Anyone know anything about it? Is it any good? Is it easy too handle? Can you run windows programs on it? Especially Word and Excel? How about games? Are there limits to what non-Windows OS programs can run with hardware? I've never used anything but Windows so fill me in. And no I don't want to use the Open Office stuff. Word and Excel work just fine for me. I downloaded Ubuntu and burned it to the disk and then booted it from the disk on my computer for a demo. Seemed pretty cool. Reason is that I am getting a new job which once I can get access to overtime pay I am going to build a new computer. I like Windows XP. Never had a problem with it but I want to build this computer and am considering all my options. Here's the site: http://www.ubuntu.com/
Why? What problems did you run into? I demand answers or I shall napalm your house while riding helicopters playing Ride of the Valkyries!
In terms of Linux distributions, it is by far the easiest for a Linux novice to pick up and use. It can run Word/Excel (2003-, no fancy 2007) if you install Wine, but that is an ordeal in and of itself - getting that shit up and running probably took three hours out of my life, and it isn't exactly for beginners. Also, it's kind of picky about what it will run. Games...well...hope you like everything with a little penguin on it. While the community is growing, about the only mainstream thing you can hope to run on it is Unreal Tournament, a hacked-together Doom 3, and Source-based Steam games, IIRC. Hardware is a fun issue with all flavors of Linux. Popular stuff gets drivers. Unpopular stuff does not. It takes a while for new drivers to get written, so brand-spanking-new hardware will be mostly useless. Expect hell getting your video to work, though on Ubuntu, it's probably the easiest. If you're truly considering all your options, I'll be the guy to suggest Vista. It's running beautifully on some rather old hardware on my end (excepting a nasty BSOD which stems from the fact that ATI and MS have a little pissing match over legacy hardware). You won't have driver issues if you stick with good quality hardware. That means a mainboard with an Intel or nVidia chipset. That means a video card that you've researched that has WDDM drivers. That means researching the sound card you buy to make sure it doesn't have issues. Beyond that, it's really pretty much up to you! Ubuntu requires less research up-front, but you get a hell of a lot of it down the line. Vista requires more up-front research, but it's remarkably hassle-free down the line. Or, well, you could go with XP, but I think on most modern computers that you would build, that it really isn't optimized to use your hardware to its fullest extent. If you've got any more questions, shoot. Ubuntu is probably the only flavor of Linux I'm any good at, though.
Well that's it for Ubuntu! Off to the trash with it. It's a shame that no one seems to be able to truly compete with MS. I'll probably go with Vista Ultimate OEM. The target date for this computer is Dec 2008. That should be plenty of time for Microsoft to work out the kinks and stuff as the OS will probably be the last thing I buy.
Indeed. Being that OS X is now distributed on x86 systems, I don't think it would be too hard for them to compete directly. Personally, I would LOVE for this to happen. It'd put some competition pressure on MS, plus it would remove the largest objection I have to the mac: way overpriced hardware that you must buy from Apple. Keep in mind the OEM EULA. IIRC, you can't do any upgrade installs with it (i.e. getting a new mobo on your PC). The retail version otoh allows for infinite reinstalls as long as it doesn't exist on more than one PC at a time. It could be that MS caved on this though, as retail copies used to carry the same restrictions until a huge amounts of complaints from DIYers started rushing in.
This is why IMHO Apple sucks donkey balls. They are so hell bent on forcing you to buy their hardware when the reality is they should concentrate on the software side. How much bigger and stronger would Apple be if in its past they had gone the route MS did and let outsiders build the computer while they concentrated on the OS and other software? Well there is that but in reality I'm probably not going to change the motherboard short of a defective part. It's a long time between then and now so there is plenty of time to think about it. I just think of it highway robbery that they would charge $189.99 for Vista:Ultimate OEM and then charge $339.99 for the retail version. If you buy the retail version you are essentially paying $150 just for the right to reinstall the software on a PC if need be. Sadly there is no competition to go to rectify this. Don't you just love monopoly's?
If Apple ever actually sells enough software to be interesting, people are going to realize they're no better than MS.
Exactly. Once they leave the little tiny hardware world they live in now, and open up to the endless complexities of the DIY and OEM market, all of a sudden they will be having a LOT more work to do in debugging. And if the market share becomes noticable, spyware/adware/hackers will focus on them more. Same concept applies to firefox. Really it's not all that much more secure (activeX is a big difference, but the firefox solution is to just drop support entirely), it just isn't as big of a target as IE is.
Yup. There aren't a lot of security problems with OS X right now because nobody's interested enough to look for them.
