Slashdot Mirror
Hacked DX10 for Windows Appears
Oddscurity writes "According to The Inquirer someone managed to write a wrapper allowing DirectX 10 applications to run on platforms other than Vista. The Alky Project claims to have reverse-engineered Geometry Shader code, allowing Windows games to run on Windows XP, MacOSX and Linux. The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to ascertain whether or not it's a hoax."
No thanks. I'd like to be able to use my computer without needing five top-of-the-line graphics cards just to run the OS.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Even if he really managed to do this (which I doubt, look how long wine has been around and it still doesn't run everything), won't he get sued immediately for something like this?
----
Squirrel
well, you're going to need those cards to run DX10 anyway.
Well the first three letters are right...
The article claims to have a software implementation of DirectX 10 Geometry Shaders, so no, you wouldn't.
If nothing else, this can be a call to others to create similar projects. If the Alky Project is real (which it is by all accounts so far), then even if it is shut down, their work will continue. If it can't meet it's goals in some way, then it's full promise will remain as a focus for the great need to NOT 'upgrade' to Windows Vista, drawing in a large number of developers. It is also the promise that applications made for DirectX 10 may live beyond their operating environment.
This is very much a more direct refection of the same phenomenon that allows entire hardware systems to be emulated against the wishes of console, arcade and computer manufacturers.
This is the start of the market's reaction to Vista, made manifest.
Ryan Fenton
We are hacking Windows apps to run them on Windows OS's.
Let the sadness ensue.
I can't ignore this comment as it seems Slashdot keeps perpetuating this myth...
Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer?? If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines.
Now, if you had said it as below you would have had a point:
"No thanks. I'd like to be able to use my computer without needing five top-of-the-line graphics cards just to run the OS in 'fancy graphics' mode.
I downloaded it and everytime I start up a Direct X 10 tutorial it crashes out, the file sizes 400k also seem a little small.
I'd also like to know how he implemented Vertexs and Indexs since in DirectX 10 you allocate one buffer and it can be any type but under DirectX 9 you have to choose the type of buffer when you create it. Copying all that stuff into memory so you can allocate the buffer in the DirectX 10 drive at render time is going to slow things down a hell of a lot.
Still if it worked it would be very interesting for the wine project.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It is a hoax according to Hans Phall
Or get a mac, for the price of windows Vista, with screen-licking graphics and other cool shininess! Ooh, shinyyyyyy!.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Seeing as how I do not like vista, on the basis that I like to be in control over what software I run. That being said I can't wait to run DX10 on my build of linux and my XP rig! we just need someone evil enough to prove it.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
If only windows were like Linux. I don't really mean in the open-source way, but more in the separate projects way. If DirectX was a separate project from the windows OS, then it would work on windows XP without us having to go hack it. There's no reason why DirectX 10 can't work on windows XP. It's just an artificial limitation that MS through in to get people to buy Vista. MS does this a lot, with IE, IIS, MS Office, DirectX, and many other tools. I don't see why people put up with it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So rather than a top-of-the-line GPU, you'd have to compensate with a top-of-the-line CPU to handle the load brought on by software rendering.
'Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer?? If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines.'
A variety of machines with really fast processors and boatloads of ram.
Well i likee to use my computer without having to read 50 manuals and then going to 150 sites on top of that just to be told "RTFM noob" while said manuals are incomplete.
Li-nux sucks nuts.
If he releases the code to the whole world, then who will they sue?
(write-line *coolsig*)
Looked up the definition of "misnomer" recently?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Does the OS detect the card you have and then tone down the OS' level of resource hogging based on that?
With the (arguably) poor reception for Vista from the press and user communities and the (GPU) Hardware and Games writers obviously wanting to push DirectX 10 to help sales (ooo shiney AND blured!) is MS under non-trivial pressure to bring DirectX10 to XP? What are the chances of this happening?
Will we end up with a backlash where OpenGL is updated to include features parity of the DirectX10 cards and developers switching to using OpenGL as the driver layer so they get the XP market?
I think it's a perfectly cromulent word.
Realistically, to run any likely dx10 app, you'd need at least 64 top of the line cpus to handle the software rendering load.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Which I have anyways, and is useful for other things like editing multi-media, unlike that high end DX10 card. Besides, I have a reasonably high-end DX9 card.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Even if it did, XP (the primary OS this would be desired for tbh) doesn't have the necessary resource management necessary to fuel the power needed for the graphics processing that DX10 takes advantage of. Sure, you might get it working, but it would be slow as heck.
. . but this screams "Getting gullible people to give me $50 for mostly snake oil"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Well if so many tools out there weren't mindless lemmings, having to have the latest PC games and thus buying an OS they dont need, we could all send a message to M$ and the game writers that we're not interested in buying into their planned obsolescence.
M$ has functionally taught us that security is going to be something that's left up to us.....so OK, no sweat, redmond......BTW, I won't be needing the OS you spent many many millions developing, thanks.
same problem, dumbass!
except some people think the MacGUI looks ugly.
Actually, I think the default GUI on any OS I've used looks attrocious, but I find I can take Widows and KDE (ok, the latter isn't an OS, but it can work on many!) and make them look good with minimal effort.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
> The Inquirer is understandably cautious
Wow, now there's a sentence I never expected to see in print!
Actually, it just needs boatloads of RAM in the classic interface, can be average. You only need a good GFX card and a powerful CPU in Aero...
But, if you do have those boatloads of RAM, Vista can be faster than XP. The turnaround point, according to some tests I've seen, is between the 1 and 1.5GB mark, varying on the apps you use.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
and shouldn't be deriving anything meaningful from this.
I'm just happy you're not the ones making any decisions about the future of any sort of tech.
Or is that exactly what the project is?
Please, tell me where that is from. It's been driving me nuts trying to remember the source of the reference!
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Yes, I have, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misnomer . Have you?
A misnomer is a term which suggests an interpretation known not to be true.
