OpenDocument is XML, and is great for versioning with svn. Not really. Open Document is XML wrapped in a zip file, so its still a binary file from the point of view of the source code control system.
Unless there's a plugin for SVN that will unzip the opendoc files and version the contents. I havent run into such a thing if so.
Not to mention, if that works for opendocument, then it'll work exactly the same for office 2007 docs, since both are just xml files zipped into a binary.
The 'wiki-style' features of sharepoint are not dependent on Office at all. Just a web browser, even works just fine with firefox.
Now granted, its not as good of a wiki as some real wiki's (confluence jumps to mind), but its not targeted quite like that.
The parts that use Office are the document management pieces. But even those, you can use OpenOffice locally, and either a web browser or WebDAV to push/pull these OO files from sharepoint.
I think the trap people fall into is thinking Sharepoint is Just Another Wiki, when its kind of a different thing. Only time will tell whether it'll be successful in the long run, but I see lots of Medium and large org shops who love it, and find it the 'just-right' set of features and ease-of-use to be compelling.
Perhaps MS Exchange is the "ultimate in richness" but Citadel could meet the requirements for the vast majority of users and is WAY more scalable than Exchange. What does this mean? Exchange is darn near infinitely scalable. You just keep adding more boxes at whatever layer you need more processing power (MTA, OWA, MAPI, Mailbox, etc).
The only real limitation is the 16TB per database, and 50 databases per exchange organization. Thats a farly big upper limit. If you're willing to split up along subdomains, you could run this arbitrarily high.
But for the price MS charges for their stuff? You could hire an ambitios young programmer to MAKE it for you for that price. If you're speaking of Sharepoint, its free. Comes with Windows Server, no additional cost. It's arguable that you have to buy windows server, but only if you want to run sharepoint dedicated on its own box.
Of course, if you're speaking of Exchange.... well, at least at the Enterprise version level, its pretty much not cheap.
the hosts love the reliability, security, stability, and cost. What's more, anyone they choose can update or expand it. FWIW, the same is true of sharepoint. It's pretty much bulletproof, is basically some.net isapi filters running in IIS with storage in sql server 2000 or 2005.
It's free in that it comes with windows server, no extra cost there. Doesnt crash, just works.
And the extensibility, programmability is vast, and can be done by anyone who can develop in.net.
The big difference is that the process is seamless from within the office products. So its much easier (ie, alot less clicks, less process overhead) than using SVN with Tortoise or something similar.
Sharepoint also logs everying and supports commit comments. It also will version office files internally, which SVN wont do (treats it as a binary file).
Also, sharepoint doesnt limit you to office documents, anything can go up or down, but the integration with office is the big winner for most groups.
Plus, the document management stuff is only ~25% of the interesting features of sharepoint. The programmability and extensibility of it is huge.
SVN would be far superior for source code, web files (.html,.css, etc). Sharepoint works better in most scenarios for office documents.
Sharepoint is huge. Many businesses use it. Lots of money to be made as a consultant right now showing people how to use it effectively. There are certain types of information worker type of jobs for whom sharepoint is superior to traditional file sharing.
It's not anything like as entrenched as Exchange, but dont discount it too much. There's a lot of activity going on around sharepoint.
And to discount access? Access is so ridiculously successful at giving non-IT folks the ability to create simple database and form apps without involving IT, that its often the bane of many IT shops in large organizations.
Many, many organizations out there have lots of sub-enterprise (but still critical) business processes that run purely on access, and were developed as point solution by the dept 'techy' because IT didnt have the resources to do the project properly.
Microsoft likes to change their inextensible formats with every new version of the program, since it helps to push new sales. They wouldn't be able to drag the reluctant customers along if everyone could get support from the next supplier on the list. That's a little disingenuous. If a feature isnt in the spec, and a word processor is committed to 100% compliance without any superset features, then it would be impossible to develop new feature which differentiate the product.
For example, if the format doesnt support a watermark, then they wouldnt be able to support watermarks. If ODF didnt support formulas in their spreadsheet, then they wouldnt be able to have formulas.
Why would anyone on earth want to hamstring their own company like this? It doesnt make any sort of sense. All it does is guarantee that they will always be playing second fiddle to the people who own the spec (ie, OO.org).
The answer is to install more unwanted software. Who asked you to install more software? It's an executable. You copy it to your hard drive and run it. Seasoned techs often carry around a CD or jump drive with these tools on them.
