My Mini Review on Vista

v0n said:
I'm fighting temptation to switch my 30 day Vista trial into classic mode.
There's no such thing as a 30 day Vista trial, if you've illegally downloaded Vista from somewhere and are using it without a product key (hence it works for 30 days) then you are breaking the law, it's not shareware.
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Tute said:
I'm not really sure why Microsoft are even bothering with a 32 bit version of Vista, I mean so many processors can support 64-bit now, it almost doesn't seem worth it.

If there was just a 64 bit version then the manufacturers would only have to support one version of the OS, no drivers needed for a 32 bit version and they could concentrate on the 64 bit version.

Also, from what I can gather, the 64 bit version can do everything the 32 bit one can, right? Plus some other stuff, like supporting more RAM.

Am I totally wrong? I know little about how the OS works under the hood, so I may have gone off at a ridiculous tangent here! :o
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Yes apart from a silly memory limitation on 32bit, but I have noticed my machine when running the 64bit performs better and does not perform so much hard disk indexing as the 32bit does.

Another thing to mention 32bit apps and games are much easier to reverse engineer then 64bit, due to the level of security, not saying nothing is impossible to crack. Vista runs much more better in 64bit mode.
 
Tute said:
I'm not really sure why Microsoft are even bothering with a 32 bit version of Vista, I mean so many processors can support 64-bit now, it almost doesn't seem worth it.

If there was just a 64 bit version then the manufacturers would only have to support one version of the OS, no drivers needed for a 32 bit version and they could concentrate on the 64 bit version.

Also, from what I can gather, the 64 bit version can do everything the 32 bit one can, right? Plus some other stuff, like supporting more RAM.

Am I totally wrong? I know little about how the OS works under the hood, so I may have gone off at a ridiculous tangent here! :o
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Well I think the main thing you're forgetting is business machines. Not many companies have masses of 64 bit CPU's. Maybe the next upgrade in a few years time then that may be the case but at the moment I'm sure a vast majority of companies have the standard 32 bit architecture - and let's face it they don't need much more for what they do (dependant upon the company of course).



M.
 
PinkPig said:
There's no such thing as a 30 day Vista trial, if you've illegally downloaded Vista from somewhere and are using it without a product key (hence it works for 30 days) then you are breaking the law, it's not shareware.
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Oh, but Inspecteur Clouseau - why would anyone illegaly download the betas if they were available legally and so were the keys?
 
m4cc45 said:
Well I think the main thing you're forgetting is business machines. Not many companies have masses of 64 bit CPU's. Maybe the next upgrade in a few years time then that may be the case but at the moment I'm sure a vast majority of companies have the standard 32 bit architecture - and let's face it they don't need much more for what they do (dependant upon the company of course).



M.
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Yeah, but do a lot of businesses really pay to keep up with the latest versions of Windows anyway?

Many of them are simply content on 2000, hell i've seen schools running NT4 on machines.

I'm talking about making all versions of Windows from Vista onwards 64-bit only, after all it's pretty hard to even find a processor for sale new that doesn't support it!
 
my employer still uses win2000. My employer just before that upgraded to winXp.
I dont think a lot of businesses (small tomid-range anyway) will be upgrading to vista just yet.Notuntil they really need it.

As the saying goes, why replace something that isnt broken.

Im not going to upgrade to vista until i really need to. Cant see any reason just yet. Plus its still not 100% there yet. I'll wait for a few service packs to be rolled out and then make the move.

Never had any problems with xp, its a sweet OS
 
Tute said:
Yeah, but do a lot of businesses really pay to keep up with the latest versions of Windows anyway?

Many of them are simply content on 2000, hell i've seen schools running NT4 on machines.

I'm talking about making all versions of Windows from Vista onwards 64-bit only, after all it's pretty hard to even find a processor for sale new that doesn't support it!
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Really depends on the business. Most companies such as Banks / Building Societies would because of the security aspect. Smaller companies might not however as they buy PC's on an ad-hoc basis then the upgrade will be forced upon them.

As an IT market I don't think it will be completley 64-bit for a number of years yet you can still buy 32 bit CPU's and while that's still an option Microsoft will provide products for them as it's a massive part of the market (much more so than 32 bit).



M
 
I wasnt overly impressed with Vista TBH.

Saying that, I tried it a short while back with a downloaded torrent, so even back then, it was probably a lot older than it could have been.

I found it unreliable and slow.

