Possible Last-Minute Problems With Vista SP2

crazyeyes writes "It looks like Microsoft is facing problems with Windows Vista SP2. The final Service Pack for Vista and Server 2008 (before Windows 7 comes out) has been delayed. The folks who broke the launch details and dates of previous Service Packs for XP and Vista have Microsoft's latest internal schedule. Can Microsoft get it out before Windows 7? According to the new schedule, just barely."

Comments

They have to..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Windows 7 is Vista SP3.

Re:They have to..

[Tr3vin]

Since Windows 7 is Vista SP3.

Also known as Windows 1.0 SP86.

Re:They have to..

[GF678]

Why do people keep referring to Win 7 as a service pack for Vista?

With that logic I could say XP is a service pack of 2000.

Operating systems don't need to be evolutionary, and in many cases it better they aren't. Incremental improvements from a (questionable) proven base are better than making too different and new.

I think people keep forgetting history when it comes to MS operating systems.

Re:They have to..

[SpaceLifeForm]

We try.

Re:They have to..

[zonky]

It's more of a "R2" style release.

Re:They have to..

[peektwice]

Operating systems don't need to be evolutionary, and in many cases it better they aren't.

Yes, but incremental improvements to a flaming bag of shit results in larger flames and more shit.

Re:They have to..

[khellendros1984]

I think you've missed the meaning of the word "evolutionary". It *is* a set of incremental improvements from some baseline.

I would consider XP similar to a "service pack" to 2000. They're almost the same OS, in much the same way that Vista and 7 are almost the same. If 2 operating systems are designed to use the exact same drivers, they may as well be the same OS.

Re:They have to..

[afidel]

On the server side that's exactly what they are calling it, the server release based on the Win7 codebase is to be called Windows Server 2008R2.

Re:They have to..

[samriel]

When you think about it, that 2000->XP logic works. By the same logic, Windows 7 is a service pack, and direct descendant, of the original Windows NT.

If you were to look at the codebase, I would wager that Vista and Win7 are incredibly close. The majority of the overhaul is a) interface (to add a nice KDE-esque taskbar) and b) usability (How about an obvious add/remove programs panel?).

In the same vein, there have only been two or three real Microsoft operating systems: MS-DOS, the Win1-3/9x codebase, and the WinNT codebase (I might be wrong; this is mostly a viewpoint thing anyway.)

Re:They have to..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the huge flames make it look like it goes really fast.

Re:They have to..

[jmorris42]

> Also known as Windows 1.0 SP86.

No, service packs are a free download. Windows 7 is Vista SE. Remember Win98SE? It was a service pack but they needed some cash and made people buy it as a version upgrade. Looks like history is about to repeat with Vista except this time they also have to change the name because Vista has gained such a horrible brand identity. It's now the Edsel of Operating Systems. Like the Edsel, Vista probably doesn't deserve all of the rap it has got but reality and PR aren't on the same planet with each other.

The big takeaway from all of the Windows 7 reviews though is that if you hate Vista you will probably hate Windows 7.

They are saying you can run Windows 7 on a netbook. Ya, like you could run Vista on one. Yes it installs and sorta runs but XP runs better.

Windows 7 toned down the security nags a bit and added some nice chrome to the taskbar. Haven't even heard Microsoft itself claim any other major differences with Vista other than yet another IE rev that is currently so broke it might not make the cut. Bugfixes and a couple of minor UI tweaks do not a major version make. We are firmly in point release territory at best, service pack sounds closer to what they are going to ship. They are going to call it a new version because they need a fresh hit of revenue.

Re:They have to..

[RMingin]

XP *is* a service pack of 2000. Kind of a service pack of service packs, compiling all the fixes to date and adding a few new features. There's not a lot different. Windows 7 is an SP of Vista even moreso.

If you want to argue that SPs don't introduce major changes, then XP SP2 was a different OS. That sucker brought more changes, both visible and behind the scenes, than 2000->XP did.

Re:They have to..

[beav007]

The majority of the overhaul is a) interface (to add a nice KDE-esque taskbar)

I love this.

Microsoft: where innovation means copying other peoples ideas...

Re:They have to..

[MrSteve007]

Here's a list I came up with detailing some of the more visible differences in Windows 7. It entails quite a bit more than just a Service Pack:

http://geekpi.com/?p=25

For users

* New Interface: A greatly simplified toolbar, but only at first glance. The quick launch and taskbar now intermingles and can be greatly customized by the user.
* New Taskbar: The taskbar now automatically hides icons as theyâ(TM)re added, into what I call an icon corral which can be selected to show the icons.
* UAC simplification slider: You can define how and when you are prompted by the UAC, even shutting it off.
* UAC definition by program: You can also exempt specific programs from UAC prompts.
* Device Stage: A number of rumors have been circulating about this one. First and foremost, device manufactures DO NOT have to program this in order for it to work it is just an option for direct interaction. Access all the functions of your devices from one screen.
* Homegroups: Its a situation that many of us face. We have a domain controlled work laptop. We come home and want to access our personal media (now managed by libraries) and printers. This solves those problems, while keeping company data safe. Default printers change automatically, depenting on what network you connect to.
* Libraries in Explorer: expanded support for Libraries across networks and a changed browsing interface within explorer.
* Math Input panel: It seems quite advanced, including input of hand/mouse written algebra and calculus.
* Calculator: Adding separate programmer and statistics modes to the previous standard and scientific calculator options.
* MS Paint: Welcome the ribbon.
* Magnifier: built in application to magnify a specific area of the screen and zoom in. This is similar to the capability enabled in XP or Vista in with Microsoft Mouse software.
* Gadgets across the desktop: Gadgets are no longer limited to the gadget toolbar.
* Simplified network connection stack: Ability to peek into the network stack and select an available network without opening any windows.
* Sticky windows (my definition): You can now drag windows to the top of the screen, which will automatically maximize the window. Also by dragging the window to the side of the screen, it will size the window to take the half of that side of the screen
* Preview Desktop: To the right of the taskbar, there is now a preview desktop button.
* Media Player Codec Expansion: Native support for AAC, H264, divx, xvid, AVCHD, flip video to the list of supported codecs.
* StreamOn: Ability to push audio and video output to networked A/V devices (think radios, receivers, and TVs).
* Display Color Calibration Wizard: A step-by-step interface to more closely calibrate proper gamma, brightness/contrast, and to eyeball proper color.
* Simplified Sideshow support: I previously installed sideshow on my windows mobile phone, when I created a Bluetooth relationship with the phone (for PAN support), it automatically discovered its capabilities and shows this in the sideshow area and device stage. Remote bluetooth control of media player, via a win mobile phone.
* New Backgrounds: Sure, absolutely not important, but an interesting re-take on the current Vista background theme.
* Faster Boots: Parallel device initialization during boot â" faster boot times. Demo showed a 5-10 second faster cold boot over Vista.
* Simple Shutdown: In later builds theyâ(TM)ve removed the confusing red, round button and replaced it with a simple, named â(TM)shut downâ(TM) button on the start menu, with the optional OS stops on a pull down menu on the right.

For IT

* Action Center: Thereâ(TM)s a good deal built into this function, but one of the most interesting features is a built in application that allows users record a walk thr

Re:They have to..

[neokushan]

It's significantly faster than Vista, might not be huge changes under the hood, but the changes that are there are definitely for the better. It certainly feels like what a new OS should feel like.

Re:They have to..

[dgatwood]

By that definition, Mac OS X v10.5 and Mac OS X Public Beta are the same OS (printer drivers notwithstanding). You remember Public Beta---the version that didn't even have an Apple menu....

A well written OS should generally work with the same drivers as previous versions with few exceptions. Every now and then it isn't possible, but for the most part, it is not only possible, but also desirable.... Using driver compatibility as a metric is a really bad way to judge whether something is the same OS or not....

Re:They have to..

[Anonymous Coward]

Also known as Windows 1.0 SP86.

That reminds me to the latest client I work for...

If they go onsite to a new client who bought the product, they bring one cdrom with their main program.

The day after, the technician comes in with a DVD, and instals 3-400 hotfixes contained on them.

To top it off, most hotfixes are redunant: they fix something in say hotfix 287, and in QA is approved, while someone else is working on hotfix 288. The next person releases his hotfix, QA tests it and it gets released, to realize on site it's fixing hotfix 288 and undoing hotfix 287. So they release hotfix 289, which introduces another bug, which is added as "known issue" and gets fixed in hotfix 295.

If I look at it, MS does a pretty fair job at it...

Re:They have to..

[jmorris42]

> With that logic I could say XP is a service pack of 2000.

No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines. It had some pretty major teething problems because of it. Later service packs have corrected most of the problems, which is the big problem facing Microsoft. XP is finally a fairly stable operating system. If they could have fixed the 'everyone runs as root' problem inherited when they had to have backwards compatibility with Windows 9X it would have been really good.

> Operating systems don't need to be evolutionary, and in many cases it better they aren't.

As someone using Linux I totally agree. It is the major changes (breakage is bad) that tend to get distros flamed. The problem is asking people to fork over ~$100 for fixes to product defects and a few minor UI improvments that is finally starting to cause problems for Microsoft after getting away with it several times in the past.

> I think people keep forgetting history when it comes to MS operating systems.

Not me. I haven't actually used their newer crap much but I have been following their antics for a long time. Their BASIC interpreters were pretty good, quality has went downhill ever since.

Re:They have to..

[microbee]

Yet people cheer at Windows 7 like it wasn't so.

Re:They have to..

[himurabattousai]

They are saying you can run Windows 7 on a netbook. Ya, like you could run Vista on one. Yes it installs and sorta runs but XP runs better.

My stock Eee 904 would like to disagree with you and your definition of "sorta runs." Is Seven numerically and meaningfully faster than XP? I don't know. I don't do benchmarks. What I do is use Seven in what could be considered real world testing, and I do know this: From where I type this, the experience of using Seven beats the experience of using XP. In fact, I've been running Seven longer than I ran XP on this machine.

All the usual YMMV caveats apply, but don't knock it unless you've tried it.

Re:They have to..

[sortius_nod]

I agree, I've had no issues yet* and am running it on 2 machines (old athlon 3000+ 64 single core and a T5500 laptop). Performance is good, annoyances reduced, IMO better than much Vista.

One thing that disturbs me is calling it "Seven", too close to that horror flic from a while back. ;D

Re:They have to..

[The Grim Reefer2]

No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines. It had some pretty major teething problems because of it. Later service packs have corrected most of the problems, which is the big problem facing Microsoft. XP is finally a fairly stable operating system. If they could have fixed the 'everyone runs as root' problem inherited when they had to have backwards compatibility with Windows 9X it would have been really good.

Actually that sounds like a very good description of 2000 to me.

Re:They have to..

[TrancePhreak]

I disagree. Windows 2000 was good in some ways, but it was not a consumer OS. XP brought all the needed functionality and compatability that was needed to make it a consumer OS. Windows 2000's video drivers ran slower than XP's, so it was not as gamer friendly. Lots of older apps would not run in Win2K, but they will in XP because of the extra compatability layers.

Re:They have to..

[644bd346996]

Hmmm... NT 5.0 to NT 5.1. Most people call that a minor version number change. XP added eye candy a bad DOS/Win9x compatibility layer, and product activation. Beyond that, the only XP software that couldn't be trivially back-ported to 2000 was stuff that depended on libraries that Microsoft restricted to XP for purely business reasons, rather than technical reasons. XP essentially was a service pack (plus a theme pack) that Microsoft got away with charging money for.

Re:They have to..

[644bd346996]

OS X 10.5 is derived from the Public Beta in a series of incremental releases that were, with one exception, overpriced. None of the updates to OS X has come with new features that are worth the $130 that Apple charges, though at least Apple hasn't billed any of them as an all-new rewrite of the previous version. On the other hand, many users (particularly converts from Windows) may feel that the performance increases found in new releases of OS X are worth paying significant money for. (I personally feel that that attitude can only come from unreasonably low expectations for software "upgrades".)

Re:They have to..

[b4dc0d3r]

If small changes are incremental, what are big changes called?

Re:They have to..

[RMingin]

I've never seen anything to confirm any video driver differences between 2K and XP. Since they're using the same drivers and the same directx, I'm skeptical.

Further, 2K can do all the compat shim tricks XP can. They're all in slayerui.dll, just the tab isn't there on .exes by default.

2K and XP are more alike than you imagine.

Re:They have to..

[pbailey]

And they will still have problems with sp10 when ii comes out.

Re:They have to..

[ProfessionalCookie]

Which brings to question- what in the world will Vista SP2/SP3 fix? If they fix those things won't they just end up with Windows 7? If that's the case, what does a Windows 7 license offer over Vista?

I think a lot of Vista licensees are getting hammered, not only for buying a crappy OS but because they're going to get charged to have it fixed.

The only honorable thing to do would be to offer Windows 7 upgrades to Vista licensees at Media only cost. I don't think we stand a chance.

Re:They have to..

[ProfessionalCookie]

Now diff your list (7 and Vista) vs Windows 7 and XP. Finally count the things that were promised for Vista and compare this number to the-above. And then you'll see why Windows 7 is a service pack.

Re:They have to..

[ProfessionalCookie]

Incremental improvements from a (questionable) proven base are better than making too different and new.

Which is why the anthems of people are saying "Break backwards compatibility and make something that works." Essentially breaking backwards compatibility happens anyway, you might as well do it on purpose and with reason. Look at what Apple did from OS 9 until now. They have a somewhat structured, and semantic OS with stable and structured foundations...but they had to draw the line and axe compatibility somewhere.

I long for the day that MS starts over. It's not like what worked on XP will stop working on XP.

Re:They have to..

[jo42]

Why do people keep referring to Win 7 as a service pack for Vista?

They are being polite. Some of us refer to it as "the polished turd formerly known as Vista".

Re:They have to..

[The Great Pretender]

A bit like Tiger and Leopard?

Re:They have to..

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, but of course they're always going to be 99% "the same" because they have to run the same software as the previous version.

32-bit Vista can use XP drivers (it doesn't like to, and it gripes at you when you install them, but it can), so by your definition Vista's the same as well. Of course if you include things like TWAIN drivers and printer description files, then Vista's the same as Windows 3.11.

Re:They have to..

[Gerzel]

This time I think it is to get away from "Vista is a clunker."

Vista has gotten such bad press that they are releasing it under a different name building hype so people will judge the next version as a separate entity from Vista. Dang it all if I bet it'll work.

Re:They have to..

[petermgreen]

No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines.
From a marketing perspective yes , from a technical perspective no.

They added marginally better support for dos and I belive some old badly behaved windows apps but it was just that marginally better still not much good.

The important stuff like WDM (which allows drivers to be shared between the two lines and brought support for plug and play to the NT line) and directx was already there in 2K.

