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MS Responds To Vista's Network / Audio Problems
quirdan writes "With the discovery last week of the connection between Vista's poor networking performance and audio activities, word quickly spread around the Net. No doubt this got Microsoft's attention, and they have responded to the issue. Microsoft states that 'some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not'; and that they are working on technical documentation, as well as applying a slight sugar coating to the symptoms. Apparently they believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight,' only affects reception of data, and that this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3."
Remember folks, this is a feature, not a bug.
Two plus two is five. War is peace. Rinse, repeat.
Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
No, the network speed drops to ~10-15% of non-audio playing speed. Very significant issue.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Back in 1994, I bought a Power Macintosh 7100. One of the first PPC chips, about 66MHz, and running a positively archaic operating system.
I still have the machine, and drag it out from time to time. When this story broke, I pulled it out of storage to test it, and see how it compared. With a 10/100 ethernet card in, running the mac's System 7.5.3, it could successfully play an MP3 while transferring, and it made no difference whatsoever to send or receive speed over the network.
Take note Microsoft: 1994, 66MHz, System 7.5.3, more than 13 fricken years ago.
That was the response of a MS tech regarding a defect that a bunch of us found in one of their C libraries some years ago. They must have had that guy train his successors.
To say nothing of traditional multithreading, how do they explain how the entire OS could be run on either of my cores, but just networking and multimedia can't run together on both of them without some kind of tradeoff?
I couldn't begin to keep track of how many times I've heard that one in the industry. 'X is broken'. 'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apparently they believe an almost 10% drop in networking performance is 'slight,' only affects reception of data, and that this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3.
Interesting, VERY interesting. This either means that Microsoft Programmers are incredibly incompetent or they are hiding something. I can take a really old Linux kernel (or windows 98 install) on a Pentium 233 mmx processor and see less than 0.05% drop in networking performance while playing an mp3. In fact I dont see that drop playing 2 mp3's at the same time while transferring large amounts of data over 100 base T. I do this daily on my whole house mp3 jukebox that is linux based, it has 2 seperate sound cards that plays 2 different mp3 files while I upload another 60-80 mp3 files I corrected the data tags on. I do not see the performance hit of 10% on hardware that is at least 20 to 30 times slower than the typical Vista machine.
What are they hiding?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations.
So I see! All that matters is the Internet performance of the average user, which is probably what, less than 5Mbps anyway! How silly of me to think there would be a problem with say... trying to access a corporate file server to work with say really big data files? Wow, I'm really going to recommend Vista to my clients now!
Oh, I see,
as in "slightly pregnant" or "slightly dead"??
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
All in all, the performance hit is obviously expected behaviour. I guess it's just the severity of the hit that's unexpected.
They'd probably planned just a 70% performance hit, but we can see their software performs better than expected.
Ignore this signature. By order.
FTA:
"The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off."
Granted, I don't want my audio stuttering, but the idea that the CPU can't keep up because of file transfer is insane. Maxing out an ethernet connection doesn't take much CPU. Even if we put the audio at a very high priority, I don't see how that would immediately degrade ethernet performance by 90%. I could accept no more than about 5% in a worse case scenario.
To be fair if I renice rhythmbox to 18 and transfer a file, things go to hell. Renicing to 10 clears it up. I saw no degradation of speed. Apparently Debian can do file transfers at full speed while playing an mp3 on a rather old PC*. Something isn't right here...
*Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB DDR
No, it's not. Read the old FA:
However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput.
Oh, please. You're right that Vista is a more capable operating system than Mac OS 7. You're wrong that it would have any implication on audio playback.
I can encode a 320mbit VBR MP3 at about 20X playback speed. That's encoding, the slow phase. MP3 playback is NOT a real-time task. It hasn't been for ages. The system decodes the next several seconds of audio, stores it in an audio buffer, and tells the system to play it. If you hit pause, it then stops the active playback immediately, but there's still more audio data available. This way, there's no reason for the audio to skip, and the audio program doesn't need to be top priority or realtime.
Ironically the only audio program I've had problems with skipping under Windows is iTunes, and only when running some other task at 100%.
In any case, audio programs don't need realtime priority and there's no reason why playing audio should cause network performance to degrade in a properly designed system. I can see a poorly designed system manage to completely screw things up with interrupt handling, though.
