Thoughts on Vista

unbending · June 13, 2007, 2:33pm

[quote]Misterhamper wrote:
DirectX 10 wil probably be cracked to run on XP, so no need to buy Vista for that.[/quote]

Actually its already cracked. It just needs polish to run real nice, still being developed.

http://www.fallingleafsystems.com/

{DirectX10 XP Project}

[quote]
Personally I use TinyXP, which is like XP except all the useless crap (that XP doesn’t need, and you won’t even see it’s gone) is removed. It only uses 50MB Ram to run.[/quote]

TinyXP was made with nLite. If you know what you’re doing you can make one yourself fully customized to what you need.

http://www.nliteos.com/

jedidiah · June 13, 2007, 4:06pm

[quote]ragingbassist wrote:
get a mac book. once you go mac, you never go back…ghey statement but nonetheless true.[/quote]

The surefire indicator that I think someone is a flaming idiot is a recommendation to buy a mac.

Seriously, I’ve had one and the OS is a computer play center for adults. Customizable? It’s Steve Jobs’s way or the highway.

Now, for many people, the mac way will work just fine because they are too stupid to care or actually fit into his mindset. For people who actually know a thing or two about computers and want to have control of their systems, Linux is the inevitable option.

I’ve used windows for 17 years now and Linux for 6 months. My heart is definitely in Ubuntu.

OSX is the most dictatorial piece of software I have ever encountered and the mac mindset is so utterly controlling, it’s totally backwards to me. Maybe macs just “make sense” to others, but to me, it’s how they would have computed in Soviet Russia.

Tiribulus · June 13, 2007, 10:01pm

I like Macs, but then again I just like computers.

I have to agree that for everything except games Linux is the T-Mans OS LOL. It truly is putty in the hands of the user and that putty gets softer for those who know a lot more than I do.

If it has one drawback (drawback indeed?) it’s that it never breaks. I just had to rebuild my web/file server due to a mainboard failure that took down the drives too =[ (yes that sucked, but I did have tapes)

It’s been so long since I had to touch Apache, Samba etc I had to actively remember what the hell to do. Once shit works in Linux it just keeps working until you or the machine dies.

Ubuntu is cool. The live CD outfit is perfect for somebody wanting to twiddle without a commitment. Better than Knoppix in my opinion.

Back on Vista for a second. I CANNOT stand the new explorer interface, windows explorer/my computer I mean. It looks like they changed a buncha stuff for the sake of making people feel like they now have something different. Way more cumbersome, busy and deep than the old one.

unbending · June 13, 2007, 10:19pm

I don’t agree about Linux. I tried Ubuntu and IT SUCKED (overall).

It was great for a regular PC user. Internet, mail, and office apps.

But the codec support was terrible. Could not get it to play DVDs properly, no iPod connectivity (even though it should have, never got it to work), and no driver support.

Linux looks nice and it has potential. But right now I consider it an alpha, not even.

Still needs some heavy development and support to flourish.

jedidiah · June 13, 2007, 10:40pm

[quote]unbending wrote:
I don’t agree about Linux. I tried Ubuntu and IT SUCKED (overall).

It was great for a regular PC user. Internet, mail, and office apps.

But the codec support was terrible. Could not get it to play DVDs properly, no iPod connectivity (even though it should have, never got it to work), and no driver support.

Linux looks nice and it has potential. But right now I consider it an alpha, not even.

Still needs some heavy development and support to flourish.[/quote]

I’m not sure how far back of a version you used but the latest, Feisty Fawn, has none of the problems you listed.

I know linux is not a perfect system, I’m painfully aware. Right now, I’m fighting for my built in webcam and fingerprint reader to work. However, as tribulus said, it is putty in the hands of the user.

That said, FF has great codec support–out of the box it is better than windows and will play anything you throw at after a five click operation in automatix (free and open-source–eat windows). As far as iPod support goes, I can think of five problems off the top of my head that will automaticaly configure the iPod and copy music to/from flawlessly.

