Technical Look at Vista

[Iced_Eagle]

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars/1

In the light of these difficulties, many people wrote Vista off. Though still some ways off, it was deemed a pointless failure and not worth bothering with. This is unfortunate. Even after the false starts and scaled-back plans, Vista is still a huge evolution in the history of the NT platform, and that's not something to be sniffed at. The fundamental changes to the platform are of a scale not seen since the release of NT.

Great article on Vista! Not a review though for those wondering.

It's a nice technical article talking about the deep changes to Vista and how they're starting to change things to update it for this next age of computing.

One example is using vector graphics systems instead of current bitmap ones. This actually isn't apparent yet until people start writing applications using WPF, so don't just open up any program in Vista and expect the crisp-ness. Don't expect those apps to come out in mainstream until end of this year or next year.

For those saying Vista has absolutely nothing new, this may be an interesting read if you are also interested in lots of details.

Reading the article only makes me more excited for the next release of Windows in a few years... Now they have the foundation and can really start to expand and mature on it.

 

[Dax]

Nice article. Whether I like it or not I'll have to familirize myself with the new OS sooner or later. I'm thinking of buying a new laptop and it only comes with Vista pre-installed.

Another nice aspect or feature of Vista is how it treats system memory. Similar to how Linux manages system memory.
People are complaining it eats up all the memory but unlike XP, Vista does it best to occupy all the useful high-speed system memory for caching. Vista understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive.

Article

 

[Beerdude26]

I know Vista has loads of highly useful new features that will without doubt enhance my computer experience, but I'm still kind of sceptical towards the entire "OMFG THIS SHIT ISN'T HD-CERTIFIED, NO HD FOR Y00"-farce.

 

[Gray Fox]

Thats nice, but it doesn't even come close to compensating for Vista's disadvantages.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

 

[CyberPitz]

I'll give you a technical look at it.

Vista Sucks.

 

[CrazyHarij]

i'd rather get a mac than update to vista, it's really the way things are heading

 

[[RnL]Stefan]

I know Vista has loads of highly useful new features that will without doubt enhance my computer experience, but I'm still kind of sceptical towards the entire "OMFG THIS SHIT ISN'T HD-CERTIFIED, NO HD FOR Y00"-farce.

That's not really Vista related. But PS3 and 360 related, too.

Thats nice, but it doesn't even come close to compensating for Vista's disadvantages.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I read most parts of this article. It was written to cover wide aspects of the disadvantes. imo, too wide. the HDMI part for example was totally vista unrelated. How are televisions with hdmi chips related to vista? thats maybe a problem, but vista is only part of it, as it supports hdmi. but thats not the main problem. the article is rather pointing out the disadvantages of hdmi in general.

And if people are too dumb to read, and buy a HD screen without HDMI it's their own fault ..lol.

anyway...do you buy a pc to look HD content? i will, if i ever consider watching hd content, buy a hd player.

it also lacks some backup, is based on statements by people from the industry. imo a badly written article.

 

[jondy]

It's the publishers that decide if content is HDMI-locked. HDMI has nothing to do with Vista.

 

[tehsolace]

im curious as to what apps may look like after using this new API to its full capabilities. will apps be much more fluid?

 

[Gray Fox]

That's not really Vista related. But PS3 and 360 related, too.



I read most parts of this article. It was written to cover wide aspects of the disadvantes. imo, too wide. the HDMI part for example was totally vista unrelated. How are televisions with hdmi chips related to vista? thats maybe a problem, but vista is only part of it, as it supports hdmi. but thats not the main problem. the article is rather pointing out the disadvantages of hdmi in general.

And if people are too dumb to read, and buy a HD screen without HDMI it's their own fault ..lol.

anyway...do you buy a pc to look HD content? i will, if i ever consider watching hd content, buy a hd player.

it also lacks some backup, is based on statements by people from the industry. imo a badly written article.

Read the article before replying please.

It's the publishers that decide if content is HDMI-locked. HDMI has nothing to do with Vista.

Same as above.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

You do realize that the same content protections on digital media are in XP as well right?

It's just that nobody honestly cared about all of the HD content years ago when XP was released... Nobody even reported on it.

