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The Advantages of Upgrading From Vista To XP
An anonymous reader passes us a blog posting, which may be just a bit tongue-in-cheek, about the pros and cons of upgrading from Vista to XP. "...there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly."
This new Windows XP should make a great gift!
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It took so long to get Vista People forgot what XP use to be like on the modern systems of the time. Same thing happends with Mac OS X leopard. Most of the problems with Vista is much like when they upgraded to XP, Yes different problems but just as anoying... If you really want to get a perspective Install WIndows XP SP0 on a PC that is 5 or 6 years old... Then you see what you are missing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now if only MS could release a version of XP that didn't have the activation stuff. Get rid of all of the DRM that is in Windows now, aid then they would be "customer friendly".
Quit trying to make the software stop working, and concentrate on making it work all of the time.
Of course, if the customer experience is terrible, nobody would bother trying to pirate Windows.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It's really sad when you see how much power is truly lost on vista. I setup a Mac the other day for a client, and it was also running XP through parallels. It ran both just fine with only one gig of ram. A virtual machine, and two entire operating systems... and most PC's out there that are not quad cores with two gigs of ram run like shit. I used to be a microsoft fanboy... -But sadly the tides are changing.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
Funny, and a nice jab at "upgrading" windows, but really, this could have been much better done by a better writer. How many times did he end up writing "snappy and responsive" to describe XP versus Vista?
also, it really could have benefited from a singular tone. Satire is much better when the voice of the piece doesn't change. Take a page from the onion and just treat this as though it were a review of a "new" OS from microsoft.
All in all, not 1/10 as good as it could have been.
When are we going to feel tired bashing Vista? Until the next Windows release?
Come on... I'm not a fan of MS and I'm posting this with Firefox but I have been running Vista on two machines -- one laptop one desktop -- and two machines on XP. i just don't see anything really bad with Vista. If nothing else, it looks more pleasant. In contrast, one of XP machine is running like snail still after several attempts to clean ups, defrags, and registry cleanings; so i don't even want to boot it up anymore.
Does the extra little candies worth your money? for some here, it is not no matter how good it is. For others, the eye candy worths everything. Isn't that what iPhone is all about?
Approaches the ease, yes, but takes 5 - 10 times as long as, say, a sidux installation. Then, as you say, you have to go find drivers, etc. I say this "Microsoft" startup is probably peddling vaporware. We'll see if they manage to stick around.
much longer development cycles between os releases, like 6,8,10 years
and have MAJOR improvements in the mix
for example, i think vista was supposed to have a database like file system when i heard whispers of it way back in 2003/4/5
then i heard that idea got shelved
hey microsoft: if you shelve major improvements, why would anyone upgrade?
if they had that db-like filesystem, then in 2-3 years from now, when that os would have been released, everyone would be talking about what a revolutionary leap forward microsoft had on its hands (yes, i know it's really not a groundbreaking idea, but you know how pr and popular opinion works). now, instead, apple is stealing the thunder for having vista like features before microsoft, when it's just faster graphics card eye candy
windows 95 was such a dramatic step forward from previous iterations
same with xp (patching up windows nt to release to the public instead of business, as windows xp, to increase stability, was certainly an improvement over win me! again, we're talking pr and popular opinion here)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, I'm not sure about Mac OS X. But I did install Windows XP SP0 on a PC five years ago, and it was amazing compared to 98SE (besides the fact that I had to turn off the ugly theme and install Zonealarm, which took all of 2 minutes).
Hats off to Microsoft for releasing an OS that is obsolete before it even hit the shelves! That's the sort of market driven forward thinking that we have come to expect from such a great company.
Now only if they would start charging for service packs, that would really add to share holder value.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm writing to you on my brand new shiny home PC. Box fresh today. When I ordered it, I had to pay £50 to 'upgrade' from Vista home to XP pro.
This is my principle home machine there was _no_way_ I was going to run Vista on it yet.
I made sure I got a meaty graphics card for when the time comes though.
DOS. None of that shell nonsense. Straight forward computing for the masses! Fast, stable and with no eye candy what so ever.
Imagine, if you will, that Vista were released on October 25, 2001 and XP arrived on November 8, 2006. Would you consider XP to be an improvement?
UNLESS YOU LIKE INCONCEIVABLY OS SUCKAGE, YES!
I have to agree with Linus on this one
Other than DX10.x in Vista for purposefully DX10.x limited specific games releases (HALO 3, et al), what IS the killer app in Vista?
(Don't flame me man! I am serious, what is the Real "advantage" to Vista for gamers?) What is the performance advantage? Is it designed to fully take advantage of future generations of multiple quad-core processors with 8+GB of RAM and not really current hardware which is not optimized to utilize it?
Not intending to get into a flame war at all, I have used Vista and I just don't get it.. why the bloat? Why so much DRM? Why specifically break Direct3d and EAX and force the rapid development of OpenAL sound cards and drivers, etc.. Why completely eliminate the look and feel of the UI users have mastered since Win9x/2k (or at least leave a Classic Win2k option for the UI) I play my games in XP and I love it. Once WINE, etc.. can match the performance in gaming of native XP, this discussion will then be between XP and XP emulation.
See I think this is just a symptom of the wrong approach from microsoft. Basically, the big realease meant that all the linux guys and apple guys made sure for the next year they'd be shouting at the tops of their voices about how much vista sucks, and becuase of the huge jump in hardware needed and software compatibility that the normal users (who don't know about, or care about, the fanboys) are reluctant. But this situation just seems to breed this kinds of articles.
Maybe instead of writing this crappy joke article which frankly, didnt work for me, these "writeurs" should do something more useful. Personally, I reckon if microsoft had spent the 5 years from XP to vista releasing a package every 6months, each time adding a feature (like aero or the backup featuers) and also each time fixing the problems with the previous release, then the feautures would be hugely accepted and then step up would have been seen as nothing. However, having said this, where microsoft goes wouldnt have changed and theyt would end up where they will be in 2 years (when the service packs are released) Basically what I'm saying is, you're probably veiwing in fairness something which i 5 sevenths complete but that microsoft's release plan sucks ass.
He, for example, failed to consider all the good things Vista did.
And upgraded to Windows 2000 NT. Seriously. It runs happily on old hardware, an old laptop with 64 MB RAM, 300 Mhz Pentium 3, 2 gig hard disk. I can run most of the apps I throw at it, the few that dont run I dont need on that machine anyway.
Message to Microsoft: Less == More. Forget the Candy Floss and concentrate on making core API run faster and leaner.
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
DualBrain - Level Up Your Brain! - now available on your iPhone!
My parents bought a new vista system today, 1.6ghz dual core, 1GB of ram, integrated graphics,320GB HDD, 19' widescreen, keyboard, mouse and a hp printer all for $599.
Of course we bring it home and hook it up, first boot was unimaginably long, the second one was also fairly long, after within the first 5 minutes 'windows explorer' crashed which prevented pretty much everything (also this crash prevented it from shutting down, it sat at the shutting down screen for about 20 minutes)
I had warned my parents several times about the blunders of vista (they had been using ubuntu 7.10 before their computer's power supply died and took the mobo with it) but there wasn't much along the lines of availability in this area for computers (they didn't want to spend a lot of money and wanted a lot of stuff) so getting a PC without vista would have been difficult and it may be nice for a time when eventually vista works alright (we all remember that XP had similar problems upon release), unless it turns into the next ME (which I've been comparing it too already, makes people shiver).
From their standpoint upgrading to XP would be nice(they don't have a legal copy however) but I'd rather they upgrade to gutsy (although it's more work for me since they don't really know how to use it that well, once I set it up for them it causes a lot less problems down the road).
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
and even then quite a few apps still dont work with windows 64 and there many printers and other usb stuff that does not have 64 bit drivers?
M$ do your really need all printers , scanners , and other basic input devices to be forced to be 64 bit?
and why do you have to pick 32 bit or 64 bit?
10.5 does not force you to make that choice.
I cannot wait until the day Windows 7 is rolled out and all the people with their snide Vista comments begin to proclaim Vista to have been the be-all and end-all of Windows OS' and that Windows 7 is a failure on all counts.
I'll say it if no one else will. I like Vista for the most part. While there are some minor annoyances it has impressed me with its stability and increased security. I'm currently running Vista on a desktop I bought last month but I do plan on purchasing a copy and installing it on my laptop as well.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Drop DirectX and go OpenGL. Helps everyone. Games for windows can then be made to work in WINE (or native Linux and Mac). Niceties can be given to Windows. Etc.
signature is pants
Vista is so bad, that if Microsoft mailed out free copies
to everyone (like AOL), 90% would hit the trash, and of
the remaining 10%, maybe 1% would try it within a year.
Even die-hard Windows users know already had bad Vista is.
The word is out on the street.
You can't shine shit.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
i can imagine the improvements/ negatives as well as you can, but i['m no expert
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Upgrade to MS-DOS 6.1. The screen response is incredible!!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I believe MS commented on the issue with sound cards pointing at the sound card industry for putting out trash drivers.
-]Phreak Out[-
Seriously, people need to get over this cliché of vista being the anti-christ. I have it running on two of my machines (one of which dual-boots ubuntu) and I have had little to no problems with it, and I have to say I enjoy it more than XP. Honestly, all XP was, was a GUI upgrade to Win2k (the best microsoft OS leap in my opinion). Vista on the other hand actuall has some neat features that, while don't make it worth upgrading, make it useful to have instead of XP. The only reason people downgrade back to XP is because they're trying to use shitty old printers and devices, and they expect these 10 year old pieces of technology to run on newer machine. The biggest downside to vista is the amount of memory it takes up, both on the HDD and RAM. But you can lower the RAM impact by just turning off things like Aero, and all those services you probably aren't going to use. Seriously people, get an opinion for yourself. Try using vista.
I can't be asked -- I've seen this saga in too many forms. Haven't we all? Perhaps I've gone over the edge (kinda like the guy who wrote the article) -- no matter -- this saga has gone on far too long in too many variations. Windows is crapola! We all know it.
.t.
If you're wondering about it or chatting about -- Stop it! Install some variant of Linux and get on with whatever you need to get on with -- except for playing computer games of course.
I'm at peace with Ubuntu >. Stories like this make my peace even more peaceful -- especially when I"m not playing games -- otherwise I'll duel boot.
I don't, in 2007 I still use XP with the "classic" theme and still roll back all those annoying "enhancements" like that idiotic puppy for the search function.
What was that about anyway? I can understand using an icon like that but it stands totally alone in the entire interface and its design is totally out of place in both the official XP look and the classic windows look
Anyway, 2007 and I still use the same gui as in 98 and W2K. So tell me again please how I will call Vista the best when 7 comes out when I still think a lot of what XP delivered was a total crapfest?
Don't push your own fanboyness on the rest of the world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think it would hit home a lot more if bloggers and technical sites called Windows Vista for what it really is: Windows MPAA edition. It wasn't written for consumers, it was written to satisfy the DRM requirements of the MPAA to be fed to consumers. All that DRM down in the driver level is what is slowing it down.
That the world would come to the point that xp would be described as an upgrade from anything.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The anti-Vista whining has gotten more annoying than the silly "M$" thing or the Slashdot trolls talking about Microsoft users sucking Bill's cock.
The genuine problems with Vista (the multiple versions, the price, lack of solid drivers) were exhausted as a subject months ago. Since then, the computer press has acted like a bunch of 15-year-olds with a nerd fetish. Vista is actually somewhat nice.