Additionally, I don’t think you’ll find a better mp3 player/ipod manager on any OS than Amarok, beats the hell out of apple’s bloatware.

I’ve only been using since edgy eft, and FF is a big improvement over that. I’m aware that things you mentioned were definitely problems in past builds, they really are not an issue anymore.

The main things that should be improved in GG are wireless support (better WPA) and more peripheral support (i.e. my fucking webcam).

And, Trib, the new Ubuntu live cd is effing awesome–much cooler than knoppix, I agree (of which I have been a big fan).

Tiribulus · June 13, 2007, 10:48pm

[quote]unbending wrote:
I don’t agree about Linux. I tried Ubuntu and IT SUCKED (overall).

It was great for a regular PC user. Internet, mail, and office apps.

But the codec support was terrible. Could not get it to play DVDs properly, no iPod connectivity (even though it should have, never got it to work), and no driver support.

Linux looks nice and it has potential. But right now I consider it an alpha, not even.

Still needs some heavy development and support to flourish.[/quote]

OK, there is no arguing that any Linux distro is still harder to get setup than Windows. However, everything you just named and could possibly name is most assuredly supported and probably not as difficult as you might think to get working, again, depending on the distro and the specific thing in question.

I DO NOT mean this as a jab, but the fact that you could call Linux an Alpha" tells me that you just aren’t that savvy a user, not that there aren’t people, maybe even on these forums who aren’t better than me as well.

Linux is not in it’s infancy. It is, by the very open source nature it lives under, just not as standardized as Windows. This is good for geeks and blows for everybody else.

Let me put it this way. If somebody were to set you up a Linux box with everything you want and you weren’t concerned with mainstream games you’d get the picture. It’s like going through the digital world in an A1-Abrams that’s as nimble as a dune buggy, to continue the car analogies.

Tiribulus · June 14, 2007, 1:35am

@ jedidiah:

If you haven’t already you have to checkout http://www.webmin.com . Remote administration for the rest of us (on one hand). Been using it for about 15 versions and it just keeps getting better. I can do anything, anywhere in the world, as if I were sitting there. It’s as secure as your network as a whole.

Also, what used to be Coyote Linux BFW Firewall & Router • Portal BFW . Runs off a floppy disc or cd (I think Claudio started work on a HD version now) and with a prehistoric machine sporting minimal muscle and a couple nics you have a first rate broadband router/gateway that beats the hell outta the store bought ones.

Mines running on a P90 with 16 megs of memory and no hard drive or cd rom drive with 2 Intel E100b’s. That has remote admin functionality (there’s that word) as well.

RonPWood · June 14, 2007, 2:05am

[quote]unbending wrote:
I don’t agree about Linux. I tried Ubuntu and IT SUCKED (overall).

It was great for a regular PC user. Internet, mail, and office apps.

But the codec support was terrible. Could not get it to play DVDs properly, no iPod connectivity (even though it should have, never got it to work), and no driver support.

Linux looks nice and it has potential. But right now I consider it an alpha, not even.

Still needs some heavy development and support to flourish.[/quote]

Codecs- its called VLC, video lan client, no codecs needed: ever.

iPods are meant for macs and windows, why you picked an ipod is a different story- however you should be able to with a bit of effort mod itunes for linux.

And what driver support do you want? Theres plenty of drivers out there, and suprisingly sometimes thirdparty drivers work better than the ones developed by whoever. If you are looking for the latest driver for a brand new video card, you probably wont find it.

But then again - you don’t need a brand new video card. A slightly older option would work better until more support comes out.

Tiribulus · January 20, 2008, 2:46am

OK, I’ve come full circle again with Vista. Busy, cluttered, bloated pain in the ass. My wife found a prehistoric Dell dimension 4100, P3 1000 in the garbage. Needed memory and a drive which I threw in, half gig and a 40 gig ide drive. Even had an old Geforce 2 in it. I put Win2k on it and have now been even more persuaded to stand by my previous assertion that 2000 was the peak of efficiency for MS OSes.

