Good user interface design should be designed around these principles. Lots of labels and instruction for those who have never used it before, because they will be reading everything, and proper placement of GUI elements to allow easy muscle memorization.
This was basically the foundation of my point regarding the UI direction MS is going. Less locate and use, to more just 'use'...
MS gave clues to this several years ago when they said we are nor longer looking at ways for users to 'find' information and features as a goal, but redesigning the UI so people just know where their stuff and the features are.
Menus are the hiccup to productivity via bad memorization and cascaded access to features, that are then additionally nested in dialog boxes.
Office 2007 shoves the user to a new approach, be productive and not have to 'hunt' for features, even if they are complex once you have used the software for a few minutes.
Everyone though Office 2007 was going to tank, but in reality the users 'really' like it, and that is why you don't see massive complain forums dedicated to bad talking Office 2007 anymore than you see for any other release, and yet Office 2007 was a major UI paradigm shift, and just the start of what MS has up it sleeve.
Additionally, you would not believe how many 'existing' features users like about Office 2007, that they never knew existed in previous versions. This is another area of success in adding to user productivity.
A Mac virus won't spread via the 'net because the odds of a random connection leading to another Mac is much smaller than hitting a PC.
What you seem to miss, is that once the virus is on your Mac it has 'full' access to everything, including your email contacts, can open the ports it needs and drop out a copy of the virus in an Email Link to all your friends.
With Mac users and their 'community' this would be the perfect way to target 'other' Macs, as people running Macs tend to have at 'least' one friend that is also running a Mac. Multiple this by X and you have a lot of Mac users adding the virus to their system.
And whether you want to believe this or not, Macs are more at risk, because of the social aspect of this virus, and Mac users assume they are immune to viruses and are less relunctant or knowledgeable about clicking on links to update a codec.
The most successful Windows 'desktop' viruses have been spread through an initial compromised user and then using that system to socially engineer their friends to get infected. Most 'problems' out there are not randomly attacked over the net without user interaction, Windows is not that insecure.
Also the posts here try to pass of IE as less secure. Technically IE7 is the most secure browser when it is running on Vista, as it is running at a lower security level than even the user, and has access to 'nothing'. It is a sandboxed browser, unlike IE of the past that was integrated into the OS. Even Safari cannot make these claims, nor has this level of security, and Firefox has no mechanism to run in a secured sandbox as well.
So if anyone expects IE7 on Vista to spread viruses, they might be waiting a long time, as even visiting a web site with an exploit that gets through IE7 and Vista, it can't infect the machine, or the User files even, as it doesn't have permission beyond basically browsing the web.
This is where the non-Mac world tells Mac users to quit their sniveling and suck it up, Macs are on the new frontline as long as Apple is doing the equivalent of Bush's idiotic 'Bring em on' statement in their ads.
(Apple already made the mistake of making fun of Vista for increased hardware requirements in their ads, and Leopard is far more demanding less backward compatible with old hardware than Vista. Do you think Apple will re-run their ads, and this time show the Mac guy getting upgraded with new RAM and new video cards just so it is as fast as Tiger and applications like Time Machine can run properly?)
In preparing to post a rather lengthy reply, I stopped myself after I looked ar you tagged website. I see you have no conceptual grasp of UI if you allow this kind of 'presentaion' to represent you and your software.
If it were as you claim, then blind people would be unable to construct sentences.
Should I have qualified my statement with 'seeing people' since blind people don't need or use the technics specific to a GUI? Kind of like auditory processing constructs would be lost on deaf people.
Go look up brain studies, even primates that are shown visual images 'reflect' the image pattern in activity in their brain. (i.e. the picture is recreated in electrical impulses in the same pattern)
Then go look up mirror neuron studies with regard to memory retention and subconsious response.
The whole 'blind people' couldn't construct sentenaces is about as far off track or idiotic of a response I have seen in a while.
Anything that forces a graphical representation also forces us to converse in terms of graphical representations. And guess what, humans don't do that very well.
If done poorly this would be a major concern. However what you mis-estimate is how we store information. All words are image associations in the human brain, so pattern matching a ribbon bar is multitudes faster than menus, and why 'toolbars' were a welcome introduction to the GUI paradigm.
Besides, it isn't any hard to tell someone, hit Alt, Type H, Type A. I'm pretty sure that even if you stick with visuals, people will know what what images are when described, although it would not be neccesary if the GUI menu replacements are designed right like in Office 2007, where two to three keystrokes access every command in the software and even allow users to select complex choices like virtually infinite colors without having to use a mouse.
Mindsets that reject new directions in thinking, are why Menus have hung around so long, even if the new direction 'is' more efficient and easier to use. Just like watching a tech geek use a GUI and 'think' through what they are doing like it is CLI or a FileManager list instead of abandoning old thought patterns and NO LONGER thinking about 'list' constructs. This is how 90% of most techs and users still think, and this type of UI paradigm has been replaced on all consumer OSes for over 10 years.
I'm not great with a CLI, but the menus that the "market speak" poster says MS is moving away from allow me to use keystrokes to open programs and do many of my tasks without "mousing around" and generally increase my productivity over the default methods I see in Vista.
If all the items normally included on a menu is still available through other UI elements, how does this hinder your work? Additionally, if ALL keystrokes are STILL available for every feature, how can moving to a new UI paradigm from menus affect your productivity?
Take Office 2007 for example, no menus, and keystrokes still work for everything, in fact faster than with menus as more options are available on the 2007 Ribbon Bars, and you can keystroke to the various options faster than digging through the menus. Simply hit the Alt key and the keystrokes light up on the screen.
I would completely agree with you if Microsoft wasn't on top of the keyboard accessibility angle with the new UI push they are going for. Windows is still the most consistent and keyboard accessible GUI, and this is not something their geeks would allow them to remove, as it is a fundamental aspect of productivity, especially in typing centric applications like Word 2007.
If my observations and shedding some light on the MS UI movement is seen as market speak, then MS will be able to leapfrog the OSS world easier than I expected.
Yeah, totally totally true. Office 2007 makes no sense at all as a strategic move. It is totally different from what people are already able to use, even if it is somehow better (just seems overly simplified to me).
I wonder what the hell has been going on with Vista and Office 2007. Not that MS has ever been brilliant about these things, just the monopoly.
Microsoft is in the process of pulling off a in your face, quiet revolution.
