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Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has finally released the final build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 'There are a few significant additions that are included in SP2: Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista, Windows Connect Now (WCN) is now in the Wi-Fi Configuration, and exFAT file system supports UTC timestamps. The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes.' A list of other notable changes is available on TechNet. SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet, but it will be 'during the coming months.'"
And now that it is released to the public, Vista SP2 is no longer the most secure OS out there... it was doing so well too... why did they have to release it, its all downhill from here..
I can almost imagine the developer sitting at his desk getting an e-mail from their issue management system that there's a problem with Fc.exe (file compare) ... only to have him realize that his for loop that iterates over the buffer that reads the files should have the while conditions of <= 128 and not simply < 128!
This is forgivable, I code some pretty stupid errors sometimes.
What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!
My work here is dung.
is Windows 7 RC1.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Isn't that coming out in October?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Can someone please elaborate what this UTC timestamp thing is? With some googling I can just assume it means UNIX timestamp. Can we please not invent new names for everything?
I can't believe MS finally (almost) admitted they made a mistake. It may have taken almost as long, in technological terms, as it took the Catholic Church to admit it's mistakes with Galileo, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Windows Search 4.0?! I HATE that POS. I've made a very deliberate attempt to NOT download this off of windows update, and now if I want to be up to date with my system, I HAVE to install it? Assholes.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I wonder if they have fixed the throttling bug where if you're streaming media over a wireless link, Vista throttles the connection down so much that it causes buffer underruns and severe clipping. I can't listen to FLACs in VLC unless I set buffering to at least 20 seconds.
I used to work at a company that had a glacial workstation OS upgrade cycle. It took them nearly 4 years into XP's lifecycle to consider XP (they were still deploying Win2K), and XPSP2 changed so many of the inner workings of the OS that the deployment was delayed until mid-2006.
I just wonder if the changes in Vista SP2 will sideline similarly glacial Vista deployments or be a blessing, allowing people to skip Vista for Windows 7.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
No one's using Vista anyway.
What are you talking about?? Plenty of people are using Vista. My Website's stats show (For the month of May until today): Windows XP 57.5 % Windows Vista 22.5 %
SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet
Well, maybe it isn't, but my Vista Home Premium at work "complained" this morning it had a new update, which was SP2, I let it download and play with it, now it's installed and it seems to work ok up to now.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
So uhh, what was the 300MB+ item in Windows Updates this morning that I installed? I'm sure it said service pack 2.
This will make 7 Vista SP3, then.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes."
Windows versions become usable after the 2nd service pack, in my experience.
Sorry, I forgot some words: to the statement you MUST leave your computer idle for a time if you want to be able to search it please append "without having to initiate a separate, file-based search". Thank you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought it would still take another RC...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm hoping that SP2 doesn't break the functionality of my HTPC like Windows 7 did. I tried Windows 7 x64 RC on my HTPC for about a week or so, but my sound card (X-Fi Extreme Audio PCI-Express x1 slot) developed some major problems that caused MCE to crash and WMP to crash.
I went back to Vista on it. I'm happy enough with the Media Center in Vista that I doubt I'll use Windows 7 on this box in the future, even though the UI of Windows 7 Media Center seems to be a little less "cluttered". My biggest complaint about Vista is the format of the recordings you make. I cannot seem to easily manipulate the resulting recordings very well at all, and I have to rely on MCEBuddy to convert the recorded shows to a format (H264) I can then use on other systems and OSes. ( I know, I know...DRM can suck my salty balls)
From a usability standpoint though, Windows 7 seems superior to Vista in the installation process, as well as the Desktop UI. I am surprised that they don't just convert the installed Vista base to Windows 7 for the simplicity of support. (well maybe not "surprised". it "is" MS, afterall)
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
No one's using Vista anyway.
No, but many are forced to tolerate it.
Do you believe everything you read or hear on the net and TV? I've been using Vista 64bit for about two years now. It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far. Very stable since SP1 was released. Initially, yes there were problems. Most of the issues I encountered were due to Nvidia drivers however, not problems caused by MS. I seem to remember having similar issues when XP was released many moons ago. I still maintain that the only real problem with Vista is the media and users that are too afraid to learn modern tech.
i just booted vista on my dual boot laptop, and instantly i got prompted to install sp2 from auto-update...
dont care about vista, or any windows, i just never bothered to remove it completley... sigh... damn vendors with preinstalled win$shit
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
You should not check your own web site so often... ;)
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Looking at your site, I can see you develop sites for people who don't know any better (than to either get some real professionals or do it themselves). This kind of falls into line with 22.5% of your visitors being Vista users.
I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.
Anecdotal evidence is never an apt reply to sarcasm or trolling, you'll just end up looking the fool.
I don't use Vista myself but I know someone who does. He had to back out SP2 because it reduced Powerpoint to a crawl. It looked to me like there was excessive HD activity.
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1687/vistasp2g.jpg
LIARS!!!!
Apparently Server 2008 shipped with its SP1 built-in. 2008 SP2 auto-downloaded yesterday.
The Indexing Service and Windows Search are not the same thing. I never used Windows Search under XP because I had gone out of my way to learn how to configure the Indexing Service (which is a huge pain in the ass) so that Start > Search would give me indexed results. I never experienced the Indexing Service pwning my machine as you say, though, and I indexed 3+ TB worth of stuff with it.
:P
You have to do heavy configuration in Vista with Windows Search to have it search outside your profile, but once you do, the searches are much faster than XP was, compared to Indexing Service or WDS based searches.
