Microsoft VISTA

[Netizen1]

That aside I hear MS extended support for XP until 2010.. so why switch to Vista now if yuh gettins support til then?

That's what I was thinking...

I remember using Win2k until XPSP1 (or was it SP2)

Basically, I (and others like me) held out until the new OS stabilized sufficiently. I predict the same will happen with Vista. (Especially considering the hardware requirements)

[W1nTry]

This is funny... there is an ongoing war of words with MS Vista team and  a fellow called Peter Gutmann a researcher at the university of Auckland. He originally posted a blog/article/whaeveryouwannacallit about how broken and how the EULA (I think it was the eula) is the longest suicide note MS has ever written. I am certain its in this thread already, but either way there is an update as of 4 or so days to the writing of this post the MS Vista dev team put up a blog (which you can find here) the funny part is how Peter goes onto dissect comments from the blog and sections from the blogs author on previous accounts where the man seems to be constantly putting his foot in his mouth as he has contradicting statements. Have a read here

To sum it up, MS is trying to justify making you spend more money on hardware to run its software as its DRM infected to the mountains in order to make sure you have all the other DRM infected hardware parts as to watch ur newly bougth music/video/HDcontent whilst justifying it by spinnig in mud round and round... interesting to see that the most votes goes for MS pwns ur soul :p

[W1nTry]

Microsoft work-around allows clean install of Vista upgrade

No previous Windowses necessary

By INQUIRER newsdesk: Thursday 01 February 2007, 10:23
Click here
USING MICROSOFT'S WINDOWS Vista users can perform a clean installation of the operating system from an upgrade DVD.

Microsoft provides instructions to do such a thing, according to IT hack Paul Thurrott here. But it may also want to keep it quiet since upgrade versions are around a third cheaper than full Vista versions.

Thurrot posted a work-around that advises users not to enter the product key first time around when installing with an upgrade CD. This will get the OS onto the system.

Users then have to run the installation file again from within Windows Vista, enter the registration key and essentially upgrade the Windows Vista installation with another Vista installation. µ

Just in case yuh actually want to go Vista... it is the cheaper route.

[W1nTry]

*sighs* yeah they really have to get that SP1 out the door BRISK...

Beware being ripped by Vista hardware scams

Will your hardware be supported?

By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 07 February 2007, 10:05
RYAN SHROUT, over at PC Perspective, has a cautionary tale for those that have jumped onto the Vista operating system bandwagon.

He says that as he continues to use Vista, he's discovering more problems and not just with graphics applications and monitors.

No. He bought a Linksys wireless print server gizmo under a year ago and has discovered that the firm has no plans whatever to support it.

We wonder how many other hardware devices are going to be or are incompatible with Vista. Perhaps the vendors should be rather more transparent about this than they're currently being. That is to say, rather than listing products that do have Vista support, listing the products that don't.

And, we expect, there's probably heaps of kit out there that are still being sold that could end up giving you a mare of a year.

[TriniXaeno]

Think I'll try that upgrade thing.

Yeah @ unsupported hardware. Same happened with XP. Driver hunt Extreme.

Modems, tv cards, sound cards, tons of kit gave me hell as a technician to work on XP. Sometimes I'd find one to download from an extreme techie that hacked something together. Only recommended if you're feeling adventurous/desperate.

In most cases I just tossed the kit out and got XP compliant hardware.

Personally, I'd expect no different from Vista. All the major stuff should work just fine but vendors would likely not put any effort in creating drivers for less popular gear.

(print server would qualify as less popular, lol)

Those things should be TCP/IP based anyways. Hated the ones that needed driver support.

[Falener]

Well I tried Vista and it wasn't bad, worked pretty fast. Most of my programs worked except for my antispyware, antivirus, burning software etc. There was problems with the drivers concerning my stuff like the blutooth, tv tuner and webcam. There is no available updates for them so I was stuck without them. Although Vista is pretty, there is nothing in it that I cannot do already on my XP system. Most of the graphic features are programs for XP already (topdesk for example). My suggestion is to either dual boot vista or just stick with XP for the while.

