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No wonder, really, since they know better.

Aye; sheep are people who have only ever used Windows and think it the beat to march to. There's nothing wrong with /liking/ Vista, on new machines it just works, but it's still Windows to me.

Im happy dual boot XP and (quite happy) Ubuntu user (Im writing this from Ubuntu) and i call Vista a complete disaster (even worse than Windows ME) and best thing that happen to promote open source and Linux ever since its creation.

Not much can be worse than ME and Vista is certainly not worse than ME.

"Not much can be worse than ME and Vista is certainly not worse than ME."

DRM/activation/WGA, pricing, EULA, and system requirements for Vista are worse than ME. Vista is a DOWNGRADE.

So those things you mentioned, in your opinion, make Vista a DOWNGRADE from ME?

All this talk about DRM actication and WGA...
I'm using Vista and I've NEVER have been limited by any form of DRM so far. I have no HDDVDs or BluRay movies though, so that's why maybe.
WGA and activation? Activation takes like... 30 seconds after install, and you're done. It's gone. Never bothered me again.

System requirements are of course higher - no suprise here really, but my 3-year old Athlon64 (2GB of RAM and a gf7600 gt) system runs it flawlessly.

"I'm using Vista and I've NEVER have been limited by any form of DRM so far. I have no HDDVDs or BluRay movies though, so that's why maybe."

You are lucky.......so far.

"WGA and activation? Activation takes like... 30 seconds after install, and you're done. It's gone. Never bothered me again."

MS will be "authenticating" the OS every month, just remember the computer belongs to MS, not you.
http://www.mypcpros.com/computer-blog/2007/5/1/microsofts-new-valid...

"System requirements are of course higher - no suprise here really, but my 3-year old Athlon64 (2GB of RAM and a gf7600 gt) system runs it flawlessly."

The system requirements for Vista are absurd, but I guess that is what happens when a poorly made OS is loaded with DRM. Linux is a quality, secure, reliable, reasonably priced, DRM free OS with modest system requirements, you should try it.

Edited 2007-05-09 17:30

Linux huh? I thought we were discussing Windows differences but what the hell, a bit OT never hurt anybody.

Yeah, I use/administrate linux systems, gentoo specifically, everyday at work and I love it.
It's great for servers (It's the only system my company uses) and work-dekstop environment

On a HOME desktop though, I just want a multimedia workhorse, a "plug and play" system that I can run my games on, watch a movie and use a program or two without too much hassle. These tasks are still WAY less time consuming (and trouble free) on Windows. And on top of that I'm used to, and like, some of the Windows-only software I use daily. I just appreciate Windows for what it is - a great home system if you know how to set it up and maintain.

I've used Linux exclusively on my home desktop for 9 months just to see if I can switch completely... and it didn't work out for me. Not for anything big, but I just got tired of those little annoyances, like software compilations failing or misbehaving graphics drivers... and lack of my favorite games (no, cedega doesn't cut it - not even close).

I rather spend my free time doing things I like instead of fighting with the os to play that h264 encoded clip without eating all available cpu power or getting that latest and greatest 3d game to somehow work under wine.

@Ultimatebadass

I read your post twice. A properly configured gentoo box is a superior multimedia workforce than that of Vista.

I use Gentoo as my primary desktop so I am familiar with it. If compilation problems/misbehaving graphics cards are a problem to you. Why are you even attempting Gentoo?

", after 5 years and billions of development, that would be sad!"

Only three years of work; they threw out all the work they did on the XP codebase and switched to Server 2003 SP1 in mid-2004 in the Vista reset. Miguel de Icaza said they threw out 60% of complete bad quality code they had written at that point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista#Mid-2004_...
http://wsjclassroom.com/archive/06jan/bigb_microsoft.htm

Edited 2007-05-08 14:34

60 % != everything.
Therefore the development process took _more_ than 5 years. Add to that the fact several of the most advertised technologies didn't make it into Vista (and most likely never will materialize) despite having been worked on for more than 15 years.

If you take a look at the wikipedia article you linked to you'll see this statement: "Successive internal builds over several months gradually integrated a lot of the fundamental work that had been done over the previous three years, but with much stricter rules about what code could be brought into the main builds."

Therefore. More than 5 years of development (6 years actually not counting parts in development since before 1990 and yet to materialize).

C'mon, Like there's no bad code in open source. There are tons. Everywhere.

Or you checkout the sources of every oos you use? And peer review them? Sun's OpenOffice as well I guess

What you report at least shows that time has been used productively. I prefer one feature taken out, than a broken one...

Edit: fixed typo

Edited 2007-05-09 00:24

Haha, well we don't know what the quality of code in Vista is like, now do we, since it's closed source!

I haven't written ANYTHING about quality of code. Of course there is bad code in FLOSS. Some of it is horrible though I've seen some beauties as well (but some code has been horrible to look at... my eyes my eyes).

I merely responded to a poster incorrectly claiming that Vista hadn't been in development for more than 3 years. This is incorrect. It's been in development for more than 6 years. That's all I wrote. I never wrote anything about FLOSS being better. I only wrote Vista had been in development for more than the incorrectly claimed 3 years.

How you managed to turn that into a claim that FLOSS is alwaya better is a mystery to me. I wrote no such thing.

>>The only people that I know that critisize Vista to death are people who use open-source operating systems.<<

Not me. I know people who have used microsoft exclusively for the last 20 years, and they *hate* Vista.

Major complaints: too much obtrusive drm, doesn't burn dvds correctly, lacks essential drivers, and is too slow.

I don't know anybody who actually likes Vista. Most people I know just see no reason for it.

Major complaints: too much obtrusive drm,

What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?

"What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?"

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

"What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?"

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I'll repeat:

How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?
Say, I'm a Joe User. Provide an example of how I'm supposed to feel the obtrusive nature of DRM.

I got a phone call from a friend recently. He couldn't play his DRM protected (sic) WMA files. It came up with nice message though asking him if he wanted to buy *his* files again. This was on XP.

Now Vista downscales your content switches off drivers...and remember HD content hasn't even hit Vista.

And remember like WGA/Activation etc. etc this can change for the worse at any time.

I got a phone call from a friend recently. He couldn't play his DRM protected (sic) WMA files. It came up with nice message though asking him if he wanted to buy *his* files again. This was on XP.

Well, I was talking about Vista's DRM, not DRM in general. Personally I dislike DRM as much as everyone else, however lets put the blame where it belongs.

Now Vista downscales your content switches off drivers...and remember HD content hasn't even hit Vista.

At least you can play HD content on Vista, downscaled or not. You don't have that possibility on other OSes at all.

And remember like WGA/Activation

Some people here love to exaggerate the significance of WGA or activation, when in fact 99.999% of users never experience any problem with it.

sorry I don't really understand your statement. Vista had *more* DRM than every before.

It is true I can only play DRM unencumbered HD content. But you can save your money on Vista Ultimate+Blu-ray drive and buy a PS3 and have your computer run 33% faster. Or wait a couple of years and the player from your serial box.

I do not think in any way I imagine the significance of WGA/OGA/Activatation etc they are awful, and please could you reference that percentage, because that figure seems a little high, Linux adoption rate is a long way from hitting figures as high as that.

"I got a phone call from a friend recently. He couldn't play his DRM protected (sic) WMA files. It came up with nice message though asking him if he wanted to buy *his* files again. This was on XP. "


Either there was a bug or your friend maxed out the number of computers that was allowed on the DRM. Normally, you should be able to play the WMA song on a new computer by simply authorizing the new computer to play the song. For example, if you use WMP to play a song, if the computer isn't authorized for that song, WMP connects to the issuer of the DRM license (the place you bought the song from), prompts the user for username/password, retrieves the license and authorizes that computer. But if you've already done this with N computers (where N is the maximum computers that the DRM allows), then you have to deauthorize one of the other computers first.

The example you gave is not particular to Vista, as you even admit that it occurred on XP. And similar also occurs for iTMS songs played on OSX, XP, or Vista.


"Now Vista downscales your content switches off drivers...and remember HD content hasn't even hit Vista."

So Vista is simply implementing the DRM set down by the HD-DVD and BR disc content creators. This allows Vista to legally play protected discs. You'd rather not have that ability? Anyway, the "downscaling" issue isn't relevant right now. HD-DVDs and BR discs do not have the downscaling flag enabled, and won't until at least 2010. By 2010, many will have compliant HDPC (or whatever the acronym is) monitors, so it still won't be relevant even then. Also, OSX Leopard will do the same most likely (Apple is a member of BluRay Disc Association, and as such is even more in bed with the movie creators than is Microsoft).


"And remember like WGA/Activation etc. etc this can change for the worse at any time."

Again, this is not particular to Vista. XP has WGA/Activation.


So, if you would, please answer the GP's question. What is it about Vista's DRM in particular that is obtrusive to Joe User? How will Joe User feel this obtrusiveness in ways that he would not with XP or OSX Leopard?

@MollyC as always a great comment.

Absolutely, I'm glad you you pointed out that DRM is limited to a number of new computers. It highlights one of the things I truly love about DRM. It *only* begins to bite in the long term. I find it truly wonderful that WMP without selecting any option *contacts* someone, how serious is this spyware.

