Next Windows 'won't be annoying'

As described on Microsoft's own website

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentID=10478203

I'm glad to see they are admitting to a lot of the shit things about Vista, I actually find it pretty shocking actually they are making a new version of Windows so quickly.

XP is still the better OS, in pretty much every possible way. They must have just given up with Vista. Which is a good move in my opinion!

Oorah!

EDIT: Hopfully it uses the same drivers as XP.. which it wont.

"Microsoft has tweaked the design of Windows 7 in ways the company thinks will make it easier for people to switch between open windows, files and applications."
They make it sound like "Windows 7" is "Windows Vista - redesigned" :(

I've never considered that Vista has any "sh*t things", tbh. Sure it had a few teething troubles prior to SP1, but then, so did XP. Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten about that.

That said, a newer OS that runs faster and on lesser PCs sounds good - the uptake of Vista and consequent complaints about its speed are largely from people who are trying to use it on PCs which simply are not up to the task.

Be nice if Blitzmax FreeAudio worked on it as well.

On the downside, I've already bought two licences for Vista (well, one that I bought, and one that came with my laptop). Getting a lil sick of buying operating systems but there isn't a lot of choice. If you're serious about writing games, you need to keep up.

If Microsoft include any new features in Windows 7 that somehow increase my productivity, then I'll be interested. Vista was supposed to make common tasks easier and faster, but failed miserably. A common task for me was using WinRAR, browsing the net and running Blide on a PC with only 1GB RAM. Vista sucked at this, XP rocked.

That same PC now has Server 2008 installed. Still eats up a lot of RAM, but, despite being the same codebase, is a lot snappier than Vista ever was on it.

XP is staying on my laptop until support for Windows 7 (or later) starts leaving XP behind.

Same here, I was an early upgrader and bought Vista HP from PC World, then I have bought a laptop with it on.

I have also two XP licenses, Pro and Home, the Pro one I bought from Ebay because at the time, I wanted to faff on with Visual C# 2002 and its ASP.NETiness.

This has been made redundant since Web Developer comes with its own local server to test online apps.

I do miss XP now and again, but I couldnt go back, not in a million years... My overall experience with Vista has been great, and any little problem I've picked up generally has nothing to do with the OS, just software/driver writers not catching up. Sometimes though with software, this can be fixed by simply changing the 'compatibitly' settings in the apps properties.

I enjoy Vista, I will probably end up with 2 Windows 7 licenses when it arrives, but as long as it works for me... I'm happy! :D

Dabz

What makes you think Windows 7 is a new version of Windows? It's not. Windows 7 is the Windows Vista was supposed to be, except Vista was already 2 years late, and they decided to release it as an unfinished product, because the alternate would be getting ripped to shreds by the US government and several large multinational corporations for breach of contract.

Vista was never meant as anything other than giving Microsoft space to breathe, a stop gap solution to fulfill their enterprise bulk licensing agreement obligations.

So, Vista is a Windows ME for the 21st century, then? :P

> What makes you think Windows 7 is a new version of Windows? It's not. Windows 7 is the Windows Vista was supposed to be

Yep. Agreed. Vista now seems to be the new Windows Millennium.

What, they are re-releasing WinXP?

I'm a big fan of Vista. I installed it last weekend not having used it since Beta 2.

It runs super fast compared to XP on my 7800GS, I didn't try it pre SP1, but haven's seen any speed problems with copying files. Everything's really snappy, all the more techy tools are much more accessible and can be found without using the command prompt or Run..

Windows defender has a bunch of useful features that make it worth leaving on, UAC doesn't nag as much as I feared. I decided to leave it on so I know whats going on behind the scenes when I'm running apps.

Windows firewall works in both directions instead of just warning about incoming connections only like XP.

If you don't have enough ram, go out and buy what you need to make up 2GB. Ram costs roughly $10 - $15 per GB these days so not really much excuse for not having enough.

