Is Vista the New OS/2?

An anonymous reader asks: "Well after the long torturous wait, Vista is finally out. Is it just me or do others see similarities between Vista and the OS/2 launch back in the '80's? I mean you need new hardware to run the new OS (Just like OS/2). Even on the best '386 system OS/2 still ran like a dog. Older apps sometimes didn't work (DOS penalty box). And most important, what was the compelling reason to upgrade? Add to this an interview I saw with Ballmer, some time ago, where he was talking about how he knew OS/2 was doomed when IBM kept talking about OS/2's KLOC's (thousands of lines of code), and how bloated OS/2 was. Now I see an interview with him where he talks about how great Vista is due to the, yes you guessed it, the KLOC's of code in it. So is Vista going to see the same fate as OS/2?" This is kind of a hard sell seeing that Vista has Microsoft's might behind it, rather than against it. Still, how long do you think it would take a good percentage of computer users (say 80+%) to migrate to Microsoft's latest and greatest OS?

No

[bwoodring]

To rebut your points: 1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC. You may need a video card to get a composite desktop, but I bet people who don't know enough to get a real video card won't care anyway. 2. Vista may not be revolutionary, but it's a clear improvement over XP. It's better looking, more polished and overall a much nicer experience. 3. Almost nobody is going to "buy" Vista. Very few people "bought" XP either. It just makes more sense to get it preloaded. 4. The drivers and other compatibility issues will be ironed out quickly. Right now Vista seems exotic, but it 3-6 months it will be standard on all new desktops. Software and hardware vendors will get on the bus quickly. I didn't run any of the betas or RCs, but I downloaded it from my MSDN account as soon as it came out and I've been impressed. It's probably not 5 full years worth of work, but it's good.

Re:No

[TheRaven64]

OS/2 was a big improvement over Windows 3.x in many, many ways. It ran Windows 3.x applications, but it also ran 32-bit ones. It had pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, so badly behaved Win16 applications couldn't break the whole system.

So, why didn't people buy it? Well, at the time, a single seat license for OS/2 was around £500, and a computer was around £1000. Unlike Windows Vista, no one was selling machines with OS/2 pre-installed with a big OEM discount (IBM were trying to sell PCs, so they weren't really pushing other people to license OS/2). Given the choice between Windows for around £50, or OS/2 for around £500, people went with Windows. OS/2 was better, but it wasn't ten times better.

Re:No

[Osty]

It's probably not 5 full years worth of work, but it's good.

That would be because Vista/Longhorn wasn't being worked on for five continuous years. The Longhorn reset [windowsvistaweblog.com] essentially restarted the clock on Vista around mid-2004. That means Vista as it ships really represents only the last 2.5 years of work, not the full 5 years since XP RTM. In between was Windows Server 2003, XP SP2 (which really could've been a full OS release rather than a service pack), 2003 SP1, and a fair amount of Longhorn work that went away (WinFS, for example).

Not many similarities at all

[mgemmons]

I find very few similarities between the launches of the two operating systems, or at least none of which can't be also attributed to the launch of any new OS. Vista does not require new hardware to run. Sure, if you have a 10 year old computer the odds of you getting it up and running is unlikely, but the same could be said if you had a 10 year old Mac and tried to run OS X on it. Of course, I will leave Linux out of this particular point because it probably would run on a 10-year-old computer ;).

The argument that older apps won't work on Vista is false. Vista is backwards compatible with older software, including DOS apps.

What is the compelling reason to upgrade? If you are already running Windows I think it is very compelling to upgrade. Vista gets a lot of bad press, deservedly so some of it, because the UI borrows from other successful operating systems and some functionality too, but there is a lot to love under its hood if you are willing to look at the OS as a new one are willing to learn rather than trying to use it just as you do XP. Here are a few of my favorites new pieces of functionality:

The new copy functionality that pushes all copy issues to the end of the queue so that all "are you sure?", "unable to copy file, rety?", etc come after every copyable file has been done rather than randomly as in XP.

Speaking of copying...you can see additional useful information when copying files such as the xfer speed in mb/s.

We are finally done with the C:\Documents and Settings directory structure and have a more reasonable C:\Users directory. The Documents and Settings folder always annoyed the hell out of me.

Bread-crumb-like links for directory paths when browsing through folders. So, I can type C:\User\Administrator\My Documents\Backups\2005\Expenses\IBM\Clients in a folder URI and be taken to that folder. Then be able to click on any word in the URI, like "Administrator" and be taken to that folder.

64 bit everything! All Vista versions except for Basic come in 32 and 64-bit versions. You get both versions when you buy Vista. So, everyone will have access to the 64-bit version at no extra charge. To pass driver certifications venders must supply both 32 and 64-bit versions of the driver. Being able to have a fully supported 64-bit OS will be nice.

Security is completely revamped and includes offline and boot-level protection via BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Searching is thoroughly integrated into the OS. For example, open any folder and you'll see a google-like search toolbar alongside the URI which allows you to instantly filter what you see in that folder. I said any folder and meant it. Open control panel and there is the same Instant Search toolbar on that folder. Or open the "Searches" folder from anywhere and see a bunch of pre-configured searches. Looking at mine I have instant searches for "Shared By Me", "Recently Changed", "Recent Pictures and Videos", "Recent Email", "Recent Documents", "Recent Email Attachments" and "Recent Music". You can of course customize new searches.