Then again though, I remember when I first tried the downloadable free version of XP64, it was so quick compared to XP32 that it was shocking... The final version when I got it was no quicker at all??? - Its probably the other way round with Vista? - I need to try out a later version I think, on a newer system perhaps?

What the minimum spec it will run on?
 
I'd say spec wise to get the best of it:

P4 2.8GHz
1GB RAM
128MB Video Card
15GB HD Space

With all the betas you have to remember that they use all kinds of debugging tools to get all the relevant information for system crashes, etc. so they can improve the product. This is normally what makes the system run slow - I can't say I've had any slow downs (like I used to get in Windows XP after it had been on for a week) and the computers been running constantly without a restart for 10 days.

As I said before businesses will upgrade - normally a couple of months after commercial release - the main reason being is security. With User Account Control and the other security features it does make it a worthwhile update. I know of several companies who, right now, will be trialling it for use in the business environment and then updating to it very soon.



M.
 
My Take on Vista

Thanks to Work, I got to test drive Vista at work and home, and I went back to XP until the following is sorted.

Drivers for lots of printers and other devices are released.
VMware is Updated; use that a lot at work you see for testing. See, The issues I had with VMware Workstation 5.5.3 were very slow startup of VMs and then adding USB devices didn't work.
The hard drive is in constant use. I have wondered why quite a bit.
My Podcast software, Juice doesn't work. I don't really want to use Itunes, which does work. I don't know, maybe it's just me. And Ipod related, Anapod Explorer, I couldn't configure some options due to the new explorer not showing all the options, though that might have been down to me not finding how to add options to the explorer bar.

Some performance issues with games, but not all, as Vista has this neat way of taking some of your system ram and using it for Graphics. This in fact did speed up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory slightly but slowed down Psychonauts. The speed has got better with a later driver release by Nvidia but fact remains, that the same hardware gets less performance under Vista than XP.

But all in all, I like Vista. It was very stable on the Inspiron 9300 i was running it on, worked, the network section where you have different networks showing was very nice. The desktop was smooth to operate. But not all what we need from the OS is there yet, and won't be until at least after the consumer launch where the manufacters will release the drivers. Other issues, we will have to wait for updated programs.

On another related note, Office 2007 I do like. The new menus are easier to work with, you can preview styles before applying and save as PDF with a free add-in.
 
paul_h_amiga said:
The hard drive is in constant use. I have wondered why quite a bit.
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The search index updating itself. When you first install the OS, your HDDs do take quite a hit because of it, but over time the frequency and intensity drops.

paul_h_amiga said:
Some performance issues with games, but not all, as Vista has this neat way of taking some of your system ram and using it for Graphics. This in fact did speed up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory slightly but slowed down Psychonauts. The speed has got better with a later driver release by Nvidia but fact remains, that the same hardware gets less performance under Vista than XP.
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Vista drivers are still very much in their infancy. I'm not sure if nVidia's are still in beta or not, but they're certainly not optimised for gaming yet. As for the system RAM, Vista's very much improved over XP. Essentially it uses up all of your RAM, and when it's needed, it releases some of it for the application that desires it. XP tends to load into the RAM on demand, while Vista gets most of it used, then intelligently moves it around. It's quite a big improvement, but leads to people saying "OMG, my 4GB RAM is ALL used in Vista!!!?!" etc.
 
this_is_gav said:
As for the system RAM, Vista's very much improved over XP. Essentially it uses up all of your RAM, and when it's needed, it releases some of it for the application that desires it. XP tends to load into the RAM on demand, while Vista gets most of it used, then intelligently moves it around. It's quite a big improvement, but leads to people saying "OMG, my 4GB RAM is ALL used in Vista!!!?!" etc.
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What is the effect of this to the end user? I can't see how applications can load any quicker than they do in XP because at some point they will have to be read from the HDD into RAM on either OS. And XP does cache programs in RAM itself so I am confused.
 
I have found some games to run better than on XP too, rFactor gains about 10FPS in Vista and thats without OC on the graphics card, strangely though GTR2 using near enough the same engine suffers in Vista compared to XP for me.
 
dirtydog said:
What is the effect of this to the end user? I can't see how applications can load any quicker than they do in XP because at some point they will have to be read from the HDD into RAM on either OS. And XP does cache programs in RAM itself so I am confused.
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Don't know myself, but it does work well in practise. :P

I presume it's a redesigned pre-fetch feature.

Start-up times still seem faster than XP, so it's all good anyway :)
 
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