And why do I need to install software from Sysinternals to uninstall a Microsoft application from a Microsoft OS? You dont. We werent talking about uninstalling at that point. You had made a claim that there is no way in windows to see what processes a file is opened by, or what DLLs a process has loaded. So thats what I gave you.
Does Office not hook and/or replace various system dll's? Is there a way to know for sure if it does or not? Run it, see what they open. Are you fighting a holy war or trying to solve a problem. I can give you the tools to solve whatever problem you have, but I cant make you give up your religion.
I'll stick with the best way to be careful when tampering with undocumented parts of the registry that "affect behavior" whatever that means, is not to do it at all. It is just more reliable to wipe and reinstall the OS. I'm not really sure what 'undocumented parts of the registry' means. It's all pretty straightforward. People that are experienced and knowledgeable on the platform dont have this mysterious fear of it that you do. It's just a hierarchical value storage system. It's not that big of a deal.
I think the core problem here is that you're just not very knowledgeable about the platform. People that do this for a living dont have the kind of problems that you seem to run into. It's only complicated and scary to you because you dont understand how it works.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I dont have anywhere near the experience on Solaris that I do on Windows. And dont even get me started on VMS. Yet, I dont go onto discussion sites and rant and rave about how VMS' package manager system is crap. I accept the fact that I dont know enough about it to evaluate it, so I keep my mouth shut.
It's the same here. You clearly dont have enough knowledge of how windows works to be criticizing it, as a number of your criticisms are based on faulty assumptions about how things work.
Take for example, the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\AppEvent.Evt. If you can find a way to delete that while the system is running without shutting down event logging, the system will go unstable. Thats the application event log. There's no reason you would ever want to remove it. Removing it should make the system go unstable. And that file has nothing to do with an Office install, thats a core part of windows. I'm not sure if you actually tried to remove that, or are just making up a random example here, but this is not really relevant to the discussion we were having.
Since there's no way to know which dll has which file open, or how to get it to close, or what necessary function it has hooked, tampering with them is unwise. This is trivial to do.
Sysinternals Handle http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Proc essesAndThreads/Handle.mspx
Similarly with legacy registry entries -- there's no way to know which of them are legacy from O2K7 bloatware, or which ones can be safely removed. This is also fairly straightforward, if you're familiar with the platform. Certain parts of the registry actually affect behavior, so if you're going to clean up after an installer and modify the registry, you need to be careful when modifying these parts.
Others, such as the COM registries, can be safely deleted if nothing else is referring to it. Of course, if there's a newer version of the component installed and set as primary, then you dont really need to.
In relation to Office, the only thing you really care about in the registry is file extension associations, and these are pretty straightforward to adjust if you're familiar with the platform.
You are welcome to try your MCSE wizardry on your own O2K7 demo bloatware when you get it. Who's an MCSE, are you? Me, I would just uninstall the O2k7 demo, and be done with it. Or not install it in the first place.
Well, in the real world everyone runs Windows as admin and most of them have to take care of their computer themselves while barely knowing enough to turn it on and write a letter in Word. My business doesnt run as admin, and none of our clients do unless they explicitly demand it. And when they do, we give them notice that its going to cost them alot more money in the long run, and that work done because of their not following our best-practices will be billed full retail rates.
The software is simply not reliable and too tightly intertwined with the operating system and common libraries. It all works great if you do it right. Once we take control of a client's network, these sorts of problems just dont ever happen. I'll grant you that it is a shame that MS Office doesnt do a side-by-side installs of different versions, and that they expect there to be only one version of an office product installed at a time.
Do you really think its reasonable for a business to have its non-IT employees spend time installing random software and breaking their machines? Does the same business let the receptionist do the oil change on the company truck if he/she doesnt know what they're doing? Computers/OS/Software are several orders of magnitude more complex than a car, yet you wouldnt let any random employee start tinkering with your work truck. So why is it okay for any random employee to tinker with your work computers as admin?
"Normal circumstances" do not happen very often in the real world either. Well, thats why there are good IT shops and good IT consultants. To help these businesses stop throwing their money away by doing things inefficiently. If you run into your clients, and they're operating in the way you describe, isnt that your job as their IT consultant to show them how to do it better? Wouldnt that make you more money, and make your clients more money?
