Does Vista have to much features? (Or does Vista ​"think​" to much?)

To me, it's not if something has a lot of features, but how they're implemented.

People complain about "feature creep"/"bloat" in the consumer phone market, yet Smartphones have more features than consumer phones, and they're still usable.... because Smartphones are extensible and the extra features were implemened using a standard extensibility system, contrast with Consumer phones where a lot of it is hard-coded into the OS or phone's shell, any extra 'features' are tacked on as Java applications that both perform terribly and look horrible on the mobile platform.

The same can be said about Vista, I've got nothing with it having more features, so long as they're implemented in the best possible way, i.e.:

• Not as shell extensions
• Not as bits other bits are dependent on
• Not as anything that would need to be enabled on-boot
• Not as anything that affects the performance of the computer unless the feature is explicity called upon
• and so that it can be disabled/uninstalled a my whim

W3bbo makes a great point on this subject. Hard Disk space is very cheap now, but memory and CPU still isn't. If the 'bloat' sits on the hard disk and is never accessed then it isn't really hurting you too much...

The only problem comes when bloat is moved into RAM and or scanned during a system event (e.g. Boot Up, Application Loading, Right Clicking a file, Shutdown etc).

Take for example Window XP's "Tour"... Very annoying, very useless... But in the grand scheme of things it isn't really the bad kind of bloat as after you run it and quit it, the application is never run again and if you want to you can even compress the binary down to save space.

Adversely take Windows Messenger on Windows XP... That is the bad kind of bloat... Runs in the background for no good reason... Hooks into login, hooks into Outlook Express, hooks into Internet Explorer. Even when completely disabled its artifacts remain in the system.

My point is that there are fundamentally two types of bloat, the good kind and the bad kind.

The Vista beta packages include the Vista Ultimage image which includes everything including the kitchen sink if your computer will support it. From what I understand there will be somewhere around five versions of Vista when it ships, each with their own set of features/functionality. With this in mind, I think that Microsoft will be taking the smarter route of an extensible platform where functionality is included as requested/required and not intrusively bloating the vista core.

Part of what you're experiencing with Vista "thinking" too much is caused by one of the security features that was added late, and is somewhat still in its infancy when it comes to implementation. Microsoft is hoping that the feedback that they receive from the beta will help them solidify the final design of the feature.

Note: I hope that made sense, as it's a bit late here...

> Does Vista have to much features? (Or does Vista "think&quot...

A word to the wise: truncate first, then encode.

You know what's missing? The ability to re-organize the task bar by dragging and dropping. That'd be the chit.  

maniac78 wrote:

You know what's missing? The ability to re-organize the task bar by dragging and dropping. That'd be the chit.  

littleguru,

as mentioned above, Vista will be available in six flavours each with different feature sets, one being Ultimate which includes EVERY FEATURE!

At this stage you are running Ultimate, but you may want to have a look at the different flavours here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx

You can quite easily disable the various services (I think I have disabled about 10 or so) that you dont need, including Tablet / Media Center ones if you dont use them.

They really dont seem to slow it down much having them enabled however... of course I have 1.25G of RAM so I am sure that helps


edit: You can also remove some bits and pieces (including Tablet PC functionality) by going Control Panel -> Programs -> Windows Features

maniac78 wrote:

You know what's missing? The ability to re-organize the task bar by dragging and dropping. That'd be the chit.  

littleguru wrote:

Yep. I know that. But the installer should see that I'm not running on a tablet etc... I have not thouch screen at all.

We'll see what the final version brings (I like to have the Ultimate also with the Final version)

But then what happens when you connect a Wacom tablet after installation? Is a normal users supposed to know he has to manually enable the Tablet PC service when he does that? Should we amend the driver installer so that it figures out which services to install for specific types of new hardware? At some point, you can't keep making special cases for everything.

Why not?  Is a normal user going to install windows and deselect the tablet pc option?  No, most likely only a power user would do that.  So there is nothing to worry about.

I've never known modularity to be a bad thing.

littleguru wrote:



pacelvi wrote:  littleguru wrote: Yep. I know that. But the installer should see that I'm not running on a tablet etc... I have not thouch screen at all. We'll see what the final version brings (I like to have the Ultimate also with the Final version) So you want the Ultimate edition which has every feature but yo dont want every feature. An installer is supposed to know this?

I want the ultimate, but I have no tablet PC, but I like a few other features of the ultimate. Why does the installer not disable the Tablet PC services during install? What's so complicate about understanding that?