Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

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re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:17:44 GMT

Andy,

the X1600 does not use this chipset, so should not be an issue. If you have disabled onboard graphics on your MSI motherboard and are now using an X1600, then the ATI drivers are a red herring. Your motherboard drivers were last updated back in mid 2004(http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/download/dld/spt_dld_detail.php?UID=537&kind=1) however I would expect the motherboard to work with Vista with your external card, providing the AGP drivers from ATI work. Have you tried the Windows XP AGP drivers?

That is the best I can do.

thanks

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Andy Maggs — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:39:53 GMT

Hi David,

This was the final reply I received from ATI:

"At this time there are no Vista Drivers for the 9100 IGP chipset. So far there has been no indication that these drivers will be released. If Micro Star also does not release these drivers for Vista, then I would revert back to Windows XP."

This was the one and only reply from Micro Star

"For your concern, I have to regret to inform you that due chipset limitation, RS3M-IL(MS-7003) doesn't support Vista. you may run Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to confirm this, it will easily show you an report that if your mainboard supports Vista and supports which version."

Despite what Micro Star say, the upgrade advisor did not detect that my Motherboard would have a problem with Vista.

As far as I can tell this problem only effects the AGP version of the Radeon X1600, not the PCI Express.

Thanks for your interest.

Kind Regards

Andy Maggs

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Russell Clements — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:01:21 GMT

David, Thank you for your reply. Thank you for your efforts to get the word out about MS products. I've been reading your blog now for a couple, maybe several months. I appreciate your candor.

I am glad that you made the post you did because while there is certainly some of "the pot calling the kettle black" going on here, there is much that could have been done better on the parts of several parties.

I have found MS employees via thier blogs to be FAR more responsive to issues than any other company that I have dealings with. As an example, the video card that I bought last summer was a high end card that I bought specifically to be able to run Vista when it came out. When I upgraded to Vista, I was HIGHLY peeved that I couldn't play DVD's AND that ATI didn't have a fix for the situation (since the software that came with it previously didn't run on Vista). It was out of place to blame MS for this, when it was more correctly an ATI rant. However, since MS is already distributing the codec, wouldn't it have been nice to get it and not have to go through the trouble at all? I have already contacted ATI's help desk and have gotten NOTHING from them.

From the description of your attempts to duplicate the table move effort in Word 2007, it sounds like exactly what I was doing. When I released the table, it would immediately shoot back to the left margin and not move the table at all. I don't know that I was doing anything different from what you have described, but it didn't work. Many times in a row, I might add. I had about 10 tables in the entire document, perhaps that is signficant. I can only say that the experience significantly impacted my willingness to recommend the product and even use it myself. If it wouldn't cost me a couple of hours to rebuild the machine again, I'd put XP and Office 2003 back on here.

Outlook 2007, which is probably the most critical app for me in the Office suite, has been greatly improved. I love the built in RSS readers and REALLY love the search functionality. However, I have problems with RSS feeds all showing up with the same date - January 1 of whatever year they were posted. Sometimes the blogs just don't update. They just sit for 20-30 minutes. One of my biggest peeves is that one cannot PASTE a RSS feed addresss into the "Add a New RSS feed" box. OH, HOW I HATE THAT!! Especially since Sharepoint published blogs include a GUID which is a [explicative deleted] pain to type.

I just tried to double-click on a vcard attachment in outlook and I got an error message that says the interface isn't available or something. Again, I'm not interested in troubleshooting this issue, I just know that for my clients, I don't want to be supporting this kind of stuff. Office 2003 is working quite well. Lookout's not as good as the new search stuff, but I don't have problems like this on O2003. I'll bet that on a "normal" day, I get 5-10 of these weird errors. Many times just double-clicking or doing whatever again will be sufficient to have it work, but I shouldn't have to deal with that at all. At $100/hour, how much phone time do I have to invest with clients to resolve little things like this before I've lost the slim profit margin I could have gotten from selling this software? How much do such phone calls erode the service profits made from the roll-out? Until this software is more stable, it is a liability to sell and service. Again, I'll say that Office 2003 works well.

