Windows Vista...welcome to SUCK?

[Link19]

Here is how I look at it. The upgrade from Windows XP to Vista will not be that big. I think it will only be slightly more of an upgrade than from 2000 to XP. Other than the new LDDM drivers, I don't see Vista being much more of an upgrade from XP than XP was from 2000.

Now, it seems that Windows NT 3.X to Windows NT 4 was a pretty big upgrade. It was also a huge upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000.

Now from Windows 9X to the NT based opertaing systems, I wouldn't call that an upgrade, but rather a major, required necessity because Windows 9X was a POS OS!! Windows 9X should have died as quickly as possible as soon as XP came out. However, Windows XP and Windows 2000 deserve to stay around and be supported for a long long long time even after Vista is released and becomes mainstream.The reason for that is because Windows 2000 and Windows XP are still good quality opertaing systems, and not everyone who buys the latest hardware will want to run Vista. But anyone running POS Windows 98/ME should have been forced to upgrade to at least Windows 2000 if they wanted to buy the latest and greatest hardware as far back as 2002.

 

[networkman]

Originally posted by: STaSh
There are over 2000 new features in Vista. XP had a little over 1000.

And just like XP, there will be just as many free bugs included with Vista as well. :frown:

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: networkman

Originally posted by: STaSh
There are over 2000 new features in Vista. XP had a little over 1000.

And just like virtually every piece of software, there will be bugs upon release. :frown:

Fixed.

 

[ndruw]

here'd my solution-im headed off to college next year, and they only charge 10 bucks for a copy of XP with their licensing deal, so vista cant be that much.

i say: why not just buy it cheap and dual-boot it to try it? its only $10

for everyone, just spend an hour or two to download evals when they come out. you know there will be evals (and if not eval versions, there will be torrents )

 

[bersl2]

OH NOES! A ZOMBIE THREAD! :shocked:

Originally posted by: Smilin
Remember, unused ram is wasted ram. If running perfectly an OS would consume nearly all the ram in a box. Keep in mind that just because ram is being used doesn't mean it can't be immediately reused. You want your OS to cache up things that you may soon use - it makes things snappy. If it happens you decide to do something else, that memory can be freed up in a couple cycles tops.

The sentiment is correct, but a lot of that is wrong. RAM that is used by one program cannot be used by another. No, a "perfect" OS keeps its persistent, non-disposable (a data cache in memory is considered disposable) components as lean as possible, because memory that they use cannot be used by transient userland programs. And don't give me any crap about swapping pages to disk; hard drives' latency is a little bit too high for my tastes.

Also, your assumption that fetching things from memory is that cheap is simplistic. It is true that getting data from memory takes 2 cycles in the simplest of models (as an example, see the datapath for the simple machine in a class I am taking), but in modern computers, that won't even get you on and off a RAM chip. The reality is that memory latency is two orders of magnitude more costly. You can hide it with respect to interactivity by switching to another process/thread, but it still hurts throughput. Also remember that those context switches have significant costs too.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: STaSh
What makes you think I was responding to nweaver's post?

You were right underneath it, it made sense and there was nothing else between it and your last post that you might have been responding to. If you were responding to something else, you might have made it clearer by quoting. If you were just inserting a random fact for the benefit of the world, my question, at least, still stands

 

[stash]

haha yeah it was a random fact, sorry. I meant to mention it way back on the first page, but I forgot. Sue me

This is what I get for posting at work while working on six different things.

 

[stash]

And to answer nweaver...

I would say these are the biggest features for me anyway:

1. Security. Snicker all you want, this is the most secure Windows OS ever. All users will be regular users by default, and even users who are given admin rights will run in a restricted token most of the time. Protected IE will make IE the most secure browser on the Internet, period. Running as a regular user will actually be doable, as opposed to the clunky way of doing it on XP. Yes, my Linux friends, you've done it all along, I get it.

2. Search. It is everywhere. The start menu, in every colum in explorer, IE, everywhere. And it's fast.

3. RSS. I'm not a huge RSS junkie, but the feedstore in Vista makes RSS easy and fun. IE will use it, Office 12 will use it, and devs will be able to write for it.

4. Power Management. There are three basic power settings, and if you go into advanced settings, you can configure a myriad of things. A huge improvement over power settings today.

5. Networking. The network stack was rewritten, and configuration and monitoring is much improved. The network center tells you at a glance how you are connected, and if you aren't, you get troubleshooters that actually work. The wireless GUI is much better than in XP.

That's a start.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: STaSh
1. Security. Snicker all you want, this is the most secure Windows OS ever. All users will be regular users by default, and even users who are given admin rights will run in a restricted token most of the time. Protected IE will make IE the most secure browser on the Internet, period. Running as a regular user will actually be doable, as opposed to the clunky way of doing it on XP. Yes, my Linux friends, you've done it all along, I get it.