Also it's worse than just the manager clicking "OK" - 2007 actually gives (every time you open and save a file) very severe-sounding warnings if you use the old formats along the lines of that you will 'lose information' unless you click OK or that your old documents are 'not secure' unless you click OK. NATURALLY any regular person will 'click OK'. This is just flat not true, in any way. I have Excel 2007 open right now, created a document, put a bunch of stuff in it, and saved it as.xls. No warning, no complaints, no magical auto-conversion. Just effortless functionality.
Now I have seen that warning, it hits me maybe 1/3 of the time when I'm saving Excel documents in.xls format. But I am currently unable to make it happen now, though I'm trying.
And Excel is the only 2007 application that I've ever seen this happen on. I've never seen it in word, and I've been using Office 2007 since November 2006.
This whole thing is being blown way out of proportion.
This is ridiculous. Why would a 'large company' let dell/hp/whatever decide what version of office to order?
Any 'large company' is not buying retail or oem software anyway (except for maybe the base OS, but never office). You buy it off your Select, Open, or Enterprise Subscription. Anybody who buys Office from Dell with their computer that is in this scenario is wasting money, as you're paying about twice what it costs you to buy the software through your contract.
You're basically talking about a 'large company' with poor operational practices, poor purchasing/procurement oversight (wasting money on OEM versions of office), and no IT department.
This isnt typical. I'm sure there are some poorly run companies who operate like this, but they deserve what they get. You cant throw money away and then complain that you threw money away. Just do it right the first time.
When they try to open the new file formats with updated old versions does it only tell them they need to upgrade office or does it also let them know their are free viewers and a backwards-compatibility pack? Yes, when you try to open an Office 2007 file with Office 2003 (fully patched), it tells you that it needs to download the office compatibility pack and gives you a link.
It's about as friendly and easy as you could possibly want.
One, the fact that trial software went about changing even one file or one type of file into a new and incompatible format without multiple difficult-to-bypass warnings to the user is really inexcusable. Except it didnt happen. There is no mechanism to do this (automatically change file types). Your client is lying to you to cover up his own mistakes. I've seen it happen a hundred times.
Two, you can call BS until you're blue in the face, but that install of Office 2000 was borked, and the cause was installing the trial Office 2007 software, because it all worked fine before that. The fact that Microsoft can't manage to make their software function reliably when two different versions are installed is just ridiculous. It does work under normal circumstances. About the only rule you have to follow with this stuff is to install and uninstall in chronological order. So install 2007 after 2000, and when you go to uninstall, do 2007 first, then 2000.
You mention earlier in the post that this person had 2003 components as well. Clearly, this was not a well managed box. You had someone installing and uninstalling stuff willy-nilly without having a clue what they were doing, and then they managed to screw things up. It's not too surprising.
Your personal experience is not bad MS, its bad user.
Your client should never have had administrative rights to their machine.
Even with all the components uninstalled it will leave a legacy of non-deletable directory trees, dlls and protected registry entries. There is no such thing. At worst, the installer/uninstaller would remove the administrator's delete/modify acl's from the folders, but this is trivially undone.
That would be evil if that's what happened, but its not.
This entire/. posting is garbage. The editors are idiots (or at least the one who posted this one is).
Almost every single thing in the posting is factually incorrect.
Basically, this is a case of someone making up out of whole cloth how he thinks it might work, with that assumes a worst-case situation, and then goes nuts on that, assuming its true.
Unfortunately, nearly all of it is garbage. The new system does not auto-update to the new version. There are no uninstall/down-install problems (I've done it). And Office 2003 will prompt you to download a free converter pack if you try to open an Office 2007 document with it.
Frankly, I'm really starting to think that the editors here are just posting controversial topics (even if they're just made-up) to drive traffic and gain income. It's very sad.
When this happens, try downloading the patch binary manually and running it yourself.
That will commonly resolve the behavior you were seeing.
Not sure why, but there definitely are times when Automatic Update/Windows Update/Microsoft Update wont be able to apply a patch, but it works fine when you run it by hand.
I don't like dealing with the power save options in XP. Most of them suck and aren't worth the trouble. What exact problems do you experience?
For power saving modes, there's standby and hibernate, the only thing missing there is a sleep+hibernate mode that some more recent OS's do (including vista).
Other than that, you can have the OS shut off just about all non-essential components, control the CPU speed, control the hard drive spinning up/down, screen brightness, network cards on/off, etc.
Microsoft's format works on only Microsoft's products. Care to clarify this? As I stated above, its an open, documented spec, and stored as plain-text xml in a zip file. In what way does that 'works only on Microsoft's products'?