[disciple]

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - US sales of computers carrying Microsoft's new operating system Vista soared in the week after it was launched, defying the expectations of analysts who gave Vista lackluster reviews.
ADVERTISEMENT

Personal computer sales for the week following Vista's debut to succeed Microsoft's
Windows XP in January were 67 percent higher than those in the same week in 2006, and nearly triple those of the preceding week, according to Current Analysis Inc.

"I didn't expect to see such aggressive growth right off the line," Current Analysis research director Samir Bhavnani told AFP. "If you are Microsoft, you have to be pleased with these results."

Adding to the achievement was the fact that computer sales are usually sluggish during the end of January and the beginning of February.

"This bodes well for Vista," Bhavnani said, cautioning that a more reliable picture would be shown by PC sales figures in the coming six months.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070209/tc_afp/usitsoftwareretail

[disciple]

why does vista appear to use soo muh memory??

In previous versions of Windows, system responsiveness could be uneven. You may have experienced sluggish behavior after booting your machine, after performing a fast user switch, or even after lunch. Although too many carbohydrates might slow you down after lunch, your computer slows down for different reasons. When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks— including automatic backup and antivirus software scans— take this opportunity to run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take space in system memory that your applications were using. After you start to use your PC again, it can take some time to reload your data into memory, slowing down performance.

SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive. SuperFetch uses an intelligent prioritization scheme that understands which applications you use most often, and can even differentiate which applications you are likely to use at different times (for example, on the weekend versus during the week), so that your computer is ready to do what you want it to do. Windows Vista can also prioritize your applications over background tasks, so that when you return to your machine after leaving it idle, it's still responsive.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

[W1nTry]

 

Vista makes people less efficient than XP did

GUI friction

By Nick Farrell: Wednesday 28 February 2007, 08:53
Click here to find out more!
A CONSULTANCY OUTFIT has found that Vista makes people less efficient, despite having lots of nice interfaces.

Pfeiffer Consulting conducted the research based on an independently financed series of benchmarks designed to work out how Vista influences user efficiency.

The benchmarks are its own idea not universally accepted, and are based on such things as "perceived differences in efficiency" and "user experience between operating system, applications, and digital devices". If you take this factor and divide by your shoe size you get a benchmark.

"Mouse precision" use apparently dropped in Vista well below the Mac OSX and slightly worse than XP. Pfeiffer's report called "User Interface Friction" includes things like teh finding that the slight lag that Windows imposes when displaying menus and submenus had dropped down the loo. Vista/Aero Desktop Operations, such as opening folders, deleting elements, had Vista/Aero 16 percent worse than Windows XP.

Pfeiffer Consulting is telling punters to think very carefully before migrating or upgrading to Windows Vista, particularly if trying to give them to anyone who is remotely creative. µ

[BloodWar]

nintendo wifi conection only work on xp thats all i got to say bout that

[Spazosaurus]

We just seeing more and more reasons NOT to go with Vista for some time to come. I mean, come on. I am yet to see 5, hell 2 GOOD reasons why the vast majority of computer users should upgrade. Meh, I'll tell you what Vista is. She is just a brand new bess gal that you pull in after dumping the old one (who btw was not as bess looking), only to realise afterwards she's a hellufalot more expensive to maintain (read memory, cpu and purchase price) and no more loving, caring and attentive than the old one (which btw can be made to look as pretty as the new one with a lil makeup and lipo)

[disciple]

lol lol @ unknown's g/f analogy...

still.. i eh go lie.. though she might be more expensive to maintain, and the old one might be able to approach her looks ( is still makeup, lipstick, and admit it.. a badly done weave..)

the novelty with this new chick gonna last for a while, esp. if she givin you the same lovin....   
besides, is a initial investment you makin to keep this chick ( buy a new car to check her, cuz she livin south)
but after that, is all good. lol


besides..  we all superficial.. we all want hot chicks. lol
and vista is clearly the hot chick to xp's 'plain jane'  ( who in turn was better than that mampee, win95)

[W1nTry]

Speak for yourself on the superficial part. Although i'd be initially attracted to a female who isn't ugly, I can honestly say that no matter how BESSS yuh are, if yuh act like a B1TCH I won't find them attractive... anyways that aside:

Vista activation cracked by brute force

Sledgehammered

By Charlie Demerjian: Thursday 01 March 2007, 17:15
IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft's unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.