Linux has done it all along. Blah, Lynx is the most secure one on the Internet. Good to hear finally IE runs under a little "virtual machine" now so it can't wreak havoc outside of that. Will I not need admin to install everything?

5. Networking. The network stack was rewritten, and configuration and monitoring is much improved. The network center tells you at a glance how you are connected, and if you aren't, you get troubleshooters that actually work. The wireless GUI is much better than in XP.

What is the benefit from the network stack rewrite? Is it faster or less buggy?

 

[Seeruk]

You would never think that this was a technical forum, with so many people complaining about RAM requirements. It is SIX YEARS since the last OS from MS or course it's gonna have higher RAM requirements. Personally my home desktop RAM has gone up exponentially regardless of the OS mainly to play the games I want to play rather than for OS reasons.

Win95 I had 32mb RAM and upgraded to 64mb at some point.
Win98/ME <shudder> I upgraded to 128 and then 256mb
Win2000 I upgraded to 384mb and soon after to 512mb
WinXP 512mb on release, only upgrading to 1GB about 18 months ago for gaming performance

WinVista who knows..... I currently have 2GB but I am damn sure in 18 months or so that will go up as I like perfect frame rates (i.e. >60fps constantly) at 1600x1200 resolutions.

But the test box I run Vista on now, with ALL EYE CANDY has 512mb of ram, a 2800 Sempron and a £35 ATI Graphics Card. Smooth as the proverbial baby's buttocks

Thats the same memory requirements as I needed to run WinXP comfortably SIX YEARS AGO so where are these higher memory requirements again?

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: STaSh
And to answer nweaver...

I would say these are the biggest features for me anyway:

1. Security. Snicker all you want, this is the most secure Windows OS ever. All users will be regular users by default, and even users who are given admin rights will run in a restricted token most of the time. Protected IE will make IE the most secure browser on the Internet, period. Running as a regular user will actually be doable, as opposed to the clunky way of doing it on XP. Yes, my Linux friends, you've done it all along, I get it.

2. Search. It is everywhere. The start menu, in every colum in explorer, IE, everywhere. And it's fast.

3. RSS. I'm not a huge RSS junkie, but the feedstore in Vista makes RSS easy and fun. IE will use it, Office 12 will use it, and devs will be able to write for it.

4. Power Management. There are three basic power settings, and if you go into advanced settings, you can configure a myriad of things. A huge improvement over power settings today.

5. Networking. The network stack was rewritten, and configuration and monitoring is much improved. The network center tells you at a glance how you are connected, and if you aren't, you get troubleshooters that actually work. The wireless GUI is much better than in XP.

That's a start.

1. That is a start, and I do believe the security thing. XP SP2 is leaps and bounds ahead of where the were. Glad to see a new limited user model. For Joe Sixpack, this could easily help with keeping his box running smooth. Not sure on the IE7 statement, I'm a "wait and see" kind of guy.

2. Search....I don't use it that often, but when I do, it's google search. I guess if this is built into the OS, that could be OK. Not somthing that would cause me to buy a new OS off tha bat, as Google Search provides this functionality for most stuff.

3. RSS...Meh, for me anyway. I guess a good desktop slashdot RSS could be good (I use a desktop widget in gnome for this, but I rarely use it right now)

4. Power Management- Good for laptop users, most desktop users could care less (mine is on 24/7 anyway). Another "Wait and see if it offers anything that usefull for normal end users" feature for me

5. Why? was the XP network stack broken? I am a wireless engineer, so I abhor the WZC anyway, in favor of the client utility. Exception to this is broadcom (I hate theirs). But then, most of my work is Atheros based (ACU) and Intel (Proset). Again, another "Could be really good for Joe Sixpack" feature, definatly not a deal signer for me.


I'm sure I'll get to play around with Vista (Test lab with my own O/S MSDN license) but I'll probably not rush out to replace XP with it. I've not actually booted XP at home for months now though. It's been relegated to a scanner machine (no linux drivers) and I've been considering using VMware for it. The biggest plus is going to be #1, as it will affect us by reducing family/friend support calls

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: MrChad

Originally posted by: networkman

Originally posted by: STaSh
There are over 2000 new features in Vista. XP had a little over 1000.

And just like virtually every piece of software, there will be bugs upon release. :frown:

Fixed.

There are NOT bugs! They are features. And don't tell anyone as they will want to charge extra for those! sshhhhh.

Oh, and about 3 months back.... The term for those that hate M$, we call them ABMs. Anything But Microsoft'ers.