In actuality, although the word might be nice, its usage above is rather malapropistic, for the denotation of "misnomer" is along the lines of "using the wrong name for a person, place or event" as opposed to "perpetuating untruthiness".
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I'd be the first to agree that the UI in Mac OS X is quite limited in terms of customisability.
If you like the OS X GUI, great! If you don't, you'd be forced to use third party apps to change even the most basic elements.
Me, I'm happy with the way things are, but if there was an easier way to change the appearance, I might consider changing. All in all, it doesn't play that big a role though, the increase in productivity has been well worth the decrease in UI customizability.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Yes, it only runs Aero if your graphics card can support the interface.
But if you don't use Aero and run it in classic mode instead then what are you getting from Vista? Nothing that dramatic since Aero is the big selling point for MS. Sort of like buying a big house and not being able to use most of the rooms.
It's a lovely word, isn't it? I really think it's use embiggens the English language.
When schoolteacher Edna Krabappel hears the Springfield town motto "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man," she comments she'd never heard the word "embiggens" before moving to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word."
He said _useful_ projects.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Did you even bother to read the rest of that page? Or cross reference with a publication reputable in the area of word definitions, such as a dictionary? It's really not complicated. "Misnomer" is the wrong word to use.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I already wrote a DirectX 11 emulator for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum! Booya b*tchez I'm da hacka p1mp! Who wants to send me $500?
Such 3rd party apps exist?
A post involving links would be at least +3 informative -1 offtopic worth!
Still, being visually impared, I doubt there's anything to fix the one problem that I find makes it unusable...
That menu bar stuck at the top, rather than with the applicationw indow involves a lot more head movement.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
A misnomer is a term which suggests an interpretation known not to be true.
FAIL!
It looks like Wine (Codeweaver) for MacOS X 10.4 Intel-PC.
Prey is NOT a DX 10 game but a DX 9 game which works more or less okay in WineHQ/CW.
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
I kind of went along with that too, but have now re-installed XP out of frustration.
I'm using a Dual 8800 GTX video card (the Dell XPS H2C system: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetai
I have 2 fast disks striped w/hardware raid and things like file copies felt sluggish and slow. (Moving files around the hard disk).
Using the windows explorer was numbingly frustrating.
The Video driver would crash frequently, even after disabling SLI (I know, it's nVidia's problem, not MS's...) But, the driver would recover and then it would go into a chain of driver crash warnings.
The BSOD's would occur not hourly, but seemingly about 1-2x per week.
The AERO didn't seem to make the system sluggish, but I'm running the fastest video cards on the market..
I'm sure if your running a simple system, integrated graphics card and AC97 audio, your disk configuration isn't complex, or has good drivers.. you might be ok, but some of the subtle problems of vista don't show up until after a month or two of using it. (I've been using since Beta 2 off and on, including RTM and bought a copy at launch).
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800), and I put a copy of vista on that machine and it works fine, but all she does on her computer is open the web browser and play solitaire. She has FAR from high end hardware, and she runs it in the high graphics desktop mode without a hickup. the issues I've described on my machine doesn't bother her, she doesn't do things like open the file explorer or copy large files around.
We ordered a batch of dell low end desktop for customer-service reps here at our office, they are running Vista. They have integrated video cards (probably Intel) and it seems to be fine with Aero running, 1 gig of ram. But the only app they use is Mozilla.
I personally regret not buying a Mac Pro after spending 3 or so months fighting with Vista on my new machine, I've concluded that XP will have to work until it's EOL'd and I can feel I didn't completely waste my money on that Dell and buy another Mac to replace it.
A real dictionary might have served you better.
From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:
Main Entry: misnomer
Pronunciation: "mis-'nO-m&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English misnoumer, from Anglo-French mesnomer, from mes- mis- + nomer to name, from Latin nominare -- more at NOMINATE
1 : the misnaming of a person in a legal instrument
2 a : a use of a wrong or inappropriate name b : a wrong name or inappropriate designation
XP will run certain programs better than Vista will. Consider that it is even more of a resource hog than XP.
Not to mention the large number of programs and device drivers wont run on Vista at all.
In 2 or 3 years Vista will be a good OS. Currently the bugs far out weigh the benefits. As I recall XP went through similar problems. At launch it was buggy, a resource hog, and many programs/drivers couldn't run on it. (It's still a resource hog compared to older OSes[or *nix / BSD OSes], but hardware has progressed to the point of it not being an issue for only most people/markets)
For a significant portion of the market the primary reason to "upgrade" to Vista is DX10 (once DX10 games come out).
Games are among the programs that ought to run better on XP.
Thank you, ever so much A/C for copying and pasting what took me an entire 3 seconds to find on my own!
Hello Steve, how are you ? Not too busy at the office with the Vista issues ? :)
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
AC sir.. that link of yours is #$@#$in saved.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Don't likee your computer you drooling windows chump. It will
make it all wet.
Disgusting child.
A quick google results in "ShapeShifter" http://unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter
I've had good fun with ctrl scroll-wheel-up and ctrl scroll-wheel-down though. So that might be a way to go for visually impaired.
It doesn't solve the menu bar problem though. Whilst annoying at times, I've recently seen a widescreen windows notebook with adobe reader within a browser. My word! There was hardly any space for the text left due to the sheer number of toolbars present.
Good luck.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
But last time I checked the 'fancy graphics' mode was the only vista feature...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
CPU can be average... Sorry, not sure how I missed typing that.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
linux is a kernel. it is incapable of sucking nuts. distributions, on the other hand.. they often suck nuts. good thing theres like 1000 of them, many of which have nice gui installers and tons of newbie help guides available for the most common problems. then again, you can always install slackware 2.0 from a floppy and then bitch about the remaining 6 slack users telling you to rtfm.. whoever modded parent "insightful" must have been trying to use a creative spelling of "troll."
"Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer, what's wrong?"
Pretty sure they mean, it just needs boatloads of RAM. In the classic interface (the graphics card) can be average....
