Discussions

"Now aside the fact, that I have no problems with routers or"

Many users had to upgrade the firmware of their routers or replace them (if unsupported) because of Vista autotuning (there was even an article on slashdot about a full provider having that issue), because Vista requires a special non-standard OPTIONAL DHCP flag that many routers don't support to get an IP address. Sources: (1) (2) (3)...

"Windows Update"

lucky.

"high CPU usage with WMP" "or audio skipping..."

Because you have a core2duo, try on a slower machine (like an Atom-based UMPC) to play a video on WMP both on XP and on Vista and you'll see an huge speed difference, it's so huge that even putting the mouse over a tooltip could make the video skip (there's even a funny KB about the issue on Microsoft's website. Solution? Don't move the mouse while playing...).

"What's so great about that longhorn video?  That's something I never got. The redeeming GUI features of the OS that is featured in that video seem to be flying pictures in the explorer and flashy effects."

Longhorn was set to be released 3 years before Vista and was planned to have major changes not just in the UI but Microsoft decided to do a "reset" of Longhorn development because they couldn't finish it in time and all people got was an OS with a superficially pretty UI where many features were delayed, cut or just left half broken because even after the reset they had to rush to avoid releasing something outdated. That video is not so amazing according to today's standard but it was really astonishing in 2002-2003. Vista was really too little and too late and the high hardware requirements, bugs, missing drivers and that resident unfinished feel certainly didn't help its image.

"The biggest cause of the negative image that portrayed Vista is exactly the post above me (Evil SEO). FUD, plain and simple."

If mine's FUD yours is plain ignorance. Come here and counter all of my points, if you can. I can find plenty of news or forum posts that prove that a lot of people had those issues, can you prove the opposite? I dare you, counter all of my arguments properly, then, and only then, you could call them FUD. Come on! Don't be scared! I'm waiting..

It's beeping because it wants your attention, try giving it a goodnight kiss before it goes to sleep, maybe it'll stop beeping.

What caused the negative Vista image? Maybe you can start from the longhorn videos that portrait something entirely different instead of that slow P(OS) with so many broken features (Resolution independence? Broken (the sidebar misbehaves, IE7 requires an obscure registry key to do proper scaling or all the pages look completely messed up...). Firewall? Broken (if you have ONLY 1 public connection all sharings are turned off on ALL connections? WTF design is that?). Higher performance with DX10? Can't still see a faster game. The new audio architecture? Broken (audio skipping, network throughput dropping while playing audio, unbelievably high CPU usage of WMP while playing content because of the protected pipeline DRM cr*p...). The new TCP/IP stack? Broken (how many routers is Vista incompatible with? And don't blame the routers for these stupid useless tcp/ip settings Microsoft forced that you can't even disable without obscure command-line commands). The new Explorer? Ultra-broken. Desktop Search? Can't count the times I had to delete the index. The new Windows Update? Can't count the time updates and even service packs failed to install and rollbacked. and the list could go on and on...) and plenty of bugs (how many cumulative reliability packs in just 2 years? a dozen?). Not to mention the many consumer-screwing marketing choices you could even write a top 10 about.

Vista IS the worst OS microsoft released, not ME. ME had its problems most of which were caused by bad drivers but Vista... Vista is really, really bad by itself even when you don't count the amazing number of bad drivers that were and still are released for it (the hard drive of one of my laptops that has a stupid nforce 410 controller just got corrupted for the nth-time (BSOD + chkdsk finding tons of errors at reboot), thank you nVidia drivers) just 1 day ago.

bureX said:

Holy c***... Just had a 90s Disney Channel flashback... ahh, those saturday mornings will not be forgotten

Um... What was the point of this thread again?

bureX said:

Yt was easy on Vista RTM where you could turn off driver signature checks but since SP1 you can't turn those off anymore, only signed drivers load.

I've installed some modded synaptic drivers for my trackpad yesterday, got the "Driver is not signed' warning, but clicked "install anyway"... It worked. (Vista x64 HP with sp1)

"The point I was making, harking back to the beginning of the thread, was that the app compat wasn't Windows only. And, as I understood the situation (although I never tried it so I could be wrong), I could have run 32 bit firefox and run flash inside that (much like with Windows). (Although if what you say is right either I'm wrong or Ubuntu is unusual to allow you to do that)."

Yes, of course you could run 32bit firefox, the 64bit linux kernel can run 32bit applications but installing it on a distro were it wasn't planned offering 32bit compatibility it can become a real pain, just check out this tutorial to install 32bit firefox on 64bit Ubuntu and see it for yourself. Thank god it's the "painless way install 32-bit Firefox and proprietary 32-bit binary plug-ins into your Ubuntu amd64-bit installation, accomplished without the complexity of establishing a 32-bit chroot environment", you only need to open a couple of terminals and type a few dozens lines of terminal commands, how unexpected. If that's the painless way I wonder what the other ways are...

"And the "compile it yourself" attitude it exactly the problem with parts of the linux community - it's not a friendly attitude. Don't try and argue that it's correct/right/good because they don't make it friendly - which is the problem (although I'm glad to say that in my experience with the Linux community most of the people are not like that, a significant minority are)."

It's one of the many linux developers' obsessions, they never want to accept compromises for retrocompatibility (PulseAudio? the latest X.org that broke support for many non-free drivers of common nvidia/ATI/intel videocards?) and always prefer having the users face the consequences of those obtuse choices, maybe hoping that those users will go complaining with the software/hardware companies whose softwares stopped working pushing for open source releases. Having to run weird plugins wrappers, install 32bit chroots environment, type dozens of terminal commands while they could just have shipped also a 32bit version of Firefox that could run everything fine is just plain nonsense.

bureX said:

Evil SEO said:

*snip*

How could it be better?

