Windows Vista WTF



  • When seeing the new Mac VS PC "If your printer does not work with windows Vista, buy a new printer... Ask not what windows vista can do for you but what you can do for windows vista" here is a nifty quite from MS...

    "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.

    (windows vista runs 2x slower than windows xp EVEN with the new service pack 1 compared to xp service pack 3) 

    http://www.news.com/Windows-XP-outshines-Vista-in-benchmarking-test/2100-1016_3-6220201.html

    *Sigh* and I thought Apple was making all this mumbo jumbo up... o well... Go microsoft with super-fast-ultra-high-speed-innovative-new-operating-system!!!! 



  • doesn't say anything about the settings of the settings.  The default settings for Windows Vista are quite a bit more system intensive than the defaults for XP.  Also this article doesn't give a link to more information on the benchmark and basically tells me nothing about it.  All it says is that it uses Office.  Also, I find it both ironic and moronic than Apple is blasting Vista for not working with hardware. 

    I'm not a MS fanboy or anything, but this article is a complete turd. 



  • Sadly, it's exactly that kind of nonsense that caused me to buy my first iMac two months ago.



  • @dlikhten said:

    When seeing the new Mac VS PC "If your printer does not work with windows Vista, buy a new printer... Ask not what windows vista can do for you but what you can do for windows vista"

    That's rich, coming from Apple.  Mac OS has a horrible record on backwards compatibility.
     



  • I once ran into the bug where if you try to install Mac OS X on a G3 iMac without the most recent firmware, not only does it not work, it bricks the iMac.  (In fact you don't even have to actually begin the installation, simply booting into the install disk is enough to instantly trigger the bug.)  You have to plug an external monitor into the VGA port and perform some incantations to bring it back to life.  Easily the most painful operating system upgrade I've ever experienced (and I used Linux in the 90s).



  • @dlikhten said:

    "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista,"


    Someone posted something along those lines in the comments of this ZDNet blog entry. So, I posted this reply.

    While getting those links, I noticed that he deleted the comments by other people that said anything about his attitude problem.




  • @dlikhten said:

    (windows vista runs 2x slower than windows xp EVEN with the new service pack 1 compared to xp service pack 3) 

     

    I didn't even realize there was a service pack out... I don't pay attention to these things unless I need them.

     

    Since I installed Vista (the day it became available to the public... I downloaded Business Edition for free through MSDN Academic Alliance), I have had absolutely no performance problems. My system boots in less than 30 seconds, logging into Windows takes about 10-15 seconds, and by 1 minute after I push the power button everything is ready to go. Not only that, installing Windows Vista actually mysteriously solved performance problems I was having in Windows XP related to a firewire sound device I have. TRWTF is that I installed the Windows XP drivers for it running in compatibility mode. This leads me to believe that MS got something right here. Also, since I first installed Vista (February I guess?) I have had absolutely no BSoD's/reboots. My system has hung three times due to loose SATA cables, but I suffered no data loss as a result. All of my hardware works flawlessly with it, and everything runs great (except for Matlab 7 which crashes upon starting).

    I have heard many people complaining about how much Windows Vista sucks and I just don't get it... It's actually the first MS operating system that hasn't completely pissed me off in some way or another since I got my first computer with Windows 3.11. I don't know if I just got lucky and happen to have a hardware configuration that works well with Vista, but I doubt that I'm alone with my experience. The only uncommon piece of hardware that I use is my firewire soundcard. Everything else is very mainstream.

    I should also mention that when I first upgraded to Vista, I was using an Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice). Since then I've dropped in an Opteron 185. The upgrade was completely plug-and-play, and although I have seen some general performance boosts, the system was very responsive before the upgrade too.



  • @seaturnip said:

    I once ran into the bug where if you try to install Mac OS X on a G3 iMac without the most recent firmware, not only does it not work, it bricks the iMac.  (In fact you don't even have to actually begin the installation, simply booting into the install disk is enough to instantly trigger the bug.)  You have to plug an external monitor into the VGA port and perform some incantations to bring it back to life.  Easily the most painful operating system upgrade I've ever experienced (and I used Linux in the 90s).

    Interesting... a few weeks after I got my iMac with Tiger, they released Leopard, and the upgrade was literally: insert-dvd, <enter>, watch-tv-for-45-minutes, reboot, remove-dvd. I guess either I got lucky, or Apple is getting it's act together...



  • Isn't Vista great?

    My girlfriend bought a new laptop recently that came pre-installed with Vista. It apparently has a 4 hour battery life. However, it turns out that the benchmark tools they use to determine such a number, which represent the battery life of a system running at normal load, had not yet been adapted to take account of Vista.

    We spent ages turning off any feature we could think of, but could not get the battery life to go beyond 3 hours.



  • @SpoonMeiser said:

    Isn't Vista great?

    My girlfriend bought a new laptop recently that came pre-installed with Vista. It apparently has a 4 hour battery life. However, it turns out that the benchmark tools they use to determine such a number, which represent the battery life of a system running at normal load, had not yet been adapted to take account of Vista.