I'm pretty certain that Microsoft implemented DRM in its operating system as it saw fit. Unless your somehow trying to imply that a company that is prepared to happily the ignore the EU laws, is somehow scared of Hollywood...or that HD Blu-ray makers have intimate knowledge of the workings of the Microsoft OS., or they could have offered the consumer the right to *choose* whether to have a consumer OS.

Its true XP had activation, and I'm sure that false positives will continue. I'm sure you are aware of the extra limited imposed on an unactivated desktop....btw what was so great about XP's original spyware

"How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?
Say, I'm a Joe User. Provide an example of how I'm supposed to feel the obtrusive nature of DRM."

From the article:
"Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's ?The Dark Side of the Moon?, released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista (I'm just using SACD as a representative example of protected audio content because it's a well-known technology, in practice Sony has refused to license it for playback on PCs). Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista would disable it, and you'd end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd."

I am posting the link again, read it this time:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

"Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's ?The Dark Side of the Moon?, released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista (I'm just using SACD as a representative example of protected audio content because it's a well-known technology, in practice Sony has refused to license it for playback on PCs). Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista would disable it, and you'd end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink

Sure, because you can play SACD or other protected audio content on OSX or Linux. Oh, wait, you can't!

http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense

A computer belongs to it's owner, not MS. Drm/activation/WGA infection is unacceptable:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticle...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows.html
http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/167101037

Vista EULA is detestable:

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/29/microsoft_vista_eula_analys...

That's a horrible example. SACD doesn't play on Linux, XP, or the Mac OS. In the example you quoted, Vista is allowing SACD to play over a secure connection and (presumably) through attached speakers but not over an unsecure connection whereas NO OTHER OS IN THE WORLD LETS YOU PLAY SACD AT ALL.

By definition that is not obtrusive in comparison to anything else currently on the market.

"Vista is allowing SACD to play over a secure connection and (presumably) through attached speakers but not over an unsecure connection whereas"

If Vista regards the speakers as "insecure" for playing the "premium content", Vista would disable it. I guess MS decides what speakers you will use, it is not your computer, it is Microsoft's computer.

"NO OTHER OS IN THE WORLD LETS YOU PLAY SACD AT ALL."

Who cares? Who wants a DRM infected SACD?

"By definition that is not obtrusive in comparison to anything else currently on the market."

Disabling the use of "premium content" because MS does not like your speakers is not obtrusive?

Edited 2007-05-11 15:36

There is no obtrusive DRM, my DVD's burn fine, it has almost all the drivers I need at it's faster than XP. So my experience is exactly the opposite from what you have "heard".

I have three friends that bought brand new laptops with Vista; they "enjoyed" all the eye-candy and the "everything in another place" features and after two weeks, they all went back to Windows XP SP2.

As they said to me, XP SP2 feels lighter, faster and fulfills all their requests.

I use Windows XP and Windows 2003 at work, here at home I use Kubuntu and I prefer having 2 GB of RAM for MY USE instead of having the 2 GB of RAM for the OS USE.

I think you are pretty off the mark when you say the 2 gig ram for my use. Vista does not use it for itself but rather for apps and its all memory resident. Supre Prefetch. Bottomline, Vista out of box is bloated. If you use vLite and tweak it as speedyvista website suggest it can work extremely well. It is definitely an ugprade to XP however I wont use it till SP1. Then I will definitely switch.

Yeap, I know I am exagerating about the memory usage, but I do not see huge benefits on SuperFetch (TM); all your memory is allocated with applications the system thinks you are going to use some time on this session [I do not know the MS algorithm to determine what applications should be loaded; but the OS cannot be never totally sure that you are going to use those applications]; the process of loading applications into RAM consumes processor resources and makes access to the disk; turning your computer slower while this occurs (maybe "uselessly" if the applications are never going to be used on this session).

Anyway, if I need to launch another application into my system, the preloaded applications will be unloaded from the RAM [again, unnecessary memory deallocation and CPU consumption].

As far as I have experienced the caching into memory happens kind of silently. You wont even notice it....other than your RAM getting filled up!

Yeah, the caching to ram and hard disk doesn't slow down your system at all. In xp all that hard drive thrashing would but it isn't the case in Vista.

I think you have some misconceptions here... the OS has a priority scheme for both disk IO operations and memory pages. The pages that are loaded speculatively by SuperFetch are given the lowest priority when they are loaded, so they're the first to go if someone else really needs the memory more. Disk IO is also priorities, so if someone else wants to touch the disk, they get to go before SuperFetch, so the boot-time disk activity shouldn't make a difference.

Superfetch is not allocating and deallocating memory. This isn't like malloc() in C. Instead it's moving moving "pages" (4KB chunks) of data from the disk to the physical memory. Most of these pages are read-only (since they come from EXEs and DLLs), so dropping (you could conceptually think of this as "deallocating") pages costs nothing... you just overwrite the memory with the new page of data because the old page has not changed since it was read from disk. Unaccessed superfetched pages are dropped before any other pages on the system, so you really lose nothing from this optimization except for the memory and resources superfetch itself takes to maintain and run its fetch scenarios.

Superfetch is not preloading. It's totally different from the OOo preloader or anything else like that. It is actually a cache-warming system that's pretty advanced. If you'd like more info, look up Russinovich's article about it.

Vista uses the ram for your use. It just caches everything to it so it launches faster. When your apps or games need that ram it is instantly freed up for it.

Essentially what it does is make use of idle ram by caching to it before the pagefile. This is a good thing.

When the only people who criticize the dominant product in a given market are those with experience with other products, it makes you wonder...

FWIW, folks have been criticing Microsoft's practices and technology for far longer than Linux has been a popular alternative -- look in the Google Groups archives in the early and mid 1990's, for example.

Vista doesn't need to be special, it just needs to be. That's what you should expect from a stagnating monopoly.

Vista doesn't need to be special, it just needs to be. That's what you should expect from a stagnating monopoly.

Yeah sure. Welcome to 2007, most people know they have a choice (OS X, Linux, Windows). For now, most choose Vista. I suggest also you go read the wikipedia article on whats new in vista (Im not going to link it, its been linked here too many times).

Im happy dual boot XP and (quite happy) Ubuntu user (Im writing this from Ubuntu) and i call Vista a complete disaster (even worse than Windows ME) and best thing that happen to promote open source and Linux ever since its creation.

Thank you for telling. However, in order to raise this discussion to the level it deserve, would you care to explain _why_ its worse?

I will give you my arguments for Vista;

* Vista is NT based. Its made with security in mind, and is already proven to be quite secure.

(Secunia: The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Microsoft Windows Vista, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Not critical)

* Vista got great hardware support. Its loaded with tens of thousands of drivers.

* Vista is great for gaming with DX10(In my opinion, gamers run the IT market. Win the gamers, you win the market)

Thats just some.

Does Ubuntu have anything like Time Machine? I'm not aware of it shipping with anything similar (not that I've ever thought to look for such a thing)

Linux does have some simular alternatives, but nothing built into Ubuntu. It would however be a nice feature. Submit a feature request, it might get added

Being a gamer, I have to say:

Games run slower on Vista than XP in most cases.

You can't really call Vista secure yet as its been out for all of 5 months. When it has replaced XP, then the malware and virus writers will target it. Then we'll see if its secure. (it may be but you can't really know yet)

Hardware support is a bit fuzzy. I see lots of instances of companies not supporting Vista for older peripherals. Who wants to buy all new gadgets because they upgraded to Vista? Plus there were (might still be) major problems with Nvidia's driver.

DX10 isnt out yet. So how do you know its going to be great? Plus, I wonder how many DX10 games will be Vista only(Halo3 at least). Makes it pretty hard to compare when it wont run on XP.

Add to that the fact that I can tune XP down to use less than 64 megs of ram after a full boot, and you cant seriously argue that games will ever run as good on Vista. Not with all the DRM crap that is taking up resources in the background making sure you dont pirate stuff.

EDIT: Bad grammar

Edited 2007-05-08 15:08

Drivers are not really Vista's fault. Games run slow cause of crappy drivers mate.

I agree but I would like to mention that this argument is also often used against Linux and is also not fair. Thanks for bringing this up.

"Drivers are not really Vista's fault. Games run slow cause of crappy drivers mate."

Games run slow because of a crappy OS. 5 years and 6 billion dollars and this is what they have to offer people? Vista is an abomination, just use LInux.

The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_ubuntu7.04

Edited 2007-05-08 16:41

Thats right, don't use vista because games run slow, use Linux, where they don't run at all!

"Thats right, don't use vista because games run slow, use Linux, where they don't run at all!"

There are games for Linux:
http://www.tuxgames.com/
http://happypenguin.org/

People can also play games on a video game console. Who needs Vista?

A dearth of drivers is hardware manufacturers' fault.

"A dearth of drivers is hardware manufacturers' fault."

It is Microsoft's fault because they are forcing hardware manufacturers to make complex DRM infected drivers.

Read "Problems with Drivers" section:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#drivers

"Drivers are not really Vista's fault. Games run slow cause of crappy drivers mate."

