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)

Post a reply to this message

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)

Post a reply to this message

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)

Post a reply to this message

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*

Post a reply to this message

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)

Post a reply to this message

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).

Post a reply to this message

> -----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

Post a reply to this message

> -----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

Post a reply to this message

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.

Post a reply to this message

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)

Post a reply to this message