    We spent ages turning off any feature we could think of, but could not get the battery life to go beyond 3 hours.

    benchmark tools ... yeah right ...

    how the manufacturers determine the battery life

    1. disconnect the display,

    2. remove the harddisk

    3. turn on the laptop and start the measurement

    4. note the time when it powers down due to empty battery

    5. add 0,5 h to the result in order to compensate for statistics

    6. print it on the case

    7. put a weaker battery in the laptop in order to cut costs, sell the bigger one for more money



     



  • I think it's a little strange that they decided to use not one, but two service packs that are still in Beta.



  • @snoofle said:

    @seaturnip said:

    I once ran into the bug where if you try to install Mac OS X on a G3 iMac without the most recent firmware, not only does it not work, it bricks the iMac.  (In fact you don't even have to actually begin the installation, simply booting into the install disk is enough to instantly trigger the bug.)  You have to plug an external monitor into the VGA port and perform some incantations to bring it back to life.  Easily the most painful operating system upgrade I've ever experienced (and I used Linux in the 90s).

    Interesting... a few weeks after I got my iMac with Tiger, they released Leopard, and the upgrade was literally: insert-dvd, <enter>, watch-tv-for-45-minutes, reboot, remove-dvd. I guess either I got lucky, or Apple is getting it's act together...

    This is a G3 iMac flaw as far as I know; I was given a G3 400 iMac that had already been toasted this way. For reasons I've never seen explained, one or more later versions of Mac OS X do something truly horrid to the video firmware that renders the internal CRT inoperative. If you let the clock battery die, then you lose not just the CRT, but it won't boot either: shortly after the chime, it switches off. Changing the hardware configuration will briefly hold back the no-boot bug, and I happened to have a spare DIMM which, if you keep swapping and exchanging the DIMMs, will get you a few more successful boots, using an external screen.

    Then you have to get a copy of the new OS X-safe firmware onto it, but I was out of luck there: the hard drive was also gone. The firmware updater requires OS 9.1, but my install CD is 9.0.4. I can't install 9.0.4 onto the iMac's drive -- even from my own Mac -- as the drive triggers a system freeze. I can't boot the iMac from my own Mac's drive, as it's Old World and doesn't carry the ToolBox ROM image needed for New World (ToolBox-less) Macs. I think what I did was pick apart the installer tome (Apple's CAB equivalent) to pull out various iMac-related boot files and implant them into my own OS, using my drive as a temporary donor drive to kickstart the iMac and run the firmware update. (I forget quite what I did as it's been a year or two now.)

    Once the computer firmware was updated, the video firmware was "fixed" and the screen came back and it booted normally. It still took three of us to figure this all out though and get it working. My sister had this iMac, with a brand new hard drive and keyboard, a copy of Tiger and a new clock battery. Before she got it set up at her new home, the clock battery had already died (!) and now the PAV board seems to have given up the ghost -- it boots but the screen is failing. Sadly, the death of the irreplaceable PAV board (combination power/audio/video) was predicted and my own iMac might well die the same way. Flaky critters.

    But then, someone on another forum recently had a Linux live CD apparently hose his PC's BIOS and hard drive and render it a brick.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    But then, someone on another forum recently had a Linux live CD apparently hose his PC's BIOS and hard drive and render it a brick.

    This is bullshit. It's AFAIK not even possible. This guy probably had an incidental hardware failure at the same time or he did something stupid like trying to run win only bios batch with wine...



  • @death said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    But then, someone on another forum recently had a Linux live CD apparently hose his PC's BIOS and hard drive and render it a brick.

    This is bullshit. It's AFAIK not even possible. This guy probably had an incidental hardware failure at the same time or he did something stupid like trying to run win only bios batch with wine...

    It's quite depressing how many "impossible" and "bullshit" things really do happen and really are true. I'm not inclined to believe this chap, of course, but not being a forum member any more, I can't raise an objection to his story. It seems that all the other plentiful technical people also failed to object and help ascertain the real cause. But then, if the forum wasn't so full of idiots, I might have not given up in despair.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:


    It's quite depressing how many "impossible" and "bullshit" things really do happen and really are true. I'm not inclined to believe this chap, of course, but not being a forum member any more, I can't raise an objection to his story. It seems that all the other plentiful technical people also failed to object and help ascertain the real cause. But then, if the forum wasn't so full of idiots, I might have not given up in despair.

    In computing some things are granted, like the fact that no hardware used in PC-s is really unique and acts predictably, unless its broken. In witch case you are screwed anyway. Wanna bet it was a Win or Mac specific forum? Anybody even remotely aware how live CD-s work would have objected to this assumption...



  • Also, hardware failures can have many causes, software being the least
    likely of those. Most likely I an external force like a power spike on
    the incoming line, PSU failure, and then a component failure in the
    motherboard, then ESD  damage from user side handling. There can be
    more causes, but these are the top ones. Software damage is in the very end after the weird flukes... Software damage in 99% of the cases requires user interaction, the CIH virus lesson it seems was well learned by the industry...