The fact remains though, is that sure there are articles saying how Vista is doom and gloom... Can you please tell me with real experience how you've been hindered by all the stuff you guys talk about? It's useless to post articles on theoretical bashing, rather than saying "I put in an HD-DVD to my computer and it didn't work!"


About the Mac comment, Vista is catching up to OSX in terms of graphics capabilities. Not quite there in Vista, but it's definitely light years ahead of XP. However, everything else in OSX besides the graphics department is behind Vista. Hell, I get more crashes on my iMac than my PC which is why I never use the damn thing.

For those of you bashing Vista, have you actually used it on your computer for more than a week? Or are you just giving in to the internet bandwagon by posting links about how "bad" Vista is?

Like I said at the top of my first post, Vista is only the foundation for which the next series of Windows can grow on. It's not perfect, we all know that. However I think they're on the right track to pushing the industry forward.

 

[Beerdude26]

I'm not going to pay for top-of-the-line hardware and software before I get a black-on-white notification that all the crap I might ever buy that should be compatible with Vista actually IS compatible with Vista.

High-Definition Werewolves or not.

 

[[RnL]Stefan]

Read the article before replying please.

Didnt i state that i read the article? and also mention that i consider most of it BS?

the other article, to stay on topic is an interesting read though.

 

[Gray Fox]

Didnt i state that i read the article? and also mention that i consider most of it BS?

the other article, to stay on topic is an interesting read though.

No you didn't, you merely took a glance at the header, for **** sake you can just see from the table of contents, what topics it covers, and it's much broader then you mentioned, much much broader, so either you did not read it or you are a retard.

You do realize that the same content protections on digital media are in XP as well right?

It's just that nobody honestly cared about all of the HD content years ago when XP was released... Nobody even reported on it.

The fact remains though, is that sure there are articles saying how Vista is doom and gloom... Can you please tell me with real experience how you've been hindered by all the stuff you guys talk about? It's useless to post articles on theoretical bashing, rather than saying "I put in an HD-DVD to my computer and it didn't work!"

Complete and utter bullshit, xp has nowhere near the amount of content protections as Vista, nor is it implemented so rigidly at it's core. And why should I not trust the article, it's written very clearly with solid foundations on which it bases it's criticism of vista, criticism that are echoed all around by many different people.

 

[[RnL]Stefan]

No you didn't, you merely took a glance at the header, for **** sake you can just see from the table of contents, what topics it covers, and it's much broader then you mentioned, much much broader, so either you did not read it or you are a retard.

well, thanks for going down to such a level.

first: i did read it (almost completly).
second: you cannot know whether i read it or not, you can only assume
third: calling me a retard for my opinion about this article won't help any of us. it rather shows how biased your opinion about this OS seems to be.

 

[Gray Fox]

well, thanks for going down to such a level.

first: i did read it (almost completly).
second: you cannot know whether i read it or not, you can only assume
third: calling me a retard for my opinion about this article won't help any of us. it rather shows how biased your opinion about this OS seems to be.

It's not about your ****ing opinion, it's simply you ignoring so much the article has to say.

But yeah you are right, I did behave like a dumb monkey by calling you a retard. There is not question about that.

 

[[RnL]Stefan]

just going by the head lines (yes, i read the articles behind it). also it will state my opinion, others might have other opinions

• Disabling of Functionality: basically an article about HD content and not being able to watch it. let alone that there's no HD vid cards yet.
  
  I couldn't care less. HD content is still at least 1 year, maybe even 2 years away until it hits the main stream market. Until then, if i ever bother watching hd content, i will either have a player or a vid card that supports it. my monitor already does.
  
• Indirect Disabling of Functionality
  
  Voice Cancellation missing - so what. In voice comm programs i could still get loops, by using XP, too when my speakers are on. i use headphones and don't have to worry about sounds interfering with my mic. the programs i used were interfering with it on xp already, so that's not an issue.
  
• Decreased Playback Quality
  The article states that the only reason to get vista is aero glass. it missed a lot of the advantages that you could read in the article above. actually that was reason enough to stop reading for me, the first time.
  
  so the article says, that all audio and video is crippled and then upped again with loss of quality. yet this only happens when HD content is playing. sort of seems like a reason NOT to ever get HD content. still no point against vista for me. but rather one against HD in general. let alone that there IS NO HD hardware available...
  
• Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
  
  i really like linux, on servers, on desktops and on many small embedded computers. yet..guess what. all large hardware manufacturers have closed source drivers, which work well. even better than the unofficial graphics drivers included in linux.
  
  so vista makes coding open source hardware drivers harder / impossible? the coders can still use xp for quite a few years. maybe by then linux is accepted enough to get more out of the box standard driver support.
  
  guess what: another point is gone (for me)
  
• Elimination of Unified Drivers
  
  no more one size fits all drivers for vid cards? funny thing is that forceware supports the gf8800gts and gtx, although they have slightly different set ups. as the article said: that's a problem of the hardware suppliers, not mine. and if every change requires a new piece of code is that necessarily a bad thing?
  
• Problems with Drivers
  
  Not having drivers ready: well, it takes some time. i cannot say who's fault it is, whether MS didnt give enough information to hard ware manufacturers or whether they just were too slow, hit too many road blocks while writing the drivers.
  
  Creative still doesn't have 100% working drivers, nvidia does have drivers now. whether they work or not, is debatable. for me they work in almost all games.
  
  That's a temporary problem imo. and look at linux: there's still no 100% working drivers for the 8800 for example.
  
  the WHQL process being too slow, is a microsoft problem. They need to make it faster. Though, its not a reason against using (32bit) vista.
  
• Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation
  it first says: older card cannot handle HD content due to drivers being too old / not signed/ causin problems whatsoever. as example it shows the tnt2 card which is still widely used according to the article.
  
  now think about it: who's still using the tnt2? office computers maybe. moms computer down in the kitchen, dads office pc, generally in many non tech enthusiasts pcs there's still old hardware running. are these people interested in vista? VERY likely not. are these people interested in HD content? probably not either, or they have a dedicated HD player..so what?
  
  on a sidenote: vista CAN tell whether a jack on my onbaord sound card is used or whether i use the jack on my audigy card.
  
  the rest of this passage is based on assumptions, so i didnt bother reading it really, just "flew" over it.
  
  let alone that the tnt2 neither can display HD content, because it's too weak, nor can it be used with a large tft display, as it's got no HDI port. Bad point in my book...who the hell will be using a tnt2 on vista? or even a gf4? i abandonned my athlon thunderbird 800 when i switched to XP... that's how things work out. hardware gets too old.
  
• Decreased System Reliability
  The system can be soft rebooted, if anything seems to be compromised. means if some bus fluctuation appears, vista will restart the graphics sub system. never happend to me, i can plug in usb devices as i want and dont have a problem. where could this happen? on servers with hot plug hard disks? do they care about the graphics subsystem? i doubt it.
  
  the rest of the examples is just ridiculous. If the navy is using windows NT to control their missible cruisers..omg, they really shouldnt. but i doubt they will bother using vista too soon. it's a main stream OS, the navy should really consider using something more reliable.
  
  and the rest of the links led to "proof" about macrovision acting up due to content protection. these links were from 2003. there was no fking vista in 2003! how can this guy show proof of how biased vistas Hd protection is, by showing macrovision problems from 2003? this is BS.
  
• Increased Hardware Costs
  
  this passage is a rundown on how you cannot use current large displays to play HD content and how you need to buy new displays, that matches the "robustness" requirements to play HD content. also you cannot introduce new "security systems" what ever that is, without asking hollywood. assuming it's copyright security systems he's talking about, it just sounds fair to ask the ones who provide most movie material (in the western world)
  
  again: lot's of HDMI rant, which is only a small part of vista.
  
• Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP
  More HDMI rant (remember, i don't care about HDMI). problems that can result from this are that certain programs cannot have their own debug measures in consumer vista setups anymore, because they could leak HD content. for ATI owners that indeed sucks, as obviously VPU recovery wont work anymore. granted, that sounds like a problem. on the other hand it maybe forces the manufacturers to write even better drivers.
  
• Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
  this passage states that there *could* be problems caused by copyright protection, when playing video or music. but the author cannot verify that either.
  
  more cpu power used due to encryption of the communication between drivers and hardware, backed up by a 30 year old paper. do i have to say more? current cpus can handle that while computing the 5000th root of pi.
  
  pins and credit card numbers stored in plain text opposed to video content being encrpyted in a special page file shows how much hollywood influenced the development? umm...how the hell is vista supposed to know i just typed in a credit card number? its no different from my mail to my grandma, is it?
  
  and again: this only happens, when HD contenct is being played, which i do not do.
  
• Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption
  
  well, yes, it sucks to know that the encryption takes away resources that could be used for rendering. yet ... this is only for HD vid card, isn't it? i don't bother getting one too soon. let alone, this one will have even more power than the last one.
  
  and DRM? that's a TOTALLY different story and it's getting very offtopic, when the passage speaks of mp3 players battery lifes. sure, you could be worried about your hardware degrading faster, due to the computing power needed to encrypt DRM protected content. on the other hand people max out their hardware by playing games at highest setting and others are running SETI@Home at 100% cpu usage for years. so how is DRM related hardware degrading such a big problem (of vista?)
  
• How Effective is it Really?
  I guess everyone has to decide that on how own. i think the many small features and improvements i found out already, are worth it imo. anyone else, who maybe has tons of small scripts on XP, to make it more comfortable or who're satisfied with the comfort of XP don't really HAVE to more too soon.
  
  to get back to the article: it's again ranting about HD DVDs not being playable (maybe) and that vista is not worth it, in order to watch HD DVDs. i neither have HD DVDs nor do i care about being able to play them, because as i said if i ever come to play HD-DVDs they either work on vista and my hardware or i have a capable HD player.

Basically this whole article is talking about vistas content protection, which isn't working yet, since there's no HD hardware to use on it. This makes this whole article look like a huge pile of BS, imo. how the hell is he able to judge on the quality of the video output if there's no hardware available?

A: it's not even usable yet, due to the lack of HD hardware (vid cards and players)
B: is not what i am interested in...after all im a gamer and games will stay on dvds for a while still.
C: it's a tiny part of the whole OS. There's so much more you can do with vista, that's not being blocked by content protection.

so IMO using this article as clincher against using Vista is very narrow minded, unless you're totally into HD content.

 

[Naudian]

I'm using vista right now. It's okay...

The only real issue with Vista that I'm having is the large amount of programs that are incompatible with it, yet work fine on XP.
Also, graphics drivers have yet to be perfected. All games work, but at much lower framerates than they did on XP.

There is another weird thing happening right now that I can probably fix...
What happens is that if I don't have my external DVD drive switched on at startup, Vista hangs at the loading screen for like 5+ minutes doing nothing at all. If the drive was switched on, it would boot up nice and quick. wtf.

There are other things I dislike about windows in general, but I wont bother going into it.

For me, using Vista has been pointless so far. I should have reinstalled XP long ago...I guess I thought the issues like graphics drivers would be fixed sooner, so I just stuck with it.
Oh well, it works well enough for now and I know it will get better later on.

 

[function9]

For those of you bashing Vista, have you actually used it on your computer for more than a week? Or are you just giving in to the internet bandwagon by posting links about how "bad" Vista is?

Or it could just be that a lot of people made a decision based on all the new "features" that they do not need or want anything to do with it. Not everyone buys into the "It's new! It MUST be better!" Sorry, not everyone has $200+ to drop on something they might or might not want. Or spend the time installing another OS.

The question should be, what can Vista do that XP can't or what can it do to make my life/work/games easier to do or run better? I can't remember the last time I cursed XP because I couldn't do something. Or the last time a game ran awful because of bad drivers or an OS that wasn't up to the task. For me, win2000 was a huge improvement over NT4. Since then I feel a lot of hot air coming from MS's direction but not much else. It wasn't until they started dropping support for win2000 that I switched to XP. And going from NT4 to win2000 didn't include having to overhaul my system. From what I recall on the same system win2000 ran much better than NT4 ever did. Maybe some people get all giddy over a pretty interface, but the looks of the UI is the last thing on my list for an OS.