I tried it out for a couple of days. Nice but not quite there yet. I hear tell the next version will probably be a decent OS replacement for XP. Don't get me wrong, it's very nice. But I don't want to piss about with command lines. I want to be able to write, play games and watch/listen to media. It's not an either or deal, I want all 3 things.
True. I've never believed their smug bullshit. However if they ever bothered to sell enough software that would be a good thing as there would be competition between MS and Apple and they would both hopefully work harder at making good products.
Truthfully? They'd be gone. The fact that they're on "standard" hardware now shows that they've actually stabilized. Up until this point, it was their hardware and how tightly the OS could mesh with it that was the real selling point. If they had split off the OS, I seriously doubt it would have made it past OS 8 or so. See, as much as a joke the Vista dev cycle has been to Apple fans, they have their own skeleton in the closet named after a guy who, anymore, is most known for the music in commercials about beef. Copland was what would have been Mac OS 8. Apple poured two years into developing an operating system that, had it been completed, would have been pretty nifty. Object oriented, good protected memory, and a whole host of other stuff. The problem? They couldn't get it to work. And as it dragged on and on, and as Microsoft released the incredibly innovative Windows 95, Apple was forced to release a rehash of System 7 as OS 8. The grand rehashing tradition continued through until the release of OSX. Due to some legal manuvering, OS 8 killed Mac clones - had Apple been interested in software alone, they surely could not have payrolled what amounted to successive failure. They needed the rather exorbiant exclusive hardware prices to bankroll about half a decade of software mediocrity. The funny thing is, Microsoft did much the same thing during that period, with the relatively unremarkable consumer releases of Windows 98 and the abysmal Windows ME. However, they had the user base built up from the phenomenally successful Windows 95 to ride it out. Mac was sitting on what amounted to still-expensive clones and Apple's own overpriced hardware. Now, had this hypothetical gone further back, I'd say that there would have been more of a chance of success, but less of a chance of it actually happening. Up until when System 7 started getting dated, Apple really was a pretty strong player, and probably could have afforded to switch to X86 based processors and OS sales only. Finally, don't expect a switch anytime soon. Jobs really likes one key concept, and that's one I can't particularly fault him for, since it's excellent design - consistancy. By having a single hardware base they control, they can guarantee consistant operation. By having a single source of hardware, they can guarantee consistant pricing. It's still going strong today - the only reason Cingular got the iPhone contract (which at&t inherited) was because they were the only US network who was willing to accept Apple's demands to ensure consistancy - hell, all iPhone tech support goes to Apple, even if it's an issue with at&t's network! A good example of why OSX is strongest on Apple hardware is the leaked x86 build. A bunch of people could get it to install on their mish-mash of hardware, but few could get all of it running nicely, if at all. All that due to how ridiculously huge the hardware market is. If you had to switch to supporting that, it'd be absolutely brutal. The really funny thing about all of this is that a speech that Steve Jobs gave that many hated is damn, damn good, and really should be taken seriously by all sides in the so-called OS wars:
I'm on XP and Redhat. I keep getting asked why I'm not on Vista. I simply don't want to spend the time to be Microsoft's QA department. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-03-02-vista-problems_N.htm Certainly anyone familiar with Microsoft knows that any major new tech is going to have considerable growing pains. Vista has had so many Dell has rolled back their licensing in order to sell XP again. And the Microsoft Licensing agreement for Vista is simply draconian: http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/case-against-vista.html
This is not "Vista" doing this. This is a HARDWARE protection called HDCP and in fact will happen if you are using Blu-ray or HD-DVD players in ANY os, UNLESS every component in the chain supports HDCP (drive, video card, monitor). AFAIK HDCP has been cracked already but not in such a way that allows for easy use of your old video card and old monitor. This issue is the doing of the movie studios and even exists with your TV. (Yes, if you bought an HDTV that isn't HDCP compliant, you will need a new one to watch HDDVDs or Blu-rays on it at real HD quality.) Basically anyone who bought a TV more than a few months ago is probably in this situation. That said: who the fuck buys a HDDVD or Blu-ray drive anyway? Oh, who cares, it's all part of MS's evil plan to make you buy more expensive monitors... that they don't sell... right... Not true... personally I have used spybot and adaware on Vista and they still work just fine. There's nothing preventing you from using any other antispyware programs. And FYI windows defender is NOT an antivirus program. I could pick apart the rest of that guys statements but I've gotta get going. Reading it really makes me wonder if he knows what the fuck he is talking about.
Yes you can. You just have to call them and tell them you changed hardware. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116202 Is what I got for my latest PC.