Memory management is MUCH better in vista over XP, and it dynamicly fills the ram prefetching your most common used apps and does it very efficiently making the computer more responsive than XP and allowing your apps to load much faster.

The indexed search thing works quite well, you can tell it which indexed folders to use, and which folders and file types to ignore. So you can optimize it a fair bit. Really like the thumbnails, and for an artist having the overwrite dialogue when copying images of the same name over one another is a godsend since it shows you thumbs of both images.

There's a ton of usability tweaks over XP that makes it a much better more intuitive OS. I really like it and my system isn't a modern powerhouse.

Single core 2ghz Athlon 64, 2gb 333 mhz ram, 7800 GS AGP.

At first I was sceptical and kept my XP partition, but havent really used it since installing.

I have one problem that has meant I have to keep XP. That's my 12 year old Serial Wacom tablet. I had to use a reg tweak to hack Vista into recognizing the serial port using the XP drivers. It works fine in corel painter, pressure, tilt and eraser but not photoshop CS4 which fails to recognize the pressure. Seems like its an Adobe problem and the way they access the drivers because other apps work fine. If it wasn't for that, I'd scrap dual boot and stick with Vista :)

Anyway, I wish I had done it a while back, I do hear that Vista was pretty bad prior to the recent SP1 update though.

which is why you wont find me installing it on this box as it stands

Haha nice one :)

Vista was slow at copying/deleting files prior to SP1 - particularly when handling a lot of small files.

My system isn't a world away from yours; Single core 2.2GHz Athlon XP3000+, 1.5GB RAM 333MHz, 7600GT. I wouldn't mind more RAM but that'd mean ditching all my current ram in favour of 2x1GB. Considering upgrading to a dual core system next year so that's probably not going to happen.

Maybe Windows 7 will be good, but how can it be better than XP when XP is not broken and works fine?
All I need from an OS is to be able launch my programs and occasionally move files around, and that all drivers work.
A new OS will always have problems with drivers, unless it's backward compatible, but Microsoft has never been backward compatible like Lotus (who support all versions back to release 1.0 of 1989).

DOS wasn't broken and worked fine.

DOS is actually broken, because it can't run Windows programs, and all the drivers. The lack of a graphical UI is not a problem though.

So its not broken, it just doesn't do what you want any more?

I see.

Anyway, if that's your best argument, why aren't you still using Windows 95?

DOS was the best OS ive used to date, with Win3.11 it was perfect. IMHO the problems came when they merged the two together. An OS that worked in a small amount of ram ~64k nowadays you wouldnt be able to get a driver in that.

Windows 95 does not run Crysis or other high end games.
It's very simple: Windows XP just works, it runs all programs and games.
If Windows 7 runs also all programs which XP does, it will be fine.
It would be even better than XP if it would use less resources.

its like saying vhs is broken cos it cant read dvd's
well probably better saying DVD and blu-ray as they are atleast physically similar

dos worked, it scared the luddites and gave spotty herberts a job instead of working in supermarkets and burger kings
from what i remember 3.11 only made it better to use art packages by giving them a better screen size (at a cost of colours on screen), but dos games could be run via a boot floppy with all the redundant stuff taken out of autoexec.bat and config.sys
with vista and xp as bloated as they are im surprised there is anything left for a game to use

nor can a 486, i think its mostly due to DX than w95 and gfx card vendor drivers gearing towards 98 then xp and vista
if they made DX10 work on 95 then there would be way more people whinging that their games run dog slow, because they would be using archaic chips and not quad core systems

Why are you playing Crysis when Jet Set Willy worked perfectly?

Hey if you're going to talk cobblers, then I might as well, too.

What I'm saying is that the most important thing is that things work, it's irrelevant if they didn't work earlier, or will work in future, what matters is that they work now.
Windows XP does that, it works now.
To get things to work has actually the most business value, it doesn't matter if it's obsolete technology or whatever, as long it works, now.
It's also the biggest challenge.

