'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage Those worrying about what befell the near-universally disliked Windows Vista will be delighted to know that its name persists on-screen in UK branches of phone flinger EE. Spotted in glamorous Fulham Broadway over the weekend by Register reader Julian, today's entry in our Bork!Bork!Bork! thread sees "Vista" being a bit poorly …
I used Vista on a couple of craptops* a longish time ago.
Surprisingly it was stable, and people was able to do their work. I expect the ghost of WinME to haunt me with this Vista abomination. But no, these was the most stable I've seen any M$ product to be. Which is totally weird.
Anyways.
I upgraded one of said craptops to Win7, and found that performance was improved, but not drastically though.
*IIRC it was Mecer W565M laptops, was good and solid, but in today's age and time these are relics and not worth the time or money, unless you want to install Linux Mint or FreeBSD on it.
I think there were two major problems with Vista:
1) it was the first version of windows that forced uses to think a tiny little bit about security and they hated it.
2) MS claimed it only need 512MB of RAM to work. While technically true no one should ever have sold a new computer with Vista or upgraded an old PC to Vista if there was only 512MB on the system. It did work but was so slow it looked like it was broken.
To be honest Vista struggled with 1GB of RAM never mind 512MB compared to XP on the same hardware.
I remember getting a new Dell laptop around 2006 that came with Vista Home Premium which had 1GB RAM and after about 1 week of frustration trying to use it I downgraded to XP and it was immediately apparent how much quicker it was.
Tried 128MB which would have a BSOD after 60 minutes no matter what, 256MB which would go for a few hours before blue screening and 512MB had running over 2 days at a Lan full pelt during a Red Alert 2 LAN match which lasted 2 days. Never had any issues with my machine with 384MB.
I admit I ran anti virus software and my only experience is from my first machine I purchased with my own money from my weekend job (I told Evesham Vale I wanted Windows 98SE, but they couldn't supply) as I knew at the time it was bad. Everyone else at the time had Windows 95/98/98SE and obviously from my experience I would recommend Windows 98SE until I went to Windows 2000 Professional myself.
Yes, XP is faster but compared to every version of Windows since Vista, I prefer the appearance of the Vista desktop, it was art. Everyone who wants to keep Windows 7 going is actually in love with the downgraded Vista appearance. I do software support so I use them all every week - the funny thing is that everyone who bitched about the Vista security difficulty is now lathered in Windows 10, the world's worst interface ever.
"Actually, on my 286 the turbo button did work. I had to turn it off to play a submarine game, because at the higher speed the game became unplayable... IIRC it was "overcloking" the CPU from 10-12Mhz to 16...."
You were playing GATO? One of the first games I played on PC and thought it was fugly as hell with the crappy CGA graphics compared to my C64 version. A nice simple game, but 688 Attack Sub a couple years later totally trounced it, both in gameplay and graphics. (and I still play 688 every now and then on Dosbox).
Turbo on actually meant the CPU was running on its normal full speed and turning turbo off just reduced the MHz on the CPU somewhat.
You young whippersnappers anyer newfangled floppies.
*Pats Stonehenge beside me*
Mine have always been stiffies an that's the way we LIKED it dagnabbit!
Now, those poor bastards over on Easter Island, they had a head crash. Talk about a pain in the neck!
*Cough*
I'll get my coat. It's the one with the Primordial Soup spoons in the pockets... =-)p
Yup, those were two of the major issues that turned the public against Vista.
Regarding 1), adding UAC was a fine idea on a conceptual level (after all, Linux and MacOS have equivalent features). Where it failed practically was with the OEMs who installed bucketloads of bloatware on their PCs, most (if not all) requiring admin access, triggering UAC in some cases up to 30 times on each boot up (how anyone thought that that was ok is beyond me). Naturally, users hated the new OS and the UAC.
Regarding 2), the 512MB requirement was a concession from MS to (once again) OEMs, who could save a few $ (less than 10, if I remember correctly) per machine and still call it Vista compatible. As much as I understand that MS and large OEMs live in almost symbiosis, this was a bad call.
Another problem were graphics cards of the day. Most PCs at that time had Intel integrated graphics, yet Intel had no GPU capable of driving Vista Aero at the time the then new OS was released (DX9/SM2.0 capability was required). There were parts that had the capability on paper, but in practice (due to horrendous drivers and "shortcuts" made in hardware), none worked. Those users would buy brand spanking new "Vista compatible" laptops and get the ugly as sin Vista Basic GUI instead of what they saw in all of the ads and, whatever they did, they couldn't get it to work. Good luck trying to explain to a non technical person how Aero not working on their brand new, expensive machine was anything but MS's fault.
