Vista rant ---- MS must dump it...
- Thread starter mito
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I hate that too... After I close a game it takes a few seconds to refresh the screen. But I'm not going back, only forward.
Why do you care about how much memory it's using? It's using it! Would you rather not have your memory not being used at all? It's being used for intelligent buffering. Vista releases the memory used for buffering when it's needed for use by applications. Try running Vista on various sized memory installed to see 600 meg is not needed. I've run Vista on configurations from 512 Meg to 8 Gigs. The memory in use, which is mostly used for intelligent buffering, scales with available physical memory.
No one likes major slowdowns. Were you fully patched up with all the MS patches? I'm not experiencing them at all now.
Funny thing is that people used to say the very same thing when XP came out, replacing Win98/ME/2K...
As a tester for "Longhorn"/Vista since very early on (about 2003, IIRC), i can say that it has been coming of age very gracefully. It's a great OS, once you learn how to take advantage of it.
Note that i also use Linux and OS X, so don't call my point of view one-sided.
That pretty well sums up my thoughts on it too so far.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Nothing that can't be fixed by lowering the price dramatically.
* WinXP was way more stable than 98 & ME. Developing on 98 was a very painful expierience, you had crashes you hardly could find a definite reason for it. 2K & XP are both way better in that regard as they do a better job on catching illegal accesses & debugging.
* WinXP was way more compatible with games, compared to 2000.
Now, remind me, what does Vista offer over XP? (Besides DRM and a memory-hogging desktop)
Besides DX10, I see nothing of interest for me, and I wont care unless its gonna be required by games.
Since you asked what Vista has going for it...
Vista has a genuine multi-threaded i/o system, better support for 64 bit processing (hardware drivers and support for memory over 3 gigs), and makes better use of your memory through intelligent buffering and preloading.
Where as XP has single-threaded i/o system, lacking support for 64 bit processing, hardly has any drivers for 64bit, limits memory exposed to roughly 3 gigs (3.25 gigs or less), and does not make use of memory even if it's not being used.
Vista has a genuine multi-threaded i/o system, better support for 64 bit processing (hardware drivers and support for memory over 3 gigs), and makes better use of your memory through intelligent buffering and preloading.
Where as XP has single-threaded i/o system, lacking support for 64 bit processing, hardly has any drivers for 64bit, limits memory exposed to roughly 3 gigs (3.25 gigs or less), and does not make use of memory even if it's not being used.
Come on.
I don't think even you believe that.
WinXP was more "compatible" with games because it was designed to be a gaming/multimedia base.
There was never a "Home" equivalent in Windows 2000 (which was, essentially, a workstation/server OS, much like Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming Windows Server 2008 -ironically, a Vista-based OS-).
Any modern OS works by taking advantage of memory space when it's there, available -and now, cheap and capacious-.
When you can keep a dynamic RAM software usage, why insist on the old "keep it in the hard drive to conserve RAM" mentality in existence since the 1980's ?
OS X likes RAM, Linux likes RAM, Vista likes RAM. No difference. The more RAM you have, the more it stores there.
RAM is and always will be much faster than any standard hard drive or even flash-based SSD drives.
Ill give you better 64-bit support, but the rest of your arguments should make the OS faster - which most test dont indicate (rather the opposite). So why care for a featurelist if the sum of all parts negate it?
@INKster: memory-hogging desktop means that you need 1 backbuffer for every app, which needs to be kept uptodate. It helps if you move Windows around or want flashy shaders, but other than that you are just redrawing way too much compared to XP (which burns CPU-cycles too). I want RAM to used, but not wasted.
I said nothing about filesystem caching.
Any modern OS has GPU-based 3D, shader model 2.0 and higher desktop interfaces (OS X -Quartz- and Linux -Compiz/Beryl/Fusion-).
Why would Windows Vista have to be any different ?
That it burns a few extra CPU cycles is merely a natural consequence of the fact that it also needs to use a brand new API (WVDDM), instead of the old WDM that first shipped with Windows 98 and was carried over to XP (while keeping WDM as an option for legacy apps).
Nothing that won't be eliminated once the driver teams have matured their knowledge of WVDDM and DX10.
OS X and Linux just use the OpenGL API to achieve a similar effect, and in fact -at least technically- there's no significant hurdle that prevents Compiz Fusion and KDE 4.0/Gnome 2.20 3D-accelerated desktop window managers from working under Windows Vista, just like AERO Glass does with DX9L/DX10.
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To tell the truth, I really liked Vista. I liked the protection system, the new User directory, the interface. Actually, I was using IE7 and being very happy with it. Vista is very stable. But it also has small (very) annoying things, like:
- major slowdowns (yes, I was fully patched/newest drivers)
- very bad gaming performance (some games unplayeble, like stalker)
- file copies that took ages (even with new patches)
- somethimes, it would be very slow after being started, I had to do a hard reset to avoid it. Never understood the source of the problem, XP and linux run fine.