--
Sigs are lame.
"In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design."
I know we've been over this before. But for whom are we 'improv[ing] multimedia playback'? Is it really an issue in 2007, to perform a network transfer and play an MP3? Or is it Vista's "secure audio path" that is responsible for this? Remember, this is the same Vista that polls your hardware every few ms to check if you're playing 'premium content'.
I know not everything bad Microsoft does is done with forethought and malice (..) but really now. After reading the 'cost analysis of Vista content protection', can you not understand the apprehension? If some "multimedia" (albeit not 'premium content', but who's counting) is played, other parts of the system deliberately go into a 'limited' state? After reading that, does it sound like a bug to you?
"But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback."
I call shenanigans.
Even if this is a legitimate "bug", i.e. the Vista testers were actually experiencing crackling audio while performing high bandwidth network transfers, who made the conscious decision to throttle the *network* instead of fixing the audio path and audio drivers? Windows XP had no problems performing high-bandwidth transfers and using the sound simultaneously. Besides normal operating system scheduling there was no 'throttling' of any device A when any device B activates. This is Vista content protection backfiring, plain and simple.
Nobody could expect Microsoft to come up with an OS that does two things well at the same time. That would be multitasking. We're decades away from the invention of computers that can do that.
Networking is overrated also. It's probably just a fad that will fade away once we all get high density flash storage for our sneakernets.
Music? If you wanted to do artsy iLife stuff like that you should have bought an iFruit.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All in all, the performance hit is obviously expected behaviour.
Well of course they are expecting a performance hit, after all they aren't "just trying to play an MP3" they have to do 7 different DRM related processes while playing an MP3, on top of Sony's hack of your webcam doing a biometrics check to verify that you are the original purchaser. Seriously though, does the drop still happen if you play a DRM free MP3 on a non-MS player?
We are all just people.
"performance hit is obviously expected behaviour" and from the article, "Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback"
That is utter BS. On a decade old machine, its possible to run a network and audio playback at real time speeds. Given the power of even low end PCs these days (minimum spec Vista machines) its crazy they cannot handle both together.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Maybe they don't care at all about deployment of Vista.
We harp on MS a lot, but they ARE clever in certain ways. Suppose someone is thinking Big Picture in some kind of twisted sense. They can play a variant of GoodGuy/BadGuy by having a "Sacrificial OS" every 8 years. They're somehow getting us to pay for their beta testing. They HAD to get Vista out, period, and rely on their patented brand of bluster to get through it. They were getting serious heat from inactivity. I bet someone got utterly crushed when they had to switch codebases during that dev setback.
I barely heard of Win Me - consecutive tips told me to get Win2000, which lasted me through 2.5 OS changes from MS. Then in the early days, I saw a lovely crash&burn act on XP *SP2* until everyone repaired their firmware. I even had some flash devices that I had to return until the factory shipped ones with newer firmware.
Now XP is their heavy duty workhorse while they experiment with their new codebase. Suppose just for a moment that Vista NEVER works... but what they learned from Vista SP1 gets applied to Windows 7 (anyone got a codename yet?). Then maybe by 2010 all the results of history on the media scene will be in, maybe they will back off from DRM, and take some other focus. If they don't screw it up, Vista will be that smile in techie's forums, Windows 7 will be the new 8 year workhorse, and off we go ever after.
Having cash flow the size of a country must be fun.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What a load of utter Crap! If such a trade-ff was ever necessary, then we would have been seeing it in Win XP as well, and obviously we don't.
Vista networking is broken! Try copying over files from your XP machine on a mapped drive if you don't believe me. And audio/video functions in Vista are equally broken. And I bet its for the same reason: Kiss-Up To Hollywood DRM.
Microsoft has caved to the almighty Hollywood dollar, and with Vista you're pwned more than ever!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You see, they couldn't stop people from cracking DRM and copying music. And they couldn't stop people from going online and sharing their music. But, Billy has one last ace up his sleave: You can't do both at the same time! There! Ha!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So does this affect all Windows media players (e.g. WinAmp), or just WMP? Could be a great argument to jump ship to non-MS software.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=702
I just took a different route and told the RIAA/MPAA to go fuck off by buying a Mac mini.
Say what you want about Apple but at least they're not bending over every time the RIAA/MPAA asks them to do something.