That oxidizing relic runs better by quite a bit than this 2.5 ghz P4 machine with 2 gigs of ram and a 160 gig SATA drive. I AM NOT kidding. I am fully aware of the artificial limitations imposed by the industry before anybody tells me about all the cool shit that can’t be done on 2000, most of which actually can anyway.

BeTheBarbarian · January 20, 2008, 4:20pm

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
OK, I’ve come full circle again with Vista. Busy, cluttered, bloated pain in the ass. My wife found a prehistoric Dell dimension 4100, P3 1000 in the garbage. Needed memory and a drive which I threw in, half gig and a 40 gig ide drive. Even had an old Geforce 2 in it. I put Win2k on it and have now been even more persuaded to stand by my previous assertion that 2000 was the peak of efficiency for MS OSes.

That oxidizing relic runs better by quite a bit than this 2.5 ghz P4 machine with 2 gigs of ram and a 160 gig SATA drive. I AM NOT kidding. I am fully aware of the artificial limitations imposed by the industry before anybody tells me about all the cool shit that can’t be done on 2000, most of which actually can anyway.[/quote]

Here’s the thing with Vista. When properly tweaked it runs great on an older system.

In order for vista to perform awesomely out of the box, you are going to need a few things.

Core2Duo 2.0 Ghz or higher will be best. 2 gigs of 800mhz or faster RAM. Nice 7200 rpm sata2 hard drive. And a 256mb video card of your choice.

If you meet the above your machine will be running nicely out of the box.

I’m not saying I prefer vista by any means. I’m just saying that once you meet some base requirements it works so much better.

Synthetickiller · January 20, 2008, 5:59pm

I’ve been using Vista since the summer of 07’ and I haven’t gone back to using XP.

Vista at this point has great driver support. Anyone who is disagreeing with my statement must have only used Vista when it came out.

I’ve had a few software conflicts, mostly temperature sensing software like coretemp. Unless you overclock or something, you won’t even be bothered with programs like these. Even that program probably has a working update by now. I’ve had no issues with normal software, games, etc running on my pc what-so-ever.

I think honestly, what you do with your OS determinds which OS you want / need. A lot of people love to play around with linux while other’s prefer OSX. If you game, and I can’t stress this enough, you’re stuck with winblows. Having DX9 and DX10 support is the bottom line. Emulating this is not going to get great results normally and might take more tweaking in linux and you want to.

The bottom line is that you need a fast computer for Vista. Don’t expect to run it on a system that’s single core and has 1 gig of ram. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Linux is great if you know a lot about programming but I found myself in over my head trying to tweak and install programs correctly in non-ubuntu versions of linux. There is a lack of support for things in linux which worries me about upgrading. Maybe in the future, it will be streamlined, but for the average user, especially with someone who doesn’t have a lot of time on his / her hands, linux is not really the best choice right now.

Mac is decent, but you’re stuck with expensive hardware, a limited software library, a non-existent game library, and what appears to be a very limited upgrade path. I don’t know if you can actually pull out the CPU from a new mac desktop or not, I haven’t tried. But, I can’t see apple really letting that happen. If I am wrong, someone let me know. It would be news to me.

I would say stick with XP for now since nothing requires Vista and XP will run faster, especially if you don’t have a C2D or Athlon x2 or higher CPU and at least 2 gigs of ram.

@ BeTheBarbarian, 800 mhz ram won’t really help you. Unless you’re running your CPU 1:1 (say 400x5 = 2000 or 2ghz) you’re not getting all you can out of your ram. I had ddr2 800 and at stock my q6600 would run my ram at 266 (or ddr2 533) not 400 (ddr2 800). The timings make a greater difference unless you’re overclocking. 4-4-4-12 runs much faster than 5-5-5-15. I might add though that DDR2 800 prices are really low and you can even get 2x2 gig kits (4 gigs total) for about 100 bucks, which actually improves performance in Vista from what I’ve seen over using 2 gigs.

