Comments on: Windows Vista First Impressions

By: Bob Kerns

Bob Kerns — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:10:16 +0000

I found that the biggest shock in switching to Vista was that so much functionality had moved. I learned that the search feature in the Start menu was the biggest help in overcoming this.

But there’s also shock in finding functionality you’ve added to your four-year-old XP is not available out-of-the-box in Vista, and you can’t remember where you got it from….

Your RAW support is a good example. If I recall correctly, there’s no RAW support in XP, either.

I googled vista raw thumbnails, and came up with this helpful article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2007/01/23/raw-support-in-windows-vista.aspx
which lead to:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2007/03/30/canon-raw-codec-for-windows-vista-released.aspx
which lead to:
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&tabact=DownloadDetailTabAct&fcategoryid=314&modelid=11933
Which would appear to have what you need. Hope that helps!

People tend to flame Vista as a knee-jerk response, without considering the myriad of third-party pieces in the equation. (The hardware industry has long been particularly lax in the quality of device drivers; we could have a good discussion of the dysfunctional economics involved). While there are certainly grounds for flaming Microsoft and Vista, for some reason 90% of the internet flaming is bogus, so keep an open mind and think for yourself. (There’s an interesting sociological phenomenon where any blog that mentions Vista attracts flames from the linux and mac camps as well as people who think XP was god’s gift and shouldn’t be touched! Sometimes I suspect a spambot at work…)

And use google to find quick answers…

Ironically, it was Google that brought me to this page, looking for a solution to another Vista annoyance. I shouldn’t be surprised, of course; google has always thought very highly of you, and you turn up in my search results fairly often.

My experience with XP was that 1GB was the minimum to avoid slugishness. Even so, I found when I upgraded my old laptop (1 GB) to Vista, it got MORE responsive, not less. (I could speculate on the reasons, but I’m not claiming a general result here). I always recommend considerably more memory than MS does, and for Vista, I recommend a minimum of 2GB. That’s not because of how much Vista takes up, but because of how much everything you’ll run takes up — plus Vista does a pretty fair job of using any extra memory to keep things responsive, with prefetching, etc.

(Personally, I’ve got 4 GB, but I’m not a typical user, am I?)

By: Rainer

Rainer — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:02:50 +0000

Vista is hopefully the last stone in MS good tradition of bad products. I can’t remember any of the MS OS’s running without annoying bugs before the first patch came out (called a “service release” or “service pack”).
It’s just MS strategy to deliver unfinished products. To be first on market and to save costs in QS. Vista is a pain – but in two years, when the first service pack is available and the average laptop has a 10GHz quadcore CPU it will be usable.

Lesson learned: Never be ahead of technology with MS products!

By: Chris Brookins

Chris Brookins — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:36:54 +0000

Microsoft just released patches for performance and reliability – I’d be interested if your experience improves after applying these two updates.

http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert/archive/2007/08/07/windows-vista-pre-sp1-performance-and-reliability-updates-released.aspx

By: Daniel Taylor

Daniel Taylor — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:12:07 +0000

Vista isn’t going away, so we’ll have to get used to it.

I beg to differ. I don’t have to get used to anything. Vista is horrible and I have no intention of doing day to day work in it. If enough people feel the same way, software vendors will continue to support XP. If not, there’s always Mac OS X or Linux.

I have no intention of following Redmond down the Vista or Office 2007 paths. Both products are trash.

By: J. Peterson

J. Peterson — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:04:30 +0000

You’re so polite. Look at the torching Forbes reviewer Stephen Manes gave Vista:

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

“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.

…”

By: verc

verc — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:41:32 +0000

I just bought a Toshiba laptop at best buy as well.
I inquired about XP, but they had no machines with it.
To avoid those dialog boxes, turn off user controls. Vista also has something called “packet scaling” which can slow you down on slower connections. This can also be turned off.
DWM consumes huge memory. 2G RAM seems wise.
“During a lot of system administration tasks, bizarre dialog boxes pop up demanding extra administrator rights, even though the machine only has one user, which was configured without a password.”
Vista isn’t going away, so we’ll have to get used to it.

The latest version of IE seems quite nice, and I have ceased using Firefox.

By: Dennis Linnell

Dennis Linnell — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 20:27:23 +0000

I didn’t like Vista very much, either. But it does have one nice feature: autorun is disabled by default. So when you accidentally insert a CD, DVD, or flash drive containing the W32.Deletemusic worm, Vista will ask first before deleting all the .mp3 files on your system. Occasionally those “bizarre dialog boxes” that “pop up demanding extra administrator rights” are useful for something.

By: Don

Don — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:28:58 +0000

I needed to buy my daughter a notebook computer for her freshman year as a Mech. Engineering major at the Univ. of North Dakota (CU Boulder wasn’t cold enough for her). After agonizing over Vista vs. XP, I settled on a Mac Book Pro with XP and Parallels. The Mac Book Pro came standard with 2GB memory and can be upgraded to 4GB. So far no buyer’s remorse but it does appear she will have to use BootCamp (free download from Apple) to boot XP alone to get the compute power needed to run CAD software like Pro/E Wildfire which she will learn in ME 101 during her first semester.

The campus IT department recommeded XP over Vista. It’s nearly impossible to find an XP machine at retail stores. This is a real bonus for Apple.

By: David Magda

David Magda — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:18:25 +0000

The reason why Vista may not be working with your NAS is because Vista is probably using a new authentication protocol called NTLMv2. Newer versions of Samba do support it, but that version of Samba may not be present on your Infrant unit.

To tell Vista to also use the older NTLM(v1) protocol follow the instructions at:

http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746

Hopefully Infrant will update there firmware so things work out-of-box (especially with their anticipated 4.x release).