How fast will MS push out DX 10.1 or some other small update to make this stop working like what they have done in past.
They did things like this with win32s and os/2
If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines.
There are other issues that have made Vista a path to pain
Frankly, I can't see why there hasn't been a class action suit to get Microsoft to provide a free service-pack-3 style update to XP which includes all of Vistas supposed security enhancements, without the other features. After all, XP was clearly defective. Maybe the Vista security alerts being so annoying are one of the reasons that many don't want Vista even on new machines.
There also ought to be a class action to give users the right to transfer any previous XP license to another machine, even if just as a second or third OS on a Mac. However a user paid for it, if they paid they should be able to transfer the license.
Even if Vista does work properly on your hardware, some security features that many might expect (like bitlocker functionality to guard data when a laptop is stolen) isn't even included in the versions of Vista that most people are being stuck with.
Hopefully this portability for DX10 will reach a practical level. Any sort of lock-in to Vista should be avoided.
Vista + brown Zune = prior art problem (colonoscopy)
Your original usage :
I can't ignore this comment as it seems Slashdot keeps perpetuating this myth... Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer??
This is incorrect usage - it looks like you wrote myth twice, realised this looked bad, and then searched around for another word to replace it with.
The entry on Wikipedia is misleading if not downright wrong, but if you consult *any* proper dictionary, you'll find a better definition. You appear to be using wikipedia as a dictionary and to think that misnomer means simply 'something which is wrong'. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and wiktionary is a crap dictionary. The comment you replied to doesn't misname anything, it asserts that Vista needs lots of graphics cards to run. Perhaps that's wrong, perhaps it's mistaken, perhaps it's a widely accepted slashdot myth, but it's not a misnomer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world uses misnomer to mean using the wrong name for something, not something which is wrong or mistaken. Your usage is just a mistake, and not one that's common enough for you to claim it's correct.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amisnomer
Why is this important? If we continually misuse words, they lose all meaning. We already have plenty of words for things which are wrong, mistaken, or myths, you could have used them instead.
Why won't people on the internet just accept they're wrong sometimes?
People keep perpetuating it because it's the only perceived value that Vista has. Shiny new graphics and DX10, there's really not much else.
Yeah yeah li-nux is just a kernel sure pass the buck onto someone else don't blame poor linux.
Ubuntu sux and its number 1 on the distrowatch and it all goes downhill from there. Its sad so many people want to pirate innovations made by Microsoft without paying for it.
"Free Software" is communism disguised as a nice free hippy movement. International Socialism. That and its brother National Socialism (bsd? when it is headed by german sounding name dude you wonder... notice the similarity of name bsd to lsd) causes all the problems in the world.
Cody has been around for quite a while. He worked for mp3tunes dot com and helped code their locker project. He , as I remember, started coding right out of diapers, and i think he worked with DVDJon for a while... lets not discount this "pre-alpha" release just yet.. the kid knows how to code.
Just wait for SP2 then
Vista != Aero. Implying that all Vista comprises is a GUI is like saying KDE = Linux kernel. Actually DX10 was one of their big selling points, looks like they will have to find something else to taut out now...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Hopefully the most of the bugs will be worked out by the the time SP1 comes out. Personally, except for pure test beds, I always wait until the first SP comes out to install any OS. I remember fighting with a couple Macs when the first version of OS X came out. Same with Windows Server 2003. But i wouldn't completely write Vista off yet, especially in your case with a complex setup, the drivers may take a bit to all get working in unison.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I am increasingly impressed by the erudite and incisive
nature of Steve Balmer's arguments. This is a great
improvement Steve -- see how applying the intellect gets
you much further than throwing chairs about. Now, if we
could only do something about your spelling.
The only thing I saw on the fallingleafsystems.com site was a youtube/google-video clip of Prey running in windowed mode on Mac OS-X. Now I'm not exactly sure, but isn't Prey a modded Doom3 engine - which was OpenGL and cross platform, being able to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X? So their only example of DX10 working on a non-Vista or even XP machine not only doesn't use a DX10 example, its not even a DX9 (or any DX) example...
Thanks for the flamebait, but seriously since you appear to doubt the uselessness of porting DX10, consider this. Of the many changes in DX10, one of them is a more focused set of requirements for DX10 compatible cards. When a game developer is writing a DX10 game, they are writing it with these specifications in mind. Do you think for a second that Crysis, Alan Wake, Shadowrun, UT3 or whatever other DX10 game in development is going to run worth a crap in a software DX10? I wasn't aware there was such a demand to run the DX10 sample apps. This to me is the main reason for calling this project useless. There's also legality issues, the question of whether this is even real or not, and assuming it is real, to what degree of support is to be expected in the absence of Vista. In fact, like most rewrites of software projects, particularly in the gaming area, most of the focus and attractiveness of DX10 comes from its refactoring of some of the problem areas of previous DX versions in order to provide large speedups. For example, in DX9 and below, draw calls are very expensive, and a game can easily start choking and performing very badly on just a couple thousand draw calls. Each draw call has very large CPU overhead to it. It doesn't take much to hit this draw call cap and become CPU limited. DX10, due to the new API and driver model has been written with this in mind, resulting in a huge reduction in draw call cost. OpenGL already has pretty cheap draw call cost. I'll agree that marketing probably played a huge role in DX10 Vista only, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part due to the engineers getting to a point where they just had to say "Look, there's some big foundation level problems with DX that we can't improve much on without rewriting it." Any software engineer should understand the need to refactor sometimes, and sometimes you can't keep backward compatibility. Vista naturally provides a target for such a rewrite. It wouldn't make sense to have XP Service Pack 2 or whatever replace the XP driver model and whatever other parts of the foundations of XP is needed just to get DX10 on XP. DX10 is a major rewrite to the entire API and how it interfaces to the hardware. Could they have ported it to XP? Probably at huge cost, which in business terms mean hell no. It just isn't worth it. So marketing gets to use it to pimp Vista too. It's a win all around for MS, and for gamers and developers who do run DX10 there is potential for alot more over DX9. It's unfortunate it comes at the price of the turd formerly known as Vista.
