MS Reportedly Adds 6 Months of Vista Downgrade

LiteralKa sends in a poorly sourced Reg story claiming that Microsoft has granted OEMs six more months to sell PCs using Windows Vista with the support to downgrade to Windows XP. OEMs can now offer such arrangements until July 31, 2009 — the previous deadline was January 31, 2009. The article claims as source "a Reg reader" without further details. Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up.

Comments

Adding 6 months of..

[kvezach]

Downgrade? Upgrade is more like it.

Re:Adding 6 months of..

[JAZ]

I hate to be a Grammar Nazi, but, in this context, the preferred spelling is "UPGRAYEDD".

Re:Adding 6 months of..

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Downgrade? Upgrade is more like it.

You poor, poor dead horse. You've been beaten so badly. Rest now.

Re:Adding 6 months of..

[manoelhc]

Every Windows release is a downgrade...

Re:Adding 6 months of..

[ps2os2]

Remember Time and Space are relative.

Gasp!

[Samantha Wright]

Critical reception of the Reg? It's about time. Good work, submitter.

Front Page?

[donaggie03]

Why is a poorly sourced, unconfirmed story from the Reg posted on the front page? VERY slow news day?

Re:Front Page?

[eebra82]

Why is a poorly sourced, unconfirmed story from the Reg posted on the front page? VERY slow news day?

Because it can still be interesting and open to great discussions. As with everything else, it is up to the user to decide if he/she believes the story is accurate or not. And at least it is clearly stated that this article is poorly sourced.

Re:Front Page?

[Oktober Sunset]

Isn't a poorly sourced, unconfirmed story from the Reg is posted on the front page every day? It's usually just called a story from the Reg tho.

The Reg

[morgan_greywolf]

I can't decide whether The Reg is The National Enquirer or the Weekly World News of tech news sites on the Web.

Can someone help me with this? ;)

Re:The Reg

[Silicon Jedi]

The National Enquirer and the Weekly World News were sister publications. WWN was the cheaper printed one and got all the better stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_World_News

Re:The Reg

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yes.

HTH. HAND.

Well well

[Daimanta]

"Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up."

Including Slashdot.

Re:Well well

[antic]

Slashdot is rarely considered a timely news source at the best of times, which makes me wonder why they would approve an openly acknowledged poorly sourced story, rather than waiting?

Fair enough, two answers might be "kdawson" and page impressions from all of us Vista haters, but are not the editors adult employees with some sense of quality and thought?

Re:Well well

[foobsr]

adult employees with some sense of quality and thought

You might as well think that 'employee' vs. 'sense' and 'thought' is a contradiction these days if you look at the 'quality' that is delivered (and at the cost to fix the financial implications).

CC.

Re:Well well

[MarkovianChained]

If they run the story before there's a good source, they get blasted for running speculation instead of news. If they run the story when there's good speculation, someone will inevitably post "Digg had it first!"

Sometimes, it's really damned if you do, damned if you don't for the editors.

Thank God

[sdemjanenko]

I still do not see why they are cutting off XP. If their Vista is so good than it would speak for itself and people would switch to it. Perhaps once computers have enough power to waste a few extra cycles on vista's ineffiencies it will catch on. i guess i have a problem with microsoft trying to bully people into using their newest software. If they used that time constructively I am sure they could come up with much improved products.

Re:Thank God

[HBI]

They're cutting off XP because Vista sucks. That is obvious. This is an attempt to force conversions to Vista by putting an air of inevitability on it. However, the truth is that if people don't use Vista, they can't can XP. No company can afford to kill their source of revenue.

If the OEMs can't sell with XP then companies will start pirating it with VLK versions anyway so... I don't see where Microsoft has any leverage here.

Re:Thank God

[Dunbal]

Vista is a piece of crap and official Microsoft policy is to deny it, of course. Can't speak badly about the company after all, can we?

I use XP. My daughter bought a new laptop and hates Vista. My dad bought a new laptop and after 2 weeks STILL can't install a printer driver - the Microsoft website is a maze of recursive links that never actually provide useful info. Not to mention all the nagging Vista does. So what incentive do *I* have to switch? I'm happy with my dual boot Ubuntu/XP computers, there the operating system does its job and doesn't try to get in my way.

Re:Thank God

[sdemjanenko]

thats true, vista ultimate cannot support dual boot which is annoying as hell. ive got ultimate x64 which i have had to modify so many settings on but all i really want is the ability to run slackware on it as well.

Re:Thank God

[RAMMS EIN]

Well, I can only speculate as to what Microsoft's reasons for cutting off XP are, but I would imagine they include a desire to eventually stop supporting it - preferably when not too many people are using it anymore. If they continue to sell XP, XP will supposedly continue to gain new users and keep existing users, which means Microsoft will have to support it longer.

Re:Thank God

[ubrgeek]

> They're cutting off XP because Vista sucks.

I guess I didn't correctly read what you meant. I'm assuming you mean they're _not_ cutting it off yet. Regardless, IMO they're allowing for additional time because it's an extra revenue source. Why limit the potential option to one OS when you can get people buying one of two? It's also to their benefit to do so rather than to effectively cut off sales to both: "Hey, I hear Vista is terrible. I wanna go to XP. What do you mean XP isn't for sale anymore? Hmm. I wonder what's up with this whole Ubuntu thing I keep hearing about...."

Re:Thank God

[DAldredge]

How is it obvious that Vista sucks?

Re:Thank God

[HBI]

Did you ever use it? I ran it for 9 months. Short answer: it's slow. Very slow. Performance is lousy, and if an operating system's performance is that much slower than a previous version, it sucks. I am not concerned about the DRM issues so much, just performance.

There were some good points: graphically it was nice, and I liked some of the UI enhancements, but balancing this out was the incompatibility with some software that I need, such as TFTP servers. Also, certain games (intended for XP, not talking ancient 9x software here) that work on XP will not work on Vista, period.

I reformatted the system as an XP box with the same software and it's a peppy performer now - Core Duo laptop with 2GB RAM, fyi.

It wasn't a driver issue or a crapware issue, pretty much apples to apples.

Re:Thank God

[Dunbal]

So Vista sucks because your father (who must be what? 60? 70?) can't install a printer driver?

      Yeah, my father, who worked for IBM, who programmed mainframes to do accounting and payroll for companies with thousands of employees (think GM, etc), who has had every imaginable kind of PC since the 70's. He can't install a printer driver for his HP All-in-one. So your point was? Not every 60 year old is computer illiterate.

Re:Thank God

[DAldredge]

Yes - I use Vista and W2K8 on a daily basis. My main box runs Vista 24/7 and see 0 slowdowns. Am I doing something incorrect? What games are those that do not work?

Re:Thank God

[BradleyUffner]

Blame HP, not microsoft. The driver for my all in one Brother laser installed perfectly in Vista x64. If it's possible for one company to do it correctly and make it easy for the user then it's possible for any company to do it. It sounds like HP dropped the ball. What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?

Re:Thank God

[Shados]

The current mob's opinion of Vista comes from A) People who didn't even try it, B) people who WANTED Microsoft to fail before Vista was even in development, and C) people who did try Vista, either from piss poor OEM installs (fuck you Dell, can you at least CHECK if your bundled drivers are of the correct version when you modify your XP images to run Vista instead of making a Vista one from scratch? dumbass OEM), or from the early driver screw ups (Creative...Nvidia...)

Then when someone brings that up, one of the 6 people who had -REAL- issues with Vista (hey it happens, I've ran Linux for years and once in a blue moon I have had some REAL issues with it...it even happens to Macs) pop up to validate the claims of A, B and C, even though their situations are completly different.

Vista is a self fulfilling prophecy, nothing more. The OS itself works just fine (I have to use XP at work, and man its driving me batshit insane after using Vista for a while, in real production scenarios and at home)

Re:Thank God

[bigstrat2003]

It doesn't suck. I've seen many people on /. (including myself) explain that it works fine for them and others, yet the FUD persists. Go figure. :/

Re:Thank God

[H0p313ss]

Blame HP, not microsoft. The driver for my all in one Brother laser installed perfectly in Vista x64. If it's possible for one company to do it correctly and make it easy for the user then it's possible for any company to do it. It sounds like HP dropped the ball. What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?

Sounds like all the problems are very hardware dependant. I purchased a new computer because my gaming machine would not run COD4 well and the resulting Vista machine not only out-performs everthing I've had before it also supported my HP printer out of the box. I actually set aside a day to move my printer and scanner over from their previous host and deal with all the driver issues, instead I found myself finished in hardly more time than it took to rearrange the cabling.

NB I'm no microsoft fan... I spend 80% of my professional time writing Java with Eclipse, about 10% of it on Linux. I am a huge proponent of and occasional contributor to FOSS. My linux experience goes back 14 years at least... if I poke around I can probably find the 0.9 floppy disk somewhere. My phone runs linux! AND I AM VERY VERY VERY SATISFIED WITH MY VISTA GAMING MACHINE

Re:Thank God

[clang_jangle]

Blame HP, not microsoft.

B.S. If my HP all-in-one runs fine with OS X and Ubuntu, and ran fine with XP but won't work in Vista, it is Microsoft's fault. You have to remember, one of the main reasons Vista even exists is to sell new hardware . It certainly wasn't necessary to replace XP for any other reason, lots of people like XP just fine and it still does pretty much everything consumers expect a modern OS to do. No, Vista was designed to literally require people to have to buy new stuff, as well as to make the **AA's job a bit easier. Either of which is more than ample reason to reject it.

Re:Thank God

[tha_mink]

B.S. If my HP all-in-one runs fine with OS X and Ubuntu, and ran fine with XP but won't work in Vista, it is Microsoft's fault. You have to remember, one of the main reasons Vista even exists is to sell new hardware . It certainly wasn't necessary to replace XP for any other reason, lots of people like XP just fine and it still does pretty much everything consumers expect a modern OS to do. No, Vista was designed to literally require people to have to buy new stuff, as well as to make the **AA's job a bit easier. Either of which is more than ample reason to reject it.

People said the same thing about Windows 2000 when it replaced NT and then XP when it replaced Windows 2000. Your HP all-in-one will run on vista just fine when HP gets off their ass to write a proper driver for it.

Re:Thank God

[Mateo_LeFou]

"What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?"

I think the logic is like this: there are *free (in all senses) alternatives aplenty out there, and their main drawback is that they sometimes need a bit of tweaking before they take Windows to school, frequently because the hardware manufacturers "don't support" Linux.

If you're going to charge multiple hundreds of dollars per PC, we kinda expect you to go into the back room with the HP people and get things humming for us.

Re:Thank God

[ubrgeek]

"I think you need a reality check hoss. Your surroundings does not equal the norm. A 30 minute public access cable show does not a campaign make. Awaken."

I can't tell if that's your sig file or a response to my post. If the latter, then ... um ... yeah. I have zero idea what that means. Regardless, more people are getting familiar with the name Ubuntu then with other distros of Linux (except investors who learned the name Red Hat years ago). No, I'm not saying that it's a ridiculously large number when compared to the rest of the world that knows the name "Microsoft." But it is a significant enough group that popular publications like PC Magazine are mentioning it, not just more niche ones like Linux Magazine.

