Been with vonage for 3 years on one phone line and a year on another and have had no problems. Only 2 major outtages but i still have a cell phone for backup calls and my daughter knows how to use both. They also know to talk to neighboors if it really comes down to it.
I've saved over 1,000 bucks switching to vonage the past 3 years and don't regret it at all. Number portability was an issue network wide until about a year ago and even then i don't bother because its always good to start with a clean line anyway.
Funny how much you don't know about Vista.. or OS's for that matter. A video card is a video card and even under XP's "2d" display it still used the 2d aspects of your video card to render graphics in 2d mode and 3 graphics in 3d mode.
Vista is much "snappier" because the graphics card is doing what a graphics card should do.. if your doing rendering as well, aero isn't going to slow it down by any noticeable means.
Guess you haven't tried and yet another slashdot user has jumped to conclusions.
Vista can do all of that and then some. The standard interface, is just that, the standard interface. Everything is customizeable and i'm sure you will see some neat stuff once 3rd party developers like stardock and others get a hold of it and release there addons.
really? how is it insightfull? its completely off topic, irrelevant and not only that its retarded
He took my statement out of context and tied it to something completely out of subject. I was the one stating my old Peecee runs vista very well.. if you want to get really retarded why not preach to the people complaining how dual core systems are slow and they're pissed there sli system isn't supported or they STILL can't watch hdtv.
oh why bother, this is the slashdot crowd, where garbage is #1!
Hey braniac, the dude was questioning if a P4 laptop could run vista.. My XP 1700 is 6 years + old and it *RUNS* vista.
Has nothing to do with the power of the CPU in calculating weather patterns or crunching numbers. Infact the machine used to be a Linux box running knoppmyth but i have since gave up trying to run myth because *cough* windows vista & xbox 360 is that much easier and my wife and kids can dig it.
so yeah, my old media center pc is capable of calculating traffic signals for an entire town while it does HDTV streaming to my 360's on top of file serving for my home network and recording tv shows off cable and still being able to login to it directly or through remote desktop.
Your summary is entirely incorrect.. read the Wikipedia article again.
1. Eye candy is there.. and most certainly will shine 2. Somewhat is an understatement. 3. improved backup - yes, the new backup system is a major update and very easy 4. don't know what your talking about. XP and Vista search are entirely different beasts.
What makes it worth the price is all of the features combined - media center, media player, dvd maker, windows share, defender, better security, better reliability, better hardware integration & support, faster/snappier UI and takes advantage of modern hardware much better than anything else out there.
BTW, most people don't pay retail. It will be cheaper to buy a new PC with vista already installed than to upgrade your own but any hardcore tech dork will know how to get a copy at a decent rate.. (buy OEM from egghead with a usb cord or something like that..)
Vista isn't worth an upgrade the day it comes out unless you use the functionality provided within. THe dvd maker is nice, movie maker works great with dvr-ms files now and media center is night and day an improvement over MCE 2005 so i will upgrade my MCE machine day one.
Vista will truely shine when Office 2k7 comes out, 3rd party software companies integrate with the new interface and workplace environments and offices and large companies can make large, secured and easily managed deployments easily.
DirectX 10, Vista Gaming, Live Anywhere, integration with Longhorne Server and many other services that are falling into place will make it really WORTH the cost to the average user.
Vista is an enabler for what Microsoft plans to deliver.. you either want a piece of that or you don't.
The only reason you say that is you are a graphics nut. The UI doesn't make the OS, the experience does and part of the experience is performance, stability, reliability, trust, installation, safety and overall getting the job done and making it easy to do so.
Vista has all of the eye candy you can want and if you don't like it, it is entirely replaceable now that there is an actual window manager.
So to discount the OS on the default GUI is to falsely discount the OS because out of the factory it doesn't give you a woody and to also say the bling is all that matters is to discount what computers are designed to do in the first place, get the job done and i'm sorry eye candy doesn't get the job done, just makes it more appealing.
What are you talking about.. Takes 2 seconds to switch off UAC, i didn't say it takes two seconds to reboot.
