We <3 Windows

Maes said:

That being said...I'm sure that there must be someone, somewhere, still using Windows ME and claiming that it was "the BEST Windows ever made, it was just severely misunderstood!".

Haha. So you do have a sense of humor.

The unfortunate thing for those of us who don't mind Vista is that Windows 7 isn't really that big of an improvement either. I kind of kick myself for it, but I bought a Vista Ultimate OEM. Which means that unless I buy Windows 7 Ultimate, anything else will be a downgrade. The 16GB memory limit in 7 Home Premium is more than enough right now, but four or five years ago having 4GB of ram was was almost unheard of for a home PC, and even having 2GB was pretty high. In just a few years the standard doubled, and my dad's new computer even has 8gb. Before we know it the 16GB limitation will be a hinderance and anyone that bought Home Premium that wants to upgrade their RAM is going to shit bricks.

Personally I think MS is being just a touch shortsighted for 7 as far as that is concerned.

But whatever.

What do you think of the driver/delayed industry response situation in Vista?

About RAM, IMHO there's no pressing urge for the average user to really go above 4 or even 2 GB right now, at least with XP you're never fully gonna use them unless you keep 50 windows open or something.

Yeah, of course industry standards raise, but even with Vista 1 GB is more than enough for browsing/document processing etc., and what games seriously need more than 2GB, let alone 8 or 16 GB, even in the near future?

id Tech 6 will probably require a supercomputer cluster with 32gb RAM and 16gb video cards. :P

The delayed driver response probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista was so poorly received in the first place. Even when MS announced that they'd cut XP support in a short amount of time and basically said "Well, if you don't want to use Vista then tough shit", the majority of people still stuck with XP. The manufacturers probably just didn't feel it was worth it to fix the problem when everyone was just rolling back to XP anyway.

Which just created a Catch-22; people weren't using Vista because bad driver support, and manufacturers weren't fixing the drivers because people weren't using Vista.

Nomad said:
Are you forgetting that XP was pretty much also a pile of crap until SP2?

From what I remember, it was so much better than 95/98 that we didn't really notice any issues it might have had. I know I switched to it as my primary OS around September 2002, which would have been about the time SP1 came out. And I had been using Linux, which means XP couldn't have sucked too much by that point...

Which just created a Catch-22; people weren't using Vista because bad driver support, and manufacturers weren't fixing the drivers because people weren't using Vista.

I'm using XP x64 which supposedly has no driver support, but I have only one (older) piece of hardware that lacks a 64-bit driver. (But this is probably because it's a newly-built system and I checked that all the new parts were supported before purchasing them. And I find that buying hardware that has OpenBSD support tends to create systems that work under just about any operating system.)

And ironically, the reason I'm using XP x64 is to make full use of my system's 4GB of RAM. I got 4GB of RAM mostly to ease editing of large scanned images in hugin and The GIMP (my old system had 1GB but thrashed a lot when working with anything over around 400dpi). And my scanner is the only piece of hardware without a 64-bit driver :-P

Okay which one of you's edited the thread? >=O

Anyway, i actually don't know the specs for Windows 7, will a 1GB Ram comp suffice?

I dunno if it could be called average users. But most anyone working with art on the computer would have use for all the ram they can get their grubby hands on.

UAC did absolutely NOTHING to protect most people from viruses and spyware. There was about a three month lag where Vista tended to break malware, more because of weird compatibility reasons and then it all knew how to exploit Vista nicely. The UAC didn't get in its way; it got in the way of us guys getting paid to remove the viruses. People see those prompts and just click right through. Then the stuff appeared that just walked around UAC anyway. It secured smart people from stupid viruses. Nothing else changed except the directory where I installed Oblivion so I could avoid three prompts for every file I changed.

Vista's sound system is so slow the pro audio guys reverted to XP instantly.