Re:Thank God

[Perky_Goth]

Dal, it's slow. Copying files, updating icons (which it does over and over for no discerning reason) and then every other time. I've ran it for a year and a half on a brand new PC because I couldn't figure out what drivers I needed for XP. Now that Vista decided to hard lock every 8 hours and blue screen installing SP1 (hey, maybe it fixed something, though it worked just the same with the beta) and that I had to reinstall Windows, I just upgraded to some pirated remastered version of XP.
The speed difference is enormous, even doing something like scrolling a page in Firefox is much much smoother and enjoyable. And I've lost nothing in functionality that I used (superfetch and shadow-something were just a waste of resources for me, UAC just trained me to click ok by having me doing over and over when updating system settings, like ordering the fucking start menu), everything still runs fine, but much faster. I've lost DX10, but I can't tell the difference anyway. And now games shouldn't lose so much time preloading their working set to memory (I haven't had time to try them yet), games would just slowly ground away for a few minutes while it swapped whatever to memory.
That's my experience. Dog slow on a 2gb E6300 machine. And uglier than XP. I'm glad to have gotten rid of it, hopefully forever.

Re:Thank God

[neumayr]

It's sad people feel they have to restore their geek credentials after saying something positive about a Microsoft product.
Politics aside, and not everyone cares about politics, isn't it the logical choice to use the tool that gets the job done? And if that's Vista, so be it.
I hope nobody's seriously claiming there's a open source drop-in replacement for everything people use Windows for.

Re:Thank God

[H0p313ss]

If you're satisfied with Vista on a new machine, it's because you haven't tried running XP on the same machine.

The point is, I DON'T NEED TO BECAUSE IT JUST WORKS

Re:Thank God

[SnEptUne]

Most software sucks, whether it is from apple or orange, and Vista is no exception. Why on earth do I need to click start? Why do I need to install drivers, and what are the drivers doing inside a computer, most people don't fit inside.

I shouldn't need to understand the inner working of the system in order to use it, such as file and folder, copy and paste, etc... Heck, what on earth is a file? And when I clicked copy on a picture, why doesn't my photocopier copy it?

Re:Thank God

[SnEptUne]

Whether it sucks or not is subjective. I found toilet bowl sucks because I don't like sitting on it. I would rather have the old fashion "toilet hole" thingy whatever it is called, because it is much easier to clean. But 99% of people on earth would disagree with me, so what's my point?

Re:Thank God

[rantingkitten]

Maybe so, but driver installs have been an annoying pain in the ass since as far back as Windows 95. Possibly earlier, but I wouldn't know since I jumped right from my DOS 8086 to a Win95 486 back in 96. Anyway, my point is that driver installs, and especially printer installs, are bloody obnoxious and, try as I might, I am honestly not able to recall one single instance where a printer install went off smoothly.

It never, ever autodetects the printer, even when it claims it can. I'm always forced to manually select the driver from a list of models. Half the time the model I want isn't even on the damn list, but several that are tantalizingly close are, so I use those. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. And all of that happens whether I try Windows' completely, utterly useless hardware-detection-driver-installation thing, or download the executable from the manufacturer.

If it's a network printer, god help you, since even with the IP address it won't connect a good percentage of the time. Then there's the plethora of crapware the manufacturer thinks you need in addition to a driver: A new Start menu folder, a quicklauncher, a systray piece of nonsense, a few icons on the desktop, some of which are just ads for more products from the printer maker.

In the end, it takes ten minutes longer than it should, barely works, and tends to randomly up and die for no reason, forcing you to reinstall the driver such that your printer list is now littered with seven of the exact same thing, with a tiny, tiny little checkbox next to one of them to show you it's the default one.

I'd say the blame is easily fifty-fifty for the annoyance of driver installs. Windows shouldn't be such a piece of junk that it allows any executable to shit all over your machine, and Microsoft has enough support from the vendors that this stuff should be truly plug-and-play. On the other side, the vendors need to make the process less bloody-minded, and stop shitting all over my machine just because I want a driver.

By the way, I hooked a Brother printer (forget what model) into my Ubuntu laptop yesterday at the office and had no problems whatsoever printing a PDF. I didn't have to go hunt down a driver off some website, run random executables, or click through any EULAs. Ubuntu didn't get up in my face about how it was detecting new hardware, couldn't find drivers, was checking online for drivers, couldn't find drivers, and would I like to send this error to Mr Torvalds? It just worked.

Re:Thank God

[colinrichardday]

So Linux fans can blame hardware manufacturers who don't release Linux drivers?

Re:Thank God

[BradleyUffner]

So Linux fans can blame hardware manufacturers who don't release Linux drivers?

Umm... yeah. Who else would they blame? If my "Fubar Super Widget 2000" doesn't work in Linux I'm not going to blame RedHat, that would be pointless, they didn't build it, it's not thier responsibility to make drivers for it. I'm going to be mad at whoever build the widged, especially if thier box says "Linux compatable".

Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Lord Lode]

By july 2009 Windows XP will be 8 years old! Because they extend it till then, both Microsoft and the market agree that this 8 year old operating system is still relevant and not hopelessly outdated despite its age.

In those 8 years, Windows has hardly evolved. Honestly, Windows Vista doesn't add too much groundbreaking stuff to Windows XP, the only real technological novelty is the graphics.

Eight years is a lot in computer history, and if you look at what it was 8 years before Windows XP, that was 1993. So Windows 3.11 is to Windows XP, what Windows XP is to Windows Vista, but the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller than the difference between 3.11 and XP!

why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[miffo.swe]

"why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?"

In short, because Microsoft succeeded in killing platform independant applications.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[morgan_greywolf]

why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?

It's not exactly the way you paint it. There is no 'line of succession' between Windows 3.11 and Windows XP.

XP and Vista are derivatives of Windows NT. Version 3.1, the first version of NT, was released in 1992. There's a chasm of difference between Windows 3.11 and NT 3.1.

Between Windows 4.0, which was released in 1994 or 1996 and Windows 2000, there's not that much difference outside of the user interface changes. And between 2000 and Vista there's not that much difference, aside from user interface changes. But the evolution as a whole shows that 4.0 and Vista are very different operating systems.

Windows 95/98/ME and descended from the same line as 3.11. And thus have the same problems.

So, no, it's not that simple.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[morgan_greywolf]

s/Windows 4.0/Windows NT 4.0

my bad.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[mcgrew]

why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?

What do you need an OS to do that XP doesn't already do? But the question answers itself. A more evolved OS should run apps faster and more securely and be easier to use.

Since a fully-patched XP is pretty stable and secure, and Vista is allegedly bog slow, I'd call switching from Vista to XP an upgrade, especially considering MS's penchant for changing everything around, giving you a brand new learning curve. An OS that booted faster (and not just because the old version has a huge registry), ran apps faster, allowed more apps to run without more RAM, and allowed some unnecessary steps to be skipped would be worth paying for. Eye candy isn't worth the money to most of us, particularly when that eye candy causes the PC to run slower.

DOS 6.2 was the best OS upgrade MS ever made. It was faster than 4 or 5, had a better interface (mouse based but would also use keyborad), and most of all freed up disk space with its "doublespace".

Microsoft needs to learn that they have competition. Macs have always been there, and Linux has been ready for the desktop for years and folks are starting to notice.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Richard_at_work]

Well, to be honest the entire GUI platform across the board has pretty much stagnated in the past 8 years (and 'across the board' includes OSX and the various Linux desktop environments) - there hasn't been anything revolutionary that I can immediately think of that would make XP defunct with regard to the desktop, there is no fantastic new way of doing things.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Vellmont]

why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?

I think this is a decent question. You'll note that other OS's actually DO evolve at a decent rate (Linux OSX, etc). So why does Windows such a dog?

The answer, I think is really all the accumulated weight that Windows has to carry. That's not just "code bloat" as some would have you believe, though that's part of it. It's all the OTHER pieces of software that simply HAVE to work on windows for them to continue to exist. Microsoft has resisted pruning much out since the Win32 architecture first came out, for fear of losing market share to the competition. This has been a mistake, and is costing them now.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[UnknowingFool]

One of the issues that has plagued MS is the long time between XP and Vista. 5 years is a long time between hardware too. With 98-> XP, it was only three years. If customers wanted to upgrade, most of the time, it was just a matter of more RAM. If they needed to upgrade things like CPU and video cards, it was easy. With 5 year difference it becomes harder. Take me for example. My machine is an AMD 2200 1GB RAM with an AGP video card. Although MS says this is enough for Vista, we all know it isn't. I can easily upgrade the RAM. But without going to ebay, I can't upgrade the CPU and AGP was phased out. I supposed I can get an older PCI card, but if I'm upgrading the video, I might as well get a decent one before the next upgrade. And I had a decent machine for XP. Most consumers bought cheap computers that could never handle Vista. So they can't really upgrade, and they should really buy new computers. Unfortunately some of them tried to upgrade because MS requirements said they could. They got burned and told their friends.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[DAldredge]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista

Kernel and core OS changes

* The new Kernel Transaction Manager enables atomic transaction operations across different types of objects, most significantly file system and registry operations.[18]

* The memory manager and processes scheduler have been improved. The new CPU cycle-based thread scheduling gives a greater fairness and more deterministic app behavior.[19] Many kernel data structures and algorithms have been rewritten. Lookup algorithms now run in constant time, instead of linear time as with previous versions.
* Windows Vista includes support for condition variables and reader-writer locks.
* Process creation overhead is reduced by significant improvements to DLL address-resolving schemes.
* Windows Vista introduces a Protected Process [20], which differs from usual processes in the sense that other processes cannot manipulate the state of such a process, nor can threads from other processes be introduced in it. A Protected Process has enhanced access to DRM-functions of Windows Vista. However, currently, only the applications using Protected Video Path can create Protected Processes.
* Thread Pools have been upgraded to support multiple pools per process, as well as to reduce performance overhead using thread recycling. It also includes Cleanup Groups that allow clean up of pending thread-pool requests on process shutdown.
* Data Redirection: Also known as data virtualization, this virtualizes the registry and certain parts of the file system for applications running in the protected user context if User Account Control is turned on, enabling legacy applications to run in non-administrator accounts. It automatically creates private copies of files that an application can use when it does not have permission to access the original files. This facilitates stronger file security and helps applications not written with the least user access principle in mind to run under stronger restrictions. Registry virtualization isolates write operations that have a global impact to a per-user location. Reads and writes in the HKLM\Software section of the Registry by user-mode applications while running as a standard user, as well as to folders such as "Program Files", are "redirected" to the user's profile. The process of reading and writing on the profile data and not on the application-intended location is completely transparent to the application.
* Windows Vista supports the PCI Express 1.1 specification, including extended configuration space and segmentation. PCI Express registers, including capability registers, are supported, along with save and restore of configuration data.
* Native support and generic driver for Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) specification for Serial ATA drives, SATA Native Command Queuing and Hot plugging.
* Full support for the ACPI 2.0 specification, and parts of ACPI 3.0.[21] Support for throttling power usage of individual devices has been improved.
* Kernel-mode Plug-And-Play enhancements include support for PCI multilevel rebalance, partial arbitration of resources to support PCI subtractive bridges, asynchronous device start and enumeration operations to speed system startup, support for setting and retrieving custom properties on a device, an enhanced ejection API to allow the caller to determine if and when a device has been successfully ejected, and diagnostic tracing to facilitate improved reliability. [22]
* The startup process for Windows Vista has changed completely in comparison to earlier versions of Windows. The NTLDR boot loa

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Pig Hogger]

There are many widely used OSes that are more than 8 years old. In fact, XP is NT by another name, and NT is more than 15 years old in any case.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Chaos Incarnate]

About the only thing XP doesn't do that would be nice is DirectX 10 support. But since that requires a wholesale replacement of the driver model, I can understand why it's not being patched in.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Ephemeriis]

By july 2009 Windows XP will be 8 years old! Because they extend it till then, both Microsoft and the market agree that this 8 year old operating system is still relevant and not hopelessly outdated despite its age.