Also, on XP, if you did configure the built-in Indexer to index your stuff, Start > Search would give you results from both in and out of the index, from what I recall. It might be folder-based as to whether or not something not in the index that was supposed to be was included (but was newly created for example, and hadn't been indexed yet), but I can't really remember anymore... been using Vista for too long now
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Right now on Windows Server 2008 Standard I've got 3 VMs running on Hyper-V no problem. According to the release documentation I'm now going to be limited to one guest? I can't even find pricing for additional seats. Way to go Microsoft.
Wow, I've been using this Windows Mojave for a while now... it's SO much better than Vista!
"I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not"
Hell, I expect there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in open source software, until somebody -other than those actually responsible for the code- submit a patch.
I'm looking at you, silly little Thunderbird bug #92165 from 2001/Jul/24.
I think the same about my OS X updates.... though it is getting to more than x.x.2 now.
Vista is native to Blu-Ray, gawd I hope this kicks Apple in the pants.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
TLDR: I hated Vista. Loved XP. Use Linux. Installed 64bit Vista. Vista Crashed and burned. Reinstalled with SP2. It just Works.
I've been a longtime XP user. I use Ubuntu and RHEL at work. I use linux and unix. I hated Vista with a passion, thought it was a PIA and had so much config problems. I then bought a new PC (quad core 6GB ram, blah blah) so I figured I'd put Vista on it. First time worked ok. I updated my bios, it blew away my Raid 1. Got irritated and stopped screwing with it. Then SP2 came along in the last few weeks and I reinstalled my OS and installed SP2 over it.
It just works. Works perfectly. So simple to install Vista and simple to install the SP2. 2 reboots and I had everything working. Fixed the RAID issue, fixed the bluetooth issue, fixed some other quirks that drove me batshiz crazy.
I gotta say that I used to hate vista with the passion of a 1000 firey suns. Now I'm like "Well it's not too bad, what's the problem with it again?"
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
I beg to differ with your numbers:
Numbers of page view per platform on the last 12 month of a little european website:
Page Views
Platform Sum %
(blank) 231,944,487 14
AIX 63,675 0
AmigaOS 1,399 0
BeOS 1,145 0
CP/M 26,258 0
DOS 28,158 0
Dreamcast 319 0
HP-UX 1,405 0
IRIX 2,535 0
Linux 10,782,630 1
Macintosh 22,543,401 1
NetBSD 1,930 0
OS/2 6,449 0
OSF1 1,000 0
OpenVMS 383 0
SCO_SV 38 0
Slurp 61,242,836 4
Solaris 7,625,811 0
SunOS 197,176 0
Unix (unknown) 67,609 0
WebTV 2,111 0
Windows 12,050,352 1
Windows 16-bit 11,607 0
Windows 2000 132,118,040 8
Windows 32-bit 6,226,532 0
Windows 95 723,941 0
Windows 98 32,166,513 2
Windows CE 107,696 0
Windows NT 5,474,837 0
Windows Sever 2003 19,986,701 1
Windows Vista 30,442,927 2
Windows XP 1,012,030,914 62
unknown 39,486,905 2
TOTAL 1,625,367,720 100
I thought Windows 7 was being released later this year?
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista...
In a service pack? So much for the Microsoft that said they will keep new 'features' out of service packs. If I want a Bluetooth Feature Pack, I would download it! If I want Windows Search, I would download it! I DON'T WANT IT and now you'll force it on me?
I tell Windows Update CONSTANTLY that I don't want Silverlight. I've told it not to show me this update at least 20 times!!!! I suppose they'll just include it in a service pack and I'll get it anyway!
This guy will be modded down, unfortunately. I totally agree, I have been using Vista 64bit for over a year now, it has crashed on me twice in that time. My XP machine is far less stable. Also, because of its 64bit capabilities and its far better use of multiple cores (I have a quad core), I have found a performance increase over XP. Its performance has also remained, even though I have added a large amount of apps to it, it does not seem to suffer from slowing down to a slow grind after a few months of use, like XP does. There are some stupid, irritating features to it, like the UAC, driver signing, aero theme...etc. Luckily all of these features can be turned off. The only 2 problems I have with it is the integration of DRM, and the lack of EAX support (although this is being solved by drivers).
My Windows 7 RC installation is reported as IE 7 on Windows XP SP2, because half of the video streaming sites I use (legitimate, obviously) break with "AMAGAD UR OS IZ NOT ZUPPRORTREAD." messages, which are absolute rubbish as I am able to watch them in Firefox on Windows 7 as long as I alter the user agent string.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Looking at your site
The site that my email address is at is currently a placeholder until I have time to work on my own site. The site where I pulled those statistics is a real business site for a Summer Camp. The reason I did not (and will not) post a link to that site is because it is on a weak server and I'd rather not get slashdotted.
I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.
Where do you get that piece of information from? Personally, I have been working in Web and Software Development and in Systems Administration for fifteen years and I have no problems with Vista.
Windows (Unknown Version)
You might not have had problems, but so far a lot of people have had problems.
:).
Maybe it's the initial stuff that was crap. But you know what, that makes it an even better reason to stay with what works. Stuff that has more of the bugs fixed.
I was using Win2K after WinXP SP2 came out. And Win2K was quite stable. The few blue screens in years was due to hardware going bad, or a bad NIC driver.
I'm now using WinXP SP3 on the desktop and ubuntu for my server. And both have been stable. I wouldn't use WinXP "the original release".
I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...
I think I'll skip Vista. Maybe Win7 or something else would be stable enough for me
Don't get me wrong I'm grateful for the guinea pigs and early adopters. It's just not a good idea for everyone to be an early adopter and go Vista.
Personally, I've seen Vista and Win7, and it sure looks like MS has gone nuts. They've changed a lot of "tech" UI stuff for no apparent good reason.
