windows vista?

[diesel]

has anyone used this o/s yet? i just bought a new pc and its coming packaged with it. im worried its not going to work well with non-MS apps like zonealarm and other stuff that i use. anyone?

[Phrazz]

I've heard and read Very Bad Things about Vista. It's a CPU hog, is buggy, has problems with Java-based apps/sites and little has been ported to it so far. I bet most freeware/shareware won't work, either. Computerworld (usually pro-Bill Gates) also seems reluctant (various articles about those making decisions to adopt or not...most are waiting right now). Oh yeah, it also is likely to have some giant security holes that won't be found out for many months after it is released.

I would not use this for a year or two (or more). What do you need in Vista anyways?

The EU contends that Vista continues also the unfair (illegal) bundling practices, which is still in courts in Europe. The US got weak at the knees and I think Massachusetts is the only continuing lawsuit against Microsoft.

If you didn't get your new PC yet you should reconsider. XP should be fine.

If I was an IT manager and I valued my job, I wouldn't move to Vista or migrate my people to Vista for 12 months. I'd sit and wait," said Andy Walker, a technology columnist and author of an upcoming help book on Windows Vista.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070129/tc_ ... doption_dc

Microsoft is forcing people to use Vista because they spent so much money on it and they want their 6 billion back fast.

And here's a component of Vista that will lead to crash 'n' burn (or giant security holes):

http://news.com.com/Why+Microsoft+is+wr ... 23924.html

They don't call it "the bleeding edge" for nothing.

[diesel]

yeah i've read some lukewarm reviews too. some glitz, but not much new content. i might just play around with it and see if i like it. i have my xp cd lying around somewhere and can just reformat if i want.

[headnugg]

This seems to be along the same lines as don't buy a car the first year it's on the market......

Wait a year for them to get reviews and critiques and iron out all the bugs....

[Dan]

i recently migrated to a Mac yet i also have windows xp installed in both a partition and in emulation software.

I love it, mac osx is a powerful operating system that can run a full version of windows inside it very efficiently.


vista is going to be treacherous. I fix computers as a side job, I was not planning on purchasing vista but I think I will be getting much more issues to fix with vista, not sure what I am going to do!

-dan

[JEFFfromNC]

FYI, for anyone thinking about upgrading to the new Vista OS.

Vista crippled by content protection
By Chris Mellor, Techworld

PC users around the globe may find driver software is stopped from working by Vista if it detects unauthorised content access. Peter Guttman, a security engineering researcher at New Zealand's university of Auckland, has written _A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection_ <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... a_cost.txt>) . He reckons Vista is trying to achieve the impossible by protecting access to premium content. Users will find their PCs' compromised by the persistent and continuous content access checks carried out by Vista.
Gutman thinks these checks and the associated increased in multimedia card hardware costs make Vista's content protection specification 'the longest suicide note in history.'

The core elements in Vista have been designed to protect access to premium content. The design requires changes in multimedia cards before Microsoft will support them for Vista use. Content that is protected by digital rights management (DRM) must be sent across protected interfaces. This means cards using non-protected interfaces can't be used by Vista PCs.

Disabling and degrading
Vista is disadvantaging high-end audio and video systems by openly disabling devices. The most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) which doesn't have any content protection. It must be disabled in a Vista system when DRM-protected content is being played. Equally a high-end component video interface (YPbPr) also has no content protection and must be disabled when protected video is being played.

- Vista covertly degrades playback quality. PC voice communications rely on automatic echo cancellation (AEC) in order to provide acceptable voice
quality. This requires feeding back a sample of the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, which isn't permitted by Vista's content protection scheme. This lowers PC voice communication quality because echo affects will still be present.

- This overt and covert degrading of quality is dynamic, not consistent.
Whenever any audio derived from premium content is played on a Vista PC, the disabling of output devices and downgrading of signal quality takes place. If the premium content then fades away the outputs are re-enabled and signal quality climbs back up. Such system behaviour today indicates a driver error. With Vista it will be normal behaviour.

- Vista has another playback quality reduction measure. It requires that
'any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality.' If this happens with a medical imaging application then artifacts introduced by the constrictor can 'cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening.'

CPU cycle guzzling
The O/S will use much more of a PC's CPU resource because 'Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual ... Vista polls video devices on each video frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still as they should be.' Also 'In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content
sent to video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128.'

Encryption/decryption is known to be CPU-intensive
Device drivers in Vista are required to poll their underlying hardware every 30ms - thirty times a second - to ensure that everything appears correct. It is apparent that Vista is going to use very much more of a PC's resources than previous versions of Windows and degrade multi-media playback quality unless the user has purchased premium content from a Microsoft-approved resource.

