Thats it...I've had it...I've never allowing MS to install that SP ever 
again.
The only thing that seems to happen when I allow its installation, is that 
IE starts using upwards of 300mb of ram just for thinking about opening a 
page (Opera to the rescue), my displays go all funky and I'm forced to have 
640x480 and 4bit color, with both mirroring the same content, povray editor 
goes all batshit and won't redraw properly, plus other crap that results in 
my needing to reformat or uninstall the SP...

Whats the real purpose of this SP I wonder? To suck so bad vista (or even 
marburg virus) looks good by comparison? To force me to use Gentoo?

I really am starting to think its retribution for those who don't want to 
use vista, to force them to downgrade to vista under the guise of fixing 
bugs and patching security flaws, with just enough of that actually in there 
to make it not completely a lie to claim so..

I suppose if I were a malevolent, souless devil-spawned black void of a 
company, I might just do the same thing.

And I still think ol' billy shouldn't have named his company with the 
description of his twig'n'berries.. ;-D

Maybe it is time for me to check out Mono again...perhaps its more stable 
this time..

ian

Post a reply to this message

[GDS|Entropy] wrote:

> 
> Whats the real purpose of this SP I wonder? To suck so bad vista (or even 
> marburg virus) looks good by comparison? To force me to use Gentoo?
> 

I've wondered that ever since I found the service pack dropped the 
address bar from the taskbar.

Vista has it. XP Used to have it, but now it doesn't.

As for the problems you're having, I haven't had any such problems with 
SP3...

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

"Mike Raiford" <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:49d3a2c8$1@news.povray.org...
> [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
>
>>
>> Whats the real purpose of this SP I wonder? To suck so bad vista (or even 
>> marburg virus) looks good by comparison? To force me to use Gentoo?
>>
>
> I've wondered that ever since I found the service pack dropped the address 
> bar from the taskbar.
>
> Vista has it. XP Used to have it, but now it doesn't.
>
> As for the problems you're having, I haven't had any such problems with 
> SP3...
>
> -- 
> ~Mike
>

Hmm...thats odd...

SP3 has been doin' me wrong ever since it came out...my system instantly 
goes from "rockin fast and fully cooperative" to "slower, more buggy and 
stubborn than a legless mule at a maggot farm".

I am seriously considering just ridding myself of the windows scourge 
permanantly in favor of either OpenSolaris, Gentoo, Mono or Ubuntu, after 
imaging my windows HDD after a reformat and reinstall of all requisite apps, 
and then running that from within linux whenever I wanted to use something 
none of the nix variants support.

It is really just getting to the point where I can no longer justify the 
annoyance of running 'doze.
I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the 
issue with pissta, and that I do not like..they seem more concerned with 
flashy doodads and humdinger thingamabobs than stable functionality...which 
is stupid. I'd rather my OS freakin work and do so quickly than have some 
asinine glass interface crap, and a kernel that requires half of my system 
resources.

This is what happens when natural selection has been so stifled that the 
population can be distracted for weeks at a time by small shiny objects. We 
get crappy a OS catering to subhuman feces hurling key-eaters.

*fumes*

ian

Post a reply to this message

[GDS|Entropy] <gds-entropy    AT    hotmail   DOT  com> wrote:
> I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the 
> issue with pissta, and that I do not like..

  That's one of the problems with Windows: You are more or less forced to
submit to whatever whims Microsoft may have today. (The only other
alternative is not never upgrade your system, leaving you wide open to
any discovered security holes.)

  If Microsoft decides to stop support for XP today, in order to force
people to "upgrade" to Vista or Windows 7, who is going to stop them?
I don't think this would even fall under any fair competition or monopoly
law (such as for example certain DRM measures do, at least in the EU, as
Apple has found out), so there's no way any country can force MS to keep
supporting their own old OS by law.

  So basically your only option, if you want to keep using Windows, is to
feed money to Microsoft each couple of years. And you have not much choice.
Don't like a feature in a new Windows? Tough luck.

  It's not like Linux, BSD variants and OpenSolaris would be the perfect
OSes, but at least you are not force-fed anything, you have tons of choices,
and you are completely free (as in liberties and monetary cost) to try
whatever you want.

