Dumb Question: Why Vista?

Jup... it's just "tha shiny" thingie that attracts PC users to get that, I wouldn't say ugly, but evil thing... a friend got it, installed it (somehow), and had it running within just a few hours... then some days later she asked me why oh why was it so slow now... I didn't know what to say, I mean.. I did warn her ...

For me, I considered Windows "done" with NT4. I still remember working at an old job, on a beat up 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM. The thing operated like an absolute dream system, even with the entire Office 2000 Premium edition opened, plus IE (company standard, you understand), a graphics program, and a text-editor for designing my web pages.

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GREAT point! Win NT 4.0 was one of the best products ever from the Redmond team. I ran it for years. I tinker with PC hardware constantly, and a while back, on a wild hair, I built a "new" Pentium Pro 200 system (all the parts you could ever need - and then some - available for half nothing on eBay) and loaded up Win NT 4.0 SP6 on it. Running the software of the day it STILL flies, and it is as solid as a rock. It runs almost all my modern software as well, although a bit more slowly, as you would expect from a 200 MHz CPU (that's 0.2 GHz in "today speak"). I have loaded it up with Office 97, Opera 9.22, and a variety of email clients. It is a fully functional and remarkably fast environment. Not as "glitzy" as Win XP or Win Vista, but darn useful!

So, the moral of this story, at least where Microsoft is concerned, is don't upgrade to the latest and greatest OS until a long time after it is no longer the newest thing AND until you have much faster hardware than was common at the time it was released!

I'm not sure if this is true of Macs - I have heard that Mac OS X actually seems to get faster with each release. Any comments? I am looking forward to the release of Leopard, but honestly, I will hang back and await reports of its performance before I decide whether to buy it. Tiger is plenty good for me for a while.

spilio said:

For me, I considered Windows "done" with NT4. I still remember working at an old job, on a beat up 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM. The thing operated like an absolute dream system, even with the entire Office 2000 Premium edition opened, plus IE (company standard, you understand), a graphics program, and a text-editor for designing my web pages.

J

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I think NT really came into its own with 2000. XP was just lipstick and more user-friendly wizards. 2000 was a great OS right from the get-go. It had all of the power of NT, with the refinement, interface and plug-n-play capabilities of 9x. I remember thinking when I went from 2000 to XP, that the only major improvement to me was the faster boot-up times.

Had they continued to refine and enhance 2000 and stopped re-releasing NT at that point to concentrate on a top-down rewrite, it would have been a good move. Sure, it would have been nearly 8 years with no new product, but that would have given them ample time to graft the Windows interface on top of an open source kernel, much like Apple did with FreeBSD. (OK, pipe dream).

One of my biggest arguments with Microsoft is that they release new product, but never actually finish and completely fix the bugs before they release the next version.

I remember Outlook 98 had a rather severe bug with recurring appointments. If there was an existing shared appointment that was modified in one of several ways, it could corrupt the appointment. That in turn would cause reminders to stop working for every user that had that appointment in their calendar. The only way to correct it would be to locate the offending appointment and delete it. Mind you, in a corporate setting, people had hundreds of appointments. So, they would have to go through each one, one-by-one and delete appointments, closing and reopening Outlook until the error message went away. The only indicator (other than not receiving reminders) would be an error message at Outlook startup saying "An error occurred" (or something similarly non-specific). Microsoft's official KB article said the fix was to upgrade to Outlook 2000. Lovely.

cwa107, agreed completely on 2000. Very stable. Used 2k Server 24 a day for over 5 years. It never crashed. Never. Ran my sites and a few local business's, email and some forums. Never a problem. I used 2k Pro for my main OS for years also. Very good OS.

XP is nice also but really like cwa107 said, better Plug and Play, faster bootup, nicer look, but the basics were all in 2000.

I occasionally access a Windows 2003 Server system at work. I can get to it in many ways, even through RDC [Remote Desktop Connection] on my little MacBook. For a Windows system I've got to say it works fine. It is administered with the "classic" interface and it's clean. It runs the things I need to run for work on the Windows side, and it lets me access files local to my machine (Win machine if at work or Mac if at home).

