So, Vista not stable yet I guess?



  • Spotted as an advert on a computer parts website [b]today[/b] :




  • "Now with Service Pack 2!"

     I'd hope so, it's only been out 3 years.

    My guess is that it's an old ad that just hasn't been updated.
     



  • A month or two after the Vista lauch, Dell re-introduced XP, due to demand.

    Personally, the fact that all the new models had been switched to Vista just after launch was a big part of why I ended up buying a macbook instead of a PC.
     



  • @merreborn said:

    A month or two after the Vista lauch, Dell re-introduced XP, due to demand.

    Personally, the fact that all the new models had been switched to Vista just after launch was a big part of why I ended up buying a macbook instead of a PC.
     

    I'm sure there are lots of good reason to get a macbook, but that ain't one of them. I built a self assembly PC recently which of course came with no OS. But the site I bought the parts from, Overclockers.co.uk also sell plenty of OS-less machines, and I'm sure other places do too.
     



  • I'm glad Dell reintroduced XP as an option on new computers.  I just wish they'd stop even offering Vista on new computers.



  • @Albatross said:

    I'm glad Dell reintroduced XP as an option on new computers.  I just wish they'd stop even offering Vista on new computers.
    Why didn't you simply use the utility designed to transfer files and settings? :-<BR>



  • @merreborn said:

    A month or two after the Vista lauch, Dell re-introduced XP, due to demand.

    A friend of mine bought a new Dell two months ago, with Vista preinstalled. Two weeks later, the harddisk contents go haywire. The Dell helpdesks tells my friend that "Vista is a little bit more fragile with crashes". Seems that crashes or other unclean shutdowns can seriously corrupt the harddisk. Way to go, Microsoft, now that we thought that W2K and WXP mastered crash-handling well enough!

    I won't touch Vista with a ten-foot pole before SP1 or SP2 have seen the light of day. 



  • @TheRider said:

    @merreborn said:

    A month or two after the Vista lauch, Dell re-introduced XP, due to demand.

    A friend of mine bought a new Dell two months ago, with Vista preinstalled. Two weeks later, the harddisk contents go haywire. The Dell helpdesks tells my friend that "Vista is a little bit more fragile with crashes". Seems that crashes or other unclean shutdowns can seriously corrupt the harddisk. Way to go, Microsoft, now that we thought that W2K and WXP mastered crash-handling well enough!

    I won't touch Vista with a ten-foot pole before SP1 or SP2 have seen the light of day. 

    Having installed Vista 64 on my new machine (4GB of memory, XP 32 only recognizes 3 at a time), this doesn't exactly fill me with warm fuzzies. I just wish creative would manage to create an X-Fi driver that doesn't blare white noise out the speakers every time I reboot instead of nice pleasant sounds. Having more than 2GB of memory is apparently not a "feature" with them.



  • I haven't had Vista crash on me once in two months.

    What does keep crashing constantly is Acrobat Reader. Oh, and Nvidia drivers still suck, and I couldn't even install the latest localised drivers, I had to use the English ones. Oh, and Photoshop CS2 keeps forgetting my settings, and Adobe's answer is 'buy CS3'. Oh, and NFS Most Wanted crashes constantly, and EA's answer is 'wait for Pro Street'. Oh, and I've had Firefox lock up hard and force a reboot.

    But Vista never crashed. So far, the only problems I've had with Vista (after figuring out where the useful settings are) are that it occasionally scrambles the categories of the desktop background picker, and there was a problem updating Defender at one point, but nothing disabling and reenabling automatic updates couldn't fix. And those are hardly unsurmountable issues.

    Quite a difference with my old ME box, which tended to crash Explorer when opening any folder, randomly gave tapisrv not responding errors on shutdown, froze on shutdown if I used the printer during that session, either hung on a black screen or auto-rebooted after shutdown instead of turning off, randomly corrupted image previews causing Explorer to freeze upon opening the folder, always crashed when trying to copy .avi files unless preview was turned off, and locked up if I tried to open WMP and Firefox at the same time.



  • @Brother Laz said:

    I haven't had Vista crash on me once in two months.