In those 8 years, Windows has hardly evolved. Honestly, Windows Vista doesn't add too much groundbreaking stuff to Windows XP, the only real technological novelty is the graphics.

Eight years is a lot in computer history, and if you look at what it was 8 years before Windows XP, that was 1993. So Windows 3.11 is to Windows XP, what Windows XP is to Windows Vista, but the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller than the difference between 3.11 and XP!

Very true. Vista has a few changes under the hood that are nice... But the major difference is in the UI. There are some GUI modification tools out there that let you customize your Windows desktop with different themes and visual styles... I've worked on XP machines that were skinned to look like Vista machines, and it is very hard to tell the difference.

Look at KDE, Gnome, or the Linux kernel over the last 8 years... Amazing changes, all sorts of added functionality.

Take a look at the MacOS over the last 8 years - again, huge changes. Not just from a UI standpoint but real changes in how the OS operates.

Vista is a little bit more secure... A little bit less stable... And a lot more shiny... But that's about it.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[ehaggis]

Correction: Desktop Operating Systems were created and do not evolve. Random kernel mutations cannot explain the complex machines which are our desktops and servers. Survival of the fittest? How do you explain Gentoo and DOS 5.0 still in production environments?

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[ruin20]

Actually, I run vista without the fancy graphics and actually get comparable performance. On top of that I can appreciate the UAC and improved control schemes. And although it breaks a lot of programs that use FlexLM (and all you need a new license file from the individual vendors, most cooperate), I can't complain about backwards compatibility.

So when you say operating system goes slower, please clarify under what conditions. I've run linux with compviz on the same hardware and although it runs faster than Areo, its still slower than XP and vista without Areo.

I can already say vista has delt better with leaky memory than XP and UAC has already stopped a program from doing something that I didn't want it to. And it doesn't run any slower. But that's just my experience.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh.....here is DX10 for XP although I can't tell you how well it runs since me card only supports DX9. Of course it hasn't been updated for awhile because everyone realized that DX10 not being ported to XP makes it a non starter. I mean,look at Shadowrun and Halo 2 for PC. If MSFT thought THOSE games would get folks to switch....HA HA HA HA.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Shados]

the UI is the most insignificant change that was made to Vista. The graphic sub system (not the part you see, but the "engine"), the security architecture, the network stack, all of the management tools (even the task manager!), all of the enterprise services (mostly useful for developers, but IIS jumped up 2 full numbered versions between XP and Vista, but its not the only one that was upgraded... a large part of the COM+ stack did, and its not only useful for servers), new multi-threading primitive, enhanced .NET integration, IPv6 used for everything that can use it by default, enhanced diagnostic tools (like the ability to do a hang dump without extra tools), on top of all of the new WinServer 2008 integration...

The GUI part could go away and it wouldn't matter. That said, for a home user, the GUI is virtually the only thing that matters, so a lot of the "under the hood" changes that MacOSX undertakes don't matter all that much either, compared to the new shiny keyboard shortcuts and shell features.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Blakey Rat]

I've worked on XP machines that were skinned to look like Vista machines, and it is very hard to tell the difference.

Do any of those skinning packages do real compositing of windows, or do they just fake it with clever bitmap-moving? Have a link?

Look at KDE, Gnome, or the Linux kernel over the last 8 years... Amazing changes, all sorts of added functionality.

Yeah, but 8 years ago they hardly did shit. It's not so much "added functionality" as "catching up to Windows and Mac OS."

To go back to my compositing example, sure there's now compositing in Ubuntu-- they started working on it when OS X announced it would have the feature, and they finished it up shortly after Windows Vista actually shipped with the feature. That's not "added functionality," that's "catch up."

Take a look at the MacOS over the last 8 years - again, huge changes. Not just from a UI standpoint but real changes in how the OS operates.

Yeah, but not all the changes have been positive. There are still Mac OS 9 features that haven't been implemented in OS X. OS X's Finder is still vastly inferior to the OS 9 version. OS X's task switcher might be better than the OS 9 version, but it's vastly inferior to the Windows taskbar. Software compatibility in Mac-land is a joke; it's already impossible to run a OS 9 program at all, and soon it'll be impossible to run *any* PPC program on OS X.

These are all reasons I no longer buy Apple computers, and instead I've switched to Windows. That's not to say that Windows is a better product, but at least with Windows I know features I love won't be "disappeared" during the night, and I won't be paying through the nose to upgrade perfectly good software packages that the OS vendor decided to break for no good reason.

Vista is a little bit more secure... A little bit less stable... And a lot more shiny... But that's about it.

In what way is Vista "less stable" than XP?

I kind of disagree with your premise though. The reason Windows doesn't evolve is because it can't evolve; Windows' biggest selling-point is that it's compatible with millions of old software. The fact that Vista has made as many changes as it has in the light of maintaining that compatibility is impressive to me.

You also have to remember that Microsoft took the most popular office software on Earth and completely and utterly rebuilt its GUI, basically from the ground up. When compatibility isn't as much an issue, they've shown that they're completely willing to make drastic changes to improve a product.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Blakey Rat]

I think this is a decent question. You'll note that other OS's actually DO evolve at a decent rate (Linux OSX, etc). So why does Windows such a dog?

Supposedly they do, but why isn't OS X and Linux substantially better than Windows if that is the case? I mean, OS X hasn't even begun implementing Windows' enterprise features and game features, nor has Apple shown any inclination towards either.

It's all the OTHER pieces of software that simply HAVE to work on windows for them to continue to exist. Microsoft has resisted pruning much out since the Win32 architecture first came out, for fear of losing market share to the competition. This has been a mistake, and is costing them now.

Is it?

If Microsoft does make changes that broke older software packages (they made a few in Vista, at least the 64-bit version), why do you assume those packages would be re-built as Linux, or OS X, or Java apps instead of simply re-built as Windows apps?

After all, the developers who wrote it originally know Windows best, their customers already all use Windows, and a new Windows version would be able to use more of the old code than any Linux or OS X port would. And from the business angle, what has changed in the marketplace to make Windows-compatibility less important to their existence? Nothing.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[ColdWetDog]

How do you explain Gentoo and DOS 5.0 still in production environments?

Well, if you want to get all biological, evolutionary biology recognizes 'niche environments' where selective pressure (or lack thereof) and stable ecology allows for organisms to maintain their genomes without significant change for long periods of time.

A 'production box' sitting in a corner of a building, not connected to anything, running some giant machine that has a lifespan of decades may well fit this analogy. Whereas a laptop swimming around the hive of scum and villany that is the Internet might not survive very long without an OS that has a better "immune system" if you will.

If I have a few more cups of coffee, I might be able to hack out a car analogy, but this is the best I can do at the moment.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[XHIIHIIHX]

3.1 was 16 bit
NT was 32 bit
Vista is 64 bit

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[mcgrew]

You're completely missing the point. If it offers nothing visible except eye candy it's not worth buying, period. If it does a whole lot more stuff, fine, that's possibly worth having to buy new hardware.

But Vista, from all I've heard, offers exactly zilch - except eye candy. That's not worth buying a new computer for.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[Doghouse Riley]

Is it in any way a Bad Thing that XP is eight years old?

The purpose of an OS should be to provide a consistent platform for data access, communication, and input/output devices. That's about it.

If there were an OS that did just those things and didn't insist on weaving the apps and the OS together via DLL's or dependencies, it might be routine to go ten years between major OS versions, which would be fine with me.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[petermgreen]

The port to 64 bit was probablly quite a major change (though nowhere near as major as the changes from 3.x to NT) but that happened sometime before vista (the itanium version of XP came out in 2001 while the x64 version came out in early 2005, vista didn't come out until late 2006/early 2007)

And afaict the vast majority of vista users are not running the 64 bit version. Many people can't run it because of specialist hardware (am I the only one who thinks MS shot themselves in the foot by requiring signed drivers?)

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[morgan_greywolf]

No.

Windows 3.x was 32-bit, but the main API was 16-bit. That's why it required a 386 or better. You could, in fact, install a 32-bit API called win32s for Windows 3.1

NT was both 32-bit and 64-bit. NT 3.5 and 4.0 ran on DEC Alpha and MIPS.

Vista also comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[XHIIHIIHX]

I was being a little generous. Windows 3.1 was mostly 16 bit; windows nt, 2000 xp et.al were mostly 32 bit; windows vista is mostly 64 bit. Microsoft OS's tend to bridge two major processor technologies. Windows 3.1 ran on 286's:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;79749

System requirements for standard mode are:

â Intel 80286 (or higher) processor
â 1 MB or more of memory (640K conventional and 256K extended)
â 6.5 MB of free disk space (9 MB is recommended)
System requirements for enhanced mode are:

â Intel 80386 (or higher) processor
â 2 MB or more of memory (640K conventional and 1024K extended)
â 8 MB of of free disk space (10.5 MB is recommended)

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[XHIIHIIHX]

The vast majority of users did not run windows 3.1 on 386 processors, they ran it on 286's, until later they required it for enhanced mode. 386 was specialist hardware. Exactly the same deal with vista, soon it will require 64 bit processors. Signed drivers increase system stability. If you need to run an old peripheral, use your old computer.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[ion.simon.c]

Your generalization is a bit over-broad.

However, I'm currently involved in porting a MASSIVE wad of Windows code to Linux. The number of single-character code changes required to build that code under Linux are astounding. : /

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[miffo.swe]

Its the short version. The long version can be read from the DOJ trial where Microsofts monpoly is described in detail. It paints a very clear picture of why MS has taken most of its decisions. Most decisions has been bad from an engineering standpoint but good for the monopoly. The monopoly and the complete absence of any real competitors is whats holding computer development back so much. Our computers software lags tens of years behind research in an otherwise very fast area of technology.

Re:Desktop Operation System Evolution

[ion.simon.c]

IDK.

At home, I'm happy to use the latest in Linux Desktop technology to Get Shit Done; and the latest in Windows Server technology to Play Video Games.
I'm pretty happy with the situation that Microsoft has helped to create in my household.
Don't get me wrong, I know that MSFT has done (still does?) numerous things that hurt computing but are good in the short term for business. But, might some of this lag in computer software be due to incompetent or poorly trained programmers? Hell, I'm employed as a programmer now, and I'm *extremely* incompetent.

I'm going to email sean@windows.com and...

[digitaldc]

...and see how he feels about being 'downgraded' from Vista -- or maybe it is 'upgraded' to XP?

I wonder if any of these people knew their whole world would become a confusing choice of operating systems when they decided to become 'Windows'

Vista Home

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Vista Home and I like it.

The networking is better than XP. It plays nicer with Samba, btw.

I find it to be more stable than XP.

And this crap about it being a resource hog is BS. If you're running all the bells and whistles, I got news for you folks, of course it's going to be a comparative pig - geeze. Turn off Aero if you got a low end machine or buy the machine with Home instead of Ultimate - god!

No, I don't work for MS. It's just that some of you people are just broken records slamming shit for the sake of slamming it.

