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Deja vu: http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17571

Maybe in future Windows maintenance threads we could see people post helpful tips rather than stirring?

Indeed, when I did it, I did it with style, class and tongue-in-cheek. That other one was a pale attempt at imitation.

Amateur.

"Just insert a Linux CD, reboot..."

*sigh* that line is so incredibly tired. Like 10 years ago tired.

So therefore do you not think there is a public perception that Vista needs to be replaced with something else ?

So therefore do you not think there is a public perception that Vista needs to be replaced with something else ?

No, there is no such "public perception", unless by "public" you mean pale geeks who read OSNews; otherwise, the "general public" could care less.

The GUI maybe simular, but whats under the 'bonnet' certinally won't be

how many computer users do you know that actually CARE what goes on under the hood of their OS? how many peeple do you know would even notice a difference?

geeks, techys. sure, how many of yur friends read www.osnews.com?

The majorety care. Nobody wants a system that can't support their game (because DirectX10 isn't supported on XP) or doesn't offer the latest drivers for their USB devices. People might well care about the (reportedly) improved securety (although I'm yet to but Vistas security through it's paces).

An OS isn't defined by its GUI.

the only thing vista has going for it is DX10 and that could have been backported but MS just wanted a reason to force peeple to upgrade. drivers for 'new USB' devices will be made for XP and essentially also 2000 for a long time yet.

to us an OS isnt defined by its GUI. to the majority of PC users the GUI is the OS.

security is as good as xp with all the patches an hotfixes.

An OS isn't defined by its GUI.

.....but it's judged by it most heavily.

"An OS isn't defined by its GUI."

Given that the operating system is designed to be used, then its interface, given that it is graphical is very much how it is defined as far as the user of the operating system is concerned.

That the drivers are outside the kernel space now, or the sound architecture has been revamped means nothing to me as a user of the system.

That aside, if people want w2k looks from Vista for a bit more speed thats fair enough; that is their defining concern for the operating system experience.

After some initial GUI-shock given the differences between XP and Vista I really like what Microsoft have done. I'm not saying they are innovative because they're not, but they are done well for the most part. The searches built in work really well and are slick (not just the one on the "Start" menu) the breadcrumb navigation is an excellent improvement on the old pathing.

similar

I guess it depends on how much you care about aesthetics. Most of the extra functionality provided by Vista will still be there, it'll just look less pretty.

Personally I'd rather have the extra speed; the novelty value of eye-candy, like the pretty pointless transparency effects, wears off very quickly.

Now, take a look at Vista's insane system requirements.

Vista runs fine on my old 900Mhz Duron/512Mb box. System requirements satisfied by almost all 5-6 old PCs are hardly insane.

Edited 2007-04-03 18:34

Vista runs fine on my old 900Mhz Duron/512Mb box

No. It doesn't. It really really doesn't, and I don't know what you're used to, or what your definition of "fine" is, but Vista does not run fine on that hardware.

It may run "fine" on your hardware in the same sense that Windows XP runs "fine" on my parents $300 PC with 256MB RAM. That is, it boots, and then manages to start the browser and email client after some swapping. If that's your definition of fine then so be it. For someone who just wants to browse the web and check email, that kind of performance is ok. Of course, people with those needs have been fine with the performance of computers for over 10 years.

But the rest of us actually do things with our computers. We are not content to wait for Vista to thrash the harddrive for 3 minutes after bootup (longer than my 2 year old install of XP), we are not content for it to fill the RAM with god knows what, and not content to have background processes consuming resources for no apparent benefit.

Windows XP SP2 is the better Windows (and quite good overall), and Apple/Linux is the better alternative.
Of course, none of this will matter and Vista will have great success. Aren't monopolies great?

Edited 2007-04-03 19:37

blahblah blah... and more blah.

I haven't booted into windows since last december on my PC, but damn people. XP *can* run "fine" in 256mb of RAM. but NO out of box all my xp installs used about 50-60mb of ram on bootup.

but Vista... 'eh, it *needs* 1gb. I've used PCs that have it with 512mb of ram. it sucks

*not out of box ...

