Last week, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista went gold, and was released to manufacturing. The release has been long coming (five years of work) and was surrounded by controversies, rumours of rewrites, and legal threats by Microsoft’s competitors. We got our hands on the RTM build (Microsoft Windows 6.0 (Build 6000)), so read on for the first superficial look at Windows Vista Ultimate.
I stress ‘superficial’, because this first look “review” will only take a look at the external appearance of Vista, since it is impossible to form a proper judgment about such a big release in just a few days.
The machine used for this installation is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Pentium M 1.73Ghz, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and an Ati Radeon x300 with 128MB of dedicated video RAM.
The installation routine hasn’t changed since the last few beta/test releases, and is fairly straightforward. Contrary to the Windows XP installation routine, Vista’s is entirely graphical, and requires minimal user interaction; all you need to do is enter your serial number, select whether you want to upgrade or do a fresh install, and select a partition/hard drive to install to, and you’re set (and, depending on your version, you also need to select which edition to install). I found the installation to be excruciatingly slow, just like in previous Vista builds. While this is not a show-stopper per se, annoying it is, still. The really good thing, though, is that all the user interaction is placed at the beginning of the installation, so when that’s done, you can easily go back to having a life.
After the actual installation is complete, you are asked to create a new user upon first reboot. Logging in for the first time takes a lot of time, just like it did on previous builds. Especially the part where Vista assesses your computer’s performance takes really long. After that, however, you are ready to go.
Hardware recognition was, contrary to XP, excellent. Everything worked right out of the box, including my bcm43xx-based wireless network chip. Whether a certain bug in this driver that plagued Vista (for me, at least) during all of its test builds is fixed remains to be seen (the driver was very unstable, erratic, resulting in me being unable to reach the net for 99% of the time; it did connect to my home LAN, but refused to connect beyond that LAN to the internet). One piece of hardware was not functioning properly: my touchpad. It was working alright, but Vista recognized it as a standard ps/2 mouse, and hence my scroll areas did not work, and neither could I turn off the extremely annoying touchpad tapping. Another usual problem when it comes to hardware recognition, my internal SD card reader, also worked just fine. A quick test of the sleep/wake cycle did not pose any problems.
The first thing a longtime Vista beta tester like me notices when running the RTM is its speed; it just feels so much faster than any of the previous builds I have tried. By default, Vista turns off the flashy Aero interface for my hardware, but turning it on did not result in a significant speed/responsiveness decrease; however, further testing, under heavy loads, is needed before one can really say something about Vista’s performance (especially compared to XP).
Subjective, but here it goes: Aero is beautiful. The transparent blur, the subtle effects when opening/closing and minimizing/maximizing, the live preview when hovering over a taskbar item (useless but pretty); t all just blends right in, and never gets in the way of what you are doing. As for the rolodex, it’s no Exposé, but it’s usable. I’m sure some clever programmer will soon use Aero to come up with a decent Exposé clone to replace the rolodex.
There are cosmetic improvements across the board in build 6000 when compared to the previous builds, the most important of which is the new icons and artwork: finally, one of my biggest pet peeves in Windows is fixed: a lot of icons and artwork dating back from the stone age are finally updated (not all though, yet, as a quick look through /windows reveals, shame!). The icon set itself is just stunning. Seriously, this is the best-looking icon set I have ever used; but of course, this is a very subjective matter. The new Vista fonts are simply stunning.
I still don’t like the new Explorer. I cannot really put my finger on it, it seems as if it is simply ‘too busy’. There are widgets and buttons everywhere, which all distract you from the actual content: the files. The fact that Vista defaults to the list-view with small icons and lots of details does not really help either, and there does not seem to be an option to set the icon size system-wide (only on a per-folder basis); at least not that I have found yet. For the rest, Explorer also feels notably faster than in the test builds, which is a welcomed improvement. Interestingly, Windows Vista has Time Machine. When system protection is turned on (which it is automatically) you can view and restore previous version of modified files via their ‘properties’ dialog. Less flashy than Apple’s variant, but useful nonetheless.
Searching functionality is integrated into the Start menu, but I’m not yet sure that’s the right place to put it; when searching, the actual contents of the Start menu disappear, and I’m simply not really sure this is the right way to go (things in GUIs shouldn’t just disappear). Searching itself works fine and again, is faster than in the previous builds. The search field doubles as a replacement for the ‘run’ dialog, something experienced users will really appreciate (I know I do).