  As I commented in another thread, I firmly state that Windows and Linux
are *not* equivalent choices, as if it was a matter of taste which one you
use.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

"[GDS|Entropy]" wrote:
> Thats it...I've had it...I've never allowing MS to install that SP ever
> again.

I installed it on my machine. Worked fine. But then I installed Linux and
I've been on it for months :)

I installed it at work, no problems.

I installed it on my sister's machine. Got literally a dozen blue screens in
the same day. I tried uninstalling it, and got a blue screen in the middle
of uninstall. Managed to get rid of it on a second attempt.

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> so there's no way any country can force MS to keep
> supporting their own old OS by law.

Especially since MS tells you they'll stop supporting the OS at a certain 
date when they release it. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:17:28 -0400, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:

> Mono

Mono's not a Linux distro, perhaps you meant openSUSE? ;-)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:07:14 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Warp wrote:
>> so there's no way any country can force MS to keep supporting their own
>> old OS by law.
> 
> Especially since MS tells you they'll stop supporting the OS at a
> certain date when they release it. :-)

Yeah, there's no need - if they change their minds, it's possible they 
could get sued for changing the support EOL of the product.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

> I am seriously considering just ridding myself of the windows scourge 
> permanantly in favor of either OpenSolaris, Gentoo, Mono or Ubuntu, after 
> imaging my windows HDD after a reformat and reinstall of all requisite 
> apps, and then running that from within linux whenever I wanted to use 
> something none of the nix variants support.

If you don't need any Windows specific software, and you're happy to learn 
about a new OS then I see no reason at all to stick with Windows, you're 
just wasting money.

> It is really just getting to the point where I can no longer justify the 
> annoyance of running 'doze.
> I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the 
> issue with pissta, and that I do not like..they seem more concerned with 
> flashy doodads and humdinger thingamabobs than stable 
> functionality...which is stupid.

Of course some people have different experiences, but I've been running 
Vista for a while now as my main work machine (and at home) and have never 
had any stability issues.  So far I've only found benefits, my big chunky 
CAD application loads 5-10x faster than on XP (identical hardware) which is 
a real plus for me.

Anyway, can you blame MS for wanting people to switch to their current OS? 
The longer people keep using XP the longer MS have to support it, and that 
costs money.  With Windows 7 around the corner I would imagine MS really 
want to get rid of XP before having to support 3 OSs.

> I'd rather my OS freakin work and do so quickly than have some asinine 
> glass interface crap,

Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP your 
3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...  BTW you can always 
turn it off if you don't like it.

> and a kernel that requires half of my system resources.

I wish the kernel would use ALL of my system resources ALL the time.  What's 
the point of 4GB or the fastest RAM sitting unused while the kernel 
continues to load and save things from a slow HD?  I'm sitting here now on 
Vista, nothing open apart from Live Mail and 4663 MB out of 8GB is "used". 
I'm pretty sure the entirety of my CAD software is in that "used" figure, 
along with every other app I have recently used.  This is a GOOD thing!

> This is what happens when natural selection has been so stifled that the 
> population can be distracted for weeks at a time by small shiny objects. 
> We get crappy a OS catering to subhuman feces hurling key-eaters.

Hehe, your SP3 experience is definitely not the norm, we had SP3 rolled out 
at work a while back.  Maybe it's installing some driver update that is not 
compatible with a certain piece of your hardware?  I think with some 
googling and investigation work you could find out what the problem really 
is.

Post a reply to this message

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP your 
> 3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...

  Certainly not true. Go to the proper system setting configuration dialog
and turn off display hardware acceleration and then try eg. dragging a window
around. See if you can notice any difference between the CPU doing all the
work vs. the display hardware doing it.

> > and a kernel that requires half of my system resources.

> I wish the kernel would use ALL of my system resources ALL the time.

  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
make any sense.

>  What's 
> the point of 4GB or the fastest RAM sitting unused while the kernel 
> continues to load and save things from a slow HD?

  So you would want a 4GB RAM disk? And exactly how do you expect to run
any application after that? (And what if an application would want to use
4 GB of memory?)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>  Certainly not true. Go to the proper system setting configuration dialog
> and turn off display hardware acceleration and then try eg. dragging a 
> window
> around. See if you can notice any difference between the CPU doing all the
> work vs. the display hardware doing it.

