[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:17:30 -0600
Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:

> >From http://chalain.livejournal.com/43015.html:
> 
> "I wake. For a moment, I stare at the ceiling trying to remember something.
> Something important. Something important happened last night, but the
> details escape me. Something fascinating yet sinister, like touring the CIA
> offices. Something exotic yet somehow familiar, like putting hot sauce on
> meatloaf. I wonder if I have a hangover. I wonder why I am thinking about
> the CIA and meatloaf. I roll onto my side.
> 
> There is a strange woman in bed with me.

[ snip ]

That was very good.

I found Vista does look nice, but I've had pretty much the same look for some
time on WinXP using WindowBlinds, which also offers features Vista doesn't
have.

Some of the Aero features are pretty but useless, like the application
switcher.  I like Apple's explose better, but truthfully: I don't think
anyone has application switching quite right yet.

I found the desktop responsive, as long as you don't actually do anything.
Touching almost anything seems to result in heavy paging and extended load
times.

Keep in mind: the machine's I've been playing with it on are all laptops and
desktops designed specifically for Vista, with fast graphics and 2GB of RAM.

Just coming to desktop, I see resource usage on all of the machines like this:

1.5GB of RAM used, 40% of it active (not cache)
400MB of swap used

That's pretty consistent across all of the 2GB laptops and desktops I've
tried so far.

That's *awfully* heavy for sitting on the desktop.  

I can't believe I've been calling KDE piggy... :/

Applications that start almost instantly with WinXP, take several seconds in
Vista.

Microsoft has already announced a service pack to fix a host of problems, so
maybe it will help.

I decided to look at Vista because I need another Windows license, and
unfortunately prices of WinXP doesn't seem to be falling.  I was hoping after
Vista came out that I could find WinXP Pro SP2 for about $40.

In several places, Vista is *cheaper* than XP Pro.

Ignoring DRM for now, the other big issue is that Windows Vista will only
work properly with "verified" drivers.  I can't remember what they are called:
WHQL or something like that, and I see a lot of hardware that doesn't have
those drivers.

For example, none of the last few nVidia drivers I've used are "official",
even though they come direct from nVidia.  I don't even know where to get
the WHQL versions.  From what others have told me, Vista will refuse to
enable some features if you don't use the "official" drivers.  For example,
Aero won't work, even if your driver has all of the needed features.

The only "official" nvidia driver I could find was the one that came with my
graphics card, and it is quite old.

I also heard that a lot of Vista sound drivers are unaccelerated, which seems
to jive with previous Microsoft statements about not supporting accelerated
sound hardware.

Finally, I can forsee Microsoft using driver certification as a big hammer to
hand money to hardware partners, by making your perfectly good but not
profitable older hardware stop working.

I guess right now I'm waiting to see a few things:

- ways to remove DRM from Vista
- backlash severe enough to get Microsoft to remove or lessen DRM
- ways around the "certified" driver issues
- backlash severe enough to relax the driver qualifications
- fixes for some serious performance problems

I really hated to see Vista happen, because I still need Windows software,
and I like to play games, and I can see that within a couple of years it will
start getting hard to not use it.

Then again, there are other things I'm looking for:

- DirectX 10 modification that combines shaders to let older cards support the
  unified shader model (which is *NOT* required for DX10 anyway)
- hacks/utilities to add parts of Vista to XP Pro

Of course, better yet: portable code that runs on Linux and MacOS, and the
hell with Windows.  Unfortunately, I see it being years more before that
happens.

-- 
shannon           | Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. -- Unknown