The excuse does not work for Linux or any other OS. Hardware support is poor under Vista. And Linux does not have the same co-operation; 3rd party support; or cash enjoyed by Microsoft.

The interesting think is. Its still poor after 7 months release + significant time with beta versions floating around.

I've read excuses from hardware manufactures being blames to DRM to not optimized drivers.

There is something fundamentally wrong, and I think it starts with Microsoft trying to drive the hardware. Which is like the dog wagging its tail.

but seriously something is amiss.

Funny though. When a driver is missing for Linux MS-lovers always claim it is Linux' fault. Double standards anyone?

There is no DRM crap running the background. Nothing prevents you from pirating anything.
The ONLY time the DRM is active is when watching protected HD content. That's it. It doesn't monitor your illegal activities, it doesn't report them to anyone.

It's the same copy protection on protected HD discs that also affect your set top box and TV. If you don't play this on your PC you will never notice anything.

For me Vista is as fast as XP for gaming. But then I have an Intel chipset and ATI video card so I have good drivers. Nvidia users on the other hand are having problems. I don't blame microsoft for that but rather Nvidia.

This is wrong. Vista has a protected media path, preventing tapping into any of the content. Even if you're playing an unprotected video in WMP, the video and WMP are still actively protected from being recorded or modified. Vista checks regularly that it is not being tampered with, Patch Guard protects the kernal. There is an overall increase in background CPU usage solely for the DRM protections that go into Vista, protected content or not.

Even if you're playing an unprotected video in WMP, the video and WMP are still actively protected from being recorded or modified.

I don't use WMP and my CPU utilization while playing media content is the same as on W2K. Of course, there are absolutely no problems recording and modifying video.

Vista checks regularly that it is not being tampered with, Patch Guard protects the kernal.

RTFM, PatchGuard has nothing to do with DRM.

There is an overall increase in background CPU usage solely for the DRM protections that go into Vista, protected content or not.

Prove it with facts.

That's totally false. The Protected Media Path is opt-in based on a codec asking to run in that environment and being signed to do so. The level of protection provided by the environment is also up to the codec developer. The PMP is not used for unprotected media. Anyone running Vista can switch the recording endpoint to stereo mix or line out, open a wma/mp3/etc. in WMP, and record it in Sound Recorder or some other app. Likewise for video -- open an unprotected video in WMP and route the output to the input of a recording device or application, or just transcode the file or use it in an editor. It works no differently than any other OS.

Vista is a good gaming OS? What are you smoking. On the same hardware Vista is alower, takes longer to boot up, takes longer to shutdown, existing games run slower, often severely slower, and sometimes not at all.

No games currently use DX10, when they do, you'll be looking at 2GB realistic RAM requirements, if not 4GB for any serious gaming.

Sorry, what you've been sold is a polished turd.

On the same hardware Vista is alower,

On modern hardware Vista is faster.

takes longer to boot up

Roughly the same time or 2-5 seconds slower than XP (15 vs 20 seconds). Which is still considerably faster than OSX, not to mention Linux.

takes longer to shutdown

Rougly the same time, cannot discuss the exact times since I rarely boot or shutdown the OS -- sleep/hibernate works better.

existing games run slower

Can confirm this. It's shocking 5-10% slower, which is due to still not polished video drivers.

No games currently use DX10, when they do, you'll be looking at 2GB realistic RAM requirements, if not 4GB for any serious gaming.

No big deal, considering 2GB will be standart at the end of the year.

"On modern hardware Vista is faster."
Irrelevant, you avoided the statement. On the same hardware Vista is slower than XP, Ubuntu & OS X.

"Roughly the same time or 2-5 seconds slower than XP (15 vs 20 seconds). Which is still considerably faster than OSX, not to mention Linux."
Where did you pull this figure from?? A fresh install of OS X boots in 30-35 seconds and shuts down in 5-10 seconds. I ran Vista on the same hardware (1.83GHzCD 1.5GB RAM) and it took 1:30 to boot up and far too long to shut down, compared to 45 seconds to start with XP

"No big deal, considering 2GB will be standart at the end of the year."
Yes big deal. Having to upgrade solely because your OS is slow and bloated is throwing good money away. Where is the value in having to buy Vista, new RAM and the game, or a new machine entirely? You seem to have decided to stop thinking because you have money to burn.

I think what he means by the "modern hardware" bit is that given a lot of RAM, Vista will start up faster than XP. I don't know for sure if it actually is faster, since I haven't booted XP on the same hardware in a long time, but Vista does have some new boot-time caching technology to improve startup speed, but it requires at least a gig of RAM to be effective. One thing that is extremely noticeable on Vista is that the machine is quite responsive as soon as it's booted up. You don't get that 10-20 second bubble in which you can see the UI and watch programs start up in the systray without being able to do anything. The hard-drive will be going for longer than XP because of the caching, but actually launching programs during this period is fast.

I personally think OS X has great boot times and would not call Vista faster than it. On the other hand, I don't think Vista is significantly slower either. 1:30 for bootup is far too long. Take a look in the Event Viewer under Windows Logs->Diagnostics-Performance. That'll likely help you figure out what's causing your system to go slow.

Irrelevant, you avoided the statement. On the same hardware Vista is slower than XP, Ubuntu & OS X.

The statement is irrelevant. Who cares if its slower on P166MMX when dualcore CPU is $60 today?

Where did you pull this figure from??

Thats my own system stats. Granted its pretty fast, but even on four-year-old laptop with a 4200 RPM hard disk Vista boots in 40 seconds.

http://www.vistaclues.com/readyboost-performance-test/

I ran Vista on the same hardware (1.83GHzCD 1.5GB RAM) and it took 1:30 to boot up and far too long to shut down, compared to 45 seconds to start with XP

Definitely drivers or/and third-party software issue.

Yes big deal. Having to upgrade solely because your OS is slow and bloated is throwing good money away. Where is the value in having to buy Vista, new RAM and the game, or a new machine entirely? You seem to have decided to stop thinking because you have money to burn.

If you are gamer you have to upgrade not because of Vista (which itself uses just ~300mb), but because for upcoming games 2GB is minimum amount to play comfortably.

If I compere my own experiences with Xp and linux

The actual bootup process feels a bit slower on linux but that depends on how its messured
If we take into count that linux is detecting new hardware each time its booted and the fact that it dosn't load a couple of programs like antiviurus antispyware and a firewall which is often the case of any windows based machine, then Linux might ewen be faster to boot. Windows Xp detects new hardware when its booted up so sometimes the user has to deal with installing drivers for different fings and do at least one reboot before he or she can start to actual use the computer

so the question is:
Is the bootup process messured from the moment the user push the startbuttom to the moment he or she can start to use the computer, or is it messured from the startbutton is pushed to the moment in witch the user can type in their username and password?
Most windows XP users dont ewen have a username and pasword that needs to be typed in

It's only slower on benchmarks from BETA drivers several months ago. That's shocking! Nvidia drivers are still bad so performance is down a bit there but ATI users have the same performance as XP.

In fact anandtech has a review up showing oblivion running faster in vista than in XP.

4gb of ram is no where near a requirement. It's not even necessary. I speak from first hand experience.

do you mean this review http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917 I do hope so.

It states that sounds like 4gb to me.

Interestingly the article shows.

1) Networking performance is faster under XP (20% to 30% faster)
2) OS performace faster under XP (6% to 13% faster with graphics being 30% faster under XP)
3) for applications XP was faster in everything by between 5% and 20% with the *exception* of startup times thanks to readyboost; even *word* was faster.

With gaming your right Oblibion is a smigin faster. for quake4 25% slower. On 64bit vista half life 2 is 33% slower and thats on a AMD card.

Basically the results are in every single area apart from from application launch time your better ungrading 64bit Vista to 32 bit XP.

Edited 2007-05-08 17:41

Old article along with beta drivers. Things have improved since then though Nvidia still does have a ways to go.

For me everything is faster than XP on the same system, or at least the same speed. Everything. Even my latency has dropped in games.

I went from 2gb of ram to 4gb and noticed no difference. There wasen't much hard drive thrashing before and when it does happen it doesn't affect performance like it does in XP. And it's not a requirement. It's just there so superfetch can cache more to it. Nothing is hurt by not having it.

I am tempted to believe a benchmarked article than you. I only picked this article because you chose it. At the time of the article Vista had been out *2 months*, and nothing has changed now. Oddly enough the one benefit from Vista you say makes no difference.



It doesn't affect just affect Video it affects all applications and networking. *You* have actually made me look forward to Vista Server. I can't wait.Its important to note that the article *you* chose to is on an AMD card.

Vista is slower in *every* way than XP apart from application startup In many cases a third slower. Live with it.

Edited 2007-05-08 19:10

Vista is NT based. Its made with security in mind, and is already proven to be quite secure.

It's practically impossible prove anything to be secure.
Not many desktop or server programs come with Vista, so you may well compare its base install to OpenBSD's base install and see how that comes out in Secunia.

Vista got great hardware support. Its loaded with tens of thousands of drivers.

Funny how some people here give the exact opposite argument (I can't really say anything on that myself, as I don't use it).

