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Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details
babyshiori writes "Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate! The build is the lead-up to the actual service pack, which will be made available to even more testers at a later date. 'In our early tests with the beta, we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds. Microsoft is also touting improvements in "the speed of copying and extracting files," so we tested a few of those scenarios. We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totaling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.'"
Exciting. Really.
http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195414376.jpg taken from http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/yes_virginia_there_is_a_vista_sp1.html
will it allow me to do things like run applications and operate a computer now? :)
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
With modern technology and many billions of dollars in development costs, you would think someone would figure out to save an image of a just booted system and only rebuild it when configuration changes. Granted, the restored image will need to reopen files, restore network connections and deal with changed removable devices. But that's where those billions of dollars come in...
From TFA;
According to Microsoft, typical load times for the final version should range from 30 to 60 minutes. The installation requires 7GB of free hard-drive space (some of which will be reclaimed after the installation isn complete), though the finalized install file itsel is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update.
Is this a service pack, or a fresh install replacing most of the core files? Really, should a service pack take that long to install, and require that much space? To put it into context, after a year of use, this XP machine's Window's directory totals somewhere in the region of 3gb.
Looking at my current Vista laptop, I wouldn't be able to install the SP without removing some of my music files first...
Is this a joke?
Don't trust the times this article points out too solidly, they certainly don't sound like they were derived using proper statistics. More likely, they probably just booted it up once before installing the SP, timed it, and then booted it up after, and timed it.
Could be wrong, but whatever, let's party, SP1 is near!
This is really nothing new, Windows 9x, 2k, and XP were all turds when they were first released. Driver maturity, application refinements, hardware improvements, and service packs all make the experience more tolerable.
But I'm sick of the status quo and expected a much better OS when Vista was first released. If it took 9 months of driver development and OS improvements - then it shouldn't have been released 9 months early.
Vista is a not an epic disaster because of:
1. Performance.
2. Security.
3. Anything that early technical adopters care about.
It it is an epic disaster because of:
1. Lack of backward compatibility (software and hardware).
2. Non-technical people being aware of (1).
Therefore, testing whether files copy 2% faster is like exhaustively examining a bolt in a tanker that has run aground and split in half.
Thanks to all of the issues with Vista, its got a bad reputation. It requires a modern computer, yet most people are happy with what they have, and don't have any reason to migrate to Vista. I am actually extremely satisfied with Vista, but I got Vista Premium from my school, so I didn't pay directly for it. I also have a fairly beefed up computer (3 GB RAM). The problem isn't bugs or boot times, its running times, Vista is just about as fast on 3 GB RAM as when I has 1 GB RAM and was using XP. Now that I've gotten used to it, I like the way Vista does things. But again, people like me don't decide Vista's success, its people who went out and got a $600 computer 5 years ago, and have only known XP. What percentage of people who use a computer today ever used Windows 3.1? Windows 95 through XP are very similar in terms of operation. Vista is a fairly big shift, and getting millions of people who only understand one set of GUIs to change GUIs is an almost impossible task.
It's been available since late September. .658.
The new version is
The system in this anecdote was a high-end, AMD-based notebook. I can't remember the exact spec's (is that a valid contraction? "specs" just seems so dirty).
I opened 27 Internet Explorer windows with msn.com inside, resized them all randomly, and then jammed away at the keyboard -- rapidly mashing the keys responsible for Flip3D! In short order, Windows Explorer crashed and the snazzy new error reporting system appeared.
I bought a new computer shortly after Vista was released. My old PC had been getting on in years, and when it died I picked up my current laptop to replace it. I was a bit uncertain about using Vista since I had heard so many bad reviews about it, but it came pre-installed so I figured I would give it a go. After a few months of using it, I realised I was right to be worried. At least on my laptop, it was slow as hell, and buggy. It would freeze for no reason, and crash out of programs that XP had run without a hitch. Several of my friends had similar experiences. I considered going back to the store and requesting a tech have a look at it, but having worked in a similar place myself, I figured they wouldn't be able to do anything that I hadn't tried myself (and at the very best, they would send it away to be "looked at" and I would be sans laptop for a few weeks). So instead, I uninstalled the OS, and reinstalled XP SP2. My machine is now flying along and hasn't crashed since.