Yeah its bloody hard work having to re-install it every so often and making sure everything is backed up incase of 'problems'


Not really Blitz manages to work on TONS of hardware without problems, the main problem occurs when publishers and programming companies re-invent the wheel every time they write a game or use an engine that has more bugs than an ant farm.

Im with GFK on this one XP isnt an amazing OS even at the best stretch of the imagination, for me Windows98SE was the best merged windows OS. Yes im using Vista ATM after a catastrophic XP crash (the entire hard disk was corrupted not even fixing the tables and MBR would fix it). I havent had to reinstall that at all and it boots quite quickly and I can play all the latest games on it without a problem.

For me Microsoft should never have merged DOS and Windows together, it worked amazingly well seperated when they merged them they opened a can of worms they have been trying to 'contain' ever since.

...They never "merged" it, they just pretty much stuck "win.com" on the end of Autoexec.bat. It was entirely capable to have a system that went to DOS then booted windows at your command, just like win3.1 before it.

The NT Kernel was a different kettle of fish, and not based off DOS at all.

Nobody's mentioned Windows 2000 yet. I find this odd.

Thats about the size of it. Although i will say that ME was a disaster because its was broken and full of bugs. With vista the disaster is the fact that a lot of inoperability is caused by "features" and incompatabilities.

Vista might be ok for most home users (and some seem happy with it like GFK) but to use it in a large corporate or complex network environment is a solid nightmare. While it doesnt seem to break as easy as XP, supporting it for other things is a much bigger headache.

Well, whats the point, it was more or less XP without the fast(-er-) boot and the fisher-price facelift (and the multitude of XP bugs until SP1 came along).

Interesting detail: Windows 7's actual version number is 6.1, which means that Microsoft considers it a minor upgrade to Vista.
(Windows 2000 is 5.0, XP was 5.1, and Vista is 6.0)

Microsoft has pretty much stated that windows 7 is still based on the Vista kernel, in part to keep the driver compatibility with the current Vista releases.

When MS first released Vista in 32 and 64 bit versions, I remember reading that they said that the next version (=windows 7) was going to be 64-bit only, but I haven't seen any mention of it since.

While it seems like a logical progression, going strictly 64 bit would also mean another compatibility disaster since many older programs don't work properly under 64 bit. (Pretty much anything that hooks into the OS at a driver level breaks, which includes things like older versions of Nero / Roxio CD burner software, WS_FTP (thanks to its explorer FTP extensions), etc.)

One thing that somewhat scares me if that one of the big marketing points MS keeps spouting about Windows 7 is that it will be even easier to use.
Pretty much all of Vista's 'ease of use' features annoy the snot out of me -- the OS assumes the user doesn't have a clue of what they're doing, and in doing so it needlessly complicates matters for people who do.
Yes, I do know where my files are stored, thank-you-very-much. vista's stupid 'breadcrumb' explorer navigation may be halfway convenient at times, but it's mindboggling stupid that MS took away the "up one level" button in explorer. That one was easily spottable, and *always in the same place*. Using breadcrumbs to navigate means that the point to click on jumps all over the place, and if you have long folder names in a smallish window, then there isn't anywhere to click to to go up a level since it just didn't fit on-screen.

What genius came up with that? I guess having a single button to go up a step is just sooooooo mindbogglingly confusing to the average user that it just had to go?!

precicely. In the days of dos, and earlier GUI standards, those that had to use computers learned what they needed and used them for it. Those with an interest took it to the next level and it became easy. Now we have got these horrible patronizing interfaces that all but confuse basic users and practically encourage them to get in a mess.
Worse, the ones with an interest in computers find themselves getting annoyed more and more by "easy" pretty pictures and hieroglyph software which is often harder and more confusing than the "complex" way, simply because the sheer obviousness of it. Meanwhile the clueless are just as clueless.

It seems the industry tries to target interfaces at those who absolutely hate computers, cannot be arsed to read more than a line of manual and make them interested in "computers", failing miserably. Meanwhile ignoring and infuriating the genuinely interested.

