Author Topic: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware (Read 30,674 times)

zridling · « **on:** April 04, 2007, 02:57 AM »

It took me a while, but I finally made the plunge and replaced an older computer that I'll turn into a dedicated Linux machine. I even tried OS X for a couple of weeks and apparently I'm the only person left who wasn't really impressed. Customizing the software can mostly be done in a day, but finishing those customizations always takes me another week. As for Vista, it wants to eat whatever speed and power you can feed it, which means your next system should include nothing less than the following:

Vista x64 version (among the several, Vista Business is the one I like best among Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate). Get the 64-bit OEM version for half price;
Core 2 Duo (or Quad-core if you're rich) or AMD-64 chip with damn fast motherboard;
Get a well-reviewed videocard, big and fast as crapzilla. You don't have to get the most expensive card, just the best one for the value;
Buy a case you can easily add and remove components from. If not, start modding with lots of big-assed fans;
Buy a 22" monitor, or two. They cost between $280-$360 and are worth every penny. The 24" screens are great, but not worth the cost difference.

<img src="http://www.thegsblog.com/i/computer-inside.jpg" />

Throw in a couple of 300G-1T HDs with it, and hey, you've got a system that will hold you for 3-4 years at the least, depending on how much multimedia/gaming you use it for. If you haven't bought Vista yet, good for you! In many ways, it's a stupid step-bitch of an OS, and Vista Explorer is the utmost idiotic mess you'll come across. The biggest difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions is bus speed, of course, but-that shows directly when copying or moving files. In Vista-32, it can be slow as hell; in Vista-64, you say "Oh yea." But you'll want the new OS with a new system, and an easy way to prep yourself is to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/0735622701&link_code=as2&camp=1789&tag=bottcom-20&creative=9325">buy Windows Vista Inside Out</a> by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson for only $30 at Amazon. They show you how similar it is to XP and how different it is, and out of the eight Vista books I've read, it's the one I keep going back to.

Finally, don't ignore Linux. There are several very hot distros right now. Among them are <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop">Ubuntu</a>;, <a href="http://www.freespire.org/">Freespire</a>;, and <a href="http://www.pclinuxos.com/news.php">PCLinuxOS</a>;. You can easily <a href="http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2094892904.html">dual-boot Vista</a> (although Windows always wants to be the first OS), and with time, you might come to wean yourself from the Microsoft teat.

Darwin · « **Reply #1 on:** April 04, 2007, 03:06 AM »

Quote

I even tried OS X for a couple of weeks and apparently I'm the only person left who wasn't really impressed.

No, join the club - we've got jackets...

Darwin · « **Reply #2 on:** April 04, 2007, 03:08 AM »

PS Not yelling from the rooftops about OS X's superiority and Steven Jobs' genius is modern day heresy. Just warning you...

zridling · « **Reply #3 on:** April 04, 2007, 03:15 AM »

Oh trust me, OS X has a lot going on, but for the video editing I was doing (or tried to), it didn't win me over. Unlike Vista, there is excitement in the Apple camp, that's for sure.

cthorpe · « **Reply #4 on:** April 06, 2007, 05:52 AM »

Quote from: Darwin on April 04, 2007, 03:06 AM

Quote
I even tried OS X for a couple of weeks and apparently I'm the only person left who wasn't really impressed.

No, join the club - we've got jackets...

There are jackets now? Where's mine?

f0dder · « **Reply #5 on:** April 08, 2007, 11:50 AM »

I installed Vista on my AMD64x2 4400+, 2gig ram, GeForce 7600GT system... on a 2x160 GB raid-stripe that's "plenty fast". Following Microsoft's WOW!!!!1111 campaign, here goes:

1) WOW, it still has to reboot multiple times during installation.
2) WOW, screen flickers and displays weird characters, then goes blank for extended periods during installation, but unlike 2k and xp installs, there's no warning about this.
3) WOW, it boots almost as fast as XP after installation.
4) WOW, in spite of the hardware-accelerated GUI, it feels no faster/smoother than XP (and some system apps are even slower, because of the way their UI is done).
5) WOW, applications start up slower than on XP (might improve after running it for X days because of prefetching and whatnot, but still lame that initial speed is bad).
6) WOW, IE7 and the new explorer in Vista are slow compared to IE6 and old explorer.
7) WOW, the Aero interface and flip 3d are useless.
8) WOW, it took five minutes from inserting an usb flash drive until Vista would let me access it.
9) WOW, the UAC is annoying.
10) WOW, it's even more hype and less value than I imagined.

