Comments on: Microsoft looks to 'Mojave' to revive Vista's image

CNET News gets an exclusive look at what's likely to become a piece of a new Vista marketing push.

[Dalkorian]

Bottom line folks - the only people who would be fooled by this "Mojave" nonsense will come to a very rude awakening when they finally get their own copy of fista home - only to discover their 2 year old computer isn't good enough to run it. They'll sink good money after bad, shoving more RAM into it, a new video card, more drive space ... only to have it totally lock up because all the changes on the computer pushed it past it's ridiculous "3 changes and you're out" idiocy. Hopefully by this time they have found a real friend who will tell them like it is - fista and winblows in general is trashware foisted upon an unsuspecting public as a workable OS instead of the faulty slaveware it was designed to be. This friend will do them a real favor and install a flavor of Linux and they will be surprised at how fast and powerful their computer suddenly has become. It will take a little while to get used to the new system, but they will finally be happy. And free. And their computer will finally be theirs, instead of being "leased" to them by "the man" (that's right - you THINK you own your fista PC? HAHAHAHA! YOU ARE PWNED BY THE BILL!!!).

Run the ad M$. It, along with the trashware called fista, will be your downfall. Good riddance.

[JimmyCrackhead]

Wow, its gonna take a LOT more than Mojave to help Vista.

JT
www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

[djreedps]

Disclaimer: I am a Linux user who hates Microsoft and Windows. I haven't run Microsoft software for at least the last five years.

A friend of mine has a Vista laptop. That is the only place I have used Vista. The most noticeable things I hate about Vista from his laptop are:

1. The machine is so slow. It has Vista Home Premium but only 1G of RAM. His computer with 1G of RAM and Vista is like a 386 machine compared to my Sabayon Linux machine with 1G of RAM. I don't know whether his processor is faster than mine, but it probably is. I know that 2G of RAM would make his VIsta laptop a lot better, but why should he have to upgrade his relatively new laptop when with Linux 1G would be very fast?

2. Whenever Vista puts up the dialog box alerting the user that he is going to do something "dangerous" like installing new software, it first blanks the screen. Completely black. Then the screen comes back with a color dialog box and everything else in grayscale. There is also a part of the bootup process where the screen goes completely black. That is very unnerving for me. Why does Vista have to leave the screen completely black? If you aren't used to that odd behavior it makes you think the machine has crashed or hung.

3. GUI idiosyncrasies. For no good reason, GUI buttons are in different places on different Microsoft applications. They have been moved from XP to other places in a lot of the OS apps for no good reason. Very confusing and awkward. Also, why did Microsoft take away the "go up one directory" button from Windows Explorer? Yes, I know you can click on the directory you want in the newly enhanced address bar in Explorer. But I still like the Up button.

On a positive note, I was able to install Service Pack 1 without any problems at all. I was pleasantly surprised since I had read about other people not being able to boot up Vista after installing SP1.

[danpoleary]

Well, I had no problem with various firewire hard drives on XP, but on Vista, crash after crash. Nothing worked, not the built in drivers, not the provided drivers, not a single third party driver. So I for one, think that only showing bells and whistles is the best way to trick people into liking Vista. You need to get it to work for people to like it! And for those that say use USB or eSata. Nope either too slow, or limited drive chains.

[Pixelslave]

I am not surprise. What needs to be repaired is not Vista, but the Microsoft and Windows brand. Cut the tie, man. It's time to break up Microsoft -- this time it's not under the pressure from the government. The MS brand is so bad that MS's marketing money is put into erasing the negative view, instead of promoting Vista's strength.

[siriusproductions]

At the time, I had WinXP MCE SP2 (since updated to SP3) with a P4 3.20 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and tons of HD space. I ran Microsoft's own Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, but only out of idle curiosity because I had no plans to switch to Vista.

Every single problem it identified was a Microsoft application. There was no problem with any of my hardware. There was no problem with any of my non-MS software. Every one of the many problems it said would interfere with, even prevent, a switch to Vista were all from Microsoft. If I'd ever had any thoughts of "upgrading" to Vista before, that put an end to them.

