Are you being serious? XP is Win2k with additional bloat - I mean, features. How could it be faster? I am guessing you are kidding (hence the 'wink'), but maybe there's something I don't know. . .
Vista
- Thread starter peteweaver
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Are you being serious? XP is Win2k with additional bloat - I mean, features. How could it be faster? I am guessing you are kidding (hence the 'wink'), but maybe there's something I don't know. . .
I doubt it. I think it's the classic "newer is better" mentalityAre you being serious? XP is Win2k with additional bloat - I mean, features. How could it be faster? I am guessing you are kidding (hence the 'wink'), but maybe there's something I don't know. . .
XP aint faster than 2000.
I'll admit its maybe not feasible for everyone. But the RC2 Beta of Vista is still widely available. So if one wants a decent preview of the features within Vista, they can certainly do so at no cost.
XP over 2000? Driver rollback, functional restore points, Windows Firewall, faster bootup and shutdown. Not to mention many extended features for Active Directory group policy control.bigred said:
See, if you throw the caveat in that its from the home PC perspective, then sure, the upgrades may seem less significant. And I'm fine with that. But then don't use blanket statements saying there are no significant new features in Vista, because from the enterprise side of things there most definately are.
I agree that anyone, for any platform running around toting its security before its been released to full production is annoying. And the list you gave of the 12 new features of Vista covers it pretty well. I'll agree that Vista is not a revolution of the Windows platform, but there are some decent and significant improvements, despite what one might think about MS implementation.
Remember that Vista is not 100% targeted to home users, not by a long shot. Many of those features are welcome additions to those of us having to control and deploy Windows desktops in mid/large organizations.
As much as people gripe about the UAC it is still nice to have, and the concept exists in many Unix / Linux environments and with Macs, the concept of having to invoke admin rights when needed.
As for performance, people need to consider the requirements. For every person complaining it ran slowly, I can find someone saying it ran fine. My PC meets most of the minimum requirements and Vista RC2 ran fine for me, not major performance or speed issues. The only significant issue I had was actually with Windows Media Player 11 which had a habit of pinning the CPU when buffering videos. Switched to Media Player Classic and it went away.
Overall I think Vista is a nice step forward, and yes will need a little fine tuning over the first 6 months or so. But its certainly better than XP was with its initial release.
And yes, I agree, there maybe a much less solid case for home users to upgrade. That doesn't mean that there are not significant improvements, and that to different scenarios that those features have value.
What does "fast" mean in terms of Windows anyway? XP certainly isn't "slower" than 2000. What metric are we measuring speed with? Boot up and shutdown? How many applications can be opened at once, and any potential lag in switching between windows etc? Games? Memory / CPU Usage?I doubt it. I think it's the classic "newer is better" mentality
XP aint faster than 2000.
I'll agree to the fact that I don't think XP is necessarily "faster" than 2000, with the exception of bootup and shutdown times. Overall the PC moreso dictates how fast the OS operates. XP may make more efficient use of memory and CPU times, but not that would be significantly noticeable to a regular home user.
I guess my main issue is that on a site where people are skeptical about a great many things, that when it comes to certain topics, Computer OS's in general, that critical thinking tends to fly out the window as everyone flogs their favorite dead horse (Windows sucks, Linus sucks, Mac sucks) what have you.
I'm no Microsoft fanboy, but lets take a serious look at things before letting our bias run off with us.
negativ
Graduate Poster
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I wouldn't buy Vista right now, period. I' played around with it for a few days and went back to XP. Too many things don't work. I really like the navigation updates, though, and once the first big service pack comes out, I may give it another chance.
You can still get XP (in several flavors) from NewEgg, by the way.
I ended up running Vista on my new laptop against my will. My wireless card doesn't have XP compatible drivers available. They are due out in the next 2 months, but in the meantime I have been forced to stick with Vista.
And, to my surprise, I actually like it. The annoying "Windows needs your permission to continue" can sometimes really piss me off. And periodically I have trouble finding a compatible version of some software, but all in all I am pretty happy with the new features.
That said, I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate Edition. I cannot in good conscience endorse this product for the price they want to charge normal people for it.
And, to my surprise, I actually like it. The annoying "Windows needs your permission to continue" can sometimes really piss me off. And periodically I have trouble finding a compatible version of some software, but all in all I am pretty happy with the new features.
That said, I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate Edition. I cannot in good conscience endorse this product for the price they want to charge normal people for it.
There is one change form XP to Vista that will be dramatic, once programmers learn how to take advantage of it. Screen elements are no longer bitmapped, but vector based, and can be manipulated as objects in ways that are just not possible in the GDI+ scheme of things. I know, it doesn't sound like much, but this can literally mean a revolution in alternative display formats, like near-zero processing cost for realtime graphics calls, or the ability to offload digital-imaging effects to your video board and then reload the results back to the image in memory; this could be done with both still and video images. This could be really, really big.