You are kidding, right? The people that want the cutting edge - the same people who are likely to purchase Vista. No, I'd say it's all part of another 'unintended consequences' situation that MS screwed the pooch on. It's intended to ensure licensing is maintained. http://www.nowpublic.com/windows_vista_biggest_consumer_rip_off_in_history_0 A study from New Zealand University by Peter Gutmann and recently posted under the Bad Vista Movement reported: Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Instead of hearing premium high-definition audio, you get treated to premium high-definition silence. Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video. But what if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. “None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP […] If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920×1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money […] If you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920×1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money”. The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia. ATI was later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception. As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually play Blu-Ray disks in HD format: “Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible”. The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD monitors. One of the big news items at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007), the world's premier event for consumer high-tech, was Samsung's 1920×1200 HD-capable 27″ LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when everyone else was still shipping 24″ or 25″ monitors as their high-end product The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S-Video, and component video, but no HDMI with HDCP) secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it. If you have even more money to burn, you can go for the largest (conventional) computer monitor made, the Samsung's stupidly large (for a computer monitor) 46″ SyncMaster 460PN. Again though, Vista won't display HD content on it, turning your $4,000 purchase into a still-image picture frame (oddly enough, this monitor has been advertised as “HDTV ready” by retailers even though you can't display HD images on it, although in practice the term “HD-ready” has been diluted close to meaninglessness — 10-year-old 14″ CRT monitors have a higher resolution than many “HDTV-ready” TVs). Sounds like more of that quality we've come to expect from Microsoft. Now it isn't their standard - but they obviously implemented the standard without understanding all the implications of adopting it, and there's no way to disable it within the OS. And once again the reason I refuse to use new MS systems until they've been extensively debugged. No, it's an anti-spyware program. This probably comes from a misunderstanding - security analysts claim that by incorporating anti-spyware software into Vista, then independent companies will be run out of the market, thus leaving only MS and freeware as viable alternatives. Of course, Windows Defender is so bad at it's job that isn't likely to actually happen. In one case Defender itself created a security hole that could be exploited anytime it read a specific PDF file: According to a security bulletin published by Microsoft: "An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted PDF File that could potentially allow remote code execution when the target computer system receives, and the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans, the PDF file". http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/secur...nd-Windows-Vista/0,139033343,339273717,00.htm Webroot, an anti-spyware competitor, said Defender failed to block 84% of the adware, trojans, malware and spyware they tested it against. http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197000593 "We're not necessarily saying that Defender is unusable, but that it's not up to par with the security industry," Eschelbeck says. Needless to say, there's plenty of issues with Vista. Compatability, security holes, bugs galore... If you want to troubleshoot it for Microsoft, more power to you and you are a braver man than I, but I've spent enough hours as their QA department (ie a customer) in the past to not want to do it again anytime soon.
The only thing that really pisses me off with Vista (yes, I went back for the Mobile Device Center) is that THE SIMS 2 runs really sluggish. On XP it ran faster even while OO was defragmenting in the background. I mean, come on, that game is five years old. Other than that, no problems. And I the new search function
The only thing that really pisses me off with Vista (yes, I went back for the Mobile Device Center) is that THE SIMS 2 runs really sluggish. On XP it ran faster even while OO was defragmenting in the background. I mean, come on, that game is five years old and I probably have three times the recommended configuration. Other than that, no problems. I the new search function
Of course Sims 2 is going to be slower on Vista. The system is adding an extra layer of complexity by encrypting and decrypting output to all peripherals, including your video content. Vista is all about Digitial Rights Management, making sure everything on your PC is legit and has the correct signatures:
I wish they would focus more on making the OS work than on making sure everyone is not doing anything illegal.
No, only morons buy them because they should realize at this point, hardly any hardware is HDCP compatible. The whole HDCP thing is a complete joke, and with such low hardware support and with the format wars still undecided, only a complete goon, or someone with way too much money to waste buys these devices... ESPECIALLY on the PC. Your whole article is blaming vista for the downsampling but it is still the doing of the SPECIFICATION. If they didn't implement this then... you wouldn't be able to get ANY high-def quality picture from HDDVD or Blu-ray. The HDCP spec REQUIRES that this downsampling takes place if ANY link in the chain hasn't been "approved" by the HDCP committee. The only other option was to go the illegal route and bypass HDCP, which a corporation, especially a big one like MS, can't do. Furthermore, any approved devices have been deemed "compromised", they can be blacklisted on future discs that are printed... meaning that if anyone finds out a way to use the 2000 dollar HDTV you just bought for piracy, you could be forever shut out from full HD quality on all future discs. THAT is why buying these devices is a joke. I am not buying them out of protest. If they chuck this goofy HDCP concept, OR if it becomes so ineffectual that it doesn't severely limit me, then I'll consider it. It's part of the hair-brained scheme designed to keep people from using inline devices to record the content from the output stream (and avoid cracking it). Of course the biggest joke is, all they are doing is screwing the uninformed, LEGAL consumer out of good content, and they aren't going to stop the pirates. So, once again, they make illegal copies (that can be played full quality anywhere!) more and more attractive.