IIRC they were planning to make 2K be the release that unified the consumer and proffesional lines of windows but they bottled out at the last minuite and made ME because too many people were still relying on old dos or badly behaved windows apps.

Re:They have to..

[fermion]

Homegroups: Its a situation that many of us face. We have a domain controlled work laptop. We come home and want to access our personal media (now managed by libraries) and printers. This solves those problems, while keeping company data safe. Default printers change automatically, depenting on what network you connect to.
This is a depreciated and dead feature in Mac OS X. At first I missed it, but then, as the OS became more advanced, I didn't. The OS seems to take care of switching networks, etc, automatically. It connects to the 4 or 5 known wireless networks I use on wakeup, which also connects any media. The OS spools and prints to printers as they become available.

Math Input panel: It seems quite advanced, including input of hand/mouse written algebra and calculus.
This is a missing feature. Mac OS X has had grapher built in for a very long time. It is an indispensable tool. If MS can implement something better, for instance copy and paste to MS Office and Powerpoint. In my experience, creating equations and graphs in powerpoint is unreasonably difficult.

Magnifier: built in application to magnify a specific area of the screen and zoom in. This is similar to the capability enabled in XP or Vista in with Microsoft Mouse software.
The lack of universal access features on MS Windows is one reason that I consider it a toy rather than a serious business tool. It is good that they are now putting resources into taking this seriously. In particular, if such features are well implemented, it could be a significant competitive edge over *nix.

New Backgrounds: Sure, absolutely not important, but an interesting re-take on the current Vista background theme.
Another toy feature like the ability to change the background from a right click on the desktop. This is a clear indication of lack of focus in development, and lack of discipline the ranks. Just because something is simple to do doesn't mean that it should be done.

Improved Disk Defragment status: While it isnâ(TM)t as hypnotizing as watching the blocks move, Win 7 at least shows you defragement progress by section, passes, and percentage; which is a big improvement over Vista.
Why are we still dealing with disk defragmentation in 2009?

Lighter footprint: Netbooks, here comes Windows 7. Demonstrated using a 1ghz, 1 gig of ram. They claim theyâ(TM)re trying to reduce those requirements. Goodbye XP, once and for all.
This will be critical test. MS Vista failed largely because it did not work on hardware even a year old, and did not work on hardware at the expected price point. Add this to the problem that MS is losing the monopoly on laptop, and is not in a position currently to create a monopoly on the netbook. As is said, this will allow the replacement of XP.

Increased Support for multicore CPUs: A fully managed code, that is designed specifically with parallel processing in mind. *rumor*
Unfortunately such really cool features are seldom fully realized. If I were a cynical person, I would think this feature was a last minute addition to compete, at least on the spec sheet, with 'Grand Central'. If this a late addition, I hope that MS will do what it normally does, which is push the development at the expense of the usability and stability of the overall system.

Less Versions, SKUs: Word on the street is that theyre looking to reduce the number of SKUs involved.
We need two, maybe three versions. First, an stripped down OEM version that can be installed on the low price points PCs. A complete OEM/retail version, sold for say $150 retail or upgrade from the base OEM version for maybe $50. If MS still feels that playing games is the best path to success, a third uber version, maybe with third party extensions, can be sold to maintain the illusion that MS Windows is worth $400.

Re:They have to..

[Orion Blastar]

Some people have taken Windows 2008 Server and using it as a workstation because it runs better than Vista. No joke! Just get the lowest priced small business version of Windows 2008 Server. There was a Windows 2008 Workstation patch on some BitTorrent sites to turn it into a workstation OS by removing server features.

Windows 98SE was the last good version of Windows 9X, Windows ME was a joke and really really buggy. Windows Vista is really Windows ME 2.0 practically with the NT/2000/XP modifications all butchered up.

Re:They have to..

[TimothyDavis]

If 2 operating systems are designed to use the exact same drivers, they may as well be the same OS.

They are the same OS, and it's called 'Windows'.

Are you aware that drivers that work for the client edition of Windows also work on server edition? In fact I have XP 64 bit drivers allowing me to use a couple of devices on my Windows Server 2008 system. Just because Microsoft doesn't break a bunch of functionality doesn't mean there isn't a huge change in the OS.

You cannot judge the changes of an OS solely by the UI you work with either. There are many things that have changed under the hood to support many new scenarios and technologies. Microsoft will generally create a new API for the industry to use, and eventually depricate the old API. This allows you to run DX9 display adapters on an OS that was built for DX10, etc.

Re:They have to..

[shutdown -p now]

The quick launch and taskbar now intermingles and can be greatly customized by the user.

This one's actually more interesting when it looks, when it comes to programs that are aware of the new taskbar, such as IE8. I haven't checked the APIs yet, but apparently it's possible to draw a progress bar at the background of your taskbar icon (the filled part takes full height of the icon). Explorer uses it to report progress on file operations - copy/move/delete etc; and IE uses it to report download progress. It's nice to be able to see how things go while the corresponding applications are minimized.

Of course, there is also the ability to extend the stock menu for the icon - a la OS X - but also to publish your own inner tabs (or similar mechanism) for integration into the taskbar, complete with thumbnails etc (again, IE8 does that). After using this stuff for a while, I think I might actually take the OSS apps I use often (such as Miranda IM) and provide patches for Win7 taskbar integration.

Re:They have to..

[shutdown -p now]

Using driver compatibility as a metric is a really bad way to judge whether something is the same OS or not....

Even funnier is that, according to that metric, a minor Linux kernel revision may often be a "whole new OS", even if it runs exactly the same stuff in the userland.

Re:They have to..

[shutdown -p now]

The taskbar is not KDE-sque anyway, it's much more along the lines of OS X Dock (though arguably makes a bit more sense, but that's subjective).

Anyway, who said anything about new taskbar being innovative? It's just nice, and it's long past time either KDE or Gnome should copy that from OS X as well. It does everyone well to spread good ideas around.

Re:They have to..

[Jugalator]

Since Windows 7 is Vista SP3.

No, MS don't do these kind of changes in service packs to everything from the kernel to the UI. It just doesn't happen. Windows XP SP2 was an extreme case, but not even that SP made changes on the scale of W7 over its predecessor.

Re:They have to..

[Jugalator]

* Increased Support for multicore CPUs: A fully managed code, that is designed specifically with parallel processing in mind. *rumor*

Fully "managed code"? This sounds like .NET 4.0 which will do this, but it won't be in W7 AFAIK.

It will however have improved performance in regards of multicore CPU's: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going%20Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

Re:They have to..

[Jugalator]

Yes, like a Tiger or Leopard that can run the vast majority of software out there without virtualization. I hear it's pretty nifty as you get lower resource requirements when you run Windows applications. Seriously, that's why it's still a big deal, although they're "catching up" in some areas.

Re:They have to..

[drsmithy]

* New Taskbar: The taskbar now automatically hides icons as theyÃ(TM)re added, into what I call an icon corral which can be selected to show the icons.

The "New Taskbar" has the same UI misfeature that Windows XP's (in default configuration, once you have enough open windows with "group and collapse" turned on) and OS X's Dock (all the time) do:

Once all those buttons collapse into one, it makes moving directly from one arbitrary window to another annoying and slow. Although at least you can still disable it.

* UAC definition by program: You can also exempt specific programs from UAC prompts.

Oh, great, thus defeating the purpose of having it in the first place. You should have stayed the course, Microsoft, you were probably only 12 months away from the majority of developers actually releasing properly written software. Now they're all just going to leave it broken and have a (default ticked) "exclude from UAC" box as part of their installation.

* Sticky windows (my definition): You can now drag windows to the top of the screen, which will automatically maximize the window. Also by dragging the window to the side of the screen, it will size the window to take the half of that side of the screen

The former is mostly pointless (double-click in the titlebar has achieved this since Windows 3.x days). The latter sounds a bit more interesting.

* Preview Desktop: To the right of the taskbar, there is now a preview desktop button.

Meh. WinKey+D since Windows 95.

* Faster Boots: Parallel device initialization during boot Ã" faster boot times. Demo showed a 5-10 second faster cold boot over Vista.

For the life of me I have never been able to understand the obsession with boot times. Then again, I only reboot my PC maybe once a month.

Re:They have to..

[drsmithy]

Why are we still dealing with disk defragmentation in 2009?

Because file systems still fragment. Yes, even the ones you think don't. I have seen ext3 and UFS filesystems with well over 50% fragmentation.

For *most* people [0] it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, but thanks to decades of 'IT lore', there is still an irrational belief that defragmenting is something you need to do regularly and frequently on PCs to maintain performance.

This tool is a placebo for those people.

[0] For a small minority out there (large files, mostly full filesystems, frequent writing, heavy use) fragmentation can actually get noticable. In which case this tool might actually do something useful for you - but it would have done it just as well without the picture window and disco ball.

This will be critical test. MS Vista failed largely because it did not work on hardware even a year old [...]

Rubbish. Vista was usable on hardware up to 7 years old with minor upgrades and at release dual-core boxes with 2G of RAM (more than enough for decent Vista performance) were $500. A year earlier they cost only a little more than that, albeit with slightly slower processors (which is mostly irrelevant, since - as with OS X - it's the RAM that matters most).

Re:They have to..

[Dayze!Confused]

My problem with calling it "7" is that I live in Taiwan where 7-11's are on nearly ever street and that almost every one just calls it "7", using English none the less. So when I hear "7" I think of a convenient store.

Re:They have to..

[Barsteward]

INCREMENTAL ??

Re:They have to..

[suckmysav]

Yeah, you often hear windows fanbois telling linux fanbois that Windows is just as good as Linux because they use server 2K8 and have none of the problems that linux fanbois are wont to point at and laugh.

What none of the windows fanbois seem to want to acknowledge is that;

a) They have paid at least several hundred dollars for a copy of win2k8 or

b) They are using a pirated copy that they stole from work or dl'ed from TPB

Personally, neither one of those options really appeal to me so I'll stick with Ubuntu I think

Re:They have to..

[drsmithy]

Which is why the anthems of people are saying "Break backwards compatibility and make something that works."

People say that right up until that one program their world revolves around stops working. Just look at all the hoo-ha around Vista, even though in the grand scheme of things it hardly breaks anything at all.

I long for the day that MS starts over.

It's been and gone 15 years ago. It was called Windows NT. There is _zero_ need to dump NT and start over again.

Re:They have to..

[pmarini]

I think people keep forgetting costs when it comes to Microsoft.

Think about this, a Service Pack is made available for free, to "cover" for the bugs that they left in the product, even after years of Beta testing...
Calling it a "new" Operating System instead gives them the chance to sell it to the OEMs - who I believe don't have access to the Software Insurance programme that they sell to the large Enterprises - and the few mad people out there who still want to buy it from the shelves...

This about it, 150 million Vista paying installations vs 150 million free XP SP4 downloads...

Re:They have to..

[drb_chimaera]

To be honest I *hated* Vista - hated it enough that I went to the effort of finding XP drivers for my supposedly unsupported laptop and rolled back to XP on it (for gaming purposes, otherwise I'm using Ubuntu on it) but I've been playing with the Windows 7 beta on a spare box at work - so far I've been very impressed, it seems to have built on the things that worked well in Vista, while hugely improving the things that bugged the hell out of me about the OS.

It's reasonable to point out that Win7 is very much a point release to Vista, in the same way that XP was to 2000, or 98SE was to 98 but I never had a problem with Microsoft's approach on either of those cases

And lets be honest, with the massive backlash that Vista has recieved, I can hardly fault the marketing department from doing everything possible to seperate Win7 from the Vista brand and reputation - in their shoes I'd be doing the exact same thing!

Re:They have to..

[drinkypoo]

Almost everything (though not quite) above is just Microsoft trying to make up for someplace they fucked up in Vista. The simple truth is that this is little more than a service pack, and anything new included in the OS is likely to have growing pains anyway. Just like Windows 98 SE. Which was the initial argument, anyway. Please drive through.

Re:They have to..

[ruemere]

For *most* people [0] it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, but thanks to decades of 'IT lore', there is still an irrational belief that defragmenting is something you need to do regularly and frequently on PCs to maintain performance.

My experience is that users who intensively use filesharing applications often suffer from heavily fragmented files

[...] Rubbish. Vista was usable on hardware up to 7 years old with minor upgrades and at release dual-core boxes with 2G of RAM (more than enough for decent Vista performance) were $500. A year earlier they cost only a little more than that, albeit with slightly slower processors (which is mostly irrelevant, since - as with OS X - it's the RAM that matters most).

Valid for bounded set of variations of "usable". There were numerous instances of where Vista's performance suffered and still suffers. Granted it's usually due to hardware and application compatibility issues, however, given the length of Vista production time, the final version of the system should not exhibit such symptoms.

regards,
ruemere

Re:They have to..

[drsmithy]

My experience is that users who intensively use filesharing applications often suffer from heavily fragmented files

They probably do - that would be the kind of scenario where fragmentation happens. I sincerely doubt it's having any meaningful performance impact, however (unless they're torrenting on the company's fileserver).

Valid for bounded set of variations of "usable".

Of course. While Vista was usable on that 7-year-old PC, XP would have been a better choice. However, my point is the oft-made suggestion here that you need a fire-breathing quad-core PC with 4GB of RAM and a high-end video card just to run Vista is ridiculous.

Pretty much all those "low-end" PCs that run Vista badly, would run it quite well if they had $50 more memory in them (even if they saved $50 by getting a slower CPU). However, since RAM is a concept the average end user can't really wrap their head around, PC sellers typically ramp up the processor speed, disk space and video card specs (as these are easy to advertise) on their machines while leaving memory at inadequate levels.

There were numerous instances of where Vista's performance suffered and still suffers. Granted it's usually due to hardware and application compatibility issues, however, given the length of Vista production time, the final version of the system should not exhibit such symptoms.

My main PC here at work is a ~3 year old dual-core Opteron box with 4G of RAM and some Radeon x300-based video cards. If I didn't regularly fire up VMs, 2G would likely be fine. It is by no means "cutting edge", but it runs Vista fine.

Re:They have to..

[David Gerard]

The program loader doesn't presently work, but I'm working on Wine for Windows! First step: get it to actually compile ...

Re:They have to..

[professorguy]

it's possible to draw a progress bar at the background of your taskbar icon

.

Back in the day, when our application was doing something requiring a progress bar, we'd rewrite the WINDOW TITLE from "MyApp v2.3" to "13% - MyApp v2.3" (then "14% - MyApp v2.3", etc).

What do you know? A progress bar that works even when the program is minimized since the TITLE is written into the taskbar button.

But not all programmers did this. So guess what? Not all programmers are going to make calls to the ProgressIcon API either.

So to fob this off as an improvement over XP is really disingenuous.

