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HardOCP Spends 30 Days With Vista
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
You can change it. Much like I did for 6 years of XP, I'm about to switch my Vista install over to "Windows Classic" but I kinda like the eye candy (20" LCD with a Win2K looking desktop just doesn't justify the $700 I paid a couple years back for the monitor).
The biggest thing I've liked about Vista is a graphical installer (which, admittedly, you should only have to use once), good support for hardware driver updates (not the drivers themselves, necessarily, just going to find updates), etc. Of course, I've been using OSX as my primary machine for almost three years, so I got used to those things while using XP only to play WoW with a much better graphics card than my PB G4.
Windows will use what it can until something else needs it. Unused Ram is wasted ram.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Perhaps your experience with much of the system memory being used is due to SuperFetch. See the article below for more information. Bottom line, however, is a.) Vista may be using your system more efficiently and b.) if you don't like SuperFetch, it's easy enough to turn off.h tml
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.
Yes. First, get this and this. Then try this URL to read it ad-free.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The default in XP is to reboot and log the error in the Event Viewer when you get a BSOD instead of actually showing you the BSOD. Microsoft realized that since maybe 1/10,000 people actually can act on the BSOD data that shows, there's really no reason to show it to everybody else.
There's a checkbox to turn that feature off, if you want to see BSODs, in the System control panel I believe. Or just check your Event Viewer when you have a mysterious reboot.
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For me, the most striking feature of his review concerned burning DVDs. He claimed that Vista uses a new file format for DVDs that isn't backward compatible with earlier Windows versions, not to mention being incompatible with Linux, Mac, etc. I'm puzzled about why I haven't heard more about this problem if it's real. For those of you running Vista, have you had problems writing data DVDs that work with non-Vista systems? Did you have to choose specifically to use the traditional format when burning the DVD? Is it really non-obvious how to make the traditional format the default as he suggests?
This seems like a show-stopper to me for anyone wanting to exchange data with non-Vista users, especially if the default is to use the Vista-only format. The fact that I haven't heard this complaint before makes me suspicious that it's something unique to his setup, but not being a Windows user I have no basis to judge.
with absolutely nothing running Vista Business sucked up 35-40% of my RAM. Thats sitting still, doing nothing, with nothing running.
If the machine is sitting still and doing nothing, it shouldn't matter if the OS uses 100% of available memory, maybe for pre-caching the next chunks of data it think you'll ask for, or running a background index process against your filesystem.
The issue is when you start to add application load to the machine -- does the OS release memory it's using for those "idle" tasks so that apps can use it, or is it greedy?
Really? Cause I haven't seen anything of the sort of everything is slower. In fact everything that isn't related to a single program doing hardcore processing is faster. Searching is way faster, cutting losses from failed network events is faster, and most importantly for me, when you are heavily taxing ram/virtual ram each window respond faster(as if you weren't doing heavy duty work). But if you aren't talking about individual programs being slower, then yes some programs are slower to do cpu intensive tasks. Not by too much... at least for me. I'll take the other improvements any day as trade for a few frames per second on my video encode. It just feels better to me. But then again I gave it a chance before dismissing it outright.
I've never found a use for the indexing and search functions that people are happily touting with Vista, Google Desktop, and others... Instead, I use a logical directory naming convention that makes looking for what I need a simple matter of choosing the directory that has what I need.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
One place where Vista is dramtically faster than XP is repainting invalidated areas of a window (areas that were covered by another app and now are visible). This is a result of the DWM and hardware compositing. Apps get called to repaint less often as a result and while this might not be a measurable speed boost in normal cases it does mean that apps which are busy doing other work will not have the normal windows crap on them while they wait for a repaint because they won't need to.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
The problem is people always have been used to running as admin or equiv ANYWAY. So a sudden difference bothers them. Also it fairly blindly assumes that you need admin for any installer, which is not true.
It is compared to WinXP on similar hardware.
Vista sucks for gaming if you have better things to do than buy a highend system. I've had no real pressing reason to upgrade my desktop, particularly in the "gaming" direction. But even fairly recent games run playably in WinXP on my aging desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB PC133 RAM, and a GeForce FX5200 128MB PCI. On Vista this was decidedly not the case, Empire Earth 2 ran pitifully, whereas I could actually play and enjoy it on WinXP.
I agree there's a huge FUD machine pounding on Vista, but a lot of it is the same kind of Linux FUD I see spread... isolated, very real gripes by a small but noisy population blown out of proportion into generalities. It happens with introducing any new tech, this is hardly shocking.