Tags! Tag your pictures with useful information. After a recent trip to Italy I added metadata tags to all the pictures I took there. Now I can do a filter on "Rome" and see all the pics from Rome or "Florence" and see all the pics from there or even search for Rome museums and see all the pictures in Rome that were taken in museums. Tagging metadata is integrated into the OS and any file can be tagged with metadata, not just pictures. Tagging rocks.

Many new column header controls for folders. For example, looking at my Documents folder I can click on the dropdown for the "Name" column header and choose "Stack By Name". I now see three document stack icons: A-H, I-P, and Q-Z. Clicking on these will take you to those stacks. I'm sure there will be replies that say this or that OS had had that functionality for years, which is fine...there are some great OSes out there. I doubt Vista will win over very many people who are using other OSes anyway. My contention is that if you are running XP, Vista offers everything XP does plus a host of new features (that aren't eye-candy related) that make this OS very much worth the upgrade.

Re:No

[omicronish]

"1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC." Buhahahahahahahahaa!!!

I don't know about other people's experiences with Vista's performance, but mine has been decent. Not amazing, not horrible, but decent. I built my machine 2-3 years ago: Athlon XP 2700+, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB RAM. Vista is installed on a 20 GB partition (I have XP on the other 180 GB partition), and currently there's 2.5 GB free after installing Civilization 4, Visual Studio 2005 Pro, and Office 2007. I'm running at 1920x1200 with full Aero.

Due to dual booting I've been able to subjectively compare game performance between both XP and Vista, and honestly, there isn't a noticeable difference. Civ4 starts out fast and slows down near endgame under both OSs. Quake 2 through 4, Unreal Tournament 2004, Age of Empires 3, WarCraft 3 were all performant at high resolutions (except Quake 4 which ran well at 800x600 under both OSs). Compatibility is also quite good: I tried a bunch of non-recent games altogether (20+ in all) and the only one with issues is massive texture flickering in Alice. Hell, even SimTower ran perfectly, and that game is over a decade old.

As for normal usage, I do sense a bit of UI sluggishness compared to XP, although it seems to affect everything so it might be immature graphics drivers. But the system is still very usable, and the sluggishness is only apparent when using XP directly after Vista, which is something I haven't done in weeks.

As a gamer

[kerashi]

I can say I probably will install Vista when I build my next PC sometime next year. The fact that DX10 won't be available on XP pretty much seals the deal alone, a fact that won't be lost on gamers like me. Now will I be rolling it out across all 4 of my PC's? Would I install it on my current PC? Absolutely not. There is no need, either for myself or for businesses, to go to the expense and hassle when existing Windows XP installations work just fine. But for a new PC, especially a top-end gaming machine, there is no reason NOT to go to Vista if you intend to run Windows.

Biggest difference...

[BlabberMouth]

there is no alternative to Vista on new computers as there was for OS/2.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually find many operations run faster in vista than XP.

i realize this is considered blasphemy on /., where everybody who has never used vista is convinced it must suck.

Don't be stupid.

[StarKruzr]

Your comment suggests that Linux will never be "ready for the desktop." Assuming you accept that it isn't already (which I don't), that is simply absurd. It is either there already or will be within a year or two -- not 5 years down the line like everyone used to say. Have you SEEN Ubuntu lately? It is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking awesome.

Something good about Vista

[armanox]

On my laptop I'm currently dual booting XPsp2/VistaRC1. While I've not worked with the release version, I was quite impressed with RC1 & 2. Not had any driver issues except a slight PM issue(doesn't recover from standby or do screen brightness control). But, on the plus side, on a 1.7GHz Celeron w/ 512MB RAM I'm running(not walking as Beta 2 did) Aero, and have seen graphics card improvements (the ATI 200M is still a POS, but its slightly better under Vista. Try the POS out under Linux w/ OpenGL to get find out why I refer to it that way). On better systems, I've not noticed game decrements, using CS-Source, HL-2, and FEAR as the test games. The device manager is finally available under the Control Panel, and I no longer push Start to shut down the comp. The Start menu itself has improved, for the first time since Win95 - no more pages of expanding menus. The touchpad driver has improved, and now I can use the scroll functions under FF. My only complaint is my virtual cdrom driver no longer works, and I'm using the MS one (download located here [microsoft.com])! And aside from the OS using more RAM (which XP builds up to anyway...), I am quite happy with the preformance (guess that's from when I used to "crawl" KDE 3.0 on a P1 box w/ 49MB ram...). As far as the DRM issues go, don't do anything that would cause such a problem under Vista! Keep an XP box up and running for that problem, or, as I do, use Linux for torrenting and ripping CD's/DVD's. No Vista DRM there! I will also add that I am quite happy with WMP11, my previous choice was to just run the system under linux or VMWare Linux to use amaroK or XMMS. So, I fail to see what all of the grief about Vista is from. I did not like Windows XP, and will be quite happy to not have to carry XP disks and CD keys for fixing people's computers, so I don't have to look at the welcome screen after an HD format. I hope that most people will opt to upgrade to Vista, or switch to Linux.

Re:I love you too...

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Ah, at least you looked. Of course, there's a little more to the original Bott article [zdnet.com] than you say:

What if I had stuck with the stock configuration? That original RAM configuration of 512MB would be OK with Vista

and

I've tried Windows Vista on systems that are considerably older than this one, with equally good results. For instance, I have one 2002-vintage system with similar upgrades (including a new CPU) that is running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition with the full Aero interface just fine.

I notice you omitted those facts.

Look, dude, you may not want to upgrade; that's your business, and no matter of mine. I probably won't, as it isn't worth it to me to buy four licenses at retail. But at least, when you tell a lie, don't tell a blatant one, OK?