Just follow any CFS thread (or any Linux scheduler threads in the archive), the new shiny Linux scheduler.
Remember, this was supposed to be an UPGRADE. Honestly, it is just terrible. Vista on a laptop is simply awful. These were brand new HP laptops with 2GB of RAM.
Vista offers nothing. It is an utter waste of time to attempt an upgrade at this time. With Vista and IE7, the shine is definitely off of MS. There is nothing in the MS product roadmap that is even remotely interesting to me at this point.
MS competitors have never had a better time to take advantage of MS market position than they do now. The hole is wide open.
So why is it that Win XP never had this problem on slower hardware? Nor Win2K, ME, 98SE, 98, 95...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What are you saying? Can't you see it's excellent backward compatibility? It plays Mp3 like you were on your old 386! How more backward can that be?
So I ran my own test.
I transferred a 3.5 gigabyte file from my Ubuntu Fawn laptop to my Vista Ultimate workstation. Both are dual-core Intel processors; the Ubuntu laptop is a T5600 @ 1.83ghz, and the Vista workstation is an e6600 @ 2.4ghz. They are connected through a normal Belkin with a 100mbit ports.
(Amusingly, the file in question was a Vista Ultimate ISO.)
While the transfer took place I opened Vista's task manager and looked at the network utilization graph. Steady at 38% with almost no deviation. I let that go for a minute.
Then I played an mp3.
Immediately the utilization went to 27% and held steady. As soon as I stopped the mp3, it shot back up to 38%.
I did this all with WMP at first, thinking that'd be it. To double-check I ran my usual player, Winamp, with the exact same results.
Here is a screenshot of the network graph. Every single one of those dips you see was me playing an mp3. Disgusting!
Thinking that just maybe the problem was disk usage, I did two things. First, I forced a defrag on Vista while the transfer was underway. Network utilization was unaffected. Next, I tried streaming music from my own darkwave station (and then shamelessly plugged in on slashdot). Network obligingly dropped to 27% even though streaming shouldn't use the disk.
I'm convinced. This is a seriously messed up issue and I hope to whatever diety that Microsoft rectifies it quickly.
For the record, Vista has managed to annoy me a lot less than any previous incarnation of Windows, at least in userland, once I turned off the UAC crap. And I like some of the little extras that it does. But from a technical and administrative standpoint, this is highly obnoxious, and I'm pretty appalled.
I do have to say, though, that until I went out of my way to test this, I had never noticed the difference, and I'm a technical guy. The average user would probably never notice the difference under any circumstances. That does not excuse this type of idiocy, but it may explain why MS chose to do this. Just a guess.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
"...this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3."
That's funny, the last time I remember any OS taking any significant hit to play an MP3 I was running on a 166 mhz Pentium II.
emailing lies to children
That may be the greatest line I've seen an AC post on here in my eight years reading this silly little website.
'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
Must be a bug in their design process but it could be something to do with the company structure. I suspect it comes from the marketing interface which is horribly broken. The customer value in gates.h is still pointing to RIAA and MPAA rather than user.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Absolute bullshit. Microsoft are right here. They've admitted there's a bug in it - something is definitely wrong if the re-prioritizing of tasks is causing that much of a performance hit.
But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design. Sometimes it is built directly into hardware - you dedicate fewer, faster lines to audio and slower and buffered to the networking. When audio skips you are FUCKED. When network traffic stalls, TCP - and in fact UDP and most other protocols layered in some fashion over Ethernet or ATM - is actually designed to handle it by retransmission.
A 90% drop is ridiculously high, but it IS keeping your audio system fed with data reliably. Perhaps it just needs some extreme fine-tuning. It's certainly the case that a PCI Express audio card because of the high overhead would not be fed data fast enough (PCI Express is high bandwidth but not low-latency) if a PCI Express networking device was pushing data around. We've had this stuff before on Creative cards, where the PCI latency and bus mastering has been tweaked such that the PCI chipset holds the bus for "far too long" causing problems with the rest of the system. But in the end there are not that many TRULY elegant ways of doing it.
