windows vista

[Dallas06]

It seems to be the most major upgrade windows has ever seen. It has a very different look/feel than XP.

 

[WYSIWYG]

Looks a lot like the Apple OS X

 

[ToninuMT]

I have used the RC1 version of Windows Vista which I had downloaded from Microsoft. Then I installed it as a second OS alongside my current XP installation. The look of the OS blew me away, I was quite impressed with it. They did a major overhaul to the look of Windows, and I agree with the previous post that it does look a lot like MAC OS. At first I felt a bit lost until I knew where everything was.

To get all the bells and whistles of the new visual style you need a good 3D graphics card. My 128Mb ATI Radeon 9800 Pro managed just fine and it's a few years old now. I am using a Socket 478 Pentium IV 3.0 GHz processor and 2Gb of RAM with an SATA HD. I think the large amount of RAM helps alot since it's an older PC. I do think it's worth upgrading to, hopefully it won't be too expensive!

 

[Matt1809]

At first I felt a bit lost until I knew where everything was.

Dont forget to search for things using the built in search, especially in the control panel, there are a ton of options. The help system is pretty good to, they have these nice guided help things that show you on screen how to change settings and stuff, its rather neat.

 

[teh_nathan]

It seems like a lot of bloat or "feature creep" to me.

 

[pinkrose]

so u need a fast computer, with an expensive 3d card do u to run vista?

 

[trawler69]

Well T-Rexx has summed up perfectly my views on MS. My main feeling is that their systems are now out of control. No properly written OS should need constant security updates and tweaks. It has got top heavy, consuming more and more resources just to keep the OS running, leaving less and less for the actual software you wish to run. When I was writing programs the object was to reduce and optimise the code as resources were limited at the time. I feel that software should still be written with those values to avoid the obsolescence of hardware because it can't cope with the OS. An example with my current laptop is that I downloaded a fix to make the mute light flash correctly, it was 64K, twice as much memory as my BBC computer had in total and that used to run a robot with six degrees of freedom and still had space to spare! I've now started playing with linux and am very impressed, the speed is phenomenal as it is small enough to all reside in Ram with no lengthy disk access and use of swap files. Any way not trying to hijack this thread just making a few observations about the way things seem to be going with MS.

 

[Matt1809]

It bothers me that MS has decided belatedly to incorporate the Microsoft Anti-Spyware Program into the Vista OS.

Anti-Spyware is not ment to fix flaws in the system's security, but flaws in the people who use it. A system can only do so much to prevent a user from trying to install something they shouldnt.

It bothers me that Vista contains more than 50 million lines of code. No human being can comprehend anywhere near that amount of complexity. And no group of people has ever proven adept at managing such a monster.

Allow me:
"The sixth release was the Intel version of Tiger, which as Jobs pointed out, was a port of 86 million lines of source code to an entirely different architecture."
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2006/08/15/wwdc.html

And the hardware requirements with vista a perfectly inline with pratically every new computer on the market today. But really, XP came out 5 years ago, were you expecting the requirements to stay the same?

Knoppix 5.0 requires 96 MB to execute in full graphics mode.

Knoppix and Windows are two very different operating systems. Your so worried about the amount of memory windows vista takes up, but it takes up alot of memory to improve performance. Perhaps you have heard of SuperFetch? Were commonly used applications are preloaded into ram to speed up how quickly they start? Does it have an file indexer running in the background? Vista's requirements are perfectly inline with that of Mac OSX.

It is also important to note Microsoft is making the shift to managed code. Now a days people have alot more ram then they use to. Thus programs are getting bigger, but at the same time much more secure.

so u need a fast computer, with an expensive 3d card do u to run vista?

Not really. Obviously the faster the computer the better, but I have found Vista to run smoothly on most systems once you give it a few days to speed itself up. and you only need a semi-decent graphics card if you want the special visual stuff to run. It just needs to be a DirectX 9 card.

If you want to know how vista will run on your computer, you can always try this:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx

 

[Matt1809]

Lol so this one time linux crashed. Is this it way of telling people you shouldnt use it?

