Tom's Overly Detailed Vista Review

prostoalex writes "The weekend is here, and several software sites have published extensive reviews of Windows Vista for your reading enjoyment. Tom's Hardware is running a 500 hour Windows Vista review that spreads out 40 pages." From the article: "This new operating system is huge: it has more than 37,800 files, taking up a total of 10 GB. Part of this size stems from the fact that the current Beta is for the so-called "Ultimate Edition", which contains all available components, including complete versions of both Tablet PC and Media Center capabilities. In addition, many applications have been compiled in debug mode, so some space savings should occur for final versions once that debug switch is turned off. For our Windows Vista preview, we used Build 5381."

Comments

I TOLD them it was a dupe!

[yagu]

Let me save you some time, this is a dupe.

As a "subscriber", I get the preview of articles with the blurb: See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor. at the bottom. This gives opportunity to correct errors (doesn't happen much) and more importantly help stem the tide of dupes. I replied, told them "DUPE, BIG TIME", but alas. (It's a dupe of Tom's Hardware Looks at Microsoft Vista Beta.)

So, since it's a dupe, and I already posted to that story, feel free to read my post again.

(I don't mind the occasional dupe, I wonder why a mechanism to prevent them is offered if it isn't used. Sigh.)

Re:I TOLD them it was a dupe!

[fm6]

All Slashdot needs are editors who aren't terminally lazy. Zonk is by far the worst.

Dupe with print-view link

[thewldisntenuff]

This was a dupe from last Wednesday, posted mysteriously in the Linux section (something in the dupe post about Ubuntu 6) of /. -

You can read the original thread here

And if you don't like clicking through 40 pages, there's a print view here

File count is not a measure of OS size

[Anonymous Coward]

"it has more than 37,800 files"

For comparison: my Mac (Mac OS X 10.4.6) has:

• about 78000 files in /System
• about 100000 files in /Library
• about 40000 files in /usr
• about 65000 files in /Developer
• about 110000 files in /Applications (this includes third-party apps I installed)

The lesson you should learn from this is that the number of files is not really a meaningful indicator of the complexity of a system.

Trick for Tom's -- append "print.html" to URL

[novafire]

I learned this from a post on another Tom's related link on /.

Just append print.html to end of the Tom's URL and get the one page print article.

I figure if the article is a dupe, might as well dupe any useful comments, right?

Secret TH Printer Friendly Layout

[TubeSteak]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html

Someone in a previous Tom's Hardware thread pointed out that adding "print.html" to the end of any TH article will magically give you a ONE Page article.

Thank you fief (12961). It looks like you've learned a thing or two since getting that low UID .

Re:10GB? You have got to be kidding!

[Skuld-Chan]

Ditto for OS/X.

Not true at all. The default install for my G5 was well over 10 gigs on OSX 10.4.x.

Re:Too many pages

[vtcodger]

Didn't read it, eh? A wise decision. Summary:

• Pages 1-3: They have again improved (i.e. changed) the graphical interface with, are you ready for this? tranparent windows (I assume this is different from not displaying the window at all).
• Pages 4-11 They've fixed IE so that it is secure, does what Firefox does, and prints properly (about damn time if true). People still use IE?
• Pages 12-15 They've added GUI IPV6 support
• Page 16 You can specify your language for voice input
• Page 17 They've tinkered with the help system (again).
• Pages 19-21 You will now have a choice of secure or usable. That's an exclusive or.
• Pages 22-24 They have expanded Windows Update (an accident waiting to happen if you ask me)
• Pages 25-29 They have tinkered some with Explorer. Some of the stuff sounds reasonable.
• Page 29 They have done more work on device driver installation. This is probably a genuine improvement. But XP was pretty good.
• Page 30 You can specify default browser, email, etc in one place
• Page 31 There will be a new DirectX, but it's not ready yet.
• Pages 32-39 All the old games are there and you can save and restore them. They've added chess, inkball.and purple place.(Yes, TH really devoted EIGHT pages to games)

It took five years for This ? I imagine that there is more, but I don't know what. I've probably trialized some genuine improvements. But on the whole, Vista seems pretty underwhelming, and in any case, my fondest hope is that I can stick with Windows 9 until either Linux really works well, or Microsoft rethinks its approach to OSes and delivers up somthing that does less and does it better.