The desktop that died on me had been running Windows 2000 for over five years, after which I upgraded to XP when I friend offered to give me an install CD he no longer needed. I ran 2k for that long because it met my needs, and was more stable and powerful than the versions of Windows I had used previously (3.11/95/98/ME). The only reason I switched was out of curiosity, and with SP2, XP became the best Windows I had ever used.
I wasn't curious about Vista, but because of circumstances, I ended up trying it anyway. It was an absolutely terrible experience, and I am so glad to be back to my nice, stable XP. So, there's a lesson for Microsoft to learn. They had an opportunity to get a user onboard with their latest OS, but they blew it so badly, that I am now likely to keep on using XP for the next five years, and if I need to switch operating systems then, I am more likely to go with Linux, or buy a Mac.
Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.
...does it also now display the XP logo at startup?
I got a new Dell 630 laptop. 1.8 GHz 7100 Core 2 Duo, which same as reference system. XP is ready to go in 40 secs from a cold start. My disk drive is 5400 rpm. I still remember the good experience of going from Win 98 to XP. From what I've read XP is happy with 512M memory whereas Vista needs at least 1G minimum. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have enough pride in their software to do thing right? Latest version of Excel has math error. What more can I say.
Apple must be seriously considering porting Leopard to PCs, if you were buying a new PC which would you prefer Vista ready or Leopard ready?
...the new ToiToi portable toilets fature violas at the bottom of the tank, supposedly to cheer up anyone who happens to fall inside.
The question is, does this make any difference?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I installed Vista just to test it out to see what was so bad. The first thing that struck me was that the boot times are so long, and my HDD activity LED is blinking constantly. I have a high end PC too*. What really blows my mind is how long it took to develop this POS. A 20 second improvement wouldn't be much of an improvement. With my specs and good programming it should boot IN 20 seconds.
* Core 2 Duo E6750 at 3.2 Ghz, 2 320 GB Segate Baracuda SATA II HDDs, 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 800 at 1xxx Mhz (forgot exacts), P35 Gigabyte DS3, and a Nvidia 8800 GTS.
622677120
Doing the work to install
the fixes to the OS in the
same way as they always have because the one
thing they've never done
over the decades,
and we know it, is to thoroughly check
over an initial release
again and again to make sure that it's good enough
and therefore we are all
expecting that there will be many
different service packs to fix the
results.
My experience is that copying large files (hundreds of MB or more each) across a network is very slow, copying several hundred JPEG files which are relatively quite small is not a good test. It has been speculated that it is the "baked in" DRM of Vista scanning these files that increases the time. If true, I doubt the DRM would scan JPEG files, as these files are pretty small.
Personally I'd much rather they get around to releasing XP SP3.
Vista isn't on my personal radar, nor of my employers. But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.
Macbooks can boot into Leopard in about 30 seconds, and we can start our 7 year old Linux boxes at work in less than a minute....how does Microsoft get away with this kind of stuff?
Monstar L
..does it play Linux?
No matter how much you polish a turd, it's still a turd..
I know it's new and it's got some user interface changes, but for the stuff I do with a computer, is there a reason I should be running Vista, or that I shouldn't uninstall Vista from my next computer and upgrade to the light, fast, relatively DRM-free OS known as Windows XP? So far no one has presented a compelling case for using a OS that runs slower and requires twice the memory of XP. It could be I'm missing something really really super important here. Is it that we're just supposed to run whatever is newest? Because by that logic we should vote for whatever presidential candidate is youngest.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Being comprised of mostly carbon atoms, if you polish the turd long enough at the right pressure and temperature - it will turn into a diamond.
Superman could do that.
Only I don't think anyone would like shaking hands with him later.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Three Squirrels
Thank the GNODs.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Are you serious? It takes a notebook over a minute and a half to boot Vista? And to think I was getting annoyed with my 40 seconds from power on to KDE desktop (which includes me typing my login). I'd actually have to get to class early just to give it enough time to be ready take some stupid notes.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'd like to see that comparison myself. In fact, I'd like to see a series of common software products and benchmarks run in that comparison - not just those that have "tweaked" to take advantage of some zippy new feature in the latest graphics card supported in Vista but not XP.
Fact is, I'd like to see similar comparisons run between a stock 32-bit single processor system (maybe at 3GHz) and a 32-bit dual-core system (maybe at 2.4GHz) - each running the same speed memory and disks. And definitely not running two copies of the benchmark software and adding the results in an attempt to convince me that running two copies of Photoshop simultaneously will give me faster editing of one a single image.