BTW, one feature is soft upgrades and soft boots. For example if you install ATI video drivers you don't have to reboot because the drivers can boot the device itself now.. Vista is getting there.. in no way though am i saying its perfect, just most people aren't bothering to do there homework before dissing it setting false or incorrect expectations.
of course i'm checking my backups:) Wife is good at destroying things.. I'm an IT nut anyway, i deal on much larger systems with much higher risk as an Oracle DBA. I know the importance of backups.
I'm a MS Beta tester so of course i run the betas, however as features, performance and stability goes in what i use Vista for it works and being a beta is no problem for me and i'm happy to report the isuses i do send up to Microsoft have been fixed and rather quickly.
I love technology.. that includes OSX, Vista, Linux, Solaris and many other systems. I'm just impressed with Vista and what it offers out of the box and i think MS has done a lot with this release to get the community involved.
Look forward to "gold" but until then i'm happily chugging away.
Nope.. i don't have that problem.. Check your PC clock, the only time I have seen such errors is if your clock has the wrong date and the SSL certs fail to verify. I bugged that with MS and they said its fixed in a future build. (invalid clock also messes with windows update, online activation and other areas..)
Make sure you didn't enable strict zone support or else you will be prompted to open a new window for non defined zones..
The 360s act as a media extender which allows me to use "Extend" media center in my bedroom and living room to use the functionality of the windows media center computer. IE, it allows me to watch/record/pause/rewind live tv, watch recorded shows, listen to mp3s, get weather, show caller id while watching tv, play slideshows, synchronize my usb cards, watch HD content.. (all with a remote control..)
Not only does it do the media center extender but when my wife is watching tv i can go into another room to watch what i want to watch or to play games.
You see to do all of the above on a computer you need a beefy computer.. a video card that can play HDTV as well as the 360 does would cost more than the 360 so i run that PC "headless" (i just remote desktop to manage it) and use it over the network or through the 360s'.
The windows media share exports my mp3 and image collection to WMP hosts that can connect in as well so you get the full library support through the network as well.. nice for my home office.
I do backups.. i have firwire drives that i run backups to. The images are fully synchronized to my wife's laptop as well. She's the photographer of the family. We also have DVD backups of all of the images.
What makes you think i can't run all of that on vista? I've been running vista as a primary OS for about 4 months now (since june).
I don't use the machine to do much photo processing itself. Its mainly my home media center box and file server. I disabled UAC, non needed services, firewall, windows defender as i have it behind a nice firewall (ipcop) so the CPU goes to pushing video and yes, it handles 2 360's just great watching tv, doing slideshows and playing a bunch of music. I telecommute and listen to a lot of music and catch up with Daily Show, Myth Busters and Colbert Report at lunch time:)
Amazing how much you can do when commercials aren't a part of your tv habits anymore!
The home directory structre has existed in OS's long before OS X even existed. Not sure about the rest of your points as they seem really, really, really miniscule to base your entire OS views on. If you want to really see vista shine quite using the old stuff and try the new stuff. Computer Management - right click on Computer, Click Manage and give that a shot.
There are some new tools in seperate betas that really simplify management even more than what this does but i'm not sure if they will be in vista or a related download afterwards or part of the longhorn server release.
Runs on my XP 1700 as a "headless" media center server powering two xbox 360 and handling file share and windows media share for over 10,000 photos and about 7,000 songs. This machine has 1 gig of ram, several 250 gig hard drives and handles recordings with a single tuner at this point in time. Working on a second tuner that will run FireSTB to handle pulling hi-def from my comcast box.
I only have a geforce 4 mx 440 on thre so my score is 1.0 but everything that ran in XP is useable and same performance in vista.. i can swap out video cards and make the desktop fully useable with aero but i like it powering my extenders. Biggest thing i did was optimize the system for services, enable a large cache and dump my recordings on a different drive then what most of my pre-recorded stuff is and have a seperate boot drive as IO is where most of my latency is.
I will be throwing in an XP 2600 becuase i got one off ebay dirt cheap, but there you go. Vista works and it doesn't need a super system like you fellas seem to believe. Beta testers have it working on much lower end systems as well - just add memory.