A key element of both Vista and Office 2007 is the paradigm of moving the GUI away from sins of the past.
The first and biggest problem with old UI concepts was Menus. They were a fast solution to a big problem. Menus are by nature not a 'graphic' UI element, even though they are synonymous with GUIs today.
If you are using Menus, you are in effect having to memorize a list of commands, and their location. Memorizing lists of words is one of the things GUIs were supposed to remove, and failed.
(Look at the Help Search in Leopard, it is specifically designed to search for Menu Items in applications because even Apple understands Menus are still not the ideal GUI solution.)
Vista and Office 2007 (more noticeable on Office 2007) virtually removed all menus, with the exception of single list contextual menus, and they will be replaced at some point as well.
Microsoft is 'slowly' using their UI research to bring new GUI concepts that are long overdue to the Graphic environment.
What the non-Microsoft world seems to overlook is how far they will take this, and how MS could leapfrog both Apple and the current OSS world if people stop paying attention or discount what Microsoft is doing. This is how it is a 'quiet' revolution, as most people don't get the 'bigger picture' of what Microsoft is slowly moving towards.
If you take Office 2007, Vista, and especially the framework constructs of WPF/Silverlight, notice where they are heading, as the WPF aspects are designed specifically for implementing new UI concepts in new ways. Microsoft plans on bringing the results of their GUI research this to their customers now that they have the frameworks/platform to do it.
So the next time you read an article by a 'tech' person giving Office 2007 or Vista bad marks for something like 'removing' UI Menus, realize the 'tech' person doesn't get it and MS is pulling one over on them even.
Cool, so now we can talk about the application and driver signing in OS X, and all the audio/video DRM as well, and yell DRM DRM DRM a million times like people did when Vista was released?
Or do we shut up because it is Apple, and label all their DRM as security?
I have to agree. The review is much like something I personally would have wrote. Focusing on what Apple did right, what they screwed up, and not spending needless time trying to compare OS X to other operating systems.
I have seen a couple of other 'ok' reviews of Leopard, but they always end up trying to compare it to Vista, and this can go badly either direction depending on the reviewers background.
Coming from the Mac side, even when technical, they often don't understand the technologies in Vista and end up making very wrong comparisons or assumptions. The recent MacWorld review completely messed up their comparison of Time Machine to the snapshot/backup system in Vista, and instead focused on Volume Shadowing, which is the copy-on-write feature of NTFS, ended up very confused and assuming Vista couldn't restore file versions/revisions from backups or even how on volume snapshot versions worked in Vista.
Coming from the PC side, they often focus on the closed nature of OS X and use that as a comparative tool. One review totally slammed Leopard for being what it is good at, and that is consistency on a consistent hardware platform, and whether people personally agree with this model or not, a lot of people prefer this model and is why they buy Macs.
I'm very much a tech person, that admittedly uses Vista probably more than any OS on a daily basis, and I found this review very good. It was like listening to one of my Mac techs talk about Leopard. Excited, but not fanboi excited where Apple can do no wrong.
The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.
Sun and their promise that Java will get faster has been the motto of the year for 12 years now, when will it actually get faster than turtle speeds?
Sad that running a Java written IDE on Mono is faster than Sun's own crap.
This is/not/ counting the 600+MB listed under 'cache' section, which of course is a good thing -- this is just the base memory usage of the OS and its components. It's that simple.
There are two levels of cache, one is the original OS cache, and the second is the Smartfetch cache. Both consume separate and large chunks of RAM.
Looking at 'cache' usage in TaskManager doesn't report Smartfetch.
So you are going to argue that a 4GB Vista machine that boots up and shows 30-40% RAM in usage on a plain install is really using 1.5gb for the OS, plus and additional 500mb for the OS cache?
What about a 1GB Vista machine that also reports 30-40% RAM usage? Or a 512MB system that reports 30-40% RAM Usage?
I have a 16GB machine here that shows 30% RAM Usage on boot, are you going to really argue that it also is using 5GB of RAM for the OS?
If you add up 'all' the OS files in a Vista install (not counting the recovery folders, just the portions of the OS that run), it is less than 1.5GB, so your theory fails on even the 3GB system, let alone when you get to the 16GB system.
I know the concept of user and application behavior monitoring caching system is 'beyond' most people's understanding, but it is why Vista scales up to incredible amounts of RAM to keep increasing OS performance by caching more and more of applications and even documents used in consistent operational patterns.
As a side note, the caching system in Vista when used over the period of a week will be optimized to the point that when the user runs even large applications like Outlook or Winword, the applications are pre-cached and load in under 1 sec even on a 2ghz - 1GB Machine.
There's a tiny subset in the audiophille market who do
I know a lot of audiophiles, and although some like vinyl, they wouldn't argue it is superior.
Most audiophiles want analog tape that can be slowed down for higher quality sample based on the particle placement on the tape.
However with newer digital audio streams producing twice to several magnitudes the quality of CDs, even this is no longer important to most audiophiles, as tape would need to be on insanely sized reels to produce the same level of quality based on the magnetic particle spacing.
I'm sure people that love vinyl do so for good reasons, but it is not a superior format; even 1940's wire based recording was superior to modern vinyl.
Vista runs better on 64bit hardware even installing vista 32bit
Ok, I'm sure the new processor helped your system performance, but you do realize that technically this is impossible unless you install the 64bit Version of Vista, as the 32bit version of Vista has no 64bit CPU optimizations compiled into it?
Vista 32bit is just that, and Vista 64bit is optimized for the additional 64bit registers, etc.
Vista and MS make a clear line in the products, just as they have done since 2002 with XP 64bit. They are not hybrid 32/64bit OSes like OS X is, where part of the OS is 32bit optimized, and some components have 64bit optimizations available.
As for performance on a 2.4ghz P4, our tech labs has numbers of many systems in this class running both XP, Win2K, and Vista. Vista was the fastest on over 80% of the tests, and never fell out of the 4% margin of error on the tests where XP was faster.
Vista when first installed feels sluggish as the indexing and optimizations and backups get up to date, but once that happens, it runs like a different computer. The first few hour Vista experience sucks because of all the new services getting online and caught up, but after that period, it runs rather efficiently. (The initial install slowness is not exclusive to Vista, OS X does this as well, especially Leopard when it is creating the Time Machine backups.)
Good luck, and if have the opportunity, grab a copy of the 64bit version of Vista, especially if you are using an AMD processor, as the AMD offers more gain from 64bit than Intel's EMT64, and will be very noticeable when running Vista 64 compared to Vista 32 on the same system.