Backup management is a hell of a lot nicer in Vista -- XP almost forced you to go with a third-party app. UAC works very well, and makes running Windows as a limited user a reasonable experience -- in XP it was doable, but a serious pain. System restore is _much_ improved with Vista, something I noticed after a borked nVidia RAID driver update. The performance and reliability wizards that can go through and look at which of your apps are crashing are a nice little idea. There are hundreds of these little improvements. It's not god's gift computer nerds, but it's not that bad either.
And yes, I am a Linux sys admin. At any given time I probably have more Linux boxes running than Windows boxes.
I bought a Small Business Dell earlier this year and as such got asked to file out a Dell Business survey about Vista.
And you are right, basically I demanded to be able to buy XP on my next laptop from them.
They asked be to describe Vista in a short phrase. Mine was "Piece of junk".
The only Vista does better IMHO is off-line files. Very seamless in Vista vs XP (which is a big factor). But I am plagued by constant App freezes, network issues, driver incompatibilities, UAC issues, Defender updates, Visio error messages (turn off COM add-ins), etc..
After ~7 months I have uninstalled enough software and turned off enough security features that it is OK to use.
But I shouldn't have had to do that.
That laptop doesn't do anything cutting edge: Office, Firefox, iTunes.
My problems are problems caused right out of the box.
Vista wasn't fully baked by the time it shipped. It is MSFT's version of Intel's Itanium.
PS:
Dear HP why don't you write some F'ing Vista compatible printer drivers?!?
Dear MSFT, why the Hell do you need to change the printer driver model? Does the text now print in 3D, or is it the same as when NT was printing?
Some things never change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
If you view XP as a text emoticon...
Windows XP has its shortcomings as well. If you maintain a number of computers for a company, you'll notice that there is no good way to set up one Windows XP computer exactly the way you like it and then duplicate that setup to other computers, unless all of your computers have identical hardware.
I'm not disagreeing with you as I've not thought about it enough to say whether my own idea is good or bad, but I think rather than longer development cycles, they might actually need shorter ones. The Linux world seems to make excellent progress with numerous small increments. This of course necessitates a quite modular approach to developing the OS (with the most dramatic example being the separation of OS from Window Manager), but this actually leads to a much greater stability as you aren't suddenly shifting from one system to something very new and different, with all the headaches of testing, driver release, app compatability etc., etc. that this causes.
If a new release of Linux came out ever five years, I think we'd see massive problems with each new release of that, as well.
Of course the release schedule is driven by marketing, rather than developers so it might seem academic, but I have a suggestion to Microsoft on the million to one chance that Ballmer is reading through these articles in a dark fit of depression. A better solution would be to take an incremental approach to Windows releases and to make money through a subscription process. We know that customers resent being forced to go through an expensive upgrade cycle. Wouldn't the pill be easier to swallow if so long as they paid their very modest subscription to Microsoft, the updates just kept rolling down. One day it doesn't support a journaling files system, the next day it does - much like Ubuntu updates? Microsoft want to be in a service industry, providing media packages and other options with a steady stream of income, not a risky forecasting of sales for each new OS or version of Office. Wouldn't a subscription model suit that better, enabling lots of services to be rolled into one? And at a stroke you've cut down on vast amounts of piracy of the Windows OS. It's surely better to have a million users paying $24 a year than it is 500,000 maybe paying $80 once every five years. New PCs would as usual just come with a modest 1 year subscription free!
I know that I'd be happy with this model and a lot less resentful of seeing the big cost of the OS added to the price of the PC as one big extra cost. There are so many things that could be rolled into a subscription model in other areas of Microsoft's business that its almost silly.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like a good idea for both Microsoft and its customers. They're no longer competing with other proprietary OS's (bar the Macs). They're competing with free. And you can't do that by demanding $100 from people. You can do it by asking for a couple of dollars a month and people feeling that they're getting something good in return. If anyone knows the chair launching one, point him in my direction would you?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
That may be accurate in some cases, but it appears that it has more to do with the REQUIREMENT from Microsoft to only use their SOFTWARE mixer in Vista, thus breaking nearly all Hardware audio effects (my read is: for *DRM* requirements):
"...DirectSound3D on Windows Vista
With Microsoft's decision to remove the audio hardware layer in Windows Vista, legacy DirectSound 3D games will no longer use hardware 3D algorithms for audio spatialization. Instead they will have to rely upon the new Microsoft software mixer that is built into Windows Vista. This new software mixer will give the users basic audio support for their old Direct Sound games but since it has no hardware layer, all EAX® effects will be lost, and no individual per-voice processing can be performed using dedicated hardware processing.
EAX has become the de facto standard for real-time effects processing. It has been incorporated in hundreds of games and has become the method of choice for game developers wanting to add interactive environment effects to their titles. Some of the best selling games of all time use the EAX extensions to DirectSound 5.0 and beyond, including Warcraft3, Diablo2, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Ghost Recon, F.E.A.R. and many others. Under Windows Vista, these games will be losing the hardware support that came as standard under the previous Windows Operating Systems, and will no longer provide real-time interactive effects, making them sound empty and lifeless by comparison to the way they sound on Windows XP.
In some cases, where a game specifically looks for a hardware audio path, it may even fall back to plain stereo output. This will be a very different landscape for 3D audio than the one that both Creative Labs and Aureal Technologies® pioneered 8 years ago. Both companies dedicated hardware power to rendering increasing numbers of 3D voices, with each voice taking full advantage of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) technology, wave tracing and other advanced processing. With the native Windows Vista audio APIs, all this advanced, hardware-based 3D audio processing will be inaccessible. Instead, basic mapping to a generic speaker placement scheme will be employed, and all interactive processing and rendering will be dependent on the host CPU. While it is true that CPUs continue to get faster, the Vista audio architecture intentionally simplifies things, such that the potential processing load for multiple 3D voices is limited. Inevitably there is a tradeoff. This will be especially true for gamers that have come to depend on the kind of high-end 3D audio experience available from products like the SoundBlaster X-Fi, with its advanced headphone 3D audio processing and dedicated hardware DSP effects. For gamers this would be the most noticeable loss in Windows Vista, and it would be a definite step backwards for PC gaming audio if developers only had the option of using native Windows Vista audio APIs. However, they do have a legitimate, proven alternative in OpenAL..." http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html
1) If existing OS: run complete antivirus scan and clean existing install, fix everything. Then run a GOOD antivirus scanner (I like Kaspersky), and do it right.
.Net
2) Format system disk.
3) Install new MS OS (Win2K or better)
4) Install all updates EXCEPT:
5) Remove unnecessary schmutz (unneeded services, drivers, games, etc.)
6) Replace MS MediaPlayer with Media Player Classic.
7) Do not install any further MS software
8) Ever.
9) Seriously, not ever.
10) It's not that hard, and will very rarely crash.
11) Oh yeah, don't install too many Adobe apps, either, and keep as much crap from auto-starting as possible (Adobe gamma, Adobe Reader starter, etc.).
12) Don't use Internet Explorer (any version - the people who tell you IE7 is 'okay' are idiots).
Put some hardware in between your machine and the Internet at large. Being behind even a simple NAT box will help enormously.
Enjoy.
I don't think Vista survived for more than a week on my wife's laptop (HP Pavilion dv9015) before I "upgraded" it to XP. She works for a small company and the worst problem was that modt of the custom applications she needed to be able to run wouldn't run under Vista. I got everything working under XP that she needed although I never really tried to get the TV card working. It should work but haven't tried it.
On the other hand, I upgraded my HP zv6015 from XP to Linux almost as soon as I got it back in 2005. It's currently running CentOS 5 x86_64. More on that story at my blog: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress/?p=15.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Hey, to all the pundits like the fellow who wrote TFA, I just want to say that I'm still using Windows 2000, and use XP only when I absolutely have to. I've disliked XP from the very beginning, and haven't changed my opinion in the intervening years. Just because Microsoft came up with something even more ugly, bloated, and bollixed up than XP, doesn't make XP any more desirable than it was before.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
That's been my solution. My dad wanted to get a notebook -- the office store had a Toshiba for $300 with Vista. I looked at the specs and was like "that's a good deal, but Vista is going to piss you off." After like 2 days he's "Vista is pissing me off". Ubuntu 7.10 installed with everything working off the bat, including the widescreen display. Simple steps:
Install off the LiveCD
It pops up the restricted drivers manager -- I checked the boxes for Atheros HAL and the modem. (I thought there'd be one for the ATI card, but apparently it's just an old enough model the open source driver supports it fully...)
I put in the WEP key for my parent's network.
I installed "ubuntu-restricted-extras". This installs Flash, Java, video playback plugins (including DVD), plus some other random stuff that basically "should" be on the install CD but can't be for licensing reasons.
Since my parents have 256kbps DSL, I clicked on the little update icon to have it get the updates, so they wouldn't have to wait through it.
I think all but the updates took under an hour. The updates took an additional hour or so to download, and about 2 minutes to actually apply (they would have gone much quicker with a faster internet connection.)
One last machine-specific tweak -- the bootup splash didn't show up on that specific machine (not too uncommon I've found) and in fact slowed the bootup a lot (THAT is a bit odd...), so I put "nosplash" in the boot options. Without that it took around 90 seconds to boot; with it it boots in about 20 seconds flat.
Ok, in IT, there's essentially two paradigms. Microsoft and !Microsoft (which that alone is a sign on how succesfull MS are).
The !Microsoft oriented people seem to have a lot more distaste for Microsoft stuff than the other way round, and article postings such as this one is evidence of that. Being, let's say, heavily based in Microsoft, I have tried and indeed on occasion promote OSS tech over MS tech sometimes, and the same goes for my colleagues. Every time I've asked someone bad-mouthing MS stuff how much time they've given to Vista for instance, and the response is along the lines of "fuck off n00b".
Now, I don't think for a minute that if Microsoft could wave a magic wand and have OSS disappear they wouldn't (no matter how expensive that wand might be), but you all miss a trick here. For Microsoft people, this war isn't about religion, it's ultimately about money. That means any anti-Linux propaganda they may (or may not) push out is calculated with a cool head.
On slashdot, anti-microsoft propaganda is often pure bitching and rabid foaming at the mouth by some obscure geek sat at home with an opinion the rest of the world doesn't care about. Sometimes you guys have a point, let's not pretend it's all ranting (not even nearly), but you must realise, school-ground article submissions like this one only serve to make you look like kids, and very unprofessional. That image sticks, and spreads too - all of which is a shame BECAUSE FOSS projects genuinely have thier own niche in the IT universe.
Remember, IT isn't religion, it's a profession, a skill, a choice, whatever. Microsoft for all you bash them, in my opinion look far more organised and professional than the anti-Microsoft people seeking at all costs and turns, to bash and tarnish them. And Microsoft are winning already; just keep checking that MSFT ticker.
Bring the mod points, this is an unpopular opinion I know, but to quote a cliché - "I've got karma to burn"
throw new NoSignatureException();
Why on earth would I limit myself to the reduced sales that a "Vista only" version of my software would lead to?
This is just another failure of Vista. Microsoft included a whole load of technologies which were *artificially* limited to Vista (no XP version) in the hope that all the new Vista-only software would force people to upgrade from XP.
In reality it's having the opposite effect. Developers are shunning the shiny new technologies because only an idiot would write software which doesn't run on XP (...at least until the year 2010 or thereabouts). Even the "secretly-Microsoft-funded" DX10 showcase games are flopping. I expect the next generation of games to be more DX9 friendly.
Microsoft's whole "we can *force* an upgrade to Vista by...XXX" mentality is misguided. The way to get people to upgrade is by producing a brillian OS and they've failed badly on that one.
Vista has no compelling features. None whatsoever.
No sig today...
Somebody apparently decided to develop an OS on his spare time and released the source code for anybody to improve on.