If I buy a new system before Windows 7 comes out, then I'll get Vista with it, but I have absolutely no reason, need, or desire to switch in the meantime. XP does what I need. Supplemented by other applications and utilities, I am confident in its security and capabilities. Switching to Vista will use up resources that I prefer to keep for other things. I don't want the "aero" interface and I certainly don't need it.

Switching (I can't say "upgrading") to Vista will cause way too much disruption as I sort out and replace the many Microsoft applications that will stop working. Why should I waste the time and effort to do that? My system works fine now and does everything I need it to do.

I think hardware and software are updated so frequently now that fewer and fewer people care about trying to always have the latest. For many people, it's no longer a status symbol to have the very newest version of everything. Remember the huge lineups of people wanting to buy Windows 95 the first day it was available? Those days are over. Some people will always have that need to be first, but they're an ever-decreasing minority. While Windows versions are still years apart, the lack of a need to have the latest has affected its sales, too, and I believe that has been a major factor in the slow sales of Vista.

Even people who wanted to upgrade are waiting. The old adage about never using v1.0 of anything surely apply to something as complicated as an OS. Microsoft may be about to try a new (or at least another) marketing plan, but the release of SP1 should get much of the credit for any increase in sales.

[ddsharper]

It's really simple, not rocket science. Vista's 64 bit OS is incompatible with major software and hardware. Palm centro, palm os and audible, and many others. Perhaps the mantra is being tested: if you tell a lie enough people will begin to call it truth. Finally, one need only search google to find out the truth. Vista is driving the masses to tears. It's echoed in the hallways of workplaces, in the homes of the little people and in the ivory towers of academia. Instead of spending millions to convince people to doubt what they have seen after shelling out their hard earned cash, I say, fix the problems and give us compatibilty.

[mebzor]

"To be sure, the focus groups didn't have to install Vista or hook it up to their existing home network."

You really don't need to read any further than that... I wanted to like Vista. really. Ran it for a while and gave up... Marketing gimmicks aren't gonna fix that rock.

[hswear3]

When Windows 2000 Professional was released, it was really a pared down version of Windows 2000 Server.

They should start doing this again. Release the business and enterprise clients at the same time as the servers. Who cases that That will be a year or two later. What the business/enterprise customer will get is much more stable, bug-free OS without all the consumer stuff like AERO, media center, and movie maker, etc.

Enterprises won't upgrade until SP1 of Vista anyway, if at all. And they could call it Windows Server Client (or Desktop). It time to separate business/enterprise systems from the consumer mess!

[jslo2008]

Microsoft is truly looking desperate here. I hope they don't think that all the negative talk is coming from WindowsXP users who haven't switched over yet. It's actually Vista users that are doing most of the complaining. I actually thought Vista from the outside looked kind of "Wow" and I really looked forward to my new laptop with Vista on it. I was not prepared for the day of patching and upgrading and the totally unintuitive way they set up the tree structure in Explorer. And then there was the networking. Did they not get it - that most people use their computers in a networked environment, be it home or office? Why make that task harder rather than easier? Why make it so if you leave one networked environment with your laptop, you've got a good hour trying to connect again? And the same when you get it back home? I also think that there comes a point when "security" crosses a line into "paranoia", especially when security means that you can't even use your own machine without permissions.I mean locking the front and back door is one thing, but all the bedroom doors as well? And so on.

I work as IT at my job and I am keeping our workstations on XP. No new computers for that place. Unless I want endless hours of headaches for nothing, only to get it back to where we already have it. It's not worth it.

As for their campaign, sorry, "Wow" doesn't cut it for me anymore. This isn't IMAX. We have to live with this thing Microsoft has created every day. Besides, ever see the ads for those films where they interview people coming out of the theater - that's the sure kiss of death. You know it stinks when they go that route.

[3rdalbum]

I don't think Mojave will really work very well, because the whole reason why people don't like Vista is because it's different to XP. Sure, people might say "Wow, Vista can do this", but that is forgotten when the user opens the Start menu, for instance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Linux user so I don't want Vista to succeed. But people are very unfair to Vista, especially when complaining about the security improvements.

