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Umm, you sure there is nothing wrong with your setup? I've got a Athlon XP 1.43ghz connected to my TV for movie watching pleasures, and it can play back 640x480 videos just fine without any hiccups...Actually, it can even record video at 640x480 at 25fps and still have some spare CPU time left. Though, I haven't tried h264 encoded material on it, but everything else works just peachy.
I don't see that as a flaw (maybe because I've never seen the behavior you describe).
What I worry about is the ability to declare yourself as a 'user-critical' process is essentially unrestricted, an on-your-honor thing. The abuses are just too powerful; I would think that there would have to be a whitelist to be allowed to use this priority, at least one controlled by Microsoft if not one controlled by the enduser.
We all remember back when popup ads first reared their ugly head how Microsoft declared that they would not be adding a popup blocker into IE4. They predicted that any site that maliciously used popups would be quickly abandoned by the Internet community, and that sites that used pop-ups as they were intended (to provide information for applets, f'rex) would be punished for other's sins by including a pop-up blocker in IE4. Before that, it was not including memory protection in Windows 95, as there were legitimate uses of it and any company whose products abused it would quickly kill themselves in the market and become dead weight on the shelves.
I think MS trusts third-party companies a little too much...
133Mhz PII run Beos 5.0.3 will run 640*480 video using VLC 0.8.6c run play videos fine if there no other load, my 533MHz desktop plays the video fine unless I use FireFox to do my downloading. Use NetPostive, NetNautiX, NetPenquin or BeShare to download and I see a perfect video with no problems.
The idea that anything over 1GHz should have any problems handling media and networking at the same time is silly. MS messed up in their code somewhere.
Member since:
2005-10-02
The funny thing is that anything above 1 GhZ is perfectly capable of playback without hiccups even under heavy load - without affecting network bandwith. So one can wonder how come Microsoft felt compelled to make an unnecessary change with Vista.