You've got to be joking. Vista barely ran on my 2Ghz Athlon Machine with 1 GB DDR2 Ram. Ever tried using explorer?

I think one of the deciding factors in Vista's speed is the graphics card as Vista (unlike previous versions of Windows) actually uses the GPU to render the UI.

An example of this was on my modest 2GH Celery 512MB RAM PC. XP actually ran slower than Vista and I think that's all down to the high spec'ed ATI card I have installed.

I don't know what your GFX card is. I've got a 9600XT. That can handle most modern games, so a few windows shouldn't tax it too much.

Vista performance must vary quite a bit. It ran very well on my Athlon 3800 X2 with 1 GB. That's 2 GHz. Later I upgraded it to 2 GB RAM and it runs much better, but it did run fine before.

It could be that you upgraded. If you have a bunch of files already in place, then the disk indexing Vista does may take a while to complete. It also defrags the disk in the background. Both seem to slow down disk accesses a bit, but the system is better for it afterward.

I did a fresh install. And turned off the indexer after a while, based on my need to regularly search in non profile locations.

You're comparing a dual-core Athlon64 running at 2 GHz with 1 GB of DDR-SDRAM to a 900 MHz Duron with 512 MB PC133 SDRAM??? Yeah, I wonder why performance varies a lot!!

If people are going to start throwing performance numbers around and "it works great on my comp with X, Y, and Z", then at least try to compare similar systems.

Saying things work great on your Uber-box and wondering why people are complaining is like saying the weather is nice in Hawaii and wondering why people are complaining about snow storms in Alaska.

Edited 2007-04-03 23:20

My 2Ghz Athlon 2800+ with 1G DDR 400 runs it pretty good, at least as good as XP on the same hardware. Maybe you ahve a hardware issue of some kind.

Aero off right?

It runs well on my macbook without Aero with 512MB of RAM, although not exactly great (but that's prolly Parallels fault).

Edited 2007-04-03 21:46 UTC

Getting to the desktop and starting Mail doesn't totally count as "running fine".

Even Windows 95 booted on my 486 DX2-50 with 8MB of RAM, but I hardly classified it as "usable".

"Someone needs to stop the insanity."

Someone needs to stop the trolling.

"""
Now, take a look at Vista's insane system requirements.
"""

One thing that Microsoft has always gotten right is acknowledging that what is a lot of memory and a lot of processor today is not a lot of memory and processor tomorrow.

Vista took 5 years to get out the door. 5 years from now we will look at the 2GB that maxes out my motherboard today, and think "Oh, how quaint! Expressing memory capacity in Gigabytes! Will it run Emacs?". ;-)

Edited 2007-04-04 05:43

Now, take a look at Vista's insane system requirements.

That speaks volumes to how bad MS is getting with bloatware. They can streamline it pretty well and still end up with an OS that requires more resources than alot of 3d games out there.

I mean, Come on!!!!!!!

Someone needs to stop the insanity.

It's pretty much a corollary that, over time, software will continue to expand in functionality and thus eat up all available computing resources. You may not like that additional functionality, but plenty of people DO. Fortunately, computer hardware continues to increase in speed/capability while simultaneously decreasing in cost, so it's really a wash. The fact of the matter is that the machine you bought 5 years ago is a shadow of the machines which are available today. Of course, that doesn't excuse software developers from optimizing their use of memory, but it does suggest that people who are complaining about Vista not running on old hardware need to get over it. It's like complaining about gravity.

Of course it uses more CPU for security but not security from outside attacks and viruses. Security from keeping you locked down by DRM, system bus scanning, driver/hardware security, etc. Shame that people will upgrade for DX10, only reason to upgrade.

Hmmmmm, that's odd. Vista seems to have a firewall (Windows Firewall) and a malware scanner (Windows Defender). Maybe I'm just hallucinating... Are you claiming that those components aren't part of Vista?

Scanners and firewalls are prevalent over all operating systems, are you trying to suggest they are a reason to upgrade to Vista ?

Now that would be a real WOW factor !