[The_Decider]

What security improvements?

A halfassed copt of the user system on *nix.

Randomly moving processes around in memory? It takes less than 10 lines of code to deal with that.

Constantly annoying users with popups? That will either cause them to click yes without thinking about it or shutting the retarded thing off. Either way, no security there.

Other OS's can run reasonably secure without amateur roadblocks and annoying the **** out of its users. Why can't MS?

[palewook]

famous comedian once said, if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. as an IT person might remark, if you have to explain the merits of an O/S, it's perceived to not have any.

[coyboss]

"Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista"

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh The Old Bait and Switch technique!!!

Wonder how many of those "techies" were PISSED OFF at MS for this TRICK??

They didn't list that did they??

[The_Decider]

How many true techies did they talk to?

[drbayer]

One of the hats that I wear is desktop support. In order to get a good feel for Vista and make decisions about allowing it into the environment, I used it exclusively for about 9 months. Like any new OS, there was a learning curve, and in this case it was a steeper learning curve than we have come to expect from Microsoft (more like the Apple OS 9 to OS 10 curve). I was initially excited about Vista having seen the Microsoft launch presentation and how well it performed there. In my production environment, I was very disappointed. While I was able to do everything that I needed, the performance of the system was abysmal, both as an upgrade and on new systems with plenty of processor/memory/video power designed for Vista. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will essentially be Vista without the bloat. I'm quite curious about that - if we can have the benefits without the performance hit then I might consider it in the enterprise. Microsoft will need to move quickly though, before Apple makes a concerted effort to make inroads in the enterprise.

[Clothahump]

This "Vista sucks" rhetoric sounds familiar ..

http://board.midibuddy.net/showthread.php?t=14189

[ozidigga]

Vista is mostly fine in 64bit and high end hardware, especially if you want more than 3gb of RAM. However I have experienced varied driver issues which are simply unexplainable - for example USB mass storage wouldn't work on my previous install, and could not get it working without reinstalling Vista completly. And my existing pc has intermittent network problems which I'm sure is driver related and use the vista 'repair' funtion to reset the adapter to make it work. Some are not major issues, but I can say that the average user would be frustrated and stuck not knowing what to do when driver problems occur. I personally don't mind Vista - but I would hate to be the poor bugger who has to answer the help desk in a business that has adopted vista. My managers use vista and I just wish they wouldn't - some of the problems which occur are just too random and waste too much time finding a solution.

[chrisk1234]

I read many negative reports about vista and how terrible it was, but as a .NET developer I felt I would give it a go on my latest new PC build so that I could play around with WPF. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that it was perfectly fine! I really can't see what the problem is anymore. Maybe pre service pack 1 there were a few niggling issues, but it's nowhere near as bad as what everyone makes out. It seems to be "cool" now to bash microsoft and their products, when MS is no better or worse than any other large corporate... I bought a macmini to try-out OSX end of 2007, and yeah it's a nice OS but it's not a crazy revolution like many zealots proclaim. I come from a unix background, having used FreeBSD a fair bit while at uni and after, and to me it seems that Apple hide a little TOO much from the user sometimes... although given that I might be considered a "power user" then this might not be the opinion of everyone.

I summary - Vista is fine, it does the job and I have had no problems with it. And this is with me using the 64-bit version too!! All I can say is I am pleasantly surprised given all the bad press I read before I made the jump 3 months ago, and I wish MS well. As long as they put out software that does what it is meant to do reasonably well, then good luck to them. At least you don't have to spend the money that you have to to get into the mac world :/ And alas linux isn't quite there JUST yet for usability, although ubuntu is doing well!! All in all it's an interesting time in the OS industry, and I am glad that the major players are all so close with features etc that the end user is finally getting some benefit from competition!

