Thoughts on Vista SP1

Let me begin by saying I am a power user, and as such many things in my environment are different from a lower breed of user. My Vista system has six monitors and some of the best DDR2 RAM money can buy. I have a server at home with nearly 4TB of total storage.

I’m an official Microsoft Beta tester, a Senior Applications Developer II, and an all-around geek in every sense of the word. Well, not every sense; I wouldn’t define myself as “A carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken”. So I’m a geek in almost every sense of the word.

I hate the term “Power User”; it’s too vague and subjective. Some people call themselves power users because they know how to install a game and burn a CD. These people are smoking black tar heroin, plain and simple. When I call myself a power user, it’s based on a thorough understanding of the underlying hardware and software architectures, a wide variety of experience in many fields within the computer industries, and the overall geekery I have pursued over the past two decades. I scored 97% on a CompTIA A+ Certification exam, and 80-90% on all the MCSD pre-tests I’ve taken so far. So yeah, I’m a power user, but don’t call me that. Just call me a geek.

Now that the introductions are out of the way, let us proceed with the examination of the closed Beta of Microsoft Windows Vista Service pack 1 (Ultimate Edition, Build 6001).

Allow me to begin with the good things:
- IE7
- Tons of security and performance upgrades
- Aero Glass is pretty and shiny
- Problems and solutions keeps a list of problems and solutions
- Multiple simultaneous multimedia streams have significantly improved prioritization and synchronization

And the bad things:
- IE7
- I’ve submitted 11 bugs in 3 days. Make of that what you will.
- Support has been discontinued for an incredible amount of hardware. Even a whole slew of PCI 2.2 cards are now considered “Legacy”.
- Security and performance upgrades are causing me performance problems.
- x64 Support continues to lack significant support. Try getting drivers for it. Seriously. You’ll end up running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor as a result.
- Problems and solutions almost never has a solution for me.
- My memory is almost always at maximum I/O, thus reducing its lifetime.
- Vista ATI video driver crashes alot.
- It’s still not done!

Now for the drill-down, skippy, 411, info, analysis:

1. Why is IE7 on both sides?
- IE7 has some great upgrades. Most of them are in the ether where you’ll never see them, like security.
- Tabbed Browsing: A great feature to have at my disposal, though honestly I’ll never use it.
- It’s slower than IE6. I must be able to type Start > Run > IEXPLORE > Alt-D > URL > Enter. This should be one fluid sequence; Alas, I must now wait for MSIE to finish loading. I’d just type the URL into the Run dialog box, but I don’t want it in my run history - Just in my browser history.
- The UI is boated and ugly.
- See my dedicated blog post on Internet Explorer 7 for more information.

2. Back-end stuff:
- Security updates. Yay. Now I shall sit back in my chair and bask in the glow of the knowledge that a malicious cracker will not be able to execute arbitrary code to gain control of my computer.
- Performance Upgrades: DirectX 10 comes stock; DirectX 10.1 is currently in the works. Having multiple multimedia streams open simultaneously now has better priority balancing, resulting in an overall smoother framerate across all streams. When they work, that is.
- Windows Update (”Microsoft Update”, or whatever they’re calling it nowadays) upgraded my Visual Studio 2005 to VS2005 SP1 without me having to go do it myself. The downside, of course, is they justified it as “This program has known compatibility issues with Windows Vista”. WTF? It’s Microsoft software! VS2005’s entire development lifecycle occurred within the Windows Vista development cycle! How can there be a compatibility issue? Are your departments just not communicating with each other?

3. Aero Glass is pretty and shiny. I really like the translucency effect that allows me to see some portions of what lies underneath; I just wish more of the unused portions of each window would be either glassified or removed from the window. Oh, yes, and Aero Glass refuses to run on my homogenous multi-adapter display. Just check out this Microsoft article on MultiMonitor Support and Windows Vista. In fact, if you Google for Homogeneous Multi-Adapter Configuration (An official term from Microsoft), you’ll see that I’m third on the results page - Out of 47 hits. Clearly, this isn’t a popular issue. But it’s still an issue.

4. Problem Reports and Solutions Center: Detects BSOD’s and other crashes; logs them for future reference; Looks for solutions and installs them with my permission. That’s the good part. The bad part, of course, is that it’s detected 46 Problems so far and has only solved two of them (Which are the same issue - VS2005 SP1). (2/47)*100 = 4.26%. I am not impressed by a solution rate of 4.26%. You wanna impress me? Solve this recurring bug that crashes my media players and boots to blue screens. Figure out why so many programs just “stop working” (Microsoft’s happy way of saying “crash”).

5. Multiple simultaneous multimedia streams have significantly improved prioritization and synchronization: I notice that when I have multiple media streams open, they’re alot smoother and less choppy than before. Furthermore, my Logitech camera’s quality seems somewhat improved.

6. Microsoft has responded to one of my 11 bug reports so far ((1/11)*100 = 9.09% response rate). They basically said that getting stuck in a portion of Media Center setup isn’t an SP1 problem — Though they didn’t provide me with a suitable forum in which to publish the issue!

7. Microsoft has dropped support for a large amount of old hardware. I understand discontinuing legacy support, but is a PCI 2.2 RAID controller built 7 years ago really old enough to be called Legacy? Bah; this issue has existed since the first Vista I saw (Windows Codename: Longhorn, Build 4074); plus I really don’t have any of that old stuff running anymore (like I did when I beta tested Vista RTM), so I’ll go ahead and drop this complaint in favor of moving forward. The install is big enough anyway, spanning an entire DVD-R.

8. x64 Support continues to lack significant support. Honestly, this isn’t a huge deal to me since the x86 software runs fine on my 64-bit hardware. So I’ll let them get away with it for now - But this is gonna be huge moving forward.

9. My memory is almost always at maximum I/O, thus reducing its lifetime. Seriously, what are you doing? At least it makes my Corsair XMS2 DIMMs look cool. They have LEDs which light up more and more as they fill up; Vista has them transferring so much data they’re pretty much blinking really fast.

10. Vista ATI video driver crashes alot. I have three Sapphire ATI Radeon X1650 Pro video cards installed (512MB GDDR3 each, PCI Express x16). I wonder if this is related to the fact that Vista won’t run Glass on them when every Microsoft resource says it should?

11. It’s still not done! No matter how much I use it, I keep noticing subtle nuances that disrupt my workflow and interrupt my User Experience. Even if you strip out all the crashes and buggy behaviors, you have to consider:
- Significantly different navigation from Windows XP
- The same crappy multi-monitor support they’ve had since Windows 98. Only faster, and with more problems. Oh, yes, and no WDDM support for any video card older than two years. You can use older cards, but you have to force them to an XPDM driver, which takes some know-how.
- Stability: Look how many people still use Windows 2000 or older. Granted, they’re hard to find, but they’re out there. People are afraid to upgrade when they’ve found a stable product. Because of Vista’s lack of stability, people will be hesitant to adopt it. Furthermore, the Blogosphere is abuzz with people who are “Holding off on Vista, will try SP1″. Did you hear that, Microsoft? This is your last chance to save alot of your customers! They will begin migrating to OSX and Linux in droves if you can’t stabilize your product!

They’ve been working on Vista since Windows XP was released. That’s five years of development - Longer than has ever been spent on a single release of any Operating System in history - And it’s still not stable.

What. The. Hell.