As much as I would love to be doing MS's bug reporting for them, it doesn't pay me anything. I'll wait until the first service pack and hope it gets fixed then.

What is the process for "the public" to get what they think is a "bug" addressed?

I very much appreciate your willingness to engage in this discussion. Thank you for letting me vent my spleen.

Russell Clements

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:53:30 GMT

Russell... glad to hear I made you laugh. I have to admit I am aware of the DST patches, but not being based in the US (I'm in the UK) I am very much watching from the side lines :-). Perhaps the patches are based on feedback for how people would like it to work in certain situations (i.e. moving dates inside data)?

Lets deal with Vista 1st - DVD playback requires a CODEC - does on XP, still does on Vista. Microsoft supply one in Ultimate and Home Premium. To get DVD playback working on XP you either had to buy a CODEC, or use someone elses player that had it in (or use WMP that used their player). You can still get those same 3rd party CODECs for much less if that is all you are interested in.

Now lets deal with Office 2007. First off, this blog entry was about the hardware and software issues people are finding with Vista, so I did not discuss Office, however not beign shy, lets have a look at what you said.

I do think Office is a fantastic product - I use it all the time - have done so for months and I create a considerable amount of documentation. BUT - I have seen the Outlook problem you discuss and having it recently raised by a partner a bug is being opened on this to get it fixed. Now, for the tables problem - is this new to Office 2007 or did the problem exist in Office 2003? I have not seen this problem. In an attempt to recreate your problem, this is what I did:

1) Insert tab, created a table of 5x5

2) hovered over the table just above the top left corner until a cross in a box appeared

3) dragged box to the right and table moved

4) let go

Let me know what I am doing wrong and if it is not behaving to spec, I can raise a bug on it.

As always, this blog is about the discussion as much as the starting entry - I want the MS products to be better than they are, not because I think they are not good, but because I know they can always be better. I hate it when a MS product is tarnished because of things that MS cannot control, such as drivers, but I will always put my hand up if the product has a problem.

thanks

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:42:04 GMT

Andy,

Microsoft if bound on what it can say is or is not supported by the hardware manufacturers, unless it is our drivers we are removing. You can often run Windows XP drivers to get over initial hurdles. Having said that, unless a vendor offers support, no amount of desire by Microsoft can help.

http://ati.amd.com/technology/windowsvista/Products.html does state your video card is supported with Vista, so it sounds to me like they fluffed you off, or their page is wrong. Again, I would be intrested in some more facts so we can update the hardware tool after a discussion with ATI :-)

ttfn

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:27:05 GMT

Mike,

I hear where you are coming from. Some hardware support problems are because the hardware will not work in some way with Vista, others (the rumour) is because the hardware vendor does not want it to work.

The Office, UAC and Install message areas are ones that are down to Microsoft and I would love to hear more about. Details on error messages, scenarios, screen shots etc would be good - either to the blog, or to my e-mail at the top of the page.

thanks

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Russell Clements — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:36:18 GMT

I laughed out loud when I read this post. In the US, we've been dealing with the Daylight Savings Time (DST) patches that Microsoft has had TWO years to put together. Some of them are on rev 12 for the "fixes". Perhaps Microsoft is a lot more culpable in the "I'll fix that when I need to department" than a blue badge might like to admit.

I'll say too, that Office 2007 is BUGGY AS HELL!!! I would not recommend this product to anyone. The vast majority of the time, Outlook 2007 will not close. How simple should that be? Click the x and watch it go away? It just won't do that. Word 2007 has been a nightmare to work with. Try moving tables. Moving a table half way across the page, it snaps right back to the left margin. I have been using Word 2007 for documentation for about a month now and it is so buggy I wish I hadn't put it on my machine. I will certainly NOT recommend it to anyone.

