drive [yeah I still have one] would go crazy and grind looking for a disk. This would continue until I physically put in a disk, would read the disk, than stop the activity. I made a report of this incident which kept occurring through several of the releases, only to be told in affect that the problem could not be replicated so it must not be happening. Upon installing the final release of Vista Ultimate, the problem no longer occurred. :-)

So with both Vista SP1 and XP SP3 I still have nothing to report. They both just work fine on my system.

But that wasn’t the case when I tried Firefox 3 Alpha 8. The browser itself worked OK. In fact it picked all of my settings except two of my extensions were not compatible. No biggie. But after the first day of testing I found one minor glitch. I put my system into hibernation each night when I close down my personal system. The following morning at boot, the system would not start up. I got a black screen, no hard disk activity, nothing. I forced a hard boot and all was well. On the 2nd day when the same thing happened, I reverted back to the days of old. ‘Last program on, first program off’ and uninstalled Firefox 3 and all was well. I did make a report to the Mozilla team on this. :-)

Comments welcome.

[tags]vista, xp, windows, beta, testing, report, sp1, sp3[/tags]

  • marc klink

    Microsoft, in every trial I’ve participated in, has never admitted to problems unless a very large,vocal group complained in a public forum, not fully under the Microsoft sphere of influence. Then, miraculously, after one or two refreshes, the problems disappeared. Sometimes there would be a description of the problem, but only if it was one of interaction with other branded software.

    The very vocal output, and outrage, by the people who have complained about Vista must have been something that it was totally unprepared for, as the amount of press coverage, and blog activity has been extreme. I listen to those Microsoft apologists who say that XP was not accepted at the same levels as Vista and laugh. This is after much thought, and conversation with others I have known a long time, who switched to XP as I did, which was almost right away. For me, XP solved problems, it did not make any.

    I wrote somewhere else that the problems would not have been nearly as bad with Vista if it had been approached as NT 3.1 was. When that OS was released, it was made clear that the new operating system had huge (for the time) hardware requirements, and that many common peripherals were not being supported. Those willing to make hardware changes, and consult the HCL did fine, and those unwilling to do this either stayed with Windows 3.1 or were (explainably) unhappy with NT. Unfortunately, things were not as clear cut with Vista, because it has problems with approved, or standard hardware.

    As for Mozilla, I gave them very detailed descriptions of problems with Thunderbird, including exactly what I had done, and what was happening, step by step. For me, this was excruciating to write, as it was so detailed, and I chose the words so carefully, to convey exactly what was happening. I got absolutely no response whatsoever – although I had given my name, my address, my e-mail address, and a phone number. All of my criticism was done in a constructive manner, and I only got testy much later, when I wrote about it here.

    For both Microsoft and Mozilla, I probably will never again waste my time with problem reports. This is too bad for them, as I can explain, in great detail, problems on 9 machines, ranging from a K6-2-500 to an Athlon64 X2, with memory ranging from 512MB to 3GB. There are also a couple of Intel machines in the mix. (Not to mention any other machines that might be in the house as part of the repair process.)

    While I realize personal replies are not possible, a ‘bot reply, detailing what I reported, would at least let me know my efforts were not in vain. This is the sort of response I have gotten from others, when participating in beta tests, such as Quarterdeck (for QEMM and DesqView), Novell (for Netware 5), and Lavasoft (for the latest version of AdAware) – when I have not gotten a personal reply.

    It was clear long ago that Microsoft was too big to care about things like proper appreciation of its beta testers, I was stunned when Mozilla showed the same behavior – just another small reason I no longer install Mozilla products unless specifically asked. I use, and recommend Opera, as that small company has brought out great product, and keeps improving it in the manner that its life depends on it. A very good plan, as complacency leads to customer dissatisfaction.