 

[Corny]

As for patches/fixes? One only has to do a Google search for the terms and you'll soon discover that there are hundreds if not thousands of patches and fixes for linux.

you forget something here. with those search term you find a LOT more than just security patches for linux. you most likely find
- feature patches/updates
- patches for certain linux programs
unlike in windows, linux is in a constant development. microsoft makes it release, and after that it gets a feature freeze and all they do is security fixes.

 

[Corny]

i once managed to fuck up my hotplug manager so that it caused a kernel panic.
well that was when hotplug still was in alpha

 

[Matt1809]

microsoft makes it release, and after that it gets a feature freeze and all they do is security fixes.

Well many of the changes made in XP SP2 were new features, it just so happened that they were security related.

 

[Corny]

Well many of the changes made in XP SP2 were new features, it just so happened that they were security related.

yeah, but that was just because elsewise XP probably now would have self-destructed itself the other service packs were merely a compilation of security patches.

 

[buzzj]

you forget something here. with those search term you find a LOT more than just security patches for linux. you most likely find
- feature patches/updates
- patches for certain linux programs
unlike in windows, linux is in a constant development. microsoft makes it release, and after that it gets a feature freeze and all they do is security fixes.

That's an interesting point! Do you suppose MS does it that way because, with their market share, they figure they don't have to offer on-going improvements?

 

[bluesummer]

I'm posting from it and it looks and feels really slick for a non-finished product. I also think the only thing about its look that resembles Mac OS X is the drop shadows for the windows.
The sidebar feels pretty useless to me but some people are going to like it, I guess.

By the way, you shouldn't have to upgrade to run Vista, it only feels a tad slower than XP in some ways (scrolling in browser windows, for example) with all the bells and whistles on.

 

[Corny]

well what new features did windows xp get with sp1?

and do you understand the differences between "linux" as the buzzword, "linux" the os and do you know the difference between "linux" and a linux distribution?

oh and you started the whole patch/fix thing, so don't tell me i am turning this in a win vs something else discussion

 

[Corny]

That's an interesting point! Do you suppose MS does it that way because, with their market share, they figure they don't have to offer on-going improvements?

i think they are slowly beginning to realize that they need to do that. while a few years ago they still said that they don't need firewalls virusscanners or anti-spyware stuff, they now offer almost that. partly for free, partly as part of the OS. they got a lot of flak from the press for their security politics and they are trying hard to get away from that.
however, the no1 reason for windows still is office. and interesting enough - if you have a look at the new office version, there they really threw over some of the old stuff and brought in a fresh wind.
they also had great ideas and plans for vista. but almost everything interesting was cutted, and now you merely get a fancy new windows more graphics

 

[Matt1809]

That's an interesting point! Do you suppose MS does it that way because, with their market share, they figure they don't have to offer on-going improvements?

No, it has to do with the fact that enterprises dont want to have to upgrade every year. Could you imagine pushing out a new OS every single year to 50,000 computers?

but almost everything interesting was cutted, and now you merely get a fancy new windows more graphics

Well, instand desktop searching was in longhorn before apple er..."innovated" it. But yes, some good stuff was cut, however its not just a pretty new face. Much of the core of Windows was completely re-written from the ground up. Like the network stack, and audio stack. They arnt surface changes, but will make a large difference to everyone that uses windows.

 

[miaplacidus]

My opinion about Vista is that it requires an expensive PC (outside the US and Japan, computers fast enough to run it are really expensive) to do the same that Linux or Mac OS accomplish in less powerful configurations.

You see, it requires 15 GB of free hard disk space only for the operating system... compare that to the 4 GB of Ubuntu Linux with the most-commonly used applications (OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc), the compositing engine, Xgl, the programs to manage a recording studio, and some other programs. And you can make Linux look as good (if not better) than Windows Vista, without any performance loss.

 

[cozmik]

Vista looks intersting, but it's going to be expensive in it's most feature filled version. I probably won't upgrade my existing computer. More likely, I'll just buy a new one this Spring with Vista already on it.