My experience with multiprocessor systems suggests that with a 2-CPU system 1+1 does not equal 2 CPUs when computing performance except for software very specifically written for such an environment. Or for users who want to run a compute-intensive video editor while simultaneously compiling software. And even then not if some other resource is the limiting factor.
I suspect that the huge majority of users will usually see better performance from a single 3GHz CPU than from two 2.4GHz CPUs. And they won't see anything at all from adding more processors.
I have to say one of the most broken features (from a design POV) is the blocking of start-up programs. Great, so users are secured against programs that might start up without their permission or knowledge. Great, so I can right-click on the tray, scroll to the blocked program, and left-click to start it up.
However - where the Hell is the checkbox to remember my choice?.
Having to do this on every boot is crazy. It was funny that this issue was on the "Windows 7 Wishlist" - it should've been one of the first updates out the door after RTM, and at the latest, SP1.
In case anyone still has nightmares about this, there is a work-around apparently - http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&p=6509411
...right around the same time as Vista SP1, if not sooner. XP SP3 is also in Release Candidate Status, and (based on my testing, anyways), is *almost* totally ready for release. A few minor things to take care of, but it's looking really good.
MS sometimes releases security roll-ups between service packs or after the final service pack, but they really should do this every quarter if not every month.
A security roll-up should be nothing more than all of the security patches since the last service pack, minus those that have been superceded, recalled, or otherwise outdated, and minus those that are very recent and not yet "proven in the field." In practice, this means everything more than 30-60 days old minus those that had problems or which were later updated.
This would make it a lot easier to rebuild a machine safely:
1. Download the latest service pack and security roll-up.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack and security roll-up.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
Compare this to the current technique:
1. Download the latest service pack.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
Compare step 3: The current technique relies a lot more on "hope there are no bugs in the firewall" than if you could easily install a security roll-up before connecting the machine to the network, particularly for the home or small-business user.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm biased. I'm a unix/linux user. Have been since 2002 or so. I gradually developed a hatred of windows when, as a windows 98 customer (not a windows user, I paid for it to brceive a service), I got bored having to reinstall my OS. I used XP briefly for a while especially for games and such. Then i Stopped using it. I became a sole nix user. I had no need to play games because I had little to no free time because of work. Recently I've made the switch to ubuntu and also switched jobs.
This has allowed me some more gaming time. For this reason I bought a nice laptop with a good on board graphics card to play games with. It came with Vista, and that I left on it and dual booted with Ubuntu Gutsy. I bought a few games I'd missed out on in the previous year or two.
I began thinking its been a while since I actually used windows, perhaps I'm judging it harshly. So i decided to try and give a go as my main OS as much as I could. Much of my work is done by logging into other machines via ssh so I thought I might not miss Linux too much and I knew putty was a very good terminal emulator implementation.
So, I tried to install Brothers In Arms: Earned in blood. I Didn't get very far. It just did nothing on clicking the installer. Some searching later shows that this game doesn't work on vista. Apparently the system they used to ensure that you dont lend the CD to your friends or such also ensures that it doesn't work on vista. I had similar problems with one other game I bought.
At this point I was quite happy with Vista aside from that it seemed to have used 12GB of diskspace before i'd even booted it up for the first time. It was shiny and slick. It was fast to boot. I had very little on the local machine itself apart from the games. I'd copied some video files and installed all the games from the Orange Box too.
I played through all of Portal/HL2/HL2E1 and I'd noticed that start up takes around five times longer than it did in the first week. The same performance crap I had experienced with 98. Same shit, different kernel. Aside from that I found that some days the hard disk would begin to thrash _all_ the time. To get rid of them I had to kill system processes and turn of much talked about features.
I was getting annoyed. I felt vindicated. It was also starting to crash, It just does it more elegantly than XP. Steam games had weird start up problems involving minimising and maximising a dozen times.
The internets informed me that Orange Box games work well in wine (which I didn't believe). I've never had a great deal of luck with anything working in wine. But vista was getting beyond a joke and I really thought considering the graphics card I had I should be seeing better game performance. So i thought I'd reinstall my laptop with XP/Gutsy and be done with it. However I couldn't find an XP disk. So I just went with gutsy.
