Vista is out

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:01 am

Stop being an ass for the sake of being an ass.

I'm doing it for the sake of calling crud, crud.

You noticed better performance?? Compared to what? Your bogged down registry rotted XP system? Come on.
I sure noticed the performance difference. It ran half as fast as a pristine XP install and a lot of things didn't work right. Oh, that will be fixed in the final version right? It will all be peachy soon. Deja vu!

Shinier looks is the only valid point here, and that only compared to XP.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:43 pm

Echoecho wrote:No technology savvy people have praised Shitsta legitimately. Just fanboy fluff has.

You're right. Only the fanboy fluff are wasting their time heralding it as the Second Coming of Bill Gates and lining up to slurp up the sloppy seconds.

The rest of us are busy just using the shit.

I know a developer who wrestles with Windows GUI development on a daily basis, both for career and for hobby development. He would probably stab out his own eyes rather than switch to some other development platform. He's also using his own money to buy Vista for all of his systems and then for his whole family as well, since he has to deal with configuring and networking all of their machines.

Of course, Vista is not a requirement for using Visual Studio 2005, which happily functions under Windows XP. Although there are a number of bugs in the Common Controls library that have been corrected in Vista. Aero also does a nice job of masking real window painting glitches. Expect to see more developers migrating to Vista in the future, churning out dialog code with issues that all but unnoticeable unless you take Aero out of the picture. (For instance, the long standing repainting issue with GTK Win32, where scrolling within a dialog which has another window floating over it will cause parts of that window to leak into the dialog. It simply goes away with Aero enabled. Nice of Microsoft to transparently solve issues that uppity Linux crossporters probably don't notice through their WINE goggles.)

phOnYmIkE wrote:what are your alternatives? linux? mac? lol

Certainly, switching platforms is an alternative for someone with nothing but time on their hands to learn a new system. Great for end users, not so great for employed developers. Although I'm sure hobby developers enjoy throwing their work away and starting over every now and then. Oh, that's right, they should have started the right way in the first place, with Open Sauce.

phOnYmIkE wrote:only prob I see is if people have lan cards older than 6 years (like I have) then they won't be able to get on the net to get newer drivers. I would have made lan card support on install #1 because it's the doorway to update all other drivers. there's gonna be problems with vista on release over this kind of shit.

Luckily, the Vista installer accepts drivers from both CD and flash drives. Great for those of us who don't keep one of those antique floppy drives installed.

casualsax3 · Post by **casualsax3** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 4:17 pm

kode54 wrote:For instance, the long standing repainting issue with GTK Win32, where scrolling within a dialog which has another window floating over it will cause parts of that window to leak into the dialog. It simply goes away with Aero enabled. Nice of Microsoft to transparently solve issues that uppity Linux crossporters probably don't notice through their WINE goggles.)

Ah I was wondering what happened to GAIM! I figured they just fixed it with Beta 5 - nice to know. There is some other sweet stuff because of Aero - like you can drag video from monitor to monitor and it will display normally like a regular window, even split between monitors. Also, they *finally* managed to come up with a Windows Media Player GUI that's better than Media Player Classic - and screenshots capture video now:

Echoecho wrote:You noticed better performance?? Compared to what? Your bogged down registry rotted XP system? Come on.
I sure noticed the performance difference. It ran half as fast as a pristine XP install and a lot of things didn't work right. Oh, that will be fixed in the final version right? It will all be peachy soon. Deja vu!

If you're talking about Beta 1,2 or RC1, then yes, you're going to be very impressed with how much faster the final version of an operating system will run when all of the debugging shit is turned off.

kevman · Post by **kevman** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:05 am

Actually, it does run quite a bit faster. But still painfully slow and RAM-hogging.

This Vista RTM, and I am currently transferring files off of a thumbdrive. But its moving the data 300kilobytes per second in the copy dialog, about 20 times slower than it should be. (This is a Barton 2500 with a Radeon 9800 Pro).

And it won't really do anything else; opening other windows is taking 3-5 seconds. I can't get Half Life 2 to start on it yet, so I dunno about game performance.

The RAM usage off of a fresh, default, boot isn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I was guessing 2000Megabyte Plus, and its only about 1200meg. All 768meg of its RAM is used, as well as 600meg of swap file. The hard drive never stops clicking, until about 5 minutes after you finish using it. The sidebar is really slowing it down. Bad.

Companies such as US Steel are going to have to invest thousands and thousand of dollars into RAM before rolling it out. I really don't see Vista as usable in a development environment with less than 3 gigabyte of RAM.

casualsax3 · Post by **casualsax3** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:30 am

I'm running 2GB of RAM and with about 10 apps open including Firefox, Winamp, Thunderbird, Office 2007, GAIM, and some work related stuff, and I'm only using 47% of my RAM, or 962/2048MB.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:42 am

Ok, so we have established that some people may need to work on Vista to correct one bug in Visual Studio. Cruddy Visual Blewdio aside, it's all about the novelty for regular users. It is not better than XP, just better looking.