So uh, is there an option somewhere to get the posting not to eat my newlines? I gotta
shit myself?
Yes, I do think him for answering my question.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
So uh, is there an option somewhere to get the posting not to eat my newlines?
Use Plain Old Text posting option. HTML requires that you actually write HTML, ie use the <br> tag.
haha that came out badly, without the br tag. "I gotta * shit myself" * insert br tag. Christ, so we have de-evolved into the requirement to br our newlines manually? I guess the post form couldn't be asked to detect something so trivial?
If there was some problem in XP that I can't get around, or a performance boost by moving to Vista, I might think about re-installing that version of Vista that came with my new computer (I got rid of it and put XP Pro SP2 on it).
I'm doing media production (audio and video) as well as some Flash and web development. I see absolutely no reason to change to Vista, and because of Vista's adoption of DRM, and the irritating "security features", I have several good reasons NOT to use Microsoft Vista.
Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this latest OS. If they would have updated XP, massaged the interface a bit, and added DX10 support, they'd have had a huge hit on their hands. I'm not a MS hater, but I tell anyone who asks me not to bother with Vista.
When I'm doing music in Sonar 6 or Steinberg Wavelab, my new Core 2 Duo system really works beautifully with XP, and all the little tools and plugins upon which I've come to rely perform better than ever. I couldn't even make them work under Vista.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The whole point of TFA is that this is a reverse engineering and re-implementation of DX10.
It's not just someone finding a way to install Vista's DX10 on XP (which would be technically very hard, near to impossible, because DX10 relies on some new feature of Vista's kernel. Reportedly to give a more direct "console-like" access to hardware for games. Probably in fact to make less likely a backport and force people upgrading OS).
It's that they (pretend) that they have reverse engineered DX10 and created (their own) wrapper to run DX10 software on non-Vista platform. As some DX10 functionality is implemented in the wrapper itself, it is supposed to even work on hardware that may lack some of this functionality in hardware. Maybe some DX10-to-DX9 wrapper ? Or DX10-to-OpenGL2 ? The fact is that this wrapper is supposed to work not only older versions of Windows, but also on Mac OS X and Linux. Either because it's a DX10-to-OpenGL2 wrapper (just like Wine provides a DX9-to-OpenGL wrapper), or because it's a DX10-to-DX9 wrapper running on top of the wine's DX9-to-OpenGL.
But the whole stuff doesn't involve installation of DX10 and thus could benefit to wine, reactos and/or Cedega, specially if it's appended as a newer DX emulation code. They already have similar DX9 wrappers. DX10 could be added to wine with that project, even if it needs some older DX underneath (already available legally in wine).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know everybody wants to believe that Microsoft arbitrarily decided that DX10 would be Vista only so they could "force" people into buying the OS, but, as usual, it's a tiny bit more complex than that.
DX10 relies heavily on graphics card memory virtualization. The new Windows Display Driver Model, WDDM, introduces this feature. In order to accomplish this, it required a lot of low level kernel changes. So many, in fact, that back-porting it to XP would basically make XP's kernel into Vista's kernel.
There comes a point where you just have to say that a particular feature is only available in Vista. DX10 fits that bill.
If I have an XP system, it's probably not equipped with the latest graphics card.
If I'm adding an abstraction/emulation layer, it's probably adding significant code to be executed.
Chances are that my performance is going to take a measurable, if not fatal, hit for any but the latest hardware.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Ok,
But this software implementation can't be used as a guide to make an generic hardware-accelerated implementation? Better yet, can't this be used for a clear-room implementation? One that is safe to incorporate on Wine, Cedega, SDL, etc...
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Being that Cody Brocious is 19, who wants to take bets that he'll rename the project in a couple years? Maybe something along the lines of... Alky-Hall Project?
About a month ago, I replaced the aging nVidia 6800 card in my aging 3.5 GHz desktop PC with an ATI X1950 graphics card that I picked up for about £120 ($200 approximately). I then put on Far Cry, a game from 2004-odd, was able to turn up all the graphics options to full on a 1280x1024 LCD monitor and ended up playing a game that, in my middle-aged view, was giving me almost photo-realistic graphics - and all this within DirectX 9.
I appreciate that people might want to play on big screens and wide screens these days, meaning that they possibly want 1600x1200 (or whatever) displays, but I'm finding it difficult to understand what DirectX 10, and therefore Vista, can possibly bring to the "gaming table" anyway.
Yes, I accept that some people quite like the idea of accelerated 3D desktops (I personally cannot think why) but the fact is that a lot of people use XP (myself included) purely because of it's ability to run games. And if games graphics are already *THAT* good, what more do gamers actually want that isn't currently being done by a reasonable graphics card, a recent game and DirectX 9?
I'd love someone to explain it to me because I really don't see what the great "hooha" is about DirectX 10.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
and test it out! Oh wait...
...it is a major strike against Microsofts Vista deployment plan since the only real improvment is DirectX 10 (sorry, but that's the fact, the rest are either eyecandy gimmicks or DRM "features").
It is on the other hand a very good argument not to look for a Windows alternative so MS will not kill it, it may even make them release a crippled DX10 for Win XP.
Here's a little contextual usage. Let's see if you can spot the word you're looking for:
Calling Wikipedia a dictionary is a misnomer.
Wikipedia's reputation for reliability and accuracy is a myth.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer?? If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines
If you have a capable video card (and if you don't, $30ish to get one is not really a big ask), you're far better off leaving Aero turned on and offloading it to the GPU. Going back to "Classic" mode can actually be slower, because the CPU is now doing all the work the GPU would otherwise be doing.