>One thing that somewhat scares me if that one of the big marketing points MS
>keeps spouting about Windows 7 is that it will be even easier to use.

With ease of use comes specialisation, And specialisation decreases usability for people not in need of 'ease of use'. Unless Microsoft can create specialisation as a subset of the general use, it will end up being the other way around.

Which generally hasnt been Vista's fault, as an example, my Speedtouch modem didnt have a 32bit driver... YET, Thomson found the time to squeeze in a 64bit driver for Vista's launch.

Another example is that a lot of software companies werent prepared for Vista's UAC permissions setup. Yet, it took only a handful of coders on THIS site to overcome the permissions fanny on.

I don't agree agree that Microsoft should take all the slack for Vista's pretty dismal start regarding support for old hardware/software. They built an OS, there was literally a ton of KNOWN compatibility issues, MS released a piece of software that TOLD people if there hardware was incompatible, TOLD people if their PC spec wasnt good enough, I had a mid-road PC at the time and it told me I could run HP, and it DID point out about issues with my Thomson USB modem.

Companys did know their software wouldnt work on Vista as expected.... THEY KNEW!!!! *Heck, not there fault though, they didnt write Vista! Oo

I knew what I was getting into when buying Vista using these tools... And it worked out canny.

I knew some software wouldnt work, I knew which hardware needed new drivers... If someone has bought Vista without doing this research then what can MS do?

Get ripped to bits again? Work to release a SP that will resolve literally a possible million individual problems? Get ripped to bits again?

Vista is a new type of Windows OS, its NOT XP, it never will be, its probably not what MS wanted, but its here, it needs to be supported by any software you write, so do us all a favour... stop whining because there are users PC's out there that you will now have to support for the next 5 years or so until Joe User upgrades to Windows 9!!!

And after that happens.... Repeat!

Dabz

The annoying part is that many/most of the software companies answer is "just buy the latest version of our product for $$$$$ and it won't bug you", when the current version is fully functional if it weren't for Microsoft non-configurable UAC stuff.

UAC wouldn't be half as bad if there were a way to add programs to an exception list, just like for example the windows firewall. Just a simple "Allow this particular program to do whatever the <bleep> it wants" would be SO much better than the current setup -- currently I'm pretty much forced to turn if off to get anything done (like I mentioned before, when a program in a DOS box does something 'prohibited' you don't get the choise to allow/deny, it always denies)
Without UAC it's back to being a free-for-all...

How is that MS's fault?

If a certain software company cannot configure their software to run on the newest incarnation of their 'base' platform, what should MS do? Buy them out?

Come on... other companys pulled it off...

And regarding the 'upgrade' scenerio... That is no way MS's doing, if you want to blame MS for price fixing then go ahead, but I imagine anyone on these boards will agree that the only people that DID look forward to Vista are the greedy bastards that charged its end users for this... Which probably ended up with a update that contained an extra 200 lines of code!!!



UAC is there for a reason, you may not have grasped it yet, but one of the biggest turn ons is that it stops pap installing on your machine.

Yes, turning off UAC may be fine on a setup that only contains one account... But what happens if you've got the whole family on there.. What happens if you have multiple accounts on there and you have someone that answers an email stating 'Your documents are enclosed'

Typical cannon fodder for the unsavved, but, thats just an example... what about having a teenager downloading a 'plugin' from a porn site?

They would only be allowed to install the shite if UAC is turned OFF!!!

Otherwise, they would have to shout of you to enter your password to let them continue...

UAC is there for a reason, its not a pain, its an extra layer between you and the tits... Use it, dont use it... all in all, you get caught without using the UAC Condom, its noones fault... Well, apart from MS's obviously, because they never made it good enough... Apparently!

Dabz

was taken from a usefull article at tweak guides.