Now if Microsoft were to have taken Win2003 Server and hardened it, that would be decent - for a Windows machine. If they were to add a full Unix environment (enhanced version of their now defunct Unix services or an up-to-date version of Cygwin), they'd have a sweet machine. A machine like that would have kept me away from Linux and OS X.

My vista on macbook pro

Well, im a pc and mac user. pc user for over 15 years. mac user for 2 years. i know about from DOS to Vista. I got mac to have a change with all those commercials. i checked mac and they said that they have excel on it. (im an excel user for all my files.) so i did buy mac and ms office for mac. checked it out but its slow. then bootcamp said that it can run on native speed. tried using xp sp2 and ms office 2007 on it. works fine. good im back on business. so what will happen to my mac. well i used it for my personal use and back up. back up because even if windows crashes i can still retreive my files even if you cant boot up windows anymore. after a while windows crashed because i tried to edit registry. well no big deal... macs there, hmm... time for a change... lets try vista. i installed vista... great security, but u need lots of memory. well no biggy got 2 gigs. why vista? fast on browsing which i need, well faster than osx... excel 2007 works great too.. works even better... games... everything works. why windows on mac, all the great games run on pc hehehe WITH MACS HARDWARE. heres the deal.... i love macs hardwares and compatibility to all. vista that runs on a mac is like heaven. well i like mac too. i will upgrade to leopard next month too. well its like have the best of two worlds.

I think Vista is going through some growing pains since it's a major overhaul; not unlike the first version of OS X. I've only been using Macs as a primary computer for less than a year, but I've seen comments on this site about how buggy and bad the first version of OS X was. Maybe someone with first-hand experience can chime in.

That's just a typical problem with "early adoption" of any major release. Maybe with a little time and a service pack update, it will be better. I hope so, for Microsoft's sake. They're getting way too much bad press and Apple and Apple stockholders couldn't be happier. (I knew I should have bough back in December!!)

I do have Vista installed on my MBP via bootcamp, but mainly because I just wanted to give it a try, it only cost me $10 (student license) and I don't depend on Windows for anything important (mostly gaming). Unless something comes out for Apple to rival Media Center, I will be using Ultimate eventually for a media center computer.

fleurya said:

I think Vista is going through some growing pains since it's a major overhaul; not unlike the first version of OS X. I've only been using Macs as a primary computer for less than a year, but I've seen comments on this site about how buggy and bad the first version of OS X was. Maybe someone with first-hand experience can chime in.

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Well, I don't have that much experience with OS X before 10.3; I think that's when they finally nailed it. 10.1 was released less than a year after 10.0 and was free (or I think you could pay like $10 to have the CD shipped to you)... that sort of shows how unfinished 10.0 was. 10.1 still had some quirks, but it was more of a finished OS. 10.2 was better, but like I say, I think 10.3 was what put them way in front of Windows XP (some will argue they where always ahead, but I think there was a period where Microsoft really got their act together [like others have said above] and Apple was just treading water)... then 10.4 just made it better.

As for new OS X releases running faster on older hardware, I'd have to agree. Spotlight and Dashboard where a little slow on my 733MHz G4, but everything else had sped up from Panther. I don't know about Leopard though; Leopard seems to be littered with more graphical effects and I think will catch out the older machines... but I suppose only time will tell.

spilio said:

^^ Probably to get Apple's selection of high-quality hardware, physical style, and their support. When the hard drive crashes, or the RAM locks you up, you can go to your Apple Store and get fast, friendly help. Or you can spend hours on the phone with Dell, HP, or whomever insulting your intelligence by asking if the comp is plugged in or not.

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First of all, with a company like Dell you can call for a whole year and have the product fixed without leaving your house. My closest Apple store is about 90 miles away. I had to drive there and then they had to ship it off to get it fixed and then ship it back all because the 90 days "complimentary" phone service was up. They wouldn't even talk to me about it on the phone. I could have saved gas money (180+ miles) and time (3 hours) if they would have just had some kind of phone service like Dell that will let you send it off to get it fixed for the whole year.