I couldn't believe how flawless Orange Box games went on. Honestly, wine is a serious engineering achievement. Everything works. perfectly.
Goodbye Microsoft, and may our only encounters be the ones in which someone pays me large amounts of money to deal with you.
OK, so I normally never reboot my MacBook Pro, I just put it to sleep. (Why should I ever restart it? It's a Unix-based operating system running on a laptop.) But, for the record, I wanted to know exactly how long it takes to boot the thing from scratch. It takes 35 seconds to reach the login window, and 60 seconds to get a fully loaded and usable desktop. I'm not trying to be smug here: that should be about normal for a Mac OS X or Linux machine. So how can Vista be so slow? Why do people even bother with it? How sad and boring. Life is short - we'd better try to enjoy it while it lasts.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Quote from article (emphasis mine):
An INCREASE in time is now considered a performance improvement? Wow, it looks like Microsoft went beyond redefining "downtime" and is now into redefining faster as slower and slower as faster!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You can throw all of those away - with enhanced DRM in the service pack, you won't be able to play them anyway :^)
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Actually, a turd is mostly water, therefore hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Once superman squeezed all the water out, there wouldn't be much left for polishing.
Honestly, I dont get all this windows stuff. 90 seconds to boot and that's an improvement?
Vista SP1 should have been in beta the day Vista shipped. Vista SP1 should have shipped no more than 3 months after Vista.
Leopard just came out last week, and there is already a service pack: v10.5.1 is already out. Most Mac users will never run v10.5.0, because it's already automatically updating itself to v10.5.1 and within six months v10.5.3 will come out on a new DVD and on all new Macs. So Leopard's first-release flaws were caught by early-adopter users and fixed right away by Apple, they are already history. That kind of platform management is completely missing from Microsoft's releases.
At one of the Web development shops I work at, 5 years ago the designers all had Macs, and everyone else had Windows. Then by 3 years ago all the coders had Macs also. Then in the last year all the business people traded in their ThinkPads for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and a couple of them are already running Leopard. Absolutely zero interest in Vista by anyone, not even IT, who are using Macs also and managing Linux Web servers.
After all the problems with XP, everyone wanted an antidote to XP. It's clear that Mac OS X is the antidote to XP, not Vista. Microsoft definitely lost the second chance that Vista offered. They needed to come back with a very small, very stable core OS that they can patch very quickly and easily, in Internet time, not Bill Gates time.
Should appear shortly. As soon as their systems finish booting.
Have gnu, will travel.
On a Core 2 Duo? Windows Vista usually takes 1 minute 51 seconds to boot, and a little head jiggle, er, 20 second reduction is supposed to make me happy?
Something is seriously wrong here. Perhaps not limited to just Vista in this case, but something is badly wrong if modern computers with all their supercomputing glory take four times as long to boot today than they did 15 years ago.
C'mon guys, get parallel boot dependencies going properly. Yes I'm talking more to the Linux/BSD crowd now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
XP SP3 is happening. It is in testing now. I believe it is at RC1 now.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's funny the lengths MS is going to in order to hasten Vista adoption. Halo 2 for Windows was released not long ago. That's right, Halo 2. The old game from about 3 years ago that ran on a Pentium 750. Now the PC version is nothing special (as with Halo 1 suitably crippled to make the XBox look good), but it requires, you guessed it, Vista.
Of course there's no reason the game code actually needs Vista to run and in fact there's a patch (in the form of a DLL) that lets you run it under Windows XP but I just find it interesting how desparate MS seems in obsoleting XP.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You think hard disk requirements will reduce? That's not what happened for xp sp2. The preview was 273.3MB and the final release 495 MB.
No its one of those "poems" where you just write some prose and toss in line breaks .
The message has nothing directly to do with the "prose". Read just the first word of each line. If you still don't get it, google the "definition of insanity".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nearly all Windows XP computers are configured incorrectly where every user runs as admin. The only places I see Windows XP configured correctly was at my old lab in college where everyone ran as a normal user and not admin and in certain work places. In addition to that, certain pieces of software require you to be running as admin rather than just a regular user making running as a regular user in windows XP a pain in the ass.