I think the reason people ignore the ability to use the Classic Appearance is that it brings up the question of why you'd switch to Vista if you're going to use the old Windows 2000 look. You may as well just run Windows 2000 since it'll run much, much faster and use much less RAM. At least, run XP with the Classic appearance.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Microsoft® Visual C#®
By John Sharp, Jon Jagger
I was skimming along and found an interesting little note and attached code: At first I was thinking. Maybe he did it as an example of what not to do in a loop. (referring to the "!=") but the next "note" states: Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know ANY programmers that would do this. What would happen if something happened to your hardware (surge, heat, solar flare, misbehaving thread, etc.) and during your precious array loop something happened and your computer mis-interpreted your array length. You could have yourself a very fun infinite loop. But no worries. When the world is perfect, this will never happen and you should be more concerned that the index coming out of the loop is exactly the Length of your array. That seems to be more important than a possible infinite loop. Granted, if you have one of these stray events dogging your memory, you might have greater issues, but we all know computers today are not 100% accurate all the time. I guess that's why this guy stressed using try/catch for everything
Now, I don't claim to know about Microsoft's internal programming staff, but if this guy is on the team... that would explain a lot of things in Windows land.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm curious, what level of quality does Windows have? Thought so. Face it, you just prefer to use the only thing you know, and don't like the idea of learning something new (too much effort eh?).
Linux isn't that hard.
correction: what level of quality does the Windows manual have
my bad, it was what I was thinking
Sounds good. Tell me when you've finished protecting your code against, uh, solar flares. May I suggest using lots of comments? They absorb neutrinos.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
I think that you are underestimating how complicated your rig is. Just try installing and Linux distro; if it takes more than an hour of searching forums to get it to work then you probably shouldn't be so angry at Vista. Like the other guy said, give it time to be patched; XP wasn't truly ready until SP2 :P.
tl;dr
If you want people to read what you write please space it out appropriately rather than having a huge monlith of text. I really detracts from your good point, much like Aero dtracts from "the turd formerly known as Vista." (btw it's still called Vista isn't it?)
I think the real question we are all asking ourselves is: can our modded xboxes running linix to emulate a powerpc running WinXP use this wrapper to allow us to play DX10 games? I mean how else are we going to play Halo 2? Ohh... wait... right
Don't see why this is funny... my 64 arrived today... using them to build a Gentoo Beowulf cluster so I can play UT2004!
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
I'm still amazed the problem some people are having with it. I don't have nearly the hardcore hardware as described here but it's enough. I'm currently running a Black MacBook, 2Ghz Core2Duo, 1GB of Ram, and a Intel GMA 950. Nothing extraordinary but runs Vista fan-flipping-tastic. And I'm not light when it comes to my apps.
I encode in xvid, Photo edit in Photoshop, Program in Visual Studio(don't argue with me it's just what we use), Music is handled with Winamp, Internet via Firefox, and mail via Thunderbird. Most usually at the same time. I run with full Vista Aero and I have sidebar running at all time(I use it all the time, much better than the OS X Dashboard). There have been no slowdowns other than when I transfer over the wireless network(which has never been fast ever). I haven't had any major problems aside from needing to upgrade my outdated drivers once and have been great ever since.
Honestly if you want to get a great Vista experience then your Mac Pro will do it with justice. Amazing huh.
You complain about possible hardware malfunctions for that? Hardware errors are possible, but the solution is usually to trash the hardware and replace it, except with high-confidence computing, and that's relatively uncommon.
What you should worry about is your habits. If you get a habit of writing != to terminate a loop, you rely on a certain starting condition. If you have a function that fills an array and returns a long integer of number of elements, it might return -1 on error, and you'd be happily trashing your heap with your "for (a = foo(); a != 0; a--)" loop.
Or if it didn't touch memory, you'd be waiting eons for the loop to complete. Not quite infinite, but a gnat might starve on the difference.
It was a bad example, sure. But you never know what is going to happen. You can't plan for every contingency, but you can definitely plan for those that are the easiest to resolve up front instead of trying to track them down later. By expecting the loop to end on an exact number and not planning for the loop to go beyond your planned iteration, your not doing a very good job. In his example, what would happen if another thread changed the size of that array after it checked his condition? It would never end. As I said, unlikely, but it could happen.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Alky is supposed to be released under the GNU LGPL. Where's the source code?
I think you and I agree here... I stated hardware issues, but generally it's bad practice to expect a singular condition for a loop.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
if this is true, it would be good news for the developers of W.I.N.E. It'll make it slightly easier to run Windows games on Linux.
\
Yeah I'm not sure about the funny mod either ... it was a completely serious response. That it's practically unbuyable was pretty much the point.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This is kinda offtopic, but I'm always amazed with what you call "old"/slow hardware. If all you do is surf the web and play solitaire, what kind of hardware do you think you need? Win95 was enough to run web browsers and solitaire! A Pentium I and 64Mb RAM is enough! I assure you that most tasks you do on a typical computer require less than 800Mhz to run perfectly fine. Sure, if you want to run the latest and greatest games, you do need a highest end PC, but for most people, that's not the case.
I wonder how much of this is caused by marketing and how much is caused by "buying ability" (ie: you buy because you can or because marketing makes you believe you need it?).
In my country we don't have that much extra money to buy a pc every year. Normally we buy computers every 5 to 10 years... And I dare say that with the latest procs it will be even further between updates (updating from a P2 to a P3 or P4 was a big change, updating an AMD 3000 to a 3600 isn't much difference).
Just so you know, WinXP minimal requirements are a P2 and 64Mb of RAM. And it actually runs quite well (better than win98 on the same hardware). I guess marketing makes people believe that unless you have 1GB of RAM and the latest proc it won't run fine...
i'd like to be able to use my computer without needing a top of the line graphics card _and_ have the fancy graphics. OS X and linux both need very little for their fancy graphics: beryl runs just fine on my athlon 850mhz and radeon 9250 (with the open source driver), and on my laptop with a radeon 9200 and shared memory (i keep the processor clocked at 600mhz for battery life), i can't exactly remember the specs of the mac, but i've seen OS X's effects work just fine on similar hardware. so why should windows get to require the latest and greatest hardware for effects that have been around long before that hardware existed?
