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Vista is Slower, But XP Is Still Dying
An anonymous reader writes "Though the Redmond software giant may be extending the lifetime of XP on low-end laptops, the end is nigh for the aging OS. That extension makes perfect sense, as recent studies have shown XP is far faster than Vista across a number of platforms. Still, Microsoft is 'sticking to its guns' when it comes to drop-dates for most other uses of the XP operating system. 'There are several dates that apply, but the one you're probably thinking of is the June 30 deadline that Dix referred to. That's the last day when large computer makers -- the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world -- will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs. It also marks the official end of XP as a retail product.'"
You have to follow a few links in the first link to get to this fine article where they explain that in 2007, XP's share went up in the enterprise. Since we know the end is nigh for Vista as well there seems little motivation to feel this pain.
That's telling, isn't it? And that's actually from Forrester, whose bias is legendary in favor of Redmond.
I should think some Vista evangelists aren't getting their bonuses this year.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Windows Classic... they'll hire some marketing guy from Coca Cola to run the campaign. "You told us this was the software you grew up on...."
The real test will be what happens when XP is officially dead. No sales. No support. What will happen with activation?
No, XP is a zombie.
Lovecraft confirms it.
I don't know about you all, but I'm ready for someone to buy Microsoft and turn it around.
MSDOS is even faster! Seriously you can't just say "Vista is slower so it must be worse". There are other factors to consider - functionality, aesthetics, hardware support, security, and so on.
You might have heard of this little thing called GNU/Linux that's been able to do everything XP and Vista can but with far fewer resources. No? Oh well, run your 7 year old OS and wait for Windows 7. The 7 to 7, or 7up should match the Coke classic upgrade very well, complete with a corn syrup obesity epidemic. Where did you want to go yesterday?
Good riddance. With a new LTS release of Ubuntu coming up in a scant few weeks and support for the entire Adobe creative suite in Wine, I don't see as there's much reason to bother with it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Last I checked, it was competing with free software remarkably well. In fact, it owns something like 70-90% of the market, depending on which market you look at.
Surely someone as open-minded, intelligent and non-biased such as yourself must stand back and admit that it must be doing SOMETHING right in order to maintain that lead, as well as for so many people to kick up a fuss now that it looks like it's going to be killed off.
Surely, I mean surely in the near-25-years that Microsoft has been developing windows, they hit the nail on the head and released a genuinely good Operating System at least once! Surely!
Or maybe not. Maybe nearly 90% of the users out there are all idiots or forced to use it because Microsoft has a proverbial gun stuck to their head. Those same users are also being forced to cry out loud "please no, please don't kill off XP! Please!". Or maybe it's just you.
Just a thought.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This is going to sound crazy, but bear me out. So here's what Microsoft does. They take the OS and develop a Windows GUI for it. They pour a billion dollars or so into WINE development and research (while providing WINE's coders with full access to existing Windows APIs) and they bring WINE's performance and compatibility to dizzying heights. And then they sell it. Call it Windows, sell it as Windows and do what Apple's done with Darwin. Keep the proprietary stuff proprietary and the OSS stuff OSS. You'd wind up with a rock-solid OS, and your users could run their old software until their apps received an update to the new system. Eventually WINE would no longer be needed.
This all sounds a lot like Apple, MacOS X and Classic, doesn't it?
Anyway, there we go. I'm sure there are a thousand valid reasons why this couldn't/wouldn't work and naturally it will never happen. I understand that. I can dream though, can't I?
Full Tilt
In a VM or better yet in a Citrix session, silly. That's not a good excuse to run Windows as your base OS.
This wikipedia link should help.
No charge. If you need anything else I'll be here all day.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is not the increase in resource use. This is nothing new. Every release of Windows, most releases of OS X and even some new flavors of Linux have increased resource use because they do more. The big problem for Microsoft this go-'round is that Vista really doesn't give you enough reason to accept the increased resource use. XP is a perfectly fine OS and to get people to move away, especially if that move is to a resource hog, you really need to drop the hammer and give people a kick-ass must-have OS. MS clearly failed to do that in Vista and they're paying for it now.
Seriously, can we just stop doing this everytime there is a new release of windows? When XP was released it was "OH MY GOSH, NOBODY LIKES XP!!! WINDOWS2000 WILL BE AROUND FOREVER!!!!". Now we're doing it all over again with Vista. There isn't a pattern or ANYTHING. Like maybe large enterprises that move at a snail's pace tend to adopt one rev behind.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/15/0035209
>>What about current and next gen games?
>>How do I get those to work?