If you truly believe that Microsoft is releasing an open format usable to all competitors then you are fucking retarded. There's nothing to believe or not believe. The products and specs were released in Nov 2006. It's a done deal. The spec's onlne, go read it.
is a tremendous waste on 1280x800 laptop screens as it takes nearly 1/4th of the screen for GUI chrome If this is your biggest complaint, then just set the ribbon to auto-hide. Then it only takes up real-estate when you're clicking on it.
Thats not true at all. If it grows the entire windows & Microsoft ecosystem, and only loses a little bit of money over its lifetime, then it may indeed be worthwhile to the stock holders. Thats pretty much the definition of loss-leader.
Note that they dont strictly have to make that 3B back again, as the XBox franchise is a tremendous corporate asset that has tangible value in and of itself and its immediate P&L.
MS is smart about these things. They're selling an integrated ecosystem of products. Selling lots of XBoxes means lots of people creating games for the XBox. Creating games for the XBox means you're 80% of the way to creating the game for a PC (or vice-versa). So this grows the windows franchise as it tends to expand the games industry (more games = more windows buyers).
Same goes for XBox live. They get advertisers for XBox live, so the more xbox players they have, the more xbox live users they have. So more money for advertisements, more money for cross-product tie in (selling other stuff through xbox live).
And it just goes on like that.
MS is in the community & ecosystem business. They can sell some types of products at break-even, if it grows the whole ecosystem, as it then sells more windows & office products.
MS is very savvy about this stuff, and it allows them to create network benefits off of products/divisions that dont make a huge amount of money in and of themselves.
Not to mention there's going to be a certain amount of just raw, tangible assets (capital, talent and otherwise) in the xbox divisions that just makes the MS corporation more valuable.
They're all talking about how giving lots of ram to Vista's disk cache makes it faster, and so more RAM is helpful there.
But disk cache is gravy. If you dont have enough ram to feed it, then it'll behave the same as XP did (roughly, XP had a much less aggressive disk cache). But if you feed it more, it'll be faster. But you dont need disk cache, if you dont have enough it'll run just like XP did.
Let's compare:
XP w/ 1GB, 200MB kernel, 500MB userspace apps, 300MB disk cache
Vista w/ 1GB, 400MB kernel*, 500MB userspace apps, 100MB disk cache
*Note I'm guessing that, at a worst case, the in-memory kernel size doubled from XP. I dont think it grew by this much, but we'll use it as a conservative estimate.
So in this scenario the only difference is that the Vista version has a smaller disk cache. Add another 1GB of memory, and now you've got the same scenario, but 1.1GB of disk cache. So the OS will load the most commonly (or most recently, not sure what kind of caching algorithms it uses, but I think its more sophisticated than a 'most recent' cache) used 1.1GB of files from disk.
Otherwise, everything will be the same. I mean basically its a large solid-state-memory disk that sits in front of your spinning platter disk for commonly accessed things.
In fact, the Anandtech article you posted basically said that 4GB was useful in Vista x64 because once the disk cache fully populates, you may not have to touch the disk at all. But since XP isnt really capable of this kind of intelligent disk cache, you're not comparing apples to apples here. You're basically saying that Vista can use arbitrarily large amounts of memory to improve disk-bound performance via disk caching. Well, nice find, welcome to one of the core truisms of modern computing. The server world lives and breathes off of this truth. The only real difference is that XP didnt have the ability to use large amounts of memory for an effective disk cache, and none above 3GB at all (in the 32-bit version) in any case.
Thats a performance enhancement over XP, not a performance degredation. So if you dont have enough RAM to give the disk cache much to work with, then you're basically operating in the same mode as XP, just with a bit larger of a kernel space usage. It appears that superfetch itsel puts some of its statistics in memory, but that should be a few MB at most, which is not material.
So basically, based on both logic and the articles you posted, 4GB is not necessary for Vista to run normally. It's just handy if you want a big disk cache.
So all you really need to run roughly the same as XP is the same memory as XP, plus the additional size of the Vista's in-memory kernel space. Thats a few hundred MBs at most.
BUT if you want significant performance improvement over XP for disk-bound processes, then buy more memory and let the disk cache go nuts.
This is basically the logic trap most people get into when talking about this. They dont distinguish between how much pegged memory the kernel needs, and how much the disk cache can use. They pretty much just see it as a big glob of memory usage by the OS, but thats a highly inaccurate approach.