(Disclosure: I am not an MS basher. I run Vista Home Basic on my home PC--I think it's OK. Of course I removed the UAC and all the gadgets.)

Re:They have to..

[shutdown -p now]

The difference was that writing progress to the title the way you describe was not standardized in any way, while this new thing is.

Of course it will take considerable time before most apps pick this up. But it is nice nonetheless.

Re:They have to..

[Golddess]

I'm always reminded of the borg.

Re:They have to..

[dgatwood]

Evolutionary, yes, but when you look at the percentage of change, it rapidly approaches the entirety of the OS by the time you get three or four releases away. X PB didn't even visually resemble 10.5, doesn't share the same case-sensitive filesystem support with 10.5 (UFS vs. HFSX), doesn't have any notion of DNS service discovery, has a completely different printing system, didn't have any of the Core Animation or Core Image functionality that makes so many Mac graphics apps possible, etc. Even at the BSD level, X PB behaved more like a BSD variant while 10.5 behaves generally like an AT&T UNIX variant.

My point is that sufficient evolutionary change without seeing the in-between stages is almost indistinguishable from a ground up rewrite....

Re:They have to..

[DeskLazer]

because people are still paying full-price [as in well over $100] to "upgrade" to the new OS. if they were just incremental improvements, charge an incremental price.

for those who say "I don't buy a new OS," think about the computers you buy that come pre-loaded with the OS [ignore this if you are a pirate, arrrrrr]. you don't pay it upfront, but the company building the machine charges you for it.

I agree, no huge (r)evolutionary changes are needed, but that means we shouldn't pay the (r)evolutionary price for it either. I get my OS' at a discount because of my workplace, and I can justify paying for one, but only if it's going to leave me off better than the last one did [hence why I ran 2K all the way until Vista, when new software refused to run on 2K].

Re:They have to..

[treeves]

Excremental?

Re:They have to..

[poached]

how the hell do you make a SP3 without a SP2?

so by your statement they are developing sp2 and sp3 simultaneously? think about it.

Re:They have to..

[quickOnTheUptake]

Do you mean "revolutionary"? Pretty sure "evolutionary" does refer to small incremental changes.

Re:They have to..

[HeronBlademaster]

From what I've read (I don't own Vista), you can put gadgets on your desktop in Vista too. That's not an improvement; they simply removed the gadgetbar as an option.

Re:They have to..

[Christophotron]

Some people have taken Windows 2008 Server and using it as a workstation because it runs better than Vista. No joke!

Actually I tried this, and it is, indeed, a very big joke. Just like other win2008 workstation believers, I ignored the fact that it uses the same kernel as Vista. Except it was never meant to be a desktop OS. It was nothing but trouble, and making things work properly (as they would have on Vista) was an ongoing chore. For example:

-Vista x64 drivers, which should work, are often "not intended for this platform" and require extra hackery to force them to install. Certain "desktop" features such as bluetooth have no existing drivers for Server 08 and Vista drivers can be kinda hacked, but never really completely work. You may be able to copy over the driver files from an existing Vista box if you can find them all, but often you have to download the sketchy hacked DLLs and INFs from "tweaker" sites.

-Software is often "not intended for this platform" and requires extra hackery to force installation to achieve a not-fully-functional state. Just because it's a server OS, software companies will try to force you to buy the "server" version that costs 3x as much. There is no decent free antivirus software available (on x64 at least). Clamwin was the only thing that would run, and it sucked. Avira Free > all.

-No discernible difference in performance (unless you enable Hyper-V to slow everything down). In fact I think Vista utilizes my hardware better. And games run reliably well on Vista, in contrast with Server 08.

Simply go here and read the list of "tweaks". Oh, look, you can enable wireless networking! Wow, what an achievement! And gaming controllers, another amazing tweak! Turning on Aero (A.K.A. desktop composition A.K.A. graphical hardware acceleration A.K.A. it speeds up your PC if you have a graphics card so why the hell would you not want this?). All the shit that is enabled by default in Vista and that most people would want in a desktop or "workstation" OS requires extra effort to manually enable in win2008. But you might not want some of those features, you say... Then just freaking use Vista and turn them off using the reverse steps of the aforementioned tweak guides.

And there is a COMPATIBILITY LIST for various games. Meaning you usually have to dick around with each individual game to even get it to attempt to run. Fallout3 froze up everytime for me in the first scene of the game and was not playable at all, even for 2 minutes. This is actually what made me go back to Vista once and for all.

There is NO REASON to run Server 2008 on a desktop unless you also want to use IIS or some kind of activedirectory gobbledygook. I'd recommend just using Linux in a VM for your server needs. Hyper-V, you say? Hyper-V sucks and you do not want it. It will not acceptably run any decent Linux distro, as it's only "accelerated" for Microsoft guest machines (i.e. no Hyper-V tools for anyone else! except maybe Novell...). VMWare workstation is considerably faster than Hyper-V even with all its fancy hypervisory crap. Turning Hyper-V on slows the whole machine down because even the host must run underneath the stupid hypervisor. That's the definition of a hypervisor, I guess, but in that situation should there even really BE a host OS? With Hyper-V, Server 2008 acts as a "host" that has full access to the hardware and the "guest" OS'es can't even access a freaking USB port or create sound. Like VMWare workstation, but much more limited. Shouldn't all the VMs have equally shared access to resources, or have certain resources delegated to certain VMs through user configuration? Why else should there be a hypervisor between the hardware and the OS? Shouldn't the guests run *faster* i

Re:They have to..

[Christophotron]

You forgot c) They got it for free from the MS JourneyEd program because they are a student.

Re:They have to..

[iainl]

I remember 98SE, yes. Microsoft sent me a free copy, because I'd registered my purchase of 98 at the time. So I never realised it was supposed to be anything other than a nicely-packaged service pack.

Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

These silly Windows stories have pretty much negated their desired effect on people.

Ever since the lead up and release of Win2k Slashdot has been trying to manufacture the news fiction that "Windows total failure. Year of desktop Linux has arrived"

* Late service packs

* Stories of such and such company skipping a certain Windows version or service pack

* Hyping early bugs ever new has and then pretending they were never fixed

With Vista Slashdot went over the top with the Windows FUD and nothing came of it. Now everyone is:

* Trying out Win7 and raving about how good it is

* Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements

Pretty much destroying any credibility Slashdot might have with exactly the people this site hoped to turn into Linux users with the Windows FUD.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[fred fleenblat]

Churro?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[dgatwood]

They weren't lied to. When Vista came out, it was a compatibility disaster. The rest of the computing world simply wasn't ready for it when it was released, so drivers weren't ready, apps didn't work, etc. The rest of the computing world kept right on improving, though, and users kept on upgrading their software, drivers, etc. Thus, at this point, most people have versions of apps and drivers that are compatible with Vista, most hardware manufacturers have working Vista drivers, etc. As a result, Vista isn't as much of a train wreck as it was a few years ago, nor is Windows 7 for the same reason.

Of course, if someone upgraded to Vista today, he/she would find that Vista still uses way more RAM than it should (and way more than XP uses), but that's one of the things Windows 7 is supposed to be addressing. Don't underestimate how important that is when it comes to overall usability, performance, etc. Those "minor" improvements to Vista are not really minor. They just aren't feature changes. There's a difference.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[setagllib]

What masterful release are you talking about? Windows 7 isn't even out yet. If you're going to prepare trolls in advance at least make sure you don't post them too early.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[__aatgod8309]

Of course, if someone upgraded to Vista today, he/she would find that Vista still leaves far less unused RAM than XP, but that's one of the changes Windows 7 is supposed to be reverting.

Fixed for accuracy. Seriously, what is the issue people have with Vista making use of the memory you have?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[sswanny]

So two people? Nice.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Starayo]

Because my other software needs to use that memory, you insensitive clod!

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yeh, mark me as a troll but think about it ... Anyone who just wants to read their email, browse the web and sync their iTunes with their iPod will choose a Mac.

Yes, if they specifically want to sync their iTunes, their choices are pretty much just Mac or Windows.

But I would guess the main reason Linux struggles on the desktop (besides not being given much of a chance) is that you're talking about a mythical class of user. Users who really do only want to read email, browse the web, and play music on an iPod would be fine with Linux, and would probably be very interested to find that they can buy a laptop for less than a thousand dollars that will do all of that -- and comes preloaded with Linux, so no installation issues.

But real users always have one more thing they need to work. Linux will get you 95% there, but the last 5% is different for everyone.

Still, with this economy, I wouldn't be surprised to see people trading that last 5% for a drop in price alone, especially if they consider TCO (how often will someone have to service it?)

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Computershack]

Fixed for accuracy. Seriously, what is the issue people have with Vista making use of the memory you have?

Exactly. In fact, the very people who berate Windows overlook the fact that so many people in the Linux community thought Superfetch was a good idea that the "preload" daemon in Linux was born.
Oh look, here's a "Preload Drastically Improves Linux Performance " Slashdot article.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[sleeponthemic]

The person who puts these articles up can often be found posting this type of piece to incite furor. If you've ever wondered why an article was posted, chances are, you're wondering about a kdawson post.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[FishWithAHammer]

Except that Vista does graceful caching and cedes RAM when an application wants it. Forgot that part, hm?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Cowmonaut]

They always forget that bit. And the bit that its actually a good thing!

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[khellendros1984]

I had 4 problems with Vista.
1. Aero is pretty, but not useful
2. The performance sucks; it uses clock cycles and memory to automate things I don't care about
3. Massive intrusive support for DRM and content protection (HDCP, etc)
4. Windows Genuine Advantage is mandatory.

They cleaned up the UI. It's sleeker, while maintaining some of Aero's glitz. The performance has improved, although not as much as I'd like. The DRM and WGA are still there. Half of the things I disliked about Vista were improved.

I still dislike Vista, and find Windows 7 to be a slight, but nice, improvement. I'm still not leaving XP. Like with Vista, I don't see enough improvement to make it worthwhile.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[khellendros1984]

Because it doesn't give it up when I want to use it for something else? I'd rather that the operating system be leaner, so I can run my heavy duty stuff on top of it. A game can't use the resources that the OS has allowed itself to expand into.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[FishWithAHammer]

Exactly. It's a good thing that your OS will use more RAM for caching, so long as it gives it back when somebody else needs it. Think of it as nice(1) for caching or something.

(Then again, the majority of complainers probably don't know what nice(1) is either.)

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[afidel]

Except it doesn't really, just like every MS VM it often decides that keeping system cache is more important than keeping applications in memory and so it decides to swap out "infrequently" used code and data. The problem is when you go to switch from your photo app to your browser after not having used the browser for 30 minutes Windows has to swap it back in, in the meantime it might have just been using that ram to hold autosave files that were never re-read. This leads to your browser taking up to a minute or two to come back to usability.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[GooberToo]

Except that Vista does graceful caching and cedes RAM when an application wants it. Forgot that part, hm?

So does XP, Linux, and most Unix variants. That has nothing to do with the central complaint. Vista uses far more memory than it should to achieve a unit of work. Much of which is held by the OS and/or the GUI.

Specifically, this is one of the items Windows 7 should address. So your casual effort to make Windows look good completely ignores the fact your comment is not topical in the least and altogether ignores the central complaint.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[tux0r]

I'm good.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[aztracker1]

1. you can disable it. There are other things that are nice, the menu imho is much better. And the restructuring of the profiles/home folder is much closer to how *nix is. I would say it's actually a little better, now that the subdirectory structures are all under the home folder in windows. 2. You can disable them (search, defender etc. I do). 3. Honestly most of this isn't active unless trying to play content that you can't play on Linux as it stands, so the point is kind of moot. 4. This part sucks.. I hate it, and always have.

I like a lot of the under the covers changes to Vista myself. Most of the reorganization makes more sense to me than prior windows versions. I think there's a few points to improve even farther still. I've used a lot of different OSes, desktop environments and applications. If you are happy with what is working, and still getting updates, go for it.

As an example, the only reason I am upgrading my media center, is I am changing the base hardware, and the old remote died, and the new one doesn't work under XP. I'll be using MediaPortal over MS's Media Center interface though (can remove the parts of the menu I don't use). I think Vista got a well deserved bad rap, and the main reason for the rename is to get past it. Win7 is based on Win2008, which was based on Vista... this is how software evolves... the name change is marketing to get past the negative things that have been addressed.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Sancho]

Yeah, Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot with that one. Memory used for cache should have been made perfectly clear to avoid (or rather, mitigate) this kind of FUD.

Now if you go look at the processes that Windows spawns by default, you'll still see that Vista uses more memory, but it's not by much. Certainly nowhere near what the FUD spouters would like you to believe.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[dgatwood]

Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista.

The display subsystem is designed in such a way that any apps that use GDI for drawing get all their windows double buffered, resulting in memory bloat and poor performance (source: Guardian.co.uk). Indeed, changes in the window management system result in a huge reduction in memory footprint in Windows 7. A fifty percent reduction in backing store size is not a small improvement by any stretch of the imagination, particularly when you consider that most of that bloat represented a Vista regression relative to XP....

The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[FishWithAHammer]

What kind of broken and/or ancient machine takes a minute or two to page back in application data?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[diamondsw]

* Trying out Win7 and raving about how good it is
* Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements

Um, that's why Windows Vista sucked. The performance was poor and the UI changes were... questionable (overly excited UAC, anyone?). I've tried Vista since installing 7, and while yes, a lot of what people like was there, it wasn't as well done. Now it's finally usable - it's just a shame that 7 wasn't released as Vista SP2...

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[innocence18]

Much of which is held by the OS and/or the GUI.

Can someone please tell me how much extra memory enabling something like Compiz takes on a Linux system. I'm genuinely interested to know. Running Server 2008 the DWM process which manages that stuff in Windows takes around 700-800kb with all the eye candy turned off and increases to 25-26mb with most of the aero glitz turned on.

Currently in Win7 Beta this process is sitting at around 16Mb with EVERYTHING turned on. This seems like a fairly trivial amount of memory to me so I'm interested to know how much more efficient the Linux alternatives are. Likewise, if anyone has information about OSX I'd be keen to see that too.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[evanspw]

That's utter bollocks. I have a workstation with 8GB of RAM running Vista64. No such thing happens. All open apps spring back to life pretty much instantly no matter how long they have been dormant.
There's something fucked up in your setup, or you're trolling.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Johnno74]

1. Aero is pretty, but not useful

Huh? Why do you have such an issue with Aero? If it bugs you so much, turn it off...
Its mainly just bling. Unless you have crappy onboard graphics the performance cost of aero is negligible. I like the bling, and the preview on alt-tab or mouse hover on the taskbar is useful.

