Windows XP Beta 2 versus Windows Vista Beta 2

[Guest]

Hi

How many people on this newsgroup have experience of testing Vista and XP
when it was at a similar stage in Beta?

From my experience, XP appeared to be far more stable at this juncture.
Does anyone else have a view on this based on their experiences?

 

[John Barnett MVP]

I agree. Windows XP at this stage in the development cycle was more stable
than the current build of Vista. At this stage in the Windows XP beta i was
using XP daily on a production machine rather than a test machine. Vista,
unfortunately, gets looked at only on a test machine and only periodically
because it is so slow (yes we all know it is beta, but XP was faster at beta
2). A large proportion of software will not install on Vista and those that
do crash or hang. Internet connection via DSL modem can be patchy (this was
not an issue with XP). I find that resuming from sleep or hibernation breaks
the internet connection making it impossible to connect. I'm also finding,
now that when rebooting the internet connection is also useless. the only
way around it, so far, is to create another connection and then delete the
old one.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

The information in this mail is supplied "as is". No warranty of any kind,
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of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this mail..

 

[Reed Rinn [MVP]]

I've been on the beta programs for all of the Windows releases back to 1.1
(and for MS-DOS releases before that).

In my opinion (FWIW), Vista Beta 2 is MUCH more stable than any previous
Beta 2 release of Windows, but I'm speaking from the perspective of testing
and evaluating the operating system itself. If you have "standard" devices
with good drivers, Vista Beta 2 is very solid for a Beta. The "instability"
and bugs that many people are experiencing are from installations that are
using legacy (XP or modified XP) or early-release device drivers. The
difference between now (Vista) and then (XP) is that there are many, many
more hardware configuration and driver options available. Hardware vendors
are faced with having to provide device drivers for more products which are
increasingly complex (32 bit, 64 bit, security, WDDM, WHQL, etc., etc.).
Probably 90% of the bugs that I have submitted for Vista are due to some
kind of driver bug or compatibility problem.

I'm testing Vista on several platforms. On my Dell XPS desktop, it runs
great. There have been no crashes or problems. I've only submitted 3 or 4
bugs on that system, and they mostly dealt with Media Center stuff that
might be related to my tuner and video card. On the other hand, I have
Vista installed on my Toshiba G15 laptop and it crashes all the time or
exhibits other video, sound or networking problems. These are most likely
due to device driver issues. I've submitted a bunch of bugs on the Toshiba.

That's my opinion, your mileage may vary.

-Reed Rinn
MVP Shell / User

 

[Kudzu]

Strange you mention Toshiba. I bought a Toshiba M-45 just to see how Vista
performed on an average consumer laptop. I did a format and clean install
and to my surprise, Vista found all the hardware and installed the proper
drivers. It's been running for three weeks now with no problems. It's so
stable; I've been using it at my work. However, I do backup my data twice a
day to my network storage. Just it case.

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM]

Hi

How many people on this newsgroup have experience of testing Vista and XP
when it was at a similar stage in Beta?

From my experience, XP appeared to be far more stable at this juncture.
Does anyone else have a view on this based on their experiences?

I find Vista more stable than WinXP was at this point. I haven't crashed
Vista Beta 2 but I was crashing WinXP Beta 2

 

[Tinkerer]

I've had three crashes so far, but I think they're related to my RAID and
SATA drivers.

 

[Guest]

In my experience so far, Reed Rinn has about nailed the problems to date. The
driver signing protection scheme will actually let you force install drivers
that Vista does not like, and behold, trouble. Once those drivers are
installed, I have yet to find a way to uninstall/remove them, which is
agrevating to say the least. In all, my three Vistas are stable and fast, but
ended up as all clean installations, because the upgrades will allow non
compatible drivers aboard, and Vista does not like that. Lastly, removing the
driver protection does allow some older drivers to work with Vista, example
Promise 378 Fasttrak RAID.