The new gui is just a fraction of what Vista offers and i'm amazed at home many people praise it or deteste it based on that single aspect alone.
UAC annoying? Not really, it finally juts alerts you to a change that affects your system as a whole. UAC used to be MUCH more annoying on previous betas but really is a non issue for most people on 5728 or higher because once your running there really isn't much you need to change and being alerted to changes that can impact your system is a good thing.
It takes 2 seconds to disable it if you don't like it. Windows R, msconfig, disable UAC, reboot.
voice chat isn't included in the dashboard like xbox live version 1 but peer to peer communications.
There are games - specifically EA games that use servers, but i'm not sure how the voice is handled on them or if the servers are for games, stats or data gathering or other purposes.
You can use whatever firewall you want, both in software and hardware. You can use whatever virus scanner you want, both software and hardware. When vista pops up with the security center it doesn't even focus on Microsoft products - your first choice are compatible third party products.
So what is the point of all of this?
The other security implementations would be like asking Unix to allow replacement of Sudo, root and user permissions and replace it with a third party app that would just give you want you were wanting to begin with in the first place.
actually its real easy. Just enable "media sharing", open media player and it discovers media on the network and plays the catalog like your on the other pc.
If you can use itunes, you can use WMP11 & Media Share
Under windows vista you can enable media connect on the master PC and as many remote pcs can connect to those resources as you have licenses for of which i would hope the license store allows for the appropriate downloads/uses and isn't relying on amazon services to do what can be done locally nice and easy.
Distract us from Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and the nations angst against the "War on terror" by doing nothing short of "foiling a plot and raising the threat level"
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously scientists don't even trust Macs :)
Been with vonage for 3 years on one phone line and a year on another and have had no problems. Only 2 major outtages but i still have a cell phone for backup calls and my daughter knows how to use both. They also know to talk to neighboors if it really comes down to it.
I've saved over 1,000 bucks switching to vonage the past 3 years and don't regret it at all. Number portability was an issue network wide until about a year ago and even then i don't bother because its always good to start with a clean line anyway.
Yes, you can do all of that and then some. Hell you can finally write your own window manager if you really want to.
Funny how much you don't know about Vista.. or OS's for that matter. A video card is a video card and even under XP's "2d" display it still used the 2d aspects of your video card to render graphics in 2d mode and 3 graphics in 3d mode.
Vista is much "snappier" because the graphics card is doing what a graphics card should do.. if your doing rendering as well, aero isn't going to slow it down by any noticeable means.
Guess you haven't tried and yet another slashdot user has jumped to conclusions.
Vista can do all of that and then some. The standard interface, is just that, the standard interface. Everything is customizeable and i'm sure you will see some neat stuff once 3rd party developers like stardock and others get a hold of it and release there addons.
I said it takes 2 seconds to disable it, didn't say it takes 1 minute because you need to wait for the reboot to finish.
Next time i'll spell it out for you since i seemed to have confused half of slashdot with a process that takes 2 seconds to do.
really? how is it insightfull? its completely off topic, irrelevant and not only that its retarded
He took my statement out of context and tied it to something completely out of subject. I was the one stating my old Peecee runs vista very well.. if you want to get really retarded why not preach to the people complaining how dual core systems are slow and they're pissed there sli system isn't supported or they STILL can't watch hdtv.
oh why bother, this is the slashdot crowd, where garbage is #1!
Hey braniac, the dude was questioning if a P4 laptop could run vista.. My XP 1700 is 6 years + old and it *RUNS* vista.
Has nothing to do with the power of the CPU in calculating weather patterns or crunching numbers. Infact the machine used to be a Linux box running knoppmyth but i have since gave up trying to run myth because *cough* windows vista & xbox 360 is that much easier and my wife and kids can dig it.
so yeah, my old media center pc is capable of calculating traffic signals for an entire town while it does HDTV streaming to my 360's on top of file serving for my home network and recording tv shows off cable and still being able to login to it directly or through remote desktop.
Your summary is entirely incorrect.. read the Wikipedia article again.
