Windows Vista

[silver]

Yeah, I ran the Vista Beta's and like XP home, couldn't get them off of my box fast enough.

I can kinda relate as I used Windows 2000 for a long time. Unfortunately it just can't support the newer hardware. I installed it along with SP4 in my Seagate 320 SATA II drive and it hung up on every shutdown. Probably a driver issue however I tried 3 different versions with just as many chipsets and no joy. Like I said about Linux, sometimes you got to stop working ON the computer and start working WITH it. Also I'm quite certain that the drivers for Vista are going to be more highly optimized for dual-core systems. Multi-threaded apps are still the way of the future and XP has serious limits in memory addressing. I'm going to move to Vista 64 if I get my dream system built. Just hoping the program coders make 64 bit apps available.

[silver]

I only upgraded to XP last weekend, been using winME for the last 6 years.

Ummmmm, in the infamous words of Charlie "Ewww." Windows ME was Microsofts biggest let down since, .... since, ..... well I guess ever ! How you managed to keep it working well could possible make for a good book.

[owdamer]

Ummmmm, in the infamous words of Charlie "Ewww." Windows ME was Microsofts biggest let down since, .... since, ..... well I guess ever ! How you managed to keep it working well could possible make for a good book.

People have been telling me for years how bad ME is, but no one can tell me why its supposed to be so bad. I've never really had any problems with it. We had a 2 pc home network, and the only real issue we ever had was with ics, the internet sharing thing. We ran a little prog called proxi and that worked fine. We ran a 333mhz p2, and a 667mhz p3. The p3 was a packard bell which seemed to have a lot of "issues" but I like to think of them as characteristics
The only reason we've finally upgraded to xp is because AVG support for 98/ME ends sometiime this month.

[dragracer1951]

Catalyst is ATI's driver and display management utility for their video cards and according to that info it runs Open GL natively. I assumed that you are using either a Fire GL or a Quadra. Of course I would check the reviews of your peers prior to installing Vista though you might consider making a dual-boot system. Also I would recommend that your video cards have at least 512MB RAM.

I run a Nvidia Quadro FX4500
Of course it has at least 512MB...
ATI's stuff does not play nice with the software I run. Solidworks, Mastercam, Catia, Pro E....
Bad JuJu.....
Just say no......

All of the people that I have talked to (Including the QC Dept's at CNC Software adn Solidworks) have all said, Don't go to Vista.
I could care less what is the latest and greatest. It has to run the applications that I run. My programming box is a 3gig dual core with 4gigs adn a Quadro FX4500 and a couple hundred gigs of hard drive networked to my server that has 2 terabytes of storage. It's what I use to make my living.....
The advice I have been given is wait for the first service pack and we'll see.
I still haven't heard what, specifically, is soo much better about Vista than XP Pro.

[silver]

You wouldn't happen to work for MS would you Silver, I haven't known a single MS OS work awesome straight out of the box? The first time I ran XP Home, it was off of the drive within 24hours.

Nope, not that lucky. And note that this isn't really "straight out of the box" and there are still quite a few issues with it. Mostly caused by idiotic companies like nVidia which hasn't published good drivers yet or companies like Roxio who state that their software is compatible when it may or may not work correctly. Also remember that Vista was released to the manaufacturers on November 8th so all of the hardware and software developers have had the final version for nearly 3 months. Prior to that there was 2 betas and a ton of monthly preview versions. Here's a few things I like :

Better file organization than XP. It;s the little things that combine to make it easier to manage your files.

Easier to move/relocate the psuedo-system directories such as Documents, Music, Pictures.

Built-in backup utilities.

Superfetch - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... mance.mspx

Integrated desktop search tool. It simply works simply.

CD and DVD session writing built-in. Put a disk in and simply right-click and send to DVD-R. Keep adding until nearly full. Open Computer, right-click drive and select "Close Session". Done !

Re-written audio and video subsystems. Lays the foundation for significant improvements over the next 5 years.

