Held off on Vista and will a little longer anyway. I am pleased to see the bugs being hammered out though, really aren't going to have much of a choice pretty soon. I'm still running ME on this one and XP on the server. Laptop is XP as well. I've noted a bit of HDD noise and vibration on this one so I suspect that my ME days will be going south soon enough unless I reinatall it on the new HDD I know I'll be getting soon. I hear people vent their hate for ME but frankly this thing has crashed once in seven years so I really can't gripe too much, it's served me well. I've come to get used to and actually like XP though that phishing filter sure saps the time. Any hints to the upcoming Windows 7 alluded to? Seems it's where we're going to end up, I just hope it goes smoother than Vista did initially.
They're not using the MinWin kernel for Windows 7. At this point it's going to basically be Vista with some kernel updates and some as-yet-announced new features.
Thinking of updating to Vista Ultimate 64, just not sure if it's worth it yet and if i have the firepower to use it fully, that and i'm worried that my games will not work on it. (World in conflict, EvE online, Spore*) *When it bloody comes out.
Well, that's a bit of a mixed bag. Not because it's Vista, but because it's 64 bit. Poorly written applications behave...oddly...at times with it. And that's one of the many reasons why I was advocating the complete overhaul with Windows 7, rather than the route the XP zealouts scared MS into taking. However, reading your post, new games like the ones you mentioned shouldn't be a problem at all. Hell, if I recall correctly, EvE Online works great under Vista 64-bit. Just do your research and you'll be fine - World in Conflict doesn't come up with a bunch of forum posts bitching about Vista 64-bit when you throw it into Google, so that's a good sign. Compatibility for old stuff is where you run into issues. But, one of the reasons you start getting into fancy new technology is to get away from the old stuff, so realistically, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. However, if it comes down to choosing between Vista 64-bit and XP 64-bit, my God, anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex will choose Vista. XP 64-bit is terrible by any reasonable estimation. Hell, driver support alone for Vista 64-bit is leaps and bounds ahead of XP 64-bit's simply because it was a reasonable option when the OS was made. I'm of two minds when it comes to computer knowledge. On one hand, you've got people who can better take care of themselves, but on the other, there are a hell of a lot of them that don't get that the "minimum system requirements" are anything but. I mean, hell, the minimum requirements on XP was a 233 MHz processor with 64 megs of RAM! I've seen it done, and let me tell you, it ain't pretty. So then people come into Vista with systems that barely eke out the minimum requirements and are surprised when it is less than stellar! When XP runs better on it! Well, no kidding. Vista has a heftier memory/HD space requirement than XP, but it also makes far better use of those resources as well. Proportionately, at least in terms of cost, Vista is really using no "more" RAM/HD than XP did at the same point in its lifetime. I think the biggest debacle regarding Vista is actually regarding the "Vista Capable" labling that sort of distorted how well the computer could actually run Vista, but a huge part of that was due to the hardware manufacturers wanting another bullet point to sell their systems on.
Just ran the Vista Upgrade advisor (1.0) and it says i can run all of them. So i might be trying to get hold of a copy in the not to distant future. Category Action Required Explanation CPU: No action required Your computer's CPU is AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ System memory (RAM): No action required Your computer has 2.00 GB of RAM. DVD drive: No action required Your computer can read DVDs. DVD-RW drive: No action required You can record DVDs on your computer. Video card: No action required Your current video card will support the Windows Aero™ user experience. (Nivd 8400GS) Might slap in another two gigs just to be on the safe side. Not sure i want the Windows Tablet and Touch and Windows Media Center.
from what I understand Vista preloads more applications making opening them faster. This has the appearance of using up "gobs more memory" but like Kyle said it's using to your advantage. needing a discrete video card to take full advantage of an OS seems a bit whacked. Especially when most machines sold today don't have it. Not familiar with Vista (have no machines running it), but I have one on order so we'll see...