    What does keep crashing constantly is Acrobat Reader. Oh, and Nvidia drivers still suck, and I couldn't even install the latest localised drivers, I had to use the English ones. Oh, and Photoshop CS2 keeps forgetting my settings, and Adobe's answer is 'buy CS3'. Oh, and NFS Most Wanted crashes constantly, and EA's answer is 'wait for Pro Street'. Oh, and I've had Firefox lock up hard and force a reboot.

    But Vista never crashed. So far, the only problems I've had with Vista (after figuring out where the useful settings are) are that it occasionally scrambles the categories of the desktop background picker, and there was a problem updating Defender at one point, but nothing disabling and reenabling automatic updates couldn't fix. And those are hardly unsurmountable issues.

    Quite a difference with my old ME box, which tended to crash Explorer when opening any folder, randomly gave tapisrv not responding errors on shutdown, froze on shutdown if I used the printer during that session, either hung on a black screen or auto-rebooted after shutdown instead of turning off, randomly corrupted image previews causing Explorer to freeze upon opening the folder, always crashed when trying to copy .avi files unless preview was turned off, and locked up if I tried to open WMP and Firefox at the same time.

    I note that you are comparing Vista with ME instead of XP.  I'll take that as indicative of the fact that Vista sucks sweaty donkey balls.  If you had XP instead of Vista, you would not be having these problems.  It surprises me that people think that this kind of operation is acceptable in an OS.



  • @TheRider said:

    A friend of mine bought a new Dell two months ago, with Vista preinstalled. Two weeks later, the harddisk contents go haywire. The Dell helpdesks tells my friend that "Vista is a little bit more fragile with crashes". Seems that crashes or other unclean shutdowns can seriously corrupt the harddisk. Way to go, Microsoft, now that we thought that W2K and WXP mastered crash-handling well enough!

    I won't touch Vista with a ten-foot pole before SP1 or SP2 have seen the light of day



    You honestly think that a support goon knows any damned thing about filesystem stability? What movie are you living in and how much did it cost? if the drive was corrupted, chances are it was a bad drive or motherboard. They didn't re-write NTFS for Vista, and whole drive corruption bugs tend to be easy to spot.



  • They did change NTFS in a number of ways a likely broke something. Of course, since it was already highly broken, they wouldn't even need to change it to achieve whole drive corruption. I've seen NTFS get corrupted in a number of ways, but I'll just share the best one.

     A Windows 2000 SP3 machine with an installed time of a few years and an uptime of a few weeks suddenly crashed to the standard BSOD. When the reset button was pushed, it couldn't boot. I forget the exact error because its been years, but wahtever should come right after NTLDR failed (there was a FAT drive with NTLDR and boot.ini on it, W2K was installed on a separate NTFS partition). So, I get out the regular tools and go to work. Boot with ERD Commander, drive in question doesn't get mounted. Odd. Boot Remote Rescue and map the physical disk over the network to another W2K box, where I try to mount the volume. Failure. Try running various tools on it, but everything basically says 'This disk is not formatted NTFS'. Now, this could sound like fatal physical disk failure, but the disk was in perfect condition and there were no sector read errors at all. Eventually, I found a great little program called GetDataBackforNTFS, which saved the day. Basically, I pointed it at the disk, it read the whole MFT into memory, and then tried reconstructing around the errors in a variety of ways and presented alternate view into the file system. I pick the one which shows files and not just garabage directories full of garbage names, and it 'mounts' the volume using its in memory reconstruction of the MFT. I was then able to copy all the files off the disk, reformat the disk, reinstall W2K, and copy back all my rescued files. Nothing big in the end, but solid proof that NTFS can trash a whole partition in a single write to the point that almost everything that can deal with NTFS doesn't even think the disk is formatted.


     



  • Technically, they actually did change NTFS slightly for Vista -- it now includes support for something called "atomic transactioning" -- but I've been following coverage of Vista pretty closely, and have heard nothing even resembling crashes causing hard disk corruption.  The only thing that really consistently seriously wrongfoots Vista seems to be the nVidia drivers, especially combined with a Geforce 8800; and nVidia's new attempt at them will be better.



