Vista a work in progress

How many people in this room have had big time problems with Vista? I am pretty sure the number is HUGE. Problems are all over the board. Network discovery issues, installation issues, service pack installation issues and the list goes on.

I came across an issue where, when I clicked “Turn Windows features on or off” I would just get a blank popup. Initially I thought it might be a permission issue. But after some research I found out that there were some registry changes suggested which would help solve those problems in some cases. In my case it did not work and the only solution was to reinstall Vista again.

So, I decided to reinstall Vista and there was more “fun” in store for me there. My vista installation was fine but then when it started installing the updates things started going awry again. Everytime it would install some updates and restart and then try to repair something. This went on for more than four hours. After that I decided to install the service pack 1 directly and then things started to stabilize. Later I had network discovery issues all over again which after couple of hours solved by itself.

All in all I spent about one day just installing vista. For a product that had been in development since years I expected more out of it. My initial experience with Vista has made me believe that it is still a work in progress and it will take some more patches for the OS to stabilize. Quite disappointing to say the least.

3 Responses to “Vista a work in progress”

  1. Vista’s a bit of a gong show, and I think a large reason for it is the dichotomy that currently exists within Microsoft between the old guard like Steve Ballmer and the fresh visionaries like Scott Guthrie.

    On one hand you have Guthrie, who’s “open sourced” (read-only publishing) the .NET Framework, actively seeks feedback from non-MS communities regarding MS technology, and is being really active in creating technologies and frameworks that work with other platforms and developers rather than work over (as in pounding). Taking small steps and focusing on specific things and making them better for the developers – all developers.

    Than you have Ballmer, a guy who as recent as 2 weeks ago in San Fransisco made the following quote:

    1974, our sophomore year in college, Popular Electronics Magazine, MITS, it’s the 8080 microprocessor on the cover. MITS builds the personal computer with the 8080. And Paul runs to Bill and says, okay, we’re not hardware guys, we’re software guys. And Bill and Paul look at each other and said, yes, let’s build all the software anybody is going to ever need for one of these. We’re on the same strategy, basically, 30 years later.

    I’m not sure that’s a good thing. MS needs to tighten it up or split it up, because that current game plan is killing them. When you have your thumbs in as many pies as Microsoft does, you end up with a lot of tablescraps all over the place.

    Microsoft needs to cut the crap and get back to basics.

  2. And by “San Fransisco” I of course meant “Seattle”.

  3. [...] Janak Kapadia’s blog From My Perspective « Vista a work in progress [...]

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