"If you've been paying attention to the various industry news outlets you've no doubt come across the story about the Microsoft engineer advocating Windows Server 2008 as a 'workstation' OS. According to him, if you make the right tweaks - installing the Desktop Experience feature, adding a few missing utilities, tuning the scheduler - you can turn Server 2008 into a fairly convincing Vista knock-off, one that's faster and more scalable than the original. Curious, we decided to see for ourselves just how well Server 2008 stacks-up to Vista with SP1." In addition, ExtremeTech has an article on Vista SP1 performance.
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Member since:2006-09-15
DRM is only enforced (active) if you use HD content on Vista with Microsoft's Media playing tools.
For non HD content and non MS media playback software DRM is non exisitant. It doesn't stop you creating or playing back media.
I'm also usre that by the time HD Video content becomes mainstream on computers (re BlueRay Drives) then VLC or equivelents will be able to play back that content bypassing MS DRM components.
Member since:2006-01-02
Gutmann's article has only tangential connections with reality. He makes a lot of easily-confirmable assertions (you would only need a profiler or kernel debugger to prove any of them... both of these things are provided for free by Microsoft). Despite the lack of actual confirmation of any of his claims and the opposing statements of Microsoft employees who actually work on the relevant parts of Windows, people still believe that there is some mysterious DRM that's magically consuming their cycles without doing anything to confirm it.
Member since:
2005-07-07
“Since [encryption] uses CPU cycles, an OEM may have to bump the speed grade on the CPU to maintain equivalent multimedia performance. This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PCs” — ATI.
This is the DRM that stops high def videos from playing at full res on non HDCP enabled monitors/video cards
this comes from:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html