A much better boot loader. Nevermore will I boot my system only to see a BSOD stating that some system file or directory is missing or corrupt.

Windows Recovery Environment is much better than XP. http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/default.aspx

The Help & Support tool actually has answers !

Zoomable icons that are actually file images. That is to say that if you're looking at a icon for a digital image then the thumbnail is that image. Same for videos, text documents and PDF's. Hold down the Ctrl key and slide your scoller and the icons get larger or smaller depending on direction.

All that and more. But of course there is no free lunch and there's certainly no such thing as a perfect OS so here's the other side of the coin.

Takes a lot of RAM to run effectively. 2GB recommended.
The start bar/application menu is about the dumbest I've EVER seen and I've seen a lot.
Drivers are still hit and miss and the ones that are out don't work as well as the latest XP drivers.
There's really only two themes for the desktop. Either the Vista or Windows Classic themes.
User Account Control can drive you nuts.
Sometimes it seems like the programs attempting to index my hard drive will never stop paging to the drive. From Vista's own search tool to AVG Anti-Virus to Roxio 9. They can be really annoying.

Here's a large image of my desktop.

http://www.legacy-photo.com/images/desktop.jpg

[silver]

I still haven't heard what, specifically, is soo much better about Vista than XP Pro.

Besides speed, stability and security, not much.

EDIT : Furgot to mention power management. My system is running about 5 degrees cooler during usage and 10 degrees cooler at idle than it did under XPSP2.

[silver]

One thing I'll note is that I absolutely do not use the Windows default programs. Things like Media Player and even Messenger tend to be watered down and generally unacceptable. Media Player in particular really chaps my ..... chaps as it simply uses too much CPU and memory to do something so simple : Play an MP3. Instead I use Foobar 2000 which is capable of playing more media types anyway. I ripped all of my CD's to WavPack and transcoded them to MP3. Foobar never takes more than 2% of my CPU to run.

[sickle44]

2GB, that's bloddy awful. Although that's what I've got in my box right now, mainly for VS. I just looked at my schools free software program and low and behold, there's a free copy of Vista Business, I guess I'm Vista bound whether I like it or not. Personally, I'd much rather wait for three years until they roll out SP2.

64bit, Dude, I wouldn't buy a new box until the programmers catch up with the hardware or until the hardware just friggen slows down with the changes, which should kinda happen now that they've hit a little bit of a wall. K6/2 400 will work awesome for quicken and apps for my 4year old. That said, would I like to have a dualcore with HT technology, sure, but it would be silly as I don't have anything that really needs it to run. Hell, I'm still playing Halo the odd once in a while.

[YZFRob]

Tim, computer geek much? Shit I'm in the industry and don't have that many.

Yeah, I ran the Vista Beta's and like XP home, couldn't get them off of my box fast enough.

Hmmm.

Compaq Presario 5150 350 AMD K6 Win 98 (original 98 not SE)
HP Pavilion lap AMD1800+ XP Home
Homebuilt 1 AMD 2100+ on FIC mobo dual boot Suse 9.2 Pro/XP home
Homebuilt 2 AMD Duron 1000 on asus mobo dual boot Ubuntu/XP Pro
Homebuilt 3 Intel PII 450 slot 1 on gigabyte mobo Suse 10.1 (server)
Apple //e with monochromatic monitor that still works fine

Have a PIII socket 370 asus mobo, 1.2ghz cpu/ram just waiting for a case.

#2 was built from a board/cpu and ram that was given to me after building the guy a new 2.8 P4
#3 was a free one that someone was just gonna throw in teh garbage
extra board/cpu was given to me after upgrading a friends pc from this to a P4 2.4.

[YZFRob]

People have been telling me for years how bad ME is, but no one can tell me why its supposed to be so bad. I've never really had any problems with it.