Every system bus is contended at some point, and if the contention shows VISIBLE or AUDIBLE artifacts, then the user will be pissed off. That means, display corruption, legobricking of MPEG data, audio skipping or looping, you cannot have this on a high quality multimedia system, however, 100mbit/s transfer rate really is just fine when it comes down to it. Not perfect considering you paid for something 10x faster, but still, not all that bad for multimedia performance.
It doesn't matter if it's still usable. What matters here is that doing something as simple as listening to music has been shown to decrease the network performance of a computer. Completely unacceptable.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Also, I'm not sure if I'm interpreting those screenshots correctly (I don't use Windows so I'm not too familiar with its monitoring tools) but if 100% in that graph corresponds to 1 Gb/s transfer speed, then the speed drops from 32 megabyte to a still very respectable 16 megabyte per second. People seem to suggest that networking grinds to a halt when playing audio, but although this drop is very significant, it by no means renders your network connection unusably slow. In fact, it's still pretty damn fast.
I'm sorry, but you aren't making any sense whatsoever. If I buy a racecar that I use on Sundays at the track, and turning on the radio decreases it's top speed from 200mph down to 100mph, is that OK because that is "still pretty damn fast"? If I book a flight that should take 10 hours but whenever the stewardess serves food or beverages, it decreases the plane speed so that the flight takes 20 hours instead, travelling at only 300mph, is that ok because it is "still pretty damn fast"?
If I am running an internal network, where data transfer speeds are critical to the work I am doing and playing MP3s decreases that speed by 50% (assuming it is the 50% you are claiming the article says and not 85-90%) is that ok because it is "still pretty damn fast"?
I have been playing MP3s on systems as old as 486's (which used a whopping 10% CPU - with NO network degradation) - there is NO load on today's system when playing an MP3 - except through poor design - or worse yet, intent - so there is no reason why network speeds should drop AT ALL - much less 50%, 85%, 90% or whatever. As others have noted in other threads on /. and elsewhere, such bottlenecks of late all seem to be due to DRM related issues in Vista... I wouldnt doubt a similar issue is the cause here - and the reason why Microsoft is (properly for once) stating that some of this issue is actually due to design.
The fact is, on today's multi GHz, multi-core systems, a 10% drop in network performance would be outrageous for something as simple as playing an MP3 or other audio stream... 50% is ludicrous... and I can't even think of a word to describe what an 85-90% drop would constitute.
Yes, when it comes to the Internet world, even a 90% drop in network performance on a gigabit network card doesnt really mean anything for most people - such an attitude misses many still valid points and issues, such as there are numerous users who don't have that Internet bottleneck to make such slowed down connection speeds a moot point (college students for one, businesses with dedicated high speed lines for another) - there are also users of every sort who have home networks set up who WILL see the degradation in speed since they are not limited by their Internet Connection Speed (businesses, home users, gamers doing LAN parties, you name it) - and most importantly, there is no VALID technical reason why playing any audio stream should degrade network performance on today's hardware.
That last point brings up the final issue. It really does not matter if MS claims there are valid design reasons or valid technical reasons for the drop in network performance (whether 10%, 50%, 85%, 90%, whatever) - because as far as the features end users want, there is NOT - and the only "features" I can think of that would cause this are DRM related technologies so liberally sprinkled all over Vista. Any other reason is quite simply poor coding and design... and as MS didnt write, and has barely changed any of the networking stuff in Windows in quite some time, I think it is more of an issue of "features" that no one wants, may be illegal (under the fair use doctrine) and should never have been dumped into Vista to begin with.
People seem to suggest that networking grinds to a halt when playing audio, but although this drop is very significant, it by no means renders your network connection unusably slow. In fact, it's still prett
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
You refer to Winblows, Windoze, and Windows. Are these three different OS's?
My suspicion is:
s /cableguy/cg0905.mspx
1 3073
s /2007/02/VistaKernel/
A) Networking stack in Vista is rewritten, for example, IPv6 is native, IPv4 is optional.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/column
B) Audio stack is re-written, allowing for the new mixer, where each app has its own volume control (and some DRM, but that's not relevent to this issue)
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=7
C) the Thread scheduler is changed in Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issue
D) Appears to only affect Gigabit and above networking.
item C is possibly the key to this bug, I'm sure the Networking people did lots of perfomance testing, and so did the Multimedia people, as well as the Kernel folks... But, perhaps the full ramifications of the Thread Scheduler could not have been tested in every other combination.
