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Why Vista Won't Suck
creativity writes "ExtremeTech is running an article on the new features of Windows Vista and why it is a must upgrade for all Windows users. They take apart the marketing hype and tell you what exactly to expect in Windows Vista. They specifically pick out less-hyped features like a kernel which has new Heap Management and details on SuperFetch, which is Vista's application cache."
Looks like a forced upgrade for US gov users; if AES-256 and "SHA-2" hashs are really going to be US gov security requirements, the only way Microsoft will support them is by upgrading EVERY windows desktop and server to Vista. (For some reason Microsoft has refused to put AES-256 support into any non-Vista version of its SSL stack even though the rest of the industry has been doing so for almost five years now.)
I remember my last intentional switch to Windows (Win 95). It, too, was going to have all these wonderful new features (better GUI, better memory management, multitasking). I tried for 2 years to get the same level of stability I had in DOS, and then went to OS/2. And machines which didn't ship with Win 95 were even more of a beast to get working correctly if you had added stuff to your box.
IMHO, "upgrading" to Vista will be the same thankless task, and it will be at least a year before machines shipped with Vista are going to be "right". Microsoft will rush this job because it's already so late that they almost have to.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Windows 3.1 (1994)
Windows 95 (1995)
Windows 98 (1999)
Windows XP home edition (2002)
Mac OSX (2004)
The last upgrade has been, by far, the most satisfying.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
which version out of the 12 should i upgrade to ;) i think windows vista is likely to do more for linux than anything before ;) i mean what would you rather do, pay for a whole new operating system that is very alien to you, and requires you to upgrade your hardware and alot of software, and is likely unstable (and new so doesnt have a proven usability).. or download a FREE operating system that is also somewhat alien (to windows users), but has proven stability and usablity, also you wont have to upgrade your hardware for it either... oh btw did i mention its free?
i for one am tired of microsoft telling me when i have to drop 2000 dollars for a new computer. your choises are:
A) keep using (and patching) the older versions of windows which become more and more unstable patch after patch
B) keep using the older versions of windows but DONT patch, and then your system becomes more and more exploitable as more exploits are discovered
C) upgrade your hardware, and buy new version of windows every couple of years, (spending potentially thousands of dollars), relearn how to use the new windows, relearn how to use the new office all over again..
D) download a free open source alternative, DONT upgrade your hardware, dont let your upgrade schedule be locked into someone elses marketing plans. dont run the most heavily targetted OS for exploits/hackers. Use open office which seems to be more similar to MS Office than the new version will be. DO enjoy the benefits that come with open source
After using linux for a while going back to windows is extremely painful and youll wonder how you ever managed to use it.
But Windows 2000 and XP don't actually suck! They're pretty poor, the GUI is dodgy and the CLI appalling, but they run anything you throw at them and rarely crash. They by-and-large get the job done, and 2000 was well ahead of Linux and Mac OS at the time. Overpriced, yes, lame, yes, dated, yes, suck, no...
One of the reasons Vista won't suck is because Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff out of the kernel and into user space. OK, 10 years ago when Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 they put GDI in the kernel to increase performance, which was a terrible idea as the performance increase this gave was more than offset by stability problems. If Microsoft had been smart they would have kept the kernel as small as possible and waited a couple of years for hardware speeds to increase, as they inevitably did. So basically one of the biggest reasons Vista "won't suck" is because Microsoft has finally decided to undo mistakes they made 10 years ago. Color me less than impressed.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
This is patently untrue, and is just one of many examples where people completely misunderstand MS's support of HDCP and a secure digital path to the monitor. There is NOTHING in Vista that requires this. NONE. ZIP. The secure digital display output is there to enable that REQUIREMENT of HD-DVD and blu-ray. If you have a problem with it, complain to both the HD-DVD and blu-ray consortiums, it's their fault. And it'll need to be in consumer set-top players as well as any other OS on any computer that wants to comply with those standards. Don't want to play HD-DVD or blu-ray? Fine, then you don't need a new video card or monitor.