The Start menu is a bit of a mess, if you ask me. Since almost every Windows application is named “Windows [something]”, there is like 28462 times “Windows” in the menu. Other than that, the menu uses a tree view which is simply really annoying and counter-intuitive. The ‘classic’ start menu is still available, but for some weird reason, it uses the classic Windows theme, making it look really out of place.
My first impression is that of a major leap forward for the Windows platform, and that of a few baby steps forward when compared to the previous builds. However, I do find some of the defaults weird, at best; the detailed list-view in Explorer, the tree structure of the Start ‘menu’, those sorts of things. Only more usage will tell whether or not they can be overcome, and if I can adapt to the new Windows.
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How does the first impression compare to SLED 10? I remember you writing nice things about it, and Novell hyped it all the time as the “Vista killer”, so it really interests me. Performance, usability, fun, and so on? Was it the same hardware you’ve tested on? (I think so)
Hey, good question.
Well, I think they are on par, mostly. Simply put, SLED 10 has all the advantages and disadvantages of being Linux ánd has a pretty interface, while Vista has all advantages and disadvantages of being Windows ánd has a pretty interface.
They both failed miserably in the touchpad department, in any case.
Edited 2006-11-13 11:47
But still Vista needs more hardware to run. And Linux mostly runs better than Windows given the same hardware. Right now, the only thing that gives Windows any advantage is the applications that run on it.
Maybe it’s just me but on two computers I tried SLED it’s really slow, don’t even get me started on YaST or this auto-updater thing using Mono. It’s just as slow or maybe slower than Vista.
There are other distros that may be faster than SLED. And mono apps are really slow to start. Too much hyped. It reminds me of java 5 years ago (don’t know about today improvements).
miscz said: “Maybe it’s just me but on two computers I tried SLED it’s really slow, don’t even get me started on YaST or this auto-updater thing using Mono. It’s just as slow or maybe slower than Vista.”
I thinks its you. I just tested this on a Via CPU @ 1000Mhz and it was incredibly snappy. (Surprised me)
I’ve seen Suse/SLED run quite well on some computers but never fast enough for my tastes. I think that installing single app should not take 10 minutes. People suggest different package managers and even switching to Synaptic, I thinks I’ll just use Debian-derived distros
“Just” the applications you run? Well, IMHO, what really matters isn’t the OS itself but the apps you can run on it and how they perform.
Nice review Thom, but I’m afraid that Vista isn’t doing it to my desktop anytime soon.
First Superficial Response. No thank you. More glitz isn’t what I want from an operating system. I want something that recognizes ALL of my hardware, is very fast, and stays out of my way so I can use the programs I need to do my job.
“First Superficial Response. No thank you. More glitz isn’t what I want from an operating system. I want something that recognizes ALL of my hardware, is very fast, and stays out of my way so I can use the programs I need to do my job.”
Yeah, I agree. MS is continually trying to “improve” Windows, but all that really mean is they are just dumping more crap into the OS and its interface. I used to think that the ‘Category View’ in XP was horrendous…until I saw the control panel in Vista. Now you have to look in the main window and the sidebar just to find anything. If you turn on classic view, you just get bombarded with icons.
Edited 2006-11-13 13:13
So you want OS X.
touché
Did you have time to test how the slightly deeper things worked, like having mails as separate eml-files, and persons as separate contacts?
Did you have time to test how the slightly deeper things worked, like having mails as separate eml-files, and persons as separate contacts?
Those are things for the thorough review, expected in a few weeks.
Acknowledged. I’ll be looking forward. Separate mails and contacts are the two features I cannot understand haven’t been implemented earlier – it was possible already in win95. And it makes indexing mails and contacts so much easier.
We’d all love to see everything moved into individual files or SQL. Microsoft JetDB and any other propritary database file structure needs to go ASAP.
I cannot understand haven’t been implemented earlier
Because of FAT and storage space concerns, probably. The typical message in my inbox looks to be about 2-8KB – not much of a problem on a modern filesystem + large disk, but that could take up a significant amount of space on a small drive, especially thanks to the large cluster size in FAT.
DOH! Should’ve thought of that. It sounds plausible – at least with FAT16 (and to some extent also FAT32).
uses a tree view which is simply really annoying
I haven’t seen the final yet, but my problem with the new Start menu was mostly coming from the fact that after installing a few apps which put their submenus in there, some with longish names, sometimes their names was wider than the box in which the tree-like menu is in, which made me scroll the menu’s box horizontally, which just blew my fuses and made me really angry. Does it still behave this way ?