1. Eye candy is there.. and most certainly will shine
2. Somewhat is an understatement.
3. improved backup - yes, the new backup system is a major update and very easy
4. don't know what your talking about. XP and Vista search are entirely different beasts.
What makes it worth the price is all of the features combined - media center, media player, dvd maker, windows share, defender, better security, better reliability, better hardware integration & support, faster/snappier UI and takes advantage of modern hardware much better than anything else out there.
BTW, most people don't pay retail. It will be cheaper to buy a new PC with vista already installed than to upgrade your own but any hardcore tech dork will know how to get a copy at a decent rate.. (buy OEM from egghead with a usb cord or something like that..)
Vista isn't worth an upgrade the day it comes out unless you use the functionality provided within. THe dvd maker is nice, movie maker works great with dvr-ms files now and media center is night and day an improvement over MCE 2005 so i will upgrade my MCE machine day one.
Vista will truely shine when Office 2k7 comes out, 3rd party software companies integrate with the new interface and workplace environments and offices and large companies can make large, secured and easily managed deployments easily.
DirectX 10, Vista Gaming, Live Anywhere, integration with Longhorne Server and many other services that are falling into place will make it really WORTH the cost to the average user.
Vista is an enabler for what Microsoft plans to deliver.. you either want a piece of that or you don't.
The only reason you say that is you are a graphics nut. The UI doesn't make the OS, the experience does and part of the experience is performance, stability, reliability, trust, installation, safety and overall getting the job done and making it easy to do so.
Vista has all of the eye candy you can want and if you don't like it, it is entirely replaceable now that there is an actual window manager.
So to discount the OS on the default GUI is to falsely discount the OS because out of the factory it doesn't give you a woody and to also say the bling is all that matters is to discount what computers are designed to do in the first place, get the job done and i'm sorry eye candy doesn't get the job done, just makes it more appealing.
What are you talking about.. Takes 2 seconds to switch off UAC, i didn't say it takes two seconds to reboot.
BTW, one feature is soft upgrades and soft boots. For example if you install ATI video drivers you don't have to reboot because the drivers can boot the device itself now.. Vista is getting there.. in no way though am i saying its perfect, just most people aren't bothering to do there homework before dissing it setting false or incorrect expectations.
of course i'm checking my backups :) Wife is good at destroying things.. I'm an IT nut anyway, i deal on much larger systems with much higher risk as an Oracle DBA. I know the importance of backups.
I'm a MS Beta tester so of course i run the betas, however as features, performance and stability goes in what i use Vista for it works and being a beta is no problem for me and i'm happy to report the isuses i do send up to Microsoft have been fixed and rather quickly.
I love technology.. that includes OSX, Vista, Linux, Solaris and many other systems. I'm just impressed with Vista and what it offers out of the box and i think MS has done a lot with this release to get the community involved.
Look forward to "gold" but until then i'm happily chugging away.
Nope.. i don't have that problem.. Check your PC clock, the only time I have seen such errors is if your clock has the wrong date and the SSL certs fail to verify. I bugged that with MS and they said its fixed in a future build. (invalid clock also messes with windows update, online activation and other areas..)
Make sure you didn't enable strict zone support or else you will be prompted to open a new window for non defined zones..
The 360s act as a media extender which allows me to use "Extend" media center in my bedroom and living room to use the functionality of the windows media center computer. IE, it allows me to watch/record/pause/rewind live tv, watch recorded shows, listen to mp3s, get weather, show caller id while watching tv, play slideshows, synchronize my usb cards, watch HD content.. (all with a remote control..)
Not only does it do the media center extender but when my wife is watching tv i can go into another room to watch what i want to watch or to play games.
You see to do all of the above on a computer you need a beefy computer.. a video card that can play HDTV as well as the 360 does would cost more than the 360 so i run that PC "headless" (i just remote desktop to manage it) and use it over the network or through the 360s'.
The windows media share exports my mp3 and image collection to WMP hosts that can connect in as well so you get the full library support through the network as well.. nice for my home office.
if you read the comment i replied to is suggested that vista couldn't run on his P4 which is probably more capable then my XP 1700 as described above.
