Another FUD-smearing "OMG Vista sux0rz" from the media...

[Frank]

Most of the additional "responsiveness" can be attributed to the kernel and it's ability to prioritize and multi-thread IO requests. For all previous WIndows OS'es, IO requests had "uber priority" and were allowed to walk all over everything. Further, they were always limited to the first logical ACPI-enumerated processor in the system. So if a process had the lowest priority possible but somehow ended up creating a ton of IO traffic, it would take over your PC's world. Or if a process had access to all 16 cores in your system and was given UBER-priority by you, all the IO requests would be handled by the 1st logical processor in the system and as such would likely bottleneck hardcore.

Hence the whole "grinding to a halt" when your machine was heavily disk-utilized (defrag, virus scan, paging to disk, etc). Lame.

Vista prioritizes IO threads now, and also spreads them evenly across all CPU's in the system. The only time that IO gets "uber" priority is if the kernel goes into a memory panic, which almost never happens unless you're on a 256mb machine with WAY too much open, and then only the memory management IO gets that priority.

Makes the OS "feel" a whole lot better, especially when you're multitasking.

That sounds like something I would want to get, at last.

 

[Albuquerque]

Also keep in mind, while my examples of IO's were related to disk access, IO prioritization doesn't stop there and neither does Vista's load balanacing. IO traffic impacts many devices, such as network packets, sound data, video data, fiberchannel data, etc.

Vista's handling of IO on the whole is far superior to anything found in previous Windows OSes.

 

[Florin]

Well, sounds like I need to download Ubunto and check it out then Last I checked, it wasn't anything near that easy. I will have to get back up to speed...

Well, I happened to have a spare Dell Precision with a DX9 card in it at work last week, along with a fresh MSDN Vista DVD, so I figured I'd go ahead and install it for kicks. I'd also read about a new Ubuntu 6.10 that was just out, and having never really used Ubuntu before I downloaded that to give it a spin as well.

Ubuntu's installer blew me away. I think it's got any current Windows or Unix installation procedure beat, and that includes MacOSX. I mean, which other OS gives you a fully functional desktop with Firefox and OpenOffice just by booting the CD? After that, installing it to my hard drive was as easy as clicking one icon and answering the same bunch of questions about my location and keyboard settings that the Windows install did, only without the serial key check and with a number of sweet little optional extras like a built in Partition Magic clone, which I used to resize my Vista partition.

One reboot on and there I was, high res desktop, USB keyboard/mouse/memory stick all working right off the bat, and with a huge list of programs ready to download and install with a few mouseclicks. The whole thing is just very polished. And then later on I discovered something called Beryl, which makes Vista's 3D eye candy look positively lame in comparison. Times really have changed..

 

[Albuquerque]

I mean, which other OS gives you a fully functional desktop with Firefox and OpenOffice just by booting the CD?

CentOS 4 does

I'm playing with CentOS 4 right now, I'll switch to ubunto when I'm tired of this one Sounds pretty cool...

 

[Blazkowicz]

you can give a lot of people a relatively easy and safe OS : install firefox, delete the IE icons, be sure their PC is behind a router .

 

[Albuquerque]

you can give a lot of people a relatively easy and safe OS : install firefox, delete the IE icons, be sure their PC is behind a router .

Howabout making it easier and actually making the person a "user" versus an administrator? A lot of people / companies set their normal user base as full-admins of their local machine. Most of IE's spyware / malware / adware "issues" stem from the fact that most clients are running with full-admin rights which allows almost anything.

One of the things we've played with internally at my company is building a small process to force IE to run in a "reduced-rights" mode, basically an embedded run-as command with "user" credentials. It solves a significant number of security issues without any obvious issues to the client.

 

[Frank]

The whole thing is just very polished. And then later on I discovered something called Beryl, which makes Vista's 3D eye candy look positively lame in comparison. Times really have changed..

Yes, Beryl is nice and relatively painless to install when you have a nVidia video card, but a real pain when you have a Radeon. I haven't been able to get it to work with that.

Although all the fiddling is in getting the video card up and running, and displaying an accelerated 24 or 32 bits picture.

It's quite lame that those free developers deliver a much better product than both of those companies.


Edit: Beryl (and emerald, the window decorator) are both still in Alpha (version 0.2 for Beryl), but they work much better than the "stable" production versions of the video drivers. Although I would call the ATI one pre-Alpha. It cannot even get it's own configuration tool installed, and barely works in the best case.

I'll try again some day with the mesa (Open Source) drivers. At least those work well, although they perform poorly with the X1xx0 cards.