Longhorn in M1 was… not impressive. The earliest build of Longhorn I’ve seen had: a download manager for IE and a drive space meter. Hardly a “space-age operating system” at that point! Flashy UI bits really didn’t start getting compiled in until 364x and later, around M2.

i just don’t understand how anyone can tolerate sitting in front their monitors to watch a movie. it’s crazy i tell ya! completely incomparable to kicking your feet up and enjoying your DVDs and other such content at 10′!

excellent job! keep up the great work! one request (or two depending on how you count it): host/display HD DVD and Blu-Ray content from within MCE itself. might not be up to you but still, i’m just putting it out there.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ready.asp

what hardware is she using? I am using amongst other things an Intel MacBook Pro which doesn’t seem to have this problem… judging from the latest developer release though I think they might have fixed this issue.

Mike,

I am not saying things are perfect with any of these systems. At the end of the day they are being developed by humans which by design aren’t perfect. Thankfully!

However, I am scratching my head as to why Vista has so many performance problems with the network and file i/o. What’s more after doing extensive searches on the this and other issue on the MS site I can’t find any mention of it which makes me wonder if any of these issues will be addressed in SP1.

For example. I was chatting with a friend the other week about the iPod. He told me that it’s design perfection and the role model that all other MP3 players will always follow. I ask why, if it’s so good, did apple completely dump the entire thing when they launched the iPod touch? Gone is the interface, style, everything that he was saying made the iPod the ultimate MP3 player.

We were chatting about how great the iPod touch is and eventually agreed that it is also NOT the pinnacle of MP3 player design of usability. It’s merely the bee have RIGHT NOW. Sooner or later something better will come along, we just can’t envisage it yet.

So everyone who says Vista is perfect or OS X is perfect had better remember… It might be perfect TODAY, but tomorrow you’ll probably think it clunky and old hat.

There are definitely areas where Vista sucks royally. One of them is network throughput. I do creative work with large media files stored on networked NAS drives. The drives are attached via a 1 Gbit network. Accessing the drives from WinXP or Leopard is fast as hell while Vista seems to crawl along then speed up and suddenly start crawling again.

It certainly can’t be driver related as it’s happening on different machines with different network cards. It also can’t be the NAS as if happend with different appliances. While I agree that this will probably get better over time as SP1 and SP2 for Vista get shipped it does make me wonder why Apple is capable of shipping an OS without such major issues. There is no doubt Leopard has it’s problems but it’s nothing compared to Vista.

Where my confidence in totally plummets if I then read that they are already working on the next version of Windows which they intend to release next year. My question would be what about fixing the problems with Vista first?

Usually the best indicator as to how well an OS upgrade runs and how much productivity improvements it brings is to look at corporate adoption. From about 20 odd large Australian corporates I work with not a single one has started a Vista migration. Most of them either will wait till SP2 or jump Vista alltogether and go straight to what ever the next version is.