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @snoofle said:
    @seaturnip said:

    I once ran into the bug where if you try to install Mac OS X on a G3 iMac without the most recent firmware, not only does it not work, it bricks the iMac.  (In fact you don't even have to actually begin the installation, simply booting into the install disk is enough to instantly trigger the bug.)  You have to plug an external monitor into the VGA port and perform some incantations to bring it back to life.  Easily the most painful operating system upgrade I've ever experienced (and I used Linux in the 90s).

    Interesting... a few weeks after I got my iMac with Tiger, they released Leopard, and the upgrade was literally: insert-dvd, <enter>, watch-tv-for-45-minutes, reboot, remove-dvd. I guess either I got lucky, or Apple is getting it's act together...

    This is a G3 iMac flaw as far as I know; I was given a G3 400 iMac that had already been toasted this way. For reasons I've never seen explained, one or more later versions of Mac OS X do something truly horrid to the video firmware that renders the internal CRT inoperative. If you let the clock battery die, then you lose not just the CRT, but it won't boot either: shortly after the chime, it switches off. Changing the hardware configuration will briefly hold back the no-boot bug, and I happened to have a spare DIMM which, if you keep swapping and exchanging the DIMMs, will get you a few more successful boots, using an external screen.

    Then you have to get a copy of the new OS X-safe firmware onto it, but I was out of luck there: the hard drive was also gone. The firmware updater requires OS 9.1, but my install CD is 9.0.4. I can't install 9.0.4 onto the iMac's drive -- even from my own Mac -- as the drive triggers a system freeze. I can't boot the iMac from my own Mac's drive, as it's Old World and doesn't carry the ToolBox ROM image needed for New World (ToolBox-less) Macs. I think what I did was pick apart the installer tome (Apple's CAB equivalent) to pull out various iMac-related boot files and implant them into my own OS, using my drive as a temporary donor drive to kickstart the iMac and run the firmware update. (I forget quite what I did as it's been a year or two now.)

    Once the computer firmware was updated, the video firmware was "fixed" and the screen came back and it booted normally. It still took three of us to figure this all out though and get it working. My sister had this iMac, with a brand new hard drive and keyboard, a copy of Tiger and a new clock battery. Before she got it set up at her new home, the clock battery had already died (!) and now the PAV board seems to have given up the ghost -- it boots but the screen is failing. Sadly, the death of the irreplaceable PAV board (combination power/audio/video) was predicted and my own iMac might well die the same way. Flaky critters.

    But then, someone on another forum recently had a Linux live CD apparently hose his PC's BIOS and hard drive and render it a brick.

    I had one of those iMacs, but somebody else had already (succesfully) installed OS X before I got it.

    However it's not as if the bug was undocumented, from what I remember it was mentioned in the release notes on the CD (readable from OS 9). It's also mentioned on Apple's support website.

    Yes, the bug was serious, but that's why it's always best to check for potential caveats before installing any new OS.

     

    As for Vista, my first experiances with it were installing on my HP-Compaq NX6125 laptop (AMD Turion 1.8Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, 80GB HDD, ATI "Mobility X300" graphics) before general release (MSDN).

    It ran awfally. It could never wake up from suspend successfully, it was incapable of playing videos without stutter at any resolution (stutter could be minimized by playing them in media center at 800x600). Eventually Vista decided the graphics chip was PCI (in reality it was PCIe). It rarely dropped below 25% CPU and managed to use about 50GB of disc space (with just Windows, Office 2007 and a few minor utilities installed) before I disabled system restore.

    Note that HP had certified this laptop and provided Vista drivers.

    Many of the problems (general slowness, inability to play video, possibly CPU usage) could be traced to the useless graphics chip. ("Mobility X300" is a misnomer, the chip actually had about 30-40% of the performance of the real X300 and used shared memory).

     

    Later, I installed it on my self-build desktop (Currently: Core 2 Duo E6700, 3GB RAM, a whole 250GB SATA drive for Vista (in addition to the other 3 HDDs in the PC), GeForce 7600GT) and it runs *much* better. I still use XP for gaming (I have over 100GB of games on a seperate drive), but Office, Visual Studio (just installed 2008) and even running VMs takes place on Vista.

    In other words, Vista performance varies heavily and it is not always obvious what the performance issues are caused by. I have seen Celeron laptops with benchmark scores similar to my old NX6125 that run Vista with no problems, yet I have also heard people with Core 2 systems similar to my desktop complain about Vista.



  • @mallard said:

    In other words, Vista performance varies heavily and it is not always obvious what the performance issues are caused by. I have seen Celeron laptops with benchmark scores similar to my old NX6125 that run Vista with no problems, yet I have also heard people with Core 2 systems similar to my desktop complain about Vista.

    Inconsistency is a big indicator of underlying issues... Something is very wrong when a system runs with totally different performance on comparably powered machines.



  • @death said:

    @mallard said:

    In other words, Vista performance varies heavily and it is not always obvious what the performance issues are caused by. I have seen Celeron laptops with benchmark scores similar to my old NX6125 that run Vista with no problems, yet I have also heard people with Core 2 systems similar to my desktop complain about Vista.

    Inconsistency is a big indicator of underlying issues... Something is very wrong when a system runs with totally different performance on comparably powered machines.