2. The performance sucks; it uses clock cycles and memory to automate things I don't care about

IMHO Vista doesn't have a performance problem. I've got an XP desktop at home that is loaded up with plenty of stuff like file indexing and other things that come out of the box with vista. Its performance is slightly better than vista when lightly loaded, and _heaps_ worse when heavily loaded (couple of users logged on, lots of memory-hungry apps open)
In situations where XP would have problems even responding well enough to even shut down Vista just keeps on chugging along. Performance degradation under load in vista is mugh more graceful than XP, no question.

3. Massive intrusive support for DRM and content protection (HDCP, etc)

Pop quiz. Can you point to just one thing that you can do with XP, but the DRM in vista blocks you? Things like HDCP suck a bit, but they weren't invented by microsoft, but they were required by the MPAA in order for vista to support high def output of "protected" content - something XP can't do at all. Vista will not stop you ripping a DVD or CD, playing a dodgy Xvid download or anything else you can do on XP.
Please don't use any references or quotes from Peter whatsisname from Auckland University or you'll just look as uninformed as him.

4. Windows Genuine Advantage is mandatory.

Yeah, kinda a pain, but only if you have pirated windows. If you have an OEM install then its "preactivated" via a key in the bios, but having to activate retail copies is a hassle, particuarly if you change hardware or rebuild. I'm not happy about this one either, but its hardly a dealbreaker.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[TrancePhreak]

How is the support for HDCP intrusive? It's only enabled while playing a file that requests that kind of DRM.

If you want to see real intrusive DRM, get a Macbook with just a vga port and try to play protected iTunes videos...

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[sigismond0]

Then you have serious issues with your computers. I've never had any sort of problem with switching into programs after not using them. Maybe two or three seconds of lag, but that's it. Sorry dude.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[slimjim8094]

I've got it running in 12 real MB (105 virt, but real is the best indication) with wobbly windows, cube, cube transform (it's a cylinder now) and a couple of switchers/nice effects.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[innocence18]

That's cool to know. So MS are not hugely off the mark on this one. With some judicious tweaking they could potentially get it down to the same memory footprint.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Starayo]

Except it obviously doesn't fucking work because a fresh install of vista still took on average three times as long to do everything as a machine with the same specs, XP SP2, and which had never been defragmented. With high-end specs at the time. I started with an optimistic view of vista, but it's a complete and utter pile of smoking crap that I'm happy to purge from every machine I can. What good features it has are carried on to windows 7, which I rather like.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[pimpimpim]

I have no significant experience with either Vista or Windows 7, but in the last 12 months I bought two computers with adapted and language-localized versions linux preinstalled by default and supported by online repositories at the manufacturers. I didn't have to go to some obscure store either, I got them at main outlets, an asus eee at a big german electronics store, a dell mini at dell.com. I could have bought similar linux-based systems at about 4 other sources/manufacturers (acer, lenovo, etc.).

Today I plugged in my hp printer/scanner combo in the dell mini for the first time, it f-ing just worked (tm). Even without starting a wizard, a printer icon appeared, and both printing and scanning were enabled. Same goes for my bluetooth mouse. The year of linux on the desktop might not be there, but the year of linux on the netbook is already there, my friend, and it's kicking some serious ass.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[afidel]

Do you ever actually get free memory below a couple hundred meg? If not then you might not experience what I'm talking about. On XP with fast user switching it can happen with a gig and a half free on a 2GB machine, log out a user and load up something with a VM size of a couple hundred megs then log back in as the first user, the HDD thrashes as the app is paged back in.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Blakey Rat]

1. Aero is pretty, but not useful

Yes it is, it makes windowing operations responsive even for applications that aren't. i.e. if I have some dumb application chugging along that doesn't have manage its UI in a separate thread, and I drag its window around, it still stays updated correctly in Vista. In XP, I'd see nothing but tons of invalid redraw areas.

Maybe it's not *very* useful, but saying it's not useful at all is just crap.

2. The performance sucks; it uses clock cycles and memory to automate things I don't care about

Uh, this is too vague to even address. For what it's worth, I *do* care about the automatic things Vista is doing (the search indexing is awesome), and Vista's really good about stopping them if I start putting load on the computer, so I have absolutely no problems with this.

3. Massive intrusive support for DRM and content protection (HDCP, etc)

What does the word "intrusive" mean in your head? I've had Vista since release day, and I've never been "intruded" on by any DRM. I honestly think this is just one of those Slashdot memes based on completely fantasy. If not, I'd love to hear exactly what operation Vista prevented you from doing due to DRM.

4. Windows Genuine Advantage is mandatory.

And...? So what?

Like with Vista, I don't see enough improvement to make it worthwhile.

Then don't use it. That's fine, nobody's holding a gun to your head to upgrade. But stop spreading bullshit about Vista, huh? You can not like something without spreading bullshit, right? Or have you lost that ability?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Blakey Rat]

Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista.

While I agree with you, and Vista still has some problems in that area, it's a LOT better than XP (you know, the OS that everybody here loves so much better). XP frequently will start swapping out applications that have been minimized for 30 seconds-- it's ridiculous.

So in short, while I agree with you, the people who say "stick with XP" are actually saying to stick with the OS with *worse* swapping.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Blakey Rat]

Bull. Shit. How stupid do you think we are? If you're going to make shit up, try not to exaggerate so much, it'll be more convincing.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Blakey Rat]

Users who really do only want to read email, browse the web, and play music on an iPod would be fine with Linux, and would probably be very interested to find that they can buy a laptop for less than a thousand dollars that will do all of that -- and comes preloaded with Linux, so no installation issues.

I bought a MSI Wind for $300 that can do all that, run Office, and came with a full copy of XP.

Anyway, I would argue that there is a "WebTV" class of users who aren't being serviced as well as they could be with products currently in the market, but I definitely don't think Linux is doing anything more to meet their needs than Microsoft is.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[SL Baur]

First off ...

This leads to your browser taking up to a minute or two to come back to usability.

O.K. so you have a large enough resident set size of currently running processes that you've exceeded available core and put the O/S into thrash mode. Any O/S will do that. RAM is fast, disk is slow.

Except it doesn't really, just like every MS VM it often decides that keeping system cache is more important than keeping applications in memory and so it decides to swap out "infrequently" used code and data.

O/S cache includes executable pages of memory. Poor decisions on what to keep in cache make and break performance nowadays when basic hardware speeds, primarily main memory and disk have not kept up with advances in CPU speed.

The problem is when you go to switch from your photo app to your browser after not having used the browser for 30 minutes Windows has to swap it back in, in the meantime it might have just been using that ram to hold autosave files that were never re-read.

The hardest problem a VM has to solve is what to do with anonymous VM pages, ie pure unsaved data that has no backing store on disk, as from say an executable image or data file. If you were modifying images in your photo app (and they may well be modified by the application before it hits main memory if you're dealing with a compressed format) you are looking at one of the worst-case scenarios for a VM to optimize - a memory hog. Those pages can only be written out to a swap file/partition and rarely can be written into congusous portions of the disk so that they can be paged back in quickly.

Ditto for the case of the browser, only more so, since web browsing has gotten sooooo expensive in this day and age of multimedia web browsing.

The distinction between anonymous VM pages and backing store VM pages is an important one. If there's backing store, then you can always optimize your disk to arrange for files, executables, etc. to have their blocks laid out on disk in some sort of optimal fashion for paging back into memory.

Modern Unix filesystems tend to do a pretty good of keeping things organized on disk until the disk gets extremely full. I gather the Microsoft Windows users are expected to do this themselves, but the point remains the same.

What you're _actually_ describing is a hardware limitation in dealing with memory hogs and if you are running into that sort of thing a lot, I would suggest you upgrade your hardware.

And to all the idiots who responded with "it's like instant on my machine", well duh! You're not running the same equivalent workload and have not approached the thrash threshold.

I would have loved to have seen something meaningful criticizing the Microsoft VM, but frankly you haven't described anything that any other virtual memory O/S is prone to.

Oh and if anyone attempts to patent defragging swap space, PRIOR ART. You heard it here first and it's an obvious concept.

(And yes, I am now in the habit of shutting down Opera before starting World Of Warcraft on my Mac, I get better frame rate that way).

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[SL Baur]

Except that Vista does graceful caching and cedes RAM when an application wants it. Forgot that part, hm?

...

Specifically, this is one of the items Windows 7 should address. So your casual effort to make Windows look good completely ignores the fact your comment is not topical in the least and altogether ignores the central complaint.

We heard all the same sort of astroturfing here before and after Microsoft Vista's initial release. The folks who dared say something other than that Microsoft Vista was the greatest O/S tended to get flamed and modded down.

Vista has generated a ton of hidden revenue. I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it. It's rather a statement that people have paid a fortune for Microsoft Vista and are afraid to use it. The same will be true for Microsoft 7. I hardly see us skipping ahead to untested (by our guys) software.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[SL Baur]

Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista. ...
The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....

Ah, that sounds like you get it.

I was there when the accounting functions in Linux were changed to report O/S cached memory and in many respects, the subsequent bitching and whining was similar to what I've seen here with regards to Microsoft Vista usage.

Measuring true VM efficiency is a black art and is highly dependent upon the work load.

I won't offer any comment with regards to your Vista-specific comments, I do not do Microsoft Windows. Aggressive caching in memory is a VERY good thing. Unused memory is wasted memory. I suspect that as you guys grow your user base around Microsoft Vista, enough people will be around to calm down the Chicken Littles at least with regard to apparent memory usage.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[petermgreen]

Finding out that Win7 is just Windows Vista with some UI and performance enhancements
People hate vista primerally for three reasons

UI issues
Performance issues
Compatibility issues

The third issue will mostly fade away over time as vendors update thier products. So if windows 7 manages to address the first two issues it should address most of the gripes people have with vista.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[FishWithAHammer]

Just tried it on my laptop (Core Duo 1.66GHz, 5400rpm drive, 2GB RAM). Loaded up a virtual machine with 1GB of RAM in VMware, fast-user-switched to my machine's other account and back.

Not a problem.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[FishWithAHammer]

See, I've installed it on a bunch of boxes and it's fine. Not *quite* as snappy as XP, but not bad at all. Windows 7 is faster, though, about on par with XP. And I'm loving it.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Toonol]

That's the theory, but I'm not sure it's an improvement in practice. I think it's like file indexing in the background to improve search... it certainly makes search faster, but not quite enough to make up for the constant churn and slowdown. A hundred processes that improve your speed, that each slow your computer down by 0.5%... ever worked in a business that implemented so many profit-increasing plans that they lost money?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[shutdown -p now]

The display subsystem is designed in such a way that any apps that use GDI for drawing get all their windows double buffered, resulting in memory bloat and poor performance

Isn't that an inevitable consequence of moving to a compositing window manager, and doesn't enabling composition on X have exactly the same effect?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[tuba_dude]

That's utter bollocks. I have a workstation with 8GB of RAM running Vista64. No such thing happens. All open apps spring back to life pretty much instantly no matter how long they have been dormant. There's something fucked up in your setup, or you're trolling.

You've got an almost optimal setup. Most people have 2 GB RAM or (most likely) less. I'm a nerd with gobs of spending money after I pay my bills, and I still only have two gigs of RAM.

Swap is a failure mode, and although slow, a very graceful one. It's what happens when you have less RAM than your workload requires. Right now, a typical workload in Vista is enough to trigger that failure mode in a typical store-bought system.

You have a system that's specifically designed to be very far from that failure mode, while most people have systems that are only as far from it as they can afford. With Vista, the RAM available:RAM required ratio is much closer than it's been in a long time, so the cost of avoiding swap is higher than it used to be, and for the people that understand that issue, it's a problem. (Everyone else just says "My system's slower with Vista!")

Swap's going to happen for a lot of people, and it's arrogant to assume everyone can afford to avoid it to the level you can. Don't dismiss the fact that Windows' swapping methods are bad (or that Windows is bloated) just because you can afford to avoid them.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Corporate Troll]

I didn't have to go to some obscure store either, I got them at main outlets, an asus eee at a big german electronics store

Yes, I've got one of those too. More specifically an Asus EEE 701 4G. The repositories haven't been updated in ages. Firefox is still in version 2.0 and not even the latest one and it's not supported anymore. Try installing Firefox 3.0 manually (or better don't... You'll fuck up the machine. Okay, that was partially my own fault for assuming that /opt/firefox wouldn't be used for Firefox.)

I switched mine to the EEE version of Debian. Everything worked out of the box there: painless install using the bootable USB image they provide. After that, it was just a matter of selecting just the basic installation and then type:

aptitude install xorg lxde iceweasel icedove gnumeric abiword

(Basically, I surely have installed a few more packages by now.. but not by much: 1.2G is used on the internal SSD)

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[tokul]

Huh? Why do you have such an issue with Aero? If it bugs you so much, turn it off...

And get inconsistent interface that is even more crappier than Aero or Windows XP/2K.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[cyxxon]

(And yes, I am now in the habit of shutting down Opera before starting World Of Warcraft on my Mac, I get better frame rate that way).

I actually solved that problem by going from 2 to 4 gb ram on my Vista64 machine. Before that e.g. landing in Dalaran made the game basically unplayable for a minute or so, and alttabbing to a Firefox window that was open in the background with 20 Wowhead tabs opened was taking somewhere in the 2 to 5 minutes range - seriously. By adding the additional 2 gb of ram (actually I swapped the ram, to a faster CL setting as well, but that's a minor detail, I guess) I was able to boost my framerate from typically 1-15 fps in Northrend to 10-40 fps, and be able to alttab to Firefox in 1 to 2 seconds, and landing in Dalaran now doesn't cause hiccups at all.

So you might actually just be at the limit of your hardware as well?

To get back to the original topic, though: I felt a much bigger performance hit when going from TBC to WotLK then when going from XP32 to Vista64, all on the same hardware.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[jabithew]

It's very annoying. If they announced it as a feature of Linux slashdot would have dozens of articles about why it is the Best Thing EVAR, but because MS done good it is just dismissed as RAM-hogging.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[jools33]

In answer to 3. above - I have windows vista 64 ultimate with all of the latest updates - and there is a common bug - that has been there since release (over 2 years ago!) and is still not resolved, where windows frequently loses the EDID information of your monitor that you have connected - and then whenever it boots up with any Nvidia driver enabled it boots to a black screen. As Nvidia have half of the market for graphics cards - this would seem to be a fairly widespread problem you would think. The only sure fire way to resolve this currently is to restore the system from a restore point, others recommend pulling the power cable from the monitor for 30 mins (doesnt work for me). I get this problem about once a week - and there are many many others with this problem - which is a direct result of the DRM trying to find out what monitor hardware I have. I'm willing to bet this will still be an issue with windows 7 too.
See:
http://cyleft.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/horrible-problems-with-nvidia-geforce-drivers-and-vista-x64/

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[drsmithy]

I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it.

Site licenses are typically for "a workstation version of Windows NT". So it doesn't matter if people are using Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro or Vista Business, a single license covers all possibilities (probably even down to NT 4 Worksation).

