Coding Sanity

Okay, so for once I wasn't an early adopter, but I tend to be a bit conservative with OS upgrades, especially one as fraught as Vista has been. In any case, I've upgraded only my home machine, which is basically a games machine *** file server, my main development box, my laptop, is remaining Vista free. So, I've been using Vista for the whole weekend so what do I think? Well, it appears to be one of the buggiest operating systems I've ever used. It's blue screened once, required reboots 9 times (not counting software installations), had screen artifacts jagging crazily about the screen, is incapable of playing a video file or DVD for more than a few minutes, and is constantly excercising the CPU, even when there shouldn't be any activity. But it is pretty.

Yep, the UI is certainly very slick. The way that the icon of an AVI contains a still frame from the movie, and then the folder's icon it's in contains a couple of frames from of the movies in the folder. I like the new address bar very much, and the UAC doesn't appear to be as irritating as I had feared. As a friend of mine said, suddenly XP looks very cartoony in comparison. Also, it's problem resolution is brilliant compared to the moron one installed with XP ("We are still investigating this problem, for the last 4 years"), and is actually helpful, even going so far as identifying a PCI card without drivers and downloading and installing them while I was still busy looking for the website. I had just arrived on the driver download page, and suddenly the card started working. I must say I was impressed.

But... all that is nothing against the massive stability problems plaguing my computer. Frankly it looks like the blame can be laid on nVidia. They (and Creative Labs) appear to have totally fluffed their Vista drivers. Fair enough, they are beta drivers and maybe I'm speaking too soon, maybe suddenly they'll have fully functional stable drivers by Tuesday, but frankly I doubt it. They seem convinced that they will do the seemingly impossible deed of completing the functionality of their drivers (yes, they're apparently not yet feature complete, at least in nVidia's case), as well as stabilizing them in a couple of days. To me it looks unlikely. I wonder how unhappy someone would be who goes out buys Vista, installs it, and his computer stops working. I don't think your average guy in the street would have any doubts that it's Microsoft's fault. In a sense he'd be right. If the drivers are this poor, Microsoft should have been raising a holy stink about it, but they haven't as far as I've seen.

The end result is that we're just a couple of days from Vista release with all the hardware manufacturers promising drivers ready for release, but all the beta drivers actually out being horrifically far from release quality. In any case, wouldn't it have made sense to ship the drivers with Vista? Now, even if you've got quite old hardware (like my video card), the latest Vista release won't support it out the box, and you'll have to download what will quite possibly be a buggy driver.

Oh yeah, one cool feature in Vista, the Reliability Monitor. The only trouble is that of 5 driver crashes, 3 forced restarts, 6 non-forced but neccesary restarts, 4 major system slowdowns and about 5 application shutdowns plus a blue screen, it's picked up: 1 application shutdown and 1 driver crash. So, it seems the Reliability Monitor isn't too reliable itself.

Conclusion

If these driver issues get sorted out, Vista should be fantastic. They're not too much of a hardship for me, since it's basically a spare machine, so I'm not getting worked up about it. I hope that in future Microsoft will insist on drivers being ready way before release date. I mean, for goodness sakes with all the delays in the Vista project the hardware manufacturers have had about 5 years to get ready for this.