Vista Business won't play DVDs? What's up with that? I guess my training DVD's aren't business related and I have no reason to play them on my business machine, eh? How about on my laptop? Was it MS's judgement that I'd never want to play DVD's on my laptop running Vista Business? I can do it in Windows XP Pro, why not Vista Business? Oh, wait! I can pay $138 to upgrade the license to Ultimate? Wow! I've got a better idea! I'll just stick with XP Pro and Office 2003. They just work.

I'd say Microsoft has a LOT of room for improvement in this "I'll wait to deal with that until I have to" department.

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Andy Maggs — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:34:05 GMT

I ran the hardware advisor before upgrading and it said I would have no problems provided that I installed an available update from ATI post installation. It took 8 goes to finally get Vista installed after which no Aero despite upgrading my Radeon 9200 to a Radeon X1600 (AGP). ATI claimed it was a problem with the AGP support on the motherboard, the motherboard manufacturer Micro Star claimed it was a problem with the ATI chipset and finally ATI conceded that it was indeed their problem and that they were not intending to support the particular chipset I have in Vista! I have had to revert to XP because the hardware manufacturers will not support Vista and my PC is only 2.5 years old. This is not a rumour, it is a fact.

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Mike Edwards — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 18:34:58 GMT

I have a couple of Vista Business Systems up and running connected to SBS 2003.

The following is what I have come across so far:-

1) Lack of drivers for major equipment Canon MFP etc.

2) Lack of drivers for minor equipment Label Printers.

2) Lack of compatible utility software (Scanning).

3) Incompatibility between Office 2003 & Office 2007.

on the same machine especially with Access Applications.

4) Vista UAC gets on my nerves, screens fading, messages

popping up etc, has now been turned off – its not

security anyway – it has no learning ability.

5) Vista seems very slow to boot and slow to run – (Duel

Core 2GHz Processor + 2Gb of RAM and rising).

6) Annoying messages - did this or that work / install

correctly.

7) Adobe Acrobat incompatibility to produce batch Acrobat

documents - found a couple of workarounds.

8) CAD incompatibility - AutoCAD etc.

9) Engineering software incompatibility - Wonderware /

Allen Bradley etc.

I'm trying very hard to like Vista, but I feel like just giving up and go back to XP Pro and just waiting for SP1, by then the drivers and new applications will have been released or upgraded.

I know that a lot of the above problems are not Microsoft’s fault but there is no way I would recommend Vista or Office 2007 to any of my clients at the moment, the pain would just be too much.

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:42:28 GMT

I see where you are coming from, but from all the conversations I've had with hardware manufacturers they were counting on the success of Vista.

I happen to think that besides the mobile device piece Vista was ready by a long shot. The core is fine and some drivers will always ship later - this has always been the case.

thanks

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Gary Fenton — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:18:09 GMT

I'd argue that Vista itself was unprepared for release. I'd also throw this into the argument - manufacturers felt that the uptake of Vista would be slow and saw no need to get their Vista support sorted until they see a move in the market towards Vista?

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

David Overton — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:36:53 GMT

Bob,

I can't answer that - being based in the UK, the DST changes are not top of mind for me (sorry). I don't think anyone understood the issues until more recently. I know that Microsoft started telling people about it back in May 2006 (eg see timeline on this KB - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387/en-us), but I think the impact on people's calendars etc was only more recently understood. Many of the patches have been around for several months though, but the critical nature of them is only more recently being flagged.

However, there are now some great tools to help at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst for example.

ttfn

David

re: Was Vista's arrival a surprises to anyone? No? Then how come so many people were unprepared - hardware vendors, ISVs, even Microsoft to an extent

Bob Muir — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:16:44 GMT

I agree with you completely. What I want to know though is why Microsoft waited two years to release DST patches. If they had released the patches a year or even six months ago, we wouldn't be going through the headaches we're going through now. :(