Once upon a time there was a movie that the Critics raved about. It had as one if it’s stars Jennifer Jason Lee. As myself, my sister and our friends sat in the movie theater we waited for the movie to get to the good part. The part that the Critic raved about. The really good part of the movie that they promised us.
Then the end titles rolled. And we went.. okay… did we watch the same movie that the critic did? Because that movie was horrible. And yet he absolutely loved it. Thought it was riviting. And all the while we were thinking.. did we have the same experience as the critic?
Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD:
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/
Seeing articles like this make me want to tell Microsoft to stop wasting my Stockholder dividend money on fedexing media to journalists(1). Because I totally disagree with Walt. I noticed an extreme increase in speed and so did the person who’s computer I installed it on. Biggest impact? Outlook 2007. That now opens up and snaps to attention that it never did before. His comment that there isn’t a change in the security system.. that it still “nags you too much”.. again I disagree with the only time I’m “nagged” is when patches are needed for third party stuff with autoupdaters, and then he says “requires add on antivirus”. Walt, do you honestly think in this day and age of EU and DOJ that they will ship it with antivirus? Perhaps arguably antivirus has less affect these days, and perhaps the savvy person who leave UAC on and runs as standard user can operate without antivirus, but Walt, dude, please.
It’s easy for journalists to hate Vista these days. And in reality we should be neutral about it. It is after all just an operating system. It is the platform upon which everything else is done. It is not the “everything else”. It doesn’t save lives. It doesn’t cure cancer. It’s not white bread. It serves up applications. That’s all it does. And it’s not a religion either.
But I tell ya somedays it’s hard to tend towards liking Vista for fear that you are labelled a Koolaid drinker. You know.. I can’t help liking the security and group policy under the hood.
But at the same time, it pains me to no end to see people getting stuck with installing the Vista SP1 preliminary patches and now disabling auto updates because the pain of patching is too great. I see too many of the OEM builds getting into trouble.
Bottom line, make up your own mind.
(1) In full disclosure this still kinda irks me that at the same time Microsoft was stating that they were not going to release Vista sp1 to TechNet and MSDN customers until next month, they were fedex’ing media of SP1 to journalists that seemingly do their best to find the oldest hardware to install it on.
I posted the following response to Walt’s blog site:
Walt, to summarize — large files copied in half the time as before, and waking from hibernation was up to 10 seconds faster, but no visible speed improvement from a cold start. So the only real complaint in your article is that your HP printer still doesn’t work – which is an HP issue, not Microsoft’s, for not providing proper printer drivers. So what’s your beef?
As an aside, I would suggest providing people to a link to read what Vista SP1 does and does not include. Perhaps a link like this one from the Microsoft Vista Team Blog:
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx
I wasn’t too impressed with the performance and reliablity of Vista RTM and did not offer it to my clients because I felt it wasn’t ready yet.
But in all honesty I can say that Vista SP1 sure makes a huge difference in performance and reliability. It’s too bad Vista didn’t perfom like this at it’s launch. But of course there still would have been those that would have suggested to wait for SP1 anyway.
I really enjoy Vista a lot more now with SP1. Good job Microsoft on a great Service Pack release.
You could just do what I do and ignore Walt these days. He’s lost all credibility in my mind (due to comments like what you refer to above or others that came before it) and while he still has a few users, I don’t think his install base is as large as it used to be if you know what I mean.