That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.  In the graphics card it's quite separate, 
and XP didn't use any of the 3D capabilities of the card.  Nowadays any 
decent 2D game will use the 3D capabilities of your card as it is much more 
efficient and flexible than using the "old" 2D accelerated functions, so 
it's only right than the OS should do the same.  Maybe on new graphics cards 
the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

>  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> make any sense.

Why not? If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.  It 
seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

Post a reply to this message

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> That's 2D acceleration, not 3D.

  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> Maybe on new graphics cards 
> the 2D accelerated functions will be removed completely?

  Your jokes are not all that funny, really.

> >  Oh, you would want your CPU usage to be 100% all the time (with the
> > increased power consumption) and all the RAM consumed by the kernel so
> > that it would be impossible to run any actual applications? That doesn't
> > make any sense.

> Why not?

  Because you want to keep the CPU as idle as possible to conserve energy
(especially relevant in laptops, but also on desktop computers, and not
only from energy conserving point of view, but because running the CPU
at 100% all the time shortens its life).

> If a new app needs to be loaded and I have no free RAM, the OS 
> simply decides which bit to disregard to free up space for the new app.

  I thought you wanted apps to load faster rather than slower?

  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
free it when an app needs it?

>  It 
> seems more ludicrous to "wipe" the RAM every time an app is closed if you 
> don't need it for something else.  People need to get out of the habit of 
> thinking lower "used" RAM is better, it just doesn't make any sense because 
> the OS can free up RAM whenever it needs to in an instant.

  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
the kernel to free the RAM, and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

>  Why would the kernel deliberately keep the full RAM allocated just to
> free it when an app needs it?

So that in the likely event that you run an app that was run before and 
still in RAM, it would load much faster.

>  Your sentences are contradictory. First you say it doesn't make sense for
> the kernel to free the RAM,

Not when it doesn't need to, no.

> and then you say that freeing RAM is a practically
> free operation because it can be done "in an instant".

Of course - what's contradictory about that?

The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
costs.  Marking RAM as "empty" when it is not needed for anything else at 
that moment seems a silly idea, and is why Vista has things like SuperFetch.

Post a reply to this message

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >  You said that the graphics card sits completely idle in XP, and that the
> > CPU does *all* the work. What you said was clearly false.

> I said 3D card.  I meant the 3D part of a graphics card.

  You clearly contrasted it with the CPU. You explicitly said that XP
draws everything with the CPU. That rather clearly means that when you
said "3D card" you were talking about the graphics card.

> The slow part is loading from HD to RAM, that should be avoided at all 
> costs.

  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
how much is cached.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even configure
> how much is cached.

Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more RAM 
than its predecessors?

Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in RAM 
as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for the sole 
reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just erase it later 
when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> Of course some people have different experiences, but I've been running 
> Vista for a while now as my main work machine (and at home) and have 
> never had any stability issues.

Same here. There's a couple of annoyances. I like the Vista media center 
less. If I do a chkdsk during boot (which I do before making a ghost 
backup), sometimes some programs won't start, as if there's some system 
library or service they're depending on that didn't get initialized until I 
reboot again.  Other than that, no problems here.  Hard to judge the speed 
since I upgraded the processor and drives as well.

> Actually the new GUI uses your 3D card to draw the graphics, under XP 
> your 3D card sat idle while the CPU did all the graphics...  BTW you can 
> always turn it off if you don't like it.

I like the new GUI. It has benefits besides just the glass borders. The 
drawing all happens in the background and gets composited, so it's real easy 
for the system to give live thumbnails of a program's window and stuff like 
that.

It does thrash a bit more than XP did with the same amount of RAM, but not 
so much as I find it a PITA. Just lots of disk activity when you switch 
between big programs. I think it manages to keep a much better track of what 
parts of the working set need to be swapped in first.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even 
>> configure
>> how much is cached.
> 
> Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more 
> RAM than its predecessors?

Sort of. It's more like a cache prefetch/readahead, based on the paging 
behavior of previous runs of the same program. Plus, if a program gets 
swapped out by something, when that new something exits, the old program 
gets swapped back in preemptively rather than on demand, making the system 
more responsive.

> Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in 
> RAM as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for 
> the sole reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just 
> erase it later when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

I think you're talking past each other. Scott is saying the kernel uses up 
all free RAM as disk buffers. Warp is saying "why would you want the kernel 
to use up all memory?" Clearly using it as a resizable cache is a good idea, 
while using all memory for something the kernel cannot discard when needed 
is a bad idea.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

Post a reply to this message

On 4/2/2009 12:44 AM, scott wrote:
> That's 2D acceleration, not 3D. In the graphics card it's quite
> separate,

For the past several years, they've been the same thing.  You just 
access them using different API calls.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

On 4/1/2009 11:31 AM, Warp wrote:
> [GDS|Entropy]<gds-entropy    AT    hotmail   DOT  com>  wrote:
>> I'd be happy to stay with xp pro...but MS seems hellbent on forcing the
>> issue with pissta, and that I do not like..
>
>    That's one of the problems with Windows: You are more or less forced to
> submit to whatever whims Microsoft may have today. (The only other
> alternative is not never upgrade your system, leaving you wide open to
> any discovered security holes.)

That's one of the problems with providing commercial software: you have 
to actually pay your support staff!

MS can't (or won't) afford the staff to support 3 versions of Windows 
simultaneously, so they're trying to cut down.

Makes perfect sense to me.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

Chambers wrote:
> 
> MS can't (or won't) afford the staff to support 3 versions of Windows
> simultaneously, so they're trying to cut down.
> 

MS might actually stand a chance to afford that. They won't, because
it's not profitable.

-Aero

Post a reply to this message

Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Makes perfect sense to me.

  That doesn't change in any way what I said.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 4/4/2009 9:05 AM, Warp wrote:
> Chambers<ben### [at] pacificwebguycom>  wrote:
>> Makes perfect sense to me.
>
>    That doesn't change in any way what I said.
>

No, but you seem to be criticizing them for not supporting older 
operating systems.  I merely pointed out that their refusal to support 
older OSs makes perfect business sense.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> No, but you seem to be criticizing them for not supporting older 
> operating systems.  I merely pointed out that their refusal to support 
> older OSs makes perfect business sense.

  I didn't criticize them for not supporting older versions. I said that
if you use Windows, you will at some point be in the situation that you
will not be getting any security updates anylonger and you will be forced
to buy a new version. Not only will the new version cost quite a lot of
money (I bet usually more than your current version), but the differences
between Windows versions are rather big. If you don't like the new version,
then you are stuck.

  (The main problem with Microsoft is that they have this mentality that
every new version of Windows has to look different just for the sake of
looking different. Whether the change actually improves anything, or on
the contrary, degrades usability, is completely irrelevant.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> 
>   (The main problem with Microsoft is that they have this mentality that
> every new version of Windows has to look different just for the sake of
> looking different. Whether the change actually improves anything, or on
> the contrary, degrades usability, is completely irrelevant.)
> 

It sells, if something :(. Most people won't understand a bit if you
tell them you've rewrote memory management and tweaked the scheduler,
but they do understand if you tell them you have a new shining desktop
environment available.

-Aero

Post a reply to this message

On 4/6/2009 8:15 AM, Warp wrote:
>    I didn't criticize them for not supporting older versions. I said that
> if you use Windows, you will at some point be in the situation that you
> will not be getting any security updates anylonger and you will be forced
> to buy a new version.

Fair enough, it sounded like criticism but it seems you didn't intend it 
that way.

> but the differences between Windows versions are rather big.

If the differences were small, why would anyone upgrade?

>    (The main problem with Microsoft is that they have this mentality that
> every new version of Windows has to look different just for the sake of
> looking different. Whether the change actually improves anything, or on
> the contrary, degrades usability, is completely irrelevant.)

 From what I understand, it's the users that are the problem, and MS 
doesn't like it any more than you do.  But, they have to eat, which 
means they have to sell the new OS, which means they have to convince 
people to buy it... which means, if they put a lot of work into the 
system, and make it really great, and give it the same look and feel, 
people will just go "Huh?" and move on.

The problem is one of noticing things... ideally, an OS shouldn't even 
be noticed.  Of course, if you don't notice your OS, then you probably 
don't think about buying a replacement either.

MS is in the sticky situation of needing people to notice their OS to 
sell it, but needing people to NOT notice it for them to like it.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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