Vista changes that through UAC and the "admin" account not really being admin. That's because there's a conflict of interest: people coming from windows XP expect to be admins and have complete control of their computer but people from the nix world see it as you should never run as admin and if you do only do so for the task needed (sudo). So now the default vista setup puts people into a weird admin mode where everytime you want to do something that actually requires admin rights, UAC pops up. You can actually configure vista closer to the unix style where everyone runs as a normal user and anytime admin privileges are required, they need to type in the admin password. I like this a lot better because now when friends/family ask for computer help I can configure their vista computers closer to a unix model and prevent them from screwing over their system.
Before we start, yes I could install *insert zip program here*, but it has been handy having the native ability on machine your repairing and would prefer not to install unnecessary software on.
Back to my point, Vista off the bat is painfully slow to unzip files. The last 20 MB file I unzipped on a Vista box, it actually took less time for me to copy the file off onto my memory stick, unzip it on my lower spec'd T60 and copy it back onto my memory stick across to the Vista machine. What the hell is with that?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release
If users of Microsoft Windows rejoice over a stupid service pack, users of Microsoft Vista need to get out more.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'd be happy with SP5 ;)
(Did anyone else have issues applying SP4 by the way? It was apt to fail on G2 HP Servers. Never got to the bottom of why...)
The big question isn't whether or not Vista is acceptably good, it's that it doesn't do a single thing that XP can't. In many cases it does things worse/slower.
So is there a reason to upgrade from XP? I don't see one.
If you hadn't got the Premium version for free would you have paid $400 for it?
No sig today...
But the turds I produce are definitely not mostly water. Mostly Bristol 2-5, rarely 1 or 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Stool_Scale
Superman would have things to squeeze there. Using heat vision first would be advised though.
Ahh... yes.. Slashdot.
THE place where one can have intelligent conversation involving Windows Vista, Superman AND fecal matter.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
MSFT should rename Windows XP and Vista to Windows Classic and New Formula because they're pretty much getting the same reception.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
This SP had better be good. From prior history, each NT OS since NT4 has gotten less service packs than the ones before it:
NT4 - 6
2000 - 4
XP - 2 (3?)
If Microsoft holds to this pattern, this is going to be the first of a maximum of two service packs.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
There were *TWO* versions of NT 4.0 SP6 - 6.0 which broke things like ... Lotus Notes (which I supported at the time) so MSFT came out with 6a since the only thing they fixed was to restore support for Notes working logged in as a non-admin.
I know, splitting hairs...
Your wish is our command.
Caution: May contain nuts.
Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?
Seriously, "improves stability, performance, and reliability when reactivating a machine from Hibernate or Suspend mode"? 20 seconds faster to boot, or copying 2GB from a SD card? And it only takes 7GB? I'm sold.
/. bash Windows for the most ridiculous things, but this time they're asking for it.
I mean, sometimes people at
+1. Troll, but but so funny I am laughing my ass off. That was worthy of Family Guy!
How ya like dat?
It's not just the speed though. For example, a Core 2 Duo System clocked at 2.4Ghz will typically run anything faster than a P4 at 3.0Ghz even if it's only running on a single core. We're no longer in the days of more Mhz = Faster computing. Now if you could get a Core 2 Single then you might have a point, but multi-threading has been around for a while now, this is just a push to make it happen, so it won't be too long until many things will take advantage of it. eg. World Of Warcraft got multi-threading in the last patch, and I'm sure many existing apps will too.
I am of the opinion that they really dropped the ball with this Vista thing and even if they fix a lot of the problems in this service pack, it won't really help their position by much. I mean, look, XP did just about everything that businesses needed an operating system to do. If MS had spent the last several years improving XP, ironing out the bugs, perhaps rewriting a few modules that really needed to be re-engineered, fixing security flaws, optimizing the system, getting rid of some bloat or otherwise reducing the footprint of the OS, and just basically making small incremental improvements, and releasing them often, then I really think that XP would be a real winner by now. Just think, if every six months, say, they had released a new service pack for XP, then XP would be at service pack 10 by now. They could have made small transitions, allowing all the other companies in the industry time to catch up, to fix whatever issues might prevent a certain application or another one from running, etc.
But instead, let's take a look at what they did.
