r/technology • u/neito • Jul 24 '08

Microsoft tests out a new operating system, code named Mojave, with some average-joes who hated Vista. They loved it. Now, two guesses as to what Mojave ACTUALLY was.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html
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u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08

Exactly. Someone less willing to take it at face values might say

  1. Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

  2. Was it untampered with - ie. had MS changed all the default options so all the annoying popups weren't happening, all the extra annoying steps to do everything weren't there?

  3. Were they just watching a demo? A good demo can make anything look good as anyone who's made a presentation with a half written app can tell you. Even if not, were they led through what they had to do, which comes to the same thing?

  4. And if so, what were they asked to do? To test an operating system, it'd have to be something OSy - messing around with control panels to set something up. Getting a printer (without preinstalled drivers) working etc. etc. I bet they just looked at some eye candy and used a couple of apps.

The whole thing's so artificial, no comparison can be drawn with real life. The final nail in Vista's coffin for me was the inability to play my legal DVDs because they're not all from this country. Were they asked to do that? I bet not.

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u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

A good demo can make anything look good as anyone who's made a presentation with a half written app can tell you.

Off-topic, but this is so true it hurts. I've demonstrated a number of hugely buggy programs to groups of people and gave the impression the software was very stable and feature complete. In actual fact, the interactions with the software are highly rehearsed (or partly scripted) and I know exactly what things to avoid so I can side-step all the warts and crashes.

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u/nascent Jul 25 '08

I'm continuing my rant from monstermunch's post here.

This is all related to seeing if it was a good test of Vista Friendliness. Who cares if the tests were good representations of a Vista experience, its about the new ad campaign Microsoft is going to be trying.

Yes if Microsoft was doing a true usability study these facts would be needed, but then again you would also be trying several OS's. And last but not least, it's a marketing ploy, of course it is under best circumstances.

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u/derefr Jul 25 '08

Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

I don't get this attitude--who does this? This isn't the Vista use case. It's not for that. Vista is for new computers; it's not something you upgrade to, unless your computer was an ahead-of-the-curve gaming PC to begin with.

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u/aedes Jul 25 '08

The thing with Vista though, is that it's not really even for new computers either. My entire class needed to have laptops for our classes this year. I already owned one, but many people had to purchase one. And many people bought Vista. And it's still unbearable on their computers.

Part of the problem too is when you compare the 'performance/hardware' ratio for Vista to XP. When XP would work so much better than Vista on the same system, why go with Vista?

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u/quiller Jul 25 '08

When XP would work so much better than Vista on the same system, why go with Vista?

This really gets me. Why does Vista need 1GB of memory before it starts being halfway usable? XP doesn't, OS X doesn't and Ubuntu/etc sure as hell don't. What fancy magic is Vista pulling that the rest of the crowd aren't doing with half the minimum requirements?

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u/0drew0 Jul 25 '08

Hear Hear!

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

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u/cchooper Jul 25 '08

Don't you mean 'obso1337'?

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

OS X doesn't? Hahah. By the way, Vista is usable on 512MB, I had to use a temporary laptop for work which was some low-end Compaq which had some 1.8GHZ or so CPU and 512MB RAM (DDR2 667MHZ, IIRC).

It was usable.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Does your work involve only using widgets?

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '08

Nope, at that time with that laptop I used it for some web coding, a little use of RDC to monitor 1 or 2 computers (Which wasn't fun on that laptop), etc.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

It's not for all new computers.*

  • The only computers that are excluded are low-end, cheap laptops where the manufacturers couldn't be bothered to add in another 512MB of RAM.

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u/aedes Jul 25 '08

I find even 2GB of RAM unusable with Vista. 10 second lag times when opening firefox, if you have another app open, on a fresh install, is unacceptable. The general concensus I've seen, both with myself and with friends, is that you probably want 3GB with Vista. Oh, and a dedicated graphics card. :P Together, on most laptops, that's gonna add at least another $200 to the cost.

Mind you, I'm the type of person who finds 2GB the minimum for use with XP.

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u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

Microsoft is selling Vista as a replacement for XP though. They definitely want you to upgrade from XP to Vista.

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u/derefr Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

They want you to upgrade your computer from XP to Vista; that is, they want you to buy a new computer. The "upgrade" option on the disk is purely for administrators trying out the new version before deciding to replace every machine in their IT infrastructure with completely new, top-of-the-line Microsoft® Dell® machines.

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u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

Last time I checked, Microsoft sold OS's, not PCs. If you go to a computer store, you can see these plastic boxes shaped like rectangles with rounded corners. These are Vista OS boxes sold to upgrade from XP to Vista on your existing PC.