ChristineR
Illuminator
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Actually that is very cool, but right now I'm not exactly dieing to see Windows come to life. I'd rather have the extra memory.
It's not just pretty effects; it's the ability of Windows to handle just about any visual element, in realtime for both still and video images, with drastically reduced processing overhead. Take, say, a 20 or 30 megapixel digital image, that you're blending with another bitmap, like either an alpha blend or a bump map, just about anything. The native Windows functions convert it to vector-based image, then you can offload the bump map or alpha blend to your GPU, and reload the processed image into memory. HUGE savings in processing time. And you can do it constantly in real time with a video stream. Prettification of windows elements is just a freebie. That high-end video card now has a business case justification, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
ChristineR
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I'm trying, but I'm just not seeing the use of bump-mapping my Windows elements. Sure, piping everything through GDI objects kind of sucks but we've been living with that for a while. I'm visualizing Windows moving around like 3D characters, but it's not exciting me too much.
It ain't easy to create a vector image from a bitmap, by the way. The usual way to do it is to start vector and convert to bitmap if needed.
It ain't easy to create a vector image from a bitmap, by the way. The usual way to do it is to start vector and convert to bitmap if needed.
To quote Prewitt:
Nope.
You do NOT want to convert your bitmaps to vector and back again. You will lose detail that way, and bitmap to vector conversion is a difficult job to do. Much more difficult than just doing the changes in the bitmap to begin with. It would take longer and you would get a much worse result by doing things that way. I'm no fan of MS, but even I don't think they're THAT stupid.
You can make use of the graphic card abilities to manipulate a bitmap (but I don't know if Vista can help you with it.) That's a different thing entirely, and not unreasonable.
Vista uses vector graphics in some parts of the Aero GUI. The advantage to using vector graphics is that they scale well to different screen resolutions and dpi settings. From what I hear, Aero is not completely vector based (some of the graphics are still bitmaps) and comes apart visually if you use extreme dpi settings.
Wowbagger
The Infinitely Prolonged
You know what I really love about Vista, (besides the better Tablet support)?
When you have file extensions shown, and you rename a file, the extension is not selected by default, so you can just type in the new name, without reselecting only the name portion, first!!
Sometimes, it's the little things that really make the biggest difference in your day-to-day computer operations.
When you have file extensions shown, and you rename a file, the extension is not selected by default, so you can just type in the new name, without reselecting only the name portion, first!!
Sometimes, it's the little things that really make the biggest difference in your day-to-day computer operations.
That has got to be the absolute smallest improvement that has taken the longest to get.
Windows has been tossing the warning about not changing the extension for years. It seems like making it not select the extension when renaming would be a simple and obvious thing, but yet here it is seven years after Windows 2000 came out (I know Win2K does this) and it has just now been changed.
See now this is the kind of actual useful stuff that can attract customers.
The UK magazine PC Advisor is running a post-install Vista poll. Results here-http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/poll/index.cfm?action=showresults&pid=238
The same site has details of the class action suit M$ may be facing over advertising computers as "Vista Capable" when they can actually only handle Vista Home Basic, which lacks the Aero interface, arguably Vista's main selling point to the general home user.
The same site has details of the class action suit M$ may be facing over advertising computers as "Vista Capable" when they can actually only handle Vista Home Basic, which lacks the Aero interface, arguably Vista's main selling point to the general home user.
I tried XP home edition on one of my computers - it was slower to boot than Win2kPro. And it crashed more, a lot more. I took it off and re-installed Win2k.
One of the things I don't like about XP is that I have to select for all file types every time I do a file search, if I want to include hidden files. With Win2k, I set it once and it automatically does this every time I search. This is the kind of thing I call 'bloat' that MS would call a 'feature'.
Ripley Twenty-Nine
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This is an interesting issue, because PC game manufacturers have been doing this for years.
Many 3D games offer significant graphical features, but only for cutting edge PCs with high end graphics cards, RAM, and processors. On their packaging, they mention 'minimum' requirements (Meaning that yes, the game will run, but maybe not well), and 'recommended' requirements.
It's not even rare nowadays for people to buy a new PC, or do a signficant upgrade just to be able to run a certain game; we certainly saw it when Doom 3 was released.
So basically it's a tough call to say if Microsoft is being blatantly dishonest, or just not being as forthcoming as they could be about what 'Vista Capable' means. My understanding is that PCs that meet minimum requirements can actually run any version of Vista, but that Aero will have to be turned off.
jimlintott
Master Poster
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I'm curious, is Vista still identifying file types by extension? Now that is something that is broken and needs fixing. It has even been a security issue. Ever seen a song.mp3.vbs file?
How about symlinks? Does Vista do proper symlinks now?
aerosolben
Evil Genius
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The potential security vulnerability is in hiding extensions, not having program associations. Is that what you mean?
Apparently.
http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2006/04/15/576568.aspx