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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!
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
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.
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?
Hats off to Microsoft for releasing an OS that is obsolete before it even hit the shelves!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+
DOS. None of that shell nonsense. Straight forward computing for the masses! Fast, stable and with no eye candy what so ever.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
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".
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 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.
- 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!
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.