The basic problem is that Multimedia playback changes the thread scheduler, which affects EVERYTHING. it could have been "Inkjet Printing while playing audio fails", "cannot hot-swap IDE drives while playing audio", "an open audio application blocks hibernate if brand XYZ laptops"... by chance, gigabit networking performace was affected, not because of any direct link.
Whats needed is for all performance or reliability minded software to be tested both normally, and while playing music in the background (or just with a program that turns on MMCSS, and then does nothing else). Just like when running under a debugger, multi-core machine, virtual machine, etc. different timing, thread deadlock, and race conditions may be found.
You just beat my sig up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, it still happens.
The original reports noted that foobar2000 was just as affected as WMP. The problem occurs when the audio driver is in use. Interestingly, pausing foobar2000 seemed to release the audio driver (network performance went back to normal) while pausing WMP did not. VLC performs in a similar manner to foobar2000, although bypassing the audio device (decoding straight to a null device) results in no slow down.
So, no, it's not the checking for DRM while unwrapping the MP3 like you suggest. You can do that quite happily via VLC, provided you don't intend on HEARING it. ;-)
The summary says "Apparently [Microsoft] believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight'". But here's what the article actually says:
"In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
If the alternative to Microsoft FUD is Anti-Microsoft FUD, I'm not sure we're much better off.
Whenever I want to play an mp3, I just turn my gigabit NIC up to eleven.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No, they're three descriptions of the same OS in decreasing order of product experience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When I used vista I didn't see a slow down in network speeds, but at the time I was reorganising media on my hard disk, I started at 10gigabyte file transfer, vista stopped, completely stopped literrally, its like i was running vista on a 66mhz processor, it was not funny, 1hour later when I had reinstalled XP it was much better.
I think this is actually a chipset bug - I see this on intel chipsets all the time now. My quadcore machine at work, my Toshiba M200 laptop; they both have IDE throughput issues, and drag the rest of the system to a halt.
No idea why. The latest drivers did help somewhat though - it doesn't stall nearly as much.
You might want to check your drivers on www.driveragent.com and see if there are newer chipset drivers out which fix the problem.
Of course, this is all anecdotal; it might still just be a problem on the Vista end.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I think GP's referring to Home, Ultimate and Business
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
This laptop I am working on now ($5k USD class laptop) came delivered with Vista. Let me give a few exmaples of what I had to deal with to make the issues clear.
A quick example of this would be how I needed to copy high-bitrate media-files (HDTV, 20mbps) locally before I could play them in Vista. On GigE freakin' LAN.
Copying 4GB+ virtual machines, again on GigE LAN could take better parts of a day. Checking the performance monitor, I could see that I had 10mbps actual data-transfer. I'm not kidding here. IO was beyond piss poor.
This is something I've never had issues with in any other OS. I'm not calling it unacceptable. I'm saying it's fucking crap.
In short: There were a few improvements I honestly liked in Vista (apart from the eyecandy), and those were really nice improvements, but honestly...
All the issues I had in Vista which I assumed any modern OS has tackled years ago, with regards to performance, usability and all that were simply too much for me to handle. I'm back at XP SP2 and I feel like that's the biggest hardware upgrade I have ever done.
For those interested in the technical aspects of this, I would wrote a simple, hypothetical article on the aspects of OS complexity and performance from a developers point of view on the tight Kernel-DRM coupling some time back.
That, however, is nothing compared to what this guy did.
Reading these it's pretty obvious why Vista has exactly the issues it has, and why MS sucking up to the entertainment industry probably is the worst business move they have ever made.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There shouldn't be *any* decrease!
People have been doing simultaneous sound/networking as long as I can remember and this never happened before.
Audio playback shouldn't even register as a tiny blip on a modern CPU (and neither should networking!)
And...there's people with quad core machines who get the problem. How do you explain that?
No sig today...
OK, what's with the selective quoting of the Microsoft response? The article header tries mightily to make it seem like Microsoft thinks this problem is not much of a problem. It also tries to imply this is happening to everyone, all the time, and Microsoft could care less.
However, reading the actual Microsoft response gives a completely different take on things. Microsoft realizes that this behavior, while having good intentions, is causing issues. Far from being some unfounded bug, there is a real purpose behind why the slowdown is occurring, namely a focus of multimedia scheduling performance trumping all. They are going to address these issues, not ignore them, but you wouldn't know it from the article teaser.