Vista Annoyances Resolved. (About sifting through the FUD surrounding Vista, annoyances, what they are for and how to get around them if you decide you must)

http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

im not in the least bit interested in computers in most respects, i just want to use it to do stuff. i want to write, then i want something that lets me do that (wordprocessor), i want to doodle (not that i do) i use paint or something else.

part of that quote makes me think "all car owners are petrol heads who pop the hood every weekend with their mates and tweak"
where as in truth car and pc owners just see it as a means to an end, thats why i hate all the bloat and gumph between me and my 'job'

Off the top of my head. Here are a few things I love about Vista

- It's slower than XP, there's no doubt about it, having owned one of those PCs where you can pull out a harddrive and have a dual boot of Vista and XP, Vista was also slightly slower. From the 15 mins it takes to backup my work to my pen drive to the 2 seconds delay after clicking back on the IE browser. Yep it's slower. Even typing in the BlitzIDe gives a 1 to 2 second delay before the letters start appearing on screen.

- It takes about 2 minutes to shut down, it reminds me of my Win98 PC after it hasn't been reinstalled for 2 years.

- It's a lottery as to whether things will work on it, backwards compatibility is pretty poor, or things will work on one Vista machine but not the next.

- Where has the 'parent' directory button gone? Nagivation is a nightmare.

- Right click on a directory-> find. Where has 'FIND' gone? And even when you do 'find' it, the indexing or whatever it is seems to detect pretty much nothing.

- I can't find my programs due to the improved navigation system, I have simply resorted to using the help box as a run box, typing in things like 'paint' and 'notepad.

- My favourite program ever MSPaint has been ruined, the zoom slider is totally horrible, it requires too much mouse work, and now I can't easily drag my images into MSPaint and add 255,0,255 into my images because some idiot changed the pallette to light colours you'd never want to use, oh and there's no way of putting pure magenta back in.

- Windows defender, it seems to initiate itself and start scandisking all in its own accord. I can tell when it has started because performance (and compiling in blitz) suddenly drops to an all new slow.

- I hate the thumb pad thing on laptops, I keep catching it when I am typing, I turned it off on my XP machine but in Vista, there appears to be no way of disabling it.

- Vista security warning : Do you want to move your mouse up? Click yes to proceed (or something similiar)



And yes, Vista was meant to be easy to use and yet somehow seems to be harder to use. And it's existence is pointless since XP runs everything, runs on lower spec machines and has very few problems.
Wasn't Vista meant to spawn the next wave of DirectX10 exclusive games? That never seemed to happen did it (obviously)

I'm still happy with XP. Besides anything new takes a little getting used to. However Microsoft are good at developing OS s that seem to need a gargantuan amount of hardware spec. They'd defo shift more if they made it for 'lower' spec machines - which by the time it is released will mean a 3.5GHz quad core processor with 3 Gigs of RAM and a 1Gig Vidoe card.

Oh, and maybe a 3 phase power supply.

Oh god, I don't believe I'm reading this in a development forum.

Nobody remembers what was like to code without an unified driver architecture, to manually code or implement each driver for each piece of hardware out there? or, as the user, to hope that each specific game had a driver which supported your TSeng ET3000 videocard or non-creative audio card.

It's primitive memory management also required each developer to find his own solution to the conventional memory limit problem, culminating in the DOS4GW EMS/XMS manager in the last years.

It was like a fight against entropy.

> hey'd defo shift more if they made it for 'lower' spec machines

I have an eeePC here with XP Lite on it. If Win7 turns out to be another overbloated 15GB mamouth I'll hang on the the XP installation as long as possible

There is a big rise in ultra portable laptops now. MS ought to think about releasing a much much smaller O/S footprint, strip out all the DRM crap, and the 2000 drivers trying to cater for peripherals you may never ever use

Same for the OTT system requirements, I don't want to buy a cray supercomputer just so I can watch stupid transparent windows and dialogs fading in and out

It's also good to see Ubuntu getting better all the time so there will be less and less depency on Windows:
http://oss.itproportal.com/articles/2008/11/01/ubunty-810-shows-linux-os-now-mature-preludes-mobile-platform/

I gotta say congrats to Dabhand. Post was awesome.


