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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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 Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 1:16 am |
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I tried one of the late betas in September and I was generally pleased with it. It is pretty much a painless incremental upgrade that doesn't really add any major feature but makes everything a little prettier and a little easier to do. The only big problem with it is the activation and DRM. I am confident that these measures will be totally broken in short order by hardworking pirates, but still they represent something of an annoyance.
Also, the third-party application and driver support was terrible when I tried it, and it almost certainly still isn't up to par now. I would wait six months at the minimum before switching. There is no compelling reason to hurry anyway.
| Legal Step wrote: |
| This doesn't bode well for Longhorn, the other super secret OS |
Is this some kind of subtle joke or something? Longhorn was just the codename of Vista before its name was officially decided, much like say Nintendo Revolution.
| Legal Step wrote: |
| The problem with Windows is that nobody wants to trample on The Creator's ideas so everything gets piled on. Every extension of Windows is piled on to the previous version and so and so forth because to do something new different and leaner would require the support of the people they are fighting against. |
I don't know what you mean by "support of the people they are fighting against", but anyway the reason they do this is to avoid breaking old software as much as possible. This is a very very important issue for corporate customers, who don't want to hire a team of programmers to rewrite their internal software every three years. Along with the support for cheap generic hardware, this is the reason Windows dominates despite Mac OS X's (until now) technical superiority.
| BenoitRen wrote: |
| Windows Vista is the ultimate crap. |
This childish rant barely deserves to be dignified with a response, but anyway...
| BenoitRen wrote: |
| -They again had to rape the interface and bloat it with tons of shiny effects, to the point of needing a fucking 3D gaming video card to display it well. Aero my ass. |
What? No. Bog-standard el cheapo integrated motherboard video cards will do. All this GPU power has been around for years and you're complaining that an OS gets around to using it? Also, Vista's UI is just fine (and still better than XP's) if you turn Aero off.
| BenoitRen wrote: |
| -They bloated the OS even more so you now need 2 GB of RAM and 15 GB of HDD space just for it to run well. An OS is supposed to be an operating system that consumes the minimum of resources and support your applicaitions, not trying to be a jack-of-all-trades program! Death to the perpetual upgrade cycle! |
Attacking Windows for bloat is silly. All those new features have to go somewhere, and I'm not seeing Mac OS X or desktop Linux distributions doing it much more efficiently. And keeping around old APIs is still less resource-intensive than running your old software in an emulation layer like you have to do with Macs, or recompiling it like you have to do with Linux.
And people don't appreciate the kind of optimizations that Windows makes and that none of its competitors do. For example, XP and Vista boot hella fast: that's because of clever logging of what files are accessed at bootup and then defragging the disk to put all those files near each other. Vista now exploits flash memory on USB keys as faster virtual memory.
| BenoitRen wrote: |
| -Now Windows will annoy you even more with the new User Access Control pop-ups! To be honest, this wasn't a bad idea, but its implementation sucks. It asks you about a lot of things you shouldn't need administrator priviledges for, or things that aren't really harmful! |
Turn it off then. But you'd be an idiot and you know it.
| BenoitRen wrote: |
| I never liked XP for its toy look, restrictive behaviour, incompatibility with older games, and bloated back-end. |
Use the classic look then, what?, ack this is because of the vast improvement in architecture did you prefer the instability and general crappiness of Win9x?, and addressed above. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 1:43 am |
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| DaleNixon wrote: |
| You've got to be fucking kidding me! I'll bring a stopwatch to work tomorrow and time my slow-ass XP and Vista images' boot times vs. Linux and OS X. |
Actually I haven't tried running Linux and OS X on comparable hardware to what I run Windows on lately, I'm not sure exactly how they compare. I'd be interested in hearing the stopwatch times. I remember being very impressed with the boot time when I switched from W2K to XP, but maybe it's not so great anymore.
| DaleNixon wrote: |
| And this is done automatically? You know, most modern journalized filesystems defragment on the fly... NTFS excluded. |
Yes, you don't need to do anything special to turn it on. As for the other filesystems, sure but don't they just clump everything together randomly, not position things based on usage profiling?
