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It was a stretch to show you how ridiculous your assertion about DRM-checking measures being active all the time sounds. "

It was a hell of a stretch all right. That much I'll give you ... no more.




What? Why don't you first PROVE that the CPU Vista is using is for "DRM Polling"? What sense would "DRM Polling" make if you're not running any DRM content at all, huh? I mean, what sort of ridiculous line of thought are you following here? "

If you are not running DRM content at any one moment in time ... how would Vista know when you actually began to run DRM content at a later time? It must check at some time, must it not? The only place that Vista can put such a check that CANNOT be worked-around by some maverick application program is by having it run all the time as part of the kernel.



Vista is slow. Quite a bit slower than XP, even when Vista is running on more powerful hardware. The only two apparent core features of Vista that could feasibly account for this slowness are Aero bling and continuous checking if protected content is being processed.

OK, Aero bling is handled by the graphics GPU. This is shown experimentally by trying to run Vista on a system with a low end graphics GPU, such as Intel graphics.

That leaves only continuous polling for the presence of protected content by code for handling Vista DRM provisions as the prime suspect for the observed poor performance of Vista on machines with a decent GPU.

That observation in turn leaves the assertion that Vista DRM is NOT the cause of the slowness as the likely-to-be outrageous assertion.



Yes, but all the other bullshit about "DRM Polling 100% of the time" is hurting the true message. "

Hmmph. How exactly is it hurting the message? Vista is slow. It has DRM. Provisions for DRM are very likely to be embedded in the running kernel, so that third-party userland applications cannot work around it.

What is exactly IS this "true message" that you imagine?



What? YOUR statements come first. Your FUD comes first. Reasonable people shoot it down, and the people who first made the outrageous claims say "PROVE IT ISN'T SO!!". How does that make sense to you at all? "

From my perspective, yours are the outrageous claims. vista is slow. Vista has DRM. DRM is very likely to be at least a contributor to the slowness. How about some credible argument (and not mere IMPOLITE SHOUTING) why this would NOT be so?

"Because Microsoft says so" is not credible argument.

Edited 2009-02-19 12:24 UTC

Nonsense, and you know it.

Vista would know you are running media that requires the protected paths because... Well, the file you just opened REQUIRES IT. It has it built in.

Does an OS or a browser continuously poll to see if a web page has Flash content? Of course not. The browser knows this because it the page tells it to load he Flash player.

There is no polling going on if you don't run content that requires the protected paths.

Come on, you don't even need to have programmed to have some slight idea of how any OS handles events. How does your PC know when to decode h264 video? IT NEEDS TO BE POLLING THE SYSTEM 24/7 LOLZ!!!



Vista is slow because it requires tremendous amounts of RAM and a new memory caching system that runs like crap on anything less than 1 GB--and on anything with more than 1 GB, it's supposed to run like crap until the OS gets used to what you do (more or less I believe that's the idea of SuperFetch)--I believe they did this to eliminate the stupid amount of paging XP does. It has nothing to do with CPU time being eaten all the time.



By lying. There is a legitimate complaint to the inclusion of DRM-decoding capabilities in Vista, and the FUD is silencing the real reason.



I told you before. It's making customers justify Hollywood's unethical claims without even knowing they're doing so. That's the real complaint.



As I said, last I checked, you need to prove someone's guilty before getting them in jail.

God, I hope it doesn't look like I emphasize with Microsoft, because I really don't. But the loonies in my own camp make me sometimes wish I did.

If you are not running DRM content at any one moment in time ... how would Vista know when you actually began to run DRM content at a later time? It must check at some time, must it not? The only place that Vista can put such a check that CANNOT be worked-around by some maverick application program is by having it run all the time as part of the kernel.

Umm, from purely software development point of view: how would an application or the OS know that one application is accessing file to which DRM should be applied? Constantly reading the memory areas allocated by that app? That wouldn't fly, you can't identify DRM protected content in the middle of all the random stuff, especially if the application has already moved forward with the file and the file header isn't anymore in the memory.

No, there is no such polling. The logical and functioning ways of being able to do those things are two: when the application issues an open command for a file or resource the OS checks if the file header has DRM clause. If it does then the OS applies DRM. The second is when the application in question tries to output the contents somewhere: the OS checks again for DRM restrictions if the output is to any sound, video or file output.

So, no. Lemur2, if you had any programming experience you'd know it's not possible to "poll for DRM content" unless the OS checks everything all the time, in which case the whole thing wouldn't run even on very very high-end machines. And it would result in many false alerts, too, as there is no way to guarantee that any random data has no data blocks that look similar to DRM data blocks.

I'm just pointing out your mistake here. Other than that, I have no idea how much all the DRM stuff use CPU time. Not that I even wish to try, quite happy with XP for games and Linux for everything else.