Vista is great for gaming with DX10(In my opinion, gamers run the IT market. Win the gamers, you win the market)

Gamers don't care if their game uses DX10. They care if the game looks good. You don't need DX10 for that, in fact most contemporary games depend on DX9 and not 10. Also nothing says you couldn't get the same quality with OpenGL. Both are just a programming interface for the graphics card! (Granted that in the case of OpenGL you might have to use extensions as its API is developed to be clean and thus takes longer to mature)

I don't have much against Vista since I haven't used it, but really, do you have any arguments FOR Vista? I find that some people seem to have trouble articulating them, even if they do.

The Vista hardware support is less then stellar. I am using a Samsung ML-2010 laser printer I bought less then 6 months ago. Plugged it into my Kubuntu box and it autoconfigged quite nicely. I went to network share it with my friends at school. Xp would find it with the aid of a driver cd,no complaints. However, as of a few months ago, there were NO vista drivers for it, and the XP driver cd wouldn't work either...

This used to be true, but is less the case nowadays. The PC gaming market has become a fraction of the overall video game market, and more people are using PCs for productivity/Internet and consoles for gaming.

This used to be true, but is less the case nowadays. The PC gaming market has become a fraction of the overall video game market, and more people are using PCs for productivity/Internet and consoles for gaming.

I don't see this happening. The most popular subsets of games still don't map well to consoles: first person shooters, massively multiplayer games and strategy games. Plus, much of the PC gaming scene also revolves around the modability of games-- something consoles can't provide. In fact, from my perspective as a middleware developer, I see a rebirth happening in the PC game industry right now. Game development is slowing moving from large monolithic game houses to smaller studios. Linux has an opportunity to take advantage of this transition, but it will require a rather large effort to provide stable driver support and good tools for game development.

And yet it *is* happening. The PC market now represents perhaps 10% of the gaming industry. Don't take my word for it, read industry papers. Go to trade shows. For most of the biggest developers, PC gaming is an afterthought.



Apart from a few core titles (HL2, WoW, etc.), these genres simply are not as popular (in terms of sales) as many others found almost exclusively on consoles: non-FPS shooters, RPGs, sports games (including driving games) and so on. I believe you see these games as the "most popular" because those are the types of games you play, and from a PC gamer's standpoints those represent the majority of games, but in fact they arent. Check the sales figures.

I'm not even touching the Wii stuff, which is quite unique and is catching like wildfire among casual gamers...



Perhaps, though saying they *can't* provide it is not quite true - it would be theoretically possible. However, you're talking about a niche market here, not a mainstream one.



Well, it's certainly not dead, but as a game developer I don't see any particular changes in the basic trends that shape the industry right now.



Perhaps in your local area, but this does *not* represent the current global trend. On the contrary, the consolidation of development studios continues unabashed.

Note that this is not necessarily what I'd like...it's simply what's happening right now.



Honestly, I doubt it (and I'm a longtime Linux advocate). I think it's a strategic mistake to hedge any bets on Linux gaming (beyond casual gaming), though of course I'm not going to complain about any advances in that area.

I will give you my arguments for Vista;

Ok, you gave some good arguements but none that would convince me to upgrade from XP. It's NT based and I haven't had any securety problems. I haven't had any hardware problems and DX10 gaming isn't a big selling point.

Why, because everything than can be done on DX10 can be done in OpenGL without the Vista requirements (but with the appropriate hardware). As for DX10 games, you won't be able to take advantage of many of those features unless you're running top end hardware. And I don't mean top end hardware now, I mean top end hardware when those games are actually released.

And the desktop. It fails to impress me. I want application performance, not pretty widgets. Same argument goes for other OSes as well.

>>Yeah sure. Welcome to 2007, most people know they have a choice (OS X, Linux, Windows). For now, most choose Vista. <<

IMO: wrong about both:

1) People don't have a choice. People have to use the OS that runs their apps, and runs their hardware.

2) Most people don't chose Vista. Most chose to stay with XP.

Most people actually buy buy a new computer that comes preloaded with windows whether they like it or not since most pc vendors preloades it in there factories and dosn't offer any alternatives, accept for Dell who is starting to ship ubuntu-pcs in a short future.
But it remeins to be seen if they will put some money in marketing of these computers. I might ad that i live in Sweden.
All I've seen so far when it comes to advertiseing is "Dell rekomends windows Vista", not a word about Ubuntu on Dells swedish webbsite.
Most Linux users have bought a wndows based pc at one point in time and then domnloaded an linux iso file from the internet because of the lack of linuxbased pcs on the market. Things are starting to get better though.
Lets hope that HP and others are following Dells exemple.

I keep reading Vista reviews hoping that something will convince me that Vista is worth the money and effort to switch. As an enthusiast, I don't need much of a carot to convince me, but sadly, Vista fails to accomplish it.

It appears to me that most of the effort in producing Vista was spent attempting to drag a legacy of poor design choices into a truly novel and fresh OS. In so doing, it fails on many levels. To add insult to injury, MS demands a premium and couches choice in esoteric versions that leave users befuddled.

We need a clean break redesign. Not just a 2003 Server codebase wrapped in a shiny new face. Its time to rethink the PC architecture. It's become a deck of cards.

I'm absolutely with you. Great posting.

Microsoft could have done something useful and propellent to the PC world. They had it in their hands and they took all the time needed for it. But they failed on their own politics from yesterday.

Vista is a sad day for computing; the only thing I like about it is that it leaves field for the competition.

Does Tiger?

Not without a third party application but its a good one. Here's a link: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

There are some things that are kind of like it. rdiff-backup. I like BackupPC the best, though, it's like (uncrippled) Windows Home Server.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html#screenShots
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc

Also, VSC is only the ultimate, business, and enterprise version of Vista. THe version most home users will get doesn't have that feature.

See:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_editions.asp

There was something like moocow fs on slashdot a while ago that had versioning built in. OLPC also has a revision filesystem, someone should port it. ZFS and Reiser4 take snapshots...

EDIT: It's called "ext3cow" http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/0413253&threshold...

Edited 2007-05-08 14:15

How much RAM? Get at least a GB. Also try out the latest nVidia drivers. It really shouldn't be slower than XP on your hardware.

That is weird.

Compiz works fine on my Radeon 7200 (thank you open source ATI drivers, out of the box) which is six years old. Beryl works amazing (except for no water effect) on my 5 year old Geforce Ti 4200, even with Blur enabled when moving Windows.

For Eugenia's Ati Radeon x300, I wonder if she used the open source drivers or fglrx (only XGL)?

Edited 2007-05-08 14:32

>>Those that live in the Microsoft world are stuck, and can't/won't go elseware. Why? Lemmings menatlity.<<

IMO: that's not why. Think about what an OS does - it allows you to run your apps, and use your hardware. Without apps and drivers, what good is an OS? How many people run an OS just to run the OS?

And please understand, there are a lot more apps than just web-browsers, and mp3 players. There are tons, and tons, of specialized 3rd party apps that only run on windows.

It doesn't matter how good an OS may be. If people are not confident that the OS will run all the apps they will need - now and in the future - then that OS has no chance.

You must be a gamer, then.....

Well, I stay with (also) Windows for games. Also, all today's Linux users are former Windows users, so they are not as stuck as you suggest.

Also, I had to go back to my mates Windows laptop in order to use this MS office, because OOo can't do a very, very, VERY simple thing I need: That is printing power point slides , 3 on a page with commenting lines next to it - come on guys, what's up?!

I'm actually shocked; shocked that OOo cannot print a slide layout with commenting lines next to the handout page.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/11/printing_handou.html

oh you can. In fact its a template you can set it up as you want. Although I have to admit its a disgrace that its not the default template. I'm glad that you spent all that money on Office instead of say a wii + 10 games on Office to do something that took seconds to search for on google.

You guys can be really stupid around here at times, do you know that?? No, that's why I have to come back at times and tell you about it so that you can better yourselves. Why am I getting modded down on that perfectly valid observation?

It is not that the function is in your face or anything. After all, someome saw necessity to make a blog entry out of the issue, and the answer to it starts like this:

"Steve's question is in regard to one of the most unnecessarily complicated tasks in OpenOffice.org."

You, see, someone is in agreement with me that this is a very, very, VERY simple thing. Every student on this planet who actually does his homework relies on this function where slides are supplied.

Well, if you print in Windows, you get the options of the printer menu all the same, everywhere. In MS office, the printer menu offers the option, for OOo it doesn't - it is a fair assumption that you cannot do it. Actually, I suspected it might have to do with some sort of limitation of my 10 USD Canon printer driver, and so I went to university with potable OOo, but no luck. I did't buy office, I said I used my neighbour's machine, or did I not..? And in turn, you get modded up for that. Another good point in time to also point out again how wanting the modding function is aroun here, or how little you know how to use it.

Thanks for the link.

I know people who are now saving for a more expensive computer so they can run Vista... they're afraid of being "left behind".

I really don't understand this... MS products -hide- the way computers work from their users (example... shortcuts, "hide file extensions for registered file types", etc.) So how is updating Windows going to keep one from becoming technically "left behind"?

The author mentions "free", but not "freedom". As in the freedom of knowlege one gains the right to by using free software. This fact alone would stop me from using Vista, no matter how well it works.