They hyped up how amazing the next version would be for an incredibly long amount of time. A database file system; integrated search; an amazing new interface; there were all kinds of innovations that were supposed to get released with Vista. But then reality set in and it was realized that even for a behemoth the likes of MS, it isn't just a simple task of banging out k-locs of code to achieve the kind of incredible product that they were shooting for, and to do it from scratch. If they had simply continued with the XP codebase, adding instant search as a service pack, adding the database file system as another service pack... or better yet, instead of service packs, if they could have modeled these things as modules of some sort that could be installed optionally in a system, then they could release them independently of other features, and an OS release would be unaffected by delays in those other modules. The result of the way they worked was delays, delays, delays, and I really feel that at some point, they took what they had, packaged it up as best they could, called it the final product, and shipped it, just to say that they had something. This is a shame, since all along, they had XP, which, if you clean it up using some utilities you can download for free, and if you uninstall a lot of the bloat, switch to the classic interface, turn off all the animations (or in system preferences, tell it to optimize for best performance, rather than best appearance), well, if you do all those things and make sure that Windows NEVER accesses the Internet except through a firewall (a Linksys box suffices for most purposes), and if you make sure the system doesn't pick up spam, spyware, adware, popups, and all kinds of other crap that attacks Windows (which is achievable by keeping a backup of your system with exactly the configuration you want, and keeping the OS on one partition and your data on another, so that you can simply plop the backup right into the OS partition when something goes haywire), well, if you do all those things, then XP was actually a very good OS. I know, I hate to say it. But yes, it did everything an OS is supposed to do: It booted the computer; it provided facilities to run other programs; and it allowed those programs to use the shared resources of the computer. It also provided many services on top of that that could serve to enhance the computer's usefulness. Now you can argue that it's bloated, that it's slow, that it's prone to security problems, that many many things are wrong with it, and you're right as far as I'm concerned. But the fact is that once an IT department figures out how to get control of this beast, it will do pretty much whatever you want. So I went off on a tangent but the point was that MS already had in XP a perfectly good platform for adding features and even, yes, gaining more control of other markets, which is what they always like to do. They sort of dumped this out the window and went for the next big thing.
I hope the do something about bluetooth support in Vista. The current stack is stripped all but mouse and keyboard drivers. I bought a new bluetooth headset, after destroying so many wired headphones over the years. But Vista is asking me for a driver. The manufacturer doesn't supply a driver, so i'm stuck with a paperwieght headset. Vista has no support for A2dp... isn't this the sort of thing it should do out of the box? more info here: http://www.dev-toast.com/2007/01/05/uncrippling-bluetooth-in-vista-rtm
So, which one do you guess will be out first? Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or Vista SP1?
That's the swap file update. Remember -- the one you have to e-mail them in case of support difficulties? After the update, the registry is cleaned up (or, if it is... clean?.. some of your other files...)
I never did see the whole thing about restarting. I'll have XP running for a week, even if I had installed the Crysis demo, played through 5 times, and uninstalled, and then even when I want to reboot it takes all of 45 seconds (however going through and closing uTorrent, skype, trillian, and all the instances of firefox, vlc media player, windows explorer, blender, and visual studio that have accumulated takes significantly longer simply because of the sheer number of them and the fact that they were banished from RAM to the hdd two days prior). The whole time I never see my computer slowing down unless firefox is taking 300 megs of memory, which is certainly not microsoft's fault. It does start to act funny sometimes however, but it's nothing that impedes productivity.
Here's a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer.
(from Scott Adams, Dilbert)
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
In any industry other than consumer software, Microsoft would have been shut down years ago for negligently exposing consumers to grossly defective products. Vista is the Aqua Beads of software. You wouldn't tolerate this level of nonsense in your automobile, your television, or your kids' breakfast cereal; why tolerate it in a commercial product that has huge economic and public-policy exposure?
To tell the truth, I'm fucking sick of the whole OS thing. They're all crap, anyway you look at it. XP hides all its configuration options and treats me like a brain-dead two year old. It's fat, stupid and ugly. Linux is a piece of crap for other reasons (HW incompatibilities, badly written SW, little to no support from 3rd parties). I've heard Mac OSX is a decent OS (never used it extensively as I can't afford a mac), but that it has problems with Hebrew and other RTL languages, which (sadly) is a deal breaker for me. What's left? FreeBSD? Is there in existence an operating system that doesn't suck? Vista isn't going to miraculously become the best thing on Earth with SP1. The sad fact of the matter is that a simple, open, just-working OS is not something I have ever seen.
To all the Linux geeks out there loading their flamethrowers:
The fact that among the trash heap that is modern OSs Linux is the only usable option (that I found) doesn't mean it's not still a piece of crap.