Oh yeah, if you go the Vista route, get Vista x64, NOT a 32 bit version. They suck, big time.

Good luck. OS’s seem to be a a PITA when it comes to getting everything you want.

Synthetickiller · January 20, 2008, 6:02pm

I would like to make a correction, you can upgrade the CPU in a mac. Everyone, rejoice!

Tiribulus · January 21, 2008, 12:32pm

The point is Vista does nothing any better than 2000 did to justify spending one cent on new hardware, ESPECIALLY for the average user who surfs the web and does email with a splash of word processing and pix and vids thrown in.

XP does a few minor things easier than 2000 did. I’m in the middle of starting a PC repair business and I have users who are still using 98 and aren’t interested in anything new if it costs more than about 10 bucks.

Of course you can strip tweak Vista and coerce a good deal more performance out of it, but why? To get what? I can run a 10 year old box with 2000 and get exactly the same thing and by the time I get through strip tweaking that, which I have, It outperforms the newest SUV machines for anything except games. Speaking of games, most will run on 2000 and all will run on XP better with half the horsepower, except you’ll still need a burly video card.

As far as security, there are 2 basic kinds in the Microsoft world. The kind that has come to fruition in Vista which turns the machine into an overbearing nanny box and the kind you do yourself which takes precious little contribution from Windows itself. In other words, for the average user, Vista is probably the most secure Windows so far and the most intrusive asking questions every 10 seconds in condescending romper room language that they still don’t understand anyway. By the time you set it up to operate smoothly for them you’re back at square one with the question of what the hell have they gained by buying that shiny new machine that they didn’t already have with the old one?

The question isn’t whether you can get it to run how you want, but what are you gaining by doing so. DX 10 is long cracked for XP and most people don’t even know what that it is anyway and have no interest in serious PC gaming so that doesn’t give an answer either.

RSGZ · January 21, 2008, 6:11pm

I don’t mind vista to be honest, yes it might be a little slower than before, but it is more stable than XP in my experience, and nice for 64bit applications. My HP notebook is now a few months short of a year old (AMD 64bit Turion, 2gb ram), and I’ve been running it here since it was launched and it runs like a dream - no problems at all whether it be speed or reliability.

At work, I have a quadcore Q6600, 4gb dualchannel ram, a $400 gfx card and plenty of hard drive space so I don’t even see the issue here.

Tiribulus · January 25, 2008, 4:18pm

I haven’t had any undue stability issues with any MS OS since the second SP for 2K, to their credit. I also don’t have any stability related issues with Vista. In my opinion MS no longer deserves the rep for unstable desktop products that they once had which was largely centered around 9X/ME and was well deserved. Even NT was fine when handled properly. I still wouldn’t trust my business backend to them however.

Here’s a case in point. My daughter’s laptop has been running XP forever, but The old Acclaim game Fur Fighters won’t run in XP, not right anyway. I threw a different drive in that machine and put 2KSP4 on it just for that game and told her we could put the other drive back in if need be.

I got it set up for her with all the essentials and it’s been 3 weeks now. She just now said to me. " I tried to save a paint drawing as a jpg and realized my computer has 2000 on it now". The 2000 version of paint doesn’t allow saving in anything, but bmp format. All this time with her using it a few hours a day and that was the first time she even mentioned not having XP on it. It didn’t come up because for 99.9% of what everybody does it doesn’t make any difference.

Vista not only makes no difference it is actually more difficult to use for somebody already used to older versions of Windows.

BeTheBarbarian · February 3, 2008, 3:10am

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
I’ve been using Vista since the summer of 07’ and I haven’t gone back to using XP.