A mouse is a device used to point to the xterm you want to type in
why would you want Vista without Aero? in that case I would better go for XP
I will probably get modded into oblivion for the subject alone, but hear me out...
I think WINE is a waste of effort on the part of the development team. Not to say they haven't done some really cool things, but to me, hacking together a system to run Windows apps on Linux seems counter-intuitive to the whole IDEA of Linux/OSS/FSF and the vast community of supporters.
So you can run Outlook, IE, some games or whatever, from a community that gripes about innovation, that isn't all that striking an accomplishment to me. By doing so the message, to me at least, to developers of "Windows Only Software" is "Go ahead, make Windows software instead of Linux native apps. We'll show you. We'll just run it in WINE!" Way to go, you just validated their business plan/model. They have no reason to make a Linux native app.
These DX10 guys and WINE and the Cedega people... Why do you want Linux to be seen as a "Me too!" platform? If the effort in these projects was spent creating Linux native applications that blew Windows software away, Linux would achieve broader acceptance more quickly and MS would sh_t themselves.
Again I am not trying to limit the impact of these projects, but it just doesn't make sense to me anymore.
No sig for you!!
If this project pans out, and you can run DX10 games and applications on Windows XP systems running DX10 hardware, Microsoft has some definate explaining to do; their claims that DX 10 would only work on Vista will be busted. I imagine these guys will get sueded into oblivion by Microsoft, but Microsoft would be forced to admit that DX 10 COULD run on Windows XP systems and thus people don't need to run Vista in order to run DX 10 games. Definately hoping this pans out.
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800), and I put a copy of vista on that machine and it works fine, but all she does on her computer is open the web browser and play solitaire. She has FAR from high end hardware, and she runs it in the high graphics desktop mode without a hickup.
As far as most people are concerned, that's a pretty high end system. The processor is towards the low end for current retail products, but the graphics card is pretty far up there, and 2 gigs of RAM is certainly on the high end. That computer is much better than the average system at Best Buy. Microsoft wouldn't be able to sell Vista if a computer like that couldn't run it.
It really is slower overall. My mother got a brand new laptop with 512 MB (not much, I know, but not bad for XP). It took forever to boot up. Sure, you can turn off aero. Control Panel still takes several seconds to appear.
With a couple of gigs, though, sure its going to be fast. It may even be faster. But vista definitely is a hell of a ram hog.
Microsoft is pretty elitest when it comes to their hardware, HCL, and expecting a "perfect" environment. The costs to get HCL compatible hardware are significant when compared to what it costs to setup some whitebox Linux machine. However if you play by Microsoft's rules and buy servers that are compatible with the HCL (like an HP Proliant for example), you will have a pretty seemless, trouble-free Windows experience. If on the other hand you're using a SATA RAID controller from some Taiwanese company, and some ABit motherboard, and some no name bargin RAM, you're going to be in for a world of hurt.
This is not my experience. I installed Vista on a virtual machine on a machine which also runs 2000 in a VM. Even with all the bells, whistles, blinkenlights and such turned off Vista was unusable while 2000 just works fine. The VM's were similarly configured except for memory: Vista got more than twice as much as 2000. The actual amounts of memory were 256 MB for 2000, 612 MB (the maximum I had) for Vista. If this is progress than call me a Luddite but I don't want any of it. Vista might have a few features missing from 2000 but who cares?
--frank[at]unternet.org
OK I have to call BS here. If you bothered to look at the drivers they are labled as BETA drivers. SLI is not supported under Vista even in the new April driver release. I have a GeForce 8800 GTX and have been testflying Vista as a dual boot. Vista so far has been running great for me. Granted I have 4 gigs ram, a powerful graphics card, Overclocked 3.4 Ghz dual core CPU, and gobs of hard drive space but I haven't seen any of these stability issues people are screaming about. Based on your post you sound like someone who jumped in blind and was expecting too much. Think about that. Vista is still basicly a beta OS. The driver support still isn't there and there are still no Vista apps out there. There is no reason to run Vista yet. At this point it's a toy.
Rule 5: Anonymous does not forgive.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I've payed far more than $200 to play a single game. Millions of people are spending $250 to bowl on their TVs (Wii).
If and when the killer game comes out for Vista I'll spend the $200 on Vista (plus another $200-$2000 to buy the right machine to run it).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Only time will tell though...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
and who is your information source for that? Microsoft?
I would like to see an unbiased report on how difficult it really is, of if it couldn't be some how hacked around.
Mount Evans built on top of Longs Peak would be like Mount Everest!
are you running low on ideas for new acronyms ?
DX10 has been a product of Yamaha for years and years.
To be fair to vista, linux is a hell of a ram hog too. Although it outperforms Vista in most every way on the same hardware. Linux needs at least 512mb to perform well and because it does no swapping unless it needs it you will see huge performance increases if you give it a couple gigs. It'll just run everything from memory and for the rare occasion you need more ram than that, it turns on swap.
Hell, you can give XP 2gigs of RAM and turn off swapping but be prepared for the system to crash the minute you try to run photoshop and office at the same time.
The GMA 950 is actually pretty good for what it is, and it was designed from the ground up to be an affordable solution for Windows Vista (or so they say). That said, I've been under the impression that the eye candy is actually faster than the CPU hell that is the non-Aero UI (which, having used Vista on both, is definitely the case). Offloading the UI to the GPU definitely makes a massive difference in both speed and responsiveness, and as far as I can tell, the reliability of the system, as well. The only problem is that most of the high-end vendors don't have working drivers at the moment, which indeed does cause crashes and other anomalies (hello, nVidia).