IMHO too many of us are either brand-blinded into believing Windows is the only way, too dumb to think beyond the logo, too afraid to make the attempt to gain back control of the computer technology that's changing our lives (mostly for the worse), or simply too downtrodden and apathetic to care.

The things you said should be put in a manifesto of some kind. I agree 100%

(I commented from my IBM T40 Thinkpad running FreeBSD 6.1)

Go BSD!!!

For sure...T42 w/ FreeBSD 6.2

Wonderful system isn't it? Thirty years of bright people creating sensible software to solve problems and get your work done.

There was a delay on restoring!?

I think you are confusing machine here. Beryl was jittery on my desktop machine (Radeon 9000), as clearly said in the article. Beryl on the laptop (Radeon x300) flies.

I'm just little confused about why in Ubuntu on an X300 chip someone would want to use the proprietary driver. I thought all r300 with the exception of the onboard 480's where available to this, and the only one supporting AIGLX.

...? I don't understand you. My x300 certainly does not need the Ati drivers; in fact, it uses the open source driver. But, there are millions of people out there who do want the proprietary driver, and for them, my complaint is valid.

but isnt really a complaint that should be directed at Linux but at ATI

but isnt really a complaint that should be directed at Linux but at ATI

What? Did you read the article? The complaint was about Ubuntu's restricted drivers tool, which does NOT warn you that you need to enable the restricted repositories before you can actually use the damn tool.

So, unless that tool is made by Ati, my complaint is properly directed towards Ubuntu.

Really as it did inform me of that when I installed it on all 4 of my machines. Also the post before mine was about the driver not the tool.

From your article "All the effects had a delay and were jittery." That definitely says delay.



Then is say clearly proprietary drivers are not needed for the on the r300-400 chipsets. It may be millions, but for market share in Linux the r500-r600 chipset this is a small percentage.

You *fail* to mention that the majority of Microsofts market share; Those that run an intel chipset haven't a cats chance in hell of running areo.

Its easy to compare the two interfaces.

Aero
====
Will simply not run on the majority of machines without a decent 3D graphics card.

Beryl
=====
Will work on the majority of machines *even* with an onboard intel chipset. Still experiencing problems on some chipsets.

To say that Vista has a better implementation of backup because it doesn't require the use of a secondary drive is just bad journalism

If you are an 'IT Pro' *cough* than you would know that Previous Versions/Volume Shadow Copy can also backup to external or additional hard drives.

We use VSC on our servers exclusively to back up to secondary hard drives. You can choose a second physical disk or a different partition.

As an "IT Pro" (not), I can safely say VSC CAN backup to external media. I use VSC to backup to an external USB2.0 HDD weekly.

Ubuntu will not play on old hardware.

Then why does Ubuntu work fine on my IBM T23, with 256 MB of RAM?

It surely won't run Vista.

"Why is Vista Home never reviewed is it really so crippled it has to be ignored; Is Areo and other features so important to Vista. This does seem the only one of the three that I have *never* seen reviewed, and yet simply becuase Aero will not work on most legacy systems is memory and decent graphics card. Although if you need these you should perhaps be thinking of buying a new system anyway simply because this is not economical."

Yes, like I mentioned, Vista Home Premium is what's being sold on Dells and HPs. Home Premium does not have Volume Shadow Copy.

MS mitigates this with its Vista Anytime upgrader, but that does mean shelling out more cash.

Home Premium has Volume Shadow Copy. Just not the explorer interface for it. Apps can still take advantage of it.

It was first introduced in XP (the service).

Edit: XP confirmed.

Edited 2007-05-08 15:22

Linux is different from Vista in that it truly is a moving target. What was true of Linux 6 months ago is not true now.

I haven't run gnome for over a year and my experience in 256mb was bad enough to move to XFCE; although I ran KDE Lite with no problems, but settled on XFCE because it suited *me* better.

I know there was efforts to slim down memory usage in gnome and several notable articles were posted at the time. I just do not know how successful their efforts were.

I suspect from your and Thoms conflicting opinions that 256mb is borderline for Gnome, but realistically there are benefits to having more.

I hope that when Ubuntu ships on Dell computers they have the good sense to include at least 512mb of memory , as I believe that this is needed for a *good* experience of Linux+X+Gnome+OpenOffice+Firefox, and dell are notorious for skimping on things like memory. Their XP machines showed how well XP worked on little memory for 6 months then slowly ground to a halt. Ubuntu does not have that problem, but I would hate to see New Linux Dell users being given a poor first experience of the Linux platform.

Then see what happens when you try to teach him everything about linux!

I suspect the reality that regardless of how sharp he is, he just can't get into a new mindset about certain things, so it may not matter much which OS you place in front of him: he'll still remain perpetually perplexed. The exact details about what hangs him up may differ, but the overall pattern is likely to remain.

These days, I'm not convinced your father would be any better with a Mac with OS X because it has become of a similar complexity level with non-obvious things.

"Then see what happens when you try to teach him everything about linux! "

Thanks for answering. He basically uses a lot Firefox for browsing and email (Yahoo). Sometimes he needs to listen to music and he needs to find them in the harddrive, which is hard for him to do, as Windows Explorer can have so many folders and subfolders... He also uses his digital camera for taking pictures and films, and he needs to find them when they are synchronized to the harddisk. Eventually he needs to edit some photos, resize them for sending by email attaches, and so on. He also plays a couple of games online, mainly chess on Yahoo and a pool game called Carom3D. Sometimes he wishes he could denounce other Carom3D gamers who misbehave, as when he gets out of his mind and misbehaves himself, he is denounced and banned from the game for a few days or even a few weeks...

But all of this is so hard and frustrating on him and on me, as I can't teach him everything and make him remember them when he needs them.

You are right that any O.S. would be hard, but I find Windows has failed so far, because he has been on it for the last three years and it's still hard for him. Windows XP, BTW.

And what part of "shortcuts on the desktop" doesn't solve the file problem?

His desktop has plenty of icons and even shortcuts already set. The problem is that unless it is really comprehensive, it doesn't fix the problems I am afraid.

Also when he downloads files as in email attaches they go to the desktop. If he could organize things by himself, I am sure it wouldn't be a problem, as he would already understand more what is going on... Think for instance every time he needs to browse for a file, in those file opening windows... Unless the shortcuts were all there as well, in a comprehensive way, he would have problem navigating the directories to find what he needs...

Let's say, the more the O.S. organized the things and made them straightforward by default, the less the user would need to learn about what's going on to get things done.

The O.S. needs to behave well by default.

BTW, sometimes when he is playing Carom3D, the dialog of the antivirus is activated on the background and the game window is "minimized", and he needs to click back on the taskbar game window button to go back to it and resume it.

These little annoyances can be stressful, like those windows asking for updates of programs, or Windows taskbar messages warning the user of something...

Where downloads are stored by default can be changed and is a feature of the browser, not the OS. So that's easy to fix, even if it's a mess by default.

And as for the antivirus thing stealing focus, that's a poorly-written app (like most). There have been discussions regarding whether a window manager should even allow that, but it often comes down to a couple of annoying apps that should stay in the backgroound and don't. For that reason alone you might want to consider a more well-behaved antivirus/antispyware suite (or a more limited access account on the machine to preclude the need for it; that works for my parents for the most part, and they're power users among their age group).

As for organizing files... well, even the best of us get lost in our own directory stacks now and then, and it takes concerted effort to keep it organized. Maybe the OSX- and Vista-style searching (often denoted by the Mac name "Spotlight") makes that simpler. There are utilities to recreate that in XP and on Unix-like systems. Hope that helps.

Well, I ran Vista RC1 on my AthlonXP 1700+ and it garnered me a 1. After adding a Radeon 9250 (I believe), that gave me a 2.....Aero never ran right. Probably bad drivers.

In order for that to make sense, you have to justify the extra "stuff" that Vista is doing that XP is not. For many, running Aero and UAC is not enough.

Furthermore, why is it that as the Mac OS advances, the code gets optimized and future versions run BETTER on older hardware, whereas with Microsoft, successive versions require you to DOUBLE the minimum requirements?

It's not that we don't buy into the system needing more resources, it's just that we need a valid explanation of WHY. Decoding DRM on the fly is not a good reason for me to have to add 1 GB of RAM for equal performance.

In order for that to make sense, you have to justify the extra "stuff" that Vista is doing that XP is not. For many, running Aero and UAC is not enough.


If by Aero you mean completely redesigned multimedia toolchain, where audio, video, and yes, desktop rendoring, performs significantly better and in a modern fashion, and by UAC you are including the myriad security technologies that bring windows from the travesty that was XP to one of the most secure operating systems out there, you have still only scratched the surface of the improvements done to the os.

Furthermore, why is it that as the Mac OS advances, the code gets optimized and future versions run BETTER on older hardware, whereas with Microsoft, successive versions require you to DOUBLE the minimum requirements?


