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Software Tool Strips Windows Vista To Bare Bones
Preedit writes "A free download that can cut Windows Vista's gargantuan footprint by half or more is developing a big following on the Internet. vLite is a configuration tool that lets users automatically delete a lot of unnecessary Vista components — such as Windows Media Player and MSN installer — to pare the OS down to a reasonable size.
The software is catching on. An InformationWeek story notes that a forum that asks users to suggest new features has drawn nearly 50,000 page views.
Meanwhile, Microsoft officials have themselves conceded that Vista is "bloated" and are developing the next version of Windows on a core called MinWin, which is smaller than Vista by an order of magnitude."
I think the person that said that MinWin is smaller than vista by an order of magnitude needs to rethink their description or check their numbers. The article says that Vista Ultimate requires 15GB to install (I am not sure if it is saying 15GB is only needed during the installation process or it needs that much after installation). However, the article also states that MinWin is based on 25MB of data. The article does not say how large an entire installation of MinWin will be. However the article phrases things in a way that leads me to believe they were only speaking of the base of MinWin when stating that it is smaller than vista by an order of magnitude. The differences is more than an mere order of magnitude.
how did you determine how much video memory was in use? is there a generic tool for that?
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
I know fine that the OS does a lot more, but the improvements (which are really good ideas, like leaving out backwards compatibility in DX10 etc to get rid of some bloat) have been totally counteracted by the GUI for one (yeah I know you don't have to use Aero), and DRM, whatever the **** is causing the 'long goodbye' and so on.. and sure prefetching is also a good thing to do in some cases (though if it's done badly then things just slow down even more with loads of stuff that you don't want being prefetched.. take the stupid Adobe 'Speedlaunch' for example..). I though that after XP Microsoft had started getting their act together, but so far it just seems like it was a fluke.. now that they've had a shock though maybe they will get their act together.. like Intel had to do to come up with the Core processors after the embarrassment that was the P4s/Ds
which is totally what she said
Really, there are two scenarios for getting Vista:
a) New PC. Has at least 400Gbyte HD (ok, maybe 120 if its a laptop). 15Gbyte is a very minor fraction.
Windows 3.1 used a larger part of the 120Mbyte HD my first PC had.
b) You buy it, and pay $$$ for it: 15Gbyte right now is the equivalent of 3 bucks. Thats about 1% of what you payed for the OS. Neglectable.
I rather have the convinience of never having to touch the install medium again, _and_ shadow copies of system files, ect, than having a 99.5% instead of 98.5% empty hd.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
As I point out here, AVG is not free if you use it outside the home, on a network, or in business. 4 years license for their AVG Internet Security (they sell it in 2-year increments, so 3 years means ypu have to pay for 4) is $140.00. $900.00 pc + $140.00 = $1,040.00
Also, I provided a like where you can get a MacBook for $1,019.
The mac is cheaper than the pc if you're going to keep it for more than 2 years, and you intend to network it (and who doesn't network their laptop) or you intend to use it outside the home (and who doesn't bring their laptop outside the home, and connect to wireless networks).
Kevin Smith on Prince
As someone who has tried Vista on 3 different systems (64-bit desktop, 32-bit desktop, and 32-bit laptop), I can honestly say the complaints about it are not FUD. It was completely unusable on the laptop and noticeably slower than XP on both desktops.
I may try it again when SP1 comes out. As for the DX10 features, they can be given to XP and Linux users via OpenGL, which always gets new graphics card features before DirectX. Back when hardware T&L was introduced, it was available on OpenGL as soon as the video cards shipped, but it required a new major version of DirectX. The same is true with features like geometry/streaming shaders. It will be years before any game developer using DX can drop support for DX9. As a game developer myself, this problem will ensure that I continue using OpenGL for a long time.
2) The 64-bit version of Vista removes backwards compatability for 16-bit applications. I dunno about you, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the games I grew up with... and some of those games are good enough that horrible dated graphics don't matter.
I understand the other points, but honestly... If you want to play the old 16-bit applications, run an emulator. There is absolutely no reason to keep the old cruft in the OS just to support the odd nostalgia trip. (I get them too, but I have no problem firing up qemu or xen or vmware)
Try using an off the shelf name brand computer with Vista, without any customization and cleanup, and you'll see the 5-10 secs to delete a file. Out of the box speed is a must for a consumer OS, in that realm, Vista is epic fail. Core2Duo 2.4ghz, 4GB ram (of which only 3 is being used, apparently. !!!WTF!!!) I'm glad its so terrible, though, its great job security. (What, you thought that pos was anywhere near my own machines?)
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My video card has it's own RAM, so no problem with that. I'm also running Mandriva Linux 99.9% of the time, and haven't noticed it slowing down at all. I know RAM is cheap lately, but I just haven't gotten around to buying RAM, because the amount of RAM seems to work fine for all my needs.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If anyone is curious, I took screenshots of a default XP Pro install vs. a customized (for my uses) XP install, both running in Parallels with the Parallels Tools installed.
Default XP Install - 22 processes, commit charge 105 MB
Custom XP Install - 17 processes, commit charge 52 MB
The difference is astronomical. It installs faster, boots faster, runs faster, and shuts down faster. Definitely worth the time, even just for one install.
So... you're saying that Vista runs great if you throw top-of-the-line hardware at it? Hell, I have a laptop that was near top of the line a little over a year ago, and it doesn't even have 4GB of RAM, or any SD cards for ReadyBoost. Try that machine with XP... it'll FLY. Or Linux even. Just because Vista is fast on new hardware does NOT mean that it's an efficiently designed OS. When you're running as many cycles through there as you are, you don't notice the tons that are wasted.
If you're gonna recommend Vista, at least throw in the caution that you have to have a machine that you paid over $1500US for in the last year.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
What uses that?
Anyway, whilst I'm no gentoo fan, I love debian and ubuntu. You can run openoffice.org on either and I challenge you to tell me what it is you use on MS Office that OO.o doesn't provide. You can probably run MSOffice under Wine anyway.
And as for games... Well the Orange box works as well under Ubuntu as it does on Vista. Load times are slightly quicker too.
What Adobe software were you talking about?
Adobe make a lot of software.
To put things horribly in perspective I booted a little fanless machine into win2k last night that can run many applications that Vista can. The machine has 256MB of memory that it shares with video at 1280x1024 and has a fairly slow VIA processor. WoW is of course a slideshow as far as refresh goes but the time to start MS Word 2000 from boot is faster than on a 32bit Vista machine with 2GB of memory. I hope updates make it a bit more modular so it doesn't spend so much time loading things you won't need that session in from disk to clog up memory.
And yet, what's the bet that Microsoft will still find some pressing need to make Internet Explorer a critically integrated part of MinWin?