http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20943
It comes.
My one wish is that the support for multiple monitors is a lot better than it is in 2k/XP.
I have absolutely no interest in upgrading. Most of the security upgrades were already included in XP Service Pack 2, IE7 is available for XP (not that I’d use it instead of Firefox anyway), and as a non-PC-gamer, DirectX10 is meaningless to me. There’s nothing that really justifies the upgrade (better file search capability? Google’s got it already) and the ridiculous memory and graphics requirements to run it fully are… well, ridiculous. A lot of hoopla over nothing much, I’m afraid.
I’m a PC gamer, but I’m not sure I want to upgrade. DX10 sounds cool, but I honestly don’t know much about it or how much it will really improve my gaming experience.
I’ve also heard mixed messages about Vista’s system reqs: some say it’s a total hog, but testers dispute these claims and says it runs just fine.
Microsoft will try long and hard to find a way to force you to require Vista. I used/still use win2k for the last 7 or so years. It was like XP without all the hassle. The last year though, Microsoft has made a huge effort in making things incompatible with 2k, mainly the new media player and ie 7.0. Neither of those matter to me, except some hardware like tv tuners and mp3 players require the new media player. There are other options for the same hardware out there, but it still is a big hassle. I love my creative jukebox mp3 player. I’ve had it for like 5 years. I wanted to upgrade to a new creative player, but they all require the media player 9.
Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability to force something onto you that you don’t need.
Oh, I’m sure if I buy a new computer in two years it’ll come with Vista. But I ain’t upgrading my current one.
As for the system requirements, it is possible to run Vista with lower stats, but you’ll have to turn off the fancy graphics and a few other features.
Microsoft warrants its products for times between 5 and 10 years, which can be extended depending on the amount of people using a software and its importance. So basically, after some time, you get unsupported. That is not because they are evil or nasty or anything else, they’ve got to sell if they want to be a company and if they didn’t change the system, one day everybody would simply already have the system and they’d have no one to whom they could sell.
Now, there has been a lot of improvement from 2K to XP. Now, I’m not discussion imperfection of systems, because then someone might start on how Linux is better and all, I’m just comparing two versions of Windows.
One reason why XP is better than 2K, for example, is NX - “no execute” - which comes with SP2. It’s a technology that keeps the system safe from buffer overflow attacks. I don’t want to change the topic of the thread so I won’t mention every security feature that XP has over 2K, but the official documentation released for SP2 alone is over two hundreds page long. So don’t think that Windows 2000 is XP withouth a hassle, you’re actually more vulnerable than otherwise. This is only natural, since they will mostly focus on more recent products, including for reasons already written above.
Now, I know a handful of people who feel the same way about Windows 95 - 98 and 2000/XP. They simply never went too deep with computers, most even don’t have a USB or DVD drive, and all they do is working on Wordpad and play Solitaire, so they never felt like moving from these already long unsupported systems. They never gave themselves the time to check the differences between these systems, so nowadays they have to manually install drivers from CD’s whenever they want to use a different kind of device via the USB port, among a handful of other things that are simplified in more recent systems, so they feel it’s the best and more comfortable way to be. You see where I’m heading. You’re complaining about media player now, you’re going through some pain someday if you want to use lots of wi-fi devices, or if you want to get into an wireless network.
Vista will implement new goodies asides the ones already mentioned, though I recommend waiting a little more before upgrading. I’ll give it a couple of months more before I grab my copy, so there’s time for the any newly-discovered post-release bug to be fixed up and avoid some headache. I already have a license, though ^_^. edit: I have a license for each of the six (oaky, seven, I counted the Started Edition out) editions available, and I’m going for the Ultimate Edition install first.
AS for Vista requirements, think like this: it’s quite cheap and reasonable to get a high-end computer nowadays, and even Windows XP doesn’t go hard on the machine. I ran XP Pro with SP2 on a pentium 166 Mhz with 128 mb of Ram, so of course it’s like a feather for my current machine. It’s been like this for a while, and the current machine can run any system without giving too much resources for it (in the context of home PC’s).