Too bad, really. There's supposedly some pretty decent changes in the kernel (like I/O priorities), but everything gets bogged down by the most heavy and useless GUI that Microsoft has come up with to date. Yay. When the base OS doesn't fly on the hardware mentioned above, something went really, really, really sour.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #6 on:** April 08, 2007, 11:57 AM »

Ok, now that i've got a completelly unpartial mini-review of vista by f0dder, i'm definitelly sure i won't install Vista any soon. Specially given the fact that my laptop is 4 times less powerful than that computer!!

f0dder · « **Reply #7 on:** April 08, 2007, 12:05 PM »

Heh, "completely impartial" should probably be "fascistly biased" instead. But at least I did run it on real hardware and spent a few hours with it. Also keep in mind that other people have far higher sluggishness threshold than I do, and thus might be able to accept Vista.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #8 on:** April 08, 2007, 12:28 PM »

Yeah, the "completelly impartial" part, was definitelly ironical

Well... I see your point about the "sluggishness threeshold", but you also have to notice that if Vista gets "slightly sluggish" in you machine, it'd look "tremendously DEAD" on my 512mb of memory and 4200rpm 80gb disk

nosh · « **Reply #9 on:** April 08, 2007, 01:13 PM »

I pity the uninformed fools here who think Vista is no good!
Vista is an AWESOME OS....FOR MY DOG TO POOP ON! $:-\$

Jokes apart - I really feel for the people who've shelled out good money to upgrade to this travesty. MS needs to seriously rethink their OS design strategy... unless it's one big Wintel conspiracy, which seems really likely. Either that or the engineers at MS are smoking something really bad.

dk70 · « **Reply #10 on:** April 08, 2007, 03:27 PM »

You need SUPERSITE for Windows http://www.winsupersite.com/vista/ - give in.

Windows Classic is still available f0dder. No need to submit to MS defaults. If you also disable/tweak new gadgets I would think you have a slightly improved XP - and will be happy with purchase

DX10 games will take care of what is left of hmmm - well after you have bought faster video card and game developers are done with DX10 magic.

Crying about buggy drivers, lack of drivers, strange incompatibilities, having to wait for program updates was also reality in 2000 and 2001

All know it is just the way OS upgrades works. Now getting used to periode, hyping over. Many times worse for 64bit Vista Ive read. Comes with 32bit retail right? Get it that way if necessary.

Only problem I can relate to without having tried Vista for a long periode is no support for more than 4gb of ram. Then assume all buy those new hard disks with tons of ram onboard, use flashdrives or what? Could be a problem for some, hopefully not MS way of promoting 64bit. Some logic in that limit? A "feature" of 32bit?

Im ever so happy with XP and plan to stick with it for 1-2 years more. Then possibly dump Windows all together and go linux - which will have matured even more at that time. Gaming interest can change that plan unfortunately. Too much "Vista only" from this or that software might get me annoyed enough to upgrade but I dont think situation is comparable to W9x vs XP. Hope not.

f0dder · « **Reply #11 on:** April 08, 2007, 03:36 PM »

Windows classic is available, yeah, but MS (and all the fanboys) were promoting Aero as super slick and super fast.

I'm not crying about lack of drivers etc., if I had been doing that I would have mentioned how games seem to drop 10-15fps in performance as compared to XP... I certainly do hope that's just a driver issue.

32-bit x86 isn't really limited to 4GB of ram, but it requires special OS (and application) support to utilize more in 32bit mode, and you still only have a 32bit address space, where you must map "windows" (hah!) of memory.

I'll certainly stick to XP as long as I can, might give Vista another go once they get SP1 or SP2 out. I just hope games won't be going DX10-only for a while.

Tweaking Vista is, at the moment, way more bother than it'll be worth, especially until drivers mature, and somebody finds a way to disable all the DRM and additional driver signing crap. There's some good work in progress, but it's not all the way there yet.

Darwin · « **Reply #12 on:** April 08, 2007, 03:43 PM »

Quote

Tweaking XP is, at the moment, way more bother than it'll be worth, especially until drivers mature

Do you mean Vista?

Darwin · « **Reply #13 on:** April 08, 2007, 03:45 PM »

Now... I *thought* I had posted in response to

Quote

Oh trust me, OS X has a lot going on, but for the video editing I was doing (or tried to), it didn't win me over. Unlike Vista, there is excitement in the Apple camp, that's for sure.

but clearly haven't...