 

[Tinkerer]

That is exactly my problem. To get around it, I installed an IDE
drive, and did a clean install of Vista to that, got it up and running
and got it to see the three partitions on my RAID array by supplying
WinXP Fasttrack drivers. They seem to work a bit better than the
Server 2003 drivers. Once that was done, I used Vcom's System
Commander 8 to copy the partition over to the empty partition on
the RAID array. I then used Sys. Commander to boot from the
copied partition, and I had no crashes on boot up, and everything
seemed to be working well. I still couldn't boot into the new Vista
partition without Sys. Commander, so I unplugged the IDE drive I
did the initial install on and booted from the Vista disc, and ran the
startup repair utility, and I've been booting to it ever since then with
little trouble, except for the three bsod's. The error messages were
IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors, but I can't recall the specific
files.

 

[jonah]

I find Vista more stable than WinXP was at this point. I haven't crashed
Vista Beta 2 but I was crashing WinXP Beta 2

You're not trying to break it hard enough, I am on re-install number 9
at the moment. BTW do I run out of activations on number 10 or does it
not count if the re-installs are all on the same machine?

Jonah

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Same machine does not decrement your 10.

You're not trying to break it hard enough, I am on re-install number 9
at the moment. BTW do I run out of activations on number 10 or does it
not count if the re-installs are all on the same machine?

Jonah

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

How many people on this newsgroup have experience of testing Vista and XP

when it was at a similar stage in Beta?

From my experience, XP appeared to be far more stable at this juncture.
Does anyone else have a view on this based on their experiences?

You have to keep in mind that XP was essentially a new coat of paint on top
of Windows 2000, whereas Vista is a major rewrite of *a lot* of low-level
components--including a new driver model.

 

[Kerry Brown]

You have to keep in mind that XP was essentially a new coat of paint
on top of Windows 2000, whereas Vista is a major rewrite of *a lot*
of low-level components--including a new driver model.

I think this is the key to the Vista experience so far. If you have stable
drivers for your hardware the experience is a good one. Because the way
drivers are used by Vista is very different there are not as many stable
drivers as there were for other Windows betas. Another big problem for
software developers is the improved security. It breaks many programs.
Microsoft until a couple of years ago fostered a programming culture that
assumed they had complete control of the pc and they could ignore what other
programs may be doing. Many programmers are having a tough time unlearning
this attitude. I believe in the end this may attract programmers from the
Linux/Unix world because they are used to this paradigm. If this is true
then Vista may harm development for Linux in unexpected ways.

 

[Alan Simpson]

This seems like the biggest most complicated beta of all time to me. XP
wasn't exactly fun. But this is a much more radical change than XP was.

And like you guys I've been through a zillion of these since the DOS days.
The biggest pain in the beginning of this one was the lack of drivers. I've
gotten a few drivers over the months. But I still only have one out of three
monitors lit up ;-)

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

MS appears to view it that way also. Windows 2000 was NT 5.0 and XP was NT
5.1, while Vista is NT 6.0.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

This seems like the biggest most complicated beta of all time to me. XP

wasn't exactly fun. But this is a much more radical change than XP was.

Indeed--just the fact that users are no longer running as admins by default
is going to take a lot of getting used to for developers who were used to
the idea of always having access to everything. Mind you, this is something
that should've been done ages ago--actually, that's how it should've been
enforced from NT onward. But, I guess MS prefered to get people to migrate
from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (where everything's still a free-for-all),
and then keep those default access rights going from 9x to the NT line (even
though access could've been restricted from that point on). Of course, now
that they're ready to remove those rights, a lot of apps are going to be
broken on Vista...requiring some undoing of years of bad habits...

I feel MS has to take some of that blame, one way or another.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

They do. They freely admit that their old ways have created this situation.
There is no painless answer after all this time.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

They do. They freely admit that their old ways have created this

situation.

Music to my ears. Now show me an actual quote on www.microsoft.com I
can link to.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

They do. They freely admit that their old ways have created this

situation.

Music to my ears. Now show me an actual quote on www.microsoft.com I
can link to. Over and over again.