It doesn't seem so (it seems to track your usage), but it looks like a behavior you'd want to keep. SuperFetch
Well, gee, why am I not shocked by that? *sigh* THIS IS WHY I AM NOT INTERESTED IN VISTA (besides the lack of proper DOS). Not because of perceived software compatibilities, not because oh noes it's NEW and STRANGE. Because MS has been making absurd visual changes to stuff lately and not letting people change much to suit themselves. It shows in IE, it shows in Word (I don't care about the ribbon, I care that I can't add or remove buttons or tabs), and Vista shows the same tendency to spectacular (in the look-at-me sense, not necessarily excellence) style and no tendency toward substance. I'm sick and tired of being dictated to by snotty, arrogant software people. Designers, executives, I don't care who's responsible, I'm sick of it. People are not perfect, systems are not perfect, and they ought to stop acting like they are perfect. IF you're in the habit of starting up your profile and then walking away to attend to other things while it all loads up, yes. If I just want to start up WordPad to print something out quickly before I leave the house, I'm not going to be interested in sitting around waiting for Firefox, GIMP, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, WinAmp, YIM, Calculator , . . . to preload. Sometimes just waiting for the AV to load up is a bit irksome. 1. Don't the last few words logically follow from the first phrase? 2. I think the AV might have something to say about having its "scheduled scans" scheduled for it by the OS. Gee, ya THINK? Eeeexcept I don't think that's the only reason progress gets slowed to a crawl. Aaaand ya know, this happens with all Windows OS's since at least Win95. Cuz it's magic like that! Good. Why wasn't this the case before?
I tend to leave my machines "hot" under XP. I use standby instead of "shut down" retaining current memory contents. So keeping stuff in memory that I use often would (should) help. Dunno about cold boots. But I hope that with multi core processors and prioritizing the preload, the preload itself would (should) be unnoticeable, except if you call a program that's normally preloaded during this time it might take a bit longer. I like the fact the OS is getting smarter and using more ram and using it affectively rather than having it sit idle. But this is where machines with less than 2gig are probably at a disadvantage. Should have a vista machine to play with in a couple weeks with decent specs. Last one I bought (December) I went out of my way to get XP, but I was looking for the cheapest option at that time.
Vista is designed (rightfully) for the future. 2GB of RAM is low-end these days (you can buy 8GB for about 140 dollars right now). Complaining about preloading is stupid. There's absolutely NO REASON to leave memory empty, EVER. Overwriting something in memory is the same speed as overwriting an empty portion of memory. So there is quite literally no benefit to leaving huge chunks of memory empty, if the OS guesses wrong, worst-case scenario it's the SAME as if it hadn't tried to preload anything. In the best scenario, it guessed correctly, and now you don't have to hit the disk. Also beyond the prefetch stuff, Vista is designed to allocate the OS memory reservation based on your memory configuration. This means that it "limits" itself in order to leave more memory for user applications. This also means that a system with 8GB of RAM is in fact noticably faster than one with 2GB. User programs will behave the same, but Vista itself won't be hitting the disk often (because it will not reserve too large of a % of your memory). I contend that no new system, even a 32-bit system, should be running less than 4GB of ram. The savings between 2GB and 4GB are only about 10 dollars anyway. Note that despite the loss of about half a gig of memory in 32-bit OS's, a 64-bit OS will use 20%-40% more memory for all native 64-bit apps (instructions are 64 bits wide instead of 32!). This means that in fact, a 32-bit machine with 3.5GB available usually has more "real" space than a 64-bit machine with the full 4GB. I'm planning to upgrade to 8GB as soon as I get my new hard drive and install 64-bit vista.
Which is what I'd expect. Which leaves me wondering why some people make a point of reinstalling every so often. Is this preloading thing a one-time occurrence, then? Cuz if it happens every time I boot up it isn't the same time-wise. Good!
This doesn't have anything to do with reinstalling windows. It happens whenever it sees you have a lot of idle resources, it tries to guess (based on user history) what you are likely to access. It's basically a continuous process that is designed not to occur when the system is under heavy load. Yes, it is good. It's good that it allows the OS to be usable on more modest hardware. However, for people with low system memory, it doesn't give you a true picture of the speed of vista, since it can be artifically limiting itself and causing more hard drive accesses. In a few years when people are sporting larger and larger memory sizes, Vista's "quickness" will pick up accordingly.