So yes, the in-memory kernel data structures have grown some between XP and Vista. Call it a couple hundred megabytes. And some of the buffer-overflow protections will cause a slight bloat in stack & heap usage. But thats the only _necessary_ memory growth. (necessary here defined as minimal paging.)
On top of that, Vista has a higly aggressive, learning disk cache that will use all available (otherwise unused) memory.
So Vista 'appears' to use much more memory (if you dont distinguish between kernel memory and disk cache), but in reality only requires a little bit more. And Vista appears to be much more responsive if you give it lots of memory for the disk cache, as it largely eliminates the need to go to disk for commonly used things.
When he says 'images', he's not talking about images as-in virtualization, he's talking about images as-in automated desktop deployment from 'images' of a base desktop build.
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Unless there's a plugin for SVN that will unzip the opendoc files and version the contents. I havent run into such a thing if so.
Not to mention, if that works for opendocument, then it'll work exactly the same for office 2007 docs, since both are just xml files zipped into a binary.
The 'wiki-style' features of sharepoint are not dependent on Office at all. Just a web browser, even works just fine with firefox.
Now granted, its not as good of a wiki as some real wiki's (confluence jumps to mind), but its not targeted quite like that.
The parts that use Office are the document management pieces. But even those, you can use OpenOffice locally, and either a web browser or WebDAV to push/pull these OO files from sharepoint.
I think the trap people fall into is thinking Sharepoint is Just Another Wiki, when its kind of a different thing. Only time will tell whether it'll be successful in the long run, but I see lots of Medium and large org shops who love it, and find it the 'just-right' set of features and ease-of-use to be compelling.
The only real limitation is the 16TB per database, and 50 databases per exchange organization. Thats a farly big upper limit. If you're willing to split up along subdomains, you could run this arbitrarily high. But for the price MS charges for their stuff? You could hire an ambitios young programmer to MAKE it for you for that price. If you're speaking of Sharepoint, its free. Comes with Windows Server, no additional cost. It's arguable that you have to buy windows server, but only if you want to run sharepoint dedicated on its own box.
Of course, if you're speaking of Exchange
It's free in that it comes with windows server, no extra cost there. Doesnt crash, just works.
And the extensibility, programmability is vast, and can be done by anyone who can develop in
The big difference is that the process is seamless from within the office products. So its much easier (ie, alot less clicks, less process overhead) than using SVN with Tortoise or something similar.
.css, etc). Sharepoint works better in most scenarios for office documents.
Sharepoint also logs everying and supports commit comments. It also will version office files internally, which SVN wont do (treats it as a binary file).
Also, sharepoint doesnt limit you to office documents, anything can go up or down, but the integration with office is the big winner for most groups.
Plus, the document management stuff is only ~25% of the interesting features of sharepoint. The programmability and extensibility of it is huge.
SVN would be far superior for source code, web files (.html,
Sharepoint is huge. Many businesses use it. Lots of money to be made as a consultant right now showing people how to use it effectively. There are certain types of information worker type of jobs for whom sharepoint is superior to traditional file sharing.
It's not anything like as entrenched as Exchange, but dont discount it too much. There's a lot of activity going on around sharepoint.
And to discount access? Access is so ridiculously successful at giving non-IT folks the ability to create simple database and form apps without involving IT, that its often the bane of many IT shops in large organizations.
Many, many organizations out there have lots of sub-enterprise (but still critical) business processes that run purely on access, and were developed as point solution by the dept 'techy' because IT didnt have the resources to do the project properly.
For example, if the format doesnt support a watermark, then they wouldnt be able to support watermarks. If ODF didnt support formulas in their spreadsheet, then they wouldnt be able to have formulas.
Why would anyone on earth want to hamstring their own company like this? It doesnt make any sort of sense. All it does is guarantee that they will always be playing second fiddle to the people who own the spec (ie, OO.org).
I think the core problem here is that you're just not very knowledgeable about the platform. People that do this for a living dont have the kind of problems that you seem to run into. It's only complicated and scary to you because you dont understand how it works.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I dont have anywhere near the experience on Solaris that I do on Windows. And dont even get me started on VMS. Yet, I dont go onto discussion sites and rant and rave about how VMS' package manager system is crap. I accept the fact that I dont know enough about it to evaluate it, so I keep my mouth shut.
It's the same here. You clearly dont have enough knowledge of how windows works to be criticizing it, as a number of your criticisms are based on faulty assumptions about how things work.