OSX.0 was a half done, unusable piece of garbage. It took 3 major revisions (that users had to pay for) to get to the point where it usable, and another one to get to where it was polished. comparisons between 10.3 and 10.4 are unfair, this is the jump from 9 and 10, and if you remember, that wasnt anywhere NEAR as pleasent as the XP to Vista shift has been. Lets see what happens when SP1 comes out, my guess is it will improve performance while adding features (like 10.1), just windows users wont have to pay for it like apple users did.

It's not that we don't buy into the system needing more resources, it's just that we need a valid explanation of WHY. Decoding DRM on the fly is not a good reason for me to have to add 1 GB of RAM for equal performance.

I don't understand that argument. Vista DRM capabilities give users the CHOICE of being able to use modern media. If you don't want to play HD-DVDs, you dont have to, but you are able to, and legally. The ironic thing is this comes from linux users more often then not, who (unless they bought the linspire dvd player) are currently unable to play normal DVDs legally on their OS, which Vista does out of the box.

But, to get off of DRM, there is a hell of alot going on. When I first installed Vista, VS took as long to launch as it did on XP. Now, it takes as long to launch as firefox. After a bad install, I was notified there was a registry problem, and how to fix it. Any time there are changes to the way the system operates, I am notified. There is a (functional) firewall. The network stack self-optimizes, so I can get the best bang for my buck without manually messing with internal settings no matter what kind of connection I use.

All those things are RAM intensive, and those are just thing things that *I* notice, every day.

The word you are looking at is slower; available to a minority of desktop owners.



I think the CHOICE people wanted was whether DRM was included or not. Because its effects are further reaching than those of being able to play modern media.

The word you are looking at is slower; available to a minority of desktop owners.

I experience less latency with audio apps, video rendors better with less resources then XP, and the desktop is far smoother then XP. Resizing windows even on a modern system with XP results in visible repaints, passing a window over a video with xp leaves a trail of blue behind it, and when an app is overloaded and stops responding, passing a window over it leaves a trail of garbage. I'm not even talking aesthetics, I'm talking capability.

I think the CHOICE people wanted was whether DRM was included or not. Because its effects are further reaching than those of being able to play modern media.

No actually, it isnt.

http://www.xkcd.com/c129.html

I certainly want the CHOICE of drm or not. People in general were never made aware of the choice, or that there even is a choice.

Vista x64 is worse than XP because it makes hardware subjugate to the *AA/MS/IBM/EDS, sony and the content producers. Perhaps not of note in a 1 of N, 5 month review; but it is important longer-term because we need the freedom to understand the products we buy and own.

If I did run !vista, and the machine is technically capable of playing HD, why are you all so comfortable, or at ease, with it being artificially crippled ? Because that is what vista and hdcp do. They let MS coerce artificial-technical-obsolecence by legal and licensing means.

Oh, on a separate note, 500 euros no apps ! huh ?

You are not being forced into buying DRM protected content, or DRM protected hardware when you install vista. You can happily run vista, and deal with DRM as little as if you were running linux.

HOWEVER

if you run linux, you are stuck with open formats, which while technologically comparable, are completely unsupported by commercial industry. That means that if install linux, you do not have the choice anymore of viewing media you legally bought. the reason? the lack of support of drm media.

So, lets reiterate.

Vista: the ability to choose whether to view drm media or not view drm media

Linux: no ability to (legally) view the majority of commercially supported formats.

Which one of these options offers choice? The argument on the evility of protected content is a completely and totally different issue, the fact of the matter is that it is here, and vista gives you the option of buying in, or not. linux doesnt.

No please let me reiterate.

Vista: Has Trusted Computing; Built into the OS; You can only view HD Protected content through a major upgrade in hardware or which a small number of computers on sale support. Your Protected(sic) media causes your computer to pass information to a third-party, which can change at *any* time though an update. With any false positive crippling your machine; The ramifications of this go *beyond* that of the OS itself to the hardware which comes with exiting technology.

Linux: buy a Chinese HD-player.

Which of these offers choice *Linux*. Linux has offered the choice of buying an OS that is not crippled by DRM

Some people do not think those things are worthy of a $249 UPGRADE price tag. Security can be implemented, if not well supplemented, with user knowledge, and for many the audio and video capabilities in XP are "good enough."



No one paid from 10.0 to 10.1. 10.2 Jaguar was perfectly useable. That's ONE paid upgrade. Panther got the system mature, and Tiger took it to a whole new level, no different than Windows 2k and XP did to the systems at that point in time, and those were all paid upgrades. It sounds to me like Leopard will surpass Vista at a minimum, and certainly offer many new features. And it sounds universally accepted that Vista will need SP1 (which we expect to be free) to iron out all of the rough edges, so the comparison is even less sucessful in illustrating the point. A little less poetic license there would be more accurate.

No system is perfect, but to suggest that as other systems perform better as they are optimized that Microsoft shouldn't be subjected to that same rule i ludicrous.

Some people do not think those things are worthy of a $249 UPGRADE price tag. Security can be implemented, if not well supplemented, with user knowledge, and for many the audio and video capabilities in XP are "good enough."


Agreed, which is basically what I stated one or two posts above this one. Hell, if win95 is good enough for you, then stick with it.

No one paid from 10.0 to 10.1. 10.2 Jaguar was perfectly useable. That's ONE paid upgrade. Panther got the system mature, and Tiger took it to a whole new level, no different than Windows 2k and XP did to the systems at that point in time, and those were all paid upgrades. It sounds to me like Leopard will surpass Vista at a minimum, and certainly offer many new features. And it sounds universally accepted that Vista will need SP1 (which we expect to be free) to iron out all of the rough edges, so the comparison is even less sucessful in illustrating the point. A little less poetic license there would be more accurate.

Im sorry about the .0-.1 free upgrade, I jumped off the apple boat with .0, and jumped back on with .3.

The Big Deal with Tiger is going to be Time Machine, which started for windows in server 2k3, but is now in Vista. I still believe OSX to be more usable (which is far more important then feature set), But vista and tiger are pretty comparable now.

Apart from the pay-for upgrade comment on .0-.1, I think what I said still stands, Vista now is alot better then what apple gave with OSX.0. The purpose of the whole rant in the first place was because the comparison between the xp-vista upgrade should be os9-osx, not osx.4-osx.5.

No system is perfect, but to suggest that as other systems perform better as they are optimized that Microsoft shouldn't be subjected to that same rule i ludicrous.

That again, is the crux of what I was saying. We will see now what MS does with the vista codebase, but comparing a major upgrade with a minor one makes no sense.

"Time Machine, which started for windows in server 2k3, but is now in Vista."

Only Enterprise, Business, and Ultimate have Volume Shadow Copy. How does 400 dollar Ultimate compare to ~200 dollar Mac installs (one edition too, no?)? Ronaldst told me that the service runs in XP and up but I've never found a nice GUI to give me access to it as those editions do, so I nor the average user can't use it.

The context of that statement was that tiger was going to be ahead of vista with features. The fact remains that it already exists on vista, if only on the high end versions. And the vista gui is a hell of alot nicer then the song and dance you will get on tiger.

Not Saying that 10.0 wasn't a piece o' garbage, but 10.1 was a free update to 10.0 users, actually.

Yeah! I remember the same argument over DOS versus Windows 3.0/1 (am I showing my age?).

The problem with this argument is that Vista (arguably) has no clear superior or new features that warrant the upgrade from XP. Pardon me but beryl 0.2 on Feisty makes Aero pale in comparison. And Ubuntu performance with beryl is stellar (for me at least!).

Those who speculate that Vista SP1 will be the real OS MS should have released, well - I hope they are right anyway.

I remember it too ;-) Thats why I brought it up, people don't seem to understand that to do alot more requires more resources.

When you fire up Vista, the only new features you see are the backup/imaging stuff, the shadow copy stuff, and of course, Aero. When you use it for several months, you realise theres alot more going on. Just read my last post to the other guy for a list of the stuff that I use it for.

As for Beryl, quite honestly, I hate it. The Vista effects are subtle, and under a quarter of a second, which is exactly how such things should be. I like subtle alot more then clicking minimize, and waiting 5 seconds as the window slowly drips into my taskbar. Maybe Beryl is paying more attention to such things now, but last time I used it it was a flashy "Look what we can do!" thing. What I want for every day use is more of a "With great power, comes great responsability" approach when it comes to desktop effects. In this, Vista is my favorite, even above mac, which I usually praise up and down for being the best desktop os on the planet.

IMHO, this is the second win95 release MS has done, where they do a massive jump from downright archaic technology, to leaping a year or two behind where apple is.

As for SP1 being a savior, I guess it depends on how things work for you. Vista behaves very differently for different people, for me performance is flawless, and there are only a handful of minor issues I with it, which is well in the bounds of what one expects from a new os. For others, performance is awful, its crashy, nothing works right, and they hope sp1 fixes that.

You can tweak the window animations to last as long as you want. Perhaps the version you tried didn't have good defaults set, however changing the speed at which these animations play is trivial.

As for flash, Beryl gives you the option, at least. With Aero, it's take it or leave it. I like subtle animations too, and the Exposé clone "Scale" is extremely useful.

Just because you don't like the defaults doesn't mean that the whole application is terrible. In fact, due to its open nature and the fact that it can be customized just the way I like it, I find Beryl to be much more advanced that Aero is.