Actually the slowdown is due to her being on the edge of memory requirements in XP. She has a dual core proc IIRC. The FPS drop in games has been shown to be very small in games except in those cases where the extra MEMORY from vista pushes the system into not having enough for the game. Hardly any games use multithreading (at this point), meaning that you have a whole other core (or 3) to execute all the system functions. 8-core chips are only about half a year away. Really these type of backround processes that everyone hates NOW will soon be seen as a great boon, getting stuff done while the user notices no performance hit. Then, after that, games will get multithreaded well enough that people will start caring again. ATM there are only a few games even on the horizon that can use more than two cores, but eventually, as methods & tools improve, this will change.
So those would be the morons who believed the advertising by manufacturers that said they were HDCP compatible but actually weren't? Here's a hint - it was a couple of months before it was proven that the manufacturers were misrepresenting their products. If we are talking about people who want to buy cutting edge tech, they generally don't wait several months to do so. I agree that HDCP is a ridiculous standard. But that's why I'm not interested in putting it on my box at home. And, of course, the encryption standard that's causing all this overhead, redirecting computer resources from running my apps and displaying my content, was hacked in 2001.
And the largest reason that Vista takes so much more memory than XP is its overhead for security monitoring, such as the encryption process for the it's video output. Other than that, there's no reason why it should be a substantially more memory intensive OS than XP. But it certainly is. So yes, the problem is memory. But the reason it's a problem is the OS security that adds an extra layer or three to most basic processes. Multithreading has nothing to do with this discussion. Software almost always lags behind hardware by 1-2 years.
Christ, do you do anything but bitch about Vista with your crazy paranoia about DRM? It's not what's causing her issue. And you know why they add security to layers? It ain't for your conspiracy theories. It's because there are idiots out there who will use anything to get at protected operating system elements. Here's the thing - a game is not considered "video content." Why? Because it's not. Or do you think that every goddamn thing on your screen is being run through cryptography? You think the smiley needs to be run through encryption? Basically, when examining the file to be played back, Windows determines whether or not it is "commercial protected content." Chances are, that'll be right there in the file. What it does is then encrypt it (and I'm pretty sure that it's the hardware that's dealing with it itself that does that, but I'm not sure), send it along the secure pipe between the computer and display, and then decrypt it there. Windows is really unable to take a gander at a file and magically determine whether or not it is "commercial protected content" without the file itself specifying it. Hence why there are HD-quality rips out there right now that play just fine on Vista- rip out the bits that tell Windows it's "commercial protected content," and Windows'll treat it like any old file. By the way, Microsoft agrees with me on gaming, and even the most conspiracy-minded person has to agree with what they say: Source That's right - if a game has HDCP-related slowdown, it's because the game itself requested it! While EA would be exactly the company I'd think of that would be so fucking stupid to try this, I'm pretty sure that Maxis could strongarm them out of it when it comes to The Sims 2, especially since it has so very little commercially licensed content that could be in danger via a man-in-the-middle attack. Now, if Cass was viewing an HD-DVD film while playing The Sims 2, then yeah, there'd be slowdown (I mean, aside from DirectShow fighting Direct3D for use of the graphics card). But she isn't. She's just playing her game. A game that, I must say, is far more resource-intensive than it claims to be.