What Vista does is the following: as long as your system’s resources aren’t being heavily used by your applications, it will try and milk every performance available from your parts, specially the video board. Why? For user experience! You don’t use more than 2 mb video memory with XP SP2, but if Vista sees no one is using the video board’s resources, it will grab it for itself and take you to an eyecandy’ed walk in the desktop. It will release these resources as soon as any program requires some, though.
And this is only if you allow it to do so. Vista has a special UI called Aero, which is the one everybody talks about and is so performance-greedy. Turn Aero off and it’s not even close to heavy for even non-highend machines. For instance, last time I saw, it’ll run on a 600 to 800 Mhz processor, 256 mb Ram machine. Heck, Aero itself asks for a 1.0 Ghz with 1 Gb of Ram. I have triple that for processor and that much Ram, coupled with 128 mb video memory (which is already outdated by today’s standards) on a machine which didn’t cost me more than 500 bucks, so I couldn’t care less.
As for the thing people are calling Browser Wars (at least they call it so here), in the battle between Internet Explorer and Firefox, my opinion is that Opera wins.
Another edit: They’re saying that Windows Vienna/Blackcomb is going to be even better. Vista is just an intermediary between XP SP2 and Vienna.
That doesn’t really bother me because I tweak the hell outta XP (and eventually vista) to disable the eye-candy. I like my cut-and-dry desktop, sans huge shiny icons for My Network Places. I can’t tell you how much I loathe XP’s default theme. But I disable this stuff primarily to free up every last bit of CPU and RAM for other more important things.
In other words, Ren just said that Vista was the next Windoes Millenium Edition. Does anyone else know how bad ME was?
I’ve said it before and I’m more than happy to say it again: Vista is pure rubbish dressed up in eyecandy. They’ve made a few improvements to security, sure, but that’s not something that should be introduced in a new release, it should be introduced in upgrades and service packs. It’s still Windows, despite the improvements they’ve implemented from MacOSX and Linux.
It isn’t worth the money, especially not the fortune you’d have to dish out for Ultimate.
I agree. Upgrading my mac to Leopard will be remarkably cheaper than having to upgrade Windows. I don’t know how Vista will be but I anticipate it will be like XP and cost 300-400 + taxes. That’s absurd.
That’s the reason why I use Linux. I don’t have $300-400 to spend on an OS.
The only reason I still use Windows is because of gaming. Otherwise I’d totally run Linux.
I have all licenses for free. No, they are legit. I got them via MSDN Academic Aliance.
There is some talk about making a special sale for those who wish to upgrade. Unnoficially, there is talk about people being able to upgrade from Vista to Vienna for free.
Vista is not being forced down your throaths so I don’t see the reason to bitch so much about it. Don’t like its cost? Use some other system instead then, there are hundreds of Linux distros and many other free OS’s. Think it’s not an improvement? Don’t upgrade now. What makes one version of Windows better than its previous one is not one big point of change, but rather a lot of small things that make the system easier to use and safer. Of course you can’t backport every safety measure to older systems (which is why Windows 2000 didn’t get NX while XP got), and for the easiness, a lot of things that have to come as patches for older Windows are native to Vista - Like .NET 3.0 and everything Live! related.
Like I said before, I know people who have been thinking like “it’s just the same thing with a shinier user interface” and are using Windows 98 up to this day. They end up missing things like better USB support, Windows Update, a much better user account system etc.
Specifically on Vista’s case, everybody is talking solely about Aero and the drop of WinFX, and skipping the point of, for example, XML-defined windows, Live! Gadgets, and the fact that you can use USB drives as extra RAM memory. I don’t see many people talking about these, which are superb improvements. Specifically the extra memory thing, I don’t see it being put into a SP3 for Windows XP, both because its support time is coming close to an end, and because it’d be a hassle to backport.
I am not a pro-Microsoft fanatic, I’m just looking at facts. Everybody’s speculating about the system being trashy and just an excuse to get easy money for no improvement, but few people here have tested it, let alone read any documentation. I tested the Release Candidate 1 version and I liked it. Runs smoother than you’d think, considerably lighter than the previous betas (which I also saw, though I didn’t go deep into them).