I mean, when I did have an issue with the Dell, I used the web chat and was done in about 15 - 30 minutes.

So Apple's "fast, friendly" help was not very...

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And there's no one that's really touched on any of Vista's new features that make usability more enjoyable. all I've really read is along the lines of "pretty interface for idiot PC users".

Indexed files = Instant searches. Like OS X has and XP did not. You type in what you want and it shows up.

Aero interface = Real time views of minimized windows. Hey, when I have 10 different programs open, even the same program in different windows, I can tell what they are without having to search through them.

Update explorer = now you can view file folders and more accurately see what the contents are. Open a folder full of pictures and the actual images are displayed as icons. That's much better than a ton of .jpg or .raw icons that come out of the camera as IMG_1001, IMG_1002, etc...

Better "self management" = I've installed Vista on 3 computers. I've only had to go out and find a driver for one of those. Vista will search the internet and find the drivers for your system if they're not included in the ones that come with Vista. With XP, if it didn't have it in the installation, then you had to find it and install it.

Windows Defender = 2 of the 3 computers are mine. I browse the internet, download torrents, check e-mail, etc...So far there have been no ads, no popups, no slow down or nothing of the sort. Some people think the constant Deny/Allow message box is a hassle. I think it's great. I've had it pop up on occasion asking if I wanted to install adware. It's also a good deterrent for accidentally making system changes that can affect the computer. It's like the feature included in OS X, but used much more often.

Vista also included drive encryption, easier networking capabilities than before, better notebook power management, and better performance from a correctly configured and compatible computer.

A lot of the complaints stem from people trying to run Vista with unsupported hardware (which is the manufacture's responsibility to create drivers, not MS) or less than required hardware specifications. Some one trying to run Vista with Aero engine on with a system with only 512 ram, 2.4ghz p4 and a 32mb integrated GPU is going to complain because their system is running like crap.

AFAIK, Mac apps have been built so that they will run on older machines without much problems. That's why your 7 year old Mac can run OS X and new programs. But as technology advances and the want for flashy apps and programs, so does the hardware requirement. As technology advances and allows developers to incorporate new tricks into their programs, the old machine will barely be able to run them...even Mac Apps.

I mean, Apple is not going to support the PPC chip forever, not with everything in the past several years now on the Intel platform. There's just not a lot of money in supporting old hardware at a certain point and that's what drives these businesses.

Same thing with Microsoft. "Advanced" hardware (extremely advanced from 5 years ago) is getting to be pretty standard in the consumer's home these days. Why would they build and OS that will run on hardware 5 years ago without taking advantage of the current market and cutting edge. They'd be better off re-releasing XP if that was the case. 2-3 years from now when Vista is getting towards the middle of it's life cycle, people will not have any problems running the OS at all as far as hardware goes. Everyone here knows MS doesn't release a new OS every 2-3 years like Apple. By that time, 4gb may be standard along with 5000mhz FSB speeds and 5ghz quad core chips.

After all, wasn't is just 2 years ago that Apple computers were running more than comfortably enough on 600mhz PPC chips with 512mb RAM with no real though of 256mb DX 10 compatible graphics cards? Now we have programs and an OS that requires us to have 2ghz chips with a lot greater processing power and 2gb of memory to run with out slow downs?

Good points Village Idiot - a reasonable review of some of Vista's new features.

A brief counterpoint though. I just installed Yoper Linux 3.0 on an old 1.6 GHz PIV machine of mine, with 512 MB of RAM and initially at least, a 32 MB video card. I got all the security and none of the hassle, pretty much every program in the Linux universe is available and able to run on it, and it drips eye candy without issue - multiple desktops, glittering 3D icons, Beryl/Compiz based spinning cubes, wobbly windows... the whole nine yards... all from a lowly 1.6 GHz CPU using only 512 MB of RAM (...and it reports that almost half of that RAM is idle most of the time!).

The point is that you don't NEED a massive CPU and enough RAM to choke a horse to make this stuff go. What you NEED is well designed software. That is the real beef most folks have with Microsoft... poorly designed junk with features ladled in with massive bloat. Take a look at what you can do with almost any optimized Linux distribution and you will see how far Microsoft is from providing a reasonable product.