>This wikipedia link [link to playstation 3] should help.
So your answer on how to get PC games to work on Linux, is to not play PC games? I'm just *not allowed* to play starcraft II when it comes out?
Many people own PC's specifically for playing games, and don't do much else with them. Is your solution for them, that they don't need a computer at all? Or maybe they should put Linux on their computer, and then throw it in the closet and never look at it again?
Blind evangelism isn't helping Linux... it turns people off when they are given bad advice by people with an agenda.
How does he run them under Linux, as you suggested? Citrix or a VM STILL USE WINDOWS. The point is to NOT USE WINDOWS, remember?
People who cannot activate a product in 2020 or 2030 may have grounds to sue Microsoft for violating their perpetual "license."
Microsoft will have several choices:
* offer a full refund/buyback
* maintain some way to activate the product
* issue a patch so activation is not required
* get Congress to exempt them and others who use this technology from fair-trade and contract laws
In the interests of avoiding negative publicity, MS will probably keep their activation lines open for as long as they can without spending a lot of money, then issue a patch.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What I'd like to see is a more concerted effort to address the problems with Vista. Microsoft could make Vista as fast and usable as XP today if they would just get through their thick heads that some of the policies they came up with for vista are bone headed.
Consider:
1. Drivers. There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
2. 64 bit support. Microsoft has willfully hamstrung Vista 64 by not providing compatibility with 32 bit drivers, and by making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit. If you look at Apple's systems, they have a much better model where 32 bit drivers work *fine* on a 64 bit system. There's no reason your video card driver needs to be 64 bit anyway...
3. Background tasks. Here's a hint: Let us easily turn them the fuck off. There should be some kind of Windows performance control panel that provides a central place to switch off file indexing, and the endless other miscellaneous tasks that spin the drive on Vista *constantly*.
Until those issues are addressed, it's stupid to expect gamers who need good graphics drivers, and laptop users who can't have the spinning harddrive wearing down the battery constantly to take a second look at Vista.
I gave Vista a good 6 months, and really did appreciate things like not having to run as administrator constantly. I felt much more secure running with lower privileges user like I do on my Ubuntu and OSX installs. However, dispite the fact that I tweaked the hell out of my system (including turning off file indexing and switching off aero in favor of the win2k look), and the fact that my system *should* be ridiculously overpowered by looking at the hardware specs, the background services made my system run like a *dog*.
I've switched back to XP, and it is like night and day. Suddenly, my machine no longer locks up doing some stupid task in the background. Suddenly, the stutter is gone from my games. Suddenly, everything is snappier.
What's more, I now actually get to run with file indexing ON, by using the google desktop. This gives me all of the same search functionality as I got on vista, but with no noticeable performance overhead. Hell, I could probably start running as a non admin user on XP, now that applications have finally been forced to learn to live with reduced permissions for Vista compatibility...
Maybe it's time for Damn Small Windows.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It isn't as though MS changes driver requirements all that often. There has been a real long time between XP and Vista. MS isn't requiring people to release new drivers every 6 months, more like every 5-6 years. That isn't unreasonable. Have a look at how often nVidia has to change their Linux drivers and tell me who requires more.
Also, as you noted, it isn't as though there hasn't been some time. Vista has been on the open market for over a year now, and MS told their developers at Beta 2 that all the driver interfaces were stable. That's a lot of time to have developed a new driver. If you still haven't, well I have trouble feeling that it is MS's fault. If you can't learn the new (very well documented) interfaces in a year's time, well then there is something wrong on your end.
Computers change, that is simply a fact of life. If you can't deal with that, then you are in teh wrong business. You can't expect to release something and not have to change it for 30 years. Interfaces (serial, USB, firewire, etc) will change, buses (PCI, PCIe) will change. OSes will change. You are going to have to update to support those.
When Vista first came out, I told people to lay off the hardware companies. It takes time to build a stable driver on new architecture, especially the video card companies who had some really massive changes. Now, I don't defend the hardware companies at all. You've had a year, and just about everyone does have a stable, tested driver out. If you still can't, well that is your problem, not MS's.
Windows NT and 2000 and their server versions will still be around for many years to come. Unfortunately, it's not safe to put them on "the Internet" which is a shame, because they make darn good machines for certain applications.
I think the going rate for NT Server with 5 CALs is $30-$50 at computer fairs. It's been out of support for ages. If it were truly worthless it would be in the dollar pile.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What matters is what goes on in the trenches. When major corporations still prohibit the installation of Vista on any machine that connects to their network, Microsoft will continue to sell XP. My Corporation is Fortune 10 and we still prohibit Vista installs!
