Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> IME, USB tends to be far slower than IDE (and presumably SATA).

SATA is about 2x the speed of IDE, on just raw thruput. At least that 
I've seen.

> OTOH, USB flash drives don't have a seek delay, which may or may not 
> counter the slowness of the bus.

Yes. Large reads come from the disk, while small reads come from the 
USB. Plus, by reading from the USB, you don't have to move the head of 
the disk that someone else might be trying to use also.

> Doesn't XP have this also?

I never needed it under XP - I always ran as administrator, because I'm 
cluefull enough to not load up trojans and cluefull enough to make an 
image of the HD before trying out dodgy software from unreputable 
places.  But yes, you could do a "runas" in XP, which is sort of the 
equivalent of sudo.

> It seems to me that the only "new" thing about Vista is
> 1. It's more pretty to look at.
> 2. They added several hundred minor improvements to various things.

Except that all the minor improvements really do add up, yes. Whether 
you think they're overcharging is rather a different question.

> There doesn't seem to be anything radically new about it. They just took 
> XP and tweaked it slightly.

If it were *radically* new, old software wouldn't run. You can say the 
same thing about every UNIX variant since 1970, and every VMS variant 
from before that. :-)  If you want "radically new", go grab a copy of 
Singularity.

Yes, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on that you, as a home user, 
probably won't see. Shadow copies, transactional file systems, OS 
virtualization, stuff like that that lets things like your database 
engine running in the virtual machine know that it needs to complete all 
its transactions and hold off starting new ones and flush its buffers 
*in the virtual machine* because you're about to take a snapshot of the 
host's disk for backup purposes. Or that lets you lose power halfway 
through upgrading a program and not have half the changes on the disk 
and the other half blown away. (I'm not sure how Linux handles such a 
thing, actually. I always assumed I had to do that sort of reliability 
work manually and without any support from the OS. :-)

Not the sort of thing you'll run into when surfing the web.

> It's nice that they're trying to make improvements to the thing, but... 
> uh, you want *how much* for a few minor tweaks? No thanks.

You need to run *something* on your new machine. :-)  You might be able 
to use Linux, depending on what you're doing.  But a lot of the 
"obvious" improvements in Vista are targeted at the server end, not the 
home user, possibly because MS figures they already have a lock on the 
home user OS market.  As they say, "We're number one! Why try harder?"

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

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