I've heard it's taking off like gangbusters.
Even has a GUI and all.
Some Finnish kid, though.
Sounds un-American to me, doing stuff for free. The American way is to pay through the nose for stuff that doesn't work. Gotta buy American or the Chinese will own everything. including the oil. Or maybe the Finnish. (Never gonna use any cell phone except Motorola.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- Vista plays MP3s just fine.
- Vista plays AVIs of your favorite shows just fine.
- Vista plays DVDs just fine.
- You can run software to rip DVDs on Vista.
- You can rip CD audio on Vista.
- You can convert your DVD movies to AVIs on Vista.
- If none of that is good enough for you, you can install a couple plug-ins in Vista and play all the Ogg and Matroska files you want.
Seriously, Vista does kinda suck, but when you go around talking about how it sucks for reasons that aren't even true you kinda just sound like a dumbass fanboy.Breakfast served all day!
Look, everybody trashes Vista because it's eyecandy takes up power. Well, guess what? For the overwhelming majority of PC users, you can put all of the technical improvements imaginable into an operating system, but if it does not look different and do something visual that they have never seen before, they are not going to notice the positive differences. I mean, even the leading linux distro (Ubuntu) has jumped through hoops to get compiz (read: eye candy) to work well enough to leave on by default. Why? People like to see spinning cubical desktops. It's fun. People also like clear window borders with shadows. It's fun.
What's more, if Microsoft does not change the UI across the board a bit, then people are not going to accept the differences that really are necessary for technical reasons. UAC (which is ultimately an improvement, even if it could have been done more gracefully) would never be acceptable to a non-technical user if it was just grafted on top of what looked like XP. For those of us who understand the difference between technical improvements and eyecandy and do not want the eyecandy, it is very easy to turn off. Once it is off, I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS), it is a nice incremental improvement over XP in a lot of ways. For example, the way limited privilege accounts are handled is vastly improved, which is really nice in a multi-user environment (businesses, universities, libraries).
Finally, there is the fact that eye candy can actually improve the usability of the OS. I find that the way vista gives me a little thumbnail of minimized or covered windows when I mouse of the task bar really useful.
I'm typically a Linux user, but as "the IT guy" at the small business where I work, I have to administer a couple vista boxes. I've bought a computer with Vista for my inlaws. They like it. The people where I work like it. Yes, the eyecandy takes power, but eyecandy always takes power, and eyecandy is what the overwhelming majority of PC users want.
Face it folks, for the market at large, Vista is an improvement.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool slashdotified anti-Windowlogist,
until I upgraded from Vista to XP. I still need an an E6600 Core Duo
CPU on an Intel DG965RYCK motherboard (running any version of the BIOS
before April 4, 2006 to get around the 2GB memory limitation--Intel
still hasn't fixed the BIOS bug) with 4GB RAM and a 250GB SATA
drive to open more than one IE7 tab without thrashing and to assure
IBM XT performance levels (for backwards compatibility with the 8086);
and it is true that I was placed on a secret list of evil malcontents
because I needed to validate my copy of XP through the classified
Windows Advantage Homeland Security program, after an attempted
upgrade to XP from a DELL OEM disk (I couldn't wait for the CompUSA
going-out-of-business discount); but now at last I enjoy the glorious
Windows religious experience, as promised by the stupendous sound-track
that accompanies the successful booting of the magnificent operating
system Windows XP, the long-awaited successor to Vista.
Obviously this is a slow news day and the editors at Slashdot couldn't find any news for nerds or stuff that matters.
Folks, this kind of shit got old years ago.
Vista came out. It has some problems. Guess what. So did XP when it first came out. So did every version of OS X when it came out. So did every previous version of a Microsoft OS. So did every previous version of an Apple OS. So has pretty much every distribution of Linux when they have first come out.
I've been using and programming computers for 34 years. And in that 34 years, I can't think of *any* OS or program, other than maybe "hello world" in what ever language, that has ever been error free on the first version. You show me someone who says "this OS has no bugs", and I'll show you a blathering idiot.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I thought the writing was pretty good actually. I cracked a smile a couple of times reading it. Nicely done.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Circumcision is child abuse.
Maybe those meat flaps need to go on a diet. Nothing like hot, nasty, sweaty sex to trim a fat cunt.
Drop DirectX and go OpenGL.
OpenGL and SDL (and whatever else is required) of course - OpenGL is roughly equivalent* to Direct 3D, which is a subset of Direct X.
(* that's from the point of view of a gamer, not a games programmer, of course - I've no idea how close they are in features, ease of use, etc)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I was expecting great things from Aero, but when it arrived all I coud find was a 3D "alt-tab".
Try using a Mac sometime, or Linux...they have an order of magnitude more "window candy".
No sig today...
This upgrade really deserves to be called an "upgrade". I found Vista more sluggish, as it took way more time to boot and perform fingerprint login compared to XP. Also, browsing files was slow, and I experienced roughly 20-40 fps loss in games. I found that some devices that used to work in XP, didn't work in Vista. Vista also eats lots of memory and CPU, let alone disk space. The one and only advantage in Vista compared to XP is the overrated Aero interface, which in fact takes lots of resources to run and isn't really that beautiful. Window switcher ? *sigh* It just really isn't worth it, believe me. XP is better than Vista, period.
That being said, I see the upgrade from Vista to XP as just an upgrade from bad to less bad. Of course most games play best on Windows, but aside from that, everything can be done better in other operating systems. OS X and Linux (Ubuntu as a popular example) are really something beyond Micro$oft's imagination. No, I'm not forcing people to switch their operating systems, instead I strongly recommend that people take look at the alternatives and think if they're really happy with sticking (and struggling) in the "World of Windows".
Just thought I'd point out, Halo 3 isn't even available on PC. Perhaps you were thinking of Halo 2?
Vista is really annoying because it has several important, useful, and/or cool features that really make it a better OS, for example:
1. IO Scheduling - the scheduler now tracks IO requests and priorities, not just CPU time. This is probably my #1 complaint with almost any OS: Any app can bring the system to a crawl by issuing constant disk IO, regardless of how much CPU time it is using. Use up a lot of memory to cause swapping and you can effectively DoS just about any system even with no admin rights whatsoever. But since Vista considers IO in its scheduling a low-priority process can't flood the disk with requests. No technical reason this can't be back-ported to XP.
2. Hot-patching - long overdue, but at least it is being delivered. Other than swapping out the kernel there is no excuse for rebooting to install or update any subsystem. There is no technical reason why this can't be supported by XP.
3. User-mode driver framework - Even if we can't have microkernels, at least we can start moving more stuff into user mode. The audio subsystem is one of these. Frankly, except for some very minor pieces, not only should most drivers live in user mode I think most drivers should use a form of managed code as well (perhaps with some deterministic GC or other memory management mechanism). Switching ring levels isn't the massively huge hit it was on older x86 processors. Again, no reason this can't be supported by XP.
4. DirectX scheduler and video virtualization - long overdue; let the OS virtualize the 3d hardware and dish time out to any app that needs to do some rendering. We've all been over the DirectX 10 scandal before and are well aware that it could be back-ported to XP.
5. Explorer improvements - more multi-threaded (less blocking) and (FINALLY) it doesn't b0rk an entire file copy job just because one file failed... now you can retry or skip the offending item. Welcome to 1993, apparently.
6. Pending IO cancellation - the IO subsystem finally understands how to cancel pending IOs. Ever had a zombie process that wouldn't go away, even though you did an End Process or kill on it? It probably had an incomplete network or disk IO request out there, but under XP and earlier Windows can't cleanup the process until all the IOs are finished. In Vista the IO subsystem understands how to cancel the IO, or if it can't be cancelled will automatically take care of cleaning it up when it returns... no need for the process to stick around waiting on a request to complete that it doesn't give a shit about. Again, this should have been part of an XP service pack.
7. Async SMB/Net - All the SMB/Net calls and apps support async IO now, so you can finally CTRL+C a 'net view \\machine' command and have it terminate immediately, instead of having to wait 60 seconds for that CTRL+C to register while the network operation is blocking. This one I can't even understand... Windows has supported non-blocking IO since the original NT. IO Completion Ports (essentially callbacks when an IO operation is complete) are fast and used throughout Windows for all sorts of things. Except in this one area.
8. Kernel transactions - now the Registry and supported filesystems (NTFS), along with any subsystem or kernel object that cares to implement support for it, can participate in transactions. This one makes installations far easier and simpler - just run all your registry and file updates inside a transaction and commit when done. Also makes hot-patching support easier, since running processes keep their open handles to the previous version of the file prior to the transaction. All filesystem should have supported transactions in like 1995; no idea why it has taken this long.
9. Shadow Copies exposed - this one is really dumb; XP already supports shadow copies, it just doesn't expose them to you. Again, something we should have seen on clients several years ago when disk space started getting really cheap. Empty sectors on a disk are like empty blocks of memory: a complete waste. Just as ever
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
But I guess I was one of the few. If you did like New Coke, you might try RC. It's pretty close.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
A nice incremental move forward. Lots of stuff under the hood for SAs (Kerb'd NFS), filesystem based directories (oh, so sweet).
VNC built-in such that when I see a machine on the network, I can bring up it's desktop. Super for around the house. Bring up a remote dual screen and see a really long screen in the VNC window. No muss, no fuss.
Some nice subtle changes in the GUI. Where it especially shines is when using it as a media center. Drop links to network shares of movies and music into your movies and music folders and they show up under frontrow, like magic. Login to resources is auto-magic (keychain).
Drop cover art and it shows up like magic too. DVD rips, mpeg4, what have you. Frontrow's new version makes it so much better. A mini + leopard is Apple TV with a slot loading DVD and an accessible desktop.
Certainly not revolutionary. Nicely revolutionary.
(I got rid of my last XP desktop (AMD 64's) and got an 8 core MacPro when Leopard was released. Switching was like curing a dull toothache that had been causing me pain for years.)
Read my post. I am an avid linux user. I even mentioned Ubuntu and compiz and stated that I am a linux user. Debian is my flavor of choice, to be precise. I administer a variety of systems at work, including Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris (although that box bit the dust a few months ago), win2000, winXP, and Vista, which (obviously) means I have to be familiar with how they work. When I bought my last personal computer, I looked very seriously at Macs and I decided against it because I don't like the UI.
I am no user interface expert by any measure, but I am not ignorant on the issue.
You don't like Vista's eye candy. Fine. I don't either. That neither changes the fact that a lot of people like Vista's eye candy nor the fact that Vista's eyecandy does present some useful features to the user (like the mouse-over thumb nails I mentioned before). That also does not change the fact that on a technical level, Vista does have several improvements over XP.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
DX10 won't work on XP because it relies on Vista's new display driver model. It's a good thing because it allows better management of GPUs: they can have virtualized memory, they can be interrupted (and thus timeshared), and it runs outside of the kernel, which improves stability. Sometimes making improvements means breaking compatibility, it's just a fact, and I would rather have an OS that is improved at the expense of back compatibility than one that is overly constrained by the limitations of its predecessors.
Yes, Thank You for the correction, I did mean Halo 2 (for PC), not Halo 3.
Interestingly, Halo 3 is even further crippled by Microsoft so it will ONLY work on their XBox360 console. (Good thing Microsoft does not author the games I prefer to play.)
Imagine if General Motors, Ford, or Toyota only produced a car/truck that will only operate using their own specific brands of fuel!
I play MP3's all the time in the background on Vista. I have a duel-core 2.6Ghz Intel with 4G of memory, and as the screen changes... menus popping up, heavy disk activity, you can hear little glitches in playback. Almost like a 1/10 of a second cut in the song.
