DailyTech - Windows Vista Build 5472 Released

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Software Windows Vista Build 5472 Released
Brandon Hill (Blog) - July 17, 2006 4:56 PM

20 comment(s) - last by TomZ.. on Jul 18 at 11:12 PM

Another interim release goes to testers

Microsoft today released another interim build of its oft-delayed Windows Vista operating system. The latest build offers a host of improvements over the previous 5456 build including improved NVIDIA driver performance in Windows Media Center. According to Bink.nu, there will also be improvements made to the performance of this build compared to earlier builds of Vista. "Vista in its beta form is pretty taxing on the system. It's slow and a little non-responsive. That piece of software is now about nine weeks old and that may not sound like a lot but at this stage, that's an old version in software terms. You'll see a huge difference [in performance]," said Microsoft corporate VP of Windows client marketing Mike Sievert.

Windows Vista beta testers as usual can get the latest build from the Microsoft Connect website. The general public, however, will just have to sit this one out.

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why even quote marketing people?

By dbauer2000 on 7/17/2006 10:11:41 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
You'll see a huge difference [in performance]," said Microsoft corporate VP of Windows client marketing Mike Sievert.

I love marketing people. What's he gonna say? "Hey, yea, well, we...uhh...its gonna blue screen on ya still...and it still not as fast as WinXP...but hey, we've been working on it for 6 years and its almost done. Probably won't be any more delays."

RE: why even quote marketing people?

By Scrogneugneu on 7/17/2006 10:19:54 PM , Rating: 2

You're obviously not working in the programming sector. Here's a translation :

"We've been busy with an addition in the system that caused several bugs quite hard to hunt down and crush out. So, while we were working on the somewhat major issue, all development of importance was put to a stop, in order to help find the problem. The focus for everyone not already tasked with correcting the new flaws was now with smaller tasks mostly related to performance.

Hence, there hasn't been any major revision for a long time, but we've finally found and killed the bugs. Meanwhile, some optimizing of the code occured in the background. So, since we can't simply stand here and wait to get back on our schedule, we'll just put it on the normal development delays and get a new build out. Now, we must work faster, because we're behind schedule, but we also must work slower, because we don't want to make those mistakes again."

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By dbauer2000 on 7/17/2006 11:26:31 PM , Rating: 2

Wow, you got all that out of Mr. Sievert saying that the last release was 9 weeks ago and that makes it very old in software terms? You must be his manager (or his wife, since like my wife, you can read between lines).

And your correct, I don't work in the programming sector; I write code that works and test it before rolling it to end users. The latter part is something most developers still don't understand. I know this is going to start a flame war about how its impossible to write software that will work 100% of the time on all the different systems out there. Its not impossible, it just requires more design time and that's something that most developers don't have, although in Microsoft's case, I think 6 years is long enough.

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By darkfoon on 7/18/2006 1:18:34 AM , Rating: 2

I've studied Microsoft's programming model, and discussed it with some former employees, and all I've got to say on the matter is that 6 years is not enough time. With your programming model, sure 6 years is long enough, but that's because you're one person, not many teams of people, and you have a better model.

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By Spoonbender on 7/18/2006 6:39:05 AM , Rating: 2

Write an OS that works, is about as compex as Vista, in less than 6 years. Then I'll agree to your superiority. It's easy to write software that works 100%. If your software isn't too complex.
If you're writing an OS, it's quite a bit trickier. If you believe otherwise, then prove me wrong. But I'd like to see some substantial evidence for your claims of superiority.

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By TomZ on 7/18/2006 8:40:31 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
And your correct, I don't work in the programming sector; I write code that works and test it before rolling it to end users. The latter part is something most developers still don't understand.

You are naive if you think that Microsoft doesn't understand this. Vista consists of around 50 million lines of code and is being worked on by 2000 software developers. Think about that relative to the software you're working on. Simplistic software development processes are not effective on large efforts like this. Testing is a large part of what Microsoft does, but team organizational challenges and other similar issues also dominate in projects this large. For example, how much effort do you think it takes to write specifications for all of Vista. After all, you can't test if you don't have a spec to compare to. You have a written spec for your software, right?

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By GreenEnvt on 7/18/2006 8:51:08 AM , Rating: 2

BETA means it is still a work in progress, and not ready for release yet. I expect any beta to be buggy, slow, and have limited functionallity, since the programmers are still working on it.

If we get to release candidate stage and it's still really buggy and slow, then I'd start to worry.

5456 has been running fine on my system (A64 3700, 2gb ddr400, 400gb, x1800xl)

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RE: why even quote marketing people?