I don't say this to be argumentative or to provoke a virtual shoving match. I truly believe this, and truly believe that facts like the above bear it out. Microsoft needs to concentrate on improving the design and quality of its products, not on the "too much is never enough" endless feature stream.

OK, I will get off my soapbox! See why I don't use Windows any more?

I just installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on a 500Mhz IBM Thinkpad 600x with 384 Megs RAM. It runs quite well considering such an old system.

So I know just what you mean.

Of course the irony is not lost on me that I am typing this using a massive CPU running on a machine stuffed with 2.5 GB of RAM...

mac57 said:

Good points Village Idiot - a reasonable review of some of Vista's new features.

A brief counterpoint though. I just installed Yoper Linux 3.0 on an old 1.6 GHz PIV machine of mine, with 512 MB of RAM and initially at least, a 32 MB video card. I got all the security and none of the hassle, pretty much every program in the Linux universe is available and able to run on it, and it drips eye candy without issue - multiple desktops, glittering 3D icons, Beryl/Compiz based spinning cubes, wobbly windows... the whole nine yards... all from a lowly 1.6 GHz CPU using only 512 MB of RAM (...and it reports that almost half of that RAM is idle most of the time!).

The point is that you don't NEED a massive CPU and enough RAM to choke a horse to make this stuff go. What you NEED is well designed software. That is the real beef most folks have with Microsoft... poorly designed junk with features ladled in with massive bloat. Take a look at what you can do with almost any optimized Linux distribution and you will see how far Microsoft is from providing a reasonable product.

I don't say this to be argumentative or to provoke a virtual shoving match. I truly believe this, and truly believe that facts like the above bear it out. Microsoft needs to concentrate on improving the design and quality of its products, not on the "too much is never enough" endless feature stream.

OK, I will get off my soapbox! See why I don't use Windows any more?

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Don't knock powerful machines tho. At work I'm using a Dell 1950 PowerEdge server running two Dual-Core Xeon 3.0 GHz processors and 16GB RAM on a multiprocessor job running Red Hat Linux Enterprise v4. I'm on the 5th pass with it, and it takes roughly 3 1/2 days to complete a full pass of 50K iterations. The OS should give you access to all of the CPU cycles, not consume them on other garbage.

Good point mathogre, and no knock intended. I am just constantly amazed at how useful the older, supposedly "lesser" machines are, if you just don't burden them with all that newfangled OS bloat.

Sounds like a heck of a job you are running there - what is it trying to compute? Or is that company confidential?

...of course I am tempted to suggest that it might be attempting to deduce the question to which the answer is "42"... ...but of course we all know that such a computation takes far, far longer!

It's an automated airspace design tool. AI stuff. It helps determine what airspace a controller will work, balancing lots of factors. One process spawns others, in this case four, for a total of 5. Without the multiprocessor mode, it would take probably 2 weeks to complete one pass.

Isn't the answer also "fish"? -_^

mathogre said:

It's an automated airspace design tool. AI stuff. It helps determine what airspace a controller will work, balancing lots of factors. One process spawns others, in this case four, for a total of 5. Without the multiprocessor mode, it would take probably 2 weeks to complete one pass.

Isn't the answer also "fish"? -_^

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Very interesting. A close friend of mine works with Stress Analysis of rockets. Can't say too much, but they use powerful systems for their work otherwise it would take forever to get done!

mac57 said:

Good points Village Idiot - a reasonable review of some of Vista's new features.

A brief counterpoint though. I just installed Yoper Linux 3.0 on an old 1.6 GHz PIV machine of mine, with 512 MB of RAM and initially at least, a 32 MB video card. I got all the security and none of the hassle, pretty much every program in the Linux universe is available and able to run on it, and it drips eye candy without issue - multiple desktops, glittering 3D icons, Beryl/Compiz based spinning cubes, wobbly windows... the whole nine yards... all from a lowly 1.6 GHz CPU using only 512 MB of RAM (...and it reports that almost half of that RAM is idle most of the time!).