Just wanted to say that I like OS X but not enough to make the switch. I just don't think that it is a quantum leap over XP (let's leave Vista out of the discussion as I've yet to play with the beast - other than noodling around with it in computer shops). Apple needs a better file manager for a start... The hype REALLY turns me off, too (bought a Samsung mp3 player instead of an iPod for this reason). I'd add the smugness and condescending attitude on the part of long term users and converts but for the fact that I've seen plenty of the same from the Windows camp as well (and have been guilty of it myself)... Having used both, I don't see vast superority in one over the other and, knowing windows well and having accumulated the software that I need over the years, I don't see the point of switching. The cost of doing so is high and my experience with both Macs I own (an original iMac with OS 9.2 on it and an iBook running OS X 10.2) is that they are no less prone to problems than my Win 98, 2k and XP machines.

My favourite comment on OS X crashing came from a CNET forum I was reading. After trawling through a couple of pages of diehard Mac fanatics going on and on about how stable OS X is and how any XP machine that they have tried crashes for them, there developed a side thread about OS X crashing for some regular Windows users that had tried it/used it in conjunction with Windows. The thread culminated with the observation, on the part of an OS X user, that if the OS was crashing, it reflects on the ignorance of the user, rather than any inherent shortcomings in the OS! The irony!

I agree with dk70 and f0dder about sticking with XP for the foreseeable future. I regret not buying a notebook before Christmas with XP preinstalled (I assumed that XP machines would still be available when Vista came out, but can see that I'll have to order a computer from DELL or something to buy a notebook with it preinstalled). My notebook is aging and I'd like to upgrade the hardware but don't want to deal with Vista... (don't own a standalone copy of XP that I can "downgrade" to). Linux may be the way to go. At least I'm only going to be facing a learning curve, not a learning curve coupled with a massive investment in software (to run on expensive hardware) to make the switch.

MrCrispy · « **Reply #14 on:** April 09, 2007, 10:30 PM »

I use Vista Enterprise at work on a dual Xeon (quad core) box with 3GB RAM, and its the best OS I've ever used. Going back to XP at home feels a little dated. However, this is absolutely useless for me as a guide to how Vista will run on my home pc, since the work pc is such an unholy beast!

btw, Vista uses a lot of RAM due to SuperFetch. You don't want memory lying unused anyway. Most of the slowdown comes from the indexing as well as the constant drm and integrity checks that Vista keeps running.

zridling · « **Reply #15 on:** April 09, 2007, 10:57 PM »

About the only printers that HP submitted drivers for Vista (32 & 64-bit) were for its color Laserjets. Go figure. Their website now says they're working to get the rest out by July... maybe. Maybe users could do without printers, but no business could, which is very odd, since HP is the leading computer reseller these days — "Buy our new Vista-enabled computer, but the printer that comes with it is DOA." Oy.

Frankly, I just don't like Vista. Here's are three UI reasons that drive me nuts:

(1) Move/Replace dialog is huge and confusing:

(2) Save As dialog has no memory of its settings, no matter how you setup Vista Explorer:

(3) Vista Explorer is a garbled mess. This is as pretty as I can make it, and it's still useless:

(4) Finally, here's the Add Files dialog, which is self-defeating:

I could go on, but I posted another topic on things to disable right off the bat when installing Vista.

MrCrispy · « **Reply #16 on:** April 10, 2007, 12:00 AM »

You have to remember the design process for Vista -

1. build a brand new 3d accelerated graphics stack that allows video compositing, real time previews and is truly next gen

2. expose it as only a bunch of transparent window borders. Never mind that Vista can do everything all those Beryl/Compiz videos can do and more. DO NOT expose any of this functionality as a public API because users or 3rd party devs will NEVER want to take advantage of it.

3. Dumbify the UI as much as possible. Blow up all icons and dialog boxes to twice their normal size. Hide all information that might confuse a user (if said user was a caveman). LESS IS MORE !!!

4. Ditch every single concept your research dept came up with for innovative file management and presentation, instead scramble to add security checks to everything and rewrite all of Vista in unmanaged code. Focus 99% of Explorer's dev effort on the breadcrumb bar and 'stacks', which 99% of users will never even get to see, much less use.

I am only half kidding. Vista is a sad reflection of what could have been. Believe ot or not, under that very pretty and mostly functionality-challenged shell lies a relatively good OS.

Darwin · « **Reply #17 on:** April 10, 2007, 12:04 AM »

Quote

Linux may be the way to go. At least I'm only going to be facing a learning curve, not a learning curve coupled with a massive investment in software (to run on expensive hardware) to make the switch.