Do you have any screenshots on your blog Thom ?
Also its interesting to note the processor speed , ram count of the test machine , not withstanding the video card quality that although Vista installs slowly its pretty much usable after.
Nice review , thanks. Means I can throw it at a machine without too much hardware investment.
There’s already an Expose clone in the wild, you can get it from here:
http://blogs.labo-dotnet.com/simon/
Played with it for a bit and it’s pretty cool. Although I don’t use neither that nor Flip3D much.
For those of you with Vista, press Ctrl+Alt+Tab for a third option, it brings up the new Alt+Tab with thumbnails and makes it stick around until you press one of the thumbnails with the mouse.
“For those of you with Vista, press Ctrl+Alt+Tab for a third option”
You will end with arthritis in your left hand
Edited 2006-11-13 14:51
There’s also OpenExpose:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openexpose/
The MSDN release comes out on Nov 17th.
Which is over the 7 day comment made before.
Is there any burning software that actually runs under Vista? The last time i checked Nero wasn’t compatible.
The latest version of Nero which came out in mid October does work on VISTA RC2. I am running RC2 and have had no problem installing and using this new version of NERO.
Is there any burning software that actually runs under Vista? The last time i checked Nero wasn’t compatible.
http://www.imgburn.com/
well, I don’t like vista, and I wont use it.
Well…the beautiful thing is, even though MS has a monopoly in the OS world, you don’t have to use any of their products if you don’t want to. There are still plenty of alternatives out there that in many ways are just as good if not better.
Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom.
“Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom.”
Hostile, but funny
“Hostile, but funny
”
When you receive by mail a “game” created with Excel you start to understand why I’m being a little hostile
i send documents in formats that can’t be read by ms office or other microsoft programs
“i send documents in formats that can’t be read by ms office or other microsoft programs
”
I did too, but they bitched at me, as if it was my fault they couldn’t open a damn PDF or a report generated in HTML didn’t show well in IE. So I said “f–k them”, and now I export every report they want from me (I do payroll) as RTF and rename it .DOC and done. They will always ask for a Word or Excel. Damn suckers!
Ugh! Replying to myself: and still have to fix the Windows problems (being a tech guy) to family and friends. How I would like to be able to just say “screw you & your Windows” to everyone, but can’t. I still need to live in society.
It would be easier to just say “I don’t understand about computers, I’ve just got this thing Linux installed on mine and have never got a problem. I’ve heard you don’t get viruses and it’s faster and more secure.” and point someone else to do installation. But they already know me
English must be your second language…
So you understand it; English second language must be you…
I installed Linux; it sucked. Fonts look horrible. WiFi stops working on regular intervals, Gnome is slow, and KDE looks like an 11 year old designed it. The reason there are no viruses? No one cares about it…
“English must be your second language… ”
Indeed.
“So you understand it; English second language must be you… ”
I don’t follow you here; probably due to English being my second language. Do you mind translating it to plain Spanish so I can get your point?
“I installed Linux; it sucked. Fonts look horrible. WiFi stops working on regular intervals, Gnome is slow, and KDE looks like an 11 year old designed it. The reason there are no viruses? No one cares about it…”
Different POV. You can install Microsoft fonts if you like them.
I don’t have WiFi, so I cannot tell.
I like how KDE was designed, with integration in mind and thinking about a desktop for the future. Unlike Windows that was designed taking too much care of DOS and backwards compatibility. See, you still have drive letters, handycapped internet connectivity and protocols, viruses.
P.S.: me fail English? Unpossible.
Wetback…
Note that I don’t live there. I’m proud of not being a U.S.A. citizen, but and american I am.
Can we please go back to discussing the article? I don’t want to resort to moderation, you see.
Thanks.
Moderate me Thom, but I won’t just shut up when some guy starts discriminating because my language is not english and I don’t live in the U.S.A.
Hey, you forgot to mod down yourself.
If you’re not a citizen, then you’re not an American. It’s simple.
I born in America, a continent, you know? Or you still think that America is the United States of America? You surely live in Texas…
Ahh…wrong. No I don’t live in Texas. Ask 100 people in different countries, and say the word America, 99% will associate America with the U.S.
Go enjoy your polluted water…
Edited 2006-11-13 19:22
Ahh…wrong. No I don’t live in Texas. Ask 100 people in different countries, and say the word America, 99% will associate America with the U.S.
This is really off-topic already, but still, even if 99% of the population of the earth did associate the U.S. with America, it still isn’t the same. America is still a continent, no matter what. Besides, atleast here, everyone associates USA with stupid…Does that mean then everyone’s correct?