Cue the yeah but "It's worse than Linux." "It's worse than OSX." "It can't do X" "I'm an admin and you wouldn't believe the problems there in connecting to [insert some incredibly esoteric system here]" blah blah blah...

Re:Vista Home

[tha_mink]

I have Vista Home and I like it.

I can do better than that. I pushed out 37 vista business installs about 4 months ago to all of our workstations here, and I've not had a single problem with it. The bees seems to love it and, for me, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. I watch all this bashing going on and quite frankly, I don't get it. I understand that YMMV, but it seems like Vista is getting hammered but nobody's really tried it. I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.

You may now commence with the typical bullshit bashing...

Re:Vista Home

[Anonymous Coward]

As an african american, I am outraged by your use of the deregotary word samba. We're on the verge of electing the first black president by a landslide but some people refuse to give up their racist attitudes.

Re:Vista Home

[pablomme]

And this crap about it being a resource hog is BS. If you're running all the bells and whistles, I got news for you folks, of course it's going to be a comparative pig - geeze. Turn off Aero if you got a low end machine or buy the machine with Home instead of Ultimate - god!

While I disagree with the general Vista bashing, it is not difficult to confirm that Vista is a lot slower than XP. I've got both installed in VirtualBox. XP boots in 10-15 seconds, Vista in 1-1.5 minutes. That's the time to get to the desktop; responsiveness comes 5 seconds later for XP and 1 minute later for Vista. Audio stutters on Vista but not on XP. Same with video. Etc.

I like most of the changes in Vista. From big things like UAC to small ones like the naming of C:\Users. But one can't deny it's a damn heavy OS.

Re:Vista Home

[Clarious]

Vista is good enough but it has several bad things so people is still sticking to XP. For example, it drain my laptop battery life 25% than XP, and that is with aero turned off, just this reason alone make XP my OS.

Re:Vista Home

[larry bagina]

Porchmonkey

The new Ubuntu/mono based distro? I think it could gain acceptance in the corporate world, with it's combination of rock solid stability and MS/.Net buzzwords. I'l bring it up when in my meeting with the CTO this afternoon.

Re:Vista Home

[Colonel Korn]

I was going to write a well-written retort full of reason and fact, but I decided that it was a waste of time. Instead: *expletive* *expletive* *expletive*.

Moving on.

The people I've heard not complain about Vista use their computers as document editors and web-browsers. However, I have to remind you: my pocket watch can do this, and it costs less than a single install of Vista. To butcher an old phrase: Vista is about as useful as a tit on a bull, and about twice as ugly.

I declare your post to be silly fiction based on a lack of experience. There's nothing I did I XP that doesn't work in Vista. My Vista machine exists primarily because of gaming. My framerates using the same graphical options as in XP are the same as they were in XP, and that's normal and well documented - Vista stopped being slower for gaming long ago, and long before I was willing to install it. It also gives me access to 4 gigs of ram with zero driver problems, unlike XP64, and the general OS responsiveness is improved over XP. It about half a second to load Firefox for the first time after I boot, compared to a few seconds in XP. The same sort of improvement shows up in most apps, though Photoshop only loads at the same speed as it did on XP. Particularly nice is that Vista, while starting out (after a few days of superfetch) faster than XP, continues to extend its lead as time goes on. It seems to be immune from the general slowdown that affects so many XP installs.

Re:Vista Home

[Ephemeriis]

I can do better than that. I pushed out 37 vista business installs about 4 months ago to all of our workstations here, and I've not had a single problem with it. The bees seems to love it and, for me, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. I watch all this bashing going on and quite frankly, I don't get it. I understand that YMMV, but it seems like Vista is getting hammered but nobody's really tried it. I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.

I've had a very mixed experience with it myself...

I've got a tablet running Vista that probably shouldn't be. It was never designed with Vista in mind and the hardware is just barely supported. It runs, but not well. I'll likely go back to XP again with it fairly soon.

At home, I've got several machines running Vista Premium and I've had absolutely no issues with them at all. They're used extensively for gaming and the performance is just fine. No complaints.

I've also got several workstations at work that we're testing out with Vista Business and have had no trouble with so far. A few people are having issues with the GUI changes, but that's about it. They're generally as stable as XP was.

Then we've had a number of clients buying new computers and getting stuck with Vista. Their experiences generally range from bad to just plain horrible. Lots of incompatible hardware and software. Unexpected learning curves. Lots of complaining about strange issues. Repeated service calls.

I think a large part of the problem has been that this is the first major OS change that a number of people have had to deal with. Folks have been using XP for a number of years now, and everything has more or less worked the same. Now you've got folks just ordering a random computer from Dell, or picking something up at Best Buy...assuming that everything will work the way it has been...and suddenly stuff doesn't work. Their printer won't work with the new computer, their old software won't work, the buttons are all moved around.

Most of the issues I've seen are with people who didn't really expect Vista on their machine, or didn't actually research what switching to Vista would mean for them. For the folks that have intentionally upgraded to Vista it has, more or less, worked.

Which certainly doesn't make it a good OS... Or even much of an upgrade in a lot of cases... But I don't think it's as horrible as a lot of people are claiming either.

It's a Microsoft OS - anyone who expected rock-solid stability and bullet-proof security needs to have their head examined.

Re:Vista Home

[Chryana]

Vista is not awful, but it's worst than XP in many ways (For instance, where is the button to go to the parent directory in windows explorer? How come I have to click through half a dozen dialogs to change file permissions?). It feels slower, which is annoying, and it simply doesn't have any compelling feature to make me want to switch. As you said, YMMV, but the consensus so far is that it was a long wait for nothing, which, from my personal experience, I tend to agree with.

Re:Vista Home

[bigstrat2003]

No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade, though. It's basically a replacement for XP with a few extra bells and whistles... not worth upgrading if you have XP, but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.

Re:Vista Home

[TheSpoom]

...but c'mon...It's 2008.

So... what? My relatively new laptop had no end of problems with it (and when I say relatively new, I mean a gaming model I bought in January of 2007). What exactly are you suggesting here, that we should have to upgrade our hardware and/or software every time we get a new version of an OS?

Protip: Microsoft needs to put a metric shit-ton more man-hours into compatibility with previous hardware and software. They shouldn't be releasing an OS that doesn't run just about everything that the previous one did. Things that don't, for example, interface directly with the kernel shouldn't have problems running. If they do, that's a huge architectural flaw that MS should fix instead of trying to get all of their developers (who, one could argue, are their most important customers) to update their code.

Of course, that said, Vista did seem to be rushed since it had missed several release dates anyway.

Re:Vista Home

[D Ninja]

It also gives me access to 4 gigs of ram with zero driver problems, unlike XP64, and the general OS responsiveness is improved over XP.

How did you manage to accomplish this? Vista only shows 3 and a little bit gigs of RAM, even though my BIOS sees 4. Any help would be appreciated.

Re:Vista Home

[raijinsetsu]

Then I guess all those benchmarks out there must be wrong. It's all a conspiracy to bury Microsoft's newest product. Yeah... that must be it.
And my first hand experience with Vista... also part of this conspiracy. My mother has a computer that was "built for Vista" (which, by the way, MS has admitted was a "marketing overstatement", ie. LIE). It's slow. It crashes ALOT. We've upgraded drivers. We've done a clean install. We took the necessary updates. It still crashes. It's still slow. It's still a load of crap.
My high-end system costs $4k. It has everything that anyone could want in a system. It can do ray tracing lightning fast but apparently can't load Vista in under 15 minutes, even after spending hours removing all the "sparkle" that is the new UI.
Your experience appears to be derived from a single desktop. I have used multiple desktops, laptops, and notebooks. I have also done research and generally kept up on the happenings in Vista in case there was some mystical transformation from trash-heap to XP-upgrade. I have yet to see it.
I'm glad it works for you, but, you are a minority of a minority and are in no way a benchmark for all Vista installs.

Re:Vista Home

[Giometrix]

It also gives me access to 4 gigs of ram with zero driver problems, unlike XP64, and the general OS responsiveness is improved over XP.

How did you manage to accomplish this? Vista only shows 3 and a little bit gigs of RAM, even though my BIOS sees 4. Any help would be appreciated.

Do you have Vista32 installed?

Re:Vista Home

[JuanCarlosII]

For instance, where is the button to go to the parent directory in windows explorer?

Yes! I use a combination of XP Pro, Vista Home Prem, Ubuntu, and Xandros on my various computers and have found Vista to be no worse (for my use, YMMV) than any of these with the single exception of this one "feature". Seriously, who genuinely thought that removing the 'up' button was a good idea?

Re:Vista Home

[gsgriffin]

If you're running a 32bit system, you will max out with memory allocation at around 3.2G, you need the 64bit version to see 4G, don't you?

Re:Vista Home

[crivens]

I've tried Vista and I hate it. It's ugly, complex, overly fussy and just downright painful to use. It came pre-installed on a laptop I bought my wife and after using it for one hour I wanted to send it back, dig into the savings and buy her a Macbook Pro instead.

Re:Vista Home

[matrim99]

Vista 32 can only see 4 gigs MINUS memory address space reserved for hardware (video card(s) and other hardware that require reserved memory). This typically results in 3 to 3.3 gigs being available in Vista 32 with 4+ gigs of RAM installed on the computer (same thing with XP 32). To see more than this with any Windows flavor, you must use the 64 bit version (XP or Vista).

Re:Vista Home

[Ephemeriis]

No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade, though. It's basically a replacement for XP with a few extra bells and whistles... not worth upgrading if you have XP, but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.

I like that 64-bit support is more mainstream in Vista. XP Professional 64 always felt like an afterthought.

Beyond that, however, you are exactly right. There is no compelling reason to switch to Vista. And in many cases there are plenty of reasons (older hardware/software) not to.

Re:Vista Home

[raijinsetsu]

For 32-bit Windows systems, you can also install a driver called Gevotte's RRamDisk. The setup is a little technical. Basically, it's a ram-disk that uses your CPU's PAE to access memory above the 4GB mark, regardless of Windows' limitation. You can then place your swap on the ram disk.
It's not as elegant as using all available memory, and it does cause some overhead, but I know it works well. I've been running it on my XP PC for a few months now.

Re:Vista Home

[TheDarkMaster]

I think the guy above is maybe "flamebait", but...

I don't forget yet a Vista machine with 2GB RAM needing several minutes from "PC start" to "read to use", and this on a fresh-installed system (no antivirus, no crappyware, etc).

Re:Vista Home

[HangingChad]

I understand that YMMV

Our "M" has most definitely varied. The only machines we consistently have problems with are the Vista laptops. We're pushing out Ubuntu on our desktops, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. And the money we save on licenses is a bonus.

Is that what you consider bullshit bashing? We don't like Vista, we like Ubuntu better. Unfortunately the sales staff got laptops that came with Vista and those machines account for the majority of our service calls.

Re:Vista Home

[cerberusss]

My mother has a computer that was "built for Vista" (which, by the way, MS has admitted was a "marketing overstatement", ie. LIE). It's slow. It crashes ALOT.

Just a suggestion: bring it back to the store. I'm just like you and tried to fix everything myself. Now I have my own business don't have the time for that, I either: 1) tell the seller to come pick it up for repairs 2) if they won't, retract payment from credit card company or 3) scrap it.

I'll admit this is all sounding a bit abrupt but I have come to hate the mucking with Windows.