NEW hardware wasn't working on Vista for the better part of 2007 at least. In 2007 it was actually easier to run some Epson printers from 1992 on Vista than it was to run some new HP printers that said on the box they were Vista compatible. The same went for all kinds of hardware. There must have been something funny going on with driver support because my last Asus mobo (again with a Vista logo on the box) never even got a manufacturer chipset driver for Vista (I just checked again too). That whole mess went nicely with all the important, new software that didn't work. Somehow nobody's tax or security software worked in 2007.

Vista also came with its share of crazy internal issues. There were the "cripple the network speed because otherwise the music will lag" and the "hey, we can't even copy files reliably" bugs. Yuck!

With all that garbage it's no wonder everybody hates it. They had people like me who were being paid to fix it telling them not to upgrade if they had anything important to get done because half the time stuff didn't work, even if it claimed it did. Some of this was directly Microsoft's fault, like crippling the OS so most AIO printers only worked right on business editions.

Sure, it got better, but it was too little too late. If they'd hammered it Windows ME for another year it might have worked too, but would anybody have wanted it? The benefits of Vista over XP are there in some cases, but they're small enough that upgrading hasn't been worth it when even the betas of Windows 7 were proving to be quite nice.

UAC fits a typical family setting. What it doesn't fit it the common setting around most of us here, where we run our own computers, with one user account.

Good idea? Yes. If something that requires admin privilage levels needs to be done in a limited account, it can. Vista also provides compatibility for old applications which would dump INIs, temp files, whatever into c:/windows

The flaw: Most users don't need limited accounts. I'm sure A LOT of your computers run one or two administrator user accounts. Chances are that all of you have a great clue on what you are doing right now. In this case UAC just gets in the way. UAC will barely stop malware. My XP machine feels just as secure as this Vista machine. The only thing UAC will stop are stupid people. REALLY stupid people.

On an other but almost releated subject, The thing that irritates me though is that Vista was basically advertised as a "family" os. I don't care how many family privacy protection and file sharing features your operating system has. I can handle all of that myself, thank you very much.

And on the final subject I'm pretty sure my dad has at least 5-10 XP licences sitting around here. I might end up dual-booting XP just to get around the Vista annoyances, all while being able to run applications that "require" vista for no other reason other than to force you to upgrade.

No, UAC helps the intermediate users. The ones that actually pay attention to what dialog boxes say, at least. The REALLY stupid users just hit OK on everything that ever pops up. There was a study about that, and it conformed that most users are idiots.

UAC combined with limited user accounts will stop them from totally fucking the computer up.

But you're right, none of us that actually know what we're doing really need UAC. But on the other hand I like having it there as a fallback just in case I download some misleading torrent or something. :P

my friend and I ran into a problem like that when we tested out a proof-of -concept program with a GUI. we found out it might be best to disable the buttons for 3 or less seconds. it makes people stop when they try to mindlessly click, and when they realise that didn't work, they actually read the dialog.

Ninjalah said:

Anyway, i actually don't know the specs for Windows 7, will a 1GB Ram comp suffice?

One gig will be plenty for everyday tasks. I had it running on 512Mb with a few things turned off and it still ran better than XP.

Windows 98 ran faster than Windows 95 on the same hardware.

Bucket said:

I wouldn't know. I've always logged on as an admin. I suppose I should stop doing that but I probably won't.

Yeah I'm way late but I thought these posts got deleted.

Anyway, even when logged in as an Administrator, you don't have Administrator rights with a program until you hit "Continue" on the UAC window. Shutting UAC off prevents you from doing this.

Ninjalah said:

Anyway, i actually don't know the specs for Windows 7, will a 1GB Ram comp suffice?

It should provided you're not running the 64-bit version, using XP Mode and/or allocated a large chunk of system RAM to integrated video.

