scott wrote:
> Even just upgrading from 1GB to 2GB makes quite a large difference, and 
> at today's RAM prices you'd be really silly to buy Vista without the 
> extra RAM.

Yeah, especially on a x64 chip.

> The real kicker for me is how fast large programs start up compared to 
> XP. 

Google up on "readyboost".  The system tracks what page faulted early on 
in the last five times you started that program, then in the background, 
it loads of the pages into RAM (if you have enough). For things it knows 
you're going to run (like services) it has readyboot, where it loads up 
pages even before the program starts. And then there's something called 
"superboost" or some such, where if a big program comes in and knocks 
the pages of an idle process out of memory, when the big program exits, 
it idly reloads the pages that got knocked out of memory.

XP had a similar thing with the "prefetch" stuff, but I think Vista took 
it several steps farther. That's what the bit where plugging in a USB 
drive gets you faster access does - an extra level of paging cache 
between memory speeds and disk speeds, and without the seek delays as well.

> I think Vista makes much better use of the 
> RAM, or more intelligent use of the RAM.

That's one of the big things it does.

>> UAC doesn't bother me at all.
> 
> Didn't bother me either, until I had to turn it off for something or 
> other (POV I think haha),

Actually, you don't have to turn of UAC to make the previous POVs that 
write to "Program Files" work. That's a separate setting. The UAC 
checkbox changes about five independent things, only one of which is 
"try to make programs that write to protected directories work right 
anyway."  Check out the stuff in Group Policy.

Also, the bit where setup files automatically ask for admin permissions? 
That's a separate flag too. If the POV team wants to test it not 
offering admin install when it doesn't have admin rights, the flag is 
under Group Policy too.

But yeah, the UAC comes up too often until someone mails you a Word 
document and when you open it the UAC comes up saying "someone's trying 
to partition your disk! Is it you?"

The nice thing is that it doesn't even have to be confusing for 
non-technical users. Every button that's going to cause a UAC prompt is 
marked with a shield icon. So you can just tell your grandmother "If it 
asks you like this, and you hadn't just clicked on this icon, say no."

There's even a "sudo" out there that will take the command line and run 
it elevated, so if (like me) you keep forgetting you want an admin 
command-line, you don't have to go back to the menus to get it. 
(Informationally included for people actually using Vista. :-)

I have to look over the firewall still and see if it's actually useful 
for blocking spyware and such, but I've read something that implies it 
is, assuming it can't be automatically turned off.

> OOC what things about the XP GUI didn't you like that have been 
> fixed/changed in Vista?

I liked the Vista look immediately too. Lots of small improvements, and 
just a nicer look to it. 3D without being too "cartoony". Colors easier 
on the eyes. Start menu is easier to navigate (eliminating the complaint 
that you have to carefully move the mouse to the right to keep the 
submenu from vanishing), sound effects somewhat more muted, the explorer 
address bar is nice, the new thumbnails are nice, the task bar with 
previews is nicer.  They once again moved the right-click menu for the 
directory you're currently looking at, but it only took me five minutes 
instead of a week to find where it went this time. Not sure I like the 
"organize/view/..." menu as much as the old one, or the lack of a 
left-title-bar button (altho a right-click in the title bar serves). 
Everything has gotten a touch more simplified, which is somewhat 
annoying to a nerd like me. Some stuff that you're supposed to run in 
the background (like disk defrags) has gotten much slower to invoke 
explicitly. The search stuff looking for files is rather confusing. (I 
liked one reviewer's comment: "The search window has no place to type in 
the search string! And why is there a 'search' field on the search 
window, for searching in the results?"  Uh, dude? Give it a try.) Even 
the new task manager and the "performance monitor" is very nice. Solved 
a couple of problems with the included device drivers already. (No, I 
really don't want a steady 10% CPU usage for your wonky audio card even 
when you're not playing audio, when it works just *fine* with the 
drivers you actually had Microsoft test. Tell me why your audio card 
actually has to be doing 4,700 page faults a second again?)

The new hybrid suspend is nice. I/O can actually get interrupted now, so 
opening a broken network share doesn't hang. It might just be my machine 
and not Vista as such, but it'll actually come out of sleep mode when I 
try to remote into it, even fast enough that the connection attempt 
doesn't time out - nice when your XBox is trying to dial into the 
machine upstairs, too. Sleep and wake are both much faster, usually 
within a handful of seconds each (well, if you're not dumping out 6G of 
RAM to the hiberfile, that is).

Shutting down or rebooting while something is busy is much more nicely 
handled, too. It no longer looks like a nerd alert, but instead gives a 
screen saying "here's the list of things running, here's the one that's 
stopping you from shutting down, here's the message saying why it 
doesn't want you to shut down, do you want to shut down anyway?"  If you 
want to see what I mean, boot up Vista, then quick as you can tell it to 
shut down before all the system services have finished starting up.

It does, occasionally, and for reasons I haven't quite figured out, just 
take surprisingly long to do something. I'll log out, and it'll take 30 
seconds to log out instead of 2. Or I'll tell it to reboot, and I'll 
hear it thrashing the disk for a minute before it turns off. Weird stuff 
like that. But if I let it go, it seems to finish reliably.

Oddly enough, if you run a chkdsk /f on the boot volume at boot time, it 
takes not only the time to check the disk, but it takes an extra whole 
bunch of time to boot up, like 90 seconds after it finishes the chkdsk 
instead of 10 seconds. I can't imagine what it's doing, unless the fact 
that you did that caused it to purge out prefetch files or the USN log 
or something like that. I expect with enough effort in boot logging and 
event manager stuff, I could figure out what's taking the time.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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