There were also problems with Nvidia, who was still unprepared at the time of release and whose drivers caused the vast majority of all of Vista's crashes in the first months after release. But whom did the average person blame, Nvidia (who, in the eyes of the broad public, could do no wrong with their drivers, ever) or Windows (whose instability was a meme before that term existed)? Plus there were problems with some older NV parts (at least some FX series GPUs) who had similar HW and SW shortcuts and now didn't work properly with Aero.
So, mix all that together and add the usual "if you want to sound tech savvy, just say that MS is crap" and people were hating on the new OS to no end. Meanwhile, my at the time already vintage single core Athlon64 machine with 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9800Pro ran Vista like a champ, although the OS did take maybe 200MB more out of the RAM than Windows 2000 did when ran on the same machine (Win2000 is a lot lighter on its own, but add GPU and other drivers, with their new .NET control panels, and an AV of the day and the difference was not as drastic).
The first UAC iteration was really too intrusive (read Mark Russinovich about it at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/dd822916(v=msdn.10)) - and that was fixed in Windows 7.
Apple fell in the same trap with Catalina.
Moreover IIRC VIsta Home Basic edition could not enable the Aero mode (without some tricks), regardless of the GPU, and not a few OEMs installed that edition.
Anyway with Windows 10 MS solved the issue giving everyone the worst UI.
I know they kind of relaxed UAC in 7 and later, but, AFAIK, I think (and that's what I saw from skimming through that article) that all they did was tweak it so that changes to some settings in control panel do not trigger UAC, which IMO isn't such a big deal (how often do you tweak stuff in CP after you've finished the initial set up in the first several days after the fresh OS installation) and I'm actually a freak who goes and puts UAC on the highest setting (which I think is the Vista equivalent) instead of turning it off.
Even so, I still see the UAC prompt less often than once a week on average, I think, although one's mileage may vary: while I did more development, running an IDE such as Visual Studio triggered UAC (the debugger required elevated access), but nowadays, in general use, one sees it very rarely, except when installing new software. That's mostly thanks to the fact that developers have learnt to make applications that don't require admin rights unless actually needed, which wasn't always the case.
By contrast, back in the XP days, developers assumed that we were all logged in as administrators (which was almost 100% true in the home environment), so, if it was easier to do something in a way that required admin access, they did it that way. Then Vista came along ad suddenly some random application or game (for instance, some Football Manager from the era, if I remember correctly) would trigger UAC.
So, as far as I could gather, the fact that we now see UAC a lot less than when Vista came out has more to do with developers changing their practices than anything else.
What really pisses me off is software developers STILL assuming users run as admin!
We run a lot of vertical market software and almost all of it requires us to jump hoops (not technically difficult but frustrating) to get the various packages to run as standard user.
Bunch of sorry, lazy-ass wankers! *shakes fist*
The problem with graphics cards and Vista, was that Microsoft were trying (as with UAC) to undo their sins of the past, and move on to a sensible display driver model (WDDM).
Unfortunately despite several years of warning, hardware vendors were slow to adopt it, leading to hardware that either ran slowly, or not at all. These days it's standard and works fine.
That's Vista in a nutshell really. It was Microsoft's attempt to fix various problems with previous versions of Windows, and the only way to do that was by making some things incompatible. Win 7 was really only a very minor upgrade (it probably could have been called Vista SP3), but the extra years gave hardware manufacturers and developers time to move to a more modern OS design, and there were many less problems when it launched.
Yeah, I used a Vista laptop with 1Gb of RAM for a while, and I often got the feeling I'd have got quicker results using a stone circle. Probably a shorter boot time, too.
The thing that made the security annoying was that every UAC prompt had to be clicked through twice. I never knew why this was, but it was never fixed in Vista. It was fixed in Windows 7, and coincidentally the moaning about UAC pretty much vanished when 7 came out.
Never? Mecer is a South African brand (that's where I've seen it in the wild) that makes stuff that looks like it was reverse engineered from a generic stock photo of a laptop / PC?
My experience with Mecer stuff is that it generally stinks. Every time I come across their kit, I dread it. It's almost always low spec, badly constructed and cheap. Deffo "Made for African Market".
Awful kit. I have to thank them though. Because it sucks, I have a decent amount of demand for taking good stuff from Dell UK out there once a year.
Compliments the WiFi kit I also take out there due to strict WiFi regulations in ZA.