All in all, I installed XP x64 today, let us see how the things develop I will be missing the Vista search and protection features, but I hope that google desktop and sandboxie will be a good replacement.
- major slowdowns (yes, I was fully patched/newest drivers)
- very bad gaming performance (some games unplayeble, like stalker)
- file copies that took ages (even with new patches)
- somethimes, it would be very slow after being started, I had to do a hard reset to avoid it. Never understood the source of the problem, XP and linux run fine.
All in all, I installed XP x64 today, let us see how the things develop
I will be missing the Vista search and protection features, but I hope that google desktop and sandboxie will be a good replacement.Its not slower for me, in fact its a faster, smoother experience. Games may be marginally slower but certainly nothing I would notice.
Add to that it looks better, its at least as stable, it includes a better featureset, the absolutely superb sleep mode, and it comes with DX10 and I don't know why anyone would prefer XP.
I understand Zengars frustrations if he's getting random slowdowns but I certainly haven't expereinced any problems like that. I wouldn't remotely consider returning to XP, IMO Vista is a better OS all round.
The performance delta between xp and vista is greater than the performance delta between win2k and xp, I dont remember any application running slower on xp, just games at first ran a bit slower because of premature drivers.Funny thing is that people used to say the very same thing when XP came out, replacing Win98/ME/2K...
As a tester for "Longhorn"/Vista since very early on (about 2003, IIRC), i can say that it has been coming of age very gracefully. It's a great OS, once you learn how to take advantage of it.
Note that i also use Linux and OS X, so don't call my point of view one-sided.
Also the networking stack is fucked even when you aren't encountering the audio bug with it.
With vista's new network stack why on earth should it be signficantly slower?
I don't know.
Because IPv6 is now the primary protocol and it's still not very mature at handling that ?
IPv6 in WinXP, besides being an optional download, was known to be extremely buggy.
I'm confident that SP1 will resolve most issues people have been reporting in the past few months.
I also have reasons to believe that Vista was primarily a way to "seed" brand new network, audio, display and security API's while keeping compatibility with old applications untouched as much as possible.
Much in the same generic situation in which WDM was released with Windows 98, or the Win32 API with Windows 3.1x.
The future desktop OS from Microsoft will probably be legacy-free and rely on the "Viridian" technology they'll be deploying with Windows Server 2008 in Server Core configurations.
Vanderpool/Pacifica and DX10, pervasive managed code, etc, all hint at further advanced levels of hardware-assisted virtualization as a way to ensure retro compatibility and, at the same time, reduce the complexity to achieve it without compromising new software technologies.
Vista doesn't need about 600MB of RAM idling at desktop.
It can use that much, it can use more too, to cache things etc, that's what it's supposed to do, 0MB mem free is always the optimal situation!
Oh, and someone on another forum did a test, 2 instances of a memory tester running at the same time with settings set to "all free memory" - under XP they got in total ~50MB more mem to test than on Vista, so much for a memory hog OS
just found this article :
. Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after January 31. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavors of Windows XP preloaded until June 30, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010. The move indicates the continued demand for the older operating system, some nine months after Windows Vista hit store shelves.
. Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after January 31. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavors of Windows XP preloaded until June 30, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010. The move indicates the continued demand for the older operating system, some nine months after Windows Vista hit store shelves.
People have removed the IPv6 component and still gotten slower performance :neutral:
and vista's new IO subsystem may be the reason for programs running slower : http://www.tech-hounds.com/article29/ArticlesComplete.html
Ouch...
Rainbow Man
Veteran
I find it strange to hear people rag on vista's file copying performance. Personally, vista copies files monstrously faster than XP or any previous MS OS because it seems to buffer more in RAM than before (which is about time).
I don't hear my harddrives rattling like..rattles anymore. It's a much smoother and more enjoyable experience. And faster too since the fewer seeks need to be done the more actual work can be done.
So I guess the slow speed people are seeing must be due to some rather peculiar system-particular bugs that hit only certain hardware setups..
Peace.
I don't hear my harddrives rattling like..rattles anymore. It's a much smoother and more enjoyable experience.
And faster too since the fewer seeks need to be done the more actual work can be done.So I guess the slow speed people are seeing must be due to some rather peculiar system-particular bugs that hit only certain hardware setups..
Peace.
This is actually a good point. For most people who purchased XP the crossgrade doesn't appear to be particularly compelling at this time. I probably wouldn't throw Vista off any new PC I buy, but the price is just ugh.