“Ask 100 people in different countries, and say the word America, 99% will associate America with the U.S.”
There’are still more ignorants that 100 people. I would raise the bet and say a billion.
“Go enjoy polluted water…”
I would go to U.S.A. then. My country really takes care of its resources. I ask you, who created the pollution all of us enjoy today?
Well, that’s factually wrong. Citizenship and Nationality do not equal each other. It’s a typical assumption made by those who haven’t spent enough time doing research
Hey! We wetbacks love Linux and FOSS too!!!
I doesn’t matter that Senator Gates intends to build a “great wall of licenses”…we will find our way through, not by piracy but by a legitimate utilization of FOSS.
Linux is fun, productive, light weighted…and …even better; if somebody doesn’t like the user interface, he/she can change it 😉
Also, who said I use Windows? I don’t recall stating what I used…
I assumed it. As this is about a Windows post and you quickly jumped in to rant about Linux sucking.
I jumped on the original poster. He wasn’t a Windows person either…he/she felt the need to bash it because they felt Linux/Mac was the best solution. My response was/is the use what you like.
You jumped wrong. You should look where you click, because you replyed to my comment, not the original poster.
english is my 3rd language
can you translate that to either swedish or finnish ? and you can’t use a translation program!
i say no to everyone in my family if they ask me to fix a windows problem becorse i don’t like windows and don’t want to use it unless i get paid for it and don’t have to use it at home
Mellin: Same i do with Linux. When someone asks me about linux, i tell them it is a pile of shit but it is Free and it comes with source code.
When they ask me what is source code, i smile and move along:)
btw i am glad i don’t have to use Linux either at home or work:)
I wish I could get paid for fixing my family’s Windows PC. But I cannot ask them for money and even won’t accept any from them. So I don’t have any choice. I still get money fixing others computers.
Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom.
Hilarious. Your concept of “freedom” requires the rest of us to become enslaved to your choice of OS. And this is progress? No thanks.
“Hilarious. Your concept of “freedom” requires the rest of us to become enslaved to your choice of OS. And this is progress? No thanks.”
No way. That’s why there are standards. Standards Microsoft don’t respect in order to maintain their monopoly. I don’t pretend people use Linux just because I don’t like Windows. I pretend people use standard formats for information interchange. No more than that.
Talking about progress, Microsoft didn’t help much in 10 years of development. What you have now is mostly what you had 10 years ago with a little more eye candy. No innovation, no progress at all.
And my concept of freedom is right. You should check with the dictionary what freedom is. My freedom doesn’t require anything from anyone. It’s something personal. I choose FOSS because I’m a free person that values his freedom and most important, I want to stay free. People’s freedom to use a Windows & Microsoft only application that uses files in a non-standard format prevents me from easily accessing that information. They are free to choose, but still want me to use MS Office to be able to open and save files in the format they use. So who is enslaving who?
So you blame windows for progress now. What has anyone else done for progress? Software industry as a whole lacked innovation and kind of stalled on innovation.
Microsoft on the other hand still brought ease of use of wireless, easy DVD/CD burning and playing etc.
In general software industry is becoming stagnant but i wouldn’t blame it on Microsoft.
What else have people done? What linux brings to table other than copying windows?
Java was good but Sun’s stupidity ruined it. Now let us wait for the next big thing. Till then you will only see incremental changes.
“Microsoft on the other hand still brought ease of use of wireless, easy DVD/CD burning and playing etc. ”
Oh really? I thought hardware vendors provided drivers to allow Windows to use wireless and you needed Nero to burn a CD/DVD. You still need to chase special DVD players because Windows by default doesn’t play DVD well. So what are you talking about?
“What else have people done? What linux brings to table other than copying windows?”
What does Linux (a kernel) have to do with Windows? Where is the “copying” you say? Linux exists since 1991 and the current Windows kernel came after Linux. So how Linux copied Windows?? Do you realize they are both different technologies? Linux is a POSIX OS. Windows is not. Different APIs, different everything. Stop saying stupid things.
“Java was good but Sun’s stupidity ruined it. Now let us wait for the next big thing. Till then you will only see incremental changes.”
Java is still good. Better than that .NET rip off by MS. They copied it, like they copy everything. Not that is wrong, but what have MS done? They gave the people a stupid ineficient bloated insecure OS. Great achievement.
What does Linus (a kernel) have to do with Windows? Where is the “copying” you say? Linus exists since 1991 and the current Windows kernel came after Linux. So how Linus copied Windows??
