Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-change-horses-midstream dept.

twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But why? by wampus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Turn off thumbnail generation. The DRM is only used for playback of protected files.

  2. Re:But why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could we please stop trolling about this? The copy protection on Vista is about the same as XP. Yes, can we please stop trolling and claiming that the Vista DRM is "just like XP"? Because it is not and anyone who has used the OS knows that.

    First off, it's well known that the redone video and audio drivers were required for the new DRM. That right there is a change: pre-Vista, the OS wasn't designed explicitly for DRM. Now it is.

    Secondly, the new designs shave a good 10%-50% off performance. Audio acceleration is gone. EAX effects are no longer possible. Recording the audio output of programs is no longer possible. All in the name of DRM.

    ALL layers are now encrypted. This, not surprisingly, slows down the OS. By a lot. It also greatly reduces battery life. Where before, playing a music file might involve a single decryption step to send the data to the audio player, it now must be re-encrypted before being sent to the card, then re-decrypted before being converted to analog. All because an enterprising user might otherwise snoop on the bus to "steal" the audio data.

    In short, Vista is 10%-50% slower solely to allow for DRM. The kernel was redesigned with DRM in mind, not user experience. Battery life was halved in extreme cases - again, solely for DRM.

    It's not trolling, there are simple facts that have been exposed time and time again. Look it up on Google. Vista is much, much, much worse than XP when it comes to DRM.