A pale mesh of old and new technology is advertised with the statement "The future is now at Apple"... They had plenty of time and a small hardware list to take care of. It could be a lot better... Also, installing unsigned drivers on x64 Vista is quite easy, don't know what the fuss is about...

"But Evil, are you not compareing apples to oranges here.  Apple has a draconian control on what hardware is available on their hardware.

Microsoft is not a hardware company (for the most part), when we are talking a Microsoft PC we are talking an OEM that chooses to use MS OS and usually hand picks a group of hardware for that system.  Although there is that idea of expansion of which a Microsoft PC has millions of more choices than the Apple PC.
"

Yes, Apple controls the hardware it sells you but not all the other third party hardware you can install/connect like printers, scanners, cameras, webcams... but also when you buy a PC with a 64bit processor you can be pretty sure that you will have all the motherboard drivers to make it run a 64bit Windows. Whenever you buy a PC or a Mac the hardware of the computer itself has always been 100% 64bit ready since the first 64bit CPUs came out because 64bit chipsets and motherboards needed to use the newer processors were employed as soon as they became available, it's the other older hardware that had issues because except very few little cases it didn't have proper 64bit drivers on XP 64bit since Microsoft wasn't requiring them and when Vista came out wasn't supported anymore because of the stricter requirements for driver certification.

"Mentioning the point of 32 bit drivers in comparison to signed 64 bit drivers. It is a way to get control on drivers. Since in the 32 bit unsigned world 80% of BSOD's and general unstability were caused by those drivers without controls."

Yet signed drivers didn't stop nVidia, ATI, Realtek, Creative, Logitech, Hauppauge, Intel and many other hardware companies from releasing drivers that still had plenty of stability issues at Vista's launch. It took months before Creative soundcards and ATI/nVidia videocards fixed their drivers that where bringing entire systems down and many laptop users still have to live with those old drivers because WHQL certifications made things so annoying that ATI/nVidia stopped releasing official video drivers for many mobile video cards leaving the burden to laptop makers that couldn't care more about updating those drivers often leaving them to the first nov 2006 release.

"So the comparison would be. in the Apple world where a hardware Vendor has to to through apple before they can sell hardware for apple systems. is true for 32 bit and the 64 bit world."

Yes, but that applies only to the hardware of the Mac itself, not to all the other third party hardware that work with it.

"in the microsoft world that wasn't true until the 64bit world at the consumer level. 

I personally was disappointed that MS didn't take the high ground and force 32 bit signed drivers also."

Probably it's because that would have killed hardware compatibility with XP drivers and many people wouldn't have had any way to run Vista at all with their older hardware. With ram prices dropping so fast 32bit Windows will soon be dumped by hardware makers, it's been a while since even cheap PCs started shipping with 4GBs of ram and I doubt that when most PCs will ship with 8gb/16gb in a couple of years people will still accept running a version of Windows that can only use 3GBs of those.

"Fair enough. On my system, most games suffer about a 20-40% loss in performance in DX10 mode compared to DX9 mode, but this is likely due to my video card."

It's not just the drivers, most (if not all) actual games are designed with DX9 in mind and quickly ported to DX10 so they get very small speed improvements because they don't really use all the features of DX10 and often those games don't run with the same exact settings when you select DX10, usually the games load higher resolution textures and more GPU-intensive shaders.

"It's true that pure 64 bit mode isn't going to help straight computation much. Sure, the extra registers will make some difference, but you won't see it except in some very specific situations."

Indeed the x64 switch was mostly about the RAM limit and not performance, you may gain speed in specific applications but having to run two 32bit and 64bit subsystems together is going to waste a lot of resources for anything else. There are far more interesting CPU features like SSE4 that can really speed up multimedia performance if only properly used (DivX for example is about 50% faster with SSE4 support enabled on the last C2D).

"However, Paolo's original assertion was that 32/64 bit context switches on MacOS X causes overhead. I don't really see how comparing 64 bit and 32 bit Windows to each other has any relevance to that at all."

Because most games are 32bit, when they run in 64bit they have context switches from 32bit to 64bit (so you can compare native vs context switched) but what's more interesting is that native 64bit game engines don't show any noticeable performance difference even when only the DirectX APIs (GPU details set to minimum) come into play.

One random article from the interwebs http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=30

"This reduction in overhead is a big deal. Any requests to the DirectX API translates into CPU overhead, so DirectX 10 takes aim at reducing the number of requests required. With DirectX 9, the overhead is somewhere around 40%. This means that a little less than half of your hardware is being used up just by the DirectX infrastructure! DirectX 10 is able to reduce this down to 20%, which is an impressive improvement. It means that games running DirectX 10 will only need half the CPU time for DirectX related calculations, freeing up the CPU to focus on other aspects of the game like AI.

Among other things, another feature introduced in DirectX 10 is called "Instancing." This is a feature that allows the same object to be rendered multiple times without all the overhead. Without it, game developers are limited to roughly 500 objects on the screen before the overhead gets ridiculous. With DirectX 10, you'll see a new ability to have virtually limitless numbers of objects -- the only limit is the speed of the hardware. This means bigger armies, more trees, even individually rendered blades of grass if the game developer chooses! In whatever way it ends up being used, Instancing will be a big part in bringing game detail to the next level."