 

[CTho9305]

I don't see why everybody is so anti-eye-candy. A lot of Vista's eye candy is actually done by the graphics card, which is pretty much idle in normal desktop use anyway. Transparency the way Glass does it is very cool - you can read text, but still see what's behind a window. As others have pointed out, every new OS requies more memory than older OSes, and RAM is cheap and will be cheaper when it ships. It's not like Linux is all that great with 128MB either.

 

[stash]

4. Power Management- Good for laptop users, most desktop users could care less (mine is on 24/7 anyway). Another "Wait and see if it offers anything that usefull for normal end users" feature for me

I hear you on that, I threw it in there because laptops are getting more and more popular every day.

5. Why? was the XP network stack broken?

No, it isn't broken (I'm using it right this second ). But there are some significant performance increases with the Vista stack. I've heard some numbers like 40% faster between two Vista machines, and 10-15% between a Vista machine and an XP or 2003 machine.

But I would encourage people to check it out for themselves if they can. If you have an MSDN sub or are on the beta, you can use it now, or there is supposed to be a public beta in the Spring. You can't (or at least, you shouldn't) decide if you like it based on what I write, or what anyone else writes about it.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
I don't see why everybody is so anti-eye-candy. A lot of Vista's eye candy is actually done by the graphics card, which is pretty much idle in normal desktop use anyway. Transparency the way Glass does it is very cool - you can read text, but still see what's behind a window. As others have pointed out, every new OS requies more memory than older OSes, and RAM is cheap and will be cheaper when it ships. It's not like Linux is all that great with 128MB either.

Agreed, if I've got the video card may as well put it to work doing *something*; if I dont have the video to support it than the system depreciates to "classic" mode gracefully.

4. Power Management- Good for laptop users, most desktop users could care less (mine is on 24/7 anyway). Another "Wait and see if it offers anything that usefull for normal end users" feature for me

On my desktops this isnt a big deal for me either (both my office and my home desktop run pretty much 24/7). But for my laptop this is something I've really wanted for a long time, XP just doesnt give you much control over power consumption (even though the hardware supports it).

Why did this old thread get bumped anyways? As if we dont have enough Vista threads that are full of speculative posts :roll:

As Stash mentioned there will be a public beta fairly soon, if you want to know how it works than wait for the beta.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: STaSh

4. Power Management- Good for laptop users, most desktop users could care less (mine is on 24/7 anyway). Another "Wait and see if it offers anything that usefull for normal end users" feature for me

I hear you on that, I threw it in there because laptops are getting more and more popular every day.

5. Why? was the XP network stack broken?

No, it isn't broken (I'm using it right this second ). But there are some significant performance increases with the Vista stack. I've heard some numbers like 40% faster between two Vista machines, and 10-15% between a Vista machine and an XP or 2003 machine.

But I would encourage people to check it out for themselves if they can. If you have an MSDN sub or are on the beta, you can use it now, or there is supposed to be a public beta in the Spring. You can't (or at least, you shouldn't) decide if you like it based on what I write, or what anyone else writes about it.

optimizing the software? I don't really see how you could get 40% faster out of TCP/IP...my XP box pushes along at a very nice clip (limited more by drives then network) and I don't see really how this is happening.

I'm not trying to troll and say "that feature is lies and marketing hype", I'm just trying to understand this.

 

[stash]

There's a video on channel9.msdn.com somewhere that goes into more detail, but I'm too lazy/busy to find the link at the moment

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: STaSh
There's a video on channel9.msdn.com somewhere that goes into more detail, but I'm too lazy/busy to find the link at the moment

Yes, that video made claims of 40x faster (or at least something from channel9, if that isn't the one you're thinking of). I think this falls in the category of wait-and-see, since numbers like that (even 40%) are probably things that marketing will take way out of context. I'm sure it's not bs, but I'm pretty sure they're under pretty particular circumstances.

@nweaver: what I gathered out of that video was that there were changes made to the tcp congestion control algorithms. What they were exactly, I don't remember but I think it was something about paying more attention to round-trip-times than timeouts. I dunno...

 

[stash]

Yes, that was it. I guess it was 40x, not 40%. But yes, there are specific circumstances, which is why I mentioned them It's for Vista to Vista communication. I think they go into that in the video.

There are still supposed to be (smaller) perf gains for Vista to non-Vista. I'm not entirely clear what that includes though (non-Windows? will it speed up Internet access?).

 

[RVN]

Where are the Rolling Stones when you need them?

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: STaSh
Yes, that was it. I guess it was 40x, not 40%. But yes, there are specific circumstances, which is why I mentioned them It's for Vista to Vista communication. I think they go into that in the video.

There are still supposed to be (smaller) perf gains for Vista to non-Vista. I'm not entirely clear what that includes though (non-Windows? will it speed up Internet access?).

Vista-2-Vista doesn't explain 40x. I listened to the video a while ago and I still want to know what these special circumstances are.