LOL, they branded me as a troll already for talking about the way things are. Thankfully, some people out there have real experience with it. You are correct, UAC is horrible... I disable it on all my machines save for the laptop I cart around. If you haven't checked it out yet (I just start using it 3 days ago), take a look at the Media Center component. With a few plugins and a TV card, I've built the best HTPC I've ever seen. Didn't expect MS to build something like that and not have it on the fore-front. The only lingering issue I have at this point (now that SP2 fixed Bluetooth) is that Peer Guardian still seems off in 64bit. I guess I'll be sticking with VMware a bit longer to emulate XP.
Your comment matches up with my experience with x64 Vista. Which makes me wonder if there's a significant difference in performance between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Maybe the 64 bit doesn't actually carry the Black Plague after all?
My laptop had it available last night...?
Oh, and of course, I unchecked the "critical" update of IE8.
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Of course, the rest of us who've downgraded to XP, but still have the license/restore partition with Vista are wondering about the performance. Stick with XP on my laptop with only 2G of ram or do we upgrade, yet?
Vista isn't that bad on a powerful enough computer. I bought a new laptop with Vista 64 reinstalled. I tried XP on this computer (bad luck with Vista in the past), but some drivers weren't even available so the overall stability of the machine suffered. I don't really have any major complaints, and I think the built in search is pretty great for mp3s. It's two years later now, and most computers are finally powerful enough to run Vista.
It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far.
you must be kidding me
Yes, there's a huge difference. My laptop came with 32-bit preinstalled. and after a few months of usage, I upgraded to 64-bit and immediately noted everything being faster, especially if you have >= 4 GB of RAM.
In the beginning, there was null.
Add me to the folks who use Vista 64-bit with no complaints. Its as stable as my XP machine ever was.
I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.
The available language packs went from 4 to like 30 and there were I think 4 critical updates and 1 to IE8 in Windows 7 RC. I installed the updates (not the languages) and restarted...only to have boot problems. As someone who never bought or got into Vista I imagine that frustration (boot FAIL) is what Vista users have felt this whole time...my condolences.
You'll get no qualms from me. Early adopters get what they deserve. I'm unfortunately put into that position quite a bit... I'm top tier tech support, so I need to learn new OSes when they're released. Haven't had any real issues with 64bit save for the driver issue and PG2 mentioned earlier. That being said, I wouldn't run Vista 64bit on anything less than a C2Duo, 4GBs RAM and a discreet video card. If you don't have that, you'd be best served sticking with XP until Win7 (I've found the beta and RC1 to work well with slightly older hardware).
I totally agree, I have been using Vista 64bit for over a year now, it has crashed on me twice in that time. My XP machine is far less stable.
Now, I'm not going to argue about Vista's stability, it's the speed and general bloat I have problems with, but seriously, what the fuck are all you people doing to your XP installations?!
I barely maintain my system at all, much to my disdain, but I haven't had it freeze/crash/BSOD/whatever in the past 3 years (well, a few times, but they don't count because it was faulty hardware, not software) and I torture the hell out of this computer!
Ezekiel 23:20
yeah, that, and the fact that it's slow as shit. Seriously I bought a PC pre-loaded with Vista, and despite having heard bad things about it, I decided to give it a try. It was *unbearably* slow, on a 2009 PC! I turned off all the fancy graphics, and the indexing, and a bunch of other stuff. It got a lot faster. I installed XP on another partition, and.. well it's unquestionably faster. What I *really* don't get is why certain random things are so much slower - like copying a small file in explorer??
No... Not a real notable difference depending on what HW you have. I ran Vista x86 before not having all my RAM started bugging me. A few old school games (the original Homeworld comes to mind) worked better but other than that pretty much the same. I seem to remember the x86 version not using signed drivers, but I may be wrong.
I am sure Vista is fine with the latest software, and for personal use. However, have you tried deploying Vista in an enterprise environment (or use older software for that matter)? Here is a small list of issues that have caused us to stop looking at Vista for a rollout:
1. Group Policy management (the move to admx files has caused numerous backwards compatibility issues)
2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.
3. Try creating images with default software for imaging workstations due to #2.
4. In-house applications need to be recoded.
5. Minimum requirements for Vista would require a major purchase of machines to be able to run it.
6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.
7. Random core dumps on Dell Latitude laptop line (have had 8 of them do this), even with the latest drivers and firmware.
No he's not since Windows 7 isn't released yet and Vista is heaps ahead of XP.
And I'm running a whopping 100% of all my programs in 64 bit. Why are people still using Windows again?
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Install a half decent graphics card (instead of using the Intel integrated shit) and most of your speed problems will disappear. Unless you got something with a Celeron or Athlon X2, in which case your CPU is too slow to handle Vista effectively, in which case I'd recommend sticking with XP.
And therein lies the problem. I shouldn't need a great computer to run the operating system.
Ezekiel 23:20
OSF1 and CP/M?
I wonder what kind of website it is.
SCO_SV 38 0
Sco_SV has 38 users? Why haven't we seen a SCO doubles market share article?
load "$",8,1
Then stick with XP... From 10 years ago. You don't need new features or better handling of HW resources right?
It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far.
That doesn't say much for Vista, does it? MS have never released any software that works properly.
If it says "Microsoft" on the box, you know it's faulty!
Windows - a poor proprietary client for a Unix world.
Seconded. It's a graphically accelerated OS. Cannot imagine running Vista on anything but discreet graphics.
How do I slipstream this or where are good iso's for vista 64 that are not on a pay site as Why should I pay to download a copy that I have payed for.