Such over-reaching by Microsoft could prove to be the catalyst needed to
spur increased takeup of Linux desktop operating software, or of Apple's Mac OS.

[etahn]

People are still running windows?

[diesel]

i recently migrated to a Mac yet i also have windows xp installed in both a partition and in emulation software.

I love it, mac osx is a powerful operating system that can run a full version of windows inside it very efficiently.

did you use that boot camp beta to run this?

long story short, i canceled my order and now im eyeing up the macs. a bit pricey but i've heard good things. i need to do some research.

[harrymcq]

I've been a mac guy since '84 or '85 and though I'll admit that apple had some bad years in there in the 90's since OS X things have been pretty awesome. And now as Dan said with the Intel chips in the new Macs you can run XP totally native (boot camp beta, soon to be part of Leopard - 10.5) which is good for games in particular or anything else that needs low level hardware access. For most folks though Parallels is a MUCH better option to run XP on the Mac because you don't have to re-boot and it integrates the Windows apps pretty seamlessly into the Mac interface.

Of course you'll need to run virus protection on your XP install(s) even though Boot Camp and Parallels are pretty good about protecting the OS X parts. It's also not a bad idea to run anti-virus on the Mac even though only about 10% of my clients do and I don't (I am an Apple certified consultant by trade) because even though there really aren't any OS X viruses in the wild at this point and OS X is a more secure system it is only a matter of time before we do start getting some attacks. Also running anti-virus on the mac is a nice thing for your windows friends because it will keep you from unknowingly forwarding a virus-laden email. Right now Intego's anti-virus is my top choice for OS X, Norton messes with too many programs for my tastes.

That said if I was buying a PC and had to run Windows (I would much rather run Ubuntu Linux or some other Linux) I would buy one with XP or if it came with Vista I would wipe the disk and install XP. Security aside what Vista does to A/V for DRM purposes as Jeff's post describes is sickening.

[harrymcq]

And not to be a sickening Mac evangelist but the notion that Apples are more expensive than Dells isn't necessarily true. (though people seem happy to discuss it ad infinitum)

http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2006/04 ... le-vs-dell

[Dan]

Since i have "switched" i have loved it. Sure they are pricey and they are considered sealed machines but they are very powerful. I do have the bootcamp beta and the windows drivers are working great. only draw back is Parallels will recognize my external hd but will not mount to it. However i can access it through a shared folder that mounts to OSX so i can get at the filles just a little meandering.

I have come to realize that i only use a few specific programs that are windows only, so i am able to run parallels for those. Bootcamp is when i am doing alot of work on adobe audition to manipulate audio but for the most part its just for kicks.

I am sure diesel you will love the mac. The GUI is just so much fun. I have crashed the mac a handfull of times but it was only during parallels not reconginzing my external.

go to your nearest apple store and try to say your enrolled in a college you get a whole heck of alot of moooney off!

-Dan

[diesel]

you can get a discount if you have a college id? i still have mine somewhere.

so tell me more about having problems with your external hd. i just got one. so the only way to use it is through this 'parallel' thing? what is this? is it an application that enables you to run xp at the same time as the o/s x?

[fourthaye]

it all depends upon how you format the drive, one should be able to format it (using the mac disc utility) so that it will be recognized on both win/osx

[lumpy]

In addition to a student discount, the apple.com store offers refurbished machines (stock updated all the time...but maybe mostly on Thursday am) for significant discounts.

It has all the warranties of a brand new apple, and is thoroughly cleaned/inspected/tested before being shipped out. No fancy packaging, but seriously great deals.

Also, while my girlfriend is a grad student, there was no student ID check when purchasing online, which gave a big discount on the 3 year extended applecare.

[Dan]

Diesel I will clarify. Mac OSX can read/write my external FAT32 hard drive. It also can read my windows NTFS partition for bootcamp. I also made a third share partition on my hard drive, i had to use the diskutil command in terminal to properly do it, bit tedious but worth it.

My external mounts in OSX perfectly but parrallels is emulation software. Basically you install a windows (or linux what have you) into parallels and then while running Mac OSX it runs booting up windows as if it were just another application. you can switch to make it full view to appear as if you were running windows natively. However this might just be me but my usb2.0 external hard drive will not mount specifically in parallels. There is a "network neighborhood" link that lists Mac OSX opperating system as a file. to get at my external hard drive i just navigate to /volumes/external simple

in bootcamp, meaning running windows natively everything works fine, the hard drive mounts perfect applications run, no issues!

i hope that helps


-dan