After having to fix issues with a ME pc (most caused by the retard that tried to put a 160gb HD on it). Not to mention teh modem issues (he was on dialup). No matter how much I TRIED to tell him you cant leave teh 160 as 1 partition. He needed to break it up int smaller ones since ME wont recognize over 137. One of those guys who asks you for help, but when you tell him something aint gonna work, he'll go ask his "computer expert" brother who cant add ram sticks without screwing that up.

Then again I've known some people who never had a problem with ME.

[dust]

Silver you sure do like Vista a lot. Your posts look like a sales speech. Too bad it doesn't work

I won't change before Vista can do what you say and NOT demand any extra resources compared to Windows XP and Windows 2000/2003. If that never happens then it's not a better OS for most people.

Why do you think Microsoft won't release a DirectX 10 version for anything else than Vista? They could if they wanted to, but they need a way to force all the gamers to change and what better way than to make sure new games only works in vista? That alone is enough for me to either newer change or to download it. And I even get my OS'es for free. The day that I support forced software upgrades is the day the moon turns to cheese :cool

Nice desktop. It looks a lot like mine. Oh, did I say that I run a 4 year old theme in Linux? I thought Vista was brand new?

[sickle44]

YZFRob,

So what's your point, should I be calling you a computer geek much too?

I've built all my own boxes also.

[silver]

2GB, that's bloddy awful.

It's funny about how people are annoyed by the memory issue when the procs have jumped up significantly as well. Here's my general guidelines since '93

3.11 - 16MB - 486/66
95a - 32MB - 586/100
95b - 64mb - 586/166
98a - 128mb - 586/200
98b - 256mb - P2/300
2KPro - 512 - P3/1000 or dual P3/700's.
XPPro - 1GB - P4/2.8 or similar Athlon or dual Xeon.
Vista - 2GB - PD/3.0 (dual core) or similar Athlon or dual Xeon.

As multithreaded applications become more common and RAM densities grow even larger, we'll see 64bit OS'es become the norm on any system above a PDA. I personally wanted to switch to XP x64 however the driver writers weren't very accommodating.

[Mad Hatter]

I still have a 486DX2/80 running DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. A lap top that is dying it still trying to run the same.

I have a K6 133mhz running Win95 and a 233mhz running Win98.

Lastly I have a 1.0ghz and a 1.3ghz running XP Home and a 3.06ghz running XP Pro

Sheesh, I have cell phones that have more to them. I recently came across a Nokia MP3 player/phone with 80 ALBUMS on it. Someone threw it in our phone recycling bin. SCORE!!!

Topic at hand, how many vid. cards actually use 10x at this time?

[wortdog]

I run a Nvidia Quadro FX4500
Of course it has at least 512MB...
ATI's stuff does not play nice with the software I run. Solidworks, Mastercam, Catia, Pro E....
Bad JuJu.....
Just say no......

All of the people that I have talked to (Including the QC Dept's at CNC Software adn Solidworks) have all said, Don't go to Vista.

I've been using Pro E with Vista without issue. Its the graphics drivers that come with Vista that don't have OpenGL support. Nvidia and ATI drivers both have had fully functional OpenGL support in Vista as of 4-5 months ago. Performance was slightly better in XP though, so you may as well just stick with that until you're actually forced to upgrade.

[silver]

Silver you sure do like Vista a lot. Your posts look like a sales speech. Too bad it doesn't work

Well we have it working on a few systems already. Not a single OS crash yet. Not one. Some applications issues with CD burning software but nothing major.

I won't change before Vista can do what you say and NOT demand any extra resources compared to Windows XP and Windows 2000/2003. If that never happens then it's not a better OS for most people.

Well the added functionality is not something you need. That's certainly understandable. Currently there isn't that much of a difference between XP and Vista and if XP satisfies your needs then far be it from me to tall you what you need. I just know that I'm building one more system soon and that with the kids, bikes and so forth, it's gonna be my last one for a few years. And it had better be a good one !

Why do you think Microsoft won't release a DirectX 10 version for anything else than Vista?

