Why Vista wont suck - According to.....

Beansprout said:
Methinks Vista-bashing is common because:

> It's late
> It's MS
> None of the bashers have used it
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Some of it no doubt :) In my case, I have genuine grievances about it though which I won't bother going through again here.. suffice to say none of the above three reasons applies to me.
 
I think Microsoft are doing some excellent stuff behind the scenes with Vista, but from a purely end user point of view I'm not seeing anything that will make me want to go out and buy it. I think that's the main problem with Microsoft' approach to operating system development; they don't really have to convince end users in order to dominate the market.

The performance control panel seems like a rather useless idea to me. It sounds like the sort of thing retailers will utilise to fob off customers seeking technical support; "Have you checked the performance control panel?" How is this going to adapt to new hardware; when everyone has 8GB of RAM in their computers, will everyone have a RAM 'sub rating' of 10? The automatic defragmenter is nothing new, the power plans seem like something joe public will overlook and the network center is just a pretty GUI placed on XP's networking features.

The one thing that bugs me most is the amount of inconsistency in the user interfaces. I sincerely hope that Microsoft are going to liase with some GUI experts at some point in the development process, because I'm no expert in the area (I'm more of a web development chap) and I'm sat here cringing at the organisation of these interfaces. What's up with the 7 speaker icons on the speech recognition screen, for instance? Surely it would be better to emphasise the options the user would be most interested in (Perhaps depending on whether they've set up speech recognition before) and put less emphasis on those which the user is unlikely to need, instead of putting the same emphasis on each one?
 
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Al Vallario said:
the network center is just a pretty GUI placed on XP's networking features.
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Nope. The networking stack and the firewall has been rebuilt from scratch. They are considerably more powerful now. For instance, native IPv6 support.

Also the "network center" is much more than just a pretty face. It's based on some work from Microsoft Research labs. It can identify when a critical part of the network goes down (e.g. your router, wireless, file server, ISP) and notifies the average joe user with an easy to understand warning message along with diagnosis tips.
 
A big gripe I have is that people have commented (I think Xtremesystems) that is basically kills all overclocks or something. I mean, there is a difference between clocks on W2K and WXP because of DEP and turning DEP off does actually increase clock possible slightly, so there is some merit. Maybe it's just the beta causing the problems.

Other than that and DRM, I'm good to go. I should be all setup as it looks like I'll be waiting for G80/R600 before my next upgrade - PS3 will get me by until then :D.
 
Lt. Manlove said:
I'm getting bored of these comments now.
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no need to be funny about it, i was simply stating a fact!

personally i'm dead happy with my xp now, stripped out the stuff I don't need and works bombing fast

but i probably will get vista, sure its a hd space hog and possibly memory hog right now, but it will be sweet

a lot more work has gone into vista than ever has in xp, xp was basically windows 3.1 + nt + me, with some sparkles on top and a ton of drivers when it came out!
 
I thought the idea of performance rating was that instead of spewing system specs on the side of game boxes, publishers can just say "yeah this game needs a 3 in Vista to run" and be done with it. That will make things a ton easier for everyone, and can only be a great idea.
 
Caged said:
I thought the idea of performance rating was that instead of spewing system specs on the side of game boxes, publishers can just say "yeah this game needs a 3 in Vista to run" and be done with it. That will make things a ton easier for everyone, and can only be a great idea.
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now thats a cool idea :)
 
That's definitely the best article I've read on Vista. It's looking good IMO. I'm interested to see how good the re-written networking code is, particularly the wireless part of it. Wireless networking in XP can have it's problems, and it'd be great if they could make it easier to setup and more stable (no random drop-outs or 'no wireless networks detected' messages when their blatantly is).

My only issue is the new audio stack not allowing for hardware acceleration. But if the performance has been optimised then it may not make that much difference (here's hoping).