Try re-reading my post. Leopard runs faster than Vista on the same hardware. As the hardware gets slower, Leopard does better than Vista *until* you hit the cut-off point, where Leopard won't even install, while Vista will gladly run increasingly poorly.
This is not something that can be tested on older hardware.
As for leopard vs Vista performance. Go look at Tiger vs Vista performance when using NATIVE Intel binaries reviews of products like Adobe CS3 products. Vista stomps OS X Tiger.
Now go look up any other performance review comparing the two OSes, take a native OSX Intel game vs the same game on Vista. Vista again is much faster.
So how can you claim/makeup that Leopard is faster than Vista, when Tiger isn't even faster than Vista when booted on the same Mac Hardware, running dual ported OS optimized versions of the same software?
If you 'could' install Leopard on a 700mhz PIII then you could compare old hardware as well, but you can't, and a 700mhz PIII IS slower than a 800mhz G4, that Leopard crawls on already, and Vista with enough RAM runs nice and peppy at the 700mhz level.
Both OSes want 512mb of RAM and have a 1GB of RAM sweet spot, so you can't even use the 'large RAM requirements' argument.
You're conflating minimum hardware requirements with how well it runs on supported hardware.
Supported harddware argument? WTF. The whole point of the previous arguments is that Leopard supported and RAN on Older hardware than Vista, now the argument shifts when those facts are wrong?
Tiger can't even match Vista's performance with applications that are Mac's bread and butter like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop on TODAY'S hardware. So it would be insane to 'proclaim' that Leopard is faster than Vista on 'old' hardware when you have no idea, and no way to even test it.
Do us all a favor, go look up OS X Tiger vs Vista performance when running the same applications on the same hardware.
What's worse is that the from a time standpoint, there are PCs sold *THIS VERY DAY* that are not Vista-friendly, while every Mac sold for the last few years is absolutely Leopard-friendly, which is more indicative of the ad you were referencing (about the PC having to have an upgrade operation to run Vista).
I hate to burst your bubble, but there are computers on Apple's website that you can buy today that are not so Leopard friendly. Go look up the models with less than 1GB of RAM.
Microsoft doesn't control the hardware market, you can buy PC computers that won't even run Win2k or Linux at acceptable speeds. Maybe if MS became a hardware/OS monopoly like Apple does, then you could use this argument against Vista.
This same hardware you talk about not being 'Vista-friendly' is hardware that Leopard wouldn't run well on either. Additionally with the vast PC hardware market, there are new systems sold that Leopard couldn't run on at all, let alone not be 'friendly'. Want me to find you an Ad of a server with a Rage 128 or older Video card in it? How about an Intel based System without SSE2 or SSE3, and see how well core graphics work?
How in the hell does Apple create such a cult of brainwashing? Can't you think 'different' for yourself?
The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.
I can't believe this is actually being defended. Do you not understand the laughable aspect of this on today's processors?
There is a community of people here that have used 'more advanced' IDE environments on lower end hardware 10 years ago. Ask Delphi, VB, VS developers how well these features have worked, and they are dealing not only with the language syntax, but also massive multi-level OS API sets.
Delphi 2007 handles not only the language, vcl,.net, and also a 400mb OS SDK of APIs, and it loads in a couple of seconds, and works instantly.
How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?
There is NO reason this should be slow as crap, and it is borderline crap.
There are OS features which won't run *at all*, and many programs which will run so horribly that saying they run at all is little more than word-play.
There is ONE feature, the DWM (Aero) video composer.
Past that, even editing video on an old SVGA graphics card works just fine and anything else you throw at it.
Maybe think of it this way, do you think Longhorn Server won't run on a Server that doesn't have a modern 3D video card in it? The core OS, video subsystem, driver model in Longhorn Server (Windows 2008) and Vista is identical.
Why would you think rendering the screen on a SVGA 16bit mode makes things not work on Vista? If OS X Leopard wasn't trying to use a new modded rendering method for core UI features it wouldn't have this problem, but sadly it does and it is not designed to downscale.
In contrast, Vista's new WPF API system is designed to elegantly downscale so that it will run on old 3D cards, and even drop to pure CPU rendering. (This is how WPF/E (Silverlight) works BTW, and is cross-platform.)
Drop a 1993 PCI video card with 512kb in Vista, it still works. PERIOD.
Want proof? Have one of your friends run Vista in VMWare or Virtual PC that emulates a 1993 era S3 PCI Video Card. EVERYTHING still works.
I'm really not trying to smack OS X around too much here, as I do have some respect for what Apple is doing, and some of my tech members are avid OS X fans/geeks.
However, you can't claim Leopard performs better than Vista on older hardware, and you can't claim that Leopard will even run properly on older hardware when it specifically doesn't. Vista will run on a 1999 era Computer, with memory being the only thing that would be of concern.
I haven't tried it, but I would bet that Vista could be wiggled to load on a Pentium II 300mhz system from 1997, and even then, RAM would be the biggest factor.
People tried to make the same claims about XP when it was released, how it didn't work on old hardware, how it was bloated, etc. I also remember people staying with System 9 because OS X was big and slow. I remember working hard to convince tech peers that most of this was FUD as well.
For example, I have a laptop in my lab that is a 200mhz Pentium with 80mb of RAM, and it is running Windows XP with default settings (themes, pretties, etc) on, and it also has Office 2003 loaded on it.
It runs faster with XP than it did with Win95 or Win98. Compared to a modern computer when XP launched, it is slow as hell, but from its time period it is surprising fast, and oddly runs faster with XP than with the OS that shipped on it.
(BTW I don't recommend running Vista on a PIII era computer, and I don't recommend running Leopard on a 1999 G4 either.)
If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.
If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive. Think about it, your computer can render 3D worlds with 30fps on just the CPU, you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighting and anti-aliasing?
The same is true for Vista. In fact, you lose out on more OS-level features by using a RAGE 128 on Vista than you do using one on Leopard.
Time Machine's interface won't work with an older video card. Would you consider that to be more important that the transparent glass in Vista turning off?
There are several other applications THAT ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT in Leopard that also fail on Video card this old.
Vista and all the bundled applications can run on a 1993 SVGA Card - PERIOD.
I know a lot of people disable Aero, thinking they are speeding up Vista, but the composer technology used by Aero adds API acceleration in addition to shared 3D surfaces.