    I'm running Vista on mine, although you probably wouldn't notice it at first glance. I have made sure that my Vista (just like the XP before it) looks like plain old Windows. I defragment, optimise virtual memory, even go through and switch off whatever services I don't need (including the Themes service et alt.). Anything that could be a drain to performance is disabled, unnecessary programs are uninstalled. I'm sure if you compared my computer to the my coworker's one (identical Dell Voltron, ordered on the same day from the same reseller) mine would perform noticably better.



  • TBH , I have yet to use Vista properly but from what I have seen of it, it does run horribly slow on a freshly purchased machine. Not because of the fact that Microsoft make horrible, unstable, hardware hungry OS's, but because system builders such as Dell, HP, Acer, etc.. load on their own horribly designed software 'features' that are the underlying cause of the majority of problems for the average PC user. And OFC these people decide to blame it on Vista, not understanding that the systems manufacturer has loaded on a suite of application that the end user will never want, use and even hinders their workflow.



  • phelyan, and you don't see anything wrong with an OS that needs such hard trim down to run sensibly?

    The crap system builders hoist on their machines is dreadful, but cannot be the single source for such diversity in vista esperience IMHO 



  • I have two PCs running Vista Ultimate as well as a few running XP.

    My laptop running Vista is faster than my wife's slightly older laptop running XP. Battery life is similar.

    My desktop running Vista (dual core 2.6GHz) is considerably faster than my previous one running XP (single core with hyperthreading 3.2GHz). OK, it has a much faster graphics card on it as well. The Vista 'Usability score' is 5.9 so it's pretty high spec. I built it for Supreme Commander which is a real CPU/resource hog, and it works fine on Vista - whereas if Vista was running at half the speed of XP, it would be awfully slow.

    I think you'd need to know what benchmarks were run. If you were checking UI things like dragging windows, on a low-end graphics card, then it's pretty obvious that XP is going to be considerably faster than Vista, because it doesn't have all the eye-candy like the translucent window frames etc, so an XP windows move is a simple graphics card blit, whereas a Vista windows move is a lot more complex. For people who have to have it as fast as possible, you can always turn this off.

    'Behind the scenes' stuff runs at pretty much similar speeds. For our software development I have two VMWare setups, one with Vista and one with XP, running on the same host system. You'd be struggling to find any difference in the performance of our software on the two systems.

    I wouldn't be surprised if some of these 'Vista is half the speed of XP' benchmarks are done on low-end PCs with the 'eye candy options' all turned on and then are testing UI stuff.



  • @death said:

    phelyan, and you don't see anything wrong with an OS that needs such hard trim down to run sensibly?

    The crap system builders hoist on their machines is dreadful, but cannot be the single source for such diversity in vista esperience IMHO 

    I think it's a fine line to walk. In theory I could be needing a caching DNS on my machine, UPNP discovery services or the Distributed Link Tracking Client. As things are, I don't need them. The ony gripe I have is that these things cannot be configured or turned on and off by a normal user easily, but will require straying far from the "normal user" level of knowledge.

    Besides, I don't think it's just the crap the OS guys are responsible for. Too many applications seem to insist these days to leave some background processes running, to enable 'quick startup' (MS Office Suite, OpenOffice, QuickTime), to perform periodic tasks (Google Desktop Search) or wait for events (iPod Helper, AVG, AdAware) so they slowly add to the resources your system uses. You can easily knock a quarter off your system's performance by running useless applications and background services.

    I can slow the development server (RedHat) and my machine at home (MacOS X) down with similar shenanigans. 



  • This year, I bought 2 laptops.  Both dual core intels at 2 Ghtz.  Each had 1 GB of RAM.  laptop 1 is a macbook running tiger, and laptop 2 is running vista home premium (with aero and about everything else disabled).  Laptop 1 has a separate video memory while Laptop 2, I eventually learned, has shared video memory. (this is important because from what I can tell, people with nicer video cards have fewer issues with vista.)

    Task 1: push the power button, log in, launch Firefox, and log into my email account.

    On Laptop 1, it takes about 14 seconds. On Laptop 2, it takes about 75 seconds.

    Task 2:  firefox open with several tabs, including a flash game, a news site, web based email, and a pdf.  also, listen to music (iTunes) and navigate hard drive

    On laptop 1, I can do all the above without ever even noticing an issue with responsiveness.  On laptop 2, when I try to open a PDF, it slows down.  I can listen to music (iTunes).  When I try to navigate my hard drive, the machine quits responding.

    These may not be formal benchmarks, but they are enough for me.  I doubled the RAM in the vista machine (2GB), and the only difference is that it crashes less often.  I will not compare battery life as they have totally different size batteries and and different size displays.  (funny enough, both get between 2 & 3 hours)

    I am not trying to bash MS or push apple.  I have few issues with XP.  I use to run Win2K (using LightStep instead of explorer), and it would stay up for months without a reboot.  I use to support old versions of Mac, and I could crash them pretty regularly.  But, I will say that MacOS X is the simplest OS I have dealt with.  Vista is the slowest and most memory intensive OS I have dealt with.