Cheers

[python42]

My company has a large IT department which I have worked for (and with) for 29 years. Some time back, realizing that they had some problems, IT hired a consulting company to talk to other departments to determine what the problems were and what to do about them. After two months of interviews it was determined that all of the problems were "perceptual". In other words, IT was doing everything right. It was everyone else that was having problems. As a result, my supervisors decided to remove my entire group from IT and form a separate entity to provide IT services for our control centre. We now provide better service (no red tape) at a much lower cost.

Same thing with Microsoft. Their solution to all of Vista's problems is not to write better systems, but to spend massive advertising $$$ to convince everyone that the crap that has been produced is not crap at all. It is time for Microsoft to drop back and punt - carry on with their research project to rewrite Windows from the ground up in a well coordinated fashion. Let the legal system worry about the legal and moral issues relating to digital media ownership and just concentrate on producing a cohesive OS with a sane user interface.

[bbbaldie]

Have you ever tried Linux? Imagine a world where your GUI was your choice, where a GUI crash simply means restarting it, with the actual O/S running steadily in the background. Imagine a machine running swiftly with every possible bell and whistle on a gig of ram and a Pentium 4. Imagine forums loaded with friendly help for when you do have issues. Imagine no overhead of spyware-killer/antivirus programs. Imagine no more registry to get loaded down with crap left over from incomplete software uninstalls. Imagine integrating fully with 95% of Windows apps in a corporate environment with a machine that only reboots when you want to upgrade the kernel. Imagine security issues fixed in hours instead of weeks.

If you are convinced that Vista is an excellent O/S, why not load a Linux distro on an old machine and do nothing but work in Linux for a weekend. Then tell me what you think of Vista.

[yaneurabeya]

Perhaps, but even then running Linux -- or any Unix of that matter -- without a lick of security

Idiots who don't know how to use PC's will switch over to Linux and pretty soon Linux will become a target for hackers and virii makers, because let's face it -- they target the largest computing marketshare. Sure, it may be tougher to do with the improved privilege separation (one point where Windows most certainly still fails -- even with Vista), but with a bit of social engineering one can make an app which a person think does said function A (play a game) but in the end does said functions B & C (spam all people in address book, replicate itself), and then there are the folks who won't keep their PCs patched and 3rd party apps up to date, who will inevitably cause issues for the rest of us.

People need to educate themselves on how to use their PCs, just like with cars. If you don't take care of your machine you're liable to affect others -- be it on the highway or the Internet -- so in that case you should leave your computing maintenance to others to perform.

[The_Decider]

Yane,

Market share and security have nothing to do with each other. I wish you idiots would find a new lie to spread around.

A default Linux install is exponentially more secure then a fulled patched windows with a real firewall installed and a ton of AV and AS stealing resources.

Linux is also exponentially more user friendly than Windows.

[yaneurabeya]

For what it's worth Vista is both better and worse than XP.

How is it better? It is better with managing memory, doing multiprocessing, x64 support is MUCH MUCH better in Vista, and a working system restore.

What do I mean?

Vista's better with managing memory because (based on my perception and experience) it adopts more of a Unix-style allocation and swapping routine that should be done with an operating system.

You shouldn't always have free memory -- in fact if you check top(1) in any other modern Unix based OS (FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris) you'll discover that the "free memory" shrinks over time to near 0, but things keep on going well even though the free memory is gone... common misnomer with OS users because they don't understand how memory management works.

Improved concurrency and multiprocessing is important. XP could scale up to 2 virtual processors reliably. However, once you get past 4 virtual processors to 8 or 16, etc, XP will start to choke because when it was designed it wasn't meant for that kind of concurrency!

Same as 2k vs XP on my previous P4 machine -- XP was leaps and bounds improved over 2k in terms of concurrency and multiprocessing. However, 2k was tailored towards a different build architecture than XP, so it may have been because of compiler optimizations, etc that XP was so much better than 2k.

As for x64 support, Vista does a good job -- not so much from Microsoft's point of view but the fact that it fleshes out that there is a group which needs proper x64 support.

I used to laud that XP x64 was so much better than Vista but after using Vista x64 I can say that it is much better than XP x64, to the extent that XP x64 is a steaming pile of s^%&.