Vista's actually pretty solid on good hardware (even a Celeron with a gig of RAM and a GMA 950 will run it fairly efficiently), but I still don't see a point in upgrading to it, mainly due to the incompatibilities with certain applications, lower benchmark scores, and massive memory usage. If you've got in excess of 2GB of RAM and a dual core CPU, though, the system is more responsive than any I've ever seen.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800),
WOW! Is that old? My own system is from begin 2003 and it's a workstation class AMD Athlon MP 2400+ (2 CPUs) with 4Gigs of RAM and a NVidia AGP card (originally it was a Ti4200, now it's an FX5500). My wifes machine is a P-IV 2.4HT with 2Gig of RAM and the Ti4200 that was in my machine. Sure they have been slightly upgraded (mine from 1Gig to 4Gig and hers from 512Meg to 2Gig). I wouldn't dare to call them "old", but they are easily outperformed by your wifes system.
I found a complete P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM machine in a dumpster as I found a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon (no RAM though, but I have some of my own!) there. I don't know what I use them for, but both make decent desktops. Also consider that my primary laptop until 3 months ago was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM. I only replaced it because it was starting to physically fall apart. My dad still uses his P-III 733MHz/512Meg RAM laptop. He wanted to replace it earlier this year and I asked what the problem was: not enough disk space. Upgrading the 20Gig disk to a 80Gig disk made him happy....
I think you have a very strange definition of "old". Even my definition of "old" is stretched. I won't take a fully functional P-III out of the dumpster, because I know that I'll find a better one next time I come along.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
A decision was made early on in the process of DX10 that compatibility with NT 5.x would NOT be a design goal. Compatibility with NT 5.x was only relevant to Longhorn technologies that would be used on corporate servers -- specifically Windows 2003 Server -- as Longhorn Server would not be coming out for some time.
So, with that restriction lifted, they could look at ways to re-architect DX10 to better address concerns that they had with the existing model.
One issue that was previously difficult to address was that if you ran multiple monitors, you might try to run multiple Direct3D applications. But the API and driver model handled this sort of situation poorly, and one is reminded of the Windows 3.1 days. A poorly designed Direct3D application could starve other DirectX/Direct3D applications by not relinquishing control of the GPU (3d pipeline) often enough or allocating up all the free video memory (or allocating it burstily in varying amounts) which would cause other 3d apps to freeze, visually glitch, or have to deal with memory errors/timeouts.
DirectX 10 introduces a model where video memory and access to the GPU is managed like system memory and CPU scheduling. DirectX 10-compliant video drivers must provide primitives that conform to these new features.
In this fashion a DirectX 10 application can allocate as much texture memory as it wants; if it doesn't fit in the graphics card at display time, it is paged out to main memory (and if that's full), swapped out to disk just like anything else. And it can hammer on the GPU all it likes; if other apps try to use it, they will be given their fair-share timeslices and your rendering will be slowed down.
The Windows XP driver model has no infrastructure to allow for these features. The API could emulate them but I don't know how well that would work without some sort of hardware support in the card that I suspect is necessary for it to work correctly (especially with the virtual memory and paging in video RAM)
I doubt that feature even works at all with AGP. It's probably PCIe only.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There was a proliferation of sound APIs back when computers had clockspeeds under 1GHz and SSE took way too many cycles if it stalled. Nowadays we have SSE3 that can do DSP ops on like 16 samples at a time in one cycle, advanced cache technologies, multicore processors running at 2GHz+... these can handle environmental audio entirely in software for a very small slice of the CPU. Mixing 64 channels and applying simple FIR filters is child's play.
No reason to waste a PCI slot and have to deal with a propietary interface if you don't need it. All you need is an AC97 endpoint per speaker pair, or an optical out, and a decent stereo setup.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If I want to run Vista on my laptop, I have to run the generic vga-driver, and that is slow enough that the system becomes practically unusable.
Other than that, Vista runs just fine on my 4 year old laptop.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
You mean there are some games that are *only* supposed to run on Vista? My experience has been completely the opposite; I thought it was designed *not* to run any games...
(Just got my son a new laptop, and we're thinking we'll have to "upgrade" it to XP, so we can play half the games he likes.)
(And the cancel/allow thing is beyond silly; having to do that more than once for a single install, is just crazy.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to ascertain whether or not it's a hoax." So much for the rigor of investigative journalism.
I think this is a clear example of leveraging software to benefit the company. If a user wants to play it on their PC, they have to run Vista and/or upgrade their computer. Otherwise you have to go buy a not-inexpensive limited-purpose console. Both options benefit Microsoft.
It's absolutely their right, and it absolutely sucks. As has been said elsewhere in this thread.. the technology used in Halo 2 doesn't require DX10. Maybe I could be coaxed into thinking that if Halo 2 only played on the Xbox 360, but the fact that they have it running on the original... grrrr...
I've been on the verge of going one route or another for some time now, so I feel that Halo 2 is definitely something that will help drive Vista sales. Gamers are more likely to be early adopters, and hanging a popular game out there that only runs under Vista would probably be enough to make a lot of them bite the bullet, even if they were already very happy with their XP rig.
As for me, I was ranting about this very issue with a coworker, and he ended up offering to let me borrow his XBox and copy of Halo 2. I'd rather own the game, but neither option that would have me buying it sits well with me, so Microsoft gets none of my money and none of my goodwill.
I'm running Vista with the equivilant system form Polywell, and have had no problems at all. Even with the cursed 680i sli motherboard that everyone else seems to have problems with (including having it catch fire).
You misunderstand why people are complaining, or they are complaining about the wrong thing...