Oh wait, sorry, my misunderstanding.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
He's not asking "How do I use Linux to solve a problem?" He's asking "If I use Linux, how do I still give Microsoft money?" If the question were the former, the question would have been "How do I deal with these .docx documents?" In that case my answer would be to use OO.o to convert them to a standard format, except for the ones that stupidly require vendor specific software. For those you still have to use MSOffice apps to convert them until you can get your contacts to use an interoperable format, and that means probably Citrix.
We don't tolerate people sending us .WP documents or VisiCalc spreadsheets any more, do we? Unless we must, and then we convert them.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true. They're doing it because they sell a lot of copies and because they're evangelised to do it. The sooner they're weaned from that the better, and shifting to console games for a while can ease the transition. The point of playing games after all is not to play them on your PC. It's to play them. So play them on a platform that's designed for them. Duh.
If he wants to just give Microsoft money for no reason, he can continue to overlicense unused software like most enterprises are doing right now. That's a hearty way to flush some serious cash down the Redmond toilet for no reason if that's what you want to do. As abhorrent as the idea is, it's still better than actually using that stuff.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well he was answering the question "How do I run Office 2007 and VS 2008 under Linux?" Your issue is with the question, not the fact that he answered it. If the questioner had asked "what can I use for an Office app in Linux" and the responder said run Office 2007 in Citrix, you would have had a point. But he didn't.
How about we're going to run an Exchange server on 2003 but our clients will run Evolution in KDE, or something like that? Does it have to be all or nothing? Oth, what's wrong with having "stop using proprietary software" as a "big picture" goal, that everyone works towards. Just like asking everyone to be frugal and reuse things as much as possible to cut down on overhead, you could also give people incentives to bring in free and open source alternatives to proprietary software you are using, especially if the vendor you are currently using charges fees at every opportunity and does its best to lock you in and prevent you from using it in concert with software from other vendors.
This is what I'm doing at my work. I may never get us completely rid of Windows and other "squeeze-every-last-penny-out-of-you-we-can" type software, but every time I manage slip in a FOSS solution (using Drupal in a LAMP box to create a resource center on the company intranet for example) it's a win for the company, and an overall step in the right direction.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Mandatory activation.
Vista in all of its flavors requires activation either at the mothership, or via an activation server on your network.
This one requirement, has ZERO benefit for the end user. Microsoft made this mandatory to close the "Volume License Key loophole" that allowed corporate copies of XP to be widely and easily pirated.
Now the anti-piracy cost falls to the end user. Corporations that deploy standard images must now manage the activation process in addition to all the other things that make a Microsoft network tick. There are a million ways that activation causes problems - remote users, computer rental companies that re-image after every use, schools that re-image labs frequently...etc.
I don't see Microsoft "fixing" this problem ever.
-ted
I use linux very extensively and find a number of niceties (compiz has far more practical features than Vista and OSX, and a number of general benefits of running a platform that is comprised entirely of things I can examine transparently myself but also is a healthy competitive landscape from the commercial vendor perspective). Making the hardware consist of interchangeable commodity parts has done wonders for the pricing of components, and the similar phenomenon is even more pronounced in software. Every user including gamers should appreciate what that means. Especially as MS increasingly treats the customers as the enemy (embracing DRM, increasingly bold 'anti-piracy' measures).
That said there are certain approaches:
-Ignore Linux and gaming. The highly immediately pragmatic stand, probably what you would justify. The question here becomes are you forced up the upgrade trail by Vista? A weaker, yet not currently aggravating stance is to at least boycott Vista and tell microsoft you won't pay, and by extension boycotting games if they make DirectX 10 a requirement, hardware if they fail to provide XP drivers, etc.
-Use Linux and cave if Wine will run the game. Wine runs a surprisingly large number of games (Orange Box a popular example). This, of course, doesn't necessarily send the desired message, but it goes a ways. I have seen software patches and graphics drivers note Wine-specific issues, so some developers are seeing Wine as a valid demographic to target given the effort. This requires being vocal about your mode of usage, or else face game patches screwing up your experience by making Wine-incompatible design choices.
-Use Linux and refuse to buy any non-native games. There are some publishers that released native games. NeverWinter Nights (but not 2), id games, Savage 2. Reward them for publishing quality games for your platform, while being vocal about refusal to buy other titles. There are some decent Free games too, I was surprised how decent Nexuiz was (though I confess the artwork isn't as nice as other games, but the engine seems pretty good at its core).