It's amazing they managed to struggle with all the processor power and memory when Amigas can play MP3's.
I just don't get it.
I googled a little bit and see that Windows capped it at 4GB. Linux had >4GB modes before x86_64 came along, wonder why Windows didn't let you use it, or was it something they reserved artificially for server level OSes?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The one thing I know is that DirectX also includes DirectShow : a video acquisition lib. To my deepest regret, I have to admit that it is more efficient than any OSS alternative I know of.
About the OpenGL vs Direct3D however, I wholeheartedly agree
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Meanwhile, Wine, when it does work, works a lot better. Graphical glitches in Direct3D games still exist, but not to the extent of VMware's graphics driver 3d feature. IO is snappy. WINE is an alternative implementation of the MS Libraries intended to run under alternative kernels/graphical infrastructures, not an emulator. However, Wine's implementation of the Win32 APIs is still far from perfect, and some applications will continue to misbehave for a while compared to Microsoft's implementation, whether it be under a virtual machine or natively.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"UAC works very well"
It's really the worst thing about Vista. You'll be forced to turn it off within an hour, it's *that* bad.
Perhaps when you say "works very well", you might be using different definition of words than me.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
My office computer crashed and figuratively burned early this month, so I ordered a "Vostro 400" desktop from the folks at Dell. Nice system, reasonable price and the option to configure it with XP instead of Vista. All my old programs run without complaint.
My son recently got a laptop with Linux from them. You do have a choice.
Yes.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Other than DX10.x in Vista for purposefully DX10.x limited specific games releases
Nice shot of misinformation there. DX10 & Vista support GPU multitasking, which is how you get hardware acceleration in multiple windows and the desktop all at the same time... something XP can't do. DX10 isn't just some marketing carrot to lure people to vista. DX10/Vista is a substantial upgrade to the underlying graphics system, with a whole new driver model that makes it possible... it fundamentally changes and how grahpics work in Windows at the kernel level.
It may not be something 'gamers' care about, but its important. And its pathetic when people look at just the relatively minor game-related features directx10 has added and then conclude directx10 is irrelevant.
As to your base question, what is the Killer app in Vista? I'd say their isn't one, and that it isn't a compelling upgrade unless its time to buy a whole new computer anyway. But having said that, what was the killer app for XP from 2000? I don't remember one.
What about from 98 to XP for the 'home users'? Sure XP was more stable, but it required gobs more RAM (98 ran very well on 64MB... XP was a dog on less than 256, was slower on the same hardware, and wsn't compatible with a lot of games. It came with DRM in the form of enforced limitations on connections to shared printers and folders, and featured an activation process that had the potential to lock you out of your computer if you upgraded it.
XP was as much of a non-event as Vista is. It was on some level better accepted than Vista precisely because it was so much less of an upgrade than XP was from 2000. There is a reason that 2000 is "Windows 5.0", while XP is "Windows 5.1". XP wasn't much of an upgrade!
There are actually great reasons to upgrade to Vista. A massive boost in productivity (for power users, at least) is one of them. In defense of Vista article outlines some of the other reasons.
I've been using Vista since February and once file copy performance issues were sorted out, I have nothing bad to say about it.
To partially answer your question, typical file systems are an example of a hierarchical database (FAT32, ext3, NTFS, etc.). I believe m$ was planning on adding some relational database features on top of NTFS (most "databases" today are relational) and rename it WinFS. I still don't have a good idea as to exactly what they were planning to do. It may have simply been that they were planning on adding more alternate data streams and indexing them for searches.
If someone really knows, feel free to fill us in.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It makes Windows more secure than *nix (i.e Vista is the only OS in the world where even root != root), and is less irritating than su (you don't need to type password every time, assuming you are "root").
Read about it. Try it. It works ok in practise. If you really hate the idea of not being root always and forever, it's 5 clicks to turn it off.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I run Vista on two machines and have - no problems! IIS worked out of the box, I can connect to our Mac OS X Servers (which are PDCs), all the applications run, in short, everything works. So what if it uses more disk space or RAM. WTF do people want with production machines that have 250GB HD's anyway?
It should be said too: Vista's UI is extremely user-friendly. The Start menu is a definite improvement over XP's and although it's eye candy, the GUI looks better than any on the market, including Leopard. BTW The ultimate oxymoron: Apple's Finder.
SO has anyone actually USED Vista? What am I doing right/wrong that I have NOTHING to complain about it?
www.itjerk.com
If you lot are bitching about performance, get the fuck over it. In 6 months, it will be irrelevant, just as the performance differences between 95/98/2k and XP are. I currently run games on vista with no performance problems - if you have a machine built with vista in mind, it's all good.
If you *don't* have a machine built with vista in mind, then why are you shocked and surprised that the user experience sucks? Yes, it's built for new hardware. Given that 90% of the time, all that cpu and memory is sitting idle on most people's machines, it makes sense to try and utilise it for useful purposes - for example, previous versions, search indexing, etc.
Most of that background crap can be turned off if you're really anal about it, but sooner or later you'll (or rather, perhaps one of your users will) do something stupid, like delete a whole heap of crap you don't need or whatever, and wish you hadn't.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm going to try and rationally address your post, and at the same time, try and avoid getting rabies off your foaming at the mouth rant from over the internet.
Firstly, can I say, people like you do more damage to Linux, than 10, or even 100 Microsoft lawsuits. I don't wish to participate in a community that is so committed religiously to an OS, that they can't even see, let alone admit, the benefits of the rival system. Microsoft has 100's, THOUSANDS of flaws, but they do get some things right.
Your comparison of 98 with XP just goes to show how ignorant, or blind you are to the difference in Microsoft's products. Windows 98, from a stability perspective, is a deeply flawed, semi-32bit shell running on top of a 16-bit ancient bootloader. Stability? It's crap. XP is NOT (entirely) crap. The base system is entirely different; if you honestly think that XP is comparable to 98 in terms of stability, you need your head checked. In fact, from reading your initial post, you already need to book in for a CAT scan.
Stating that every Windows problem ever is related to the registry is just further evidence of your complete retardation. The last 4 or 5 problems I've had with Windows have been shit x64 drivers that are causing heap corruption in the kernel (I've been tracking them down with Driver Verifier). These problems have no relation to the registry whatsoever. Technically, they aren't even Microsoft's fault. There's not much they can do about 3rd-parties writing miserable unstable drivers that are getting run in kernel mode. What they CAN do is try and provide some quality checks, and one way they do this is through WHQL. Look it up, most of the respectable brand names are involved in such initiatives.
Would an OSS model on these drivers increase stability? Almost certainly, so take your problems up with the developers churning out the rubbish drivers. I have, I've been submitting detailed bug reports to them.
If you can't get a stable XP/2K3 system (I won't say Vista, not because it "sucks" or is "lame", but I've had very limited usage of it, so I'm just not even going to comment about what I don't know), then odds are, you're doing something wrong, and not neccessarily MS. Maybe you're just a shit Windows admin, and should stick to the Linux world? I'll have you know I've got my Windows 2k3 server up running perfectly, acting as the host for 3 virtual machines, one of those a FreeBSD box running all my external (internet facing) services. It has excellent uptime, once properly configured, unnessecary services locked down, etc...
Could you do this just as well on linux/bsd/solaris/whatever? Probably. But that's not to say you CAN'T under Windows. It comes down to the quality of the admin. Judging by some of the comments you made in your previous rant, I'd say your competence with Microsoft products is minimal at best, and if you can't seem to get things working, maybe you should just get out of the Windows world together, and leave those of us that can get Windows products working well, to do our job.
Am I calling Linux shit? No, not for a second. I'm informed enough to recognise the strengths of each OS, and mature enough not to slag competing OS's off purely because I can't seem to get one working perfectly. My two cents? You should get in contact Adobe and help get them sorted. MY experience with their products has been sub-optimal at best.
\\hydra has been up for: 36 day(s), 22 hour(s), 38 minute(s), 57 second(s) - last reboot was a hardware reconfiguration, working perfectly.
Vista is, clearly, both less reliable and less efficient than XP for a significant proportion of people who have tried it. If it had one bad review, that would be one thing, but the web is full of them and of reports from lab tests confirming it in various contexts, and my personal experience and conversations with friends who have seen it is entirely consistent with those reviews and tests. So I have no problem accepting that Vista is inferior to XP in significant ways.
Now, it may be that it's not really down to the DRM. I find it credible that it is, given the nature of DRM technology, and I guess most people reading this have read the high profile articles with more technical details that claim so. But in any case, it doesn't really matter a whole lot why the performance is worse than XP, just that it is worse. If DRM is getting the blame and MS is suffering bad press because of some FUD here, I'm not exactly full of sympathy: it's not like they have a history of being whiter than white in their objective criticisms of their competitors' offerings, nor like the claims about poor performance/compatibility/reliability aren't essentially all true.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I do just about everything on my home PC and haven't had any problems with Vista. I honestly don't understand everyone's problem with it. Yes, I turned off Aero and UAC. If you don't know how to turn it off, you probably shouldn't be turning it off. ;)
Previously, the odd time a game crashed hard for me I could sometimes recover with a lot of patience and the task manager, but sometimes had to reboot. On Vista, my games crash no more or less than before, but recovers beautifully. Stuff like this leads me to think that once all the major third-parties get their act together, Vista will be the most reliable Windows ever. Around that time the average specs of a home PC will also be high enough that performance will be smooth on any new PC.
The only people I really feel sorry for is those who paid to upgrade old systems, or people buying $400 systems that only come with Vista, but are obviously unsuitable.
I don't see the problem. Why, this guy was able to install it in only a couple minutes.
The thing is, I'm not running Windows XP SP0 on my near-five-year-old PC as I type this. I'm running a fully patched WinXP based on SP2, as I have been for a long time. My system performs well and has always been very stable (barring some recent blips, but those are due to an identified hardware problem).
Of course XP wasn't as good five years ago, but unless Microsoft is going to go back and release Vista on time, it's what we're all running today with which Vista must compare favourably.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
...Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional? And 300 Mhz Intel Pentium 2?
Not to mention that Win2k runs like a fucking dog on old ahdrware, at least as badly as Vista on current gear. Remember all the howling back in the day about how Win2k was a bloated resource hog and required upgrades to insane new hardware specs just to run? And how there was no compelling reason for desktop users to upgrade from Win98SE?
Actually, you probably don't remember that.
Jesus fuck, if you're gonna troll, at least get your facts straight.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Somewhat ironic that they put all that time and effort building anti-piracy measures into Vista, and now nobody wants it. And then the final, delicious twist: the anti-piracy crap will sometimes shut down a legitimate installation. I bet that makes the user feel all warm and cuddly.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Vista does not allow you to specify what you want to backup, beyond a full disk image or a selection of based on canned categories like pictures, videos, music, and documents. You cannot add a filemask or a list of file extensions, let alone checking off a selection of specific files and/or folders like every fucking GUI backup software since the dawn of time.
body massage!
Maybe they are on their Christmas school break and have nothing else to write about.
Microsoft promised us again and again that it wouldn't ship until "it was ready".
In the end it came down to "Can we afford to miss another Christmas?" and it seems that yes, they should have.
No sig today...
The OP said Vista was better for developers, nobody mentioned security or "rogue apps".
No sig today...
People go on and on about Vista's wonderful new eye candy but where is it???
...or this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bYsxaMyFV2Y
Watch this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ
Tell me again that Vista has eye candy...
No sig today...