It's like any other OS (including XP). I have to spend a fair amount of time removing stock components and disabling services to get it to where I'm happy. If run stock, I can understand how you'd take a pretty big performance hit.
I'm using Vista now for the new PC I built for myself at home. All in all, it hasn't caused me to start screaming and running to find a copy of XP.
Having said that, it took three tries to install it, for some reason. It has also decided that it needs 2GB of physical memory to do complicated things like sit in Windows Explorer and do nothing. Happily, I have 6GB on this PC, but I would like to point out that my last PC only had 2GB total and it pretty much ran any application out there on XP.
UAC drove me insane about 10 minutes after I started using Vista. It was rapidly turned off.
By default, Vista pretty much tries to find every image, video, or whatever on your host and make sure that it has an Explorer thumbnail. Now, I do recall that XP did something similar too, before you made the needed performance changes.
It's just that, for some reason, I expected some how, that I could actually not *have* to turn those useless eye candy features off this time. That was not to be the case. With the default settings, on my new Core i7 920 with its 6GB, I was actually treated to opening my D: hard drive and having the window it opened briefly display (Not responding) for about 2 seconds. Any directory with any substantial number of images or even icons, I would just sit there and watch as it ran down them, slowly changing from the generic icon to the icon for the actual application. For a moment I was afraid that I had done something horribly wrong... like I had somehow put my CPU in backwards or that it was using my sound card to render the icons.
In the end, there are things you can do to fix most of the most annoying issues. And as long as you get the worst offenders, like the thumbnail making, you can get the pretty Aero interface to be pretty responsive with almost full effects. But the fact that I have what can only be described as a high end gaming desktop and I am still having these problems out of the box is disturbing.
Vista is not the worst Microsoft OS I have ever used, and it's far from unusable, but it is by far the most disappointing even after a few years of hearing it disparaged. Its not that they failed to get the hard stuff right, its that they made the easy stuff stop working as well as it used to.
And the final thing. There is no "Up a directory" button in the Windows Explorer windows any more. You have to use the stupid breadcrumbs/tree navigation now. Seriously.... why? I mean, I see people post "Just use the damn breadcrumbs and stop complaining!" in forums and I think to myself: "well maybe it is somehow better, don't ask me how, but why would you remove something that people use and are used to for no reason?" Its not like it would have taken a huge amount of development resources to leave it in there. Someone actually made the boneheaded decision to actually remove it and not even provide it as an optional setting to put it back. Right now I am actually running an add-on to get a similar functionality.
So, I bought Vista, I have a gaming machine, I wanted DirectX 10, and I won't buy Windows 7 until SP1 so I really had little choice. Its not the end of the world, but it leaves you wondering if you haven't taken a few steps backwards in places that you had thought were nice and comfortable and settled. At this point, I'm thinking the only real benefit of buying Vista, other than DX10, is that I'll be able to get an upgrade price for Windows 7 when I inevitably upgrade.
... I've been seriously freaked out a few times by Vista anticipating what I wanted done and popping up with a dialogue box offering to do it automatically. I don't have quite the faith to actually let it do it yet, but that's the same impulse that has me driving a manual, i.e. it's not rational. If windows is planning to impress me, I think developing psychic powers is a good way to go about it.
(For reference, I use Ubuntu for tooling around on the internet at home, Vista for gaming, XP on my office machine so the department tech won't hate me, and 95 on my equipment machinery because of god knows what compatibility issues with the X-ray control software.)
(Side note - Never try to get 95 to support USB, no matter how modern the hardware is and how much you hate juggling floppy disks full of plain-text data. It's not worth the emotional anguish.)
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
That's why I've always told my client base to wait for at least the first service pack on any new MS OS before purchasing. I see your tag... Never had any problems in *nix with a new release? I have!
Didn't you see the OpenSSH article go through over a week ago? Disclosing significant security issues that existed in OpenSSH since its existence and weren't even announced until months after they were found and fixed?
Open source also has lots of bugs in it. And many of them aren't fixed until they are posted about in a public forum.
You have an actual point here about open source. It's just Stallman's point restated, but still, it's valid. But you do a really rotten job of stating it and explaining how open source (or free software) is different.
The real value of open source (in terms of bugs) is that if you would like, you can inspect the code and then hopefully find latent bugs. And if you find them, you can fix them. For example, if your business depends very critically on a section of code being secure, you can hire someone to code review it. You can't do this with closed source. You won't necessarily find any existing problems, but at least you have some more control over your destiny.
From what MS and the military say, the militarized versions of Windows don't have different code in them, they just are configured differently to have more security features (which were already available) turned on. So the militarized versions certainly don't have everything they know about fixed. The same is true of open source/free software, many projects have enormous bug databases with lists of open (known about) bugs which are not fixed. Again, the big different with open source is that if one of those bugs is a deal-breaker for you, you can fix it yourself and not wait for the project maintainers to do it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You, and others, say UAC is horrible. Is that because it is your PC/Laptop and you are the only user?
I think UAC is great. I get home from work and my daughter says "What's your password because I need to install XYZ" and I smile. I can let her do as she pleases on my laptop and not worry about her install the latest Malware, Crapware (iTunes), etc.
The only time I've grumbled is when Firefox auto-updates while she's using it and it can't finish its upgrade without my password. (great engrish Inda)
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Simoniz has introduced a new compound that will actually allow you to polish a turd to a showroom shine.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
Slipstream it with vlite. Use the Windows DVD that you received when you paid for it.
Nonsense.
You don't produce media.
ProTools
Lexicon
MBOX2
Sandisk (oh yeah they have drivers, not much good if the TOOLS you use are on the drive you can't access)
Bla Bla Bla bla bla... NONSENSE!!