Actually, these are my first posts on the topic period, so even in the relatively little time I spend on Wordforge, I'd have to say I've spent negligible time on this issue. But I find it funny how strong the reaction is. Which is why they encrypt the bus - which affects pretty much everything on the host. Certainly it wastes CPU cycles. Of course it doesn't - that doesn't mean it isn't. Premium video content isn't encrypted once - it's encrypted twice, for that extra level of paranoid security. Why? Because the level of DRM included in Vista is at the behest of media companies to secure the 'analog hole' - which allows the right software to copy digital media as it is converted to analog to be played on the computer. From 'A cost benefit analysis of Windows Vista': http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption “Since [encryption] uses CPU cycles, an OEM may have to bump the speed grade on the CPU to maintain equivalent multimedia performance. This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PCs” — ATI. In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content sent to video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128. This requirement for cryptography extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just data flowing over various buses but also command and control data flowing between software components. For example communications between user-mode and kernel-mode components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code tags, at considerable cost to both ends of the connection. The initial crypto handshake is: driver -> application: cert + nonce application -> driver: RSA-OAEP-SHA512( nonce || key || seqNo1 || seqNo2 ) In this step the driver supplies its certificate to the calling application via DxgkDdiOPMGetCertificate() and a 128-bit nonce via DxgkDdiOPMGetRandomNumber(). This is either a COPP or an OPM certificate, with COPP being the older Windows XP content protection and OPM being the newer Windows Vista one. There's also a third type of fleur-de-lis certificate that the driver uses if it has a UAB (User-Accessible Bus). The certificates contain a 2048-bit RSA key which is used to encrypt a 40-byte payload containing the nonce provided by the driver, a 128-bit session key, and two 32-bit initial sequence numbers (they start at random values), the first number is for status messages via DxgkDdiOPMGetInformation() and the second for command messages via DxgkDdiOPMConfigureProtectedOutput(). Once the keys are set up, each function call is: in = OMAC( nonce || seqNo || data ) out = OMAC( nonce || seqNo || data ) (I've used conventional bits-on-the-wire notation for this, the values are actually fields in a structure so for example the sequence number is provided in the ulSequenceNumber member). This is very similar to the protocol used in SSL or SSH (in practice some steps like cipher suite negotiation are omitted, since there's a hardcoded set of ciphers used). Finding SSL being run inside a PC from one software module to another is just weird. Needless to say, this extremely CPU-intensive mechanism is a very painful way to provide protection for content, and this fact has been known for many years. Twenty years ago, in their work on the ABYSS security module, IBM researchers concluded that the use of encrypted buses as a protection mechanism was impractical. In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that… nothing continues to happen (commenting on this mechanism, Leo Laporte in his Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson calls Vista “an operating system that is insanely paranoid”). In addition to this polling, further device-specific polling is also done, for example Vista polls video devices on each video frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still as they should be. We already have multiple reports from Vista reviewers of playback problems with video and audio content, with video frames dropped and audio stuttering even on high-end systems [Note I]. Time will tell whether this problem is due to immature drivers or has been caused by the overhead imposed by Vista's content protection mechanisms interfering with playback. An indication of the level of complexity added to the software can be seen by looking at a block diagram of Vista's Media Interoperability Gateway (MIG). Of the eleven components that make up the MIG, only two (the audio and video decoders) are actually used to render content. The remaining nine are used to apply content-protection measures. So you are advocating hacking the security in order to avoid the systems protections implemented by Vista in order to stop hacking and piracy? Wouldn't it just be easier not to use Vista then? That one pretty much answers itself, doesn't it? Of course there are hacks - the OS security lasted about a week on the open market before it was broken. Again, if the benefit of all the cost to the extra overhead is security and protection, then I have to add that it's not very impressive, and does far more to hurt the user of the OS than it does to prevent piracy. And piracy is what this is all about. Now, if Cass was viewing an HD-DVD film while playing The Sims 2, then yeah, there'd be slowdown (I mean, aside from DirectShow fighting Direct3D for use of the graphics card). But she isn't. She's just playing her game. A game that, I must say, is far more resource-intensive than it claims to be.[/QUOTE] It isn't just the HDCP protection. Marsh is dancing around the truth - the premium content protection isn't going to cause more difficulties in running a game like the Sims. The bus level encryption protecting the entire system, checking the device output every 30 or 150 ms respectively, is what is dragging performance on otherwise robust systems to a standstill. So technically Marsh's answer is correct. It isn't the paranoid HDCP protection affecting Cass' copy of Sims 2. It's the paranoid bus encryption that I posted earlier that's doing it.
Ultimately I'll no doubt upgrade to Vista, but it won't be for a year or two. I'll let everyone else deal with the driver issues, bugs, paranoid security, and see if there is any response from Microsoft on some of the more odious issues. I'd prefer Linux, but there simply isn't the software available for the platform, and until that changes, Microsoft will be the king of the desktop. In a few years I'll have to change just to run the DX10 games. Of course, that might finally move me from PC gaming to a console... By then I'll no doubt be on a new machine, which will take the increased overhead of Vista's security features. Vista takes about 450 megs of memory just to run the OS, XP only took 120 mb. It's not evil incarnate, but it isn't what I want to use right now, and the argument that 'Hollywood forced us' to put these ridiculous HDCP protections is pretty silly. And of course it will be several months before the drivers are uniform, stable and efficient. So with a generation of new bugs, some suspect design choices, increased price, increased hardware overhead to run the OS, and the true benefits of the OS not being realized until the next generation of 'premium content' and DX10 games which aren't in widespread use and aren't even developed yet respectively, I'll pass for now.