There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don't have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people

It won't take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get 'you are a filthy pirate' messages. Won't that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.

So, what do you do? There is really no differentiating between a legit copy with a manually typed in wrong key and a hack attempt. Sure MS can throttle this by limiting key attempts to one a minute or so on new software, but the older variants are already burnt to disk. The cat is out of the bag.

The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, MS will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.

This is ugly for MS, and if it allows you to take back your legit keys, how long do you think it will take before people catch on to the fact that you can call in and hijack already purchased keys once you generate one that someone else activated?

No, this is a mess, and the problem is the very malware activation and anti-consumer licensing that MS built into Vista. Then again, it is kind of hard to feel sorry for them the way they screw their paying customers. We'll give it three days before there is a slick GUI version with all the bells and whistles. µ

So to add to the analogy, Not only is she a higher maintainance chick... but she could be in SOMEONE ELSE RIDE while you think she home waiting on yuh :p try that on for size... so we have a promiscuous high maintainance gf.... that CYAH be worth it :p

[Arcmanov]

Lawd.  It was not a matter of 'if', but 'when'.  I bet somebody in the coding dept responsible for the licensing part of Vista is probably worried about his job security right now.

[disciple]

nah but if is just  a beat-out....

lol

[vivman1107]

Slashdot reports that the guy who developed the brute-force keygen retracted his statement later. He said that it does attack via brute force but the chance of success is too low. When you think about it, a 25 character key would take kind of long to crack. One of the posters in the Slashdot thread worked out the number of possible combinations. It is quite interesting.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/03/1339209&from=rss

[W1nTry]

Interesting (but long) comparison of Vista and its features:

The problems with Vista laid bare

Part 1 What we got and why

By Liam Proven: Wednesday 21 March 2007, 08:43
"The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." - Steve Jobs to Robert X Cringely in Revenge of the Nerds

REGARDLESS OF WHAT Bill Gates might have claimed in interviews, a lot of the goodies in Vista have – I'll be diplomatic – drawn inspiration from rival products, primarily Apple's Mac OS X. The trouble is that Microsoft has prioritised the wrong bits, taken the wrong inspiration. And the sad irony is that if it had made different choices, we'd have got a simpler, faster, safer Vista a lot sooner.

So what sources and where has MS got its ideas from? And where should it have done so instead? You don't have to look far.

System-wide instant search and a query-driven, location-independent view of the filesystem are very useful things to have. Microsoft spent years working on "Windows Future Storage", a complex system that would store all your data in a SQL database.

Instead, Apple came up with Spotlight. A minor tweak to the filesystem code means that every file saved to disk is indexed as it's saved, making it simple to offer near-instant file searching. Once you've got that, it's relatively trivial to offer folders showing all image files or all files containing "Dear Mrs Jones" or all files of over 38.45Kb generated by used "alice" between 2:30 on 13 April 2004 and 5:15 on 26 September 2005. No need for a big heavy relational database or SQL or anything else.

And guess what happened? Microsoft quietly dropped WinFS and Vista gained a very Spotlight-like index-driven search system instead. On Linux, GNOME's Beagle search is much the same. If you use an older version of Windows, you can get much the same functionality from Google Desktop Search, MSN Search Toolbar or others; they don't have the benefits of integrating with the shell, or of being able to put indexing hooks right into the filesystem, but the end result is similar.

The idea for Vista's pseudo-3D GUI surely came from OS X – as it did with open source versions such as Compiz and Beryl. The live previews of taskbar buttons strongly resemble the live icons in OS X's Dock. The visual inspiration for the 3D window flipper was probably Sun's 3D Java desktop Looking Glass, but the competitive pressure was surely from OS X's Expose.

A bit of background
Bear with me for a second. To understand what Vista does and why, you have to know the history - and the history comes from a different company.

The whole concept of using a 3D graphics card to accelerate the windowing system comes from the Mac's Quartz Extreme. Apple's OS X is based upon NeXTStep, NeXT Computer's pioneering Unix-based OS from the 1980s. The NeXTStep GUI didn't have hardware acceleration, because it was drawn by Display PostScript, which was too complex for the simple 2D graphics cards of the time to provide any useful help. OS X's graphics system, Quartz, uses Adobe's royalty-free PDF imaging language instead – which is derived from PostScript anyway. In OS X 10.0 and 10.1, Quartz was unaccelerated.