What this means in 99% of all applications, and even GAMES running in a Window, it is faster to run them with Aero On, than Vista Basic or Windows Classic.
I think there is even an Tom's Hardware (or other review site) that was testing how much Aero killed performance, and came away shocked that Vista was consistently faster with Aero on in all appliations, and even more shocked when they got a few FPS more in games out of Vista with Aero on.
(2) That feature is supported on numerous NON-VISTA OS's... if the HARDWARE, ETC supports it (the feature is supported under far earlier versions of Windows than Vista, as well as OS/2 and now, I think Linux as well for my machine - for EVERY PCI and PCI-X slot).
Yep, you completely missed the point. You go once again back to the freaking hardware or reference user mode drivers. Brilliant, but not the point.
You really are trying hard to prove you are retarded...
Vista's driver model and how it works with GPU abstraction allows for recovery and hot swap of video devices. From docking a laptop to an external PCI/e device and transparently switch GPUs and Drivers for the display, to managing failed GPUs or driver crashes.
Sure you can reset or hot swap a video card on a several other OSes, or survive driver crashes, but try it while you are playing Doom on Linux or OSX, tell me how well the Window Manager, OpenGL, and Doom itself all fully recover.
What, they don't? Exactly, that is the freaking point.
Now repeat the above with Vista running a DirectX game (or even just the Aero interface, since it is DirectX). Notice in Vista the OS doesn't crash, the GUI is still functioning, and even the 3D applications are STILL running without a hiccup.
The original point was this: Vista is solid when it comes to the single biggest stability issue regarding WindowsXP, the kernel level video driver model.
Since your idiocy is trying to take this to a moronic level of understanding, let me be very clear for you...
Yes, there are several OSes that use User level drivers and even the hybrid kernel/user driver like Vista does. There are several hot swap video technologies. Heck even OS X has a hybrid video driver model.
However no other consumer level OS can successfully recover the GUI from the numerous conditions Vista can, especially 3D GPU recovery.
Remind me to NEVER let you work on one of my computers. Oh, PLEASE go rip the video card out of your system right now while it's running and put it back in 30 seconds later...
Guess you have never been around techs in a test lab.
NO ONE missed NT 4.0, except perhaps a few paper MCSEs who loved that NT was sometimes a pain in the ass to add hardware to and were in fear of their jobs.
Oh how quickly people forget. I remember having to fight tooth and nail to get servers moved to Win2K.
Also if you look back to the articles from the time period, everyone was relunctant to move their servers from NT 4 to Win2k, and much like today, all the non Windows server geeks were championing alternative OSes, and saying that this is the first good chance to get everyone to move over from NT back to Novell, *nix, OSX Server, etc.
It's still got too many bugs for me. They are still shutting down people's computers if they've made more than 2 hardware changes, requiring them to phone up to re-activate (if MS decides to let them). There are additional downsides that didn't exist in 2000, or XP
I did read the rest, but dicsounted it.
Vista is far more stable and bug free than XP SP2, and XP SP2 is fairly crash proof. Vista you can rip out the Video card wait 30secs and put it back it while it is running and not crash the system or even crash a 3D game running. This is something beyond XP, and beyond most OSes in terms of stability.
Of course there have been some bugs with a handful of 3rd party applications, but at almost a year later 99.9% of all of them have updates or fixes to run properly under Vista, even most of the common freeware software that people use for ripping movies, torrents, etc have all been updated to work flawlessly with Vista (and most didn't even require updates).
There isn't one piece of software than even our techs in the labs use that doesn't run under Vista at this point, and we run a lot of 'strange' and rare 3rd party crap.
Another thing people forget or discount is the Windows Update system.
Right now if you install Vista RTM, it has several updates that get applied when you go online, and these updates bring Vista up to almost SP1 status.
SP1 will only change out the core kernel and replace it with the Win 2008 server kernel, and adds DirectX 10.1 and a few updates that are available but not on the update site. This isn't like the old NT days when SPs were necessary to address updates, everyone has fairly good internet access now, and the updates are made available much faster than they ever were for Win2k or XP.
As for the activation, XP's activation system is the same. I know people complain that Vista is more sensitive, but the way it is designed is not. XP did the inventory and auditing and requires activation at the same point as Vista does. There is a 'bug' with a couple of driver models on a few SPECFIC mainboard chipsets/controllers that change the ident of the hardware that is passed to Vista, but this is something being resolved and fairly rare.
Outside of SlashDot you simply don't find or hear about people having activation issues with Vista. We have over 20 dedicated test systems running just Vista alone, and NOT one of them has ever required a re-activation, and one thing we do is test a lot of hardware on them. So things like Video, Sound, Ethernet, etc are being changed all the time.
Also 1GB of RAM isn't that much anymore, especially in the rich GUI world of XWindows and other OSes that are more and more RAM hungry. Even Apple's new Leopard runs like a dog unless you have at least 1GB of RAM at the minimum. This is technology advancement, and is not something only MS is doing.
Anyway, I hope you find what you are looking for. Good luck to you.
I'd be more than open to hear the benefits of Vista and decide on that, but it seems that most geeks that I run into (the group I would be considered in) don't see a good enough value in Vista either.
Sadly this is all too true, and not because Vista lacks features, but they are so poorly marketed by MS even 'tech' people don't realize what features are in Vista.
Pick your biggest Windows Fan Tech site and read a review of Vista, they mention less than 10% of the features of Vista, or why the new architecture of Vista does benefit users even if the workings are transparent to the user.
Someone should start an indepth site for tracking this information like Mark Russ. use to do before he went to MS. He still puts out a few good reads on Vista, but other than him, very little is mentioned about the features or inner workings of Vista that showcase some of the technologies it uses that truly are more advanced than most geeks realize.
MS's horrible marketing has really failed on Vista, especially when you see them tout features like Glass and Flip3D as 'wow'. When there are major things like pre-emptive GPU scheduling so you can run multiple 3D games and applications at the same time without a performance penalty that are 'wow' features.
I hope you find a good OS solution for your needs. Take Care...
Slashdot Mirror
Good user interface design should be designed around these principles. Lots of labels and instruction for those who have never used it before, because they will be reading everything, and proper placement of GUI elements to allow easy muscle memorization.
This was basically the foundation of my point regarding the UI direction MS is going. Less locate and use, to more just 'use'...