Re:Vista Home

[miork]

Interestingly enough, I just changed a laptop I have to Vista from linux! (of course I won't use any sort of "upgrade" language here to describe it..) The initial reason was a change in my work's VPN software, but there was much less hassle in the change than I expected. Luckily all the drivers were present on the manufacturers website, if not then it would have been a complete bust. Of course Ubuntu worked out of the box on everything but the VPN.

Re:Vista Home

[xded]

Correct. Read here for more info.

Re:Vista Home

[NoName6272]

Then we've had a number of clients buying new computers and getting stuck with Vista. Their experiences generally range from bad to just plain horrible.

I agree with this statement, most people I know with vista and like it, only web surf or type up projects. They would be as happy with a Mac as they would be with Vista or XP for that matter. I'm not a big fan of Mac or Vista but that's besides the point. The people I hear have trouble, are trying to get by with a budget computer (min requirements or less) and trying to play games on it (10FPS on low quality any one?), or upgrading a incompatible hardware computer to vista thinking everything would go fine because they spent a lot of money on the computer a month before vista came out, so logically it can run vista (PS: life isn't logical!).

I personally have tried vista, and didn't like it enough to make the change (I love XP and windows 3.11 still). I still can't stand that a lot of people bash Vista for stupid reason mostly; the constant security warnings when ever they open a program (My reply: then turn it off), others bash the UI (then download a mod and change it), even more complain about how their graphic cards can't run the cool DX10 effects (then don't use them or stop being cheap and buy something decent for once).

Offtopic: What will be even funnier is when they then try and change from 32bit vista to a 64bit xp without researching what it means and then find out nothing on their computer works. We need nerds to guide these casual users!!! (with out the intent on making the company the most money ala Fire Dog and Geek Squad; though some really do help but others don't understand the difference between ram and hard drive [go into best buy and pretend your buying a computer, act like a complete idiot and watch how they will do 1 of 3 things, take advantage, make mistakes or actually be of some help]) XKCD comic

~~
Noname

Re:Vista Home

[mwlewis]

Microsoft needs to put a metric shit-ton more man-hours into compatibility with previous hardware and software.

Are you serious? They already do a ton of this. It's the old damned if you do, damned if you don't. The breakages have mainly occurred due to fixing design flaws or bugs in previous releases that some software relied upon. I'm sure that there are some applications that broke for other reasons, but to assume that they're not already putting huge amounts of effort into this area is just ignorant.

Re:Vista Home

[tyler.lee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software) (more appropriate for /. squabbling)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba

...now go away.

Re:Vista Home

[Thelasko]

No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade

Hard core gamers "must have" DirectX 10. Although, some may argue, that hard core gamers have no sense.

Please excuse me while I return to playing Crysis.

Re:Vista Home

[plazman30]

There were 6 of us here at work on the Windows Vista pilot.

It's been about 6 months since they converted us.

Know how many of us are still on the Vista pilot? Zero!

Soon as they fix the issue with network file copy speeds, I'll think about it again...

Re:Vista Home

[hairyfeet]

Glad to see another member of the "We'd tried Vista and guess what? It sucks." club. Meetings are on Thursday,coffee and donuts are in the back. I have a nice little repair shop,therefore I try to keep up with the "latest and greatest" from MSFT because I know I'm going to have to work on them. I have run Vista Beta,Vista RTM,and Vista SP1. Here is my impressions:

SLOW,Jeebus Tap Dancing Christ is this pile slow! Sure if you run it on a dual core with 4Gb of RAM it boots okay(still slow,just not as slow) but lets be honest here:It is an OPERATING SYSTEM. Anybody remember that word? It means it should give programs access to your hardware and get the f*ck out of the way. Nobody buys the OS to stare at the desktop. When a 3GHz with 2Gb of RAM is not enough horse to keep the OS from being slow,you know there is a problem.

Networking: I have 5 machines on my home network-2 XP,1 Win98SE,1 Win2K,and the machine that was running Vista(now XP,Thank the Gods). Can you guess which one would "lose" the network? Which one that would have the network just "die" and refuse to connect without a hard reboot? Give you a hint,it wasn't the Win98SE. And don't even get me started on file transfers through the LAN. A file that would take Win2K a few minutes? Go get some coffee and start working on the crossword buddy.

I could go on and on with how many ways Vista sucked,but thankfully I don't have to. You know why? Because the folks bringing their Vista machines to me DON'T want Vista fixed. Nope. They want it gone. As in "I hate this thing,please get it off before I throw it out a window AAARRGGH!". I know a guy who actually did that with his laptop after Vista seized and ate a document he had been working on for hours. Whizzed it out a 3rd story window,whipped out his CC,and went down the street and bought the nicest Macbook pro he could find.

For those that doubt go to CompUSA or Bestbuy and buy whatever Vista machine is on sale(like 90% of the public does),take it home,do NOT add any RAM or other upgrades,and see how quick you want to pull your hair out. I'm guessing it'll be like my average customer,that is 3 days. Sure you can build a tricked out multicore rig with sh*tloads of RAM and make it run Vista okay. But why the hell you you NEED to? It is an OS people! You know you have problems when I tell my customers Vista is an option on new builds and I get a loud "EEEEWWW!",like I let a raunchy fart in front of them. Or when people bring in their machines and say "I hate my new machine,can you fix it?" and I say "You got Vista'd,didn't you." and they hang their head and go "Yep. REAL hard. Please put XP on it,please!".

So the few of you that got lucky and the moon and the stars were aligned and you did the Ballmer monkey dance and all the drivers worked beautifully,be happy. Believe me,you are the exception,NOT the rule. And sorry about the length,it is hard to put the offal of Vista into words without adding length. Otherwise you get "Liar! Vista is beautiful and you should do the Ballmer monkey dance of joy!" trolls coming out of the wordwork. Just put any of the problems I had with Vista into Google and you'll find I'm far from alone.

Re:Vista Home

[rkever]

I'm a web dev and I can say that I have tried it. I do appreciate what MS has put into it and the operating systems works well as long as you don't install too many apps. I have a few standard dev apps, and browsers, that tend to cause vista to hang for about 2mins. The only reason I say "hang" rather than crash is that I got tired of restarting and just let it sit one day to find that it eventually fixed itself. So one positive thing is that vista seems to do a better job when locking up. And really, this issue is only because the OS is new, just like XP was a time ago, and eventually apps will catch up. The only real bone I have, besides the nagging verification window which I disabled right away, is that the system, right out of the box, is a major memory hog. But RAM is less expensive now days so really that is less of an issue than it was a year ago. Although my dev work would go much more smoothly on XP, Vista is still able to get the job done well enough and time will heal the hanging apps. Not to mention I can play some impressive DX10 games :)

Re:Vista Home

[gad_zuki!]

>I think a large part of the problem has been that this is the first major OS change that a number of people have had to deal with.

This bears repeating. XP, for many people, was their first computer. This whole process is shocking to them. They have an irrational love of XP. Everything in the computer world is XP to them.

Personally, I think Vista is a step up for residential users soley for the UAC. XP runs default as local admin. This is a security nightmare. No, I dont expect UAC to be the perfect solution, but something along these lines has been needed for years.

I see Vista as vast improvement over XP. People are giving XP way too much credit. Its a typical MS product. Works okay, can be buggy, can be unstable, doesnt have good security, etc.

I also hope developers get off their assess and stop trying to write to c:\windows or c:\program files. We shouldnt need to put anyone as local admin to just run an installed app. Hopefully Vista will force them to write proper applications and make running as limited user 24/7 an attractive prospect for home users.

Re:Vista Home

[tha_mink]

The people I've heard not complain about Vista use their computers as document editors and web-browsers. However, I have to remind you: my pocket watch can do this, and it costs less than a single install of Vista. To butcher an old phrase: Vista is about as useful as a tit on a bull, and about twice as ugly.

I develop software. I manage a medium size business infrastructure. I debug applications. I use vista. I like it better than XP. So now, you know somebody who uses it in a way that you can't use your phone.

Re:Vista Home

[wbo]

The tool bar button to move to the parent folder in Explorer has been removed, but not the keyboard navigation controls. All you need to do is press the backspace key to move up the the parent of the folder you are currently looking at.

I can see how this could be annoying to some, but I personally always use the keyboard controls even in XP because I find it to be more efficient than reaching for the mouse.

Re:Vista Home

[wbo]

Things that don't, for example, interface directly with the kernel shouldn't have problems running. If they do, that's a huge architectural flaw that MS should fix instead of trying to get all of their developers (who, one could argue, are their most important customers) to update their code.

Microsoft already does a ton of compatibility testing and Vista has compatibility shims that only there to provide backward compatibility with old applications. Some of these shims can even redirect reads and writes to the proper folders if an application has folder paths hard coded in them. See Application Compatibility and UAC.

I have found that a lot of applications that are broken in Vista are broken precisely because they DO insist on accessing the kernel directly even though they shouldn't. DRM and copy protection schemes (such as starforce or GameGuard) used in games are one of the worst offenders but I have seen simular things with some (poorly written) video capture software.

Re:Vista Home

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

And here I think that clicking on the name of the parent folder in the navigation breadcrumb thing makes more sense. Clearly, people are onto something, since KDE's Dolphin does the same thing, were you can navigate to sibling folders just by clicking on the parent folder.

Re:Vista Home

[chammy]

In my case a lot of older games stopped working in XP x64 (Half-Life, Painkiller, etc) as soon as I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram. However in Vista 64bit they work fine.

So why am I using XP to play my games? For one, modern games like UT3 run magnitudes slower on my machine with the exact same settings! It's absolutely ridiculous.

Until I can play games at 1680x1050 with all the settings cranked like I can in XP, it's not going to get used anytime soon. I'll stick with XP x64 and Wine to run the older, busted games.

Re:Vista Home

[Manetheran]

There seem to be a few people like you who have vista run flawlessly, unfortunately I must be one of the unlucky ones. I have Vista Home Premium on both my laptop and desktop, my desktop I've had to re-install vista 3 times so far to fix problems, and its looking like I'll have to reinstall soon on my laptop too. I've had it for less than a month, and I can only get it to boot if I choose the "boot from last known good configuration" option. so from personal experience, not at all happy with vista.

Re:Vista Home

[not already in use]

Ditto. I had honestly never tried Vista due to the absolute thrashing it received on the internet. I was happy with XP, but when I received a free educational license for Vista I decided to see just how terrible it was. After using it, I was actually kind of ashamed by the fact that I let my perception be so wildly altered by the FUD on the internet without trying it myself. If anything, it deepened by contempt for the Mac and Linux folk who tend to spread this crap. And I like to make a few points to refute the garbage they spew:

• Most typical complaint: UAC. Ok, but plesae explain, how is this different than sudo in Linux/Unix, or it's graphical equivalent?
• Memory usage. Linux users like to get excited about arbitrary numbers. A few examples, memory usage and uptime. They are sent into a rage when their system uses the resources it has at it's disposal. You can have your numbers. I'll take my nominal startup times for various applications thanks to prefetching. Oh, and I bet I have a better uptime than you, because my computer will actually wake from sleep.
• Aero, and fancy desktop effects. Funny that the biggest push in desktop linux is desktop effects. And, oh the irony, compiz or whatever it's called these days tends to eat up the processor even when no effects are in use.

Re:Vista Home

[jeremyds]

I pushed out 37 vista business installs...

37?! In a row?