I took the VISTA plunge (as a test) on a new laptop. I plan to upgrade to XP over Christmas break. VISTA drivers are still pretty rough and have crash issues. I think I finally have achieved a stable laptop with no blue screens, but system performance is an issue. VISTA just idling consumes about 10% of the CPU, not to mention it is always waking the harddrive up. Amazingly, VISTA (the new king of all multimedia) doesn't have a built-in app that uses a USB webcam... very strange.
My biggest beef is that the VISTA System Recovery software doesn't work. I did a complete VISTA backup to DVD and wanted to test a system restore. I booted the VISTA CD and selected Restore Entire System but the restore software doesn't recognize the DVD backup set. This irked me since laptops no longer come with restore media, so I guess it is back to Ghost.
My feeling is that VISTA is much akin to Windows ME which was the retarded cousin on Win98. Everyone knows that VISTA is a hyperactive drooling OS and most will just take a step back and see what MS churns out next, or move to Ubuntu. At least my plan is to put VISTA back in the box and ignore it.
Three Rings for the Slashdotters under the sky, Seven for the Java-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Anti-Microsoft Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Microsoft where the Service Packs lie. One Token Ring to rule them all, One Token Ring to find them,One Token Ring to bring them all together and in the Microsoft darkness bind them In the Land of Microsoft Vista where the Buggy-Bugs lie.-- J R R Tolkien, amended and perverted
has slashdot sunk so low that every fucktard who wants to bash microsoft in their blog now makes it to the front page? what happened to actually posting stories on the front page for their content instead of for their flamefest value? what's happened to the hard tech articles that use to be here? it's either a bash article or a political rant. the technical richness of the site is dead.
calling it a predecessor kind of broke the satire, don't ya think?
FYI: I don't know what you guys are talking about half the time.
When are we going to feel tired bashing Vista?
When M$ dies. Really. They are spending a billion dollars a month advertising it, channel stuffing stores like CompUSA to bankruptcy, ruining careers of reasonable people like Peter Quinn, sabotaging competitors and other dirty things to perpetuate their 20 year old vendor lock down. Vista sucks and it's right to show how.
I'm not a fan of MS
I'm sure you hate your employer more than any of us can.
i just don't see anything really bad with Vista.
Your employers are the only people who see things that way.Everyone else is tired of losing money on it and says it sucks.
If nothing else, it looks more pleasant. In contrast, one of XP machine is running like snail ...
Both are better than a sharp stick in the eyes but they both blow. Free software and Mac are better for users than either.
-- QED
... just crashes randomly of its own accord.
Here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228/
Your RAM will never be half-unused with Vista. it will always be fully used. Check out the "Free" counter in Task Manager. Most of the time it will be below 10 MB.
Like Mozilla did a few years ago, I expect that somebody will inevitably fork OpenOffice, and create a lightweight simplistic version of the suite
I'd love it if someone were to do that with Mozilla. That'd be awesome.
"Is it really that hard?"
Hehe. For those with long memories, you all may remember the early Linux distribution reviews and people's reactions here to criticism.
Do you even have Vista? It is incapable of playing any kind of audio file without stuttering and popping -- this on a machine that played anything perfectly on WinXP or Ubuntu -- and the only difference is, I added another gig of ram when installing Vista.
Plenty of people are having this problem. It's because of the shitty way they reeingineered the audio stack. Yeah, there's per-application volume. Who gives a fuck when it can't play a file without stuttering?
Windows Vista 64-bit edition does not load any unsigned kernel-mode drivers, and it does not load test-signed drivers outside of an ugly "test mode". It costs $500 per year to get a code signing certificate from VeriSign. (Google will tell you more.) Providers of assistive technologies, especially individuals and small non-profit organizations, often can't afford this expense.
Well I'm not him but I have a feeling I'll have to reinstall W2K after having avoided it as long as possible. Shame the mup.sys problem has many causes but no solution. I'm wondering if all the service packs I've installed over the years are saved somwere? I could slipstream those as well. And yes I have access to a Win98 machine.
Windows ME anyone?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm running Vista x64 at the moment and I'm torn as to whether I should roll back or not. There are some nice features in Vista and x64 that I like:
* >3GB support. I do Adobe Flex & Ruby on Rails dev currently, and having >3GB of RAM really helps here, as Flex Builder/plugin, Photoshop, Flash, & Firefox really suck up RAM like there is no tomorrow.
* Vista Task Manager is much improved, with command line args, etc.
* Real symbolic link support (ln -s style) across network volumes.
* I can do without the flip card Windows-Tab, but I do like the new Alt-TAB and Task Bar preview windows.
* I run Windows Media Center with my HDHomeRun, and the new version is better than the one with XP.
* I like the goal of UAC, and if UAC didn't cause my LCD to lose sync when it does the whole screen blink thing, it wouldn't be too annoying. It is annoying at times dealing with messing with files in the Program Files directory, but many users wouldn't need to do this.
* Better sound/volume management: So for instance my Logitech di Novo Edge keyboard volume control actually works in Vista. Using WMP used to cause muting problems when pausing on XP as well.
Problems:
* Haven't been able to figure out how to get ANSI.SYS/Ansi Colors to work in the command prompt on Vista x64.
* x64 versus x86 right click Explorer extensions. I use Directory Opus, which is only 32 bit, so I have to install both version of TortoiseSVN, etc. (x64 and x86 versions).
* Adobe Flash has problems with dragging causing the desktop windows manager to think it is not responding. So dragging the timeline playhead around, dwm takes over and whites out the app even tho nothing is really wrong.
* Drivers drivers drivers. My HP ADF Scanner has no x64 drivers, and no Vista drivers, though apparently you can get it to work on 32 bit Vista by running some things as admin.
* SuperFetch. SuperFetch was causing my system to hang 5 minutes after startup pretty consistently.
* DRM would be an issue if I ever used DRM's BluRay/HDDVD. Fortunately there are ways around that.
* Lack of vbscript.dll or suitable replacement for doing *real* Regular Expression searches in Word VBA. I'm not saying vbscript.dll should be there, just that VBA should have RegExpressions included. There is a version you can buy, but $100 to add regexp to Word is ridiculous. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but it is a problem.
Linux?:
* There is an Alpha version of Flex Builder for linux, but I don't think it is ready for prime time yet.
* I love MythTV in theory, but you have to pay for listing now. Even tho it's not a lot, it is still a negative (assuming you didn't pay for Ultimate Vista).
* No Directory Opus. It really is a god among file managers.
* Games: I play a couple of games, and at a certain point it gets to be too much effort to figure to how to get decent performance in WINE/Cedega etc.
* I like the concept of OpenOffice, but for my needs, MS Office 2k7 is just better at the moment, even though I only use it for RTF, and the new Ribbon interface *does* work once you get it figured out and put a couple of custom commands in the right places. OpenOffice is sorely missing regular expression *replace* as well. And I have some custom VBA dialogs/macros that I would need to convert (lock-in I know).
* Photoshop/Flash CS3 etc.
Mac?:
* I have a Mac Book, and I like it, but I like to build my own systems/upgrade/low noise, and Mac just doesn't have the same flexibility for the price.
* Software: I dual boot my Power Book for a couple of things, but dual booting my main system isn't really something I'm into, and I haven't looked into whether Parallels/VMWare etc would allow me to use my ADF scanner in a VM on either Mac Book or my Vista x64 system, and games, blah blah.
I'm sure there are more, but still haven;t gotten frustrated enough with Vista x64 to make the rollback happen.
http://blog.slaingod.com
Around last year I perfected my knowledge of XP from a user's end... and now my optimized system runs software at twice the benchmark of the average XP installation.
//e lasted longer before it was outdated.
Its finally stable, and reliable...and... wait didn't this happen with NT and then they discontinued it and made everyone upgrade to XP? I have been afraid that microsoft will just drop support of XP early next year and force everyone to upgrade to vista... meaning I need to buy a new computer then too, sigh. Every time someone at work wanted to demo vista to me or have me cross-browser test some sites on it, it crashed instantly.
But XP is pretty good now, and only my Apple
people resist change and justify their resistance
The main one that I can think of is the Compatibility Wizard / Compatibility tab in a program's properties. That and XP had a cheaper Home version (2000 only came in Professional, Server, Advanced Server, Cluster Server, and Datacenter editions iirc).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I would think .NET (or just NET)-lords would fit better.
There is no requirement in Vista to use software audio effects. Creative's OpenAL works directly on the hardware, and Creative has even released software that allows DirectSound games to access the audio hardware through OpenAL.
Software-mode DirectSound had nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with making the audio system run in the userspace. With the audio system moving out of the kernel, it doesn't make sense from both a security and abstraction perspective to expose the hardware to individual applications directly. That means that third-party hacks like EAX, useful as they may be, don't have a place in the audio stack.
The vast, vast majority of users have integrated audio - even gamers. Integrated audio nearly always uses software emulation anyway, and it's often of poor quality. Moving to a standardized software implementation that is the same regardless of the audio chipset just makes sense.
This seems to be the time for a car analogy. Sorry.
From what I read, Parking Spot X trounces Car Model Y in tyre compatibility.
WINE is a car (or rather some part of the suspension of the Linux car). You can fit the tyres if you are lucky, and then you are set to go.
VMware is a parking spot where you can place any car, so theoretically your parking spot is compatible with any tyre you can find a car for. But you will still need to get a car on top of the parking spot if you want to use your tyres.
Are you sure you understand the difference between WMware and WINE?
Previous versions. This alone is worth the upgrade to Vista.
You don't understand how important this feature is until it saves your ass. Maybe you forgot to put that important document into a version control system. Maybe your version control system screwed up. Maybe you haven't been conscientious about doing nightly backups.
Previous versions is there. It's on by default, it snapshots at least once per day (more if you request it), and it's easy to use if you need to recover something. It doesn't take much disk space, because it stores deltas rather than complete copies.
It's not as sexy as Time Machine, but it's there by default, ready and waiting for you to make a mistake.
I got a new PC a few weeks ago (black friday deal) and it came with Vista home premium installed. I wasn't looking to move to Vista, but I figured it couldn't be as bad as people have been saying so I decided to give it a shot. Turns out it really is as craptastic as folks have been saying. Here's how my experience has gone. First boot up it can't find my LCD monitor and hangs when I try to fill out the ACER warranty form. Trying to enable the LCD didn't go well either, but it eventually worked after 5 minutes of back and forth flickering between the screens (mind you this was a pre-built machine so you would think it would have the appropriate drivers loaded). The UAC system was annoying as well, but I tried to live with it for the extra security. It wound up getting turned off after a few hours when it kept blocking functionality Aptana needed. The system also just seems generally unstable...probably about 1/2 the time I try to come back from standby, it won't turn back on and i have to hard-kill it. On the plus side, this has led me to become much better at saving my work more frequently:) Gaming has been another nightmare. I mean it's not a top of the line system and I'm more of a console gamer, but since it came with a fairly decent graphics card (Radeon HD2600 Pro) I figured I'd try out a couple of the better PC games I'd seen. I bought one of those Wireless receivers for an Xbox controller and the installation disc didn't even include the right drivers for Vista...not a big deal but kind of a WTF? for a microsoft driver cd to not have Vista drivers on it. Playing Bioshock is hit or miss. At first it had no sound until I started running it in xp compatability mode. It also seems like it only loads about 1/2 the time. Sometimes it will load in windowed mode and on the occasion it does load in full screen mode it will often break the dual monitor setup when I exit, requiring a reboot. I just bought Crysis today and it has been an adventure as well. First run it locks up before I even get to a level requiring a hard-kill. I haven't bothered with it again yet but I'm not optimistic. Crysis was the last straw for me as like the author I will be upgrading to XP tomorrow.
"If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up..."