    I am starting to believe that vista is an even bigger screw up than ME.



  • I think that one thing people miss is that Vista is designed to run on a new system. The average store-bought PC isn't new, it's just the cheapest parts they could bundle. It has been exactly the same for any new version: running Win98 on a machine purchased for Win95 slowed it down a lot, running XP on a machine purchased for Win98 slowed it down a lot, running Vista on a machine purchased for XP slows it down a lot. The difference may seem more noticeable, but that is only because it's the difference you are experiencing right now rather than one you're just remembering. I don't use Vista myself, and I have no intention of using it in the foreseeable future (and I do rather love pointing out its flaws), but I see far too many people bashing it for the sake of bashing it on incomplete information and things they've heard in passing. It damages the case for all the real complaints.



  • @dphunct said:

    Laptop 1 has a separate video memory while
    Laptop 2, I eventually learned, has shared video memory.

     [...]

    I doubled the RAM in the vista
    machine (2GB), and the only difference is that it crashes less often.

    The shared memory will cripple your performance. And yes Vista wants a decent graphics card, it's how it renders all the eye candy. 



  • I enjoy bashing it too.  Will never use it if I can help it.  Here's an example.

    I play Lord of the Rings Online.  So does my wife.  We just got her a new Dell laptop with Vista.  My laptop is a Toshiba with XP SP2.  I play it on my laptop, she plays it on her laptop.  Performance-wise, they're not too different, but hers has stalled three times this week while playing the game.  Mine never has.  I'm tempted to use one of my old XP licenses to install XP on her machine. 

    We use the same account. I'm not a Windows tech support person, so I couldn't really begin to tell her what's wrong, other than "It's vista."  In all seriousness, if not for gaming, I probably wouldn't use Windows as my main machine. 
     



  • @belgariontheking said:

    I enjoy bashing it too.  Will never use it if I can help it.  Here's an example.

    I play Lord of the Rings Online.  So does my wife.  We just got her a new Dell laptop with Vista.  My laptop is a Toshiba with XP SP2.  I play it on my laptop, she plays it on her laptop.  Performance-wise, they're not too different, but hers has stalled three times this week while playing the game.  Mine never has.  I'm tempted to use one of my old XP licenses to install XP on her machine. 

    We use the same account. I'm not a Windows tech support person, so I couldn't really begin to tell her what's wrong, other than "It's vista."  In all seriousness, if not for gaming, I probably wouldn't use Windows as my main machine. 

    I'd bet on bad video drivers. What kind of video card does it have? I run an nVidia 8800 GTS at home, and its drivers are usually miss or worse miss. Some driver updates cause all of my games to crash after an hour or so and other updates will let them play forever. I pick up a new set every time they come out, and if they cause more crashes I just roll back to the last working set. It's not Vista's fault that nVidia and game designers don't always write perfect code. Arguably there might be something wonky going on with how drivers themselves are implemented for Vista that makes writing flawless video drivers somehow impossible, I suppose. I'm not familiar enough with drivers to say anything about that, though.



  • @Welbog said:

    What kind of video card does it have?

    I honestly don't know.  I'll look at the receipt when I get home.

    One of the times it wasn't a full stall, because I could move the mouse cursor around the screen, just reeeeeally slowly. 



  • @seaturnip said:

    @dlikhten said:

    When seeing the new Mac VS PC "If your printer does not work with windows Vista, buy a new printer... Ask not what windows vista can do for you but what you can do for windows vista"

    That's rich, coming from Apple.  Mac OS has a horrible record on backwards compatibility.
     

    Yup. I remember when I first used OS X, I was forced to buy a new printer because my existing printer (that worked fine with OS 9) didn't work with OS X.

    The irony is killing me.



  • @Iago said:

    I remember when I first used OS X, I was forced to buy a new printer because my existing printer (that worked fine with OS 9) didn't work with OS X. The irony is killing me.

    From my perspective as a non-Vista user, Vista appears to offer very little to justify the bloat. OK, it has a few tweaks, like faster hard drive search (content indexing itself predates both Vista and OS X, e.g. Mac OS 8.5 has it, as does Win2k) .... oh, the sidebar, yeah, it has desktop widgets. Anything else? Aside from all the DRM that is. And a highly belated attept to do something about security that now turns out to be far too annoying.

    Five years we waited for Vista and what did we get?

    Now compare Mac OS 9 to X. Of course, Apple took their time over getting Mac OS fixed, but that's a very tragic story based on the fact that the Mac was crippled from the start by how expensive technology was back then. The Lisa failed primarily because it cost too much to make a good system. The Amiga, though -- 1985 and pre-emptive multitasking and thousands of colours, so there must be more to it than that ... Bless it.

    Throwing out your existing OS and replacing it with a fresh one is not going to be easy, and it still took years after that for OS X to find its feet. I don't like what Apple did to Mac OS, and I avoid OS X as much as I can, but it's made a lot of people very happy, and it's so touching to see the Mac flowing with attractive, well-designed software -- it's awakened the world to what the Mac is about and people can focus on doing work and having fun and not staring at bombs!