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[evanspw]

I was replying to a guy who also had 8GB of memory. Read the parent post next time.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[ed]

Agreed

I was running the KDE desktop on Xandros, Reasonably happy with it, then I decided to upgrade Firefox.

Agh, thumb, borked machine. Possibly actually only a space problem but there I was.

I installed Xubuntu and it is nice as ninepence, only hassle is with WPA2, but I'll get that sorted.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[anss123]

I'm curious, will it not play on the built in monitor?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Corporate Troll]

For me it was two things: I accidentally overwrote the existing Firefox by installing it in /opt/firefox without checking if it existed. That was my fault.

Second mistake I made was not thinking of the dependencies. Firefox needs a newer GTK that is evidently not installed on the EEE default Xandros.

So, the only choice I had would be the F9-reset and re-update everything and that over wired because "out of the box", WPA simply doesn't work. After the updates it does. Now I could have gone that way (I had in the past), but at a certain point it's better to take your own fate in your hands than to depend on Asus to keep the repositories up to date. (Yes, now I depend on Debian, but Debian *is* trustworthy! Okay, except when the patch SSH "vulnerabilities" *grin*)

My network is still WPA-PSK. I had a reason not to use WPA2, but I don't remember... (Might be the PSP, which I broke by now, that didn't support it).

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[LackThereof]

what is the issue people have with Vista making use of the memory you have?

Because XP made use of the memory MOST people had. If you had a machine with 512MB of ram, and ran a few programs, it would happily use all of it, and be perfectly responsive.

This is something Vista apologists seem to have forgotten: XP was responsive under most workloads on 512MB of RAM. And yes, it would use most or all of it.

Vista on 512MB is an unusable disaster. It is constantly swapping under a typical destop workload. Vista needs 2GB of ram to be responsive, for most people.

Upgrading to 2GB of ram in a new system is trivial and inexpensive. But, there are a ton of consumer-grade machines out there, already in service running XP. Coppermine P3's, T-bird Athlons, they've got enough CPU power to upgrade to Vista, the only thing holding them back is RAM. Machines built with SDRAM, that just can't be upgraded to handle Vista, because the motherboards just don't support that much ram. Oh sure, they can meet the minimum requirements, but the machine is going to run like crap on that amount of ram.

And I really do think people need to get off XP - an XP install in the hands of a typical computer user is just another zombie PC waiting to happen. I would much rather the unwashed masses be using Vista - it's slightly more secure! But to paint Vista's gigantic memory footprint as a good thing? Please.

Vista's substandard performance on machines with under 2G of ram cannot be blamed on all this caching, which by all accounts gets out of your way if you need the ram. Vista isn't doing anything that OSX and the premiere Linux distros aren't managing to do on much less ram. Vista is just too damn big, and for no apparent reason. Whether Vista has less unused RAM than XP on your 4 gig machine is certainly not the issue here.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[cnettel]

It is better in the 7 beta. Essentially, I think the default mode for GDI in Vista was/is a system memory buffer, a corresponding texture in video memory and finally the double/triple buffering of the viewport itself. With the right drivers, 7 removes the first of these by really doing the GDI operations on video memory. You save a bit of blitting and lots of RAM that way.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[cnettel]

I don't say you don't see this, but it's not seen by all users with x64. I've personally never seen it on a machine with Vista x64, dual DVI, 8600GT card. From your description in the post here and on the blog, this setup "should" see it. I guess it can be a matter of specific monitor models or something.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[gbjbaanb]

yeah, but he never said what kind of, or how many apps he was running. 8Gb just means you can run more stuff, maybe he does just that compared to you.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[nosfucious]

Vista is a nice Operating System for those that bought PCs up to MSs specification. Applicatons ran nicely, hibernate and sleep worked. However, it totally failed to function in any way with any sort of legacy support.

At the same time I bought a nice new Dell with Vista preinstalled, and work bought me a 2 x 64bit beasty, also with Vista pre-installed. Short story: Vista at home is still there, for at least a little while. I still do my video transcoding on my old workstaion, but happily work with vista and Cygwin when I need access to my workstation. At work, Vista had no drivers for our many printers. That alone was a show stopper. Applicatons did not deploy using our Group Policy scripts. More specifically, IBM, HP and Lexmark did not produce working printer drivers for legacy hardward for 64 bit versions of Vista. This was not fixed with Sp1. Nor would Vmware work without disabling device driver signing enforcement on each and every boot. The work PC has since had a sensible operating system installed because I could no longer afford the non-productive time.

uname -a
Linux Host-Name 2.6.27-gentoo-r7 #7 SMP Wed Jan 7 17:11:56 CET 2009 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU Q6850 @ 3.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

At work, we pulled the pin on any further investigation of Vista and decided to stick with XP. Seems the right decision. At home, Vista's days may be numbered if the next version of Knoppix supports the SATA drive.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[hklingon]

Thousands of our clients had another showstopping problem: Compatibility.

These are not home users.. these are business users. You'd be surprised how many small to smallish shops are running custom stuff, or 5 to 10 year old Line-of-Business software. Guess what? Compatibility still doesn't seem to be there in Windows 7. It seems in our beta testing Anyone who stuck with or downgraded from XP for compatibility reasons is going to continue to have the same compatibility issues.

For Clients who have wanted to invest time and effort into us working with vendors to get their apps working on vista 64-- A lot of grotesque crashes can be traced to stupid stuff. For example the SendTo folder is gone, moved somewhere else.. but there is some kind of quasi-folder in place of SendTo that some installers work with and others bomb out. Renaming the SendTo special folder and replacing it with a normal folder works just fine. If this were a linux-style hardlink the installer wouldn't crash. Instead it appears to be some sort of bastardized NTFS hardlink type abomination. Program compat. tab seems to have no effect on these "special" folders. (Special in the sense here as clinically retarded.)

So windows 7 doesn't seem to be much help in that regard in our testing, so far.

Do you know how much work went into dos compatibility in windows 95? How much pure compatibility testing? That is what needs to happen here, and certainly hasn't. There is a bug in SimCity for DOS to do with allocating freeing some ram, then immediately trying to read it. Early versions of '95 would reclaim the memory immediately, causing SimCity to crash... well, MS added a bit of code in there to check to see if it was SimCity and if so the memory was not reclaimed immediately.

Seems like there has been a shift inside MS from the pragmatists to the idealists.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[tuba_dude]

Apologies, I missed it. It must not have been expanded or something. *shrugs*

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[TrancePhreak]

It will, but there was a fiasco where videos you had previously from the iTunes store would not play through the VGA port, even though they did before an update. So if you wanted to watch them on a TV or a larger monitor you were hosed.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Everything you said is most likely true, but in my experience in my workload I hit the VM thrash threshold much more frequently in Vista than Ubuntu on the same machine running similar applications. I'd say XP was pretty similar in terms of the frequency of it happening.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[charlesnw]

Funny.... I had that same problem on a Ubuntu box (mythtv ubuntu 7.10) after moving into my new house over the weekend. It complained about EDID... plugged in another monitor it was fine. Then plugged in the original monitor and the problem was gone. Very weird.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Yunzil]

Because it doesn't give it up when I want to use it for something else? I'd rather that the operating system be leaner, so I can run my heavy duty stuff on top of it. A game can't use the resources that the OS has allowed itself to expand into.

But it does give it up? Every operating system since, well, ever can and does swap itself out when it's not needed.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[Yunzil]

This is something Vista apologists seem to have forgotten: XP was responsive under most workloads on 512MB of RAM. And yes, it would use most or all of it.

I should hope so, because the recommended amount of memory for XP was 128MB. Yes, XP runs great when you give it 4 times the memory MS recommended. And hey, Vista does too!

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[aspx]

Exactly. You want an OS to use all of your available memory to cache slow storage. Paging out data that hasn't been accessed in a long time and using that data for cache will generally result in a perfomance improvement.

If you go back to an application that you haven't used in 5 hours, yes it will take a while to get the working set paged in. But don't forget that the system has been in general running faster for those 5 hours, and some waiting in a case like that is generally a good trade.

I do wish this behavior was configurable on Windows even via a crude method like the linux VM "swappiness" parameter, but I think most users will assume that paging out is always bad and set it to whatever value disables paging out, or at least makes it very unlikely. Look at how many pages on the web recommend setting swappiness to low values. In some cases those users are shooting themselves in the foot. I guess that's why MS doesn't let you configure it.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[evanspw]

Hmmm. Mine doesn't and I also run beefy apps (I do RF chip design on it, so run 3D EM simulators and suck like). I'm pretty happy with it.
Do you have indexing turned off, and how have you configured swap?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[evanspw]

The driver thing is a real shit. But, unless you hang the printers off a W2000/XP or linux box, you'll never be able to move off XP. Windows 7 will have exactly the same problem. Microsoft were really in bind on that, since a great many older drivers blatantly break the rules about requiring Admin privileges to run. They brought it on themselves for allowing this game to go one for a decade after they new it would be a problem.

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[onefriedrice]

If you want to see real intrusive DRM, get a Macbook with just a vga port and try to play protected iTunes videos...

Okay...

Wait a second, I see a movie playing. I thought I was supposed to be seeing intrusive DRM!

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[onefriedrice]

I'd rather that the operating system be leaner, so I can run my heavy duty stuff on top of it. A game can't use the resources that the OS has allowed itself to expand into.

Nor will the OS keep holding onto it if it is requested by the game... so what's the problem again?

Re:Slashdot == The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf

[iainl]

Actually, I built a new box a couple of weeks back with "crappy onboard graphics". It turns out that even Intel's 3100 chipset has enough power to turn on Aero Glass's bells and whistles without impacting performance, so I don't worry about it.

My old box ran Vista terribly, but that seems to be more due to it only having 1Gb (to my new box's 4) than anything else.

Follow the money

[carp3_noct3m]

Microsoft doesn't want to release it soon, even if they could. The reason: less stable vista = more reason to upgrade to windows 7 (read: more money for Microsoft). That may not be the actuality, but I bet a handful of people think that way there. On a side note, Ive been running Windows 7 beta for a week now (I decided to be ahead of the curve for all future OS releases due to the nature of my job) and am overall very impressed (I know, shoot me and throw overboard into /. shark waters) Its faster (especially restart times!) and overall more polished. Now, it should of been windows vista in the first place, but its too late to go back in time with my machine (lost a watchyamacallit and a thingymajiger) I really suggest if you havent to at least throw up a VM of it sometime.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

What version of Earth do you live on where Vista isn't stable?

Re:Follow the money

[Blakey Rat]

I'm not sure whether you're just paranoid, or actually stupid. Vista is perfectly stable. Microsoft gets the same amount of money whether people buy Vista now, or Windows 7 in a few months. Do you have any kind of citation, or even an argument based in reality, to say this is a conspiracy?

Re:Follow the money

[carp3_noct3m]

Great opening, insult me and then ask for a rational explanation of my position. Someone needs to go back to college rhetoric 101! (see I can do it too =P) I should clarify that I dont think Vista is unstable. At least not as much as XP. I deal with both daily. It is the overall package of vista, small bugs, interfaces changes that annoying to end users that like stuff "where they usually are", legacy program support, the dreaded overall polish, and ESPECIALLY the weird things done to TCP/IP and networking that make it good enough for home users, but not quite worth the trouble for a company to upgrade to. But in all seriousness, for the most part, anyone who was going to buy Vista more than likely has already, minus those companies that are waiting for hardware leases to be up. Ahh, but "then a good SP won't matter!, they aren't going to buy Vista if they haven't already" you say, trying to use my previous point against me. Well, a lot of the time a business decides the next step in regards to IT by *gasp* consulting the IT guys. I personally work with many medium to small size businesses and have the influence to say "Yes you should upgrade to vista." or "No, you should wait for windows 7 depending on how it progresses." So, a service pack that does enough good stuff to impress the IT guys could potentially make them much more friendly to recommending a Vista upgrade vs wait for 7. And I bet there are more guys like me out there keeping a keen eye on stuff like that. Regardless, the entire point is moot. What you or I think doesn't matter, if you would have ready my original post, you would see that I said "That may not be the actuality, but I bet a handful of people think that way there.(referring to Microsoft)" So all it takes is a couple of people at Microsoft thinking that they can get even a fraction more revenue by withholding the Vista SP till closer to Windows 7 release, and I garunfuckintee you they will do it like that, whether its based on fact or not. And before you say "Well Microsoft would fact check that stuff more so they know if it really will make them more money." Think about this, THEY'RE ALREADY DOING IT THAT WAY, so they must be onto something.

Re:Follow the money

[shutdown -p now]

I really suggest if you havent to at least throw up a VM of it sometime.

One advice about that - you don't even need a VM even if you'd rather not mess up with your partitions. Win7 can not only mount VHD (Virtual PC) disk images, its bootloader can boot it from them, too, and you can take the bootloader out from the installation CD and overwrite the one you currently have with it. Here's how.

Re:Follow the money

[awpoopy]

What version of Earth do you live on where Vista IS stable? There; fixed it for you.

People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

Most end-users running Vista are doing so because they aren't comfortable changing their OS, those who absolutely must have DirectX 10 and don't realize you can get it on XP with some hackery, or Microsoft fans who insist on running Microsoft's latest release.

I'm not sure any of those three groups will care that much about Vista SP2. The first is largely uneducated on technical matters. The second is only fixated on gaming, and the third will be Windows 7 early adopters.

Vista SP2 however is aimed largely at the first group, who bought their computer with Vista preinstalled, and likely won't jump to 7. Microsoft has to support those users for years to come.

Re:People running Vista

[Scutter]

Most end-users running Vista are doing so because they aren't comfortable changing their OS, those who absolutely must have DirectX 10 and don't realize you can get it on XP with some hackery, or Microsoft fans who insist on running Microsoft's latest release.

Where do you get your data from? Evreyone I know that runs Vista runs it because they like it. The only people I know that bitch about Vista are Linux fanboys.

Re:People running Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't get the Vista hate around here. I'm using Vista, it works very well for me (better than XP), and why would I want to downgrade to XP?

Or, why don't you like Vista? Did it hurt you or something?

Re:People running Vista

[dylan_-]

Where do you get your data from?

Probably from real life.

Evreyone I know that runs Vista runs it because they like it.

Everyone I know that runs Vista runs it because it came on the new computer they bought.

The only people I know that bitch about Vista are Linux fanboys.

The only people I know that bitch about Vista are those that run it on the new computers they bought.

Re:People running Vista

[Schuthrax]

How about XP fanboys? Or OSX fanboys? Or Windows Server 2008 fanboys? Or Windows for Workgroups fanboys? Or even, dare I say it, Windows ME fanboys?!