So, the reason you have an absurd hatred of it is because it looks different than what you're used to? And gee, I figured that they had changed something that actually mattered. By the way, DOS in XP is virtualized, just like Vista. Theming - can easily revert back to bog-standard 2000-era, if you'd like. Won't have a bit of your unused video card going towards drawing the UI. IE? Well, I agree with you there, visually, it ain't the best. Feature-wise, though, it was a needed step up from IE6. Office, well, hate to break it to you, but no one's forcing you to use 2007. Additionally, you can make your own custom ribbons that do virtually anything you want, you just need to touch some XML. The reason, by the way, is because all those buttons you're used to are there, but most only show up when contextually relevant. Hell, there are even downloads out there that will basically restore the thing to a 2003 state. I kind of get the impression you think that Aero Glass was just something an engineer came up with and shoehorned in or something. When it comes to UI/UE, they've got scores of people who dedicate their entire life to developing usable systems. Office 2007 was, in fact, an excellent example of that - there are few new features in Office 2007, the entire development time was spent on crafting a UI that they could actually expand upon in the future - fact is, they were rapidly running out of screen real estate in the old design scheme. And so, they went back and forth with users, people who don't know a jot about how to write software, and came up with something that had a relatively short "relearning" period for those unfamiliar with the software, and something that, IIRC, could be picked up over twice as fast for new users. The Office 2007 hate bugs me moreso than the Vista hate, I think, because it just demonstrates absolute laziness. People unwilling to learn something new even though it is absolutely necessary in order for new features to be added in the future. That's really not how it works. Basically, if there is some free time in the system scheduler, it will load commonly used programs into memory. But any time there is an intensive operation occurring, the scheduler is smart enough to not keep a user waiting. By the way, XP does disk prefetching - rearranging files on the disk to improve boot times. How DARE it presume such information, right? Oh, it likely was the case before. Vista's scheduler is just better at knowing what should get the most time slices on the CPU, and, especially, how best to handle multithreading/multicore support. It's something nice that comes with not needing to support Pentium 1 processors.
You just missed 90% of what I was getting at. It kinda got lost in all that, but it boils down to: Whoever is in charge of designing this stuff is basically on a power trip from where I'm standing. I haven't used Vista, and I don't hate it, but based on MS's recent work with IE and Office I intend to shun it. Yup. Fine. I don't care about translucency one way or the other, as long as I can understand what I'm looking at. You're right, usually, but sometimes you just can't get the whole paper or whatever done at home, you know? And the university has splurged on Office2k7 for all the student-accessible computers and oh I so eagerly await the day when I logon one of those and find that the rubbish that is the Adobe toolbar has migrated to the new version and there's not a single thing I can do to give it the vicious axing it deserves. But is that feasible on a public computer? Well, yes. I dunno, I seem to remember the Reviewing ( ) tab having some mixed content. I noticed. There's only so much one can do with a word processor. No kidding. Kinda didn't help when the Reviewing and Adobe toolbars were included on default *glares at university*. 1. I really don't care that they replaced the menus with the Ribbon. I don't see how it would hurt to leave the menus in, but so be it. 2. I don't like the sensation that they're going to consolidate the Office products into one all-or-nothing product a la Works. 3. I REALLY don't like the lack of customizability. 4. Have I mentioned that I really DON'T CARE that much about the Ribbon thing? 5. Redesigning so that you have more room for expansion is nice and all, but I really don't see how putting a swoosh in the non-neutral-colored background contributes to that. Oh, right, style over substance there. Apparently even word processors won't sell nowadays unless they look all glossy. 6. Seriously, how difficult is it to add a bunch of tickboxes in the options so people can reduce the number of tabs/menus they have to sort through? Well, that's fine, then.