Going by the amount of whingers in this thread, MS have already failed miserably.


The Microsoft non-configurable UAC stuff (btw, OFF is a valid configuration) that has been documented as standard procedure by MS since 2000 and nobody followed?


It's called 'Run as Administrator'.

hehe :)
- ok ok - ignoring whether or not one OS is better than another, and
whether or not Vista or 7 are really a practical upgrade solution at this
point in time. The cost of a license for windows seems a little steep.
There are of course counter arguments - but why so much for a licence?..
I guess the simple answer is "cuz thats what they can get away with"..

...moaning aside - i reckon i will give the whole apple thing a go, if i ever have the cash to buy one... swings n roundabouts

@Enay -

You obviously havent really used Vista then. It's very simple. The Address bar has changed, instead of / you have a triangle. One of the first thing I did was wonder what that was all about.

Anyway you can change to any of the directories in the address bar by clicking on it. So you don't need a parent dir button. Click on any dir in the path and you jump straight there going back 1,3,11 dir with a single click, and the mouse back button or backspace key will jump you back to where you last were again :).



There is no find, thats what the search bar at the top right is for. it searches from the directory your in for whatever you type. You have full control of search in the start button, can select individual folders or you keep all your important files in and have it ignore the rest including system files and filetypes you have no interest in, so you can streamline it and make it work very well indeed.

BTW Vista is MUCH more responsive and easier to use than XP if you spend a few minutes investigating how it works, I guess your just too narrow minded to try new things and want everything to be like it was before. If it really is slower maybe you just need to go buy some ram. You probably don't have enough for the prefetch stuff to work efficiently.



Windows Vista Ultimate OEM was $135 at Fry's last week. Doesn't seem that much. Allthough if Windows 7 is coming so soon MS will be as bad as Apple charging for something every year or so instead of every 5/6 years.

You're talking like you haven't even seen Vista SP1.

Mine doesn't. Shuts down in about 20s.

I haven't found much that doesn't work, except 3D Studio Max 4. But given that its ten years old, I wouldn't have expected anything different.

Its still there, with the name of the parent folder clearly written on it.

You have a Search box at the top of each window for this.

I don't know why. Its all there under 'Programs'. If its so different that its confusing you, put it into classic mode so it looks the same as in XP.

MSPaint has always been crap. That's not Vista's doing at all.

You can switch Windows Defender off completely if you don't like it.

That's Vista's fault, how? You can disable any hardware by clicking on 'disable' in Device Manager. Or go into touchpad properties in Control Panel, and check 'tap off when typing'.

I think I hear the sound of something scraping around in the bottom of a barrel...

Nice imitation of FlameDuck there, Gfk. :P

I tried Vista (SP1) based on suggestions by others here. But it only lasted a few days and I went back to XP SP2 since the majority of my software would not work on Vista. That aside, and being honest, I didn't notice any "speed issues". It "seemed" faster than XP SP2 on the same system. In contrast, XP SP3 was slower than XP SP2 and Vista SP1 on the same system.

I am not fond of the gaudiness of Vista's UI, but it is no worse than OSX or the latest version of Ubuntu. If I was using Vista, I would have to find a Norton Commander clone as I do not like the new version of Explorer. Contrary to an above comment, I liked the new version of MS Paint :)

I do disagree with the comments about problems with the initial version of XP. I never had any problems with it and found it very stable on a variety of setups. I never used SP1 and only recently started using SP2.

lol, was just looking for the parent directory button, and there's regular back and forward browser buttons. I didn't notice them because I caught onto the path in the address bar working like buttons straight away.

The annoying part is that the location isn't stationary, depending on your folder names/lengths the place to click jumps all over the place, and if the parent folder name doesn't fit in the addressbar at the same time as the current folder, it throws a pop-up menu at you instead of just going up a damn level.