It's a shame ZA stopped the registration of new closed corporations for non-ZA citizens...I could have cleaned up out there doing remote support alone.
I hope Britain does a solid trade deal with ZA on service provision because I'm poised and ready to invade and take a chunk of the IT support work.
ZA techies...the Brits are coming. Get ready for aggressive flat rate pricing, extreme SLAs and efficient knowledgeable techies landing on the beaches and charging at your "kek" infrastructure.
Mecer PCs, off brand obscure DSL modems with 10 year old firmware, crap fibre/network cabling, piss poor electrical wiring....it's all up for grabs. All we need to do is not charge by the second, not turn up 14 days late with a threat of a large bill if we discover it's the customers fault (despite supplying shit equipment in the first place) and source high quality kit at reasonable prices.
WE. CAN. DO. IT.
We can save South Africa from its crap IT.
Translation for the locals:
Shoh bru, we'll bring hectic IT for you. Lekker tech that won't make your business kek.
Don’t know if they have improved but about 10 years ago I had to deal with Telkom for a circuit back to the UK.
It went through 4 suppliers (cable and wireless to London, BT to the interconnect, someone else for the international part and then Telkom into the Cape Town office), the best bit was the support department in South Africa.
Supporting international circuits they couldn’t call anyone not is the local country, so every time there was a problem you had to ring someone we employed there and get them to log the call......
I think the phrase was “welcome to Africa we do things a bit different here”
I have never understood why all those digital signs, information portals, ATMs, ad carousels etc. use Windows? All they usually do is play a video, a slide show or display some HTML and occasionally have some rudimentary input.
Using a pared down Linux installation would suffice. Why, then, install a whole Windows platform with code and features 95% of which you will never need but is nonetheless there to crash on you when you least expect it?
Management applications is probably the answer to that. Drivers, networking, remote deploy and more are all easier at scale with Windows (or were when these were created). At the time of Vista, Linux didn't even have good sound card support, let alone management apps to control hundreds or thousands of remote kiosks. For this reason, at the time, it would have been cheaper to just pony up for the fairly cheap licence.
in 2020 things have changed a bit and Linux is probably the better option, although Microsoft deployment and patching is still top of its game.
Microsoft is not the same as the incompetent admin in charge of that billboard. Just like Ford aren't necessarily to blame when a car hits another car. It's unlikely that the systems mentioned are being used if a reboot warning is on the screen, since the system would just reboot at a suitable time.
"Management applications is probably the answer to that."
There are quite easy ways to do the management in Linux and have a system that is much harder to hack. If you streamline the Linux installation to just the essentials, you can get it to run on very basic hardware with tiny SSD's and watchdog circuits to recover from glitches very easily.
I see it as a good thing that not everybody and their dog and log in and fiddle with things.
The problem with Linux is the lack of good and relatively cheap UI design tools (plus their developers) - plus sometimes the support for specific devices. Which, in many ways is also what is keeping Linux away from 96% of desktops. But HTML - it may be far faster and easier to develop Windows GUI applications than a Linux one, and native application usually require far less changes than HTML ones to cope with their running environment changes.
A lot of this stuff is powered by a Raspberry Pi nowadays.
And in many cases probably running Raspbian Wheezy which has never been updated since a friend set it up for them years ago. And probably still uses the default "pi/raspberry" account.
Half of all Pi sales go to commercial users so I imagine there are quite a lot being used in signage applications; NEC install Pi Compute Modules in their screens.
Other Pi boards may be a bit cheaper than a PC SBC but I am not convinced using a non-industrial product in a commercial offering is widely deemed an acceptable option.
Develop with Windows, deploy to Windows - It's a simple as that.
And the reason deployed platforms are running XP, Vista, or anything archaic, is because that's what worked, and is reliable still. Bugs will have been ironed out, lock-downs learned, and the set-up will be refined and pretty rock-solid despite its age. Fixing what isn't broken will create more problems than it has.
There are millions of 'outdated systems' running entirely happily out there which no one ever notices because they do work so reliably. The cases El Reg and others highlight are actually fairly rare and aren't usually a result of the OS being outdated, long past end of support.
That whole post made me break out in hives........
Is it just my interpretation or the regional settings but the Log file has entries from the 03/02, was last modified on the 02/03/2020 and the system date was currently at 01/02/2020.
And would Licence:??? in the log file suggest they're using the free/non-commercial edition?
Just on those things alone i'm amazed the displays have ever worked.