I work in a school, with an obviously limited budget, and cheapo Dells as the main workstations. They work fine with XP, and run everything very fast. No complaints. Will they run Vista? Will they bollocks. You're talking about £10,000 of hardware per ICT suite, and we have 7 suites and about another load of machines knocking around in various places (totals about 300). I'm sorry, but we won't be splashing down £70-90k (and the rest!) to buy a whole new load of PCs just to run Vista on. A lot of these new features sound like the biggest waste of resources ever, and they all seem to be taking the Gnome^W^W route of adding things in that they think people will want, then removing the options to stop it.
What the hell is the deal with this "hibernation" mode they're talking about? The DEFAULT option is to NOT shut the computer off? In this day and age with our up-and-coming energy crisis, and MS are going to make all these new 500W+ PCs NOT shut down? Who was on the crack that day at Redmond when they decided to make that the default option.
In my home life, my next step is a Mac. I've "upgraded" from DOS, to 95, then 98, then straight to XP, then an experiment with Linux ended up removing my XP partition.
Not having the reinstallation disks, I've been a happy Linux user for 4 years now. (Though I did get around to reinstalling XP, I never use it - managing 500 XP desktops at work is more than enough XP for me.)
So, basically, every version of Windows has been more secure and reliable than the last. What's the problem with that? Would you rather they stopped improving?
Looking across the hall at the Apple fanboys, I observe that the fact that every version of OS X is the fastest yet is generally taken as a sign that Apple is improving OS X, not that OS X has always been slow. So why is the fact that every version of Windows is the most secure yet not taken as a similarly positive thing?
I've been beta testing Vista for a while now. After installing Vista, I swear to God - the OS cached every single EXE file on my computer in a folder in the root of Vista's installation drive. Each EXE file is given its own subfolder in this folder, with the same name as the file followed by a unique hash. Each subfolder contains the EXE file and several accompanying files, at least two of which are XML documents.
When all was said and done, this folder took up nearly 5GB on disk. I can't even open this drive in Explorer. I let it sit for about 20 minutes once and my PC slowed to a crawl
Whatever this godawful "feature" is, I hope it is removed for the final version.
This "feature" is the supposed "trusted" applications thing.
I used to do the same thing with downloading pictures off of alt.binaries newsgroups.
What I would do is use a unix command called 'suck' and suck down the entire newsgroup since the last time I sucked it down. It would then do md5 checksums of the decoded pictures and store them in a MySQL database. Duplicate md5 checksums were automatically deleted. Either I had seen the pic before, or more than likely it was spam. Hey, even porn spam is cool sometimes, but once is more than enough. This was not resource intensive for a basic 64bit machine in the late 90s.
The thing is, that this did not need to be a 5 Gig slowing a machine to a crawl feature. Doing the checksum on a binary and storing it into a simple db is not that tough. Its a good idea. I run md5 checksums on all of my binaries every night to tell if something has changed. Its valuable when multiple people have root, so you know when something is screwed up and the binary just changed, odds are....
Anyway, it sounds like a good idea, but a very poor execution of the idea. Kinda sounds like the registry?
The registered as "safe" thing will be meaningless as soon as one of MSs "safe" apps has a vulnerability
Right, because all that will happen is that the same social engineering techniques that have been used to make very successful e-mail worms will be used to convince users to allow execution of a new program. And by then, the users will have gotten to conditioned to the reflex of clicking OK on all those execution dialogs after installing new software and years of ActiveX "Of course I'm safe to run!" components.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I have experimented with DFS a bit, though I was using Samba as my server rather than Windows. It does work quite well as long as you are using a domain. Unfortunately in my initial experiments I wasn't using a domain and so there were some problems with credentials across the various machines. Still, it's a step in the right direction, and certainly better than nothing.