In all these months of Windows Vista availability, I still had not found the time and guts to upgrade our Windows Media Center to Windows Vista.
Let me explain before you all give the answers for me 🙂
- Time
Or rather I should say priority. It wasn’t a priority as the MCE running on Windows XPSP2 workes fine for alsmost 3 years now. No flaws, no hick ups, nothing. - Guts
Yes I have faith in our products, however in the 3 years, or I should say after the 1st two weeks, the MCE has grown into a must have instead of a nice to have feature.
If for some reason an upgrade would fail or the machine would become unreliable, well that would cause an issue. This is also the reason why I chose not to participate in any dogfood programs prior to the RTM release on this ‘ production’ machine.
The process : insert DVD … upgrade …. run. Flawless. No driver issues, no trouble with DVD encoders, etc, just flawless.
The upgrade most certainly is worthwhile with regards to the enhanced UI which is extremely nice in The Music interface (much better overview of catalogue) and also the TV Guide, which when in full screen plays the (recorded) TV in the background …
We’re running Windows Vista Ultimate (Dutch) and not only I am happy (this does not take much) , but the whole familiy is happy :-). Maybe it’s just because the TV still works, or maybe its the new cool features in Windows Vista … I think its the latter one 😀
Disclaimer : this is not an April Fools day post 🙂
Henning,
I upgraded yesterday and posted today, so it is the actual truth.
I don’t know what your expectation were when you about Vista. For me the upgrade ( in June a year ago) is absolutely worthwhile. Things I persoanlly really like are :
1. Sidebar gadgets that allow me to quickly get certain information as part of my daily routine
2. Search. Embedded in Vista is amaizing. Also the fact that when you combine this with the tagging your documents you can quickly query project or other consolidated views.
3. Flip 3D and other ways to quickly preview / select open applications can be quite powerful when you have a number of apps / documents open
4. keying in the executable name at the start button i.e. word, excel or whatever and it starts the applications.
Again these are just some of the things that work for me and may not work for you or may not be enough for you to upgarde / be a reason to downgrade.
You can bet by the way that revenue growth at Microsoft is intentional 😉 we are in the commercial software business. Commoditising this business unfortunatly means you have to build software that appeals to a very large / broad audience …
So if Windows Vista does have cool features the developers have done an excellent job hiding them. I have a new laptop with Vista and I am currently thinking about buying another XP license. For Microsoft this would indeed mean doubled revenues. Not a bad business move but I am not sure if that was intentional.
Sorry, I did not look at the date. Excellent April fool hoax. You really got me.
Wow. Good prank. You took an existing machine, one that was more than three months old. Upgraded from a badly supported version of XP – media center – and:
1. Expect us to believe that it worked.
2. It still performs well. as opposed to “very sluggish”.
You see, I’ve been running Vista now for two months on my state of the art Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop. And it runs like a dog. Granted, more stable than XP.
And this, the day before EMI and Apple announce DRM-free music ?
The very “feature” that MS toiled so long for – DRM – appears to be redundant ?
—* Bill
@
Speak for yourself.
I give you my experience and these are not in line with yours (how surprising).
No issues with DRM, I run normal wma files 😉
You really forgot the feature that it now takes 20 seconds to copy a 10 kB file from one folder to another using Explorer (yes, I have read that this is a bug).
The best thing about the new user account control is that you can switch it off.
User surveys showed that the 1 minute boottime of Windows XP was not enough to get a coffee and have your morning gossip, so Microsoft finally cared about this issue and at least doubled startup times.
The search may be amazing. It can be my fault but it seems that I am quite well organized as I do not need this feature (I do not use stuff like Google desktop search either). And when I use it (e.g. I was looking for that hosts file) it did not find anything of use.
I already had the sidebar gadgets from Konfabulator and after playing around with them for some time they were gone.
I m not even saying that Vista is bad software but I do really ask myself what the thousands of developers at Microsoft do all day when the result is a new look and some multimedia stuff (you already did that with Windows XP).
4 years looking, 1 year cooking. Being a developer at Microsoft seems to be an easy job nowadays.
Henning,
You have good points and you can best determine yourself what does and does not work for you.
Maybe you should give it some time …
Good to know an upgrade will work. For now i stick with XP MCE since it runs without any problems and I think Vista needs more RAM. I have 1GB installed and this is just perfect for XP.
Maybe when SP1 for Vista comes out I will give it a shot. After I made a Ghost image of my XP 🙂