Nomad said:

But you're right, none of us that actually know what we're doing really need UAC. But on the other hand I like having it there as a fallback just in case I download some misleading torrent or something. :P

You're supposed to use an antivirus as a fallback for stupidity. :P

XP was a pile of crap when it first came out as well

From what I remember, i loved it when i upgraded from 98. To be honest and transparent the computer 98 was on was pretty much buggered, it had been the family's first computer so was probably bloated with malware and viruses and pointless "helpful" things that run in the background, eating RAM.
BUT XP still had "amazing" features like the fact if something crashed and you closed it down with the "three fingers" you could carry on working. If something crashed in 98 you could close it down but some 'residue' of the crash or something meant that the computer would either run really slowly or even just lock up until it was restarted.
Also my old scanner used to magically un-install itself on 98 all the time, the re-install process required 4 restarts, once when the scanner locked up and crashed the computer, once when you'd uninstalled the drivers, another one so that the computer had "been on" with no drivers at all installed, and then again when you re-installed the drivers. If you missed out any of those the scanner refused to work. In XP the same scanner gave faultless service until the motor to make the light move broke.

In fact thinking about it i don't think i ever upgraded the OS on that computer, it ALWAYS had the original XP on it.

Now that it's ON topic, I'm going to pitch in my undying love and devotion for Windows 2000.

This was such a good OS when it came out. I'd used 3.0, 3.11, all versions of 95 and 98 as well as NT4 beforehand. 2000 combined the best aspects of all in one neat package. It might be outdated now, but from its' release until the time XP SP2 came out, Win2k was definitely the top shit to have at the time.

I installed it again a few years ago in frustration when my last XP install fucked up. It was essentially just an ugly XP without as much driver or media support. It then crashed as I was moving something about in the start menu, and my patience with Windows ran out for good. Sadly, I can still remember the installation key off the top of my head.

Long live Windows 2000.

Yeah, I still have Win2k running on an old laptop. It sure does the job.

In my experience, 99% of the problems people were having with Vista have been solved by the following two steps:
1. Download and install the latest drivers for your hardware, those that came with your PC are outdated and crappy.
2. Do not, under any circumstance, allow games to install themselves within the C:\Program Files directory.

I only use it because it's an operating system that will allow me to play all the games without resorting to using Wine or some other Windows emulation program within a Linux environment.

Gez said:

In my experience, 99% of the problems people were having with Vista have been solved by the following two steps:
1. Download and install the latest drivers for your hardware, those that came with your PC are outdated and crappy.

The Intel Wireless issue surely accounts for way more of the 1% remaining cases ;-)

Maes said:

The Intel Wireless issue surely accounts for way more of the 1% remaining cases ;-)

I did say "in my experience" -- this thread is the first time I've heard about that Intel Wireless issue.

Gez said:

I did say "in my experience" -- this thread is the first time I've heard about that Intel Wireless issue.

It's a weird fuckup, more unique than rare I'd say. Practically there's no "best and latest" driver other than the one supplied with Vista, even with SP1, and it has the quirk of not forming stable connections with WPA routers.

On top of that, there's no Vista-compatible Intel Wireless Suite that could replace Vista's Wireless Zero Config and work around the problem. Still unfixed, and quite a problem if you consider that pretty much any modern laptop uses an Intel wireless module. :-/

Maes said:

Still unfixed, and quite a problem if you consider that pretty much any modern laptop uses an Intel wireless module. :-/

All the laptops I have (latest being an MSI GX620) have an Atheros wireless module.

Gez said:

All the laptops I have (latest being an MSI GX620) have an Atheros wireless module.

Damn snob :-p

If I recall correctly, it's one of the few modules that actually work with WEP sniffing utilities ;-)

I think that we can all agree that Macs suck.

Mr. Freeze said:

I think that we can all agree that Macs suck.

Yes :-D

QFT

As a owner of one, I resent your comments. They neither suck more or suck less than any other platform.

spank said:

As a owner of one, I resent your comments. They neither suck more or suck less than any other platform.

Do they still have those round puck mice with only one button and no way of knowing which side is up? :p

Gez said:

Do they still have those round puck mice with only one button and no way of knowing which side is up? :p

That's a common misconception. They removed the button from their mice long ago.