Modern 3D cards, though, are powerful processors in their own right - as is demonstrated by the fact that they're getting used for real computation now, such as the GPU version of Folding@Home. The innovation in Quartz Extreme, which appeared with OS X 10.2, is that Apple's engineers found a way to use a 3D card to speed up their GUI. In QE, each actual window is handled as a 3D object by the GPU - which means that the GPU does the grunt work of compositing (calculating which window appears on top of which other ones, which bits are hidden and so on), moving windows around, scaling them and so on.

What that means is that suddenly all these special effects are computationally "cheap" - in other words, they don't take much CPU power. It's not doing the work, the graphics card is. This being so, not only can the developers use them more widely. So, you get pretty but largely gratuitous effects like transparency, drop shadows and zooming translucent "ghost" icons when files are double-clicked – but it also enables useful new features, like Exposé. In case you're a deprived Windows user, I'll explain: Exposé is a feature of the OS X windowing system where hitting a hotkey shrinks all the windows onscreen - either showing all a single application's windows side-by-side, or all applications side-by-side, or even zooming them all offscreen so that you can get at the desktop for a moment without minimising or otherwise disturbing the arrangement of your windows.

There are several important points to realise here.

Firstly, all the shrinking, scaling and other "chrome" is done in hardware, so it puts no extra load on the CPU.

Secondly, all the chrome is part of OS X's Quartz graphics API - these sorts of features are an inherent part of using a sophisticated language like Postscript or its descendant PDF to implement the display. This means that the developer doesn't have to make great extra efforts: they can just specify a window as 80% transparent or tell Quartz to rotate it 74° clockwise and shrink it 18% and it just happens. Such facilities are built into the OS, so it does the grunt work of implementation, not the application developer.

On a machine with a poor graphics card, the effects are rendered in software, slowly - so even users of old Macs don't miss out on the fun. But on a modern machine with a powerful card, it all happens in hardware, automatically, and the programmer need neither know nor care. That's the third benefit - implementing things this way doesn't exclude users with older, slower hardware. It levels the playing field for developers and users alike.

The Microsoft way
Compare this with Microsoft's effort in Vista. All the chrome happens through extensions layered on top of the basic 2D Windows GDI (Graphical Device Interface). If the user has one of the Basic editions of Windows Vista, they don't get the 3D effects at all - those editions don't include the feature. If they have one of the more expensive editions but a low-spec graphics card, they don't get the snazzy effects either, because they only work on certain CPUs.

Which means that the developers have to take these things into account. And, of course, all this stuff is new in Vista. Microsoft has realised the implications of this and is releasing an update for XP to bring some of the new APIs to older versions - but if you're on Windows 2000 still, forget it. Naturally, along with the down-market Vista customers, XP users don't get the new 3D effects, either.

So if a developer incorporates this 3D stuff into their app, it won’t display on all versions of Vista and won't work at all on older versions of Windows. Which means more work for the programmers, ensuring that things degrade gracefully.

To be fair, these problems aren't unique to Vista. Now that this 3D whizzery has been done, naturally, everyone's doing it. In the open source world, there are two parallel efforts - AIGLX and Compiz. The technical details of how they work are irrelevant; suffice to say that they both use the 3D card to render and display the desktop, using two different underlying approaches. That's one of the joys of Free software - with no accounts department to have to justify things to, multiple different approaches can be tried. The one that works better or has some compelling advantage will succeed.

The snag is that the same problems that face Microsoft, trying to bolt 3D onto a twenty-year-old 2D-based imaging model, also face the Linux world. On the Free side of the fence, though, users replace and update their software far more often. New releases of Ubuntu Linux come along twice a year, the same as its GNOME desktop - very roughly ten times as fast as the Windows rate of about twice a decade. And of course it usually costs little or no money to update to a new version of Linux, whereas every successive release of Windows gets more expensive than before.