Honestly, I am most upset that I was forced to get Vista "for free" on my newest laptop and now I am stuck with it unless I want to pay even more M$ tax. Microsoft should do the world a favor and offer free upgrades to 7. Now *that* would shut a lot of people up.

Re:People running Vista

[goltzc]

Are you sure they run it because they like it or because it came pre-installed and then grew to like it?

Re:People running Vista

[Scutter]

Are you sure they run it because they like it or because it came pre-installed and then grew to like it?

Does it matter? The point is that they like it.

Re:People running Vista

[lymond01]

I know people running it because it came on their new computer, because they wanted to try it out (like me), or because it was better than XP at some of the functions they wanted (encryption & overcoming user stupidity ie administrator access).

No one I know that uses Vista actually complains that much because, in the end, it's just an operating system. Far more user-friendly than anything but maybe MacOS, more versatile in terms of driver support and applications, and as stable these days as anything out there. If I were forcing LaTex on my staff, then I'd hear complaints. The biggest complaint I get from Vista users: "Is that button supposed to be the Start menu?"

There are real issues with Vista, but with SP1, most show-stoppers were removed. It's a perfectly fine if slightly slow OS. If you include user performance with OS performance, it's still faster than anything out there.

Re:People running Vista

[khellendros1984]

I am a software engineer; I find inefficiency annoying. Vista does all sorts of anonymous crap in the background. I don't know what it's doing, and there's no easy way to find out. I don't see any concrete benefit to whatever it's doing, and it seems to do it all the time. I'm accustomed to a little more transparency in the operation of my computer. I guess that's part of the reason that Vista seems like nothing more than a big ball of annoyance to me. It's unnecessary; I can't seem to figure out what it does so much better than XP, except get money for Microsoft.

Re:People running Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not a software engineer. There is no such title. Come back when there's a Licensure Board that will issue you a PE title/certificate as a "Software Engineer". *chuckle*

Vista preloads commonly-used/already-running programs into memory (if you have it). In case you click on the program in the taskbar, its all ready to go and zooms up really fast. If you run a demanding app that needs the extra memory, Vista unloads less-needed programs (like the pre-fetched ones) and gives the memory to the program. It works very well. Vista runs more consistent than XP and if you have 2-4gb of RAM (who doesnt these days), it absolutely screams.

Re:People running Vista

[dgatwood]

Yes, it matters. It matters a lot. People who bought Vista and installed it because they liked it are the sorts of people who might upgrade to Windows 7. People who run Vista because it came preinstalled and they couldn't be bothered to request a downgrade to XP are similarly unlikely to spend the money, time, or effort to upgrade to Windows 7.

Re:People running Vista

[Scutter]

Why are you so angry about it? Are you that upset that there are people who like Vista or who might like Windows 7? Seriously, what's the problem?

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

We're both relying on anecdotal evidence here, but I have yet to meet a single person that likes Vista.

Please explain to me the advantages Vista has, and for every advantage Vista has, I'll offer five major regressions.

I don't automatically hate Microsoft or Microsoft products. I'm not a fanboy. I keep a Windows partition, and I work primarily as a SysAdmin on Windows boxes.

Vista however is a terrible, terrible OS, and even the people I talk to who run Vista, do so for the above three reasons I stipulated, except I have yet to even meet a fanboy who fits in the third category. I just assume some must exist who like Vista.

Re:People running Vista

[Schemat1c]

The only people I know that bitch about Vista are Linux fanboys.

I've been supporting Windows since the 3.1 days and although I plink around with linux I am by no means a 'fanboy'.

Vista is a bloated, useless, smelly turd of an OS and will go the way of Windows ME as soon as 7 is released.

I have not seen one business or serious user adopt Vista. In fact a sizable portion of my jobs were removing Vista to install XP when Vista first rolled out of it's dark and smelly cave.

I use Vista for the same purpose I use Sarah Palin, an instant intelligence test. If you accept either you have failed the test.

Re:People running Vista

[Johnno74]

Crap.

I got vista on a new laptop when it first came out, and yes pre-SP1 it was pretty dire. I nearly downgraded to XP, but held out for SP1. As soon as the final bits were released I formatted and re-installed with SP1 and there was a _world_ of difference. Now I'm perfectly happy with Vista, and I'm planning on upgrading my XP desktop at home to the 7 beta this weekend.
I don't try and ram vista down everyone's throat, but it does annoy me when I hear such uninformed vista bashing.
Vista isn't perfect (and likely neither is 7) but your broad sweeping generalisations are complete rubbish. I don't fit into any of your three pidgeonholes. Neither do most other people I know who use vista. There is NO WAY to get DX10 on xp. Yes, some games can be fooled into thinking they are on DX10 but that is completely different.

Re:People running Vista

[TrancePhreak]

"I don't automatically hate Microsoft or Microsoft products. I'm not a fanboy. I keep a Windows partition, and I work primarily as a SysAdmin on Windows boxes."
Vista has:
Much improved ability to run as non-admin. (life saver!)
IE in a sandbox (again, life saver)
Compositing in the video drivers instead of cpu
A much better start menu
The ability to recover from crashed video drivers
Legally supports Blu-Ray / other media.
Vista's Media Center abilities are far better than Windows MCE.

Re:People running Vista

[Johnno74]

If you can't find out what it is that vista is doing in the background, then you aren't much of a software engineer.

Look up process explorer, process monitor and autoruns sometime.

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

You can run as a non-administrator in XP, and use "Run As" to elevate privileges. It isn't as much of a pain as UAC in Vista.

Vista isn't better in that regard.

Vista isn't faster than XP, because in real world performance, you need almost twice the system to get the same performance.

Lastly, and this really annoys me, the UI is far less efficient. I need to jump through extra steps to perform the same tasks. Even if Vista was quick and responsive on a low-end machine (which isn't the case), the UI design holds me back.

The UI is a HUGE regression from XP.

Re:People running Vista

[SilverEyes]

In Alberta (Canada), under APEGGA, software engineering is an accredited discipline. There are some P.Eng software engineers (although I can't say what the certificate has printed on it). See; http://www.apegga.org/Applicants/pdf/General/GApplication.pdf

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

I'm heading out the door, and I will respond with regressions, however for your supposed improvements:

XP allows you to run as a non-admin, and it is easier in XP. You can still elevate permissions, in a far less annoying fashion. Vista's UAC is a failure, and that is why it is greatly improved in Windows 7.

If you are surfing the web in IE, you fail. If you insist on running IE, you can run IE without permissions with IE7 in XP.

2000 supported transparency, but they didn't activate it. I'm running the Vista Transformation Pack. I have a translucent Aero interface on XP that runs faster than Vista. And Vista's driver model was so broken, that the composite effects eat up CPU resources. A proper composite system shouldn't eat up the CPU and memory so much, because it should offload to the GPU. For shits and giggles I installed openSUSE 11.1 on an old retired laptop with a GeForce 440 (32MB RAM) and I can run Compiz Fusion, and KDE 4's composite effects. However, I can't install Vista on the box, even without Aero. Windows 7 didn't rewrite Aero, but it fixed some of the driver issues, so Aero isn't so CPU-hungry. But in Vista, it is an abject failure.

The Start Menu is a huge regression. A scrollbar within the Start Menu? It takes me far more clicks, and far more time to get to what I'm looking for. The Vista menu is a usability nightmare. Adding search does not offset the poor design. It look pretty, but using it is a pain.

I've never had a crashed video driver ever in XP. For over six months after Vista's release, Nvidia couldn't release a decent working Vista driver at all. The video driver situation in Vista has been poor at best. Thankfully, this seems improved in Windows 7. The fact that Microsoft placed so much emphasis on fixing the issues with video drivers in Vista points out that it was problematic.

I've got BluRay working on XP.

I haven't tried Vista's MCE mode. Perhaps you can be more specific on why it is better. Is it is anything like the start menu being better?

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

You can get DX10 effects on a DX10 video card in XP by running DX10 libraries, and games in DX10 mode. That sure seems like DX10 to me.

How is Vista an improvement over XP?

Vista is slower, has a broken driver model, UAC is broken, configuration dialogs have been relocated for no apparent reason, the start menu is a disaster in usability, and simple tasks have now been changed to multi-step processes that take more time.

Computers are supposed to enable us. GUIs are supposed to make life simpler and more efficient. Vista gets in my way at every step.

Re:People running Vista

[citizenr]

those who absolutely must have DirectX 10 and don't realize you can get it on XP with some hackery

you CANT, changing the number DirectX reports back just so you can run HALO 3 under XP is not the same as having DirectX 10

Re:People running Vista

[evanspw]

Which is a nice irony since so many of the UI changes in Vista make it look and feel like KDE.

Re:People running Vista

[TrancePhreak]

All your objections seem to be based in opinion and hearsay.

For instance, you can run XP as non-admin, but that doesn't make it easy. Lots of programs break, the program files folder is writeable for all, some things within the OS do not work if the user logged on is not an admin (installing services, video card drivers, etc).

IE7 without permissions on XP is still exploitable. IE in Vista runs as a dedicated IE user, seamlessly without having to enter info every single time. (therefor it is wife friendly).

You say you have Blu-Ray on XP, illegally I assume since there is no more info given here.

2000 indeed supported translucency, but it either had to be supported by the app or you used a hook to enable it. In 2000 the effec is all done in software, but in vista it is in hardware.

Vista's start menu is much faster to use than XP's. Click, start typing what you want to run and there it is (usually in 3 characters). Much faster for me than digging through XP's start menu. (Note: it will also find things not on the start menu, great for opening documents).

"However, I can't install Vista on the box, even without Aero"
"I have a translucent Aero interface on XP that runs faster than Vista." - you might have something similar, but it is definitely not the same as Aero. I've seen the transformation pack in action, and it often bogs the system down. A clean XP install is much smoother. An old Vista install on the same system runs smooth just the same.

Re:People running Vista

[Splintax]

You can run as a non-administrator in XP, and use "Run As" to elevate privileges. It isn't as much of a pain as UAC in Vista.

I use Vista at home, and I run XP at work as a limited user. I use runas to elevate privileges when necessary. I consider it much more of a pain than UAC. Whenever you need administrator rights, UAC pops up and asks you whether you want to use them or not. Under XP, any tasks that require administrator rights just fail, sometimes silently, and you have to relaunch them as administrator. Sometimes you can just right-click and select 'run as', but I find this option is just not there a lot of the time (it seems to only appear when you right click an .exe), and I have to drop back to the command-line runas.

The UI is a HUGE regression from XP.

Care to give examples? The only thing I've found more difficult to do in Vista than it was in XP is changing the TCP/IP settings on a network interface. Under XP, you could just double-click the icon in the system tray and click 'properties'. Under Vista, a few more clicks are involved. I think the other UI improvements (primarily in the new start menu and explorer) make up for it.

Re:People running Vista

[Blakey Rat]

XP allows you to run as a non-admin, and it is easier in XP.

No; if the application is written to expect admin, it'll simply break in XP, not run at all. Vista will automatically either:
1) Spoof the admin folders it's trying to write to to some other user-level folder, or
2) Prompt you to increase its permissions.

Both of Vista's behaviors are much better than the way XP handled it (i.e. simply breaking the app.) Now you *can* use the "Run As..." service in XP, if you wanted, but you have to enter a username/password each time, while on Vista you only have to click once to give the go-ahead. (And, for applications Vista uses option 1 for, you don't have to do jack-- it just works right.)

If you are surfing the web in IE, you fail. If you insist on running IE, you can run IE without permissions with IE7 in XP.

The fact is, IE is more secure, and that is a feature of Vista. Whether or not you like/use IE is utterly 100% irrelevant to the argument.

2000 supported transparency, but they didn't activate it. I'm running the Vista Transformation Pack. I have a translucent Aero interface on XP that runs faster than Vista.

You have benchmarks to prove such? Any translucent interface for XP is running some kind of crazy compositing layer, there's virtually no technical way it's possibly faster than Aero's use of your VPU capabilities.

And Vista's driver model was so broken, that the composite effects eat up CPU resources. A proper composite system shouldn't eat up the CPU and memory so much, because it should offload to the GPU.

Out of curiosity, how are you benchmarking this? I'd like to replicate your results with Aero on, and with it off. Your vagueness suggests you're going with your "gut-feeling."

The Start Menu is a huge regression. A scrollbar within the Start Menu? It takes me far more clicks, and far more time to get to what I'm looking for. The Vista menu is a usability nightmare. Adding search does not offset the poor design.

I disagree. For me, using the search field is always quicker than selecting a program from XP's start menu. I think you're too entrenched in your ways to make efficient use of the search field, and that if you spent some time with it, you would come to agree with ... well, most everybody. OS X's has a launcher based on search, too, so it's not like Microsoft is pulling this out of their ass.

I've never had a crashed video driver ever in XP. For over six months after Vista's release, Nvidia couldn't release a decent working Vista driver at all.

And that has... what to do with the quality of the OS?

The fact that Microsoft placed so much emphasis on fixing the issues with video drivers in Vista points out that it was problematic.

Citation? I'm not aware of any changes made with video drivers in Windows 7 compared to Vista, I'd love to see the source of your information.

I've got BluRay working on XP.

Maybe; but not legally. Again: like with IE, this is a non-argument.

Re:People running Vista

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, it matters. It matters a lot. People who bought Vista and installed it because they liked it are the sorts of people who might upgrade to Windows 7. People who run Vista because it came preinstalled and they couldn't be bothered to request a downgrade to XP are similarly unlikely to spend the money, time, or effort to upgrade to Windows 7.

What point, exactly, are you trying to make?

People who like Vista enough to go out of their way to upgrade are more likely to buy the next OS upgrade-- ok, I can buy that.

People who didn't upgrade on purpose, but got it with their OEM hardware are more likely not to upgrade to the next OS version-- ok, I'll buy that too.

So... what? What's your point?

Re:People running Vista

[Alpha830RulZ]

I think you're mistaken. Most users running Vista are running it because it was on the machine they bought. For the vast majority of users, It Just Works (tm). Get used to it.

I have three XP (one home, two Pro) machines, 2 Vista Machines, a plethora of Windows Server (2000, 2003) machines and a dozen or so Linux boxen. Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is. Vista works reasonably well, and is as functional for what I use it for as any of the other choices.

Re:People running Vista

[Alpha830RulZ]

I use Vista for the same purpose I use Sarah Palin, an instant intelligence test. If you accept either you have failed the test.

I accept Vista, and do software architecture and statistical modeling for a living, with some software development on the side. I guess those must be easier than I thought. Though I don't have much use for Palin. ;-)

Jeez, bud, give up the hate. It's not that big a deal.

Re:People running Vista

[wintermute000]

So lots of people with hi end gaming rigs are epic fails via your scientific barometer.