The only thing insightful here is a mis-spelling, like in incite a riot in your box against hardware.
Sure if you browse the web, email, text edit your vista is fine. If you are trying to do video, audio production with hardware you've paid thousands of dollars for your stupid $300 OS is crap, a hassle, a headache!
Frankly I will not let this lie continue to propagate. So Moderators keep him up at +5 so the truth can be seen below.
There's a difference between "not supported" and "doesn't work."
Not that I'm defending the website's slowness in adapting to change.
Comment of the year
I didn't install Windows 7 Beta (and haven't had a chance to check out the RC yet) but from what I've heard, nothing has really changed on that front with W7 versus Vista, either. Unless it's a laptop, I have no idea why most people don't have some sort of discreet graphics card now. They are dirt cheap.
Everybody said the same thing about XP when it came out.
I concur that UAC is great. Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.
As for Firefox auto-updates, that is firefox's fault. I've had goofiness when I hit cancel on the privilidge escalation dialog, but IMHO Firefox should be able to just continue working nomrally if it doesn't update.
You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much. I'm pretty sure the rest of the RAM usage is just caching or other behind the scenes cleverness. I've run Vista side by side on a 1GB machine a 4GB machine (RAM) and with only 1GB to use, only ~600MB are used, while on the 4GB machine, ~1.8G are used.
Because some of us need 32-bit emulation. WoW64 or whatever it is called works flawlessly out of the box. I assume you were making a snide comment about how some FLOSS operating system/userland is superior. Lets see you run 10 year old 32-bit applications out of box with no tinkering on your fabulous 64-bit system.
I recently bought a laptop with Vista pre-installed. A 2.4 GHz Core2-duo with 4GB of RAM. Using Acrobat Pro, I created a PDF of about 600 scanned grayscale images (a book). It took nearly 9.5 minutes. I then went to my older laptop with a 1.73 GHz Pentium M and 2 GB of RAM running Windows XP. Same files, same version of Acrobat Pro. It took only 3.5 minutes. I blew away Vista on the new machine and installed XP and tried the same task. The result? 2 min 40 sec. Needless to say, I kept the XP install.
But when are they going to release the fix that allows me to install something when I click on it, as opposed to some unspecified time in the future that may range from 30 seconds to 20 minutes and at speeds approaching XP?
Applications that take 5 seconds to install under XP sometimes took as long as 2 minutes under Vista, never understood it.
I'll stick with XP until they refuse to support it anymore. Hopefully by that time, some flavor of Unix will have matured to the point where I never have to use the command line *if* I don't care to, as opposed to having to use the command line at least once for damned near everything.
WorksForMe. I have a laptop with Intel 945GM and it works with Aero. Every once in a while I will get some tearing when I have lots of windows open and I try to to window flip, but its actually not bad. YMMV.
I recently found this annoying thing that Intel GigE drivers do. They throttle you down to 10Mbps when they think the computer is idle.
Well, eh, the statement is weird. Allthought you are technically correct but if you want or need multiple cores, heck load of memory, fastest pixel cruncher there is and so on then you need great computer. And you need great operating system to use that computer. So these two goes hand in hand./p>
You don't know what you don't know.
It is simple. O/S 2 had the IBM "Stink of Death" on it which is why Windows 95 won and O/S 2 lost.
Vista has the Microsoft ME "Stink of Death" on it. You can't really change what people think of it now. There is death, there are taxes. There is Vista sucking.
Microsoft screwed the pooch on it. They wasted 3 years working on longhorn and had to scrap it all. They spent 3 more years putting Vista together. Microsoft decided it HAD to release it in 3 years. So ready or not, it hit the market 3 years later.
There were clearly issues with it that needed to be ironed out. The same complaint that Linux had to live with. It runs perfectly for you on hardware YYY but for me on XXX it totally sucks.
vi +
You see the difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft releases these updates for free. Apple on the other hand charges you for them. Oh and gives them pretty animal names.
Depends on the content of your website.
:-)
If it deals with making Vista slightly less horrible then you will have Vista users flocking to your site
Yes, on the computers I'm complaining about I am the only user. I left UAC alone on the computer I built for my parents for obvious reasons. UAC is probably fine for a standard user, but it drives me crazy... Thankfully it's easy to disable.
Ditto with my experience as well. I think that most people who complain about Vista have never actually used a SP1 or newer version for any amount of time. About the only gripe I can come up with about Vista 64-bit is that getting some of the video/audio codecs installed can be a pain. But really, that is the only issue I have had (well, besides some software not being available for 64-bit version, but that is not the fault of the OS). Other than that is has been rather smooth sailing and I am unsure what all the fuss is about.
"But this one goes to 11!"
What is "Slurp" such that it has twice as many Win98 users?
I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.
I make sure all my Windows stuff builds as 64bit and I test on Vista64, but really for most applications there's no point.
If you need >4GB of address space it would be useful, but most applications can be written not to. Databases are apparently an exception. Still it's a bad idea to assume that you can memory map a huge file into memory, and that's the killer app for 64 bits.
In terms of performance most benchmarks put 64 and 32 bit neck and neck - ±a few percent%. Sure you have more registers, but all x86 chips use caching and register renaming to make that less significant than you'd think. 32 bit code thunks on 64 bit Windows, but the thunking mechanism is very lightweight. I've never checked but I imagine that integers are movzx'd from the stack to a register and pointers are movsx'd. You apparantly need far jump to switch from 32 to 64 bit too. But my guess is that all this stuff was agreed by Microsoft and AMD so that it ends up being efficient.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
God dammit! It's discrete, not discreet!