And kind of what I was getting is that it isn't a power trip when it comes to the user experience. Features don't get added or modified without tons of testing with real users. They run the gamut - from inexperienced to power users. People who have a set routine to those who happily explore. Fact is, this stuff represents way too much money for MS to let developers, managers, whoever, have little narcissistic enclaves. There's a lot of stuff that seems arbitrary, but there's a process behind it, always has been. Take, for example, the scraps feature. What the fuck is the scraps feature, you ask? Basically, you could copy "something" from a document - text, part of a picture, whatever, and paste it as a "scrap" into any folder. You could then use the original program to open and modify it, or it would work as an externally linked object when you put it into other documents. Well, it was removed in Windows XP. I'm sure lots of people thought that was Microsoft just fucking them over again, but the simple fact was, it was a fraction of a percentage of people who actually used it. Despite this, they still had to go and do research about the feature before they could just remove it. They called up their tech support department and asked what questions people had called in about scraps. There were a grand total of two, and both of them were "What is a scrap, and can I delete it?" Only then was the scraps feature cleared for removal. Oodles of stories of user testing on Office 2007 as well - one was a user testing a mockup made in Powerpoint. He started by clicking around the tabs to navigate them, but then he started using the scroll wheel to simply advance the slides to whichever tab he wanted selected. They had never thought of it like that - not sure if that was a feature that made it in or not, but it was at least in some of the test builds. Well, you want students to leave the university future-proofed, and MS ain't going back when it comes to Office. I don't think you have to worry about the Adobe toolbar too much. It's just going to get relegated to its own tab nowadays, or shoved in an add-ins tab for older versions. It's always going to default to the home tab, where the most-used features go. No idea, I've never done it before. Default 2007 floats my boat. I'd imagine it would basically be an XML file that you'd have to bring with you to throw in the application directory of 2007, so you'd need write privileges to wherever it looks for them. In my opinion, the reviewing functionality of Office is fundamentally broken, and has been so ever since I first used it years ago. I think it'd be fine split out into its own program, but it just bloats up Office so damn much. In regards to 1, 3, and 6 - customization is great when its portable - when you can just grab your settings and go from one computer to another to another. Until that day, though, any persistant change that one person makes could potentially confuse another user terribly. Think you have a hard time now, well, what if someone decided that line spacing really belonged in a different tab, or didn't belong at all? What if you didn't know how to change it back? This was actually another complaint/issue with Office 2000-2003. Basically, there were so many features hidden away in the dropdown menus that people were overwhelmed with text and frequently had to scroll. So, they ended up having the menus dynamically change based on the most frequently used features, and with all the options in a little expander button at the bottom of the list. This reduced discoverability of features, and it also meant that menu ordering changed. One day, the "Font" item might be at the top of the list, the next, the third thing on the list. It would always respect the "total" list ordering, but once you started removing elements and hiding them below the expander button, it shifted things around Toolbar buttons were also small, had pitiful descriptions, and the icons gave little indication as to what they actually did. They, too, could be rearranged at-will and left for the next user. 2, I think they'll keep them compartmentalized so that they can sell 50 different variations of Office with little to no development cost. 5, hah, yeah. Unnecessary, but then, just about everywhere you look, you've got people doing shit like that. Hell, look at Firefox 3's keyhole navigation doodad.
Why do you think people are buying Macs? I'm not saying that Mac doesn't have worthy technical qualities, but I am saying that the "look" and "image" that is driving its sales. Fact is, most people don't know and don't care about technical stuff. MS started to make an effort in the "pretty" UI department, as they should have a long time ago. If it looks better, buyers will assume that it is better.
According to my roommate, 7 is going to be a better Vista, and 8 is going to be what Vista was supposed to be.
When I first went to college, my computer came with ME. There were hiccups a plenty, but I got used to it, and eventually learned to love it until I installed SUSE around 2 years ago. More recently, I upgraded from SUSE to Ubuntu, and am digging it.
Well, 7 was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread, but then all the Chicken Littles started bitching on the internet about how thier Voodoo 2 couldn't run Aero Glass and some random piece of shovelware crap wouldn't install without admin privileges, so now, it's just the same policy of facelifting that the NT series has enjoyed since 2000. Windows 8, I am sincerely hoping, throws every damn bit of compatibility out the window. A built-in Virtual PC client that can run whatever shitty old version of the OS they want to run, and then a bright, shiny, entirely new codebase for Windows 8 itself, preferably using the MinWin microkernel architecture. There's something Apple understands very well, and that is obsolescence. It's high time for Windows to move on to something totally different, something not constrained by people who basically just want to buy a new copy of their old OS.
