Darren New wrote:

> 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.

IME, USB tends to be far slower than IDE (and presumably SATA).

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

> 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. :-)

Doesn't XP have this also?

> 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.

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.

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

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.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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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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Chambers wrote:
> Speaking of which, I don't think I've turned off the computer in about a
> week.  Quite impressive for Windows!  My XP machine got turned off
> daily!

My uptime record on Windows XP is 27 days.

Unfortunately I've yet to beat that since I got Linux (due to electricity
problems, not software).

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warp [mailto:war### [at] tagpovrayorg]
>   You don't need a ten-year-old laptop. You may have trouble running
it
> in a modern laptop.

And tell me, what were the specs of this modern laptop?  I've seen it
running quite well on several other laptops, none of them considered
"gaming" or "performance" laptops, but typical light-use ones (email,
browsing, office, et cetera).

>   I wish you good luck when MS activates Vista's DRM features in a
> couple
> of years.

Thanks :)

All kidding aside, it's not like MS is the only one playing the DRM
game.  In fact, the worst offenders seem to be involved with the MPAA,
the RIAA or EA.  MS doesn't come anywhere near the top of the list of
draconian DRM companies.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Clarence1898 [mailto:cla### [at] comcastnet]
> The GUI is ok, it looks nice.  It's just taking me awhile to find
where
> MS has
> moved everything.

People keep saying this, but I really have to ask... what exactly can't
you find?  Everything I've needed is either right where I'd expect it to
be, or I found it in less than five minutes (and most things in less
than a minute).

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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I've recently bought a new laptop with Vista Ultimate installed, and I 
have actually been semi-consistently annoyed at it.  It looks very nice, 
and has been stable, and I actually rather like the UAC so far.  My main 
complaint is just that it seems to have bizarre glitches rather 
frequently, such as:

* Sometimes ignoring all mouse clicks until I log off and log back on

* At home it will stop making new connections though my wireless

* In a directory with many files, the page will flip between where I was 
at and the next page if I minimize the window then bing it back to the 
foreground.

* Turns off my wireless unless I hibernate it if I move it from one 
building to another.

etc..

Nothing major has really gone wrong, but it does seem to get minor 
things wrong more frequently than XP did for me.  On the whole I think 
prefer it to XP, but I haven't been all that that wowed by it.

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Chambers wrote:
> People keep saying this, but I really have to ask... what exactly can't
> you find?  

I don't think *I* have actually hunted for anything. Use the search, Luke.

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

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>  I wish you good luck when MS activates Vista's DRM features in a couple
> of years.

A cunning plan to make us buy Windows 7 perhaps ;-)

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> I liked it too, specially with a black glossy glass theme.  It's years 
> ahead of XP's default teletubbies look.  But Blender doesn't play nice 
> with Aero (and perhaps other OpenGL apps as well) so I just turned it off.

Blender seems to work completely fine here with Aero...

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> The only thing I like better about Vista is
> it's wireless networking.  Vista is much better at detecting and 
> maintaining
> connections.

IIRC this is one of the things they totally rewrote for Vista.  In XP the 
wireless functionality is kind of hacked on over the top of wired 
networking.  They fixed this in Vista.

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