I thought I'd go ahead and post again, because I keep finding things wrong with your post.
XP brought 32bit, NTFS and a driver structure that 98/ME and
Win2K didn't? Oh wait, you meant to say Win2K did all of that, right? Because that's where it all came from.
Vista has been out for a year? Here's another newsflash, it debut for business in December at the earliest. What month is this? Oh that's right, it's JULY. If you were to right it down in numeric format, this would be the seventh month of the year.
You want to make a bigger stink about drivers? Howabout we point the finger at the people who are truly responsible... In your mind, is the OS manufacturer at fault if drivers aren't around? Perhaps, but now let's expand that: is the OS manufacturer at fault for no drivers, then they have A: the corner on basically the overwhelming majority of the market, and B: have provided a beta platform of their OS for more than two years
before it's production release seven months ago?
Here's a quick hint: maybe it isn't all Microsoft's fault that drivers aren't exactly where you want them to be.
Here's another quick hint: if drivers aren't up to par, why would you expect game performance to be top-notch as well? Even more to your own point, even in the poor state of drivers that you so proudly renounce, games are doing very well under the Vista OS if it's all as bad as you say. Hell, if it only has nowhere to go but better, then game performance will follow right along.l
Here's another obvious point:
I don't want : crappy drivers, increased load for nothing, no new file system, DX10 so far is pointless, DRM.
So, why did you EVER make the transision from Win3.11? Because Win95 brought much-increased load, no "new" file system (in the sense that NTFS 5 and NTFS 6 are not "new"), games performed worse and it was all new drivers. You had the life of Riley man, Win3.11 was all that and a bowl of cheerios in your seeming opinion! Hell, it even had 32-bit capabilities (Win32 anyone? Howabout protected EMM386 mode, which was actually a command switch for starting the OS) and enhanced graphics capabilities (win-G, remember?) All stuffed into a nice, easy cheap 1mb memory footprint. Why the hell would anyone want the HUGE overload of 4mb of memory space?
There are a hundred things that Vista does far better than XP, and likely another100 things that Vista does that XP simply could never do. And you can sit here all day and say that "95% of the users will never need Vista's features", and you might be right -- but that same 95% of the users will also never need XP's features over 2000. It's likely that most of those users in the 95th-percentile wouldn't need features over what was available in Win95. Does that mean we should stop making operating systems?
So when the new OS comes out in '09 or '10, and Vista has been on the shelf for somewhere around three years, you can tell me
then how well it has stood the test of time. I'm willing to wager a few bucks that it fares a whole lot better than basically every other OS before it. XP was a simple refab of Win2K technology, to include drivers, thread scheduling, IO handling and memory management. Thread scheduling needed to change, IO handling NEEDED to change; things in the NT5 operating system needed correcting for modern hardware and modern applications, and a simple "patch" isn't going to fix core problems with the OS. In the exact same way that DX10 cannot simply be "patched" onto an OS that doesn't support user-mode drivers, virtualization of non-tradtional processor resources and flat memory access to memory that isn't in the "main memory pool".
XP will live on in the back of our minds, just like there was a solid and devout crowd of people who swore they'd never move to XP from Win2000 (yes, they ARE out there, still). That doesn't make those people's stance any more logical or rational...
lawl