Well, that sounds kinda neat. I don't think I've ever noticed it, not that I use Win2k in-depth much. I wouldn't think it would take that much coding. There's already an occasionally irritating option on the folder right-click menu to create a "New..." whatever document, but this would probably be more easily marketed as a selling point. Oh well. So then I want to be able to axe that tab if it comes up. I'm like that. A nicely objective way to "organize". Whenever I must use it, I rearrange Word 2k7 as best I can (it was the same with 2k3 and 2k). Takes maybe . . . two or three minutes. We have user profiles. Customization doesn't persist across sessions, unless you go right back to the same computer without anyone using it while you were gone. I'm looking at Excel 2k3 and failing to see what the problem is. How is it difficult, if you want to put, say, a .ppt slide in, to look at the Insert menu and deduce that, hmmm, "Object..." sounds awfully generic, maybe that will allow you to do it? There is no menu entry that I can see that has more than one arrow after it ( unlike my Bookmarks folder, which is hopelessly tangled ). Taping an "intent to bulldoze" notice to the back of a rickety restroom door in a musty corner of the seldom-used basement of the local City Hall building is "hiding". Putting "Visual Basic Editor" under the Tools --> Macro submenu . . . eh, that's a bit dodgy. Putting "Import External Data" under the Data menu? Please. P.S. So does 2k7 have LESS capability than 2k3? If it doesn't, then instead of "hiding" minor options behind arrows on menus, they're all out on display on tabs (whether you want them there or not), and instead of "hiding" in obscurity they're "hiding" in clutter. Unless they're sorted into dialog boxes, in which case they are again in obscurity. At the same time, of course, they took up too much space in aggregate I dunno, maybe I'm just weird, because when I didn't understand what a button was supposed to do, I used the Arrow-? button and clicked on the mystery button. I dunno, maybe I'm just used to it, but all the icons I have up on Excel are awfully suggestive. There is the sigma, which is kinda hiding the fact that there are other functions to be accessed via the drop-down menu. Oh, and the books--wait, what is the Research button doing still there?! Kill it killit killit! Quite possible. Right. I just think it's silly to apply to word processors. It's like running out and getting a new typewriter when the old one still works fine, just because the new one comes in a pretty purple color. I'm here to type a paper up, dagnabbit, not to be treated to a fireworks festival. I'd rather not have a swoosh in the non-neutral background of Powerpoint interfering with my running assessment of what my slides look like.
Oh, it wouldn't take that much coding. It's really a pretty simple thing in the end. However, it does then need to be checked for conflicts. Maintained if they change the way they handle certain things. And it's something that ends up adding clutter and is a little difficult to explain. When 99.9% of the feature use is by sheer accident, it's time to go. Microsoft is more than willing to cut things or change them if they aren't working. But it's never done capriciously. Lots of thought goes into it. By the way, there is many a tool out there that will remove extraneous New... menu items. Who wants to right-click and create a WinAmp playlist or something anyway? Since you're on XP, go try to track down TweakUI. Cool little tool from Microsoft, and for the few things it can do that will break things, it'll warn you first. Well, thanks to that Experience monitor thing that comes standard with every version of Office since XP, they know exactly what features are most frequently used. Takes you two or three minutes . Many places, especially public terminals with generic guest accounts, don't have such a luxury. Also, while the fast user switching style profiles in XP+ are a godsend, most people don't use them, terrifyingly enough. Remember, most people will never blame some guy customizing his Office for their not being able to find something, they will always blame Microsoft. What is an object? What does that mean? I mean, in terms of people who know a thing or two about computers, we know that it really means it's inserting a blank document of one type into another document using the Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) features built in to Office documents. But to most users, they have a hard enough time conceptualizing files as things that needn't be seperate. Then, on top of all that, you can insert an Object "From File," which does, IIRC, the exact same thing as Insert -> File... does. Meanwhile, you can insert some files (pictures, for example) in a wholly different window, and they're going to behave differently than other files you insert. Also, why is WordArt inserted as a picture, when it is clearly something you type? The funny thing is, all this chaos is still in Office 2007. The presentation layer helps eliminate ambiguity, and the graphical tooltips mean that most people won't even need to fire up Help. Oh, what's data? Is it another kind of file? Or is it an object? Very few things were removed. However, most of them frequently show up only in a context mode (see, for example, the Design ribbon when you're working with a table), and they always show up in the same place. They essentially "hide" only when they cannot be used. Frankly, the Ribbon is basically just a menu described as a toolbar, rather than as a list. Which many people never thought to do. It is, in a way, much like keyboard shortcuts. They are all there, and they're all quite fast, but most people are more than happy right-click copy, right-click pasteing all day long. Such shortcuts are difficult to point out because you essentially have to happen upon them to know how they work and, better yet, remember them. Ctrl-C might make sense for Copy, but wouldn't Ctrl-P make more sense for paste? Or print?
I've only played with it briefly, but I've been awfully impressed with Puppy Linux. 80 megs is the size of the current release. I installed it on one of my PCs with a 750 Mhz processor and it outperformed my 1.8 Ghz machine running XP by a wide margin! I'd still be running it if the motherboard on the machine hadn't decided that 7 years was long enough and quit working on me. While I'm going to keep a Windows box around, I'm definately going to have Puppy Linux running on at least one of my PCs.