MS gave clues to this several years ago when they said we are nor longer looking at ways for users to 'find' information and features as a goal, but redesigning the UI so people just know where their stuff and the features are.
Menus are the hiccup to productivity via bad memorization and cascaded access to features, that are then additionally nested in dialog boxes.
Office 2007 shoves the user to a new approach, be productive and not have to 'hunt' for features, even if they are complex once you have used the software for a few minutes.
Everyone though Office 2007 was going to tank, but in reality the users 'really' like it, and that is why you don't see massive complain forums dedicated to bad talking Office 2007 anymore than you see for any other release, and yet Office 2007 was a major UI paradigm shift, and just the start of what MS has up it sleeve.
Additionally, you would not believe how many 'existing' features users like about Office 2007, that they never knew existed in previous versions. This is another area of success in adding to user productivity.
A Mac virus won't spread via the 'net because the odds of a random connection leading to another Mac is much smaller than hitting a PC.
What you seem to miss, is that once the virus is on your Mac it has 'full' access to everything, including your email contacts, can open the ports it needs and drop out a copy of the virus in an Email Link to all your friends.
With Mac users and their 'community' this would be the perfect way to target 'other' Macs, as people running Macs tend to have at 'least' one friend that is also running a Mac. Multiple this by X and you have a lot of Mac users adding the virus to their system.
And whether you want to believe this or not, Macs are more at risk, because of the social aspect of this virus, and Mac users assume they are immune to viruses and are less relunctant or knowledgeable about clicking on links to update a codec.
The most successful Windows 'desktop' viruses have been spread through an initial compromised user and then using that system to socially engineer their friends to get infected. Most 'problems' out there are not randomly attacked over the net without user interaction, Windows is not that insecure.
Also the posts here try to pass of IE as less secure. Technically IE7 is the most secure browser when it is running on Vista, as it is running at a lower security level than even the user, and has access to 'nothing'. It is a sandboxed browser, unlike IE of the past that was integrated into the OS. Even Safari cannot make these claims, nor has this level of security, and Firefox has no mechanism to run in a secured sandbox as well.
So if anyone expects IE7 on Vista to spread viruses, they might be waiting a long time, as even visiting a web site with an exploit that gets through IE7 and Vista, it can't infect the machine, or the User files even, as it doesn't have permission beyond basically browsing the web.
This is where the non-Mac world tells Mac users to quit their sniveling and suck it up, Macs are on the new frontline as long as Apple is doing the equivalent of Bush's idiotic 'Bring em on' statement in their ads.
(Apple already made the mistake of making fun of Vista for increased hardware requirements in their ads, and Leopard is far more demanding less backward compatible with old hardware than Vista. Do you think Apple will re-run their ads, and this time show the Mac guy getting upgraded with new RAM and new video cards just so it is as fast as Tiger and applications like Time Machine can run properly?)
In preparing to post a rather lengthy reply, I stopped myself after I looked ar you tagged website. I see you have no conceptual grasp of UI if you allow this kind of 'presentaion' to represent you and your software.
If it were as you claim, then blind people would be unable to construct sentences.
Should I have qualified my statement with 'seeing people' since blind people don't need or use the technics specific to a GUI? Kind of like auditory processing constructs would be lost on deaf people.
Go look up brain studies, even primates that are shown visual images 'reflect' the image pattern in activity in their brain. (i.e. the picture is recreated in electrical impulses in the same pattern)
Then go look up mirror neuron studies with regard to memory retention and subconsious response.
The whole 'blind people' couldn't construct sentenaces is about as far off track or idiotic of a response I have seen in a while.
Anything that forces a graphical representation also forces us to converse in terms of graphical representations. And guess what, humans don't do that very well.
If done poorly this would be a major concern. However what you mis-estimate is how we store information. All words are image associations in the human brain, so pattern matching a ribbon bar is multitudes faster than menus, and why 'toolbars' were a welcome introduction to the GUI paradigm.
Besides, it isn't any hard to tell someone, hit Alt, Type H, Type A. I'm pretty sure that even if you stick with visuals, people will know what what images are when described, although it would not be neccesary if the GUI menu replacements are designed right like in Office 2007, where two to three keystrokes access every command in the software and even allow users to select complex choices like virtually infinite colors without having to use a mouse.
Mindsets that reject new directions in thinking, are why Menus have hung around so long, even if the new direction 'is' more efficient and easier to use. Just like watching a tech geek use a GUI and 'think' through what they are doing like it is CLI or a FileManager list instead of abandoning old thought patterns and NO LONGER thinking about 'list' constructs. This is how 90% of most techs and users still think, and this type of UI paradigm has been replaced on all consumer OSes for over 10 years.
I'm not great with a CLI, but the menus that the "market speak" poster says MS is moving away from allow me to use keystrokes to open programs and do many of my tasks without "mousing around" and generally increase my productivity over the default methods I see in Vista.
If all the items normally included on a menu is still available through other UI elements, how does this hinder your work? Additionally, if ALL keystrokes are STILL available for every feature, how can moving to a new UI paradigm from menus affect your productivity?
Take Office 2007 for example, no menus, and keystrokes still work for everything, in fact faster than with menus as more options are available on the 2007 Ribbon Bars, and you can keystroke to the various options faster than digging through the menus. Simply hit the Alt key and the keystrokes light up on the screen.
I would completely agree with you if Microsoft wasn't on top of the keyboard accessibility angle with the new UI push they are going for. Windows is still the most consistent and keyboard accessible GUI, and this is not something their geeks would allow them to remove, as it is a fundamental aspect of productivity, especially in typing centric applications like Word 2007.
If my observations and shedding some light on the MS UI movement is seen as market speak, then MS will be able to leapfrog the OSS world easier than I expected.
Yeah, totally totally true. Office 2007 makes no sense at all as a strategic move. It is totally different from what people are already able to use, even if it is somehow better (just seems overly simplified to me).
I wonder what the hell has been going on with Vista and Office 2007. Not that MS has ever been brilliant about these things, just the monopoly.
Microsoft is in the process of pulling off a in your face, quiet revolution.
A key element of both Vista and Office 2007 is the paradigm of moving the GUI away from sins of the past.
The first and biggest problem with old UI concepts was Menus. They were a fast solution to a big problem. Menus are by nature not a 'graphic' UI element, even though they are synonymous with GUIs today.