Ren, I think you are this forum’s resident microsoft fanatic.
What are XML defined windows and what is so great about them, besides the seamless mergling of our GUI with a more modern buzzword? Weren’t people who were into this stuff already customizing windows using non-microsoft programs that hooked into the gui?
What are Live! Gadgets, besides being a way to confuse us as we try to parse sentences containing that name?
We could already use USB drives the same as a hard drive, so I guess they just took it a step further and made it so you can put swapfiles onto them? Or is the access speed of a USB device actually competitive with RAM? What if they get disconnected while the system is running?! I’m guessing anyone using that feature should be careful about that.
Hearing that the average version is gonna be like 300, and the high end one like 500, I wonder what its gonna do to new computers that have gotten quite cheep lately (eg decent ones for 200, and pretty good gameing desktops for under 1000)…
The other thing, as meantioned above, most of the stuff will run on XP, and will have to be offered for compatibility reasons as patches/upgrades/features to XP. DirectX10 being one of them (and probably the bit Im most interested in)
Thank you, though I cheer up Google more.
Makes customization much easier. It doesn’t take a couple of neurons to be able to do some serious modding of even a huge application in under a quarter of an hour.
What are Live! Gadgets, besides being a way to confuse us as we try to parse sentences containing that name?
They’re small programs that you can add to your system to customize it. As of today, the smashing majority of them are made by third party people using the Windows SDK. You can use them for a large variety of things. They range from utilities like battery monitors for laptops, RSS feed catchers, performance meters etc. to small windows games to UI customizing goodies like the infamous Gadget Watch which used to be a favorite among people some time ago to the downright silly ones that are not worthy mentioning but rather checking out by oneself.
Must see:
http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?l=1
and
http://microsoftgadgets.com/Gallery/
When you connect a USB drive, it uses its free space for a pagefile, and preloads data there for faster loading. It uses cryptography on the data being stored there for your safety. Now, the coolest part is: you take the USB drive out abruptly, and the only “damage” you get is a small loss in performance for not having the preloaded data there, which will just be preloaded back in the hard discs again. YOU WON’T LOSE SYSTEM STABILITY. Don’t just take my word and believe/disbelieve right away, find a machine with Vista installed, stick a drive in and see for yourself.
More on that here: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6039379.html?tag=nl.e040
I’ll say it again, you guys should try the system before you speak of it. You don’t have to buy it, just find someone who’s got it and check it out. Even if you turn out not liking it anyway you’ll at least get some real in-depth knowledge on its differences from XP. You’ll actually have much better arguments to support anti-Vista opinions if you try the system out.
I found Windows XP to be a significant and obvious improvement from 2K and certainly from 98. It was far more user-friendly, crashed much less often, and let the user do what he wanted far more easily. It was a lot easier on the eyes, too - smooth without being over-obvious. Security-wise, of course, it was a huge step up (eventually). Windows Vista sounds like a bunch of gadgets and widgets that most users will never even notice, let alone use.
I’m not “bashing” Vista; I’m sure it’s a very nice OS. I just can’t see any justification whatsoever for the price and system stats required in upgrading, certainly not until it’s been out for a few years, medium-tier computers can run it without problems, and third-party software is widespread.
Everything positive you’ve said about the system is based on the assumption that we are hardcore programmers who are interested in <i>DOT NET THREE DOT SIX</i> and <i>INTEGRATED APPLICATION IDENTIFICATION BY MEMORY MODIFICATION</i> and <i>LIVE! WINDOWS ENHANCER PERFORMER SWAP MEMORY FUNCTIONS THROUGH THE URETHRA</i>. Vista’s only good for eye candy, marginally better security, and future tech/app support, that’s what the average consumer is going to go for if they get it.
Good point.
As for the high costs - the actual pricing will probably stay lower than the values mentioned here, at least for home editions.
Check it out: http://www.vistabase.co.uk/articles/vistacosts.htm
Cless: good point there.