Yes it was broken at launch and yes there's still a lot wrong with it, but for someone who hangs around on Slashdot you are strangely ignorant about that geek sub-species who run multi-GPU configs with >4Gb RAM and have discovered that Vista64 is the best fit for that kinda spec gaming rig.... not to mention beating out the other wintel variants in benchmarks....

Also I love your attitude, you obviously feel right at home here. Pls setup your soapbox somewhere more public in future and send me some popcorn.

Then again if your job is desktop installs/refreshes and you've been doing it since Win3.1 then it really explains the bitterness and angst.

Re:People running Vista

[Alpha830RulZ]

Vista gets in my way at every step.

Have you considered the possibility that -you- might be the problem? Seems like several of us manage to muddle through.

Typing from a dual boot Vista/Fedora machine, running Vista SP1.

Re:People running Vista

[chiguy]

When a device does something that you don't understand and therefore you don't see any concrete benefit in whatever it is doing, you immediately believe it is it bad.

I suppose that means you would not use it.

I'm a software engineer and I barely know how computers work at their guts. I have never coded in binary. Compilers do some pretty nifty optimizations that, given the time and desire, I could figure out, but the projects I've worked on rarely require optimizing my coding for the compiler.

I don't have a lot of animosity for Vista, other than it's hard to learn something that's just a bit different in a lot of ways (you lose track of what things changed and what things didn't).

But the idea that one has to understand everything one uses is extreme and a poor starting point for an argument.

Re:People running Vista

[cerberusss]

I was forced to get Vista "for free" on my newest laptop

Couldn't you just select a vendor who installed another OS on your laptop?

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

Clearly, in the case of poor UI design, blame the user.

Let me give you an example. In a "classic" or XP start menu, I hover, move and expand through the start menus without extra clicks. I can quickly navigate the menu.

For many users who only run a few apps, having a few pinned items works fine. But I have tons of apps, and tons of games installed. I actually need to navigate the menu.

In Vista, I have to click and drag on a scroll bar, click on a folder, lather, rinse, repeat. Navigating the menu takes considerably longer.

When the same task takes longer, this is a usability regression. It isn't just me. Independent usability testing found that most users took longer to perform the same tasks in Vista.

The fact that if you're determined, you can muddle though and manage to use the interface doesn't mean that the interface is good, or better than XP.

Vista is full of tons of tiny UI regressions that go back to a trend years and years in the making. I've noticed that Microsoft seems to design UIs lately around what looks good in a screenshot or mock-up. If it looks pretty, then who cares how it actually operates?

Compare the UI in WMP9, 10, 11 and 12. Arguably the player looks nicer in each incarnation, but using the app is less friendly with each new incarnation.

The new Vista start menu looks nicer because it doesn't explode out sloppily, but it is a usability regression.

Next take the explorer toolbar. The up button is removed. The interface looks cleaner, but the usability takes a hit for it.

Some people don't mind jumping through an extra hoop at every step. I'm not one of them.

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

I think you are mistaken, as you did not correctly read what I wrote.

I described in the first group, people who got Vista because it was on the machine they bought.

And if you want to insist that Vista Just Works, then talk to the countless users who had hardware and driver issues, or hibernation issues. What about the fact that you get a 10% drop in networking performance if you're playing any audio?

Vista is a failure, acknowledged by many at Microsoft as a failure.

Vista's biggest problem in my book, is that XP was a fine release (post SP1) and that Vista has to compete with XP.

Re:People running Vista

[Enderandrew]

I can't tell you how many game forums I've seen where games, and especially games with mods, don't work in Vista because UAC breaks folder privileges. In XP, I can run the game as a non-admin, and just elevate rights for specific files or specific folders. In Vista, the Program Files folder is sacrosanct territory and must be treated differently. Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.

As for Aero vs XP, download the Vista Transformation Pack, and run it with a true transparency app. You can run it quite well with onboard graphics, 512 MB of ram, and weak processor. I've installed it for people on older boxes that don't meet Vista's requirements, and it runs quite well. We have old junk laptops at work waiting to be tossed out, and I recently installed XP (with the Vista Transformation Pack) and then openSUSE 11.1 on it (old Celeron processor, upgraded the system to 512 MB RAM, and a GeForce 440) to compare composite on both. Both ran reasonably well. These is no way you can get Aero to run on that hardware. It isn't even possible.

I've developed XP sandboxes for my users when I make desktop images, or when I research and install individual apps. I find precisely what authority they need, and grant that. I find proper sandboxing to be easier in XP.

Re:People running Vista

[drsmithy]

You can run as a non-administrator in XP, and use "Run As" to elevate privileges. It isn't as much of a pain as UAC in Vista.
Vista isn't better in that regard.

Speaking as someone who has been running a regular user account and making use of "Run As" since about 1997, this is a load of utter shite. UAC in Vista is so much easier, more effective and "better" that it's not even funny.

Re:People running Vista

[drsmithy]

I have not seen one business or serious user adopt Vista.

I'm a *UNIX* sysadmin and I use Vista both willingly and happily (on a 3 year old PC, no less). The ease with which it allows me to run as an unprivileged user, alone, is worth the price of entry IMHO (not that I've seen any 'price' thus far - works as well, and as fast, as Windows 2003 did).

Re:People running Vista

[drsmithy]

The Start Menu is a huge regression. A scrollbar within the Start Menu? It takes me far more clicks, and far more time to get to what I'm looking for. The Vista menu is a usability nightmare. Adding search does not offset the poor design. It look pretty, but using it is a pain.

Anything you use frequently should be present in the top-level Start Menu, either because it's been automatically put in the frequently used section, or because you manually pinned it to the upper section.

If you have to go searching for something, the difference between a cascading menu and a scrolling one, is irrelevant.

Of course, you're probably one of these luddites who cursed XP's new Start Menu, despite it being superior in every measurable way, and immediately went back to the 'Classic' one muttering under your breath about "control".

Re:People running Vista

[drsmithy]

In Vista, I have to click and drag on a scroll bar, click on a folder, lather, rinse, repeat. Navigating the menu takes considerably longer.

You don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel ?

Next take the explorer toolbar. The up button is removed. The interface looks cleaner, but the usability takes a hit for it.

The breadcrumb trail in Vista is *vastly* superior UI than the up button. It achieves everything the up button did and more besides. In no way, shape, or form is it a "regression".

Re:People running Vista

[drsmithy]

Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.

For someone who claims to be a Windows sysadmin, you have a pretty poor understanding of both the point of UAC, what it does, and the security it offers.

Re:People running Vista

[indi0144]

Sysinternals have a great app for this, take a look.

Re:People running Vista

[Blakey Rat]

I can't tell you how many game forums I've seen where games, and especially games with mods, don't work in Vista because UAC breaks folder privileges.

Wrong; UAC *enforces* the rules that have always been in place. It's not Microsoft's fault that game developers are piss-poor at programming, and their products usually end up as buggy pieces of shit.

In XP, I can run the game as a non-admin, and just elevate rights for specific files or specific folders.

YOU can, because you know how to. The average man-on-the-street would never be able to manage this, and for them Vista's method (which is automatic and not manual) is much better.

In Vista, the Program Files folder is sacrosanct territory and must be treated differently.

As it is in XP, and 2000, and NT4. Again, applications are *never* supposed to write files to the Program Files folder in *any* version of NT. The only difference between Vista and XP here is that Vista actually enforces these rules programmatically, instead of relying on software developers to do the right thing.

Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.

No it doesn't; it still prevents (for example) a virus downloaded from an online game infecting user accounts other than your own. Given, it definitely weakens the protection (and boo on companies who have done this as a "workaround" for their buggy-ass applications: I'm talking to you Blizzard*!) but you're still better off than running the same game as Admin on XP.

I've developed XP sandboxes for my users when I make desktop images, or when I research and install individual apps. I find precisely what authority they need, and grant that. I find proper sandboxing to be easier in XP.

Maybe, but Vista does it *automatically* (for IE at least) without any user interaction. Say it with me: "I am not the typical user." The typical user doesn't know how to fiddle with permissions, so he just runs as Admin. Vista allows them to run as a more secure user account without knowing how to fiddle with permissions; this is a GOOD THING.

*) See my blog post on the subject: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/

Re:People running Vista

[awpoopy]

I know about 150 people who have vista and hate it. I almost count as the 151st except I am now windows free. - 100%. For all those saying throw up a vm of vista - I did and it sucked just as bad as the real machine I put it on. I now put challenge back to you and ask you throw up a vm of Linux. BTW: You can do this with a few different versions to find the one you are most comfortable with ON as many vm instances you want to because they will all outperform vista and they are all free.
I am a recovering windows developer and a current card carrying Linux fanboy.

Re:People running Vista

[Yunzil]

Seriously, even Vista's default performance monitor will tell you what process is using what resource.

Re:People running Vista

[Abcd1234]

I am a software engineer; I find inefficiency annoying. Vista does all sorts of anonymous crap in the background. I don't know what it's doing, and there's no easy way to find out. I don't see any concrete benefit to whatever it's doing, and it seems to do it all the time.

*shrug* Then turn it off. On a laptop with a low-ish amount of RAM (which, these days, is 1-2GB), the first thing I do is disable: scheduled disk defrag, SuperFetch, and the indexer. I'll also disable any virus scanner that's onboard (yeah, it's a bit of a risk, but dear god... realtime virus protection is seriously expensive, in terms of CPU usage, etc), and personally, I also disable Aero (mostly because I think it's fugly). I'll then actively disable the services that make all those things go.

With those changes, Vista is actually a very comfortable OS to work with, IMHO. It's biggest problem, though, is that it requires all this tweaking to actually get decent performance out of it.

All of them?

[Gothmolly]

Could it be that the last minute problems of Vista SP2 are just ... well, Vista ?

Of course it'll be out first

[tsalmark]

Windows 7 will also slip.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[DigiShaman]

It's pretty much a proven fact (a) Windows sucks, (b) people will continue using it

It's called "industry momentum", and Microsoft has a lot of it. You know how it goes. Jackie uses MS Word because her co-worker Jill uses it. Jill uses it because one of her clients uses it. So on and so forth. Windows and Office will never be killed off with a silver bullet. When going against the establishment, change can only happen slowly and study steadily. So far, only Apple seems to be remotely close.

And will anyone notice?

[nurb432]

Really, how many people really care about SP2?

Can Microsoft get it out before Windows 7?

[That's What She Said]

Sure they can! Can you trust Microsoft when the subject is "deadlines"? The question is not if Vista SP2 will be out before Windows 7. The question is how many weeks, months or years will Windows 7 be delayed!?

Re:Beating dead horses...

[nurb432]

Its called 'features' and 'enhancements' and ya, its annoying as hell.

What "Last Minute Problems"?

[Jon.Laslow]

TFA doesn't actually mention any problems, and most people on the non-public SP2 Beta news groups (disclaimer: I'm an SP2 technical tester) are reporting this beta is very stable. I haven't had any serious issues with it, and I've yet to see any proof of a 'show-stopper' that would cause such a delay.

Now give me a minute to get my flame-resistant suit on so I can safely watch my karma burn.

Re:What "Last Minute Problems"?

[syousef]

TFA doesn't actually mention any problems, and most people on the non-public SP2 Beta news groups (disclaimer: I'm an SP2 technical tester) are reporting this beta is very stable. I haven't had any serious issues with it, and I've yet to see any proof of a 'show-stopper' that would cause such a delay.

Haven't you read the reports? When you put it in standby it steals your credit card and goes on a shopping spree, poisons your dog, microwaves your cat, gets intimate with your mother and your sister at the same time, torches your car, steals money from your favourite charity, sends insulting messages and incriminating photos to your boss, and turns your girlfriend into a lesbian.

Re:What "Last Minute Problems"?

[ukbazza]

.... turns your girlfriend into a lesbian.

Not all bad news then.

Re:What "Last Minute Problems"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your witty optimism can only mean you have been using MS far past the safe dosage. Please submit yourself to the nearest poison control center immediately.

Re:*BSD is Dying

[SanityInAnarchy]

Copypasta.

Re:The sound you hear in the background

[khellendros1984]

Not a Debian bootstrap?

Re:Beating dead horses...

[rfunches]

When college students and faculty come to my desk and ask how do they save or print their document in Word 2007, that's a pretty clear indication that the Word UI is complex and complicated.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Tubal-Cain]

"PrintScreen" key.

Re:Red Title?

[drachenstern]

Are you sure it wasn't just part of the firehose? You'll have to look and see if you're on index2.pl or just index.pl on your home page. It's most likely that you're on index2...

Re:Not to hijack but....

[khellendros1984]

Well, I registered 4 or 5 years ago, and my id is nearly 1000 times yours. I think it was about 2 years ago that we hit over a million (not sure on that number)

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Lord Aurora]

So far, only Apple seems to be remotely close.

And that's because Apple is starting to do things MS did a while back. Can you honestly not see the signs? Apple fanboys conveniently look past the horrible shortcomings of their demi-god and continue to root for it solely because it is not Microsoft.

Re:*BSD is Dying

[Bonobo_Unknown]

There is still one relatively successful distribution of *BSD

Re:Beating dead horses...

[icebraining]

I don't know about OS X, but iTunes on Windows does not "just work", it barely works at all. Usually the iPod "disappears" on the middle of a copy and I have to do it all again :|

Re:Red Title?

[Macthorpe]

Yeah, it's Index2. One of these days I'll bother to turn it off.

Re:*BSD is Dying

[dgatwood]

Inclined to understatement much? I'd say that BSD being on about 1 out of every 12 PCs sold worldwide qualifies as more than "relatively successful", but maybe it's just me. :-)

Who cares?

[moniker127]

Windows 7 is superior to windows vista, so who cares if they release a new service pack for it... ever?
Most companies arent upgraded to vista anyway.
Windows 7 is a really nice OS. It just feels like a next gen OS. There are still a few bugs in it, but its still in beta, so thats to be expected. But, ive been using it as my main OS for about two months now and I've never been happier. I'm someone who switches OSs a LOT (usually once a week, I have a disk dedicated to alternate operating systems for dual booting), and i've never encountered one that just works the way that windows 7 just works.

Re:Who cares?

[arminw]

.....Windows 7 is a really nice OS. It just feels like a next gen OS....

You mean they finally have made their Apple OSX software copying machine a little better? You mean that the new Windows 7 will run FASTER and better than earlier versions of Windows on the same older hardware? Newer versions of OSX run faster on the same hardware than the older versions. Is that at last, finally also true of Windows? How does Windows 7 run on a 2001-2002 vintage computer compared to OS10.1 versus OS10.5 on a same age Mac? A PC of that age often won't even run VISTA without at least a RAM increase. Is that still the case with Windows 7 also?

Re:Beating dead horses...