If you are using Menus, you are in effect having to memorize a list of commands, and their location. Memorizing lists of words is one of the things GUIs were supposed to remove, and failed.
(Look at the Help Search in Leopard, it is specifically designed to search for Menu Items in applications because even Apple understands Menus are still not the ideal GUI solution.)
Vista and Office 2007 (more noticeable on Office 2007) virtually removed all menus, with the exception of single list contextual menus, and they will be replaced at some point as well.
Microsoft is 'slowly' using their UI research to bring new GUI concepts that are long overdue to the Graphic environment.
What the non-Microsoft world seems to overlook is how far they will take this, and how MS could leapfrog both Apple and the current OSS world if people stop paying attention or discount what Microsoft is doing. This is how it is a 'quiet' revolution, as most people don't get the 'bigger picture' of what Microsoft is slowly moving towards.
If you take Office 2007, Vista, and especially the framework constructs of WPF/Silverlight, notice where they are heading, as the WPF aspects are designed specifically for implementing new UI concepts in new ways. Microsoft plans on bringing the results of their GUI research this to their customers now that they have the frameworks/platform to do it.
So the next time you read an article by a 'tech' person giving Office 2007 or Vista bad marks for something like 'removing' UI Menus, realize the 'tech' person doesn't get it and MS is pulling one over on them even.
deliberately crippled with DRM
Yep it applies...
Cool, so now we can talk about the application and driver signing in OS X, and all the audio/video DRM as well, and yell DRM DRM DRM a million times like people did when Vista was released?
Or do we shut up because it is Apple, and label all their DRM as security?
DRM DRM DRM DRM DRM!!!
Oh, wait, we only say that when it is MS, when Apple does it, it is SECURITY...
I have to agree. The review is much like something I personally would have wrote. Focusing on what Apple did right, what they screwed up, and not spending needless time trying to compare OS X to other operating systems.
I have seen a couple of other 'ok' reviews of Leopard, but they always end up trying to compare it to Vista, and this can go badly either direction depending on the reviewers background.
Coming from the Mac side, even when technical, they often don't understand the technologies in Vista and end up making very wrong comparisons or assumptions. The recent MacWorld review completely messed up their comparison of Time Machine to the snapshot/backup system in Vista, and instead focused on Volume Shadowing, which is the copy-on-write feature of NTFS, ended up very confused and assuming Vista couldn't restore file versions/revisions from backups or even how on volume snapshot versions worked in Vista.
Coming from the PC side, they often focus on the closed nature of OS X and use that as a comparative tool. One review totally slammed Leopard for being what it is good at, and that is consistency on a consistent hardware platform, and whether people personally agree with this model or not, a lot of people prefer this model and is why they buy Macs.
I'm very much a tech person, that admittedly uses Vista probably more than any OS on a daily basis, and I found this review very good. It was like listening to one of my Mac techs talk about Leopard. Excited, but not fanboi excited where Apple can do no wrong.
The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.
Sun and their promise that Java will get faster has been the motto of the year for 12 years now, when will it actually get faster than turtle speeds?
Sad that running a Java written IDE on Mono is faster than Sun's own crap.
This is /not/ counting the 600+MB listed under 'cache' section, which of course is a good thing -- this is just the base memory usage of the OS and its components. It's that simple.
There are two levels of cache, one is the original OS cache, and the second is the Smartfetch cache. Both consume separate and large chunks of RAM.
Looking at 'cache' usage in TaskManager doesn't report Smartfetch.
So you are going to argue that a 4GB Vista machine that boots up and shows 30-40% RAM in usage on a plain install is really using 1.5gb for the OS, plus and additional 500mb for the OS cache?
What about a 1GB Vista machine that also reports 30-40% RAM usage? Or a 512MB system that reports 30-40% RAM Usage?
I have a 16GB machine here that shows 30% RAM Usage on boot, are you going to really argue that it also is using 5GB of RAM for the OS?
If you add up 'all' the OS files in a Vista install (not counting the recovery folders, just the portions of the OS that run), it is less than 1.5GB, so your theory fails on even the 3GB system, let alone when you get to the 16GB system.
I know the concept of user and application behavior monitoring caching system is 'beyond' most people's understanding, but it is why Vista scales up to incredible amounts of RAM to keep increasing OS performance by caching more and more of applications and even documents used in consistent operational patterns.
As a side note, the caching system in Vista when used over the period of a week will be optimized to the point that when the user runs even large applications like Outlook or Winword, the applications are pre-cached and load in under 1 sec even on a 2ghz - 1GB Machine.
There's a tiny subset in the audiophille market who do
I know a lot of audiophiles, and although some like vinyl, they wouldn't argue it is superior.
Most audiophiles want analog tape that can be slowed down for higher quality sample based on the particle placement on the tape.
However with newer digital audio streams producing twice to several magnitudes the quality of CDs, even this is no longer important to most audiophiles, as tape would need to be on insanely sized reels to produce the same level of quality based on the magnetic particle spacing.
I'm sure people that love vinyl do so for good reasons, but it is not a superior format; even 1940's wire based recording was superior to modern vinyl.
Vista runs better on 64bit hardware even installing vista 32bit
Ok, I'm sure the new processor helped your system performance, but you do realize that technically this is impossible unless you install the 64bit Version of Vista, as the 32bit version of Vista has no 64bit CPU optimizations compiled into it?
Vista 32bit is just that, and Vista 64bit is optimized for the additional 64bit registers, etc.
Vista and MS make a clear line in the products, just as they have done since 2002 with XP 64bit. They are not hybrid 32/64bit OSes like OS X is, where part of the OS is 32bit optimized, and some components have 64bit optimizations available.
As for performance on a 2.4ghz P4, our tech labs has numbers of many systems in this class running both XP, Win2K, and Vista. Vista was the fastest on over 80% of the tests, and never fell out of the 4% margin of error on the tests where XP was faster.
Vista when first installed feels sluggish as the indexing and optimizations and backups get up to date, but once that happens, it runs like a different computer. The first few hour Vista experience sucks because of all the new services getting online and caught up, but after that period, it runs rather efficiently. (The initial install slowness is not exclusive to Vista, OS X does this as well, especially Leopard when it is creating the Time Machine backups.)
Good luck, and if have the opportunity, grab a copy of the 64bit version of Vista, especially if you are using an AMD processor, as the AMD offers more gain from 64bit than Intel's EMT64, and will be very noticeable when running Vista 64 compared to Vista 32 on the same system.
