Then it'd look like Vista. 'Hi, I'm your friend! NOW BE ETERNALLY DAMNED BITCH! (Error, soul not digitally signed.)'

My first experiences, were the comforting return of the Blue Screen. I had honestly not seen it for nearly 3-4 years, as it's NEVER turned up on XP. Hailing back to the days when getting anything to work after 3.1 could be a touchy experience. When the Blue Screen was something you often blamed on karma, for lack of a better excuse as to why it had appeared just as you had beaten that final boss. It's back. And it's profound affect on me makes me remember how I felt when I'd heard Firefly was being cancelled... probably about the same time I last had a blue screen! I was actually one of the guys who sent a death threat to Fox :)

Feel free to post your pet peeves on Vista. But having tried to play EVE under it, and having that god damned data feature pop up and crash the program every other hour, I've already set time asside this weekend to roll-back. Joy.

Yhorian

FWIW, my Vista machine is the least problematic Windows machine I've ever owned.

But it was also a completely new machine with relatively high end specs.

It doesn't annoy you to have to run VS as admin and such? Just the DOS prompt tedium was enough to turn me off. You can't include privilege escalation without having a "sudo" equivalent.

I think its fine for what most people do - for what I do its a bit tedious. W2k & Ubuntu FTW. I might be biased since I'd rather execute things from the command prompt than click around the UI.

>It doesn't annoy you to have to run VS as admin and such?

Possibly it's that I'm running VS2008, but I don't have to run it as admin.

Other than installs, I don't think I've been prompted for escalation for anything not written in the 1900s. YMMV.

After finally getting a new PC last month I decided to try out the Vista Business I got from my University back in the days and to be honest: Till now I still didnt regret it...
The only trouble I had was finding the correct flash tool for my motherboard, all other drivers,programs and games seem to work without any problems till now.

Vista is certainly a resource hog but as long as you throw enough hardware at it, that doesnt pose a problem. :p

Have been on my brand new (4 months old) laptop, which came with Vista Business already on it, and my new Dev box (2 months old) which I put Vista Ultimate on. I had been dreading using it, since I played around with many of the earlier builds of it, and the performance on it completly sucked. I had upgraded my main machine to it after the launch, and it was dreadful and ended up wiping my box and going back to XP.

So far, my only recommendation about Vista is to get it as part of a brand new machine package (not some homebrew build, like I normally do).

Vista is basically Microsoft's attempt to reign in the deployment nightmare known as Windows (personally I'd love to see the Registry just go away). Blue screen errors are the result of errors in driver code. In order to do all the things that thirdparty developers for Windows do they make liberal use of Window's driver API. For instance - if you go into device manager and turn on virtual drivers you'll see that your anti-virus has several loaded to allow it to intercept file accesses before Explorer does. Chances are one of your drivers was straight ported from XP - seemed to work out Ok and was distributed as is without having memory usage validated. You can download Windows debugger tools and open the mini-dump that Windows does (one of the few things I like about Windows) and it'll parse the last stack trace to see what driver (.sys) was executing at the time of the crash. From there you can see if there's something you need to update or at least email the dump to the provider. I've found when I upgraded to Vista all my crashes were coming from my anti-virus (BitDefender) - mostly because I edited the installer for BitDefender to let me deploy it on Vista.

Third party components not being updated in a timely manner for Vista isn't really Microsoft's fault. The only problem I have with Microsoft and Vista (and bear in mind I don't do much driver level programming - so it could be that MS went and introduced bugs into that layer that I'm not aware of) is that Microsoft in general tries to do too much. It tries to optimize things for you (example - prefetching & IO prioritization) and it tries to secure software for you (denying writes outside of a limited number of locations, a bizarre privilege system, UAP). Contrasted with Linux, Windows is actually incredibly complicated - especially when you have a system where thirdparty developers have taken certain liberties that they shouldn't have taken (example - WindowsBlinds hacking the lower level GDI libraries - causing otherwise solid apps to look buggy because memory access violations start popping up where they wouldn't using standard GDI libraries). The only thing that complicated on Linux is CORBA but that's mostly abstracted enough that you don't need to deal with it.

All these problems will be sorted out though eventually I imagine but what I'd really like to see is a 1:1 port of DirectX to Linux so that developers could write games cross-platform. That and Exchange support would eliminate my need for Windows entirely.

How ham handed and horrifyingly easy it was for Microsoft to toss out such a poorly tuned product.

Seriously, if they even considered their opponents competition this wouldn't have happened. Their monopoly might not be as total as previous years but it's clear they just don't care.

This is backed up by the glorious 'We put in these alerts purposely to annoy YOU' confession and the fact they're pulling XP from the shelves just to FORCE people to take their ####ty product.

I'm not about to debug something I paid for. That's their job. And for the damn price I paid, I expect far better. It is a damn shame there is no way to get my money back.

You are missing the point of what I was saying. When you get a blue screen its a driver issue. Microsoft doesn't write the majority of drivers you use (they do write some of them though). If your anti-virus crashes, you get a blue screen and Microsoft has no control over that.

In general its not quite as simple as "My computer crashed - it must've been a bug in Windows". Debugging at least tells you what it was that messed up so that you can fix/replace/update it.

Edit: I do sympathize with your dislike of Microsoft's tactics and with Vista in general though. I don't care for Vista either.

Afaik one of the features of Vista was that various drivers (notably video) were going to run in user mode, meaning driver flaws wouldn't take down the whole OS.

That said, I don't plan to even consider switching to Vista until about SP3. By that time, hopefully they will have worked out all the kinks, and hardware/driver producers will have "caught up".

UMDF gives the opportunity to write user mode driven drivers by interfacing with an abstraction layer. It cannot however implicitly sit between a driver written for kernel mode and push that kernel mode driver into user mode. In other words, you have to specifically write your driver to run in user mode in order for it to be user mode. UMDF is also written to target PnP drivers - specifically MTP based hardware (ie, MP3 players). AFAIK it doesn't allow you to interact with the PCI bus.

Its easier to think of it like libusb for Windows. There's a generic driver provided and you can write user mode code to interface with that generic driver. The generic driver in turn handles packet composition and transfer with the USB/Firewire bus. Works well with USB/Firewire devices but probably not so well with graphics cards because of the nature of graphic card evolution.