The point is that you don't NEED a massive CPU and enough RAM to choke a horse to make this stuff go. What you NEED is well designed software. That is the real beef most folks have with Microsoft... poorly designed junk with features ladled in with massive bloat. Take a look at what you can do with almost any optimized Linux distribution and you will see how far Microsoft is from providing a reasonable product.

I don't say this to be argumentative or to provoke a virtual shoving match. I truly believe this, and truly believe that facts like the above bear it out. Microsoft needs to concentrate on improving the design and quality of its products, not on the "too much is never enough" endless feature stream.

OK, I will get off my soapbox! See why I don't use Windows any more?

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Microsoft has these huge advantages that allows them to have 90% more users than Linux ever will.

Ease of use - Install it and maybe some drivers, Vista is a little more automated in this. Linux, not so much. At all. I put Ubuntu on a hard drive and popped it in my Dell. It was taking me forever to find out how to get a driver installed for the wireless card. Apparently, the device wasn't well supported and there was a ton of stuff you had to do to get it recognized. I didn't even get around to messing with trying to correctly find and install drivers for the rest of the hardware. With Windows, you plug something in, and it either installs or ask you for a disk for drivers, etc...Vista is like Window's for dummies. Everything has a wizard or help to get it setup and running so your average user isn't just sitting there and scratching their head.

Compatibility and unity - Linux will never be popular until if has a "standard". Either an complete standardized OS or a standard by which all OS's work and by what support and software they choose. Infact, OS X is probably the closest thing to standardized Linux there is.

You have to pay for it - Windows & OS X. Yes, that's a good thing. How many free versions of Linux are there? How many of those versions have 800 numbers that you can call up 24 hours a day for software trouble shooting or support? If a product doesn't draw in money, it makes it extremely difficult for the company/person that designed the product to support it correctly.

Market Share - Even Apple with it's small market share in comparison to Windows is much greater than probably all the Linux distros combined. If you have market share you have the attention of the companies that design hardware and software. Point being, go to a store that sells computer software. The only place you may not see that sells Windows compatible software would be the Apple Store. Even then, there's programs that they carry that will work on Windows. Like if there's a copy of World of Warcraft, it runs on Windows and OS X. Can't escape it, it's there.

Apple's marketshare is smaller so it demands less attention for software developers. You can still find their software, it's just not going to be at every store out there.

Linux? Very rarely will you walk into a store that carries Linux compatible software. Occasionally a game that runs on Windows and OS X will also run on Linux.

Same thing with hardware. You need drivers to run it...so it follows the above sentiments.

All of this comes at a disadvantage. It's like when XP dropped. It's requirements were considered to be fairly high by some, but now, I should be able to install it on any computer made in the past 7 years and have it run smoothly.

Village Idiot said:

Compatibility and unity - Linux will never be popular until if has a "standard". Either an complete standardized OS or a standard by which all OS's work and by what support and software they choose. Infact, OS X is probably the closest thing to standardized Linux there is.

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Excellent points, all of them - but the one in particular I like is what you said above.

Linux's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness - lack of standardization. You hit the nail on the head. Every facet of the OS (even its kernel) can be and is customized. Even Ubuntu, which does a good job of popularizing the desktop environment as Gnome is also available as Kubuntu (KDE), and several other varieties. That's great if you're a seasoned Linux user who has strong preferences for a different window manager, but it's bad for a newcomer who is still trying to understand the basics of the OS.

I also agree with your comments about drivers. You plug a device into a Windows machine and it prompts you for drivers if it doesn't come with them. There is a very standardized process for installing those drivers. In Linux, it just won't work until you figure out where to get the driver and how that particular driver is installed. Sure, you can get help from the community, but if it absolutely needs to work immediately, good luck on finding an on-demand answer. Your prowess with Google is going to determine your degree of success. Again, that's fine for seasoned computer users that have a degree of determination and skill, but bad for the lay-person who just wants to surf the web via an encrypted wireless connection.