    Vista is an XP bugfix with some stolen features for good measure, and a scarily disproportionate amount of bloat to go with it.



  • PerdidoPunk -- You are by far the ONLY person I've known to have no vista problems. Its like the 1 in a million shot that your XBOX 360 wont break in some way. somebody is bound to not have a problem, I say with your luck... play the lottery you will win!

     

    Regarding Macs, I don't use them, in fact I think MS is evil but Apple is just one step behind waiting for MS to roll over. The sh** they did with the iPod... nobody I know (and i know quite a few ppl) had their iPod last longer than 4 months at a time without breaking... at least the first time. (1st generation was probably the most sturdy)

     My friend did mention this:

    "Windows Vista needs 2gb of ram and then it flies, otherwise it performs like crap"

    And my response to that is... Linux (with compiz or beryl) has niftier features than vista visually, much more effects, much cooler stuff, AND it performs better WITHOUT the need for such high ram. So by example, we know that it is doable to make a system look good, and perform well. I am not saying Linux > Windows (yes i am) but I am saying that you can't claim that vista does something so phenomenal that it REQUIRES such high hardware.
     



  • @Iago said:

    @seaturnip said:
    @dlikhten said:

    When seeing the new Mac VS PC "If your printer does not work with windows Vista, buy a new printer... Ask not what windows vista can do for you but what you can do for windows vista"

    That's rich, coming from Apple.  Mac OS has a horrible record on backwards compatibility.
     

    Yup. I remember when I first used OS X, I was forced to buy a new printer because my existing printer (that worked fine with OS 9) didn't work with OS X.

    The irony is killing me.

     Should that be the new commercial? If your printer does not work with your computer, sue your printer.
     



  • Those commercials are full of lies and hypocrisy, which are not noticed only by techies but also regular users whose experience of PCs doesn't correspond to Apple's claims.  The Mac guy also comes across as full of himself.  I wonder how much they really help Apple.



  • @Welbog said:

    What kind of video card does it have?

    It says here on the receipt that it's an "ATI RADEON Xpress1270 HyperMemory, Inspiron 1521 (integrated)



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @Welbog said:
    What kind of video card does it have?
    It says here on the receipt that it's an "ATI RADEON Xpress1270 HyperMemory, Inspiron 1521 (integrated)
    How recent is the driver? I suggest looking online for other people using that video card and see if they have issues with it.



  • @death said:

    This is bullshit. It's AFAIK not even possible. This guy probably had an incidental hardware failure at the same time or he did something stupid like trying to run win only bios batch with wine...
    Actually, there was a case a few years ago, when the CD-ROM probing at bootup could brick certain DVD drives. There's also the case of some IBM ThinkPads, where if you install lm_sensors, the probing can kill one buggy chip and destroy the motherboard (both of these are actually hardware faults, but they were triggered by Linux).



  • @seaturnip said:

    Those commercials are full of lies and hypocrisy, which are not noticed only by techies but also regular users whose experience of PCs doesn't correspond to Apple's claims.  The Mac guy also comes across as full of himself.  I wonder how much they really help Apple.

     

    Apparently they help enough. The truth is, I hate apple for not allowing any custom hardware. There should be Mac Vs PC: 

    "So Mac, it seems that you are QUITE stable huh?"

    "Yea! In fact I can do everything you can and I run a bit better!"

    "Well, question for you, how much do you cost...? Say I just need to type up papers for school..."

    "Oh thats a silly question, at least 1000 dollars, and if you want games, 2000 or more!"

    "Why PC users can buy a 300 dollar PC and it will do everything 70% of PC users need it to do... Beat that!" 



  • @dlikhten said:

    And my response to that is... Linux (with compiz or beryl) has niftier features than vista visually, much more effects, much cooler stuff, AND it performs better WITHOUT the need for such high ram. So by example, we know that it is doable to make a system look good, and perform well. I am not saying Linux > Windows (yes i am) but I am saying that you can't claim that vista does something so phenomenal that it REQUIRES such high hardware.

    Exactly. I'm running Compiz on my work machine (they're basically the oldest and slowest machines that still actually run), and it works near flawlessly, smooth effects around 99% of the time. This is a machine with 512MB of RAM (a quarter what Vista asks for), a 2GHz P4 (your average fan heater), an AGP graphics card, and a serious number of applications running at the same time (glancing right now I see Pidgin, two instances of gedit, Thunderbird, two terminals, Firefox, several filesystem browser windows, xfig, and a few instances of evince). I happen to like these effects much better too, and there's definitely more customisation open to me.



  • @dlikhten said:

    "Well, question for you, how much do you cost...? Say I just need to type up papers for school..."

    "Oh thats a silly question, at least 1000 dollars, and if you want games, 2000 or more!"

    "Why PC users can buy a 300 dollar PC and it will do everything 70% of PC users need it to do... Beat that!" 

    The thing is, if people spent the same amount of money on a new Windows machine as they do a new Mac then you would see Windows absolutely destroy the Mac on a performance scale.  Most of the "reviews" out there really don't do a real comparison whether they are looking at XP, Mac, or Vista because they are very different things.  And for those that claim MS copied Apple, get over it.  Every single one of the OS vendors has copied their competitors; and Apple has stolen as much as everyone else.  They've also done more than anyone else to lock out competitors.