Because there is no need to. Even if the OS and the drivers support DX10, there aren't that many applications written to take advantage of the unique capabilities of Direct-X 10 yet. By the time there are, XP will be EOL. Remember that XP is now 5.5 years old and it's been updated with two service packs and probably another 55~60 updates on top of that. There's only so much you can do to the base before you simply need to start fresh. Apple learned that lesson the hard way.

They could if they wanted to, but they need a way to force all the gamers to change and what better way than to make sure new games only works in vista? That alone is enough for me to either newer change or to download it. And I even get my OS'es for free. The day that I support forced software upgrades is the day the moon turns to cheese :cool

A little macaroni wit dat cheese ?

Note that Vista supports both DX9 and DX10. I don't think Microsoft really wants to "force" anything but rather they're just trying to shake loose some legacy-bagage. As an example of legacy hardware silliness, Jim is a machinist and might use RS232 ports for data transfer to his machines. This is or at least was common in machine shops as well as government purchased hardware even though the RS232 port was surpassed in performance long, long ago. It was invented in the 60's and we still have this ancient technology on many computers today. Why ? Because people insist on backward compatibiltiy. Letsee, RS232 = 58kb/s and USB2 = 480 Mbit/s. Gosh that's a really no brainer ! But for some it must a case of "no brain" as they keep perpetuating this old, obsolete and grossly outdated technology. The same with Direct-X. 9 is backward compatible with 8 and 7. So now we should have 10 backward compatible with 7 which was released 8 years ago ? In the computer field 8 years is at least two very full generations. The equivalent would be riding a classic bike such as a Norton Matchless from 1967 might be neat, how do you think it would compare to an R1 ?

Nice desktop. It looks a lot like mine. Oh, did I say that I run a 4 year old theme in Linux? I thought Vista was brand new?

Linux ? What's that ? Oh that's the OS that I tried and tried to get to do something ! Yeah I think it was something like using dual monitors. Yeah that was it ! I remember it really well unfortunately as I ended up spending 3 hours just trying to get Xorg.conf to work with my ATI X600 on dual (not twin) monitors. FYI, been there, done that and got the Red Hat Revolution T-Shirt. And also watched as RH6 crashed while the company themselves was showing everyone in the audience how great it was. Sound familiar ? Something like Billy "BSOD" Gates had happen ? Linux is good for servers. It's not a good desktop OS. Not yet.

[dragracer1951]

While RS232 may in fact be old school technology, It is in fact what my machine data goes through to get to my machines. I probably COULD do this over my network, but the cost issue is prohibitive. For example, to get an ethernet adaptor on either for my Haas machines, requires a $2900 option which includes...are you ready? the ethernet adaptor, a USB port and a 20 meg hard drive. My Fanuc 0i controls have 256k of memory. larger memory options are about $5k per meg. No kidding.
The ethernet option for the Fanucs was in the $6k range.
I CAN however use USB to RS232 adaptors with VERY short cables to achieve 115kbs speeds which is acceptable for DNC control of the machine. There are wireless options as well There are options for me out there but for now at least....Vista ain't one of them. I see no gain over what I am using now.

[dust]

Linux ? What's that ? Oh that's the OS that I tried and tried to get to do something ! Yeah I think it was something like using dual monitors. Yeah that was it ! I remember it really well unfortunately as I ended up spending 3 hours just trying to get Xorg.conf to work with my ATI X600 on dual (not twin) monitors. FYI, been there, done that and got the Red Hat Revolution T-Shirt. And also watched as RH6 crashed while the company themselves was showing everyone in the audience how great it was. Sound familiar ? Something like Billy "BSOD" Gates had happen ? Linux is good for servers. It's not a good desktop OS. Not yet.

You are absolutely correct. It's not ready for desktop use for people who does not have the knowledge and/or will to make it work. How hard it is to get it to work is up to the user. For easy use there are lots of options. Red hat would not be my choice if plug and play is what you would want. The Linux equivalent of Windows XP would be something like Debian or Ubuntu.