Scanners and firewalls are prevalent over all operating systems, are you trying to suggest they are a reason to upgrade to Vista ?

I made no such claim. I was responding specifically to the issue of whether Vista has a firewall and malware scanner. It does.

No it wont.

Micorosft wouldn't have spent five years improving NT just to throw it away.

Windows has become too big and complicated to replicate the same thing on top of a fresh codebase within any practical time frame.

NT development occured in parallel with 9x, so the jump was fairly straight forward.

We're not talking a normal company. Microsoft has the resources to quickly pull off a codebase rewrite if they decide it would be in their best interests.

Of course, in providing support for all the old applications people are still using, they'd end up with so many compatibility layers running alongside the core services that they would only get a small improvement for the cost, so it's not likely.

No.

Vista is a prime example at how difficult Windows has become to manage.

It took 10-20,000 MS employees 5 years to make enough improvements and changes ontop of XP/2003 (based on NT) to call it Vista.

Prior to Vista, the NT codebase was already mature after several years of existance.

The complexity really speaks for itself on this one.

Vista is a prime example at how difficult Windows has become to manage.

That is exactly the reason why they should have rewritten the whole codebase.

I'm pretty sure they could have done it in five years, if the developers didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility.

That way they could have corrected all the old design mistakes that plaque Windows even with Vista.

It would not have been too difficult for them to write a good compatibility layer on top of that new OS either: Just think about the WINE project. They have been able to do just that *for Linux* even without Windows's source code! And when the apps run in WINE they run almost with native speed, even games!

The great advantage of a compatibility layer would also be that it would protect the new base OS from badly written legacy apps. Furthermore, fixing this layer would be just a matter of re-installing it.

Now THAT would have been the brave *new* Windows of the 21st century!

Edited 2007-04-04 12:53

Doubtful

For one, ME wasn't really an OS in the strictest sense of the term. MS had to replace the old 9x systems with NT if just because running Windows on top of DOS is a joke.

Plus the way Windows will probably move forward in the future maybe through incremental updates (like OSX version numbers) rather than large OS jumps. This would make much more sense in terms of development time and resources, plus they can gradually bring in big changes rather than shock users into a new interface.

Off topic slightly:
Why has my earlier comments about believing that a lot of consumers do care about the nuts and bolts of the OS *AS WELL AS* the GUI (in terms of compatability etc).
That was as polite and relevant as every other post in this thread. Plus I thought it was against OSNews T&C to marks posts down if you simply don't agree with them. Have I misread the rules or are there some unfair voting going on? I just can't see why one post would be voted down and the others voted up when they're just two angles of exactly the same discussion.

Edited 2007-04-04 11:54

only reports 350MB ram being used right now with media player & explorer running.

...
Ha, what do you know, ram shows 309MB used now...

Do you have any idea how sad that is? I can get Windows 2000 Pro to run perfectly well on 24 MB of memory after it gets "stripped" (perfectly well being it runs wordpad, internet explorer, plays music, etc. More than that you'd need 32-48, but you don't need nearly the "minimum requirement" for it to work (work well), which was, what, 64MB?)... I mean, come on people... Even 2k3 stripped used 68MB or memory when running by itself, media player uses, if I recall, about 15MB, explorer uses something like 24MB... so that's maybe, maybe, 100MB doing the same things in 2k3

You realize that most non-Vista laptops still being sold today only come with 256MB in them, right? "Ha ... 309 use now..."

Maybe people who bitch about performance realize that you shouldn't need a better computer to run windows than it takes to run Doom 3...

You know how much memory my computer is using right now running audacious, firefox, gaim, X-windows, XFCE, and three terminal sessions? 96MB... yes, that's right, 96 MB... using 2k3 (stripped) I could get the exact same set of programs (minus X and XFCE) running in 140MB... what is this "309MB" crap?

Just because you have 2GB of memory does not excuse the operating system taking over 1/4 of it by itself.

I agree. More RAM=more better. I think the graphics card does NOT actually affect RAM usage much. Windows double-buffers graphics in system memory anyway, so it may not really affect DWM memory usage to have a huge graphics card. Not absolutely sure on this one though.