I'm a hybrid of sorts. I'll check out a demo under wine if the game is overwhelmingly interesting (i.e. orange box) to see if I want it and would risk it, but will be much much more likely to buy a random game with a native linux binary. A lot of my gaming is reserved for console games, but FPS and RTS and the like I feel no console has an adequate interface (though metroid prime on wii was not too shabby). BTW, server-only binaries on linux aren't enough for me. I know it seems like being partly evangelical, but the reality is I want more out of my core platform experience and don't want to be beholden to a single corporate entity. The PC architecture is great for that, with multiple compatible vendors for practically every part except the OS platform, so long as MS is the dominant vendor. Making moves to change that is a good thing for consumers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
CPU benchmarks:
XP with SP3: 2053
Vista with SP1 Aero disabled: 2018 (change: -1.7%)
Vista with SP1: 1994 (change: -2.8%)
So, basically, your machine will be imperceptibly slower if you want all the whiz-bang 3D and transparency of Vista's UI. Go figure.
Other results from the linked article:
- XP boots about 30 seconds faster.
- Vista copies a large file about 30 seconds faster.
- XP might run faster on machines with 256 MB of RAM. Obviously a huge concern with memory costing about $20 per GB.
I don't mean to challenge anyone's world-view, but the people I know who run Vista are quite happy with it. That includes my wife, who runs Vista Home and Office 2007 on her 6 year old laptop with half a gig of RAM.I've had first hand experience running DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1 Under VMWare. If i'm not mistaken, I remember finding an old copy of Windows 1.0 on the net and running that under VMWare.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hah. Yeah, XP may be faster than Vista. Then again, I'm sure that Windows 3.1 would run faster than XP. Why don't we bring that back? Vista is a platform. A platform on which an amazing new set of features can be implemented. Just wait for Windows 7. It'll show the true power of the Vista platform.
Until they sell out the rest of the way Eclipse makes a nice development platform to replace Visual Studio. If they do sell out there will be a fork. You'll find that if Eclipse isn't included in your distribution you'll find it in the Applications installer. All linux users can develop applications on day one if they want to. They don't have to, but since it's built by developers they served their own needs first. It turns out programming is not some occult science after all.
As for J#, C#, VB and WebDev, we're back to the same "How do I keep giving Microsoft money" question again. Those are not standards. They're proprietary solutions and stuff you build on them will obsolete every time Microsoft decides it needs more of your money. It's a trap. Don't fall into it. If you must program in those soon-to-be dead languages then you've created your own predicament and nobody can help you.
Photoshop? Enough with the photoshop. I don't care about photoshop. If you need a dedicated photoshop box it's no excuse to chain everyone in your enterprise to Windows when it's only you that is determined to suffer.
3d? You have to be frimping kidding. You don't really think Windows is a cutting edge 3d platform do you? On what planet?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Windows NT makes the fundamental assumption that kernel mode programs have direct access to user-mode memory. The kernel is in the same address space as user-mode programs. Kernel drivers can directly read user-mode parameters from the same address that was passed in from user mode. This offloads parameter checking from software to the CPU's page table, a nice performance increase.
This prevents 32-bit drivers from ever being possible in NT. A 64-bit user program would pass in a 64-bit pointer in an ioctl and a 32-bit driver would have no way of accessing that address. The kernel can't translate because it does not know what ioctls mean, and they can contain pointers.
In contrast, Darwin's kernel has a separate address space for user mode and kernel mode. Switching between user mode and kernel mode is a full page table reload, and access to user memory from the kernel is done through special accessor functions. This is a additional cost to kernel calls in Darwin compared to NT.
As for video card drivers not needing to be 64-bit... The extra 8 general and 8 SSE registers do help in the inner loops written in assembly language for some operations that the cards don't support directly.
By the way, have you heard of Windows XP x64 Edition?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Essentially, what this 10% increase means is, that about half of the people who got new hardware also got Vista to it, and nobody switched "mid-life" for their hardware.
Many people getting new hardware, got an OS other than Vista. My dad got a Mac. My new Core 2 Duo machine runs Ubuntu Studio. To get it without an unwanted OS meant assembling it myself. Boot to login and login to homepage on screen on the Mac or Ubuntu machine is much faster than any of the Windows machines in the house.
The truth shall set you free!
There are a lot of advantages to Windows in a VM.
Windows XP is still available. You can stock up on enough copies to meet your VM needs.
You can keep an activated VM to roll back to when your Windows VM becomes corrupted, as all of them do, with less trouble than imaging a real machine.
It doesn't have access to your real hardware unless you let it.