By masher2

(blog) on 7/18/2006 9:25:25 AM , Rating: 2

> "I write code that works and test it before rolling it to end users..."

Beta Release : An intermediate step in the development cycle, commonly used for testing , internal demonstrations and previews to select customers.

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The bloated hope.

By 13Gigatons on 7/18/2006 6:17:43 AM , Rating: 2

Another build that is so much faster then all the other builds that came before. Vista is bloated but hopefully will run great on newer hardware like quad core setups with 4 gigs of memory. I think 2009 will be a banner year for Vista.

Seriously I am so disappointed in Vista. I can't believe how much Microsoft has messed up. Longhorn RTM was slated for 2004 release and it's 2006 and it won't be out until 2007 and even then you will need to wait until SP2 until it's really polished.

RE: The bloated hope.

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 7/18/2006 7:57:26 AM , Rating: 2

Or you could stop crying about bloatware and let Microsoft do it's job?

Seriously getting tired of people here crying about how Vista is just so bloated, and awful, and boohoo whine whine.

If you don't like it Don't Upgrade. If you do like it, then upgrade. I also think a few here don't have a clue what Beta means. Just be happy Microsoft is rolling beta builds out to testers rather than just releasing and seeing what happens. No operating system has been 100% bugproof on release, EVER. Infact theres really not been any complex software released that didn't have bugs. You also need to remember, Microsoft has debuggers and whatnot running in beta builds to record errors and problems, and report on them. Then theres the whole thing about Windows supports practically every piece of hardware in existence, any idea how hard that is?

Here's a new idea, sit, wait, buy or don't buy, stop crying.

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RE: The bloated hope.

By rrsurfer1 on 7/18/2006 8:14:12 AM , Rating: 2

Good point on the debuggers. The debug logging that is enabled is surely slowing Vista down, probably by a very noticable factor.

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RE: The bloated hope.

By TomZ on 7/18/2006 8:30:50 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
You also need to remember, Microsoft has debuggers and whatnot running in beta builds to record errors and problems, and report on them.

I agree with everything you said, except my understanding is that these releases are not "Checked" builds, so the debugging code is not present. What is present is the normal "report problems to Microsoft via Internet" code and other diagnostic code that will ship to customers in the final release.

Within the Microsoft development process, functionality and security get completed as a first priority, followed by performance later. If my understanding is correct, this is why the performance of the current beta build is not yet up to par.

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RE: The bloated hope.

By Nekrik on 7/18/2006 7:39:28 PM , Rating: 2

You can use BCDEdit.exe to find out if the debugger flag is set. In the last build I ran (5384) it was not enabled, but people were reporting it was.

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RE: The bloated hope.

By TomZ on 7/18/2006 8:26:42 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Vista is bloated but hopefully will run great on newer hardware like quad core setups with 4 gigs of memory.

Let's get back to facts, instead of expressing fact-like opinions. In what way is Vista "bloated" in your opinion? What functionality in Vista consume too much memory and/or CPU? Also, what build of the beta were you running and what were your hardware specifications?

Anyone can make cheap shots - but it makes for a more interesting discussion if you bring educated opinions based on facts into the discussion.

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RE: The bloated hope.

By QueBert on 7/18/2006 10:53:22 AM , Rating: 2

Vista takes 4x the HD space of XP (if not more) 15 gigs of my HD was taken up by uhhh... a GUI with more eye candy. I don't have winFS, I don't have anything "new" or at least anything new that matters. I wonder what MS's bloat forcast projection is for Vista's Launch? Even with them cutting features out left and right to make release date. Something tells me they can hit a 20 gig install, for XP with a new interface.

yeah yeah yeah. Vista is "all new code" Pepsi changed their cans a few years back, but it's still Pepsi *shrug*

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RE: The bloated hope.

By TomZ on 7/18/2006 11:12:59 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Vista takes 4x the HD space of XP (if not more) 15 gigs of my HD was taken up by uhhh... a GUI with more eye candy.

You sure about that? Others are reporting less.

current beta of Vista and the current beta of Office 12 are loaded onto one of my test machines, and collectively, they consume about 11 GB of disk space.
http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289...

Anyway, with hard drives costing like $0.50/GB, that means you're allocating only $7.50 worth of storage space for Vista. Do you see that as a serious problem?

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Interesting Article on Vista's Internal Challenges

By TomZ on 7/18/2006 9:15:13 AM , Rating: 2

We shouldn't forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully. The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial.

http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/...

Despite the tone of the quote above, this article is actually a very candid look at the challenges Microsoft faces in developing Vista.