Woo hoo... quoting myself! Just to clarify, I'm perfectly happy with XP Pro, although I have at various times run both dedicated linux machines (Mandrake 8 and 10) and dual boot configurations (my employer's IT department made me remove the linux partition before they'd let me onto the college network). With sites like this as a guide, making the switch seems less and less an ordeal, though.

zridling · « **Reply #18 on:** April 10, 2007, 12:36 AM »

MrCrispy, you make the point I meant to. What Vista leaves me with is a feeling of great disappointment — YOU TOOK FIVE YEARS AND THIS IS ALL YOU CAME UP WITH? And when you read through my little Vista Tips post, you'll see how deep the Control Panel hole goes. I read a CNET critique of Vista and their biggest gripe was that they didn't put Search on the desktop — whaaa? (It's on the Ultimate version, but still just one click away in the Start menu for all other versions.)

Darwin, I've been pushing Linux on my blog. I'm dual-booting now, but hope to wean myself off Windows completely in three years, if not sooner. Hell, I could do it now, but I'm not ready. By 2008, that effort will be a lot easier to do with easier, systematic installation of applications coming along with an exponential leap in proprietary driver support. It's also not really difficult to dual-boot Vista with a Linux distro and access NTFS files on a Vista-formatted drive now. Also, THANKS for the Linux Equivalent Project link. How'd I miss that!

Darwin · « **Reply #19 on:** April 10, 2007, 02:37 AM »

I've been playing around with Live distros of Linux (Saboyan and Kororaa) and they are pretty slick (though not so much fun to run on my geriatric notebook) and I most likely will wind up wit a dual boot machine when I have to replace said aging computer. The ONLY thing keeping me wed to the idea of keeping Windows around (and accessible via a skookum machine) is software that I need for work that I don' *think* I can find Linux equivalents for. Come to think of it, the damned software vendoer charges for POINT release updates and neither my version nor the current one are Vista ready, so I migft as well buy a bigger harddrive and dual boot this veteran... Right, off to do my due diligence on a honkin' big 5400 rpm notebook drive. Whatever happened to the 7200 rpm drives? I've only seen one notebook with one installed by the manufacturer and haven't really noticed much of a buzz surrounding them... I'll add googling for reviews to my To Do list. Is the stream of consciousness thing working for anyone else? No? I'll shut up now.

zridling · « **Reply #20 on:** April 10, 2007, 05:24 AM »

Yep, me too. If UltraEdit and NewsLeecher had Linux versions, it'd be a lot easier. Sure, Crossover and Wine help, but it's not the same. I spend my day in UltraEdit. Meanwhile, in the background, I'm downloading crap day and night on Usenet and bittorrent. The great thing is that Linux continues to make persistent strides and more people use various Linux distros on the desktop than Apple's OS X, but you'd never know because that doesn't make the stockholders happy to know such a thing! Besides, computing ain't real unless you're doing it with only one mouse button.

f0dder · « **Reply #21 on:** April 10, 2007, 05:59 AM »

Quote from: "MrCrispy"

btw, Vista uses a lot of RAM due to SuperFetch. You don't want memory lying unused anyway. Most of the slowdown comes from the indexing as well as the constant drm and integrity checks that Vista keeps running.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM, sure thing, that's what the BSD folks have been going by for ages. I'm not sure SuperFetch is the only reason why Vista swallows a lot of RAM, though... the point is that you should adapt to the amount of available RAM - even XP runs pretty well with 512meg.

I don't think the Linux or OS X revolution is going to happen anytime soon, so sooner or later I'll probably be forced to go the Vista route. With blackbox, explorer^2 and some manual tweaking, it might just be bearable. I'm going to hate the crappy new save-as dialogs and whatnot, though >_<.

Again, it's pretty sad they messed all the gui parts up so much, added all the drm crap, and made the system so hardware greedy for no reason at all - a lot of aspects about the kernel changes sound pretty nice.

zridling: try having a look at SlickEdit for linux, it's appearantly the bee's knee's. I find the UI pretty ugly though, enough that I'm never going to appreciate it's power. Or whatever.

JeffK · « **Reply #22 on:** April 10, 2007, 11:32 PM »

I'm installing Vista (Business) on my relatively new laptop today. Wish me luck.

Jeff

Darwin · « **Reply #23 on:** April 10, 2007, 11:56 PM »

Good luck, Jeff! FWIW, what I've seen/experienced with Vista on computers in shops (this is extremely limited exposure to Vista, I admit) seems more integrated and impressive than I recall XP seeming when it first came out (I waited two and a half years to upgrade to XP).

Let us know how you make out!

Hirudin · « **Reply #24 on:** April 11, 2007, 11:25 AM »

Add files dialog? What's that..?