Yes it does, but why? That is great for Vista's new user interface and running multiple apps at once, but it isn't necessary for geometry shaders. People are complaining about not having DirectX 10 on XP, but what they mostly want is prettier and faster graphics for their games. Microsoft could add that functionality to DirectX 9 so that people don't have to upgrade to Vista. They didn't do that though, preferring to force people to upgrade. There are two things keeping me tied to Windows now. One is Visual Studio (which I use for work and fun development). The other is games. I only have one main computer and I don't want to be rebooting all the time to run a game, or I would have Linux installed as my main OS. I certainly don't want to upgrade to Vista, and not having new DirectX 10 features in XP will probably make me hold off a long time in buying a video card.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
That's NOT a high end computer? Jesus christ. I'd hate to see what you throw away...well actually...I'd love to dig around in your garbage cans and find it, but that's another matter.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
I know what you're saying, but be careful about the blanket statements. I have an old IBM thinkpad that has 256MB of memory in it. XP runs like a one-legged dog even before I run any user apps, but Xubuntu (XFCE, pretty lightweight) runs great for Firefox, Thunderbird and most other things I need to get done on the family room computer. Of course, my dev Ubuntu box needs a gig or things feel slow with everything I need to run.
Derek
Don't Panic...
'but Xubuntu (XFCE, pretty lightweight)'
Lightweight indeed and just fine for me or you. But XFCE isn't or no gui is not really a fair comparison to a full featured UI like that in XP or Vista.
I can run the emulator on my Beowolf cluster....more powerful than an NVIDIA Radeon 8000.
No sig today...
got a pIII 933 w/384meg and an agp nv6200 256meg ddr2 .. runs gentoo very well. and beats the shit out of xp, which thrashes badly with only ~ 20 tabs open in firefox.. i can open >100 under linux and the vm doesnt slow the system down massively ... with say google earth.. gnome .. plus various other apps..
windows vm thrashes really badly..
My mother ran Mandrake 9 on a Celery 433 with (I think) 256MB RAM with no problem.
It doesn't break if that is what you are getting at. It just doesn't run at anything approaching speed. I've used a system with specs similar to what you are referring to and there was a noticable delay just opening a menu. You'd open the menu and then have to wait for the icons to fill in. When you open even a text editor you have to wait and wait some more before it finally appears and a attempting a search and replace operation in a medium sized text file is less than immediate.
You can work that way. Most windows based home pcs perform that way. If they didn't out of the box (usually they preload enough crap to make sure they do) they will from the spyware after a couple weeks.
Aside from mom's and grandmas, I don't know many who would be willing to cope with that kind of performance.
I'm fairly sure it would take more CPU cycles to send commands to the GPU for Aero than to draw the classic interface.
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2007-Ap ril/056237.html
... just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain"
"From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic
functions
Windows has a manual?
This whole thing smacks of a scam to me, mainly as their "video evidence" is a video of the Prey Demo running on OS X. Being as you can download the prey demo for mac http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=19386h ere and it is in fact native code, I don't see anything too startling here. My money says this is a huge hoax to get some students some money.
"Everlasting peace will come to Earth when the last man kills the last but one." - Adolf Hitler
On a side note, in C#, you would use foreach to iterate through an array, anyway (and elsewhere as well - there are very few excuses for a plain for loop in C#).
Because this is slashdot, and in case you haven't noticed the site in general is desperate for Vista to fail and takes every opportunity to rubbish it, whether the criticisms are valid or not.
Some people are like that - if they dislike something strongly enough they feel the need to denigrate it as often as possible. Me, I think it's childish and a waste of time and effort. If it's harmless, just ignore it.
Oh, and "misnomer" means a bad or misleading name, such as "friendly fire" (there's nothing friendly about it, it does just as much damage).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
But a fast usermode to kernel interface is difficult to get right. It's in large part why microkernel based operation systems are so hard to get working fast. Then there's GDI to contend with, and making any changes to GDI is troublesome. I believe much of the work done with Vista have been in battle with GDI. In fact, I heard that GDI is emulated on Vista. MS must have said "screw it" at some point, and sent GDI headfirst out of the kernel and into some emulated environment. BTW, if you want to know how troublesome GDI is you should check out the Stardock people. They made a theming engine on top of it (no small feat). I heard from unreliable sources that MS ended up licensing theirs for XP.
"OK I have to call BS here. If you bothered to look at the drivers they are labled as BETA drivers. SLI is not supported under Vista even in the new April driver release. I have a GeForce 8800 GTX and have been testflying Vista as a dual boot. Vista so far has been running great for me. Granted I have 4 gigs ram, a powerful graphics card, Overclocked 3.4 Ghz dual core CPU, and gobs of hard drive space but I haven't seen any of these stability issues people are screaming about. Based on your post you sound like someone who jumped in blind and was expecting too much. Think about that. Vista is still basicly a beta OS. The driver support still isn't there and there are still no Vista apps out there. There is no reason to run Vista yet. At this point it's a toy."
:)
:P
I'm curious as to what your saying is bullshit? My computer isn't what I say or that Vista doesn't work for me? I have 4 gigs of ram, 2 8800 GTX boards, quad core extreme CPU, etc.
I didn't dual boot, I worked on vista clean install with no dual boot. I was committed to give it a try and I ate the dog food buddy, when you want to run your computer with vista for a few months lets talk. Until then you cry bullshit, I cry ignorance
I have no axe to grind with MS or Vista, I'm happily waiting for it to work well on my hardware. I'm sure over time they will sort out the issues, but I guess it's unfair for me to post MY experience using it? I have a dell restore CD that I was able to put XP back on, keep my docs on an external drive anyway.. so no biggie. I'll wait for SP1 to give it another try.
Talk about shooting the fucking messenger
IIRC, hardware-accelerated sound was removed from Vista for 2 reasons:
1) Increased stability (now the audio drivers run in user-mode, instead of kernel-mode)
2) DRM enforcement - now nobody has direct access to the audio hardware, which closes off a potential avenue for making unauthorized copies of "protected" audio.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
My point wasn't a feature comparison, but rather you can have a functional box with low specs. Sure, it doesn't have all of the features of XP or Vista but no one in my house would be using those features anyways. The laptop can browse the web, view email, watch DVDs/video and play all of the installed games (admittedly, pretty lightweight) with no problems. With XP on the same laptop if I tried to run anything more than Firefox it would slow to a crawl.
Derek
Don't Panic...