Try re-reading my post. Leopard runs faster than Vista on the same hardware. As the hardware gets slower, Leopard does better than Vista *until* you hit the cut-off point, where Leopard won't even install, while Vista will gladly run increasingly poorly.
This is not something that can be tested on older hardware.
As for leopard vs Vista performance. Go look at Tiger vs Vista performance when using NATIVE Intel binaries reviews of products like Adobe CS3 products. Vista stomps OS X Tiger.
Now go look up any other performance review comparing the two OSes, take a native OSX Intel game vs the same game on Vista. Vista again is much faster.
So how can you claim/makeup that Leopard is faster than Vista, when Tiger isn't even faster than Vista when booted on the same Mac Hardware, running dual ported OS optimized versions of the same software?
If you 'could' install Leopard on a 700mhz PIII then you could compare old hardware as well, but you can't, and a 700mhz PIII IS slower than a 800mhz G4, that Leopard crawls on already, and Vista with enough RAM runs nice and peppy at the 700mhz level.
Both OSes want 512mb of RAM and have a 1GB of RAM sweet spot, so you can't even use the 'large RAM requirements' argument.
You're conflating minimum hardware requirements with how well it runs on supported hardware.
Supported harddware argument? WTF. The whole point of the previous arguments is that Leopard supported and RAN on Older hardware than Vista, now the argument shifts when those facts are wrong?
Tiger can't even match Vista's performance with applications that are Mac's bread and butter like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop on TODAY'S hardware. So it would be insane to 'proclaim' that Leopard is faster than Vista on 'old' hardware when you have no idea, and no way to even test it.
Do us all a favor, go look up OS X Tiger vs Vista performance when running the same applications on the same hardware.
What's worse is that the from a time standpoint, there are PCs sold *THIS VERY DAY* that are not Vista-friendly, while every Mac sold for the last few years is absolutely Leopard-friendly, which is more indicative of the ad you were referencing (about the PC having to have an upgrade operation to run Vista).
I hate to burst your bubble, but there are computers on Apple's website that you can buy today that are not so Leopard friendly. Go look up the models with less than 1GB of RAM.
Microsoft doesn't control the hardware market, you can buy PC computers that won't even run Win2k or Linux at acceptable speeds. Maybe if MS became a hardware/OS monopoly like Apple does, then you could use this argument against Vista.
This same hardware you talk about not being 'Vista-friendly' is hardware that Leopard wouldn't run well on either. Additionally with the vast PC hardware market, there are new systems sold that Leopard couldn't run on at all, let alone not be 'friendly'. Want me to find you an Ad of a server with a Rage 128 or older Video card in it? How about an Intel based System without SSE2 or SSE3, and see how well core graphics work?
How in the hell does Apple create such a cult of brainwashing? Can't you think 'different' for yourself?
The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.
.net, and also a 400mb OS SDK of APIs, and it loads in a couple of seconds, and works instantly.
I can't believe this is actually being defended. Do you not understand the laughable aspect of this on today's processors?
There is a community of people here that have used 'more advanced' IDE environments on lower end hardware 10 years ago. Ask Delphi, VB, VS developers how well these features have worked, and they are dealing not only with the language syntax, but also massive multi-level OS API sets.
Delphi 2007 handles not only the language, vcl,
How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?
There is NO reason this should be slow as crap, and it is borderline crap.
There are OS features which won't run *at all*, and many programs which will run so horribly that saying they run at all is little more than word-play.
There is ONE feature, the DWM (Aero) video composer.
Past that, even editing video on an old SVGA graphics card works just fine and anything else you throw at it.
Maybe think of it this way, do you think Longhorn Server won't run on a Server that doesn't have a modern 3D video card in it? The core OS, video subsystem, driver model in Longhorn Server (Windows 2008) and Vista is identical.
Why would you think rendering the screen on a SVGA 16bit mode makes things not work on Vista? If OS X Leopard wasn't trying to use a new modded rendering method for core UI features it wouldn't have this problem, but sadly it does and it is not designed to downscale.
In contrast, Vista's new WPF API system is designed to elegantly downscale so that it will run on old 3D cards, and even drop to pure CPU rendering. (This is how WPF/E (Silverlight) works BTW, and is cross-platform.)
Drop a 1993 PCI video card with 512kb in Vista, it still works. PERIOD.
Want proof? Have one of your friends run Vista in VMWare or Virtual PC that emulates a 1993 era S3 PCI Video Card. EVERYTHING still works.
I'm really not trying to smack OS X around too much here, as I do have some respect for what Apple is doing, and some of my tech members are avid OS X fans/geeks.
However, you can't claim Leopard performs better than Vista on older hardware, and you can't claim that Leopard will even run properly on older hardware when it specifically doesn't. Vista will run on a 1999 era Computer, with memory being the only thing that would be of concern.
I haven't tried it, but I would bet that Vista could be wiggled to load on a Pentium II 300mhz system from 1997, and even then, RAM would be the biggest factor.
People tried to make the same claims about XP when it was released, how it didn't work on old hardware, how it was bloated, etc. I also remember people staying with System 9 because OS X was big and slow. I remember working hard to convince tech peers that most of this was FUD as well.
For example, I have a laptop in my lab that is a 200mhz Pentium with 80mb of RAM, and it is running Windows XP with default settings (themes, pretties, etc) on, and it also has Office 2003 loaded on it.
It runs faster with XP than it did with Win95 or Win98. Compared to a modern computer when XP launched, it is slow as hell, but from its time period it is surprising fast, and oddly runs faster with XP than with the OS that shipped on it.
(BTW I don't recommend running Vista on a PIII era computer, and I don't recommend running Leopard on a 1999 G4 either.)
If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.
If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive. Think about it, your computer can render 3D worlds with 30fps on just the CPU, you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighting and anti-aliasing?
The same is true for Vista. In fact, you lose out on more OS-level features by using a RAGE 128 on Vista than you do using one on Leopard.
Time Machine's interface won't work with an older video card. Would you consider that to be more important that the transparent glass in Vista turning off?
There are several other applications THAT ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT in Leopard that also fail on Video card this old.
Vista and all the bundled applications can run on a 1993 SVGA Card - PERIOD.
Disable Aero and go back to classic interface.
I know a lot of people disable Aero, thinking they are speeding up Vista, but the composer technology used by Aero adds API acceleration in addition to shared 3D surfaces.