Re:Vista Home

[644bd346996]

You need 64-bit Windows for Windows to see more than 4GB of RAM, but that's only because Windows is so poorly written. It's support for PAE in the workstation-class editions is half-assed at best, even though PAE has been near universal since the Pentium Pro. XP SP2 even requires PAE for full use of the Data Execution Prevention, but Microsoft has never enabled a 32-bit non-server operating system to access more that 4GB of RAM.

They clearly could, and it's obvious that over the past several years there's been quite a bit of demand for PAE support on 32-bit systems, but Microsoft has never deigned to supply that. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this wouldn't be the case if the desktop operating system market were even somewhat competitive.

Re:Vista Home

[Colonel Korn]

It also gives me access to 4 gigs of ram with zero driver problems, unlike XP64, and the general OS responsiveness is improved over XP.

How did you manage to accomplish this? Vista only shows 3 and a little bit gigs of RAM, even though my BIOS sees 4. Any help would be appreciated.

You're using Vista 32, I'm using 64. I suggest that you switch, though you might look up any very old piece of hardware you have first to make sure it has drivers. I have yet to find something I can't do or use in 64, but my machine has nothing older than 6 years in it. XP32 also only lets you use 3 gigs of your ram (though older versions at least lied and showed all 4), while XP64 lets you use all 4 gigs. Unfortunately, XP64 is much shakier and less supported than Vista64.

Your same Vista key will work if you want to install the 64 bit version. You can request a 64 bit disk from MS for the cost of shipping (or so I hear), or you can just borrow or download a copy and then use your key to do a fully legal installation.

Re:Vista Home

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.

Unless you play games.

Or you don't like the pointless and sometimes downright infuriating UI changes.

Or you prefer not to support compulsory, consumer-hostile technologies like DRM, activation, remote monitoring, forced downloads of patches, and all that jazz, which are generally worse in Vista than in XP (though the licence agreement for some of the XP service packs is doing its best to make them almost as bad).

Which describes almost every home user I know who is still running on Windows.

Re:Vista Home

[Colonel Korn]

Then I guess all those benchmarks out there must be wrong. It's all a conspiracy to bury Microsoft's newest product. Yeah... that must be it.

And my first hand experience with Vista... also part of this conspiracy. My mother has a computer that was "built for Vista" (which, by the way, MS has admitted was a "marketing overstatement", ie. LIE). It's slow. It crashes ALOT. We've upgraded drivers. We've done a clean install. We took the necessary updates. It still crashes. It's still slow. It's still a load of crap.

My high-end system costs $4k. It has everything that anyone could want in a system. It can do ray tracing lightning fast but apparently can't load Vista in under 15 minutes, even after spending hours removing all the "sparkle" that is the new UI.

Your experience appears to be derived from a single desktop. I have used multiple desktops, laptops, and notebooks. I have also done research and generally kept up on the happenings in Vista in case there was some mystical transformation from trash-heap to XP-upgrade. I have yet to see it.

I'm glad it works for you, but, you are a minority of a minority and are in no way a benchmark for all Vista installs.

1) Look at recent benchmarks, say from 2008, and they're right and they agree with me (don't compare the dx10 version in Vista to dx9 in XP - compare apples to apples. dx10 seems to largely suck).

2) I have main firsthand experience only with my desktop, and more limited (I use them but they're not mine) experience with a couple of other desktops from work. None have crashed on me, none are slow. Definitely I understand that people with other hardware will have different experiences, but based on what I've heard not on internet forums but from other people who use Vista, the vast majority have zero problems.

3) My high end system cost...well, it's hard to say since I upgrade instead of rebuying everything each time I need a speed boost, but the core system was $600. That doesn't include my hard drives or monitor. Or the case or power supply. I'm using a C2D, so overclocking is easy. I really never felt comfortable with an OC on a computer important to me, but with this generation of CPU I feel safe running a 2.4 GHz chip at 3.2. My load CPU temperature is under 50 C, with a giant but only $30 heat sink, and as I've said, I've had zero crashes in Vista. My computer takes 25 seconds to go from the end of the BIOS checks to a login prompt. There's absolutely no way it should take 15 minutes for any OS to load for you. The delay is definitely not about the normal load of the OS - you have a major hardware or driver problem, which should be easy to find and fix. Log the boot process and see what's stalling for 14 minutes 30 seconds. That's the problem.

4) I don't recommend Vista for my friends. I'll tell them it's working for me, but I don't want to be the reason they spend $80 on an OS and then find that it's got some problem with some part of their system. It's unlikely, but it would be terrible if it happened. I don't want to inflict 15 minute boot times on anyone.

Re:Vista Home

[bigstrat2003]

Unless you play games.

BS. I'm a big gamer, and game on Vista Home Premium. Since release, I've had only one issue: KOTOR 2 wouldn't work. Other than that, works beautifully. There is no reason, as a gamer, to avoid Vista. In fact, gamers have MORE reason to use Vista, because they can use DX10.

Or you prefer not to support compulsory, consumer-hostile technologies like DRM

Don't use media with DRM, and you'll never have issues with DRM. That's so consumer-hostile!

activation

Which isn't hostile. It Just Works the vast majority of the time. Activation is completely transparent to most users.

remote monitoring

If you want to make ludicrous claims, offer proof. As far as I recall, all that has ever been offered is traffic going to Microsoft, which in no way constitutes any sort of proof.

forced downloads of patches

*cough cough sneeze*

Oh, sorry about that. I'm allergic to bullshit. This isn't normally a problem, but it happens sometimes when people spew bullshit about Vista "forcing" you to download patches, when it does nothing of the sort. You know how it is.

Re:Vista Home

[Real1tyCzech]

Upgrade to SP1, retard. The process manipulation Vista does with multimedia/networking has been greatly reduced. (and can now be turned off completely with a reg key)

Re:Vista Home

[Real1tyCzech]

Upgrade to SP1, retard. The process manipulation Vista does with multimedia/networking has been greatly reduced. (and can now be turned off completely with a reg key)

Re:Vista Home

[Sinbios]

You need 64-bit Windows for Windows to see more than 4GB of RAM, but that's only because Windows is so poorly written. It's support for PAE in the workstation-class editions is half-assed at best, even though PAE has been near universal since the Pentium Pro. XP SP2 even requires PAE for full use of the Data Execution Prevention, but Microsoft has never enabled a 32-bit non-server operating system to access more that 4GB of RAM.

32bit systems don't have enough addressing space for 4GB of RAM, cuz 2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,295. This space is also shared with other hardware. It's not because Windows is poorly written. Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM.

Re:Vista Home

[DAldredge]

Funny - It boots in less than a minute on my dual core pentium 1.6GHZ with 2GB RAM.

Re:Vista Home

[D Ninja]

Yeah. I do. I figured that was the problem. So, my question is this...

Is it better to have 2GB of dual-channeled RAM, or is it better to have 3GB of non-dual-channeled RAM (which is what I have if I leave all 4 sticks in)?

Thanks!

Re:Vista Home

[D Ninja]

Your same Vista key will work if you want to install the 64 bit version. You can request a 64 bit disk from MS for the cost of shipping (or so I hear), or you can just borrow or download a copy and then use your key to do a fully legal installation.

Really? If that's true (I'll research it), that's awesome. None of my hardware is older than 2 1/2 years, so I should be fine on drivers (I would hope anyway...except maybe my webcam which I use for Skype). Other than this RAM issue, is there any compelling reason to use 64-bit over 32-bit?

Thanks for your response!

Re:Vista Home

[Giometrix]

Yeah. I do. I figured that was the problem. So, my question is this...

Is it better to have 2GB of dual-channeled RAM, or is it better to have 3GB of non-dual-channeled RAM (which is what I have if I leave all 4 sticks in)?

Thanks!

I'm not a hardware guy but....

This link (from 2005) has some benchmarks between dual and single: http://www.tcmagazine.com/articles.php?action=show&id=128

From the last page:

"The ambiguity in most of the benchmark results we saw today sends a very clear message: on todayâ(TM)s systems, the advantages of Dual Channel memory setups are negligible for average users.

While some memory specific benchmarks, those designed to saturate bus bandwidth, demonstrated the Dual Channel systemâ(TM)s superiority, very few real-life applications took advantage of it, and some games even managed to perform better on the Single Channel setup."

My logic is as follows: if the extra GB keeps you from paging out to disk even a small number of times, it probably more than compensates for the small performance disadvantage of one channel vs dual. Of course, YMMV.

Re:Vista Home

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm a big gamer, and game on Vista Home Premium. Since release, I've had only one issue: KOTOR 2 wouldn't work. Other than that, works beautifully.

Except for the huge performance hits reported by just about every game review since Vista's release, that sounds perfectly normal.

And what DX10-based games actually have noticeably better graphics than DX9 anyway? DX10 isn't an advantage unless game developers are actually using it to good effect.

As far as I recall, all that has ever been offered is traffic going to Microsoft, which in no way constitutes any sort of proof.

Erm... Right. They've been caught red-handed calling home without permission more than 20 different ways, and they have a history of monitoring things like what you watch or listen to in Media Player using tracking IDs, and they have things like Windows "Genuine Advantage" (ha ha), but it's all entirely benevolent. They'd never actually get it wrong and remotely shut machines down, would they?

This isn't normally a problem, but it happens sometimes when people spew bullshit about Vista "forcing" you to download patches, when it does nothing of the sort.

Tell that to all the sysadmins who had to sort out the updates when MS screwed up SUS a few months back.

Or you could just trust them, assume those words they've added to recent licence agreements saying they can do this are just there for decoration, and believe that there is no technical mechanism through which they could actually do it.

Re:Vista Home

[SnEptUne]

Why must I forced to use new software, when all I need can be accomplished with a wordperfect 3 running on DOS? 486DX is enough for my use, so don't force Vista on me, pretty please?

Re:Vista Home

[SnEptUne]

There is a flaw in that logic. Just because a computer have XP installed does not imply it is as old as XP.

Then again, 8 years old is considered new for me; I only replace hardware when it is broken beyound repair, be it a car, an oven, or the kitchen sink. Yeah, I am a tree hugger, I can live without eletricity if it can save the environment.

Re:Vista Home

[Windowser]

It's a Microsoft OS - anyone who expected rock-solid stability and bullet-proof security needs to have their head examined.

I knew I was using Linux for a reason. Thanks for reminding me

Re:Vista Home

[node 3]

32bit systems don't have enough addressing space for 4GB of RAM, cuz 2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,295. This space is also shared with other hardware. It's not because Windows is poorly written. Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM.

Yes, they can. The person you were replying to even spelled it out for you.

Three times.

It's called PAE.

Re:Vista Home

[DaveWick79]

Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor.

It's a memory addressing issue and a 32 bit memory address simply can't access more than 4GB of RAM.

Re:Vista Home

[node 3]

Don't use media with DRM, and you'll never have issues with DRM. That's so consumer-hostile!

Impossible. The OS itself requires DRM (WGA) in order to fully run.

I'm not one of those people who say that if something contains DRM, it must be avoided. I'm far more practical about such things. Vista is, however, the most DRMd system to ever hit the shelves.

Re:Vista Home

[X3J11]

Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor.

It's a memory addressing issue and a 32 bit memory address simply can't access more than 4GB of RAM.

This is not entirely accurate. As has been mentioned earlier, the PAE support that has been available in processors for numerous years allows an operating system to circumvent this limitation.

Physical Address Extension

So while technically the system is still limited to 32 bits of addressable memory, it can map memory of up to 64 GB within the 4 GB address space.