    If the Holy Reviewers wanted to do a real comparison between Vista and Mac, then take a brand new Mac, and a brand new HP or Dell at the same PRICE point.  If they wanted to throw XP into the comparison mix then you'd have to disable everything like UAC and Aero on Vista, which negates any reason for moving to Vista.  For those willing to build their own, you can buy enough leading edge hardware to build 3 machines and still have cash left over instead of getting a Mac.

    And as for the Linux weenies: most of the world really doesn't care that you can have a spinning cube as a desktop on 15 year old hardware.  They want something that doesn't take a comp sci degree to pick a "flavor", configure, run, and keep up to date.  Also, the whole "open source" thing scares a lot of people.  Especially given the number of open source projects that just die because no one wants to fix bugs with them any more.  I'd be curious to see how many Linux "distros" have gone the way of the Dodo.



  • @clively said:

    And as for the Linux weenies: most of the world really doesn't care that you can have a spinning cube as a desktop on 15 year old hardware.  They want something that doesn't take a comp sci degree to pick a "flavor", configure, run, and keep up to date.  Also, the whole "open source" thing scares a lot of people.  Especially given the number of open source projects that just die because no one wants to fix bugs with them any more.  I'd be curious to see how many Linux "distros" have gone the way of the Dodo.

     Obviously spoken by someone who hasn't given a modern distro a chance. Take Ubuntu, a semi-retarded person could have that set up and running in virtually no time. They won't have to go looking for software anymore either as almost everything you could ever want is available through either the package manager (which auto-resolves all dependencies, before you start on that one) or the very simple to use Add/Remove program, which gives you nice categories and doesn't show you all the libraries and garbage that you don't care about (which are all again automatically sorted out for you). Linux has come a long way if you pick up a decent distro.
     



  • @clively said:

    And for those that claim MS copied Apple, get over it.  Every single one of the OS vendors has copied their competitors...

    And I fully support this: failing to copy risks re-inventing an inferior wheel. However, the objective is not to spend five years producing a new OS release that looks like all you did was grab anything pretty from your main rival, including graphical sudo (UAC). Mac OS X still requires every localisation of a program to bring its own dialog layouts with it (due to differing text length) so where's Avalon? Where's WinFS? Where's a centralised, generic notification provider service? I don't mind copying, but you've also got to push the envelope, be the people that Apple will be copying next time. If all you ever do is copy the competition, you do look pretty weak. And believe you me, we're so very not out of ideas yet.

    @Kemp said:

    Take Ubuntu, a semi-retarded person could have that set up and running in virtually no time.

    If only that were true. Part of the reason why we have so many distros (and did you mean Ubuntu, XUbuntu, KUbuntu, Vladubuntu, Nerfbuntu...) is that none of the existing ones seem to work. An unfortunate friend of mine tried several including the *buntus and none of them would actually work, and this is on a rather ordinary Dell PC. Things like X11 crashing and what not. He'd already reached the point of despair when he gave SimplyMEPIS a try and, amazingly enough, that one worked, and he's happy now.

    Other friends have reported that OpenBSD installs and recognises hardware much better than Linux does, but *BSD isn't the OS that gets all the attention.

    Most people in the world don't like choice. Or, rather, they don't like choice when there's no way to make an informed decision. You want an electric shaver and there's fifty models that all do, you'd think, the same thing, but obviously some do it more than others. Far too many cars to choose from. And far too many versions of Linux. People want to go to a shop, buy a computer, and surf and send e-mail. At least with Macs, they do just work.



  • @dlikhten said:

    And my response to that is... Linux (with compiz or beryl) has niftier features than vista visually, much more effects, much cooler stuff, AND it performs better WITHOUT the need for such high ram. So by example, we know that it is doable to make a system look good, and perform well. I am not saying Linux > Windows (yes i am) but I am saying that you can't claim that vista does something so phenomenal that it REQUIRES such high hardware.

    Windows requires better hardware and more RAM than Linux because it's designed to be used by more, less computer literate people than Linux is, plain and simple. Linux would be really great if everyone on the planet was comfortable working at the just-slightly-better-than-a-DOS-prompt-but-with-higher-security level. Unfortunately, the average Mom & Pop at the local deli, or the average school teacher, building maintenance man, or middle school student don't fit into that category.

    With the added ease of use comes greater complexity, and with greater complexity comes more overhead.

    Linux is fine for people who are tech geeks. For the average user (including the majority of business users), Linux will never be an option. It's much too hard to get anything done.

    And yes, I have worked with Linux. However, as I said, the majority of business users (and therefore businesses) are Windows-based, and since I code for a living I work with the platform that the customers are working on.

    And with regards to MS being evil, how can an inanimate corporate entity be evil? MS is a business, and it's run like a business. There's no good or evil involved. Sure, the strategic choices made sometimes aren't what I'd consider to be right, but it's just that: a strategic choice. It's not a struggle between good and evil that good is losing. It's business.
     