[samriel]

Yes, Apple fanboys do it. Linux fanboys do the same. The only reason Microsoft fanboys have to rub it in the others' faces is that they're ahead of the curve.Microsoft is doing stuff that probably would've been done by another big software company, but for the fact that Microsoft bought and/or killed all of the other big competitors in the '80s and '90s.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it is an indication that they have little or no problem solving capabilities. How about having them look for the blue circle with a question mark in it when they aren't sure how to do such simple tasks. I installed Office 2007 for the entire company (about 500 employees) and I've only had 2 people ask such simple questions as that - one that has poor eyesight and the other who is very computer-illiterate.

More that a Service Pack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a list I came up with detailing some of the more visible differences in Windows 7. It entails quite a bit more than just a Service Pack:

[snip]

        * Less Versions, SKUs: Word on the street is that theyre looking to reduce the number of SKUs involved.

So . . . . point update PLUS service pack. Certainly worth the price . . .

Re:Flaming $hit!

[TaoPhoenix]

I wish it would flame. Analogy time!

In the surrounding support camps to the Mount Everest expeditions, they actually use fuel made of ... flaming shit! Problem is, from a low potential stored energy compounded by the thin air, it burns terribly messily, and basically trades warmth for respiratory damage into disease susceptibility for the climbers, who then have real trouble completing the climb.

So, does 7 Flame? Or does it sizzle messily and leave half chewed partially upgraded versions of everything all over your comp?

Re: That silly staged sig

[TaoPhoenix]

I've seen Generations 24 and now you with 25 of that sig, but what is the point of faithfully copying the broken word at the end?

Re:Graceful Ceding that doesn't happen

[TaoPhoenix]

For a minute there I thought you were talking about the US economy.

Re: That silly staged sig

[samriel]

Not to hijack, but it's not broken so much as Slashdot caps the length of signatures to, what, 128 characters? Seems a bit low to me.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[guruevi]

Actually, people are considering stepping over to other platforms (finally) because

a) Apple has very much improved their interoperability and price points since the last major computer buying cycle (3-5 years ago, the Internet age with the G5 (greatest desktop ever but expensive) and P3-P4 (P3 was good but P4 was a disaster)). Now all those P4's are coming of age and a Mac will run your olden programs as well as new ones for both platforms.

b) Linux and even OpenOffice 3 has reached feature parity with what most Windows users are currently running (XP and Office 2000-2003) and has some of the nice things of Vista as well if you have the hardware (accelerated desktop and effects)

c) Vista is a disaster (whether it's PR or not we leave in the middle) and requires an overly expensive computer to run all it's features on. In the mean time, the economy is making people look for lower-end which has Ubuntu on netbooks, gOS on Wal-Mart's stuff or allows Apple to beat Dell in mid and high-end (good looking too) computers (especially business)

d) The geeks that most people ask about computer related stuff have some experience with either Mac/Linux and will likely recommend that as well. A few years ago, most geeks I know were still in Windows 2000-XP land whereas most (the same people) now run Linux.

e) 80% of all incoming students in the University I work at has an Apple machine and I've heard that other Universities are experiencing the same (one executive said in a meeting that within a few years we might all have to switch since all our students will want us to accept non-Microsoft digital formats too). Since students are considered the most tech-savvy in most households (where non-geeks live), most likely the parents are following their lead even if it's just to get iChat to work.

f) Whereas businesses used to be able to spend a lot in IT, now most businesses have tightened their belt, if not only in free-budget IT. CIO's and CFO's are actively looking for cheaper alternatives where before you could spend multiple thousands in server licensing without anybody asking. Also the current and incoming geek-class server admins have knowledge and experience with alternatives where before server admins were sometimes nothing but glorified accountants that worked on a really good spreadsheet in Excel once.

Re:I'm one of those people you are talking about

[pimpimpim]

About 10 years ago I installed linux for the first time. The internet was there, and every time Internet Explorer crashed in windows 95 on my pentium 100, it took the network interface with it, and I had to reboot. At one point I had enough, and because some friends were sgi or linux users, they got me convinced to try it, and I went to a store and bought a box-set of linux install cds and manuals by SuSE. After loads and loads of puzzling I got everything working. I redid this several times, with several linux versions, just like you. I ran openbsd for a while (one of the easier installs by the way), tried slackware. Knoppix was fine, but installing it instead of just running the live cd was no trivial task. My interest in figuring out how to install linux went down over the years, since at some point it isn't a learning process anymore, you're just hopelessly searching for ideas how to install some specific kernel module for some specific piece of hardware. Big jump to: now. You can buy several netbooks with several versions of linux preinstalled. I did, because I like linux, but I don't like installing it. And it really works. There are some problems of course, but the effort to configure my linux machine is not more, probably even less, than on the xp machines I am asked to check every once in a while. Installing software and hardware is getting easier almost by the day. By the way: if vista would really be such a good OS, I wonder why MS has such a hard time with it, and even Bill Gates admits that he'd rather not talk about it until the next OS is out.

Re:Not to hijack but....

[zoloto]

Meh, I still have issues with people with UIDs higher than the 600k mark. I should have registered when I first started browsing /. back when UIDs were in the 100k range

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Splintax]

Since those are both pretty easy-to-find options (Office orb at the top left -> Save, and orb -> Print) I think it's more likely that those students and faculty are just used to the old interface, and too lazy to work out how to use the new interface themselves. This is pretty common when IT support is readily available.

I fail to see how the new UI makes it more complex to save and print. It's almost exactly the same, except you click the Office orb instead of "File".

There is a big retro-rebellion going on

[Orion Blastar]

because many users are asking for that Windows XP downgrade and willing to pay more money to get it.

Plus more and more file sharing networks are downloading Windows XP ISO images at new records for downloads to get rid of Vista and replace it with a pirated version of XP because they cannot buy a copy of XP except from certain vendors.

Not only that but a lot of people are waiting for ReactOS to enter Beta testing and get closer to a 1.0 release version. So they can have a free and open source Windows alternative that runs native Windows XP drivers and software.

Heck some people even want to use AROS, HaikuOS, or some other FOSS alternative to Windows just to get away from Vista. Even, gasp, Linux! Plus more and more Macs are being sold and converted from PC users.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[chiguy]

I agree that it's difficult to find. 100% of the folks in my [small] office had to ask someone else how to print when 2007 rolled out.

Thing is, the UI isn't any more complicated than the old one (does putting the print function in the "File" menu any better?). It's just different. And when you have been trained for years where to go to print, and then you put it somewhere else, it's not nearly as obvious.

In this case, the main problem is the Orb in the top left looks like the title bar icon from other programs, where you would never go to find the print function, or any other meaningful function that wasn't more easily accessible in the top right. This has been ingrained in them as long as they've used windows.

So the Orb is a blind spot.

Once they knew about the Orb, they have no problem using the UI, so it's not complicated in a strict sense, just initially confusing, and that IS the designers' fault.

Re:Beating dead horses...

[dbIII]

iTunes? Even a relatively old version on a relatively old eMac for someone who last spent time with Macs in 1988 is a fast and efficient music piracy machine! Feed in a CD, a box pops up - click "Arrr" and it goes. MS Windows is a bit crappy with USB on occasion so it's likely to be that - I'd say check to see if there are newer drivers for your board or usb chipset.

Re: Down level Mac hardware and current Mac OS X

[Douglas Goodall]

I have an iMac 17" flat panel 886MHz PPC 1GB-ram machine that is currently running Mac OS X 10.5.6. Everything is working very well except that there are problems getting a flash version for PowerPC that will work with youtube. Otherwise the machine is running better than WIndows would be on an older machine of approximately the same caliber.

I recently loaded Windows XP on a 3GHz 2GB-ram toshiba P35-S609 and the gui response is very sluggish. Much worse in fact than the GUI on the iMac. The machine was so sluggish in fact that I had my mouth hanging open that people put up with this. I have been using the Mac for about three years now, and gave up Windows about two years ago. I am not a fanboi, but rather a systems programmer with a lot of experience in operating systems. I understand things like what goes into smooth mouse tracking. I have to give Apple the prize for systems that run faster each release, and systems that run well on limited resource hardware.

Re: I only wish...

[Douglas Goodall]

I can see a world where an XP lookalike would be good enough, except that the same things that keep Linux off the desktop would work against ReactOS. Anything less than 99.99% compatibility would cause a support crisis and could not be sold to businesses. Businesses are sold Microsoft solutions because they work within certain criteria and can be supported, sort of.

As an engineer I can see that ReactOS would solve many problems exc ept the funny stuff like Active X and programs that need contemporary APIs and SQL Server. Unfortunately, most users seem to need the whole tamale of Microsoft features to run their mission critical collection of programs, unless they make a concerted effort on a corporate level to use something else like Macs, and sometimes Linux. There may well come a day when ReactOS hits a compatibility point equal to where Microsoft was five years ago, and for many people that might be good enough, but no for a critical mass of the population I am afraid. I put my money on Apple and Mac OS X, for the long term. Unless Microsoft just stays around and we have to suffer with them until we die.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:*BSD is Dying

[drinkypoo]

BSD being on about 1 out of every 12 PCs sold

Cite?

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Just Some Guy]

Since those are both pretty easy-to-find options (Office orb at the top left -> Save, and orb -> Print)

That's easy enough once you know about it, but it would never occur to me to click on a product logo to get functionality other than an "about" dialog.

Why can't a Vista SP come out after Win7?

[JSBiff]

I, personally, don't see any reason why they couldn't release Vista SP2 after the Windows 7 release. I mean, is there a law of the Universe that previous product updates cannot ever come out after a new product? Wasn't Windows XP SP3 released after Windows Vista? I believe it has been MS's policy to continue to release updates for versions of Windows for something like 5 years after their release, even after they've released new OS versions?

Re:Why can't a Vista SP come out after Win7?

[That's What She Said]

This is not the issue. The original timeline specified Vista SP2 being released before 7. The question was if the new release date for Vista SP2 would be set before the release of Windows 7.

Adding to your explanation, Apple still releases updates to Tiger, even after almost 18 months after they released Leopard. It's very important that people running older versions still get fixes...

Re:Beating dead horses...

[Splintax]

You're right, but there are plenty of things that aren't intuitive about office software. It's simply too complicated for someone who's not experienced with computers to just 'pick up'.

If you're arguing that the orb is counter-intuitive even for computer-savvy users, then I disagree. I worked the orb out as soon as I went for the File menu and discovered it wasn't there anymore. The orb is in pretty much the same place. (And if you've used Vista, you'll recognize the product logo as the button you use to access the main menu.)

Re:Beating dead horses...

[painehope]

Thanks, truly, for reminding me of these points. I'm a strictly UNIX/Linux user and admin, and work in scientific industries where Windows isn't used by anyone but the beancounters and execs. So my exposure to Windows and it's current standing in the business world is pretty limited.

As for the university bit, I'm about to go back to school for a while (nothing better to do in a recession, jobs are really scarce in my niche market and location, and I can't feasibly relocate at the moment), so I'll get to see whether they still teach systems architecture out of UNIX books and then expect you to write your code for assignments in MASM. I still have nightmares about one class I took where they expected a shitload of assembler written in MASM, yet the version I was given didn't run on my dual-boot machine (the only Windows installation I had), nor did it run on most of the systems in the lab. Imagine 40 students (with about 30 computers) (a) trying to figure out which machines worked and (b) fighting over them.

It was such a goddamn nightmare that I just quit college altogether. It wasn't like it offered me anything that I couldn't get out of CS books and on-the-job experience, and my job was already eating at least 50-70 - sometimes up to 90 - hours a week of my time (so I chalked college up as an unnecessary burden at the time). Why pay to learn when you can teach yourself and get paid for it, and have an extra 15 or so hours a week to relax?. Well, get drunk, work out, and get laid, but that's my definition of relaxing.

Re: Down level Mac hardware and current Mac OS X

[arminw]

....Much worse in fact than the GUI on the iMac....

It must be some hardware issue Windows is having with your Toshiba. I run XP on my Macbook pro 2GB laptop under a Parallels VM and that works about at the same GUI speed as the native OSX equivalent programs. Only 512M is allocated to the Windows XP Virtual Machine. Of course our 2.8Ghz 6GB Dual Quad Core Macpro desktop system is quite fast with 2 GB allocated to VISTA running in a VM. However it is noticeably slower than the native OSX GUI. Fortunately, VISTA is not needed for actual work, but just to get familiar with it in order for us to service a few customers who are stuck with it.

A 512M XP VM on the Macpro is MUCH faster than VISTA however and there is no noticeable difference between XP and native OSX programs. In contrast to the VISTA VM, some real work gets done on XP.

.....now I'm just amused.....

[OutOnARock]

I thought Windows 7 was actually Vista SP2 plus new marketing....

Does that mean that Windows 7 is now Vista SP2+ plus new marketing (the + being the stuff they didn't put in the Vista service pack on purpose)?

Not a software engineer?

[professorguy]

Here's a movie of me getting my Master's from Harvard. Notice that when my specialization is read, you can hear the announcer say "Software Engineering."

So I have a degree in software engineering and then I go out and design software. That would make me a, uh, um, er.... I guess I'll have cards made up that say "Dude who can design and create software."

Re:Not a software engineer?

[Abcd1234]

Sorry, bub. As a software developer with a bachelors degree in the field (I can't decide if I can tolerate school sufficiently to get that masters that my honours program was grooming me for :), let me tell you... you're not an engineer, even if your little piece of paper from Harvard tells you so. The fact that our industry has chosen to co-opt the term speaks to me of envy more than anything else.

You may be a software developer. Architect. Designer. Any number of other things. But you're not an engineer, any more than you're a doctor, or a master tradesman.

Re:Not a software engineer?

[professorguy]

Seems silly to me. Why not just make the distinction between "Engineer" and "Engineer certified by such-and-such agency" rather than between "Dude with some paper" and "Engineer"? Seems like that would both address your concerns and acknowledge that many people call themselves engineers (whether they SHOULD or not).

Re: Down level Mac hardware and current Mac OS X

[Douglas Goodall]

Are you telling me that XP running in a VM on a powerbook is about the same as Mac OS X running native? That makes no sense to me. If you say that is what you are seeing, I must believe you, but your information doesn't match up with my information.

Re:Perfect Example Of This Shit Right Here

[GooberToo]

Vista's first impression was that it generally was slower

And for the record, it has consistently been benchmarked to be slower than XP and Linux - at least when it first came out. People have the "impression" it is slower because it really is/was slower. In some cases, by a wide margin.

Re: Down level Mac hardware and current Mac OS X

[arminw]

...Are you telling me that XP running in a VM on a powerbook is about the same as Mac OS X running native? ....

The discussion was about the GUI, not necessarily all applications. However, that said, I have encountered no problem using quicktime and iTunes on XP on that laptop. I actually installed these two programs just to see whether they would work and how well. I was pleasantly surprised that they ran just as well as the native OSX versions. I have never done that experiment (yet) on the VISTA VM on the Macpro.