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/discreet.html
Which, of course, are all thanks to Microsoft's monopoly, which you're supporting by still using Windows. Not trying to cause trouble, but there's no point complaining about a problem if you're still part of the problem.
Obviously someone watched Angels and Demons last night...
Actually I'm the son of a minister that had an interest in astronomy as a child. It was the first comparison that sprang to mind.
Not that it matters, but I haven't read or watched any of Dan Brown's works.
Yahoo's spider/bot. Presumably Googlebot was higher, but was manually removed.
I don't have to. I recompile them or use a newer version.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I heard rumor that they will be disabling autorun in one of their future releases of Vista. Since it's not mentioned for SP2, I guess we'll be waiting for another update for Vista? http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/04/28/changes-in-windows-to-meet-changes-in-threat-landscape.aspx
Not entirely sure of the legality but give K-Lite Codec pack a shot (search for "Edskes File Download Mirror" in Google). There is some setup required which probably shouldn't be handled by an end-user, but this pack handles most codec needs. For everything it doesn't, VLC.
Several users on the BitDefender forums are complaining that the BitDefender Anti-virus software is treating certain Vista SP2 files as trojans and quarantining them during installation causing the "Black Screen of Death."
http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=13819
you guys can throw numbers at each other all day long, but without context they are meaningless.
You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much
Not only is that not much by today's standards, but it's even dirt cheap. One GB of RAM costs less than $15.
And yes, Vista does all kinds of nifty caching and other tricks to make better use of RAM. There's simply no point in having RAM sit there unused.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
The weird thing is that we have more unknown OSs than Vista....
btw, I use Vista and I'm not trolling. :)
I hope there will be a way to avoid having to install the crapware M$ call "Windows Search 4.0" that SP2 includes!
I would have to echo these comments. I too run Windows Vista 64 bit for the last year and no problems at all!! XP used to give me issues after 5 to 6 months. Vista 64 bit has been great. I know Linux is a great OS but for the non techie people using PCs Vista 64 bit is a very good OS with the proper hardware and with hardware costs where they are it is not expensive to spec or build your own system that will run it very efficiently. I hate to say it but the whole reason Vista has a bad reputation is not so much the OS itself it was the system requirements. People who run single core CPUs and less than 1 gig of ram should not run Vista or at least run 2 gigs of ram. That makes a huge difference. I haven't tried Windows 7 yet but may look at it soon to see what is coming. My main system will remain on Vista for all my daily computing.
How seriously are you actually using Vista x64? I was forced to upgrade from XP because I actually needed a 64-bit OS. (I do scientific computation, but some of my apps are windows-only, like SolidWorks.) When stressed like that, Vista has proven to be slower and less stable for the things that could actually be done within the confines of 32-bit XP. I used to be able to run simulations for at least a week without crashes. On vista, I'm lucky if my computer is still on in the morning when I let things run overnight. And to top it off, it's power management on my laptop is worse than most linux distros (although this is more of a driver situation than a windows problem).
I've no doubt that Vista x64 can be better as a casual desktop system due to the increased headroom of a 64-bit platform, the re-written drivers, and better security, but I've yet to figure out how to tune it for heavy-duty work.
That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference. Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)
Which, of course, are all thanks to Microsoft's monopoly, which you're supporting by still using Windows. Not trying to cause trouble, but there's no point complaining about a problem if you're still part of the problem.
And you are supporting terrorism, animal abuse, and global warming by using whatever the hell you are using.. Mac is it?
After installation SP2 proceeded to break/forget my static ip NIC's default gateway IP after using WOL once.
Ironically, this bug is an old one and was originally fixed in SP1. Looks like SP2 un-fixed it.
Mr. Gates should call Adam and Jamie to start working on SP3.
Then again, I find it pretty funny that DRM, which is quite likely to introduce bug and crippling functionality, is packaged as an "experience update". From TFA (bold mine)
It's funny only until your neighbor's kids put on their NVIDIA glasses to watch - or play - "Monsters vs Aliens 2" on their family's 3D-Ready HDTV.
They are having a great time.
There isn't a monitor, HDTV, sound system or cable to be found anywhere on the market that doesn't support the protected path.
The low-res download for portable media play is part of the deal.
The geek will continue ranting on about DRM - and Microsoft will continue to rack up sales for Win 7 and the next generation XBOX.
Unless I know the target audience of your website how am I to know what these stats really mean?
And therein lies the problem. I shouldn't need a great computer to run the operating system.
Define "operating system."
Define "great computer."
If raw power is there and raw power is affordable, why shouldn't the operating system make use of it?
It's not quite the same as GMT. There can be a few seconds difference between the two.
"... a few seconds ...." ? According to the link you reference:
For most common and legal-trade purposes, the fractional second difference between UTC and UT (GMT) is inconsequentially small, so UTC is often called GMT, for example by the BBC, although that usage is ambiguous.
You might be thinking of GPS time.
The GPS navigation message includes the difference between GPS time and UTC, which as of 2009 is 15 seconds due to the leap second added to UTC December 31 2008.
Bittorrent is your friend. MiniNova, PirateBay, TorrentZ, etc. Since you stated you already posses a license to use such software, I have no qualms about providing you pre-integrated sources. If they aren't available today, they will be within the next week.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Define "operating system."
anything other than WinMe or Vista.
Define "great computer."
anything but HP.
As much as I would love to call your website "little" getting over a billion visits, I would like to know the 319ish people still using a Dreamcast to surf the internet with, let alone visit this website with. ... The fact DOS has more site visits thatn Windows 16bit, is just awesome...