I have Vista on one of my PC's. I find it slower and more or less undesirable compared to Windows XP64 on my other boxen. It's there largely for me to get familiar with, as we're all undoubtedly going to be dealing with it soon and for a long time to come. You may be able to avoid Windows in your personal computing, but you'd have to live in a tiny bubble indeed to go through a work day without interacting with a co-worker, client, or customer who isn't on a Microsoft product of some sort.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Good "conspiracy theory". Ever heard of Singularity? Whole OS written in C, Assembler and Managed .NET. They've end-of-lifed FoxPro and VB6, I'm sure that ASP will dying. They've started moving big chunks of Office 2007 to .NET so it's probably just a matter of a few years before they're ready to dump everything into managed code and start rolling out Singularity (Windows 2010?).
You're really not that far off, people have been "waiting" for Vista, but this is really a throwaway OS, nobody is using it and it's not like business is "clamoring" for even this version. Heck many Enterprises have just finish rolling out XP. The new WPF and WCF will surely be functional under Singularity, and Enterprises are just now moving to Managed Code applications (check out the market for ".NET developers"). MS won't die away if this Vista "fails", so we're probably all looking at a Managed Code future in 2010 or 2011 :)
The obvious answer, and the best one found in the articles, is this is an issue with priority.
I can drop my file transfer ability by using my USB TV-Tuner that installs itself as above average priority.
In tryin to give better audio quality it's effecting other areas of the system.
Wow! Yet ever other post is a stupid conspiracy piece of crap.
Get a freaking clue before you post. And if you're still wondering why it's a Vista issue and not a XP issue at this point call you grandma for tech support instead of the other way around because you're not qualified to think apparently.
Hmmm... lets say I do graphics all day, and archive the raw data to our file server (or perhaps even store the data there)... instead of wasting the power of my iPod's battery (assuming I have one) or needing a dock with speakers... why can't I just play MP3s from my computer while I am working? And when I do, why should I wait 3 minutes (or 5 minutes) for a file transfer that should take 1.5 minutes?
Data transfer speeds aren't always critical to wanting to reach maximum transfer rates (as in my example). Nonetheless, you are still missing the point. There is no reason for the network degradation (under these circumstances) - regardless of what MS claims. Period. End of story.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Ran just fine on my 5yr old 'Dell' (only the case and mobo) when they were out. I never noticed any problems. I used that box as my no.2 desktop and my home's file server/intercom-interfacing stereo. After I got a new box to replace it (this one -made- for Vista) I noticed problems. THREE TIMES it not only ran up all 3 of my secondary fans while pumping music thru the system, it actually killed its own power. Under a lower stress level. (The new box only runs as desktop/whole-house jukebox, the old one still works as a server, just running Gentoo/samba).
I'm not sure quite what the problem was, either the chipset differences of the two machines or program differences from the beta/rc to the final, but somehow the switch really nuked my shared audio performance.
Burn the Land and Boil the Seas, you can't take the sky from me...
The thing is a damned pentium can handle both, why can't a dual core do it when it has one core to do the networking and one to play music? It might not be an earth shattering end of the world type problem, but it is still a problem that should not exist. Why the hell can a system that is 50+ times more powerfull than an old junker running windows 98 not be able to do the same tasks without slowdown? This is one of the reasons why I haven't upgraded from XP to vista yet, because even with a modern system it offers nothing that would improve my productivity and gaming, only things that would slow it down. Here's hoping developers hold off on making DX10 only games until MS gets their act together and fixes stupid bugs/slowdowns like this.
I was responding to:
Yes the "old Apple" was as bad as Microsoft (proprietary file formats, protocols and even connectors) but they've changed.
First off, unless Apple publishes the source code, they have proprietary file formats, procols, etc. They have a whole proprietary fricking Windowing System. You can jump through their hoops and use the 'hooks' they provide to develop code for said Windowing System, but just as with Microsoft, the Apple products will always work 'best' because they're coded to the full API, not just the 'top layer' one provided to third parties.
Third parties and end users don't have to care about wether the source code is available for it to be in their interest for it to be available to developers who might write apps for them if they didn't have to kiss the ring.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.