RTFA
I do backups.. i have firwire drives that i run backups to. The images are fully synchronized to my wife's laptop as well. She's the photographer of the family. We also have DVD backups of all of the images.
:)
What makes you think i can't run all of that on vista? I've been running vista as a primary OS for about 4 months now (since june).
I don't use the machine to do much photo processing itself. Its mainly my home media center box and file server. I disabled UAC, non needed services, firewall, windows defender as i have it behind a nice firewall (ipcop) so the CPU goes to pushing video and yes, it handles 2 360's just great watching tv, doing slideshows and playing a bunch of music. I telecommute and listen to a lot of music and catch up with Daily Show, Myth Busters and Colbert Report at lunch time
Amazing how much you can do when commercials aren't a part of your tv habits anymore!
huh?
The home directory structre has existed in OS's long before OS X even existed. Not sure about the rest of your points as they seem really, really, really miniscule to base your entire OS views on. If you want to really see vista shine quite using the old stuff and try the new stuff. Computer Management - right click on Computer, Click Manage and give that a shot.
There are some new tools in seperate betas that really simplify management even more than what this does but i'm not sure if they will be in vista or a related download afterwards or part of the longhorn server release.
Runs on my XP 1700 as a "headless" media center server powering two xbox 360 and handling file share and windows media share for over 10,000 photos and about 7,000 songs. This machine has 1 gig of ram, several 250 gig hard drives and handles recordings with a single tuner at this point in time. Working on a second tuner that will run FireSTB to handle pulling hi-def from my comcast box.
I only have a geforce 4 mx 440 on thre so my score is 1.0 but everything that ran in XP is useable and same performance in vista.. i can swap out video cards and make the desktop fully useable with aero but i like it powering my extenders. Biggest thing i did was optimize the system for services, enable a large cache and dump my recordings on a different drive then what most of my pre-recorded stuff is and have a seperate boot drive as IO is where most of my latency is.
I will be throwing in an XP 2600 becuase i got one off ebay dirt cheap, but there you go. Vista works and it doesn't need a super system like you fellas seem to believe. Beta testers have it working on much lower end systems as well - just add memory.
I'm not going to copy and paste them here, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista for all of the features & enhancements that really make vista what it is.
The new gui is just a fraction of what Vista offers and i'm amazed at home many people praise it or deteste it based on that single aspect alone.
UAC annoying? Not really, it finally juts alerts you to a change that affects your system as a whole. UAC used to be MUCH more annoying on previous betas but really is a non issue for most people on 5728 or higher because once your running there really isn't much you need to change and being alerted to changes that can impact your system is a good thing.
It takes 2 seconds to disable it if you don't like it. Windows R, msconfig, disable UAC, reboot.
voice chat isn't included in the dashboard like xbox live version 1 but peer to peer communications.
There are games - specifically EA games that use servers, but i'm not sure how the voice is handled on them or if the servers are for games, stats or data gathering or other purposes.
You can use whatever firewall you want, both in software and hardware. You can use whatever virus scanner you want, both software and hardware. When vista pops up with the security center it doesn't even focus on Microsoft products - your first choice are compatible third party products.
So what is the point of all of this?
The other security implementations would be like asking Unix to allow replacement of Sudo, root and user permissions and replace it with a third party app that would just give you want you were wanting to begin with in the first place.
actually its real easy. Just enable "media sharing", open media player and it discovers media on the network and plays the catalog like your on the other pc.
If you can use itunes, you can use WMP11 & Media Share
Under windows vista you can enable media connect on the master PC and as many remote pcs can connect to those resources as you have licenses for of which i would hope the license store allows for the appropriate downloads/uses and isn't relying on amazon services to do what can be done locally nice and easy.
Uhh, Obviously you don't know much about your #1 pick because google OWNS blogger.com and has owned for quite some time.
Where you even around in the 'good ol days' ?
I just thought the same thing. "how convenient"
Distract us from Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and the nations angst against the "War on terror" by doing nothing short of "foiling a plot and raising the threat level"