And I was talking about the final beta. If you're telling me it's faster than XP, you're a liar, or seeing what you want to see.

kevman · Post by **kevman** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:08 am

casualsax3 wrote:I'm running 2GB of RAM and with about 10 apps open including Firefox, Winamp, Thunderbird, Office 2007, GAIM, and some work related stuff, and I'm only using 47% of my RAM, or 962/2048MB.

Did you tweak it at all? I imagine you had to. What did you do?

When I said it needs three gigs, I meant for development.

Ever developed for Java? It typically involves 2 JVMS taking 300-600meg of RAM each.

corronchilejano · Post by **corronchilejano** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:48 am

This thing REALLY eats up resources. I barely have Avaya and RCD up and I have only 60% to go (I'm using 2Gb Ram on a Dual 6.4).

It's a LOT faster than XP is (you REALLY notice), though I'd have to use it a bit more and fill it with garbage to see if there's any slowdown. Also, a don't know why, but this thing pages for everything (altough it's STILL quick).

QUICK EDIT: I CRASHED it today. I dunno if it's actually a CPU failure, but Vista FROZE on me during a certain process in a call. No errors, no messages, a DEEP freeze.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:03 am

Echoecho wrote:If you're telling me it's faster than XP, you're a liar, or seeing what you want to see.

Why, yes, a fresh installation of Vista is somewhat faster to boot and is more responsive than a two year old XP installation, but that's not a fair comparison, now is it?

A proper comparison of the new system should also involve a battery of cache tests, such as effects on application startup time, data persistence, effects of new data and memory allocation on the cache, etc.

But really, I am just seeing what I want to see. Next week, I'll throw the whole thing out to install my own hackintosh, because that can probably run my favorite irreplaceable Windows-only software right on the system desktop with Parallels. Or maybe I'll switch to Linux after all, because I hear XGL / Beryl is way prettier than anything out there. If I could just tear myself away from this complete setup that I started two months ago that's finally worn in to my needs.

Maybe I'll try FeebySD 6.x instead next time I'm bored and have the drive space to kill. All of the Open Sauce, significantly less of teh gays.

Echoecho wrote:Ok, so we have established that some people may need to work on Vista to correct one bug in Visual Studio.

It's not a bug in Visual Studio, it's a bug in Windows Common Controls, a library bundled with the operating system. (For example, right-aligning text in the first column of a listbox control under certain conditions causes painting glitches, where the space between the end of the first column and the beginning of the text in the second column is left unpainted, except for the selection rectangle, causing obvious glitching when scrolling. There are other issues with LVS_OWNERDATA and/or owner draw style that result in paint requests for items which aren't visible, increasing overhead for large lists.)

All meaningless to those not bound by the trappings of evil capitalist software platforms. And really, if you're not using this software, why the hell are you posting in a topic about it?

(Oh snap, I posed several questions to you, and told you to get lost, all in the same post!)

Corronchilejano wrote:This thing REALLY eats up resources. I barely have Avaya and RCD up and I have only 60% to go (I'm using 2Gb Ram on a Dual 6.4).

Care to check the Task Manager to see how much of that is cached data? (Performance tab)

You can also check out the new default panel of the Reliability and Performance Monitor, or Resource Monitor, or perfmon.exe, or whatever. It can be launched from the Start Menu, or the Task Manager's Performance tab, or by running perfmon.exe.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:19 am

Either way. I'm sorry but I can't say the new install of Vista even "feels" faster while using it compared to a new XP install. It is noticeably slower. And boot up times; in it's default state it didn't come close to the speed of the XP system I have with unused services disabled. The list of true advantages of upgrading to Vista is very weak. What bothers me is when people don't just admit they are fanboys after the latest fad, which is the staggering majority in the case of Vista. Then I'd leave it alone.

casualsax3 · Post by **casualsax3** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:39 pm

kevman wrote:Did you tweak it at all? I imagine you had to. What did you do?When I said it needs three gigs, I meant for development.
Ever developed for Java? It typically involves 2 JVMS taking 300-600meg of RAM each.

No I didn't tweak it at all, except to shut off iTunes and Quicktime in msconfig.

Echoecho wrote:Either way. I'm sorry but I can't say the new install of Vista even "feels" faster while using it compared to a new XP install. It is noticeably slower. And boot up times; in it's default state it didn't come close to the speed of the XP system I have with unused services disabled. The list of true advantages of upgrading to Vista is very weak. What bothers me is when people don't just admit they are fanboys after the latest fad, which is the staggering majority in the case of Vista. Then I'd leave it alone.