I'll be upgrading soon to Vista Business. I got a copy on eBay for $80 (a copy that the seller got for free BTW), it's supposedly the same as the retail version... For anyone interested, I also got a copy of Premium OEM for $35... So, if you do your shopping right you can get a copy for very little compared to the insane retail price. Ultimate doesn't seem to be much less than the OEM version on Newegg... you could prolly get a copy for $165 if you look hard enough.

I installed a trial on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500, 2.4 ghz P4, 1g RAM, nVidia 4200 "go" video) by installing without a key. There aren't drivers for my video card, so everything is excruciatingly slow. Like, I tried Solitaire; it took about 3 minutes to manage to move a red 4 onto a black 5. It took so long because if I clicked, then moved the mouse, it would sometimes click somewhere else. I turned on the CPU/RAM gauge widget... Sitting at idle the CPU never got below 7%, and would spike to 60% or so every few seconds... funny.

After I install it on my desktop (with much better specs) I'm going to give Aero a chance. I like the idea of transparency and stuff, I think it'll be neat! Using 3D tech for a 2D interface has been a good idea for a long time, Yoshi's Island anyone? I'm glad it's finally come to the computer world.
I look forward to using 64 bit, though I'm not sure what I think it'll do differently. All I know, is when the SNES was coming out, we all knew that it was 16 bit, and that made it better!
So far, I also like the widgets. Of course something similar is available already for XP (I think Yahoo has some program, and there's others) but it wont come close to being universal until it's included in the OS. I plan to have the widgets on my second monitor, always on top (that's gotta be a choice) and transparrent.

I very glad they put all the versions onto every DVD! Well, sorta. There's 2 different DVDs, a 32 bit version and a 64 bit version. The weird thing is, the image of the 32 bit DVD is only 2.49 gigs. Surely the 64 bit version isn't too large to fit onto a 7.4 gig DVD!?!? Maybe they're trying to avoid any possible compatibility issues with dual layer DVD ROMs? The very real advantage I see to this is those of us who want to buy a Laptop can format and reinstall Windows immediately. Goodbye stupid AOL crap. Goodbye stupid HP/Dell/Sony software! Goodbye being tied down to discs that don't include the latest service packs... well, for the most part.

As for the complaints above...
Yeah, I can't believe it still restarts twice... it didn't blink and stuff for me, but I also wasn't playing that much attention.

Who cares about boot speed? I mean, sure if you restart 5 times or more in an hour it might be annoying, but I can't imagine many of us do that very often. I think people bitch about the boot time because it's so quantitative, anyone can use a stopwatch and see that one takes longer to boot than the other, but I doubt many people can explain why it matters so much to them that one is a whopping 10 seconds slower.

Programs are starting more slow than XP? Wha? How is this possible? We can all be sure that if this is an actual problem it'll be resolved soon. I mean, it's mostly a function of how quickly the data can be read from the HDD and put on the RAM isn't it? Vista isn't making our HDDs slower is it?

IE sucks anyway. I've heard that Firefox used to cause BSODs, but you can be sure that'll end soon (if it hasn't already). Explorer has always sucked, I actually think it looks better now (but I'll be putting Directory Opus on there anyway).

I agree that dialog is huge, but I think it's fairly simple. I always forget that by renaming the file in the dialog is how you activate the "rename" button in Opus. This has all 3 common options in the same dialog... certainly it's not confusing?
Also, it looks like the dialog also tells you how many files the "apply to all" option is going to effect. A useful piece of information!

I think the problem you're having with the Save As dialog is probably more related to the program than Vista. This problem is also very common in XP. In media players if you choose to add a "file" to your playlist one dialog appears and starts in folder "A", choose to add a "folder" to the playlist and a DIFFERENT dialog opens in folder "B"...

That explorer shot looks fine to me, similar to XP...

How come "DRM" and "drivers" are always brought up together regarding Vista? Don't tell me there are driverz (like "warez") out there... Really, is there DRM with anything except entertainment media? Why are you buying music or videos. Why are you consorting with people who buy music or videos? If you can't watch Lost because you can't get a copy without DRM that's a problem with you, not the OS...

And a couple complaints of my own...
Have I missed something? Since when is searching on your own computer so important? I use the windows search maybe once every 2 months... who cares?

It sure is lame they removed the cool new FAT/NTFS/whatever thing they hyped the shit out of at the beginning! Of course, Linux is barely catching up with NTFS, I guess Linux users should be rejoicing...

Is the stream of consciousness thing working for anyone else? No? I'll shut up now.