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
Will it still use THREE TIMES the RAM that my Ubuntu desktop uses (same functional apps running)?
J
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.
You can do that for Administration accounts, yes. However, you may not be aware that requesting authentication with a super user's credentials is the normal UAC behaviour for limited users.
Personally, I set up two accounts on my computer: an Administrator account, where I turned off UAC prompting, and a personal limited account that I mostly use. When I log in as the Administrator, it means I plan to do a bunch of admin things and don't want to be nagged - I provide one password when I log in, and that's it. If I find I have a need to do something admin-ey while I'm using my standard account, UAC just prompts me to type in my super user's name & password, and it escalates me for the duration on the operation. Very much like Linux & OSX desktops.
It's only annoying when an app installer is written to create Start Menu/Desktop icons only for the user who's running the installer, and doesn't offer an "all users" option. In those cases I sometimes have to copy the relevant files from the super user's profile to my actual working profile.
That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference.
And you clearly dont understand the software you're talking about.
Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)
If you dont like UAC in that configuration, why not change how UAC behaves? Turn off admin-approval, and change the UAC behavior so it works more like sudo, or like the XP-style runas.
It seems to me like you didnt take 5 minutes to google how to tweak your UAC config from the grandma & grandpa home-user configuration it ships with to a more suitable one for yourself.
If you turn off UAC, how do you elevate to an admin account when you need to install new software or change system settings?
Runas doesnt really work right in Vista, so I'm betting that isnt it.
The achilles heel of Vista is drivers. If the drivers have problems, then the whole thing falls over.
As a counter-example to yours, I'm running Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w laptop. 2.4C2D, 4GB memory, 7200rpm hdd, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M with 512MB onboard.
This machine shipped from HP as x64 ready, and has been the most flawless laptop I've ever owned. It runs basically until the once a month updates from MS, and I abuse it pretty heavily, running Oracle Enterprise 10g, Eclipse, and Tomcat with a couple big app servers, all a part of normal development. I actually am looking at moving up to 8GB of memory, as the 4 isnt really enough for that kind of use (I have the swappiness set really low).
It literally just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going, and never stops. It's also the most reliable Vista machine I've seen in the field, though I think that has more to do with it being a high-end engineering laptop from HP, so the drivers are high quality.
Be careful that many CAD/CAM/CAE apps dont really support 64-bit properly, though I cant speak specifically to SolidWorks. Too many apps in that space have near monopolies, and just never upgrade their software.
Actually, I think you'll find that in the corporate space, HP has some of the best kit out there.
In corporate-level laptops (ie, things branded Compaq, not the crap you buy in BestBuy), they're absolutely fantastic. Nearly flawless.
In x86 servers, the ProLiant's are also fantastic.
In particular, the high end HP laptops run x64 Vista quite well. Seems like that class of machine is one of the only ones to have quality drivers.
I think the issue is more the drivers.
If your equipment supports x64, then the drivers are either freshly written for Vista, or have gotten quite a bit of work.
I think a big part of the problem before was that alot of low-end, consumer level equipment shipped with drivers that were minimally modified from XP so that they (just barely) worked. But if the equipment was to support x64, they had to put some real resources into developing the drivers.
This leads to another general rule of thumb for vista: You'll do MUCH better if you buy equipment that is officially supported in x86 or x64. Stuff that is NOT supported in x64 seems to be lower quality, and more shoddy in the drivers.
And since Vista is heavily sensitive to bad drivers ...
I don't think I am stressing my computer as much as you, I am using it as a desktop and occasional gaming computer. I have done some serious re encoding of HD video which meant that I needed to leave it of for a few days straight with all 4 cores maxed out constantly, it handled that fine. I also find that it runs Autodesk AutoDAC, Inventor and Mechanical all very well, AutoCAD and Inventor are 64bit, and load noticeably quicker than in XP 32bit. As Allador said, it may well be that you have a shoddy driver or something that is causing instabilities, with some background checks on your hardware Google could throw some light on it, but you may spend a long time trawling.
Relax, I was just trying to turn a troll into a funny. In all honesty I'm of the camp that thinks the OS should be as unobtrusive as possible, meaning it's never used. It's just there and gets out of your way so that you can work (or play games).
Of course, I could also remind you that calling Vista the best OS you've seen out of Microsoft is damning with faint praise...
Reactionary response. Well done.
And they were right. XP was crap when it first came out. So it wasn't such a good idea to buy a great computer just to run it.
Today, XP SP3 is a lot better than XP SP1 or XP "The Original Release" in terms of stability and security.
Similarly, why buy a great computer just to run Vista SP1 or Vista "The Original Release"?
Install a half decent graphics card (instead of using the Intel integrated shit) and most of your speed problems will disappear. Unless you got something with a Celeron or Athlon X2, in which case your CPU is too slow to handle Vista effectively, in which case I'd recommend sticking with XP.
So Vista is just about ok - if you want lots of excessive graphics - but just not for Laptop users?
Sounds about right to me.
You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much. I'm pretty sure the rest of the RAM usage is just caching or other behind the scenes cleverness. I've run Vista side by side on a 1GB machine a 4GB machine (RAM) and with only 1GB to use, only ~600MB are used, while on the 4GB machine, ~1.8G are used.
Whereas Windows XP will run on 64MB of RAM. Your definition of 'a lot' is very different from mine and many of my customers and friends.
Your setup just seems weird to me though. If I had to make a comparison to a linux system I would say that you have created an account named root2 in the administrator (or wheel is it still called) and configured sudo to not require passwords to elevate. Then you do all your work with the oter account.