It interrupts ones train of thought, and I find it definitely counter productive to just having an 'up' button. (but I guess I'm outnumbered anyway, in that I often jump straight into a folder multiple levels deep instead of browsing there from the root every single time)

Anyhoo, for the others who don't like this Vista 'feature' there is one sort-of workaround: you can also navigate one level up by hitting the ALT-UP keyboard shortcut.

Still would have preferred the old 'parent folder' button though, since it is quick, consistent, easy to spot, doesn't jump around, and doesn't require changing between mouse and keyboard.

Because XP will be broken, and won't work fine forever. Seriously. Why aren't you using Windows 95 still? I'll tell you why, because your fancy 21st century hardware doesn't work on an 20th century OS. When Windows 7 hits, XP will share the same fate. The only thing keeping XP alive is Microsofts stupidity and complete lack of understanding of their market. ULCPCs and HTPCs how did you not see that one coming? Because you were too busy mucking about with speech and handwriting recognition, that for some reason only ever seems to correctly recognize the word "Microsoft", and which absolutely nobody wants, rather than paying attention to the needs of your customers. Still, I guess that's one of the benefits of having a monopoly.

GUI: An ingenious device that makes simple tasks simpler, and complex tasks impossible. :o>

No it doesn't. It only prevents you from INTENTIONALLY installing something POTENTIALLY harmful. All the spyware in the world, being installed using exploits, rather than stupid users, conveniently circumvents UAC anyway. UAC's main reason for existing is so that Microsoft can shift the blame of an "Insecure OS" from being Microsofts fault, to being the users fault.

On a domain, pre & post login startup and shutdown takes as long as XP (about one to two mins each). This is more a problem with the windows domain itself i guess.

On my Laptop (a dual centrino 1600 2GB, no domain) i get :

Startup Delays:

XP pre login: 29 secs
XP Post login: 1 minute 10 secs

Vista pre login: 21 secs
Vista post login: 30 secs

Ubuntu pre login: 23 secs
Ubuntu post login: 2 secs


Shutdown Delays:

XP: 20 sec
Vista: 40 sec
Ubuntu 13 sec

I upgraded my computer and found XP (which I'd gotten used to) just couldn't handle the changes, crashing upon booting. Plus, I wanted DX10 for my new GTX260! :) So, I bit the bullet and grabbed Vista.

It installed in ten minutes and has been running like a champ ever since. I've had the odd quirk, but nothing more than what I had in XP. Some things XP does a little better, but overall Vista is a solid upgrade, with a few new features which make working in Windows just so much easier. You win some, you lose some. All the Vista whining is just stupid, though. It's a solid OS.

I don't think anyone has argued against Vista being a solid OS (which it has been since about 6 months after release, when the drivers started working properly). it's just that it is so resource hungry and seemingly inefficient at accomplishing most tasks that it frustrates just about everyone who uses it.

There are still the inevitible "XP works on my PC but Vista broke it" stories, which happens every time a new OS comes out. People just don't know how their PC's work, misconfigure the hell out of them and then wonder why changing a major component (e.g, the OS) throws a bunch of problems their way.

Vista isn't perfect, but it's perfect for some people's requirements (e.g., DX10).

To be honest, I think we all want AmigaOS with memory protection, virtual memory and, the clincher: worldwide vendor support ;)

That's only half true, the true part being the less important. By default, Vista users do not have Administrator privileges, which makes a big difference.


However, no more than Mac OS X, even though nobody points it out.

I'm just wondering if history will repeat itself....

If so whe following will happen :

- Everyone thinks Windows 7 will be better then Vista because of lot's improvements according to MS.
- Windows 7 comes out and people start buying and installing it from day 1 on their old Windows and run into problems because there are no Windows 7 drivers available for some of the old hardware devices.
- People will start complaining again because they expected hardware compatibility and speed would be better then Vista.
- Service Pack 1 comes out for Windows 7, most anoying bugs are gone and most people have a pc with updated hardware to be able to run Windows 7 normally.
- MS anounces Windows 8, Windows 8 will be faster and better then Windows 7.