What this means in 99% of all applications, and even GAMES running in a Window, it is faster to run them with Aero On, than Vista Basic or Windows Classic.
I think there is even an Tom's Hardware (or other review site) that was testing how much Aero killed performance, and came away shocked that Vista was consistently faster with Aero on in all appliations, and even more shocked when they got a few FPS more in games out of Vista with Aero on.
PS I like your list, good points.
(2) That feature is supported on numerous NON-VISTA OS's... if the HARDWARE, ETC supports it (the feature is supported under far earlier versions of Windows than Vista, as well as OS/2 and now, I think Linux as well for my machine - for EVERY PCI and PCI-X slot).
Yep, you completely missed the point. You go once again back to the freaking hardware or reference user mode drivers. Brilliant, but not the point.
You really are trying hard to prove you are retarded...
Vista's driver model and how it works with GPU abstraction allows for recovery and hot swap of video devices. From docking a laptop to an external PCI/e device and transparently switch GPUs and Drivers for the display, to managing failed GPUs or driver crashes.
Sure you can reset or hot swap a video card on a several other OSes, or survive driver crashes, but try it while you are playing Doom on Linux or OSX, tell me how well the Window Manager, OpenGL, and Doom itself all fully recover.
What, they don't? Exactly, that is the freaking point.
Now repeat the above with Vista running a DirectX game (or even just the Aero interface, since it is DirectX). Notice in Vista the OS doesn't crash, the GUI is still functioning, and even the 3D applications are STILL running without a hiccup.
The original point was this: Vista is solid when it comes to the single biggest stability issue regarding WindowsXP, the kernel level video driver model.
Since your idiocy is trying to take this to a moronic level of understanding, let me be very clear for you...
Yes, there are several OSes that use User level drivers and even the hybrid kernel/user driver like Vista does. There are several hot swap video technologies. Heck even OS X has a hybrid video driver model.
However no other consumer level OS can successfully recover the GUI from the numerous conditions Vista can, especially 3D GPU recovery.
Get it yet, or should I type slower next time?
432? Wow... If this is accurate then Apple is making out like a bandit.
Everyone knows phone makers, resellers, etc make money off each contract; however, the industry average is about $200 per 2 year contract.
Remind me to NEVER let you work on one of my computers. Oh, PLEASE go rip the video card out of your system right now while it's running and put it back in 30 seconds later...
Guess you have never been around techs in a test lab.
Sorry for assuming you weren't retarded...
NO ONE missed NT 4.0, except perhaps a few paper MCSEs who loved that NT was sometimes a pain in the ass to add hardware to and were in fear of their jobs.
Oh how quickly people forget. I remember having to fight tooth and nail to get servers moved to Win2K.
Also if you look back to the articles from the time period, everyone was relunctant to move their servers from NT 4 to Win2k, and much like today, all the non Windows server geeks were championing alternative OSes, and saying that this is the first good chance to get everyone to move over from NT back to Novell, *nix, OSX Server, etc.
Things don't change much, just the memories do.
It's still got too many bugs for me. They are still shutting down people's computers if they've made more than 2 hardware changes, requiring them to phone up to re-activate (if MS decides to let them). There are additional downsides that didn't exist in 2000, or XP
I did read the rest, but dicsounted it.
Vista is far more stable and bug free than XP SP2, and XP SP2 is fairly crash proof. Vista you can rip out the Video card wait 30secs and put it back it while it is running and not crash the system or even crash a 3D game running. This is something beyond XP, and beyond most OSes in terms of stability.
Of course there have been some bugs with a handful of 3rd party applications, but at almost a year later 99.9% of all of them have updates or fixes to run properly under Vista, even most of the common freeware software that people use for ripping movies, torrents, etc have all been updated to work flawlessly with Vista (and most didn't even require updates).
There isn't one piece of software than even our techs in the labs use that doesn't run under Vista at this point, and we run a lot of 'strange' and rare 3rd party crap.
Another thing people forget or discount is the Windows Update system.
Right now if you install Vista RTM, it has several updates that get applied when you go online, and these updates bring Vista up to almost SP1 status.
SP1 will only change out the core kernel and replace it with the Win 2008 server kernel, and adds DirectX 10.1 and a few updates that are available but not on the update site. This isn't like the old NT days when SPs were necessary to address updates, everyone has fairly good internet access now, and the updates are made available much faster than they ever were for Win2k or XP.
As for the activation, XP's activation system is the same. I know people complain that Vista is more sensitive, but the way it is designed is not. XP did the inventory and auditing and requires activation at the same point as Vista does. There is a 'bug' with a couple of driver models on a few SPECFIC mainboard chipsets/controllers that change the ident of the hardware that is passed to Vista, but this is something being resolved and fairly rare.
Outside of SlashDot you simply don't find or hear about people having activation issues with Vista. We have over 20 dedicated test systems running just Vista alone, and NOT one of them has ever required a re-activation, and one thing we do is test a lot of hardware on them. So things like Video, Sound, Ethernet, etc are being changed all the time.
Also 1GB of RAM isn't that much anymore, especially in the rich GUI world of XWindows and other OSes that are more and more RAM hungry. Even Apple's new Leopard runs like a dog unless you have at least 1GB of RAM at the minimum. This is technology advancement, and is not something only MS is doing.
Anyway, I hope you find what you are looking for. Good luck to you.
I'd be more than open to hear the benefits of Vista and decide on that, but it seems that most geeks that I run into (the group I would be considered in) don't see a good enough value in Vista either.
Sadly this is all too true, and not because Vista lacks features, but they are so poorly marketed by MS even 'tech' people don't realize what features are in Vista.
Pick your biggest Windows Fan Tech site and read a review of Vista, they mention less than 10% of the features of Vista, or why the new architecture of Vista does benefit users even if the workings are transparent to the user.
Someone should start an indepth site for tracking this information like Mark Russ. use to do before he went to MS. He still puts out a few good reads on Vista, but other than him, very little is mentioned about the features or inner workings of Vista that showcase some of the technologies it uses that truly are more advanced than most geeks realize.
MS's horrible marketing has really failed on Vista, especially when you see them tout features like Glass and Flip3D as 'wow'. When there are major things like pre-emptive GPU scheduling so you can run multiple 3D games and applications at the same time without a performance penalty that are 'wow' features.
I hope you find a good OS solution for your needs. Take Care...