Big mistake! That's precisely what Microsoft and its engineers have never been able to do properly. First they had DOS (which, as you'll recall, they "got" from someone else by whatever means). Then they had Windows, based on ideas picked up from a visit to Apple (which in turn got them from Xerox PARC, but that's another story). Neither DOS nor Windows 1-2-3 was really much good as an operating system, either in terms of functionality or stability. (And don't even think about security - that wasn't on the requirements list at all).
Then came the big turning point, when Gates had the wit to hire Dave Cutler and his crew from DEC, whose management was doing such a great job of driving it under the waves despite having the most powerful engines on the high seas. Ironic, really - DEC had great hardware and software coupled with lousy management, and Microsoft had great management coupled with lousy software. Naturally DEC didn't have the wit to hire some Microsoft managers, because its own managers were too dumb to think of that.
Everything you like about Windows since the mid-1990s is directly attributable to Cutler and his team. They laid down a steel skeleton for the "Black Pearl" that was Windows 3, while (regrettably) keeping the same user interface more or less intact. The result was a series of OS - NT, 2K, and XP - all of which (once debugged) are solid clients and pretty reliable servers too. To this day much of the internals of Windows bears a striking resemblance to the internals of VMS, right down to the names of data structures.
The trouble with Vista was precisely that Microsoft tried to get clever and creative. The further they get from the original NT steel skeleton, the more lost they are. (Don't even get me started on WinFS, which they never even managed to deliver).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Blindly modding troll without some kind of rebuttal makes yourself look stupid, and pretty much helps my post look stronger in this instance.
I smoke karma for breakfast.
throw new NoSignatureException();
They've made XP too good. Hey wait, there's "Service Pack" 3 coming.
$disablesenseofhumor++
You'd be better off with a command line linux.
Can use the full abilities of the hardware, multitasking, 32bit, 64bit, compatible with dos programs (dosemu).
Virtual terminals mean you can even run multiple full screen graphic programs like games or remote desktop or xinit.
$disablesenseofhumor--
You were modded a troll because the parent said they had tried UAC and it was annoying and thus must be turned off for the computer to be useful.
Your response was a smug "well, you should try it, it works great". Which is ironic, because you haven't done anything to justify your position that UAC is anything more than a marketing gimmick that must be turned off to allow you to use the computer properly.
There. Does that explain it? You're welcome.
It probably made the moderator want to bang your head on the table. Since he/she doesn't have that option, the best they could do is moderate you a troll.
I have the same problem. A dual core machine, tons of RAM, and it is constantly glitching MP3 playback. It's amazing how bad it is when you do routine stuff like, starting a new program, opening up the task manager, copying files, emptying the trash. If people don't hear it, then they're not trying very hard.
If they don't get it fixed in SP1, I'm done with it. I'll reformat go to XP or maybe just finally give up on Windows and make the move to Linux.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Ooh, well I've got a great piece of software for you. This software changed my whole user experience. Its called nLite, and in a nutshell it lets you rip your Windows CD to your hard drive, open up the installation files, tear out all unwanted elements, repackage it and burn it into a new installation CD. I've been running my own version of Windows for a couple years now. I pre-set all my preferences (so on a fresh install, sound FX are off by default, as one example), preinstalled certain drivers, pre-installed my Service Packs, obliterated any trace of Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and MSN. It's also a hands-free installation, so you can just drop it in your drive and let it go on it's own for most of the way.
Probably the best part I like about this app is that it actually gives you a breakdown on what each section of Windows does, so you know what you're taking out. It has great, simple information on each component, and if it's critical to windows operation or not (so you don't create a monster that doesn't even boot).
http://nliteos.com/
And if you want to go a step further you can always get some disc-cloning software like Ghost or something, and just make a clone of your drive after a fresh install.
Hey, twitter! Yeah, I know, AC and all, but it's the most friggin' obvious thing in the world. Fool.
I write bullshit
If XP came out today and its requirements were scaled by the same amount my machine has scaled in that interval, it would use 1.75GB ram when browsing the web after booting, take 25GB of HD space on a fresh install and require a 1GHz CPU.
;-p
I would be complaining about the lack of backward compatibility with vista's apps, how unstable XP is compared to Vista SP3, running as root and missing security such as UAC and firewall. With these gone who knows what's going behind your back!
I'd also complain about the crappy fisher price colour scheme and how they rearranged the control panel. And that searching is too slow and you can't just search the entire start menu any more.
At a stretch, I'd also mention that the default browser doesn't even have tabs, that explorer is also the browser like it was during the annoying IE4/win98 period. And it's missing mahjong, one of my favourite default games.
XP's sounds are too loud and in your face, and I can't control the volume of individual apps any more, like I would so that skype can't deafen me when I'm playing videos. So now I can't even hear anyone's retort. What? WHAT? LALALA!
This article compares one msft product to another msft-product. Either way, msft wins. How is this anti-msft?
2) Slashdot is not rabidly anti-msft. Far *far* from it. Often, when an OOXML, or Vista, article is discussed, the forums are flooded with pro-msft zealots, and all the pro-msft are modded way up, and the anti-msft posts are all modded way down. It happens all the time. Five years ago, slashdot may have been anti-msft, but not anymore.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
How many of you remember the fact that Microsoft was sued for stealing a patented ergonomic mouse?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
One of the most insightful students of the American psyche is Alexis de Tocqueville. He observed the American penchant for volunteer cooperative organizations, starting with volunteer fire departments and going from there. He said this volunteerism is unique, not found anywhere else in the world (not even neighboring Canada, which he also studied).
Open source software is an extension of this uniquely American practice of using voluntary cooperative associations to do what is needed -- and now extended world-wide by the Internet.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
What total, irrelevant bullsh*t. DRM has been at the core of why I won't touch Vista, and hope that it, and Microsoft, crash and burn without trace. That's not going to change, because it's not about technical capabilities, it's about my rights and responsibilities.
Simply, I don't care how well Vista does or doesn't play whatever it finally deigns to permit, nor even how small or obscure the subset of things it won't play is. I object in principle (and at a fundamental, "scr*w you" level) to the idea that an OS should be allowed to have any part in determining what I, as a private and legally accountable individual, am or am not "allowed" to do. Respecting the legal rights of others, and understanding what that entails, here and now, is *my* job, and while I have an ounce of choice in the matter I'm going nowhere near a product that presumes to think differently.
I can't help it if I then get considerable satisfaction in seeing that my employers (a large multinational) continue for technical reasons to roll out XP installs on the company machines, rather than Vista - that's just the icing on the cake.
As someone else did mention, a great well reasoned reply to the MS fanboy 'What Me Worry?' dolts who can't see the absolute throttling of our rights and use of our own computers that is being attempted. It's hard to use reasoning and logic with some people who only respond to misleading advertising involving pretty women and 'cool' looking people and promises of 'more realistic' smoke for their gaming experiences when in exchange you give your ability to use your own computer as you see fit. Vista is the stink bomb and it's flagship whoopsie doo game Crysis is bombing as well so to me it seems like there is hope for people to not be fooled by it all.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
"Why doesn't my keyboard work in this system tool, and that system tool?
Microsoft has put new security measures into Windows Vista to make shatter attacks more difficult, called User Interface Privilege Isolation. Low-privilege software can't send messages to higher-privilege processes, except for messages on a Microsoft-defined whitelist such as WM_KEYDOWN. Only signed code (again, starting at $499 per publisher per year to VeriSign) can bypass the whitelist, and I have not yet read enough about this to know whether the whitelisted messages are enough for implementing complete user interface accessibility.
In many academic environments, Blackboard is used for many courses, as a way to get course information, turn in assignments, and communicate. Take tests, sometimes. Students with brandy-new Vista machines were unable to post to class discussion boards or take part in surveys or online tests. They haven't figured out the problem yet, but it does not seem to be the Active-X issue which is an ongoing problem from recent Explorer upgrades. About a year ago, Blackboard was saying that it wasn't yet Vista compatible. Still seems not to be.
True, the music industry has had a few outbreaks of common sense since Apple and EMI announced iTunes Plus, but most of the new DRM in Windows Vista is related to video. To residential end users, audio is no substitute for video; the American people have largely abandoned radio dramas.
Consumer audio reached the highest level of fidelity that the economically significant majority of people care about back in the 1980s with the introduction of Compact Disc Digital Audio. Since then, improvements have been largely to convenience (CD changers, portable CD players, MP3 software, portable MP3 players). Consumer video, on the other hand, has continued to increase in fidelity since then: digital recording (LaserDisc), fully digital recording (DVD), more horizontal resolution (component video), progressive scanning (EDTV), and more pixels (HDTV, HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc).
Besides, it costs a lot more money to produce video than to produce audio. A 110-minute double album can be recorded for well under a million dollars, even in the overproduced pop style that the public appears to prefer as of 2007. A 110-minute movie, on the other hand, might cost two orders of magnitude more.
Interesting how "don't buy corporate produced media". e.g. MPAA,RIAA,etc is never presented as part of the solution every time DRM is discussed on Slashdot. Wonder why?
No shit, genius. New operating system = new system requirements. Everyone expects that. That wasn't his question. He wanted to know what the incentive to upgrade to Vista is. Is there some killer app that will make it the must-have operating system? Or is it just another run of the mill upgrade with some tweaks?
I shall then contribute some Actual Harm.
I use 3rd party Mp3 players, choosing to bypass both iPods and both Microsoft lines. (PlaysWithVistaForSure) and (ZuneDoesNotPlayForSure).
For me, the entire point of these is that they are data storage devices underneath, and can hold a few items besides your batch of songs on there. Therefore, I never need to buy vanilla data drives, because one of the players always has an extra 200 megs left.
One day, they simply refuse to accept new files, and the fields in MyComputer have been changed from DeviceName, Type, Size, Space Free to Album, Song, Artist, Year. Things that make you go "Hmm."
Life trundled on for a while, and then I happened to be fiddling with one of my backup machines. *The behavior was back to normal*. Really!?
Get this - it was some weird "anti-functionality" from Windows Media Player 11. When I uninstalled it, everything went back to normal. To confirm, I re-installed it. Bricked again. Uninstalled again. Everything fine.
That was THE last straw.
We can discuss little quirks here and there, but I will not allow Microsoft to totally hose my devices.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
wait a second, we've seen this before haven't we...remember windows ME? I for one use Linux :P that way i dont have to listen to the annoying marketing war between apple and windows. Witch do you guys think was worse? windowsME or Vista? ;)
I have a 19" CRT monitor with Windows XP SP2, and I like it because I play games a lot.
Well, my first experience with Vista was when a friend got his tower here, and Vista would not reproduce fullscreen video in my monitor.
Well, that was before I wiped that piece of garbage and installed a streamlined version of XP that starts up in 15 seconds top.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Vista's eye candy is limited to things people might find useful
Again, the rigid black/white, all or nothing thinking.
XP has settings for individual graphical effects (eg. menu fading, etc), Vista could have the same for eye candy. That way everybody can decide for themselves what's "useful" or not.
I bet a lot of 'business' users would turn it all on (and enjoy it).
No sig today...
I used win98 until late 2004 or so when I upgraded to XP. I was glad I waited, my XP experience has been great since. Have a laptop with an oem xp, and 2 desktops with 2 win xp cds. Ati had to stop making win 98 SE video drivers for me to want to upgrade.
Now that XP SP3 is coming out, I cannot wait.
I wont even dwell on messing up my working computers and moving to Vista until SP2 Vista has been out for at least 6 months to a year. My buddy next door made the mistake of getting a laptop with vista on it (after I told him not to get vista), he has had nothing but bad luck and mis fortune with it since he got it. Of course he asks me for help with it, and I am like, sorry, never touched Vista, so I don't know, I suggested he upgrade to Xp, so he wiped vista off of it and went back to using XP Pro.
