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To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?

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nevf:
I've written an article for anyone thinking about upgrading to Vista. See: To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?"

Comments most welcome. Best posted on the blog.

f0dder:
What impressed me the most was it was able to install and work with a range of nVidia Video and nForce LAN drivers without me lifting a finger. On Windows XP on the same hardware I need to manually install these drivers from the CD that comes with the Motherboard.

--- End quote ---
Only because Vista is more recent than XP, so those drivers have been added to the default install - for other hardware, you'll still need to load drivers during setup (though those can, finally!, be loaded from USB drives and whatnot, not limited to floppies). With 2k and XP you can fortunately make a slipstreamed and driver-integrated install CD, so you don't need to use floppies. And with something like www.nliteos.com , this isn't just limited to über-geeks, but also in the realm of the power users that would usually do an install themselves.

Vista has a very attractive new User Interface called Aero which I think looks great.

--- End quote ---
And it's the first thing a lot of us are going to turn off as the first thing after installing... there goes one sales argument :)

however from what I now know after doing the work to updating our software products for Vista, is that there are some quite fundamental areas which must be addressed for software to work correctly on Vista.

--- End quote ---
Many of the "new requirements" for vista compatible software is actually just about writing clean and well-behaving applications; a lot of the "omfg vista breaks this!" would already be broken on NT4 if run from a non-administrator account...

The question is, really, "why bother". There's some interesting kernel changes, but they're swamped down by the rest of the system (okay, turn off Aero, tweak the install, substitute blackbox and xplorer^2 and it should be bearable), and there's the added DRM and driver paranoia.

The two big selling points would be DX10 and suppot for hybrid flash drives, both which I can't see any real technical reasons for not being supported on XP. We'll probably even begin to see applications that are artificially limited to run on Vista, even though they'd run fine on XP (like one of the Age Of Whatever games that had no problems running on Win2k, after reversers patched out the XP checks).

nevf:
What impressed me the most was it was able to install and work with a range of nVidia Video and nForce LAN drivers without me lifting a finger. On Windows XP on the same hardware I need to manually install these drivers from the CD that comes with the Motherboard.

--- End quote ---
Only because Vista is more recent than XP, so those drivers have been added to the default install - for other hardware, you'll still need to load drivers during setup (though those can, finally!, be loaded from USB drives and whatnot, not limited to floppies). With 2k and XP you can fortunately make a slipstreamed and driver-integrated install CD, so you don't need to use floppies. And with something like www.nliteos.com , this isn't just limited to über-geeks, but also in the realm of the power users that would usually do an install themselves.
-f0dder (May 01, 2007, 07:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

yes you are likely right, however this particularly motherboard has everything on it (video, LAN etc) and nothing much worked on XP before installing the mobo CD, whereas on Vista everything worked.

Vista has a very attractive new User Interface called Aero which I think looks great.

--- End quote ---
And it's the first thing a lot of us are going to turn off as the first thing after installing... there goes one sales argument :)

--- End quote ---

I would assume a cross section of DC readers will turn off UAC, but I certainly hope that's not the case for the majority of PC users, especially the mom's and pop's who get themselves so easily into hot water.

however from what I now know after doing the work to updating our software products for Vista, is that there are some quite fundamental areas which must be addressed for software to work correctly on Vista.

--- End quote ---
Many of the "new requirements" for vista compatible software is actually just about writing clean and well-behaving applications; a lot of the "omfg vista breaks this!" would already be broken on NT4 if run from a non-administrator account...

The question is, really, "why bother". There's some interesting kernel changes, but they're swamped down by the rest of the system (okay, turn off Aero, tweak the install, substitute blackbox and xplorer^2 and it should be bearable), and there's the added DRM and driver paranoia.

The two big selling points would be DX10 and suppot for hybrid flash drives, both which I can't see any real technical reasons for not being supported on XP. We'll probably even begin to see applications that are artificially limited to run on Vista, even though they'd run fine on XP (like one of the Age Of Whatever games that had no problems running on Win2k, after reversers patched out the XP checks).


--- End quote ---

With the step to XP a lot more hardware "just worked". With Vista that has happened again, as witnessed above. This on its own is a very good reason to use Vista. With my few days of playing I felt Vista was easier to use and things seemed more logical. Again a plus for all users.

Another very important area I didn't really mention is the new IE7 Protected Mode when running on Vista. This locks down the Browser and should make it nigh impossible for malicious code and web sites to screw up your PC. This has to be a major source of problems for many users and should dramatically reduce problems people face.

MrCrispy:
We should really look at Vista as a new kernel with a lot of improvements under the hood, most of which manage to completely disappear by the time you get to the UI. Microsoft Server products, which apparently don't have to go thru the marketing bastardization process quite so much, are uniformly excellent. Win2k3 and the upcoming Longhorn server are both really neat.

Give Vista about 6-12 months. SP1 will be out and most everyone will be on it and thats when people will start bashing XP as 'quite inferior'. Same thing happens with every MS OS - Win9x, NT, XP :)

steve_rb:
I'd rather to look at the face of the beautifull girl in the icon of your post rather than vista. Who is she? Why people don't belive whoever created such a beautifull creatures is able to creat much more pretier than the most preterier woman on the earth and who don't want to marry  such creatures?

Let leave everything (vista, computers, money, life, ... ) and think about the very first moment our eyes will grasp such a beautifull angels no one can imagin.

surry guys I couldn't help myself thinking about angels which are prepared and ready for all those who are true belivers.


 :-*

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