The point is that most PC users do not need what Windows have to offer. Most Microsoft office users could just as well be using Open office (I would bet my FZR that Open office's script language (python) is a heck lot more powerfull than the one in MS office). If you are the type that play a lot of games Windows is the choice. That is what Windows does best. For Office and server use Linux would be the best bet. The problem is that most users choose what software to use first and then look at Linux. If they looked at Linux first then getting the software they want to use would be a lot easier

Vista is going to be nice im sure but for non-gamers i would recommend Linux, bsd or OSX.

[silver]

You are absolutely correct. It's not ready for desktop use for people who does not have the knowledge and/or will to make it work. How hard it is to get it to work is up to the user. For easy use there are lots of options. Red hat would not be my choice if plug and play is what you would want. The Linux equivalent of Windows XP would be something like Debian or Ubuntu.

Yep. Been there too. And Slackware, Mandrake, Vector, SuSE, Mepis, Damn Small, ZenWalk and more. Ubuntu is user friendly but comparing it to Windows is like comparing a Ford F100 to a Ferrari.

The point is that most PC users do not need what Windows have to offer.

I disagree. They need exactly what Windows offers. Broad-based driver and software support and compatibility.

Most Microsoft office users could just as well be using Open office (I would bet my FZR that Open office's script language (python) is a heck lot more powerfull than the one in MS office).

Hmmmm, more powerful than C# ? I don't think so.

If you are the type that play a lot of games Windows is the choice. That is what Windows does best.

This is because Microsoft writes a standardized API and makes it available to all the developers through MSDN. This is quite the opposite of Linux which has no standards and no central authority.

For Office and server use Linux would be the best bet. The problem is that most users choose what software to use first and then look at Linux. If they looked at Linux first then getting the software they want to use would be a lot easier

I think they look at hardware more than any other factor. You need to have the ability to connect to WiFi, scanners, printers and networks easily. None of this is done easily across the board in Linux.

Vista is going to be nice im sure but for non-gamers i would recommend Linux, bsd or OSX.

I recommend the UNIX variants to users of laptops such as Dell or HP make. As long as they're about a year or two old. For desktops there simply isn't the driver and hardware support necessary to support the broad range of peripherals used today. Look at the Creative sound cards. Epson scanners. Lexmark printers. Driver support of these common peripherals is sketchy at best. I give Linux credit for being a solid stable OS. But above the command line it simply doesn't compare well with Windows 2000, XP or Vista. As to OSX, how many times have they killed backward compatibility already ? I wouldn't touch a Mac for at least another 2 years. And then only if they had stabilized their development better.

[silver]

While RS232 may in fact be old school technology, It is in fact what my machine data goes through to get to my machines. I probably COULD do this over my network, but the cost issue is prohibitive. For example, to get an ethernet adaptor on either for my Haas machines, requires a $2900 option which includes...are you ready? the ethernet adaptor, a USB port and a 20 meg hard drive. My Fanuc 0i controls have 256k of memory. larger memory options are about $5k per meg. No kidding.
The ethernet option for the Fanucs was in the $6k range.
I CAN however use USB to RS232 adaptors with VERY short cables to achieve 115kbs speeds which is acceptable for DNC control of the machine. There are wireless options as well There are options for me out there but for now at least....Vista ain't one of them. I see no gain over what I am using now.

Completely understandable. In fact Vista is not targeted to end users such as yourself On the other hand I fit the bill far better as I'm interested in multimedia. Having had a professional photographer studio, I possibly have literally a ton of films here to scan in and play with. Actually in your case XP or Win2K probably work best and perhaps equally well.

Regarding the RS232, it does work as long as your files aren't too large. When I scan a 4X5 negative, the file size is between 512MB and 1GB. Transferring 1GB over RS232 would be about like using dial-up. Not something I care to do anymore. Boy they really sock it to ya for hardware prices don't they ? !! "Prohibitive" is being kind. Hmmm, I wonder if there's an opportunity to make some kind of adapter there for a reasonable price ?