I don't even feel sorry for MS, they brought it on them selves. Maybe if they understood what people wanted out of an OS, they could make some headway. Instead they are more interested in invading every other market for monopoly purposes instead of paying attention to their original monopoly they lost.
~DF
I can a very big problem in the 'XP FOREVER' camp, namely drivers. A friend of mine got a cheap laptop (~$500) and immediately wanted to clear Vista Home off of there, and install an nLited copy of XP. It failed, because XP didn't have the SATA drivers needed. After he slipstreamed them in, it installed, but he ran into several driver issues, like the onboard Intel video not supporting Shader Model 2 under XP. The hardware could do it, but Intel had simply stopped caring when Vista came out. I'm not even going to get into the hoops he had to jump through to get audio working properly on there. I'm guessing that many companies are just going to stop developing drivers for newer hardware, soon leaving us with no way to have 100% functionality on XP. Will we see a dedicated scene emerge, similar to the linux crowd, where people spend a huge amount of time trying to write/hack together new drivers, just so they can keep back the encroaching tide of Vista?
My question to you would be, why the hell would you want GPU multi-tasking? I wouldn't WANT hardware acceleration for the desktop and an app at the same time. The desktop doesn't need it, and it would reduce performance in your applications. I want my games to perform faster, not slower. Also, just because XP doesn't support GPU multi-tasking doesn't mean DX10 cannot be used on XP. If coded properly, you would just need to disable that feature depending on the OS.
The main one that I can think of is the Compatibility Wizard / Compatibility tab in a program's properties.
That is -not- a killer app by even the loosest interpretation. Backwards compatibility is inherently not a reason to upgrade. It eases an upgrade sure, but since we're talking about users who were already happily using the older version of windows the ability to keep doing what they were doing in the new version is not a compelling must-have reason to upgrade.
That and XP had a cheaper Home version (2000 only came in Professional, Server, Advanced Server, Cluster Server, and Datacenter editions iirc).
Again, not a killer app. Business users went from 2000 to Pro because they needed domain support. Home users were predominantly running 98, so the XP Home edition is hardly a killer app. And home users going from 2000 Professional to XP Home actually took a hit. They lost the security model they were used to, they lost the ability to join a domain, share arbitrary folders easily, etc, etc.
Sure it was a more attractive price point and made the jump to XP Home less daunting for users of Windows 98, but again, decidely not a killer app.
Oh, and just for the record, there was a "Windows 2000 Home edition" in the works, but it was killed off and never released. Apparently it was similiar to XP Home in that it only supported one CPU instead of 2 and other similiar limitations. I guess they deemed it wasn't ready for the home market - and we got Millenium Edition instead. I think I would have preferred Windows 2000 Home edition.
Hey, that should be Microsoft's new Vista marketing strategy: "Get the fuck over it." Snappy!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Same question to you, but for XP vs 2K.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So how long before the service packs break and bog down XP to the point Vista with a few good service pack fixes under its belt sucks less than your up to date XP? Tune up the new, detune the old. I don't think they can afford to have Vista be seen as a flop by the average person or the industry at large. It does not matter what this crowd thinks, it is irrelevant to them, what matters is the mass perception. Would they do it? Remember who we are talking about here.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Why? Because I cannot agree to the EULA and not agreeing with it is irrelevant because many of the things it says you will allow to happen are coded in to the source, so there is no way I can say "that is not legally enforceable" because it doesn't matter if it's legally enforceable or not, the only way to avoid it happening is to not use XP.
Been that way for a loooong time.
"That's a fair point. What I was more trying to say is that Windows doesn't let you do things that it thinks is a copyright violation, which is quite different to something actually being a copyright violation. The DRM allows the content producer to interfere with how I use a file on my own machine without having to be able to support their restrictions and rule through law. It becomes a case of my freedom being restricted not through a socially accepted right to restrict it or through an agreed contract, but simply because the content provider is able to reach into my home and restrict it through technology. "
;) "
Sounds like a fair deal. The public is already on record that it feels it's OK to pirate copyrighted material, and has been using technology since it's inception to restrict the copyright holders rights. So why should one be surprized that everyone's favourite "technology" is being used against it? Goose, gander and all that.
"As to wanting things to get worse so that the public will object, I think that its already sufficiently bad enough for that, and I'm part of the public so I'm objecting.
Except for the fact their objecting to the wrong cause. It would be one thing if people weren't pirating at all and we had DRM. But that's not reality. Piracy came first, then DRM. The public didn't see the writing on the wall and continued to pirate. So why should anyone start crying tears for those who can't take a hint?
In contrast, one of XP machine is running like snail still after several attempts to clean ups, defrags, and registry cleanings; so i don't even want to boot it up anymore.
So I'm not sure which to believe... "Use XP because Vista sucks," or "Use Vista because XP sucks."
Personally I use OS X and only read the Vista-sucks articles for the comedy value. They'll never be relevant to me or my employer...
you had me at #!
Honestly, why are people so clueless. Life is short.
you had me at #!
98 to XP was a huge leap forward in stability. I remember the daily crashes of 98, which, in my experience, crashed more than Windows 95 did. I don't know about ME, because I never tried it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I installed Vista on my (then) basically top of the range Acer TM 8215 Core 2 Duo 2GHz 2GB RAM laptop, which had XP on it before, and I don't think I can even begin to scrape the surface here of just what a horrible experience it's been. An enormous amount of money's worth of apps were broken - my VS6, Photoshop 7, Acrobat 4 etc. Multi-monitor support has been broken and buggy and flaky since day one. In the default aqua mode, the system runs so slowly that you can 'feel' the lag between pressing keys on the keyboard and the appearing of the characters on screen even in things like Notepad. No amount of driver upgrading has solved this yet (I did however solve it by disabling the only nice thing about Vista, that it looks much better than XP, i.e. I had to go into a classic interface mode). Half the hardware was broken too and it's taken literally man-weeks to fix (almost) everything (so far) --- the most retarded being basic USB devices like Microsoft mice or flash disks or external hard disks didn't even work (fixing it took months of waiting for patches to come out as well as browsing online forums and doing odd registry hacks and manual workarounds); bluetooth still doesn't work, my webcam was broken and I had to jump through crazy hoops and browse lots of online forums to figure out how to get it to work (MS messed up the driver name); my Canon digital camera didn't work with it; my Nokia phone software didn't work - all took hours or days of researching 3rd-party forums etc. to fix. Infra-red and card reader still don't work. Copying/moving/deleting files is ridiculously slow and silly, even if you delete one file you watch this dialog "discovering" and "calculating" and "estimating" and eventually doing its thing. Explorer is a fscking joke - they've somehow made the world's worst file manager even worse - it almost seems to randomly select a different view mode for every folder even though I've told it to view all the same (if I didn't have to use Tortoise I wouldn't use it at all). It keeps grouping the views in stupid ways and I can't see any way to disabled grouped views. It's less keyboard-friendly too, and pressing 'tab' takes you in strange circles sometimes. I also have the 'hard drive going incessantly while idle' that the person in this review had, and I've really tried disabling just about every service etc. but just can't get it to go away. It spontaneously restarted a few days and hard-killed my open applications while I was working to install some updates - no warnings, nothing. It has a stupid bug in it whereby in some applications, it randomly makes a "ding" sound when clicking in any list (seriously - google 'vista ding problem' or 'vista system beep listctrl'). It's generally slower than XP, the memory management is terrible (apps seem to end up in swap just when you breathe funny and never quite come out). There are strange problems with networking, e.g. ODBC is just twice as slow as XP, for no apparent reason. The SAMBA is broken - or at least, it broke support for e.g. my Mac mapped samba drives that worked PERFECTLY in XP, and after some months I eventually found a forum that explained some obscure registry edits you have to do to get it to work. It also doesn't run some of the legacy (e.g. DOS/VGA) apps I used to be able to run perfectly fine on XP. When browsing through a folder of videos, when trying to open them with Media player there is often a huge (e.g. 30 second +) delay before it'll start playing a file. On the plus side, well, actually I can't think of any advantage over XP at all. I only installed it to see what it was like and because our own applications need to run on it. I've had problems with the wireless networking randomly sometimes just 'breaking', and restarting the computer is required to fix it. There are problems with things like networking or USB devices not waking up when coming out of sleep mode. I do not have broken hardware - everything worked fine under XP. I want XP back. I don't think I exaggerate in saying Vista is a horrible tragic disaster and the worst thing MS has ever puked up, and I'll most likely be using a Mac as my next primary system - I honestly now just want to turn my back on them.
Nuff said.
you had me at #!
Not totally at least. 3D acceleration as architected today pairs X with kernel drivers for the DRI stuff. 2D acceleration can get by without a kernel module, but realistically speaking, that's relatively a trivial task in this day and age.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Circumcision is child abuse.
lasted on my laptop for 4 hours before IT was purged. Dual boot Fedora / XP for when I have to run an winbloz ap.
I did the same just to see what it was like... I'll be upgrading to Ubuntu Compiz after the holidays settle down. The performance is just way to low on Vista to even think about keeping. it.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
Speaking of XP, as of last week MS are pushing WGA as a high priority (=mandatory) update some of the XP machines I've been working on. It's not optional and cannot be ignored. Anyone noticed that?
...because of their stupid pen input thing. I don't believe I've seen this issue mentioned before, so let me lay it out for you.
I'm a graphic artist, and I'm a sucker for pretty desktops which is why I installed Vista in the first place.
As soon as I installed my Wacom Intuos3 though Vista disabled the default driver, installed its own suite of handwriting garbage, and disabled the Wacom driver I installed. Not only did that turn off the tilt and pressure sensitivity on the tablet, it also made the pen very unresponsive making it way way too slow to draw.
And here's the best part. You can't turn Vista's pen tools off! Not without going into the registry or something, and I'm not going to mess with that.
I totally agree that Vista is unusable, and W2k was awesome, and the initial XP was crap... I agree with all that, but you said something deriding Windows 64-bit, I'm assuming you're talking about x64. For me, x64 has been the best Windows TO DATE. I have a 64 bit processor, and there aren't drivers for some generic/old hardware, but other than that, it is ROCK SOLID, FAST, and operates pretty much how it should at all times.
I only wish there was a Tinyx64, since I hate reformatting and having to type in security codes and reboot. I miss how TinyXP just did all of that for me.
And of course, none of the Windows are really equal to Ubuntu at this time, but there aren't any games for Ubuntu.... so.....
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I love a good MS-bashing as much as the next guy but please, before bashing something at least try it first. I've just installed Vista on a from-scratch built computer and I have nothing to say but good things (surprisingly). I decided to take the plunge and go Vista from my old Win2K setup and I'm glad that I did. Unlike some other people who may or may not have actual experience with Vista I've had no problems AT ALL. No problems with drivers for old or new hardware, no crashes or hangups. Nothing. Lord knows I kinda' expected the worst (or at least not the best) based on comments from other folks but I've had nothing but a good experience. And as far as DRM is concerned another poster has it right; Microsoft imposes no DRM at all for any common or standard task. This is not to say that they don't facilitate it -- I had the same "can't print the PDF file" issue as someone else -- but it is not fair to blame Microsoft for simply running a program created by someone else.
In short - don't knock it until you really try it. You may be surprised.
Who is claimed that Vista is an appropriate server system?
By "crazy graphics bugs" I hope he doesn't seriously mean the way things tend to "stick" to the desktop if the system is too busy to clear them when they are supposed to fade, or some such... because that's a problem Vista doesn't have (if using Aero) and XP does. I have yet to see a singe "crazy graphics bug" of the sort described in TFA in Vista. Maybe he should update his drivers?