You're blindly ignoring everything that people who are using Vista are telling you. I have no fucking reason to praise this OS, other than the fact that it really is better. I still prefer Ubuntu, if that means anything to you.

There are fanboys, and then there are the polar oposites of fanboys that are bitterly opposed to everything the fanboys like, regardless of whether or not it's actually good. You are the latter, and you're just as fucking annoying.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:28 am

I'm just calling it as I see it, bub. If one looks around the net, all the smart people know Vista is Shitsta.

sweener2001 · Post by **sweener2001** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 8:32 am

the smart people don't do lame name replacements.

corronchilejano · Post by **corronchilejano** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:45 pm

Echoecho wrote:I'm just calling it as I see it, bub. If one looks around the net, all the smart people know Vista is Shitsta.

The OS itself is not bad. It's the license thing what worries me.

Clements · Post by **Clements** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 8:31 pm

My main criticism at the moment is the price. In the UK, the pricing scheme for the retail editions is as follows:

- Vista Home Basic is £154.99 inc VAT
- Vista Home Premium is £184.99 inc VAT
- Vista Business is £250.00 inc VAT
- Vista Ultimate £325.00 inc VAT

From what I have read, and my experiences from using RC1:

- Vista Home Basic has severe limitations, like no Aero etc. That excludes this SKU immediately for me.
- Vista Home Premium lacks the networking features that I would like.
- Vista Business seems to be the best option. Apparently lacks a few things from Home Premium, but none appear useful/vital for my purposes.
- Vista Ultimate is a massive rip at £325 (US$637) even for a one-off purchase.

This leaves me down to Vista Business. £250 is still very expensive (I got XP Home SP1 OEM for £60 about 4 years ago, and still use a slipstreamed SP2 version of it). I have the choice of OEM or Retail, so I'll probably buy OEM and hope I can activate after I upgrade my PC. I'll probably leave my laptop on XP.

I'll wait a while before buying Vista for now, as I also need to buy the student edition of Office 2007 which will probably set me back another £100...

casualsax3 · Post by **casualsax3** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:52 am

Yeah, there's no way I'd pay anything over $150 for Vista. Pirate the fuck out of it.

snkcube · Post by **snkcube** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:14 am

casualsax3 wrote:Yeah, there's no way I'd pay anything over $150 for Vista. Pirate the fuck out of it.

I might be thinking the same, due to the insane pricing.

xamenus · Post by **xamenus** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:03 am

That is a little expensive. If Microsoft releases SP3, I think I would be content enough with XP. Actually, I'm content enough with it already.

alexz721 · Post by **alexz721** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:43 am

The RAM requirement is the biggest thing holding me back from getting Vista right now.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:49 am

Depends what you mean by "bad". To me something that has that many licensing limitations, and which has no real advantage in using, is bad. Speaking of Aero, I just installed the Beryl manager on a linux system, and it could use some polishing yet, but while using it I think 'Aero who?' Another incentive to want Vista Ultimate edition flushed down the toilet as far as I'm concerned.

Btw, good luck pirating this thing. you'll need it. I know I've known some people who took pride in their XP cracks, but boy does that seem cumbersome and asinine with all the problems. Even when I did use a pirate copy I used a volume copy. But either way, in case you haven't noticed, they are cracking down hard on piracy, or at least that's their claim for including Genuine Spyware, or whatever that thing is called. And it will only get worse with Vista.

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:50 am

it requres 512, which costs like $20. my god you people live in the stoneage.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:55 am

Hmm, where in the crap do you buy 512 of DDR2, or even 1 for that matter, for $20? Flea market?

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:23 am

I've been looking at RAM on newegg, and you won't see 512MB anything for < $25.

(You'll start seeing some when you search for $25-$50, and even then the RAM would be at $45+)

also, what's holding me back right now would be:

* which edition I want
* Price
* Memory

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:38 am

you want 512MB of DDR ram for $20. hahaha

who said anything about DDR? I found two sticks of 128 pc100 ram (aren't you cavemen jealus?) and added it to my motherboard, and it worked great. though I'm sure you guys run your computers without ram, and therefore need 512MB of ram, but an upgrade to 512 (512 - amount in your comp) can be had for cheap. the ram I found was on an old motherboard about to be thrown away.seriously what kind of crap do you people have where 512MB of ram is such a problem? you guys should just go back to win98 you cheap bastards.

Echoecho · Post by **Echoecho** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:34 am

I dunno buddy but you'd be hard pressed to find even 512 of PC100/133 for $20, so stop lying. Not to mention that something that old is likely to be too slow for comfort on vista.