So, which one do you guess will be out first? Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or Vista SP1?
. . . Maybe Ubuntu 9.04 Jolly Jaguar
I talked to a guy last week who got the pre-release service pack.
He said Vista really sucks before applying the Service Pack, and is pretty OK after applying it.
He is also more of a Linux/Unix sort of guy, so I don't think he was spewing Fanboi.
They sure need to do something with Vista.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
First, how much of the dual core performance advantage comes from some intrinsic improvement in the way instructions are executed within the cores (fewer clocks per instruction/more instructions per clock)?
Second, how much from more recent technologies giving faster bus speeds and memory?
Third, how much from the simple fact that having one CPU to run dozens of background processes frees the other to run just the application?
While I'm not sure what modern testing would reveal, I recall that direct apples-to-apples (same processor, same motherboard, same memory, same peripherals) testing done 15+ years ago on dual processor UNIX systems, consistently proved number three to be the winner. Typical improvements in performance by enabling the second CPU were in the range of 20%. Increasing bus or memory speeds provided essentially identical performance boosts in both single and dual CPU tests. Running threaded benchmark software and allowing some of the threads to utilize the second CPU also provided performance improvements but obviously required thread-enabled code - which still isn't the norm.
A 2.4GHz CPU plus that 20% improvement = approx. 2.9GHz of effective performance. Close enough to make us think we're getting something worthwhile from that second CPU above what we'd get from a single 3.0GHz chip.
XP did bring something :
- For the first time a NT kernel was brought to the masses. Up until then, when Joe Six pack went into a computer shop, all he could get was a DOS-based Windows like Windows 95 or 98. Most game developers only targeted that platform too. Windows 2000 was mainly marketed toward business settings.
Compared to Windows 2k, lacks anything noteworthy new. For most people, XP is just 2k with some ugly green/blue theme bolted on. The only main feature is that NT is the new official kernel for everybody.
Now, add the fact that prior to Windows XP Home, the last non-business OS was... gasp... Windows Milenium Edition, and you understand while people ended switching to XP. And even so a huge part of the population stayed with the more mature and stable Win98. The attention that those users attracted when Microsoft EOL-ed Win98 may show that this portion isn't negligible. The rest of the average users migrated mostly because of what XP offered compared to the official OS available to them, not because of the amount of difference since the last codebase update(Win2k, which they skipped).
Fast forward to today : to those people, Vista doesn't offer anything new at all. For them, it's almost the same beast with a different skin theme (at least with a less ugly choice of colours) and some sort of annoying popup system that always get in the way and in fine doesn't bring that much the expected security.
It makes no difference with what was staying on their computers already (which this times happen to be the same technology).
So they don't see the point of rushing out of their home and buy the latest Microsoft creation, specially given the high price and the confusing abundance of choices of slightly different versions.
Probably, Vista will only very slowly gain market share, as people start replacing their machines (which is happening slowly as sometimes reported here because, even given some software inefficiency, their current machine are good enough for email/browse/type and such everyday tasks) *AND* companies stop proposing XP as an OS option. Or when Microsoft manage to alienate all Pirate Edition windows users to encourage them to upgrade to an expensive legal option, without having them flee to alternate solution. Or when their current machine gets so much viruses that it crawls to death and the user decides to replace it because "it's gotten too slow" (Which will happen less quickly, now that multicore CPU capable to run all spyware/botnet/SPAMmailers in background are more widespread).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
- Installer supports installing drivers from CD or USB (XP only supported floppies)
- Installer doesn't require any key, you can put that in anytime during the 30-day activation window
- Built-in calendar application. Why Windows didn't have this before I'll never understand.
- Click on the clock in the taskbar and you get a nice calendar pop-up instead of a change the date & time dialog
- "C:\Documents and Settings\" has been renamed "C:\Users\" - you know, what everybody did in DOS 4.0 in 1988?
- Ability to remove all icons from Desktop (including Recycle Bin which couldn't be done in easily in XP)
As you can see none of these things are really that significant, more nuisances, but when you run into these nuisances many times per day for something like 6 years they start to get REALLY ANNOYING. Vista also has a new folder called "C:\ProgramData\" - note that there is no space (as it should be), but they still left "C:\Program Files\" with a space. So now they fixed this problem in Vista 90% of the way but left this one lingering folder, presumably just to piss me and my OCD off.