Linus is no copy! Linus was created! By act of natural creation! Linus is no clone! If u sink he is clone, then show any other person look like Linus! Is not true!
Why did you change Linux for Linus. I was talking about the OS not the creator, troll!
You really have a lot to learn. Establishing a “standard” isn’t a pathway to innovation. For example, the quintessential standards org — the W3C — is pretty meaningless now. They publish “standards” all the time which are never adopted (ie. XHTML). And you know why? Because you don’t innovate in a bureaucratic committee, where all the members plod along for months or years until they reach some politically-palatable consensus. Innovation is born in garages. Innovation primarily breeds in secret. It doesn’t wait for some lame organization’s stamp of approval.
Whether you like or hate Microsoft, they’ve innovated by putting useful technology that works in the hands of millions of people. Linux advanced on the backs of predecessors. Its contributors copied freely from just about every possible source (Windows, OS X, Unix, etc) to yield a whole that is no better than the original sources, which is the reason why desktop consumers aren’t flocking to use it. When I say “no better”, I mean it doesn’t provide sufficient differentiation to make a transition from Windows- or OS X-to-Linux obvious. I find it laughable when some people suggest that marketing is the missing ingredient of success for Linux. They completely misunderstand the market.
And let me clear up another misunderstanding that you have. Software, itself, doesn’t give you freedom. Nor do so-called “open standards”. Choice and competition give you freedom. On that note, MS’s presence in the market doesn’t stifle anyone’s freedom. It is merely another choice among many. You make your choices. I’ll make mine. That’s the cornerstone of freedom.
yes you are fully right.
I use linux for 2 years now and since a few months a mac, too 😉
i’ve used macs since 1996
I don’t like peas, and I won’t eat them…
Edited 2006-11-13 16:50
just give them to me
Is there any burning software that actually runs under Vista? The last time i checked Nero wasn’t compatible.
I think that will be one of the big problems with Vista. People are comfortable with XP. They will need a compelling reason to upgrade. I will probably wait until service pack 2 comes out. By that time all the missing parts of Vista should be in there.
I haven’t gotten my hands on the RTM release, but the betas I ran didn’t really seem to offer much over XP SP2 other than…well…being really shiny. In all fairness, I basically agree with Thom when he says that it is visually stunning, but it ran like a pig on my test box when I had Aero turned on (Thom says it has improved, but since I don’t have the RTM release I can’t check on it).
I did find it quite encouraging that there was marked improvement with each test release, especially since I will eventually have to support Vista, but none of the companies I support are going to roll it out until it has been in the wild for quite some time. Hell, the largest company I work for still mandates Windows 2000 Pro on their laptops and workstations, so just imagine how long it will take them to adopt Vista.
While I do like (and, these days, expect) having a pretty desktop, I don’t personally intend to shell out the cash for Vista. I found it to be a serviceable OS, and the new eye candy was quite nice, but I can get a serviceable OS with eye candy for substantially less money.
Reminds me of a line from Red Vs. Blue…
“We’re in the future now! Everything is verrrry shiny here.”
http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/vista/rtm/images/Volume%20…
Volume mixing at the application level. Hallelujah! I’m looking forward to the open source equivalents too
Rumour has it that the new abilities of Vista’s audio mixer are thanks to an ex-Be employee that Microsoft hired.
http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper/2005/32.htm
While I’m a sucker for eye-candy and shiny pretty colors, I doubt I’ll ever use Vista..I can barely play Oblivion under Win2k, so I kinda doubt it’d even run under Vista. But since I can’t try the speed myself, has anyone compared gaming speed under Vista to XP or the older Win2k? I’d be interested to know how big the hit is. I assume that if you really wanna do gaming, you’d need to shell out a whole lot of cash, but is it really so?
The only problem with gaming in Vista is that the audio and video stacks are completely new and no longer in kernel mode. So the hardware companies have to write new drivers from scratch, and as such, the actual driver performance is quite abysmal at this point.
I found a Microsoft’s Vista editions comparison chart and it is so obvious they are trying to nickel-and-dime consumers while milking businesses at the same time.
If you want to look at the “features” available to the different editions go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.msp…
Will it show the full pathname of the destination folder so I know that I’ve dropped the stuff to be copied on the right target? Will it show total bytes to be copied and completed? Or is it still as brain-dead as every similar dialog in Windows since the beginning of time?
Pretty UIs are one thing, but USEFUL UIs are better, IMO.