Faster and more responsive depends on your metric. Vista opens my programs MUCH faster than XP, because SuperFetch has already cashed them into RAM in anticipation of (for example) my regular afternoon roaming gang in EVE Online (a game with a large memory footprint that takes upwards of 8 seconds to load in XP). Vista is also so much faster at searching it's not even in the same league as XP - there are after market add-ons that come a lot closer, but Vista's search blows anything shipping with XP out of the water, and its integration into the Start menu means that after just a few weeks of using Vista it was so automatic that I couldn't understand at first why it wasn't working when I had to use an XP machine. XP certainly also had its moments when you would double-click on My Computer, nothing would happen, so you're wait a few seconds and double-click again. Repeat a couple times until suddenly it works, and four identical windows open at once.
"System lock on login" is the one that made me actually go RTFM, because I couldn't believe ANYBODY was that blatantly wrong. One of the well-known issues with XP is that immediately after login, for up to 5 minutes in the case of one machine I saw, the system is too busy to do anything else - in fact, trying to start another program during this time slows things down so much that it takes longer than waiting for it to finish loading completely, then starting the app. Vista still takes a while on bootup (though you could reduce this by not using the sidebar; for me it's worth it) but it's much better about allowing you to do other things during bootup. Then again, I upgraded from a (pre-loaded with a ton of shitty software) OEM copy of XP to a clean version of Vista, whereas the reviewer presumably went the other way.
For the multitasking one I have no clue WHAT the idiot is on; the kind of halt-the-whole-system-I'm-busy described in TFA has never happened to me on either XP or Vista, save when a truly excessive amount of swap was in use (and that was on XP, years ago when I ran with under half a gig of RAM).
File copy and delete got a lot faster when they released a patch somewhere near 2 months back that resolved a lot of the "calculating" delay. It might still be slower, but it also has vastly better options with regard to file overwriting, and as somebody who used to run as a limited user on XP the ability to do a file operation in a restricted location without starting a special instance of Explorer as admin make's the slight delay quite worth it.
I'm not sure where the comment on Windows Update is coming from; the Background Intellignet Transfer Service used in XP is still used in Vista, and I have yet to see either one slow down my web browsing. Maybe large file downloads are affected a bit, but I've certainly not found Vista worse than XP.
The driver issue is mostly a third-party one, but I've had no troubles in months either except for nVidia and their refusal to support their laptop cards with the official drivers (I'm using a modified INF file with a much newer driver than is officially available for the card, and it works great). Vista can also load 95% of XP drivers in my experience; the sole serious exception is network device or service drivers.
Since Vista automatically checks online for new drivers, I've found it much BETTER at locating drivers than XP was - for example, it automatically found my webcam driver, while before I had to go dig through HP's site.
Requires less hardware I'm not going to argue, except to point out that Vista's needs are pretty perfectly aligned with Moore's Law and XP's needs (roughly 8x the officia
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
My question to you would be, why the hell would you want GPU multi-tasking?
... Try that in XP...
You know. The same sort of idiot as you asked, back in 1987, "Why would I want CPU multiasking for the shell and an app at the same time. I want my games to run faster, not slower."
Then in 1997 he asked "Why would I want DirectX?" its an api on top of a device driver through the windows bloated kernel for chrissake! Games should talk directly to to the hardware not through 3 layers of crap. I want my games to perform faster, not slower."
Apparently in 2007 that group is asking "Why would I want GPU multitasking..."
The answer? Because taking a couple percentage points in performance hit, to allow your entire desktop to run accelerated is a significant step forward for the desktop. Why should my quad-core desktop be able to multitask like a demon out of hell but run like a retarded dog if more than 1 of those applications needs video acceleration. And given the current trends, both OSX and Linux are doing it...; hell OS X's Final Cut Pro ads show it running half a dozen video windows at once overlapped, and you hit expose and they shrink and float around and all continue playing without missing a bit. Try that in XP. Next check out Beryl or Compiz or whatever its called this week
Also, just because XP doesn't support GPU multi-tasking doesn't mean DX10 cannot be used on XP.
DirectX10, in order to support GPU multitasking and the blu-ray/hddvd DRM stuff requires all new drivers, and an all new driver model, and an updated kernal that can deal with the new driver model and new drivers. It can't just be lumped backwards onto XP, without giving XP the new driver model, and the kernel update...but then its not really XP anymore.
They can add the new 'direct3d shadermodel 4 stuff' to directx9, and it sounds like that's exactly what they are doing for the next directx9 update for xp. But while it may have the new 'pretty shader features' of directx10, its not directx10.
If coded properly, you would just need to disable that feature depending on the OS.
Yup. "If coded properly". Of course. Why didn't I think of that...so all we have to do is take the entire new driver model from Vista, backport it to XP, without breaking anything including all the existing XP drivers (which don't acutally work with Vista's new driver model... so now XP is going to have Vista's driver model and XP's running together in harmony. Piece of cake... "if coded properly".
You are right, its a step 'backwards for games', the same way Windows was a step backwards from DOS for games. But in the long run, its a step forward. And remember, Windows is the LAST of the major PC OSes to make this move... both OSX and Linux have got 3D accelerated desktops, and have had them for a while.
-stability- however is not a killer app.
If it were than Vista's killer app is also -stability- because with UAC, removing you as administrator by default, and forcing signed device drivers by default (in x64) they have significantly hardened the OS against malware, viruses, and rootkits, which will improve the PC's overall reliability and stability. XP might not actually -crash- but a malware infested PC is not exactly a joy to use either.
You remember 98 crashing daily? I don't. My 98 PC didn't actually crash all that often, and it still doesn't (yeah I have a couple around for testing, and supporting old software), because the OS itself wasn't that bad, and I avoided using those applications and devices that were crap and crashed the OS, and it wasn't that hard to do either. Yes 98 would die if you left it on for weeks on end, but it was a desktop os, and a daily or weekly reboot was not exactly that onerous a problem.
Now I'm not defending 98. But I am saying it wasn't all that hard to get 98 running reasonably reliably for most people most of the time. And certainly enough, that a $200 'upgrade' to Vista, plus possibly a RAM upgrade, and hard drive upgrade to support XP was hardly a killer app. Especially since XP wasn't great with a lot of Win98 software, especially games, even with its significant efforts to do backwards compatibility. A lot of us dual-booted back to 98 for games.
Bottom line, yes, XP was definately a lot more stable than 98. But 98 wasn't really so bad that people would line up to by XP for 'stability', ergo... stability was not a killer app.
OK, so you actually do understand the difference between them. This leads to the obvious question:
Do you also compare parking lots to cars?
They're technically different, but serve similar purposes, so the comparison is not absurd.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Comparing them is not absurd, as long as you remember to consider that it is two fundamentally different ways of solving a problem.
Stating that one of them trounces the other is beyond absurd.
Wow. Congratulations, you might be the 2nd biggest douche bag in the universe. Thanks for being mature in your reply. GPU multitasking is completely different compared to CPU multitasking as with hardware acceleration you really only need to focus on one app at a time. CPU multitasking doesn't require that as it has little to do with visual output. Ok, new driver model, big fucking deal. It amounts to nothing. Why? Because you're spouting off reasons why it can't be ported from Vista to XP. It was never about that, I'm arguing that it could have been done for XP from the beginning. So now, instead of having DX10 shader support in XP, everyone has to buy a new copy of vista because 0.0001% of the Windows install base need GPU multitasking. Sorry, WANT gpu multitasking. Awesome. If you want GPU multi-tasking, use linux. Its free! I can understand how it would be useful. But not useful enough to force anyone who wants to use DX10 shaders to switch to vista. Its just another bullshit excuse for a waste of 5 years.
Hm. I'm not a hardcore geek, but not a basic user either.
:/
I moved to Windows 3.x because I needed the tcp/ip winsocket thing for internet access. Still was running games in dos4gw mode of course. The text typing app in windows was occasionally useful and better than the basic Dos edit thing, but then my old Amiga had a much better interface long before.
I went to Win 95 and that was a tremendous improvement despite all the bugs and the insane headaches getting everything configured. It was a pain but it -was- much better with a lot of things useful in there that I didn't have in Win 3.x. Of course, it broke a lot of the Dos games but hey, I could see that new games would use/need the stuff in Win 95.
98 came out and I pretty much ignored it. Didn't seem to have anything really useful and all games were made for 95/98 and word 95 worked fine thanks.
2k came out and I was given a laptop with it on it at work. Came to hate it when it hard crashed multiple times while I was working on some Word documents and lost everything without giving me a few seconds to copy/paste or even a grayed screen that allowed me to see what I had last typed and write out the outline on a paper or another machine(never had the issue on the last version of 95). Never used it outside of work, number of games didn't run on it anyway.
ME? hahaha
XP came out, and it -did- have a good number of actual improvements over 95(!). I made the switch, there were some bugs and issues but since it was offering me a lot of actual improvements for the basic stuff I was doing, I went through it. Sure was a LOT more stable compared =b
Same story as a lot of others, I read the reviews and decided to avoid vista. Unfortunately, when came time to buy a new laptop (old one went for a swim), couldn't find one with XP. Figured it couldn't be as bad as people said and got a new HP.
Vista Pros: I like the little internet icon that tells me if I'm connected to the network but not the internet.
It came with IE 7 which -is- better than 6 and that forced me to realize it (tabs are useful). That led me to try Firefox but doesn't work with some of the bank apps I use sorry
The default search is better than in xp
Vista cons: HELLLLLLLLOOOOO???????????????? What kind of an OS is it that runs out of resources and does NOT tell you when programs try to do stuff and fail???????????
You're sitting there with your usual 12 IE open, couple spreadsheets (openoffice, got tired of having to explain AGAIN to MS that yes, I was activating my legitimate paid-for copy of office xp on a new computer -again- because I changed it), Skype, Yahoo messenger, thunderbird and maybe WoW in the background.
And your coworker walks by and is surprised to see you and asks why you haven't replied to his Yahoo messages. At which point you try to send him a message and realize that you CANT! you get no error message, just... NOTHING! You double click again, and after a while understand that Vista just doesn't wanna do more than what it's currently doing and so is ignoring any requests to do so WITHOUT SAYING IT.
Means that if people send you messages, you don't get them and neither you nor them know about it.
Other cons: It's slow. Machine is a lot more powerful than the $300 HP/wallmart black friday laptop from a couple years back, and yet it's slow. Yes, I run a lot of stuff, but I did that on the older one (had 1.5gig of ram on it, didn't have a problem).
Did I mention I'm cheap and don't even have Aero since i have vista basic so it's not what's making it slow?
And what's up with the step backward on the task manager?? XP, app locks up, you ctrl/alt/del and you kill the app. Vista, app locks up, you do same... and sometimes, it doesn't work!!!! Or gets you to the useless menu about changing pw or switching user or buying pizza and when you click on "task manager"... it locks up again!!
DRM: Now I don't follow all the drm stuff, and I'm not trying to watch HD on anything so far, but I DO
Just FYI, for those that are contemplating an XP upgrade/downgrade/lateral redeployment/whatever, I *highly* recommend Nlite - it's a program for making XP install CD's with whatever you need to rip out culled, whatever device drivers et al.
There are features I never mastered - you can set it up to install your drivers, default programs, etcetera, and such - I've never gone farther than saving my 'must have' programs and drivers on the CD so I can install them when I need them, but you can do lots more, and you can rip out all sorts of XP detritus and have a really nice, fast os. Great for your game partition (Sorry, wine is great for some things, but it sucketh much on many).
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media