Re:Vista Home

[ericartman]

My 32 bit Vista shows the 4gb of ram I have installed, on the other side of the dual boot, Ubuntu does not. Ah well I love both sides and use them both happily.

Cart

Re:Vista Home

[petermgreen]

Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM.
Oh yes they can, having a 32 bit virtual address space in both userland apps and the kernel does not mean the physical address space can't be bigger and PC processors have supported a 36 bit physical address space for quite some time through PAE mode. Indeed XP supported this before SP2 if you manually enabled PAE mode.

Unfortunately with XP SP2 they enabled PAE by default but limited the address space to 4GB even in PAE mode. They claim this was due to driver issues (I treat this claim with some skepticism).

So if you want a supported 32 bit version of windows that supports more than 4GB of address space you have to splash out for the server edition.

Re:Vista Home

[petermgreen]

Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor.
Bullshit, at least debian supports physical address spaces over 4GB through PAE though you may have to choose the correct kernel manually though (i'm not sure about other linux distros but I would be somewhat surprised if they didn't supply a kernel with PAE enabled to support more than 4GB of addres space).

Of course any one process is limited to 3GB due to the linux virtual memory layout but the system as a whole can use much more.

Re:Vista Home

[DaveWick79]

Us techies know about PAE but typically a user is not going to know what it is or how to enable it.

I'm not familiar with the linux memory layout but with Windows it reserves 1GB for the kernel. Each app by default can use a max of 2GB unless you use the /3GB switch to start the kernel.

Either way, windows or linux 32 bit desktop versions out of the box do not see more than 4GB.

Re:Vista Home

[thebonafortuna]

The Republicans now have a torture advocate and a creationist Nazi-sympathizing theocrat on their ticket for November.

I realize this is off topic, but am curious - do you actually believe that? McCain is on record as opposing torture every time it has ever come up as an issue. And he seems like the least religion oriented Republican to run for President in a long time.

Re:Vista Home

[petermgreen]

There's one, and only one, reason to do so: they moved the video drivers into user space, so if you're using a video card with flakey Windows drivers (*cough*nVidia*cough*) you won't get a bluescreen when the video drivers crash. Which means you won't lose all your work.
Not entirely.

MS say

"At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected."

So it might help it might not, it depends which part of the vendors code is buggy.

Re:Vista Home

[SenseiLeNoir]

64-bit vista CAN see more than 3.25GBs of RAM.. unlike XP64.

If you read the grandparent post, he/she is talking of 64bit Vista.

Re:Vista Home

[geekoid]

WE had it in the lab for a while, but it is dog slow on file transfers, still. It fails on all of our legacy stuff, which is needed.

We run it on boxes well above the min requirements. We ahve odd network stops on the machines form time to time.

We ran a number of studies and scenarios. Quite frankly, it has no value over what we are doing. None at all.

They would need to pull out their DRM, it's making the OS dog slow, show us some value add, and fix there stack we might reevaluate it.
Right now, it's just not good enough. We are very serious about the OS choice, we would buy many thousand licenses. Luckily our organizations allows IT to test and evaluate and lake tech. decisions.
Probably becasue there were some tech decisions made by management that cost many millions of dollars just to recover from the failure.

Re:Vista Home

[geekoid]

Get 4 gig dual channel, create a one gig ram disk. Load games onto the ram disk when you play.
You might be able to use the ram disk as Vista 'speed boost disk, but I suspect it will require a little bit of hacking.

I'll try this when I get home. Should be interesting.

Re:Vista Home

[SenseiLeNoir]

I use the operating system that is RIGHT FOR THE JOB.

At home, on my dual core Athlon 64x2, I run Vista Home Premium 64 bit, and its my gaming rig, as well as a mutimedia rig. this is my FUN computer, which I use for serious fun. My parents use it too, and its fine, I have locked theior accounts as limited users, they are happy, it performs well, and I am Happy. It performs well enough, as is not the resourse hog people make out to be. I do have a Linux Ubuntu partition on it, which I occassianally use, for some purpose or another.

On my HOME laptop, I use XP Media center Edition, and it performs its job well. I also have a Ubuntu parition too, who I use often, but not as much as Windows.

At work, however, where I am a Software Engineer, I have chosen a custom Ubuntu Linux 64/32bit hybrid system, to manage my Quad core 4MB ram behemoth. I prefer Linux for my work PC, for what I am using it for. I do have Windows XP in a Vitual Machine, which I occasionally run for testing, which I use for testing.

My Work Laptop is a Mac......

Point being, use the OS that suits your tasks.

Re:Vista Home

[Random Destruction]

Neat. My 32 bit linux sees 4gb just fine. As the sibling posters said, clearly you're just uninformed.

Re:Vista Home

[GaryPatterson]

My Vista install was smooth and painless. Every driver worked perfectly.

My computer?

A MacBook Pro with Boot Camp.

Strangely, it seems that Apple's all-in-one approach worked better for Vista than many other vendors.

Having said all the above, I have to say that once Vista was installed, it's caused me some pain. Getting it to recognise my wireless network was... interesting. I still don't know the step that caused it to 'see' the network (I closed an Explorer window), and UAC is irritating even now. None of which bothers me, as I only resort to Windows to play Warhammer Online!

Re:Vista Home

[geekoid]

In fact PAE could see 68Gigs of memory.

However, MS put a hard coded limit in Vista, so even if you can run PAE, you can't get full potential.

I have heard the for some CPU's Vista turns on PAE by default. No hard cite on that one.

Re:Vista Home

[spectecjr]

SLOW,Jeebus Tap Dancing Christ is this pile slow! Sure if you run it on a dual core with 4Gb of RAM it boots okay(still slow,just not as slow) but lets be honest here:It is an OPERATING SYSTEM. Anybody remember that word? It means it should give programs access to your hardware and get the f*ck out of the way. Nobody buys the OS to stare at the desktop. When a 3GHz with 2Gb of RAM is not enough horse to keep the OS from being slow,you know there is a problem.

Hmmm.... I've not noticed it being slow myself. Also, I'm confused. You call it slow, yet you're saying that it boots okay (still slow, just not as slow)... which makes me wonder... are you calling the boot time slow? Or the actual operation of it slow?

What Antivirus software are you using? Do you have Norton Ghost installed? Norton Ghost made my machine crawl. No idea what it was doing, but the moment I uninstalled it, all of the stalls and slowness went away.

Re:Vista Home

[MarkKB]

32bit systems don't have enough addressing space for 4GB of RAM, cuz 2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,295. This space is also shared with other hardware. It's not because Windows is poorly written. Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM.

Yes, they can. The person you were replying to even spelled it out for you.

Three times.

It's called PAE.

I call red herring! PAE doesn't involve magic at all!

Seriously, Windows XP SP2 and forward run in PAE mode for NX or XD processors. However, Microsoft limits access to 4GB for driver compatibility reasons.

Re:Vista Home

[hairyfeet]

I said it is not as slow on a dual core with 4Gb of RAM,which was kinda the point. It is an OPERATING SYSTEM people! It is supposed to give you access to your hardware and get the hell out of your way! I can put 2K,XP,any Linux,BSD,etc on a 3GHz Celeron with 2Gb of RAM and have it boot and be ready to go so fast I barely get my cigarette lit and my coffee poured before I am ready to work. With Vista anything less than a dual core is nearly always painful.

Note that I said nearly always. That is for the EEE guy. I have found that if you are lucky,and the company has excellent drivers,and you do the Ballmer monkey dance under the full moon you can get an okay experience if you are REALLY lucky. And while it is nice that you managed to get it to go on a EEE,try picking up any Vista machine on sale at Best Buy or Wal Mart and see how long you can stand running it without pulling out your hair. You see,most folks aren't tech nerds like us and buy strictly on price. Thanks to MSFT lying so incredibly hard on the Vista requirements which they put so insanely low it is pathetic,and killing XP which was perfect for low end machines,you have places like Best Buy selling Vista Basic on a Sempron with 512Mb of RAM. You ever have to work on a machine running Vista with those specs? I would rather be kicked in the nuts,it is less painful.

If you want to know what killed Vista,more than the incompatibilities,more than the slow networking,major battery suckage,etc the answer is simple....MSFT. Instead of simply accepting the fact that Vista takes a lot more system resources than any other Operating System in history,which they could have used to marketing effect(a next gen OS for next gen hardware) they lowered and lowered the system requirements,first with that God awful Vista Capable claptrap,and then later by killing XP Home,forcing the OEMs to put Vista on too many machines which simply don't have the power to run it.

From my experience Vista should NEVER be on a Celeron or Sempron based machine PERIOD,and it should NEVER be on a machine with less than 2Gb of RAM. If MSFT would have pushed Vista towards the high end while keeping XP for the low instead of trying to force everyone onto an OS than often simply wouldn't run well on the given hardware we wouldn't be avoiding Vista like the clap now. Instead we get headlines like this and Microsoft has no one but themselves to blame. For their sake Win7 better be a LOT more like XP and a LOT less like Vista or they or going to be giving Apple and Linux a whole bunch of disgruntled ex Microsoft users.

Re:Vista Home

[ps2os2]

Yes it is off-topic *BUT* if you believe everything a republican tells you I have a Stock Broker business I can let you have cheap for only 650 BILLION dollars.

Re:Vista Home

[plazman30]

The pilot INCLUDED SP1! SP1 is way faster than gold code, but XP is much faster than both of them. A 1 hour file copy in Vista GM takes 45 minutes in Vista SP1, and 30 minutes in XP.

Vista is just too damn slow for enterprise use.

Re:Vista Home

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, your PC is a "vista capable" or one really vista capable? I hope you get the idea. For a example, the machine I tested above using XP boots on less than 20 seconds. Why the user will change for a system using much more resources and much more slow for the same tasks? And more important, Vista do not adds anything really relevant like the Win98/XP transition

Microsoft Admits Vista is a Downgrade!

[erroneus]

Well at least they admit it finally. It is NOT at upgrade. It is an attempt to make people hate Windows so much that they are starving for an alternative.

Never mind that, Windows $NEXT_VERSION!

[David Gerard]

I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.

I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.

WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved $HATED_VERSION user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!

I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.

Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!

I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.

Re:Never mind that, Windows $NEXT_VERSION!

[Caetel]

Do you really have to keep spamming this and the apple is evil post on every article?

Linux and Mac Evolution

[neowolf]

Well- this is Slashdot, so...

Look at how much Linux desktops have evolved over the last 8 years. Actually- just over the last four. Also- look at how Apple's OS has evolved over the same time period.

The only company that seems to be having a hard time evolving a desktop OS is Microsoft.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[Espectr0]

looking at the other side of the coin, the reason microsoft has trouble evolving windows, is that the OS is simply mature. linux with X/kde/gnome is developing features that windows has had for ages, and macosx is only about 8 years old.

i actually like xp, it runs most windows software, fast. try running a 7 year old distro and see if it runs today's software.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[maugle]

linux with X/kde/gnome is developing features that windows has had for ages

Wait, didn't we just have a story about Microsoft releasing something to finally give Windows multiple desktops?

...and it apparently doesn't work very well, but that's getting off-topic.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[pandrijeczko]

I'm afraid I cannot comment. In 30 years of using computers, I've used a lot of UNIX, Linux and Windows, as well as a few other lesser-known OSes.