System restore actually works in Vista. In XP (based on my experience of course) you were lucky if a restore actually went through after some kind of catastrophic config failure, software install, etc, but whatever team in Redmond, WA took the time to actually improve System restore, I thank you.

(Note: I don't keep it enabled all of the time -- just in instances where I'm installing some questionable new patches or when I was moving from Vista RTM to SP1 =]...).

How is it worse? UAC and added graphics, Windows Defender, Windows Search, etc bloat.

So, you're probably wondering: how can I get rid of the cons then?

UAC can be disabled. I don't recommend it because while disabling it gets rid of a bunch of annoying popups, the overall system that runs UAC is more improved privilege separation (the issue that afflicted) and registry separation -- and it's here for the people who either get tricked into installing malicious software (adware, spyware, rootkits, etc), or just as a means of starting from scratch if you hose your user profile (I can hose my area but that doesn't mean I have to reinstall all of Windows -- I like that).

The number of popups with UAC actually decreased (I want to say 25% ~ 40%, but I'm pulling that number range out of a hat) once you install SP1.

As for the bloat:

Graphics can be solved by getting a) a better graphics card, or b) disabling all of the Vista shiny-fisher price functionality in place of something which looks more like classic Windows! It's not hard folks.. doing your homework for b) on Google will quickly lead you to a number of pages which detail how to change the Aero look for a classic 2k / non-Luna XP look. The performance difference is pretty amazing because it taxes your video card and processor less to render the graphics.

[For what it's worth if you have an old machine with AGP or something with an Integrated Intel or ATI graphics chipset -- surprise surprise! You'll have to buy more memory because the onboard chipset utilizes(/leaches 8-)?) your system's memory to draw objects on your screen].

The one thing I'm not happy about that I wish I could disable is Windows Defender though. It's a flaming piece of crap that I don't need because I'm careful about using my system, and I have a decent virus scanner with malware support, so I was disappointed when I discovered that it was so tied into the system that completely disabling Windows Defender caused me more headache than I would have liked... thankfully I turned off the malware scanning feature to speed up my system though.

Windows Search.. heh. What a piece of junk. Why have a system which constantly indexes my machine and slows stuff down? C'mon... the OSX search indexer is faster than the Windows Search one, and a lot of the results are hidden anyhow...

Easy to disable though and I highly recommend it (if you search for files frequently, my suggestion to you is that you need to improve how you sort stuff out on your PC -- plain and simple).

As for the other media related items (uPNP / SSDP support) they can be easily disabled from within the System Management pane or msconfig and help speed up your PC a lot (I noted a 10% ~ 20% jump in performance on base systems -- pretty sweet). That support is only really required/useful when using Windows Media Center anyhow, and the only folks that have that are the Home Premium and Vista Ultimate folks...

Tablet PC support can be disabled as well unless you have a tablet or require stylus support.

etc etc.

The point is, do your homework, tailor your PC to meet your needs, and once you disable all of the Vista bloat, it's basically the same as XP, plus some helpful under the hood improvements.

End note:
I use my Vista desktop primarily for gaming and interfacing with media functionality (my desktop functions as my media machine with my other multimedia appliances), but if it died tomorrow I wouldn't be sad because I have a number of other means to an end for my computing purposes:

1. Macbook (Leopard).
2. FreeBSD server.
3. XP work laptop.
4. PowerMac G5 (OSX + Linux + FreeBSD).
5. HP work desktop (Linux + FreeBSD).

So by no means am I a casual computing user and I do a fair amount of FOSS (free opensource software) work for the FreeBSD and Linux communities.

[yaneurabeya]

I've also found a few Vista bugs as well, but humans coding software aren't perfect and introduce mistakes.

Filing them to the M$ support group is much better and straightforward now, and ensures that the bug truly gets fixed, which is what I want for everyone's benefit. Otherwise Windows will continue to be a semi-steaming pile of junk...

[The_Decider]

Yeah, spend more money to get under performing hardware. That is a great idea!

Using VIsta on a high end machine is like buying an Astin Martin and swapping out the engine for the engine that come in a KIA.