So why are we getting all this 3D glitz, anyway?
Regardless of where they come from, these sorts of features are rapidly becoming not only accepted but expected in modern desktop OSs. So we can't really blame Microsoft for doing what everyone else is doing. It gives the "wow" factor, the instant appeal of the shiny, which is the main driver of the Vista marketing campaign. Although of course the real thing propelling Vista uptake isn't adverts or upgrades, it's that soon all new PCs will come with Vista on. If it could afford to be patient, Microsoft could save its massive promotional effort - in a year or two, Vista will all but replace XP anyway.

The main reason it's going to all the trouble is twofold. For one thing, Microsoft makes a lot more money on an upgrade copy of Windows or Office than from OEM bundled one, so it is in the company's interest that people buy Vista. More significantly, though, it needs them to want Vista. Microsoft, along with the whole PC industry, is predicated on growth: they really need all their customers to dump XP and buy new software - and hardware - as soon as possible.

Actually, in recent years, the rate of improvement in PC performance has dropped off. The boom years were the 1990s, when every eighteen months, PCs got roughly twice as fast. But this is not what the famed "Moore's Law" predicts. What Intel cofounder Gordon Moore actually said was that the number of transistors it was possible to put on a chip for a given cost would double every year and a half. For a while, more transistors meant more speed - but it doesn't any more. Processor designs have got to the stage of complexity where it's difficult to make them much faster while keeping the costs down. The rate of improvement in raw speed is slowing: now, they're spreading sideways instead of upwards: more cores, more memory, GPUs that can perform more complex and more elaborate 3D rendering in hardware, and of course, bigger disks and faster communications links.

Acting against this, though, is another driver: more transistors take more power, even as they continue to get smaller and smaller. Computers with more CPU cores and more capable GPUs require more electricity to run and they generate more heat - so the machines are getting bigger and hotter and noisier, and designers need to go to greater lengths to counter these trends.

Which makes the computers harder to sell. They don’t actually work much faster than older computers, they just handle lots more data and can present it to the user with more snazzy visual and sound effects. Even for gamers, one of the hardcore performance-driven markets, the main benefits are being able to fill larger and higher-resolution displays with crisp high-definition graphics while keeping the refresh rates up.

In summary, we're not getting fancy 3D effects and other new features because we need them or asked for them, we're getting them because they're what modern PCs can do, and the vendors - Apple included - need to find ways to make these new features attractive and desirable because they need to keep selling more computers.

The only difference between Apple's method and everyone else's is due to history. Back in the mid to late 1980s, when Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple and started NeXT, he hired a selection of the best and brightest computer systems designers around, and starting with a clean sheet, they set out to build the best educational computer that money could buy - based around educational standards like Unix and commercial ones like Postscript, but intended for a market that wasn't as price-sensitive as the home and business ones, which would pay for and expected powerful machines with big screens and integral networking. The NeXT team made some very smart choices back then and Apple inherited those benefits when it bought NeXT - and thus got Jobs back on board - more than a decade later. All Apple's own efforts at designing the future - Pink, Copland, Taligent, OpenDoc, CyberDog and so forth - came to nothing and ended up in the bin.

The vision and the foresight came from NeXT, which took the best of what was out there at the time (BSD Unix, Motorola's 68030 and 68040 processors and some Digital Signal Processors), added the most promising future-looking technologies (Mach, Display Postscript, optical storage), and aimed high, for functionality not price: integrated standards-based networking, big high-resolution displays, laser printers for output and so on. NeXT also made sure that they were best-of-breed in areas like development tools, cross-platform networking and support for upcoming standards like Internet email and multimedia.

Much of this didn't deliver - there's little sign of the CPUs, DSPs or optical drives in modern Mac OS X machines. Overall, though, the bets paid off handsomely, and nearly two decades later, everyone else is still playing catch-up.

In the second and concluding part of this article, I'll look at the areas that Microsoft didn't prioritise when it was developing Vista - and which it arguably should have. µ

[Spazosaurus]

A bit long winded, however basically echoes what i've been saying since before Vista released. It's just a prettier way of doing the same thing.

[W1nTry]

Actually it still seems to not do things nearly as good as apple

[Crixx_Creww]

wow i coudlnt read all of that but i did catch where they were bigging up the macs version of windows key and D

like omfgzzzorzzz yu can click something and all yur windows dissapear so yu can get to the desktop!!! its teh greatzoristzz envensionnnszz eversszz

and iam like uh yu mean just like pushing windows key and d? ...