Will it show the full pathname of the destination folder so I know that I’ve dropped the stuff to be copied on the right target? Will it show total bytes to be copied and completed?
Yes, see link below:
http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/vista/rtm/images/Copying%2…
There’s also a mouse pointer tip that shows the location to which you’re dragging items, so you have a visual queue before you copy/move them.
Edited 2006-11-13 21:33
Sweet merciful crap, it’s about time. Maybe now it will actually be smart enough to check if a destination volume has enough space before beginning to copy/move files to it.
Yes! Thank you. That’s something which has been bugging me for a long, long time. 🙂
All the people I’ve talked to, the only ones who are seriously willing to upgrade to Vista right away or soonish, have one thing in common: they bought or are going to buy a DX10 video card and are waiting for new DX10 games.
So hardcore PC gamers will inevitably upgrade to Vista at the beckon call of game makers. That leads me to wonder why even bother with a pretty UI if most of your time spent is within a [fullscreen] game? On top of that, I heard gaming performance is lower in Vista compared to XP SP2.
Aero, love it or hate, if you’re a gamer then Vista does have something to offer.
I just use Windows to game, typing in OpenSuSE 10 now. With all the hardache MS OSs are why get another one.
Oooh, I almost stepped in it! who left that fud there, and what the heck does that have to do with the article? So you didn’t like Linux? Great. Good on ya’.
Even if it were true, ” The reason there are no viruses? No one cares about it…”, would it make sense to stick with the “popular one” and it’s 100,000 or so viruses?
I never liked popular girls when I was growing up, and they had the same virus issues !
;/
Actually I was making a pun at the original poster. I don’t Vista, and won’t use it. Same response as you…good…don’t use it; shut up and move on. I’ve actually used a number of OS’s, and they all have their share of pros/cons. User’s choice…
Oh, and by making the statement that you never much liked the popular girls is the typical geek response. Let’s face it, they wanted nothing to do with you, and thought that most chubby guys who play dungeons and dragon from the time they got home from school, until 1:00AM is just plan creepy…
Edited 2006-11-13 18:53
Oh, and by making the statement that you never much liked the popular girls is the typical geek response. Let’s face it, they wanted nothing to do with you, and thought that most chubby guys who play dungeons and dragon from the time they got home from school, until 1:00AM is just plan creepy…
That is probably the most offensive post on OSN ever.
The first part: “Actually I was making a pun at the original poster. I don’t Vista, and won’t use it. Same response as you…good…don’t use it; shut up and move on. I’ve actually used a number of OS’s, and they all have their share of pros/cons. User’s choice… “ is quite fine. Totally agree there – except you originally replied to the wrong person.. *sigh*
But, true – all OS’es have pros and cons. Doesn’t matter if it is CP/M+GEM or DOS+Windows or WinNT or Mac OS Classis, AmigaOS, OS/2 or whatever. There are ups and downs.
Has anyone actually come across a decent explanation yet of *why* Aero needs so much graphics card oomph?
I mean, so far as I can see, it’s doing basically the same as compiz / beryl, desktop compositing. Beryl is doing a fine job here at 1680×1050 using my integrated Intel graphics which appear to be sharing 18MB of system RAM (the system has 512MB and top is showing 494MB free, which is where I get the 18MB figure. *Why* it’s 18 I’ve no idea, as the video BIOS wants it to be 8, and Xorg.0.log suggests the X driver wants it to be 32. Maybe they compromised on 18?) – all effects run well and perfectly smooth. I saw Vista on a machine in my local PC store the other day, it looked nice, but nothing really beyond what Beryl does, so what’s the technical justification for its ridiculous gfx card requirements?
As you can see here http://news.com.com/Study+Vista+could+create+50,000+jobs+in+Europe/… , Microsoft is “creating jobs” with the introduction of the new Windows Vista…that is why you need more memory and more processor to do the same
Adam Smith would say: “The invisible hand of B. Gates” 🙂
Edited 2006-11-13 20:27
I know Compiz works just peachy on almost anything with a few megabytes of memory and hw OpenGL, but there’s one difference about Vista’s Aero and AIGLX (I’m not even mentioning XGL here, it’s even worse): if you’ve got AIGLX running, your framerate in any and all OpenGL apps will drop to about 1/3 of what it was before or even more…As such, I find gaming impossible if I have AIGLX enabled, and I seem to be getting lots of glitches in OpenGL apps/games/screensavers..I’ve tried this with both ATi and nVidia cards with the same results. In Vista though, they did it a different way, apparently not causing such a framerate drop, so could it explain the harder hardware requirements too? I don’t really know, but as the situation is now, I guess I gotta disable AIGLX on my machine. As much as I dislike Windows, atleast they did something right too.