That Vista isn't pleasant in a VM is a good reason to avoid it. In case you haven't heard, avoiding it looks more and more likely these days. If you're doing development and have to test on Vista then you're already using it in a VM or you're stupid.
In many cases, XP runs better in a VM than it does natively. Imagine that.
When it's time to retire it, you can drag the XP VM to the trashcan where it belongs.
Keeping the status quo is not an option. Microsoft is forcing the migration whether you want it or not. The question is, since you're being forced to migrate would you prefer to not be forced next time? If so, then where you should migrate to should be obvious.
The idea of XP in a VM or in Citrix is to smooth the migration to an open system where control of your IT is up to you, not to a corporation with a profit motive to keep shuffling you along the upgrade path and tying down your options and artificially limiting your choices.
Keep saying "we can't" and eventually you will believe it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I have written many anti vista postings since I bought a notebook with Vista loaded on it last decemember.
Most of the anti vista comments here are untrue after you get used to it, use the new start menu features and install SP1, updated drivers, and bios upgrades.
Both hogs such as Netbeans and OpenOffice ran slower on my notebook than XP assuming Vista is set up properly. Disk fetching and better caching is how I attribute the performance increase.
The majority of Vista bashes are from those who have semi supported hardware.
My notebook was running off of disk PIO mode during startup and no sata was loaded with the default Vista install. As you can imagine my system took forever to boot and when Vista indexed it slowed things down. I bashed Vista constantly here.
I downgraded to XP but upgraded back to Vista. I missed the windows index search when you hit the start button. Here is a hint for XP users.... your not supposed to find your programs by your mouse. Just type it in! Also I can search my javadocs and my ms word papers for school quickly by seaching by content. I go to a christian school with bible versus required in my papers. Vista makes my job easier as I type a subject and it searches the index for my conent.
Vista is not fast after Toshibe provided an SD sata driver and a bios update to start vista quickly. SP1 fixed the constant disk usage. It rarely ever gets in the way once things are up. Wow is just as fast in vista as in XP. Maybe only a few fps slower.
But Vista is nice for computer neophytes and the hardware markers need to take the heat for the negative public opinion.
http://saveie6.com/
Did my XP licenses all just disappear in a puff of smoke? That's one of the advantages to have at least a few beige boxes running off-the-shelf XP Pro. If the hardware dies, you can install the OS in a VM and still get use out of it.
As far as I know Office 2007 runs just fine in XP. If it doesn't, run Office 2003. Or OpenOffice.org. Or run Office 2007 on a Vista box if you just have to.
But don't tell me it's Office 2007 and VS 2008 or nothing. For most users that's not the case. If you need it, spend the money on it and be happy.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Eventually gaming on Linux will catch up. In the interim, console gaming is a good substitute. When you're striking the chains some pain is to be expected.
When Microsoft's goal was to save us from the evil monolith that was IBM, I was their biggest fan. Now I'm a big fan of IBM and not Microsoft. This isn't difficult to understand. I haven't changed sides. They have.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You guys aren't getting any traction in this thread and your best bet is to ignore it. You won't, but at least I told you so.
The vagaries of licensing are some of the things that make open solutions so much more inviting. If you discontinue your support contracts, you don't get any more support from your open source provider. The don't sue you for continuing to experience the benefits of the support you've already paid for.
And your solution for this is to make yourself a hostage to the good intentions of a commercial software vendor? That sounds like a bad plan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The intent of copyright is to allow an author of a creative work to profit from sales of the work. It is NOT intended to stop non-profit copying of a work which is not being sold. If you're engaging in non-commercial copying of a copyrighted work, a judge will take seriously a defense of "But I cannot buy the work!"
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Features don't come for free. The different in speed for most things is negligible.
Processor time is cheap, programmer time is expensive. *If* the new features mean we get better quality apps due to shared libraries/services built into the OS, then I don't see the problem.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If it's made today, you cannot define it as "not modern". If it's not even released yet you're revealing your bias completely. Tomorrow's technology is by definition "post modern".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In my house I run Windows XP Media Edition, 2x Windows XP Pro, and Vista Ultimate 64. Hands down Vista is my favorite OS to use. Granted, early versions were harder to swallow, as I have been using Vista since early Beta.
However, the major problems I had initially have been addressed. Driver compatibility, Stability and Memory usage - since SP1 at least, all of these problems have gone away for me, most of them long before SP1.
While Vista may not be the best choice for everyone, I use it for Office 2007, Photoshop, Video Encoding, and Gaming (Crysis/2142) and have nothing but praises to sing for those uses.
Of course, I realize gamers that use basic photo editing software and office applications are in the minority....