I also wonder if they put quotes in the installation of Windows 7 like they did in all previous versions of Windows like "Windows is faster then before."

It's just with every new Windows you must expect new bugs and that you need the correct hardware to make it work. Software is another story and you must not expect that every old piece of software will run out of the box on a new OS.

I mostly wait until the first service pack comes out before buying a new OS and make sure I have the correct hardware to make it work.

I miss my RAM: device and Arexx.

I installed Windows 2003 Server last week, and in the advertisement during the setup it said that Windows 2003 Server is the fastest Windows ever.
So there will be no faster Windows ever, according to Microsoft :)

I hadn't noticed it being resource hungry. It's true it fills up your ram but thats by design. The prefetch is much more efficient than XP and actually works. If you leave task manager open and check what it's doing when you run hungry apps it basicly does prefetch stuff you use a lot and dump it in ram, but dumps that data just as fast if your app demands it.

So the ram usage really isn't that good an indicator of what resources the OS is using, it just doesn't work in the same way as previous windows and runs MUCH more efficiently on a system with more memory than previous windows versions with the same large ammounts of ram.

If you don't have the ram then your best bet is probably to turn off or restrict your prefetch so vista runs more like XP. You will lose some of the responsiveness and quick startup of some apps when it reverts back to XP, but ram starved PC's might very well run better this way.

Which is an interesting choice of words, because I'm fairly sure in XP is says "fastest version yet". Although mine is in Danish, so it might have gotten lost in translation.

It's also lies.

lol

They have always made these sorts statements. Probably just copied and pasted from a standard master list:

"Now even more secure than ever"
"The fastest version yet"
"White than white"
"Fast and efficient file system"
"Blah-de-blah"

Actually, I know one thing for sure, when I installed Win98SE Lite one time and swapped over to Win95 file browser DLL's (i,e. NOT the standard web explorer) the file system was blazingly fast!
Large directories opened up instantly, files deleted rapidly, navigating around was practically instant.

Thinking about it, things were rather great having a lite Win98SE - Shutdown in around 2 seconds, startup somewhere around 8 seconds, next to zero bloat

After installing XP again it was if my harddrive was operating under water(!)


I guess those who say WinXP, Vista is 'fast' really haven't tried the OLDER technology which just got on with the job without trying to be clever

Except most of my software won't run on older OS's pre XP, and apps like 3dsmax had improved SO much in the last few that one would have to be quite a masochist to use the older versions that do work.

Calling a 1GB PC 'RAM starved' just shows how comfortable we have become with bloatware. The argument, of course, is that RAM is cheap.

It is a crying shame, ladies and gentleman, that we, as hackers, are ourselves now so comfortable with wasted bytes and cpu cycles. A tragedy, from start to finish.

Oi I remember coding without drivers having to get the memory addresses to the VGA memory buffer $B800 (64k), it was easier than coding in windows sometimes. The thing that put me off of coding in C/C++ was the windows system coming from DOS where you had access to everything with a few interrupt calls or assembly instructions to windows controlling everything was a nightmare.

I couldn't agree more, I still get pulled up for producing code using certain methods and my justification of "oh that is several CPU cycles faster than the way you do it" doesn't wash when we can 'throw more servers at the cluster' so 'keep everything uniform'.

I'm a genius being wasted I tell you!

Banshee: There are some ways to get a RAM: drive under Windows as well. for example: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

I tried it, but it wouldnt install, just gave the message "failed", at which point I was truly thankful for indi software and the English skills of the author. grrrr! I used to have a RAD: device too which would survive a soft reboot, that was extremely useful as scratch space.

Thanks for the heads up though.

Arrex is a lost cause though isnt it :( *sniff* I miss you Arrex!

At least ram only costs $10 per GB and doesn't use up cycles. Which is why Vista makes good use of it in the background.