I never said terrible, I said I hated it ;-)


Maybe its time to give beryl a try again, things like that have a way of doing quantum leaps very quickly on linux, and i'll refrain from giving more of an opinion on it till I try a newer version.

Here is a quick demo I made of beryl under fiesty...

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/566101/ubuntu_7_04/

The cube animations and the window minimization effect is not smooth. Is this the way it actually is, or was I seeing an artifact of the video capture?

If you really were platform agnostic you would probably download one of those 100's of disto's and give it a go.

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/ is what people rate. I didn't like it, but its whats happening

I was just asking a question, man... not attacking your OS.

Frankly, I don't care enough about UI to try out a linux distro just for that. When I'm using linux, it's mostly from a virtual console or at most a Konsole.

I don't care what other people use. I'm just interested in seeing the good engineering win out over the bad. I also like to look at and think about the different approaches groups take and the eventual outcomes.

If you were platform agnostic which this post has removed all doubt that you are not. The most exiting technology today is the compositing desktop. Beryl/Compiz and is one of Linux's killer applications...any you have not even tried it. I think you handle is poor subterfuge. I would be *astonished* is someone like yourself could not have a working composite Linux desktop in under an hour.

Well, I picked up this handle a couple years ago. I was a lot more agnostic then than I am now. I'd have to say that I really don't like the UNIX philosophy of splitting things up at weird points. For example, I don't think the X-server to X-client divide is in quite the right place (I'd put the toolkits into the X-server side of things because that's likely to lead to better performance). But I think this limitation is going away because we're now just redirection all X calls down to the OpenGL implementation (essentially cutting the X server out of it entirely except for the very basic tasks of managing window positions and telling the GL layer where to overlay its stuff). I'm wonder how network transparency is going to be implemented under this system once the toolkits start using GL directly in their rendering paths (looks like it's going to be a disaster). This sort of architectural issue is what I'm interested in... not "ooh! shiny!"

So, yeah... I took up your "challenge" and got compiz working in OpenSuse. It took me a little over an hour to get it working (no problems with OpenSuse or anything... it just took some time to get the GTK stuff since I'm a KDE user and the settings manager is Gnomeish). Thankfully, I edited no config files (I consider config files to be stupid... human intelligence isn't required to produce a config string, so that should be done by some simple gui which presents you with all the options so you don't have to look them up or remember them).

Sure, you've got wobbly windows, a cube virtual desktop, and nice fade-ins, but I really don't think this is killer in any market. I don't have any details on the Quartz extreme implementation, but I know that the Vista 3d-rendered desktop has a much more complete story than compiz around technical issues that are more difficult than making windows wobble.

One thing that people like you simply don't realize is that the DWM system tries to solve more problems than Compiz/Beryl:

* For one, there's an attempt at resolution independence by scaling all old apps up to a bigger size before compositing them onto the desktop. The work needed to make this happen smoothly with old apps was huge because you need to also scale the mouse movements and menu positions and just about everything else... sometimes in non-obvious ways.

* Second, the DWM is actually part of the WPF system (so technically it could have been enabled for XP, but it's likely not reliable without the WDDM). The way it works is that old-style rasterized windows (the ones you mostly see today) are redirected to the DWM process which then applies them as a texture to the global scene graph of the system (through milcore.dll). On the other hand, WPF applications talk to milcore.dll directly and their scene graph is known to the system. All of this stuff is forwarded to the Universal Composition Engine which renders it to the screen. What this means is that old-style apps, video, and new vector applications are all rendered in one place by a component which locks its updates to the screen refresh rate and which can render the scene graph multiple times to make thumbnails and magnified copies. Compiz can do some of this, but it is not integrated with any vector libraries, AFAIK, so you can't get resolution independence (look at a WPF app under magnifier... all the edges are hard and the fonts are gorgeous).

*The Universal Composition Engine is also designed with network transparency in mind. It sends vector commands over to the Remote Desktop Client when possible, to be rendered by the client's UCE or in software by the client. I'm not sure at what level of granularity the visual tree can be offloaded.

*Vector animation and video support is built directly into the UCE. This leads me to believe that we'll see reasonably-performing animations over network links (not likely with video). A major advantage of this method is that both video and animation is locked to the video refresh rate (as long as the CPU can keep up), so it should be smooth without over-updating and unnecessarily burning cycles.

The key advantage I see of the Vista architecture over the older X architecture is that it puts the "server" at the right end of the pixel divide. As much as possible, modern Windows applications will be sending compact vector data down to the "server" through IPC or over a network, which will produce much more voluminious pixel data either in software or in the video card hardware. This is an efficient way to use the system's bandwidth. The X method of pushing pixels from the apps to the server is far more inefficient. This is why Gosling built NeWS and why X really should just go away.

Look, cyclops, compositing is really not that interesting. There's a lot more depth to explore here, that is simply not even attempted in the Linux world. If you'd like to discuss this seriously, I'll pay attention to replies.

So the names is subterfuge glas thats out of the way

I'm glad your interested in the architectural issues and have...nothing to say.

Wow you got Suse up and running in just over an hour with a compositing desktop. Go Suse installs.

I'm glad you don't think a compositing desktop isn't a killer application. Yet Microsoft Marketing half a billion WOW(sic) launch will tell you different. Or the constant stream of news coming about Beryl. Or the simple fact that nobody is buying Vista home. Clearly your in the minority.

DWM ok...WPF...go..on Universal Composition...so it isn't network transparent just sends vectors go on. Go on Vector Animation...go on awww.

So what your saying is for Vector animation, and a transparent desktop and zooming. Vista is better. OK. Think about that for a moment. Think about the zoom. Think about advantages, now lets compare bitmap vs vector graphics. I think thats like on page one of every computer book. Now apply that to a compositing Desktop.

Are we there yet. Have we had a little think. I'm glad becuase after all the the one thing that remains is this Linux with a compositing desktop will work with an onboard Intel chipset the most common graphics chipset in the world and allow greater customization, and advancements that add to real users usability for example turning off the wobbly windows and using edge resistance instead...Which is the better implementation?

Now I do think that comparing X to Windows and calling one of them old is not just a little bit silly. Don't shame yourself. We both know that this is all new code build on an old engine for both. The only difference is is Vista's implementation is going to be stuck how it is for the next 2-5 years and X+AIGLX/XGL+Compiz/Beryl will continue to evolve. I know which I'd call more interesting. The one thats not getting older every day.

Seriously which works on an onboard intel chipset, and which curls up and dies.

It is smooth in action
it is slow and jerky as it is converted from .ogg to .avi for metacafe

I made a new one http://www.metacafe.com/watch/568086/ubuntu_with_beryl/

Or, open the start-menu, type msconfig, go to the Boot-tab, and check Make all boot settings permanent.

What I don't like about Vista is the lack of a proper and usable Office suite, installed along with my Windows Vista ...

Really? I double-clicked the OpenOffice installer, and within minutes had a free, perfectly usable office suite.

By the way, I want to thank the Microsoft people for a well done job, but can anyone tell me how I can write proper DATA CDs with my computer, without having to install a third party program. Mind you, we'd probably better use DVDs.

Ah. Perhaps you should click the "Help me choose a disc" link that pops up when you right-click a set of files and "Send to-> DVD/RW", or select "Burn" from the explorer interface.

The "Disk Burning FAQ" is quite complete, and goes into detais on the differences between "Live File System" (lousy name) or "Mastered" (which is ye olde ISO format, ie, what you're looking for).

While it may surprise people used to .hlp/.chm files from the distant past, the help system in vista actually works, and is light years ahead of anything in linux-land. While OSX has clear documentation, I think Vista has it beat on thoroughness.

You must have missed the part where it said he wanted it working "Out of the Box"...

You must have missed the part where it said he wanted it working "Out of the Box"...

Not really. I don't consider *any* operating system to work "out of the box".

Give me an office suite, a browser with flash and java plugins, accelerated video drivers, working multimedia codecs-- I'll consider that a basic package.

Then keep in mind that for that to work "Out of the box", you're either running a Windows OEM install, a loaded OS X install, or a violation of the terms of the GNU Public License (v2 or later), which doesn't forbid you from making it work, but it forbids distribution of the components in a "just works" fashion.

Oh, and I'll have to track down printer drivers as well as various other drivers regardless of OS. Some of that will be on the hard drive, some on the install disk, some of it will require browsing the web.

Against all that, browsing to http://mozilla.org/firefox and http://openoffice.org are fairly trivial operations (Less so since I tend to keep recent versions on my file server).

Not quite. It's illegal to distribute pre-linked drivers, but there's nothing preventing the drivers to be built and install during the user's first boot. To the user, it will seem as if it "just works", even though his interaction (a simple click) would be required at some point.

The way Ubuntu 7.04 does it is also good, i.e. suggest automatic installation of proprietary drivers when you want to activate desktop effects.

As for printer drivers, they're likely already installed, but it's true that this sometimes requires downloading and installing (with Windows as much as with Linux).

Because is saving energy, it is normal in Laptos.

The funny thing is, the salesperson says the model comes with an Intel Core2 Duo T5600 Processor, not T7200. Besides, I've switched back and forth between the "device manager" and "system" view several times, the former says it is a T7200 processor and the latter says it's a T5600. I don't think it has anything to do with the processor "switching speed" automatically to save energy...