I was actually aware of the fact you have to type in Administrator credentials for limited accounts, but it just seemed so foolish to have 2 accounts when the administrative account really does run with limited credentials until it needs admin ones. [1] Since I could have the exact same effect, why bother with two accounts.
I think I was unclear. By run, I mean run well. I've seen XP run on 128 MB of RAM and it was a painful experience. An old pentium 2 machine that theoretically met the minimum specs and started life with Windows 95. Sure, it'll work, but its not terribly useful for anything when it starts swapping the second time you open a program.
My experience is that Vista will hum nicely with 1GB, it may indeed be tolerable with less RAM, I just don't know.
You did say "You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista" [sic]
Sure, it all depends what you use your Operating System for, but I've seen people use XP with 64mb purely for internet and email with no problems, and without much swapping either.
On Vista, you'd need 16 times that amount of RAM, for any version apart from Home Basic.
Compare that to the amount of benefits you get by moving from XP to Vista. I haven't seen many.
Well, just laptops without good graphics cards. I'm working on an FX series Gateway laptop that has an 8800 GT card.
That's most of the bargain laptops out then. Quick check based on some data I have suggests around 136 of the 317 laptops have dedicated graphics.
I know Vista will run on integrated graphics, but it's a bit of a push for Microsoft to go so far on graphics when it's not actually needed for most things. Give me back my 486dx2 and a 2.4 kernel!
I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...
Per that paragraph, I think you might have the Gabriel Effect.
I think UAC is great. I get home from work and my daughter says "What's your password because I need to install XYZ" and I smile. I can let her do as she pleases on my laptop and not worry about her install the latest Malware, Crapware (iTunes), etc.
How is that different from your daughter having a power user or limited account on WinXP?
I have run as a Power User on winxp for years now. If I need to install something, I just right-click and "Run As..." an administrator. It's XP UAC and, since a power user doesn't have full access to the filesystem, it works great for hiding porn!
Give me back my 486dx2 and a 2.4 kernel!
Nothing's stopping you from doing just that. It's not like someone has a gun to your head saying you have to use Vista.
Nothing's stopping you from doing just that. It's not like someone has a gun to your head saying you have to use Vista.
Only if you try and buy a new laptop! Have you tried to buy a new laptop without Vista? Unless you go with Toshiba, it's pretty difficult!
If it already has Vista and you don't want it, nothing (short of technological ineptitude) will stop you from removing it and installing Linux or an older version of Windows (plenty to be had with some simple searching on EBay).
If it already has Vista and you don't want it, nothing (short of technological ineptitude) will stop you from removing it and installing Linux or an older version of Windows (plenty to be had with some simple searching on EBay).
Apart from paying for an Operating System I don't want, and won't be able to use?
Nah I think I have a built-in "Murphy Field Intensifier".
:)
Because Win XP Pro SP3 works fine for me. No blue screens. Same goes for Ubuntu.
In contrast it probably wouldn't survive the Gabriel Effect/Field.
Oh yeah, if you ever boot up Win98, try pressing the windows key just as/before it reaches the desktop. On the system I tried that on, it kinda caused Win98 to misbehave...
When I was using Win95 I tended to press the winkey ASAP, because I use that to launch stuff on boot up. I set up my start menu so that Winkey-3 = email, Winkey-4 = command prompt, etc. It worked well for me.
That didn't work so good for Win98. So Win98 failed my "Murphy Field Intensifier" test.
I don't think I did anything that exceptional did I?
Most online PC makers don't really tend to discount their systems much if you buy them sans Windows nowadays. I've seen some that will rebate the system down if you return the OS and serial codes, but that's become rare. So you won't really save much sans Windows.
For what it's worth - you can actually rename "hello" to "Hello" in Windows Explorer just fine - using either the in-place renaming facility with F2, or right-click, choose properties, and change the name in the folder's properties pane.
I'm guessing the entire distinction is what was explained in two posts in that thread...
one guy says that you can't do this in windows itself, giving the example: "mv hello Hello"
to which another guy says that he's silly for using a move command when trying to -rename- an entry, and gives the working example: "ren hello Hello"
I'm not a filesystem expert, so I can't say whether or not case sensitivity would be an issue (I'm just imagining that if you already have a directory called "Hello", and you're trying to rename (not move, rename) "hello" to "Hello", it will tell you the folder already exists, same as would happen if you renamed "foo" to "Hello"; but, again, not an expert).
Regardless.. everything in any other app I know of lets you rename folders and files to the same name with a different case, so I'm just surprised that in ThunderBird, one cannot. If I knew C++ -and- had enough knowledge of where my changes might affect things, I'd write a patch myself. But I don't, sadly.
I installed this on my wife computer no problem Vista Home. When I tried installing it on my Vista Ultimate machine Toshiba U205 I received the Blue Screen of Death during the reboot. I came up in safe mode, rolled back the change. Then started up in safe mode, shutdown unnecessary services, then installed SP2 and it installed fine.
Rob
I'm relaxed... I hear BS about Vista all day from my clients of whom 90% probably have never seen it let alone used it. Didn't mean to come off hot if that's how you took it. Vista isn't very obtrusive... Once you turn off stuff like UAC (if you don't want it), Sidebar, etc. Vista, like all other OSes just needs a bit of TLC after install. That being said, I own a Mac and two *nix machines (Fedora and Ubuntu). I use my Vista boxes more than anything else due to the games, the media center functionality (Sage TV is not a viable option compared to VMC) and general surfing.
That's been my experience too. I have Win7 on my lappy (945GM) right now. It runs pretty well but the tearing does get to me... Especially when watching video. Win7 (Beta and later RC1) was originally loaded only as a test for the lower boundaries of Aero. I still haven't reverted to XP and I'm picky.