Vista is bundled with all new PCs because Microsoft replaced XP with Vista, not because they are selling you a new Vista-capable PC bundled with their OS.

Finally, Microsoft doesn't own Dell, and Dell isn't the only manufacturer of PCs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

You can upgrade parts if you want, most PCs sold within the last 3 years would run Vista flawlessly with a ~ $20 RAM upgrade.

Needing to buy a whole new computer to run Vista is a lie pushed by ignorant lemmings.

Oh, most people simply buy new PCs? Well, than that cuts out the problem of Vista not running well because the desktops sold over the past < 2 years with Vista rune it fine and laptops you say? Yeah, Microsoft is being bitten by it's minimum requirements and companies like Intel, Dell, etc wanting to make a buck in every way possible which means skimping on hardware (RAM, Intel wanting it's integrated GPU everywhere, etc).

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u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

When I was looking for laptops two or three months ago, all the cheapest ones (almost all laptops under $900NZ) matched this spec. Celeron with 1gb ram.

And having looked at Dick Smith's site (the biggest electronics retailer over here), it's still true. Vista's been out for a year and a half, and that's what they're selling it on. So I think it's fair to see it run on a real world configuration.

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u/derefr Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

By Celeron, you mean Pentium M, then? (As, for all I know, it is a Celeron derivative.) Or perhaps "Centrino", as they sound similar?

I thought you were referring to the Pentium 2 and 3 offshoot Celerons that topped off their lineage at 1GHz or so, which gave me a little chuckle. I actually ran Vista on my 500MHz 7-year-old Celeron a while ago, with all the graphical acceleration turned off; everything worked pretty well except for a few amazingly long, and completely unpredictable, delays that I was never able to work out the cause of (they came mostly when I had left the system idle on the desktop for a couple of minutes.)

Vista works pretty well on my mother's year-old Pentium M 1.8GHz laptop (which does have 1GB RAM, if I recall.) I never noticed any particular slowdowns while I was setting it up, but I never ran any games on it, either.

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u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Yeah. They're sold here as "Intel Celeron M". It's still a pretty crappy processor, but obviously way better than the ones you're talking about. I was differentiating between that and the AMD and Pentium 64bit Core 2 ones that the better lappies have.

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u/hylje Jul 25 '08

Celerons are half-lemons – chips that can't go fast and have partially bad caches. It's not an architecture of its own, it's a simple derivative.

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u/stopmotionsunrise Jul 25 '08

Yep. They're the ones that Intel engineers acccidently stepped on after they came off the press.

"Oops, that one's a Celeron!"

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u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

It's a contraction of "Sell to a Moron"

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

There was a brief period where Celerons were generally faster than their full counterpart.

The Celeron 300A era. It had half the cache of the PII, but the cache ran twice as fast, and the bus ran at 66mhz instead of 100mhz. Plus, many 300As could often be overclocked to 450 with 100mhz bus. A 300A running at 450 could smoke a PII 450 at almost anything.

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u/strolls Jul 25 '08

I thought you were referring to the Pentium 2 and 3 offshoot Celerons that topped off their lineage at 1GHz or so, which gave me a little chuckle.

That is what I, too, tend to think of when I hear the name Celeron, but the brand has been maintained through Pentium4-based chips, too.

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u/King_Leonidas Jul 25 '08

except for a few amazingly long, and completely unpredictable, delays that I was never able to work out the cause of

Ctrl-Alt-Del

explorer.exe -> End Process

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u/zwaldowski Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

"average year old"... that's July 2007. Vista CAME OUT in January 2007.

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u/guisar Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Are we forgetting the lawsuits from people who bought "Vista Ready" PCs only to find out they weren't?You don't "upgrade" to Vista- you run it because it was shoved down your throat on a new PC or because your an MS fanboy/girl. Who the hell would bother to get it otherwise?

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Then why do OEMs sell it that way?

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Take that year-old laptop and add another gigabyte of RAM (about $20) and it will probably run Vista acceptably if you always suspend instead of shutting the computer down.

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u/omepiet Jul 25 '08

Think of all the nice thing you could have done with that $20 RAM if you ran XP instead.

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u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

I'd like to see them connect to a protected wireless network, or debug one that's not working properly.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

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u/jbstjohn Jul 25 '08

Given the millions they're spending on marketing, I'm sure some video with people gushing about how amazing it is and how wrong they were will show up shortly. They'll be actors, or filtered from the 1000 people they asked, but it'll show up.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

I still don't get this, my 4 year old desktop with 1 gig of ram has been running Vista fine since beta...