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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gail [mailto:gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za]
> The one thing I like about Vista is that I've never managed to have a
> misbehaving app crashe the entire OS. It happened from time to time on
> Win
> 2000. On vista I can kill the app and the OS carries on going
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!
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: scott [mailto:sco### [at] scott com]
> OOC what things about the XP GUI didn't you like that have been
> fixed/changed in Vista?
The widgets. Large, rounded boxes never did it for me.
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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Gail <gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za> wrote:
> The one thing I like about Vista is that I've never managed to have a
> misbehaving app crashe the entire OS. It happened from time to time on Win
> 2000. On vista I can kill the app and the OS carries on going
The first time I used Vista was on a friend's laptop. I got a BSOD in about
5 minutes. The application I was running? Windows' own freecell.
That wasn't very convincing for me.
--
- Warp
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Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Caveat: I have a Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of RAM, and a decent video
> card (7600GT). Obviously, if you try to run it on a ten-year-old
> laptop, you're going to have more problems than I do.
You don't need a ten-year-old laptop. You may have trouble running it
in a modern laptop.
I wish you good luck when MS activates Vista's DRM features in a couple
of years.
--
- Warp
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Chambers escreveu:
> I think people just like to complain about Microsoft for no good reason
> at all.
Well, in my case there's a pretty good reason: I don't like monopolies.
Specially marketing ones in the IT field.
> UAC doesn't bother me at all. But then, I understand what it's there
> for, and I'd much rather have it ask me than not. Besides, it's no
> worse than the equivalents in Linux and Mac OS.
It's in no way the same as sudo, which only asks once in a while.
But perhaps you're lucky to just get the pos-SP1 Vista? Before that,
Vista would ask you to allow wether or not notepad could should you an
html page source, no kidding.
> And the GUI? I waited almost two years after Windows XP was introduced
> before I switched from 2K - the XP GUI drove me nuts, and as soon as I
> found out about FlyAKiteOSX, I switched my GUI to be a Mac clone. With
> Vista, I liked the GUI straight away.
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.
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Warp wrote:
> The first time I used Vista was on a friend's laptop. I got a BSOD in about
> 5 minutes. The application I was running? Windows' own freecell.
>
> That wasn't very convincing for me.
You, of all people should know a stop error (BSOD) is caused by
something failing in the kernel, *not* a user app. Probably either bad
hardware or a wonky driver. I've never had Vista bluescreen.
--
~Mike
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"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> So, I bit the bullet and installed Vista Ultimate 64. And I've been
> working with it a few weeks now. And what do I think?
>
>
>
> I think people just like to complain about Microsoft for no good reason
> at all.
>
>
>
> Caveat: I have a Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of RAM, and a decent video
> card (7600GT). Obviously, if you try to run it on a ten-year-old
> laptop, you're going to have more problems than I do.
>
My first experience with Vista was on a low end laptop I purchased early this
year, a 1.8Ghz Celeron with 1GB memory. Performance is not very good, it is
slower than my much older laptop, a 1Ghz AMD with 256M running XP home. I
definitly need to add more memory. The only thing I like better about Vista is
it's wireless networking. Vista is much better at detecting and maintaining
connections. Last month I purchased a new desktop, Intel quad-core with 5GB
memory, running Vista 64-bit. For cpu intensive work, the quad-core runs much
faster than my older dual-core pc. But for other workloads, such as e-mail,
web surfing, word processing etc., it sometimes seems a little sluggish.
>
>
> Anyway, Vista actually runs faster than my XP Pro installation did, but
> only just. The real kicker for me is the disk usage. one thing that's
> happened to me several times now, is coming into the room, and thinking
> the computer was turned off. I moved the mouse just to make sure, and
> the think woke up - completely silent. Even leaving it running a video
> encode (I'm still in the process of moving my DVD library to my hdd.
> I've had several false starts, and changed my mind on format / quality
> settings a couple of times*), the thing will be darn near noiseless.
>
I haven't noticed any change in noise, but thats probably do to the other three
desktops running.
>
>
> UAC doesn't bother me at all. But then, I understand what it's there
> for, and I'd much rather have it ask me than not. Besides, it's no
> worse than the equivalents in Linux and Mac OS.
>
Though I understand what UAC is for, it can still be a PITA. When I install new
software, I usually turn it off until I get the new software working, then turn
it back on. For other users who don't have a clue, I'm not sure how effective
it will be. I have a son-in-law who is completely clueless when it comes to
computers. He currently runs XP, but I don't think Vista would make any
difference. If a message box popped up asking for permission to install a
virus, he would probably click OK. About twice a year I have to go over and
clean out his pc.
>
>
> And the GUI? I waited almost two years after Windows XP was introduced
> before I switched from 2K - the XP GUI drove me nuts, and as soon as I
> found out about FlyAKiteOSX, I switched my GUI to be a Mac clone. With
> Vista, I liked the GUI straight away.
>
The GUI is ok, it looks nice. It's just taking me awhile to find where MS has
moved everything.
>
>
> Given how impressed I also am with Office 2007 (separate topic), I think
> I'm actually turning into an MS fan.
>
>
Though not an MS fan, they do write reasonably good software. A bit bloated at
times, but no worse than most other developers.
>
> ...Ben Chambers
>
> www.pacificwebguy.com
Isaac
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Warp wrote:
> The first time I used Vista was on a friend's laptop. I got a BSOD in about
> 5 minutes. The application I was running? Windows' own freecell.
I think you and Windows is like me and Linux. :-) For some reason, we
just have bad luck running into corner cases or something.
That said, I imagine SP1 fixed a whole boatload of bugs like this. MS
does tend to release things before they're quite solid.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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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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Clarence1898 wrote:
> Though I understand what UAC is for, it can still be a PITA. When I install new
> software, I usually turn it off until I get the new software working, then turn
> it back on.
If you log in as administrator, it doesn't ask. (There's a flag you can
set on a per-account basis as to whether to ask, allow it, or to require
a password.)
> For other users who don't have a clue, I'm not sure how effective
> it will be. I have a son-in-law who is completely clueless when it comes to
> computers. He currently runs XP, but I don't think Vista would make any
> difference. If a message box popped up asking for permission to install a
> virus, he would probably click OK. About twice a year I have to go over and
> clean out his pc.
So don't give him an admin account. :-) Nothing is going to protect a
clueless user from himself, including sudo.
> The GUI is ok, it looks nice. It's just taking me awhile to find where MS has
> moved everything.
That's always the problem. :-) This is the first MS upgrade that hasn't
left me cursing up and down looking for the stuff, tho. Probably in part
due to the ubiquitous search bar stuff.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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