Text 15948, 116 rader
Skriven 2007-02-09 18:48:28 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Dim Vista
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


And those raves reviews for Vista just keep on coming in...

This one from Forbes technology column..

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html


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Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines
of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town
dump. The new slogan is: "The 'Wow' Starts Now," and Microsoft touts new
features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh. But as with every
previous version, there's no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at
best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and
rip somebody's liver out.

Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up old ones
and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision running things. If I can
find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft ? Most likely
answer: It did--and it doesn't care.

Example: If malware somehow gets into your machine, Windows Firewall will not
stop it from making outbound Internet connections to do its evil deeds. If you
turn off that firewall in favor of a better one, the Windows Firewall control
panel will admonish: "Your computer is not protected; turn on Windows
Firewall." But the Windows Security Center will correctly tell you that a
firewall is on and that you shouldn't run two at a time. Call it convistancy.

Gaffes like this make you wonder if security really is improved as much as
Microsoft claims. You'll still have to add your own antivirus software, a new
Vista-ready version at that. And Vista's irritating and repeated warnings about
possible security breaches don't always mean what they say and are usually
irrelevant. You'll take them as seriously as the boy who cried wolf, making
them useless as defensive tools.

As usual, things Microsoft was touting last time have mysteriously gone away in
favor of putative new wonders. Windows XP's heralded "task-based interface"
often let you perform actions by picking them from a list. Now many of those
actions have disappeared--except where they haven't.

Likewise, Control Panel options have been totally rejiggered yet again for no
apparent reason. You can still use the Classic panel view that's been available
since time immemorial, but several items have been confusingly renamed out of
sheer perversity.

The new desktop search features are a mess, thanks in part to inscrutable
indexing defaults and options. A "quick search" panel at the bottom of the
Start menu lets you find results whether in a file's name or its contents. But
on one machine--oddly, the fastest I tested--it was far, far slower than using
Start's regular search option. Though that option finds folders like
Accessories, quick search doesn't always. And if you click away to do something
else while you wait for answers, Vista abandons the "quick search" and makes
you start over.

Windows Mail is a mild reworking of Outlook Express whose big new feature is a
spam filter that in my tests flagged nonspam as spam and vice versa an
unacceptable 10% of the time. The bare-bones word processor WordPad used to be
able to open Microsoft Word files. No more. What possible rationale could there
be for "fixing" that, except to force users to shell out for the real thing?

Potentially exciting improvements keep coming up short. The speech recognition
system's clever design lets you control the computer via voice and dictate into
programs like Word. It did pretty well at understanding me even when I used a
less than optimal built-in microphone instead of a headset. But my enthusiasm
turned to dust when the software for correcting inevitable mistakes locked up
repeatedly--even when it understood what I was saying.

Many touted improvements, like the Web browser and media player, have been
available for XP for months. One minor winner is Vista-only: file lists that
update their contents automatically. You no longer have to hit View and Refresh
to see files added since you last opened the list window. Macs, of course, have
done this for years.

The new Mac-like ability to show thumbnails of documents and running programs
is cute, but it doesn't always work--typical of a level of fit and finish that
would be unacceptable from a cut-rate tailor. Only in Windowsland will you find
howlers like a Safely Remove Hardware button for memory card readers that
happen to be hardwired into your computer.

Still with us: program crashes, followed by the machine's refusal to shut down
until you lean on the power button awhile. Thereafter you may be subjected to
ugly white-on-black text from CHKDSK, a DOS-era program that issues baffling
new reports like "44 reparse records processed."

Should you upgrade your current machine? Are you nuts? Upgrading is almost
always a royal pain. Many older boxes are too wimpy for Vista, and a
"Vista-ready" unit Microsoft upgraded for me could see my wireless network but
not connect to it. The diagnostics helpfully reported "Wireless association
failed due to an unknown reason" and suggested I consult my "network
administrator"--me. Yet I've connected dozens of things to that network,
including other Vista machines, a PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's own Xbox 360.

My recommendation: Don't even consider updating an old machine to Vista,
period. And unless you absolutely must, don't buy a new one with Vista until
the inevitable Service Pack 1 (a.k.a. Festival o' Fixes) arrives to combat
horrors as yet unknown.

I suggested to one Windows product manager that if the company were truly
serious about security, Vista might offer a simple way to delete files securely
and eliminate all traces of identity and passwords so you could safely pass the
machine on or sell it years from now. His reply: "Does any other operating
system do that?" That tells you all you need to know about Microsoft. The real
slogan: "No innovation here."

As Bill Gates winds down his roles at Microsoft, Windows Vista may be the chief
software architect's swan song. It's a shame his legacy is something so utterly
unimaginative, internally discordant and woefully out of tune.
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 /m

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