Intel probably just mapped the wrong string to the device display name for their CPU driver. The difference you see between device manager and the system properties dialog is that the string in device manager is the display name for the driver and can be anything, whereas the system properties dialog reports the actual CPUID string.

You can check the System Information app or type systeminfo at a command prompt for another way of getting the actual CPU details.

Thankfully, the crippleware that is DRM hasn't yet infested other platforms.

This scheme goes against the 'free' ideals of Linux, not to mention the universal concept of 'fair use'...remember that?

Steve Jobs also seems to be increasingly opposed to it and will be taking some positive steps to disentangle Apple from the DRM mess, so all may not be lost (admittedly more with audio than video).

Edited 2007-05-09 08:02

That is not low end hardware. That memory is more than most machines have today and the graphics card is faster too.

I actually think that Windows does force obsolescence which is good for the tech industry.

Microsoft killed off their competition, and gave up even competing. I believe that whole monopoly problem didn't help either. They even disbanded the Internet explorer team. Vista is awful, and I think its awful because of the time they spend protecting their monopoly rather than being the best. OpenOffice won the day they stared running around trying to protect their formats. The patent nonsense which they supported is so obviously going to backfire on them. The patent infringement allegations are starting to slowly creep in. Linux+OpenOffice+Firefox is at worse being used as a negotiating tool. Consoles are now Supercomputers

They have stuck CPU architecture on an x86 platform, and with DirectX changed the direction of graphics innovation. Microsoft have stopped time.

The first person, who breaks the Microsoft Timewarp will be very rich, and I hope someone does soon becuase using a computer is about the same as that as 95 and the thought is very depressing.

Well said.

However, one thing everyone here seems to have missed, is that there are a lot of Vista users trying to cmoe up with a good enough reason to justify the purchase in the first place.

As everyone here knows, I am a linux user at heart, but I also have to use Windows XP, Vista, OSX and Solaris for work, I have a machine with XP and another twin machine with Vista. They both have amd 3ghz, 1gb ram and fx5500 cards.
XP whips vista in everything. Not just games. EVERYTHING

I honestly do not think SP1 can fix it.

Well unfortunately for you; DRM is unpopular with well...just about everyone its not just FSF its people who legally purchase products...customers. They are even willing to pay more for DRM Unencumbered material. Look at the new iTunes offerings.

You can try and dismiss groups like the FSF as much as you like, but increasing people are beginning to want extreme things like *fair use*.

The response against DRM is going mainstream, and has been for some time.

I don't dismiss the FSF, I ridicule it. It has yet to all that much substancial (other then the venerable emacs), while its more moderate offshoot movement, the OSF has actually started changing the world. The reason that noone ever listened to RMS and his band of merry men is that they didnt make sense, they take their beliefs to far, and they live in the aforementioned fantasy world of my last post.

As I mentioned before, DRM can be misused, just like the patent system is being misused. That doesnt mean that its not downright essential, it means that it is being misused.

We live in the day of digital media, and the old-school media dinosaurs are very slowly embracing new technology as a method of content delivery. But how are people supposed to make money in the traditional ways in a world where anything can be copied an unlimited amount of times without losing fidelity, and distributed globally with unprecidented efficiency? To say that our current industries can exist in a digital world without DRM is absolutely ludicris.

We have a choice, either we give up on our existing models, which means no more big budget movies, no more movie theaters, no more movie/book/music stores, or we come up with a form of DRM that both protects the rights of the creator, and the rights of the consumer. You say the response against DRM is mainstream, but most people like things they way they are now, they just want to be able to steal with ease, while hiding behind an alternative ethical stance. I completely disagree with this, and even if I am sympathetic to the whole creative commons revolution thing I just described, the fact is that we havnt even taken the first step in that direction. Even if we move away from our current centralized big business model of content creation, it will take decades to come to a point where DRM truely doesnt exist. But as it stands now, all it takes is to remember kazaa, or just visit the pirate bay to realise why drm is a nessicity today.

I think you don't get it

DRM is not about Richard Stallman or even Linus.

If you think that talking about them makes you feel better feel free to carry on. Clearly you need to work on your ridiculing.

Nobody likes DRM; Nada; Nobody at all, and when I mean nobody I mean consumers; customers; potential buyers...and thats well everyone.

I'll tell you a little secret how you make lots of money is you make it good; cheap; and readily available product.

...but again its not about Dick and his merry band who talk about freedom its the Billions who don't want DRM.

DRM is the arch-nemisis of RMS, and he has a burning, vitriolic hatred for it that he does his best to pass on. Linus is a highly respected, and more objective engineer. Pointing out those two things illustrates there is more then one viewpoint in the FOSS world.



Of course they don't, DRM by definition restricts their use of a product. But to look at only one side of the coin is kind of shortsighted.


People are willing to jump through all kinds of hoops to get a 15$ product for free. Heres a few game examples (just the part of the industry I know the most about, results of a misspent youth ;-)

Look at the game dev house, G.O.D. (gathering of developers). They did high quality, innovative, fun games (without drm) that sold between 15-20$. They were an small shop, and they figured that if they used your equation, they would succede. Every gamer knows about mafia, or the serious sam games, they were real popular. But because of the ethics of people nowadays, they went out of business. People were playing their games, but noone was buying.

Another game example would be Loki in the linux world. They would go and make deals with companies to port older games to linux. They did a good job, and charged very little, while providing kickass support. Again, they went out of business, because noone was willing to pay money. Ironically, a similar company called MacPlay has been successfully doing this for years on the macos platform. For some reason, mac users are the exception to this rule of universal cheapness (or at least they used to be back in the day.)

Last but not least, Id games, with the most high profile gaming-on-linux supporter out there, John Carmack. From day one, he said OGL fit the requirements, and it was worth developing and supporting linux, as bringing games to multiple platforms is a Good Thing. Id is a really cool company when it comes to this stuff, and carmack was constantly touting the awsomeness of OGL and how they would alwas support linux.

This went right up to Doom3. By the time D3 hit development, he had so many issues with OGL not doing what he needed it to do, they blew deadline after deadline. After finally getting the game out the door, with a simultanious linux release, it sold so poorly on linux that John completely lost his way. Now Id is a MS house, John praise DX all the time, and is alwas talking about how great it is to write for the xbox.

Proper DRM could have prevented the first two cases from happening. G.O.D would have made money using your formula, and Loki would have gotten the miniscule amount it needed to survive. The reason people hate DRM is because without it, they can get things without paying for them without consiquences. This is also the attitude that has prompted a significant amount of growth for linux desktop use, which is what the third story is there to illustrate.

All that to say, behind all the moral bluster most people just want a free lunch, both in the DRM argument, and in the rightousness of using FLOSS.

You have been reading too many comic books. Dick and Linus read from the same hymnsheet, although one is political and the other from the development model. Thats it in a nutshell. Although I love the emotive language. Wonder why someone who doesn't use Open-source products cares really? Dick must be doing something right.

Ohhhh I like your game example I would love to play, specially as its not really appropriate. Games have a large development team working for a long time to produce something designed to be played over hours, with a really short shelf life.

Yes Mafia; Serious Sam...gotya both on the PS2. Sorry go-on. Oh I see your trying to blame DRM. Lets see whats the fastest way to get a product to your computer. That would be the *internet*, Is $15 a lot of money compared to free?, Its still a great game why isn't it selling now perhaps they should GPL the source.

Oh Loki I remember them they were when Linux had a limited games. Why wasn't Loki games selling? was it DRM or was it that they didn't go after the long term money. I'd buy they games now. The second hand market on those games is thriving. Were they too soon? Did people want games then? Did the majority still dual boot...and do now. In reality even though those games are older those games would sell better *now*. The market share is better, and those trying linux are those who *want* games. Linux is a marketplace ripe for the taking, good advertising, but needs a few...and not FPS.

Oddly I own Doom3. I bought the windows version to play on Linux simply becuase it was cheaper and Unreal and the add-ons simply becuase they were cheaper than there Linux counterparts. I suspect I'm not alone in this by a long shot, and I got them this Christmas over the internet as anthologies and best of's see a trend here. You'd think cheap; extended shelf life; barren market; easily available might be something.

Now OpenGL vs DirectX thats a whole different story. Personally I can't see what the problem is with tools like yacc and Lex . Oddly enough though ID have deserted the windows platform entirely. So not gonna get anything on vista.

Oddly enough though all the games ID released on linux still work, and are improved have better graphics sounds interaction 3D models; derivative games; add-ons even complete GPL versions of themselves.

Oddly he recently GPLed the Map sources for quake!?

What is a shame is that none of these companies sell the games content to there games through a "one-stop-shop" and cheaply. They would have a continuous revenue stream.

None of this has *anything* to do with DRM, Nothing; Nada; Zilch.

I'm sure the money saved on Vista+Office will be enough for me to buy a console and the next generation of id games and many others or a device designed for gaming; with a greater selection of games than Vista. While leaving me more casual gaming on Linux made so popular by the wii.

Edited 2007-05-10 05:14