  • @Kemp said:

     Obviously spoken by someone who hasn't given a modern distro a chance. Take Ubuntu, a semi-retarded person could have that set up and running in virtually no time. They won't have to go looking for software anymore either as almost everything you could ever want is available through either the package manager (which auto-resolves all dependencies, before you start on that one) or the very simple to use Add/Remove program, which gives you nice categories and doesn't show you all the libraries and garbage that you don't care about (which are all again automatically sorted out for you). Linux has come a long way if you pick up a decent distro.

    Obviously spoken by a true l33t'er. Ubuntu is great. Not for my mother, though, who is pushing 70 years of age and calls me about three times a month because she can't find the Word document she saved on her local hard drive. Plus, with Ubuntu and other Linux distros, having the package manager is obviously great. Unfortunately, the vast majority of software that the package manager can install for you easily is not worth bothering with; it's nothing even close to the equivalent applications you can find for Windows.

    Simple example? Data compression. Sure, 7Zip is great; I use it myself. But compare the GUI version against WinZip, and tell me which one you'd rather explain to my mother via a long-distance telephone call?

    And games? What are the choices for mainline Linux games? Tetris clones don't count.

    I don't care how far along Linux has come. Until it can match the ease of use for the average user that Windows has, and has a great selection of real, usable, quality software, it'll never be even close to the equivalent of Windows.

    For you propeller headed Linux gurus, Linux is fine. For the remainder of the majority of the computer users on the planet, though, Windows wins. Hands down, no question, for a hell of a lot longer than anyone reading this will live. So play with Linux all you want. I'm staying where I make my money. 



  • @seaturnip said:

    I once ran into the bug where if you try to install Mac OS X on a G3 iMac without the most recent firmware, not only does it not work, it
    bricks the iMac.  (In fact you don't even have to actually begin the
    installation, simply booting into the install disk is enough to instantly trigger the bug.)  You
    have to plug an external monitor into the VGA port and perform some
    incantations to bring it back to life.  Easily the most painful operating system upgrade I've ever experienced (and I used Linux in the 90s).

    Wait, hold on -- Macs have firmware? Is that just what they call the bios?



  • @shadowman said:

    Wait, hold on -- Macs have firmware? Is that just what they call the bios?

    PowerPC Macs, such as the range in question, were using Open Firmware.



  • @KenW said:

    And with regards to MS being evil, how can an inanimate corporate entity be evil?

    Same way as anybody else: by thinking that they can't be. 



  • @shadowman said:

    Wait, hold on -- Macs have firmware? Is that just what they call the bios?

    It's actually called "OpenFirmware" - that's the name of the piece of software. The low-end PC is the only device on the market which calls its firmware "BIOS" (high-end PCs and intel macs call it "EFI", for "extensible firmware interface").



  • @KenW said:

    with Ubuntu and other Linux distros, having the package manager is obviously great. Unfortunately, the vast majority of software that the package manager can install for you easily is not worth bothering with; it's nothing even close to the equivalent applications you can find for Windows.

    Simple example? Data compression. Sure, 7Zip is great; I use it myself. But compare the GUI version against WinZip, and tell me which one you'd rather explain to my mother via a long-distance telephone call?

    Strange, I have all the software I need available in there. I have only needed one piece of software that wasn't available via the standard repositories (JabRef - a java based reference manager), and that has since been added. As for your compression question, I'd rather not install 7zip in the first place (gui version or not) when the archive manager that ships with Ubuntu does quite nicely...

    Linux certainly has a reputation for being hard to use for the average person, but distros like Ubuntu have come quite a way in the last year (or indeed in the last couple of months, Ubuntu 7.10 is out now and fixed a substantial number of things that used to bug me). Sure, the average person might be confused at first, but the same happens with Windows. The difference is that with Windows when someone gets completely lost we chuckle and submit it to a dumb users quote site, when the same happens with Linux it's taken as proof that it's unusable.

    As for games, the only reason there's a lack for Linux is that the game companies develop for the most commonly used which happens to be Windows. People get Windows bundled on machines, the industry sees most people use Windows, game companies develop for Windows, people see most games are out on Windows, people don't see why they should switch to Linux and lose their games. It's a very unfortunate self-sustaining loop.

    I'm not a Linux fanboy/zealot/whatever,  just someone who used Windows exclusively until recently and then tried Ubuntu for a while (pretty much had to at work) and found it made so many things easier. I have dual boot and the only thing I really use Windows for is games, which are taking up much less of my time these days anyway.

    I'm not trying to convince you that Linux is The Way or that everyone should be made to use it, I'm just saying that if you pick a good modern distro then it really isn't as bad as the general preconception says it is.



  • @Kemp said:

    @KenW said:

    Simple example? Data compression. Sure, 7Zip is great; I use it myself. But compare the GUI version against WinZip, and tell me which one you'd rather explain to my mother via a long-distance telephone call?

    As for your compression question, I'd rather not install 7zip in the first place (gui version or not) when the archive manager that ships with Ubuntu does quite nicely...

    Not to mention that 7zip is for working with 7z files, not zip files, and the GUI is exactly the same on Windows as it is on every other platform.


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