How to Determine File Handle Ownership
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232830
Sysinternals Process Explorer
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/uti
Sysinternals Handle
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Pro
Others, such as the COM registries, can be safely deleted if nothing else is referring to it. Of course, if there's a newer version of the component installed and set as primary, then you dont really need to.
In relation to Office, the only thing you really care about in the registry is file extension associations, and these are pretty straightforward to adjust if you're familiar with the platform. You are welcome to try your MCSE wizardry on your own O2K7 demo bloatware when you get it. Who's an MCSE, are you? Me, I would just uninstall the O2k7 demo, and be done with it. Or not install it in the first place.
Do you really think its reasonable for a business to have its non-IT employees spend time installing random software and breaking their machines? Does the same business let the receptionist do the oil change on the company truck if he/she doesnt know what they're doing? Computers/OS/Software are several orders of magnitude more complex than a car, yet you wouldnt let any random employee start tinkering with your work truck. So why is it okay for any random employee to tinker with your work computers as admin? "Normal circumstances" do not happen very often in the real world either. Well, thats why there are good IT shops and good IT consultants. To help these businesses stop throwing their money away by doing things inefficiently. If you run into your clients, and they're operating in the way you describe, isnt that your job as their IT consultant to show them how to do it better? Wouldnt that make you more money, and make your clients more money?
Now I have seen that warning, it hits me maybe 1/3 of the time when I'm saving Excel documents in
And Excel is the only 2007 application that I've ever seen this happen on. I've never seen it in word, and I've been using Office 2007 since November 2006.
This whole thing is being blown way out of proportion.
This is ridiculous. Why would a 'large company' let dell/hp/whatever decide what version of office to order?
Any 'large company' is not buying retail or oem software anyway (except for maybe the base OS, but never office). You buy it off your Select, Open, or Enterprise Subscription. Anybody who buys Office from Dell with their computer that is in this scenario is wasting money, as you're paying about twice what it costs you to buy the software through your contract.
You're basically talking about a 'large company' with poor operational practices, poor purchasing/procurement oversight (wasting money on OEM versions of office), and no IT department.
This isnt typical. I'm sure there are some poorly run companies who operate like this, but they deserve what they get. You cant throw money away and then complain that you threw money away. Just do it right the first time.
It's about as friendly and easy as you could possibly want.
As far as I know this only works with 2003.
You mention earlier in the post that this person had 2003 components as well. Clearly, this was not a well managed box. You had someone installing and uninstalling stuff willy-nilly without having a clue what they were doing, and then they managed to screw things up. It's not too surprising.
Your personal experience is not bad MS, its bad user.
Your client should never have had administrative rights to their machine.
That would be evil if that's what happened, but its not.
/. posting is garbage. The editors are idiots (or at least the one who posted this one is).
This entire
Almost every single thing in the posting is factually incorrect.
Basically, this is a case of someone making up out of whole cloth how he thinks it might work, with that assumes a worst-case situation, and then goes nuts on that, assuming its true.
Unfortunately, nearly all of it is garbage. The new system does not auto-update to the new version. There are no uninstall/down-install problems (I've done it). And Office 2003 will prompt you to download a free converter pack if you try to open an Office 2007 document with it.
Frankly, I'm really starting to think that the editors here are just posting controversial topics (even if they're just made-up) to drive traffic and gain income. It's very sad.
When this happens, try downloading the patch binary manually and running it yourself.
That will commonly resolve the behavior you were seeing.
Not sure why, but there definitely are times when Automatic Update/Windows Update/Microsoft Update wont be able to apply a patch, but it works fine when you run it by hand.
For power saving modes, there's standby and hibernate, the only thing missing there is a sleep+hibernate mode that some more recent OS's do (including vista).
Other than that, you can have the OS shut off just about all non-essential components, control the CPU speed, control the hard drive spinning up/down, screen brightness, network cards on/off, etc.
What is it that you're missing?
Thats exactly what the Office 2007 MS file formats are as well, XML files wrapped up in a
Thats not true at all. If it grows the entire windows & Microsoft ecosystem, and only loses a little bit of money over its lifetime, then it may indeed be worthwhile to the stock holders. Thats pretty much the definition of loss-leader.
I talk more about this here.
Note that they dont strictly have to make that 3B back again, as the XBox franchise is a tremendous corporate asset that has tangible value in and of itself and its immediate P&L.