  • @KattMan said:

    @Brother Laz said:

    I haven't had Vista crash on me once in two months.

    What does keep crashing constantly is Acrobat Reader. Oh, and Nvidia drivers still suck, and I couldn't even install the latest localised drivers, I had to use the English ones. Oh, and Photoshop CS2 keeps forgetting my settings, and Adobe's answer is 'buy CS3'. Oh, and NFS Most Wanted crashes constantly, and EA's answer is 'wait for Pro Street'. Oh, and I've had Firefox lock up hard and force a reboot.

    But Vista never crashed. So far, the only problems I've had with Vista (after figuring out where the useful settings are) are that it occasionally scrambles the categories of the desktop background picker, and there was a problem updating Defender at one point, but nothing disabling and reenabling automatic updates couldn't fix. And those are hardly unsurmountable issues.

    Quite a difference with my old ME box, which tended to crash Explorer when opening any folder, randomly gave tapisrv not responding errors on shutdown, froze on shutdown if I used the printer during that session, either hung on a black screen or auto-rebooted after shutdown instead of turning off, randomly corrupted image previews causing Explorer to freeze upon opening the folder, always crashed when trying to copy .avi files unless preview was turned off, and locked up if I tried to open WMP and Firefox at the same time.

    I note that you are comparing Vista with ME instead of XP.  I'll take that as indicative of the fact that Vista sucks sweaty donkey balls.  If you had XP instead of Vista, you would not be having these problems.  It surprises me that people think that this kind of operation is acceptable in an OS.

    Exactly, but i guess Vista probably feels like a good OS if you're used to ME :)

     



  • @Goldie said:

    @KattMan said:
    @Brother Laz said:

    I haven't had Vista crash on me once in two months.

    What does keep crashing constantly is Acrobat Reader. Oh, and Nvidia drivers still suck, and I couldn't even install the latest localised drivers, I had to use the English ones. Oh, and Photoshop CS2 keeps forgetting my settings, and Adobe's answer is 'buy CS3'. Oh, and NFS Most Wanted crashes constantly, and EA's answer is 'wait for Pro Street'. Oh, and I've had Firefox lock up hard and force a reboot.

    But Vista never crashed. So far, the only problems I've had with Vista (after figuring out where the useful settings are) are that it occasionally scrambles the categories of the desktop background picker, and there was a problem updating Defender at one point, but nothing disabling and reenabling automatic updates couldn't fix. And those are hardly unsurmountable issues.

    Quite a difference with my old ME box, which tended to crash Explorer when opening any folder, randomly gave tapisrv not responding errors on shutdown, froze on shutdown if I used the printer during that session, either hung on a black screen or auto-rebooted after shutdown instead of turning off, randomly corrupted image previews causing Explorer to freeze upon opening the folder, always crashed when trying to copy .avi files unless preview was turned off, and locked up if I tried to open WMP and Firefox at the same time.

    I note that you are comparing Vista with ME instead of XP.  I'll take that as indicative of the fact that Vista sucks sweaty donkey balls.  If you had XP instead of Vista, you would not be having these problems.  It surprises me that people think that this kind of operation is acceptable in an OS.

    Exactly, but i guess Vista probably feels like a good OS if you're used to ME :)

     

    Don't be so hard on yourself.



  • @HitScan said:

    @TheRider said:
    A friend of mine bought a new Dell two months ago, with Vista preinstalled. Two weeks later, the harddisk contents go haywire. The Dell helpdesks tells my friend that "Vista is a little bit more fragile with crashes". Seems that crashes or other unclean shutdowns can seriously corrupt the harddisk. Way to go, Microsoft, now that we thought that W2K and WXP mastered crash-handling well enough!

    I won't touch Vista with a ten-foot pole before SP1 or SP2 have seen the light of day



    You honestly think that a support goon knows any damned thing about filesystem stability? What movie are you living in and how much did it cost? if the drive was corrupted, chances are it was a bad drive or motherboard. They didn't re-write NTFS for Vista, and whole drive corruption bugs tend to be easy to spot.