| Broco wrote: |
| What in the hell? Are you positive on this? NAND Flash memory is not meant to be accessed like this. That sounds like a good way to kill your USB pen drive as they are not made to withstand intense amounts of reading/writing. |
Yeah, see the second-to-last entry here. My understanding is that the write limit on flash memory nowadays is comparable to hard drives, and this is no longer a problem. Note that there's another technology called "hybrid hard drives" coming down the pipeline where hard drives will include several gigabytes of flash as a cache, so it seems that flash's time to be used as a cache has arrived.
| Intentionally Wrong wrote: |
| So, is this Aero business the reason I want to turn off whatever light's causing all that glare every time I pass a desktop running Vista? I don't much like the idea of high-gloss interface elements. |
Nah, I'm pretty sure that's just the art design. Vista doesn't actually look that different with and without Aero. It just gets candy like transparency and an Expose-equivalent. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 3:30 am |
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| Drem wrote: |
My trouble when reading impressions on Vista is that I'm not sure whether people decry it based simply on it's abilities, or it's abilities compared to it's price. Because if they're saying it's not worth getting for $300, what about $15? Is it okay to install it now*, since I got it so cheap? I don't know.
*Once better graphics drivers are out, anyway. |
Yeah, I mean, it's basically Windows XP with an extra layer of polish. Few people are arguing it's a step backwards (except those obsessed with memory footprint or DRM). Some people find its new feature set underwhelming, but if you're getting it practically free then sure. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 7:06 pm |
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| IIOIOOIOO wrote: |
| You guys are all losers. Vista is not Longhorn but does have some of the FS components built for Longhorn. Longhorn is the next generation server OS (following Windows Server 2003) and will go RTM... sometime in Q4? It's beta-able right now. It's got some super-cool stuff like windowed RDP sessions. You can get Citrix Server type user-experience without shelling out for bitchhigh Citrix licenses! |
Yes, Vista is Longhorn. Longhorn workstation was given the release name Vista, but Longhorn server is still called Longhorn because MS prefers to name their server OSes by year and it's not clear whether it will be released in 2007 or 2008. It's not our fault if Microsoft's naming schemes are really confusing. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:15 pm |
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| Yeah, speaking of resolution independence, I think this will be the killer feature of Vista in the long run. When we all have 4000x3000 native resolution 14-inch screens, today's pixel-based interfaces will fail completely. I am disappointed that it doesn't seem to be used prominently right now, though. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:09 am |
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| BotageL wrote: |
| ecchi wrote: |
| So far the only thing that's actually pissed me off is that 'Sleep' takes longer than 'Standby' used to because it stores its current state to disk before powering down. This means that I can't just close my laptop at the end of class and throw it into my backpack. The wait's usually only 30 seconds or so, but I don't like it. |
This is rather interesting/confusing. They're replaced Standby/Sleep entirely with what used to be called Hibernate? I just can't see a reason why they would do this. |
I've seen more than one complaint (e.g. this) about the shutdown menu in Vista, it seems they screwed it up somewhat. Though I didn't toy with it enough to understand what the new options were.
Anyway, the option for old-style sleep is certainly around somewhere, if only by tweaking some registry key. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 11:41 pm |
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| GcDiaz wrote: |
| Although according to the little "vista system checker" thing, I can't use Nero 6? How am I supposed to backup my data? |
Yeah old versions of Nero are completely broken in Vista. You will have to buy/"buy" Nero 7 (their website says recent versions of it are Vista compatible). |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 12:12 am |
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| BenoitRen wrote: |
| See, drivers run at the same level as the kernel, so when one fails, it's BSOD. Because drivers are a big problem every time a Windows version comes out, this has become a running joke. |
Speaking of which, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Mode_Driver_Framework . |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 3:27 pm |
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| GcDiaz wrote: |
| That video was running, and didn't hitch or stutter no matter how quickly I rotated the pages. Also was installing my router at the time. |
That's what's great about the new rendering system; the work involved in the rotating effect is entirely offloaded to the GPU, so no matter how fancy these effects get, they are painless performance-wise.
| 108 wrote: |
is there anyone out there who can get me like a $5 student discount version?
i'm not going to install pirated windows on my pristine computer. |
That's not much different from pirating it, you would still be violating the license... |
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