MS is smart about these things. They're selling an integrated ecosystem of products. Selling lots of XBoxes means lots of people creating games for the XBox. Creating games for the XBox means you're 80% of the way to creating the game for a PC (or vice-versa). So this grows the windows franchise as it tends to expand the games industry (more games = more windows buyers).
Same goes for XBox live. They get advertisers for XBox live, so the more xbox players they have, the more xbox live users they have. So more money for advertisements, more money for cross-product tie in (selling other stuff through xbox live).
And it just goes on like that.
MS is in the community & ecosystem business. They can sell some types of products at break-even, if it grows the whole ecosystem, as it then sells more windows & office products.
MS is very savvy about this stuff, and it allows them to create network benefits off of products/divisions that dont make a huge amount of money in and of themselves.
Not to mention there's going to be a certain amount of just raw, tangible assets (capital, talent and otherwise) in the xbox divisions that just makes the MS corporation more valuable.
Did you read the articles you linked to?
They're all talking about how giving lots of ram to Vista's disk cache makes it faster, and so more RAM is helpful there.
But disk cache is gravy. If you dont have enough ram to feed it, then it'll behave the same as XP did (roughly, XP had a much less aggressive disk cache). But if you feed it more, it'll be faster. But you dont need disk cache, if you dont have enough it'll run just like XP did.
Let's compare:
XP w/ 1GB, 200MB kernel, 500MB userspace apps, 300MB disk cache
Vista w/ 1GB, 400MB kernel*, 500MB userspace apps, 100MB disk cache
*Note I'm guessing that, at a worst case, the in-memory kernel size doubled from XP. I dont think it grew by this much, but we'll use it as a conservative estimate.
So in this scenario the only difference is that the Vista version has a smaller disk cache. Add another 1GB of memory, and now you've got the same scenario, but 1.1GB of disk cache. So the OS will load the most commonly (or most recently, not sure what kind of caching algorithms it uses, but I think its more sophisticated than a 'most recent' cache) used 1.1GB of files from disk.
Otherwise, everything will be the same. I mean basically its a large solid-state-memory disk that sits in front of your spinning platter disk for commonly accessed things.
In fact, the Anandtech article you posted basically said that 4GB was useful in Vista x64 because once the disk cache fully populates, you may not have to touch the disk at all. But since XP isnt really capable of this kind of intelligent disk cache, you're not comparing apples to apples here. You're basically saying that Vista can use arbitrarily large amounts of memory to improve disk-bound performance via disk caching. Well, nice find, welcome to one of the core truisms of modern computing. The server world lives and breathes off of this truth. The only real difference is that XP didnt have the ability to use large amounts of memory for an effective disk cache, and none above 3GB at all (in the 32-bit version) in any case.
Thats a performance enhancement over XP, not a performance degredation. So if you dont have enough RAM to give the disk cache much to work with, then you're basically operating in the same mode as XP, just with a bit larger of a kernel space usage. It appears that superfetch itsel puts some of its statistics in memory, but that should be a few MB at most, which is not material.
So basically, based on both logic and the articles you posted, 4GB is not necessary for Vista to run normally. It's just handy if you want a big disk cache.
So all you really need to run roughly the same as XP is the same memory as XP, plus the additional size of the Vista's in-memory kernel space. Thats a few hundred MBs at most.
BUT if you want significant performance improvement over XP for disk-bound processes, then buy more memory and let the disk cache go nuts.
This is basically the logic trap most people get into when talking about this. They dont distinguish between how much pegged memory the kernel needs, and how much the disk cache can use. They pretty much just see it as a big glob of memory usage by the OS, but thats a highly inaccurate approach.
So yes, the in-memory kernel data structures have grown some between XP and Vista. Call it a couple hundred megabytes. And some of the buffer-overflow protections will cause a slight bloat in stack & heap usage. But thats the only _necessary_ memory growth. (necessary here defined as minimal paging.)
On top of that, Vista has a higly aggressive, learning disk cache that will use all available (otherwise unused) memory.
So Vista 'appears' to use much more memory (if you dont distinguish between kernel memory and disk cache), but in reality only requires a little bit more. And Vista appears to be much more responsive if you give it lots of memory for the disk cache, as it largely eliminates the need to go to disk for commonly used things.
C
When he says 'images', he's not talking about images as-in virtualization, he's talking about images as-in automated desktop deployment from 'images' of a base desktop build.
As in this stuff.