> we don't even do that in the US
Why can't we all just agree to write dates with the most significant digits first and the least significant digits last. You know, like how most numbering systems intended to be read and understood by humans work. After all, we are much more likely to want to group events/files/whatever by year, or year/month, than by "every February 2nd". YYMMDD lets you sort things in date order by sorting them by name. Or am I being too sensible again?
Anonymous, because everyone hates sensible.
@AC - "Why can't we all just agree to write dates with the most significant digits first and the least significant digits last."
We did agree, see ISO 8601 (obligatory XKCD).
On the other hand... yyyy-mm-dd is Chinese date format, so this is obviously definitive proof that Huawei is already hacking UK telecoms infrastructure from the future (and therefore definitely planted by the NSA).
[Edit] - You left off the century?! Barbarian! Heathen!! Heretic!!!
This is quite clearly Windows 7. The log may be reporting it as Vista but that's because it's probably an old version of TeamViewer which is reading the major NT version 6 and taking it as being Vista.
Vista had labels on the taskbar and did not have the show desktop button at the bottom right of the taskbar. Both of these features were new to Windows in Windows 7.
Windows 7 shipped with IE8 which explains that one too. As this is just for Digital signage, it's unlikely it's on the Internet at all and the system has probably not been updated at all since the image or configuration was created.
Teamviewer 4 is older than Windows 7! That's why it thinks it runs on Vista. They are too greedy to update their remote control software and prefer to stick with an old version which is known to have many unfixed CVE entries... That is worse than running Vista.
(Edit: It could be a LAN/VPN connection only teamviewer install though, but still)
Can I use a stun gun? Direct from the Abbot at the Abattoir? It won't hurt, at least, not for long...
A friend of mine once told me he was trying the Vista Beta and I wondered if vistabeting made people go blind. Can anyone either confirm or deny that Vist Betion makes one go blind? (Remember it's not the proverbial "stiff upper lip" we're talking about here ... :) It may be stiff, but it's hardly the upper lip, innit ...? )
So did I as it had far better handwriting recognition than XP did - I was going through a tablet PC phase than (still am) with Toshiba M200/M400s and loved OneNote as a general purpose notetaking app, and MindManager for brainstorming.
Mind you, when Windows 7 came out, I dropped Vista like a hot potato!
Microsoft should, for the sake of completeness, release MS Windows Vista source trees along with the source trees of that of Longhorn Reloaded that some MS Windows hobbyists forked it to carry on playing with it and the MS Windows 7 source trees that the FSF has recently asked Microsoft nicely for ... all under the same free/open source software license, of course.
I never knew that EE was part of BT, i am now going to find another network. I hate BT!
After all the money the government has given to BT to help those with poor internet and never delivered, you think they could do much better than use clapped out old vista. So the question begs, where did the money go?
I used to use teamviewer a lot, but it now has spyware/trackers within the software.
I think you will find BT - yes with some rural subsidy money - has done a million time more the UK than
- Sky
- Talk Talk
- Vodafone
- Virgin Media
... in delivering increasingly good broadband.
All the above may be sympathetic with people’s plight, but show no sign of delivering where there is no profit to be made. No hands stuck in their very deep and well filled pockets... and where there is money on the table no interest in delivering any subsidised (and consequently shared) infrastructure
Esp. Vodafone (and yes also EE/3/O2) where in many places you can’t even get 3 or 4G still.
—
Use AnyDesk - far better and does not wilfully fuck up the free use install restricting and nagging you to by the paid for version.
Call me Mr Pedantic (no, please, I like it) but that ain't Vista on that screen. It's Windows 7. Many internal designators in 7 still have the 'Vista' monika, yes, but look at the Start Button. Sorry, that's a Windows 7 orb in all it's fancy glory. The Vista bubble protrudes over the top of the taskbar by about a 5th. Do I win something? Some more meds would be cool.
> Windows 7 is just a service pack for Vista anyway.
Far from it. A lot of kernel changes came in. One with a big impact is "global kernel dispatcher lock", which went away with Windows 7/2008 R2, and made that OS scale a lot better across many CPUs than ever before. Windows 8 got a few quirks like that too ;), though the impact was not as big as that one.
See the videos on https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Arun-Kishan-Farewell-to-the-Windows-Kernel-Dispatcher-Lock
But your garden has some strange rules, like throwing out some fruit you could earn money with just because the rules changed without prior warning. Even if it was the newest fruit you planted it just a half year ago, and many others grow the same. And then you are left in the dark until your fruit supplier made his fruit consistent with the new rules.
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