It primarily comes down to quality, efficiency, and support.
Aero is not an accurate indicator of the system’s full capabilities. It covers most, if not all, areas graphically, but it’s meant to be out of your way rather than a tech demo. There are many applications and samples that are better showcases for platform capabilities. Aero does, however, use features not guaranteed to be in earlier fixed-function hardware. Programmable GPUs are more flexible, efficient, and can achieve higher quality. They support things like floating-point color, better AA and filtering, programmable shaders, higher quality video rendering and acceleration, etc.. D3D 9 GPUs are about 4 years old at this point, can be bought for ~$50 or less (64MB and Shader Model 2.0 is the minimum for Aero), and have been available in many integrated hardware designs for a almost as long as the GPUs have been on the market.
Aero relies on a new display driver model (WDDM), and it was/is unlikely that IHVs would want to write a completely new driver to support older hardware which could never be fully utilized in the first place. So, with that and other considerations, Microsoft chose not to support those video cards in Aero or future versions of Direct3D (D3D 10 emulates the fixed pipeline with a shader program), which also simplifies D3D (D3D 10 is a totally new architecture).
WDDM supports current graphics hardware, but is built with the future in mind (several iterations of Windows will build on this model). It includes basic and advanced driver models, and features like scheduling, virtual memory, command stream validation, and resource sharing between processes, to increase GPUs’ availability to the system for visual and non-visual tasks. Most D3D 9 GPUs will likely use the basic model, wheras D3D 10+ GPUs will use the advanced model, and gain performance and reliability benefits (context-based scheduling rather than batch, hardware stream validation rather than software, demand paging, etc.).
“D3D 9 GPUs are about 4 years old at this point, can be bought for ~$50 or less (64MB and Shader Model 2.0 is the minimum for Aero), and have been available in many integrated hardware designs for a almost as long as the GPUs have been on the market.”
…
but you still can’t replace an integrated Intel graphics chipset in a notebook with one. Nope, my brand new laptop is doomed never to get Aero.
Isn’t 256MB of video memory the minimum before Vista will enable Glass by default? That was the thing that seemed most crazy to me.
but you still can’t replace an integrated Intel graphics chipset in a notebook with one. Nope, my brand new laptop is doomed never to get Aero.
If you had any intention of running Vista with Aero Glass, you should have checked the system requirements before purchasing the notebook. The requirements have been available and unchanged for 3 years.
Isn’t 256MB of video memory the minimum before Vista will enable Glass by default? That was the thing that seemed most crazy to me.
No. You will get Glass by default with a 64MB GPU as long as it has WDDM drivers and supports Shader Model 2.0 or higher. If those were the actual results of someone testing Vista, only a few things would cause that behavior:
Bad or wrong drivers (most likely as drivers were alpha quality during the Vista beta) — could affect initial performance testing and prevent Glass from starting. You need WDDM drivers. Glass won’t work with XPDM drivers.
Running at higher resolutions and/or with more monitors than the card(s) can handle with good performance for 3D.
Bad hardware — if the hardware just has unusually bad performance for 3D operations, doesn’t have enough bandwidth (memory or bus), etc., even though it claims PS 2.0 and 64MB (the hardware is most likely defective).
It does seem like a leap forward for the Windows platform as a whole, and even more so if you’re migrating from Windows 2000/XP.
However most cool features Vista has to offer have been available on the competition for quite some time now. OSX is already at as good as Vista, and Apple is currently working on the next version.
Linux, on the other hand, keeps evolving at an exponential rate. KDE 4 is just around the corner. GNOME keeps moving forward, so does Ubuntu. Sure we’re still going to have to play catch up with vista, god knows there’s room for improvement on this side of the fence but the gap is definitely closing fast.
I don’t want to be moded down as a troll or anything since this is a Vista thread, and I for one salute our new Windows overlord and it’s blood thirsty mob :p … I DO congrat all of you windows dudes for Vista and all the nice things it’s bringing you guys, but one thing is for sure: Vista is, IMHO, far from revolutionary, or even evolutionary, at least for some of us. Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last Windows version a Linux distro has to play catch up to.
“Microsoft is ‘creating jobs’ with the introduction of the new Windows Vista…”
Maybe he means that, temporarily, more people will be needed in hard disk, RAM memory module, and graphics card factories… (?)