Being an MCE user I'm looking forward to the new media centre interface and to WMP11. Hopefully that'll make managing my music library a less annoying process than it currently is with WMP10.

Does anyone know what the <i>game performance tweaker</i> that comes with the Ultimate edition actually does?
 
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Aero Glass and the New UI

Have you ever had a window on your Windows XP desktop (or any other version of Windows) that was busy, so you move it out of the way to see the window beneath it, and you end up with a big empty rectangle where the busy window used to be? That's the unfortunate artifact of a desktop drawing system that is simply years out of date. Vista gets rid of that, and does so much more, by totally changing the entire way the screen is drawn.

If you've got a DirectX 9 graphics card with 128MB of RAM or more, you'll be able to enable the "Aero Glass" desktop in Vista. This is the real Vista desktop, and an old version that works like the current Windows XP GDI+ desktop drawing system exists in Vista only for backwards compatibility with systems that don't have the graphics hardware required for Aero Glass.


Why the need for a reasonable DX9 graphics card? Vista includes a new desktop compositing and drawing system that uses DirectX 9 to draw the screen. Every window, icon, toolbar, or other desktop element is actually a 3D surface, made of polygons and manipulated by your graphics card. It's possible to smoothly stretch, rotate, skew, light or shadow, and otherwise manipulate everything on the desktop using all the flexibility of DX9. Everything gets rendered to an off-screen buffer, and then swapped to the live desktop view. This enables all kinds of cool effects, like windows that can warp and stretch, but that's just eye candy.
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Got wood....

:D

Sounds awesome...

The hardware audio acceleration thru Creative cards will be fine if they go on with OpenAL... which will no doubt either become DX11 audio or remain a compatible alternative

:D
 
It is indeed awesome. The only OS that has anything comparable in terms of desktop rendering is Mac OSX. That has a desktop compositor, back-buffer (note, not texture-based) based rendering and also a fairly decent drawing framework (ala, Avalon.) However it is not hardware accelerated yet (although there are rumours the "Leopard" release later this year will add basic hardware acceleration.) It would appear that Vista's desktop rendering is way ahead of the game. Sure there will be the moaners who say they don't want their system and graphics memory to be used for desktop texture storage, but they are also usually the people that don't understand that "free" memory is wasted memory.

The framework they have put into Vista for the desktop is only the start. Although you may think the Vista screenshots and videos look impressive, it is only the start. Avalon and the desktop compositor are capable are much much more. Think of some of the Hollywood movies that illustrate futuristic computer interfaces (Minority Report springs to mind - minus the gloves though ;)) and you'll get an idea of the sort of power behind this technology in Vista. Apparently the next Windows release "Vienna" is going to really focus on the shell and user experience so Avalon should really get a good work out on that OS.

Nvidia and ATI are going to love it. Suddenly their products have gone from being commodity gaming items to being a core and essential part of all desktop computers in a years time.
 
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Beansprout said:
:p

Methinks it's real now after looking through it. But some parts are silly.."performance rating"? Since when does Average Joe actually care? :/
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Average joe wont be buying the vista version with performance rating features built in, these features along with the vista-game performance analyser are a part of the higher end in vista series, namely ultimate..
 
NathanE said:
Indeed as long as it's DX9 it'll be fine. Far more important is the amount of graphics memory and system memory you have...
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I just meant if you were thinking on an expensive upgrade you could pretend that your new shiny Windows requires a new graphics card to run it. (This is for when your other half asks why you are spending so much on a lump of metal)
 
mrk said:
Average joe wont be buying the vista version with performance rating features built in, these features along with the vista-game performance analyser are a part of the higher end in vista series, namely ultimate..
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But but if that's the case then doesn't it negate this idea:

Caged said:
I thought the idea of performance rating was that instead of spewing system specs on the side of game boxes, publishers can just say "yeah this game needs a 3 in Vista to run" and be done with it. That will make things a ton easier for everyone, and can only be a great idea.
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/me is confused.
 
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