OS X does a great job of bringing a set of standards to the "UNIX variant platform. But some of those facets are pay-for and closed-source - and of course there is no such thing as hardware independence.

I completely agree, Village Idiot. My point wasn't that Linux was easy to setup (it DEFINITELY isn't - I have always said that by and large, it is not for the faint of heart) but that it demonstrates what is possible, performance wise, with well designed software.

Even the heavyweight of the Linux world, KDE, has been getting faster, release over release! Can you say that of ANY Windows release? The current KDE 3.5.7, which I have just installed on my Arch Linux installation, runs signficantly faster, on the same hardware, than the last version of KDE I ran. There is a lot of bloat in KDE to be perfectly honest, but even in the midst of this, it is getting FASTER. Amazing! By the way, I can say the same thing about the other MAJOR heavyweight of the open source world, OpenOffice. I also just upgraded to OpenOffice 2.2.1, and was amazed that it loads in about half the time, again on the same hardware, as the last version of OpenOffice I ran.

So, no real argument with your key point, which is that Linux is a non standard and difficult environment to set up. However, the fact that conceptually anybody can work on any part of it has people doing just that, and constantly improving it - not just adding new features but also making existing ones work better and faster. Now THAT is progress.

mac57 said:

I completely agree, Village Idiot. My point wasn't that Linux was easy to setup (it DEFINITELY isn't - I have always said that by and large, it is not for the faint of heart) but that it demonstrates what is possible, performance wise, with well designed software.

Even the heavyweight of the Linux world, KDE, has been getting faster, release over release! Can you say that of ANY Windows release? The current KDE 3.5.7, which I have just installed on my Arch Linux installation, runs signficantly faster, on the same hardware, than the last version of KDE I ran. There is a lot of bloat in KDE to be perfectly honest, but even in the midst of this, it is getting FASTER. Amazing! By the way, I can say the same thing about the other MAJOR heavyweight of the open source world, OpenOffice. I also just upgraded to OpenOffice 2.2.1, and was amazed that it loads in about half the time, again on the same hardware, as the last version of OpenOffice I ran.

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Just with all the automation and building on previous platforms comes the need for greater hardware specs. I'm sure if KDE were to build a new version that was as user friendly as Vista (in the fact that you install it and run it and it does practically every thing you need to set it up as well as the plug and play features) then it would probably be more resource intensive.

The gaming notebook I have, which is a Dell, has Vista on it. It came with XP media center edition as the pre-installed OS. Honestly, with the hardware, I notice no real negative performance differences. I still get the same FPS's on my games, I can search my entire hard drive in a fraction of the time I could using XP, and all the hardware and attachments work at the same speed. Of course, the search is attributed to indexed hard drives.

What happens when the next version of Open Office implements A new feature that causes it to load slower and run slower on current hardware. It's a fact that can't be avoided. Once features start getting added, there's a point when the software will run slower on the same hardware as the previous version. You can only refine so much before refinement vs. content starts to equal lower performance.

mac57 said:

So, no real argument with your key point, which is that Linux is a non standard and difficult environment to set up. However, the fact that conceptually anybody can work on any part of it has people doing just that, and constantly improving it - not just adding new features but also making existing ones work better and faster. Now THAT is progress.

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Until you have different people working on the same features and directing them in two completely different directions. I could see that being a problem.

I think Ubuntu has it right. They're going for usability and trying to market it to the "average" consumer...I guess as average as some one looking at Linux can get. I still think they're at a huge disadvantage without a real foothold in the software market. I don't think Linux will ever be considered a serious competitor in the computer market...

Dell was considering selling Ubuntu boxes. I'm not sure if they still are, but the amount of those computers sold vs. Windows boxes will be miniscule. There's just too many programs out there that run on OS X or Windows that aren't made for Linux and would sway the minds of many people. iLife, Adobe products, Logic, Final Cut, commercial computer games, etc...

Sure there's open source equivalents for many of those, but does Gimp really stand up to the power of Photoshop and the availability of add ons and plugins for it? Same with the rest.

Maybe one day a Linux OS will be a big enough seller to entice the likes of certain publishing houses to release their products for it. They still have a ways to go.