But I can't comment on OS X because in all those years I have never once found a need to either use or buy anything from Apple.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[pembo13]

There are only a few features that KDE/Gnome is adding that Windows has had for ages, and that's forgetting that KDE/Gnome are just DEs. There are a multitude of features that those DEs have that Windows does not. But people tend to ignore things that Window does not have.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[Analog_Manner]

There has been a dektop manager for power users since 2004. Go to the powertoys website.

Re:Linux and Mac Evolution

[SnEptUne]

Can I drag and drop windows to other virtual desktop, and makes their border,windows decoration, etc.. disappears?

LOL!

[neowolf]

ROFLMAO! I wish I had mod points!

Downgrade? What?

[JustNiz]

Just because Y is newer than X doesn't mean Y is an upgrade to X.
Whether something is an upgrade or a downgrade depends on the relative functionality, not the time difference.

Installing XP over Vista is definately an upgrade.

http://www.tothepc.com/archives/windows-xp-features-missing-in-vista/

Re:Downgrade? What?

[pandrijeczko]

For your information, just about all the applications that are listed as having been removed in Vista can be removed with a tool like XPLite in XP.

Re:Downgrade? What?

[Yunzil]

http://www.tothepc.com/archives/windows-xp-features-missing-in-vista/

I read this list, and most of them sounded like [b]good[/b] things.

The Buzz

[Stanistani]

The bees seems to love it...

Any operating system that our crop-pollinating overlords prefer is all right by me!

Is that you, Mr. Ballmer?

[mangu]

I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.

Do you think it makes sense to upgrade the hardware without getting any additional functionality?

Just to show a different point of view, I have recently bought a Linux eeePC-900 and am loving it. It has more or less the same capability as a typical notebook of a few years ago: 900 MHz CPU, 20 GB storage, 1 MB RAM, yet it weighs less than one kilogram. That's what I consider TRUE progress. I have the same functionality I had before, but with a big gain in portability.

If you have to upgrade your hardware just to keep the same functionality, without any significant gain, then why do it? Why not keep the same old hardware and software you had before?

The real reason for this...

[pandrijeczko]

...is simply due to the huge tactical error Microsoft has made over Netbooks & low-powered handhelds.

XP can be slimmed down relatively easily to run quite well on these devices but there is no chance with the size of Vista.

I'm sure that there is still a big demand for XP over Vista but I also understand (with my limited reading of MS product bulletins) that Windows 7 is being designed as a scaleable OS, presumably so it can run on these smaller devices. Therefore it makes commercial sense for MS to keep XP alive for their own reasons of getting onto Netbooks until Windows 7 is ready.

So it is not just because there is a continuing demand for XP from new PC buyers.

Mod Down Parent

[Cowmonaut]

Aside from that being an ad covered bastard of a page, the majority of the info is taken from Wikipedia without reference. Whomever wrote it seems to be trying to pass it off as original research too.

Go Here. Aside from it being Wikipedia and not an ad-laden cesspool it has more information and less bias. Some of the "missing features" actually DO make sense by the way.

No MSochist Here

[grahamkg]

My 2 1/2 y.o. Dell just died. It was out of warranty. I replaced it with an iMac.

hardware upgrades, functionality static

[ifdef]

I was recently looking at a cheap computer that had *ONLY* 1 GB (that's GIGAbyte) of RAM, and was told that it only came with Vista, but that Vista doesn't really run in only 1 GB or RAM, so the computer came with some kind of crippled Vista. The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade. It was an amusing conversation, which I admit I was only participating in to see just what a fool the salesperson could make of himself.

And at first I thought Windows 95 was such a memory hog, because you needed what, 4 MB, for it to run?

But when you think about it, what do I actually get for all of this "improved" hardware? I spend most of my day editing code, using a plain text editor with non-proportional fonts. (Yes, I do admit that my code builds a lot faster these days :-) When I write documents, I have a choice of many, many fonts that I could use, but I only use 2 on a daily basis (and could happily make do with one), and only EVER use maybe half a dozen. The title bars on my windows shade smoothly from dark on one side to light on the other, but how does that actually improve my productivity, or even my enjoyment? I use accounting programs that have pretty graphics, but I would actually RATHER just get my results in spreadsheet form -- what I really care about is the numbers themselves.

Now get off my lawn! :-)

Re:hardware upgrades, functionality static

[petermgreen]

The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade.
Unfortunately that is correct :(

If you get vista buisness or ultimate OEM you get downgrade rights but afaict if you get it retail or retail upgrade you don't. So if the machine came with a home edition of vista then afaict your only legit ways to get XP are either buying a full retail copy (which iirc aren't being made any more though there are still existing copies on the market) or going through volume licenseing (or maybe a system builder pack if you are prepared to register as a system builder)

HP problems

[Kupfernigk]

In fact this is an issue with HP rather than Microsoft. I don't use Vista (because my company doesn't support it internally) but I do not see any obvious reason why printer drivers should be hard to install. I work for a company which consults in printing, and over the last two years I have been growing increasingly concerned about the quality of HP firmware and drivers. I don't know what the problem is, but the Windows drivers are getting really bloated (and sometimes hard to install) and the firmware has a number of inconsistencies. I am suspecting offshoring of firmware development.

The HP Linux printer system is excellent, and this is not intended as HP bashing per se.
In fact, not only HP but also Samsung have excellent Linux support. My advice to Vista users is simple: do not buy HP all in ones, especially as you can get cheap to operate color lasers from other manufacturers.

This reminds me...

[Aphoxema]

One of my many bosses at work was really, totally into Vista, defended it tooth and nail and swore up and down it was the best thing he ever had done did see. I kept telling him he'd end up hating it, and just didn't believe me. Asked me if I ever used, and I explained the only time I ever did was for five minutes playing with a Touchsmart at Best Buy. He said if I hadn't used it then I really have no right to talk bad about it, so I just let it go.

Then he started having problems, blue screens, he shelled out a couple hundred on a new motherboard trying to bulldoze the problem, and it did fix it.

Then he got SP1, and he got blue screens again, then he reinstalled and he still got them.

Then he bought new memory...

New hard drive...

New processor...

New video card...

Then, and I swear this is a pretty bright guy, he found out it was shoddy web cam drivers, the one he insisted to always have plugged in.

Then he switched back to XP just so he could keep using that web cam. I said, "It's not Microsoft's fault that this company made bad drivers" and he said "Yeah, I decided Vista wasn't so amazing after all"

Re:This reminds me...

[Shados]

Thats a funny story :) Shitty web cams do that crap quite often in general... A long time before Vista came out, a friend of mine had gotten a 30$ microsoft web cam... the drivers for it sucked so hard, it would blue screen -XP- constantly...

Re:Thank God - curse Ballmer

[AliasMarlowe]

Blame HP, not microsoft. The driver for my all in one Brother laser installed perfectly in Vista x64. If it's possible for one company to do it correctly and make it easy for the user then it's possible for any company to do it. It sounds like HP dropped the ball. What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?

Well my HP All-In-One installed perfectly in Ubuntu. All functions working, available via the network to any PC in the house. HP provides pretty good driver packages which install effortlessly in my experience, whether on Linux or Windows. If blame for a non-functioning printer is to be assigned to either HP or MS, my guess would be that software issues are MS's fault, and hardware issues are HP's (maybe there's a borked connector or something).

BTW I also programmed IBM and DEC mainframes in the late 70's, DEC PDPs and VAXen in the 80's, and had an original IBM PC (before the PC-XT or PC-AT existed). Actually, I used the Commodore PET even before the IBM PC existed.

Vista is better than Linux!

[mcrbids]

Ok, the subject is a bit of a troll, because I'm typing this on my Fedora Core 8 laptop. But seriously, have you tried to run Fedora Core 9? It's been the most disappointing O/S release I think I've ever encountered.

For years, I've been pleasantly surprised at all the new cool stuff that I see every time I install a new release. The icons are prettier, the driver support is better, etc. There's usually a little training curve as I get used to new things (EG: NetworkManager as opposed to "ifup ") but it's always been well worth it.

Until I tried Fedora Core 9.

Nothing seemed to work out of the gate. All the icons were "flashy" but X11 crashed constantly, wouldn't recognize any resolution greater than 1024x768, (on a 1680x1050 laptop) and destabilized the whole system if I did so much as change a FONT in KDE. In their lame attempt to make it look a little bit more "OSX-y" they butchered the color scheme, (black on charcoal on black is NOT sexy) and managed to remove much of the functionality of KDE. (like, being able to move icons, add submenus anywhere, etc)

I don't know how much of this is RedHat's fault, and how much is KDE's fault, but I seriously shame RedHat for letting such an obviously bad product ship. I know, it's Fedora Core, which is essentially forever in Beta, but this does not qualify as a Beta. Maybe a "functional, unstable Alpha".

I upgraded back to Fedora Core 8, (big sigh of relief) things are back to generally working, and I won't be touching 9 again. Ubuntu is starting to sound better and better...

Shame on you, Red Hat!

Yeh, but does it have a cool name?

[argent]

You know Microsoft, they call it $RANDOM_CITY but when it goes into the boxes it'll be renamed "Windows $NONSEQUITER". If it was called $ATTITUDE $ANIMAL it'd really rock.

Re:Yeh, but does it have a cool name?

[David Gerard]

I'm still waiting for Mac OS X Kitten.

Re:Yeh, but does it have a cool name?

[argent]

Mac OS X Polecat
Mac OS X Moggie
Mac OS X Luwak

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Toshiba's at least doing it...

[Anonymous Coward]

This was sent to us from our sales rep from Toshiba in Winnipeg.

----------------
Hi Everyone,

I wanted to announce that Microsoft has extended Toshibaâ(TM)s ability to provide XP Pro Downgrade Media for applicable notebooks with Vista Business until July 31st 2009. Previously, the cut off date was January 31st 2009. Toshiba will do their best to continue to include XP PRO Downgrade media in the box with all of our notebooks shipping with Vista Business pre-installed.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Regards,

[name withheld for privacy]
Sales Representative, MB/SK
Information Systems Group

Toshiba of Canada Ltd.
150 Greenwood Ave.
Winnipeg, MB CANADA
R2M 2T3
[...]

Inside Sales Support: 1-800-TOSHIBA
www.toshiba.ca

--------------------

So it's at least confirmed for Toshiba.

On another note: Jesus Christ... stop turning every thread on here into a f**king flamewar... -_-

Vista Sales through the roof!

[neurosine]

How else are they going to sell XP, and mark down that Vista is selling...just...just great.

You're wrong, even MS says so.

[geekoid]

Gah, did you even read the post? look into what PAE is? of course not, that would be actual facts, and that would hurt your MS fanboi status.

Here is is straight from the horse mouth:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

"Physical Address Extension. PAE is an Intel-provided memory address extension that enables support of up to 64 GB of physical memory for applications running on most 32-bit (IA-32) Intel Pentium Pro and later platforms. Support for PAE is provided under Windows 2000 and 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. 64-bit versions of Windows do not support PAE."

I'm sorry, that was a mistake..Apple fans are called Fanbois, MS fans are called suckers~

Confirmed by CNET

[Leemeng]

.. and MS has issued a statement. Check out their spin:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10057617-56.html

"As more customers make the move to Windows Vista, we want to make sure that they are making that transition with confidence and that it is as smooth as possible," Microsoft said. "Providing downgrade media for a few more months is part of that commitment, as is the Windows Vista Small Business Assurance program, which provides one-on-one, customized support for our small-business customers."