Nah, I think what he really means is that those 50,000 people will be needed to be trained as Linux administrators, since no one will either be able to afford the upgrades to Vista, nor will they need them in businesses. But if Microsoft stops supporting anything but Vista, then businesses will have to migrate to something else, and since Linux and other operating systems don’t require as much hardware to run decently, they’ll just switch.
Seriously, how many businesses will want to upgrade their crappy Dell workstations that run XP just fine with 256mb-512mb of ram and onboard video to more expensive hardware, simply to able to run the latest Operating System from Microsoft?
To all the Linux lovers and Windows bashers, as a Windows user, i don’t think linux stand a chance. My last experience was with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.
1. It is ugly.
2. Fonts sucks so i had to copy windows fonts to Ubuntu to make it look at least a little pretty
3. Installation is horrendous, read my earlier posts to see what i went through to get it to install.
4. Application availability is bad. It has bunch of substandard replacements. More details below:
1. Evolution doesn’t stand a chance against Outlook and not even outlook express. Reading newsgroup was worse in evolution and it would hang evolution so many times. Then i tried Pan News Reader…wow what a load of crap, you can sort your messages but you can’t hit a key to reach the sorted message like if i want to read all message from X then hitting X will instead do something else.
Sorry even pine is better than that but it has it’s own limitations.
2. Open office looks like a cheap and bulky clone of Microsoft office. Yes it is free if you are a useless person with plenty of time.
3. Where are good development tools…no softice, no good debugger with windbg…doing kernel debugger is like a witchcraft in Linux whereas on Windows it is so much easier. Just add a flag in boot.ini and attach debugger from another machine.
4. Good messenger client – now instead of a good yahoo messenger with video and voice or MSN messenger you get cheap clone like gaim…Did i say it’s interface is pretty ugly..oh well…
There are so many small little things here and there that just seems so hacked up that i gave up.
Sorry everyone who things Linux is at par or who is make to believe that…to me linux seems more like 2-3 years behind even XP in terms of usability and choice of applications.
And now please don’t bother answering each point by countering it because as a user i kicked linux out of my computer and it will stay like that for sometime no matter how much you OSS fanatics justify it.
Windows is far behind Mac OS X
Mellin: You do realize that OS X only runs on their own hardware so they don’t have to supports loads of weird and wonderful hardware and they have limited applications.
If OS X needed to support a user base as diverse as Windows i bet the story would have been different and the new release won’t come as fast as they do now.
define own hardware?
intel cpu
intel motherboard
same harddrive as any pc
intel network card
stock dvd/cd reader/writer
ddr ram (same as any pc)
same graphics card as any pc
1. Any Intel motherboard vs a standard ones that MAC will have.
2. AMD motherboard, AMD CPU
3. What same hard-drive, MAC has fixed PC configurations where Windows guys put all sort of old and new hard drives.
4. Broadcom, RealTek etc etc network cards
5. How many DVD/CD brands are there, do you know?
6. RAM is ok because it is pretty standard
7. Same graphics card, are you kiddinggggg me… NVidia, ATI, Intel on board etc
Windows supports a lot more weird and wonderful hardware so does Linux but not OS X in anyways.
Err…Even though I don’t own a Mac myself, I guess I still know more about Mac hardware than you..You see, they only use selected hardware for which they can assure they have high-quality drivers and which work well together with other hardware. On most common PCs the parts aren’t so specific and they may have compatibility issues too. Besides, there are more differences than just that, like for example PCs use a BIOS for setting everything up before booting the OS, but Mac hardware use EFI. It’s all these little things that define Macs as Macs. And since Apple knows all the details of their hardware, they don’t need to support anything else.
Then i tried Pan News Reader…wow what a load of crap, you can sort your messages but you can’t hit a key to reach the sorted message like if i want to read all message from X then hitting X will instead do something else.
Eh? That’s the first time I’ve seen a complaint about single-key keyboard shortcuts, that was always one of the really nice things about Forte Agent (the windows newsreader that PAN is inspired by, IIRC).
Sorry even pine is better than that but it has it’s own limitations.
If don’t mind using the shell and primarily read plaintext newsgroups, then SLRN is a good choice. The .slrnrc file usually needs quite a bit of tweaking to make it comfortable, but once that’s done, it’s the nicest newsreader I’ve used.
looking forward to the more indepth version, I’ve installed it as well and so far so good
here’s a few high resolution (PNG screenshots) of same
cheers
anyweb
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2568