    Actually, yes, I have high respects for Dell support, because I have had them help me competently and quickly several times in the past. I know other support organizations that I don't even bother to call when I have a problem with their product, because my experience with them has been less-than-nice (such as Cablecom in Switzerland).

    But you are actually right: After first helping my friend on the phone and via remote-login to reinstall Vista for him on the dual-disk RAID-1 machine, where the BIOS claimed one of the two disks bad, and the extended hard disk diagnostics test, taking several hours, revealed no defective sector and nothing -- the supporter finally came to the conclusion that there really must be something wrong with the hardware. Two days later, a service guy came home to my friend and exchanged both the motherboard and the hard disk. Now he lives in peace.

    Conclusion: No, Dell supporters don't know everything (I had told my friend already that simply reinstalling Vista wouldn't solve his BIOS-says-hard-disk-is-bad problem), but they are still trying hard. I was just trying to inform you guys of what Dell support had said about their opinion of the stability of Vista. And I think this opinion also led to Dell supporting XP again on new sales.



  • @poopdeville said:

    Don't be so hard on yourself.

    Err... i didn't say anything about myself :s 



  • @Goldie said:

    @poopdeville said:

    Don't be so hard on yourself.

    Err... i didn't say anything about myself :s 

    Read what you wrote again. 



  • @Simon said:

    Technically, they actually did change NTFS slightly for Vista -- it now includes support for something called "atomic transactioning" -- but I've been following coverage of Vista pretty closely, and have heard nothing even resembling crashes causing hard disk corruption.  The only thing that really consistently seriously wrongfoots Vista seems to be the nVidia drivers, especially combined with a Geforce 8800; and nVidia's new attempt at them will be better.

    NTFS is a journaling file system, so this has always been supported.  Atomic Transactions is a Kernel level improvement and not an NTFS improvement.

    The only substantial changes to NTFS have been in the areas of bugfixes and feature changes; however, largely the last set of major changes were in the Windows XP release.

    Vista is not and never will be "more fragile with crashes."  The whole "crashing your computer corrupts your drive" thing has been gone for a while.  You can lose chunks of data and such, but that's about it.  You shouldn't see instances where the whole drive gets pooched.  If you do, I'd pin it on the motherboard / drivers or something of that nature before I'd pin it on NTFS.

    Plus, don't confuse the crappiness of Win32 with the FS.



  • @asuffield said:

    @Goldie said:

    @poopdeville said:

    Don't be so hard on yourself.

    Err... i didn't say anything about myself :s 

    Read what you wrote again. 

    and pull it out of context...

    "Exactly, but i guess Vista probably feels like a good OS if you're used to ME :)"

    ME not being the OS but the pronoun 



  • @ShadowWolf said:

    NTFS is a journaling file system, so this has always been supported.  Atomic Transactions is a Kernel level improvement and not an NTFS improvement.

    The only substantial changes to NTFS have been in the areas of bugfixes and feature changes; however, largely the last set of major changes were in the Windows XP release.

    Vista is not and never will be "more fragile with crashes."  The whole "crashing your computer corrupts your drive" thing has been gone for a while.  You can lose chunks of data and such, but that's about it.  You shouldn't see instances where the whole drive gets pooched.  If you do, I'd pin it on the motherboard / drivers or something of that nature before I'd pin it on NTFS.

    Plus, don't confuse the crappiness of Win32 with the FS.

    When do you propose the magical point was crossed where a NT crash is unable to horribly corrupt an NTFS volume? This definitely happened in Win2000, as I detailed a few posts up. The chanegs to NTFS going from W2K to XP are probably less significant than the changes going from XP to Vista. Just because you don't notice them as a user, doesn't mean they didn't happen. NTFS transactions involve changes in the NTFS driver as the kernel, though not necessarily in NTFS on-disk structures. There are others as well if you read up on what has been done after the WinFS abortion. When a system is crashing, it can do any stupid thing it wants, including writing over a critical part of the file system. This is true of any OS and thre is no way to completely mitigate the possibility, only reduce it.

     


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